Tag: book reviews

#REVIEW: The Will of the Many and The Strength of the Few, by James Islington

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews2 Comments
The original cover
The new cover
The “are you fucking kidding me” cover of the sequel
The main cover of the sequel

I make bad decisions, guys, and it seems like James Islington’s books are just absolutely committed to proving that at their every opportunity.

Islington has written, to my knowledge, five books. I own six of his books. I have read three and a quarter of them. I have liked one of them. I bought and read The Shadow of What Was Lost, the first book of his Licanius trilogy, three years ago. I did not like it very much, but the book as a physical object was remarkable, and I bought the entire trilogy before finishing the first book. I made it, if I remember correctly, less than 25% of the way through the second book before deciding I was done and putting it away. Other than placing it on the shelf and perhaps moving it to a different shelf once or twice, I have barely touched the third book and have never opened it.

Somehow, this did not prevent me from buying The Will of the Many when it came out– and I bought the original cover, the one with the columns up there. I read it and quite liked it– the world building was a little shallow, and the plot not especially unique; every “brilliant young person goes to a Special School” book is gonna have some major similarities, but the Rome-inflected world was at least interesting if, again, not very deeply thought-out, but whatever.

Then I started seeing the book on shelves with a whole new cover. You know this about me; I like my shit to look nice and clean, and midseries changes to covers annoy me tremendously, and I didn’t want to buy a second copy of the first book just to match the second on the shelf.

And then they made an announcement that all copies of The Strength of the Few would have reversible covers, one to match each version of the original cover! My understanding is that Islington himself was behind that decision, which I both support and tremendously appreciate. My man knows his audience! Good on you.

The fucking word “Hierarchy,” the title of the series, was spelled wrong on the spine.

I swore– a lot– and then said “Fuck it, this is why I have a job” and bought a new copy of the first book so that it would match. I cannot display a fucking spelling error on my bookshelves. Unimaginable.

(Right about here is where I’m going to stop reviewing myself and start reviewing the books, btdubs.)

I decided that since I was getting a new copy of the book anyway, I’d reread Will before diving into Strength. This, I feel, was the right move. I read so much that most of the time I have read literally hundreds of books in between any given book and its sequel, which means that I frequently don’t enjoy sequels as much as I should because I simply don’t recall the first book as well as I should. And I’d already had one Islington series go sour on me, and I didn’t want it to happen again.

The Will of the Many was an excellent read the second time through as well. It’s a genuinely good book. I stand behind it.

The Strength of the Few … was not. I’ve got it three-starred on the various book services right now and I genuinely might move it down to two. And the most frustrating thing is that a lot of the problems with Licanius are showing themselves again in Hierarchy. It was okay that there wasn’t a whole lot of clarity about how the wider world worked in Will, because the main character was confined to this little school on a tiny island and wasn’t really interacting with the wider world, so when you’ve split the … government? into Religion, Governance and Military and not really defined what it means to be “in Religion”, or when you have a couple of characters who are in the Senate, because this world is based on Rome somehow so there has to be one of those, but haven’t actually really said what the Senate is for, you can get away with it. But you’ve got to broaden that scope out in any sequel, especially when you end Book One, which was mostly a hunt for What Really Happened to the MC’s adoptive father’s brother, by splitting the entire universe into three parallel planes. At that point, I would like to understand how all this works. The main character exists in all three worlds in book two, only at least two of the three versions of him don’t know that he’s in all three worlds, and one of them is Egypt-except-not, and one of them is, bewilderingly, Wales-except-not.(*)

It means that the world you’ve learned about in the first book is only a third of the second book, and the other two worlds genuinely aren’t very interesting (not-Egypt is better than not-Wales, but not by much) and that’s before he starts sidelining and/or killing every interesting female character in the first book, and it’s also before you hit the No One You Thought Was Dead Is Still Dead part of the book, which is just fucking annoying.

There’s also a form of magic called Will, and an interesting setup in not-Rome where society has organized itself into pyramids where everyone pledges part of their Will to the people above them, and Will does stuff but it’s not entirely clear that Islington has figured out the parameters of what it can do, nor is it clear to me why holding someone’s hand and saying “I cede you my Will,” or whatever the code phrase is, lets them take part of your life essence away from you. It’s rigorously codified without actually making a whole lot of sense, which is not a great combination. I feel like if you poked the whole system too hard it would collapse.

(Even the school the MC attends in the first book was … kinda sketchy, as far as the worldbuilding goes. It’s also organized into tiers, and the MC moves from seventh tier to third over the course of a single semester, but everybody seems to be the same age and it’s not at all clear how often or even whether anyone graduates, or how long they’re supposed to be there, or really even what they’re studying; dude mentions that his classes are getting harder a few times but never really says why, and nothing is ever difficult for him, really.)

I damn near DNFed the second James Islington Series Volume II in a row, is what I’m saying here. It’s just not nearly as good as the first book, and again, much like the first series, I feel like the central conflict is not well defined here. The first book was a pretty straightforward “find out what happened to this guy” thing, and it got more complicated than that but that was basically what was going on. Now there’s a Cataclysm every three hundred years (what happens during a Cataclysm? Bad stuff, but … don’t ask what kind! People die, alright?(**) It’s bad!) and apparently we’re going to stop it somehow, I guess, and something something worlds got split up, and …

<spits>

Blech.

Again, I’m an idiot, so I’ll probably pick up the third volume when it comes out (I hope there are only planned to be three, but who knows) just for completeness’ sake, because it would really piss me off to have two copies of the first book, one of the second, and not have the third) but I think I probably have to be done with this guy after that unless everything really turns around.

(*) This got me thinking about how Rome and Alexandria, two massively different cultures, are only 1200 miles apart. That’s about the distance from northern Indiana to Houston.)

(**) The phrase “all right,” which is two words, not one, and I will let you get away with “alright” in dialogue but not much else, is misspelled every single time it appears in both books. I hate it.

Monthly Reads: November 2025

On By Luther M. SilerIn Photography, Reading1 Comment

Book of the Month is Matt Dinniman’s This Inevitable Ruin, because shut up, that’s why.

#REVIEW: The Place Where They Buried Your Heart, by Christina Henry

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My Aardvark book box subscription scores again; the books from this service have consistently surprised me with their quality, especially the horror novels, which have produced some of my favorite books of the year– books that I’d never have come across were it not for the club.

I need to get something out of the way first, though. This is a haunted house book. It’s a pretty damn effective haunted house book. You can really stop reading here if you want! You probably already know if you like good haunted house books, and if you are that guy, go grab this.

That said: the verb that keeps getting used throughout this book about what the house does to people is eats. The house eats people. The main character is Jessie Campanelli, fourteen years old at the start of the book (and living in a neighborhood near where I lived in Chicago, and in high school in 1994, which was the year I graduated, so this book hits home in a few places) and sick at home in bed, when she dares her annoying little brother to get a couple of his friends and go spend half an hour in the creepy old house down the road.

One of his friends loses an arm. Paulie is never seen again. The house ate him. And it’s immensely creepy and atmospheric in the book, but God help me, every time I saw a reference to the house eating someone, I was reminded of this:

(Forgive me, please, Christina Henry; your book is way way better than Death Bed: The Bed that Eats, which Oswalt gets the name of wrong every time he mentions it, but I couldn’t get past the eating.)

Jessie, who is an adult with an elementary-aged child by the end of the book, spends her life living in the house she grew up in, and Paulie’s death reverberates throughout the book, leaving scars that eventually rob her of her entire family and bring her one of her own. The book does a great job of capturing the kind of working-class, multi-generational families that Chicago’s neighborhoods are known for, and the relationships, bad or good, between Jessie and the rest of the characters in the book are a definite highlight. Jessie herself is kind of a mess, but she’s earned it, and her determination to better herself and keep her son safe is kind of inspiring.

I read this book in about four hours, a hundred pages before bed and the rest this morning before I was able to do anything else. It’s hard to put down, and the pacing is masterful. It’s creepy as hell throughout, and if anything I could have gone for another fifty pages or so to beef up the ending a bit. The book doesn’t quite fumble the finish, but the ending does feel a little bit rushed, which is my only real complaint.

I missed spooky season with this one– I should have read it in October– but you should check it out anyway.

(Okay, one thing: to be completely clear, there are gonna be some dying and/or threatened children in this book? Paulie isn’t the only one. If that’s not your bag, avoid. Consider this your trigger warning.)

On Dungeon Crawler Carl

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Wow, that’s bigger than I thought it was going to be.

Oh well. Scrolling’s free.

I finished the seventh and most recent book in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series last night, staying up too late to do it. The eighth book comes out in June; I pre-ordered it the literal first day it became available to do so. Dinniman has an unrelated book, Operation Bounce House, coming out in February, and I’ve preordered that as well. The series is currently expected to be ten books, and apparently might be eleven.

I don’t think I’ve reviewed any of the books as I’ve read them, and I don’t really intend for this to be a review yet either, as a multi-book review really ought to be for the whole series and even as fast as Dinniman seems to write, we’re at least two or three years away from that. I will say this, though: I started this series mostly out of FOMO, something that y’all know good and well catches me on books all the time. I don’t like not reading good books, even if their premise– aliens invade Earth and a guy and his cat get thrown into an intergalactic competition that somehow mimics the genre tropes of role-playing video games– is completely ridiculous. “LitRPG” is its own entire genre; having read and enjoyed eight books in it, other than reading more of Dinniman’s work in the future I have no plans at all to dip my toe into any other examples of it.

I’ve been reading about a book a month in this series since picking up Dungeon Crawler Carl in May. The first one was at least a little bit against my will; I wasn’t expecting to like what I was reading all that much, but again, FOMO.

I plan to restart the series in December so that I can have read it twice by the time A Parade of Horribles comes out. My wife picked up the first book on a whim a couple of months ago and is currently reading book five, and she’s read them back to back to back to back to back. Which means the same as “back to back” but sounds like more of a feat. This is not a thing she does, guys.

These books have no fucking right to be this good. They’re too ridiculous and too raunchy to be as good as they are. And yet somehow this series is the best new thing I’ve encountered in a long time, and having read four thousand pages of this series this year I am about to start over and do it again.

Plus Bounce House and the first book of another series of his called Kaiju Battlefield Surgeon, because right now Dinniman is tied with BrandoSando for the author I’ve read the most books from in 2025, and I can’t let Sanderson win that contest.

Just do it. Trust me. Put aside your reservations and pick up the first book. The whole series is on Kindle Unlimited if you happen to have Amazon Prime, so you don’t even have to pay for it. Get them from the library. I know, I know, this feels like it has to be dumb as hell. Go give them a shot anyway.

Some quick book reviews

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In April of last year, I reviewed Laura R. Samotin’s The Sins on their Bones, which I was sent an eArc of by a publicist. I liked it enough that I finished it in six hours and immediately ordered a physical copy of it, and while it’s been sitting on my shelves for a minute or two, I got the sequel on release day as well.

And … well, I could literally rewrite the previous review more or less word for word for this book. I finished The Lure of their Graves in an hour before going to sleep last night and a few hours across this morning and afternoon– less than a day, easily– and if I talk about it much it’s going to seem like I hated it. My gripes about the first book still apply to the sequel; everyone’s obviously Jewish but the word “Jewish” never appears; Russian only exists for the phrase moy tzar, the main character is kind of a lot, the characters in the book are supposed to be the main figures of a government but come off more like a grad school polycule, etc, etc. I’m slightly revising my initial “holy shit, this book is gay as hell” assessment; it’s gay as hell, but what it actually is is a world where literally everyone is bisexual. Sexual orientation and possibly even sexual preference effectively doesn’t exist. Dmitri Alexeyev, the Tzar from the first book (and still the tzar of the second, although he’s never going to feel like a ruler of anything at all) spends most of the book trying to decide who he should marry to keep his country and the surrounding lands stable, and the three main candidates are a man, a woman, and a nonbinary person who makes it abundantly and repeatedly clear that they are willing to swing any direction the vine can get to.

Also, I genuinely don’t get the title. It’s possible that I’m dumb, but I don’t get it.

That said, once again I enjoyed the hell out of this book and I will be reading more from Laura Samotin in the future. Yes, I know I just did nothing but complain. I contain multitudes. Deal with it.

I apparently didn’t review K.M. Enright’s Mistress of Lies when I read it back in July, but I liked it quite a lot, and I finished the sequel, Lord of Ruin, yesterday, and because any time I read a Laura Samotin book I have to have weird synchronicity with the book before it, it’s also super gay and involves a spymaster and a king and an attempt at a rebellion and a fair amount of explicit sex, although this one also involves the scariest vampires I’ve ever encountered in a book (Oh, and the book before this, Coffin Moon, also involved vampires, so we’re all about the themes recently) and a Polynesian monstrosity called a manananggal that is not something that your nightmares need to be aware of in Donald Trump’s America.

Oh, and magical trans people. I’m deliberately withholding details. But transitioning at least can involve magic– it’s not clear if it has to– and you’re going to be confused at a couple of points in this book by who has what body parts, because being trans in these books does not work like it does in the real world. Just a heads-up. The Cursed Crown books are a duology that is now finished, and Enright’s series still has one more coming. I’m definitely in.

#REVIEW: Kindle Paperwhite, Signature Edition

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews2 Comments

Having read an entire big-ass book on this thing (TEOTBB is 260,000 words) I can get to the meat of a review of my newest tech toy in a single sentence:

Reading a book on this thing feels like reading.

If you don’t know what I mean by that … I’m not sure how well I can explain it, to be honest. I have an earlier version of the Paperwhite– about ten years old now, so probably pretty close to the first generation– and on that device and every other Kindle I’ve ever touched, I was never able to forget I was holding a tech object with a screen and not a book. I couldn’t get into stories the same way I could with a book. I had trouble remembering details, or even keeping my place on a page. Reading short stories on the Kindle wasn’t bad, but entire books? Forget about it.

At some point in the last ten or so generations of this thing, they fixed that problem, and I’m not sure exactly what the difference is. I can say it’s tremendously faster than my old Paperwhite, which is no surprise, and since ebooks themselves haven’t really evolved all that much in that time you can really feel the speed difference in a way you might not be able to with a phone upgrade or a new laptop or something. It’s got a pleasing heft in the hand and while I wasn’t terribly happy with spending nearly $40 for a case at first, now that I have it I really like it. I got the fabric cover, and the texture is marvelous, both on the inside and the outside of the case, and the automatic wake-up/shut-off when you open and close the cover is a nice feature.

(Why did I spend $36 when I could have gotten a case much cheaper? It says “Kindle” on the cover and not some other random brand. If I’m going to put my device in a case, the case needs to be either featureless or branded for the device and not for whatever random company makes the case. Yes, I know that’s dumb. It’s how my brain works. That’s my original Paperwhite case under the new one up there, and you’ll notice there are no words on it.)

Battery life is going to be excellent– I’m not sure how long I spent reading that book, but it only ran the battery down to 81%. It says that “typical reading time” is just under 14 hours, but I don’t know if that’s how long I took in my one read or what. I was annoyed by the Kindle displaying when certain passages had been annotated by a ton of other people, but I was able to turn that off.

I spent a pleasant half-hour today rearranging my wish list on Amazon, moving fiction books by new authors into a new “Kindle Wish List” section, keeping books I know I want in print and nonfiction on my original wish list. I’m going to need to get into the habit of deciding I Shall Read A Kindle Book Now and buying the book right then from my wish list, because I still don’t like how this thing displays your library and anything I download and don’t read immediately is going to get lost. That will require a bit of an adjustment, but at least I know the reading part is going to work, and that’s good.

(Two more quick things: I just started Ron Chernow’s Mark Twain today, and it’s 1200 pages, and after holding it for a while I damn near shelled out another $17 to get a digital version that wasn’t going to torture my hands as much. I may still cave, we’ll see. Also, Bedlam Bride is unfairly fucking good; it’s the best book of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series so far, and as I’ve said repeatedly DCC already didn’t have any right to be as good as it is. I only have one book from the series left and then I have to wait for the rest of them to come out. I’m not happy about it.)

#REVIEW: The Bone Raiders, by Jackson Ford

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews5 Comments

Man, this was a lot of fun.

It may be that there’s no cliché less true than “You can’t judge a book by its cover.” You not only absolutely can judge a book by its cover, you are supposed to. That’s what the cover is for! It’s to attract peoples’ attention, particularly those kind of people who are likely to enjoy the book.

And let me tell you something: I absolutely encourage you to judge Jackson Ford’s The Bone Raiders by its cover. Five badass-looking women of color holding weapons and a fire-breathing technically-not-a-dragon in the background? Sold. Gimme. We’re done. I don’t quite get why they decided to put the Billy Joel quote on the cover, but that’s not just my biggest gripe about the cover, it’s my biggest gripe about the book. Because this book is everything that you think it is upon looking at that cover, except maybe a little smarter than you’re expecting. I’m super psyched that it’s a trilogy, because I want more of these characters and more of this world, which can be fairly boiled down to “Mongols during the time of Genghis Khan, but dragons and feminism,” and that’s really all I need.

(Every POV character is a woman except for the first and last chapters; the first chapter is an okey-doke and the last chapter is a tease for the next book. There are hardly any men with dialogue. I can’t believe a guy wrote this, to be honest.)

But yeah. This is one of those reviews where I don’t need to belabor the point at all. Violence and humor and violence and world building and violence and lesbians and violence and rebellions and violence and family drama and violence and … animal husbandry. If you’re remotely interested in a book with that cover, go grab it right now. You will be well rewarded. I want the sequel, and I want it tomorrow.

Go get it.

Two quick book reviews

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews5 Comments

I am in a horrendous mood, as the world is continuing to go to shit and nothing seems to be able to stop it or even slow it down, but there are still books out there, so I may as well talk about them. I don’t have the energy to make a full post about either of these so let’s just do a couple quick paragraphs each and call it a day.

Samantha Downing’s Too Old For This is a book about a serial killer forced out of retirement when a documentarian comes calling who wants to make a series about her. She was never actually brought to trial for her crimes, but changed her name and moved across the country anyway, and she’s less than interested in someone dragging all of that back into the light again.

She’s in her seventies, by the way.

This book ended up being lightweight and quick and more fun than it probably had any right to be, as Lottie Jones’ life keeps getting upended more and more as she attempts to cover for her crimes– both the old ones before she moved away and the new ones she has to keep committing as she keeps making mistakes that wouldn’t have mattered when she was killing people decades ago but are a bit of a problem in an era of near-constant surveillance by our own possessions. I can imagine a reader who is bothered by the fact that the protagonist is an unrepentant serial killer who we’re more or less expected to like, or at least enjoy reading about, but I’m not that reader and I had fun with this. I may look into more of Samantha Downing’s work if I ever allow myself to buy books again.

So, yeah, okay, I finished it, and it’s a thousand pages long and I have a full-time job and I still finished it in less than a week, and because of that I can’t really call it bad, but … if you weren’t going to buy this anyway, don’t let anyone talk you into it. SenLinYu is a perfectly cromulent author and no one would ever read this book and figure out on their own that it was originally brought into the world as Harry Potter fanfiction, but it’s way overhyped, at least from my perspective. I keep seeing videos about people who were in tears for the last two hundred pages or whatever, and I feel like these people need pets or significant others or something, because in the end it’s just a book and it’s being treated like a life-altering event online. I said in my first post that I was buying this out of FOMO, and I’ve got to stop doing that. I’m never going to be missing out if I don’t read a book TikTok likes.

(I deleted the app again today; we’ll see how long it lasts this time.)

Again, it’s not awful, but it’s definitely romantasy despite all the people insisting that no, it’s dark fantasy— I’m pretty sure “dark fantasy” is just romantasy with at least one rape scene to these people– and I’m tired of romantasy as a genre. It’ll look good on my shelf, and I didn’t hate it like I figured I would, but those are the best things I have to say about it.