Friday, March 23, 2018

Review - That Game We Played During the War

That Game We Played During the War
by Carrie Vaughn
Date: 2016
Publisher: Tor.com
Reading level: A
Book type: short story
Pages: 16
Format: e-book
Source: Tor.com

The people of Gaant are telepaths. The people of Enith are not. The two countries have been at war for decades, but now peace has fallen, and Calla of Enith seeks to renew an unlikely friendship with Gaantish officer Valk over an even more unlikely game of chess, in Carrie Vaughn's novella That Game We Played During The War.

(synopsis from Goodreads)

This story had an interesting premise that led me to want to know more. There are two groups, the Gaantish and the Enithi. The former is telepathic, the latter is not. They were fighting a war, though why they were doing so was never really explained.

The story basically describes a meeting between two people from opposite sides who met during the war, and now they've come together again and are playing chess. Of course, that's an interesting and complicated idea when one person knows the moves the other person is about to make! I'm still not sure if I missed something, but there seems to be more to the relationship between Calla and Valk than we're told.

This whole idea would be an interesting setup for a longer novel that might explain such questions as to why the war happened (nobody seemed to feel much like killing each other--taking prisoners appeared to be pretty common in lieu of killing--so it came off kind of like a big, stupid game with terrible consequences like famine), more of the mechanics of how the telepathic Gaantish society works, and maybe a clearer explanation of exactly what happened between the two characters here.

Overall, though, it was a fairly enjoyable story with some thought-provoking elements.

Quotable moment:

The Gaantish officer stared at her. Her hair under her cap was pulled back in a severe bun; her whole manner was very strict and proper. Her tabs said she was a second lieutenant—just out of training and the war ends, poor thing. Or lucky thing, depending on one's point of view. Calla wondered what the young lieutenant made of the mess of thoughts pouring from her. If she saw the sympathy or only the pity.

"You speak Gaantish," the lieutenant said bluntly.

Calla was used to this reaction. "Yes. I spent a year at the prisoner camp at Ovorton. Couldn't help but learn it, really. It's a long story." She smiled blandly.

Plot: 3/5
Characters: 4/5
Pace: 3/5
Writing & Editing: 3/5
Originality: 4/5

Enjoyment: 4/5

Overall Rating: 3.57 out of 5 ladybugs

Thursday, March 15, 2018

Review - Bitter Grounds

Bitter Grounds
by Neil Gaiman
Date: 2003
Publisher: Tor.com
Reading level: A
Book type: short story
Pages: 17
Format: e-book
Source: Tor.com

Coffee, New Orleans & Zombies.

(synopsis from Goodreads)

This was a tricky one. On the one hand, it's Neil Gaiman. I've read some of his other short stories, as well as Coraline, so I thought it would be safe to assume that this would be a quality story. On the other hand, the typos were so bad that I was continually being distracted and thrown right out of the flow as I tried to figure out what the sentences with messed-up punctuation or missing words were trying to say.

Aside from that, though, this is the sort of story that doesn't really work for me. It starts so late that we basically just get an ending, to both the story and the character arc. Who was this nameless narrator? Had he been zombified? If so, where/when? Before he got to New Orleans? What happened with Anderton and the tow truck driver? What was going on with the anthropologists? Were they just a bunch of weirdos, or were they tied into the zombie stuff, too? Was everyone?

Overall, I just feel like I read the last few pages of a book and am utterly confused as to what the thing was even about.

Quotable moment:

In every way that counted, I was dead. Inside somewhere maybe I was screaming and weeping and howling like an animal, but that was another person deep inside, another person who had no access to the face and lips and mouth and head, so on the surface I just shrugged and smiled and kept moving. If I could have physically passed away, just let it all go, like that, without doing anything, stepped out of life as easily as walking through a door, I would have done. But I was going to sleep at night and waking in the morning, disappointed to be there and resigned to existence.

Plot: 1/5
Characters: 2/5
Pace: 2/5
Writing & Editing: 2/5
Originality: 2/5

Enjoyment: 1/5

Overall Rating: 1.57 out of 5 ladybugs

Wednesday, March 14, 2018

Review - The Dragon with a Chocolate Heart

The Dragon with a Chocolate Heart (Tales from the Chocolate Heart #1)
by Stephanie Burgis
Date: 2017
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA Childrens
Reading level: MG
Book type: prose novel
Pages: 253
Format: e-book
Source: Amazon.ca

Aventurine is a brave young dragon ready to explore the world outside of her family's mountain cave... if only they'd let her leave it. Her family thinks she's too young to fly on her own, but she's determined to prove them wrong by capturing the most dangerous prey of all: a human.

But when that human tricks her into drinking enchanted hot chocolate, she's transformed into a puny human without any sharp teeth, fire breath, or claws. Still, she's the fiercest creature in these mountains--and now she's found her true passion: chocolate. All she has to do is get to the human city to find herself an apprenticeship (whatever that is) in a chocolate house (which sounds delicious), and she'll be conquering new territory in no time... won't she?

(synopsis from Goodreads)

This book was so cute and so much fun! I wish it had been around when I was younger (but I still enjoyed it very much as an adult).

Aventurine is a great character. She has a distinctive voice, and we never quite forget that she's a dragon trapped in a "puny human" body. I love the message about finding your passion--the thing that makes you so happy that you want to do it all the time--and being true to who you really are on the inside, even when that might be difficult. There's no romance in this book; instead, we get some great friendship and family themes. And the dragons themselves are wonderful characters; instead of mindless beasts, they're actually quite scholarly (did you know dragons debate philosophy and write epic poetry?) and they even think humans are the stupid ones!

I've barely seen this book mentioned, and it's a shame, because it's a well-written story with a good message, a fun plot, and unforgettable characters. It hasn't gotten nearly the amount of attention it deserves.

Quotable moment:

When I passed a waffle stand two minutes later, I didn’t even let out the snarl of desperation that wanted to rip itself from my throat.

If all I had were five marks, I would not waste them. I was a fierce, powerful dragon despite my current body problems, and I could control myself, no matter what Mother or Jasper thought.

I just wished that all the horses I passed didn’t look so delicious.

Premise: 5/5
Plot: 4/5
Characters: 4/5
Pace: 4/5
Writing: 4/5
Editing: 4/5
Originality: 5/5
Enjoyment: 4/5

Overall Rating: 4.25 out of 5 ladybugs

Friday, March 2, 2018

Review - My Life as a Bench

My Life as a Bench
by Jaq Hazell
Date: 2017
Publisher: Nowness Books
Reading level: YA
Book type: prose novel
Pages: 234
Format: e-book
Source: Amazon.ca

'There are so many benches lining the riverside, each and every one tragic in its own way.'

Ren Miller has died aged seventeen and yet her consciousness lives on, inhabiting her memorial bench by the River Thames in London.

Ren longs to be reunited with her boyfriend Gabe, but soon discovers why he has failed to visit. Devastated, she must learn to break through and talk to the living so she can reveal the truth about her tragic end.

Unique, haunting, and compelling, this is a story about love, friendship, a passion for music and what, if anything, remains after we've gone.

(synopsis from Goodreads)

WARNING: spoilers - To read this review with the spoilers hidden, check it out on Goodreads.

I really didn't like this one. Here's the thing: I made a sort of reading resolution this year that I was going to stick to books from big publishers in 2018. I've become exhausted from reading self-pubbed and indie crap. Picking this book up was my own fault... but, to be fair, I assumed an award-winning novel would be written and edited well. I didn't realize that the awards this book won were for self-published and independent-press books.

I don't really have a problem with the premise. In fact, it's kind of interesting. But the way it was executed was not. Ren's spirit is basically trapped in a memorial bench on the banks of the river. She has no one to talk to, other than another bench spirit named Lionel, who conveniently goes silent every night so we can listen to Ren narrate her life for us. There are a couple of problems with this setup. One is the repetition. For much of the book, Ren repeats herself, and we have to listen to variations on her first days in London over and over again. So much of that could've been skimmed over even more (but that would've decreased the page count on what is already a short book... even if it doesn't feel like it when you're reading it). By the time Ren finally tells us the whole story, we're into about the last quarter of the book. Almost all of the action happens after that point, making it really uneven. The second problem with Lionel may be something that's just a limitation of the Kindle edition, but I'm not sure. See, when Ren and Lionel talk to each other, Ren's dialogue is in italics. Lionel's isn't. There are no quotation marks. The problem comes in because Lionel's dialogue is formatted the exact same way as the regular narration, so sometimes I couldn't tell for a moment whether Lionel was speaking or if we'd reverted back to the narration. I have to wonder if perhaps the paperback edition uses different fonts for Lionel and Ren, but this issue, combined with a few others, makes me suspect that it was just the author being artsy.

There were other stylistic choices that I wasn't fond of. In fact, by the end of the book, I was getting really pissed off. And I'm going to assume they're stylistic choices, because someone with an MA in Creative Writing should know better than to pull all the crap this author did. Between the silent actions that passed for dialogue tags (probably my biggest pet peeve) to this weird dialogue thing she did where two sentences would be tacked together with a tag, but the second sentence always started with a lowercase letter, I was about ready to DNF the whole thing out of frustration.

The story takes place in London, for the most part, so there's a lot of British slang. I was wishing for a glossary as I was reading, and I discovered one at the end. But most of the words I'd had trouble with weren't even in it! (I have a feeling the glossary was written more for British folks who might not've understood teenage slang. As a Canadian, I encountered lots of other words I wasn't sure about... but that most Brits would probably know.)

The story itself is ham-fisted and looks like it was trying to take advantage of the current discussions about race and discrimination. The problem is that it was done so badly that I didn't buy it. On the one hand, we've got Gabe, a mixed-race kid (he's half black, which we don't even find out until way into the story, even though it's important to the plot), who's accused of murdering Ren. Despite the fact that he's pretty much squeaky clean, everybody assumes he killed her, even though it goes completely against his character. When we finally find out what really happened, it comes so far out of left field that I still have a hard time believing that that's how it unfolded. Besides the fact that the real killer's motives weren't foreshadowed enough, Gabe basically got out of jail because of a psychic. That's... would that really happen? If the police were so racist as to assume Gabe was guilty simply because he was black and in the vicinity, would he really get off because a psychic said he didn't do it?

The ending was left full of questions. Where did Lionel go? Why is Ren's spirit still there? Is she really going to stay there for decades, just so she can visit with Gabe? And does she expect Gabe to stay loyal to her and never move on with his own life?

Overall, this was an interesting premise that could've been worked into a really cool story, but the way it was handled was boring, repetitive, unrealistic, and kind of annoying. This isn't a book I'd recommend... even if it has won some awards.

Premise: 3/5
Plot: 1/5
Characters: 1/5
Pace: 1/5
Writing: 2/5
Editing: 2/5
Originality: 2/5
Enjoyment: 1/5

Overall Rating: 1.63 out of 5 ladybugs

Review - Chapter Six

Chapter Six
by Stephen Graham Jones
Date: 2014
Publisher: Tor Books
Reading level: A
Book type: short story
Pages: 32
Format: e-book
Source: Tor.com

"Chapter Six", by Stephen Graham Jones, is an anthropological zombie story about Crain, a grad student, who has a theory of mankind’s evolution. As he and his former professor scavenge on bone marrow left behind by the local zombie horde, he makes his well-reasoned argument.

(synopsis from Goodreads)

This is a different sort of zombie story. Very cerebral. Even though we don't really see any brain-munching going on...

It was just okay for me. It read too much like a textbook, with these two anthropology nerds talking shop. The story did pick up eventually, but only at the end. It almost felt like... well, Chapter Six of a novel. All the technical discussions about evolution would've been okay as part of a larger work, but they took up way too much of this short story and made it kind of boring. The ending makes up for that a little, but it's still not something I'd read again for fun.

Quotable moment:

Once it was dark enough that they could pretend not to see, not to know, they used a rock to crack open the tibia of what had once been a healthy man, by all indications. They covered his face with Crain’s cape, and then covered it again, with a stray jacket.

"Modern sensibilities," Dr. Ormon narrated. "Our ancestors would have had no such qualms."

Plot: 2/5
Characters: 3/5
Pace: 2/5
Writing & Editing: 3/5
Originality: 3/5

Enjoyment: 3/5

Overall Rating: 2.71 out of 5 ladybugs

Thursday, March 1, 2018

Review - As Good as New

As Good as New
by Charlie Jane Anders
Date: 2014
Publisher: Tor Books
Reading level: A
Book type: short story
Pages: 32
Format: e-book
Source: Tor.com

From the author of the Hugo-winning "Six Months, Three Days," a new wrinkle on the old story of three wishes, set after the end of the world.

(synopsis from Goodreads)

Quirky and pretentious, this is a short story about a woman who finds a genie and his bottle after the end of the world and sets about trying to make things right. I wasn't impressed with the writing (here we have yet another author who doesn't know how to correctly punctuate dialogue), and the overall tone was both bland and affected. The MC's best friend's name was Julie for the first half, and Julia for the second, and there was even one spot where we were suddenly inside a non-POV character's head for one sentence. Editor?

The main character, Marisol, isn't too bad, but we don't really know much about who she is, beyond a few labels. The descriptions of her weird plays didn't help much, either; those just made me feel like she was trying way too hard to be an artiste. And Richard, the genie... Almost immediately, he's described as looking like a Jew, and then Marisol refers to him as a "self-loathing" genie. I went back and reread how the character was introduced, and I couldn't see anything that indicated self-loathing. So either the author was relying on a tired stereotype, or she was telling the reader about the character, rather than showing (which isn't great, either).

I didn't quite understand the wishes. I mean, I understood what they were, but Marisol's second wish pretty much eliminated the need for the third (and fourth) wishes, so I didn't really understand why she made them the way she did. I got the feeling that she was just trying to show how clever she was. She wouldn't make stupid wishes like all those other wishers of the past. She was too smart to do the things that would lead to apocalyptic results. Well, good for you, Marisol. But you basically wasted two wishes. She had all the time in the world to think about how to overcome any loopholes or paradoxes, so you'd think she would've been able to come up with something better... or at least a little more interesting. (Technically, she wouldn't have had a lot of time, but we're operating under the assumption that frozen microwave dinners have infinite viability. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't want to eat those after a few years, no matter how good your freezer was.)

This review is threatening to overtake the story itself, as far as word count goes, so I'll just end it here. Not terrible, but not great, and probably pretty forgettable. I'm sure there are better genie stories out there.

Quotable moment:

Maybe she would have done more good as a playwright than as a doctor, after all—clichés were like plaque in the arteries of the imagination, they clogged the sense of what was possible. Maybe if enough people had worked to demolish clichés, the world wouldn’t have ended.

Plot: 3/5
Characters: 2/5
Pace: 3/5
Writing & Editing: 2/5
Originality: 2/5

Enjoyment: 2/5

Overall Rating: 2.26 out of 5 ladybugs