Book of the Month is going to be Shannon Chakraborty’s The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, with The Fury of the Gods, In the Hour of Crows and The God and the Gumiho nipping at its heels.
Tag: fantasy books
#REVIEW: The Drowning Empire series, by Andrea Stewart
Brace yourself, if you wish, for the rarest of all things from me: a mixed review of a book series. The majority of the time if I write a review of something it’s because I enjoyed it. After a lifetime of reading, I like most of the books I read, mostly because I know my tastes by now, there are lots of books, and for better or for worse I simply don’t experiment enough to be buying a lot of books that I’m not going to enjoy. I don’t like shitting on authors, either, so I’m not likely to write a review of a bad book unless I really hate it, or at the very least I think my dislike of it can be entertaining to someone. So mixed reviews simply don’t happen that often because I don’t feel the need to bother. The thing is, I read this entire series, all 1800 pages or so of it, over the course of October and I feel like it’s worth talking about.
Here’s the tl;dr: I enjoyed these books enough to read all three of them, and they’re certainly not bad, but worldbuilding and character issues drag the series down.
Spoilers, but only as necessary, and I’ll try to avoid mentioning major twists.
The series starts off well with The Bone Shard Daughter, easily the strongest of the series. Lin is the daughter of the emperor, who has been ruler of the Phoenix Empire for decades. The Phoenix Empire is a series of islands, and if this world includes any sort of mainland it’s never really mentioned. The emperor is a master of bone shard magic, which involves taking a small piece of the skull (!) of every citizen once they reach early adolescence. The shards are used to make constructs, which are basically Frankensteined animals. Instructions are written on the shards that basically constitute programming for the constructs; some simple ones only have a few but others can be much more complicated. Also, if your shard is used to power a construct, it will eventually kill you, and the construct will stop working once you die. Minor problem. I know. The emperor is stubbornly refusing to either name his daughter his heir– he has a male student who is also a candidate for the role– or to teach her bone shard magic, and a lot of the first book is dedicated to Lin sneaking around and teaching herself magic.
Oh, and Lin has lost a lot of her memory, as has the student, and the fact that he seems to be working harder to regain his memories is one of the points in his favor for some reason.
Also, occasionally the islands just … sink. Killing everyone on them, as you might imagine. It’s bad. But the main conflict of the first book, despite the presence of four other POV characters, is Lin’s relationship with her father and her attempts to get him to take her seriously. And the first book is genuinely good! I five-starred it, and I don’t regret it; it’s not until the second and third books that the series’ problems become more apparent.
Specifically, Lin becomes emperor through means I won’t reveal, and … it becomes real clear real fast that Lin doesn’t really know why she wants to be emperor, and she’s not very good at being emperor, and there are a whole lot– a whole lot, the refusal of the series to settle on a single villain is one of its problems– of people who think the entire dynasty just needs to go away. Lin ends the tithe (the process of taking bone shards) and in the process the book kind of unceremoniously abandons a lot of what made it cool.
The constructs are part of the problem. The book makes it clear (at first, at least) that the emperor is the only person who really understands bone shard magic, right, so the fact that there are thousands and thousands of constructs out there is kind of a problem, because you really feel like the guy didn’t have time to do anything but churn out constructs all the Goddamn time, and despite the constant harping about ending the dynasty there really seems to be very little that the emperor needs to do. Stewart seems to be aware that the islands need some sort of economy so that the emperor can worry about trade, and she’s invented two things: a stone called witstone and caro nuts.
It was never clear exactly what witstone was or how it was used other than people were constantly whining about needing to mine it (there is a running theory that overmining is related to the islands sinking) and it occasionally powering boats. Sometimes they’re very upset about running out of it. It feels like Stewart wants you to think that witstone is magical (and calling it witstone will never make any sense) but it’s basically just … coal. Like, I have no idea why she didn’t just call it coal, and if it’s different from coal somehow it’s never made clear how.
Caro nuts. God, caro nuts. Caro nuts are mentioned, conservatively, a couple hundred times across the trilogy. Islands need more caro nuts. Islands sink that were a source of caro nuts. Okay, I’ll do this, but you have to share your caro nut stash. Oh no they have stolen our caro nuts.
“Caro nuts” can cure “bog cough.” If they’re useful for anything else I’m not aware of it.
Bogs, by the way, are an ecological niche typically found in cooler northern climates– Scotland, for example– and not tropical islands.
No one will get bog cough at any point in the series. In fact, I’m pretty sure there is literally never an actual caro nut touched, handled, stolen, eaten or sold by any character during the series. We’re repeatedly told bog cough can be fatal and that people off-camera are getting it because it’s the rainy season. It’s completely off-camera. We don’t even meet any side characters with it. No survivors. No characters are, like, nurses or doctors or anything. The book just talks about caro nuts fucking endlessly because the emperor needs to be responsible for something and sure let’s make distribution of caro nuts a huge fucking deal.
One of the POV characters spends the entire first book searching for his (presumably dead) wife, who will never be mentioned or thought about again after the first book. By the third book he spends most of his page time hating himself, and really I didn’t blame him because he was annoying the piss out of me.
The first half of the third book is spent in a quest for a magical (sort of) sword, one of, we’re told, seven, even though only about four ever show up. The sword is tossed into the ocean in a standoff about five pages after it is found, and they were very much not looking for it so that they could destroy it.
Eventually two of the characters will adopt a “gutter orphan.” Every orphan mentioned in the book is a “gutter orphan,” which starts to feel really squicky after a while. I would think if Lin wanted to get the people behind her maybe opening up some orphanages might be a good idea, but the book is so unconcerned with the lives of actual people that it’s hard to really know how many of them there are. At any rate, the massive refugee problem caused by the sinking islands, which simultaneously kill everyone on them and create refugees, is probably adding to the number of orphans.
I dunno, y’all. The first book really isn’t bad at all, but none of the problems that you might find in it are going to go away, and while some of the mysteries get explained none of them really get explained in a way that helps— every unraveled mystery just leads to more questions, and the decisions the characters make get more and more inexplicable as the series goes on. Lin herself goes from being easily the most interesting character, to the point where I haven’t even really named anyone else yet, to someone who constantly makes the wrong decisions and then endlessly second-guesses herself about them. She changes her mind about something at the end of the series that she has literally been arguing against for two and a half books.
But there’s still some compelling stuff here– a lot of the characters eventually get animal companions of a sort, and they are universally a lot of fun, just for example– or I’d not have finished the series, and it wasn’t really a case of good will from the first book lingering on. Frankly, I’m looking for excuses to bail on books right now– my unread shelf remains entirely out of control. The verdict, ultimately: The Bone Shard Daughter is very much worth reading, but let it sit for a month or so after you read it, and if you’re still thinking about it, go ahead and pick up the rest of the series. Just be aware that you’ve hit the high point already.
#REVIEW: The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, by Shannon Chakraborty
I have, I believe, read everything Shannon Chakraborty has in print, or at least the three major novels and companion novella in her Daevabad Trilogy; if she has anything else out there other than maybe some short stories here and there, I’m not aware of them. I liked the Daevabad books enough that I read all of them, of course, but I’d characterize all of them as slower reads; her books have always taken me longer to read than pure word count might indicate, and something about them never quite fully clicked with me. If someone asked me about the series, I’d say something sort of generically positive rather than jumping in with both feet.
I had no idea that she had The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi in her.
I am writing this at work in between bouts of having Things to Do, as I wasn’t able to finish the book until last night, although I feel like this is substantially the exact same review if I had written it a couple of days ago when I had 200 pages left. This is another “take a look at that cover” book. See the pirate ship? Being attacked by something huge and tentacular? Okay. It’s that book. Amina al-Sirafi is a pirate. Retired, at least at the beginning, but a pirate. She’s a mom. She only sorta gets along with her mom. And then she gets handed a job: rescue the daughter of a local noble from her kidnapper, with an enormous reward at stake, and it’s time to put the band back together and go unleash hell.
God, I loved it. I loved every page. This book puts its foot on the gas at about the 100-page mark and it just absolutely does not let up until the very end, and there are pirates and sea monsters and other pirates and magicians and sea monsters and rakshasha and a couple of wry references to Daevabad— the book is technically set in the same universe but 1000 years earlier, and you absolutely don’t need to know anything about Daevabad to read it– and more sea monsters and zombie-things and magic pearls that aren’t pearls and gods and goddesses and celestial bird-thing courts and it is probably not literally a perfect book but it is definitely a perfect book for me and it’s going to be very high on my top 10 list at the end of the year.
Go read it right now.
Free writing advice
I am going to deliberately not use the name of the book I just finished, either in the title or in the body of the review itself. I have sprinkled clues here and there, however! I didn’t like this book at all, and I feel like talking about what the book did wrong, but I don’t just want to shit all over it. It has this weird enthusiasm to it that got me through 740 pages in, like, two days. It’s not entirely shit! It’s just … not very goddamned good.
So. Let’s provide some advice to authors.
- Don’t base your magic system on dragon shit. That’s not a fucking joke. The magic system in this book series is based on gunpowder made from dragon shit. Gunpowder made from certain different kinds of dragon shit has different magical effects. None of them make any fucking sense. Gunpowder made from dragon shit doesn’t make things float. Other gunpowders made from dragon shit don’t make light or darkness or Jesus Christ the magic system is so fucking dumb.
- If you’re going to load a fuckton of exposition in the first chapter, don’t put it in the middle of a chase scene. Because for fuck’s sake you guys are running for your lives please stop fucking explaining things to each other that you already know. This was shitty anime levels of overexplaining and while the dialogue was at its worst in the first chapter it never really got much better.
- Your main character should have a personality.
- Your main character’s long lost love that he’s obsessed with should be interesting. Imagine having someone built up for hundreds of pages as your MC’s Lost Eternal Love and then when she shows up she’s, like, a cashier or something. And “cashier” is her personality, not just me taking a shot at a job that for the record I have had.
- Don’t introduce fucking time travel into your plot with just a hundred pages left. Because that happened. The entire resolution to the book suddenly involved time travel. Fucking stupid dragon-shit-based time travel.
- If you spend half the book worrying about who betrayed you, the betrayer has to have been mentioned in the book. Two of the three MCs suspect each other or the third MC of betraying them and feeding information to the king. It turns out to be some random shopkeeper who overheard them and — get this — set up a listening device in the chimney so she could feed information to the king. Bullshit.
- Pick an adversary. You can have an evil king or a zombie disease or a big heist but if you’re going to try and cram all of those things in you probably ought to decide who the big bad actually is. It was never clear what the big heist was for– mainly because the guy behind the heist refused to tell anyone– and then he died and the payoff just fucking sucked all around.
- Did I mention the dragon shit. There is a hundred pages dedicated to feeding a dragon some stolen dragon shell that used to be part of the king’s crown and “regalia” and then following it around and waiting for it to take a shit.
- You can only say “ruse” so many times before it loses all meaning. The main character apparently doesn’t like being called a con artist? So it’s a “ruse”? His cunning attempt to trick me becomes annoying after the 3,000th use.
- Your title should make sense. Does that title imply anything to you? That thing doesn’t happen. Not once, not a thousand times. There is one reference late in the book to a thousand people, specifically, dying, but if that is what the title is based on an editor should have stepped on it. It’s a great title! Has fucking nothing whatsoever to do with the book.
- Your love relationships should make sense. They all suck. You can only lie to someone, directly to their faces, so many times before they refuse to put up with your shit any longer.
- No one spends as much time thinking about their own name as the main character of this book does. It’s like the author was really, really proud of the name and felt the need to repeatedly explain what it means. It’s a noun! I know what it means!
- If you aren’t writing a Star Wars book, you don’t get to use Star Wars names. I have never read anything with stupider names, front to back. Absolutely awful. I’m not going to go into the other room and get the book to find examples but literally just put some clumps of letters together and you’ll have a name from this book. Unk Sphyz. Worx Bormfork. Shibble Knif. Goddamned awful.
- Put the story in the story. The number of times that a chapter would end with the characters going off to Do Something and then jump, at the beginning of the next chapter, to after they had done that thing was fucking unacceptable.
- Dragon. Shit.
God, there’s more, but I two-starred this on Goodreads and the more I think about it the more I want to go back and change it to one. That second point is just for enthusiasm. If this book made a whole bunch of right turns where it chose to make left turns it might have been a good book, and I can almost see where this author might be writing stuff I like in the future. But Christ, this book was a Goddamned mess.
Pfah.
#REVIEW: Blood at the Root, by LaDarrion Williams
This is another one of those “See that cover? Go buy this book” types of reviews. Because … damn.
They say that authors nowadays need a social media presence in order to sell any books, and, well, I’m only aware of Blood at the Root because the TikTok algorithm put LaDarrion Williams in front of my face over and over again until I caved and ordered his book. And Williams is refreshingly direct about why he wrote this book: there aren’t enough Black boys in fantasy books, and so he wrote a fantasy book with a Black boy as the main character. Or, a Black young man at least, as Malik is 17 at the beginning of the book. Which, come to think of it, I don’t remember him having a birthday during the book, so he’s an awfully young college freshman, but I think he mentioned finishing school early at some point, so it’s probably fine.
I am certain that I’m not the first person to describe Blood at the Root as “Harry Potter at an HBCU.” In fact, I’m pretty sure the author himself has used that formulation. And, honestly, for the first half of the book or so, it’s a little bit too much Harry Potter at an HBCU, to be honest with you. You will literally be going through this book saying “Okay, here’s Hermione, and this guy is probably Draco, and that guy is definitely Snape, and oh! look! Death Eaters!” and so on and so forth. The first half is very, very tropey, in a way that I was willing to let slide because 1) the book is YA and 2) the actual intended market of the book is Black boys who don’t read much, so, y’know, the repeated tropes from other books that they haven’t read isn’t going to bother them, right? But it’s definitely there and it would be kind of ridiculous to not take note of it.(*)
That said, Harry Potter at an HBCU in Louisiana with a Black male lead is going to be pretty distinct from the Daniel Radcliffe books no matter how much it borrows, and the freshness of Williams’ Afro-Haitian mix of magics and characters is enough to carry you through the first half. Malik himself is a great character; I recognize this kid, and I’ve had to teach him math in the past, and his relationships with the other characters in the book, particularly his younger foster brother Taye and his childhood friend Alexis are tremendously well-drawn.
And then that second half hits, and you discover that all that emotional investment in the characters is about to be used against you, and the number of twists and turns and betrayals is head-spinning. Like, I don’t cry when reading books, and to a large extent I don’t understand people who claim that books make them cry all the time, but if I was a crier this one would have gotten me at at least two or three entirely distinct points.
The book definitely has some weak points, and there are bits and bobs here and there where you can tell it’s a debut novel, but it ends so well that I can’t help but strongly recommend it. I’m not sure when the sequel comes out, but I’m sure TikTok will let me know, and I’ll have it on day one. Check it out.
(*) Not that I think anyone’s going to call me out on it, but I want to point out that all of the punctuation in that sentence is exactly where I want it to be. “Black boys who don’t read much” and not “Black boys, who don’t read much”. Thank you.
In which your book sucks and you probably do too
Here’s how to write a book I’m not going to like:
- Start with what sounds like a promising premise. No, really– I’ll not like your book more if I originally thought I was going to enjoy it, and I have to start reading your book before I can realize how bad it is. So you actually need to do something cool with at least the basic setting of your book to get me to pick it up in the first place. Don’t worry– I like lots of different kinds of things, so “interesting setting” isn’t actually that high of a bar to clear. Alternatively, have someone I like and/or respect recommend your book, or even just catch me in the right mood and I’ll start reading.
- Once you’ve got your basic setting, don’t do any more thinking about it at all. It may be that bits of your setting don’t quite make basic sense. That’s okay! People who like for their fantasy books to hang together coherently are few and far between, and besides, why would you want to overthink things? Just say whatever you want. So long as it’s badass, it’s okay, right?
- Women don’t read books, and neither do men who like women, so there’s no reason to pay any attention to your female characters, make them realistic, or really use them as anything other than sex objects and/or punching bags. Sometimes at the same time!
- Rape is Realistic, which means it’s okay to have it in your book all the goddamn time. Pay no attention to the part where “realism” is not demanded in any other aspect of your writing. Women Back Then had to worry about being raped, so the male characters in your book should all be rapists and the women should all worry about rape all the time– unless they’re sluts, in which case it’s impossible to rape them anyway.
Ladies and gentlemen, let’s list the sins of Peter V. Brett’s The Warded Man:
- It’s actually pretty well-written on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph level. This actually ends up being critical to getting me to hate it, because had it been poorly written in addition to being crap (let’s assume for the sake of argument that we can actually treat these as being separate characteristics) I would have abandoned it much earlier and thus it would not have had the chance to piss me off as much as it did.
- The setting is thus: There are demons in the world, called Corelings, and they come up out of the ground every night to wreak havoc on the world and Kill All Humans! The world is thus very dangerous to everyone, and human society is more or less on the brink of extinction. The Corelings are winning, in other words. The sun drives them off, so daytime is safe, but being outside after dark is basically fatal. Corelings can be driven away by use of a set of magical symbols called Wards, but Wards can be fragile (step on one, and it loses its magic, for example) and making them correctly is difficult. This is actually a decently intriguing setup for a novel and got me about halfway through the book. However?
- He didn’t put a single damn second of thought into it beyond that. You know what every human habitation would have if the world worked like this? Walls. You’d build the walls before you put buildings inside them, and you’d carve your wards into something as permanent as possible and put them on the walls. Portable rope-and-board warding circles exist, so if you were trying to build a settlement at Point B you could put most of the wall together at Point A and then transport it so that you could get them set up quickly.
- Clothing would have wards on it– if wards couldn’t be worked into cloth for some reason, people would be wearing more permanent garments– helmets, for example, or maybe bracers of some kind– that could have wards carved into them. The author appears to have never thought of this idea, which I started wondering about maybe twenty pages into the book. The idea’s really obvious, honestly; you’d think he’d at least have had a sentence or two where he explained why this can’t work.
- Corelings can’t rise through worked stone. This would tend to suggest that most towns at least have a central area with cobblestones so someplace is safe from them. They don’t.
- “Hey, what about tattoos?” you might be thinking right about now, having learned about this scenario two minutes ago. It apparently took hundreds of years of being constantly killed by these things before one of the main characters comes up with the idea of actually tattooing a ward onto himself. Which not only works, but turns him into a demon-fighting ninja straight out of a Rob Liefeld comic book from 1995. And a thoroughly dislikeable one, too, even though previously he was an interesting character. Sadly, HIS PARENTS ARE DEAD!!! which means he smolders with generic rage.
- In addition to the defensive wards (one of which, by the way, inexplicably hardens glass to be like steel, even though every other ward does something to demons) there are offensive wards that you can put on weapons to help you fight demons; otherwise, they’re basically invulnerable. They were lost, though– all of them, so long ago that many people don’t believe they existed, even though none of the defensive wards were lost. This is both possible and makes sense… somehow. Until the main character finds a spear in a tomb, cracks the wards, pledges to start making weapons with those wards for everyone, and then… just doesn’t, for some reason, in favor of becoming Tattooed Demon Batman.
- There are three main characters. One is Tattooed Demon Batman. The other is boring. The third is a girl, with big tits, who spends the entire book avoiding rapists– like, literally, at one point she surreptitiously doses a guy’s food with some sort of impotence drug because she’s traveling with him (not a lot of room in a tent inside a portable ward ring) and she knows he’s going to rape her. He’s real open about it– if she needs his help, she’s giving up some nappy dugout. Charmingly, after spending the entire night trying to fuck her and being unable to get it up, he tells her he’ll kill her if she tells anyone about it. This doesn’t stop her from considering asking him to help her again later on in the book.
- With about a hundred pages left, she’s brutally gangraped. For no fucking reason at all other than apparently Peter Brett figured something awful needed to happen to her. Did I mention she was a virgin? Because of course she was.
- Ten pages after that (maybe not exactly, but close enough) she fucks Tattooed Demon Batman, who she’s just met, because that’s what rape victims do. Tattooed Demon Batman and Other Boring Dude kill two of the three rapists by stealing their warding circle (roll with it) but the book makes sure to mention that the big scary one of the three rapists doesn’t appear to be among the bodies.
- Throw in several chapters of slut-shaming, too, and three mothers– one a cheating, emasculating harridan and two whose purposes in the narrative are to die horribly so that their sons can feel bad about it. The only semi-positive female character is a Wise Old Crone. No, really, I’m serious.
This book fucking sucked and you should not read it, and Peter V. Brett should feel bad for having written it. The worst bit is that I could easily keep complaining for another thousand words but the boy just woke up so I have to go.