Category Archives: Challenges

Revenge of the Elf

Book Review of Revenge of the Elf (Nysta, #1), by Lucas Thorn

NystaIn June of 2012, I picked Lucas Thorn‘s fantasy novel, The Revenge of the Elf from the Amazon free list.

Description from Goodreads:
Nysta is a new kind of elf.

When nine killers rode out of the homestead with blood fresh on their hands, they reckoned that would be the end of it.

The lost spellslinger was looking for a way out. He figured Nysta could lead him to the safety of a town called Spikewrist. And then there was the tragic creature born in the darkest shadows of legend. He reckoned she would fight the greatest fight of all.

But none of them counted on the violence she would unleash. Because in the Deadlands there is no forgiveness. No mercy.

Winter in the Deadlands could be cold. But the revenge of an elf would be colder.

 Review:
I  went into this book with high hopes of a strong,  kick-ass female warrior. And I had reason to. The following is from the latter half of the Author’s Note:

Nysta is certainly the culmination of many years of dissatisfaction in the presentation of female characters in fantasy.

As such, Nysta will never heal anyone with amazing healing powers. She will never drink tea and discuss dresses. She will not stand back and watch her boyfriend fight the monster.

She will not be rescued by the hero, because in my book, she IS the hero.

And in some ways Nysta is bad-ass. She’s certainly skilled with a blade or two (dozen). But that’s not really the same thing as strong. I could excuse all the tears and even the way her thoughts are scattered one moment and obsessive the next; she’s grieving the loss of the love of her life, after-all. (And Talek seemed wonderful and worthy of her love.)

But the author fell into the same trite trap as many others when he made her a victim of sexual abuse and circumstantially forced prostitution as a child (starting as young as seven presumably). The book also starts with rape threats and whoring comes up frequently in conversation or insults. Nysta’s very ashamed of what she had to do to survive and when discussing this history is the only time in the book that she feels fragile. I swear authors, there really are other ways for women to become strong. But you would never know it from reading fiction. How very pat.

I wouldn’t even mention it, since it’s basically the norm. Except that Thorn made it apparent in the above note that he was aiming to break the pattern of women’s presentation in fantasy. Then why go with a plot device so overused as to have become cliché? Men don’t have to be victims before they can become strong. They don’t need that forging process and frankly neither did Nysta.

What’s more, Nysta’s presumed strength is of a very male sort. She can kill more people than the next guy therefore she must be strong. But I would argue that’s skill and something else entirely. Internal strength needs to based on something more and Nysta lacks that. To paraphrase Chukshene, she’s still just that scared little girl, servicing some minor noble on her knees in a dirty back alley.

So, I’ll give it half marks for my hope of a strong, kick-ass woman warrior. She’s kick-ass sure, but she didn’t strike me as strong in any sense but the muscular type. Disappointing, to say the least.

The book also has a cool cover. But again, being as Thorn apparently wants to widen women’s available and acceptable place in fantasy, I should ask why she’s half-naked. Especially considering the book is set in winter and she’s fully dressed in leather armour and a full length, fur-lined cape (mostly even with the hood up) for the entirety of the book. Again, for someone trying to break new ground, Thorn keeps falling into disappointingly well-trodden paths.

As for the rest of the story, I’ll give it half marks too, because I liked it in a lot of ways, but feel very little compulsion to continue the series. For one, Thorn has a tendency to overuse things. Nysta, and to a lesser degree Chukshene, have a habit of dropping puns and one-liners. At first, it was funny. Then I couldn’t decide if it was genius or just cheesy. By the end and the 100th such occurrence, I’d started imagining a ‘ba-da-bum’ and a laugh-track in my mind each time one of the characters dropped a clanger. It had been wholly reduced to Dad Joke level humour and definitely fell on the super-cheese side of the equation. Same thing with Nysta’s constant threats and Chukshene’s endless needling, it was effective in the beginning but just disruptive to the narrative by the end.

And the end, or lack there of, is one of the biggest reasons I don’t think I’ll continue this series unless I come across the sequel as a freebie. The whole plot of this book is set up by the blurb to be about Nysta hunting down and killing her husband’s murderers. However, she doesn’t find them until about 80% into the book. Then there is about a one-page altercation in which most of them escape. That’s it. That’s the entirety of the fight between her and the men she’s hunting.

She fights some robbers, some zombie type things, walks, rides a horse, cries, refuses to eat, talks and talks and talks, but she doesn’t fight the Bloody Nine much at all. Then, just at the end something else entirely happens, opening the plot to a much wider path and the book ends.

You don’t get the satisfaction of seeing Talek’s killers caught or much of a sense of vindication on seeing them realise that Nysta isn’t ‘just a whore’ but a dangerous killer they should fear. You don’t know what’s possessed Nysta (she’s unconscious at the end). You don’t know why Chukshene is sticking with her. You don’t have much more than a hint at where the series is headed. It’s just one big question-mark, making this whole book feel like little more than a prologue to something more. It is not a stand-alone book.

The writing itself is pretty good. Mechanically readable with believable dialogue (outside of the puns). There were a couple editing hiccups, but not enough to bother me. I was confused with the world-building. The author does set up a rather complex religious and political landscape, but it’s set up, not described or explored. So, I only ever had a vague understanding of it. It was enough to follow the story, but not enough to feel fully invested in it.

The author also seems to have an odd attachment to spiders. Chukshene runs with his knees too high, like an injured spider. A hill looks like a spider squatting. Runes looked like spiders dancing. Someone is described as cold, like a spider. Plus, apparently Chukshene just doesn’t like them and they can get as big as a hand. I second Chukshene here, hate them, so I notice these things.

All-in-all, if I had gone into this book with different or no expectations, I might not be as disappointed with it as I am. It’s not a bad book, a lot better than many indies I’ve read. But I really wanted that strong warrior Thorn promised in the beginning and I didn’t find her.  (Maybe we just have very different ideas of what makes a woman strong, but I still finished in a sulk.)

And as one finale snarky side comment, though she never drank tea, Nysta did in fact discuss a dress, a red one. Maybe not in the ‘I’m a pretty-pretty princess’ way a lot of fantasy, especially YA fantasy (which this is not, it’s harsh, violent and gritty, with lots of cursing—none of which I mind) does when they want to let a man provide the woman with the femininity she’s obviously lacking by being a fighter, but still there was a dress, it was discussed.

The Urchin

Book Review of The Urchin, by Adrianne Ambrose

The UrchinI nabbed a copy of Adrianne Ambrose’s book, The Urchin, from the Amazon free list.

Description from Goodreads:
Since the End came, leaving the United States a confused and desolate wasteland, what is left of society has been trying to pick up the pieces and put itself back together. Nick Miller is willing to do whatever it takes, and is flying a top-secret mission over the devastation when he is forced to make a crash landing. Luckily, he is rescued by the brooding, enigmatic Vance Amherst and his dubious crew of teenage boys, who are eking out an existence in the remains of their boarding school. But Nick quickly realizes that something is very wrong at Stanton Academy: the school has been turned into a fortress bristling with giant spikes; the boys, armed to the teeth with wooden stakes, exude a desperate, fearful discipline; the teaching staff is conspicuously absent. And night is falling…

Review:
I was quite impressed by this book. I can’t say I liked all of it, I never quite warmed up to Nick, for example, but I enjoyed the read. I loved Vance as a lead and Johnny as a motivating side character. Some of the other boys also really snagged my heart, most notably Martin.

I also liked the idea of a group of ~8-17 year old boys surviving in a vampire infested, post-apocalyptic America. They’re barely fending off a shift toward Lord of the Flies-like behaviour. Really, just one boy/man is standing between them and self-destruction and then one incredibly selfish boy/man drops out of the sky, decides he knows what’s best for all of them and disrupts the balance, leading to chaos and ruin. Lending a bit of admirable grey to the story is the fact that his motives are selfish, but he’s also not entirely wrong.

I’m always thrilled to find a little room for moral ambiguity in a story and Nick provided that, as did the ending. Was it a happy one? It depends on whose ending you’re looking at. I think Vance and Johnny had a happy ending, probably Nick and Dave, too. But Martin and the boys? Maybe not so much. It’s hard to say for sure and I like that a lot.

I did have an issue with…well, how to say this without a spoiler…there was a deception at one point and the perpetrator of this deception has to act in accordance with it, obviously. But we’re treated to his internal dialogue, which also runs along the same lines of the deception. It was unbelievable to me that he would internalise it to the point of even thinking to himself as if he’s done as he’s pretending. Yes, it more effectively led the reader to believe the lie, so that the reveal is not totally obvious, but if you think about it, it feels wrong.

The book was also in need of further editing. It was readable and I’ve definitely seen worse, but there were some copy edit mishaps, some head-hopping and one scene (with Dave, under the trebuchet) that doesn’t seem to correlate to the rest of the book. It might have been a dream (or an act, maybe), but if so, I don’t know whose.

All in all, however, Ambrose is a most impressive writer and I’ll be looking for more of her work.

The First Noble Truth

Book Review of The First Noble Truth, by C. Lynn Murphy

The First Noble TruthAuthor, C. Lynn Murphy sent me an ecopy of her novel, The First Noble Truth.

Description from Goodreads:
Machiko Yamamoto pulls out her hair, picks at her skin, and triple checks the locks to the house behind the school where she works. When a foreigner moves into a neighboring thatched roof cottage, she quickly falls in love with the quiet woman with the mangled hand. 

Krista Black does not mind the weekly visits from the local English teacher. The scarred woman seems harmless, but she always wants to talk about travel and language and why Krista has come to the remote, Japanese village. Krista avoids her questions. She has seen much of the world, and she knows what it does to fragile people. Machiko may want to know her, but she could never understand her. 

Set in Kyoto, New England, Africa and Kathmandu, THE FIRST NOBLE TRUTH is a story of redemption, interwoven between two protagonists, across two cultures. It peers beneath the comfort of expected storytelling to investigate the dualities of suffering and joy, religion and sex, and cruelty and kindness.

Review:
This book is, first and foremost, beautiful. The use of language is absolutely breathtaking. Yes, some would say it’s fully purple, overly detailed and clarity is compromised for poetic effect, and it’s occasionally true. But less often than one would expect, considering. This is the sort of book you can slow down and read just for the sheer joy of feeling the rhythm of the words sliding over your tongue as it slowly builds itself into something substantial.

The plot does wander at times, taking long detours into the interesting but largely irrelevant lives of side characters and such. Further, the use of both first and third person narratives was an interesting one. If I had to choose one main character, it would be Machiko, the third person narrative (which seems wrong to start with). The story is set in her third person present, with most of Krista’s first person narrative being of past events. And they often felt like strange detours themselves, not becoming relevant until the very end when the two women’s lives finally truly intersected.

Thus, I felt I knew what made Krista Krista, but didn’t interact with her present self enough to connect to her character. As if all that history was actually a third character. While so much of Machiko’s internal thought process was explained, I knew her present self well, but not much of what made up her character outside of her Trichotillomania. Though it’s worth noting that Murphy’s descriptions of Machiko’s compulsions were enough to make me want to pick my skin and pull my hair. I definitely related to the character’s tendencies more than I should have been able to.

One of my favourite aspects of this book is all the wonderful characters who provided amazing love and support to the two main characters. I think it’s rare to find a book with no easily identifiable villain and in which authors manage to create believable bonds of friendship and family. It endeared them all to me.

The story itself is heartbreaking, if subtle. Sorrow and suffering is the underlying theme of the book and it’s not hidden. The two women lead very different lives, with very different causes for their different types of suffering. But neither is less legitimate than the other. And in the end, the reader is left with what is probably the only ray of hope in the whole book. (Yes, I cried.)

This is definitely a book worth picking up and taking your time with.