Nocturnal Book Reviews

Bitterblue by Kristin Cashore (Graceling Realm #3)

Review copy courtesy of Gollanz Geeks

Synopsis from Goodreads
Eight years have passed since the young Princess Bitterblue, and her country, were saved from the vicious King Leck. Now Bitterblue is the queen of Monsea, and her land is at peace.

But the influence of her father, a violent psychopath with mind-altering abilities, lives on. Her advisers, who have run the country on her behalf since Leck's death, believe in a forward-thinking plan: to pardon all of those who committed terrible acts during Leck's reign; and to forget every dark event that ever happened. Monsea's past has become shrouded in mystery, and it's only when Bitterblue begins sneaking out of her castle - curious, disguised and alone - to walk the streets of her own city, that she begins to realise the truth. Her kingdom has been under the thirty-five-year long spell of a madman, and now their only chance to move forward is to revisit the past.

Whatever that past holds.

Two thieves, who have sworn only to steal what has already been stolen, change her life forever. They hold a key to the truth of Leck's reign. And one of them, who possesses an unidentified Grace, may also hold a key to her heart . . . 

Amazon  US/UK | Amazon kindle US/UK(£3.99) | The Book Depository US/UK | Fishpond

8.5/10

Beautiful book. After so many disappointed reviews I was bracing myself for the worst, but Bitterblue was quirky, puzzling and utterly lovely.

Lexicon by Max Barry

Egalley thanks to Penguin Press HC

Synopsis from Goodreads
At an exclusive school somewhere outside of Arlington, Virginia, students aren’t taught history, geography, or mathematics—at least not in the usual ways. Instead, they are taught to persuade. Here the art of coercion has been raised to a science .Students harness the hidden power of language to manipulate the mind and learn to break down individuals by psychographic markers in order to take control of their thoughts. The very best will graduate as "poets": adept wielders of language who belong to a nameless organization that is as influential as it is secretive.

Whip-smart orphan Emily Ruff is making a living running a three-card Monte game on the streets of San Francisco when she attracts the attention of the organization’s recruiters. She is flown across the country for the school’s strange and rigorous entrance exams, where, once admitted, she will be taught the fundamentals of persuasion by Brontë, Eliot, and Lowell—who have adopted the names of famous poets to conceal their true identities. For in the organization, nothing is more dangerous than revealing who you are: Poets must never expose their feelings lest they be manipulated. Emily becomes the school’s most talented prodigy until she makes a catastrophic mistake: She falls in love.

Meanwhile, a seemingly innocent man named Wil Jamieson is brutally ambushed by two strange men in an airport bathroom. Although he has no recollection of anything they claim he’s done, it turns out Wil is the key to a secret war between rival factions of poets and is quickly caught in their increasingly deadly crossfire. Pursued relentlessly by people with powers he can barely comprehend and protected by the very man who first attacked him, Wil discovers that everything he thought he knew about his past was fiction. In order to survive, must journey to the toxically decimated town of Broken Hill, Australia, to discover who he is and why an entire town was blown off the map.

As the two narratives converge, the shocking work of the poets is fully revealed, the body count rises, and the world crashes toward a Tower of Babel event which would leave all language meaningless. Max Barry’s most spellbinding and ambitious novel yet, Lexicon is a brilliant thriller that explores language, power, identity, and our capacity to love—whatever the cost.

Release Date: June 18th 2013.

Amazon  US/UK | Amazon kindle US/UK | The Book Depository US/UK | Fishpond

9.5/10

 I can't help it, guys. Max Barry is my author, like Chuck Palahniuk, John Twelve Hawks and I suspect, Cory Doctorow (when I finally get to read his books).

Last year I read Jennifer Government, and it blew my mind. This year Lexicon did exactly the same. It's convoluted, paranoid, bizarre and utterly men in tin foil hats material. I was walking in a haze for a couple of days totally consumed by this book, thinking about it.

There’s a law somewhere that says readers will invariably get hooked on a series the minute they don’t have time to read it. Especially a really substantial, meaty fantasy series with complicated world-building that doesn’t lend itself to anything other than full-immersion.

Those kinds of books make a very lasting impression. And in my case, the fantasies I plowed through starting in college, invariably during dead-week and finals when I’d have to claw my way to the surface, gasping for air, just to stumble to class, were the ones that stayed with me and helped shape my very strong opinions about things like the rules of time travel and how vampires and shifters should behave. You know, the important things.

So when I talk to high school English classes full of teenagers waiting for me to dazzle them about being an author, the really intriguing parts of the conversation are about other people’s books, starting with the ones that influenced me as I wrote Marking Time.

“The rest of the journey passed uneventfully, if you consider it uneventful to ride fifteen miles on horseback through rough country at night, frequently without benefit of roads, in company with kilted men armed to the teeth, and sharing a horse with a wounded man. At least we were not set upon by highwaymen, we encountered no wild beasts, and it didn't rain. By the standards I was becoming used to, it was quite dull.” ― Diana Gabaldon, Outlander

 Outlander is constantly shelved in the wrong section of nearly every bookstore I’ve ever browsed. The exception being a small, independent bookstore in Northern California that kept Outlander stocked in the fantasy section, not among the bodice-rippers.

 Don’t get me wrong, the love story between Claire and Jamie is, well… steamy, and whole discussions have happened over wine about who could play Jamie in the movie. But actually, Outlander is one of the very best time travel novels EVER!

Diana Gabaldon researched the hell out of 1743 Scotland and it’s the details that really make this an extraordinary story. The thing that has always really resonated with me was how it felt to be a “modern” woman thrown into the past with no warning and no real survival skills beyond whatever knowledge she brought with her.

 “Lucas Priest, Sergeant Major, United States Army Temporal Corps, was trying to figure out how to stop a charging bull elephant with nothing but a Roman short sword. Scipio had given the order to advance and Lucas wondered if the legion commander really believed that Rome's famed phalanx formations would intimidate a berserker like Hannibal. Sending foot soldiers against his pachyderms was not unlike attempting to stop a Panzer column with tricycles.”
– Simon Hawke, The Ivanhoe Gambit

 The Ivanhoe Gambit is a book one in a twelve-book fantasy series, and the one that cemented the “rules” of time travel firmly in my brain.

It explains the Grandfather Paradox (if a person goes back in time and kills their grandfather before he has met their grandmother, how can he exist to go back in time?) in a way that makes it perfectly impossible for a person to ever meet themselves in the past.

 And the series explores the idea of time as like a river, with small anomalies behaving like pebbles thrown in the water and causing ripples that are easily absorbed by inertia. But big anomalies, say like going back in time to kill Hitler before he could start a war, would be more like throwing a boulder into the river and causing the water to divert around it. What, then, would happen when those two streams re-join? Would one entire timeline suddenly cease to exist?

Simon Hawke’s device of setting each book around an established historical event and playing with what might happen inspired me to dance with the known history of Jack the Ripper and then put my own spin on it. Because solving historical mysteries with fantastical resolutions is so much fun!

 “Zane looked. The death’s-head gaped back at him, encased in its hood. His hands in the gloves were skeletal, and his ankles above the shoes were fleshless bones. He had assumed the visage of Death.” – Piers Anthony, On a Pale Horse

On a Pale Horse is book one of Incarnations of Immortality series by Piers Anthony, and plays with the brilliant device that Death is an office. And if, like the hero of the book, you accidentally kill death, you get the job. I love the idea of concepts personified, and I borrowed very liberally from that idea for Marking Time when I made Time, Fate, Nature, War and Death into Immortals with long family lines full of descendants with skills they inherited from their powerful ancestors.

“It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.” ― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

 Patrick Rothfuss is a genius. Totally irreverent, deeply committed, unapologetically geeky and incredibly well-read, he has joined the ranks of my favorite authors EVER.

 And although I can’t claim that The Name of the Wind influenced Marking Time in any discernible way, everything about Pat’s brilliant writing makes me want to be better. Just… better. That is all.

“I snuck a look to see how Eric was taking this, and he was staring at me the same way the Monroe vampires had. Thoughtful. Hungry. "That's interesting," he said. "I had a psychic once. It was incredible." "Did the psychic think so?” ― Charlaine Harris, Dead Until Dark

 Okay, to be fair, Dead Until Dark and any of the other Sookie Stackhouse novels from Charlaine Harris had very little to do with the Vampire mythology I created in Marking Time.

I’ve actually never come across mythology like mine – with Vampires as the Descendants of Death – made, not born, since it’s an oxymoron for Death to be born.

But I’ve been reading about Vampires since Anne Rice’s Vampire Lestat (not bad, except for the Rock Star stuff), and some of that mythology just doesn’t work for me.

Sorry, sparkly Vampires? Really? But Charlaine Harris brought Vampires back in a funny, slightly irreverent way, and Sookie’s voice, especially in the early books, has enough sass to bring Vampires out of the dark and creepy realm and turn them into real characters.

These are just the books I start with.

Invariably, Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card comes up (“What? You haven’t read it? Get it RIGHT NOW and read it before the movie comes out in November!”), Blood Song by Anthony Ryan (cheap on kindle, with a ridiculously high number of five-star reviews), and anything by Robin Hobb or Neil Gaiman.

Among my YA recommendations are some amazing books like Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor, Girl of Fire and Thorns by Rae Carson, Divergent by Veronica Roth, Under the Never Sky by Veronica Rossi, and a new (to me) find in contemporary fiction, The Sea of Tranquility by Katja Millay. And that’s not even counting anything by Suzanne Collins and J.K. Rowling.

Stephen King said “Books are uniquely portable magic,” and Alice Hoffman believes that “Books may well be the only true magic.” And of course Lemony Snicket never trusts a person who has not brought a book with them, but Neil Gaiman said it best:

“May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.”