Review: Smoke and Iron

Smoke and Iron by Rachel Caine
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In the fourth and penultimate volume of Rachel Caine's Great Library saga, we get things a little shaken up as Caine tries her hand at juggling multiple POVs - previously, Jess had pretty much monopolized the POV for the first three books. But now, after everything and everyone's all broken apart and split up like the cast of a horror movie, Caine's gotta pull a little somethin-somethin out of Rick Riordan's House of Hades playbook, jumping between any of several POV characters every few chapters. It really works, because while the book does still run a little longer than it should, it's very welcome that so many characters are sharing the narrative load and allowing us to get more of an idea of what's going on. And how bloody difficult it's going to be, ending the reign of the Archivist and the corruption infecting the Library and subverting its grand ideals. It all builds up to an ending that's equal parts heartbreaking and hopeful, successfully piquing my interest and making me much less able to wait till next year - or whenever the fifth and final book comes along.

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Review: Bright We Burn

Bright We Burn by Kiersten White
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Well, nobody's perfect. I picked this one up only because my library had extra copies on the Lucky Day shelf - otherwise I had no intention of placing a hold on it or anything, not after I found the first two books to yield such diminishing returns. I can tell you that this final entry in the trilogy is an improvement over Now I Rise. For one thing, it's a shorter book - which is great because the nearly 500-page first two books, especially Now I Rise, both felt super bloated while this one is more streamlined to wrap things up. Though I'm more than a bit disappointed that there's a lot less opposition to Lada, I also feel that that kinda reflects our real-world disappointment in Trump's enablers who let him run roughshod and hide behind a populist veil of virtue when he's really just nakedly manipulative and setting the world on fire just to watch it burn. Which is basically what Lada is, let's face it. But of course we still have Radu, ever the tender-hearted guy who really gets into the thick of things this time around, but still is run by his heart and soul the whole time. As with the first two books, Radu's the main reason why I'm reading. I could think of so many ways I'd write this series instead, if it were mine. Like, it'd be a standalone, and it'd probably have Radu and Mehmet be a canon couple, and Radu would actually be the main character with nothing in Lada's POV whatsoever.

But for now, I bid this trilogy anoshe and hope that, while a lot of Kiersten White books have somewhat disappointed me in the past, her next two books - Elizabeth Frankenstein and, of course, Slayer - impress me a hell of a lot more.

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Review: Fugitive Six

Fugitive Six by Pittacus Lore
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I think this might be the first time I've read a Pittacus Lore book and not been super-duper invested in it. Don't get me wrong, I still really enjoyed Fugitive Six for what it was worth, but it was considerably harder to enjoy at times than previous books in this 'verse. Even more third-person POVs clamor for dominance here, and just like Generation One, it leaves me feeling more than a bit disconnected from the characters compared to the original Lorien Legacies.

But there's one thing for sure about Fugitive Six - we're venturing into some seriously choppy, muddy waters here. The narrative gets super political at times, with jibes at in-universe "Wolf News" and "Jon Leary" as stand-ins for Fox News and Sean Hannity and, building on the previous book especially, a most welcome disdain for conservatives - look no further than Caleb's asshole brothers, who hit him with the homophobic insults and mock the concept of trigger warnings for good measure. They're bloody cartoons, but then again, one thing I've learned from writer Twitter is that the current crop of right-wingers is too one-dimensional and transparent for self-respecting writers to write. (Incidentally, I totally headcanon Caleb as bi. Just sayin'.)

What's really the selling point of this book is how much it turns things very morally grey compared to previous novels. Everyone's going behind everyone's backs, and there's not a lot of distinction between the good and bad guys sometimes. (Though there's one returning unfavorite who's pretty much the absolute worst, even more so than ever.) And by the end of this one...well, I won't spoil it, but it gets pretty Aveyardian, that cliffhanger. Not like the original Aveyardian cliffhanger of Glass Sword, but more like King's Cage in that you'll be begging the book, "Nooooooooooooooo..."

All I will say is this: I hope that Book 3 comes out by this time next year like scheduled.

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Review: We Sold Our Souls

We Sold Our Souls by Grady Hendrix
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My people at the Stanford Bookstore, when we got our latest shipment of ARCs, thought this one would be tailor-made for me. After all, I liked My Best Friend's Exorcism, certainly well enough to try and hand-sell it a lot of the time, right? Well, this latest from Mr. Hendrix deviates a bit from the culture of the 80s and moves into a culture I'm far less well-versed in: metal. Perhaps not being the metalhead I know a lot of my friends to often be - cough KODA cough - I was often struggling to really grok the significance of a lot of the references herein, and just in general having trouble connecting to the characters for the most part. And for being all about the selling of souls and demonic shit, none of that really popped for me - I just felt that it was a little too much about the demon in us all, that it felt a little too metaphorical. Not like MBFE where it was pretty unambigously not a metaphor. Then again, after a while, I did kinda zone out on this one. But that said, though, it delivered pretty well on absolute grodiness - often to a degree more appropriate for punk than metal, methinks, with our protagonist Kris having to watch a hotel guest wander into her lobby naked and piss all over the floor just 'cause. So I'm not going to write this book off, but I'm certainly going to hope that it's the worst Hendrix book I read. (Bear in mind this is only the second one I have.)

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Review: Legendary

Legendary by Stephanie Garber
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The first book in this series was a little hype-damaged for me, and I'm sorry to say that the hype damage continues in the second part - not the final part, though, not when both books have been as wildly successful as they have. No way is Garber gonna end it here, and she's already promised us one more book, aptly called Finale. This middle entry, though, is on the level of Michael Grant's Hunger or Susan Dennard's Windwitch in terms of noticeable Sophomore Slump.

Garber gives us a book that's about a hundred pages too long - after a while it really wears thin, the whole "Who is Legend?" and "What's his deal with the Fates?" mystique. It would help if the book was a little better developed in terms of world-building - there's a lot that goes too unexplained, especially for the second book of the series. Legend himself gets on my nerves a lot too after a while, because he's just so ridiculously overpowered that it's hard to take him seriously. I'm reminded of Pierce Brown's critique of The Wheel of Time - when you overpower a character so soon, the story gets really boring after a while. (Okay, so Brown was critiquing Robert Jordan's hero, and a giant series that goes on far longer than the Caraval trilogy will, but still.) But there's enough of a human side to Legend after all that there's one action he takes near the end that actually, finally, endears him to me.

And then Garber goes and imitates The Cruel Prince at the end, and not for the first time either. I don't know why, but I just feel like too many people are trying to do the Holly Black style these days, and more often than not it just doesn't work. (Like how, for me, it usually doesn't work with Black's own books.)

I'm still giving this book three stars because I enjoyed Tella's POV and her continued super-loving sister dynamic with Scarlett. Those two were this book's real saving graces, just like they were in Caraval. But I seriously hope Garber's building up to a much more impressive book in Finale, otherwise that's the end of me hand-selling Caraval at work.

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Review: The Pharaoh Key

The Pharaoh Key by Douglas Preston
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Two years after Beyond the Ice Limit, here we are again with Gideon Crew, except he's no longer got the backing of Eli Glinn. That ol' Musk knockoff (dating back to before Elon Musk was even a thing) has decided to screw over all his people, Gideon included, by shutting down his company. Luckily, though, Gideon and his old friend Manuel Garza get to go off on one last mission together, based on the findings of one of Glinn's side projects - a possible decryption of the mysterious Phaistos disk.

Because Glinn is no longer bankrolling the adventure, it's decidedly a more minimalist one than previous Gideon Crew stories. Just Gideon and Garza, mostly, as they travel to Egypt and deal with a sinking ferry, corrupt cops, haboobs, thieving expedition guides, the mysterious Imogen, and of course a small Coptic village, isolated from the outside world for so long that they continue to keep to pre-Islamic customs.

It's not the best Preston and Child book of all, but for what it's worth, it's a fairly nice 300-page time sink. Even if it relies a little too much on fakeout "deaths," and ultimately leads up to a string of partial reveals but never reveals all the answers to all the mysteries, because the Crew books are so infamous for lead-on kind of endings that really sting given the longer gap between them than for novels with Agent Pendergast. But at least this one had a more linear, easy to follow plot than Beyond the Ice Limit, and felt like a smaller-scale James Rollins story with the historical background behind the treasure that Gideon, Garza, and Imogen do eventually find.

I just hope P&C intend to follow up on this book sooner rather than later.

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Review: The Legacy Chronicles: Trial by Fire

The Legacy Chronicles: Trial by Fire by Pittacus Lore
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Just like with the Lorien Legacies parent series, so Lorien Legacies Reborn gets itself a series of ebook novella spinoffs, and just in time for the latest entry in the series, Fugitive Six, we finally get the first three novellas in this series bound up in print together for those of us, like me, who don't do ebooks. Man, I'm always super happy that Pittacus Lore can print-publish these stories in such a timely manner. *side eyes Cassie Clare for often taking a year or two to finally put out the Bane Chronicles or Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy compilations* And this little three-story collection does the job pretty well, focusing back on old faves Six and Sam (and a little bit of newcomer Nemo as well) while starting to bridge the gap between Generation One and Fugitive Six. I guess the Legacies Reborn and Legacy Chronicles series are going to be more or less strictly chronological, unlike how the original series' supplementary ebooks went all over the place in the timeline. It's a change I can appreciate from the Pittacus Lore team, though, taking on a bit of different style. Though I'm not happy that Six and Sam are relegated to third-person POV like everyone else in this second phase of the Lorienverse, again, their presence in these stories is a most welcome breath of fresh air. And it helps me get sufficiently super-pumped for Fugitive Six, which I finally picked up from the library today. I'll be sure to read it sometime in the next 2-3 weeks or so!

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