Monday, August 4, 2014
Mini-Reviews: “American Craftsmen” by Tom Doyle, “Full Fathom Five” by Max Gladstone” & “Shattered” by Kevin Hearne (Reviewed by Casey Blair)
Order
“American Craftsmen” HERE
Read
An Excerpt HERE
American Craftsmen by Tom Doyle is the first of a new series (or so I assume, given the
epilogue) and is set in modern America, but with a layer of alternate magical
history on top of it. The book reads like a thriller and is very action-packed,
similar in pacing to Larry Correia’s
Hard Magic. I could have stood some
breaks in action, honestly, with more time to flesh out the implications of
everything going on (because there is a
lot going on), but that's more a matter of preference: if you want constant
action, American Craftsmen has it in spades.
As
you might expect from the title, this book deals with a lot of issues in what
it means to be American, duty, loyalty, and service, and how none of those are
tied to religion or ethnicity. I loved that we got an ethnically Iranian female
character who is not only not portrayed as a villain, but is totally
indispensable and saves our two lead soldiers' bacon many times over. I think Doyle balanced the different cultural
perspectives well, and he really took advantage of their point of views. There
are characters with some very narrow or strict worldviews that are appropriate
given their history and shape how they interact with the world, but none of
them are straw men as they all have different beliefs, and the text never feels
didactic. Also, the author avoids some very easy-to-fall-into traps and manages
some complex issues as the plot rockets along at breakneck speed.
Order
“Full Fathom Five” HERE
Read
An Excerpt HERE
Read
FBC’s Reviews of “Three
Parts Dead” & “Two
Serpents Rise”
It's
no secret that I'm a huge fan of Max
Gladstone's secondary world urban fantasy series. In the third and latest
installment, Full Fathom Five, the
author has once again nailed the setting as fundamentally integral to the
story. For instance, the tropical island of Kavekana has a rich history and
traditions of its own but thrives on tourism, building corporate-managed idols
for wary clients.
Full Fathom Five starts off with a bang,
but then it takes a while before I understood protagonist Kai's personal stake in the plot. I love what Max does with the relationships in this book, both between people
and gods and in romantic relationships and responsibility to congregations, how
the nature of those relationships and boundaries can change without or, of
necessity, breaking. This book has a fantastic cast of women and non-white
characters, including a few from Three Parts
Dead and Two Serpents Rise who
play pivotal roles in the new novel. Full
Fathom Five can be read as a stand-alone, so if you're new to the series
feel free to jump in here.
Order
“Shattered” HERE
Shattered is the seventh and
latest installment in Kevin Hearne's
urban fantasy series, The Iron Druid
Chronicles, and in my opinion it's much stronger than the last couple of
volumes. The prose did feel a little clunky in the beginning, but the plot
makes a lot more sense and actually feels like we're back on track in terms of
overall arc, rather than just laying groundwork for later books. The biggest
point of irritation for me is that Kevin
has essentially ret-conned earlier god deaths, which robs them of emotional
impact and makes them feel like plot devices rather than events that actually
matter, so we'll have to see how that plays out. But with the addition of Atticus' archdruid to the cast we get a
new perspective on the world, and Granuaile
gets to go off on her own druidic adventures. We spend time with both new and
familiar pantheons, and through it all Hearne
threads some very complex issues that I think were handled very well.
12:00 AM | 
Posted by
Robert |
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
.jpg)
1 comments:
After reading these reviews I'm very disappointed to find that my library doesn't have Max Gladstone's books available.