Book Review: Ghost Train to New Orleans by Mur Lafferty

Summary

Zoe Norris managed to survive her first job as editor for The Shambling Guide to New York City, a travel guide for Coterie-- vampires, zombies, sprites, gods, and all other manner of supernatural creatures. Despite being a human, she's good at her job and does manage to hold her own with creatures that see her mostly as food. Now, she and her team are heading out of town to start researching their next project: a travel guide for New Orleans.

But things aren't great. Zoe's adventures in New York have revealed her to be a City Talker, a rare sort of human Coterie. Now, she has a secret, and people are out for City Talkers' blood. Her blood.

There's a reason City Talkers are rare. Is Zoe about to become food? All she wants is to write a book!

That's my summary. Here's the one I pulled from http://murverse.com/

Zoe Norris writes travel guides for the undead. And she’s good at it too — her new-found ability to talk to cities seems to help. After the success of The Shambling Guide to New York City, Zoe and her team are sent to New Orleans to write the sequel.

Work isn’t all that brings Zoe to the Big Easy. The only person who can save her boyfriend from zombism is rumored to live in the city’s swamps, but Zoe’s out of her element in the wilderness. With her supernatural colleagues waiting to see her fail, and rumors of a new threat hunting city talkers, can Zoe stay alive long enough to finish her next book?

For this author's Context and Style sections, see my reviews for The Shambling Guide for New York City and The Afterlife Series)

My Thoughts

I listened to the podcast version of this book, just to put that out there. I liked this book, but it felt... underfinished. I never got a real serious sense of urgency at any point during it, even when things were at their worst for Zoe. I'm wondering if that may be in part because even though Lafferty narrated, and I do like her voice and her writing podcast, I don't really get much emotion out of her when she narrates. I don't recall having this issue when I listened to The Shambling Guide to New York City, but then it has been some time since I listened to it. I do, though, know that this lack of real risk has been an issue with other stories of hers I've read.

Even so, there's a lot of good stuff going on here. I love her interpretation of Coterie and how things work for the undead and supernatural. The locales promised in this series may not be exotic, but it's seeing the world through very different eyes, and I love that.

Would I Recommend This Book? Yeah, give it a go! Personally, I think the reader may be served better actually reading it over listening to the podcast, but that's my opinion only. I give Ghost Train to New Orleans a useless-after-midnight 3 of 5 stars.

For more information on the author, visit http://murverse.com/

Book Review: Wool Omnibus (Wool #1-#5) by Hugh Howey

Summary

The sherriff of the Silo, Holston, has spent the last three years missing his wife. She was determined to see the outside. It couldn't be as bad as the pictures said, could it? Now, finally at wit's end, Holston has asked to leave the Silo, sure they'll meet on the outside.

With Holston outside the Silo, it's time to replace him. A mechanical, Juliette, is the surprising nomination, but before she can ascend the many levels to the top of the Silo, the people's lives get thrown into turmoil. The mayor is dead, and the next in line is Bernard, the smarmy IT director who never wanted Juliette as sherriff anyway.

Now Juliette finds herself facing the threat of going outside the Silo. Is she going to find Holston out there, or is the world just as deadly as everyone has always thought?

That's my summary. Here's the one I pulled from www.hughhowey.com/books/wool/

This is the story of mankind clawing for survival, of mankind on the edge. The world outside has grown unkind, the view of it limited, talk of it forbidden. But there are always those who hope, who dream. These are the dangerous people, the residents who infect others with their optimism. Their punishment is simple. They are given the very thing they profess to want: They are allowed outside.

Context

With all the threats of human destruction and terrorism, and knowing that we've gone so far as to drop atomic bombs on one another before, it's interesting to think what backup plans humanity could develop to live for just one more generation. Howey addresses this with his Silo, a self-contained underground city complete with farms, mechanics, cafeterias, and government. Even better, he's chosen to set Wool at a time when people have been in the Silo for so long that it isn't new. It's the way life is. There wasn't life outside the Silo. Rare people wonder about the world outside. It's a brilliant setting, and Howey addresses a lot of the questions both we as outsiders and the characters living it have.

Style

Howey has a very clear, almost simplistic style that really sets the stage for his work. Words serve the story, and he gives neither too much nor too little in description. He does excel at dialogue. The characters are very real and speak that way. Through their words and thoughts, he really gets the reader into his characters' heads, driving their actions. There was no need for him to make up a lot of strange machines or anything for his claustrophobic setting. It kept there from being a gap between what modern readers could relate to and what his characters consider everyday objects. This sort of thing could have easily gotten too strange and confusing. Howey avoided the potential for a trap of foreign creations.

My Thoughts

I was completely sucked into the setting and how people lived in this place. Uppers, Middies, and the Deep Down are different locations with different populations. Being one massive structure still creates divisions between people. There's economy and class, and it shows in how people perceive and interact with one another.

Sadly, Wool wasn't able to keep my intrigue once the newness wore off. The Omnibus is 5 individual stories that are linked, and it was about halfway through the fourth one that my interest really flagged. I did have to drag myself through the last third or so of the book, and I was glad once it was over. I did like how everything ended, so don't think there was a disappointing resolution. I just lost interest, and the book never seemed to want to pull it back. I think it might have been because the action started to split between a few different pods of characters, and there were too many of them that I just didn't really care about. The story did need it, but it didn't draw me in like it could have.

Would I Recommend This Book? Yes and no. I loved the setting Howey created, and the characters were true to human nature. It's a fantastic premise he's got, and there are tons of stories he can tell here. I adored a fair few of the characters (and hated a few that are worthy of it), but it wasn't enough to keep my interest high throughout. The writing, though, is excellent, and because of that, I give Wool Omnibus a heat-taped 4 of 5 stars.

For more information on the author, visit http://www.hughhowey.com/

Book Review Double Whammy: Edgelanders and Sorrow's Peak by Jennifer Melzer

Edgelanders  

Summary

Lorelei's fiance planned to kill her, so she ran. Fleeing for her life, Lorelei, sheltered princess, had no hope. She's lost and alone, far from the home she never got to leave before.

Then the U'lfer found her, a race of wolf-men exiled to a tiny strip of land by Lorelei's father. Mad Finn the Reckless rescued her, only to face exile for his mad actions. Now, banished to the frozen wastes of Rimian, Finn and Lorelei have to stay alive. What's worse, the U'lfer's seers prophecied that Lorelei would be the savior of the dying U'lfer race, and Lorelei is, in fact, half U'lfer herself.

Torn between a past she never knew she had and a future she doesn't want, Lorelei has the weight of an entire race on her shoulders, and a god she doesn't worship pushing her along. Not to mention the devotion of Finn, whose heart she can feel beating with her own.

This was not what she expected the world to be like.

That's my summary. Here's the one I pulled from http://jennifermelzer.com/books/serpent-of-time/edgelanders/

When Princess Lorelei of Leithe overhears her fiancé’s plot to murder her on the way to their wedding, she does the only smart thing: she runs.

Into the Edgelands, the savage, woodland home of the legendary U’lfer, a race of fierce wolves who walk as men, she knows she is as good as dead, but she would rather be torn apart by werewolves than die by Trystay’s hand.

A young U’lfer warrior named Finn catches her scent on the wind and finds himself possessed by an unnatural desire to shield and protect her from that which hunts her. From the moment he first sees her, Finn knows she is his. He feels her heartbeat, knows her soul as well as he knows his own, and he will do anything, even suffer exile from the Edgelands to be with her.

But there is more to Lorelei than meets the eye. She is like Finn; there is U’lfer blood in her veins, a beast beneath her skin she never knew was there. The answers she seeks lie south, in the frozen tundra of Rimian, where a village of people just like her have been waiting for Lorelei to come and save them since before she was even born.

Context

Edgelanders is a little hard to nail down, because it isn't the sort of "standard" fantasy that people tend to think of. It's not the sort of English knights/Medieval period, and it's not the orcs/goblins/Tolkein-ish world.

That. Is. Wonderful. Edgelanders sits on its own, breaking the mold for setting. Personally, I see a lot of Gaelic and Norse influence here... more Norse than Gaelic, I think, though, and it's a great mix. the naming conventions differ from what I'm accustomed to seeing in fantasy fiction, and it lends itself to a rich world that's unlike anything I've seen before. Oh, there are elves and trolls, but they're done differently from the Tolkein elves and trolls that they're entirely different races in their own. In fact, the elves have a different sort of name for themselves, Alviarii, though they are still informally called elves.

It's a refreshingly different setting Melzer has created for her world, and there is a lot of greatness to explore. It does make there a little bit of a learning curve for those who, like me, get sort of "stuck" in the more common Western European fantasy-type worlds, but it's a welcome enough change that I didn't mind the unfamiliarity.

Style

Melzer's writing style and my personal reading style have a little bit of a gap between them. It felt to me like she should read quickly, but I felt like the book dragged along for me, and I couldn't read for long periods of time before my eyes started glossing over. It's not a matter of subject of it being boring or overcomplex. Honestly, I don't know why there was that sort of disjoint that made this book hard to finish for me. It took me much longer to finish Edgelanders than it should have, though, and that's a little unsettling.

My Thoughts

I liked Edgelanders quite a bit, but it's one of those books that, for me, had a lot of little nagging problems that detracted from my enjoyment of it. Little things, like there being too many names of characters and places that were similar. Drekne, Deken, and Dunvarak; Rimian, Rivenn, Rognar, Ruwena, Rhiorna, and Roggi; Lorelei, Logren, and Leithe. In some ways, it just felt like Melzer got stuck on a few letters, and they all got used at the expense of other letters. It made keeping track of people and places a little difficult, but not much.

There was a lot of repetition of ideas. Almost any time we had Finn's point-of-view, he was always mooning and harping over how afraid he was that Lorelei would shun him or never accept him as a mate... only days after they met. I understand that it was a driving force for him, but I got a little sick of these sorts of things always popping up in his thoughts. I think if some of that repetition had been toned down across all the characters, it would have made the book flow faster (for me, at least) and smoothed things out, but that's a personal aesthetic.

Throughout much of the book, I felt like there was something lacking, and it was during the epilogue (which was, in my opinion, the most intriguing part of the book) that I realized what it was: there was no real clear personification of an antagonist. It wasn't until the epilogue that I saw Trystay again, and holy cow, did his presence make a huge difference in the urgency of the plot! Frankly, it brings up my hopes that book two of this series will be better, which isn't to say this book was bad. To me, it felt like a prologue... one really long prologue to the real story.

Would I Recommend This Book? I'm actually going to hold off on recommending it or not until I read the next book. If it leads in the way I think it will, then yeah, I'd say read it, but I don't feel comfortable making that call right now. This book is well-written, though I did have some personal preference problems with it. I hope the next book brings the intrigue of the story up to fill the world like it should. I will, though, give Edgelanders a foreseen 3 of 5 stars.

Sorrow's Peak

Summary

Fate is calling to Lorelei. Finally safe from her murderous fiance, she's learned that reawakening the wolf-spirits of the U'lfer is up to her. There is a task she must undertake, waking and destroying the Serpent of Time to end the vicious repetitive cycle of time the world has been in. As has happened uncounted times, Lorelei sets out with Finn and Brendolowyn. Her heart is still torn between the two men, and they're at one another's throats. Is this bickering over her the cause of their constant failure and time's repetition? Will they be able to break the cycle once and for all?

Fate says only two of them will return. Who will be coming back with Lorelei?

That's my summary. Here's the one I pulled from http://jennifermelzer.com/books/serpent-of-time/sorrows-peak/

Once a princess of Leithe, Lorelei was exiled from her homeland and led to the city of Dunvarak in the tundra of Rimian. The people of Dunvarak call her Light of Madra, and nearly every one of them has a story about the white hand of light who saved them from death during the War of Silence.

She is their savior, and being a savior is no small task.

Charged with retrieving the fractured horns of the U’lfer god, Llorveth, from a long-dead dragon’s treasure hoard in the belly of Great Sorrow’s Peak, the half-bred U’lfer believe with the horns in hand they will finally be able to embrace the dormant wolf, and rise to stand beside their full-blooded brethren in the coming war with men.

But there is more to Lorelei’s plight than simply retrieving the mystical horns of a silent god. She and her companions, Finn, an U’lfer warrior she shares a mate bond with, and a half-Alvarii mage named Brendolowyn, have made this journey before, and unless they can figure out where they went wrong in past cycles, time threatens to repeat itself for eternity.

My Thoughts

Sorrow's Peak picks up right where Edgelanders left off, so it's a pleasant, pretty  much nonexistent segue into the continuing story. I was treated immediately to more of the character I really want to know more about, Trystay, but it was brief. And I didn't get to see him again until the epilogue, but he is an antagonist, so I suppose it's not surprising. He's not even really the main conflict in this novel, but it is good to see what he's up to.

My intrigue with Trystay doesn't mean I'm not interested in our protagonist team. Lorelei is evolving, though I'd like to see her grow more quickly. She seems so resistant to change, but not intentionally. In some ways, the world is pushing her along, and she's helpless to stop it. It does sometimes make her come across as whiny, and I want to slap her sometimes, but it's hard to hate her. She's not my favorite protagonist ever, but her chemistry with her teammates makes up for a lot of frustration I have at her. I think if the book were more exclusively in her POV, I wouldn't be able to stand it.

Bren and Finn make the story in a lot of ways. Their bickering, their turmoil, seems more real than Lorelei's does, at least to me. Finn's continued pining after Lorelei, along with Bren's, get annoying. A lot. But it does have a little more purpose now, as they're really set against each other with the whole "only two will return" thing. This really comes to a crux with Bren, and I enjoyed the tension there.

Then there's the side plot, which is headed by my favorite character, Vilnjar. I want more of him. I love that his story arc has diverged from the main story, and I'm eager to see what becomes of him in book three. Yes, I'm curious to see what becomes of everyone, but his story arc appeals to me more than the main one does. That's just personal preference and has nothing to do with the writing quality or plot quality. That is purely opinion.

Would I Recommend This Book? Sure! While I'm not a die-hard fan of many of these characters, and the plot doesn't particularly resonate with me, this is a well-written and well-developed world and novel, and I believe there is something in here for most readers. It is a little on the solemn side, and maybe that's where my taste gets upset. I will be back for the next book, though. I give Sorrow's Peak an underground 4 of 5 stars.

For more information on the author, visit http://jennifermelzer.com/