An Orc on the Wild Side

Tom Holt
Completed 10/24/2024, Reviewed 10/24/2024
3 stars

This was a decent send up of fantasy, specifically poking fun at Tolkien.  It made me smile a lot, but was not the rip-roaring laugh fest I thought it would be.  However, the puns are great, the jabs at LOTR are amusing, the satire of the whole was well thought out.  It made fun of race, gender, retirement, gentrification, middle class, and corporate greed.  And it’s all played out in a basically plotless tale with elves, dwarves, wizards, goblins, wraiths, and humans.  I enjoyed the book and will read more by Holt in the future.  If you like authors like Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, and Christopher Moore, you’ll enjoy this one too.

The first half of the book begins with lots of disparate threads that take a while to come together.  There’s the new Dark Lord who is trying to usher in a new Evil with better health care, fewer wars, and female goblins.  There’s the king of the Dwarves who has a human cook.  She’s secretly from another dimension here to try to pawn off cheap Chinese-made utensils and gadgets.  There’s the human lawyer just fired from his Elven law firm for not having enough billable hours.  He gets contacted by the great eye to buy up all the lands of the Realm and displace the inhabitants.  And of course, there are the people from England who have come through a portal to buy (cheap) property homesteading the Realm in the parallel dimension.

There’s a lot going on.  It is remarkable that there is no real plot, just lots of little scenarios.  I guess it all eventually comes together as everyone tries to figure out who the great eye is and why is he trying to take over the Realm.  And I must say, the author does a pretty good job of involving everyone.  There are a lot of threads and they all somehow come together in the end.  

The fun of the book is all the references to Tolkien works and general high fantasy novels.  Holt keeps the humor at a pretty good level through most of the book.  I smiled through almost the whole thing.  I do have to say that the ending caught me off guard.  The book was listed at 393 pages, but it ended at about 359.  (the rest being promos of other books).  So I was expecting a lot more elaborate of a conclusion.  It wasn’t bad, just abrupt.

The characters were at about the right level of development for the type of comedy that is this book.  Nothing too in depth, but enough that every character had a personality.  It wasn’t Monty Python caricatures, but lots of all round silliness mixed in with some bright moments.  I give the book three out of five stars because it’s good.  I’m just a little disappointed it wasn’t funnier.  Once again, this review is rather quick and short as I’ll be in a sling for my dominant shoulder for another 6 weeks.  

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy

Becky Chambers
Completed 10/21/2024, Reviewed 10/23/2024
4 stars

This is the second novella in the Monk and Robot series, which so far is the last.   Like the first, this book is like a big hug and a warm quilt.  Sibling Dex and Mosscap are back, still roaming the countryside, but this time, on their way to Dex’s home.  The book continues to ask the existential questions about life, want, need, humanity, etc, through dialogues between Dex and Mosscap.  There is a lot less tea serving as Dex questions his purpose in life.  But like Psalm for the Wild-Built, it is still a cozy book that is a joy to read.  

I’m keeping this review very short as the book is so similar to Psalm, and because typing is still slow after my shoulder surgery.  I give this book four stars out of five.  It is very close to a five star book for me, because of the way it left me feeling.  It would have been an interesting experience if this were a single volume.  It makes me wonder if I would have given it five stars if I could have sat with it longer.  Anyway, it’s a wonderful read, so warm, gentle, and comforting in the way it leaves me feeling.  I look forward to any other sequels Chambers produces.  

Sister Mine

Nalo Hopkinson
Completed 10/18/2024, Reviewed 10/18/2024
4 stars

My reviews are going to be a little shorter for a few installments.  I have had another surgery on my shoulder and typing is one handed and slow going.  I really enjoy Nalo Hopkinson’s books, even when they’re a little uneven.  This is one such book.  I really enjoyed it, but I felt there were a few two many plot threads and jumping between them was unnerving and sometimes hard to follow.  Hopkinson infuses modern stories with Caribbean mythology and magic.  This time, the main character was a recently separated conjoined twin whose sister received all the family mojo while she received none.  It made growing up in a family of demigods difficult to say the least.  This book won the 2014 Norton Award for YA Sci Fi and Fantasy.  

Makeda is the human twin, Abby is the twin with all the mojo.  The book begins with Makeda moving to a place of her own among the humans.  She’s decided she has to learn how to live without relying on her sister.  Amidst this process, their father dies.  He was condemned to a human existence for falling in love with a human and fathering the two girls.  However, he still is a demigod and should be okay once having shirked his human body.  However, his father was suffering from dementia and part of his existence is in the invasive kudzu plant which seems to want to destroy Makeda.  She is also being chased by a haint, aka haunt or evil spirit.  So Makeda still has to rely on Abby for help in all these things.  She also has a few other people helping her, including her new landlord who seems to have some mojo of his own, and a lover of Abby’s who is in reality a guitar once owned by Jimi Hendrix.  

As you can see by the plot summary, there are a lot of strange things going on.  And the story telling jumps around among all these things.  And for there being so much Caribbean mojo, it actually takes place in Canada.  I occasionally got lost when Makeda did a lot of running from her haint, the kudzu, and other negative energy and entities.  I thought the subplots ad world building all got a little confusing.

However, I thought the characters were really strong.  Makeda is a terrific main character just trying to find her own as an ordinary human.  However, she does seem to occasionally sense mojo around her in others.  She’s convinced she’s heard messages from sea shells and trees, although she gets no support from her family on this.  Abby is a lot harder to like since she is gifted sister.  I also liked Brie, Makeda’s new landlord, who’s also a musician for a band whose music has some mojo-like effect on its listeners.  

Despite having too many plot threads and confusing world building, I enjoyed reading the book.  I was pretty gripped in the search for Makeda’s father, and what form outside the kudzu he would take, if that was even a thing.  I thought the premise was well conceived.  I give this book four stars out of five.  I have another book by Hopkinson, a collection of stories, which I’m interested in.  I might be reading that in a month or so.  

A Psalm for the Wild-Built

Becky Chambers
Completed 10/9/2024, Reviewed 10/9/2024
4 stars

This was a wonderful novella by the author of the Wayfarers series, the first of which is The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet.  I loved that and the other three novels in that series.  I was a little hesitant about this one; I’m not sure why.  I think because I thought she couldn’t top the Wayfarers.  But she at least equaled it with this book.  It’s about life after the Factory Age, when the Robots became aware and left.  Humans recreated their industry without them, and focused on sustainable technology after returning from the brink of self-destruction.  The book is so heartwarming and life-affirming that I had a warm glow about me all the way to the end.  I’m hoping the second book in this series is equally wonderful.  The series was nominated for a 2024 Mythopoeic Award.

Dex is a monk.  They crave the sound of crickets, becoming obsessed with it.  They decide they need a change and become a Tea Monk, bringing hand-prepared teas specifically made for each customer.  They’re sort of a Tea therapist, traveling the land, setting up a booth, and preparing teas based on what each customer tells them is going on with them.  After two years as a Tea Monk, they get the itch again to hear crickets, becoming an obsession.  They decide to cancel their next city visit and go into the mountains in search of them.  On the way in, they come across a robot.  Robots haven’t been seen in about two hundred years.  Mosscap, the robot, tells Dex it is on a journey to meet and learn about humans, and what’s happened to them since they walked away, and what do they need.  Dex however wants to be alone on his own journey, begrudgingly taking Mosscap along.

There are really only two characters in this story, Dex and Mosscap.  Dex is searching for themselves and their purpose.  So when Mosscap appears and asks what does Dex need, they can’t answer because even they don’t know.  They don’t know why their on the journey, only that they’ve become obsessed with the crickets.  Dex is kind of an every person who just wants to find meaning in life.  Mosscap is kind of the opposite.  It is out exploring and researching, but doesn’t need meaning in life.  Life is its own meaning.  Needless to say, they get in some heated discussions.

I give this book four stars out of five.  It’s like a warm hug, or should I say, a cup of tea designed especially for my needs.  While I’m not a tea drinker, I can relate to the feeling of having something so delicious, made for my palate, that I am sated with life.  That’s what this book was like for me.  It being a novella, I don’t want to go into more detail than I already have, hoping I haven’t given away any spoilers.  I just really look forward to the second novella.  

An Unkindness of Ghosts

Rivers Solomon
Completed 10/7/2024, Reviewed 10/7/2024
3 stars

This is the author’s first novel, published by a small publishing house.  I think both facts are evident in that the book tries to do too much.  I think it could have used a better editor.  However, Solomon is an important queer, black author with a lot to say.  Her second work, The Deep, was a brilliant collaboration with other writers and poets and walked away with the 2020 Lambda Literary Award.  This book just needed some help making sure the flow was better and some extraneous things were excised.

Aster is a black woman on the autism spectrum.  She lives on a colony ship called the Matilda.  The upper decks are for the white privileged people and the lower decks are for the poor, black abused workers.  Basically, they are slaves.  The separation is maintained by an adherence to a weird religious dogma that has evolved over the hundreds of years the ship has been travelling to the “Promised Land.”  Aster is the assistant to the gentle Theo, the Surgeon General who is also the nephew of the power-crazed second in command on the ship, Lieutenant.  The supreme ruler of the ship is dying of something that Aster’s mother may have died from.  Thus begins an investigation into her mother’s cryptic journals and the possibility of a ship-wide civil war against the abusive system that the Lieutenant has been upholding.

Yeah, there’s a lot in this book.  I had a lot of trouble getting through the first half of it.  It took me about that long to get that Aster was on the spectrum and experiencing things differently than the people around her.  Her relationships are quite confusing.  Theo has a deep fondness for her though she doesn’t see it.  She just tries to determine if they are friends.  Giselle, with whom she grew up, appears to have ADHD, which make their interactions very confusing in the beginning.  After a while, though, I started to get it and picked up on Aster interactions with Theo, Giselle, and others.  This is especially true of her interactions with guards, who clearly have no tolerance for someone who doesn’t communicate in a usual way.  Clearly, a lot of thought went into creation of Aster.  The characters were very well developed.  

I thought the world building was really good too.  But I had a hard time believing the ship was created as, or devolved into an antebellum South.  It came across a little too much like a parable to make a point than a futurist vision.  Perhaps I’ve read too many books that imply racial equality in the future.  This was just a little tough to suspend disbelief.  

I give this book three stars out of five, mainly because it’s a difficult read and I didn’t completely buy into the premise.  I’d like to read Solomon’s newer works to see what they are like, if she has evolved as a writer and if the editing of her books are better.