CBR18 Book 56: "Life Out of Order" by Audrey Niffenegger

Page count: 544 pages

Rating: DNF @ 18%. 3 stars for the bits I read

This was an ARC. Thank you to NetGalley and Hanover Square Press. My opinions are entirely my own. This book is on sale now.

In recent years, legacy sequels, coming out several decades after the previous movie, have become popular. Some are surprisingly great, like Creed and Blade Runner 2049, while others make you wonder why they exist in the first place (The Devil Wears Prada 2 and Practical Magic 2: Family Legacy, to name two that I watched over the summer). Life Out of Order comes out 23 years after the mega-successful The Time Traveller's Wife and, as such, I think it's fair to compare it to a legacy sequel. Unfortunately, I can't really tell you whether it's a legacy sequel like the first examples I mentioned, or the second, since I didn't even make it a quarter of the way through the book. 

This time, we follow Alba DeTamble, Clare and Henry's daughter. Like her father, she has chrono-displacement syndrome, which means she is involuntarily thrown back (or sometimes forward) in time to any point in her own lifetime. It makes life very difficult for her, and those close to her. 

According to Goodreads, I haven’t actually read The Time Traveller's Wife since 2011, although I remember really liking it. I rated it five stars. Unfortunately, I don’t remember that much about it anymore, and I no longer remember how I reacted to the fact that the characters are often so jumbled in each other’s timelines. 2011 was long before smartphones and social media, the scourge of reading stamina and deep concentration. All I know is that when I tried to read Life Out of Order now, the fact that every chapter starts with information about the various character’s ages and what year the plot is currently taking place in, got very confusing very fast. It doesn’t help that the book is clearly set in a depressing alternate reality, where society is a lot more fascist than it currently is, and there seems to be something rather cataclysmic coming later in Alba’s life. I kept putting it down and then reluctantly picking it back up again. Sadly, I DNF-d it at 18%. It may be a perfectly good book. It just wasn’t the right one for me at this point in time. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

CBR18 Book 10: "The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook" by Matt Dinniman

Page count: 534 pages

Audio book length: 16 hrs 54 mins

Rating: 4 stars

Carl, Donut and Mongo have made it to the fourth level of the dungeon. This time, there are trains. So many trains. The game appears to have constructed a labyrinthine tangle of all of the world's underground railway systems, and there are new and strange rules to get used to. There are bounties awarded to anyone who kills any of the players in the top ten, which now include both Carl and Donut. 

There are all manner of strange monsters on the various trains and platforms, and while the stairways are apparently on clearly announced stations, most of the crawlers are on trains going to much higher stations, and no one seems to know how to get to the end stations and back to the start of the loop. Carl gets an unexpected advantage from a seemingly useless reward box, The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook, where countless previous crawlers have noted down their tips and tricks and useful modifications about the dungeons. He just can't let anyone know where he's suddenly getting all of his new and clever ideas.

Just as determined that he won't allow the system to break him as before, Carl manages to get more of the crawlers to cooperate and work together on this level. Of course, it also means pulling off some truly insane plans in an attempt to help as many crawlers as possible make it out alive and down to the next level. 

This book was long and dragged in places, but I still very much enjoyed it because by now I adore Carl, Donut, Mongo and poor Katia, who is really put through the wringer in this one. Let's just say her character ended up developing in all sorts of ways I was not expecting. I think she should put her foot down and refuse to wear a Mohawk, no matter what Donut suggests. 

I keep being amazed at the narration, and while I am still happy I have all the audios, I will probably be able to re-read the books on paper, since I now have the voices from the audio so completely internalised. With some books, that might be a problem. Here, it is not. 

Judging a book by its cover: I love the new cover design, and will quite possibly buy the whole series in hardback if it keeps being as good as it is now, partially because I like the design so much. However, it was also fun to see a depiction of the Mantaur that Carl and the others had to fight on the old cover, as well. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

CBR17 Book 44: "Dungeon Crawler Carl" by Matt Dinniman

Page count: 446 pages

Audio book length: 13 hrs 31 mins

Rating: 4 stars

CBR17 Bingo: Rec'd (I honestly don't know how many people have raved about this book, on CBR, other review sites on the internet, as well as in my IRL book club) 

By now, most people who are even vaguely interested in this series probably know what it's about, but I'll try to give a brief summary.

Carl is wandering around, half-dressed in the snow, looking for his ex-girlfriend's prize-winning Persian cat, when Earth is suddenly attacked by aliens. All the buildings collapse in an instant and are pushed underground, and anyone who was in any of those buildings is instantly dead. Only the individuals on the surface still have a meagre chance at survival. Those on the surface are given the choice of having to fend for themselves on the surface or go underground and become a player in the Dungeon Crawler World, a multi-level labyrinth game broadcasted as prime time entertainment to the galaxy (in Carl's case, he pretty much only has the one option, since it's freezing outside and he's only half-dressed). 

So Carl and his ex-girlfriend's cat, Princess Donut, become contestants in the Dungeon Crawler Game. Princess Donut quickly learns to speak, and she and Carl, despite the extremely steep learning curve, become a good team (but not without some disagreements and conflicts along the way). They need to learn how to fight and how to best and most effectively level up, and they need to become popular enough to get corporate sponsors and online followers throughout the galaxy, if they want to stay alive, which will only get harder and harder the longer they stay in the game. 

Every so often, a book or a series comes along that so many different people on so many corners I frequent on the internet all agree is a must-read and just won't stop raving about, to the point where even if I might not have been all that interested to begin with (usually because its an unfamiliar genre to me, or I think it's outside of my fields of interest). The last time this happened, was probably with The Murderbot Diaries, which really became popular during the Pandemic (for very obvious reasons). I had heard about All Systems Red in a number of places and a lot of different sources before I decided to actually give the series a try (what can I say, science fiction frequently isn't my jam), and if I hadn't found the first novellas in an e-book sale (they are needlessly expensive at full price, considering the length of the stories), I might have waited even longer.

I don't think I've really read any LitRPG books before, and even with all the enthusiastic write-ups I saw of Carl and Donut's adventures, I was unsure of whether I would like the books or not. But when Audible had the first book discounted (a lot of people also recommended that I try the audio versions, and they were right), I figured that it was probably time to see what all the fuss was about.

Now that I have listened to the audio, with the excellent narration from Jeff Hayes and all the various sound effects, I don't think I'd want to read the books on paper. While it took me a while to figure out the gist of the story, and it got way gorier in places than I was expecting, I was pretty much hooked before the book got to 20% and now I'm really looking forward to making my way through what exists of the series so far. Audible won't let me hoard more than 6 credits (so mean), so it's good to have something I can use them on every few months. 

Judging a book by its cover: I really like the cover designs of the hardcover books that are being issued for this series, a lot better than the cover art for the previous editions. So I chose to include this cover rather than the original. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

CBR17 Book 13: "Animal Farm" by George Orwell

Page count: 95 pages

Audio book length: 3 hrs 3 mins

Rating: 4 stars

Nowhere Books Bingo 25: Banned Book

Buzzword Cover Challenge 25: Cover featuring an animal

On Manor Farm, somewhere in England, an old boar gathers all the animals in the barn and makes a powerful speech about how animals suffer at the hands of humans and should rise up and take power for themselves. Shortly after his death, the animals of Manor Farm do just that - they violently fight back when Farmer Jones and his farmhands try to control them and chase the farmer, his wife and all the other humans on the farm away. All animals will be equal, everyone will contribute to the farm to the best of their abilities, walking on two legs and using collars or human attire is forbidden, and no one will use the farmhouse anymore. The pigs manage to teach themselves to read and write and seven lofty commandments for the governing of Animal Farm are painted on the barn walls. Things seem very idyllic for the animals at first, but it doesn't take long before some of the animals take a more prominent role in the rule and governing of the farm, and as a result, decide that they deserve more than their allotted share of the resources. 

This is where I have to confess to never having read Animal Farm until this year when we're teaching it to the tenth-graders. Unlike Et dukkehjem, which I have read and taught a bunch of times, we never used this book on the curriculum before, and because I like to read for escapism and to avoid traumatic and depressing reading experiences, I've tried to stay away from George Orwell's novels. While it's not a long book, only a novella really, an allegory stuffed full of political satire isn't the easiest thing for rather sheltered Norwegian tenth-graders to process, and quite a few of our pupils are having a tough time with it. Of course, when we planned the curriculum for this year in August, none of us English teachers had any idea how much more relevant it was going to become (thanks for that, America), although the machinations of the pigs seem almost quaint compared to the geo-political nightmare taking place in the United States right now. 

I had to read up on Soviet/Russian history in the 20th Century after reading this, so as better to understand all the things the book alludes to, to then teach it to the kids. The ones who are generally interested in history and current events, seem to be getting a lot more out of the book than the others. Some of them are questioning why they have to read a book about a bunch of animals - hence the need to try to tell them the real-world events that inspired the book. It's going to be interesting to see what they think once we finish the book, it's not exactly a fun or heartwarming tale - rather than a depressing dystopian fable. 

I'm glad I read it, but it's deeply tragic that not only have we not learned anything from history and books such as this, but power-hungry despots with seemingly no grasp of actual decency are being allowed to do much worse as we speak. Poor Orwell is probably rolling in his grave. 

Judging a book by its cover: Red and black, very Communist colour scheme and the entire layout of the cover looks like a propaganda poster of some kind. The fateful windmill is front and centre, along with a slightly sinister-looking pig. There are countless editions of this book, and just as many different cover designs. I kind of like this one. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

CBR16 Book 3: "Dance with the Devil" by Kit Rocha

Page count: 416 pages

Rating: 4.5 stars

After his father died, Rafael "Rafe" Morales basically sold himself to TechCorps and agreed to become a technologically enhanced supersoldier, so he could make enough money to keep his widowed mother and younger siblings safe. He didn't really know what signing away his life would entail, and given the choice again, he probably would have chosen differently. He hasn't been able to see them for years, certainly not since he and his team, the Silver Devils, had to fake their own deaths to get away from their cruel superiors.

Unlike Rafe, Danijela "Dani" Volkova didn't really have external pressures that made her sign up with TechCorps. She was just curious and driven, and once their scientists had experimented sufficiently on her, she became super fast, agile, and graceful and lost the ability to feel pain, at all. This made her the perfect elite bodyguard for the rich and powerful, until she just couldn't handle the cruelty and corruption she was witness to and broke away. She joined Nina and Maya to become one of the mercenary librarians of Atlanta. Dani feels like TechCorps turned her into a monster. She appreciates the love that her chosen sisters and the former supersoldiers who share their lives offer her, but deep down she knows she doesn't deserve it. 

Since their very first meeting, when Dani may have "accidentally" stabbed Rafe a little bit, the chemistry between them has been off the charts. But Rafael doesn't want a quick fling, Dani doesn't do long-term commitment, and neither is willing to risk screwing up their new big, unusual family unit with relationship drama. Keeping everything casual and platonic becomes a lot more difficult when the two have to go undercover among the rich and deplorable of Atlanta. After the death of Tobias Richter, the VP of Security for TechCorps, and the one who sat with most of the power, the organisation is desperately scrambling to maintain control, and our enhanced heroes and heroines have decided that it's time to start fighting back. 

Having come into unexpected wealth at the end of the previous book, Maya is using all of her considerable resources and brains, her wealth of sensitive information burned into her brain after growing up in the loving arms of TechCorps and learning a lot of its dirty secrets, as well as calling in all the favours from her vast network of informants and allies. It's one such ally, a head researcher at TechCorps, whom Rafe and Dani are trying to contact when they go undercover, as a married couple. Once on the mission, they not only discover that Rafe's little sister is in terrible danger, but it also becomes impossible for them to keep their hands off each other. 

This is the third and probably final (there is a suggestion at the end of the epilogue in this one that there may be new dangers facing our intrepid band of heroes, but it seems like the author duo has moved on to new projects now) novel in the Mercenary Librarians series. As such, it's not the best place to start. This might very well not be an almost five-star read to someone else but as the end chapter of all that has been established in the previous two books, with all the seeds sown and the principal cast, as well as the various supporting characters, joining together to launch a full-scale revolution, I loved this book. The romance between Dani and Rafe has been teased from the beginning and didn't disappoint. 

Both Dani and Rafe got turned into lethal weapons by TechCorps, but Rafael grew up in a loving family and always knew that the sacrifices he made were for them. Dani was rejected by her parents once they realised the choices she had made, and was honed into a ruthless killing machine by the scientists. She is fiercely loyal and has vast capacities for love and emotion, all of which she is worthy of, but takes her quite some time to come to terms with. 

I loved this book, and its action-packed and thrilling finale, where the downtrodden of Atlanta join with our protagonists to kick ass and take names, in order to secure a better future, free of the dominance of TechCorps and their controlling ways. 

Judging a book by its cover: The cover for this one at least has slightly more of a sci-fi feel than the last one, but it's still a pretty generic image and I certainly would never have picked up this book from the cover alone. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

CBR16 Books 2: "The Devil You Know" by Kit Rocha

Page count: 416 pages

Rating: 4 stars

Maya used to be Marjorie Chevalier, but had to change her identity after she escaped the evil super scientists at TechCorps, where she was trained as a data courier (basically a human hard drive), with her senses specially enhanced to remember flawlessly everything she hears, reads, sees, hears and experiences. She used to work for one of the Vice Presidents of TechCorps who was secretly orchestrating a rebellion, However, her boss (also the only maternal figure Maya ever knew) was caught and executed, and Maya had to be smuggled to safety. 

She found that safety with Nina, now one of the sisters she never had. Along with the lethal Dani, they have been working to help the residents of post-apocalyptic Atlanta by passing on free information (books, videos, music) and technical know-how. They also occasionally go off on adventures to recover more books and resources. After the events of the previous books, their little found family has expanded a lot, with the former supersoldiers from the Silver Devils squad having settled down in a warehouse next to the librarians' headquarters. The group is hired to retrieve what turns out to be a genetically modified child, and it turns out that Rainbow (which is the name the child chooses for herself) is not the only one. Since Maya doesn't have super speed or strength, she stays back home holding the fort, accompanied by Grey, the former sniper of the Silver Devils, who can't be trusted on a tense mission since his body might betray him.

All the Silver Devils have technical implants that have enhanced their senses. Supersoldiers like them don't normally have a very long lifespan, but in rare cases, their bodies might start rejecting the implant after decades of being used to them. This is what is happening to Grey now. He can suddenly be struck with seizures and an operation to replace the implant has a less than 5% chance of survival, even if they could find a surgeon skilled enough to perform the operation. So Grey is accepting that he doesn't have long to live. One of the things he wants to do with his final days is make sure Maya has the skills and confidence to defend herself and keep herself safe. She's always been told that she needs to be careful not to overload her brain, or she can pretty much short-circuit, but Grey suspects that she's limiting herself out of fears told to her to control her and keep her from reaching her full potential. He shows her that not only is she an absolute wizard with all things technical, but her perfect recall is a superpower in itself, if not as physically intimidating as those of her chosen sisters.

There is a very strong attraction between Maya and Grey, however, the only man Maya ever loved before was literally tortured to death in front of her in an attempt to get her to reveal the secrets buried in her brain after her boss was executed. She's also prone to sensory overload and doesn't really know how she'd react in a physically overwhelming situation, like having sex. Letting herself fall for a man who's dying is bound to lead to heartbreak, but not acting on the attraction before it's too late might be a bigger mistake than keeping her distance.

While Maya and the Silver Devils all had very skillful people hiding their tracks and faking their deaths (complete with falsified bodies with their DNA planted), Tobias Richter, the VP of Security at TechCorps is a ruthless and deeply driven man, convinced (rightly so) that he can find them if he searches hard enough. When a video from a farmer's market surfaces, proving to him that his quarries are still alive, Maya and Grey's days together might be numbered sooner than they think. 

I enjoyed Deal with the Devil, which introduced the world and all these characters to each other. Now the super soldiers and the high-tech murder ladies all live together as a big, ruthlessly efficient, and deadly family, doing their best to right wrongs and improve their local community. Maya has always felt like the weakest of the group, and the lies to her by her former boss to keep her from showing too much of her excellence to Tech Corps means she hasn't been able to reach her true potential until Grey comes along and makes her see how truly remarkable she is, even in a dangerous situation. She's not just brains and perfect recall. Their romance develops slowly since Grey is likely to die soon, and Maya has some understandable emotional scars from her first and only romantic relationship so far.

The villain in this book is a complete psycho, and once he discovers that Maya and the Silver Devils are alive, he lures them into a trap to get his clutches on Maya. Of course, Maya is no longer a delicate flower raised in a sheltered environment and beats Tobias Richter at his own game. Things look dicey for Grey for a while (who to be fair already thought he was dying, so wanted to save Maya with the grandest of gestures), but this is a romance, and our brave, self-sacrificing hero doesn't actually end the book dead. 

By the end of this book, our altruistic heroes and heroines have some difficult choices to make. Their attempts to stay hidden from TechCorps have clearly failed, and a confrontation is inevitable. Are they ready to go to war?

Judging a book by its cover: This is about as generic as covers go. Nothing about this says post-apocalyptic action adventure with kick-ass murder ladies and supersoldier dudes. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

#CBR12 Book 27: "Station Eleven" by Emily St. John Mandel

Page count: 352 pages
Rating: 5 stars

Official book description:
DAY ONE
The Georgia Flu explodes over the surface of the earth like a neutron bomb.
News reports put the mortality rate at over 99%.

WEEK TWO
Civilization has crumbled.

YEAR TWENTY
A band of actors and musicians called the Travelling Symphony move through their territories performing concerts and Shakespeare to the settlements that have grown up there. Twenty years after the pandemic, life feels relatively safe.

But now a new danger looms, and he threatens the hopeful world every survivor has tried to rebuild.

STATION ELEVEN
Moving backwards and forwards in time, from the glittering years just before the collapse to the strange and altered world that exists twenty years after, Station Eleven charts the unexpected twists of fate that connect six people: famous actor Arthur Leander; Jeevan - warned about the flu just in time; Arthur's first wife Miranda; Arthur's oldest friend Clark; Kirsten, a young actress with the Travelling Symphony; and the mysterious and self-proclaimed 'prophet'.

Thrilling, unique and deeply moving, this is a beautiful novel that asks questions about art and fame and about the relationships that sustain us through anything - even the end of the world. 

This was our very first Cannonball Book Club pick back in 2015, and I read and reviewed the book back then too. My original review can be found here. It took me a while back then to decide that I actually wanted to read the book for myself, and I'm not going to lie, re-reading it while a pandemic swept from Asia towards Europe and the USA, was making me a bit nervous. Looking back at the dates when I re-read this book, it was exactly during the time when Norway literally shut down, when the most drastic measures in post-World War II society were implemented, all over the course of a few days. I began my re-read of this on the 12th of March, on my way to work. By the afternoon, we'd been told that the nurseries, schools and universities, not to mention pretty much all major businesses, would be closed until further notice, and everyone was encouraged to just remain indoors, in a kind of pre-quarantine.

Of course, I'm reviewing the book some three months later, and while the pandemic is currently under control in certain parts of the world, it's still spreading wildly and terrifyingly fast in other parts of the globe. While I would love to believe the hopeful views on humanity and survival that are explored in this novel, the current news cycle shows that most people are short-sighted, egotistical, self-centred and careless. It's boring and difficult, not to mention very inconvenient to shelter in place and stay away from people for months. It's much nicer if you can just go about your business instead.  It's hot and uncomfortable to wear a mask to protect others, so a whole bunch of people are just not going to do that, despite all the factual evidence that we could massively halt the spread of the virus if everyone (especially the ones who don't feel sick, but may be asymptomatic carriers) just wore a face mask, washed their hands a lot and tried to keep their distance when out and about.

Station Eleven is a science fiction novel, it's set in a post-apocalyptic society, but it is nevertheless a hopeful and uplifting read. I don't think Emily St. John Mandel would dream of the situations that Covid-19 has created world-wide back when she wrote her book, and as I said, right now, the things that seem the most far fetched and fictional to me, are how well the "Fifteen years later" societies are managing. Of course, we're currently in the middle of "Year One" of this scenario, so perhaps, in the future, when a terrifyingly tragic percentage of the population has died (even if it's not 99%, like in this book), people will again focus mainly on re-building communities and re-discovering art and beauty and togetherness.

This wasn't supposed to be quite such a depressing whinge about how bafflingly selfish a lot of people currently are, but rather a review of my re-read of the book. In my mind, I'd built up the bits I disliked, with the 'Prophet', into a much larger part of the story. So much of the book looks back on the lives of a lot of the people before the Georgia flu hit and subsequently make us care when they are either killed by the flu themselves or lose other loved ones from the illness. It's still a wonderful book, and I'm glad we revisited it for Book Club.

Judging a book by its cover: I own three copies of this book. An e-book copy, an Audible audiobook and the UK paperback copy, which I was gifted in a Cannonball Book Exchange. This is the cover of the paperback I have, which seems extra timely now that an actual pandemic is sweeping the world and we saw that in places where people were forced to isolate during the lockdown, wild animals really did end up roaming the urban streets, undisturbed by people. So the deer facing the reader among the high rises of a city doesn't seem as strange as it may have once done. It doesn't take long for nature to start reclaiming the space we take up.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR11 Book 106: "Nightchaser" by Amanda Bouchet

Page count: 416 pages
Audio book length: 11 hrs 45 mins
Rating: 3.5 stars

Official book description:
Tess Bailey: the galaxy's Most Wanted.
Captain Tess Bailey is in deep trouble. She and her crew are on the run, pursued by a tyrant who'll take them dead or alive. Tess's best hope is a tall, dark, and much-too-appealing stranger, Shade Ganavan, who says he can help her. But his motivations are far from clear...

Shade Ganavan: arrogance, charm...and that special something that makes you want to kick him.
With the dreaded Dark Watch closing in, what Tess and Shade don't know about each other might get them killed...unless they can set aside their differences and learn to trust each other before it's too late.

So in a surprise twist, here I am, taking time away from my piles of boring correction work (I'd forgotten just how much eight graders simply CANNOT write yet - that's the problem with having had tenth graders for too many years in a row) to sneak one more review in before the deadline. I finished the audio book for this yesterday when out shopping, and wanted to add one more book to my tally before the year ends.

This book has already been reviewed and highly recommended by my friends Teresa and Rochelle. Teresa even included it in her top three books of the year, which is high praise. Having read Amanda Bouchet's fantasy trilogy, the Kingmaker Chronicles, which I thought started out very strong with A Promise of Fire, and then sadly got worse with each book in the series, I was initially not too interested in this when it came out at the start of this year, but based on the strong write-ups from people who tend to enjoy much of the same stuff as me, I figured it was worth a listen when I needed entertainment in the post-Christmas stress.

Sadly, Teresa, I didn't love this as much as you did, mainly because I kept being annoyed by Tess' frequently foolish and reckless behaviour. Sure she's brave, and plucky, and defiant and willing to do anything and everything for the orphanage where she was raised (after she was 12), but the stupid risks she takes and the extreme treatment she puts her own body through (without telling any of her crew who could totally HELP her), just had me rolling my eyes a bit too many times. You can't save those orphans if you're dead, Tess!

There's a lot to like about this book, though. There's action and adventure and some truly tense stand-offs against suitably impressive villains. The opening sequence, when Tess stupidly announces her true identity not only to her crew, but to the people pursuing her, before jumping her ship into a black hole was really very nerve-wracking. Tess flits around space rebelling against the evil space dictator and stealing valuable tech and supplies to provide to the rebels, and that's a worthy and cool cause. Her crew of ragtag co-rebels are also interesting and supportive (although I question the intelligence of her crew scientist, who even when patching up Tess after injuries doesn't notice how drained of blood she appears) and I like the back story of how they came to travel together. The chemistry between Tess and Shade was good and they share some decent banter.

Despite being exasperated by the foolish tendency of the heroine to refuse help from her loyal friends/crew (once you've announced to everyone who you really are, you may as well go all in and share everything that's special about yourself) and some of the decisions made by her along the way, I did mostly really enjoy this and will be checking out the sequel (hoping that unlike in her first series, Bouchet's writing and the story actually improves, rather than deteriorate in quality). Tess both starts and ends the book in a whole heap of trouble, and it will be fun to see how she manages to get out of her next scrape.

Judging a book by its cover: I'm really not a huge fan of this cover, although I like the colour scheme of dark blues and purples, with the orange swirling nebula in the background, behind our scowling cover model, who I'm assuming is supposed to be Tess. The tightly crossed arms, the grumpy facial expression, it just seems like the model was told to go for tough and independent, but landed on pouty, stubborn toddler (I should know, I've seen that facial expression on my child many a time recently). We get it, she wears leather, she doesn't smile - the heroine of this must be tough as nails (except, of course, she totally isn't).

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR10 Book 39: "Pestilence" by Laura Thalassa

Page count: 382 pages
Rating: 3 stars

The four horsemen of the Apocalypse came to Earth and in their wake, there was destruction. Engines stopped working, planes fell from the sky, technology sputtered and the internet failed. There was  chaos, and then people learned to adapt. Five years later, only one horseman is active - Pestilence the Conqueror, who rides the length and breadth of the American continent, with whole cities dying where he's appeared. In a small settlement in Canada, Sara Burns is a volunteer firefighter who literally drew the short straw when she and her remaining colleagues decided who was to sacrifice themselves to kill the horseman. While it goes against her every instinct to harm anyone, in order to save the rest of humanity, Sara is willing to do what she can to stop Pestilence. She lays an ambush and shoots the horseman off his horse, dousing him with petrol and setting him on fire for good measure. Unfortunately, the horseman cannot be killed and is rather furious at the treatment he received.

Once the horseman has regenerated, he takes Sara prisoner and is determined to make her suffer. Normally anyone who gets anywhere near Pestilence takes ill and dies within four days, but Sara stays untouched by the plague that normally affects people. She's tied up and forced to run behind the horseman's steed until she collapses with exhaustion. When she tries to escape, he shoots her multiple times with his arrows and then patches her back up again, refusing to let her die. For trying to murder him, and refusing to show mercy when he asked it of her, he will keep her alive, forcing her to see up close the ravages of the disease he spreads on the people they encounter on their journey. While Sara may not get sick, she still requires food and shelter and can get dangerously chilled if they don't stop to let her eat and rest. While many houses are abandoned (communities seem to send out evacuation notices when they know that Pestilence and his horse are near), they frequently find people in the houses they enter. These people are not spared from sickness and Sara has to live with the knowledge that her human needs are what brings Pestilence into their homes. She has to watch men, women and children sicken and die, usually cursing her as they suffer.

Trying to escape is futile, yet as she spends more time with the unstoppable horseman and his horse, she finds out more about him and his feelings towards his gruesome task. Before taking her prisoner, it's quite clear Pestilence knew little of humans, and had a very pessimistic view of humanity as a whole. The longer they spend together, the more the lines blur in their relationship. Feelings begin to develop between them, unwilling as they both are to admit attraction to the other. How can Sara love a creature sent to bestow divine punishment on humanity? And can Pestilence be stopped from fulfilling his duty, allowing some of humankind to survive?

I'd not really heard of this book until it was selected as a monthly read in Vaginal Fantasy (which as of last month will sadly no longer have the monthly video hangouts with Felicia Day and her co-hosts, but just exist online on Goodreads and Discord) and after browsing some reviews, I was intrigued. It wasn't very expensive on Kindle and with the premise - literal immortal embodiment of Pestilence comes to Earth, takes lady prisoner - they fall in love - I wanted to see how that was going to work. The answer is, surprisingly well.

For much of the book, the book deals with two individuals who have a decidedly antagonistic relationship. They travel at punishing pace throughout fairly abandoned areas, only occasionally interacting with others (who all get sick and die, so that really brings out the cheer and pleasant conversation). Frankly, when Pestilence and Sara do approach cities or larger populated areas, that's when things get really dangerous, as Sara is clearly not the only one trying to kill the horseman. While he's immortal and will regenerate from pretty much nothing, Sara is very much a mortal. She's affected by the elements, she starves if she's not fed enough (and in the beginning, Pestilence has absolutely NO idea what is actually good or suitable to eat. He tries to feed her things like Worcester sauce and tinned sardines and he doesn't understand things like hypothermia (until Sara nearly dies from it).

Based on the description of the characters, my mental image of Pestilence was petty much Lee Pace as Thranduil from The Hobbit movies, while Sara was very much Wynnona from Wynnona Earp. She had the same kind of wise-cracking internal monologue and the tough kick-ass attitude. It is rather fascinating seeing the merciless and uncaring Pestilence slowly start learning what it's like to be a person as he spends time with Sara and sees that not all humans are hopeless and care for nothing. Because he's not human, he can be hurt, but regenerate from almost nothing, and he's not affected by things like hunger, thirst or the elements. Nevertheless, he eventually tries both food and alcohol at Sara's prompting and is rather baffled at his growing attraction to her.

The main problem with this book is that we're meant to root for a romance where one party is the literal embodiment of disease and plague. He kills literally millions over the course of the book, even after admitting that he hates the suffering his presence brings. While it's quite clear that he can control who gets ill or not (since he can keep Sara both from catching the plague, and her wounds from getting infected), it's difficult to really see him as a worthwhile hero - cause you know, genocide. He's not exactly kind and gentle with Sara throughout the first half of the book, either, but you know, she tried to kill him and burn his corpse - which wasn't exactly great either. Overall, the tone throughout the book is very grim, and Ms. Thalassa makes it even more difficult to get over Pestilence's actions in that she actually spends quite some time with some of the plague victims, making it all the more horrible when they die. I found the HEA or possibly, HFN, difficult to entirely believe in, considering the premise set up in the rest of the book.

I was, however, pretty engrossed as I was reading the book. I kept wanting to finish just one more chapter to see what was going to happen, and it's only thinking back on the book - the redemption of Pestilence doesn't work for me. It wasn't like the book was terribly expensive, though, and I am curious enough that I may well check out the next book in the series - introducing War.

Judging a book by its cover: Sara is a firefighter and doesn't really seem like the type to wear flowy balldresses (she certainly doesn't at any point in the story, as far as I can remember), but I guess it creates a more romantic visual than if she's in dusty, scruffed up clothes like jeans and a flannel shirt, or the hand-me-downs she seems to find along the way while taken from place to place with Pestilence. I actually really like the cover image, but it suggests a more historical romance than this book presents.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR9 Book 36: "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood

Page count: 370 pages
Audio book length: 12 hrs 08 mins
Rating: 5 stars

There's been a whole bunch of reviews posted for this book already, so I'm not going to spend a lot of time recapping the plot in my own words. Goodreads can help me out here:

Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to the food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, because in an age of declining births, Offred and the other Handmaids are valued only if their ovaries are viable. Offred can remember the years before, when she lived  and made love with her husband, Luke; when she played with and protected her daughter; when she had a job, money of her own and access to knowledge. But all of that is gone now...

I've kept putting off this review, because I know it's going to be a really difficult one to write and I want to do the book justice. Obviously, I had heard of The Handmaid's Tale long before Hulu announced that they were going to adapt it into a mini-series (the first episodes of which are now available to view, not that I have the emotional strength to do so yet). One of my favourite works of literary fiction of all time is The Blind Assassin, another of Atwood's novels, but this is probably still her most famous and well-known work, all the more so now that it's become all too terrifyingly timely.

Written back in 1986, the book was meant to be a work of speculative fiction, a dystopian sci-fi with a more feminist bent than 1984 or Brave New World (Atwood herself claims this book isn't really just about women's rights, but human rights, and I wonder why it's so scary to her to be furthering the feminist cause). Who knew that with the current political climate, this book feels more scarily prescient now than ever before. The grim dystopian future of this novel seems to be lurking just around the corner, much more likely to come to pass now, than in 1986, when the book was written.

As I already mentioned, I don't think I in a stable enough place emotionally to watch the TV adaptation. Listening to the book (this is the new all-cast edition), for the most part narrated by Claire Danes, was difficult enough. To begin with, in the first chapters, the dry, slightly detached way Danes narrates Offred's words felt a bit off-putting, but I understand why she chose to do it the way she has - it gives the readers the impression our narrator may be in shock or emotionally cut-off in some way, which I suppose you might be if your days were those of Offred and the other Handmaids.

Stripped of everything, even her name, Offred is nothing but a walking womb. She's not allowed to smoke or drink alcohol, she's fed a nutritious, rather unexciting diet to ensure she stays healthy. She has to go for a walk every day to stimulate the circulation. Every month, there is "the Ceremony", where she has to lie in the lap of the Commander's wife, holding the hands of a woman who clearly resents her presence, and be raped by the Commander, in order to conceive a child. It's suggested in the book that each Handmaid is living on borrowed time. If she doesn't successfully conceive within three years, she's sent away to "the Colonies" to clear away nuclear waste, along with the other undesirables in society.

Women have no rights in the Republic of Gilead. While Serena Joy, the Commander's wife, lives a life of privilege, she cannot give birth herself, hence the need for a Handmaid. While she's rich and prominent, the house and all the money belongs to her husband, the Commander. She's not allowed to read or make any of her own decisions and is in many ways more confined and house-bound than Offred, who at least gets to walk outside once a day (never alone, always in the company of another Handmaid). Women are divided into three categories. The wives, the Marthas (domestic servants, no good for childbearing) and the Handmaids - women who before the fall of the old society had proven their fertility, but were considered fallen in some way. Only the most prominent members of Gilead can be assigned a Handmaid. Poorer men can have econo-wives (not much was said about these women).

In a society where the American government is already trying to police women's reproductive rights, limiting the rights to abortion and contraception, where Vice President Mike Pence states that he cannot have a meal alone with a woman who's not his wife, and wealthy Western women travel to India or other poor countries to have women act as surrogates for them, the grim reality of this novel no longer really feels like speculative fiction, but a glimpse into a future we must fight to avoid. It no longer seems like a strange and unlikely scenario, which is obviously why both the novel and the TV adaptation feels all the more important right now.

I cannot say that this book was a pleasant reading experience and while listening to it, I pretty much had it confirmed why I've put it off for so long. It's a terrifying and harrowing story, and not at all meant to be easily digested entertainment. I wanted to have read the source material before watching the TV adaptation, though, and it feels like this book should be required reading for everyone. I'm just worried some people will see it more as the blueprint for the new and controlling society they want to introduce, rather than as a warning.

Judging a book by its cover: There's been a lot of editions published of this book over the years, and the covers are almost always excellent. My Audible audio edition has a very simple cover, with the bright red background and the silhouette of a handmaid, the only white being her distinctive hood and the lettering. It's a very stark, yet nevertheless effective image. This book doesn't need a fancy cover to sell its contents.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR9 Book 33: "The Knife of Never Letting Go" by Patrick Ness

Page count: 479 pages
Rating: 4 stars

Todd Hewitt lives in a community peopled only by men, and has one month left until he too becomes one. All the men are afflicted with something called "the Noise", meaning they can hear each other's thoughts, all the time, all over town. There were women in the community once, but they didn't survive the infection that brought the noise. Todd's mother was one of the last women to die, while Todd was still a baby.

While Todd and his dog, Manchee, are out walking in the area around Prentisstown one day, he comes across a place with no noise whatsoever. This is very unusual, and when he returns home to the two men who raised him, they are worried enough by his discovery that they bundle him up and tell him to leave. There are other men in town who suspect they know what Todd has discovered, and want to stop him at any cost.

Todd is confused and upset, not to mention surprised his foster fathers have been able to keep secrets from him at all, what with all the Noise all the time. He's given a backpack of supplies, a journal with a map in the front and a knife to defend himself with and sent on his way with Manchee as his only company. He has to go through the swamp surrounding the town and leave the only home he's ever known. As Todd runs for his life, through the swamp, chased by hostile townsmen, many of whom he grew up with, he discovers the source of the mysterious silent space. As he gets further away from Prentisstown, he also discovers that there is a lot more to the world than he ever suspected, and many of the truths he has grown up believing, may in fact be nothing but clever lies.

I knew very little about this book, except that it's the first book in a very acclaimed YA trilogy. The one thing I did know probably qualifies as quite a spoiler, but I'm very glad that I HAD been spoiled, as I knew what to expect and was less gutted than I probably would have been if I had gone into this book without any fore-knowledge. Suffice to say, I cried a LOT when the bad thing that happens happened and generally also want to warn people that this book really is a very grim read.

In many ways, this book is like the book version of The Walking Dead (the TV show, not the graphic novels, although I suspect the same applies there). There are characters that you get attached to and care for, constantly running from danger, only narrowly escaping. Every time you think they may be safe, more horrible things happen, and they have to go on the run again. The things chasing them, as well as the individuals they meet along the way, are often equally horrible.

This is a really depressing and gruelling book, but it does contain an interesting sci-fi with a concept I hadn't come across before. I think the toxic masculinity that permeates so much of the book kind of wore me out though, and since I'm already in a bit of a reading slump, and have trouble motivating myself to read anything at all, this book wasn't exactly the best of choices (but it fit into so many of my reading challenges!).

The noise affecting all the men is obviously a horrible thing, but it's supposed to be. I doubt this series is called Chaos Walking for nothing, as that is what the men wandering around in large groups are described as. This incessant drone of thoughts, impossible to ignore, unless there is some other noise around to drown it all out. There's some sort of virus that has affected all animals and livestock, enabling it so that they can talk. This of course means that Manchee the dog has even more of a personality than a cute sidekick dog might otherwise have had. Because he's a dog, he's not exactly capable of great mental leaps, and his conversation can be rather simple and single-minded, but it did make him extra adorable.

The reader follows Todd through the story, and only really knows as much as him. Hence you also discover more of the world around him as he gets further away from Prentisstown and learns new things. Now, any sophisticated reader who has consumed a fair amount of stories will probably construct theories as new little snippets of knowledge are revealed, and I'm very sad to say that I had figured out the truth behind Prentisstown before Todd himself figures it out. That's another thing that makes the book so depressing. At any point where there could be more than one possible outcome, the most tragic and sad option will always come to pass. There appears to be very little goodness in this world, and if there is, it will likely be snuffed out in short order.

This is, as I said, the first volume in a trilogy set in this dystopian sci-fi world, and the book ends on a cliff-hanger. I have the other two books in the series, in paperback even, gifts from friends. I will absolutely read them at some point (desperately hoping that there will be some kind of reform at some point and future books may be happier), but I am not in a good place to be reading anything but fluffy escapist literature right now. It's clearly a good book, but very not what my brain needs in times of fatigue and high stress.

Judging a book by its cover: My paperback copies of the Chaos Walking trilogy all have pretty simple and understated covers. There's the plain white background, and on this there is a silhouette in red of the knife, I'm going to assume the same knife that plays such an important part in the story - the same knife the book is named for. The bold black title looks scrawled by hand, and is the same that is used inside the book to show the "noise" inside the heads of all the men. It's a fairly plain cover, but effective nonetheless.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR8 Book 131: "The Queen of the Tearling" by Erika Johansen

Page count: 643 pages
Rating: 3.5 stars

Kelsea knows that when she turns nineteen, it is time for her to take her rightful place as Queen, like her mother (who died when she was a baby) and grandmother before her. She has been raised far from civilisation, by two loyal servants, who did their best to prepare her in every way they could for the duty she would be facing. What they have not done is socialise her in any way, she's barely seen another living soul since she was little, and they've refused to tell her anything about her mother or her mother's reign. So while she has a lot of theoretical knowledge about her realm, the Tearling, and its surrounding neighbours, she has little to no practical experience and is in for a sharp learning curve once some of the remaining members of the queen's guard come to pick her up to take her back to the capital.

The road back to her palace is fraught with danger, as her uncle, the regent, has sent assassins to dispatch Kelsea. He doesn't want to surrender his power, and there is more than one attack on the princess and her guards on their way to the capital. Along the way, Kelsea is rescued from an attack by hired killers by the Tearling's most wanted, a legendary outlaw calling himself the Fetch. This man and all his compatriots wear masks while they dispatch Kelsea's attackers, but later, when she spends some time in their camp, she gets to see him unmasked. He clearly has sinister plans for her uncle and is very curious about what sort of ruler Kelsea is going to be. She refuses to show fear and promises to rule the country to the best of her abilities. This seems to satisfy the bandit leader.

Once she returns to her palace, Kelsea discovers how her mother made peace with the neighbouring country, ruled by a powerful and seemingly ageless sorceress after an invasion several decades ago. Suffice to say, Kelsea is appalled and by her first actions, she sets in motion events that may very well trigger a new invasion. Shortly after, there is another assassination attempt on her while they are trying to get her crowned. It becomes obvious to Kelsea that her long-dead mother was a vain, weak and fairly useless queen who quite happily sold out the freedoms and rights of her people to keep herself safe. Her brother, Kelsea's uncle, has continued the mismanagement of the realm and most of the people are suffering badly. If she can survive, she has a hell of a job ahead of her, righting the wrongs of her predecessors. Luckily, she appears to have some sort of magical abilities too, bestowed on her by the royal sapphires that all heirs to the Tearling wear.

I've seen a lot of people give this book incredibly low ratings, probably because it seems that when the book was first released it was marketed as "Game of Thrones meets the Hunger Games". Clearly this was invented by someone who threw darts on a large board full of things that sold well in the publishing industry. "What if Hermione Granger was the heir to a really down-trodden, pseudo-medieval but somehow also set in our future kingdom, where the biggest danger was the evil sorceress in the next country over" would be a better description. Note that I didn't pick Hermione completely out of the blue. Emma Watson has apparently bought the adaptation rights and wants to star as Kelsea. I'm assuming that if that is the case, they're going to have to uglify her but good, as just in case you forget it, every third chapter or so, the author reminds you how plain, unassuming and dumpy Kelsea is. You are never really allowed to go long without being told how the new queen is rather ugly. So I can't really say that my mental image of her was Emma Watson, and also, I really felt that the girl had more important things to worry about than her appearance, but what do I know? I've never had to rule a fantasy kingdom that's pretty much been colonised and run into the ground by another.

The world-building is strange. There are references to America and England, and some generations ago, a man called William Tear apparently gathered all the scientists, doctors and learned people on ships to sail away to a new continent (no hints as to where this is), but a lot of their technology and medical expertise was shipwrecked on the way. So while there are knights and sorcery and people riding horses or using carts, and mostly very downtrodden serfs rooting around in the mud (it all got a bit Monty Python and the Holy Grail in the descriptions of the countryside and the populace, as far as I could tell), this is somehow set in the future. Also, the Red Queen who rules the neighbouring kingdom (I could look it up, but I can't be bothered to dig out my e-reader) seems to have lived for at least a century, clearly through nefarious magical means.

Kelsea has a sapphire around her neck that apparently cannot be removed until she is dead, as well as a second one that will belong to her heir. This one the Fetch could take from her though, and he gives it back to her later in the book when he feels that she has proven herself worthy to rule. Said necklace seems to be trying to communicate with Kelsea and can bestow her with magical powers. She also has a servant who appears to be a psychic of some sort, but only in the sense that she gets premonitions about bad things about to happen, she can't give specifics (that would be far too useful). Oh, and Kelsea has grown up reading and loving books because her guardian had lots of shelves worth, but in the rest of the kingdom, books are super rare and no one knows how to print them anymore or seems to care about relearning this skill (this is my nightmare).

For the first third or so, the book didn't interest me much and I actually put it down and read a bunch of other books in between. Then she finally arrived at her palace and discovered just how messed up a situation she was faced with as queen (I don't want to go into specifics, but trust me, it's pretty bad) and I started getting interested. This book is clearly just establishing the beginning of Kelsea's reign. Since each new chapter seems to contain excerpts from books written much later in Queen Kelsea's lifetime, possibly even after her death, I was never overly worried that she wasn't going to make it though to the end of the book (also, this is book one - I suspect she may survive until book three).

The tone of the book is also a bit strange. This is totally YA, and nowhere near George R.R. Martin territory (nor are there anything vaguely resembling Hunger Games - seriously publishers, did you read the wrong book before you sent out the press release?), but there are some scenes of pretty graphic violence and while there isn't a lot of sexual content, the Red Queen clearly isn't big on consent and doesn't care who she takes her pleasure with, and neither does Kelsea's weaselly uncle.

I've seen complaints that Kelsea is a special snowflake of a character, I didn't really think so. She is young, and has a lot of book smarts, but clearly needs to learn to rule properly, and has impulsively made decisions that are going to come back and bite her in her royal behind later. She seems to nurse an ill-advised crush on the Fetch, but there isn't really anything romantic hinted at with anyone. There are a lot of factions who want to oppose her, and she will clearly face a lot of challenges in the next two books before I'm sure she becomes triumphant and takes her people into a new golden age or something. As long as she makes sure there are books, I'll be happy.

It's a decent enough beginning to a fantasy trilogy. I'm really curious as to where exactly these books are set, as unless the ships mentioned were actually spaceships, I'm unsure where the Americans and English of old actually sailed to. As long as I'm entertained, and it doesn't play too important a part, I'm willing to turn my brain off in that particular respect. Since the trilogy is now completed, it seems likely I'll be reading the rest of it in the next year or so, but it's not like I'm impatient to pick up the next book either. I hope Kelsea stops moaning about how ugly she is in book two, though. Looks aren't everything, girl.

Judging a book by its cover: I've seen several covers for this book, the one that comes with my edition evokes a volume of fairy stories to me, with the red background and the black, swirly embellishments. In the centre "cutout", there is a palace on a hill, so you can probably guess from both the title and the image that this is a fantasy story. It's not the most exciting of images, but it's not bad either.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

#CBR8 Book 31: "Morning Star" by Pierce Brown

Page count: 544 pages
Rating: 4 stars

Spoiler warning! This is the THIRD and final book of the trilogy and it's going to be impossible for me to review this without referring at least a little to stuff that happened in the previous two books. Hence, this is not a review you want to check out until you are well and truly caught up. Interested in the series? Go forth and start at the beginning, with Red Rising.

So readers will remember that when we last left Darrow at the end of Golden Son, he was not in a particularly good place. The shit, as they say, had hit the fan big time. The beginning of this book finds him at his lowest point yet, helpless and imprisoned by the Jackal, tortured in isolation, unsure of the fates of the rest of the Rising, with his mind slowly unravelling. It wouldn't be a very good ending to the series if Darrow was locked up the whole time, though, and I hope I'm not spoiling too much when I say he gets rescued (and what a rescue it is!).

Having been a deep cover agent for the rebellion for years, Darrow's cover is spectacularly blown. The Reaper and his allies no longer work in the shadows. It's time to launch all out war, but to take on the might of the Jackal, Octavia du Lune and the rest of the oppressive Golds in society, they are going to need some formidable soldiers, a whole lot of guile, cunning, sneakiness and a bloodydamn ton of luck.

While Brown really is a very kill-happy sort of an author, a lot of your favourite characters are still around, to love (and hate). Sevro and his Howlers were never going to give up on Darrow, no matter that the Jackal made it look like he had been publicly executed for treason. Mustang has an army of her own and Ragnar agrees to take Darrow to his people, to recruit the fierce warrior women of his barbarian tribe to the cause. Brown may have been criticised for his treatment of female characters in the previous books, but I really believe it's exaggerated, especially in this book. Darrow's single POV narration sadly means we don't get to see what goes on in the minds of Mustang, Victra, Orion (who is now a pirate queen), plus great new additions to the cast, Holiday and Sefi the Quiet (Ragnar's sister), but they are integral parts of the story. Add to that that some of the prime antagonists are powerful and formidable women, the Sovereign Octavia du Lune, her knights Aja and Moira, Lilath the Bonerider, the Jackal's terrifying second in command, even Antonia, Victra's duplicitous sister, and you frankly have a more impressive cast of women populating this book than male characters.

With each book, Brown has expanded the reach of the story and escalated the tension and action accordingly. In book 1, the focus was Darrow's first year at the Academy and him successfully infiltrating Gold society as the Sons of Ares' mole. Book 2 had him rising in the ranks, becoming a trusted lieutenant to the most powerful man on Mars, who coincidentally also killed his wife. He becomes a skilled commander of men and learns the further arts of manipulation, politics and intrigue. It also, sadly, has him discovered, unmasked and looking to crash and burn spectacularly, with the end of the book looking dire indeed for our hero. For those of you who read the books a while back, the author helpfully includes a brief synopsis of each of the previous books at the beginning of this one, plus a list of the major characters you need to keep track of, which even I, who read all three books with only a few weeks between each one, was incredibly grateful for.

Good narrative demands that the heroes face adversity and defeat before rising to triumph at the end. In this, the final book in the trilogy, all that Darrow and the Sons of Ares have worked for are coming to pass, but they are of course facing nearly impossible odds. In the first book, I thought the story lagged a bit in the middle of the whole live action Hunger Games on a massive scale section. In the second book, the battles were among my least favourite bits. In this book, naturally, there are quite a few epic space battles, described in excruciatingly detailed ways, with all the technology and different classes of war ships related to the reader. I don't know if it's because I'm a woman, or because I honestly don't care even a little bit about the finer details of technical specs, but these bits got boring fast for me.

I loved Darrow being reunited with Sevro and the other rebels and seeing how they were working to rally their troops. I liked some of their missions, when they didn't get too far into troupe movements and giant spaceships firing on one another. I loved seeing Ragnar's home and the culture he came from. The action is pretty relentless throughout and the reader rarely gets a chance to catch his or her breath before there's something new and audacious being attempted by the characters. The final third of the book especially had me literally shouting, out loud in my living room, at the plot developments, to the bemusement of my husband and the startled cats. It may be that when I go back and re-read, I am able to pick holes and criticise more, but I was completely emotionally engaged and rather exhausted when I finally got to the end (after a certain point, there was NO WAY I was going to put the book down until I got to the final page).

It was impossible for me not to compare this book with Winter, the final book in Marissa Meyer's Lunar Chronicles as I was reading. Both are dystopian sci-fi stories, where a band of ragtag rebels fight against an oppressive power ruling from the Moon. Sadly, Winter was a hot mess of a book, where instead of some characters not being allowed enough page time (like here), the huge cast of characters all had to have their significant moments and I just didn't believe in the way they eventually succeeded. Their rebellion also seemed to succeed without any cost, far too painlessly to ever be believable. Here the battles have actual costs to those involved, there are serious consequences and there are no simple answers given. Darrow, Mustang and their allies know that it's going to be nearly impossible to change the political system that has been in place for centuries. Changing the way that not only those in power, but those who have been enslaved, think, is a staggering task. The odds of them failing are high. Winning the war doesn't mean that their battles are over. It means that they have new challenges ahead of them.

This book is by no means perfect, but it is a very good (and to me, at least) satisfying ending to what has been a very impressive science fiction trilogy. I refuse to call these books Young Adult, I honestly think that a lot of the themes explored are too serious and sophisticated for most young readers to fully comprehend and entirely appreciate. There are so many references to classic literature and history here, which I don't think a lot of teenage readers will grasp.Then there's the graphic depictions of violence and oppression - nope, these are books that should be read by a mature audience. That's not to say that there aren't highly sophisticated, intelligent and mature teens out there, but they'll find these books anyway, because they don't need a YA label to discover new things to read.

I could have done with more political intrigue and fewer tech-heavy space battles, but I really liked this book and while all the books left me feeling exhausted after reading them (I seriously needed a break after each one), I will heartily recommend the books to a lot of my friends. Well done, Mr. Brown, I'm eager to see what you come up with next.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR8 Book 20: "Golden Son" by Pierce Brown

Page count: 464 pages
Rating: 4.5 stars

This review may contain some spoilers for the first book in the series, Red Rising and some spoilers for this book. You probably shouldn't read this review unless you're caught up with the series. Go read the book instead.

This book kicks off two years after Darrow won the war games rather spectacularly by taking on the corrupt Praetors and staging a show unlike anything previously seen. He appears to be well on his way to winning more glory for himself and his patron, Nero au Augustus, when things start going horribly wrong once more. For a while, it looks like Darrow is going to be abandoned by his powerful patron and no longer be of use to the rebellion and the Sons of Ares, but a power play at the right time launches his star once more. Of course, Darrow's rapid rise comes at the cost of more battle and bloodshed, as a civil war kicks off, with Darrow at the centre. He learns that he may have some allies, even among the Golds, and more about what Ares is planning. What he might have done well to remember is that the higher he rises, the further he also has to fall.

I really don't want to spend too long talking about the plot of the book, because I think it's better if you go in not knowing a lot. If you are reading this review before you've actually finished the book, go away. I knew absolutely nothing about the plot when I read it and it made each new twist and revelation more exciting. While there are sections of this book that also lag, the pace is pretty frenetic and I felt rather exhausted at times keeping up with the story. Darrow has come a long way, but keeps being surprised that the system isn't as fair as it's purported and that even in Gold society, the paths to power are often rigged in favour of the strongest. And who is strongest can turn on a dime. He occasionally puts his trust in the wrong people or not enough trust in people he should have kept close. Because he's come such a long way, it's sometimes difficult to remember that he's only twenty years old, and twenty-year-olds are not exactly known for their patient natures.

There are some truly cinematic battle sequences in this book, either in space, involving massive starships or duels between individuals. Because I'm not all that into the science fiction aspect of these books, I tend to skim over all techno babble that seems inevitable in books like this, but I am fascinated by the way this futuristic society has actually engineered the various castes for specific tasks, such as spacecraft navigation and control. The way the Golds have created themselves as gods in the mythology of the Obsidians was also intriguing to me, and I loved Ragnar, one of the new supporting characters. Sadly, in the two years since he left the Academy, Darrow has become separated from his two strongest allies, Mustang and Sevro and I wished for more "screen time" for both of them. Both are great characters and it would be nice to have the story focused not so entirely on Darrow. There are some really cool things revealed about Sevro's origins, however, which I hope to see explored further in the final book.

This books ends on a major downbeat for Darrow and I can see why a lot of people were unhappy with it. Having heard that, I purposefully waited to read these until the final book, Morning Star, was about to be released. Since that is now out, I can read the conclusion of the story without waiting. I am going to have to take a short break, though, as these books are so relentless in their storytelling that I need to recover in between each book. Golden Son manages to keep the story moving, expanding the scope and the world-building, it's not just a bridging book with nothing much happening before you get to the exciting conclusion. I just hope that the ending can live up to the promise of the first two books in the series.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR8 Book 17: "Red Rising" by Pierce Brown

Page count: 400 pages
Rating: 4.5 stars

Just up front, there will be some minor plot spoilers in this review, but most of it is also revealed in the official synopsis of the book from the publisher. Any details of the plot I give, only cover the first third or so of the book. Still, if you prefer to go in completely cold, and have managed to stay ignorant of the premise of a book published several years ago, you may want to skip this review and just take my word for it that it's very good. Brutal and not really your run of the mill YA dystopian, but very good indeed.

 Ok, if you're still reading, I'm assuming your fine with knowing the bare bones of the plot. Darrow works deep under the surface of Mars, mining for precious minerals. He is a Red, one of the pioneers and hard workers sent to Mars, told that their work efforts are crucial to aid in the terraforming of Mars and other planets for those left behind on Earth. Working conditions are extremely tough, hardly anyone lives to a ripe old age. Food is scarce, unless you live in the town that always seems to manage the highest quotas every month. Darrow's father was publicly executed after he encouraged some other workers to do a pacifist protest against working conditions, so he and the rest of his family have been careful to be model workers. Now Darrow's young wife Eo has started voicing dissent against the system and Darrow is worried.

When they are caught trespassing in a restricted area, both are sentenced to public flogging, to be broadcast on the video feed all around Mars. The ArchGovernor of Mars, the most powerful man on the planet, just so happens to be visiting as the sentence is to be carried out. Darrow takes his punishment stoically, then is shocked to realise that Eo is going to sacrifice herself to prove a point. Singing one of the songs of rebellion as she is being whipped, Eo is hanged and her death broadcast across the planet. Her last words are to "Break the chains!" Darrow is absolutely crushed and breaks the law by fetching down her dead body from the gallows and burying it somewhere hidden. He too is sentenced to hang, but wakes up after his execution, not dead at all. A resistance group tells him that Eo has become a martyr to their cause and they need Darrow to help them fight.

He discovers that he and everyone he knows has been fed a clever lie and that Eo's theories that they are slaves are absolutely correct. Mars was terraformed centuries ago, as were the other planets in the solar system. Above-ground there are huge and impressive cities where the Golds, the highest and most powerful caste, rule society. Dancer, a lieutenant of the resistance leader Ares, needs Darrow to agree to an audacious plan. They will turn him into a Gold and make him infiltrate the highest levels of society, helping to bring it down from within. Of course, it's not like they can just slap a wig and some contacts on him and send him off. Over the centuries, the various castes, from the lowest Reds to the very highest Golds, have been genetically engineered to become different species. People can't even breed across the castes without illegal surgery. Darrow has to go through an absolutely gruelling ordeal, having his body surgically transformed in a series of very dangerous operations. Then he has to pass the entrance exam to the Academy, where the Gold send their brightest and best children to be trained.

Of course Darrow survives his transformation, and of course he passes the exam to the Academy with unparallelled results. Once he's accepted, he comes to discover that the Golds don't coddle their children and the very first test he faces is a brutal one indeed. Having no choice but to do his very best or let down the entire rebellion, Darrow does what he must, although it breaks his heart to do so. While he is full of righteous anger against the Golds, he also hasn't been trained from birth to be as ruthless as them. Once he passes the first bloody test, he finds himself in a real-life strategy scenario along with the other candidates from House Mars who passed the first test. There are twelve houses, and the name of the game is to conquer the playing field. Each house has different resources and fortifications and only those most organised and clever will win.

I have seen Red Rising described as The Hunger Games meets A Game of Thrones. I can absolutely see why. There are teenagers fighting in a large arena, quite possibly to the death, and their actions are broadcast out to the world, because the better you do at the Academy, the better a career you are likely to have in the future. If you survive the year, of course. Red Rising is dystopia turned up to eleven. Pierce Brown has clearly been influenced by a lot of other writers, but compared to the stuff Darrow has to go through in just the first half of this book, Katniss pretty much has a walk in the park. The world building is much more complex, the societal structures that are keeping our underdogs down are oh so much more devious.

Society is divided into colours, with the Golds at the top, who rule all. Below them are the Silvers, who provide the finance and the innovation. There are the Whites, who are priests and priestesses and the Coppers who provide bureaucracy. The middle castes are all genetically engineered to be the best at what they do, be it science, programming, medical care, piloting starships or providing security. Darrow and his family are the absolute lowest of the low. They are low-Reds, born under ground, living their whole lives without ever seeing the surface. Fed the lie that their lives may be hard and mostly thankless, but they are providing a valuable and vital service to enable the terraforming of the galaxy, not really given the chance to question whether things may be different.

This book is classified as Young Adult, but I can only imagine that the reason for that is that Darrow is sixteen when the book begins. There are some pretty advanced concepts presented in this book and a lot of references that readers should be familiar with to fully appreciate the scope of the story. There is also some quite frightful brutality in the book, much more so than in other dystopian series I can think of. It's here that the comparisons with Game of Thrones are obvious. I have seen the series criticised for its treatment of female characters and the accusation that Eo is fridged early on to set the plot in motion. I do see how that could be problematic to some, but personally, this never struck me as an issue. Clearly something huge had to happen to motivate Darrow to join the rebellion. Eo didn't get too much characterisation before she's killed off, but she purposefully chose to sing the song that had her sentenced to execution. She was a woman with agency and not just pointlessly killed to make the male protagonist feel sad. To me, the fridging of a female character is when she, though no fault of her own, usually just because she is the wife/girlfriend of the hero, is killed pointlessly. That isn't what happened here. Eo chose to become a martyr.

I have also seen some accuse Darrow of being a Gary Stu, which is just preposterous. While he is absolutely a Chosen One, who thanks to various factors in his upbringing has made him stronger, smarter and more resilient than most other Reds, exactly the reason he's chosen by the Sons of Ares for such a deep cover mission, he has a ton of flaws and frequently makes some pretty decisive mistakes. Obviously, he learns from each mistake and becomes more skilled and adapts his strategies as he goes on, but if he didn't, he would just be an idiot. Still, even as he keeps getting better at the game he's forced to play at the Academy, he puts his trust in the wrong people and keeps acting a bit too impulsively to ever really be called perfect. His flaws are part of what make him interesting.

This book is a bit slow to start, before Darrow discovers the truth about the society he lives in and is introduced to the resistance plot the Sons of Ares has devised. It also lags a bit in the middle, during the war games at the Academy. Some sections there were a bit of a slog to get through. Mostly, this is rather relentless action and momentum and I am deeply impressed with the scope and world-building. I felt somewhat exhausted at times, reading the book, which is why I've chosen to read fluffy romance between each of the books in the series. I need a palate cleanser before I dive into the dark and brutal world of the Red Rising universe once more.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR7 Book 129: "Winter" by Marissa Meyer

Page count: 824 pages
Rating: 3.5 stars

WARNING! This review WILL contain spoilers for earlier books in the series. Do NOT keep reading this review if you're not caught up, having read all three previous books! There are also some minor spoilers for this book, but if you skip my list of dislikes, you'll avoid them.

Winter was one of the books I was most anticipating in the second half of 2015. Marissa Meyer's retellings of Grimm fairy tales with a clever YA sci-fi dystopian twist just kept getting better with every book. I was extremely pleasantly surprised by the first book in the series, Cinder, where Cinderella is a cyborg mechanic who falls for the son of the emperor, and turns out to be the long lost, believed to be dead princess of the moon. In book 2, Scarlet, we meet our Red Riding Hood, French farm girl Scarlet Benoit, looking for her missing grandmother. She meets Cinder, now an international fugitive on the run with spaceship captain Carswell Thorne. Scarlet also falls for a biologically augmented Lunar super soldier, her Wolf and they both join in Cinder's seemingly impossible quest to reclaim her throne. In book 3, the little band of rebels liberate the evil Lunar queen's secret weapon, tech genius Cress (our Rapunzel) from a spy satellite orbiting Earth. Cress and a blinded Thorne have to traverse the desert together to reunite with the others, and Cress' initial crush on the captain, based on fantasies she made up when alone on her satellite, become actual infatuation as she spends more time with him.

When Winter begins, Cinder has prevented Queen Levana's wedding to Emperor Kai by kidnapping him. He is working with Cinder and the others on a plan to depose Levana and restore Cinder (or Selene - her birth name), but the rebels have also lost someone dear to them. Scarlet has been taken prisoner by Lunar soldiers and the gang don't know if she's alive or dead. She's actually being held captive in the zoo in the Lunar capital, kept alive by the kindness of princess Winter, Levana's stepdaughter.

Winter is our Snow White, "fairest of them all" on Luna, despite, or possibly because of the scars marring her cheek (forced on her by her jealous stepmother). Winter is the only Lunar who refuses to use her gift to manipulate the minds and perceptions of others, never using glamour or trying to influence actions, and as a result, she is slowly going insane. She has moments of lucidity and is clearly quite clever, but also episodes where she has to focus to hold it together, as she vividly feels herself turning to ice and shattering or sees the palace walls running with blood. More alarming than your run of the mill panic attack. The daughter of a palace guard, Winter became a reluctant member of palace royalty when her father married Levana. Crazy or not, she's forced to be present in the throne room every time her stepmother sentences anyone, making herself seem unaffected by the bloody spectacle.

Winter is terrified that Levana will execute Jacin, the royal guard she grew up with and has loved pretty much always (Winter, not Levana obvs.). Jacin is accused of treason and siding with Cinder and the other rebels, but manages to convince the queen that he was spying on them after he reveals some very incriminating information about them. He is punished, then re-instated as a royal guard, given the task to personally guard Winter (and make sure she is kept under control and from making scenes in public).

Kai is returned to his home in the next level of the plan to topple Levana and restore Cinder as Luna's rightful queen. He convinces Levana to move the wedding to Luna, allowing his ship to smuggle Cinder and her crew along. Of course, everything starts going pretty seriously wrong shortly after the ship lands in the Lunar capital and Cinder and several of friends are separated. Kai is taken into house arrest, safe at least until after the wedding, as Levana isn't going to let the chance of becoming Empress pass her by. Trying to quash the rebellion of her niece, Levana gets more and more frustrated with Winter's continued popularity amongst the common people.

She gets one of her chief goons to propose marriage to the princess, who is shocked and creeped out and refuses, thus sealing her death sentence. Levana demands that Jacin prove his loyalty once and for all by murdering Winter, claiming that at least he will make sure it's quick and painless. Jacin manipulates security footage so it looks like he stabs Winter, but instead frees Scarlet and makes her promise that she will take Winter to safety, joining Cinder and the gang, currently hiding out in a remote mining settlement.

Thus Jacin and Winter get irrevocably connected with Cinder and her rebellion and from there on out, they become supporting characters in a book which has so many characters and plot lines to keep track of. Cinder's plan to convince the populace of Luna that she is the long-lost princess Selene, incite a revolution, dethroning Levana and becoming the rightful ruler is poorly thought through, to say the least and for much of the book, it seems like pure luck that they get anywhere at all, rather than brutally mowed down by Levana's security troops.

I really liked the first three books in this series and had such high hopes for this book. Generally I found this book a disappointment. Here's why:

• At more than 800 pages, it's more than twice the length of the first book in the series. Yet so much of what happens in it feels rushed, confusing and chaotic. There is far too much plot crammed into this book - making it a very hectic read.
• In previous books, the action has taken place on Earth or in space, for the most part. This is the first book where the plot is mostly set on Luna. Lunar society, with an artificially created and extravagant capital, full of dolled-up nobility without any sort of social conscience, and the many remote provinces full of oppressed commoners creating resources for the capital - it all got very Hunger Games-y. 
• Just as Cinder's rebellion felt a bit like Mockingjay. So much of it felt like things I'd read before, elsewhere, which is sad, because in the previous three books, that has not been the case.
• In the previous two books, while the newly introduced characters were woven into the larger framework of Cinder's story, they've still had a chance to shine, and Meyer has successfully re-imagined three different fairy tales. Winter and Jacin, who should have had their chance to shine in this book, are almost buried in all the other stuff that happens. This is a great shame, as Winter seems like a delightful character and her interactions with Jacin, as well as their whole relationship, is pretty much solid gold.
• Cress, who I loved in her own book, spends much of this one being terribly self-conscious and annoyingly insecure, mooning over Thorne in a really frustrating way.
• The climax of the book got incredibly confusing. There is too much repetition of the same things over and over again (one or more of our characters are in peril, probably manipulated by a Lunar into attacking one of the others, situation gets resolved - rinse -repeat)
• Wolf's capture and the alterations made (don't want to say more and spoil things) seem like they are very easily worked around. If they are, why was his capture such a big deal?
• Levana - just not scary enough. She has utterly terrifying power, yet seems tedious most of the time. For complete and utter mind control done right, see Kilgrave in Netflix and Marvel's Jessica Jones. That's how scary mind control should be. Why isn't it here? 
• I'm also not at all keen on the way Cinder and the others felt that the video of Levana without her glamour should be the thing that really helped them incite rebellion. Surely there are a lot worse accusations that could have been levelled at Levana to get support from the common people, rather than just expose what she looks like under her glamour?

So what did I like?

•  Finally getting Winter's story and all the clever sci-fi-twisting of the Snow White fairy tale. I also really like that Winter is dark-skinned, adding further to the diversity of the series.
• Winter and Jacin are super adorable. I didn't like Jacin much in previous books, when he was being used as an antagonist, but he is wonderful whenever he is around or thinking about his princess.
• Seeing more of Luna and discovering where Wolf came from was nice.
• All the cool fairy tale twists reminds me how creative and clever Meyer can be.
• It was certainly a roller-coaster of a read. Soo many cliff-hangers.

The previous three books show how good a writer Meyer can be. There is so much potential in this book, but ultimately, it just tried to do too much. I think maybe it should have been split into two, so we could have had more focus on Winter in this book, leaving the final rebellion and grand conclusion to the story to happen in a fifth book. There was so much that needed to happen in this last book. It just all got a bit too much of a muchness. It's by no means an awful book, but absolutely the weakest in the series and a disappointing end to an otherwise fun and original sci-fi ride. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.