Been sick. Have pity.

Update tomorrow, when I’ve finished my reread of Crystal Rain.

I had another saved post from  wotmania, but I cannot for the life of me understand what it is saying.

 

 

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

[This review was posted 6/22/2006 at wotmania.com. Wotmania closed down at the end of August 2009, and most of the members have since migrated to RAFO. I’m moving the review here because, being normally narcissistic, I do not want to lose it. Also, I am currently somewhat sick, so this has not been edited. I’m sorry: it is informal, possibly ineloquent, and maybe even full of typos.]

First edition dust jacket cover.

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

I’m always slightly suspicious of novels that win awards that are later published again in “definitive” versions, with bits that had been left out before now added in because they were there in the original text but were edited out or bits that were added because the author wrote a few short stories along the way. (I read the two versions of American Gods side by side to figure out which one was better. When I said “slightly”, I meant “extremely”.) Anyway, the version I have is the Gollancz SF Masterworks one, and it’s, as Haldeman explains, “definitive”. It contains a section formerly too “downbeat” for Analogs audience. I’m not sure what it does to the novel as a whole.

It doesn’t really matter, since the novel is really good anyway. Very basically: Humanity is at war. In space. Highly scientific methods of space travel and colonization are involved. The enemy race are the “Taurans”. We’re not sure why, they attacked us first. The latest army strategy is to recruit highly intelligent, trained specialists (somebody remind me, which was the Alfred Bester short story that had similar ideas?) straight out of university to be a part of United Nations Exploratory Force, ‘emphasis on the “force”.’ Biologists, linguists, physicists… which brings us to Private William Mandella, 22, trained as a physicist.

The novel follows Mandella’s progress through the war, his times in between engagements as a civilian, his relationships with his rapidly changing peers.

The basic problem is thus: travel in space occurs at near light speeds. A year for Mandella means centuries back home on Earth. Obviously there’s room for a great deal of future shock between assignments. Sexual mores, trends, politics, all of society in general, is changed radically when Mandella goes back to visit, and even when he doesn’t. Survival rate between assignments seems to be low, so as the novel goes on more and more of Mandella’s original peers drop away and he’s surrounded by people younger than him, with different mores – he thinks their society is odd, they think he’s a pervert. Makes for a fun situation.

There are quite a few holes here and there, like what the hell are you doing with someone who is incapable of xenophobia in your army, when half your battle tactics depend on that wonderful trait, and what happened to all the telepaths? And the close of war was… I don’t know. I felt a bit letdown. That’s it?

Overall, though, the plot is good, fast-paced. Scenarios shift from planet to planet, and the people change accordingly. I found the socio-political changes fascinating, almost acceptable as a “This-might’ve happened”. Mandella’s final closing is surprising, but neat. In fact, I liked the closing so completely that I’m not quite sure what to do about the other novels – Forever Free and Forever Peace. I’ll wait a while for the curiosity to build before I look for them.

What else? Characterisation is sparse but adequate. Mandella is the only person whom we get to know in any sort of detail, and he’s a perfect war-narrator: laid-back, lucky, sarcastic and sardonic. He tends to form relationships with interesting people, and has what I see as a mildly quirky way of looking at women (what he characterizes as butch is laughable, really)…

The aliens themselves are interesting, I wish we saw more of them. I like the hints Haldeman drops here and there about their nature, and then when you reach the end of the novel there’s this satisfaction of “Ok, that’s what that was about”…

…all in all, a very satisfactory read. Pick it up, you. You (most probably) won’t regret it.

Thomas the Rhymer by Ellen Kushner

(Shalini hates the inverted commas, it seems, and so: This review was posted 1/24/2006 at wotmania.com. Wotmania closed down at the end of August 2009, and most of the members have since migrated to RAFO. I’m moving the review here because, being normally narcissistic, I do not want to lose it. Also, I am currently somewhat sick, so this has not been edited. I’m sorry: it is informal, possibly ineloquent, and maybe even full of typos.)

At Amazon UK

I just reread Ellen Kushner’s Thomas the Rhymer as a break from Gormenghast, and I realised that I was a bit surprised by how much I liked it.

Thomas the Rhymer is based on one of the Child Ballads – that’s this bunch of ballads, both english and scottish, that were collected into one set by a certain Francis Child, way back in the 1800s.

I had little familiarity with the ballads – I think I knew one or two of them, but hadn’t paid much attention. I did know Thomas Rymer, though – the man who stole a kiss from the queen of the fairies, and lived with her, silent, for seven years… and how he came back with Truth upon his lips so that what he said would be, would be. I’ve provided a link to the ballad here.

What I like about Kushner’s work is that the novel is divided into four parts, only the second of which deals with the ballad-content. Basic plot structure would be:
1. Gavin tells us how he and his wife Meg meet and come to love Thomas as a son, and of his budding romance with Elspeth.
2. Thomas tells us of his time with the queen, the loneliness and dangers and riddles of fairyland. This takes the essential content of the ballad and adds to it, making it more than just a simple I-paid-for-love telling.
3. Meg tells us how Thomas comes back – what he’s like.
4. Elspeth finishes the story – all that we can know of it, anyway.

It’s not a very fascinating story, as stories go. You don’t sit on the edge of your seat, wondering What happens next? I thought at the beginning that the reason I liked the book was because I knew the Child ballads, and had gone and read Thomas Rymer right before I began the novel. And in part, that is the reason. Kushner takes the ballad and gives it the depth that most songs lack. There’s a definite evolution in one’s perceptions regarding Tom and the fairies – though everyone else seems to stay rather static.

I wouldn’t know that I’d recommend the book for everyone. I find it a relaxing read, and easy read with four differing PoVs with differing levels of perception, all focussed around one single person. It flows smoothly, isn’t very big on ideas but is big on feeling – poetic-y feeling, too, none of that mundane stuff that boring people feel. So if you like action and large conflicts and shifts and epics but not graceful sweetness and growth and quiet evolution of character and plot, then this isn’t for you.

It’s a quiet fairy story, set for the most part in the real world. It’s a nice read. Pretty. It won the Mythopoeic Award back in the early 90s and that says something, possibly what I just said myself.

Something Wicked This Way Comes; The Illustrated Man – by Ray Bradbury

(This is an amalgamation of two “reviews” originally posted 6/20/2006 at wotmania.com, which closed down at the end of August in 2009. [Most of the members can now be found at RAFO.] It has been edited here and there, for grammar and cohesion. But still, they are blunt and short and somewhat uneloquent. Blame Youth!)

In some ways I find it hard to talk about why I like Bradbury. He’s a bit too elusive to pin down, and in any case my loyalties are the strong, blind obedience type. Let’s just say that he’s one of my favourite writers and move on from there.

First edition dust jacket cover - link to Amazon UK

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Something Wicked This Way Comes is… well, I suppose you could call it (poetic) horror. Will Holloway and Jim Nightshade are neighbours and best friends, almost fourteen years old. Born one day apart (Will a minute before midnight of Halloween, Jim a minute after) the two boys are, at first glance, superficial opposites. (I’ve a lot to say about the characterisation of these two boys: deliberately or not, Bradbury’s done a brilliant job on them.)

The carnival is in town – but <drum roll> – this isn’t your fun sort of carnival. Will and Jim – and Will’s father Charles – face down the Illustrated Man and his minions, and there is no way you will understand how something that sounds so cheesy can actually be haunting unless you have read Bradbury.

Bradbury is a stylist, He sacrifices hard detail for style – which is a mean way of saying that his prose flows smoothly, elegantly, and that his prose is some of the most poetic you can get without actually opening a book of verse. Something Wicked… is very representative of this proetry, and if you like, lessee. If you like Tolkien for his style then there there’s a chance you’ll like Bradbury. (Very different styles, mind you. But the words I’d use would be the same.)

Characterisations tend to be strong for the three central characters, stereotypical but strong but associated good guys. The baddies are – well, the baddies are the baddies. I particularly like the way the two boys are drawn, and the contradictory representations of the both of them. (A lot is made out for how Jim is the “deeper”, more “complex” character… but the plot itself has ample evidence that Will might hold that position, without having to make resort to things that go bump in the night.) The Holloways, father and son, are very sensitively drawn.

Hmm, what else? The plot is a bit rambling, but that’s vintage Bradbury for you – I rarely even notice things like pacing etc. It never feels slow, or too rushed. If you’re the sort who demands hard detail (Why did so-and-so happen? When did it happen? Where and who started it? How did it happens, what were the technicalities?) then you might be disappointed. Bradbury’s text is rooted very firmly in its own present, and doesn’t go backwards or forwards – something that might be related to one of the themes of the novel, or might simply be a Bradbury thing. (Both, I’d say.)

What else? Ah. Bradbury’s musings on women are schizophrenic, cute, quaint, and sixties. Don’t miss ‘em.

So, anyway. I totally recommend Something wicked… It’s small town, it’s cutesy, it’s chilly and haunted and wonderful.

First edition dust jacket cover - link to Amazon UK

The Illustrated Man is a collection of stories – some of which were written for magazines in the late 40s and early 50s, some of which were written specifically for this collection. The stories are mostly science fiction, mostly good.

It’s a bit hard to pin down the central theme in a collection of short stories, but I’d say that Bradbury is speaking most strongly of the nature of storytelling – and how dependant it is on the point of view of the storyteller. Of cages, and who is caged and why – and by whom. Of the innocence inherent in any PoV, in that it cannot ‘know’ the other.

This, too, is a lovely collection. LOVELY.

I love and adore The Illustrated Man every time I read it immediately after The Martian Chronicles, but not as much if I read it immediately after Something Wicked This Way Comes. Several of the Mars-stories in The Illustrated Man show up in tMC, for one thing. One of the stories, “The Other Foot” (the African Americans have all left Earth and live on Mars, and a white man is coming to visit.), only works for me when I see it placed in context. The hows and wheres and whys are very inadequately explored when you see it standing alone, as in The Illustrated Man, while in tMC there’s a back-story and a future. Other stories that don’t work too well would be “Kaleidoscope” and “Marionettes, Inc.”, and “The Concrete Mixer”, all of which read to me like Middle Aged Men Whining.

Most of the rest of the stories work. There is so much sadness in “The Exiles” and in “The City” – both of which are about the results of different sorts of careless destruction. “The Rocket Man” is outright sad. “The Last Night of the World” is simple: beautiful, poignant. “No Particular Night or Morning”, “The Highway” and “The Veldt” all give me chills, all for different reasons.

And, of course, there is the Illustrated Man himself. Especially if you read this after you’ve read SWTWC, the frame story of the tramp who sees visions in the tattoos on the illustrated man is almost more interesting than the actual collection. (And who didn’t see the ending coming?)

Anyway. I’d recommend Bradbury to you if you’re in the market for short stories, for elegant prose, for some slightly old fashioned small townery. He’s one of the best there was, or is.

The Dark Mirror by Juliet Marillier

(This “review” was originally posted 6/20/2006 at wotmania.com, which closed down at the end of August in 2009. [Most of the members can now be found at RAFO.] It has not been edited, since I cannot remember the novel in question. Seriously. The cover [I read the blue twilight edition) is lovely, and that is all I recall.])

 

 

I have rather stringent standards for retellings of myths/ancient histories, so I’m not entirely certain how valid this review is going to be.

The Dark Mirror, book one of The Bridei* Chronicles, follows the life of Bridei, king of the Picts from 554 A.D, from his early life to his ascension to the throne. Marillier makes no bones about the fact that a lot of the things in the novel – the pagan religion, the magic, etc., are derived from educated guesswork. What we have is a fairly competent retelling, with a dash of destiny, magic and elves (the Good Folk) thrown in for taste.

Characterisation is competent, believable. Nothing very surprising shows up re: the hero-who-would-be-king Bridei, or his druid-mentor Broichan, or his childhood companion Tuala (Tuala might be more interesting in the later books, since she’s got some fairly heavy mysterious/Good Folk strings in her background). In fact, some of the minor players are more interesting than Bridei and Tuala, and Marillier has drawn them quite well. If I read the further novels, it’ll be for the minor characters, and not Bridei himself.

The plot doesn’t lag, but four or five days after I read it simply cannot remember what happened that was enough to fill six hundred odd pages. A lot of the time is spent simply reflecting on emotions or what has happened or on dialogue. It’s a fairly standard young-boy-is-groomed-to-be-king plot, no huge surprises. As most retellings of this sort, the characters and the peoples are involved in wars, territorial rights, honour, marital alliances – and of course, negotiations between the established religions and the newer Christianity. Again, Marillier handles this last quite well, and if I read the next few novels it will be to see how she handles this negotiation.

I cannot really point out anything that is wrong with the novel. But it’s… well, it’s not exciting. I don’t need to read the next novel, and I have no deep urge to look up the history of the Picts (what is known of it) and their legends. Marillier is not boring, I was thoroughly engaged throughout the text. And yet. There’s something missing, that essential oomph of good readering, and I guess I’ll be more likely to pick up the next book if I don’t have to pay for it, if I have time and nothing else to read.

My rec? Eh. Pick it up if it’s on sale or in a library. Borrow, don’t buy.

*Pronunciation: brid (rhymes with bid) –ay (as in day). I spent too much time calling him Bride-ee. This did not help.

The Famished Road, by Ben Okri

(This “review” was originally posted 6/22/2006 at wotmania.com, which closed down at the end of August in 2009. [Most of the members can now be found at RAFO.] It has been edited, just a little, for spelling and grammar. It has NOT been edited for style, and it is blunt and tactless and appallingly unfluid. I apologise. I cannot find the review Larry wrote right now, but I am sure it must be around somewhere.)

How boring is this cover?

This is the one I had! It is so much prettier, yes?

I made the bad mistake of reading Larry’s review of this work yesterday and then couldn’t find any words of my own to describe it. Rather than pull a Kaavya Vishwanathan, I waited a day. It was… important that I find my own words to describe this novel because I found it so utterly – what’s the word? Enthralling? Powerful?

May you never walk / When the road waits, famished. – Wole Soyinka

Written in 1990, The Famished Road is set in a Nigeria that is facing the chaos of Independence. The protagonist, Azaro (actually Lazaro, only there are some uncomfortable connotations re: Lazarus, ergo the nickname) is an abiku – in the Yoruba tradition, this is a soul who exists between life and death. His former spirit companions continually call Azaro back to the spirit-world, and they’ll try anything from temptation to outright kidnap to get him back where they think he belongs.

There are spirits. Everywhere. And not wimpy ghosts who walk through walls either. These are more gutsy beings who’ll throw stones and take human form and possess your body or take you from life to another realm…

If you’ve read Midnight’s Children, then I’d say that The Famished Road is built along the same concept as that wonderful novel, only subtler, and perhaps more chaotic. (In fact, the first hundred pages are so chaotic that I wasn’t sure I liked the novel. Everything seemed… tangled and disparate. But Okri weaves those disparate threads in together so that by the end you’re left with this mythic feeling, not just in Azaro but in his father, his mother… his friends and community.)

Everything is seen from Azaro’s point of view, and his narrative ranges from sparse-and-harsh to sparse-and-epic (the latter showing up at unexpected moments, all the stronger for it). There’s no pity, no Lapierre-esque the-poor-are-noble ethos. Caught between the fevered spirit world and the hungry real world, Azaro watches his people – the poor, the hungry, the ambitious – deal in their own ways with poverty, disease and political thuggery. Azaro’s narrative is relentlessly objective. Have I said harsh, yet?

Azaro himself is delightful to read. I mean, once you stop thinking in terms of sadness or suffering, Azaro is a beautiful character. Born smiling, the child is full of defiance, curiosity, wanderlust. (And brevity of dialogue. Okri constructs several dialogues in which one participant – often Azaro – contributes nothing but the same word, over and over. It never gets old.) And, of course, depth of perception, courtesy his spirit roots (that is entirely the wrong phrase, but I don’t know how to put it at the moment.)

Other characters are worth mentioning – Madam Koto, who builds herself into the myths around her, Azaro’s parents, who suffer for him, because of him; the photographer (who has a name which I’ve forgotten!!!) who comes and goes, suffering from a persecution complex – or is actually persecuted, I never did figure which. They’re warm, inscrutable, eccentric, insane, bitter, loving… take your pick.

It’s a moving work. It’s a work about a nation that’s scrambling to build something of itself, and not quite sure yet how to go about it. It’s about the good that follows the bad, and the bad that follows the good. (Life, theuniverse, and everything in Nigeria.)

Read this novel. Bump it to the top of your list. (And remember to get past the first 120 pages if you don’t like it at first.)

I, Claudius by Robert Graves

(This “review” was originally posted 6/22/2006 at wotmania.com, which closed down at the end of August in 2009. [Most of the members can now be found at RAFO.] It has been edited, just a little, for spelling and grammar. It has NOT been edited for style, and it is blunt and tactless and appallingly unfluid. I apologise.)

I have a hard time pinpointing what exactly I like about this novel. A large part of me until now has simply screamed “Everything!” which is very convenient but not very helpful when it comes to writing a review.

So. After the success of his Goodbye to All That, Graves penned two “companion volumes of unorthodox Roman history” (from the “Note on the Author” carried in my edition). The first of these was I, Claudius, the second, and sequel, Claudius the God. The novels chronicle Roman history after the death of Julius Caesar to the death of the emperor Claudius (which would mean the accession of Nero, the guy who fiddled). I, Claudius takes us up to the death of Caligula. We’re talking sometime between the years 44 BC and 41 AD. The novel(s) are written as Claudius’ secret autobiographies, because, in part, his official histories were a “dull affair, by which I set little store” and the current accounts are to be taken as the unvarnished truth.

Claudius takes us through about four generations of Roman rule, and as far as I can make out the political history is for the most part accurate – or as accurate as these things can get. What Graves examines in the novel(s) is the motivations, and motivators, of the people in power.

That’s the dull stuff.

What’s interesting – even fascinating – about the narrative is the amount of unofficial power Graves places in the hands of women – particularly Livia, wife of Augustus (of pax Romana fame, I think, though I’m not sure right now). Livia is the ultimate evil stepmother, manipulating Augustus, her son Tiberius and her grandson Caligula to her own ends, killing off relatives she finds inconvenient or unmalleable. Livia’s not all bad, of course – her influence over Augustus is the direct cause for some very good administration in Rome and through the Roman Empire. If you don’t mind reading feminine empowerment into evil old hags with boundless ambition, then Livia (and a lot of the other wives-of-great-men in the novels) is Betty Friedan.

The novel deals with several people, a veritable rabbit warren of a family tree, most of the players have the same name, or similar names, but Graves/Claudius takes the time to make sure we can keep them all straight. I’ve never had trouble keeping up with who was who in the novel(s), though I have had trouble when I was reading Colleen McCullough’s works. Claudius follows a names-for-dummies system. (And he explains why, too, in the most avuncular fashion.)

The novel also deals with the conflicting themes monarchy and the idea of the Republic. The heroes (and Claudius constructs them as heroes, no matter how tragic their tales) are ardent Republicists, and yet must support the dictatorship – or worse yet, be the dictator. And of course, there’s the question of religion, and how it changes, and who controls it and why – and Christianity has its small but ironic role to play.

The novel is interesting as an alternative explanation of historical fact, and it provides an interesting analysis of the politics and social structures of the time. The real reason I loved the novel – and I daresay it applies to anyone who loves the novel – is its narrator. Claudius is humble, ironic, pompous, perspicacious. With the zeal of a bloodhound he follows his family history, sparing no one in his telling, not even himself. His tone is, what? Scathing, ironic, condemning, laudatory… and delightful to read. I’ve found people laughing – or snorting in disgust at what some of the “bad Claudians” have done – and I’m told I’m no different, though I’ve never really kept track.

Claudius’ narrative sucks you in and keeps you until he lets you go. His tale is by turns tragic, funny, bathetic, pathetic, outright insane… it’s tragic-comedy in a grand style, narrated by a dry and unimpressed old man who knows better than everyone else, because he’s more fun than they are, so there. He’s the underdog who survived by dint of… well, by dint of being the underdog and not getting in people’s way, I suppose you’d put it. The reader finds her/himself incredibly sympathetic towards Claudius without in any way feeling that he’s being a weenie whiner – which, in retrospect, is always an amazing thing, since so very much seems to be against him. You wouldn’t mind being related to this guy, except for the fact that you’d probably be dead. Or insane. Or perverted. Funness.

There’s not much more I can say… Read it! It’s fun! It’s interesting! It’s brilliant!

Update

I also need to look at my Mark post, and rewrite bits of it, and add to it, and maybe buy it some new shoes. Pretty ones.

After a while I figure the post-frequency shall settle down to around two a week, but that is for the future to take care of.

Over the weekend I shall overhaul the tags and categories.

I’ve got about a week’s worth of Old Reviews From Wotmania-that-was left to load over here, and then I shall start with new material. I’ve been promising to review Crystal Rain for years. (Short version: Read it, it is yummy!)

(Is anyone out there?)

Hart’s Hope by Orson Scott Card

(This “review” was originally posted 2/28/2006 at wotmania.com, which closed down at the end of August in 2009. [Most of the members can now be found at RAFO.] It has been edited, just a little, for  some coherency, spelling and grammar. It is blunt and tactless and appallingly unfluid. I apologise.)

At Orson Scott Card’s website: “JUSTICE IS CRUEL But tender mercy is the cruelest of all.

It was for mercy’s sake that Palicroval the Fair left you to live after the desecration of your honor … to live and become great Queen Beauty, whose power makes the very gods tremble and whose mercy is that of the grave. You would lay the world to ruin for your soul’s ease, and see the corruption of the heavens for your pain.

But beware Beauty-for though your power is mighty, there is still magic in the Land, and the Hart has bred a son… and the ones who have suffered your vengeance for so long may exact a payment that could split the world asunder.”

I wondered a bit at the futility or otherwise of reviewing a thingummy that was written all the way back in 1983, but I figure, really, all we talk about, re: Card, is Alvin, Bean and Ender.

I, myself, found myself not as thrilled with Card’s other works as I was with Ender’s Game. (Though Alvin I do like quite a bit.) It wasn’t just the constant repeat of the mentor-brother-archnemesis theme – I just never found quite that degree of nobility so well-expressed again in any of his works.
(And I read The Worthing Saga. Same old.)

Then I read Hart’s Hope, which is different. Card uses a different narrative style – shifting from the Plain Chant (that’s bardic to you, oh WoT-illiterate one) to the earthy/graphic/vulgar/brutal. You see several PoVs, but there’s only one narrator, and seemingly only one audience.

So… pacing is odd but gripping, characterisation is… hmm… one-sided but not one-dimensional, if you get my meaning. (The narrator has an extremely strong and compelling voice.) There are some amazingly drawn characters in there, some of whom you never really see. Plot (and this being Card, plot and character are not only intertwined, the connection is one of the main themes of the novel) is quite compelling, even when you know, or think you know, What Finally Happens.

I think Card falls down a bit on the description here and there, when the – er – mythic stuff happens. A lot of it is left delightfully unclear (they are as they are, who needs explanations, that sort of thing) but the drawback is that when the narrative does go into concrete terms it’s not quite satisfying enough for me.

And sometimes, just sometimes, I wish he’d use a softer narrator… one who let us make our own decisions about the plot (that strong voice can be overwhelming, sometimes).    

The ending, though… I love the ending. I love the various differing and different things I could say and believe about the ending.

Overall? I think you should risk it, whether or not you like Card. Because this was a good read, a fascinating one, and, as I’ve mentioned before, quite different from the other stuff he’s given us. (No guarantees that you’ll like it, but I do. Ergo.)

The Tamír Triad, by Lynn Flewelling

(This “review” was originally posted 8/29/2006 at wotmania.com, which closed down at the end of August in 2009. [Most of the members can now be found atRAFO.] It has been edited, just a little, for  some coherency, spelling and grammar. It has been edited a VERY LITTLE for style, and it is blunt and tactless and appallingly unfluid. I apologise.)

Lynn Flewelling is one of those authors I never seem to hear about in casual conversation, and I’d go so far as to say that she’s low-key – she doesn’t have her own website, merely one of those two-page dinky things on sff.net. But she gets (for the most part) good reviews, and the people who read her books, like her a great deal. [Actually, she has a blog at LJ, which she updates fairly frequently, as I found out sometime later. Not only was I tactless back then, I wasn't doing my research. And the website is not dinky.]

In The Tamír Triad, composed of The Bone Doll’s Twin, Hidden Warrior and The Oracle’s Queen, Flewelling gives us the land of Skala, ruled for generations by Queens who literally do have the Divine Right – in fact, the god in question goes so far as to deny Skala peace and sovereignty unless a woman is on the throne.

The Bone Doll’s Twin

And so it goes, until a prince usurps what should have been his sister’s throne, proceeds to murder all his female relatives (except for his sister, which frankly still bothers me) and commits sundry other atrocities, up to and including the persecution of the Illorian wizards.

In due course of things, the sister gives birth to children – a girl, and a boy who dies after his first breath. Concerned wizards who want the Queens to rule again disguise the girl as a boy – magic is used to change the child’s gender so that she displays male genitalia. Prince Tobin grows up thinking of himself – and why not? – as a boy.

These are just the first three chapters of The Bone Doll’s Twin.

One of the things I find interesting is that Flewelling doesn’t beat around the bush in letting us know (by chapter six) whether Tobin ultimately becomes ruler or not. I mean, the reader is clearly told (in the “There was a dog. It died” sense). But it’s still interesting, still fascinating and a lot of that is due to Flewelling’s surprisingly good YA narration. (If you read the Bantam Spectra blurb you wouldn’t have had high hopes for the novel. It’s terrible, even for a blurb.)

Another interesting thing is that – and yes, it happens a lot, but here it seems more obvious – in some ways, reading The Tamír Triad is like reading part (v) of Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings. You know. Aragorn’s important – very important – but he’s still just one part of the narrative. Of the story. Important, close to central – but not actually central, per se. He’s not the most important part. But when you get to Appendix A (v), you’re reading his story, and he’s the most important person in it.

The Tamír Triad is about Tobin (I still think of him/her as Tobin, though s/he wouldn’t like that) and there’s a larger – epic – framework that the reader is given glimpses of, and there’s the obvious beginnings of a new chapter in that framework that are again not directly about Tobin – but this is Tobin’s story and everything else is peripheral. There’s a very This-is-the-nail-the-horse-shouldn’t-lose feeling to it all, for me.

The Bone Doll’s Twin is a good read – and a very good reread. tBDT follows Tobin’s life up to adolescence. Flewelling puts some children through your usual levels of child abuse and actually makes it a) believable b) emotionally compellingly gut-wrenching and then gives you fairly normal children to balance it out. It’s nicely paced – I know that it’s nicely paced because I didn’t think about pacing at all while I was reading it – and ends on a good suspensey note.

If tBDT has any major flaws, they would be the adult wizards. Much conspirating is going on, and not all of it is about Tobin (though of course, once she gets on the throne everyone expects that manna shall fall from heaven and conspirators everywhere shall go into retirement) – and the Wizard/s doing all this work aren’t quite interesting enough to be remembered. In fact, by the time I’d got around to my reread (so that I could read HW and tOQ) I’d forgotten most of the peripheral plot. They’re not boring. They’re just not as interesting or memorable or heartstringtugging.

As an opening novel, tBDT is good. Not GRRM/Erikson/Jordan/pick good writer here great, but still an I-am-nit-picking-to-find-bad-things novel.

Hidden Warrior

Hidden Warrior explores, lessee. Responsibilities of conspirating, fruits of various conspiratings, Tobin and his/her raging but suppressed sexuality – and Flewelling allows a lot of the deeper aspects of that sort of issue to be addressed only in the various basics, and allows a lot of it to be seen in just glimpses, so there’s not much angsting, but at the same time there’s a lot of angsting – the wonderful mechanics of sex and sexual longing in mixed company – and the constant threat of this, that and the other. Tobin is threatened from all angles, and disclosure is only one of the things s/he has to fear. Tobin and company grow, the peripheral plot takes its tottering steps to being in the phase 1 and a bit, war and stuff happen, Tobin and some of his company are cool –

I think what HW does is take Tobin from cool-child-with-potential to Okay, s/he was worth the trouble. The same goes for various subplots.

I like the closing. If it weren’t for a few lose ends, in some ways I would even say that it was okay to not read book 3. HW satisfies very nicely.

The Oracle’s Queen

The Oracle’s Queen, sadly, is not up to par. It’s still not a bad novel, but it doesn’t have quite the pull or the intelligence or the things-to-discuss of the previous two novels.

It begins fairly decently and handles some of the gender issues that crop up now with grit though not necessarily panache. There are some very quick tying-up-of-loose ends, and a mildly neat solution to what, in HW, had seemed a very bad idea, by the introduction of a new character – a sadly two-dimensional one, but at least it fits the purpose.

tOQ focuses all the subplots in one area so you can follow them, allows the reader to see how two mentor-characters have sneakily made themselves very cool in different ways, and ends the saga very very neatly – and there’s a nice tie-in to Flewelling’s Nightrunner books [which I later discovered were mostly written first, and mention the basic Tamír premise in the first book].

Tobin and his/her various relationships evolve/grow/make the reader empathise etc. But tOC has some horrible flaws, too. For one thing, at some point what I considered some fairly important gender issues are simply thrown out the window with some gen(d)eric deux ex machina. (Without the deux.) And if there’s something interesting to be said about a boy-who’s-really-a-girl, there’s a great deal to be said about women who are warriors, and there are so many of them in this novel, and all of them are to a girl girly. I’m not asking for leather and spikes. But… they’re all feminine. Frills. It would have been nice to have at least one who went, Well yeah frills are okay, but I prefer my pants. (Jordan haters will recognise my frustration.) There’s some very patchy characterisation re: Ki, Tobin’s squire, friend and companion, who for some reason seems to be the only one who has trouble with various things that everyone else in the world has no trouble dealing with. Both of which I find odd and annoying.

And the last sixty or so pages are so crowded with Things That Happened that it’s ludicrous. The pacing is rushed – literally – with almost no time for any form of digestion of what is happening, and far too much flat narration that doesn’t in any way evoke any sort of emotion beyond “Where did the rest of the narrative go?” I mean, truly, some very important things happen coming up to the climax and Flewelling narrates them as though they’re of no importance whatsoever. (I reread bits of Tolkien yesterday and maybe that’s why I’m thinking of something similar that he made happen that he handled much better – and that wasn’t one of his better moments.) Vast problems that nobody knew what to do about are snipped through in a matter of paragraphs and nobody reacts as much as they should be. The cleaning up of last threads looks a bit like the author thought, Oh gods, when will it end?

It’s extremely unsatisfying, tOQ. Especially since so much of the bad things happen near the end, which is the bit I remember most.

To be fair, it’s not a bad book. It depicts a great deal of social/political change, upheavals and beginnings. (And one nice insult.) But it’s not as good as the first two. I wonder what it might have been like if Flewelling had taken more – or less? – time over it.

Overall? Read The Tamír Triad. Tis nice, interesting, has many curious parallels and contradictions to make one go hmmmm – and lots of different sorts of magic and some very very cute pseudo-dragons.

EDIT: Because accents are cute and I forgot them the first time around.