Review: Zeus is Dead (DNF)

Title: Zeus is Dead: A Monstrously Inconvenient Adventure

Series: Zeus is Dead #1

Author: Michael G. Munz

Genre: Low Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Kidnapping, injury, blood (mentions), stalking, religious fanaticism (mentions)

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Read to: Page 105

Back Cover:

You probably saw the press conference. Nine months ago, Zeus’s murder catapulted the Greek gods back into our world. Now they revel in their new temples, casinos, and media empires—well, all except Apollo. A compulsive overachiever with a bursting portfolio of godly duties, the amount of email alone that he receives from rapacious mortals turns each of his days into a living hell.

Yet there may be hope, if only he can return Zeus to life! With the aid of Thalia, the muse of comedy and science fiction, Apollo will risk his very godhood to help sarcastic TV producer Tracy Wallace and a gamer-geek named Leif—two mortals who hold the key to Zeus’s resurrection. (Well, probably. Prophecies are tricky buggers.)

Soon an overflowing inbox will be the least of Apollo’s troubles. Whoever murdered Zeus will certainly kill again to prevent his return, and avoiding them would be far easier if Apollo could possibly figure out who they are.

Even worse, the muse is starting to get cranky.

Discover a world where reality TV heroes slay actual monsters and the gods have their own Twitter feeds: Zeus Is Dead: A Monstrously Inconvenient Adventure!

Review:

Picture this: You’re on page 105. You’re nearly a quarter of the way through this book. At this point, you’re pretty sure you know what the plot is. You’re not really sure which option is going to be the actual antagonist, and you’ve only recently gotten a feeling that you’ve found the protagonist – although you hope not, because this suspected protagonist has a severe case of Unlikeable. That’s my experience with this book. Is it wildly creative, full of fun and entertaining ideas, and downright zany at times? Absolutely. Is it populated by a solid and likeable (or at the very least, interesting) cast of characters? Not so much.

Let’s start at the beginning, because this book sure didn’t! Everything in the first seven chapters is setup, with a wide cast of Olympian gods and various mortals introducing the world, the return of the gods, how things changed, and the foundations of the actual plot (I think? I’m about 90% sure resurrecting or not-resurrecting Zeus will be the central conflict here). A character in chapter seven gets re-introduced as “a.k.a. the young woman from chapter four” and even though I think it was supposed to be for comedic purposes, it was actually very helpful because there are so many characters running around that I can’t keep them straight. (So many, in fact, that I couldn’t even always tell how many were on the page – the scene right before I stopped reading was weirdly confusing until the last line revealed that there was a whole fourth character involved that I somehow missed.)

If you read the back cover, it feels like Apollo is going to be the protagonist here. But that’s definitely not true. Judging from the first seven chapters, nobody stands out as protagonist material, but you could make good arguments for Apollo, Hermes, or even that one rebellious college student priest of Hecate. There was a TV producer introduced on page 17 that I thought could be a protagonist, but then she disappears for fifty pages and comes back as a completely different person on page 71 to be set up as the reluctant love interest. (Or they could be two different characters that have the same name. There’s zero connection between the later character and the one from the scene on page 17 besides name and occupation so it’s hard to tell.)

It isn’t until chapter eight that someone shows up who actually has protagonist potential. There’s a Prophecy about him, making all the gods interested for various purposes, which definitely seems like a symptom of being a protagonist. But his introductory scene consists of him being annoying, awkward, and unable to stand up to a rude lady who stole his coffee. And then one scene later he turns into a stalker, putting a very, very creepy and uncomfortable angle on producer-lady’s reluctant love interest role. And he’s not the only person who seems to think producer-lady will come around if they just ignore her “No,” so I really don’t like where that seems to be going. The stalker getting the girl is never a good look, especially if the stalker is supposed to be a hero.

I think what bothers me most about how terrible the characters are is how good everything else is. I love the concept of the Olympian gods descending into the modern world and how much chaos that makes. I love that Zeus had to die to make it happen (and the question of why he demanded no-contact with mortals in the first place). I love the dynamics between the Olympians, the competing factions, the mixed reactions to Zeus’s murder, the mystery of who actually did it and how. I love how modern humans react to the gods, from wholehearted embrace to casual acceptance to ignoring to religious nutjobs going full anti-Olympian militia. There was the potential for some very interesting commentary about modern religious beliefs and behaviors. I love the variety of weird monsters now unleashed on the world. The plot, with various Olympian factions working to ensure Zeus either returns or stays dead, was solid. Even the writing style, though it did have a distinctly amateurish feel, managed to be genuinely humorous at times.

But, the characters. As much fun as the world is, as solid as the plot is and as light and fun as the writing is as a whole, it’s the characters that drive a story. And these characters all suck. They range from bland and forgettable to caricature without substance to “I would punch this person in the face if I met them” unlikeable assholes. (Or stalkers. I still can’t get over that the likely-protagonist-hero is straight-up stalking someone and everybody, including the woman he’s stalking, seems to view it as irritating but nothing more. It really bothers me that nobody in this book seems to notice or care how INCREDIBLY GODDAMN AWFUL AND CREEPY it is.) There was not a single character I could connect to, care about, or even be willing to follow around for the rest of the book. I really do think there’s a lot of potential in this story. It just needs a whole new cast of characters to realize it.

The Zeus is Dead series:

1. Zeus is Dead: A Monstrously Inconvenient Adventure
2. Zeus is Undead: This One Has Zombies

Review: Jingo

Title: Jingo

Series: Discworld #21 (Ankh-Morpork City Watch #4)

Author: Sir Terry Pratchett

Genre: Low Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Blood (mentions), death, violence, injury, war, racism, racial slurs, hate crimes, xenophobia, murder, injury (mentions), fire, crossdressing jokes

Spoiler Warning: This book is twenty-first in a series, but the book and this review contain only mild spoilers of the previous Ankh-Morpork City Watch books.

Back Cover:

Throughout history, there’s always been a perfectly good reason to start a war. Never more so if it is over a ‘strategic’ piece of old rock in the middle of nowhere. It is after all every citizen’s right to bear arms to defend what they consider to be their own. Even if it isn’t. And in such pressing circumstances, you really shouldn’t let small details like the absence of an army or indeed the money to finance one get in the way of a righteous fight with all the attendant benefits of out-and-out nationalism.

Review:

This is the most thematic Discworld book I’ve read yet. Most of the ones with strong themes have a main plot with the themes underneath. Jingo‘s whole plot is “war is stupid, so is nationalism, and so is racism too for that matter.” It makes its point very well (in my opinion), but my experience with other theme-heavy Discworld books did not lead me to expect the message to be so in-your-face.

Interestingly, somewhere along the line the City Watch sub-series has shifted protagonists. There’s a lot of major characters in the watch, but the series started off with Carrot as the main protagonist. Somehow, without my really noticing, it shifted to Vimes. Carrot is still there and being himself, but now Vimes is the one that the story is following. Which feels like a natural progression, all things considered. Carrot’s whole thing is that he is a simple Dwarven boy in the big city whose innocence and general good humor encourage those around him to be better. He was entertaining, but there wasn’t a lot of opportunity for growth, which makes him a poor choice for the protagonist of an eight-book sub-series. Vimes, on the other hand, is a great candidate in terms of character growth. Considering the first City Watch book opened with him drunk off his ass and laying in the gutter in the rain and I know from reading Snuff first that he ends up with a wife, a kid, and a nice vacation home in the country, there’s a ton of room for him to grow and adapt. And though I did like Carrot, I’m glad to see the focus shift.

Anyway. I’m not really sure what Vimes’ goal is in this book, and to be honest I’m not sure he does either. Things go very badly very quickly, and he’s just trying to keep things together and do his job while they people around him dissolve into warmongering and xenophobia. Technically his job description is “keeping the peace,” so obviously this whole war thing is gonna put a wrench in that. He’s very much had enough of this nonsense (which is a character trope I thoroughly enjoy), but gods damn it he is going to do his job even if he has to arrest both armies to do it. He got to be a nuanced character with solid motivations and definite flaws and strong emotions and I enjoyed it very much.

Some parts of this book, though, didn’t quite land. There’s a bit about Vimes’ wife being unhappy that he’s gone so much, but there is so much other stuff happening in the book that there’s no time to do anything with that plot thread. The climax also had a weird quantum parallel universe bit where you find out what would have happened if Vimes had made a different choice earlier in the book. It was interesting in a bizarre way, but I’m not entirely sure what the point was.

Considering this book isn’t unreasonably long, there’s a lot going on. I generally like fast-paced books, and I don’t have any particular objections to breakneck paces. But I do think it could have benefitted from being just a little longer and slowing down. This book tackles a lot of heavy topics about war, xenophobia, racism, and tensions between countries, and it’s hard to process all that when the plot is rocketing by you at a thousand miles an hour. Even Vimes’ strong emotional moments don’t have time to land. Just a few breaks to give the reader a chance to breathe, reflect, and process would have been beneficial in my opinion.

As it is, though, Jingo is still quite good. Despite everything happening, it wasn’t hard to follow. It was entertaining throughout and had its amusing moments (although less flat-out humor, which fits with the more serious topics discussed). And I’m quite pleased with the direction the City Watch sub-series is taking. There are still several more City Watch books to go, and I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next.

The Discworld series:

1. The Colour of Magic
2. The Light Fantastic
3. Equal Rites
4. Mort
5. Sourcery
6. Wyrd Sisters
7. Pyramids
8. Guards! Guards!
9. Eric
10. Moving Pictures
11. Reaper Man
12. Witches Abroad
13. Small Gods
14. Lords and Ladies
15. Men at Arms
16. Soul Music
17. Interesting Times
18. Maskerade
19. Feet of Clay
20. Hogfather
21. Jingo
22. The Last Continent
23. Carpe Jugulum
24. The Fifth Elephant
25. The Truth
26. Thief of Time
27. The Last Hero
28. The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
29. Night Watch
30. The Wee Free Men
31. Monstrous Regiment
32. A Hat Full of Sky
33. Going Postal
34. Thud!
35. Wintersmith
36. Making Money
37. Unseen Academicals
38. I Shall Wear Midnight
39. Snuff
40. Raising Steam
41. The Shepherd’s Crown

Review: Feet of Clay

Title: Feet of Clay

Series: Discworld #19 (Ankh-Morpork City Watch #3)

Author: Sir Terry Pratchett

Genre: Low Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Death, blood, injury, sexism, misogyny, fantasy racism, body horror (mild-moderate), murder, suicide (mentions/discussion), animal death (mentions), child death (mentions), grief (mentions), parent death (mentions)

Spoiler Warning: Reading beyond this point may expose you to mild spoilers of previous books in the Ankh-Morpork City Watch sub-series.

Back Cover:

Who’s murdering harmless old men? Who’s poisoning the Patrician? As autumn fogs hold Ankh-Morpork in their grip, the City Watch have to track down a murderer who can’t be seen. Maybe the golems know something — but the solemn men of clay, who work all day and night and are never any trouble to anyone, have started to commit suicide.

Whom can you trust when there are mobs on the street and plotters in the night and all the clues point the wrong way?

In the gloom of the night, Watch Commander Sir Samuel Vimes finds that the truth may not be out there after all …

Review:

The City Watch subseries seems to have only one plot: Preventing people from doing a monarchy. Someone wants Ankh-Morpork to have a king again and start scheming to make it happen, and the Watch has to step in and stop it from happening.

In the first City Watch book, Guards! Guards!, they crowned a dragon king. In the second book, Men at Arms, there was a scheme to replace the patrician with a king (although that scheme did generally fade into the background of the book as a whole). And this one is a murder mystery and, again, another plot to crown a king.

When I first started reading the City Watch subseries, I thought Carrot was going to be the protagonist, or perhaps a deuteragonist with Commander Vimes. But Carrot really took a back seat in this one. He was there and useful, but not a major player. The characters with the most page time in this one were Vimes (expected) and Angua (less expected). Vimes was just Vimes, now with a small taste of married life, but Angua got a lot of development – not growth exactly, but learning more about her inner thoughts and what makes her tick.

She was also the driving force for a couple of the themes this book had going on. One of the bigger ones was workplace sexism, both benevolent and less so. A more minor one, and one that’s run as an undercurrent through the other City Guard books as well, is racism/prejudice against undead people. And there were some non-Angua-related themes as well. There was the question of what people really want from government, which came up a few times. And the more major theme of who gets to be a person was explored through the murder mystery, since that plot involves a lot of golems.

I’m not normally much for murder mysteries, but this one didn’t feel like a traditional murder mystery. Perhaps it’s because there’s so much else going on, perhaps it’s because it quickly ends up being more focused on finding the suspect than determining the whodunnit. But regardless, it was a solid story. The side characters were great, Ankh-Morpork is such a fun setting, and the whole book is entertaining and often funny. It’s a good story all around, and maybe my favorite City Watch book so far.

The Discworld series:

1. The Colour of Magic
2. The Light Fantastic
3. Equal Rites
4. Mort
5. Sourcery
6. Wyrd Sisters
7. Pyramids
8. Guards! Guards!
9. Eric
10. Moving Pictures
11. Reaper Man
12. Witches Abroad
13. Small Gods
14. Lords and Ladies
15. Men at Arms
16. Soul Music
17. Interesting Times
18. Maskerade
19. Feet of Clay
20. Hogfather
21. Jingo
22. The Last Continent
23. Carpe Jugulum
24. The Fifth Elephant
25. The Truth
26. Thief of Time
27. The Last Hero
28. The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
29. Night Watch
30. The Wee Free Men
31. Monstrous Regiment
32. A Hat Full of Sky
33. Going Postal
34. Thud!
35. Wintersmith
36. Making Money
37. Unseen Academicals
38. I Shall Wear Midnight
39. Snuff
40. Raising Steam
41. The Shepherd’s Crown

Review: Maskerade

Title: Maskerade

Series: Discworld #18, Witches #5

Author: Sir Terry Pratchett

Genre: Low Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Death, murder, fatphobia, body shaming, ableism, blood (mentions)

Spoiler Warning: This book is 18th in a series, but this book and this review contain only mild spoilers of the last Witches book, Lords and Ladies.

Back Cover:

The Opera House: where innocent young sopranos are lured to their destiny by a strangely familiar evil mastermind. But Granny Weatherwax is in the audience and she doesn’t hold with that sort of thing. So there’s going to be trouble…

Review:

Granny Weatherwax is a pretty neat character idea, but she’s also my biggest frustration with the Witches subseries. She’s mean, passive-aggressive, won’t admit she’s wrong, and determined to make people do what she thinks is best for them regardless of their opinions on the matter. Luckily for my enjoyment of this book, Granny is slowly starting to get a little bit better, and Agnes, the third protagonist along with Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg, is even more fed up with Granny than I am.

Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg have decided that Agnes should become their third witch now that Magret has escaped from under Granny’s thumb. Agnes, though, hates the very idea, and instead takes her spectacular vocal talent to Ankh-Morpork to become an opera singer. Granny and Nanny come up with an excuse to follow her there and interfere. Also the plot of Phantom of the Opera is going on, complete witha mysterious black-suited mask-wearing opera house “ghost,” murders, and a gorgeous lead singer named Christine (although this Christine can’t actually sing).

Agnes is prodigiously fat, and though this doesn’t bother her in the slightest, there is a lot of fatphobia from others and some of the humor is based around fatphobic jokes. Although there is quite a bit of actual humor, as well. It’s definitely not as funny as some of the other Discworld books, but I think it’s the funniest of the Witches books so far.

There’s not really anything here that I would call a main plot. There’s the whole Phantom of the Opera thing, which mainly becomes a whodunit mystery trying to figure out who is the opera house ghost so they can stop him from murdering people, Agnes trying to find where she fits into the world of opera, Granny doing her best to meddle in everything (with Nanny cheerfully along for the ride), and a very bizarre subplot about an Ankh-Morpork-born opera singer pretending to be a foreigner and really hating how everyone goes out of their way to feed him foreign food that he doesn’t like but requesting the Ankh-Morpork food he does like would blow his cover. No, I’m not sure what the point is supposed to be either.

Though I can’t say I’m a particular fan of how things worked out for Agnes in the end, overall this was a solid book. It kept me interesting, it made me laugh, I liked Agnes a lot, and Granny Weatherwax’s more enraging aspects were toned down. It’s not my favorite Discworld book, but it’s definitely not my least favorite, and it may be my favorite of the Witches books so far.

The Discworld series:

1. The Colour of Magic
2. The Light Fantastic
3. Equal Rites
4. Mort
5. Sourcery
6. Wyrd Sisters
7. Pyramids
8. Guards! Guards!
9. Eric
10. Moving Pictures
11. Reaper Man
12. Witches Abroad
13. Small Gods
14. Lords and Ladies
15. Men at Arms
16. Soul Music
17. Interesting Times
18. Maskerade
19. Feet of Clay
20. Hogfather
21. Jingo
22. The Last Continent
23. Carpe Jugulum
24. The Fifth Elephant
25. The Truth
26. Thief of Time
27. The Last Hero
28. The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
29. Night Watch
30. The Wee Free Men
31. Monstrous Regiment
32. A Hat Full of Sky
33. Going Postal
34. Thud!
35. Wintersmith
36. Making Money
37. Unseen Academicals
38. I Shall Wear Midnight
39. Snuff
40. Raising Steam
41. The Shepherd’s Crown

Review: Soul Music

Title: Soul Music

Series: Discworld #16 (Death #3)

Author: Sir Terry Pratchett

Genre: Low Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Death, parent death (mentions), fantasy racism, war, animal death (mentions), alcohol use, violence

Spoiler Warning: This book is sixteenth in a series, but this book and this review contain only mild spoilers of the first Death subseries book, Mort.

Back Cover:

It’s hard to grow up normally when Grandfather rides a white horse and wields a scythe – especially when you have to face the new music that has entered the Discworld. It’s got a beat and you can dance to it, but… It’s alive. And it won’t fade away.

Review:

The books in the Death subseries follow a similar pattern. Death has a crisis about something (usually something related to how he’s fundamentally not a human). Death does something royally stupid about it (in Mort, that was take an apprentice like a human would; in Reaper Man and now Soul Music, that’s just not doing his job). Things go very badly. And fundamentally, nothing changes.

I think that’s the root of my frustration with the Death books. At the end of each one, Death seems to realize that he’s fundamentally different from humans – he can’t be one or even act like one without horrible consequences. But then in the next Death book, he does it all over again. He learns nothing, and his actions overall change nothing. It minimally affects people he interacts with or who have to deal with him not doing his job, but consequences are always fixed by the end of the book. In fact, in this book, absolutely everything is undone and everyone forgets what happened, so there’s barely a point to having the story happen in the first place.

I don’t know if it’s some kind of commentary on the unchanging nature of death or what, but I wish he’d learn his lesson already. He is an interesting character, and I want to see him in plots where he actually gets to actively do something instead of just run away from his job and fail at being a human.

The books in the Death subseries are never all that much about death, either the character or the concept. Soul Music was instead about music. But it doesn’t actually get there initially. Death tries to master the human art of forgetting by joining the Klatchian Foreign Legion and drinking a lot of alcohol. Since we can’t have the exact same plot as Reaper Man, Death’s granddaughter Susan fills in for him. Her sections started off some interesting themes of education getting in the way of observable reality and how humans cope. And then it just lost the track of those because the music is the big thing in this book.

Although Susan is a fairly major player and Death gets some page time, the bulk of the plot focuses around Imp. He’s a country lad who came to Ankh-Morpork to make music, where he forms a band with the troll Cliff and the dwarf Glod and invent “Music With Rocks In.” It’s an obvious parody of rock music, and the band quickly becomes obvious parodies of rock stars – Imp’s full name even translates to “bud of the holly.”

I had a hard time with the characters. For supposedly being a book in the Death subseries, Death gets hardly any page time at all. Susan was supposedly seventeen, but she acted more like she was twelve. And Imp didn’t get much of a chance to be a character because he spent most of the book being basically possessed by music. The characters really seemed to be second to the ideas: Music, its effects on people, its role as a fundamental part of the universe. And a very heavy satire of young people and the rock and roll craze of 1960s-1990s. (A full half of the Discworld Wiki page for this book is a list of rock and roll culture references this book makes.)

That’s not to say it was all bad. There are plenty of Sir Terry’s signature witticisms and several genuinely funny moments. Characters from previous books, including the Unseen University wizards and C.M.O.T. Dibbler, are involved – and Archchancelor Ridcully is frankly hilarious. But this is the most specifically and heavily satirical Discworld book I’ve read so far, and since most of the rock and roll culture being satirized happened before I was even born, most of the satire fell flat for me. It’s not necessarily a bad book. It’s just not one that particularly worked for me.

The Discworld series:

1. The Colour of Magic
2. The Light Fantastic
3. Equal Rites
4. Mort
5. Sourcery
6. Wyrd Sisters
7. Pyramids
8. Guards! Guards!
9. Eric
10. Moving Pictures
11. Reaper Man
12. Witches Abroad
13. Small Gods
14. Lords and Ladies
15. Men at Arms
16. Soul Music
17. Interesting Times
18. Maskerade
19. Feet of Clay
20. Hogfather
21. Jingo
22. The Last Continent
23. Carpe Jugulum
24. The Fifth Elephant
25. The Truth
26. Thief of Time
27. The Last Hero
28. The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
29. Night Watch
30. The Wee Free Men
31. Monstrous Regiment
32. A Hat Full of Sky
33. Going Postal
34. Thud!
35. Wintersmith
36. Making Money
37. Unseen Academicals
38. I Shall Wear Midnight
39. Snuff
40. Raising Steam
41. The Shepherd’s Crown

Review: Red Seas Under Red Skies (DNF)

Title: Red Seas Under Red Skies

Series: Gentleman Bastards #2

Author: Scott Lynch

Genre: Low Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Violence, injury, blood, death, grief, alcohol use, alcohol abuse, confinement (brief), manipulation

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Read To: 21%

Spoiler Warnings: This book is second in a series, so reading beyond this point will expose you to spoilers of book one. Also, this review discusses in detail some early events in this book. I don’t consider this spoilers because they happen so early in the story, but it definitely could be considered spoilers by other definitions.

Back Cover:

After a brutal battle with the underworld that nearly destroyed him, Locke and his trusted sidekick, Jean, fled the island city of their birth and landed on the exotic shores of Tal Verrar to nurse their wounds. But even at this westernmost edge of civilization, they can’t rest for long — and are soon back to what they do best: stealing from the undeserving rich and pocketing the proceeds for themselves.

This time, however, they have targeted the grandest prize of all: the Sinspire, the most exclusive and heavily guarded gambling house in the world. Its nine floors attract the wealthiest clientele — and to rise to the top, one must impress with good credit, amusing behavior… and excruciatingly impeccable play. For there is one cardinal rule, enforced by Requin, the house’s cold-blooded master: it is death to cheat at any game at the Sinspire.

Brazenly undeterred, Locke and Jean have orchestrated an elaborate plan to lie, trick, and swindle their way up the nine floors… straight to Requin’s teeming vault. Under the cloak of false identities, they meticulously make their climb — until they are closer to the spoils than ever.

But someone in Tal Verrar has uncovered the duo’s secret. Someone from their past who has every intention of making the impudent criminals pay for their sins. Now it will take every ounce of cunning to save their mercenary souls. And even that may not be enough…

Review:

I loved The Lies of Locke Lamora. It was twisty, unexpected, absurdly long and crammed to bursting with action and surprises, featuring a brilliant con team attempting a stupidly ambitious heist. It was fantastic. I was very enthusiastic about there being sequels.

Like the last book, Red Seas Under Red Skies jumps around in time. It opens with a future scene showing what seems to be close to the climax of the book, then jumps back to the main storyline of Locke and Jean running a scam on an unscammable casino interspersed with flashbacks of how they got from the end of book one to a new scheme in a new city. And honestly, I had a really hard time with it.

The main timeline, featuring a brazen attempt to scam the unscammable, I did generally enjoy. The absurdly ambitious scams that actually might work because our characters are so good at what they do was my favorite part of the previous book too. But even with that one, there were some complicating factors.

The book opens with a future scene where Jean betrays Locke. Not even a fake betrayal for a scheme, but as far as Locke can tell a legitimate you’re-gonna-die betrayal. I already didn’t like that, because the unbreakable friendship and partnership between Locke and Jean was what was carrying the story for me at that point. So the knowledge that this was coming colored the parts I enjoyed because I knew that betrayal was happening eventually.

And with the other plotline that picked up where book one left off, I could see where Jean could get the motivation to do such a thing. Honestly, Locke has always been an asshole. But in the first book he was a competent, charming asshole, and so he was likeable anyway. He’d gotten most of that back by the time of the scam plotline, but in the earlier plotline, there was no charm. He was an unreasonable, selfish, drunken asshole. When Jean dared to try and get him to be less drunk, he undid weeks of Jean’s work purely out of spite. Like, I get it, I’m upset about the characters who died in the first book too, but being an inconsiderate asshole about it is not a good way to make a reader feel any sympathy whatsoever. With the way he was acting, I would not have been at all surprised if Jean’s betrayal was genuine – and I honestly wouldn’t blame him.

And to top it all off, the later storyline with the scam had its own issues. One of my very favorite things about book one was how the Gentleman Bastards seemed almost unbeatable – no matter how bad things seemed, Locke was still several steps ahead or else had some trick up his sleeve to gain an upper hand after a major setback. This book had very little of that. On the contrary, it’s the antagonists here that are still up to be practically unbeatable. Locke and Jean barely survived against one of the antagonists last book, and now a whole group is after them. The shoe is on the other foot and I just did not enjoy it.

What it comes down to is that I loved book one so much that I wanted basically the same thing in book two. But changes happened, as they must to move a story along. They were just changes I personally didn’t want. This is really more me than the book, and maybe I’ll try it again in the future. But I really have no desire to keep reading right now.

The Gentleman Bastards series:

1. The Lies of Locke Lamora
2. Red Seas Under Red Skies
3. The Republic of Thieves
4. The Thorn of Emberlain

Review: Lords and Ladies

Title: Lords and Ladies

Series: Discworld #14 (Witches #4)

Author: Sir Terry Pratchett

Genre: Low Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Violence, injury, kidnapping, mind control, death, animal cruelty

Spoiler Warning: This book is 14th in a series, and though it does contain mild spoilers for a previous Witches book, Wyrd Sisters, neither the book nor this review contains spoilers of any other Discworld book.

Back Cover:

Magrat Garlick, witch, is going to be married in the morning. Everything ought to be going like a dream. But the elves have come back, bringing all those things traditionally associated with the magical glittering realm of Faerie: cruelty, kidnapping, malice and evil, evil murder.

Review:

I was a little apprehensive to start this one. Actually, a lot apprehensive, since I had so many issues with Granny Weatherwax in the previous Witches book, Witches Abroad. I had hoped that there would be some more books before I came to another Witches book, but there weren’t. So I went into this worried that I would spend the whole thing raging at Granny Weatherwax’s bullying.

But I was pleasantly surprised. Against a backdrop of attempting to stop elves (the inhuman, unfeeling, cruel variety) from getting into the world, Magret grew a spine and Granny Weatherwax ate some humble pie. Not a whole lot – this is Granny Weatherwax we’re talking about – but she’s starting to have some of that character development I knew had to come between Witches Abroad and the first Tiffany Aching book. It’s promising, anyway. And with Magret starting to take back her own agency and Granny starting to become less cruel, I’m liking the Witches sub-series more. It’s still not my favorite sub-series (currently, that honor is tied between Tiffany Aching and the first six Rincewind books), but it’s becoming tolerable.

I had a weird sense of almost deja vu with this plot. The main idea is that elves are trying to get through from their dimension into the world, and this is a very bad thing. It’s been so long since elves have been around that most people either think they aren’t real or aren’t so bad, so it’s up to the witches to stop them. Since I have read the books out of order, your reading experience might be different. But the basic plot is very, very similar to The Wee Free Men, just with a different cast of witches trying to stop it. I am not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but it did make it feel less unique than other Discworld books.

In my opinion, this is one of the weaker Discworld books. I haven’t loved the Witches series generally, and this one is no exception. It lacked much of the humor and wit I’ve come to expect, there weren’t many serious themes (I can’t think of any at the moment, actually), and since I’d read The Wee Free Men previously the plot itself felt like it had been done before. The main redeeming quality – which, to be fair, is majorly redeeming – is the start of some fantastic character growth for Magret and Granny Weatherwax. This book is perfectly okay, if not fantasic, but I have hope that future Witches books will get better.

The Discworld series:

1. The Colour of Magic
2. The Light Fantastic
3. Equal Rites
4. Mort
5. Sourcery
6. Wyrd Sisters
7. Pyramids
8. Guards! Guards!
9. Eric
10. Moving Pictures
11. Reaper Man
12. Witches Abroad
13. Small Gods
14. Lords and Ladies
15. Men at Arms
16. Soul Music
17. Interesting Times
18. Maskerade
19. Feet of Clay
20. Hogfather
21. Jingo
22. The Last Continent
23. Carpe Jugulum
24. The Fifth Elephant
25. The Truth
26. Thief of Time
27. The Last Hero
28. The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
29. Night Watch
30. The Wee Free Men
31. Monstrous Regiment
32. A Hat Full of Sky
33. Going Postal
34. Thud!
35. Wintersmith
36. Making Money
37. Unseen Academicals
38. I Shall Wear Midnight
39. Snuff
40. Raising Steam
41. The Shepherd’s Crown

Review: Wizard and Glass

Title: Wizard and Glass

Series: The Dark Tower #4

Author: Stephen King

Genre: Low Fantasy Horror Western with strong Post-Apocalyptic vibes

Trigger Warnings: Death, parent death, blood, gore, violence, injury, fire/fire injury, animal death, animal suffering, guns, fire, infidelity, sexual content, sexual content between consenting minors, sexual assault, adult/minor relationship, forced marriage, verbal abuse, pandemic, excrement

Spoiler Warning: This book is 4th in a series, and reading beyond this point will expose you to major spoilers of previous books.

Back Cover:

Roland the Gunslinger, Eddie, Susannah, and Jake survive Blaine the Mono’s final crash, only to find themselves stranded in an alternate version of Topeka, Kansas, that has been ravaged by the superflu virus. While following the deserted I-70 toward a distant glass palace, Roland recounts his tragic story about a seaside town called Hambry, where he fell in love with a girl named Susan Delgado, and where he and his old tet-mates Alain and Cuthbert battled the forces of John Farson, the harrier who – with a little help from a seeing sphere called Maerlyn’s Grapefruit – ignited Mid-World’s final war.

Review:

I waited a while to pick up this one after finishing The Waste Lands, mainly because I can read a Dark Tower book in two days via audiobook at work but it takes the friend I’m reading the series with a month or two to get through each book. But this one picks up exactly where the last book left off, with the riddle contest with Blaine the Mono.

There are two different stories going on in this book. There’s the frame story with Roland and the ka-tet traveling along the path of the beam towards the Dark Tower. But a good three-quarters of the story is backstory, framed as Roland telling part of his story to Eddie, Susannah, and Jake.

It was kind of interesting to get that history. Susan has been mentioned as part of Roland’s past previously, but now we get to find out who she was, how Roland met her, and what tragedy happened that caused Roland so much pain and regret. There’s also more of Alain and Cuthbert, who have also been mentioned previously. This story expands on their personalities so we get to know them a little bit better – although it doesn’t cover what tragedy happened to them.

If the purpose of the story had been to fill in those gaps in Roland’s history, it would have been significantly shorter. I believe this is the longest book in the series, and the story of Roland and Susan is the reason. I did not like it all that much, to be honest. Roland and friends were focused on preventing or winning a war, but since we’ve spent the previous three Dark Tower books in a world where the war happened and went very badly, I knew how it ultimately ended and didn’t much care how it played out.

The rest of the plot was Roland’s young love with Susan, and it turns out I have very little patience for star-struck young love. So much of the romance had me rolling my eyes, wishing Roland would think with his brain instead of his dick and the story would just move along already. Since it was Roland’s story told by Roland, Alain and Cuthbert were not major contenders for reader connection, and Roland and Susan were too busy being stupid for love for me to enjoy them all that much. Roland himself, despite being fourteen at this point, is pretty much the same as the older version telling the story – less jaded and significantly more horny, but still clever, secretive, and dedicated to being a gunslinger.

The annoying thing is that I was actually interested in the parts of the story that were about our normal protagonists – Roland, Eddie, Susannah, and Jake. They finished their ride with Blaine the Mono, ended up in a weird parallel version of Kansas, and had a bizarrely Wizard of Oz-themed encounter before continuing on the journey. That part, I enjoyed. The backstory I think should have been about half its length. (Although to be fair, if you think about all seven books as one single story as opposed to each book being an entry in a series, proportionally that’s a fairly reasonable length for telling a backstory. I just didn’t particularly enjoy it all stuffed in one book.)

This is not my favorite of the Dark Tower books. However, I am still enjoying Roland, Eddie, Susannah, and Jake’s journeys through strange and interesting post-apocalyptic worlds as they hunt for this Dark Tower. I will be continuing the series – I just hope the next book focuses more on the present than the past.

The Dark Tower series:

1. The Gunslinger
2. The Drawing of the Three
3. The Waste Lands
4. Wizard and Glass
5. Wolves of the Calla
6. Song of Susannah
7. The Dark Tower

Review: The Lies of Locke Lamora

Title: The Lies of Locke Lamora

Series: Gentleman Bastard #1

Author: Scott Lynch

Genre: Low Fantasy/Heist Thriller

Trigger Warnings: Death, major character death, death of parent, child death, terminal illness (mentions), child abuse, blood (severe), gore, injury (severe), murder, excrement, violence, animal cruelty, sexual content (brief), torture

Back Cover:

An orphan’s life is harsh-and often short-in the island city of Camorr, built on the ruins of a mysterious alien race. But born with a quick wit and a gift for thieving, Locke Lamora has dodged both death and slavery, only to fall into the hands of an eyeless priest known as Chains-a man who is neither blind nor a priest.

A con artist of extraordinary talent, Chains passes his skills on to his carefully selected “family” of orphans-a group known as the Gentlemen Bastards. Under his tutelage, Locke grows to lead the Bastards, delightedly pulling off one outrageous confidence game after another. Soon he is infamous as the Thorn of Camorr, and no wealthy noble is safe from his sting.

Passing themselves off as petty thieves, the brilliant Locke and his tightly knit band of light-fingered brothers have fooled even the criminal underworld’s most feared ruler, Capa Barsavi. But there is someone in the shadows more powerful-and more ambitious-than Locke has yet imagined. Known as the Gray King, he is slowly killing Capa Barsavi’s most trusted men – and using Locke as a pawn in his plot to take control of Camorr’s underworld.

With a bloody coup under way threatening to destroy everyone and everything that holds meaning in his mercenary life, Locke vows to beat the Gray King at his own brutal game – or die trying.

Review:

This book was recommended to me by a friend (the same friend who recommended Circe, funnily enough). And like I do with most recommendations from friends, I didn’t really pay attention to what the book was about, just threw it on my to-read list and picked it up with no expectations and no real idea of what it was even supposed to be about.

I have to take a small detour here and talk about Leverage. Leverage is a TV show featuring a bunch of variously-skilled former criminals (and one insurance investigator) who use their various criminal skills in brilliant and elaborate plans to take down criminals that the law can’t or won’t touch. I adore the show. It’s hands-down my favorite show ever and the only show I’ve loved enough to enjoy fandom content. And if Leverage was on the more dubious side of morally gray, set in a Venice-flavored fantasy world, and led by a teenager who belongs in the definition of “confidence game,” you might get something like The Lies of Locke Lamora.

I don’t know how to write a review of this book except to say that it is really, spectacularly good. It is long, even for a fantasy book, but it needs every single word of that length because there is just so much going on always and constantly. That was the overwhelming feeling I got from reading – that everywhere I looked and even in the background, there was so much going on. The action never stops, it just swings back and forth among perspectives and times. The main story of Locke and company pulling their scam and running up against the Grey King is interspersed with bits from Locke’s past, from the history of the city and nation, and other things happening in Camorr at the same time. And it’s not just Locke against the Grey King, oh no – that would be far too simple for the audacity of this book. There are no less than five, and arguably up to eight, different factions fighting for their own goals for their own reasons (and two of them are Locke himself).

A large part of what makes this book so hard to review is that the details are revealed in layers. It starts out with a crew of talented thieves and grifters preparing to run an elaborate con on a pair of nobles. Okay, I thought, A fun and adventurous heist story. Cool. And then the story begins to peel back the layers to all the competing factions, all the factors at play in Camorr, all the plans set in motion and beginning to come to a head, and suddenly the highly entertaining and audacious heist is one of the least interesting parts of the story.

Everything is happening all the time and you’re constantly getting more information and nothing is ever what it seems. You may have gotten through three twists and finally think that you’re at the truth of something finally and you’re probably wrong. Very few solid answers are available to any but the most perceptive reader (definitely not me) until the very end. And I adored it. It was somehow both incredibly dark and a ton of fun, full of plot twists, overlapping schemes, audacious plans that somehow delightfully work, and steady slow reveals that felt like repeatedly handing me puzzle pieces and requiring me to figure out where they went while I was still receving more puzzle pieces.

I didn’t know going in that this was a series, but you’d better believe I’m reading the next book. And I very much hope that it’s more of the same.

The Gentleman Bastard series:

1. The Lies of Locke Lamora
2. Red Seas Under Red Skies
3. The Republic of Thieves
4. The Thorn of Emberlain

Review: Reaper Man

Title: Reaper Man

Series: Discworld #11 (Death #2)

Author: Sir Terry Pratchett

Genre: Low Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Death, body horror, animal death, death of child (minor), fire

Spoiler Warning: Despite this book being eleventh in a series, it has no real spoilers for previous books.

Back Cover:

“Death has to happen. That’s what bein’ alive is all about. You’re alive, and then you’re dead. It can’t just stop happening.”

But it can. And it has. So what happens after death is now less of a philosophical question than a question of actual reality. On the disc, as here, they need Death. If Death doesn’t come for you, then what are you supposed to do in the meantime? You can’t have the undead wandering about like lost souls. There s no telling what might happen, particularly when they discover that life really is only for the living.

Review:

There is a lot going on in this book. Almost too much for one book, it seems. Don’t get me wrong, it was fun to read, but trying to sort it out afterwards I’m impressed so many different things got shoved into here.

Let’s start with Death, since this is his series. The supernatural people in charge of the whole universe (apparently those exist – I wonder if they’ll ever show up again) decide that since Discworld’s Death has a personality, it’s no longer a force but a person, and people can die. So Death, who suddenly has a time limit on his existence, stops doing his job and goes off to experience life as humans live it. Disguised as the tall and skinny but ordinary human Bill Door, he ends up on an old woman’s farm as a farm hand, where he gets to experience how humans interact with each other and deal with the knowledge that they’re going to die one day.

Meanwhile, Death not doing his job means that nothing is actually dying. The elderly wizard Windle Poons dies, but since there’s no Death to help him move on, ends up back in his body as a zombie, more spry after death than he had been in decades. With the occasionally-dubious assistance of other wizards, other undead, and other residents of Anhk-Morpork, he attempts to unravel what is happening to the city as excess life starts to do really weird things.

It’s fun and entertaining, as most Discworld books are, but the themes fall a bit flat. Death/Bill Door’s story had an interesting theme of dealing with the fear of death and living when you know it’s all going to come to an end, but since the book didn’t spend as much time in that storyline (I’m pretty sure less than half of Reaper Man was actually about the reaper man), there wasn’t time for it to reach full poignancy.

The storyline with the wizards and Windle Poons was mostly “hey, if Death stopped doing his job and nothing died anymore, wouldn’t the consequences be wild?” and playing with that idea. But it also tried to add some bigger ideas – the inevitability of death, the life-sucking nature of shopping malls, a couple pointed jabs at souvenirs and a particular kind of church lady, and possibly even something about the body and aging (although that one was so muddled that I’m not sure if it wasn’t just me reading too much into it). All of them were interesting ideas, but there were too many of them for any to have much of an impact.

Despite all these criticisms, this book was quite fun. I enjoyed Death/Bill Door’s attempts to figure out what humans do, fit in, and make friends. And even though Windle Poons is not my favorite wizard, I enjoy the dynamics between the wizards and how everything at the Unseen University works. Even though Reaper Man isn’t as strong thematically as other Discworld entries, it was still plenty of fun.

The Discworld series:

1. The Colour of Magic
2. The Light Fantastic
3. Equal Rites
4. Mort
5. Sourcery
6. Wyrd Sisters
7. Pyramids
8. Guards! Guards!
9. Eric
10. Moving Pictures
11. Reaper Man
12. Witches Abroad
13. Small Gods
14. Lords and Ladies
15. Men at Arms
16. Soul Music
17. Interesting Times
18. Maskerade
19. Feet of Clay
20. Hogfather
21. Jingo
22. The Last Continent
23. Carpe Jugulum
24. The Fifth Elephant
25. The Truth
26. Thief of Time
27. The Last Hero
28. The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
29. Night Watch
30. The Wee Free Men
31. Monstrous Regiment
32. A Hat Full of Sky
33. Going Postal
34. Thud!
35. Wintersmith
36. Making Money
37. Unseen Academicals
38. I Shall Wear Midnight
39. Snuff
40. Raising Steam
41. The Shepherd’s Crown