Book Review: City of Stairs

It's a little hard to tell but I think I've made some good progress on my books-to-read list which is always a nice thing. I've been able to knock off some stuff I've had on the list for years and found that by now my library systems have a surprising number of 2014 books. Not everything (they seem to have gotten in Children of a Hidden Sea and then promptly lost it) but enough things that I always have something nice to read these days!

City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett

Audio Book Review: A Love for the Pages

To continue with my full disclosure policy on this blog, a friend of mine was the narrator for this audio book and gave me a review copy on audible in exchange for a review. I plan on making a full page for how to contact me for review requests (especially with all of the webcomic requests I'm getting these days from people who have clearly never looked at this blog before in their lives....) but I am open to stuff like this. On that note, I am going to refrain from really talking about my friend's voice since I'm sure if she wants any personal critique she will ask, I'll just say that I like the sound of her voice and didn't find it grating which is one very important thing when you're about to listen to them for six hours!

A Love for the Pages by Joy Penny

Book Review: Cooperhead

Previously on Narrative Investigations: Helen receives an ARC from Tor only to discover it's the third book in a series, crap! Thankfully her library had the first book in the series but, after writing that review, she discovered that they didn't have the second book! So it was off to the other library system so that a review of Silverblind will still happen before the new year!

Cooperhead by Tina Connolly

Book Review: The Golem and the Jinni

Wait this is a 2013 book? Shoot, I was totally going to add this to my "best books of 2014" list because it's easily one of the best books I've read this year. I know I said I was going to focus more on reviewing YA books on this blog, since clearly I like them better and I feel like I give them more interesting reviews, but I had seen it reviewed on some mostly-YA book blogs before and honestly thought it was one. And it's a good book, a great book even, so let me try and convince people who like YA and adult fiction alike to give it a shot!

The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker

Book Review: IQ84

Sometimes, usually no more than once or twice a year, I'll read or watch something and choose not to review it since I feel like there's just no way I can talk about it. That's how I felt after I read my first Murakami book, A Wild Sheep Chase, and yet despite that I was interested in IQ84. Not necessarily because of the story but rather at how widely praised it seemed to be, I was just curious what exactly had grabbed seemingly so many people. So when one of my groups of friends, which happens to have a book club in it, decided that this was going to be their next book I hunted down a copy at a local library and got to reading a book so large I felt like it counted as an actual self-defense weapon when I had to walk home late at night by myself.

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

Manga Review: solanin

This is a comic I've seen in bookstores and wanted to read for years (since, goodness it must be high school if I was actually in a bookstore on a regular basis) but didn't want to just blind-buy it, despite the fact I knew that several of my friends had enjoyed it. So as soon as I saw it at my new local library system (and convinced them to give me a library card) I immedately checked it out and got to reading.

solanin by Inio Asano

Book Review: A Natural History of Dragons

This will be my last review of a 2013 book for a while, thank goodness, I've had to completely reorder my reviewing list to get these done as quickly as I could and as a result there are some things that have been on there for quite a while. Perhaps in the future I should continue reviewing novels during November Month of Manga as well, hmm. Regardless, I'm a little surprised that out of all the 2013 books I was looking for in my library that hey had this one (new author, not your typical set-up for a fantasy, etc) but I am not one to complain when the library has things I want to read!

A Natural History of Dragons: A Memoir by Lady Tent by Marie Brennan 

Book Review: Without A Summer

So, I know I had said I wasn't particularly interested in reading more novels in this series since I suspected that nothing was really going to change from story to story but, well, it was sitting in the new books section of my library and looked really nice and shiny! Plus it had a colorful cover, yep I don't have a really good reason for why I picked it up anyway.


Without A Summer by  Mary Robinette Kowal

Summary: Jane and Vincent are back in England and taking private glamural commissions again which takes them out to London during the season and Jane invites her sister along. While trying to make sure her sister has enough to do Jane begins to hear rumors of something involving the Catholics which may or may not be related to the overly chilly year they are having, a bit of misfortune that same have started blaming on the glamourists.

The Good: I can safely I've never seen fiction set during "the year without a summer" before, although knowing the true cause of the bad weather (I was already familiar with the disaster and figured it out as soon as I glanced at the summary) did take out some of the tension. I did like how Kowal used it to recreate similar protests and social upheaval of the real 1800s, most of which I hadn't been aware of until I looked at the notes in the back and that's one of my favorite things about alternate histories, taking a real world issue, changing it a bit to fit the setting and yet in the process informing the reader in such a way that they don't realize it's happening.

The Bad: I was more or less correct, after the charming first volume it seems as if the books are starting to fall into a routine (Jane learns of a plot, suspects the worst, it turns out to not be the worst but more communication could have helped even more) and I don't like routine in my books, if I want to read the same idea over I'll go reread a book I already love. So yet again, technically and story-wise there's nothing wrong here but character wise I am starting to get bored, although I'm not sure how much character development actually is appropriate for fully grown adults.


In the end I'm giving this book 3 out of 5 stars since while I did enjoy it more than the previous book I still feel like the original book stands strongest on it's own. I've heard that Kowal plans to have even more books, I suppose it must be selling well, and I guess that if I come across any more of them in the library I'll pick them up but otherwise I won't be going out of my way to read them. 

Comic Review: Market Day

This was a bit of a short book I grabbed from the not-so-local library and when I started reading it I was worried that it would prove too short to write a review about, too short to even tell a story. But after reading this I'm sure that there was enough in that story to write a review after all, abet a short one.

Market Day by James Sturm

Summary: Mendleman is a simple Jewish rug-maker whose least favorite day of the week is going to the market to sell his wares. This week he's even without his wife and that one day shows just how much your day can change, from the joyful to the sorrowful, and how much a person can change with them.

The Good: This book may be short but it's the perfect length to tell it's story and for the first time in a while I found myself truly connecting with a character. Mendleman won me over with him describing how he creates his rugs, where his inspiration flows from and how he always pushes himself to make better and more beautiful art and that made even my heart ache when he finds that he needs to find a new buyer for his rugs. And then my heart kept aching and slowly breaking for him as the story continued on and on. 

The Bad: I do wonder what happened next, what happened after Mendleman woke up that morning and had to continue on with his life, although I think that the story ended at the perfect place as is. I don't have much to criticize, maybe it should have moved faster in one or two paces or held a moment longer in others, in the end this was a very well constructed story which also had as much emotional impact as you could from such a short book.

The Art: The art wasn't exactly plain or simple, it didn't overwhelm the page and the rest of the story which I felt like was a good move and I also felt like it was a good match for the rest of the story. I felt like the feeling it gave off, this wide illusion of space in so many of it's panels, felt very well with Mendleman's thoughts, both his great hopes and fears just being engulfed by the world he lived in.


I'm giving this book 4.5 out of 5 stars, partially because I'm not sure I would ever give a story five, perfect stars, but I connected more with this story than I have with most stories I've read lately and I feel like this book was able to portray a feeling that so many of the books I had to read tried to do but in a way that I could finally understand (or perhaps it's that I'm not also at an age to understand, while a teen could certainly read it I feel like an adult or older teen is going to get the most out of this story).

Manga Review: Lonely Wolf, Lonely Sheep

Continuing with me "well it's not licensed in the US and it's rather niche so it probably won't but it's finished and I want to share it with other people" manga reviews, this was a title that was recommended by someone, I forget exactly who, on my twitter feed and I follow people on twitter because they have tastes that generally match up with mine so when someone recommends something I take a look at it. Plus, I've noticed lately that I'm not reading nearly as much yuri /GL as I would like as I would like so why not take a chance on a one volume story and hope for the best?


Lonely Wolf, Lonely Sheep by Mizutani Fuka

Summary: There are two Kakimoto Imaris, the tall, more tomboyish "Big" Imari and the cuter looking, artsy "Little" Imari and not only do they share the same name and almost identical birthdays but they also end up at the same hospital with the same injury. What's different about them are the secrets they keep and the ways they deal with them.

The Good: There are two things I don't like which keep me from enjoying a lot of BL and Gl, too much angst and explicit sex and happily for me this story has neither of those things. The Imaris have a relationship that's more like friendship than a romance for most of the story and while they do have some issues to move past they do move past them so the story isn't drowning in tears and sadness. Both of them are reasonably well-fleshed out by the end of the story, which a few (I feel almost obligatory by this point) twists on stereotypes and the story is paced well also making for a short yet sweet read.

The Bad: A small complaint that is rather unsurprising for a one volume story, things just worked out a little too simply for them especially when it came to resolving their problems. I call this a small problem because hey, life isn't always angst filled and while both Imari's had problems they both also were unhappy about them and did deep down have the desire to fix them, plus who knows exactly how much time passed between several of the events. I didn't like how Rika ended up being rather two dimensional by the end, she's much more of a plot device than a character, but in a weird way the story didn't even need a character for her, what it needed was an event and she did fulfill that role perfectly fine. 

The Art: Normally I don't post a spread of a cover like the one above but it was just too adorable to pass up and seeing the characters in color makes me wish the entire book had been in color too. The art is a bit simple, there's a lot of white with little screentoning and nothing has a lot of detail in it but I think the feel of the art fits in well with the feel of the story, short and sweet with no additional fuss.


So I give this 3.5 out of 5 stars and would certainly buy it if it became available in North America (either in print or digitally). Actually, considering it's only one volume I wouldn't mind buying it in Japanese but, since I live at least a few hundred miles away from a store that sells books in Japanese in the US and have no time to figure out how to buy books on Japanese websites I'll just cross my fingers and hope this one gets released in the US so I don't need to worry about that. 

Book Review: Glamour in Glass

Getting close to the end of the year here! For the record, I'm going to take the first through the fifth off, partially so I can sew for an upcoming con and also because I've done such a great job getting everything reviewed I'll be basically out of stuff to talk about by then! Besides, just about everyone who took a break took one this week so it's not like there will be a dearth of content elsewhere.
In any case, I attempted to get this book through an interlibrary loan, failed, discovered it was at my local library back home, got it from there once I got home for the holidays and then got a response from my college library saying they had it. I have absolutely no idea what they're doing now, especially since I was well into the book and knew I was going to finish it long before I got back to school and there doesn't seem to be a way to cancel the request. Oh well, what matters now is that I have read it and through entirely legal means to boot!


Glamour in Glass by Mary Robinette Kowal

Summary: Jane and Vincent are now happily married and working together producing glamurals, even though Jane worries that she's not helping enough or that her contributions to the work are overlooked by everyone except her husband. However they decide to take a brief break and go on a honeymoon on the continent now that Napoleon has been disposed of and visit an old friend of Vincent's where Jane has a rather clever idea.

The Good: As odd as it sounds this book made me a bit interested in the history of the time and not the history of Napoleon and his wars but of society and the differences between countries in Europe. Possibly not what Kowal expected people to take away from it but I want to go off and read more about the time period now which I think means the book did at least a few things right. As for the story itself, it was cool to see how the magic changed and grew, although the story didn't focus as much on the magic so I almost want another book which focuses on it more. 

The Bad: I'm venturing dangerously close to spoilers here but the heck with it, despite the fact that it gives the book it's title the glassmaking ultimately didn't play a very large role in the book and I felt like it was almost disposed of by the end. Sure you could say it was only a plot device but I think it was a badly used one. And the book overall was, well, boring and I never found Shades of Milk and Honey boring. I've seen people that it is much harder to write a story about people staying in love than one about them falling in love and that certainly seemed to be the case here, even if it was nice to see Vincent be more open it was just more boring overall.

In the end I give this three stars out of five and found it much less interesting than it'd predecessor  It's not a full "you have to read this to know the entire story " sequel so read it if you want, if you don't then don't. I'm probably being a bit hard on it but, erm, oh well, I'm sure it's just to balance out how lenient I was on Kyousogiga yesterday. 

Book Review: Thieftaker

Augh, sorry this is late, I started writing this early yesterday but then got hit with a headache that could've felled an ox and decided to just go to bed early instead of staying awake (and in pain) trying to finish this. I will try to get today's regular post up as well although that will be up closer to the usual time.

Tor.com put up a short excerpt for this book a few months ago and when I had a chance to win an ARC I jumped on it. And then, continuing with my recent pattern, it took a while for me to get around to actually reading it since I had so much checked out from the libraries and enough homework to fill up all the time I had between classes. But eventually I found the time and this makes the third historical-novel-with-fantasy-elements I've read this year, can't tell if that counts as branching out for me or not. 


Thieftaker by D. B. Jackson

Summary: Ethan Kallie has an unusual job in pre-Revolutionary War Boston, he's a thieftaker and uses magic to hunt down thieves for his clients. He tries to not advertise the fact that he can use magic but when he's hired for a murder case it seems like everyone already knows his secret and that if he doesn't use magic he'll never figure out the killer.

The Good: In my copy (an ARC) there was a note on one of the early pages which I think said that there would be a map in the published edition which I think is a great idea. I've been to Boston just once and a lot of times during the book found myself wanting a map so I could figure out where everyone was, especially since they were using real locations in the story. The concept of magic here is interesting and works, my main worry had been that the magic would be so flashy that it would be unbelievable that this world had followed the exact same history as our world had with that giant difference. However the book made clear that magic users had by and large always stayed hidden (lest they be burned as witches) and for me that made the setting work which had been my biggest fear going into it. 

The Bad: Despite the fact that the opening excerpt Tor posted really grabbed me I was just, well, bored with this book by the end. I feel like it was wavering between becoming really dark and being less dark, and trying to decide just how much it wanted to use real historical characters. I didn't like Ethan as much by the end (honestly after seeing so many anime with a character going "oh god two girls like me what do I doooooo?" I have a much lower tolerance for that, especially when the character in question is an adult man who should be able to figure out what to do with his life) and just felt like the entire climax was awkward, not tense. All in all it doesn't make me very excited for the next book, I probably won't look for it at all.


So sadly a dud and I'll try to toss it in my library's free pile soon and hope that whoever gets it next enjoys it much more than me. Giving it 2.5 stars out of 5 and I'm hoping that I'll have a chance to read one more piece of historical fiction this year and that I'll enjoy it more.  

Book Review: The Night Circus

I'd seen this book around for a while before I read it, the bookstore at my college had it proudly displayed with a lot of other books which I walked past frequently, and I had heard a lot of good things about the book online but what drove me to try it out was a combination of seeing some cosplayers say they were going to try and make cosplays from it (and they planned on outfits from other books I liked so I knew we had similar tastes). I think I saw someone say that it read a lot like a YA book despite the fact that it's adult fiction which also made me curious. I was sad about one thing however, the copy I got at the library was a large print edition and yet the print was still much too small for me to read without glasses, I remember when I could read those books without my glasses back in high school.....

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

I love the papercut look of the cover and I love how the image is a reference to a clock mentioned in the book, I just like when covers go the extra step to reference a detail from a book instead of having a generic cover. That image is the one for the hardback and the paper back one is also interesting, it still has the clock in the middle but also has silhouettes of Celia and Marco on either side, it works equally well and I think it's a rather clever way to change the cover but still make it obvious that it's the same book. 

Summary: A magicians duel can take many shapes and can take years to finish so the onlooker might find it rather boring at first. But not in this case where the Cirque de Reves is the stage for Celia and Marco, two young magicians bound at a young age by their parent/mentor in a fight to the death simply to see whose student is better. Both of them grow up knowing about the duel but knowing nothing about it and have no choice but to go along as fate slowly draws them together collaborating more often than fighting, a choice that could bring disaster to both of them. 

The Good: I don't often come across stories that follow characters for years as they grow but I like the concept since so many times I'll come across stories where all kinds of big, world-changing events occur from start to finish in the space of a week. The Night Circus neatly averts that as it takes years to set up the titular circus for the duel and then the duel itself lasts years, that extended period of time makes the plot feel more "real" and it was easier to become attached to characters after seeing the grow up. The characters were interesting and sympathetic, the descriptions were amazing (I can only wonder what a movie version would look like if it had the budget and a screenwriter clever enough to make the story fit two and a half hours, it simply wouldn't work as multiple films or a serialized story in my opinion) and this is all made even more impressive when you realize that this was Morgenstern's debut novel. I enjoyed it quite a bit and highly recommend it to anyone who has ever enjoyed a fantasy story, be it high fantasy or urban fantasy, before.

The Bad: This book contains both timeskips and some out of order sequences so if you don't pay attention to the dates at the beginning of the chapters it's easy to get confused, I got particularly annoyed at one subplot which was introduced rather early on and I completely missed the fact that it was set 20 years later on. On a related note, the story starts when the two leads are quite young and doesn't finish until they're in they're in their late 20s at least so there is a lot of time when not much happens in the story. There is character development and there are some subplots which move along for sure but I wonder if the pace might be too slow for some people.


Another really strong book, something I won't be able to say next week (in case anyone was getting bored by all of my praise of late) and one I could easily recommend to half a dozen people I know. I'll have to keep an eye out for Morgenstern's next book whenever that will be since I liked how she did practically everything here and would like to see more of that.   

Book Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

This year at my family's Christmas gift swap (we're so large it's easier, and much more fun, to do a White Elephant style gift swap so I never know what I'll end up with) I made off with the first two books in The Millennium trilogy and after I saw the Swedish version of the film I started the first book. I had been warned that it had a slow start thankfully or I might not have continued through with it but it's time for the review itself to talk about that.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larson

 

Summary: Mikael Blomkvist is an investigative reporter facing jail time for libel after an article of his goes awry. While he is trying to avoid media coverage, mostly to avoid destroying the magazine he co-owns (The Millennium), he is contacted by the elderly Henrik Vanger with an interesting job proposition, to figure out once and for all what happened to his niece who went missing 60 years ago. Before Vanger hired him however he hired the talented and fiercely anti-social Lisabeth Salander, a hacker, to investigate Blomkvist and who took an interest in him. Blomkvist realizes that he needs help himself on the case and tracks her down as they start to unravel the Vanger family’s twist past.

The Good: Larson has managed to create a very intriguing mystery that’s hard to predict yet makes sense in hindsight. He juggles a good sized cast easily, it may be a bit difficult to remember who is related to who but you won’t confuse any of the characters. The pacing, once the story gets going, works well considering the story is spread out over a year (although I can easily see why the Swedish movie shortened and shifted around a few events) and it's nice to see that Blomkvist did not immediately solve the case but that it did take a lot of extra effort and time to bring the facts to light. The ending was also a bit different from the ending of the movie however, while it was interesting to see such a different tone and track taken, I do wonder why Larsson wrote that ending.   

The Bad: Since Stieg Larsson is dead it may be crass to say this but the man apparently could not pace a story to save his life. It takes two hundred pages for the story to get going and lingers on for another hundred pages after the main mystery is resolved. The entire book is nearly 600 pages long and I’m curious to know if he did die before the book was fully edited and if it was published as is, that could explain a lot. I have nothing against long books but the problem here is that most of these extra pages is devoted to giving in-depth backgrounds to one scene characters. Some of these characters might be important in later books, especially since Larsson was planning up to ten books in the series, but wouldn’t it make more sense to do that in a later book? Also, I don’t know if this is a translation issue or if it’s from the original Swedish, but the portrayal of Lisabeth varied wildly during different parts of the book. Sometimes she seemed like an awkward, neuro-typical, young twenty something and other times she seemed genuinely crazy. This happened both when the point of view focused on her and when it was from Blomkvist’s POV and instead of making her a more rounded character she came off as very uneven instead. Finally, I know there is some controversy about this term around the internet, but Blomkvist comes off as a self-insert, Gary Stu at times. There are times when he’s an interesting character and feels well fleshed out and then there are moments, with how noble he is in his journalism and how every women he meets wants to have sex with him (which is apparently very good at), which feel like this is how Larsson wanted to be himself. Blomkvist does not feel like a complete Gary Stu but those traits were just so blatant that they annoyed me to no end.  

In the end this book made me appreciate the (Swedish) film even more for how it took a book with some rather large problems and smoothed them out very well. Currently I don't have any plans to see the American version of the film, I heard that some of the rape scenes were very graphic and wanted to watch it either through Netflix or on DVD (aka, where I would be able to simply fast forward through them) but I expect I will sometime in the next few months.