Tag Archives: magic

Book Review of Beasts of the Walking City, by Del Law

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You know I love books. I love everything about books. I really do. I have thousands and thousands of them. (Thank you e-readers for making that possible.) But there is a challenge inherent in having so very much of something you love. There are days when I just cant decide what to read. I spend more time scrolling through my To-Read list than I do reading whatever I eventually pick out.

And given this difficulty, sometime I’ll take any little nudge toward a book I can get. So, when my daughter came out of her bedroom recently in a new T-shirt her Nana sent her and I thought, “That looks oddly familiar. I’m sure I have that book,” a decision was made.

T-shirt

Here, have a look. Tell me I’m wrong. I mean, I know it’s not exact. But close enough for jazz, right?

Beasts of the Walking City

Anyhow, I picked up Beasts of the Walking City, by Del Law from Amazon when it was free. It’s been sitting on my Kindle for ages. Sometimes it takes an injection of randomness to bring something to the fore.

Description from Goodreads:
It’s not easy being a color-shifting, bourbon-loving Beast, even when you can travel between your own world and Earth’s past. Even when you’re working for the gangster Al Capone.

Now, Blackwell is on a one-way trip into the ruins of a flying city to steal an ancient craft from one of his world’s biggest gangster families—a family you just don’t want to cross. But the ship is just the beginning, and Blackwell isn’t prepared for everything that comes next. First, he’s hunted by a cult who wants to wipe his race out for good. Then, he’s a pawn stuck between powerful gangster families at each other’s throats. Who can he trust? There’s the beautiful and seductive double-agent named Mircada who will steal his heart? A huge fire-belching family kingpin named Nadrune who wants him for her pet? The mysterious woman Kjat, who loves him—and who’s filling up with crazy demons from another world? The crazed general who’s after him for revenge? (Not him, at least that’s pretty clear.) Then there’s the mystery of a legendary flower that once belonged to his race, a flower that might change the world—if only he can find it.

Review:
Hmmm, so-so; more good than bad, but not stellar. I generally liked this story. The bulk of the writing is fine. I certainly liked the idea and I think the characters. But it’s that, “I think” that is the problem. The author somehow managed to write a (mostly) first person, present tense book and still allow me to finish it feeling like I didn’t know the characters well. How is that even possible?

I say mostly because there are a lot of slip ups where the author dropped into third person or past tense writing instead of first person, present tense; sometime hitting all the variations in one sentence. There were also other copy-editing mistakes. The editing needed quite a bit more work.

I also thought the book felt overly long and I wasn’t always certain what was happening at any given moment. Plus, the whole inclusion of earth and earth items/people was awkward, distracting and not particularly well integrated into the story as a whole.

I’d read another book by Law, but this one felt a bit disjointed and cobbled together on the whole.

Isles of the Forsaken

Book Review of Isles of the Forsaken, by Carolyn Ives Gilman

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Isles of the ForsakenI borrowed Isles of the Forsaken, by Carolyn Ive Gilman from my local library.

Description from Goodreads:
The Forsaken Isles are on the brink of revolution. Three individuals are about to push it over the edge and trigger events that will lead to a final showdown between ancient forces and the new overlords of the land.

Review:
This was an interesting read with some intriguing complexity to the characters and a slow but engaging plot. I was a little uncomfortable with the Great White Savior set up though. And it is a set up, to come about in the next book, but by the end of Isles of the Forsaken I was a bit squinked out with Nathaway’s position. However, up to that point I’d found him pleasantly complex. He was naive and short sighted. He truly believed he was bringing a gift of the rule of law to the islanders and was completely blind to the destruction in his wake, because he simply couldn’t see that the cultures, beliefs and practices of peoples other than his own had value and place. He wasn’t malicious in any way, just utterly ethnocentric.

Then we have Harg, the reluctant hero. I have to admit the reluctant hero is one of my favorite tropes, which made Harg my favorite character. And he too has some complexity of character. An outsider among his own people and ready for a peaceful period in his life, he instead becomes the leader of a rebellion of the very people who largely deny him, while laying claim to his cause.

This tendency of people to greedily grasp at something that would happily be given if not demanded is a theme we see with Spaeth too. She’s desperate to give of herself for the people, but no one will stop demanding from her long enough to let her gift herself instead. It’s an interesting conundrum. The same actions make her a slave in one scenario and a savior in another. And she’s so young and innocent that she has trouble navigating this confusing terrain.

I admit I’m always sensitive to representations of women in novels. It’s hard for me to look at them as individual characters in individual novels and not as one more in a collective of female characters. But the wide-eyed, beautiful, innocent, overly sexual creature of femaleness (created for a man’s entertainment) felt very cliched to me. The impression only got worse when she was constantly protected from herself by the men around her and her will was eventually subjugated to a man while she was unconscious (which she woke up thrilled about, of course).

I’ll be reading book two to see where the rebellion goes. Honestly, there is a political rebellion underway here, but the whole book is about rebellion. Everyone is rebelling in their own way and that subtle, undercurrent of frisson is what’s kept me going even through the weird dream-like scenes and slow passages that pepper this otherwise interesting book.

Book Review of Royal Street and River Road, by Suzanne Johnson

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I borrowed the first two books of Suzanne Johnson‘s Sentinels of New Orleans series, Royal Street and River Road from my local library.

Royal Street

Description from Goodreads:
As the junior wizard sentinel for New Orleans, Drusilla Jaco’s job involves a lot more potion-mixing and pixie-retrieval than sniffing out supernatural bad guys like rogue vampires and lethal were-creatures. DJ’s boss and mentor, Gerald St. Simon, is the wizard tasked with protecting the city from anyone or anything that might slip over from the preternatural beyond.

Then Hurricane Katrina hammers New Orleans’ fragile levees, unleashing more than just dangerous flood waters.

While winds howled and Lake Pontchartrain surged, the borders between the modern city and the Otherworld crumbled. Now, the undead and the restless are roaming the Big Easy, and a serial killer with ties to voodoo is murdering the soldiers sent to help the city recover.

To make it worse, Gerry has gone missing, the wizards’ Elders have assigned a grenade-toting assassin as DJ’s new partner, and undead pirate Jean Lafitte wants to make her walk his plank. The search for Gerry and for the serial killer turns personal when DJ learns the hard way that loyalty requires sacrifice, allies come from the unlikeliest places, and duty mixed with love creates one bitter gumbo.

Review:
Entertaining, but lacking in pizzazz. This held my interest. I was never quite bored. But I was also never quite enthralled either. It felt a little flat. I thought Alex, the main love interest (there appear to be three) was a jerk. Jake, the second, was a caricature of a boy scout and Jean, the third, was the most interesting but least likely. Further, I saw no reason for three possible love interest, who all saw some mystery quality to this mousy, bland wizard. DJ, herself, never grabbed me. She seemed capable enough, for all she was under trained and kept in the dark for her whole life. But I just never related to her or cared for her much.

The fact that the events of the book happened during hurricanes Katrina and Rita could have been interesting, and I’ll admit it was handled respectfully, but I also felt like it was never fully engaged with. It was a plot device and little more and DJ came out of it amazingly unscathed.

The conclusion felt a little deus ex machina and rushed. But I’ll be reading the second in the series, so not a total bust.

River RoadDescription from Goodreads:
Hurricane Katrina is long gone, but the preternatural storm rages on in New Orleans. New species from the Beyond moved into Louisiana after the hurricane destroyed the borders between worlds, and it falls to wizard sentinel Drusilla Jaco and her partner, Alex Warin, to keep the preternaturals peaceful and the humans unaware. But a war is brewing between two clans of Cajun merpeople in Plaquemines Parish, and down in the swamp, DJ learns, there’s more stirring than angry mermen and the threat of a were-gator.

Wizards are dying, and something—or someone—from the Beyond is poisoning the waters of the mighty Mississippi, threatening the humans who live and work along the river. DJ and Alex must figure out what unearthly source is contaminating the water and who—or what—is killing the wizards. Is it a malcontented merman, the naughty nymph, or some other critter altogether? After all, DJ’s undead suitor, the pirate Jean Lafitte, knows his way around a body or two.

It’s anything but smooth sailing on the bayou as the Sentinels of New Orleans series continues.

Review:
My opinion of this book was much like that of the first in the series. I enjoyed it but found it a little on the flat side. Granted, less here than in the previous book, as there wasn’t so much time dedicated to self-discovery and whinging on DJ’s part. But there was still a lot of wandering about, going on dates, eating, etc, that slowed the pace.

Similarly, I’m still baffled about why we need three men actively pursuing her and the introduction of two more that will likely try in the future. It’s becoming a bit like a harem and I find that annoying and distracting. Especially since this isn’t primarily a romance, and she isn’t really all that impressive.

The mystery was interesting and kept my attention, though I thought having someone die because he was enthralled to the villain was an exact repeat of book one and the motivation for the murder seemed a bit weak. Lastly, there were three unaccounted-for years between the first book and this one. That’s a lot of time to pass without the reader knowing what happened. Ostensibly, DJ should have grown and improved at her job in that time. In fact, that seemed the only reason to let so much time pass. But she still seemed be floundering and hanging on by the skin of her teeth and all the men in her life seemed to have just been on pause for that time because they picked up exactly where there were left at the end of the first book, three years earlier.

All in all, I liked it enough to keep reading the series (my library has the first four), but not enough to call it a new favorite or anything.

elysian fields cover

Description from Goodreads:
An undead serial killer comes for DJ in this thrilling third installment of Suzanne Johnson’s Sentinels of New Orleans series

The mer feud has been settled, but life in South Louisiana still has more twists and turns than the muddy Mississippi.

New Orleanians are under attack from a copycat killer mimicking the crimes of a 1918 serial murderer known as the Axeman of New Orleans. Thanks to a tip from the undead pirate Jean Lafitte, DJ Jaco knows the attacks aren’t random—an unknown necromancer has resurrected the original Axeman of New Orleans, and his ultimate target is a certain blonde wizard. Namely, DJ.

Combatting an undead serial killer as troubles pile up around her isn’t easy. Jake Warin’s loup-garou nature is spiraling downward, enigmatic neighbor Quince Randolph is acting weirder than ever, the Elders are insisting on lessons in elven magic from the world’s most annoying wizard, and former partner Alex Warin just turned up on DJ’s to-do list. Not to mention big maneuvers are afoot in the halls of preternatural power.

Suddenly, moving to the Beyond as Jean Lafitte’s pirate wench could be DJ’s best option.

Review:
DJ gets targeted by a preternatural murder plot, beat up a lot, should be dead, but survives by the skin of her teeth and adds to her (now alarmingly large and annoyingly pointless) harem. So, it’s basically the same plot as every other book in this series. Amusing, but not particularly deep or moving.