Category Archives: Books

Book Reviews

Book Review: The Lightning Thief

Title: The Lightning Thief

Author: Rick Riordan

Genre: MG Fantasy

Read: Dec 1-6, 2010

Summary: Okay read, but really cheesy.

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In my ongoing research of novels: both bestselling and good, I figured I should give this one a try. Sure it’s for a young audience, but I’m also a big Greek history buff.

Hmmm. The voice is engaging, and it’s certainly easy to read. The idea is great. The characters fine, not good but fine. The writing is stiff, and the plotting… oh the plotting is pretty awful. I really don’t understand why it sold so well. Perhaps it’s a vaguely educational angle?

Percy himself is likable, although he is unrealistically brave in this just-go-for-it-because-I-know-as-protagonist-I’ll-win way. The rest of the characters are pretty one dimensional, although they do fulfill the requisite positions.

The flip style is good, but not exactly ground breaking, and the sentences are clunky.

I’m a stickler for accuracy with regard to mythology. But mostly, that part isn’t too bad. Sure he completely goofed Satyrs, as they are hybridized horse people, not related to goats (although they are partial to the beasts). You can see my detailed post on Satyrs. And on a related note, Dionysus was lamely portrayed, missing out on any of the interesting nuances and dichotomies of the god. That’s the name of the game for this book — shy on nuance. Sure he throws in all sorts of figures from Greek myth, but very little of their subtle and interesting character is retained. But the modernized updates are sometimes fun. Even so, this wasn’t my big problem with the book.

The plot. The premise of modern day child of the gods is great. The overall arc of the plot is fine, that a war of the gods is brewing. It’s just they way the main quest is actually architected. The middle 50% of the book consists of a series of encounters with monsters literally concatenated with nary a thought as to connection or relevance to the overall story. In fact, you could delete quite a few of them and never notice. This is always bad writing. If a scene can be deleted without incident, well then, it probably should’ve been. The overall taste we’re left with is one of ludicrous coincidence, where everything just happens to the hero.

Then we get to the end. Can we say cheesy melodrama. There’s no real menace, or challenge. Things just kind of happen. Mostly the hero solves them by whipping out his sword disguised as a pen. It all works out. It didn’t have to be this way. Harry Potter is much better plotted.

Now I have to see the movie and compare. This may be a chore. I wonder if the series gets better, but I don’t have the interest to find out.

Book Review: Uglies

Title: Uglies

Author: Scott Westerfeld

Genre: YA Science Fiction

Read: Nov 19-21, 2010

Summary: Great Read.

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The Science Fiction in this book is a little hokey, but it’s still a extremely compelling read. There is a bit of a silly high concept in this dystopian future, where at 16 teenagers get an operation that promotes them from “uglies” (normal people) to super improved “pretties.” I didn’t really buy the idea of this particular and odd society, but I just suspended my disbelief and enjoyed the ride.

The voice is solid and captivating. It’s a good story, and the world has a really nice feel. The characters are pretty well painted too. I pounded though the book and ordered the sequel. I have some little beefs with the logic of the plot, and a bigger one with a motivation of the protagonist, and the ending. However, when I enjoy a story and care about the characters, a little ignoring is worth it.

There are also some cool gadgets. The tech feels a little uneven — I usually find that the case, where the level of technology changes aren’t consistant across the board. But a good read is a good read.

Inside Game of Thrones

HBO has been working on a new hour drama based on my favorite fantasy series, Song of Ice and Fire, which they’re calling by the title of the first book, Game of Thrones. Last night they ran a 15 minute teaser which can be seen here.

I need to do a full review of the series, which you should all immediately read if you haven’t, but it totally rules, and the HBO show looks fantastic too. The books are long, but incredibly fast paced. Set in a sort of fantastic reinterpretation of late medieval England, the magic is very lightly handled. In fact, the story concentrates on extremely vivid and ambiguous characters caught in a vicious political struggle. It’s very dark and real — giving new meaning to the Tarantino phrase, “I’ma get medieval on your ass.” However, nothing’s gratuitous, just well done.

Book and Movie Review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Title: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Author: J.K. Rowling

Genre: YA Fantasy

Read: 21 July 2007, Watched (part 1): 20 Nov, 2010

Summary: Satisfying but obligatory conclusion to the epic series.

 

Retarded title aside, this is a pretty good film. Caveats, however, abound. If you haven’t seen all the previous installments, or at least the last several — forget it. The film just roles right into the action, with nary an attempt to explain past events, or even to introduce the rather vast array of characters, some of whom die after only a few moments of screen time. This reliance on the previous chunks of the story I find perfectly reasonable, to do anything else would be difficult and boring.

What is odd, however, is that I’m not sure this film series would make a whole lot of sense to the fifty people on earth who haven’t read the books. In fact, I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t. I know a few of those people, and they seem to be universally baffled by the films, and don’t particularly enjoy them. Now I enjoyed my 2.8 hours, but I’ve read all the books, and seen each film at least once (as they came out in almost all cases). The books and films enjoy an peculiar symbiotic relationship. The films rely on the books completely for the sense of the rhythm of Hogwarts (not present in DH part 1 anyway), true understanding of the complexity of the plot, anything beyond names and faces for the secondary characters, etc. They just don’t have time to include it. The movies, on the other hand, prop up the visual world of the series. Now I first read the first four books BEFORE any of the films came out, but when I went back to reread book one this year (it’s still great) I realized how little description is actually in the novel, and how I now visualized exactly the lush and detailed visual world of the films. Most of the viewers in the theatre weren’t even old enough for it to have been possible for them to have read before being exposed to the film imagery. It also seems a bit odd that the films aren’t really made to stand on their own. To the non reader they offer up characters that they never explain. I guess the gravitational pull of the source material is too strong.

Back to DH part 1. Like the book it has an entirely different feel than the rest of the series. Particularly, given how the writers have split it. There’s no Hogwarts at all. No teachers (except a brief glimpse of Snape). Almost none of the other students (Draco and Luna only). It’s a movie about Harry, Ron, and Hermione. That isn’t bad, but it’s different. It’s also a film about Voldemort, because we see a lot more of him — or at least of the CG that completely hides Fiennes. The decision to split the film — beside making the studios et all an extra billion dollars — has given them five hours to work with instead of three. This means that this film is the most faithful to the book since number 3 (my favorite). It feels less rushed, darker and more deliberate. But even having read and seen everything, I had the feeling several times that I just had to take the logical leaps for granted. There still isn’t enough time to really explain the byzantine backstory.

Ron continues to be the weakest of the three core actors, with Harry being fine, and Emma Watson shining as Hermione. I want to see what she can do in a totally different role. Helena Bonham Carter is too over the top. The opening scene with the council of baddies was kinda cheesy, and the death of Dobby felt forced and lacked proper emotional weight. Draco just stands around and looks like he doesn’t know his lines. Hardly anyone else matters. As I said, it’s basically the gang of three in the tent vs the world.

But hell, on top it felt pretty satisfying, and now we have to wait for the last one.

Book Review: Dead Beautiful

Title: Dead Beautiful

Author: Yvonne Woon

Genre: YA Supernatural

Read: Nov 5, 2010

Summary: Great YA, gripping voice pulls you right through.

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I found this via one of my writer blogs. A lot of recent YA is frankly, trash, but this was a very well written book. Superficially it might seem very Hogwarts, a young girl’s parents die suddenly, and then she is bundled by her mysterious grandfather off to a creepy gothic prep school in Maine. But it’s anything but derivative. First of all the first person voice is great. Smart, but not forced or full of attitude it pulls you seamlessly through the entire novel — and it’s 500+ pages. I literally read it in one sitting.

I’m not going to give away the major premise, but the school setting is often an enjoyable one when done right, and this one certainly is. The characters seem real enough, particularly the protagonist, and there is a unique creepy feel to the whole world. Intellectual, but not heavy. The supernatural is fairly subtle, and about 75% of the way through there is the “big reveal” as to what the deal is with certain things. As is usual with this sort of thing the book was better before the reveal, but it still held up afterwards, even coming to an emotional finish.

Fantastic debut novel, and I eagerly await the author’s next book.

Book Review: The Last Colony

Title: The Last Colony

Author: John Scalzi

Genre: Sci-Fi/Space Opera

Read: Nov 1-4, 2010

Summary: Fun read, but not as good as the previous two.

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This is the sequel to Old Man’s War and The Ghost Brigades. I really enjoyed those books and pounded through this one as well. It’s just as easy to read and picks up with the same two main protagonists. John Perry narrates in first person as he did in the first novel.

Unfortunately, it just isn’t as good. Not that it’s bad. It’s a fun read. John and Jane, no longer nano-engineered soliders, get recruited to lead a new colony, and are swept into a high stakes game of Alien politics. It just seems sillier. There’s less specific action, more political explanation. That might be half my problem with this novel. A lot of the big stuff takes place off screen and/or is just summarized in narrative instead of being told in scene. The plot also tries to tackle way too much, leading to loose ends like a newly discovered sentient alien species — introduced, and totally never resolved or explained in any way. The political action happens too fast, and on such a large scale, with fairly crazy solutions. I just didn’t buy it, so I was left feeling a bit empty.

The fourth book in the series is apparently the same story told from the point of view of Zoe, John and Jane’s teenage daughter. I’m not sure I want to read this story again — although I did like Zoe as a character.

Book and Movie Review: The Road

The RoadTitle: The Road (movie)

Author: Cormac McCarthy

Genre: Literary Sci-Fi Horror

Read: Oct 29-30, 2010

Summary: Evocative.

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At the suggestion of my friend Peter (in comments on my review of The Passage) I picked up The Road. I’d seen the movie a couple months ago. This novel is a relative oddity, being both literary and Sci-Fi post apocalyptic.

The prose: We have to speak first about the prose. At first, as with other McCarthy books, I found it jaring. He writes long sentences without much punctuation. He uses nouns and adjectives as verbs (like Shakespeare). For example, “The man glassed the horizon” (meaning he looked with binoculars) or “The white fog paled the trees.” These long sentences are interrupted with short burps in counterpoint. The dialog, what littler there is, has no quotations (remember he doesn’t like punctuation), and precious few tags. There’re no chapters, but scene breaks occur with startling rapidity. Many scenes are just description, slashes of images. McCarthy employs vocabulary the likes of “vermiculate,” (covered in worm like lines) or verbs like “hove” (past tense of heave). I found myself needing to use the kindle app’s built in dictionary feature. Still, after 15-20 pages I stopped noticing — well I didn’t stop entirely, but it grew comfortable. This very specific and personal voice is wonderfully evocative. Haunting, and spare, but with elegant and precise use of words and word parings does a good job of sketching the bleak setting. I’m not sure how the casual reader would react, but I certainly appreciate his skill with words. No awkward Stephenie Meyer style constructions here.

The book: Not a whole lot happens in the book. Basically “The man” and “the boy” wander through this post post apocalyptic landscape where nothing but an occasional hostile person moves. The world has burned and been all used up. There is no hope, absolutely none. Not a plant or animal lives. It’s just a matter of delaying the inevitable — perhaps avoiding being eaten by cannibals along the way. This bleakness is well conveyed. Still, I had issues with the overall setup. What the hell would kill EVERYTHING but humans? Every plant, bug, animal, but just leave the people? I don’t know, but we have the same biology as the other animals. I could see everything getting obliterated, or LOTS, but not every single thing but people. That being said, if that did happen, and you waited until really few were left, it might be this bleak. But I’d think that basic items like shoes would be easier to find. With 5 billion less people to wear them, they should be in decent supply. Overall I found it very evocative, and depressing, but there are only two characters, and the dialog felt staccato and stilted. Hard to follow, and not much reason to do so. I’m a plot and character reader first and formost, so I had mixed opinions. I enjoyed reading it, I liked the deft literary sketch work, and the book is the right length (short), but I can’t say that I absolutely loved it.

The movie: I did like the book better than the movie. I’m a Viggo fan (who couldn’t be after Lord of the Rings and Eastern Promises). The boy was very good too (he also stars in Let Me In, and does a great job there too). The film is surprisingly faithful. A few little adjusts, but the only big thing they changed was adding the flashbacks with the man’s wife. There’s one brief one in the book, but it’s more developed in the film. They didn’t need this. The film captures the bleak qualities, but without the energetic prose it’s just grim on grim. I found watching to be almost punishing. The unrelenting hopelessness, the fear of being eaten. It was much scarier than the book, but also harder to stomach. It’s certainly not a fun watch, although very well made.

Book and Movie Review: Twilight

TwilightTitle: Twilight

Author: Stephenie Meyer

Genre: YA Romantic Supernatural

Read: January 2008 and Oct 2010

Summary: Confused.

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Since I’m such a vampire fan, having seen or read vast untold volumes of the stuff, I thought I should put my formal two-cents in on the strange source material that spawned the Twilight phenomenon.

First the book. I read it before the movie came out. There was a lot of buzz about it already, and I was excited about it. Generally, things that are really popular have a kernel of quality about them, and I love vampires and teen heroines. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is my favorite TV series of all time — I will blog about it one of these days. So I started reading Twilight in the Vegas airport while waiting for a flight. Despite the clunky prose (more on that later) I was actually pretty engaged in a low key way during the first half. Then Edward revealed to Bella that he was a vampire (not that I didn’t know) and the whole thing went to shit. I had to force myself through most of the rest, and the ending left me baffled. “Wait, where’d the fight go?  What about the climax?”

Back to the writing: It’s really clunky. I won’t go into too much detail, this other blogger did. But let me say Meyer is the anti Cormac McCarthy (I’m in the middle of The Road right now). He eschews punctuation, she loves it. Every long improper sentence is peppered with a random assortment of commas and em-dashes. She adores the em-dash, using it in approximately 50% of sentences, and usually not for its proper purpose of offsetting a parenthetical. Maybe she felt she had too many commas (she does), and needed to replace some of them with em-dashes for the hell of it. Oh, and she loves certain words or word combinations, like “cold fingers” and uses them several times a page in places. And she clearly choses random synonyms from the thesaurus without being aware of the connotations of said words. For example: “His expression shifted instantly to chagrin.” Can the word be used that way? I don’t think so. But none of this really matters when reading the book, you adjust and just role with it. I guess if you’re 14 and haven’t read a lot you don’t notice to begin with.

The plot and content: Given what actually happens in the first book, it’s pretty long: 118,000 words. Not much really does happen. We have a LOT of words devoted again and again to how pretty Edward is and how much Bella loves him. This isn’t really SHOWN too much, or justified, but she sure TELLS us about it a lot. But again, the first half was okay. However, once the reveal came in, it gets really silly. Basically they go play this ridiculous baseball game and the Black Eyed Peas (oops, I mean the evil vampires) walk onto the field, sniff Bella, and decide the most important thing in the world is to sink their fangs into her blood. There is no real attempt to sell anything in this plot, to provide any believable reasons, it just happens. You couldn’t possibly have more one dimensional villains — although they do compliment the one dimensional heros nicely. Then my all time biggest gripe, we close in on the unbelievable “final” confrontation of the book and Bella gets knocked unconscious (she is after all the narrator) and we miss the whole thing. It’s told to us by Edward after we know it came out okay so as to minimize tension. I had the feeling that the author didn’t know how to write an action scene, so she just chickened out.

The vampires: Oh my. It’s totally clear (particularly in later books) that Meyer doesn’t do research. This includes even watching a few vampire films or perhaps reading Dracula. Her undead aren’t really vampires, or even undead, except for being immortal and having a taste for blood, and “cold fingers.” They don’t seem dead, or particularly evil. They sparkle in the sun, they apparently have like, oh my God, no real weaknesses. And they’re all really pretty. We hear about that a lot. Let’s not forget their smorgasbord of cool psychic powers like seeing the future, and reading minds. These make hack plot construction really convenient. I actually started my novel a year before even hearing of Twilight, but reading it certainly motivated me to make sure my vampire heavy was a really bad-ass undead in a nasty evil way. He doesn’t sparkle in the sunlight but he will leave your entrails hanging from a tree to make a point — and he certainly wouldn’t ever concern himself to learn current High School vernacular.

Publishing mystery: Twilight had a very aberrant publishing history. As a first time novelist it was picked up by Jodi Reamer of Writers House really quickly. This is a very prestigious agency and that’s very rare. It was then sold quickly to a great publisher for a really huge advance. That Reamer showed interest in it is not what surprises me. There is a mysterious something about the first half of the book — it had potential. But what surprises me is that it was never edited — or if it was I’ve never heard of an editor that lax. The standard length for YA books is more like 50-70k, and there is a LOT of fluff in the book, not to mention the bad grammar and the flaccid ending that would be easy to fix. Having been through rounds and rounds of revision myself, the book was held to none of the standards my editors have exhibited. Of course it turned out to be a great decision for Jodi, but I still don’t understand why it was never edited.

The movie: Catherine Hardwicke directed the first movie. She actually did a really good job with the source material, and I think the movie is actually better than the book. Not exactly great, but better. The casting was excellent, particularly Kristen Stewart who does have a soft charisma, and she’s hot in a non obvious way. If you see her in some of her other films like Adventureland or Speak you realize that she’s actually a very fine young actress in certain roles. Twilight doesn’t provide a lot of room for subtle acting. I myself had casually known Hardwicke from when she did production design for Insomniac’s Disruptor in the mid 90’s (Insomniac was located next to my company Naughty Dog in those days). So I’d noticed when she started directing with Thirteen, which is a depressing but brilliant movie — particularly given what must have been a VERY low budget. Hardwicke brought the same kind of hand-held-documentary style to Twilight, and it worked well to offset the inherent cheese factor of the material. Not totally offset, but the result was somehow watchable. She did a nice job capturing Bella’s POV. This is tricky because in a novel, particularly a first person one like Twilight, so much of the book is dominated by the voice. With a combination of diary style voice over (more-or-less quoted from the book) and a peeping-over-the-shoulder viewpoint (as also used in Thirteen) Hardwicke pulls it off. For some reason, they ditched her with regard to directing the sequels, and the those devolve into further cheesiness. Of course so do the later novels. Can I just say Volturi?

Conclusion: I’m kinda baffled. Twilight isn’t particularly good, or well done, but it does have a certain appeal. However, the overall magnitude of success has left me totally confused. Harry Potter is ludicrously popular, but at its core rest three stunningly good initial books. The first book is really well written, the central premise is very novel and sold with incredible style. Even the ridiculously melodramatic Vampire Dairies is more fun than Twilight. I’m just left scratching my head and hoping the anti-vampire backlash isn’t too bad.

Book Review: Tropic of Night

Tropic of NightTitle: Tropic of Night

Author: Michael Gruber

Genre: Supernatural Horror Thriller

Read: Spring 2010

Summary: Very good.

I read this book both because it was represented by an agent I was interested in and because it loosely fit the ill-defined cross-genre of my own novel: Supernatural thriller with realistic style and magic. In fact, in this book it’s not even 100% clear that the magic is intended to have actually happened — but I like to think it did. There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on here, particularly to my taste. There are three points of view, and not all are as good. One is the female protagonist, a former anthropologist hiding out in Miami from her murderous African shaman ex-husband. The second is the same character, but told in the format of journals written during her field work in Siberia and Africa. And the third is a Miami Cuban-American police detective investigated a series of horrific murders in Miami (perpetrated by the nasty shaman of course). I loved the detective, his investigations of the ritual crime scenes, and the bit of Cubano Miami flavor . The present action protagonist was okay, and the journals were intermittent. When they got into the magic stuff they were good. What I most loved about this book was the creepy and very realistic feel of the mostly Yoruba based shamanistic magic. Overall I enjoyed reading it, but the book could have benefited from some tightening up. The detective investigating this awful ritual crimes was very good too. If you like murder procedurals, and you like creepy well researched voodoo-esque magic, then give this a read.

Book Review: Hex Hall

Hex HallTitle: Hex Hall

Author: Rachel Hawkins

Genre: YA fantasy

Read: Oct 23, 2010

Summary: Fun.

Continuing my unrelenting survey of both supernatural and YA books (together and separate). This is a vaguely Harry Potter-ish tale of a fifteen-year-old witch who ends up in magical reform school. It was surprisingly decent. Not great, not super innovative, but the first person voice was very enjoyable. Occasionally I found myself cringing when the events served the plot in ham handed ways. For example, the protagonist and boy she likes are both sentenced to the same detention — just the two of them. And there are vampires, but they are treated too casually like everything else. Still, it was funny and I enjoyed reading it, I didn’t have to force myself through anything. I plan on buying the sequel. This is actually pretty high praise for a reader as jaded as myself.