Review: Kitty Steals the Show

Kitty Steals the Show by Carrie Vaughn

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Kitty Norville is pretty much my ideal main character: someone who gets out of (and sometimes into) trouble by talking, not fighting - though she can fight if she must - and who builds a good deep bench of allies in the process; who gets through scary situations basically on chutzpah; and who is able to exercise a keen intelligence, even while terrified, outnumbered and outgunned.

I wouldn't say that this is the best of the series, certainly, but I enjoyed it. I did feel that the big speech near the end, for which we got a lot of build-up starting early on, wasn't as powerful as I had hoped it would be. It did its job, though, and in a way, a speech that leaves much of the audience uncomfortable and thinking less of Kitty than they did before is a better move in a long-running series.

It's worth the extra dollar or two above the price of an indie book to get decent editing, too. I have the samples for the next two books on my Kindle, and will be getting them next time I feel like this particular brand of urban fantasy: a medium level of stakes and action, a smart protagonist and a competent supporting cast.



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Review: Fool's War

Fool's War by Sarah Zettel

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



I picked up this book largely because I was on an episode of The Skiffy and Fanty podcast with the author, and was impressed with the intelligent things she said about speculative fiction. (I don't think that particular podcast episode has been released yet at the time I'm writing this review.)

I'm going to assume it's not her best work. It's not terrible, but I lost enthusiasm for it at 39% of the way through the ebook. It's a long book, and I felt like I was ready for the story to wrap up not too long after that point, but instead there was more than half of it left to go.

Partly this is because, at 39% (and having not marked some in the first couple of chapters, because you can't highlight things on Kindle when you're reading the sample), I had already hit 54 errors that annoyed me enough to highlight. Everything from an inconsistent number of hours to the jump point, to multiple homonym errors (pouring/poring, effect/affect, past time/pastime, who's/whose, to/too, everyday/every day, wreak/wreck, it's/its, exercisers/exercises), to missing words, missing spaces, misplaced apostrophes and commas, disagreements of tense and number... all the classic errors were there, and in large numbers. That sort of thing is distracting from the story.

I was reading along, though, thinking, "This isn't a bad space opera. At least the computers aren't out of the 1960s. There's even a kind of cyberpunk thing going... Oh, it's cyberpunk." And, unfortunately, there are two things that cyberpunk often has trouble with, and this book also has trouble with them. One is making interface metaphors too literal, and another is providing a believable justification for any sense of true risk to the person in cyberspace. There was a reason given for why there was a risk, but to me it came across as contrived.

I also didn't find the logic that set up the situation consistent. On the one hand, bandwidth was incredibly expensive, which justified carrying data in ships. That, by itself, is fine and believable and gives your ships something to carry that isn't raw materials - more realistic than the average space opera. But then that's all completely undermined when the Fool is able (without the very alert sysadmin noticing) to steal enough bandwidth to get her entire consciousness several systems away, and bring back several other people.

And then the Fool has to do something dangerous because she's the only one who can... except that, cyberspace being what it is, surely at least one of the other people in cyberspace with her can do whatever she can do, since distance makes no difference and none of them is physically present in the first place.

That was when I stopped reading. I was enjoying the unusual characters (women, non-Westerners, people of faith), but mainly for the fact that they were unusual. Apart from the owner of the ship, they weren't yet fleshed out to the point that I felt very close to them as characters, and I bid them farewell without regret.

I will look out for other Sarah Zettel books, in the hope that I can find one that represents the highly intelligent person I enjoyed chatting with on that podcast. Preferably one that's been past a really good editor, too.



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Review: Simon Myth

Simon Myth by Matt Posner

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



In my review of the third book in this series, I complained that the series was deteriorating, and expressed the hope that it would improve again before I quit it in disgust. I'm glad to say that, although this book still has issues, I enjoyed it more than the previous one, and it does address some of the problems of the previous volume.

The editing is still patchy. There are a lot of typos, some misplaced punctuation, and the odd homonym error (some of which may themselves be typos, like sun/son, but heckling/haggling is obviously just the wrong word). I've seen a lot worse, but it's a little distracting.

There are still continuity errors. A garment of lion skins turns into a garment of bear skins in the course of a couple of pages.

There are shifts in storytelling style, and scenes or paragraphs out of chronological order for no seemingly good reason. There are unforeshadowed uses of magic that would be less jarring if they were foreshadowed. There is a very large family in which the kinship terms are badly confused. There are a lot of Yiddish and Hindi words dropped in without explanation or translation, which makes whole sections of the book hard to follow.

One of my big concerns in the previous book, though, was that Simon, the main character, was becoming a violent, heartless person with little discipline in his use of far-too-strong magic. While I wouldn't say that concern has been completely removed, this book does go some way towards addressing it and restoring Simon to a more admirable heroic character. I also wouldn't say that he's learned his lesson, exactly, but he has the potential to have learned his lesson, about violence and also about love.

Ah, love. Simon, as a teenager, believes in each book that the current object of his affections is the perfect person for him, whom he will love forever. This is, of course, not actually the case, as he must repeatedly and painfully discover. Now that I see the trend, I can take the references to the "perfection" of the annoying, unstable Ana in the previous book as the teenage exaggeration that it is.

With those two big imperfections out of the way, the small imperfections don't do as much to bring down my enjoyment of what is, in fact, a good series. The characters are interesting, the plots are compelling and the setting is engaging. I just wish that a good developmental editor and a good proofreader were involved.



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Review: The New York Magician

The New York Magician by Jacob Zimmerman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



This is a series of loosely connected stories rather than a novel (and it's also short). Having said that, the main character, the setting, and the events are well done, and I enjoyed it.

I picked up a very small number of minor mechanical errors in the editing, which is unusually good.

The author seems to be trying to position the protagonist as an antihero at one point, but he really isn't (something I'm happy about). He does his best, at some personal cost, to keep various supernatural entities from causing too much trouble for the magical or nonmagical community. He is one of only a few who can see them and hear them, and has collected a number of favours, contacts and magical items in the course of his activities.

This collection of devices is probably the weakest point of the book, inasmuch as it becomes a bit of an equivalent of Batman's utility belt (he even keeps it on something very like a utility belt). A lot of his gathering of the objects and connections happens off-screen, which means that there's potential for deus ex machina. To the author's credit, he mostly avoids this, and the protagonist has to be clever and courageous to overcome his obstacles.

It isn't my new favourite thing, I think because I didn't have quite enough time to become fully invested in the character or in any one plotline. I definitely liked it, though, and would read a sequel.

I picked it up because Amazon kept recommending it to me as someone who'd bought Matt Posner's School of the Ages books. It's also urban fantasy set in New York, and also pretty well-written, so I'd call that a good recommendation.



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Review: Making Killer Google+ Profiles

Making Killer Google+ Profiles by Evo Terra

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Disclaimers first. I've internet-known Evo Terra for some years, because he runs podiobooks.com and I'm an author there. Evo was the reason that I (and most of the other Podiobooks authors) joined Google+, and by encouraging us to join en masse he also got us off to a good start of having people to connect with.

Also, he mentions me positively in this book, as someone who's doing G+ well (in his opinion), and, consequently, he gave me a free copy.

I'll leave it to you to decide whether you think any of this influenced my rating, but I will also lay out for you what the book does so you can decide if it's for you.

This is a book primarily aimed at authors who are Google+ newbies. If you are an author and haven't yet joined Google+, a) please do, and b) get this book and do everything it says. Likewise if you've only joined recently, or joined a while ago but haven't been active because you're not sure how it works or how it will benefit you to be on there.

If you're not an author, it may still help you. Some parts are author-specific, but a lot of it is good advice for anyone who's joining Google+, particularly if you have something you want to promote. (The advice includes being a human, not a spam-machine, in case you're worried about that.)

If you've been on Google+ for a while, it isn't going to tell you too much that you don't know, but you still might learn something. I did. I've made tweaks to my profile and added a couple of Chrome extensions that I think will be helpful.

It's a short, easy read, written in the friendly, cheerful style of a For Dummies book, though it manages not to talk down to the reader too much. There's nothing fake about that, either; I've known Evo long enough to know that this is his genuine personality, though he usually swears more.

It's well-edited by a mutual Google+ acquaintance. I did spot a few simple typos (usually short words like "to" that are missing) and passed them on to Evo to correct, but you won't be yanked up short on every page by some egregious grammatical error.

Definitely worthwhile for authors who are about to try Google+, and might well help other people too.



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Review: Journey to the Centre of the Earth

Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



I'm reading the odd genre classic from time to time in between more contemporary books. This one was enjoyable, though it definitely had its issues.

I got the edition I read from Amazon; it's part of a bundle of all Verne's books called The Collected Works of Jules Verne. It's been created by scanning a print edition, and has the usual issues that result when someone does that and doesn't give it a really thorough proofread. Usually it was clear enough what it should have said, but once or twice the distortion was bad enough that a sentence made no sense.

The text itself was surprisingly amusing. The narrator, Axel, is the nephew of a professor of geology who discovers a reference in a sixteenth-century manuscript to a passage to the centre of the earth which starts in an Icelandic volcano. The professor holds to a minority view of the earth's structure which doesn't include a high-temperature core, so he equips an expedition and drags his reluctant nephew along on it.

The characters are well-drawn: the obsessive, impatient, inadequately risk-averse professor; the anxious, excessively risk-averse Axel; the completely imperturbable and laconic Hans, an Icelandic hunter who accompanies the other two. Their interactions are enjoyable and believable.

The science, sadly, is not, and is inaccurate even for the time (as the translator takes pleasure in pointing out in footnotes). Verne plays extremely fast and loose with scientific fact, despite his Professor's declaration: "Science, my lad, has been built on many errors, but they are errors which it was good to fall into, for they led to the truth". He even (according to the translator) gets things like distances between places wrong, and exaggerates other key numbers. This would be more forgiveable if there were fewer long passages of sciencebabble breaking up the action.

There are also what I can only call continuity errors, like the 10th of July apparently occurring before the 6th and 7th. At one point the longest rope is, if I remember rightly, 200 feet long, and later they have a rope that's 200 fathoms (a fathom being six feet).

The logistics are also dubious. Three men manage to carry an incredible amount of gear, including more than four months' supply of food.

Finally, the narrator is not really a protagonist. He's carried along in his uncle's wake, pining for his fiancee (his uncle's ward, whose role is mainly to be pined for, though she is described as intelligent at least), and never really makes a decision for himself and carries it through. The final rescue that returns them to the surface occurs through a thoroughly unlikely sequence of events and entirely out of good luck, despite rather than because of anything the characters do.

I should also mention a nasty piece of racism, not in Verne's text but in one of the translator's notes, in which he explains a passing reference to measuring the angles of a skull and states that the facial angles of black people "and the lowest savages" show that their intelligence is less than that of whites.

So, plenty of issues. Still mostly an enjoyable read, for what it is: a nineteenth-century genre work which isn't among the best even of its author's.



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Review: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



A beloved classic, and deservedly so. The movie is remarkably true to it (though the ruby slippers were originally silver, Oz was "the Great and Terrible", and some secondary incidents were left out of the film). Even the opening of the movie in black and white reflects the description of the colourless Kansas landscape which Baum begins with.

I can only assume, given the large number of deaths attributable to the heroes, that the author was being ironic in his introduction when he talked about how this wasn't a dark fairy tale full of violence like the traditional ones.

The message of the story is very much "the power is in you", which has become a cliched story trope and also a cliched self-development bromide. He does a better job of it than many of his imitators, though.



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