Book Review Across The Nightingale Floor (Tales of the Otori #1) - Lian Hearn

Note: This is kind of a cheater review, since I actually read this book a few years ago. However, I am finally currently reading the second in the series GRASS FOR HIS PILLOW (it had spent far too long in the teetering To-Read pile and I decided it was time) and it’s pretty fantastic so far. Thus did I want to write up a review for the first book so at least our readers will have a base when I post the review of the second book.

I’m known to trawl the used bookstores of Toronto. Not for cheap books, though that is a perk of doing it, but rather to find and replace mass-market paperbacks on my shelves with hardcover versions, or earlier editions. This is an activity I was taught how to do by my co-blogger Chris and something we relished in doing a number of years back.  I told you I was a book nerd. Well, in northern Toronto there is a used bookstore that we sort of consider to be the honey pot of hardcover/early edition fantasy and sci-fi. The section containing those books is even on the second level in a nook and cranny corner. Well, one day when I was searching I branched out to the far end of the second level where the young adult books are and lo and behold one title sprang out at me from the shelf.

ACROSS THE NIGHTINGALE FLOOR by Lian Hearn.

I was really impressed by such a wonderfully poetic title. So I read the synopsis:

“This is the first book in a new epic trilogy that has already become a bestselling sensation in England and Australia, earning comparisons to The Lord of the Rings. It begins with the legend of a nightingale floor in a black-walled fortress-a floor that sings in alarm at the step of an assassin. It will take true courage and all the skills of an ancient Tribe for one orphaned youth named Takeo to discover the magical destiny that awaits him...across the nightingale floor.”

“Hmm, interesting.” I thought. Considering my interest in my own Japanese heritage and my lifelong enjoyment of things like Bushido I figured I give this one a go. So I think I got it for $4-6 and trundled off home clutching my prize. Little did I know I’d be whisked away so completely.

I was totally engrossed from page one, and like only a few other novels before it I stayed up all night (risking falling asleep at work the next day) and finished it. It had a really amazing Pseudo-Alt-Fantasy-Feudal Japan as a setting called the Three Countries and a set of incredibly realized characters including young Takeo and Kaede not to mention noble Otori Shigeru (who adopts Takeo after his home at Mino is burned) and the nasty villainous Iida whose stronghold at Inuyama contains the titular Nightingale Floor. Those characters weave in and out of each other’s lives as the Three Countries are brought to the brink of war. The Otori seniors want Shigeru killed, Iida wants control of the entire Three Countries and plans a marriage to solidify his plans, and Takeo learns that his father was actually a member of a secret, mystical, and somewhat magical group of individuals named The Tribe, and that he has inherited certain traits. He can “go invisible” and can put people to sleep by staring into their eyes amongst other astonishing, seemingly magical, abilities. The goal set by Shigeru is for Takeo to use these abilities to steal across Iida’s Nightingale Floor at Inuyama and assassinate the cruel warlord. The Tribe, however has other plans. Kaede is also incredibly interesting as her path sets her from beautiful caged bird who has been betrothed to Iida since she was seven into a major player herself within the politics of the world, especially after meeting the stalwart, strong-willed Naomi Maruyama. She realizes that she can do a lot more than just be a prize, that she has it within her to change the world.

What strikes me most about the novel, aside from the inventiveness of a fantasy world based on feudal Japan, is the prose. It is, for lack of a better world, gorgeous. It flows and ebbs with ease. At times it rushes past your ears like fierce storm wind, and at others it gently drifts barely disturbing the petal of a snow blossom. Hearn is quite the wordsmith in fact. Imagine something as intriguing as Harry Potter, but with a descriptive, yet easy and simple, prose. The backdrops to every scene are realized in short order, but are as astounding as stage play. Big and thunderous at times when they need to be and silently beautiful at others. Descriptions of the Otori stronghold The Hagi alone are enough to inspire. I’m pretty sure that was my favourite thing about Hearn’s writing, especially in a book where so much happens plot-wise. The third act of the novel all bets are off and it is a riveting story of adventure, clandestine meetings, betrayals, pure evil, stunning bravery and immense sadness. It’s quite a roller coaster ride and one that I couldn’t’ put down till I read every last page.

I don’t want to spoil too much of the overall plot, but sufficed to say that this is probably one of the most READABLE books I’ve ever opened. Hearn has created a fascinating world that may resemble Japan, but is entirely her own beast as she world-builds into it different religions, geography, castes of people and even magic users.

A sumptuously written feast that can be devoured in one sitting, or slowly pondered over. Either way you are certainly in for a treat with this one. With this book Hearn made me a fan of hers a few years a go, and I’m just sad that it took me so long to get around to the second book. I would also like to draw attention to the titles of the other books in the series. The aforementioned GRASS FOR HIS PILLOW is followed by BRILLIANCE OF THE MOON, HARSH CRY OF THE HERON, and then the prequel HEAVEN’S NET IS WIDE are all really poetic and clever and I think she should be lauded for those choices.

Consider this a recommendation, if you like unique alt-fantasy settings, and don’t mind the YA nature of the series you’d be doing yourself a favour to pick up the first tale. The kind of book that should be read by a roaring fire, or sitting on a tree swing, or laying by a gurgling brook, it begs to be enjoyed.

Book Review: Ghost Story (The Dresden Files #13) - Jim Butcher

It was probably sometime around when I was reading the 4^th or 5^th DRESDEN file book that I decided that Jim Butcher was my favourite author. A top spot he solidified when I read and completed his CODEX ALERA series a few years later.

If waiting a year between each new release presents me like a junkie wanting a hit, then finally getting my hands on the latest book is like feeding that addiction in full. It makes you feel giddy and light-headed. I’m a book addict, and that’s no lie. I go to the bookstore even when I don’t have anything in mind to buy to just walk around and BE THERE. So if regular books are an addiction, then a new Dresden file book by Butcher is like the finest of the fine. Bibliophilic nerdvana. (<---inventy phrases is my specialty!)

So that’s kind of my headspace as I go into reading the latest Dresdencrack (as we call it). Now before you go any further with this review, due to events in the last book CHANGES it would be next to impossible to review GHOST STORY without some rather major spoilers for the previous book. So if you haven’t’ read that book and don’t want to be spoiled for a few major events in it, don’t go further. I WON’T however be spoiling any major events from GHOST STORY so if you have read CHANGES then by all means read on.

GHOST STORY picks up the story thread where it last left off in CHANGES. The Red Court Vampires are all (or at least very close to all) dead after the war between them and the White Council of Wizards at Chichen Itza. Using a spell that the Red Court was going to use on Harry to kill his entire bloodline and reversing it on them has destroyed the court VIA their own blood link. Susan Rodriguez is dead, at Harry’s hand so she wouldn’t fully turn into a red court vampire and their young daughter Maggie Dresden is now safe. Harry however, is dead since he was shot in the waning pages of CHANGES by a sniper. Not the best place to have to start, but hey this is Harry Dresden right? 

As things begin Harry finds out he is a ghost and has no magic to speak of and there is seemingly an entire city worth of entities and ghostly beings he’s pissed off, and one of them is out to make sure he doesn’t even exist as a spirit. Rough odds, but with the help of Morty the Ectomancer Harry starts to try to piece together the events that lead up to his death and find out just who shot him. His old crew is really worse for the wear after his death and the creatures that stayed away before (having been scared of Harry) no longer have anything to fear. So the Chicago six months after Harry’s death is a much different place requiring his old friends to have become something new, something scarier and entirely more lethal. Not to mention colder of thought and cautious across the board. But just what then is the cost to their souls and who they are?

Butcher has assembled a VERY interesting book here. While it has a number of the trappings of the old-style casebooks entries in the series, albeit from the ghostly angle, it strides off in a fresh direction as well. One of transition and of fresh beginnings with new realizations and points of view. This is the book where everything that changed in CHANGES is shown in its new light. Harry’s enemies are harsher, and his friends are different. Harry himself has to adapt to life as a spirit and what he can and can’t do. Butcher does a significantly admirable job of explaining things like Why Harry doesn’t sink into the ground and go right through the earth, or how various spirits interact with the real world and why, or even how spirits themselves differ from one another and why. What Butcher does best is when he has these expository moments in the book Harry deals with them like a true pop-culture junkie...You'll see. ;)

Harry’s journey in this one is a bit of a character defining one for the most part. There are revelations that Harry comes to as a spirit (forcing him to not be able to act in certain situations) that he just couldn’t as a mortal simply because he’d normally go rushing in to every situation and screw the consequences. Well, we get a kind of birds eye view of what thoughts enter Harry’s head when he’s not able to do that. He comes to some very telling conclusions because of that, and I for one feel he’s better for it.

Murphy, Molly, the Wolves, and even Butters are different here than they had been before. Not in a bad way, but in a changed way as only they could be after the events in the last book. Harry’s death and the subsequent vacuum left in Chicago had certain effects and those characters have all been irreparably changed, Molly seemingly has gone to the deepest of deep ends while still essentially being Molly, and since she is one of my very favourite characters it’s really great to see her character deepen so much. Even people like Harry’s Fae godmother Leanansidhe have more of an introspective look at themselves in this one and I was pleased to see that. Lastly, we get three separate looks into Harry’s past all of which really give us our first glimpses of the teenager who eventually became the wizard we all know and love.

Butcher’s prose is as good as it ever has been (if not better in spots) and the pace is as relentless as it can be. And actually considering the story he’s telling in this one I’m kind of stunned the pace is just as relentless as it is. It is clearly a skill Butcher has honed over the years to make compulsively readable books, even at 13 books into the series  this one will keep you saying “Just one more chapter, just one more chapter….” before bed, and the all of the sudden it’s 3AM.

This book is pretty much everything you could want from a Dresden book, it has more awesome pop culture references (some subtle, some not so subtle) than you can shake a stick at (or a staff….see what I did there?). Choice lines like:

“Is he fast like Jackie Chan, or fast like The Flash?”

or

“How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?”

It has a riveting story where you really don’t know what’s going to happen next. It has Harry up against all odds and sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing and pretty much just being real. It has oodles of emotion, and I will freely admit to getting glossy eyed a few times early in the book when his old friends find out his spirit is around, and once later on I actually cried real tears. Like the kind of tears that sneak up on you and you don’t know you’re shedding them till they are running down your face. Manly tears, but tears nonetheless. For a book where Harry is a ghost it is also still action packed! Whether that be in the form of magical battles or gun battles, this one has everything. Of course nothing on the scale of the war in CHANGES, but if there’s one thing Butcher can really do is his action sequences. They are always above the board awesome.

Look, if you are reading this then you probably don’t need me to tell you how good Jim Butcher is and how his skill ranks up there with the best of authors. You also probably don’t need me to tell you how good the Dresden Files are. What I will tell you is that GHOST  STORY is absolutely a triumph and Butcher has created one of his best volumes in the series to date…not for awesome factors like Sue in DEAD BEAT, or the train sequence with Marcone and the Denarians in DEATH MASKS, but because this book is a little more introspective and a little more character driven. There are quiet moments in the book where I thought how deftly Butcher can handle conversations, and other moments when Harry’s internal monologue with himself is compelling. One of Butcher’s most accomplished works GHOST STORY will feed your book addiction and your Dresden addiction all in one go!

Now, only a year to wait for COLD DAYS.

Phew, a long wait, but like every year…it’ll be worth it.

Book Review: A Dance With Dragons by George R. R. Martin (Non-Spoiler Review)

 

Well it took me just under a week but I finished A DANCE WITH DRAGONS (5^th book in GEORGE R. R. MARTIN’S A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE SERIES) on Sunday morning and decided not to write my review till today since I wanted to spend a day thinking about it first.

It was requested that I try my best to avoid spoilers in this review and I fully plan to do that. So if you are concerned I will not be spoiling any major plot points, or even smaller plot points. I will however mention broader scope things and I am going on the assumption that if you are reading this review then you have read books 1-4. So, there you have been duly informed.

So how about the book. Did I enjoy it? Yes and no (AKA mixed feelings). Am I surprised that is my reaction to it? Not at all. In fact I fully expected to feel this way.

Let’s start with the structure and length. The book clocks in at around 950 pages hardcover (not including maps and house name list pages) and of that about 600 pages is spent bringing the POV’s that were absent from AFFC up to the same end-point. This equates to characters like Jon Snow, Tyrion Lannister and Daenerys Targaryen killing time. The first 600 pages could be called “Holding Pattern Till We Catch Up”, and while Martin throws in some good solid stuff and a few major twists it really does feel like a bit of a slog for large chunks. It’s nice to have new or hidden-new POV’s like Reek, Varamyr Sixskins, and Melisandre in the book bringing a fresh view into the proceedings but people like Davos Seaworth who I never really cared much for (and who existed previously as a POV window onto Stannis Baratheon) are simply boring. He has one chapter where something interesting happens, but mostly it adds up to a lot of travelling and trying to get Northern lords to bend the knee to Stannis.

There is, it should be noted, one MAJOR development in the first half of the book that could be considered a game changer. Just an FYI.

For this first section the book spends time with our main characters doing things that CAN be interesting but get overdrawn. This book is largely about good people attempting to rule in good and honest ways whilst Martin shows us that even good can produce bad, and in some cases evil. That’s a great thing and a wonderful juxtaposition to the events in the South from AFFC with generally bad people doing bad things. It would be great…in another book. This is a book we were waiting six years for and while it’s nice to show us this I feel like it didn’t need 600 pages worth of material devoted to it. Certain things, especially in Tyrion and Daenerys’ storylines by page 500, feel like overkill. It had me thinking “Okay, I get it George…can we move along please?” Is this an awful thing? No, but it got a tad tedious and had the rest of the book not delivered I’d be upset.

That said, Bran's storyline throughout the entirety of those 600 pages IS totally interesting and enthralling and almost better than Jon Snow's chapters. So there's that. 

Thankfully, the final 350-ish pages are nearly completely win. In fact there is a discernable moment (a chapter of events in the Sunspear on Dorne) in the volume where we move on from AFFC and things move forward. Characters from AFFC (Cersei, Jaime, Arya ect.) show back up and this barge of a book turns into a speedboat, as Martin leaves the doldrums behind and gets to the goods.

The latter quarter of the book is full of setup for the next book and people move into positions where the tension is palpable and events happen that cannot seemingly be undone producing some surprising results. There are also events that staggered my brain with their revelations and those are always good. Are there cliffhangers you ask? GALORE. Nearly the entirety of the last 100 pages is cliffhangers, a few stronger than others, but enough to keep people guessing and coming back when the next book drops.

(Insert joke about how long that will take here)

The final 350 pages made the read satisfying but the first 600 can be a bit of a chore to slog through to get to the good stuff. It’s like having to eat a middling dinner with 3 items you dislike and one you do….to get to eat the luscious, yummy dessert. I think the main problem lies with two issues: Firstly,  splitting the book (AFFC and ADWD) VIA POV instead of mid-story was a HUGE mistake. I think I would have preferred it the other way round and the fact that he did that presented a logistics problem with time and progression. So by doing that he HAD to create 600 pages of “holding pattern” before he moved things on. IMHO that was a mistake. This brings me to the second issue:  You could actually have covered the events in both AFFC and ADWD in one book, easily. In fact, I used to say that as long as ADWD made the split in POV make sense then I would forgive it, but it just doesn’t. What actually happens in both AFFC and ADWD (first 600 pages) could have been totally covered in about 800-900 pages total…making a tighter narrative that got the same points across. I only hope that the Book4-5 fiasco does not continue to mar the series with long waits and humdrum filler.

I don't mean to sound as if I am being unnecessarily harsh here. That's not my intention, as I enjoyed visiting this world again and Martin's prose is as good as it ever was. I read it rather voraciously for like 5 days, I just don't find it perfect. It IS however, SCADS better than AFFC if only because it concerns more interesting characters and a lot of the action takes place outside Westeros and that made it have a really nice global flavour. Still a solid read, and it totally delivers in the end.

That said, with things now moving forward at a fast pace the next book THE WINDS Of WINTER can hopefully get back to the great style of the first 3 books which are still amazing. I can hope.

If you read this book it will be for those final 350 pages. The first 600 have some interesting info and a few good developments but overall it’s filler-ish with a rather disappointing Tyrion arc actually. The end of the book is all LIGHTNING….while the first half is all sound and fury signifying…well you get the picture.

It totally delivers in the end and makes the wait worth it, I'm just glad that the AFFC/ADWD timeline/holding pattern stuff is over now and hopefully it's going to be all cream from here on out.