The Never Ending Story

A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin
Reviewed by Jason Koivu
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Holy crap, I was starting to think I was never going to finish!

So here we mostly get the continuation of the Jon Snow, Tyrion and Daenerys stories. Oh yeah, and fucking Bran the Boring, too. Aside from him, all the others are favorites, so A Dance with Dragons was a pleasure to read.

That doesn't mean it's a great book though. It drags a good deal. It lacks the surprise and epicness of the first three books. A lot of this one and A Feast For Crows felt like housekeeping.

I shouldn't differentiate between those two books. They were both meant to be one, and it's obvious when you read them and see that half the GoT characters are dealt with in book #4 and the others get their due in #5. Tipping the wide-load scales at over a thousand pages a piece, it's readily apparent why the books were split in two. Even so, the reader can't help but feel like something's missing while going through each separately. That's a looong time to put characters on hold in your mind. I feel bad for fans who read Feast back when it came out, what 10 years ago?

But what's here for us in Dance is some good, solid reading. There are slight surprises and unexpected turns here and there. It's a slow-burn page turner, not an up-all-night-cuz-you-can't-stop scorcher.

Before I finish I should like to clarify one thing after bagging on the poor boy earlier. For many a book I've suffered through the insufferable Bran story. Not since the beginning of the first book have I found him remotely interesting. But finally something intriguing does develop in this storyline, eventually. It ties up a loose end elsewhere while adding color to the crippled boy's tale. For that, I'm glad I read A Dance with Dragons.

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Silver Surfer, Vol. 3: Last Days

Silver Surfer, Vol. 3: Last Days by Dan Slott
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Silver Surfer and Dawn get trapped in a time loop, get stuck on a paradise planet, and try to rebuild the universe.

Here we are, the final volume, as of now, of Dan Slott and Michael Allred's run on The Silver Surfer. Honestly, it's kind of a mixed bag, though I can't lay the blame solely on the Surfer's gleaming shoulders.

The first story is a time loop that's depicted in a creative way, the panels forming a Moebius strip. First off, I thought this was very clever and pertinent to the story, not as gimmicky as I originally thought. I loved that the story featured Space French-speaking aliens and the area the Surfer and Dawn traveled through was called The Giraud expanse, a nice reference to noted French comic artist Moebius, aka Jean Giraud.

The second story was also pretty good. It turns out Surfer and Dawn never left the paradise planet they found in the first story. Paradise wasn't what it was cracked up to be.

The third story featured Dawn and Surfer taking the long way back to Earth, visiting everyone they met in the previous two volumes. It reminded me of the 10th Doctor's swan song before his regeneration and made me think I wouldn't be pleased with the final story in the collection.

The fourth story is what sucked half a star of enjoyment out of the book. It's a shame that this title's revolutionary run was derailed by Secret Wars. Still, it was cool seeing The Silver Surfer and Dawn attempting to rebuild the universe.

While I didn't like the abrupt ending to the series due to Secret Wars, Slott and Allred did a good job making chicken salad with the chicken parts they were given. I hear the series is coming back and I'll be ready when it does. 3.5 out of 5 stars.

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Zombie Dash

Mark Matthews
Self-Published
Reviewed by Nancy
3 out of 5 stars

Summary

Are you fast enough to survive the Zombie apocalypse?

Well, now you can find out. It's the new trend in running races; run through miles and miles of zombie infested trails, but instead of biting you, they grab a flag off of your belt, flag-football style.

See what happens when Big Pharm meets Big Horror, as three Pharmaceutical Representatives take part in a Zombie Run, and get much more horror than they planned for.

My Review

This was just the right story to jump-start my workout on the stationary bike. Even though it was about 90 degrees outside and the chugging air-conditioner didn’t seem to be cool enough, my legs were pumping in record time in solidarity with the unnamed narrator, and her friend, Becca, trying to escape the volunteer zombies at the company-sponsored Zombie Dash 10K.

It’s all fun and games, with the volunteers using little flags to represent their kills and the runners giggling and screaming in mock horror. It all changes when an evil clown zombie gets in on the action.

I don’t want to say any more and spoil the fun for anyone. This story is fast-paced, suspenseful and terrifying. Never trust zombies, even if they look like Bill Clinton or are dressed like cute babies.

Though this story was well-written, it is rife with awkward sentences and misspellings, which sometimes pulled me out of the story. In a self-published work, this is something I can tolerate, but I do hope the author will consider finding a good editor for future stories.

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The Forgotten Goddess

The Forgotten Goddess by Olivier Delaye
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The people of Atlantis all have divine gifts. These gifts are viewed as natural and good, all except one gift. Those with gift of prophecy are killed and Sebasten Oryas just happens to have this gift. He and his mother simply say he has no gift which leaves him an outcast with only one friend, Sage. When Sebasten's Great Aunt who he has never met invites him for the summer, he along with Sage go for a visit. Unfortunately Sebasten has a vision of his own death before he travels to see her.

The Forgotten Goddess is a solid story that's 100 percent Young Adult. The standard elements are all present. A big plus is the writing is quite polished. I don't believe I noticed a single typo in the entire story which is remarkable for a what appears to be a self-published novel. The scenery is vivid and really comes to life.

The world of Atlantis has some interesting aspects to it in the divine gifts. Every human resident of Atlantis has their own gift that range significantly. A few of these gifts are prophecy, illusion, transformation, breathing under water, and speaking to various animals. It also appeared that all living things have the ability to use magic. Most seem only to use low magic, but some like Sebasten's Great Aunt Elma use high magic. The difference is largely lost on me, but multiple characters activated things using their low magic.

The characters themselves varied in the story. Certain characters like Aunt Elma just had a load of idiosyncrasies and personality that made her feel very much like the kind yet peculiar Aunt. Cinder also had more than enough personality to pop off the page and seem realistic. Unfortunately the main character Sebasten didn't come alive for me. Despite spending most of the book in his head and considering his visions, little of Sebasten's personality was put on display. In the end I didn't like or dislike him which for me isn't particularly ideal. I look for characters to invoke feelings in me and unfortunately that didn't happen with Sebasten.

In the end I have to say The Forgotten Goddess was a nice start from a new author, Olivier Delaye.


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All-New X-Men: Inevitable, Vol. 1: Ghost of the Cyclops

All-New X-Men: Inevitable, Vol. 1: Ghost of the Cyclops by Dennis Hopeless
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The All-New X-Men have formed up a new team. Jean Grey has left to live a normal life. Evan aka Kid Apocalypse and Oya have joined Cyclops, Beast, Iceman, Angel, and the former X-23 current Wolverine Laura Kinney. Cyclops has set off on his own quest going after The Ghosts of Cyclops a group that revere the recently deceased present day Cyclops.

Meanwhile this group of young adults has their share of challenges.

I'm not a fan of Cyclops in general. He always seemed a pompous brown-noser and one of the best things I had seen was him doing his revolution business prior to his passing. He was still pompous, but he was at least honest. Despite my general feelings I feel terrible for past Cyclops. Traveling to the future and learning you turn into just about everything you hate has to be devastating.

He's handling things surprisingly well. The first three issues are primarily centered around him dealing with The Ghosts of Cyclops.

The next three issues shift into emotion-ville. All the young team members are forced to deal with their issues. Hank intelligence isn't cutting edge because of his jump to the future, Cyclops has to deal with what he becomes, Evan is an Apocalypse clone, Oya is religious and believed mutants were demons so she hates herself, Iceman is gay yet is uncomfortable with that fact, and Laura and Angel are having problems in their relationship.

This was really off-putting because the X-Men were literally all whining about their problems in these three issues. Perhaps for a young adult audience this would have been more appreciated, but I felt like I was being overwhelmed with teenage emotions even though they aren't all teenagers. I hope the author got that out of his system or at least is willing to take turns because it was just too much.

Ghost of Cyclops was an OK story, but their is still some potential. As always I still wonder when the time traveling X-Men will go home, but I'm trying to enjoy their story in the moment.

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GOOD MORNING, MIDNIGHT BY LILY BROOKS-DALTON

Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

”I heave myself out of the darkness slowly, painfully.

And there I am, and there he is…”

----Jean Rhys

It is interesting that Lily Brooks-Dalton named this book after the Jean Rhys’s novel of the same name. I’ve never read the Rhys’s book, but it is a notoriously depressing novel. The premise of this novel could certainly lead readers to believe that this book, too, is destined to be depressing, but for me it proved to be strikingly uplifting. Jean Rhys takes her title from an Emily Dickinson poem.

Good morning, Midnight!
I'm coming home,
Day got tired of me –
How could I of him?

Sunshine was a sweet place,
I liked to stay –
But Morn didn't want me – now –
So good night, Day!

Dickinson---Rhys---Brooks-Dalton are writers who are connected through strings of written words that are like strands of DNA passed from page to mind to pen from one generation of writer to the next. One writer lives in the next one who then influences the next one.

The Earth goes silent.

There is no bang, no debris cloud, no chaos.

Augustine, who elected not to be on the last plane out of the Arctic Circle, is strangely contented. He has never really cared for the rest of humanity. He has always been lost in his own brilliance and focused on his astronomy career, which took off like a meteorite, but now at 78 years old, he isn’t really sure if he has achieved all he was meant to achieve. ”His work ethic was strong, his ego engorged, his results groundbreaking, but he wasn’t satisfied. He had never been satisfied and never would be. It wasn’t success he craved, or even fame, it was history: he wanted to crack the universe open like a ripe watermelon, to arrange the mess of pulpy seeds before his dumbfounded colleagues. He wanted to take the dripping red fruit in his hands and quantify the guts of infinity, to look back into the dawn of time and glimpse the very beginning. He wanted to be remembered.”

He seduced women. He made women fall in love with him. It became a game for him. He played hot and cold and felt even more empowered over their desperate efforts to get him back. ”It was a thrill just to exist. There were control rooms full of humming equipment, enormous telescopes, endless arrays. There were beautiful women, college girls and townies and visiting scholars, and he would’ve slept with them all if he could have.”

There is, after all, only so much time in a day.

For most of us, if we were at the Arctic Circle or floating along in space and suddenly lost all contact with the rest of humanity, we would probably have a moment of panic or maybe even a complete meltdown. Augustine’s reaction was more along the lines of... huh, interesting. Of course, after being too high in the stratosphere his whole life to have relationships, beyond his physical needs, this isn’t that much different from his normal life, except things are quieter. He can focus.

Well, except some moron left their eight year old daughter behind.

How could this happen? Just at the moment he thought he was completely free, a cable snakes out from the ground snagging him, keeping him tethered to the Earth. He is angry. He was so close.

The other story we are allowed to follow is of Sully and her fellow astronauts on their way back from an exploration of Jupiter. ”The receivers were picking up the murmurs of space all around them, from celestial bodies millions of light years away---it was only Earth that wasn’t saying anything.”

The silence is deafening.

They are professionals who are trained not to panic. They will have been gone two years by the time they touch down on Earth. They put their minds to work on the possibilities. We are noisy creatures, now silent, which makes them believe that whatever is wrong with Earth is catastrophic.

Augustine would have never bothered to go fire up the radio, but now that he is responsible for Iris, he feels he needs to make some attempt to find another human being. He reaches Sully. Neither have the answers the other needs. They are both lost in their own desolations.

The calmness of this novel reminds me of On the Beach where the people who are left alive are resigned to their fate and are trying to enjoy the last few days of their lives. There is no pell-mell race for safety, because there is no safety. The publisher is also making connections to the recent post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven even to the extent of using very similar cover art. This is a mature work with tight prose and elegant observations. Brooks-Dalton even manages to make me like Augustine by finding the spark of humanity in him that was always smothered by his brilliance.

This is the most tranquil end of the world book you will ever read. Highly Recommended!

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The Perdition Score (Sandman Slim #8) By: Richard Kadrey

The Perdition Score by Richard Kadrey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I love this series, I ainttttttttt going to lie, I put things down to read a new Sandman Slim book. It's like old school noir books crossed with Dresden files tossed into a bag with Iron Maiden albums and old Thrasher magazines and shook up till everybody smells like old beer, apple fritters and sweat.

That glowing review aside, this isn't my favorite of the series...even not being the fav child..it still beats the brakes off most urban fantasy out today. It's fun from front to back and I want posters made out of the covers (whomever decided on making the recent installment covers like old movie posters deserves a raise)

GO buy this, and Mr Kadrey, you are gonna make me mad in book nine aren't You? (hate cliffhangers and sense a disturbance in the force)

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The Interminables By: Paige Orwin

The Interminables by Paige Orwin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Note for review readers, I have a crashed computer so I am reviewing from a phone and tablet, so I may be more disjointed than usual, if that's possible.

I really enjoyed this story, it had most of the things I dig, interesting world, I really liked the main characters, it was a humorous story, and they had great interaction. My cons are very few, although I could tell where Ms Orwin was going with her tale, her writing style is a bit disjointed and might throw some people off. That being said, great fun read and I recommend it, (thanks to the overlords at Angry Robot for the ARC)

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A Perfunctory History of France

A Brief History of France by Cecil Jenkins
Reviewed by Jason Koivu
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I'm too damn familiar with British history, I told myself recently. Time to branch out!...My branch didn't stretch too far.

The histories of France and England are deeply entwined (which always seemed odd to me considering how very different are their people, language, food, etc), so reading about France's history wasn't exactly like taking a trip to another galaxy. Since declaring nationhood, their almost constant warring would always insure some old familiar atrocity to ground my sense of time and place.

With that kind of background knowledge in place, I wasn't looking for any especially thorough or comprehensive history on France and that's just what I got in A Brief History of France. Very brief. Not particularly thorough. That's all right! There's a place, time and person for this kind of history-quickie and I'm it!

The real problem with this book revealed itself fairly early. It's uneven. In chapter one, within a few slim pages, we get the entirety of human civilization in the French region summed up in the quick mention of some cave paintings recently discovered. There ya go, a nice tidy summation of a couple million years. Then it jumps directly into Roman Gaul with a page or so on Julius Caesar and Vercingetorix. With the whole Roman Empire and its rule over Gaul taken care of, we now move into Medieval France, where Charlemagne and the early chivalric knights roamed. And all those hundreds and thousands of years are, not only lumped in with all of prehistory, but it's all jammed together in one twenty page chapter. I was a little miffed, so I flipped ahead and discovered that the period after the second world war up to the present, approximately 70 years worth, takes up 100 pages and an entire third of the whole book! So yeah, as I said, this is uneven.

Another issue, and it's minor, is the casual tone. I don't think I've ever read a history text before that referred to a historical figure in terms of their "bitchiness".

War, huh yeah, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing, you say Edwin Starr? Wrong! War is good for history books. That shit really fills the pages! It's all over this mother. I suppose that's not Cecil Jenkins' fault. I blame the French.

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FF, Vol. 1: Fantastic Faux

FF, Vol. 1: Fantastic Faux by Matt Fraction
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The new FF are struggling to hold down the fort. Bentley gets up to some mischief. The future Human Torch awakens and the future he's predicted draws nearer.

Ant-Man and company continue trying to fill the shoes of the Fantastic Four and go up against a leviathan, The Wizard, Blastaar, and The Inhumans but their biggest enemies seem to be themselves.

That might be stretching it a little but Matt Fraction and Mike Allred have created a throwback to the Fantastic Four of the 1960's, a bickering team that still feels like a family.

I dig Matt Fraction's writing. Maybe not as much as Dan Slott's on the Silver Surfer but he does a good job of writing something that works to Mike Allred's strengths and fits his art style. He also gets some mileage out of The Wizard and the Inhumans, something I don't think many writers do a good job of. I also like how he's planting seeds for the next volume while doing some good character development within the FF cast.

I really like what Matt Fraction is doing here and I'm keen to start the next volume. Four out of five stars.

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