Review: Godkiller

Godkiller by Hannah Kaner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This epic fantasy tackles the subject of gods in an unusual and interesting manner: the gods in this world are generated by human desires and failings. As people set up their shrines and bring offerings to those shrines, or pray to a specific god, they attract formless spirits who begin to take on the characteristics of the imagined deity until they manifest to life as the god humans first dreamed up. Of course, after their "birth" they usually become independent beings who then go on to wreak havoc, manipulating people to continue the worship that sustains them. This is the endless tail-swallowing cycle one of the characters in the book, King Arren, wishes to end (at least until the climax when he falls prey to wanting a god's power for himself).

We have four viewpoint characters: Kissen, the titular "godkiller" whose family was sacrificed to a fire god and who grows up to kill so-called "wild gods" who harm people in their quest for worshipers; Inara, a young girl who has somehow become bonded to Skediceth, a small "god of white lies"; Elogast, the best friend of the aforementioned King Arren who fought at his side three years earlier during the battle with the wild gods at the city of Blenraden; and the god Skedi, who manifests as a small shapeshifting flying animal, bound to Inara but trying to gain his freedom. All these characters come together in the midst of a burgeoning civil war and King Arren's running out of the time given him by the sacrifice of one of the very gods he claims to despise. Inara's entire household was massacred while she was away trying to convince Kissen to take her to Blenraden so Skedi can gain his freedom, and Elogast is also on a secret mission there to save his king.

This is the story of their journey to the dead city, the gods they meet and battle with, and what they discover about themselves along the way. All four characters undergo nice character arcs, but I think my favorite is the small god Skediceth, who wished to go to Blenraden to gain a shrine for himself and be free, but learns Inara and her love is enough for him after all. Kissen lets go of some of her hatred for the gods, and at the book's climax confronts the fire god who killed her family years before. Elogast, on the other hand, finds out his king is not at all the person he thought, and ends up throwing his hand in with the rebels.

The world is also well thought out and satisfying, with interesting questions about the nature of worship and the gods (since humans literally create their own gods). Every facet of this society is permeated with this reality, and the author has obviously thought through the ramifications of her concept. The only plot point that rang a little hollow to me is King Arren's sudden turn towards villainy at the end--that didn't feel quite earned. But otherwise, this book is well worth reading.

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Review: Sleep No More

Sleep No More by Seanan McGuire
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This 17th (!) entry in the long-running, and one of the few remaining, urban fantasy series follows right on the heels of last year's Be the Serpent . (Just as a warning, this book will make no sense unless you haven't read at least the previous volume, and preferably the previous two or three.) In the last book, Faerie was shaken up by the return of Titania, one of its original founders, inhabitants and Queens. The teeth-gnashing cliffhanger that book left us with sees Toby cast into an alternate version of Faerie where she was never a knight or a hero (or married to Tybalt); and where she is just a changeling (read servant/slave) who knows better than to resist her pureblood "betters."

This book follows up four months later, four months of Toby living in this alternate world and believing in all its soul-crushing tenets. The slow, painful unraveling of Titania's illusion/planted memories and Toby's return to the person she really is is expertly done. In the process McGuire asks some fascinating questions: who are we, without are memories? Can we become a different person entirely, if our memories are altered, and how do we get back to the person we were? And how will these competing sets of memories and experiences affect and change us? These questions are explored not only through Toby, but the Luidaeg and others. Along the way we look at our favorite characters with a sideways slant, as Toby sees them through the eyes of the person she could have been, if things had gone a bit differently.

It's an interesting way to see characters we've known across many books in a different and sometimes unflattering way (Tybalt, for one, briefly comes across as a possessive little snot). The pacing is excellent, as the story has to balance both the exterior action of Toby's journeying across Faerie to unravel Titania's plot, and the interior action of her recovering who she is and remembering those she loves. A lot of people learn things about themselves over the course of this book, and some of those things are not pleasant. This will shake up many of the characters' lives going forward.

It's unusual that an author can keep a long-running series compelling, and throw further surprises into the world, but McGuire has consistently done that with this series. The world of October Daye is as interesting as it has ever been, and it is definitely worth reading.

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Review: Thornhedge

Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a lovely novella that tells a gentle, almost cozy story, even if it has a few grimdark edges. Kingfisher (aka Ursula Vernon) excels in thrusting ordinary people into extraordinary situations. Her characters are not superheroes or anyone with special talents or education just waiting to fall into a situation where they can be put to use. They're flawed, relatable people who second-guess themselves and make mistakes and muddle through as best they can, and usually through sheer persistence and stubbornness they triumph.

Such is the case here with Toadling, the human child swapped out for a Faerie changeling shortly after her birth. She is raised by the "greenteeth" ("slimy swamp-dwelling spirits who devour unwary swimmers") who nevertheless take her in and love her. After fifteen years pass in Faerie, but only a few days in our world, the hare goddess comes to fetch Toadling to learn the ways of magic, or as much as she can, since she is not particularly adept at it. This is so she may return to the mortal world:

"It has been five days, in the mortal world, since you were taken." He smiled faintly. "And so I have another few years to teach you what I can, and then I will send you back to the mortal world so that you may arrive on the seventh day, to stand as godmother to the child left in your place."

This child proves to be Fayette, the changeling daughter of Toadling's human parents, who is a Faerie-inspired nightmare. To put it bluntly, she's a sociopath who begins to torture animals at a young age, and if not actively shoving people down the stairs or goading them into heart attacks, she stands by and watches them die because she thinks it's fun. Toadling tries to control her, but Fayette is growing more terrifying as she grows older. Toadling finally realizes the only solution is to use her water magic (one of the few magics she's somewhat good at) to put her to sleep in the high tower of the castle, and make a thick thornhedge grow up around the tower so no one can ever disturb her.

That's right, this is an inversion of the classic fairy tale "Sleeping Beauty," where the princess is not in the least innocent, but is in fact a beautiful golden-haired monster. And so hundreds of years pass with Toadling, both in human and toad form, guarding the thornhedge and its sleeping inhabitant, until a knight named Halim comes in search of the story he has heard--a fable, really--about the tower and its beautiful prisoner. Toadling tries to talk him out of hacking his way into the tower, but he presses ahead and she ends up going with him, hoping to find some way to stop Fayette for good.

They manage to do so, purely by accident: Fayette wakes, struggles with Toadling, and falls out of the tower to land many stories below, quite dead. The hare goddess returns to fetch Toadling back to the greenteeth, but now that Toadling is freed from her unwelcome burden, she finds she doesn't want to leave Halim behind. So she returns to the mortal world, with the promise of one day coming back to Faerie.

This story could not be stretched out to fill a full-length book, but the novella form is perfect for it. Toadling is a marvelous character, and while the setting could probably have been fleshed out more (it's vaguely European, taking place around two hundred years after the Black Death) since the focus is tightly on Toadling and her dilemma, that doesn't matter so much. I don't think it's my favorite Kingfisher/Vernon story (that would definitely be A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking ) but it's right up there.

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Review: The Blighted Stars

The Blighted Stars by Megan E. O'Keefe
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book is following the recent trend (somewhat) of "sentient-fungi-zombie-invasion" (see: The Last of Us) but it is also very much its own thing. It has meticulous worldbuilding and excellent depth of characterization, and is just an all-around damn good story.

In the far future, Earth is in the process of being overwhelmed by "the shroud," an invasive, plant-destroying lichen that cannot be killed or eradicated. The five ruling corporate families in this future, known collectively as MERIT, are attempting to build orbiting stations and find habitable planets for the population to escape to. These planets are known as "Cradles," and the story opens with the first of our main viewpoint charcters, the heir to the Mercator dynasty Tarquin, riding the starship the Amaranth to survey one of the newest Earthlike worlds, Sixth Cradle. Several of the previous Cradles have been contaminated by the shroud, and the Mercators are attempting to find both Earth-like worlds and planets that have stores of the mineral relkatite, a MacGuffin of sorts that is used to manufacture warpcore containment and several other things that this universe's technology is built upon.

But Sixth Cradle is already contaminated by the shroud and dying, and as the Amaranth arrives it is fired upon by its sister starship the Einkhorn. Tarquin escapes with the captain and several others in a shuttle that lands on the planet's surface. Among those others is his "exemplar," Lockhart, a dedicated bodyguard to protect him. But Lockhart is not who she seems....she is actually Naira Sharp, a "Conservator" (anarchist/revolutionary/terrorist depending on your point of view) who is convinced that the Mercator family is behind the shroud that is destroying worlds. She has come to destroy this expedition and save Sixth Cradle, but she is too late.

There are several technologies in this world that play an important role in the plot, especially the dual conceits of "neural maps" and "printing"--that is, digitizing one's memories and consciousness, storing it, and downloading it in a newly printed body after the previous one's death or in this case, after arriving at one's interstellar destination. Of course, this brings up all sorts of questions: namely, are the newly printed bodies just shells awaiting a download or actual people? ("Misprints" also play a prominent role in the story.) And when your current printed body dies and your memories and map is "cast back" to its main storage by way of quantum entanglement, is that still you or just a copy of a copy of a copy? (The story seems to be split on this, as Naira Sharp dies towards the end of the book without a chance to download. When she is printed again, she is without the relevant memories and is depicted as a different, separate person. The reason this is not presented as functional immortality is that a neural map can only handle a certain amount of downloads before it "cracks.") There is also the Mercator family's secret to mining and processing relkatite: they use an alien fungus, Mercatus canus, discovered on the crust of Venus that bioleaches and purifies the mineral. (When I read that, I thought, "And nothing can go wrong there....")

Now stranded on the surface of Sixth Cradle, Naira and Tarquin, mortal enemies (at least from Naira's point of view) must work together to solve the mystery of the shroud and what is happening to inhabitable worlds, and how the Mercator family ties in to all of it. What they discover has profound ramifications and threatens the survival of humanity itself.

These characters are drawn very well, but Tarquin Mercator undergoes the best character arc. His entire worldview is upended as he discovers what his father Acaelus has done, both to Naira and to humanity. The plot unfolds with many twists and turns, but because the story as a whole is so well paced (rapid-fire action interspersed with deepening characterization) the book's 483 pages never sag. There is also the beginning of a romance between Tarquin and Naira, but it never overwhelms the SF elements of the story.

I just loved this book. It's fat and twisty and complex, but there's not a wasted scene or moment. It's the first of a trilogy (of course) and I can't wait for the next.

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Review: The Blue, Beautiful World

The Blue, Beautiful World by Karen Lord
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I gave this book 130 pages, and I could not get into it. It's a first-contact scenario written from the viewpoint (well; mostly--about a third of the way through it shifts to a group of young people who, unbenownst to them, are gathered together and prepared to make the actual contact) of aliens who are on Earth and have been for decades. They are pop stars, actors, diplomats, and other important personages who have woven themselves into the fabric of Earth culture and life. Earth is currently isolated from a five-member galactic confederation with its own culture, economy, and political intrigue, and the aliens already on Earth are worried about being infiltrated by competing factions in said confederation. Unfortunately, I realized after I hit page 130 that I didn't care about any of it, and my TBR pile is too high to further waste my time.

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Review: Starter Villain

Starter Villain by John Scalzi
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

John Scalzi has a reputation for writing fast-paced, breezy science fiction with snarky characters and snappy repartee, and this book will only add to that. A couple of his books ( Lock In and Head On ) tackle weightier themes while still carrying on that tradition, and I prefer those books. But this one is certainly entertaining enough, and I laughed out loud several times.

For this particular book, both the title and cover are spot-on at conveying the contents, even if you don't make the connections in the story right away. Charlie Fitzer is a down on his luck substitute teacher trying to regroup after a divorce who comes into a questionable inheritance from his estranged uncle Jake Baldwin. Jake, as it turns out, is a secretive wheeler-dealer trillionaire and supervillain working behind the scenes to manipulate world events and economies, and after his death Charlie, his only surviving relative, gets dragged into the family "business." This not only involves a very Mafia-like underground cabal, but intelligent genetically engineered talking dolphins and typing cats, and a "volcano lair" in the Caribbean.

Charlie is an ordinary guy thrown into an extraordinary mess, and for the most part he handles it with aplomb. (I can't imagine my reaction to learning my own cat is a sentient being who has been spying on me for years.) He nearly gets killed a couple of times, has to bargain with other supervillains for his life, and discovers he very much does not want to be a part of this world. The story has a very James Bond-ian vibe to it, written in the author's style of dialogue-heavy and description-light. There is an absurdist edge to many of the incidents that inspire laughter, but there is also a fair amount of suspense, especially at the climax. Scalzi is an old pro at that sort of balancing act, and the book is well paced. I don't know if it will (or should) win any awards, but it's a solid, entertaining read.

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Review: The Exiled Fleet

The Exiled Fleet by J.S. Dewes
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This series is billed as "The Expanse meets Game of Thrones," and while that's a marketing tag to sell the series, I can't say it's wrong. Especially in this book: the backstory of one of the main characters is revealed, and it's a scheme of Machiavellian proportions. It's a testament to the depth of characterization in this book that when this happens, the reader (or at least this reader) really felt for the poor guy. The characters are put through the wringer in this one, with increasingly elevated crises and stakes, until the last quarter of the book with the desperate rocket ride of their attempts to escape the antagonist.

Don't start the series with this book. It picks up immediately after the first book, The Last Watch, with no explanation, and if you read this one first you will be hopelessly confused. The universe-destroying crisis of the first book is being kept at bay (at least for now) and the new challenge is for Adequin Rake, Cavalon Mercer, Jackin North, and the supporting cast to rescue four thousand Sentinels from the Divide before they starve. This requires igniting a freaking star in the depths of their ancient warship to power their FTL jumps, containing and stabilizing it successfully, and when that doesn't quite work, mounting a stealth mission to the Core (the same place they are trying to escape from) to round up the supplies they need.

This mission takes up most of the book, and piles complication upon complication. Along the way, Adequin meets the alien Viator breeder she freed in the first book, who proves to be an valuable and unexpected ally, and Cavalon confronts his grandfather, the villain Augustus Mercer, and discovers what he really is. The escape from the Mercer compound results in Adequin getting captured and Jackin trading himself for her release. (We also find out more of Jackin North's past and just how he is tied into the Mercers.)

Despite the relentless pacing and the incredible chase/battle scenes that take up the latter part of the book, the best part of it is the character interactions. Many authors have cardboard or at best shallow characters in this kind of book, preferring to let the gosh-wow space opera elements take center stage. I'm so glad Dewes doesn't do that. She continues the tradition in the first book of slowing down to let the characters (and the reader) breathe. All her characters are flawed, relatable, fascinating people, and Adequin and Cavalon in particular in this book are developed further. Adequin learns to step up and take on the burden of leadership without depending on Jackin, and Cavalon gets past the shock of his origins and realizes he is not his grandfather.

As soon as I finished this book, I went to Amazon and searched for further books in the series. It doesn't quite end on a cliffhanger, but there is clearly much more story to be told. I couldn't find anything, but I fervently hope the author can wrap this series up. These books are among my favorites of the year.



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