The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

Author – N.K. Jemisin

Trade Paperback
Pages: 432 pages
Publisher: Orbit
Release Date: February 25, 2010
ISBN-10: 0316043915
ISBN-13: 978-0316043915

Hype. A powerful tool in the publishing industry. It’s an impressive achievement when a yet-to-be-published author can create and maintain buzz about their debut novel, with readers going gaga over something that hasn’t even hit store shelves. It’s exciting for those readers, but dangerous as well. For every time an author lives up to that hype (Patrick Rothfuss) several others fail to take advantage, to prove they were worth it (Robert Newcomb, anyone?). As a reviewer, I try to separate myself from the hype, to choose my books based on what I find interesting, not what the publishers are pushing hardest. Sometimes, though, it’s unavoidable. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin is one of those cases.

As with any highly-anticipated novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms had predefined itself in my mind, based on nothing more than the blurb on the back of the book and the beautiful cover. Before it even arrived on my doorstep, it was a victim of preconceptions and expectations. I opened The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms expecting one book and found a very different beast within. Expectations are often dangerous, but in this case, the smashing of them was a very good thing indeed, for I expected a familiar story, only to find a wonderfully original one in its place.
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Best Served Cold

Author – Joe Abercrombie

Trade Paperback
Pages: 544 pages
Publisher: Gollancz
Release Date: June 1st, 2009
ISBN-10: 0575082453
ISBN-13: 978-0575082458

You can say many things for Joe Abercrombie.

You can say he’s leading the way for no-holds-barred Fantasy. You can say he’s a great stylist, with satisfying, easy-to-read prose. You can give him credit for being adept at writing convincing, startling endings (a trait sadly lacking in the Fantasy genre). You can say his action scenes are among the best out there. You can say he loves to set the reader up, then pull the rug out from under them by subverting the tropes we all know and abhor/love.

You can say all these things about Joe Abercrombie, and they all certainly apply to Best Served Cold as surely as they did for his first trilogy, The First Law. I recognized all of these qualities while reading the novel, but the whole time I also couldn’t fight the feeling that something was off, that I wasn’t connecting to this Abercrombie novel as I had to previous ones. It took me a few days, and a couple of conversations with others who had read the book, to finally unearth the roots of this feeling.
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The Adventures of the Princess and Mr. Whiffle: The Thing Under the Bed

Author – Patrick Rothfuss

Hardcover
Pages: 72
Publisher: Subterranean Press
Release Date: July, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-59606-313-6

Thinly veiled as a children’s storybook, this long-awaited sequel to Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind is a shocking departure from its predecessor. Sometime between the end of The Name of the Wind and the beginning of The Adventures of the Princess and Mr Wiffle: The Thing Beneath the Bed, Kvothe, the charismatic narrator of The Name of the Wind, has undergone an unusual transformation from male Kingkiller to innocent princess. The Catch? She lives in her castle alone. Kingkiller, indeed. Denna has been replaced by an even more irredeemable soul, Mr. Whiffle, the teddy-bear.

Rothfuss expounds upon the mysteries established in The Name of the Wind, focussing most of the novel’s plot and attention on The Thing under the Bed, a nefarious soul who’d make even Stephen King cringe. Some fans may be put off by the somewhat tangential nature of The Adventures of the Princess and Mr. Whiffle, what with it being a picture book and more or less ignoring the mythos set up in the first volume of the series, but those who dig past the simplistic prose, and deeper into the plot-behind-the-plot will find a story that adds yet another layer to The Kingkiller Chronicle and reveals further truths about the enigmatic mind of Kvothe.

In all seriousness, this its-a-childrens-book-for-adults from Patrick Rothfuss is a clever fairy tale that hits all the right notes to remind us old folk about the tales of our youth we may have forgotten. Rothfuss throws a twist on the formula by providing three endings to the tale, each more chilling and hilarious than the last. Strong art from Nate Taylor tops off the package and adds a charm beyond Rothfuss’ prose. It’s a fun, jaunty story that begs to be read time and again. Just beware to stop at ending one, if you don’t want your appetite ruined!

A Shadow in Summer

Author – Daniel Abraham

Paperback
Pages: 384
Publisher: Tor Books
Release Date: March 7th, 2006
ISBN-10: 0765351870
ISBN-13: 978-0765351876

Daniel Abraham is not as well known as Patrick Rothfuss, nor does he sell as many books as Brandon Sanderson, and he lacks the mass market appeal of Joe Abercrombie, but, like these contemporaries, his debut series, The Long Price Quartet, has helped shaped the face of modern Fantasy in the twenty-first century. Where Abraham sets himself apart from these other authors, though, is his ability to shatter the preconceptions of the genre and show that Fantasy is so much more than fireballs, sword fights and Dark Lords.

Despite being familiar with Abraham, and following his career quite closely over the past few years, this was my first experience with any of his long fiction. It wasn’t that I was uninterested in The Long Price Quartet, quite the opposite, but rather that I was saving it for a special occasion, when I was feeling burned out on the genre. Because of this two-year-long build up, and the countless other raving reviews floating around the Internet, my expectations were (perhaps unfairly) high. Having now finished A Shadow in Summer, the first volume of the quartet, I can say without reservation that all my expectations were surpassed. Frankly, it’s hard to believe that A Shadow in Summer is a debut novel, and not the work of a novelist with a dozen novels under their belt. Abraham’s novel is confident, and the writing shows a maturity that’s rare in the genre. It’s frightening to think of how accomplished Abraham will be when he does have a dozen novels under his belt.
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Spellwright

Author – Blake Charlton

Hardcover
Pages: 352
Publisher: Tor Books
Release Date: March 2nd, 2010
ISBN-10: 0765317273
ISBN-13: 978-0765317278

It’s obvious from the very early pages of Spellwright that Blake Charlton is a child of late-eighties and early-nineties Fantasy. It’s full of dastardly villains, righteous youths and hidden destinies. Like contemporaries Brandon Sanderson and Peter V. Brett, Charlton is doing his damnedest to bring back the type of fantasy where the good guys are good, and the bad guys are bad (barring a few genuinely surprising twists in the final pages) and the fate of the world’s at risk of being overrun by demon hordes.

And that’s not where the comparisons to Brett and Sanderson end. Both of those novelists are known for their intricate, imaginative magic systems, which are not only cool spectacles and a catalyst for visceral battle scenes, but also intimately woven into the plot and world of their stories, and Charlton’s work is no different. Spellwriting, which gives the caster the ability to ‘write’ complex magical formulas–much like a computer programming language–and manifest nearly anything they can think of (including cognizant, living spells called constructs and golems), is at the centre of Charlton’s story, with the main hook being that the protagonist, Nicodemus Weal (who was once thought to be a hero from prophecy) is a cacographer, a dyslexic Spellwright who can neither write his own spells nor come in contact with another’s spell without causing disastrous results.
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The Magicians

Author – Lev Grossman

Hardcover
Pages: 416
Publisher: Viking Adult
Release Date: August 11th, 2009
ISBN-10: 0670020559
ISBN-13: 978-0670020553

Much fuss has been made about The Magicians, the first foray into the Fantasy genre by Lev Grossman, uber-geek, author of Codex and Senior Writer for Time magazine. The most ironic of all? The book is not being marketed as a genre novel, but rather being shelved in the Literature section at most bookstores, despite being a Fantasy novel (full of every cliché in the book) through and through.

The thing is, though, The Magicians is a good crossover novel, bridging the gap between Literature-with-a-capital-L and Fantasy, by taking the usual tropes (magic school, dysfunctional band of misfits, wizards, ‘You’re a wizard, Harry’-moments, fireballs, etc…) and throwing in all that stuff the literary folk like (sex, moral ambiguity, cocaine and whiskey, cancerous relationships, etc…). The Magicians is like Harry Potter meets The Graduate, with a little bit of Trainspotting thrown in for good measure.

Of course, general debauchery and acidic characters aren’t a magical fix-all, able to turn any Fantasy novel into a work of literary genius; but Grossman is aware of this and uses these uncomfortable literary devices as an avenue to tell a sometimes funny, sometimes painful story of young people growing up in a world they hardly understand. Like Trainspotting, The Magicians is all about Quentin’s inability to cope with the trials and travails of real life, and his constant search for Fillory, a magical world that Quentin knows will solve all his problems. As most of us know, though, finding that place rarely solves anything, rather it’s often a slippery slope, leading to bigger and more serious problems.
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The Sword-edged Blonde

Author – Alex Bledsoe

Paperback
Pages: 320 pages
Publisher: Tor Fantasy/Nightshade Books
Release Date: June 30, 2009
ISBN-10: 0765362031
ISBN-13: 978-0765362032

The Sword-edged Blonde by Alex Bledsoe is one of those rainy-day kinda novels. You know the type. It’s not the deepest book on your bookshelf, but it’s fun. It won’t stick with you for weeks afterwards, but you can’t put it down while you’re reading it. It’s got problems, but, for some reason, you’re willing to look past ‘em. The Sword-edged Blonde doesn’t set out to be anything more than what it is: a pulpy homage to Raymond Chandler, set in a world not unlike those found in any other Fantasy world. Bledsoe knew what he was aiming for, and hit the mark on the first try. Mostly.

It seems obvious: take the tried and true detective novel formula and plunk it down in a standard Sword & Sorcery world. Like Urban Fantasy throwing werewolves and vampires into the mix, putting a traditional story in a new setting can make the old feel new again and that seems to be exactly the angle Bledsoe was trying to take. He pulls more or less every cliche out of the book – a case with a personal connection to the gumshoesword jockey’s past; amnesia; a murdered prince; gangsters, gambling dens and thugs; pretty girls and dangerous fellows – but uses them all with tongue firmly in cheek, and comes out the other end with a novel that’s fun for all the right reasons.
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The Happiest Days of Our Lives

Author – Wil Wheaton

Hardcover
Pages: 160 pages
Publisher: Subterranean Press
Release Date: December, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59606-244-3

I first became aware of Wil Wheaton (outside of his acting, of course) a couple of years ago (or maybe around the time I joined Twitter. I can’t remember) and could never really figure out what the big deal was, or why nerds (Trekkie or not) were ready to kiss the damn ground he walked on. Sure, I was damn jealous of the traffic his blog gets, and that he was going to be on Season Three of The Guild, but Wesley Crusher? Come on, nobody liked Wesley Crusher back in 1989, so why would that change now, 20 years later?

Well, for one, it turns out not even Wesley Crusher liked Wesley Crusher all that much (Wheaton appreciates the success of the show, but was never too fond of the material given to him by writers), and it also turns out that Wes– er… Wil Wheaton has a whole lot more to offer outside of Wesley Crusher and Gordy from Stand by Me.

The Happiest Days of our Lives showed up unannounced on my doorstep the other day, an advance copy from the good people at Subterranean Press that wasn’t ever really on my radar. It couldn’t have come at a better time. After coming over a marathon read of Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy, I picked up Junot Diaz’s The Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that promised to be a geek’s dream, but left me feeling confused, alienated and a little depressed. Inevitably, it became hard not to compare Diaz’s novel to the one I read next. To follow that uneven experience, I picked up the quiet little novelette by Wheaton, a collection of non-fiction pulled together from writing for his blog, WWdn and found everything little misinformed me wanted The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao to be.
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The Hero of Ages

Author – Brandon Sanderson

Paperback
Pages: 784 pages
Publisher: Tor
Release Date: October 14, 2008
ISBN-10: 0765356147
ISBN-13: 978-0765356147

The Final Empire, the first volume of Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy kicked my ass (in a good way). A great blend of original ideas, charming characters a nicely self-contained story (no real cliffhangers to speak of), and good ol’ fashioned ’80’s style fantasy. It brought me back to my roots, reminded me of when I first discovered the genre through the likes of Terry Brooks, Raymond E. Feist and R.A. Salvatore. Maybe not for everyone, in the age of Joe Abercrombies and Hal Duncans, but an accessible novel that left me wanting more.

Sanderson followed that up with The Well of Ascension, which turned out to be a massive disappointment. Instead of delivering on the promises of the first novel, Sanderson left his characters at a stalemate, giving them time to evolve, sure, but grinding the plot and world development to a halt. Gone were most of the most interesting elements of The Final Empire (the forbidding Steel Inquisitors, most notably) and in their place were insipid, weak characters dealing with politics and love stories that I just didn’t give a damn about. Elend, in particular, regressed from a confident paramour to a self-doubting child thrust into a position of rule. It felt false, and, even worse, pointless.

So, home-run in his first at-bat, flaming strikeout in his second, how was Sanderson to fare with his third (and final) attempt? Let’s call it a ground-rule-double. The Hero of Ages succeeds, but doesn’t quite hit it out of the park like the first volume.
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The Well of Ascension

Author – Brandon Sanderson

Paperback
Pages: 817 pages
Publisher: Tor
Release Date: June 3rd, 2008
ISBN-10: 0765356139
ISBN-13: 978-0765356130

In my review of Brandon Sanderson’s The Final Empire, the first volume in his Mistborn trilogy, I lauded it as a novel that returned me to my roots as a reader of Fantasy. It brought back memories of first getting into the genre and reading the likes of Terry Brooks, Raymond E. Feist and R.A. Salvatore.

Furthering its success was Sanderson’s ability to take the cliches of the genre, which the aforementioned authors were chock full of, and flip them on their head, pulling the rug out from under readers, so comfortable with genre tropes, just as they began to feel like they had a grip on the story. The Final Empire was a story of likeable characters, imaginative world-building and genuinely shocking twists. Unfortunately, The Well of Ascension takes most of these strengths… and tosses them out the window in favour of a hard-to-swallow love story and a drawn-out siege with the heroes caught between two armies. Luckily we still have one hell of a twist to end the novel off.

With the Lord Ruler seemingly defeated, Sanderson was set to explore territory not often touched upon in the Fantasy genre: how a world reacts when the evil lord has fallen and freedom is within grasp. Sanderson presents a world on the edge of chaos, one that has to transition from a society ground under the oppressive rules of the Lord Ruler to one that has to manage itself, to figure out how to right the wrongs set by a thousand-year-old regime, and why it might not be so easy to rule with kindness, compassion and democracy. Where The Final Empire was a successful character-driven caper novel, The Well of Ascension is a political stalemate led by a naive youngster.

The Well of Ascension is defined less by what it has, and more by what it’s missing. Kelsier, the dashing lead of The Final Empire is gone, and with him goes most of the charisma and fun that defined the first novel. In his place is Elend Venture, the aforementioned naive youngster, who made a strong impression when he was first introduced in The Final Empire, but utterly fails to live up to it in The Well of Ascension. Gone is the confident, aloof individual that helps bring down a tyrant, and in his place is a nervous, self-righteous boy who has little idea how to handle his newfound power. Of course Sanderson sets up The Well of Ascension as a novel about growing into oneself, and making sacrifices for the greater good, which gives Elend (and Vin) room to grow. Still, I couldn’t help but feel that the extended siege (which takes up the majority of the novel) was an excuse to halt the more interesting aspects of the story (what exactly the Lord Ruler was warning against at the end of The Final Empire; where Kelsier discovered the fabled Eleventh Metal; Marsh and his infiltration of the the Steel Inquisitors), allowing Sanderson to self-indulgently explore his philosophies on leadership and bog down the story with boring politics that just don’t hold up against other novels in the genre.
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The Final Empire

Author – Brandon Sanderson

Paperback
Pages: 672 pages
Publisher: Tor
Release Date: July 31, 2007
ISBN-10: 0765350386
ISBN-13: 978-0765350381

Back in December of 2007, Brandon Sanderson was just like every other new-to-the-scene author, just trying to make his way as a young author of Fantasy novels. He had a few published novels under his belt (and a whole slew more hidden in the deep corners of his house), had been getting good critical acclaim and decent sales, but was far from a household name. Things were looking up for Sanderson, but no one had any idea of just how high he would climb. Then came the announcement: Brandon Sanderson was chosen to complete the late Robert Jordan’s legendary Wheel of Time series.

Since then, Sanderson’s stock has risen to meteoric heights. His own novels have been released to strong critical acclaim and he’s landed himself on the New York Times Bestseller list. Wheel of Time fans wait with bated breath for the fall release of The Gathering Storm, eager and/or reluctant to see whether Sanderson is able to do justice to their favourite work. As someone who will not be reading The Gathering Storm when it arrives, I was nonetheless curious to see what all the fuss was about. I had dipped my toe in his work before (a half-finished copy of Elantris still sits on my bookshelf), and being on the hunt for some meaty Fantasy, I picked up The Final Empire, the first volume of his Mistborn trilogy.
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The Angel’s Game

Author – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Hardcover
Pages: 544 pages
Publisher: Doubleday
Release Date: June 16th, 2009
ISBN-10: 0385528701
ISBN-13: 978-0385528702

So ended my review of The Shadow of the Wind by Spanish author Carlos Ruiz Zafon. Strong words, but sounding no less true from where I sit now, months removed from writing them. In fact, my opinion of the novel has only grown, as I look back on it and reminisce – there’s no quibbling about it anymore, The Shadow of the Wind is my favourite novel, by a fair margin.

So where does that put me now, having finished that novel I was so eagerly referring to in the first review? I’ve read The Angel’s Game (the English title of El Juego del Angel), and have had to sit for weeks, letting my thoughts coalesce into something that I can define coherently enough to call it a review.
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Zoe’s Tale

Author – John Scalzi

Paperback
Pages: 416 pages
Publisher: Tor Science Fiction
Release Date: August 19th, 2008
ISBN-10: 0765356198
ISBN-13: 978-0765356192

John Scalzi’s been a favourite of mine since I discovered him last summer. Full of quick wit and larger-than-life characters, his novels never failed to entertain and reinvigorate my love for reading. His novels never let me down.

Until now, if only just a little bit.

Though Scalzi’s already a big name in the Science Fiction genre (thanks in no little part to his blog, the Whatever), he made some waves earlier this year when Zöe’s Tale was nominated for a Hugo. It’s hard enough to get nominated for a Hugo (just ask this list of authors), but to get nominated for a Best Novel Hugo with a novel that is geared towards a Young Adult (YA) audience is doubly hard. The problem, though, is that I don’t really think Zöe’s Tale deserves it. Put up against the other YA novel nominated in the category, Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, Scalzi’s effort just doesn’t hold up.
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Blood of Ambrose

Author – James Enge

Paperback
Pages: 401
Publisher: Pyr
Release Date: April 21, 2009
ISBN-10: 1591027365
ISBN-13: 978-1591027362

You know when you’re reading a novel, and you can pick out the author’s favourite word? Well, James Enge, the author of Blood of Ambrose, loves the word ‘crooked’ – it shows up on every second page, describes a good chunk of the characters in the novel and also happens to be the most accurate descriptor of the novel itself.

Blood of Ambrose is, if nothing else, a crooked novel and a crooked read.

Enge’s prose is nice – easily readable, lots of charm and irreverent wit – but it’s his storytelling and uneven characterization that fails. Enge made a name for himself as a writer of short fiction, and it shows big time in the episodic nature of Blood of Ambrose. Whereas a short story can successfully be written without much of a road plan, it’s much harder to accomplish with a full on novel, and the result here is a mess of plot points and characters that fail to coalesce into a story with any kind of satisfying flow. It never once felt like Enge had any sort of control over the plot, instead he just stumbles along, trying to find it as he goes.
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The Baker’s Boy

Author – J.V. Jones

Paperback
Pages: 560
Publisher: Aspect
Release Date: June 1st, 1995
ISBN-10: 0446602825
ISBN-13: 978-0446602822

For the past few years my brother has constantly debated over starting George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. He’s thrown the idea at me a few times, but I’ve always had a few words of caution to go along with the praise:

Never has this been truer than with J.V. Jones’ The Baker’s Boy, the first volume of her The Book of Words trilogy.

Published at roughly the same time (mid-nineties), Jones’ The Book of Words and Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire tread a lot of similar ground – multiple viewpoint characters, politics, warring countries, light on magic, a world inhabited mostly by humans, eschewing the typical ‘Quest’ archetype – and yet they diverge at the most crucial point: quality.
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