The third and final part of June’s 11 in 11 by 11/11/11 book reviews.

There were two books I read in June that were truly outstanding, both in different ways.

Geraldine McCaughrean is not a well-known author in the United States, which is a shame, because her young adult fiction stretches the boundaries of any genre she chooses to write in. The White Darkness is a contemporary adventure with elements of the supernatural, a journey to the bottom of the world and back. Sym has always been fascinated by Scott’s doomed expedition to reach the South Pole, and particularly by the romantic young Captain Titus Oates–throughout her childhood and teens, he’s been her imagined companion, the voice inside her head she shares all her problems with. When her uncle takes her on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Antarctica, Sym is so excited that she doesn’t pay attention to the signs that this is not an ordinary trip. When catastrophe strikes and the trip turns into a desperate fight for survival, everything Sym has ever believed is put to the test, and her connection to the imaginary Captain Oates becomes her last link to reality.

The most astonishing thing about this book is that despite the blindingly obvious hints that something is fishy about Uncle Victor, the clues that the reader interprets easily but that Sym totally misses, none of that feels annoying, like so many books where the author has heard of dramatic irony but doesn’t realize that it shouldn’t be wielded like a Louisville Slugger. Sym’s innocence is so plausible that it makes perfect sense that she wouldn’t know that Uncle Victor has been lying to her not just about the trip, but about everything, her whole life. If McCaughrean had gone the other route–of making Victor seem honest to the reader as well as to Sym until some dramatic reveal–it would have been just as much a cheat. The reasons for Victor’s behavior have to be obvious to the reader in order for the story to have an impact. I also like that Sym’s almost-total deafness isn’t revealed until several chapters in; it’s a challenge that doesn’t define her, but isn’t trivial either–and it makes possible one of the most moving events in the entire book. Personally, I like the uncertainty of the supernatural elements: is Oates’s presence in Sym’s head imaginary, or is it something more? The story doesn’t hinge on this question, so it’s possible for it to stay uncertain if the reader doesn’t want to resolve it one way or the other.

The other excellent book, of course, is Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings. I groused about this one publicly through Facebook status updates. I used to love giant fantasy epics, and then I didn’t anymore. And there’s something about Sanderson’s novels (barring the Alcatraz books) that makes me antsy and impatient, something I can’t identify. It’s not like they’re bad books; I’ve read all but Warbreaker and I like them very much. And it’s not the length; I read Anathem in almost one sitting and it’s almost as long as The Way of Kings. I don’t hate the prose, I’m interested in the plot both long- and short-term, and I mostly care about the characters. And every hundred or so pages I just had to put the book down and do something else.

In discussing the book with a friend, I realized that part of my problem was probably that I was only truly interested in one of the three plots, in the sense that it was the one I wanted to come back to. The other two, I cared about while I was reading them, but…it’s a military campaign, I’ve read about dozens of military campaigns, and the girl in the other section was an academic, a researcher, and practically a librarian, so give me a break, where did you expect my attention was going to go? So it’s possible that my impatience is a desire to get back to the story I care about, but it shows up only as low-level mental itchiness because the other two plots are at least worth reading. Usually with books like this (multi-plot stories) I either like all the plots, or I’ve got one I love and I’m bored or annoyed by the others, so my reaction is a lot more extreme. It could also be that the density of the material is just overwhelming. It took me a month to read the unabridged Count of Monte Cristo, because I’d read for a couple of days and then have to put it down before my brain exploded. And I love that book with an unseemly passion. Still, I’m sort of leaning toward the first reason.

But as much as I would have enjoyed a book that only had that one plot, The Way of Kings simply wouldn’t have worked without all three intertwined. The Stormlight Archive, of which this is the first volume, is going to be an extraordinary work of fantasy, and Sanderson is either a genius or completely off his nut to even contemplate it. I’m interested in the world, I’m interested in the mystery of what happened to it, I’m interested in where the characters will go next. I want to know what Dalinar got that was worth losing all memory of his wife. I want to know what Jasnah’s research will turn up about the world’s history. I want to know how many hints Kaladin has to have dropped on his head from a great height before he works out what kind of power he has. I’m interested enough that I will stick with the next book despite putting it down at least a dozen times before I’m done. This is a different kind of achievement than Anathem, but if Sanderson can keep it together, I expect it to be marvelous.

Next up: July’s books. More of them, and a higher number of really good ones.

Summer turned out to be too busy to keep up with the review-writing schedule, and now that summer’s over, I really don’t want to write individual reviews for all those books. (I just noticed that the last review I wrote was in July, for a book I finished end of May.) I broke this into three sections, because I love the sound of my own voice, even if it’s an imaginary sound because I’m, you know, writing it, and the whole thing got too long.

I got behind on my reading schedule in June, partly because I spent six days wading through The Way of Kings and partly because I read a lot of other things in between. Most of what I’ve read so far I’ve really liked, so if you break it down by month there’d be maybe one or two that were okay (or worse) and the rest would be very good. June’s reading was split more evenly between excellent and meh. (I do have a rating system that I keep track of in my database, but I don’t post those with the reviews because for me, the fine gradations between Super-Fabulous and Poke-My-Eye-Out-With-A-Stick are not consistent. I’ll mark a book as Enjoyable and later realize that it was actually better than that. So I don’t like associating those ratings with a public review.)

Two of the books, Death in Florence by George Alec Effinger and Armor by John Steakley, were on the lower end of the ratings spectrum I don’t post. Death in Florence is one of Effinger’s early novels, a story about a utopian experiment that, like all utopian experiments, is rotten at the core. The premise is interesting as long as you read it as absurdism, but it doesn’t feel like it goes any deeper than that.

Armor, on the other hand, is beautifully characterized, has a well-realized fictional world, and is also a kind of philosophical exploration that I think is more successful than Effinger’s. Where it loses points with me is how hard Steakley hammers on the philosophical point he’s making. This science fiction novel focuses on a soldier in a future war whose main weapon is the armored suit that gives him protection, weaponry, and life support. When his entire unit is wiped out by the enemy, a computer glitch keeps sending him on mission after mission, sometimes while he is seriously injured, simply because none of the human personnel believe that sort of thing could happen. Steakley’s point about humanity and needless war is unfortunately obscured by his unrelenting portrayal of all things military as either stupid or evil. It is a pointless war of aggression, and the high leadership is totally ignorant of the situation on the ground, but–not a single officer who shows humility or understanding? Not one leader who, with boots on the ground, can admit that the strategy is doomed to failure? I recommend reading this book in conjunction with Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, which uses the same basic premise but with a completely different attitude. (Armor is one of my husband’s favorites, and our disagreement about how good it was made for great tension because he wouldn’t admit I was right.

Next: the mid-range books, ones that were good but not outstanding.

Drinking Midnight Wine by Simon R. Green
Gollancz, 2001
11/11/11 Category: Fantasy

I think I expected something better from this book. Simon Green’s writing style is enjoyable and clever, and I liked the idea of the book—the two worlds of Veritie (the real world) and Mysterie (where magic happens), someone from our world being drawn into the other, that sort of thing. It’s not an original idea, but it hasn’t been done to death yet either. In the end, though, it just wasn’t very compelling.

For one thing, there are three different “first chapters” in a row—each chapter introduces a different subplot of the book, all of which end up connected, but each of them felt like the beginning of a new book instead. The main storyline follows this guy named Toby Dexter, a random schmoe whose extremely boring life takes him from his boring apartment to his menial job in a bookstore and back to his boring apartment again. The one bright spot in his life is a beautiful woman he sometimes sees on the train between these two locations. She’s clearly out of his league, but he imagines someday falling into conversation, finding out who she really is, and developing a relationship with her. One day, he gets his chance; it starts pouring rain just as they both get off the train, and the woman has no umbrella. But when he tries to approach her, the woman makes a door appear in the station wall, and Toby follows her…into a place that looks a lot like the real world, only the rain is gone, and the woman is extremely annoyed that she has a tagalong.

Things aren’t going well for the folks in Mysterie. The oldest evil, the Serpent in the Sun, is stirring; his son is trying to find a way to free him and remake the world; and the people who should keep this from happening, among them the mysterious woman Gayle, are at a disadvantage. Gayle reveals that Toby is the key to everything, a human with the power to change Mysterie. Toby, who as I’ve said before is a schmoe, doesn’t like this idea at all, but goes along with it because he’s in love with Gayle. Gayle warns him that she can’t love him in return, and he will get hurt, but Toby doesn’t care—so when he does get hurt by her, it’s hard to feel sympathetic. As the final confrontation approaches, nobody’s sure that Toby has what it takes to save both worlds, least of all Toby himself.

I was with the author for about the first sixty pages. There’s a lot of mythological detail in the story that interested me, and I was a little curious about how much of a whiner Toby would continue to be. When Green started dragging me around while Gayle introduced Toby to all these different people in Mysterie, all of whom had variations on the theme of “you’re the chosen one, but you’re a waste of space while I am immense and immortal,” I got bored real fast. It wasn’t a story, it was a fantasyland tour. The bad guys weren’t much better, despite being the son of the ultimate evil and an angel whose exact origins are a mystery. Lots of sitting around talking, not a lot of action. When the action finally started, it was too little, too late.

What really killed it for me was the awesome super powers of every Mysterie resident we met. There’s a point at which characters are just too powerful for a particular story, and when you have embodiments of natural forces who are, naturally, immense and immortal, it’s hard to see how they connect with ordinary human life, let alone fall in love with a human, LET ALONE a human who is as passive as Toby Dexter. Even the descendant of Thor, who was the least powerful of Toby’s allies, is still far, far beyond the average human guy. It would have been less of a stretch if Toby had ever really become someone creatures like that could respect or need, but despite the author’s trying to make him so, there wasn’t enough in the story to support the transformation. There was the kernel of an interesting story there, but if gormless British milquetoasts as heroes is what you want, you’re better off reading Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere.

King’s Property by Morgan Howell
Book one of the Queen of the Orcs series
Ballantine, 2007
11/11/11 Category: Fantasy

I really didn’t expect this to be as good as it was. I have a bad attitude about the generic tripe that takes up too much space on the fantasy literature shelf these days—heroes with a worldshattering destiny; characters who are just so Beautiful and Powerful and Magical that they rise against overwhelming odds to become, well, whatever is the most Beautiful, Powerful, Magical person around; weirdly spelled and pronounced names with too many apostrophes and not enough vowels; evil enemies who are so evil they defy all logic. I’m not sure why I put this book on my list, except that when my husband picked it up, I glanced through it and was drawn by…something, who knows what. Something that suggested it might not be the same old story.

This first book of the trilogy is the story of a backwoods girl named Dar whose family turns her over to the army as part of an agreed-on tribute. Her mother died in childbirth, and her spineless father married a shrew with whom he started a new family, and Stepmamma didn’t like having resources diverted from her own kids. Also, Dar’s father sexually abused her after her mother’s death, so Dar’s just as happy to be rid of them, even as she’s outraged by the betrayal. So far, the whole abused-woman-despised-by-all is a bad sign, and it sounds worse when I put it as baldly as this. Stay with me.

The story gets interesting when we learn that Dar is going to be serving in the king’s regiment of orcs. The orcs are not Tolkienesque monsters; they’re big, brutal, but reasonably humanoid creatures who fight like demons and, for some reason, insist on their food being prepared and served by women. Dar, whose behavior is that of a woman with nothing to lose, rather than a self-assured feminist icon, catches the attention of an orc called Kovok-mah. He’s surprised at her fighting spirit and at first treats her like a kind of pet (the orcs believe humans are a kind of animal, for several reasons) and then, as she gains his respect by learning the orc language and customs, as a human talisman. When Dar is claimed by one of the human leaders of the regiment, Kovok-mah defies his own people by putting her under his protection. Dar’s horrible experiences with the brutality of human men leads her to adopt orcish ways instead, and eventually she gains the respect of the entire band.

What keeps this book from being an eye-rolling anthem to the superiority of women over brutish men is that Dar is never once out of danger because of her defiance, either from men or from orcs. When she stands up to her would-be rapist, he has her beaten; when she humiliates him, she’s only saved from gang-rape by a bunch of the soldiers (with the officer’s approval) by Kovok-mah’s intervention. Similarly, Kovok-mah is ostracized by his own fellows for treating Dar like a “human” in opposition to everything the orc culture believes. At one point, he’s even demoted in rank because the orcs believe his foolish whim is the sign of a weakness that would get any warrior who followed him killed in battle. Dar and Kovok-mah form a kind of alliance based on the fact that both of them see the world differently than their peers: Kovok-mah figuratively, when he extends the respect orcs bear for females to an “animal,” and Dar literally, in the form of mysterious visions she believes are coming from the Earth itself.

Dar’s negative attitude toward men in general, and sex in particular, is well-supported in her backstory, despite how overly dramatic it is in places. Having seen her mother die in childbirth, and later watching a friend die after giving birth alone in the wilderness, Dar links sex to pregnancy and most of her aversion to a sexual relationship with the aggressive officer stems from that. Her attitude is also balanced by her relationship with a member of the King’s elite guard, a good man who grows to care for her and wants to free her, even if she never loves him back. His presence in the book goes a long way toward turning the viciousness of the soldiers in the orc regiment into a result of their environment rather than some Y-chromosome-linked biological failing. Howell also spends just enough time on orc culture (which is matriarchal without being generically so) to relieve the tension of the constant physical and sexual danger Dar lives with.

If I have reservations about this book, they’re due to that very premise. A story in which so much of the tension is provided by putting a woman in constant threat of rape and sexual degradation teeters on the edge of prurience, of being interesting more for that dark thrill of what might happen to her than because of the story itself. While I don’t believe this book goes that far, Howell’s second trilogy again centers on a woman in danger, this one a slave who falls in love with her master yadda yadda yadda, so I’m not entirely of the author’s motives here.  Still, King’s Property was an enjoyable book, the more so because my low expectations were entirely unjustified.

(My son recently had an assignment to spend the day “shadowing” someone at work to learn about their job. His teacher was fine with him shadowing me as a writer, which just goes to show you that the rising generation already knows how to work the system. So he wouldn’t spend the day goofing off, I had him write a review and “submit” it to me for editing and revision. This is what he wrote.)

Beyonders: A World Without Heroes
By Brandon Mull
Aladdin, 2011

A guest post by Rhys

A World Without Heroes is a book about two people from our world falling through to another world in some unlikely circumstances. The first main character that we meet is Jason. Jason is smart, but not a nerd or a geek, and he enjoys playing baseball. He has a fairly snarky personality but tends to like people. When he gets to this new world, at first he thinks that something weird is going on but other than that thinks he’s still on Earth. Rachel is smart, close to the point of being a nerd, and is home schooled. She is even more snarky than Jason, but still has a soft spot for people that are in need. She is very close in personality to Jason, and that helps them get along… most of the time.

This world is ruled by the last wizard, Maldor. Maldor is a bad person who enjoys torturing people and in the end almost killing them. Most of the time he lets them go with something that makes it so that they will never be a threat to him again. One person from the new world who helps Jason and Rachel is Ferrin, who is a displacer. Displacers have some weird talents; for instance, they can pull bits of them off and if it’s an eye, they can sew it on something else and still use that eye. The other person who helps them is Jasher. Jasher is an Amar Kabal, or “seed person.” The Amal Kabar are people grown from seeds that are pretty much invincible. Well, they still die, but their seed lives and grows another version of them. They only are babies once. Jasher is an outcast who is seeking out Maldor so he can kill him. The reason being, Maldor permanently killed someone he was related to.

One of the things that I enjoyed about this book is how it never leaves you hanging and it’s filled with suspense. Some of my personal favorite characters are the bad guys. Part of what made this book so good was the fact that there were bad guys who had almost, but not quite, turned into good guys just by hanging out with Jason and Rachel.

I didn’t enjoy that no matter what, the enemy pretty much knew what the heroes were doing at any time. And sometimes, the enemy felt like it was just a bit too overpowered. Even in a world where the bad guy was the last wizard, the antagonists shouldn’t have that much power at their disposal. This whole book is basically a starter for a much bigger series and that gives the impression that no matter what, the good guys are almost destined to fail at their goal till the next book.

Despite all this, I think that overall it is a good book for people who enjoy action, fantasy, and adventure. In the end I loved this book a lot and could hardly keep myself from reading it all day at school. I finished it in about 3-4 days, so I can personally say it is an amazing book that can be enjoyed by people about nine and up.