Category: Reading

#REVIEW: Advocate, by Daniel M. Ford

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The standard disclaimers apply: Dan and I are Internet Mutuals, the origin of which is lost to time but almost certainly involves Twitter somehow. I spend a fair amount of time hanging out in his Discord server, which is, in fact, the only Discord server I spend any time in. And while I reviewed The Warden, the first book in this series, I somehow did not review Necrobane, the second book. My vague recollection is that I had kind of complicated feelings about it and the review just kind of got away from me; I didn’t dislike it, although I do have to talk about it in order to talk about Advocate.

Which, by the way, I’m gonna screw this up: the name of the book is Advocate, not The Advocate. I keep wanting to put that The in there.

So let’s rip the Band-aid off here: viewed on its own, I really enjoyed Advocate, for much the same reasons I enjoyed Warden, and the rest of Dan’s work. Aelis is a fabulous asshole, of a type I enjoy reading about, and a couple of the new characters, particularly an alcoholic gnome named Mihil and a fellow Warden (and ex-girlfriend) of Aelis’ named Miralla, are also a lot of fun. That’s Miralla in the back on the cover, although the elf on the right is not Mihil, even though he should be.

(I get why he isn’t; that’s Amadin, another Warden, and he’s a fairly important character, but I suspect the real reason Mihil isn’t on the cover is that including a gnome in the composition would make placing the cover text tricky.)

The bulk of Advocate unfolds like a mystery, although we know who committed the crime from the first pages of the book, and Aelis’ job is less to prove her former mentor innocent than to convince the court that no crime was committed in the first place. The story is satisfyingly twisty-turny and Aelis gets plenty of time to show off her two best character traits: her utter confidence in her own ability to outwit literally anyone and her tendency to make a snap decision, get in over her head, and then somehow come out on top anyway. There’s lots of swordplay and quite a bit more actual necromancy than what we saw in the last couple of books.

Advocate‘s biggest problem is that, while the cover calls it “Book Three of the Warden Series,” it is, for now at least, the final book of the Warden series, and it’s structured much more like Book Three of Six than Book Three of Three. But let’s back up a little bit and talk about Warden and Necrobane.

Warden ended with Aelis screwing up in a fairly spectacular way, potentially unleashing a continent-wide zombie plague. I was expecting the rest of the series to be focused on that not-minor problem, and the book went an entirely different way than I expected, dealing with what I thought was going to be a two-book problem in about a hundred pages or so and then pivoting into something else. At the end of Necrobane, Aelis’ love interest is magically bound to a particular plot of land in the midst of a wild forest a fair distance away from Lone Pine, and Aelis is unable to figure out how to free her. Then, at the end of the book, she is summoned to the city of Lascenise, a major (and wealthy) metropolitan area, to serve as an Advocate for her old mentor, who has been accused of murder. An Advocate is basically a Warden lawyer; Bardun Jacques has a lawyer but is entitled to a Warden defending him (and investigating his case) as well. He has asked for her specifically. She has no real choice but to go.

This was another left turn, and I was concerned with what it meant; that Book Three would be taking place in an entirely different place and with, importantly, an entirely new cast— Maurenia being magically stuck on a couple acres of land a week or two away, and half-orc werebear Tun being entirely unsuited to life in a city. And, in fact, that’s exactly what happened. The two stories do end up knitting themselves together, but Tun’s presence in the story is minimal and Maurenia’s role is basically to be something else that Aelis has to worry about in addition to the rather significant number of new problems the story is dumping on her head. It’s probably important to point out that Aelis was going to have to head toward civilization anyway, as she was going to need access to libraries to figure out how to release Maurenia, but she’s more or less stuck there until her Advocate duties are discharged. Making things worse, in her last scene with Maurenia before leaving it’s made clear that there’s a time limit on how long she has to break the spell before Maurenia is, effectively, taken over by the forest.

(Side note: Necrobane also features a fight with one of the creepiest monsters I’ve seen on-page. The book contains a tooth golem, which is every bit as awful as you might think, and maybe worse.)

So your appreciation of Advocate is going to be contingent on how much you like Aelis, and how willing you are to lose the supporting cast we’ve grown to like over the last two books. This is what I mean by it being a better “book three of six” than an end to a trilogy; there’s lots of expansion to the worldbuilding and lots of character development for Aelis (we meet her family!) and all of that is cool but if you were really vibing with her and Maurenia’s relationship, or her mentor/mentee relationship with the little girl she’s teaching to read at the end of Necrobane, you’re gonna have a hard time. And this would be much easier to bear if we knew there was Book Four on the way out there, but Tor has really screwed this series over(*) and right now there isn’t one. I decided to star-rate it on its own merits, mostly because no one can stop me, but I can imagine other readers being less happy.

I want more books in this series, in other words, not only because the world is fascinating and I want more but because I think the story and the characters deserve it.

(*) Not my story to tell, unfortunately, but I feel like they owe Dan another trilogy to make up for how they treated this one. Even if I didn’t know him, the simple fact that somehow I have bought five copies of the three books in this trilogy and still don’t have a matching set to put on my shelf would have me deeply pissed.

#REVIEW: The Silverblood Promise, by James Logan

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You may have noticed this about me by now: I love me a good heist story. Any time a book is about a charming rogue whose job is to rob somebody, I’m pretty well in from the jump with no further information needed. Breaking into somewhere? Breaking out of somewhere? Scamming the local merchantry or rich assholes into, well, anything? Yep, here’s my debit card, we’re good.

The Silverblood Promise is not quite a heist novel, at least in the sense that it’s not about a single overarching act of scammery. Main character Lukan Cardova is a bit of a con man and certainly a charming rogue, but the story kicks off when his estranged father dies and sends him off on a wild quest to a hive of scum and villainy on the other side of the continent, in search of … well, Lukan’s really not sure at all what he’s in search of. He has a last-words type of note written in his father’s blood with three names on it: his, the name of the city, and another he doesn’t recognize. This is very much a “one thing leads to another” type of book, where he finds out who he’s looking for, but she’s in jail, and then he deals with that, and then there’s this whole other thing that he needs to do, and everything he manages to complete leads to another quest, much to his great annoyance. The story keeps moving along at a pleasantly rapid clip, and by the end of it Lukan is not only hip-deep in local and possibly inter-dimensional politics as well as a thieves’ guild or two but he’s acquired a combination minion and surrogate daughter in an eleven-year-old named Flea, who tries to rob him early on and then just … sticks around after that. There’s no One Big Scheme, but there are literally five or six smaller ones; maybe this is a heists novel, and not a heist novel, who knows.

There are enough ideas for five or six books packed into this book, which is Part One of (I believe) a trilogy, with the second volume to follow this fall. If anything, the book might be overstuffed, as every side character and local power structure Lukan runs into is something I wanted to know more about, but as far s I know the second novel takes place in an entirely different city. The book’s biggest weak spot is, unfortunately, Lukan himself, who can tend toward being whiny (he’s thoroughly exasperated with the plot of his book by the end) and is also a bit of a drunk, but the book at least knows that being the drunk is a character flaw. This is Logan’s debut novel and there’s also a bit of that thing where Lukan occasionally basically replies to the third-person omniscient narrator. The type of thing where the book drops a bit of worldbuilding and then Lukan will think Yeah, that sucked, or something along those lines. It can certainly be overlooked and some people won’t even notice it, but if it’s the kind of thing you notice, it’s gonna knock you out of the book once in a while.

That said, my gripes are minor and I chewed through this book’s 500+ pages in two days, losing some sleep along the way. I had a feeling, picking it up, that this was going to be one of those books that I regretted leaving on my Unread shelf for so long, and … yeah. I’ll be reading the sequel pretty close to immediately, when it comes out in November.

I’m 80 pages from a book review

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I’m nearing the end of James Logan’s The Silverblood Promise, and I’d rather be reading than anything else right now. So I’m gonna go do that! I’m enjoying the book, so expect a review in the very near future. By which I mean “probably tomorrow.”

#REVIEWS: No Longer Human and The Setting Sun, by Osamu Dazai

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My lovely wife has returned from her long sojourn, and all is right with the world again. After lazing about and whining all day yesterday, I was a veritable dervish this morning, managing to tidy, vacuum and dust every room in the house other than the office, which still got a lick and a promise. I read two books today and built half a Lego set on top of everything else. I think I can call the last Saturday of break a success.

Reading two books in a day isn’t the accomplishment it might sound like, because both of them were novellas. I’ve seen a bunch of students over the last couple of years reading these two books, and because the covers are striking (and I pay attention to what they’re reading regardless) I asked a couple of kids about them last year, and was greeted with enthusiastic recommendations. I didn’t get around to it last year and then when I recently found another couple of kids reading them before Spring Break decided to jump on them.

I … don’t get it.

So, Osamu Dazai was born in Japan in 1909, which already places him well outside of anything my students are usually willing to read. His books are obviously translated, and both of these books were written post-war, in 1947 and 1948, right before Dazai died of suicide at 38, in a scenario that appears (I haven’t done a ton of research other than reading a Wiki article) to precisely match a suicide attempt described in No Longer Human. The books sound like they were written in the late forties, frankly, which isn’t a criticism but is another reason why I’m surprised that my students are reading them, because the style of a novel from the 1940s and 1950s is wildly different from the modern YA or romantasy that I catch them with most of the time, and that’s before you have to deal with the cultural unfamiliarity of being translated from Japanese.

The closest analog to No Longer Human that I can think of is that it feels like a Japanese Catcher in the Rye. It’s about a young, profoundly alienated man, and it’s casually misogynistic in the way work from that era frequently is. It’s written in first person and is semi autobiographical; the framing device is that it’s written as three notebooks by the narrator, covering a couple decades of his life, and there’s another unnamed individual in the preface and epilogue who talks about how the notebooks were given to him. I read The Setting Sun cover to cover in a single sitting and I can’t tell you what the hell its deal is. I mean, I can describe the plot, that’s simple enough– it’s another first-person narrative, this time of a woman named Kazuko in her late twenties, a member of a formerly aristocratic family that has fallen apart after World War II. Her mom dies. Her brother is a drunken mess who eventually kills himself. She tries to have some love affairs. Then she gets pregnant and the book ends. There’s some obvious symbolism scattered throughout– a bit about burning snake eggs, and snakes constantly showing up around moments of despair– but it’s mostly a pretty straightforward narrative.

So, yeah, I get the plot. I just can’t tell you why it’s a book, if that makes any sense. I feel like I get No Longer Human, and part of me can sort of see why it might appeal to teenagers, who respond to alienation narratives. I don’t know why the hell there’s a copy of Setting Sun in our school library or why the kids are professing to enjoy it as much as Human. There are strong themes of addiction and alcohol abuse through both books and a ton of suicidal ideation and successful suicides along with some genuinely terrible family situations. I dunno; I’m gonna ask some questions on Monday and maybe send an email to the kid who was most interested in me reading these last year. Don’t misunderstand me; neither are bad books, and No Longer Human is genuinely good, but I don’t see the appeal to 14-year-olds in 2025. I need answers here, y’all.

Taking tonight off

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I’m gonna finish Hild tonight if it kills me.

(It’s not gonna kill me. I’ve got 50 pages left. I’ll be fine.)

In which I’m getting dumber

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Man, I don’t know if I should blame my phone or the Current Unpleasantness or what, but my powers of concentration have been significantly diminished lately. I may deliberately abandon the “20% of my books this year should be nonfiction” goal because I keep bailing on nonfiction books halfway through, and the novel whose cover up there and whose title I am deliberately not going to use anywhere in this post is an objectively good book— shut up, that’s a thing– and I’m halfway through it and I am suffering, y’all. And it is 100% because this book demands you pay attention to it and I am currently not capable of paying sufficient attention to complicated texts to have any real idea of what’s going on. It’s making me nuts.

I dunno, man. I don’t want to quit this book but I also don’t want to be miserable when I’m reading and it’s not like I can’t pick it up again later. That’s the good thing about books; you put them on the shelf and they stay there for as long as you want them to. They don’t grow legs and walk away. If you have even the slightest interest in juuuuust barely pre-Christian Britain and aren’t currently brain-rotted like me, you should check this book out because you’ll like it. But right now I just don’t have my shit together enough to properly appreciate it. I’m giving it one more day and if something doesn’t click I’m going to put it away and pretend it’s a temporary choice. Again, this is completely on me. I want my brain back, dammit.

#REVIEW: Masquerade, by O.O. Sangoyomi

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First things first: I’ve said this before, but if you’re not tapped into all the sci-fi and fantasy coming out of Nigerian and Nigerian-descended authors in the last five years or so, you are missing out, and you should fix that. This is going to be a somewhat mixed review of O.O. Sangoyomi’s debut novel, Masquerade, but the damned thing oozes with potential, and even if I had liked this less than I did I’d still be in for the sequel. Which sort of feels like “I like less than half of you half of what you deserve,” but I promise it’s a compliment.

The book jacket describes Masquerade as a “richly reimagined 15th century West Africa,” but I’ve got to be honest, despite what I just said about Nigerian fantasy this feels very much like historical fiction to me, and the speculative elements are minimal at best. I’m not precisely sure what’s being reimagined here. It falls under the fantasy genre because everyone is fighting with axes and machetes and spears, and when that happens we just call it fantasy regardless of how well it fits. It’s very low on the “low to high fantasy” axis, in other words.

Now, I’m not going to claim to have a lot of knowledge about West African history– I probably have more than your average American, but the average American knows nothing, so that’s not much of a brag. The book is set in Timbuktu, which was a real place, and the countries and city-states that show up as adversaries are all real, and the Yoruba are still around. If Sangoyomi has played around with history at all, it’s subtle enough that I can’t tell you about it. I can tell you that the main character, Òdòdó, is a blacksmith at the beginning of the book, and blacksmiths are consistently referred to as “witches,” but … I was never exactly clear why? Everybody’s still using smithed tools like it’s not a big deal, but they’re more or less the dregs of society for some reason.

A quick word on orthography: note all the accent marks in Òdòdó? They’re in nearly every word in the book of remotely African origin and there’s no pronunciation guide. The word I’ve rendered as “Yoruba” up there is Yorùbá in the text, for example. The city they live in is Ṣàngótẹ̀, and I don’t even know how to reproduce that S properly– I had to copy and paste it. I hope everyone will forgive me if other than the main characters’ names I don’t bother reproducing all the accents. If I knew how to pronounce them I might, but I don’t.

So anyway, Òdòdó is busy making herself a life as a blacksmith when she is abruptly kidnapped and brought to Sangote to be the wife of the Alaafin, who is basically the emperor. He’s picked her out while pretending to be a vagrant and having a brief conversation with her at her forge.

She is … surprisingly okay with this. I kind of need to rain some abuse down on the blurb-writers for this, who make the book feel like a revenge tale of sorts, and pay no attention to the “loosely inspired by the Persephone myth,” because once you get past the kidnapping there’s not a lot of there there. But no! Òdòdó is surprisingly cool with being kidnapped, she just wants her mom to be at the wedding, and her naïveté (goddammit!) at her fiancé’s (DAMMIT) insistence that he can’t find her mother to get her blessing is rather annoying. Òdòdó gets pulled into some political maneuvering, falls for a couple of truly amateurish stunts from the Alaafin’s mother, and accidentally helps touch off a revolution, and then somehow the book redeems itself entirely at the end, catching me by surprise in such a way that guaranteed the sequel was getting picked up.

Strengths: the worldbuilding, other than the weird witchery of blacksmiths, was really interesting, and the basic novelty of the setting was great. Sangoyomi’s prose is excellent, and the book managed to include some romantic elements without descending into full-blown romantasy. The weaknesses are the characters, particularly Òdòdó herself, who careens back and forth between being a silly little girl and a seasoned political operative. It’s also unclear how much of a time frame the book takes place over, and you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s just a few months at best, which is not enough time for her to learn some of the things she learns how to do. She’s really good at anything she needs to be good at for the plot to move forward, including occasionally outsmarting actual generals (and coming up with war tactics they haven’t thought of) and defeating grown men in combat, and then she’ll turn around and drink from a cup that the mother-in-law has handed her that may as well have this on the side:

If this hadn’t landed the dismount, I’d probably have just put it on the shelf and moved on, but the ending really was well-done, if perhaps again a bit out of character, maybe? Who knows! But I’d have kept an eye out for this author’s next series. As it is, I’m in for the next book. This isn’t the best thing I’ve read this year or anything like that, but it’s solid and it’s a fast enough read, at about 330 pages, to be able to forgive its flaws.

#REVIEW: Galileo’s Daughter, by Dava Sobel

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I’m trying to decide which overused sentence I should start this post with, and I can’t make a decision.

Because unfortunately, while I haven’t read this book before, I feel like I’ve written this post before. Dava Sobel’s excellent Galileo’s Daughter is a biography of a genius, and, well, I think you probably already know if you want to read a really good biography of Galileo. The title makes it sound like a thousand different literary fiction novels– there are so many The So-and-So’s Daughter novels out there that I’m surprised that there isn’t a parody of them with that exact title– but no, this book is at least a third or so about Suor Maria Celeste, Galileo’s oldest daughter, through the prism of the surprisingly large corpus of letters we have from her to him. Suor Maria was a cloistered nun, and her letters, or at least the translation of the letters in this book, show her to be a woman of lively intellect and wit, and starting each chapter with an excerpt of one of her letters was an inspired choice.

But ultimately this is a book about Galileo– a book called Suor Maria Celeste’s Father would not have sold many copies– and, well, Galileo was Goddamned fascinating, so if the author is of even middling talent writing a good book about him should not be especially difficult, and as it turns out Dava Sobel possesses far more than the typical allotted share of talent. So maybe this isn’t as comprehensive a review as I might have thought I was going to write when I sat down, but I assume the You Should Read This is still coming through at sufficient volume for you to hear it. Because you should.

Most of us have some sort of memories of Spring Break, although I suspect for most people they involve parties, or beaches, or some form of public drunkenness. For me, on the other hand, my strongest memory of Spring Break, one I reminisce about every time my own break rolls around, involves going to see a movie on the first night of a Spring Break in grad school with a good friend of mine who is a professor at Oxford now. We had to stand outside to wait for tickets in a driving, wet, utterly bullshit snowstorm in downtown Chicago, and Bill stepped out of line for a moment, threw his arms over his head, yelled “SPRING BREAK!” at the top of his lungs, and rejoined the line without another word.

I may not have partied enough as a young man, is what I’m saying here. And I openly laughed at anyone who asked me what I was “doing” for my break. I’m going to be sitting in a damn chair reading a book, that’s what I’m going to be doing. And it will be glorious.