Misfit Mage

Michael Taggart
Completed 6/24/2021, Reviewed 6/28/2021
3 star

I got this book because I kept getting ads for it on Facebook.  I read the synopsis and eventually succumbed.  I’m glad I did because it was thoroughly enjoyable.  That’s not to say it’s written well, because it has its problems, but in this case, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  The most amazing part of this book is that it’s the most detailed description of a magic system I’ve ever read.  Taggart, a new author who previously published photography books, explains the development of the main character’s magical abilities with such precision that you’d think he spent his whole life developing it.  

Jason is a gay man living in Louisville, Kentucky.  He makes a living by playing poker.  He generally wins because he has some light, innate magical abilities.  After one game, in the middle of having a romp with a fellow player, two men break into his hotel room and begin chasing him.  When they finally catch up with him, they beat him to near death.  However, he escapes and is found by his landlady Sandy and her building’s handyman John.  They turn out to be magical as well.  They wrap him in spells to enhance his recovery.  The thing is, this near-death experience has helped Jason come into his full power as a mage.  He’s taken under Sandy and John’s wing, along with another housemate, Annabeth, to learn how to use his power.  While he’s learning, this ragtag group comes under attack by an evil mage and her minions whom they must fight to keep their place in the world of magic.

Jason is a pretty great character.  He thought he was the only one with magic abilities until Sandy and John reveal themselves to him.  He’s a bit of a Mary Sue, but he’s just so likeable that it didn’t bother me.  He has a lot of learning to do and a lot of healing to experience.  It’s also great that his being gay is very organic.  It doesn’t overwhelm the plot.  And this is not a heavy M/M romance; it’s very PG-13.  His love interest is Tyler, an incubus with a good heart, which is hard to find in this world.  Most incubi suck all the emotions out of a person through sex, like a male banshee, but Tyler only extracts the bad stuff.  Tyler is sweet, and hopefully we’ll see more of him in the sequel.

Sandy is head of the House, an honor she received by being a terrific warrior mage.  She’s very knowledgeable, but isn’t all-knowing.  She learns from Jason whose magic ability developed differently from her and most of the mages she knows.  John is awesome too, an amazingly handsome half-human half-troll.  He helps care for Jason in the beginning, which includes a particularly amusing scene where he helps him shower.  It’s a revelation for Jason because he never thought he was attracted to hairy men, and well, things get a little embarrassing for Jason since John is straight.  Annabeth is also neat.  She has a different magic ability, based on sounds and music.  She’s very motherly, being, well really, looking, 50ish and always having a warm, accepting smile for Jason.  Before he learns her name, he calls her Sunshine.

There are two other characters worth mentioning.  There’s Penny, an actual penny that Jason used as a focus for his magic in the beginning of the story and later becomes sort of sentient.  How this happens and what Jason does with Penny is part of the amazing world building Taggart does.  There’s also Bermuda Moses, a kitten who steals Jason’s heart and helps him in his battles against evil forces.  Bermuda steals the scenes whenever he appears, and I’m not even a cat lover!

Now for the problems.  As I said, the writing is not great.  There are times I felt like the word choices and sentences were simple.  It reminded me of how I write.  He uses “really” a lot, like I do.  I always feel like it’s a really lazy word 😉 that a good writer would only use sparingly.  I also thought that all the descriptions of how magic works was great, but at times it derailed the plot.  It kinda was like magic, plot, magic, plot, magic, plot.  It just didn’t flow together that well.  I’m sure a good critic could pick out more problems, but these were the ones that stood out for me.

Despite the problems, the book is very enjoyable.  It’s a solid three stars out of five.  If I rated it on emotional response alone, I would bump it up a star, but I feel like the author still needs some practice developing his writing skills.  Still, I found myself identifying with Jason through his good times and bad times.  I certainly intend to read the next volume in this series and am looking forward to it, regardless of whether Taggart grows as a writer as quickly as I’d like.  This book is simply enjoyable, a feel-good read that I’d recommend to anyone.

Harrow the Ninth

Tamsyn Muir
Completed 6/18/2021, Reviewed 6/18/2021
1 star

This book was a mess.  It maybe was trying to be clever in form, but it was simply a mess.  About halfway through, I was ready to give up and put it down, but I read a bunch of reviews that said that the first two-thirds of the book are confusing and it all comes together in the end.  I also read a few that hated the whole book.  I should have listened to those few.  This book has a lot of fans and has very high ratings on several book sites.  I’m not one of them.  By the time I got to the part that was supposed to be revelatory, I didn’t care.  As with Muir’s first book, Gideon the Ninth, I’m astounded this book has been nominated for awards, including the Hugo.  The Hugo being a fan-based award, tells you how loved it is.  Amazing.

I’m not sure I can convey the plot because I’m not sure what it was.  The summary says something about Harrow going on a spaceship that’s haunted by the ghost of a planet, as well as ghosts of dead peers.  Someone one wants her dead, and she doesn’t know if the universe is better off with her or without her.  I really didn’t get that.  I don’t really know what I got.  The book is non-linear, jumping all over the timeline.  I ended up reading the chapters as 50 some-odd short stories that may or may not have been related to past stories.  I kinda could follow a couple of the story lines, but there didn’t seem to be much plot there.  Harrow is obsessed with the dead thing in the Locked Tomb back on her home planet.  Yeah, someone is trying to kill her.  People around her are getting killed, and their ghosts or more accurately revenants are coming back and interacting with her.

The book is written mostly in second person, with occasional chapters in third person.  The second person narrative actually read fairly well, not as bad as others I’ve read.  I’m not a fan of second person, it seems more like an academic exercise rather than legitimate storytelling device.  But when you get past that two-thirds point in the book, it becomes clear who the narrator is.  

The characterization is a little better in this book than in “Gideon”.  Despite there being way too many characters again, a few stood out with major roles.  Augustine, Mercymorn, the Emperor aka God, and of course Harrow.  However, I though Harrow was so very different than she was in Gideon, it was hard to connect the original with this instance of her.  My biggest complaint that there are so many ways to refer to a character, it was almost like a Russian novel:  cavalier, saint, lyctor, their name, meat.  

The prose was interesting as well.  Normally, I would have said it was good, but I found it just complicated and diffused comprehension.  Sometimes the descriptions and similes went on so long, I lost track of conversations, which is a cardinal sin of prose, particularly when there are many people speaking.

Like it’s predecessor, I give this book one star out of five.  I’m not necessarily a fan of non-linear books, but this one was simply incomprehensible.  I don’t know why lately I’ve become obsessed with reading Hugo and Nebula nominees.  I don’t vote (but maybe I should register to vote this year for the Hugos, which are being delayed until December).  I guess I want to see what all the fuss is about the nominees.  And these popular books are almost always on sale, so I buy them.  However, whether the third book in this trilogy is nominated next year or not, I’m definitely not buying or reading it.  

A Cosmology of Monsters

Shaun Hamill
Completed 6/10/2021, Reviewed 6/11/2021
5 stars

I couldn’t believe this was a debut novel.  It’s so well-written and so scary and oh so very weird.  The trend these days seems to be weirdness based on HP Lovecraft weirdness, and this is one of them.  It’s a story about a dysfunctional family and their encounter with monsters and the strange dimension they come from.  This book grabbed me right at the beginning and never let me go.  When I got to the end, I didn’t want it to wrap up.  It did, and quite nicely as well.  It’s not that I love stories of dysfunction, but it was such a damned well-crafted universe that I wanted to treasure every second in it.  And it was hard to do that because the tension kept me reading very quickly and prevented me from putting it down when I was exhausted.  I discovered this book from one of the authors I follow on Twitter, but I can’t remember which one.  Whoever it was, I’m so glad I followed their recommendation.  

The story begins with a woman named Margaret who marries a man for love rather than the rich man who was courting her.  They have two children when they decide to made a haunted house experience called The Wandering Dark.  The husband Harry starts having seizures as the opening of the house nears and Margaret finds out she’s pregnant again.  Harry dies and young Noah grows up without knowing his father.  The horror part of the story is that various members of the family see a wolf-like humanoid creature in a robe, but each ignores it until one day when Noah goes to the window to get a closer look at the creature.  Rather than react with fear, he speaks to the creature which responds by writing in chalk on the sidewalk “Friend” “Help”.  The story gets weirder as Noah’s relationship with the monster grows and children around town start disappearing.

Hamill creates extremely vivid, realistic characters.  Noah is the narrator, telling the story of how his parents met, their life before him, and the family’s life after he is born and meets the monster.  The story covers about thirty years (in only 325 pages) but we really become well acquainted with each family member at the different stages of their lives.  Margaret and Harry don’t have a fairy tale marriage even though they married for love.  The eldest daughter Sydney loves her father more than her mother.  Eunice is a depressed, suicidal middle child who thinks the world of her little brother Noah.  Noah saves Eunice’s suicide notes.  And he is a shy kid whose need for interpersonal relationships is satisfied by the Monster.  We also explore the monster’s personality as it becomes closer to Noah, even though it only communicates by writing simple words in chalk on the sidewalk.  

The world building is great as well.  The story takes place in a small Texas town, though fortunately it’s not written in southern drawl or slang.  (I had enough of that with the accents in the last book I read.)  It could actually be Anytown, USA.  The alternate dimension of the Monster is also well-conceived and described.  Vines which pierce the body to turn a human into a monster are particularly gruesome.  

I want to say so much more, but it gives too much away.  So I’ll leave with what I’ve said.  There are just so many terrific scenes that evoke sadness, empathy, uncomfortableness, tension, and fear.  There’s a little humor here and there to break up the tension.  I give the book five stars out of five because I became totally enrapt in the story, felt everyone’s pain, and put my kindle down in fear, then quickly picked it up again to get right back into it.  This is simply a terrific horror story that could be called literature because it’s so well written.  I find it interesting that in his Acknowledgments, Hamill thanks Ethan Canin as one of his MFA professors, a little-known but highly praised general fiction author who I absolutely love.  I’ve read most of his books and love how he creates ordinary, realistic people and situations.  It’s like I’ve entered a second generation of greatness.  I look forward to reading more of Hamill’s works even though I don’t generally get around to reading as much horror as I used to.

The Mote in God’s Eye

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
Completed 6/7/2021, Reviewed 6/7/2021
2 stars

I wasted a week of my life on this tedious book and I want it back!  Reading this book was one miserable experience.  I found it to be uninteresting, overly complicated, overly sprawling, and without focus.  The ending didn’t even feel like an ending.  It’s like the authors ran out of paper and said, “Oops, it’s over”.  It’s also very early ‘70s, a sausage-fest of an expedition with one woman and all the rest men.  There was some commentary on slavery which can be construed as satire or racist.  I couldn’t figure that out.  The only parts I liked were the initial introduction to the aliens and a committee debating the fate of the aliens near the end.  Everything else was cardboard military space opera and mildly original aliens.  I wonder if I read this book when I was in high school if I would have liked it.  Somebody liked it because it was nominated for a Hugo and a Nebula in 1975.

The galaxy is in the Second Empire after the collapse of the First Empire due to scads of revolting planets taking it down.  The Second Empire is held together by a vast naval fleet which uses the Alderson drive for faster than light travel.  One day an alien ship is spotted entering the area around New Caledonia.  Captain Rod Blaine captures the ship and finds a dead alien in it.  They find that it comes from a red supernova area known as Murcheson’s Eye and specifically from the yellow sun in front of it called the Mote.  The Emperor commissions two ships to go to the Mote and meet the aliens and figure if they are a threat to the Empire.

The aliens, called Moties, are almost interesting.  They are kind of mammalian with two nimble right arms and a thick powerful left arm.  They are more or less lopsided, as if they evolved without gravity.  Their society is divided into castes: the whites are the masters, the browns are the workers, and the hybrids are the mediators.  The mediators speak for the masters and keep the browns from revolting.  There are also subspecies, including miniatures called Watchmakers who repair and enhance mechanical things.  The subspecies are considered animals.  So yeah, commentary on slavery, satire, or racist.  Hard to say.  But it felt icky.

The humans have a 19th century-like empire structure, with the Emperor, marquises, and barons.  It’s patriarchal and the navy is completely populated with men.  And they are all pretty much cardboard characters.  There were a few who stood out:  Blaine because he was the main character, Sally because she was the only woman, the admiral because he was Russian, the engineer because he was Scottish and spoke with a brogue, the merchant because he was Muslim, and Jonathon Whitbread because I kept on saying “white bread” whenever I saw his name.  The cast of characters is two pages long and inevitably, the men were hard to tell apart.  I couldn’t identify with anybody.  Blaine was particularly annoying towards the end of the book when he gets engaged to Sally and he starts calling her “kitten”.  Ewwww.

Besides the usage of “kitten”, there was another word used that gave me the willies.  They liked to use the word “rape” as a pejorative exclamation.  I had one friend say it may have come from the phrase “rape and pillage”.  Regardless, it made my skin crawl.

The characters of the Moties were pretty interchangeable as well.  When the mission to the Mote sends a landing party down to the surface, the Moties pair mediators with each of the humans.  They learn Anglic very quickly, although their language of screeches and whistles eludes the humans.  Not only do the Moties learn the human language, they begin imitating their assignees and their accents and mannerisms.  So, since the humans are pretty hard to tell apart, so are the Moties.

It’s no surprise to my regular blog readers that I’m not a military or space opera fan, but I am regularly astonished when I like a book of these sub-genres.  I thought I would like this one from the summaries I read.  But within fifty pages, I knew this would be a slog.  I did find one part of the book interesting.  It’s toward the end, and surprisingly it’s a sequence where a committee tries to decide whether to trade with the Moties or not.  It was one of the few sections that I though was clearly written and the characters were actually differentiated.  

I give this book two stars out of five.  I wanted to give it one star initially, but thinking about it as a whole, it’s slightly better than the sum of its parts.  I’ve only read one other book by Niven and Pournelle, “Lucifer’s Hammer” (no review).  I read it in high school and listened to it on audio a few years ago.  I thought it was fairly well put together despite being a disaster novel.  Mote seems slapped together.  Niven and Pournelle published a sequel nearly twenty years later.  I have absolutely no interest in reading it after this book.  

A Heritage of Stars

Clifford D Simak
Completed 5/31/2021, Reviewed 5/31/2021
3 stars

Another decent book by Simak.  Like many of his others, the tale is pastoral, with almost all the action taking place in the overgrown wilderness of a thousand years in the future after the great Collapse.  It is sort of a dystopian novel where humans have destroyed all the technology and reverted to mostly nomadic and tribal living.  The one holdout is the University of Minnesota, now more of a monastery, but still a place where learning is revered.  Even though this book was written in the seventies, it feels older, more like the golden age of science fiction.  There’s a lot of exposition and philosophy rather than action, and the plot gets a little clunky at times, but I still enjoyed it.

Living at the U of M is a young man named Thomas Cushing.  After his parents and grandfather died, he roamed the wilds until he came upon the university.  He was allowed in as a grower of potatoes, but also learned to read and write.  While there he became obsessed with the history of the Collapse and the subsequent destruction of technology.  Robots were destroyed and their heads stacked in pyramids by many of the remaining tribes.  Books about technology were destroyed.  But Cushing found a particular book of the history of the Collapse that enthralled him, and some notes in it made a reference to the Place of Going to the Stars.  Cushing decides to leave the university to look for the Place.  The rest of the book is journey to find it.

I found the book to be a little Wizard of Oz-ish.  Cushing goes on a journey and collects a ragtag group of followers along the way.  There’s Meg, the “witch” who is a sensitive, that is, sensing things externally and mentally.  There’s Rollo the last remaining robot who keeps his parts lubricated with bear fat.  Rounding out the group are a man who can speak with plants and a woman who can see into the great void of the universe.  Together they encounter difficulties as they look for the Place of Going.  The characterization isn’t great, but I did like Meg, who starts out with bravado but is ultimately unsure of her mental gifts.  Rollo was also rather fun, as most of Simak’s robot characters are.  He’s not a super being, but rather a quirky companion with more humanity than most humans.  

The prose is wonderful.  Simak displays his gift of the sylvan setting as he does in some of his best stories.  The world building is simple, as it is a devolution of civilization, with broken down homes, agrarian communities, and hostile raiders.  It represents the downfall of humanity.  And that is ultimately the main philosophical question of the book.  When this current civilization falls apart, for whatever reason, will humanity rise again or wither into nothing?  Simak also makes great points about trying to reason with people who have turned their back on logic and modern thinking, relying on outdated myths that do nothing but keep people ignorant.  

I give this book three stars out of five.  It’s not as good as some of his other works, like my favorite, Way Station, but it was enjoyable.  It has a cozy feeling to it, like you’re in a cabin in the woods with a roaring fire, a rocking chair, and a comfy quilt.  I find this with most of Simak’s books, even the average ones.  He just has gift with his writing about forests and farms that I’ve never come across with any other writer.  

The Midnight Bargain

CL Polk
Completed 5/26/2021, Reviewed 5/26/2021
3 stars

I was a little disappointed in this book.  It’s good, but didn’t knock my socks off like Witchmark and the other books of the Kingston Cycle.  It’s a regency romance with magic, a fairly common trope, but this one more or less hits you over the head with its message about women fighting the suppression of their magical abilities by men.  It was a pleasant read that didn’t really take off until the end, which unraveled at a frantic pace.  This book was nominated for a Nebula, but would not be my pick.

The story follows Beatrice Clayton, a young woman who has come to the city with her family for the bargaining season, that is, when all the young women of marrying age make their rounds at parties and other social gatherings to find a husband.  The trouble is, Beatrice doesn’t want to marry because it means that she must forgo her magic, since the fetus of a sorceress is usually possessed by a spirit before it gets its soul, creating an abomination.  The result is that the baby and the woman are burned at the stake.  To prevent this, women must wear silver necklaces, not unlike slave yokes, to cancel out their talents and protecting the baby.  

Beatrice wants to be a full-fledged mage, but is obligated to marry to provide her indebted family with a dowry to return them to solvency.  Then she meets Ianthe Lavan and his sister Ysbeth.  Ysbeth too wants to be a mage and never marry.  The two young women join forces with a grimoire that explains how to be a mage without the help of the men’s magic society.  Ianthe helps as well, and as you might guess, he and Beatrice fall in love.  So she must decide what it will be, marriage and the yoke, or magic with the societal scandal and the ruin of her family.

The characters are all really well-developed and interesting.  Beatrice, Ysbeth, and Ianthe are the main characters.  Their interactions and dialogue are realistic.  I empathized with all three.  There is a fourth character, Harriet, Beatrice’s fifteen-year-old sister.  She is well-done as well, but her character is really annoying, as a fifteen-year-old might well be.  She is aghast at Beatrice’s behavior, for if the family goes into financial ruin, she would have no hope whatsoever of having her own bargaining season.  And of course, this being a regency England-styled world, a woman’s most important job is catching a man.  A lot of her dialogue is simply cringeworthy, not because it’s bad writing, but because it’s so accurate to the world Polk builds.  But this awareness did not make me like Harriet any better.

The secondary characters are rather cardboard: the long-suffering mother of Beatrice who wears the yoke, the single-minded father, the ruthless Lavan matriarch who wants her son to marry higher, and the myriad of suitors, some kindly and some foul.  The one other character I did like was the lesser spirit of luck whom Beatrice conjures to help her through the season.  It’s playfully devious and very likeable.  I enjoyed its obsession with throwing hexes to help Beatrice.  It kind of reminded me a little of Grr from the “Invader Zim” cartoon from about fifteen years back.  It’s a little naïve, fun, and dangerous.

The world building was quite good, borrowing from regency England and throwing in magic.  It’s done consistently and believably.  I had no trouble buying into it.  My trouble was that the first two-thirds of the book is unremarkable, from Beatrice and Ysbeth’s desire to break the mold cast for women in society to her relationship with Ianthe.  It all felt like it had been done before and more interestingly.  

I give the book three stars out of five.  It’s a pleasant read, but just doesn’t compare to the excitement of Polk’s Kingston Cycle.  I look forward to future books by Polk.  I think she’s a very good writer and has some excellent ideas.  I think I’m just tired of the regency thing.  

The City We Became

NK Jemisin
Completed 5/20/2021, Reviewed 5/21/2021
4 stars

Every series I’ve read so far by Jemisin is very different, that is, they have very different types of fantasy.  This book is urban-weird, Lovecraftian, while turning the tables on HPL’s racist writing.  It takes place in our present, in New York City and there is a creature from another dimension that is trying to destroy the city before it can be born into a life of its own.  Yes, very strange.  It confronts racism, homophobia, and xenophobia in general in most interesting ways.  I really liked this book, and believe it deserves its nominations for the Hugo, the Nebula, and assorted others for this year.  It’s the first of a trilogy called the Great Cities trilogy and I really look forward to seeing where she takes it.

The story begins with a young grad student coming into NYC for school.  He barely has gotten off the train when he realizes he can’t remember who he is or where he is going.  But he comes to the awareness that he embodies the borough of Manhattan.  At the same time, individuals in the other boroughs also come to understand that they are also avatars.  Brooklyn is a black former rapper, now city councilperson.  Bronx is a Lenape art curator for the Borough’s arts complex.  Queens is an Indian immigrant mathematician.  Staten Island is a xenophobic daughter of an Irish cop who still lives with her parents.  Their task is to come together to find the avatar for the whole city to help him complete the city’s birthing into a living thing before the creature from another dimension destroys the city and everyone in it.

The plot is actually much more complex than this summary, but it gives the general sense of what’s going on.  Much of the book is given over to character discovery and development.  The chapters cover each avatar’s coming to understand what has happened to the city, their own transformation into an avatar, and their fight against the temptations of the interdimensional creature.  I was very impressed at how Jemisin created such distinct characters:  the five borough avatars, the avatars from Sao Paulo and Hong Kong, and the creature, known as the Woman in White.  None of the characters ran together, which is impressive for me as I usually have a tough time keeping them separate when there are a lot of major ones.  Manny and Bronca are the most interesting.  Both are queer.  Manny is multi-racial and Bronca is American Indian.  They are on the good side but have dark undertones.  The Woman in White is wonderfully slick and evil as she tempts each of the avatars to come over to her side.

The fantasy part is more like horror in the HP Lovecraft sense.  But Jemisin turns it on its head by having the Woman in White bring the energy of white supremist groups and xenophobes to the evil side, rather than the good side.  Granted, the whole reverse-HPL theme is becoming a common trope, but Jemisin does it really well.  I found the whole world building to be tremendous, even if it is the existing world of NYC.  Having been a frequenter of the city, it seems that much more prescient.  In her afterword, Jemisin says that this is her homage to the city.  She has lived there since 2007, and her sense of the different aspects of it is right on target.  Even if you don’t know anything about NYC except what you know from movies, you will get a deep sense of it and its five boroughs.  

The only problem I had with the book was that there were long monologues and dialogues about the essence of the city, its politics, culture, and history.  I thought they slowed down the story and got a little too heady.  The book isn’t fast paced, but there is a tempo the Jemisin creates that drops from quick to sluggish.  It does pick up towards the end, which is quite exciting.  I know I complain about this in a lot of books.  I think it is a trap that many authors fall into trying to get messages across and characters well-developed.  I think Jemisin falls into that here.

Overall, the book is pretty exciting.  It is so different from anything else I’ve read that I was able to plod through the slow parts just because I couldn’t see how Jemisin was going to bring this to a conclusion.  But she does, and it’s pretty satisfying, even though it leaves a lot open for the next two books.  I give this book four stars out of five.  I very nearly gave it five stars because it came pretty close to knocking my socks off.