hearth/myth: Rursday Reads

My holiday shopping guide posts worked well enough last year that I've decided to do them again. First up is Inspirational Quotes for Writers.

The author has selected a number of inspirational quotes from a file her late son kept, and paired them with her own photography and artwork. It's a short book -- the whole thing is only 40 pages long, and most of each page is taken up with the artwork -- but even so, the layout gets monotonous. I wish the author had sometimes put the quotes above the artwork, or to one side, or made the photos halftone with the quote on top.

Most of the quotes aren't writing-related, despite the book's title. But while you may not get a story idea out of any of them, you may at least find something there to think about.

Shattered is a worthy final volume to M. Terry Green's dystopian sci-fi trilogy.

When we last left Thirteen, Cord, and little Miyu, they had liberated a slavers' ship and were heading for Helado, the city-on-a-volcanic-island where Thirteen hoped to find and rescue her sister at last. Hot on their heels was Helado's navy, headed by Prince Céfiro, who has sworn to win his father's favor by bringing in the Ghost -- the pirate who preys on Helado's most profitable industry by attacking slaving ships and setting the slaves free.

Cord has no interest in going to Helado, for reasons he is trying to keep secret. But he knows where Thirteen's sister is, and Thirteen has demanded that he take her to her. So when the navy catches up to them at last, he does the one thing he knows will reunite the sisters.

To tell you what he does would be a major spoiler. Suffice it to say that Green provides her readers with more than our fair share of twists and turns. Thirteen, Cord, and Miyu are affecting and engaging characters, and I couldn't stop reading until I reached the final page. If you're a fan of dystopian sci-fi, I highly recommend the entire Chronicles of White World series.

The Earthquake Doll is the sort of deceptively simple story that you keep thinking about, long after you've reached the end of the book.

It's 1952 in Japan. The victorious Americans have never left, and in fact are about to begin using Japan as a base of operations for the Korean War. Japan's traditional ways clash with modern American customs, and the Japanese are trying to make sense of it all.

Among those navigating this brave, new world is 16-year-old Miyoko. Her uncle has found her a position as a maid in the home of an American officer, and her mother and her mother's sister are arranging a marriage for her, even though she is too young to get married by traditional standards. And then Miyoko's cousin dies, and the foundation of her world really begins to shake. Somehow, she must find a way out of her dilemma without disgracing either herself or her family.

Williams is an excellent storyteller. I found myself rooting for Miyoko the whole way through the story. In addition, the author does her best to explain the Japanese words in the book, to the point of linking them to the glossary that she has helpfully included.

I'd recommend The Earthquake Doll to anyone with an interest in postwar Japan, Japanese culture, or fine storytelling.

Just in time for Samhain/Halloween, I bring you a trad-pubbed urban fantasy whose main character is named Samhain.

Samhain is Sam LeCroix, a former short-order cook and son of a local witch, who has only just recently realized he's a powerful necromancer. He's dispatched his hometown's former head necromancer, Douglas Montgomery, and has thereby inherited Douglas's house, gnomes, gargoyles, and houseboy -- a pukis named James. Sam is a nice guy, and isn't crazy about succeeding Douglas, who was definitely not a nice guy and who ruled mostly by fear and intimidation. Sam is new to his powers, and he's in love with Brid, the daughter of the local head werewolf. All of which makes him vulnerable. And as it turns out, Douglas isn't quite as dead as he ought to be -- and he's very interested in re-acquiring a little green stone that's stashed away in the house that now belongs to Sam.

This is the second book in the series, but I don't think you have to read the first book to enjoy this one. I figured everything out quickly enough and was never very confused.

I was, however, a little bit disappointed. I spotted this book in a bookstore and was excited pretty much right away. The title's a pun on the movie Romancing the Stone, after all, and the title of the first book in the series is a pun, too (Hold Me Closer, Necromancer -- and if you don't know that reference, I'm very disappointed in you). The blurb made it sound like the plot would include one madcap complication after another. In short, I was expecting a story along the lines of Jasper Fforde's Tuesday Next series. Or at least a heaping helping of snark. And then the author didn't deliver, and I was sad. I mean, it was okay. Just not what I was expecting.

Leland Dirks is rapidly becoming one of my favorite authors. In Brother Raven, he is ably abetted by his Border Collie companion, Angelo.

This collection of flash fiction includes pieces Dirks wrote for a couple of my own favorite micro-fiction haunts: the #2minutesgo outings at JD Mader's blog on Fridays, and the weekly flash fiction contest at Indies Unlimited. He has paired each story with his own photography and most of the photos were taken in southern Colorado.

All good so far. But the guy can also write. I'm partial to the first story in the collection, "Brother Raven," but I don't think there's a clunker in the whole bunch.

Highly recommended for fans of flash fiction.

I received an ARC of Seeker free in my World Fantasy Convention book bag, and picked it up without knowing anything about it. I expected the usual YA epic fantasy. You know -- the kind where old wizarding families teach their kids the family business, in which they'll travel around the world, righting wrongs and fighting for Justice with a capital J. Yeah, no.Seeker features old wizarding families, all right, but something has gone wrong with the system, and the Seekers are ruthlessly wielding their magic for the benefit of certain rich and powerful companies.

The McGuffin here is a stone athame -- a techno-magical knife that allows its wielder to travel from one place to another by cutting a hole in the fabric of time and space. Each old wizarding family had one originally, but somehow Quin's family ended up with John's family's knife. John's family has sent him to Scotland so that Quin's father, Briac, can train him to become a Seeker. Then he can fight Briac and get his family's athame back. Briac, of course, knows why John is really there, and has no intention of letting him become a Seeker.

And of course, John and Quin are in love. The requisite love triangle is completed by Shinobu; his Scottish father is related to Quin's family, his Japanese mother is dead, and he loves Quin and is jealous of John. When things go pear-shaped in Scotland, Quin and Shinobu escape from John to Hong Kong where, as it turns out, Shinobu's mother is very much alive. A master of Eastern medicine wipes Quin's painful memories, and she starts a new life. But it doesn't take long before the past -- and John -- catch up to all of them.

This was an amazing read that held my interest far better than a lot of YA fantasies do. Dayton lets us see out of the eyes of all of the young people, so that we understand the pressures all of them are under, and why they're all, in a sense, doomed. Yet the book ends with a glimmer of hope.

If what you're after is a typical YA epic fantasy, keep looking -- Seeker ain't it. But if you're up for a globe-trotting adventure with a bunch of surprising twists and turns, I would highly recommend this book.

I'm not a fan of memoirs, as a rule. But when I heard Bob Fuss had written one, I had to read it -- partly because (here comes the Six Degrees of Separation moment) I worked with Bob at Mutual/NBC Radio News, and knew him to be an outstanding journalist, as well as an entertaining guy. (No, he doesn't mention me in the book. Although he does talk about the "talented people working at these networks (who) were told they were being laid off" when the owners merged the Mutual/NBC news operation in the DC suburbs with CBS News in New York in 1998, and I was one of those people.)

You may not think you know who Bob is, but if your favorite radio station carries CBS News at the top of the hour, I'm certain you would recognize his voice. For decades, he was the network's Congressional correspondent. He also covered political conventions, presidential campaigns, and the odd disaster and/or coup.

Most of the chapters are straight past-tense memoir, but interspersed here and there are travelogues written in present tense, radio style. Bob has traveled a great deal, both for his job and for fun, and some of his observations had me laughing out loud. For instance, when touring Chilean poet Pablo Neruda's home, Bob writes of Neruda's tchotchkes, "The collection of items from around the world was quite impressive, as was his 'Stalin Peace Prize,' which is not something you see every day." No kidding.

In later chapters, he indulges in opinions about politicians of his acquaintance that would have gotten him canned if he'd said them in public twenty years ago. Back then, as he notes, journalists were required to avoid showing any bias; we had to keep our opinions to ourselves. Of course, things are different today.

He also talks candidly about his disability, and makes it clear that it has never slowed him down.

I give Bob a lot of credit for sticking it out in radio longer than I did -- that layoff in '98 did me in, but he didn't retire 'til last year. His book made me nostalgic about the business, though. Radio was a lot of fun, back in the day. If you're interested in radio, or in journalism, or in politics in Washington, or in travel to exotic places...oh, heck, just read the book. Highly recommended.

Baldacci is best known for his adult thrillers, none of which I have read. The Finisher is his first YA fantasy. And if you guessed this was the first of a series, you'd be right. (The second book should be available shortly, if it's not already.) The main character is Vega Jane -- Jane being her last name. She lives in a village called Wormwood, which no one ever leaves. She and her younger brother live in a sort of boarding house since their parents went into a catatonic state, more or less, after Vega's grandfather had an Event -- which means he wentpoof! and disappeared. Vega's best friend is a boy named Delph, who stutters. Her brother goes to school and she works in a factory called Stacks, where she and a man named Quentin Herms finish all the things manufactured there. They sand rough edges and paint pretty statues. And then one night, Vega sees the local constabulary chase Quentin into the Quag -- a mysterious barrier that surrounds Wormwood. No one who has gone into the Quag ever comes out again.

So already, you know that Vega is going to have to enter the Quag before the book is over. But before that, she will come into her own power, and deal with the town bullies -- not the least of which is Morrigone, a member of the town council, who starts out friendly enough but who clearly has her own agenda.

While the protagonist is a strong female and the plot included some surprises, the story struck me as a fairly predictable hero's journey. Vega is provided with magical tools with which to unlock her own magical potential, solve some puzzles, beat the bad guys, and progress through to the next level. Baldacci has picked such weird names for things in this world -- people are Wugs, minutes are slivers, days are lights (which makes for a nice "lights and nights" pairing, actually) -- that I had to wonder whether the story wouldn't morph into sci-fi before it was over. And it still might; I expect it'll be a trilogy before all is said and done.

This book is nearly 500 pages in hardback, but it's a fast read (for adults, anyway). I'd recommend it for kids who have finished the Harry Potter books and who are looking for something a little different, but not too different.

If you like your romance with a bit of a bite, you may like Old Town Nights.

Ambrose Slater is part of a family that has run the popular Slater's Bakery chain in Chicago for many years. But the real family secret is that everyone in the family is a vampire. In the world of this novel, vampirism is hereditary. Those who suffer from the condition can withstand sunlight, although they burn easily. And they can eat and drink regular food, but they also need blood -- preferably human blood -- to survive.

Ambrose has his eye on a woman named Abby Lawrence. He spotted her in a park one day as her boyfriend was yelling at her, and was smitten at once. Ambrose wants her for his own, but he's certain Abby will never agree to marry a vampire. So he decides his best course of action is to kidnap her.

That's right -- he's a stalker and a would-be kidnapper. But really, deep down, he's a good guy. And Abby does fall for him, with help from a few love bites. But the real drama begins when she realizes that he wants to have children -- babies to whom she would have to feed blood as well as milk.

I had a few problems with the editing. It seemed to me that there was too much telling and not enough showing. Also, Williams begins too many of her sentences with an -ing verb, and at times the construction doesn't make sense. The -ing form indicates an action that's ongoing. "Kicking off her sandals, she rested her feet on the coffee table" implies that she put her feet up while still in the act of taking off her sandals -- which I suppose is possible, but probably not what the author meant to say.

In addition, there were some instances where words like "yesterday" and "last night" were used with a verb in the past perfect tense. For example, "All he'd done was toss and turn last night" sounds wrong to me. I would have replaced "last night" with "the previous night." If Ambrose had said, "All I did was toss and turn last night," that works fine, because everything is in simple past tense.

Does that make sense? Maybe it's just me. If that sort of thing doesn't trouble you -- and if you like vampires and romance -- then maybe Old Town Nights is for you.

Shadowcursed is the story of an aging thief who takes one last job, and gets more than he bargained for.

At 42 or so, Bolen is not as spry as he once was, but he's convinced he can still pull off one more job. So he agrees to break into the home of the City Lord, Falasade, and steal a ruby statuette from the man's vault. The risk is great -- they don't call Falasade the Mad Lord for nothing. But there's something enticing about that statuette. Something...magical.

Still, he fences it. And then he's forced into another job, this time for an anonymous employer: to steal the statuette he's just fenced.

To sort out the mess he's in, Bolen will need the help of the clergy, all of his wits, and maybe even a meeting with the Mad Lord himself.

I really enjoyed this fantasy novella. They story moves along at a fast pace, with plenty of unexpected twists. I didn't see any editing issues. Highly recommended.

Now this is more like it. With Kitty Saves the World, Carrie Vaughn wraps up her 14-book urban fantasy saga, and she does it perfectly.

Kitty Norville, werewolf and Denver late-night radio talk-show host, has put out a tasty bit of bait for the vampire who wants to rule the world. The idea is to lure Roman, a.k.a. Dux Bellorum, out of hiding so that Kitty and her allies can trap and kill him. The vampire bites, you might say, but the assassination attempt fails -- and it's now clear that Roman is making his final moves in the vampires' Long Game. The head of the vampire coven in Denver passes a message to Kitty -- leave town now, or you and your family are dead. At the same time, she receives an offer out of the blue from a shady producer to put her radio show on TV, but only if she moves to California. What a coincidence, huh?

I've said before that with this series, Vaughn had me at Denver and radio. In this final book, she puts Kitty back in her natural setting -- the radio show, the werewolf pack's territory, and her life with husband Ben. It reminds the reader of everything Kitty personally stands to lose if she can't defeat Roman.

I skipped over book 13 of the series because Kitty wasn't the main character. While some readers seemed to think that book was crucial to understanding what's going on in this final volume, I didn't feel like I missed out on all that much.

Anyway. If you've been a Kitty Norville fan previously, you'll love Kitty Saves the World.

I got sidetracked from my plan to review one trad-pubbed book a month, didn't I? Now here it is, September. This year's World Fantasy Convention is happening in just two months, and I still have a whole stack of dead-tree books from last year's book bag that I haven't read. The Kindle is just so much more convenient... Anyway, I took this one along with me on vacation a few weeks ago, and ended up liking it very much.

Half a King is YA epic fantasy. Our protagonist is Yarvi, the younger son of the king and queen of Gettland, who was born with a deformed left hand. Without two good hands, he is useless at most things involving physical labor -- including fighting -- and so is deemed a weakling by his father. But Yarvi has a quick mind, and he is training for the ministry (somewhere between magic wielder and royal adviser) when he learns that his father has been killed in a raid. Yarvi's elder brother is also dead -- which means Yarvi is now king. Or half a king, as he tells himself bitterly -- too crippled to lead his people effectively. Or so he believes.

Regardless, his uncle forces him to lead a raid of vengeance on a neighboring king. Treachery ensues, and Yarvi ends up sold into slavery as an oarsman on a pirate ship that sails the Shattered Sea. Yarvi must somehow escape and make his way back to Gettland before he can see justice served.

I liked Yarvi, despite the fact that he comes off as a whiner in a good chunk of the book. He's always picking on himself because of his disability, but perhaps it's excusable. He's just parroting all the people around him who are telling him the same thing. The plot is tight, the treachery believable. And Abercrombie throws in a few twists along the way that I should have seen coming but didn't.

I think readers of epic fantasy would enjoy Half a King.

Can we sneak in a quick summer read on this next-to-last weekend of summer 2015? Why, yes, I believe we can.

Second Chance Summer continues the story of Elizabeth and Steve, who ran into one another on a Christmas tree lot several months back and rekindled an old romance. Now, Steve is on the verge of making a fortune on a high-flying real estate deal involving the construction of a resort hotel in the Philippines. He's about to whisk Elizabeth off on vacation -- just the two of them -- when a typhoon hits the island where his big deal is going down. This intervention by Mother Nature will tax the couple, both physically and financially. But what will it mean for their relationship?

This is the third installment in Inmon's five Second Chance Love stories. He has since collected all five into a single volume. But the stories can be read separately, and the fact that I haven't read any of the others affected neither my understanding nor my enjoyment of this one.

Inmon is a wonderful writer whose romances always deliver. If you enjoy reading contemporary romance, you could do much worse than any -- or all -- of the stories in Second Chance Love.

I love series box sets. When I've finished one book, I can just plunge ahead into the next one.

At Kevin's Watch, when we talk about the fantasy authors we like besides Stephen R. Donaldson, Brandon Sanderson's name always comes up, along with Steven Erikson, Robert Jordan (but only the first few Wheel of Time books), Patrick Rothfuss and, to a lesser extent, Patricia McKillip. And yet I've put off reading Mistborn until now.

Sanderson has created an original system of magic for this series. Basically, there are some people on this world who gain magical powers by ingesting certain metals. Each of the so-called Allomantic metals (of which there are eight, or more, depending on how far along in the story you are) provides a certain ability. And they come in pairs -- so burning Steel allows the Allomancer to push against other metals nearby, while burning Iron allows them to pull against them. Most Allomancers can burn only one metal, but a few -- known as Mistborn -- can burn them all.

They operate in a world where a single man, the Lord Ruler, has been in power for centuries. As befits all emperors, he rules over a societal system where the nobles live posh lives in grand homes in cities, or on plantations, and the skaa are virtual slaves who live in hopeless, grinding poverty. Supposedly, only nobles can be Allomancers -- but nobles tend to take the liberties with skaa that you'd expect, so Allomancy does turn up among the skaa.

In the first book, we're introduced to Kelsier, a Mistborn skaa who is already a legend as the only man who has ever escaped the Pits of Hathsin. Kelsier plans to overthrow the Lord Ruler, and he has gathered a team of thieves to help him. The team includes Vin, an orphaned girl who doesn't trust anybody. Kelsier figures out that she's Mistborn, and sets her up to masquerade as a noble girl from the country, so she can gather information by attending the nobles' balls. There, she meets Elend, the rebellious son of one of the most important noble families -- although Elend's rebellion takes the form of reading banned philosophical texts and wondering whether the skaa aren't just like nobles underneath. These three are the pivotal players in the revolution that Kelsier sets in motion.

Sanderson is a capable author, but the occasional problem slips through. At one point in the third book, Elend refers to three people Vin has murdered as a "homicidal hat trick." The line made me chuckle, but it also pulled me out of the story. Hat trick, after all, is a sports term for scoring three goals in a game, and nowhere in any of the books does anybody play a sport -- not even the nobility.

Anyway. This omnibus edition is not a quick read by any means, but it's well-written and enjoyable. If you like epic fantasy, I'd highly recommend the Mistborn Trilogy.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Summer is supposed to be the season for long, not-very-thought-provoking beach reads. But sometimes the mind wanders, or your attention span is short, and all you want is a little something to occupy your brain for a few minutes.

In that instance, I highly recommend Once Upon a Dragon. This collection of twelve short stories has something for almost everyone: fantasy, science fiction, and horror. And humor, too -- I laughed aloud at the end of "Professor Tomlinson's Last Experiment," although perhaps that wasn't the reaction the author was going for. "Perspectives on a Dragon" Parts I and II are nicely-paired point-of-view studies of all those fairy tales in which an unlikely lad rescues a princess from a dragon. Later in the collection, the story continues with "The Last Dragon." "Lifestyle Choice" takes a turn for the macabre when the heroine doesn't get the job she covets. And "User Pays" was a creepy, if all-too-plausible, look at what might happen if your average family followed a political proposition to its inevitable conclusion.

In short, the stories in Once Upon a Dragon are well-crafted, and the collection is well-edited. I thoroughly enjoyed them.

***
Speaking of summer vacation, Rursday Reads is taking a break next week. See you back here on Rursday, August 20th.

I'm reviewing this book as part of the 2015 Magic Realism Blog Hop. But Winter's Tale has been on my TBR list for some time.

Viewed from our end of the turn of the 21st century, Winter's Tale appears to be set in a version of New York City that never existed. The book spans a hundred years (it skips several decades in the middle) and begins in the late 1800s with a cart horse. The horse escapes from his stable and rescues a burglar, Peter Lake, who's being chased by a gang of thieves called the Short Tails. Peter Lake (who is always referred to by both names) eventually falls in love with a consumptive girl named Beverly Penn, and when she dies, he and the horse go over a mysterious wall of cloud and disappear. This cloud wall moves, appears, and disappears throughout the novel, occasionally spitting out something that has gotten caught up in it. Like the white horse. And Peter Lake. Both show up again in the waning years of the 20th century with magical powers and villains to thwart -- except that Peter Lake has amnesia, and he must cure himself of that before he can bring back the dead.

The book is long, the language dense and almost lyrical. I found myself enjoying the descriptive passages at some points, but rushing through them in other places in order to get on with the story. There's a very funny set piece in the middle of the book, when a character named Hardesty falls in with a dwarf who claims to be a wilderness guide but who is worse than useless at it. And occasionally there's a bit of wisdom, like this from Peter Lake: "The balances are exact. The world is a perfect place, so perfect that even if there is nothing afterward, all this will have been enough."

Ah, but it it magic realism? I'm not sure. The book's New York doesn't have much in common with our New York, other than topology. If you view the things that happen as metaphorical, then I guess it's similar to the work of Carlos Fuentes, kind of. Regardless, I did enjoy Winter's Tale and I'm glad I finally read it.