RIP, Elmore Leonard

This morning, we lost one of the best when Elmore Leonard passed away after complications from a stroke.  In tribute to old Dutch, here are reviews of three Elmore Leonard books I've read in the last couple years.


52 Pickup by Elmore Leonard

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Blackmailers have factory owner Harry Mitchell over a barrel. Either he pays them $105,000 a year or they turn over an incriminating film to the police and press, and more, if he doesn't pay up. Too bad Harry Mitchell has ideas of his own...

Elmore Leonard sure knows how to weave a serpentine tale, doesn't he? He takes a story that seems simple on the surface, that of some blackmailers hitting up a pigeon for money, and turns it into something else all together. It was written in 1974 but has a certain timelessness to it.

Harry Mitchell is the usual Leonard protagonist: cool, capable, and not entirely spotless. The way he handles the blackmailers set the stage for later Leonard protagonists like Chili Palmer and Raylan Givens. I like that Leonard made Barbara's behavior toward Harry believable after she found out he had an affair. About my only complaint with the story is that I wish Barbara would ahve gotten a crack at getting some payback on Alan.

The bad guys are an unsavory crew, as to be expected. I didn't expect some of them to go out the way they did, though. That's one of the reasons I mean to read more Elmore Leonard in 2012. He manages to surprise me in each outing. As usual with Leonard, the dialogue is as smooth as fine Scotch.

While it may be slightly less polished than some of his later works, all of the Leonard hallmarks are there: double crosses, slick dialogue, and fairly believable situations. I couldn't wait for the blackmailers to get what was coming to them and Leonard did not disappoint. Very highly recommended.

Swag by Elmore Leonard

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


When used car salesman Frank Ryan catches Ernest Stickley stealing a car off his lot, ideas start going through his head. Soon, Ryan and Stickley are armed robbers and damn good ones. Things go smoothly until someone offers them a crack at even bigger money...

Like many Elmore Leonard books, Swag is a fast-moving crime story. The two main characters, Ryan and Stick, are cast from one of Leonard' standard molds: the criminals who aren't as smart as they think they are. They're a bit of an odd couple. Stick's nervous and not all that confident while Ryan is overconfident and thinks he knows everything. They were pretty likeable as far as armed robbers go but I kept thinking about how Richard Stark's Parker would mop the floor with them.

The bad guys were suitably bad, both Sportree and the cops. As he does a lot of the time, Leonard makes the antagonists almost as interesting as the protagonists. Once complications start surfacing, they come in droves, from Arlene witnessing one of their early robberies, to Stick having to shoot two men, to Billy Ruiz. The ending was surprising but was also perfect.

Leonard's smooth-flowing dialogue and twisting plot were the stars of the show, as they normally are in one of his books. I loved that Frank Ryan had his rules of robbery, just like Elmore Leonard has his rules of writing.

It wasn't perfect but I liked it quite a bit. It was a good way to spend a Sunday evening.


The Moonshine War by Elmore Leonard
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Bootlegger Son Martin has 150 barrels of whiskey his dad made stashed away somewhere and his old war buddy, Frank Long, now a crooked prohibition agent, has his sights set on them. Will Son cave in under the pressure and hand over the whiskey or will he put Long and his cronies into the ground?

Reading an Elmore Leonard book is like bullshitting with an old friend on their front porch. In this case, it would be whiskey we'd be drinking instead of a couple frosty beers.

Rural Kentucky in the 1930's is far from Elmore Leonard's usual haunts but after watching several seasons of Justified, I figured he could handle it. I was right.

The Moonshine War plays out like a lot of Elmore Leonard books. The promise of violence keeps building until the glorious shitstorm at the end. Frank Long trying to strongarm Son Martin out of his valuable whiskey is more of the same. It went a little differently than I thought it would near the end, which is always a plus for me.

The country dialog is very well done and drives the plot forward. Like in most Leonard books, Son Martin is just a little slicker than Frank Long and the others.

Son reminds me of Raylan Givens a bit of Raylan was running moonshine instead of being a US Marshall. He's a conflicted character, his young wife dying from the flu while he was in the army leaving him somewhat directionless. He's got a bit of that Givens inner rage going as well. When his neighbors started turning on him when he wouldn't roll over for Long and the others, I knew the violence was coming. The Moonshine War actually feels like a western more than anything else.

Any gripes? Not a one besides wanting to read more about Son Martin. 3.5 stars.

Thanks for the memories, Elmore.  There won't be another one like you.

Whosday II - Two Eleventh Doctor Who reviews

In the wake of the announcement of the actor playing the Twelfth Doctor, I decided I'd better finish reading the Eleventh Doctor novels I have on the pile.

Doctor Who: The Silent Stars Go By by Dan Abnett
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The TARDIS takes a wrong turn on the way to Leadworth to drop the Ponds off for Christmas and The Doctor, Amy, and Rory find themselves on a far flung colony world that is in the grips of the worst winter the world has ever seen. But what's causing the hellish weather? And what's killing the livestock? And can the Doctor and the Ponds get to the bottom of things before it's too late?

Of course they can! After all, he's The Doctor.

The Silent Stars Go By sees the Doctor and Amy get separated from Rory early on, wandering around the frozen colony world of Hereafter. If only Rory hadn't gone back to the TARDIS for a heavier coat. After some mistaken identity shenanigans and disbelieving colonists, the meat of the story gets flung on the table in all it's frozen glory in the form of classic Who enemies, The Ice Warriors.

Abnett does a fairly good job. Rory and the Doctor both ring true to form from the TV series. It was hard not to hear the actor's voices in my head while reading. Amy, on the other hand, doesn't get to do much and is on the weaker side of things.

TSSGB felt like an old adaptation of a Doctor Who episode, lots of banter, running from things, and timey-whimey, which was the main problem I had with it. The whole thing felt really thin, like maybe Abnett had written a Doctor Who script at some point and slapped a few descriptions on it. The book was very dialogue-heavy and I could almost pick out where the commercial breaks would go.

Still, it wasn't all bad. There was a twist at the 75% mark, just like a lot of Doctor Who episodes, that was unexpected and saved the book from being a monster of the week affair. Abnett did a lot more with the Ice Warriors than I thought he would and the colony had some secrets of its own. Overall, I enjoyed the experience but I really wanted to love it. 3 out of 5 stars.

Doctor Who: Paradox Lost by George Mann
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Doctor, Amy, and Rory wind up in London in 2789, just in time to see an android dredged from teh Thames. But how could a model of android that's just been created be almost a thousand years old? And what does its warning to the Doctor mean?

I'm not sure why I originally picked this up since I pretty much swore off reading George Mann after so-so experiences with The Affinity Bridge, The Osiris Ritual, and Ghosts of Manhattan. I think what sold me is that the plot description reminded me of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode where they found Data's severed head in a cave beneath San Francisco.

This Doctor Who novel was actually the best Eleventh Doctor novel I've read so far. The Doctor, Amy, and Rory were portrayed with more accuracy than I've encountered in the past. The supporting characters, Arven the Android and Archibald Angelchrist, an old man with a past of adventuring, did their part more than adequately.

The plot is a pretty good one and could easily have been an Doctor Who episode. While the Doctor goes back to 1910 to investigate, Rory and Amy stay put in 2789 to check on Professor Gradius, a scientist conducting time travel experiments, only to run into trouble on their own. There's some timey-whimey and the two plotlines converge, complete with running away and the Doctor saving the day.

The threat, the Squall, are a batlike species of hive-minded aliens who invade the two points in time via a rift created by Gradius' experiments. Even though I knew all the main characters would survive, things got pretty tense a few times. The Doctor wrapped things up nicely and the epilogue was pretty fitting.

For once, everything is fish fingers and custard. This is probably as close to a 4 that I'll ever give a Doctor Who novel.

What's In The Box?

Skinner
by Charlie Huston
Reviewed by Kemper
4 out 5 stars.

You gotta love a book in which the weapons used by the bad-ass hero include a pair of socks and a ruler.

Skinner was raised in a closed environment as part of a screwy experiment from his autistic parents, and as an adult he worked for an international security firm called Kestrel where he became legendary for his unique method.  Skinner’s Maxim dictated that if anything happened to anyone under his protection, that he would wreak bloody vengeance on anyone and everyone responsible.  This scorched earth policy worked well for a while, but eventually Skinner outlived his usefulness and had to go underground when Kestrel tried to arrange a permanent retirement for him.

Terrance was Skinner’s boss who was forced out of Kestrel, but they want him back to track down the people responsible for a cyber-attack on the US.  Terrance recruits Jae, an analyst with a talent for building robots and OCD tendencies that allow her to find patterns in the chaos of world events, and he contacts Skinner and talks him into providing protection for her.  Jae had a bad experience with Kestrel previously and doesn’t trust them so she and Skinner have that in common.  The two race around the globe uncovering a vast conspiracy that somehow involves a slum in Mumbai.

Charlie Huston used to crank out hard boiled books featuring criminals and/or vampires and then fill them up with enough attitude, atmosphere and graphic violence to make them highly entertaining reads.  He was good enough that he probably could have had a successful career if he had no bigger ambitions, but Huston has been showing a remarkable capacity for growth over his last several books.   In Skinner, he takes what could just be a good set-up for an action spy thriller and gives it a huge amount of depth by using a couple of complex characters to throw around some very big ideas.

Skinner’s story examines how a bunch of variables like economics, political unrest and climate change have combined into a murky threat cloud that always hangs on the horizon and perpetually seems about to engulf the world.  Huston has nailed that general unease that comes with scrolling through a day’s worth of news stories and realizing that the problems far outnumber the solutions.  The Jae character is particularly good at conveying this since she has a tendency to start following patterns obsessively to conclusions that indicate the world is doomed.  While there’s plenty of action, gee-whiz tech and the usual tropes of covert thrillers like suitcases full of fake passports and money, it’s the bigger picture that makes this feel a lot more important than just a typical spies-on-the-run-against-a-vast-conspiracy story.

My one gripe is that there’s almost too much in the book.  I would have liked to get more with Skinner and Jae because they’re both such intriguing characters, but it kind of feels like we’re racing through their history to keep the core story moving.  It almost seems like this could have been the conclusion of a larger series, but it was nice to get a self-contained story rather than an author just kicking off a new multi-book narrative so I won’t bitch too much about it.

Three Characters Haunted by an Event from the Past

Reviewed by James L. Thane
Three of five stars


I first tumbled to Harlan Coben very early in his career when a friend recommended the first or second book in his Myron Bolitar series. I enjoyed the Bolitar books and found Myron to be an unusual but engaging protagonist who almost always found himself in the midst of an interesting plot.

After writing a number of these books, Coben began writing stand-alone thrillers, and I followed dutifully along. Some of these books I liked a lot; others I thought did not work as well, usually because the author insisted on piling one implausible plot twist on top of another until the reader could no longer suspend disbelief and the entire structure collapsed in ruins.

Stay Close falls into the middle of the pack of Coben's books; it's okay, but it's certainly not his best effort. The book involves three central characters who are united by their ties to a terrifying night seventeen years earlier when a man named Stewart Green disappeared. Two people saw Green in an isolated area, dead or very close to it. But neither reported the discovery; the body was never found, and Green is still officially listed as a missing person.

Ray Levine was once a world-class photographer, but he made a number of bad choices that came to a head that fateful night and now he has spiraled down to rock bottom, drinking heavily, living in a crappy apartment and working as a fake paparazzi. Jack Broome is the police detective who can't let go of the case that has haunted him all these years, and Megan Pierce is the suburban wife who's "living the ultimate soccer-mom fantasy and hating it."

Megan is also a woman with a very dark past that she escaped on that night seventeen years ago. After all this time, she decides to pull the curtain back just a bit for a quick glimpse into her former life. Just as she does, though, another man goes missing in the same way as Stewart Green. Everyone involved in the earlier case will be sucked into the new one, with potentially disastrous consequences for all of them.

As is usually the case in one of Harlan Coben's thrillers, this one moves fairly swiftly along, but I had a hard time moving with it. Unhappily, this is one of those books in which the main protagonist, in this case Megan Pierce, makes one astoundingly stupid decision after another, which is the only thing that allows the plot to advance beyond the first chapter. But after seventy-five pages or so, I simply stopped caring what happened to the woman. My attitude by that point was that a person as stupid as she deserved whatever bad things might happen to befall her. And once you stop caring about a book's central character, you usually stop caring about the book itself.

It doesn't help that at some points the writing seems unusually clunky and that the book contains a couple of villains who are simply unbelievable from the outset. By the last hundred pages or so, the book finally gets some traction and the conclusion is fairly satisfying, but by then it almost seems too little too late. Again, this is not a bad book, but a person new to the work of Harlan Coben would probably want to start with another of his efforts.

Broken Homes isn't Broken At All

 

BROKEN HOMES

Ben Aaronovich

Reviewed by Carol

Recommended for: fans of urban fantasy police procedural

★  ★  ★  ★  ★

If you've read any other Broken Homes reviews or checked out the range of ratings, you'll know that opinion on this book runs the gamut. For me, Aaronovich is starting to feel like he is coming into his own. It's mature, developed writing with rich characters and a thoughtfully developed magic and supernatural system. Without doubt, pacing is a little off from a traditional detective story, but I found that for me, it reflected the inconsistent nature of real-life police work; one does not work a case to the exclusivity of all others, and sometimes the pieces are slow to fit into place. The result is a plot that is a little more "day in the life" until it gestalts together at the end, but was an enjoyable tour on the way. If you want nicely sophisticated characters, sly humor and an insider's view to England, this is an excellent installment in a quality urban fantasy detective series.

The summary: Peter and Leslie are at the Folly, developing their magic skills and researching an Oxford University dining club group that was learning magic a couple of decades ago. Research is interrupted when they're called to an unusual car accident that resulted in one of the driver's deaths. Blood in the back seat leads them to another dead body--strangely missing a face. It sets off vague internal alarms, but with nothing clear to go on, Peter continues on with his mandatory Officer Safety training. As someone who was required to attend annual recertifications every year, I found his asides on the usual dry dust mandatory topics to be snort-worthy:
"The morning lecture was on stop and search with reference to spotting suspicious behavior... he did warn us to make an exception for tourists, because London needed the foreign currency."

There's a sidebar with a River summit and a cameo with the Folly cadet, giving more insight into the complicated nature of supernatural politics. At one point in the case, Peter and Leslie go undercover at an estate (project housing), giving a very unique glimpse from a police perspective into the local human denizens.

"I know trouble when it's below the age of criminal responsibility, and while my first instinct was to arrest his parents on general principles, I gave him a cheery wave instead."

I was really enjoying the mischievous, dry wit until about page 200 or so when Aaronvitch started to become quite serious. The wit was still there, but more sly, less frequent, letting the reader focus on the impact of the story. I found it refreshing; although I love a snarky remark, at a certain point, they become incongruent with the emotion of the story.

Honestly, I can't say enough. I love Aaronvich's tone and style. I love that his dogs are dogs, but are still amusing; that Peter is not an anti-hero, and as wry as he is, still believes in loyalty and justice; that Peter doesn't describe all women in terms of sexability, just the one(s) he wants to have sex with; that magic isn't easy; that magic is part of an ambient system living all around us; that Peter is self-depreciating as much as he chaffs others. Add to it that unlike most UF books, the police are not bumbling idiots or obstructive foils, and you have a UF detective read with a very different flavor.

I think it is also worth noting that these books have high re-read potential. Ilona Andrews recently noted "a writer can teach the readers pretty much anything through the narrative, but the lower is that starting threshold, the wider is the audience." Aaronovich doesn't handhold the reader, resulting in a higher threshold. He uses London slang, British police vocabulary, architectural terms and stories that are heavily influenced by local geography. Yet, I feel so satisfied after reading his works. This ending especially was a gobsmacker. I wouldn't call it a cliff-hanger, exactly, since I'm pretty confident in his characterizations. I think Aaronovich's tv roots are showing, and it's more of a titillating lead-in to the next installment. There's a reason I've made an effort to get the series in hardcover--I want them around for a long time.


Laughs:

"Arts and Antiques, definitely not known by the rest of the Met as the Arts and Crafts squad, occasionally recover an item so valuable that even the evidence storage locker in the middle of New Scotland Yard isn't secure enough."

"I said she could have a look around the fair as long as she didn't talk to any strange people.
'Okay,' she said.
'Or strange things,' I said.
'Whatever,' she said and skipped off.
'Or strange things that are also people,' I called after her."

"'They're probably waiting for one of us to get freeze dried,' said Lesley, whose attitude towards taser deployment was that people with heart conditions, epilepsy and an aversion to electrocution should not embark upon breaches of the peace in the first place."

Delirium

Delirium
by Lauren Oliver

Reviewed by Sesana
Three out of five stars

Publisher Summary:

Ninety-five days, and then I’ll be safe.
I wonder whether the procedure will hurt.
I want to get it over with.
It’s hard to be patient.
It’s hard not to be afraid while I’m still uncured, though so far the deliria hasn’t touched me yet.
Still, I worry.
They say that in the old days, love drove people to madness.
The deadliest of all deadly things: It kills you both when you have it and when you don’t.

My Review:

I have to start by saying that I really do like the way that Lauren Oliver writes. She constructs nice sentences, and has a gift for describing scenes and characters vividly, but without getting too purple. I still didn't love this book, and I'll spend the rest of the review trying to say why I didn't. But Oliver is a good writer, and Delirium is more than just a decent book.

When you read this book, the very first thing you need to do is break out a crane to help you suspend your disbelief. The thing is, Oliver's dystopian world, where love is an illness with a failsafe, and mandatory, cure, is fairly well thought out, except for one major thing: how did we get here? Because it seems like she's thought about nearly every detail but that. I have such a hard time believing that this would ever come to pass. Imagine how much of the world today would react to being told that a scientist has decided that he has the cure to love. Maybe some people would take him up on it, but I think that far more would be horrified. And the government that made the cure mandatory... Well, let's just say that I doubt that government would last for long. But you have to ignore all of that and just take it as given that this did happen, and the vast majority of the population were thrilled at the change. I had a really hard time buying in that far, which did affect how much I enjoyed the book.

And it is, indeed, a romance. As far as YA romances go, it wasn't a terrible one. Alex might not have been the most exciting of love interests, but he was a nice enough guy and I felt like Oliver did a good job of making me believe that Lena was truly falling in love with him. Her emotions felt real enough for me to sympathize with her, even if I didn't feel much for Alex myself. As a romance, it was neither exciting nor infuriating, so I guess I'll take that.

I couldn't help but compare this book to Matched, which I also felt lukewarm towards. They are both YA dystopias where the evil in society is basically arranged marriage. Delirium does raise the bar quite a bit, and I don't remember anything in Matched being as chilling as Lena's visit to the Crypt. Oliver also gets bonus points for acknowledging that gay and lesbian people would exist in this world (Here, it's called Unnaturalism, and the cure will fix them! Doesn't that sound like a great idea for a book in its own right?) which I don't recall Matched doing at all. Unless you're really attached to the premise, there probably isn't any point in reading two YA dystopias that revolve around a lack of romantic freedom. Of the two, I would say that Delirium is better written and has higher stakes.

Also reviewed on Goodreads.

Jay Lake Pre-Mortem Readathon, Review #8

ENDURANCE (Green Universe #2)
JAY LAKE
Tor Books
$15.99 trade paper, available now

Reviewed by Richard, 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Green is back in Copper Downs. Purchased from her father in sunny Selistan when she was four years old, she was harshly raised to be a courtesan, companion, and bedmate of the Immortal Duke of Copper Downs. But Green rebelled. Green killed the Duke, and many others, and won her freedom. Yet she is still claimed by the gods and goddesses of her world, and they still require her service. Their demands are greater than any duke’s could have been.

Godslayers have come to the Stone Coast, magicians whose cult is dedicated to destroying the many gods of Green’s world. In the turmoil following the Immortal Duke’s murder, Green made a God out of her power and her memories. Now the gods turn to her to protect them from the Slayers.

Jay Lake brings us an epic fantasy not “in the tradition of Tolkien,” but, instead, sensual, ominous, shot through with the sweat of fear and the intoxication of power.

My Review: How on earth does Jay Lake do this? He writes a series of first-person narratives from a female late-adolescent person's PoV and makes me like it.

The man is a sorcerer. I feel more sure of it now than ever. No other fact explains his ability to snare me in something I am not automatically a fan of.

Green, in this entry in the series, is as embattled as she was before. The difference is that, as an older and "wiser" character, she's battling for something outside herself. Yes, the battle will still benefit her in the winning. But she is not, unlike in Green, solely on a personal vendetta.

My main issue with Green was how frustrating I found it not to have a fuller, richer sense of the world that she inhabits. I put this down to first-person narration.

I was wrong. It was Lake working his magic. Green is a younger person in the first book, and like every single younger person on the surface of any planet, she is self-absorbed. We all were. Some of us get past it, some don't. And for some who get past the self-absorption of adolescence, it's a demanding external process that sets the gears turning.

With Green, the external source is...epic. Godlike. (You'll get the pun in the last 40pp of the book.) (Which you need to read.) (No, really.) And once we're acquainted with the quest Green needs to follow, once we're back in the leftover first-book conflict with Mother Vajpai, once we're involved and eager to follow the thread to its new, startling, and still inevitable conclusion...
...
...
...pages 317, 318, and 319 happen. I was so glad that I was reading this book AFTER the next one, Kalimpura, was published and was in my hot, grubby fists, I cannot adequately inform you of the good feeling.

A guy who can write from a girl's perspective, a young woman's perspective, and make a mean old misogynist care, not just care but CARE and want to know what happens next, is a sorcerer.

Light the torches. We need to get a stake put up. Who's got the pitchforks? Road trip to Lake-land, there to demand explanations for his powers.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

A Broken Family Picks Up the Pieces

Then Came the Evening
by Brian Hart
Published by Bloomsbury USA

5 Out of 5 Stars
Reviewed by Amanda 

Despite not being the focal point of the narrative, all of the events in Brian Hart's Then Came the Evening can be traced back to one defining moment: Bandy Dorner enlisted for Vietnam. We never know what Bandy experienced during his tour of duty because the novel begins after his return home, but we know it had a profound effect. He returns a changed man and, after learning that his home has burnt down and believing his young wife, Iona, to have been inside, a drunk, grief-stricken Bandy turns to the familiarity of violence, shooting and killing the officer trying to subdue him. Little does Bandy know that his pain will only beget pain as his wife, Iona, has left him for another man but is pregnant with Bandy's child--a child who will later be marked and judged by his father's actions.

Now before you chastise me for spoilers, all of this happens in the first few pages of the novel. Then Came the Evening picks up nearly two decades later, as Bandy's son, Tracy, decides to reconnect with the father who never knew of his existence. Bandy's release from prison is imminent and, hoping to mend the shattered family, Tracy sets about reclaiming the abandoned family ranch, restoring the gutted house in anticipation of Bandy's return home. As his wayward parents are drawn back to the hometown and the past they left behind, Tracy, Iona, and Bandy tentatively attempt to recapture a sense of family despite old wounds and fresh betrayals, learning the futility of trying to recapture what never was.

Then Came the Evening is about people who are broken beyond repair, who have been shaped by proximity to violence and live in a world with sharp teeth. The narrative moves at a slow, unhurried pace and may frustrate readers who crave more external action, but I enjoyed Hart's refusal to rush a story that should unfold for us as it unfolds for the characters. There shouldn't be a race to the finish line here as Hart is writing about life as it is lived, exploring how people are marked by choices made in mundane circumstances. I also enjoyed lingering over the novel's brutally poetic descriptions of the physical landscape that reflects and explores the internal landscape of the characters--especially in the case of Iona and Bandy as they struggle to reconnect with a time and a place and a version of themselves that was, but is no more. These are not characters who are keenly in touch with their emotions, for whom words come easily. Told in vignettes adrift in time and from varying perspectives, the novel allows the stories of each character to jostle against the other like pieces of a puzzle trying to find a way of fitting together.

While Hart does a fine job of depicting the depths to which Iona has sunk after Tracy initially leaves her to find Bandy, it's his portrayal of Bandy that is the real genius of the novel. A man who has been in prison for the last 20 years, Bandy's return home is painful and raw as Bandy's fear and disorientation are palpable. While his crime was admittedly a heinous one, there's also a realization that this Bandy Dorner is not the same one who pulled the trigger years ago. There's something heartbreaking about his cautious hope that maybe something can still be salvaged from the wreck he made of his family; he knows he doesn't deserve it, but it doesn't stop him from wanting it. However, the novel is not interested in making a case for justifying the circumstances of the crime (as Bandy's mother says, "Everybody blames the war for everything. I'm sick of it" [13]), but more interested in making a case for Bandy as a human being--one still capable of brutality, but one who has not forgotten how to feel.

While the characters in Hart's novel aren't necessarily likable, I admire how they try--with varying levels of success--to make something better of themselves and of each other. While the reader knows the odds are against these shattered people being able to mend one another, there's an inherent nobility in the attempt.

Celestial Matters

Celestial Matters by Richard Garfinkle
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Commander Aias of the Celestial Ship Chandra's Tear is charged with heading up operation Sunthief, using a ship to steal a piece of the sun and drop it on the capital city of the Middle Kingdom, the enemy of the Delian League.

This is one of those books that's hard to classify. Can something be classified as hard sf if the science in question is that of the ancient Greeks and equally ancient Chinese? That's right. Celestial matters is part hard sf, part alternate history. The Delia League is a Greek Empire founded on the spurious science of the ancient Greeks, which works in this universe. Spontaneous Generation farms are used to create animals. Space is full of air. The humors govern the health of the body. The Delian League is at war with the Middle Kingdom, which is an equally large empire built upon Taoist science.

As you can tell, the world behind Celestial Matters is a very interesting one once you wrap your head around the science. That being said, while the story is good, the writing drags. It took me about seventy pages to be fully invested in the book. It's not a light read and the science takes a bit of getting used to.

Still, I recommend this to alternate history fans who are into the ridiculous and magical science of 2000 years ago.


Also on Goodreads

Quintessence

Quintessence by David Walton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In a world where the Earth is flat and alchemy works, Alchemist Chistopher Sinclair and physician Stephen Parris leave their uncertain futures in England and flee to Horizon, a colony on the edge of the world. But even as they unravel the island's many wonders, can they truly escape the religious upheavals in England?

The Quintessance is part alternate history and part what I'm now calling alternate science. It takes place during the Age of Exploration, only in this world, the Earth is flat and the world is ruled by alchemical principles, and alchemist search for the Quintessence, the mysterious fifth element. It reminded me of Celestial Matters, another alternate history/alternate science tale.

The two leads, Sinclair and Parris, contrast each other nicely. Parris is a rational-thinking family man and Sinclair is a driven alchemist seeking to beat death. Parris's relationship with his family does a lot to flesh out his character. The wonders of the quintessence got me interested in the story before the gang ever left England, especially Catherine and the manticore.

Once they drew closer to Horizon and began encountering all sorts of magical creatures, the story took off to me, only to bog down once they reached the colony. While the experiments with the quintessence were interesting, not a lot happened until the mysterious earthquake and the bad guys showed up.

The bad guys were a bit of a problem. Parris' cousin Vaughan was almost unbelievable he was such a selfish douche and Tavera, late of the Spanish Inquisition (NO ONE EXPECTS THE SPANISH INQUISITION!), was practically twirling his mustache in villainous delight, although I actually found him the more believable of the pair. The best villains are the ones that think their actions are justified and Tavera certainly had that going for him. If the story had gone another way, I could easily see Sinclair playing the villainous role.

That's about all I have to say. Quintessence was an enjoyable read but I'm not wetting myself in anticipation for the sequel. 3.5 out of 5.

ALso on Goodreads