This is a slim paperback (103 pages) with all three of the Book of the Ancestor short stories on paper for the first time, for those folk who w[image]
This is a slim paperback (103 pages) with all three of the Book of the Ancestor short stories on paper for the first time, for those folk who won't read ebooks.
This was a LONG book - 774 pages, with a fairly small font.
I thought it was excellent. Really enjoyed it.
I've known about the book for image: [image]
This was a LONG book - 774 pages, with a fairly small font.
I thought it was excellent. Really enjoyed it.
I've known about the book for a long time but was put off by knowing that there are a great many (20?) point of view characters. I tend to prefer a small number of (often singular) points of view, and to get to know that/those character/s very well.
Contrary to expectations, the large field of points of view worked very well for me. The eponymous Red Knight's point of view gets a significantly larger number of pages than any of the rest, and helps glue it all together, as does the fact that all of the points of view are involved in the same drama, many of them in the same place, the rest converging on it.
I guess part of the reason I had such a good time with this book is that it's very different fantasy from the sort I've been reading lately. It spends A LOT of time on battles where our knight and men-at-arms and archers fight a wide variety of monsters including wyverns, trolls, bug-like things, things a bit like an elf-goblin cross, demons, and more!
These fights are generally small scale but almost always involving groups. So we might have two dozen on one side and a hundred on the other, or one big monster against twenty men etc. So tactics, formations, defences, war machines, and combined action are all important.
Moreover, it rapidly becomes clear that the author knows a vast amount of practical detail about weapons and armour and the clothes worn around them and the maintenance of such things both indoors and out in the wild. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that Miles Cameron (AKA Christian Cameron) is a long time re-enactor of medieval encounters, an expert in the combat of the time, and has forgotten more than I shall ever know about the real-world mechanics of all these things.
That level of historical authenticity, projected into a fantasy world (that seems based on Europe / England) is a fresh experience for me and enhanced my enjoyment of what was an extremely well written book. I've read fantasy books by authors with experience of the weapons and armour of various periods, notably Viking (John Gwynne) and post-medieval sword experts (Douglas Hulick & Sebastien de Castell), and enjoyed the expertise on display, but Cameron dials it up to 11.
On top of that, it's a compelling story with lots of moving parts, all juggled in a way that kept me engaged.
The characters are interesting, though they do play second fiddle to the action, and I enjoyed their stories.
There are books I read and for which I can't understand how they aren't universally adored. With The Red Knight I can better appreciate how a number of readers will come away with rather different opinions to mine. It's a book that does a bunch of things extremely well and focuses on them. It serves those up to you on a platter. But if you're hungry for different dishes you might leave unsatisfied. Specifically, if you're not a fan of fights and battle (well, skirmish mostly) scenes, and if you've never cared about how knights get into their armour and whether it really makes a difference in a fight etc ... then this is probably not for you.
I had a great time with the book, and I hope I can find space in my scary-big TBR for the next book in the series.
I finished this on the way back home from Glasgow Worldcon.
It's an excellent read and I think M.L is due to become a much bigger name than she is now I finished this on the way back home from Glasgow Worldcon.
It's an excellent read and I think M.L is due to become a much bigger name than she is now (and she's well known now).
The thing (for me) that Wang does best is that she "sees" people and delivers them whole onto the page. She's great at generating strong emotion in a small number of lines, and she understands and uses restraint very well - it works for her rather like the silences in music build the whole. And like, Robin Hobb, she's wonderful when it comes to bringing relationships to life.
Her prose is good, but it's the above, combined with top class story telling that I'd highlight.
These are all highly commercial skills, and the romance in Blood Over Bright Haven is "more traditional" than the one in The Sword of Kaigen. All reasons I think this book will sell its socks off.
For me, The Sword of Kaigen was an even better book, more sophisticated and unexpected, marred by some rough edges at the start and end. This book is far smoother, and it certain does have sophistication - it's far from being on rails. You will almost certainly be surprised by how things turn out, and Wang digs down through different layers of morality and humanity, making us reassess the situtation several times.
It's clever, emotional, exciting ... all the good stuff. I highly recommend you give it a go. I hugely enjoyed it!
She's another of those authors who bulldozes my ego and makes me admit that I need to do better at this writing game.
But the headline is that I found it a very enjoyable book that I was keen to read.
I picked this one up primarily because I saw iI have A LOT to say :D
But the headline is that I found it a very enjoyable book that I was keen to read.
I picked this one up primarily because I saw it was doing so well, saleswise, and had an incredibly high average rating on this site, stratospheric compared to the vast majority of fantasy books with 10,000+ ratings (a book's average rating declines with number of ratings).
I'm always keen to see what magic sauce successful authors use.
Additionally, James Islington was a semi-finalist in my SPFBO contest with The Shadow of What Was Lost, so I recognised the name and was extra curious.
For marketing purposes books are often described as mixtures of other famous books - my own One Word Kill was described as Stranger Things meets Ready Player One. Whilst reading this book it was easy for me to play the same game and say to myself that this element came from X and this one from Y.
I'm about to tell you what those Xs and Ys are, but first, let's be absolutely clear that this mapping is absolutely not a claim that the contributions were copied from these sources - it's just a fun game to play. Anthony Ryan's book The Waking Fire contained insanely close ideas to ones I had written in a book 15 years earlier - but that book was never published and it was simply not possible that he had copied them/been inspired by that book of mine. I note this to show how often similar ideas bubble up wholly independently.
Imagine the book is a fine wine and me the wine sleuth, sipping it, gazing into space, and waxing lyrical about notes of oak, Tuscan sun on eastern slopes, a high zinc content in the soil...
Immediately I saw shades of both Blood Song and Empire of Silence - we have what's effectively a war school (Blood Song) and the son of a royal house now down and out in an empire he wants to learn about &/or destroy (Empire of Silence - which in turn has shades of The Name of the Wind).
As the magic system revealed itself I saw strong correlations with David Farland's The Runelords where individuals sacrifice some of their own power (strength, health etc) to their own detriment, and contribute it to another who sits at the top of a pyramid of contributed power, leading to individuals with superhuman strength, speed etc.
We then learn about a physical game / assault course at the school, with moving parts, which is said to help attune your mind to the magic system -- which of course has parallels with the blade-path in Red Sister.
All of these story building blocks have bags of potential, and Islington constructs an addictively entertaining tale out of them.
We have a single first-person PRESENT TENSE point of view, which loads of people winge about when other people do it, but everyone seems to buy into without complaint here. Which just goes to show that you can do whatever you like in writing, as long as you do it well...
Our man is - and I say this with zero disrespect intended, a Gary Stu. He's not just good at everything, he's insanely good at everything. Over the course of the book he is lined up against experts in various fields/disciplines, and it doesn't really matter if he studied it briefly ten years ago or has never used the equipment before ... he's going to win. Again, in the hands of a less talented writer this would draw endless complaint. But it's such damn good fun - we/I eat/ate it up.
There are plenty of books where the main character is super good at everything, The Name of the Wind springs to mind, the Gor books (Tarnsman of Gor), even Prince of Thorns to a significant degree. I feel our man here, young Vis, also falls into the 'archetype' mould where beyond being disadvantaged and being moral/good, he's a bit of a blank onto which it's easy to project ourselves. So we can more easily share in his victories as he doesn't have a bunch of opinions and flaws etc that get in the way of steering him around as a proxy. And this of course is a guilty pleasure that works well in many books. Characters who are more complex and individual can, in many ways, be harder to identify with than the more generic hero.
I mentioned Gor above (a series with MANY problems) purely because it's a good example of a series that has another element that comes into play here, and that's "fantasy chess". A good number of fantasy books over the years have featured "fantasy chess", which is simply a made up game that is not given to us in too much detail other than it's a proxy for war and played on a board (or with cards). In Gor, our hero, Tarl Cabot (who is GREAT at everything) is also great at Fantasy Chess, and beats people at that in important moments to mix it up a bit.
Vis also has his fantasy chess moment.
And a slightly painful animal companion moment where he stops in the middle of something important in an interlude that feels entirely crafted to give us the "important later" animal friend.
And EVEN THEN with every writer bone groaning at the obvious levers being pulled ... I was loving it :D
Another grouch is that because our man's so good at everything we need everyone to be horrible to him and set against him succeeding. And that's not unusual in these school stories - we need a bully etc, and we get them in The Name of The Wind, in Red Sister etc, so I'm not being holier than thou here... my grouch is simply that the explanations for these people's opposition to our man are so thin, especially given the extraordinary lengths these grudges are taken to.
One teacher "doesn't like his name" - i.e. the family name he's adopted into. The teacher knows our guy was plucked off the streets for a purpose and isn't responsible for any of this, and yet on the strength of this old grudge does outrageous stuff that puts his reputation and career on the line.
Another boy has a grudge that our man didn't save his sister in a scenario where our man had no reasonable expectation of saving anyone, wasn't near the girl in question, didn't know her, and (without being asked and at great personal risk) saved many others.
Again - I'll return to my refrain: if I wasn't enjoying the book so much I might have laid my dissatisfaction at the feet of these issues. But I was enjoying it a lot and I've no reservations about giving it 5*.
At the end things get frantic, emotional, and finally rather complicated. It's a great read. I can see why it's doing so well, and recommend you give it a go. You'll probably love it too!
I've already forgotten how I discovered this short story existed, but I picked it up because I'm writing a book about the manifestation of cons[image]
I've already forgotten how I discovered this short story existed, but I picked it up because I'm writing a book about the manifestation of consciousness in AI, and here, published in the year I was born (and I'm old) was a story about just that. I felt I should read it.
It's a curious mixture of dry sci-fi, fairy tale, meditation on what it means to be human, and at the very end, it's strangely touching.
The only Zelazny I've read before was the Amber books, which I loved back in the 80s. The quality does tail off as the series continues though.
Anyway - I'm not sure this had anything new to say, but it said it well, and back in the 60s it was probably very forward thinking.
(remember - the polls on that page aren't about how much you enjoyed the books, just how grimdark you thought they were)
So, to me this book (it qualifies as a book, being over 40,000 words long) is pretty much peak grimdark, though leaning signifcantly towards the dark humour side of things.
Our main point of views are a young man and a demon. The young man - who we are REPEATEDLY told is the 3rd best assassin in the city - is a boastful, shallow, waste of space who we sympathise with primarily because of his desperate situation and for his basic shallow lust for affirmation, praise, and success (which many of us share). His instincts align with many of our own less noble ones, and it's always nice to read about someone and think, "honestly, that's probably what I'd do".
Having read books written individually by Fletcher and by Smith Spark, I'm convinced that Fletcher wrote the young man and Smith Spark the demon. The demonic PoV, with very different perceptions of the world, lends itself to Smith Spark's rather distinctive literary, stream-of-conciousness, warped view writing.
A city is enduring a long siege and is about to fall. An assassin is being chased by a demon and is leading it back towards the gang that hired him. Said gang comprises a mix of individuals, all more dangerous than our hapless assassin.
In addition to the demon's strangeness and ability to generate industrial scale horrific carnage, the besieging army are using all sorts of alchemical nastiness, climaxing in some fine necromancy.
In peak-grimdark style, the main character finds himself wading through excrement and entrails, with the intestines trying to throttle him from beyond the missing grave. There is a LOT of splatter in this book. Bring overalls, a welding mask, and plenty of wetwipes.
The characters in the gang are varied and fun, covering the archetypes but also giving us a warrior wife with a house husband + children. There are nods to other works by the authors, including a song whose lyrics reference a bunch of them. Clearly both Fletcher and Smith Spark were having fun writing this.
There is, in the MC's shallowness, a degree of insulation from the horrors of the story. He's scared alright, and that can infect the reader, but he really doesn't dwell on the losses or have any empathy - he's just worried about how it will impact him personally. And his ambitions, while they range from grand (everyone must bow before me) to petty (my ex-girlfriend will be sorry) are never very imaginative, just grabs at things off the list of "markers of success". That's not saying the authors aren't imaginative (they clearly are)- just that they have successfully drawn this type of character for us.
The necromantic magic was impressive and highly atmospheric. The demon was strange and scary. The characters were fun.
In many senses this really was peak-grimdark.
It's a short book, about as short as a book can technically be before you have to call it a novella, and that brevity, combined with the scale of the story being told (the fall of a city, multiple characters) mean that there wasn't perhaps the space to dig down into that more introspective, often nihlistic, sometimes literary-edged vibe that characterises the other wing of grimdark.
We're reminded of that in the dying chapters of the book where quite comedic, summary, almost cartoonish interjections let us know that the city's irrepressible merchants are reconfiguring their business model for the new normal. The brevity here quite possibly due to the need to keep the wordcount low.
In the end we get more grimdark hallmarks, where the number of happy ever afters is severely curtailed and a number of our characters follow their natures into repetition or sticky ends.
In short: this is a fun, exciting, dark, gory, imaginative tale that is well worth a read if anything I've said here sparks your interest!
To give you a flavour of it: On page 567 of 607 we are reading about a Russian KGB guy who is talking to LieutenaWell...
This is a tough one to review.
To give you a flavour of it: On page 567 of 607 we are reading about a Russian KGB guy who is talking to Lieutenant Mamiya, a Japanese prison of war in 1947. Much earlier in the book we learn that Lieutenant Mamiya once went on a secret mission in Outer Mongolia and that part of the small band was a Corporal Honda.
Much later in life (in the 1980s) Corporal Honda, now Mr Honda and a medium/spiritual advisor gives advice sessions to a newly married couple on the insistance of the bride's family.
The husband in this couple is the man from whose PoV the book is delivered.
We spend our time with this man years after the Mr Honda sessions (Mr Honda is now dead). Our man, Mr Okada, has lost his cat and is soon left by his wife in very mildly mysterious circumstances.
So ... why, near the end of the book, are we reading about a Russian man in a prisoner of war camp that interacted with a man who some years before that had very briefly spent time with the man who in later life gave vague advice and long wartime monologues to this young couple?
THERE APPEARS TO BE NO REASON WHATSOVER. It's just that kind of book.
Our man, Mr Okada meets a bunch of strange people and does a bunch of strange stuff. The strange stuff doesn't seem to have a lot of motivation other than he's having one of those slow-time breakdowns over months and months. The strange people (mostly young women) variously phone him up, present themselves at his house, arrange assignations, or live nearby. Most of the conversations start with a line or two of small talk (often less) followed by intimate often inappropriate revelations.
The phone calls and many of our man's weird dreams contain sex, or naked women, all described in a rather dry/clinical manner.
So, on many levels this is a weird, disjointed, rambling book full of weird, disjointed, rambling asides.
It's literary fiction and it's magical realism, and the cast list is full of slightly psychic people (whose powers are at the confusing rather than useful level). This gives it license to essentially do whatever the hell it wants to - and it does.
In addition to the semi-frequent sex, there is one rather horrific scene where someone is skinned alive. Again, there doesn't seem to be any point to us being told this (it's a war time memory of a man Mr Okada has met only once because of that man's distant association with a man he met a few times a few years ago...
But, and it's a big but, this is literary fiction and everything can be justified without recourse to plot or reason, as long as it can fit into some theme or create some required response...
Let's digress briefly... Modern art. What's that about then? Tens of millions paid for canvases that are splattered paint or a red rectangle on a white background. And yet the intelligensia of the field line up behind the opinion that "this" is genius, "that" is ok, and "those" are trash.
I suspect that modern art involves influencers handing out opinion and others lining up behind it. If you cloned the famous art critic and put fresh versions of them in a huge gallery filled with modern art, I think each clone would emerge declaring completely different pieces to be the best.
Does the same thing happen with literary fiction? I simply don't know.
And I have never been able to say whether literary fiction books are good/bad/indifferent other than on the basis of the writing on the line by line and page by page scale, and the answer to the question: do I want to keep on reading?
Here the writing line by line was fine. Better than fine, it was good. Very good. Not, for me, great. But it was well done. Page by page depended on the page really, but certainly there were plenty of good pages too.
And I did keep reading, although it took me about 7 weeks to finish. There is this mild mystery behind the missing wife, and I hoped to get some answers for all the weird dreams, strange ladies, explicit phone calls etc.
In the dying pages of the book we do get some handwaving explanations for some of it, and in the framework of vague psychic stuff going on ... ok ... I'll buy it.
But I think to focus on the plot, or the characters, or even the writing is to miss the point of the book and perhaps all literary fiction - it's the themes that are king, and how the book makes you feel, the moods it evokes, the ineffable ... stuff ... that it might capture, if only briefly, and thus allow you to have shared with the author.
That all sounds rather pompous ... but there you go.
I can't rate this book. I'm glad I read it, though I probably won't be queuing up to read another similar one in a hurry.
I don't want to do it down though. There are LOTS of interesting and intriguing things in it. Root about in it like you would a bric-a-brac shop and maybe you'll emerge feeling enlightened!
If you've read the first two books, and I advise you to give them a go, then you'll know what to expect here. More excellent writing, more grea[image]
If you've read the first two books, and I advise you to give them a go, then you'll know what to expect here. More excellent writing, more great characterisation, and more battles/politics within the framework of real events in the Ireland of 1012-ish.
There's lots of ground to cover in this book with a sizeable number of lesser kings vying for power and trying to get out from High-King Brian's control. There are weddings, born both from affection and from political necessity, betrayals both within the family and between allies, and fights from duels to battlefields.
The plots laid through the trilogy come to a head - Queen Gomflaith's plans are put to the test on the Irish map and in the conflict between Formorians and Descendants.
It's hard to end a sprawling tale well. Even more so when real history dictates the broad strokes in terms of who lives and dies, who prevails on the battlefield and in the peace. Lawless does a fine job though, giving a variety of emotional ends to the PoV characters and their circles of friends and family.
The number of PoVs expanded from book 1 to book 2 (as I recall) and expands again in book 3, all of them written in the first person - which has a certain power, forcing the reader to identify with all the characters more than they might otherwise have done so. First person gets us into the heads of the "evil" characters, showing them as people, albeit terrible ones, with genuine motivations, regrets and such. It's a more sophisticated take than some that are often seen in fantasy.
The end feels more like a nautral pause as history (obviously) rolls on, and a number of key characters end up in the wind with unresolved issues. I can sense another trilogy on the horizon, rejoining the story after a generation or maybe several generations.
I very much enjoyed the read. It was emotional at times, exciting, infuritating, intriguing. Definitely dive in if you've been holding off until the trilogy was complete.
I took a day off and read the last three quarters of this in one go. That's a very rare occurence, reserved for the tiny number of novels that [image]
I took a day off and read the last three quarters of this in one go. That's a very rare occurence, reserved for the tiny number of novels that really get their teeth into me.
I'm sure I overvalue my own talent and read many books that I could not have written - but Buehlman is one of those writers who rubs it in my face. I'm constantly aware of my own failings as a wordsmith when reading his work.
I loved this book. To be fair, I also loved The Blacktongue Thief, to which this is a prequel. The Daughters' War is both similar and different to Blacktongue.
It's similar because it's set in the same world (ten or twenty years earlier), the same alien foe (the goblins) are a big factor (much bigger here), and it carries the same brutal, uncompromising edge ... in fact a large fraction of it is edge. And Galva, the character through whose eyes we see the world, was the #2 (non-point-of-view) character in Blacktongue.
It's different because it focuses on a war, but primarily because Galva is a very different person to our black-tongued friend, and Beuhlman, being a brilliant writer, is all about character, letting it colour everything.
Where Kinch was pragmatic, experienced beyond his years, humorous, and a thief in his bones, Galva is unflinchingly honest, rigidly moral, and touchingly vulnerable despite her martial skills. She's 20 in the book and the horrors she witnesses are somehow more impactful precisely because of her tendency for understatement and her difficulty with expressing emotion.
We see Galva in a troop of women each with two giant ravens, bred specifically to kill goblins. This is an experiment and the birds have been magically enhanced by Fulvir - a magician who plays a significant role in the other book.
Despite their stabby/pecky habits the ravens are "animal companions" and your eyes will mist if/when any of them come to harm.
Galva's story is both broadened and deepened by the fact that three of her brothers are in the army that is launched against the goblin hordes. This allows for all manner of family dynamics, both the fair and the foul (I will resist the fowl pun here).
Anyone who has read the first (second?) book will know that goblins are nasty NASTY nasty fuckers, and that's leaned into here. They are not, however, the "problematic" kind of evil race that modern fantasy tries to avoid - these are an alien race from ... somewhere "beyond". Their bodies don't rot, flies won't touch them. They view us as meat and their actions, however horrid, have a logic to them. They have their own culture and are intelligent. And it's quite easy to imagine that if they were just a little less good at killing us, the human armies would be doing almost as horrific shit in the goblin world.
Whilst Blacktongue had a strong undercurrent of humour to leven the terror, this book is more harrowing. It's an exercise in grief, both on the small scale of individual humans, lost friends, atrocities witnessed, and on the scale of humanity. We grieve with Glava for lost cities, for vanished generations, for the works of our kind lying in ruin, unvalued by the foe. It is very moving.
This is not unremittingly sad though. There are plenty of moments of hope, of victories both small and large (although the underlying trend feels sharply downwards at most points). And there's love too - the love of family, of friends, of her people, and even small but poignant elements of romance (with a tasteful veil drawn across the sex - which I appreciated, not from prudishness, but because it felt appropriate).
The battles and individual combats are exciting and inventive - the goblins are a great foe in terms of imagination and possibilities.
It's a bitter sweet story, with a lot more bitter than sweet, but enough sweet that it was (for me at least) a pleasure rather than an ordeal to read.
Buehlman tells the story in a fresh and engaging way. Galva addresses us as a friend or family member to whom she's retelling this story years later, albeit in a frank and very honest way. We see letters from her younger brother and father that provide different views and context.
As always (again: at least for me) the key to a great book is great writing. Buehlman's prose is always powerful, never purple, he paints clear pictures and reaches into the heart of things making it all real (too real sometimes).
A truly excellent book.
If you loved Blacktongue you will very likely love this one for the same reasons. If you didn't love Blacktongue you might well find enough differences here to love this one.
I guess, having read Engine Summer, I knew what I was getting into.
Little Big is also a fever dream crossed with an LSD trip crossed with a blaWell...
I guess, having read Engine Summer, I knew what I was getting into.
Little Big is also a fever dream crossed with an LSD trip crossed with a blackout booze binge. It's much longer than Engine Summer though, and is magical realism rather than sci-fi.
The story covers several generations and at one point says "twenty-five years later" then throws you in among the children of the people you were reading about.
It starts in the late 1800s and, I think, ends up in a divergent 1950s or there abouts. The magic part of the magical realism concerns faeries of the sort that featured in fake photos from ~1920.
The magic involves changlings and creatures/people who live just behind the veil that some few can lift. The book revolves around a house built to somehow encapsulate the contradictory truth of these faery worlds, a truth alluded to in the book's title, Little Big. The ideas that are similar to (but not identical to) seeing the whole world in a grain of sand, wrapping up alternate realities that are much bigger than our own in packages as small or smaller than an acorn. Concordantly there are ideas about reaching these alternate destinations by heading away from them, by taking long, strange journeys to arrive where you started, but in a different place.
These contradictions, this illogic, means that the characters constantly fail to be able to grasp the truth - especially when past childhood - and even when they can, they find it very difficult to put into words.
There's also a vague overarching story about the story the family are caught up in, and an ill defined war both in the 'real' world and the faery.
Much of the book is talk of the relationships and fairly mundane doings of this family, along with oblique looks at the faery issue and coincident preparation for the final fairly gentle "crescendo".
For example, for 100 pages or more, we follow a great grandson of the person we started with as he lives a Bohemian life in maybe-New-York and then becomes an alcoholic searching the city for a girl who dumps him.
It's a weird book with some beautiful writing, and lots of complex spiral literary prose that churns around and around and may well exceed your tolerance for such stuff. Vagueness abounds, plot does not.
For all that, I enjoyed it a fair bit. More than many did, less than some. It is, in its final section, strangely touching, and it's sometime hard to say why exactly it's so affecting. Maybe, rather like the themes in the book, the author has worked his sideways magic on me and left me as tongue-tied as his characters.
So much, and so little, happened that I doubt if I would be able to tell anyone much about this book in a week's time. But it has a lovely vibe to it, and is well worth a look if you prefer the more literary end of the fantasy spectrum.
"the road ran down an avenue of horse chestnuts heartbreakingly golden; the wind tore fortunes from them and scattered them spendthrift"
This was a very interesting read for me. The last psychological crime thriller type book I read was Sometimes I Lie which was jammed full of rug-pulliThis was a very interesting read for me. The last psychological crime thriller type book I read was Sometimes I Lie which was jammed full of rug-pulling twists. I feel there were some similarities, but also that Last House felt fresh and original - though not being a frequent reader of the genre (sub genre) I'm not well placed to give a review in that context.
Ward's writing is very good - I enjoyed her prose a lot, particularly the short descriptions where an unexpected but apt adjective was coopted for a new role, and synthesisa was invoked.
This isn't a detective-follows-clues type of murder mystery. This is more of a cold case, and we are, for much of the book, in the PoV of someone who might well have done it. This is more about reconstructing events through the lens of a fractured mind.
I spent a lot of the book "kinda" knowing what was going on but not certain. Many things don't add up but the alternate explanations seem to be quite a stretch. But it did resolve in a way that didn't feel like unreasonable rug-pulling. If you have too many twists you risk throwing readers out of the rollercoaster at the sharper turns. Ward successfully kept me in my seat.
It's a book with quite a lot of sadness in it. Children are abused and murdered - though not "on screen" - and the reader naturally shares in the trauma of that. I won't give away whether the ending is grim or upbeat or some mixture of the two, but it's not an unrelentingly harrowing read, there's hope in the mix.
I enjoyed the book a lot and consumed it in a highly unusual 4 days, in part due to the fact I've been in hospital with my youngest daughter for a week, and in part due to it being addictive reading!
If it sounds like the sort of book you might enjoy, then it definitely is!
Finished, thanks to 8 hours sitting beside my youngest's bed in the emergency room. Potentially another 16 hours before we get to a ward, but I have aFinished, thanks to 8 hours sitting beside my youngest's bed in the emergency room. Potentially another 16 hours before we get to a ward, but I have a 2nd book with me!
I loved the Sandman graphic novels. I wasn't too hot on Anansi Boys. I read The Graveyard Book to my aforementioned youngest, and thought it was an excellent children's book.
Neverwhere is described as being "for adults" but with the intention of recreating what Narnia, Alice in Wonderland etc had done for the author as a child. That's a pretty tall order. For a great deal of this book it felt like a children's book, even when one of the characters gets crucified. The random, haphazard, nonsensical magic/underworld described promoted this feeling for me. It's all just too random to have faith in, too unstructured to believe in / understand any consequence.
On the flip side, Gaiman is an excellent writer. His prose, his description, his observation are all top notch. And at the end the book does make a rather poignant sideways observation on adulthood, and (indirectly) accepting the comparative greyness of adult life compared to the more dangerous (feeling) vividness and intensity of a child's world.
The "upsidedown" / alternative London is full of wonderful imagination and a mixture of gritty / comic / intriguing denizens...
It's a book with lots to love in it, but one I just didn't feel able to give myself to wholeheartedly. It's clear that a great many other people have been able to.
If it sounds like something you'd enjoy, then I'm sure you will. If I'd read it as a child I'm sure I would have very warm memories of it.
NOTE: The book is marked at #1 and a 2nd book "The Seven Sisters" is listed but not yet published. Which means readers have been waiting 28 years for book 2. Which is more than the wait for Doors of Stone and Winds of Winter combined!
Loading...
