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Yzabel / September 23, 2013

Review: The Cypher

My rating: [rating=2]

Summary:

GUARDIANS INC.: THE CYPHER is two stories in one. A glimpse into a multinational company that is in reality the oldest of secret societies, one that spans close to seven thousand years of existence, weaving in and out of history, guiding and protecting humanity from creatures and forces that most of us believe are only mythology and fairy tales.

The other is the story of Thomas Byrne, a young man thrust into secrets he shouldn’t be aware of and dangers he shouldn’t face, but that he ultimately will, for he is a Cypher. The only one who can steer humanity’s future.

The ultimate conspiracy theory is that Magic is real. Kept in check by technology, but every five hundred years the balance can shift and, if it does, technology will fail and those creatures we’ve driven into myth will come back with a vengeance.

To protect the present, Guardians Incorporated needs to know the future.

Review:

(I got an ebook copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.)

This novel was likeable enough, but in the end, I’ll probably forget it quickly, in spite of its good points.

You don’t get bored with the story: there’s always something happening. It is also rife with good ideas regarding magic, its role in shaping the world, elementals, various fantastic creatures, and basically lets us see a world close to our own, yet fundamentally different no matter what. Most of the characters all have their distinct features, and pave the way for more development later on. The concept of the Cypher, too, was fascinating: it’s kind of like being a super-librarian and super-translator at once, and as someone who likes both those fields of work, well, of course I would like that! Same with how the author included the works of H.P. Lovecraft, and various books supposedly never published for common people, yet available in the special Guardians’ library.

On the other hand, even though the story was interesting, I found myself dragging through it. I wasn’t sure why at first, but I think it had to do with the discrepancy between the main character and the style, among other things: although Thomas is in high school, the book reads more like a middle-grade novel, and this became strange after a while. I’m sure I’d have liked it a lot more when I was 13, but not at 17-18 (which seems to be the intended audience). Furthermore, while it’s indeed packed with action, sometimes things just moved too fast, and I had to pause and flip back to see if I hadn’t missed anything in between. A downside to this is that the characters don’t get fleshed out as much as they could have in other circumstances—Thomas especially appeared as somewhat ‘flat’ compared to others. Finally, I also wondered several times at some of the decisions made by the adults in the book (I would’ve expected them to be more clever).

All in all, “The Cypher” will likely please readers from the middle-grade crowd, but perhaps not older ones.

Yzabel / May 7, 2013

Review: Resenting the Hero

Resenting the Hero by Moira J. Moore

My rating: [rating=3]

Summary:

In a realm beset by natural disasters, only the magical abilities of the bonded Pairs—Source and Shield—make the land habitable and keep the citizenry safe. The ties that bind them are far beyond the relationships between lovers or kin—and last their entire lives… Whether they like it or not.

Since she was a child, Dunleavy Mallorough has been nurturing her talents as a Shield, preparing for her day of bonding. Unfortunately, fate decrees Lee’s partner to be the legendary, handsome, and unbearably self-assured Lord Shintaro Karish. Sure, he cuts a fine figure with his aristocratic airs and undeniable courage. But Karish’s popularity and notoriety—in bed and out—make him the last Source Lee ever wanted to be stuck with.

The duo is assigned to High Scape, a city so besieged by disaster that seven bonded pairs are needed to combat it. But when an inexplicable force strikes down every other Source and Shield, Lee and Karish must put aside their differences in order to defeat something even more unnatural than their reluctant affections for each other…

Review:

3.5 stars. Overall a pleasant and fun story to read. Don’t let the cover scare you away, even though it’s probably one of the worst I’ve ever seen in the fantasy genre, as far as published novels go.

I liked the concept of Source & Shield, the role they must fulfil in order to protect people from catastrophes. There are good sides as well as bad ones to such pairings: they’re respected, they get lodgings and food for free, they’re needed and know they help the world function in a better way… But some pairs have a dysfunctional relationship at best; if one makes a mistake, both get punished; and if one dies, the other dies too. An interesting aspect of the book was how it questioned the fundamentals behind the Source & Shield Service, gradually bringing the main character (and us readers) to realise how flawed it might me, at least on some points. Indeed, both Sources and Shields are recruited when very young, cut from their families, taught from that moment onwards to perform their respective roles—and are therefore injected with certain beliefs from the start. No need to develop more to see where this might be going.

Besides, while a little too theatrical to my taste, the villain actually made good sense when raising such points. Means and final goal? Bad. Rhetoric used to convince people? Not so bad itself, and hinting at many truths.

I was less thrilled about Lee, the narrator. I guess I expected something a little different. The blurb at the back of the book makes Karish appear as an unreliable character, full of heroics and prone to stunts and wild antics—and this is what Lee believes about him, and why she’s so annoyed as being Paired with him. The problem for me is that we don’t really get to see that, except for a couple of dialogues and parties that aren’t even so wild; most of the time, Karish actually behaves in quite reasonable ways (the less reasonable ones being the people fawning all over him). This in turn makes Lee seem very narrow-minded, voluntarily blinding herself, entrenched in her own ways, and refusing to give him a chance, ever. The whole relationship would have looked better if in the beginning, we had indeed been shown Karish behaving like an irresponsible young hero always seeking adventure and danger; or like a womanizer, with a different girl coming out of his room every odd morning. This would have make Lee’s predicament more believable to me.

Also, the world around the characters needed a little more building; but there are five other books in the series, if I’m not mistaken, so I hope such things will get developed in the next ones (which I’ll probably read, since I did enjoy the first).

Yzabel / February 6, 2013

Review: The Timekeeper’s Son

The Timekeeper’s Son by Mike E. Miller

My rating: [rating=3]

Summary:

What would you do if you could start your life over again? What if you didn’t have a choice?

That’s what happens to Andy Meyers. He has all the normal trappings of life: a beautiful wife, a nice house, and a good job. But all that vanishes when he wakes to find himself reliving his own childhood. He is suddenly nine-years-old again, and he is poised to reenact a terrible chain of events that altered his life forever.

But that’s just the beginning. Things get even more complicated when Andy discovers an impossible note. Someone knows he has come back. Someone who doesn’t want him to change anything. And they will stop at nothing to keep him from it.

As Andy starts to unravel his own past, he begins to find that things are much different than he ever imagined. His family has a secret. A secret so big that it could change everything.

Review:

(Book provided by the author through ARR #590 in the Making Connections group, in exchange for an honest review.)

Overall an interesting book, along the idea of “what would you do if you could go back to the past and change something.” It avoided falling into a lot of clichés I expect of such a genre (for instance, “let’s go back in 1938 and kill Hitler”), while also addressing the matter of time paradox, in that, of course, whatever gets changed in the past will affect the future, and so the ‘old’ life the character would like to go back to wouldn’t exist anymore, not per se, at least.

The backdrop provided, that of the Timekeepers’ organization, was interesting, and I liked the trigger to time-travel that was revealed later on in the book. It was shocking, yet also logical in a way.

I was less thrilled at the second part of the book, though. I found the Timekeepers to be perhaps a little too… naive?… in their dealings. As if they should’ve been able to expect and do more, but didn’t. Instead, Andy was the one who seemed to understand the most, when he was actually the one who should’ve been the most clueless. (Granted, he was the main character, and a main character who doesn’t *do* anything and only lets things happen would be boring. It’s just the behaviour of other characters that seemed somewhat contradictory to me.)

No matter what, I do think there’s potential to the world created here. I would probably be interested in reading the next installment, especially if it were to reveal more about the Timekeepers and how they work exactly.

Yzabel / January 29, 2013

Review: The Greyfriar

The Greyfriar by Clay Griffith

My rating: [rating=4]

Summary:

Vampire predators run wild in this exciting steampunk adventure, the first in an alternate history trilogy that is already attracting attention. In 1870, monsters rise up and conquer the northern lands, As great cities are swallowed up by carnage and disease, landowners and other elite flee south to escape their blood-thirsty wrath.

One hundred fifty years later, the great divide still exists; fangs on one side of the border, worried defenders on the other. This fragile equilibrium is threatened, then crumbles after a single young princess becomes almost hopelessly lost in the hostile territory. At first, she has only one defender—a mysterious Greyfriar who roams freely in dangerous vampire regions.

Review:

I found it hard at first to get into the story, because I couldn’t properly wrap my mind about the geography and politics of the world described in this book—it’s nothing complicated, though, so I guess it was just me, probably reading too late at night as usual, in a language that remains not my own. The problem didn’t last for long anyway, and then I got sucked in.

I want to mention that for once, too, the label ‘steampunk’ is better applied than it usually is to a lot of novels lumped in this genre. I love the steampunk aesthetics, I love in in art and clothing, but I find that too often, an author will slap a few cogs and a dirigible and call it ‘steampunk’. The keyword being ‘steam’. Here, though, we are given a world where such technology is the norm; while it’s not the core of the story, it’s still present enough to be felt throughout the novel.

The vampires are ruthless and inhuman, yet cunning in their own ways. Having the point of view of both humans and vampires throughout the narrative allows the reader to see how each species perceive each other like nothing more than animals, especially since the vampires don’t seem to care about fine clothing, architecture, arts, poetry, and so on, thus making them ‘inferior’ in the eyes of humans. I liked that take, because if we reverse it, it’s also logical: why would immortal creatures bother with the very means through which the short-lived humans strive to make themselves ‘immortal’?

The real identity of the mysterious Greyfriar was easy enough to guess, but that was alright, because the author didn’t try to actually hide it from the reader (if he had tried to do so, on the other hand, it would have fallen flat, for sure). For me, it actually tied quite well with the use of certain clichés that, in retrospect, also make a lot of sense. Greyfriar: a mysterious man who never shows his face and hides his eyes behind smoked glasses; fights like a hero of legend; fights ‘the good fight’, alone, in dangerous territories, isolated from all other humans. Greyfriar was from the beginning an image, a symbol, and I found the reason behind that image somewhat touching, even.

One thing I regularly had problems with, though, was the shift in points of view. It switches between characters several times in a same chapter, sometimes even from one paragraph to the other, yet it’s not an exact omniscient third person POV either. This tends to make me lose focus, and wonder “Wait, what? It was about Flay, and now we’re in Cesare’s thoughts? Huh?”

This put aside, I enjoyed the story, and the gritty side there was to it.