Winds of the Forelands, Book 1

For years I’ve passed this book in the store, picked it up, read the back, and put it back—not because it didn’t sound interesting, but because I was going through a phase of denying myself books in a failed attempt to control my bookshelves. When I finally broke down and bought it a few weeks ago, I couldn’t wait to start reading it and I am so glad it didn’t disappoint me. And my expectations were high.

David B. Coe’s Rules of Ascension is set mostly in Eibithar, one of many kingdoms in a realm called the Forelands. 900 years before the story opens, the Forelands were invaded by the Qirsi, a pale, white-haired sorcerer race led by Weavers, Qirsi whose powers far exceeded those of the rest of the race. But, despite their magic, the Qirsi were defeated by the unmagical Eandi, their Weaver leaders hunted and killed, and the remaining Qirsi scattered throughout the Forelands where, eventually, they were able to lead normal lives serving as advisors to lords and kings.

The story follows Tavis of Curgh, son of the Duke of Curgh and, according to the ancient Rules of Ascension, the future heir to the throne of Eibithar. Tavis, spoiled and arrogant, believes he’s destined to be king after his father until the day of his Fating—a ceremony in which a Qirsi gleaner provides a glimpse of what an individual’s future holds—when he learns that his life is quickly hurtling toward something far darker. Grinsa jal Arriett, the Qirsi gleaner present at Tavis’s Fating, is immediately disturbed by the future he sees for the boy and, suspecting that someone is manipulating the Rules of Ascension, vows to help Tavis survive his fate. Because no one knows as well as Grinsa that, despite the efforts of the Eandi to eliminate Weavers from Qirsi bloodlines since the War, there are Weavers in the Forelands again and one of them is carefully organizing a rebellion against Eandi rule.

I really loved this book. It starts a little slow, but gains speed until you’re frantically turning pages and find yourself unable to put it down. Even knowing that Tavis was to meet some dark fate, I was so shocked by the event that actually placed him there that I had to re-read the scene to make sure I’d understood it. Coe does an excellent job of crafting the multi-layered tensions between the Qirsi and Eandi, and even between Qirsi with different views of the Eandi. What is truly fantastic about the world Coe has created is the tragic nature of Qirsi magic—using their power literally shortens their life and most Qirsi don’t expect to live much past their thirties. Some of the characters are more fleshed out than others, something that only became apparent when the point of view shifted, but I found myself immediately attached to Grinsa, the mysterious Qirsi gleaner still wounded by an event in his past. And, though Tavis can be a little prig, I found myself liking him too.

This was just the sort of fantasy I’ve been craving for the past few months and I can’t wait to get my hands on the next book, Seeds of Betrayal.

I didn’t keep track of worst lines and best lines this time—so sorry—but here’s HBO’s new Game of Thrones trailer for season 2. Enjoy.

 

Oh yeah, I have this blog thing…

So, that book I was reading? Robopocalypse? Yeah, I won’t be reviewing that. Mostly because I finished it ages ago and can’t remember anything beyond  a disappointment in the execution and an extreme relief at finally having space on my nightstand for something else. Something else being The Price of Civilization (interesting, but just okay), The Expats (a fantastic thriller going on sale in May—check it out), Freakonomics (fascinating, fun to read, and deserving of all the attention it gets), The Night Strangers (extremely disappointing), The Raven Prince (this is romance, the raunchy Jane Austen kind—oh yeah), The Tipping Point (interesting but Freakonomics is better), and Rules of Ascension (a fantasy I very much liked and will review in a separate post this weekend).

Until then, please amuse yourself with this article on the Death Star. Or this soul-crushing speculation on the top 10 worst case casting scenarios for (not real!) Hollywood adaptations/remakes of geeky classics like Cowboy Bebop and Back to the Future.

None of those things catch your fancy? Try this.

 

A Dark Debut and Cinderella Re-imagined

Today I’m reviewing Prince of Thorns, a remarkable debut fantasy, and Cinder, a young adult sci-fi adventure that re-imagines the Cinderella fairy tale in a fresh and addictive way.

PRINCE OF THORNS: Book 1 of The Broken Empire

Since I finished it first, I’ll start with Mark Lawrence’s Prince of Thorns, which tells the story of Jorg Ancrath, the only surviving son and heir to the King of Ancrath, one of many kingdoms in a crumbling empire that has long been consumed by war. Four years before the book opens, Jorg’s mother and younger brother were slaughtered on the roadside by the men of Count Renar, the ruler of a province bordering Ancrath. Jorg was only spared death because he was thrown from the carriage and trapped in a snare of hookbriar thorns, where he watched the violence unfold and from which he received the name Prince of Thorns. Now fourteen, Jorg is living a violent, immoral life on the road as the leader of a band of thugs and thieves. When news reaches him of his stepmother carrying a new heir for Ancrath, Jorg is forced to return to the court of his father to protect his birthright. But much has changed in Ancrath since Jorg left and he soon finds himself back on a path of vengeance he abandoned years before—hunting the man man responsible for the murder of his mother and brother.

Having heard a lot of praise for this debut earlier in the year, I couldn’t stop myself from reading it immediately after returning home with a copy purchased from my neighborhood Barnes & Noble. The cover, an image of the book’s namesake standing surrounded by bodies and mist, caught my imagination the moment I saw it and still hasn’t let go—just as the first page captured my attention and didn’t release it until the last. This is a beautifully written page-turner with a surprising and cleverly created world (study the map carefully as you read). Jorg is a twisted and deeply disturbed young man, but that somehow didn’t stop me from wanting him to succeed—even when he was doing terrible things. The narrative alternates between the present and key moments in Jorg’s past, leaving the reader to piece together the events that led him to where he is today. This is dark fantasy at its most dark, and anyone who likes moral lines blurry will find something here to enjoy. My only complaint is that the ending was a bit anti-climatic and that Jorg (when he was a child) didn’t speak his age.

Favorite Quotes

War is a thing of beauty and those who say otherwise are losing.

I saw what they did to Mother, and how long it took. They broke little William’s head against a milestone. Golden curls and blood. And I’ll admit that William was the first of my brothers, and he did have his hooks in me, with his chubby hands and laughing. Since then I’ve taken on many a brother, and evil ones at that, so I’d not miss one or three. But at the time, it did hurt to see little William broken like that, like a toy. Like something worthless.

Hate will keep you alive where love fails.

I swallowed darkness and darkness swallowed me.

CINDER: Book 1 of The Lunar Chronicles

An arc (advance reader’s copy) of Cinder came to me in the mail at my office and I was instantly intrigued by the cover and concept. So much so that I ignored the other two books I was reading in order to start it on my train ride home that day. Set on a future Earth ravaged by a deadly new plague called letumosis, the book tells the story of Cinder, a teenage cyborg living with her stepmother and two stepsisters in New Beijing. Cyborgs are treated as second class citizens by society, which sees them as living on borrowed time, but Cinder manages to excel as a mechanic (though all the money she earns goes to her stepmother’s bank account). Her renown expertise on androids is what brings Crown Prince Kaito to her shop desperate to retrieve information from a malfunctioning android—information that could ignite a war between the governments of Earth and the moon kingdom of Luna.

All the familiar fairy tale elements are here—the girl scorned and mistreated by her stepmother and stepsisters, the prince who charms her even as he falls for her, a ball, and even a glass slipper in the form of a cyborg’s robotic foot. What is so brilliant about Cinder is the way that the fairy tale becomes the story, rather than overwhelming it. Never once did it read as though events were being forced into the mold of Cinderella because Marissa Meyer has made a familiar story all her own. It’s Cinderella with cyborgs, androids, plagues, and Lunar magic. The characters are wonderfully drawn, the world imaginative and believable, the narrative perfectly paced, and the ending (despite my initial worries) left me with that bittersweet combination of fulfillment and wanting more. I just didn’t want this one to end, and I can’t wait to get my hands on book 2.

[Cinder goes on sale January 3rd, 2012]

 

A Land Fit for Heroes

What to say, what to say…I’m sure having David Tennant prancing around on my television isn’t helping my focus any. Recently got myself addicted to Doctor Who and I can’t seem to stop.

Whoops. Digression.

Okay. The Steel Remains by Richard K. Morgan caught my interest with two sentences from its jacket copy:

“Some speak in whispers of the return of the Aldrain, a race of widely feared, cruel yet beautiful demons.”  [Ohhhh, my favorite!]

“But with heroes like these, the cure is likely to be worse than the disease.” [Beautiful demons and anti-heroes? Oh, squee!]

I’d also heard some great things about Morgan’s sci-fi Takeshi Kovachs novels. Steel Remains is his first foray into fantasy, but I won’t hold that against the book. Not much, anyway.

The Steel Remains follows Ringil Eskiath—though we do get the view points of Egar, the leader of a nomadic warrior clan called the Majak, and Archeth, a half-Kiriath left behind by the rest of her advanced, immortal race when they fled the world after the war with the Scaled Folk just over a decade before the opening of the book. All three of them met during the war and its aftermath, and as the book progresses their paths are leading them back together. Ringil, cynical, quick to anger, estranged from his family, haunted by a past trauma, and homosexual in a world that punishes such people with a gruesome public execution, is an unwilling hero recruited to track down a cousin who was sold into slavery. His search brings him into the dangerous world of a newly bourgeoning slaving industry, and to the dwenda (aka the Aldrain)—a mysterious race of gorgeous immortals with a plan that could doom the world.

“Could” being the key word, here. By the end of the book I wasn’t so sure whose side to cling to, whose motivations were misinformed, who it was that had been wronged. And that was fantastic, truly it was. I love that kind of ambiguity. I also liked the flexible portrayal of sexuality, which is such a rare thing in fantasy. Morgan handled it with brilliance, though I will say there is a whole lot of graphic male-on-male action. If that sort of thing makes you squeamish, best not read this one. But it was rather hott (two t’s intentional), in my opinion.

Unfortunately, the above is all I really liked about the book. It has some fresh ideas, it’s a page-turner, but there was just something missing. Well, not something, a few things.

Character Development: Besides Ringil and a certain dwenda, the characters are utterly forgettable. I couldn’t even remember the names of Egar and Archeth—I had to look them up. And I finished the book just two weeks ago. If they’d been minor characters, I wouldn’t think much of it. But they aren’t. They each have POV chapters throughout the book, yet I still forgot their names.

Plot: The overarching story involving the Kiriath, the Aldrain, and the ancient past is wonderfully intriguing and suggestive of depth, but the main story of Ringil saving a cousin he barely knows from slavery simply because his mother asked him to feels forced, contrived for the purpose of getting the larger story started, and seems to contradict who Ringil is—a man who angers at injustice, yes, but who is also estranged from his family. I still don’t get why he agreed to do it.

Writing: Where to start? The inner dialogue is often convoluted and hard to follow. There are many useless flashbacks that elaborate on scenes that happened a few chapters earlier. This could work if it was from a new character’s point of view, thereby shedding light on something that was missed before. But what Morgan does is essentially fade out of a scene, return to that same character later, and have that character think about what just happened wherever that scene was and about what was said by whoever it was they were with when the chapter ended. It makes the narrative feel haphazardly wrought and amateurish. And then there is the thing that drove me absolutely bonkers: I do believe if you did a word search of this book, the most frequently used word would be “fuck” (I’m exaggerating here, but you get my point). I’m all for some good cursing, but this is just overdone. It became distracting. It’s in almost every piece of dialogue and inner dialogue—regardless of character, race, age, sex, class, or place of birth—and therefore serves no purpose beyond itself. Fuck, fucker, motherfucker, fucking fuck fuck. No, seriously. It made my eyes roll and destroyed any hope the dialogue had of feeling natural. But that’s just my opinion.

Ending: By the end of the book, I just didn’t care much for Ringil. [SLIGHT SPOILER in white] In fact, the character I did care about died. This may have been intentional; this may be due to my own affinity for the darker side of things. Either way, it doesn’t inspire me to pick up book two, The Cold Commands.

So, do I recommend the book? No, not really. But I wouldn’t say it isn’t worth reading either—because it is. It was a good book while I was reading it, but once I put it down… *shrug* It didn’t stay with me.

Best Line: The sun lay dying amid torn cloud the color of bruises, at the bottom of a sky that never seemed to end.

Worst Line: He was going back to what he used to be, and the worst of it was that he couldn’t make himself regret it at all. In fact, now the whole thing was in motion, he could hardly wait. [A bit heavy handed for me.]

Some Favorites: “Common men make a distinction between gods and demons, but it’s ignorance to talk that way. When the powers do our will, we worship them as gods; when they thwart and frustrate us, we hate and fear them as demons. They are the same creatures, the same twisted unhuman things.”

Thunder rattled at the chained doors of the world.

 

Working in Retail Should Be a Required Life Experience and Other Thoughts on the Death of My Favorite Bookstore

Brace yourselves, folks. This is a long one.

At work the other day, while I was writing paperback copy, I was distracted by a tweet linking to this Ode to Borders. The ode itself, in the form of a snarky list of things booksellers never told you and displayed by employees at an undisclosed Borders store, was amusingly true. Some of my favorite points?

• If you don’t know the author, title, or genre, but you do know the color of the cover, we don’t know either. How it was our fault we couldn’t find it we’ll never understand.
• We never were a daycare. Letting your children run free and destroy our kids section destroyed a piece of our souls.
• Oprah was not the “final say” on what was awesome. We really didn’t care what was on her show or what her latest book club book was. Really.
• When you returned your SAT books, we knew you used them. We thought it wasn’t fair—seeing that we are not a library.

Anyone who has ever worked in retail (I don’t care if it was selling books or clothes or electronics) can sympathize with this list. None of it is unreasonable or controversial, and none of it should be that surprising to anybody. Or, so I thought.

Unfortunately, I made the mistake of reading the comments, drawn in by a few posts of humorous commiseration and then unable to look away as posts appeared slinging hateful words at these booksellers who, through no fault of their own, were losing their jobs. They were the sort of comments that thoughtless, self-important, and uninformed Americans have an infuriating knack for. And even though it was obvious to me that these people had never worked a day on the front lines of the customer service industry, their words still upset me.

The above list is not a recording of things the booksellers said to customers when frustrated, these are things they vented about to each other in the stock room and, upon closing their doors forever, decided to share. If you think this sort of thing is unique to Borders or booksellers and doesn’t happen at every retail store that has ever existed, then you, my friend, are either incredibly naive or incredibly stupid. If you think that Borders went out of business because its booksellers were rude, or because they didn’t work their asses off, or weren’t passionate about books or music or comics or movies, well, from the pages of one of my favorite books, you know little and less.

Borders closed because of a string of poor business decisions that began a decade ago when it handed its website over to Amazon and rapidly expanded its bricks-and-mortar stores overseas, not because its booksellers had a bad attitude (they didn’t, by the way). Indeed, I think it’s safe to say that near the end some of them should have been granted sainthood. As a shopper, what you wouldn’t know, is that in those final years staff at every store was cut in half. Then trimmed again. And again. By the end of my time at Borders last year, there were some days when there were only 2 people free on the floor—meaning they weren’t at register, scrambling to move things out from the stock room, tied to the Paperchase section, or cleaning human shit off the floors of the bathroom and sometimes even the floor of the store (that this is apparently an occurrence at many locations is appalling). This meant that customers had a hard time finding help, and a long wait getting it, which in turn meant they were (rightfully) impatient or frustrated by the time help did come. Not fair to the customer, but not fair to the bookseller, either, who is likely frazzled, just as frustrated, and has nothing to do with the understaffing at the store. Also, as staff got smaller, recovery (end of the day clean up and re-shelving) took longer, stretching well beyond a shift’s scheduled end almost every night. For the average bookseller, there was no overtime. For many on the merchandising team, all-nighters were not unheard of.

Is this an excuse to treat customers poorly? Absolutely not. Does it justify the above list of snarky revelations? Most certainly.

Working in retail taught me that shoppers can be irrational and inconsiderate, even down right rude and disgusting. But, mostly, working in retail was fun. For every mean, awful customer that was the turd in the cereal bowl of my life, 10 more came along who were fantastically patient or kind or funny or just plain delightful to help. Books are my passion, and helping people discover them was a joy. Recommending them, finding them, hunting down that title-you-couldn’t-quite-remember. It gave me the warm fuzzies. But those handful of turds are the reason I think working a job in retail (or food service) for a year should be a required life experience. I believe that the only reason those turds are such turds is because they’ve never worked those store front lines—it’s hard to treat booksellers, waitresses, or whoever poorly when you’ve been in their shoes.

Empathy, people. Empathy. It’s what separates us from the psychopaths.

So, here is my own Ode to Borders. It’s turning out to be a rambling combination of nostalgia and frustration, but I hope it will at least be articulate and interesting. Besides, as a genuine bibliophile, it’s the least I can do for a fallen friend…and a former employer.

The pin board in the break room at the Columbus Circle Borders displaying customer testimonials in the store's final days

I love Borders. Yes, love. The present tense. I’m not ready to refer to it in the past tense. Even though there are no Borders stores left, I felt odd this past weekend when I signed up for a Barnes & Noble card, and I still haven’t taken my Borders Rewards card out of my wallet. This is silly and futile, I know, but that’s how entrenched this chain is in my psyche and my life.

To begin with, I’m from Michigan, where Borders was born. It was the first bookstore to appear within a 20 minute driving distance of my childhood home—shout out to store 019!—or, at least, it’s the first bookstore I have any memory of going to. In high school I actually aspired to work at that store in Novi, Michigan, not as a career goal but as the kind of summer job I could enjoy (my working life started at a Dairy Queen and moved on to waiting tables, which I hated). After I started college, I applied for a summer job at 019 almost every year until I was finally hired as holiday help in 2006. When I moved to New York three years later, I spent a year working at the Borders in the Time Warner Building at Columbus Circle. Store 592 became my safe place in a strange, vast city, the place where I met my first New Yorker friends, and the place where many of them still worked until a week ago. Even after I started working at Random House, I still found myself in that store because I missed it and the people who worked there.

There is a camaraderie that forms among people working at Borders (and I’m sure at B&N, too). It’s what made working there so much fun, even as we started to feel the beginnings of the company’s collapse and the work got harder, the shifts longer, and the perks smaller. But I don’t think anything I say could be as well-spoken and heartfelt as this post by a friend and former co-worker in which he said:

We each live with our own cast of characters, their closeness to us determined on their level of development (round or flat). It’s not that some people are more interesting than others; it’s that only some are comfortable enough around us to show us who they really are. And it’s when these people step off-stage, their parts finished, that it hurts the most. Whether it’s time or not—and usually, it feels like it’s not—these people have to move on to someone else’s stage to be watched and loved<…>Unlike any other place I’ve ever worked, Borders was full of round characters.

This touched me because it is exactly how I felt when I left Borders for Random House, even though I was leaving it for my dream job and my future. Now, with Borders gone, it seems like that piece of me has vanished, too. When I’m having a tough day at work, or stuck in a lonely funk, I can no longer walk up the street on my lunch break to see all those familiar faces gathered in that familiar place. It’s gone forever, and that breaks my heart.

Gone, also, is another low-key place to go to when you just need to get out. A place to be surrounded by other book lovers. A place to read books and discover them. A place that won’t pressure you to buy a coffee or a mediocre muffin just because you needed somewhere to sit down and kill 20 minutes. Amazon, for all its innovative brilliance, will never, ever be able to do any of these things. The internet is not a place I can go visit when I just want to get out of my apartment but not really go anywhere.

I have a tote bag that I snagged from Word Stock a few years ago. On one side of this tote is the Borders logo. I use it all the time, have carried it to work on numerous occasions, but last week when I got onto the elevator at the end of the day, our editor-in-chief saw the logo and said, “We have got to get you a new bag.” I laughed and shrugged, but said nothing. Because you know what? I don’t want a new bag. I don’t see that Borders logo and think about the liquidation, or the poor business decisions, or the implications of the chain’s collapse on the book industry. I see it and remember the way all the stores somehow had the same distinct book smell, or the fun I had working with such awesome people. I think about that light-headed, unforgettable moment when I first walked into a Borders as a child, wide-eyed and giddy with the possibilities. I think of books and friends. I think of the safe, comforting feeling of a place as familiar to me as home.

So, if you live in New York and you see a girl walking around with a Borders tote bag, chances are it’s me. Chances are I put the Borders side face out on purpose.

Farewell, Borders. Bookworms and manga nerds, movie buffs and comic geeks, writers and authors and agents and editors, we keenly feel your passing. Farewell.

 

And now, the Dance pt. 2

All right, it’s been a while, but here goes.

After years of waiting, the fifth installment of George R. R. Martin’s gritty epic fantasy A Song of Ice and Fire arrived this summer. As I mentioned in a previous post, I managed to get my hands on a copy two weeks before it went on sale. And then failed to start reading it until after its release (oops). Why, then, did I bother to get my hands on an early copy?

Because GRRM did a signing at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square just a few days after the book’s release.

So, of course, I had to go meet my god and have him scribble in my 1st edition copy of A Dance With Dragons.

There was a brief moment of panic when I realized I had to work that day and people were lining up nearly 12 hours before the event started. Luckily, I roped my wonderful parents into the task of saving a spot in line for me and @parisazo. Mom is a fan of the books, so there was no problem there, but Dad needed some tequila to brave the crowds. He spent the evening browsing graphic novels and listening to Pink Floyd on his iPod, so everyone won in the end.

The Review Part of This Post—It’s spoiler free!

It has been a few years since I read A Storm of Swords and A Feast for Crows (and my plan to reread all the books before Dance came out failed miserably with a short-lived attempt that ended with my reread of A Game of Thrones shortly after HBO announced it had given the green light to the series). So, reading book five was slow-going at first as I tried to remember what had happened. This unexpected memory problem was exacerbated by the fact that Dance with Dragons takes place over the same time period as Feast for Crows, which means that I had to think back to the ending of Storm of Swords to make sense of what Dany, Jon, and Tyrion were up to.

But, oh, how wonderful it was to see those three again. I missed them. Missed them terribly. Although Tyrion quickly began to irritate me after a chapter or two as he fell into a repetitive self-loathing that lacked the balancing wit he’d displayed in previous books. He reminded me a lot of pubescent Harry Potter in book 5 of that series. And, unlike most readers, Tyrion was never one of my ultimate favorites, so he quickly became annoying (my favorites are Jon, Arya, and Jaime. Yeah, Jaime. Don’t judge.) but the Tyrion I remember finally came back around the middle of the book to redeem himself. Daenerys also bugged me a bit in this book, but she, too, found herself again by the end.

All in all I loved the book—there is a game changer in this one, people. And it is awesome. Dance also has a whole lot of fire and blood, and some new details about Rhaegar that cemented my Targaryen love (I can not emphasize enough my obsession with this dead character). The plot itself doesn’t move along too far (like Clash of Kings, this is another book that slides the players around on the board), but there are enough revelations to make that fact bearable.

One thing I will say, though, is that GRRM had better not take another decade to finish Winds of Winter. I’m all for being a patient fan, and not treating authors like my bitch, but the way he ended a certain character’s arc in Dance nearly made me throw my book into the pool I was reading by. I don’t know if I can wait another span of years to find out what happens.

You hear that, George? That’s the line. THE LINE. You know what I’m talking about.

Favorite Quotes

“Much that may seem evil can be good.”

“What would a Frey know of honor?” (Right? For serious.)

“Words are wind. And men will lie to get their way, as any maid could tell you.”

“Get the keys and remove those chains from him, before you make me rue the day I raped your mother.” (Name that psychopath!)

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”

“He did not know who he was, or what he was, or why he was still alive, why he had ever been born.” (This particular character arc delighted me and broke my heart.)

“Until the Mountain crushed my brother’s skull, no Dornishmen had died in this War of the Five Kings. Tell me, Captain, is that my shame or my glory?”

Six crew dead, many wildlings. Eight ravens left. Dead things in woods. Dead things in the water. (So. Creepy.)

 

Free Books & Other Things (Or Why I’ve Failed to Post a Review for ADWD)

Well, summer has come and gone, it seems. I spent a good chunk of it happily lost in Westeros while reading A Dance with Dragons—which I finished last month with much anguish—and some other portions of it less happily engaged with books like Buyology and Switch, which are quite good but can’t sate my need for magic and men with swords. So, where’s the review, you ask? I’ll get to that.

First, have I ever mentioned that me working at Random House is a lot like letting a fat kid play in a candy store? Well, it is. For someone with a book addiction, working at a publisher is exactly the worst way to prevent the accumulation of more books.

Case in point: I have approximately 30 books on my shelves at home that I haven’t read. These are mostly books I PAID FOR. Some of them have sat for years, patiently waiting for me to come back to them.  I have about 60 more on my shelves at work. That’s 90 unread books in my possession. Not so terribly bad, but it’s a bit overwhelming when you consider that for every book I read I acquire 5 more.

With this in mind, lets move on to last night when I was at the office until 11:00 pm. Not working, not even pretending to work. I was filching. In an effort to consolidate and make use of 100% of the office space in the building, Random House has slowly been relocating all of its staff to new, renovated floors. This move requires a whole lot of purging. Purging in publishing offices means free books. Stacks of them, piles—mountains, even. Books on every floor, around every corner, on every mail room counter. And who, do you ask, was in the process of moving last night? Bantam/Del Rey/Spectra.

Be still my fantasy-loving, sci-fi curious heart!

Here’s what I got:

• The Way of Shadows, Shadow’s Edge, Beyond the Shadows
• The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun (both snagged for my dad)
• Homer’s Odyssey (grabbed that for my mom—I’m so generous)
• Garden Spells
• Number 9 Dream (WIN!!)
• Jane Eyre
• The Magicians and Mrs. Quent
• The Belgariad Volume 1
• The Conqueror’s Shadow
• The Steel Remains
• The Red Wolf Conspiracy
• In His Majesty’s Service, Tongues of Serpents, Victory of Eagles (yes, I know I’m missing book four)
• London (this one is for an anglophile friend)
• The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters Volume 1, The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters Volume 2
• Saving Francesca (a co-worker asked for this one)
• Angelology
• Un Lun Dun

Suggestions for what I should read next are welcome, though I can’t promise I’ll heed them. My reader’s whim is a fickle beast. In the meantime, I’m gonna read some manga. Review of Dance with Dragons is coming. This weekend.

Definitely.

Maybe.

Definitely maybe.

 

And now, the Dance

This is one I snatched off the shelves at work. I was excited to read it—pretty much anything set between 1890 and 1920 will grab my attention, and The Golden Prince seemed to fit the bill perfectly. Set in 1912 England, the story centers on the doomed first romance of Prince Edward (the VIII had he not abdicated the throne to his brother, Prince Albert of The King’s Speech). The romance in question has been completely fabricated by Dean, though it is based on Edward’s hopeless love affair with the daughter of the Duke of Sutherland in 1917. Essentially, Edward falls in love and determines to marry the girl of his choosing, but is prevented from doing so by his father’s refusal to give his royal approval of the match. Drama and angst ensue.

Within the first ten pages, I knew I was going to be disappointed, though. Dean’s writing is melodramatic, filled with countless cliched phrases (especially where the love affair is concerned), and she handles point of view poorly, shifting from one character’s thoughts to another and then another within a few paragraphs whenever it’s convenient for her to reveal something about them. It’s frustrating and makes it impossible to really get to know the characters or care about them. I hate to say the overused phrase, but…so much telling and no showing. Recommended only if you’re seeking something light to read at the beach.

Worst Line: “I love you, too. Isn’t it wonderful? Isn’t it just too magical for words?” The blatant love in his eyes was her answer. (Before this, I had no idea it was possible to gag and roll my eyes at the same time.)

And that’s all I got for this one because last week I got my hands on something I’ve spent years [im]patiently waiting for. Working in publishing has some serious perks:

Finally. FINALLY. The Dance has begun.

 

Speaking of Patrick Rothfuss…

Back when The Wise Man’s Fear was first released, I went to one of his book signings at a B&N here in Brooklyn. By the time I managed to crawl out of my cube at work, meet up with @parisazo, and take a train from midtown Manhattan to Brooklyn, there was a line out the door and down the block. But, lucky for us, my friends @chaosrayne and Louis Santiago were already there and we were able to slip into the line with them.

Why am I sharing all this? Well, mostly because I’m super excited about having these:

1st edition Name of the Wind

1st edition Wise Man's Fear

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But also because Pat Rothfuss is awesome. I mean, I know _I_ brought three books to get signed—most people I saw brought at least two—and did he take the time to sign them all? You bet he did. Did he also take pictures with every single person who wanted one? F**k yeah he did.

Pat: What kind of picture do you want? Me: Smiles are fine. Pat: How about I gaze at you adoringly? Me: Perfect.

Most considerate, patient, and hilarious author ever? I think so.

 

The Kingkiller Chronicle: Day Two

Back in 2007 when I began reading The Name of the Wind, I immediately knew that Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicle was something special—Kvothe, the protagonist, stole my heart and broke it in the same instant—and the book was, without doubt, the best fantasy I read that year. So, when book two, The Wise Man’s Fear, was released earlier this year I couldn’t wait to start reading. It took me a while to recall everything that had happened in the first book, but once all that came back to me I spent every free moment racing through the pages. It wasn’t as good as the first book, but it didn’t disappoint.

The Kingkiller Chronicle tells the story of Kote, a fiery-haired innkeeper living in a small village of little consequence. Unbeknownst to his neighbors, Kote is actually the infamous Kvothe—the Bloodless, the Arcane, the Kingkiller—hero and villain of countless tales, some of them true, some of them rumors of his own making. We learn early on that Kvothe is hiding from his own infamy, but when the Chronicler (a legendary recorder of histories) appears at his inn, Kvothe decides to let him record the story of his life—the true story. The majority of the books narrate Kvothe’s life from his early childhood traveling with his Edema Ruh family (a race of traveling performers), the slaughter of his parents and everyone he knew by the ancient beings known as the Chandrian, and his youth spent begging on the streets of Tarbean to his time at the University learning arcane arts and magics, his search for the name of the wind, his first legendary exploits, his training with the Adem mercenaries, and his quest to find the Chandrian.  Alongside all this are scattered chapters told in the present at Kvothe’s inn, where the world has become unpredictable and dangerous, and a growing tension between Kvothe and Bast, his Fae apprentice, hints at an impending crisis if Kvothe cannot embrace who he used to be and rediscover his powers.

Despite the fact that it took me a couple months to read The Wise Man’s Fear, I loved it. The slow pace of my reading was due more to my work than to any flaw in the book. Though, there were flaws. Three things in particular bothered me.

First: The pacing. It was a little slow in places—though never uninteresting—and if I was asked to identify the climax of the story, I’m not sure that I could.

Second: It is known from the flap copy of the first book that Kvothe spends time with Felurian, a Faerie woman who lures men into the world of the Fae where she loves them until they die or go mad, and Kvothe is the only known person to have survived her. However, so many pages are spent on Kvothe’s time with Felurian that I lost interest for a while. Yes, some important things happened while he is with her (he discovers his sexuality; manages to call the true name of Felurian, thus earning his freedom; and meets the malicious creature known as the Cthae), but I think his time there was drawn out much too long. The superfluous sexcapades that followed Kvothe’s time with Felurian were a bit annoying, too (see worst line below).

Third: Denna. I just don’t like this woman. Can’t stand her. She’s so sketchy with her flightiness, her irrationality, and her vaguely courtesan ways (which are what seem to make her flighty in the first place). Every time Kvothe goes looking for her, I can’t for the life of me understand why. It makes me want to smack him. [end rant]

Overall, though, the book was an excellent read. Rothfuss’s writing manages to make magic sound both fantastical and scientific, and there is humor on every page (okay, maybe not every page, but I found myself laughing frequently). The bits of song and poetry throughout the book can be enchanting or chilling by turns, and I just adore the story (the mystery behind the Chandrian and the Amyr has me so intrigued it’s painful). One thing that I found particularly fascinating and fresh is the handtalk of the Adem, which they use in place of facial expressions and emotional inflections. The way Rothfuss handles this silent language is brilliant. Amazed respect.

Final word: I didn’t finish The Wise Man’s Fear feeling as enchanted as when I finished The Name of the Wind, but it was still painful and bittersweet to read the last page. I can’t wait for Day Three.

Worst Line: I managed very little sleep that night, and Losi came closer to killing me than Felurian ever had. (*rolls eyes*)

Best Line: Nothing in the world is harder than convincing someone of an unfamiliar truth.

Favorite Quotes:

On his first hand he wore rings of stone,
Iron, amber, wood, and bone.
There were rings unseen on his second hand.
One was blood in a flowing band.
One of air all whisper thin,
And the ring of ice had a flaw within.
Full faintly shone the ring of flame,
And the final ring was without a name.

“You must believe me when I tell you certain things. Some of the things I tell you may not be true. But you must believe them anyway, until I tell you to stop. Yes?”

They were the best sort of friends. The sort everyone hopes for but no one deserves, least of all me.

“I am the king of good ideas gone terribly wrong.”

“All the truth in the world is held in stories.”

“There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man.”

I don’t mind being called a liar. I am. I am a marvelous liar. But I hate being called a liar when I’m telling the perfect truth.

“I won the only duel I ever lost.”

Then I played the song that hides in the center of me. That wordless music that moves through the secret places in my heart. I played it carefully, strumming it slow and low into the dark stillness of the night. I would like to say it is a happy song, that it is sweet and bright, but it is not.

If you want to know the truth of who you are, walk until not a person knows your name.

I left him bleeding darkly in the moonlight, unable to cry out, dying but not dead.

Cyphus bears the blue flame.
Stercus is in thrall of iron.
Ferule chill and dark of eye.
Usnea lives in nothing but decay.
Grey Dalcenti never speaks.
Pale Alenta brings the blight.
Last there is the lord of seven:
Hated. Hopeless. Sleepless. Sane.
Alaxel bears the shadow’s hame.