Review: mini-reviews of City of Stairs, Stone Mattress, Invisible Cities, and The Lady

Seems everyone has been reading and raving about this one so it was time to see what the fuss was about.  I like how this secondary world urban fantasy spy thriller, and other books like Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence and the ones by K.V. Johansen, are putting gods back in the mix, gods like the ancient Greek gods that often meddled around in human affairs.  It was also nice to see that the main character was a woman of color who isn't automatically the smartest and most competent person in the room.  The book is very well written with flashes of brilliance that certainly brings things up a notch.

Despite all the praise, I did have some reservations.  Namely, I felt that Bennett got just a little carried away with his world at the expense of the story so that there are plot and logic holes that really should have edited better.  Anyway, I'm definitely looking forward to City of Blades.

Rating: 8.5/10.

This is my first collection of short story collection by Margaret Atwood.  I was curious about her short fiction after enjoying The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake.  Turns out I felt a little let down.  All of the stories in the collection are competently written, but none of the nine really grabbed me until the titular story "Stone Mattress" about a female serial killer seeking justice for a long-ago rape.  The last story, "Torching the Dusties" was also quite good, evoking the dystopian warnings of her novels.  I may try more of Atwood's short fiction in the future, but for now I'll probably stick to her novels.

Rating: 7.5/10.

Invisible Cities is one of the novels most synonymous with the name Italo Calvino so it seemed a good place to give the author a try.  Unfortunately, I found somewhat disappointing.  Given the lush, almost magical prose and storytelling this book should have appealed to me more, but something just never connected.  Perhaps it was something to do with the layers of metaphors and figurative language describing the cities because I could never really figure out what it was trying to say.  It was easier for me to connect to the interludes written by the third person omniscient narrator.  Despite being disappointing, that doesn't mean I'll give up on Calvino.  Some of his other work sounds interesting so I will probably give them a try someday.

Rating: 6.5/10.

The Lady is the second of the Marrakand duology, the first being The Leopard, which I reviewed last year.  While I enjoyed this book, I don't think I liked it quite as much as the first one.  The big reason for this may be that the duology is really one big book split into two so it really deserves to be read in its entirety.  The Lady pretty much picks up right where The Leopard left off and it was a little hard to get back into it after a separation of several months.  Someday when I re-read I'll be sure to read both back-to-back.

Rating: 7.5/10.

Review: more mini-reviews of The Widow's House, Full Fathom Five, The Leopard, Rogues, and The Causal Thief

If you're not already reading the Dagger and the Coin series, I can't help you.  It's not Abraham's best series, but it's very good and enjoyable.  Definitely a must for all fans of epic fantasy.  One of the things I liked about the fourth book was how the re-appearance of a dragon did not become the "deux ex machina" plot device it could have been.  Abraham's ability to play on the tropes of the genre is one of the things I like about these books.

Rating: 8/10.

Full Fathom Five is the third book in the loosely connected Craft Sequence by Max Gladstone.  One of the really interesting things about these books is how closely interconnected gods and mages are their world.  Gladstone does this by using a very legalistic component in his books so that there are lawyers, contracts, courtroom drama, etc.  This gives the books a very unique feel in a genre that sometimes feels stagnant.

This particular book features people who create idols for foreign businesses on an island much like Hawaii.

Rating: 8/10. 

This is my second book by K.V. Johansen.  The first was 2011's Blackdog, and while the world was interesting, the story felt too long and drawn out for the plot.  The Leopard is an improvement, featuring some characters from Blackdog as well as new ones.  The writing feels stronger and never gets bogged.  The two books written so far have a very mythic feel to them with gods, demons, sorcerers, curses, and quests.

Rating: 8/10.

After the disappointment that was last year's Dangerous Women, Rogues was quite a relief.  It is clearly a much stronger anthology than the other.  Most of the stories are quite strong and entertaining.  Even the authors I don't generally read or like managed to write decent stories.  This anthology may not be quite as impressive as Warriors, but it's certainly worth a look.

Rating: 8/10.

This is another sequel and third book for a series that doesn't seem to have a name, I think.  This loose series is very much on the science fantasy scale, like the Clarke quote, where any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.  In this future, matter and information are interchangeable and virtually indistinguishable.  

This third outing was not quite as enjoyable as the first book, but I liked it a lot.  Rajaniemi is an author to watch.

Rating: 7.5/10. 

I've seen this one called a "side-quel" to Blindsight, which doesn't make much sense to me.  What I think is more accurate, it that it's a companion piece to the 2006 book about sentience and intelligence.  This tackles some of the same ideas, but in a different way that is kind of hard to describe.  In the appendix to this book, the author suggests, "faith-based hard sci-fi", which is certainly interesting.  I didn't enjoy Echopraxia quite as much Blindsight, but then a lot of ideas in this one were over my head.  The two books together are certainly full of fascinating ideas and just beg for multiple re-reads.

Rating: 8.5/10.