I needed a place to put this.

This book is an interesting balance of very good and very bad information :P I find the chapters on aquariums rather useful, but wonder if its sections on keeping small wild mammals resulted in any proliferation of rabies shots among children.

Thoughts on The Goblin Wood by Hilari Bell

A very easy read, simple and somewhat forgettable. It’s got a strong female protagonist who stays firmly on the ‘normal’ end of the ‘special snowflake’ scale of female protagonists- no special powers, no hidden talents- and she’s given a realistic reason for being something of an antihero. She’s the main character, but she knows not everything she does is exactly honorable and wonders if it’s all worth it. Her main antagonists are villains, but sometimes they make good points when they call her out and sometimes she actually listens. Not something I’ve seen often in the genre.

The rest of the cast are interesting, the world is fairly simple, and the story goes about where the reader would expect. I liked the understated, not-plot-driving romance because it was understated; the main characters had set aside any aspirations of relationship so they could deal with other pressing issues in their lives, in a way that seemed much more adult than teen.

The world-building is simplistic and the story glosses over a few logistical concerns, but overall a good afternoon book. I might pick up its sequel and see where it goes. 

Thoughts on Lamplighter by D. M. Cornish

I really want to like this book.

I really do.

I don’t like it though.

I think the author must have an old English thesaurus and be crossing off each word as it gets used. There are piles of archaic terms and made-up words in this book, even worse than the first in the series, which leave me, the educated, well-read reader, confused and annoyed. 

The world is interesting, the plot is interesting, the setting is interesting, and I’m so tired of not being able to understand what’s being said or the imagery the author is going for. I give up. Not worth the trouble. 

From a page: demur, vittles, offcuts, quarto, haubardiers, pettiwiggin, sally port, sardonic, greater derehunds. (Every page has a different selection of words.) I know what most of those words are and how to apply them, but when all in a string they make the reader stop, remember what they are, call up the appropriate imagery, and wonder if that’s what it’s meant to mean, before continuing. Especially after the author designated a group of female solder-scout-nuns as ‘calendars’ and gave them all funny hats. I keep imagining an order of professional calendar-girls. Thus, ‘calendar,’ in this world, has nothing to do with timetables. If the meanings of the modern words are completely changed, why should I assume my understanding of archaic terms is correct?

Thoughts on A Saint of Dragons by Jason Hightman

It was eh. I didn’t finish it.

Story was a boy raised as a second-class student in a first-class boarding school finds out his father -and by extension himself- is heir to the St. George dragon-slaying business. His ragged knight-errant father comes plowing back into his life and hauls him off to go slay the last dragon in the world, and the story launches from there.

Good opening, really strong first two chapters... and then it slogged. The story moves right along, but the logic of the arc falls apart. I had trouble believing character actions, and the author had a bad habit of projecting his surprises in the ever-hated “little did they know, the monster was right around the corner!” I don’t care what age group you’re writing for, never do this.

The point of view wandered around, the character decisions were secondary to the plot’s demand that they show up in designated areas on time for the next scene, and I just wasn’t buying his world-building and anvilicious ‘rich businessmen and tycoons are actually all evil dragons bent on global domination and must be killed by hobo knights on horseback!’ 

Thoughts on Murkmere by Patricia Elliot

This one’s a retold fairy tale from the ‘best friend’ viewpoint. It wasn’t bad, and was a stellar example of how to use folk religion versus established religion in a fantasy setting. I really liked how the main character’s views were clearly shaped by folk practices, that were derived from a long-standing established religion, that was itself a narrow interpretation of real events. It let the characters explore the myths of their own world in a believable way, without sounding like a diatribe against any present-day religion. 

I liked the unusual viewpoint, but it did leave me wondering what the story would have been like if told from the view of the person in the fairy tail, rather than the person observing them. It does leave the viewpoint somewhat lackluster as you watch the plot unfold just barely off-screen, but overall not a bad read and rather well-written.

Thoughts on Dragons of Noor

Dragons of Noor, by Janet Lee Carey, is an exercise in an adventure we are not currently having. 

I picked this book up because it had a girl and a dragon on the cover. I’m obligated to read and become opinionated about books that fit these criteria. Speaking of the cover, if I see another Poser-stock dragon, it’ll be 2003 all over again. Please, please, poor illustrator, find a new stock dragon. Also speaking of the cover, it contains some nice foreshadowing. The author is introduced as author of “Dragon’s Keep,” which this book isn’t. The blurb at the bottom of the cover is in reference to “The Beast of Noor,” which this book isn’t. The blurb on the back of the book is for “Stealing Death,” which this book also isn’t. 

If you’re seeing a theme, rest assured, it doesn’t go away. This book is about 50% not “Dragons of Noor.” The main characters have been through a previous adventure, in “Beast of Noor,” which is referred to again, and again, and… again… as the plot of the current adventure progresses. That said, this book assures us it is not actually a sequel, but rather a ‘companion’ novel. (It’s lying. It’s a sequel.) The two main characters are a sister and brother, 14 and 16 years old, with a connection to a magical parallel world due to that prior adventure. They both receive the call to action by… um, being in proximity to a magic wind that steals children. An adventure across their world and into the magical realm ensues, via ships, pirates, dragons, tree-spirits and mythological figures. The romance subplot is nonintrusive and kinda cute, and the use of world-myth is good. The characters are well-written and interesting and have realistic internal struggles. They tackle external struggles in adventurous ways and don’t shrink from the plot-call. 

I don’t mind the characters at all, when they’re thinking about the present and what they’re going to do next. They get nostalgic about past adventures about twice per chapter and those scenes are teeth-gritting redundant. The narrative also has a habit of splitting its characters up, showing what each character is doing in successive chapters, and then bringing the characters back together again so it can show the same scene from two different perspectives. This would be a nice effect if it were used to add anything to the story, but it doesn’t. The brother and sister observe roughly the same series of events, and while they might have different feelings on them, those feelings are just passive observations and don’t influence them much. The result is more redundancy, and a padded feeling. The events used to split the siblings are also happenstance or contrived, like random pirate encounters or other ‘split the party’ methods that don’t affect the plot because everyone ends up a the designated waypoint at the same time anyway, without having gained anything but an extra chapter or two of split point-of-view. 

Overall, a pleasant read, but cutting half the pages would make a stronger story, in my opinion. *reminds self: don’t tell the adventure we’re not currently having.*

Thoughts on Dragonworld

Picked up the weirdest book at the library, and I think it's defeated me.

It's called 'Dragonworld,' by Byron Preiss and J. Michael Reaves. It's illustrated by Joseph Zucker, and you'll recognize his style from the Bakshi version of LotR (plus a zillion other places.)

This book is... very strange. I have no idea where it thinks it's going, or what it's trying to be. I found it lost in the 'teen-fantasy' section at the library, devoid of dust-jacket or back-of-book blurb. It's a big blank green book, and I think it was trying to  be the next LotR-style epic fantasy, but... yeah. I guess I'm too far down the line of mass-produced fantasy books to appreciate it for its nostalgic charm.

It struggles with a bit of mixed marketing: the illustrations are something you'd expect for, well, the Hobbit. And the illustrator draws very heavily on Hobbit-style visuals for his scenes and characters. They're cute, small, child-like and comic. The pictures are gorgeous, there's lots of them, and they tell the story pretty well. Like, I want this book to be just illustrations and no words. They're very good.

By chapter 5, three children have been brutally clawed to death by murderous dragons, one by one.

Three cute, chubby-cheeked, curly-haired hobbit children. 

This isn't a kids book, apparently.

And by chapter 10, even though the audience knows it was dragons, the many many POV characters in this book are chasing each other around in a set of rather meaningless intrigues that have nothing to do with dragons. I skipped ahead. It's 3/4ths of the way through the book before the main POV character figures out it was dragons.

We (the audience) knew this in chapter 1. 

I'm sorry book, you may be a well-respected part of 70's era epic fantasy, but I don't have the patience to wade through 500 pages of pseudo-hobbit misdirection and ill-fated ventures. This thing has more characters and subplots than Game of Thrones, and... yeah, no. Not my cup of tea. 

Don't get me wrong- I can do epics- but this is as if Thingol's decision about Beren was actually the result of a manipulation game between Melian and some other Elvish princess who thought Melian wasn't fit for the position because she wasn't a pure elf, and they were just trying to prove something to one another and cared nothing for Beren, Luthien or the Silmaril. (Dragonworld does this in chapter 9 or thereabouts.) It turns plot-hinging decisions into the trivial pursuits of minor characters whose desires are shallow and nonsensical. I'll just go reread Silmarillion now. It has fewer characters and less convoluted plots.