Review: Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Publication Date: July 23, 2019

A Jazz-Age fairy tale based on Mayan myth, Gods of Jade and Shadow is both tantalizingly original and inexpertly crafted, the sort of book that feels like it should have been far more exciting than it was. (Making it something of a prototypical 3-star book.)

Casiopeia Tun is a (lampshaded!) Cinderella, a poor relation used as an unpaid servant in her wealthy grandfather's household. After an encounter with her cousin (and tormentor) Martin, Casiopeia opens a locked chest and accidentally releases a weakened Mayan death god, partially dismembered by his jealous twin brother. Casiopeia then gets shanghaied on a quest to find the god's missing body parts, which takes her everywhere from the Yucatan to Baja California to the depths of the Mayan underworld. The story plays out exactly as you'd expect, this being a fairy tale, and also nothing like you'd expect, this . . . not actually being a fairy tale. Ahem.

The setting is tremendous, and is by far the book's best feature. Jazz-age Mexico and the Mayan underworld aren't settings that get used very often in fantasy works, so there was a freshness here that really drew the eye.

The characters swim between archetypes and complexity--intentionally so, as the book makes clear--but while some of them were well-done (the Martin/Casiopeia relationship was a classic fairy tale trope given a degree of depth and complexity that twisted it around a bit) many of the others, especially the variety of demons and sorcerers encountered along the way, felt wooden. (And I would have liked more development of the Caiopeia/Hun-Kame relationship, which felt a bit like it was following tropes so clearly that it didn't think it needed internal development of its own.)

Where the story fell hardest, I thought, was the prose. Something about the author's word choices kept clunking against my ear. Too many sentences just didn't really . . . ring true? It was the sort of thudding you often get from translated works, where the translator sacrifices prose flow in favor of meaning, and often ends up losing the meaning as well. (I realize this is not a translated work, I simply use that as an example of where I've encountered similar qualities.) And the prose style, which is clearly meant to evoke a sort of fairy-tale , too often comes across as merely dull, yanking the reader out of the story.

Overall, I really liked parts of it, but I just didn't love the whole.

I received a free copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Review: Rotherweird by Andrew Caldecott

Rotherweird by Andrew Caldecott
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Publication Date: June 4, 2019


There are books out there that you think you should love, and fully expect to love, but when you finally crack open the spine (or your e-reader of choice), you discover to your horror that the story's a bit of a slog.

That's Rotherweird in a nutshell. The entire time I was reading, a tiny voice in the back of my mind kept whispering 'you should be enjoying this!' To the point where I almost felt guilty about how difficult it was to get through each chapter. On the surface, the story sounds grand: a town founded by geniuses, an ancient conspiracy, oddball characters, alternate realms . . . but the whole thing is told in this sort of halting, dry tone that just sucks all the life out of it.

The story feels weirdly emotionless. We're given a vast cavalcade of characters---who I had little trouble keeping straight, oddly enough---but they're drawn with so little feeling that it's nigh-impossible to care about any of them. At one point a character is straight-up murdered, and it falls upon the reader's heart with the same emotional intensity as a tax audit. The prose is very 'tell, don't show,' with a sort of blase-ness that could perhaps have been meant as whimsical . . . but if that was the intent, it failed pretty drastically.

Overall, this just wasn't to my taste.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

Review: The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Publication Date: September 10, 2019


This is a book to drown in.

January Scaller is precocious, adventurous, and sheltered, qualities that serve her poorly in the mansion of her father's robber-baron employer Mr. Locke, in an early 20th century America that looks down on those who aren't the 'right' color. And January most definitely isn't white . . . though what ethnicity she and her father actually are isn't quite obvious to anyone, for reasons that are (but shouldn't be) a mystery. She's seven years old when she discovers her first Door, one of many mysterious and magical gateways scattered in the secret places of this world, and steps through it to another world---and she's much older when the mysteries of the Doors, and her own family's past, crash down upon her life.

How many ways can I say how much I adored this book? The prose is lush, inventive, addicting . . . I found myself reading it as slowly as I could, savoring each perfect sentence, each effortlessly stunning turn of phrase. I was literally angry at the idea that this book would eventually end.

This is the sort of book that I just want to hand out to strangers. Possibly throw at them. Alix E. Harrow is going straight to the top of my auto-buy list, and I can't wait to see what she comes out with next.

A superb debut, and highly, highly recommended.

A huge thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing a free copy in exchange for an honest review!

Review: The Immortal City by Amy Kuivalainen

The Immortal City by Amy Kuivalainen
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Publication Date: September 19, 2019


Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

Dr. Penelope Bryne was publicly disgraced when she went public with research that claimed the legends of Atlantis were based on a real place, a la Troy, even though that struck this reader as a perfectly logical academic argument for her to make, and the whole "she's saying magic is real" assessment of the academic community was a giant non sequitur cause she never even implied that. When a woman is ritualistically murdered in Venice, with strange symbols scrawled around her, Penelope ends up heading to La Serenissima to consult with the police.

This book was . . . bland. After the first few paragraphs, I decided this would probably be a breezy fantasy-laden murder mystery---light, but fun. Well, light this certainly was, but the fun part ended up being nowhere to be found. The plot didn't just fail to grab me; things happen that are clearly meant to be major plot points, and all I could think while reading was "I am bored to tears". The plot feels like it has no stakes, even where it clearly should have stakes, and quite a few parts were, honestly, just very badly written. The author's sense of pacing was pretty nonexistent.

There is a certain sameness to the characters, a thinness, a superficiality; I didn't care what happened to them, and their dialog always sort of clunked against the ear. Everyone spoke in the same way, with the same voice, and that voice was . . . not like how people actually speak. The magical elements were handled in a weirdly pedestrian way, which . . . sounds pretentious, I know, but I'm not sure how else to describe it. Magic just sort of plops woodenly into the plot. There was no magic to the magic. I felt like I was reading about a billing argument in a dentist's office, not an ancient magical feud.

Overall, I'd say this was definitely a clunker. Not recommended.

Review: The Grand Dark by Richard Kadrey

The Grand Dark by Richard Kadrey
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Publication Date: June 11, 2019


Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

There is nothing worse to a reader than a book with a great opening line and a terrible follow-through. And The Grand Dark has a fantastic opening line: "The Great War was over, but everyone knew another war was coming and it drove the city a little mad." That's a line with promise. That's a line that beckons you to read on.

And so I read on . . . and almost immediately, my eyes started glazing over. I'm not sure what the opposite of a gripping story is--a loose story? A slippery story? Words like "tedious" really don't capture the thing--but suffice to say, this is that. Things began happening in the last quarter or so, which isn't a compliment.

I bumped this up from one to two stars only because the writing, though numbing, is at least technically competent. I generally reserve one-star reviews for books that I legitimately believe shouldn't have been published as-is. This book is far from skillfully written, and it wasn't nearly as interesting as it meant to be, but at least it seemed professionally produced.

Overall: not recommended.

Review: Walking To Aldebaran by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Walking to Adebaran by Adrian Tchaikovsky
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Publication Date: May 28, 2019


Walking to Aldebaran is a stand-alone novella starring astronaut Gary Rendell, a member of an international expedition team sent to explore an alien artifact that suddenly appeared out beyond Pluto. We follow Gary as he wanders the halls and corridors of the artifact (which he calls the Crypts), intermixed with flashbacks to the strange events that led him there. To say any more about the plot . . . well, that'd be a pretty honking big spoiler.

Adrian Tchaikovsky is one of those incredibly prolific writers who somehow manages to be incapable of writing a bad book. I've long thought of him as the male Seanan McGuire, and this installment just reinforces that impression. His prose sucks you in, and when you're finished, you flip around to find the next installment (and get kind of cranky when there isn't one!) I really loved the overall aura of the setting: it comes across as this sort of bizarre hiking story---like being on some Lovecraftian version of the Appalachian Trail, with fellow hikers you do and definitely *don't* want to meet.

And let's just say, it's definitely the sort of book you'll want to re-read.

Highly recommended.

A big thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

Review: Seven Blades in Black by Sam Sykes

Seven Blades in Black (The Grave of Empires #1) by Sam Sykes
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Publication Date: April 9, 2019


Sal the Cacophony--bounty hunter, former mage, and wielder of the damned gun Cacophony--has been captured by the forces of the magic-less Revolution, scheduled to be executed before a cheering crowd. Playing Scheherazade to her executioner, she gives us the tale of how she came to be imprisoned: a hunt for seven rebel mages who did her a terrible wrong.

What that wrong is, she doesn't say until well past the halfway mark. Which is odd, because the story description straight-up announces it. (And because if Sal is a Vagrant, and Vagrants are rebel mages, and Sal doesn't seem to have any magic aside from the Cacophony, then it isn't hard to do the math.)

There's a really fun story in here, with some genuinely witty writing. The problem is that it's buried beneath at least a couple hundred pages of needless bloat. This leads to some pretty severe pacing problems, and a book that was far more of a slog than it should have been. Add in the plot twists that any reader who's paying attention should see coming from a mile away, and this was a pretty unsatisfying read.

A huge thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing a free copy in exchange for an honest review!