Lord-Triceratops

I want to start off this review with a strange question. It’s a strange book, so I’m allowed. Who invented the solar-punk aesthetic? I know what steampunk is. It’s based off steam or coal powered devices. The term was invented by author KW Jeter (that took some research, believe me) and flourished under numerous other writers and artists. Cyber-punk is a role-playing and video game by Micheal Pondsmith. I guess solar-punk is supposed to be a healthier answer to those two aesthetics that rely on the machines, one way or the other. Solar-punk relies on Mother Earth. I’m not criticizing it. I’m just wondering. This book could be the first instance of “plant punk” where everything revolves around vegetation. I’m going to criticize the hell out of it.

There’s a married couple, Mr. Iravan and Mrs. Ahilya, that live in a flying tree city. That’s what it says on the back cover, and that would be weird enough. Their city flies above a vast jungle of non-flying trees and terrible storms. They go on an expedition into the jungle together, one of those storms hit, and only Iravan and Ahilya make it back alive. This is one of the minor plots, where Ahilya keeps blaming Iravan for only saving her life and not her intern. I must get this out of the way before I explain the main plot, because I’ll be going down a DEEP rabbit hole otherwise. Ahilya strikes me as an impatient and ungrateful bitch. I’ll just say it. Your husband just saved your life on your expedition. All you can do is complain about how he chose not to save the life of some pimple-faced nobody that he just met fifteen minutes ago? Get over it. With that out of the way I can get to the rest of the story and how it doesn’t make any sense either.

I’m going to do that by first describing the plot in Rao’s personal language, and then in English. Try and keep up. Iravan is an Architect. The Architects of the ashram Nahkram use their sacred Trajectory to enter the Moment and see the constellations of plant life. With these Moments, they see the Two Visions and can keep the Resonance and the plants’ Raga to keep the Ashram out of the Earth-rages. But if they go too deep into the Resonance, and Traject the wrong way, they might go into Ecstasy. In that case the Council of Maze Architects votes to Excise the Ecstatic Architect. Meanwhile, the sungineers want to build a battery by trapping spiral-weed in death-boxes, but this is illegal because spiral-weed is an angry plant. Outside of the city, the Yakshas roam in the earth-rages and no one knows how they survive or where they came from.

Did you get all of that? Because I never want to write that again. Here’s what it means in normal human-speak. Architects use plant magic to control the city and keep it out of the jungle. That’s Trajection. The vast majority of the book is how plant magic is good, but too much makes you go crazy. That’s Ecstasy. It’s bad. The sungineers are scientists that want to invent things. They’re not cool like the plant-magic people. The yakshas are gigantic monsters in the jungle. That’s much easier to swallow, isn’t it?

There is a story here, albeit hidden under dense language and melodrama. The council thinks Iravan could be crazy. His wife isn’t helping because she wants to study the kaiju monsters outside, and she keeps saying that she hates Architects. Then why did you marry one? Even the author herself can’t explain that. If Iravan is locked up, then someone else will take his seat on the Sacred Council of All-Knowing and All-Seeing Tree-Wizards. Good thing that the lead prosecutor, his old friend Bharavi, is the real crazy one that tries to blow up the city with her evil plant magic. So, in the final act, Iravan mind-melds with a giant falcon, that almost destroys the city again, and Ahilya flies into the jungle to save him. There, he discovers a secret ruin. It shows him that he is the reincarnation of the first architect, and that the giant monsters are really using plant magic on a higher level than humans. That’s how they survive the storms. The storms are a byproduct of all the plants in the world getting angry, and Cthulhu wants to drop by and smash everyone. Iravan and Ahilya save themselves, and the city, with the power of new plant magic and love. I think Cthulhu just called it quits.

I swear to God that’s what this story is about. My favorite line in the entire book is, “Ahilya recognized worm-root, poison ivy, and firethorn, plants that she brought into the ashram during previous expeditions, now harmless and heavily sedated.” How do you sedate a plant? Give it drugs? Like weed? Is that why it’s called weed?

This book reminds me of something equally obscure. There was an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, I can’t remember which one. Crow T. Robot wanted to write a science fiction story. He had Joel and Tom Servo read his script, and it was all gibberish. It was just sentences like, “The Bleebs will coagulate in four quatloos. If they do that then the Morglogs will homogenize on the decapods, which will lead to complete micronation!” At the end of the sketch, Tom yelled at Crow to never put paper to pencil again. That’s what this whole book is like! Its just weird nonsensical language meant to obfuscate a boring plot about court politics and some jungle-hippie bullshit! I don’t care if the city falls anymore! Or if Iravan and Ahilya can save their marriage! I barely know what’s happening!

Speaking of the city, it’s supposed to be the great imaginative setting to this world, but Rao barely cares about it. Many authors want to create a utopian society, myself included. It’s human nature. We envision a better world than this one, based on our ideals and morals. It’s only cynicism and a lack of faith that mars that idealism. Back to this crazy story. Rao clearly has her own utopian vision, based on veganism for some reason. But there’s no practicality. Take the flying tree city. Where are all the people? There was only one sentence about a crowded marketplace. One sentence about all the people in the hospital when the giant falcon attacked. Other than that, everything is empty. Where are all the people? What do they eat? Where do they work or sleep? “Who cares?” says Rao. They can’t magically harmonize with plants so screw them. It seems that the city can already harmonize with them. Roads, buildings, the whole infrastructure down the walls and floors just turn into whatever comfort the people need. Like magic. There were instances when Ahilya would lean against a wall, or sit down or do something, and the plants would grow into comfortable grass-covered furniture just for her. When she flew out to the jungle to find Iravan, the council gave her a gliding seed pod (sure, whatever) as a vehicle. I realized that this was the first time anyone used a vehicle in the story. Other than that, the roads would just grow to where you need to walk, and everyone lives in a GIGANTIC FLYING TREE. Have you ever seen a tree, Ms. Rao? “Aerodynamic” is not a word that I would use to describe one! They’re the very definition of “rooted” to the ground.

I want to make a quick sidenote about Iravan. How convenient is it that he got soul-bonded to one of the cooler giant animals, the falcon? What would happen if his spirit animal was something less impressive? What if he bonded to the banana slug yaksha instead?

This book…wow. Imagine going to a lecture by some gifted scientist, or artist, or someone that you admire. Now imagine instead of giving a thought-provoking analysis of their research or theories, they spend the whole time talking about their fever dreams. That’s this book in a nutshell (that I conjured up with plant magic). It doesn’t make sense because it doesn’t want to. Rao probably had a weird dream, whether she was sleeping or not, about this beautiful tree city in the sky, and then realized how would she put it there? Magic! Then someone asked her what happened next? Long winded explanations of that magic! Then that someone asked about a story, and she said there’s politics about that magic! And giant monsters attack! That’s how you make a book, right? Look, I wanted to like this book. That’s why I picked it up off the store shelf. I’m convinced that for all those people that gave it a good review, Rao just gave them the bare-bones explanation of a flying tree, and they all said, “Cool. I never thought about that one before.” Well, there’s a reason why nobody writes about flying trees, or why plant-punk should never be a thing. It’s dumb. I give The Surviving Sky a…

D

…at that’s being generous. There were times when it could have been better, but then I kept reading it. I’m going to throw this thing in the recycle bin instead of the landfill. I hope Rao can get some satisfaction from that.

This year is off to a rough start. I started the first book I read, The Olympian Affair, last year so I’m not counting it. Sinner Man was awful, and this one wasn’t much better. I believe that one simple trick could fix this book. It was put in the wrong part of the bookstore, the fantasy and science-fiction section. Yes, the author claims that magic is there, but barely. She also claims it’s historical fiction, namely the 1920’s England. It is, if you don’t mind the history is inaccurate. It might be a gay romance novel, albeit a forced and predictable one that feels about as romantic as filing taxes. This book does not belong in any of those sections of the bookstore. This book is about a woman’s obsession with herbalism and interior decoration. It belongs in that section. It would still be a shitty story, but at least it would be in the right section.

A woman named Anne Crowther moves to Crow Island, which is somewhere between England and Oz, to inherit her late father’s house. Her lawyer is a nobody named Mr. Anderson, who exposits about the island’s history, and then doesn't exist for 350 pages until the end. Bear this in mind. Her neighbor is a party-going witch named Emmeline who might as well have a neon sign above her head that says, “Love Interest.” For the first few hundred pages, Anne devotes whole paragraphs on the flowers and home décor around her, but when she sees Emmeline, she can only say, “her.” Italics and all. Emmeline gets her own point of view, and she sees her, Anne, right back. She also does something that annoys me in writing. She doesn’t introduce other characters because she knows who they are. Let me explain. She has an adoptive brother and sister, Nathan and Isobel. She’s used to them living in her house, so the very first appearance of these two is a casual sentence, “Nate and Is were in the other room.” Or something to that effect. I, the reader, wondered who the hell are these people? What are they doing in the other room? Why does she just call her sister “Is” (I honestly thought it was a grammar mistake)? What's wrong with "Izzy?" Pretend I don’t live inside your head, Mrs. May, and I need introductions. The other main character in this book is Bea, Anne’s old friend (she gets an introduction). Her job is to show up at parties, dance the night away, drink, and be an absolute wreck of a human being for most of the book. The main crux of the plot is Bea begging for a love spell from Emmeline for her husband Arthur. She screws it up, and this causes death, destruction, and disease. I’ll get to that soon.

My second problem with this book is that there’s barely any magic in this magical world. There’s talk of magic, rumors, and superstitions about it, but nothing happens until the 200-page mark. There’s plenty of talk against magic. There’s a prohibition against it, and everyone either knows faux magic (whatever that is), or they put up anti-magic wards and detectors. Wait, wouldn’t that be a type of magic in itself? At one point, Bea’s husband Arthur warns Anne about the parties at her neighbor’s house. He said one guy thought he could fly and jumped off the roof. Magic did that. I would say that someone could have spiked his drink (there’s got to be something hallucinogenic somewhere on this island). Hell, magic would make him fly. He didn’t. He went straight into the concrete. This little moment happened in chapter seven. By this point in the first Harry Potter book, Harry was talking to a snake in the zoo, met Haggard who told him he was a wizard, and walked through a melting wall into Diagon Alley to buy a magic wand and pet owl. That stuff is magic. This stuff can be explained with ten seconds of rational science.

So, if the book doesn’t want to talk about magic, what does it want to do? The three most important discussion topics in this book are describing the flowers and herbs, a poem about crows and bad luck (on Crow Island. I think I know how the island got its name. You don’t have to remind me every two pages), and a “tether” between Anne and Emmeline’s two hearts. Most authors would put this down as love at first sight. A metaphor. This tether is somehow metaphysical and physical at the same time. People can see it, feel it, and react to it, albeit magically. I guess it just grows out of Anne’s sternum and winds its way to Emmeline’s. This becomes a predictable plot point in the climax. If you’re thinking, “Do they win with the power of love?” then you win the grand prize! Not reading this book to find that out! Hooray!

Where was I? Oh yes, poorly written love stories. The big crisis in the story is a love spell between Bea and her magic-hating husband Arthur. Emmeline provided the spell, and for some reason she must maintain it with her blood or die. Why? Hell if I know. Her only options are taking a blood sample from the two recipients, Bea and Arthur, or parcel out her blood day by day. I don’t get it. She’s not the one receiving the magic. Why should she bleed for it? And how much blood does she need? Gallons? Why not just wait for Arthur to cut himself shaving and take the bloody bandage? No, it doesn’t work that way and May can’t say why, but she can take 200 more pages to say everyone is in danger from it.

They do get into danger when Anne shoots Arthur, and now they have to hide his corpse from the law. Oops. Bea suffers a nervous breakdown, understandable, but then she’s bed-ridden until she needs to get up, throw a hissy fit, and wreck half the house. This doesn’t negate Emmeline from the blood debt. Somehow, killing one of the recipients of a spell just make the spell worse. Your guess is as good as mine. Anne finds her father’s spell-book and thinks, I am not kidding here, “What if we resurrected Arthur and retrieved his zombie blood instead?” As you can imagine, it doesn’t go well, and they have to kill Arthur and bury him again. Now Nathan and Isobel find out, and Arthur becomes a vengeful ghost so he can possess Bea. Why? Why not go after his killer, Anne? Why does nothing make sense?

Why am I still reading this book? I think I need to exorcise it from myself.

To her credit, May is very good with her descriptions and prose. The problem is nothing happens. There are conversations where characters say one-word phrases, like, “Yes,” “No,” or “What?” Then two paragraphs of emotional analysis or intricate details about the tablecloth. I imagine Ms. May is fascinated by all of this and thinks it makes for good literature, but to the reader, it’s just padding. If you cut out all the dense intricacies of the scenery, and all the innuendos of people’s conversations, and just focused on the actual words and events of the story, then every chapter would last five seconds. If this became a movie it would be half an hour long, but the set design and costumes would cost millions.

The chapters are short, five to ten pages on average, but extremely predictable. Most, but not all of them, have Anne or Emmeline go through emotional turmoil. Then a minor character walks in to provide their emotional support or stress. It’s usually Bea collapsing and screaming. It builds up to something meaningful like a relationship, magical potential, or even sex, and then someone interrupts. This is to provide the cliffhanger to the next chapter where it’s covered or glossed over in seconds. It doesn’t take long for the pattern to emerge.

Francesca May ruined her own chance to make a plot twist. When Anne is nursing Bea out of another relapse, she has a vision of Bea’s past. This is a new magical power that Anne never tried before, but masters in seconds. Do not question it. She sees Arthur hug and speak to another pregnant woman, but he must leave her. Why? “Because of her,” he says, “She’s pulling me.” Remember, Bea asked Emmeline to make a love spell between her and Arthur. Did that love spell ruin a legit relationship in Arthur’s life? Was Bea being selfish and jealous of another woman? A woman that Arthur impregnated and married? Is Bea the real villain in this story? She’s just using everyone around her for her own selfish, lustful and decadent needs? Who cares? Arthur’s a magic-hating man. Now he's an evil ghost. This really could have been a game-changer in this emotional mess of a story, but no. She had the chance to make a dynamic plot twist, but she threw it away. She didn’t want to make her characters look bad, or in the case of Arthur, make him look good.

Unlike other books that would forget a mistake like this, May does make something of this plot twist. It's just stupid. Anne finds Arthur’s lost son, now a small toddler, and decides to take his blood to pay off Emmeline’s debt. I was just thinking what could move this little story along? Child sacrifice! No wait, I’m not a psycho. But this is what Anne, and by extension Ms. May think needs to happen. Let’s bleed the kid for our lover’s weird demands! Emmeline says no because I imagine Ms. May’s editor told her not to do it.

Towards the end, the book suddenly gains an antagonist when it didn’t need one. Mr. Anderson, Anne’s lawyer (remember him?) wants her father’s spell-book, so he demands it from her. First, he trashed the house looking for it, then he threatened Anne to give it to him. Why? I understand that spell-books are valuable. I’m asking why not just take it before Anne got to the island? Why not read the will, go to the house before anyone arrives, and say, “I need to catalog everything here because I’m a lawyer,” then take it? Did he need Anne to find the secret chamber? It wasn’t a secret! Her old man left it in the attic, the one with the only staircase in the house and the unlocked door! Why is Anderson a villain now? I know why, because May needed to have another man be the face of evil, and she ran out of other characters.

The climax of the book has Bea tied to a bed because Arthur goes from being an angry ghost to a full-powered demon that’s possessing her. Anne and Emmeline admit their love and that means the magical tether can pay off the blood debt. Don’t ask. There’s a rainstorm inside the house. Again, don't ask. Anderson literally walks in the room, gets possessed by Arthur, and dies from the power of love. Or something. And then little brother Nathan dies because f*** if I know. Nobody with an XY chromosome is allowed to live in this story. This all happens while Emmeline threw a party in the house, so there’s a whole living room full of witnesses, but nobody calls the police. Instead, Anne and Emmeline just bury everyone in the greenhouse, right next to Arthur’s corpse and the azaleas.

I want to confess something strange about this review. I wrote it in sections. I would read a portion of this book on my lunch break, go home, and scribble down my thoughts as fast as possible. Most of them boiled down to “WTF?” but I had to get them out of my head anyway. I feel that’s how Francesca May wrote this book, in quick confused chunks that may or may not be related to each other. Nothing is cohesive or logical here, but it wouldn’t be magical or romantic or some such bullshit. But that’s the problem. Wild and Wicked Things never accomplishes its goals. It has a start but no finish every time. There’s barely any magic in a magical story, except to ruin people’s lives. There’s barely any romance. The history is messed up and every event in the plot is either glossed over, forgotten, or gone completely FUBAR. I didn’t even mention the confusing chapter layouts or the way it pretends to be four books in one. Consider that a act of kindness on my part.

Nothing is “Wild” or “Wicked” about this book, but at least it’s a “thing.” A more accurate title would be, “Complete Dunderheads Screw Around with Magic They Don’t Understand.” What’s the first letter in “dunderhead?” That’s a…

D.

Why not an F? Maybe I’m fooling myself, but I had to keep reading it to see how crazy it could get, or maybe I wanted to give it a ghost of chance. Maybe because Bea reminded me of someone that I know, who is also demanding and self-destructive. So maybe giving it a lower grade would be more personal than it needs to be. I don’t know. Right now my brain hurts. I just hate this book. The end.

It’s a new year. Time for new possibilities. New books and genres. I cannot be the only person that thinks film noir and gangster stories are cool. I have always enjoyed the tough-guy-in-trench-coats aesthetic, namely for private detectives and film noir art. One of my favorite movies is The Godfather. But I’m not an expert in either. This is the first time I’ve read a “hard crime” novel about the Mafia or the Underworld. This may also be the last. Part of me wants to just slash this book for being unlikable and depressing, but another part says that I’m not well-versed in this genre. A third part (I’m a complicated man) wants to address that this is the author’s first book and that it was lost somewhere for fifty years. Maybe he’s improved since then (I hope so) and maybe if I lived 50 years ago, I’d have a different standpoint. Then again, maybe not. I hate this book.

The book starts out on a vicious note. Donald Barshter just beat his wife to death on page one. He says he didn’t mean to do it, but he did mean to shove her body in the closet and leave town. He leaves behind his old life as an insurance salesman and runs to Buffalo, New York, because it’s nearby and no one knows him. He decides to join the local Mafia, or rather get their attention. He empties out his bank accounts, changes his name to Nat Crowley, and starts spending money and starting fights in downtown Buffalo. I hate the guy, but I must read everything from his first-person perspective. He gets the attention of the local police first for beating up a tourist in a dive bar, but then he meets a local hitman named Quince who sets him up to meet the Big Boss Baron. Baron gives him a job in another dive bar serving beer, and then he meets a woman named Anne. They start to date each other, but they’re unhappy. I should also mention that Nat pays a hotel maid, Brenda, to be a prostitute, but she’s the only one that really survives in this story. Mainly, because the author forgot about her. Don/Nat works for Baron as a bartender but he’s unhappy. When Baron asks him to go kill someone in New York City, he’s unhappy about it, so he calls Quince. The two of them plan out and murder Baron and all of his men to take over the Buffalo Mafia. It works. It’s also the big climax of the book because now Nat, everyone knows him as Nat by this point, gets a big office in a big building, spends his days looking busy, and makes big bucks. He’s still unhappy. There is not a single cheerful moment in this story. I know it’s supposed to be a “crime doesn’t pay” morality play, but I’m too depressed to notice it. I’ll cut to the ending. First, Nat and Anne go to Las Vegas to be unhappy together. Some guy from Donald’s old life recognizes him and both Nat and Anne investigate. He’s just some old loser from Connecticut that got insurance from Donald, or something insignificant. Anne takes a “shopping trip to New York” but really, she uncovers the murder of Don Barshter’s wife. She extorts Nat for money by saying that she gave the evidence to a lawyer who will call the FBI if she doesn’t call every day. Nat kills her. Then he empties out his bank accounts and gets on the first train to Cincinnati to start it all over again. Nobody learned anything and I still hate Donald/Nat as much as when the book started.

I think the only good thing about this book is that’s short: 187 pages. Block’s writing style is crisp and to the point, and this is his very first novel. Ever. From all the praise and accolades on the book covers and interviews, I can tell he’s got a fan-base. But none of that praise is for Sinner Man. It’s all for his later, more refined work. I am also aware that gangster life is brutal and vengeful. To that I say that Nat is an impulsive man that doesn’t think past his own anger. He beats the women in his life without a second thought. He doesn’t want to kill the guy that Baron, the mob boss, wants dead because he doesn’t want to be a killer (too late for that, pal). But then as soon as Quince says, “Let’s kill Baron instead,” Nat’s all for it. How did Nat think he was going to get ahead in the Mafia? Being the best salesman? This is America! Even the underworld hates to encourage hard workers! The only reoccurring motivation to Nat’s behavior is he’s unhappy, so he indulges himself, or he blindly follows someone’s orders, gets more money, and is then unhappy again. And he takes his violent frustrations out on his women. It sounds like clinical depression to me.

I am aware that The Godfather is a romanticized vision of Mafia life, but it’s also a morality play. I’ve only seen the first two movies. I’ve heard that the third is the worst, but I’ve only seen the very last scene. Spoiler alert, Micheal Corleone dies alone. It’s supposed to make you remember how he started off good and strong, even honorable from the first movie, and then it all went to Hell when he joined the Mafia. Even in the height of his power and wealth he was going downhill on a moral standard. Don Barshter was never an honorable man, and he only got worse when he decided to become Nat Crowley, gangster goon. There are no decent or honorable people in this book, and I can’t think of a way to put one in. But it’s the author’s first crime novel, and I’m no crime novelist. I hate it, but I can’t burn it verbally like other bad books. I’m going to give Sinner Man…

D+

It’s depressing and deplorable, but I can’t shake the fact that it’s Lawrence Block’s very first story that had been buried for half a century. I’m hoping he got better at his craft, but he should have just kept the concrete blocks on this story and let it stay into the river.

Many moons ago, I read and reviewed The Aeronaut’s Windlass by Butcher, and I loved it. At the time, I enjoyed it more than the latest Harry Dresden novel (whichever one it was). I was surprised that Butcher mentioned he planned to end the series with Windlass, but the fan support kept him going. Hell, I wanted to make a costume of Captain Grim based on the cover art. I’ll need a cutlass and some cool steam-punk goggles. I used to know a guy that made them. So, to stress the obvious, I am still a fan of both series. I know this means I can’t joke about a good book, but I can still offer my thoughts on it. It was good, but not perfect.

The first thing I noticed about the book was that it doesn’t take place in a weird fantasy world where everyone lives in giant towers, flies in airships, and models their society after Victorian Era England. Now, it’s a post-apocalyptic world where all that happens. The text offers some hints and allegations to the fact, (the first one I remember is a normal deer on the otherwise abnormal surface world), but the first few pages give that away. I know it’s customary for fantasy authors to make a map of their world. Many times I feel it’s unnecessary because the characters often cross just one border, or deal with one mountain, river or geological feature. Why do I need to look at the rest of the continent? Speaking of which, why are many fantasy continents just big geometric shapes with a bunch of scribbles around the coastlines? My point in saying this is that Jim Butcher didn’t use those lazy methods when he hired his cartographer. His map looks realistic because he uses a real continent: North America. The map in the book is clearly America and Canada with the spires marked over major cities. I have mixed feelings on this. Is it a spoiler? Is there going to be a big reveal about the apocalypse that created this weird world? What caused it? The people in the book say “Merciful Builders” as an exclamation, like “Oh my God,” but did the Builders just create the Spires, or did they destroy the world in the process? Questions like this are intriguing, and a good way to hook the reader. I’m not sure why the setting bothers me. I think it’s because I don’t see how the magic, or etherealism, works. We go from a technological civilization that destroyed itself just after turning its skyscrapers into city-states above the clouds, to magic crystals. I’m sure it’s all connected somehow in Mr. Butcher’s head, but it left me scratching mine.

Enough about the setting. How is the plot? It follows soon after the events of Windlass, with Spires Albion and Aurora inching ever closer to war. The mad Auroran etherealist Madame Cavendash has figured out a new war weapon. I’ll try not to spoil it, and the first victims are a nearby colonial Spire. They’re all dead, and Captain Grim and the crew of the Albion ship The Predator are too late to rescue anyone, except a bunch of cats. I remember when I bought this book, the store clerk said he liked the new series, but there were too many talking cats in it. I’m a cat owner myself, but I can see where he’s coming from. He’s also going to be disappointed in this one, because Fenri, the leader of the cat refugees won’t tell anyone what they saw until they get a new home. So, the fate of Albion’s war effort relies on these furry little brats. Am I incorrect by saying that this is a little silly? My cat loves to meow all night for treats even though his bowl is full and will then wake me just before sunrise for more food. I can understand that they can be adorable little dictators. But we don’t have time for that because Captain Grim and his best friend Bayard, and his noble girlfriend Abigail Hinton, are going to Spire Olympia to coax them out of neutrality and join the upcoming fight against Spire Aurora. Or at least ask them to keep out of the way. This involves fancy dinners and balls with the Olympian upper class, and the cutthroat politics (literally) of dueling two Auroran champions. Meanwhile, Captain Grim must meet with the Auroran Captain Calliope Ransom, his ex-wife, and pirate Captain Ravenna, his new lover (before I forget to mention it, these are awesome names). I’m going to be frank, but I hate stories that center around gossip and misinformation, especially when these half-baked rumors lead to war and people dying. The good news is that all of the suspense in these chapters comes from the two duels that Bayard and Abigail get into. The Auroran champions didn’t win their dueling belts by bribing the judges either. Abigail’s opponent is one of the genetically improved “warrior-born,” who is acting on behalf of her equally deadly etherealist friend. Bayard’s opponent, Rafe Valesco, is a straight-up serial killer who duels just to keep his actions legal. Honestly, it was pretty predictable that Bayard and Valesco would have to fight. Both characters are the best duelists with the hottest tempers, and they’re both going to a political stand-off that will put them within sword-striking distance of each other. Duh. The twist what happens in each duel, and who gets the fight who. I won’t spoil it.

I will spoil the fact that the duels were a big distraction for Cavendish and the Auroran fleet to arrive with their doomsday weapon. This was what the cats witnessed, and being cats, didn’t want to tell anyone until it was too late. The final third of the book has all the ship-to-ship action that surprised me in the first novel. Jim Butcher knows how to spin a good yarn and choreograph an exciting action scene. I knew this from his Dresden File novels, but that’s focused on a single person running and fighting for his life. This is about massive ships firing their broadside cannons. Now the people are there to shout orders and status reports at each other, and to the ship (the Predator can now psychically speak to Captain Grim. This is new). The climax was the best part of the book, hands down, but the build-up has its moments.

I’m not sure how to grade this book. I’m still reeling from the stellar climax, but there were moments when I wanted to shout, “Get on with it! Who are these people?” during the political science scenes. I know that makes me sound like an impatient child, but maybe it was just the flowery pseudo-historical language and the fact that there are so many characters I lost track a few times. If I ever saw that bookstore clerk again, I’d warn him about the cat chapters. They did seem like a way to drag the story along. I also want more stuff on the post-apocalypse science/magic. The very last chapter of the book ends with another doomsday prophecy from the Old World, just like The Aeronaut’s Windlass. I kind of wanted that stuff mentioned earlier to link the stories together. Final verdict, I really liked The Olympian Affair, but I hope that Jim Butcher keeps it separate from the Dresden Files. It’s more fun to explore new worlds than it is to link them together. That way an author doesn’t just find their voice, but their singing range. The Olympian Affair deserves an…

A-

I believe I’ve mentioned my love of con artist stories. I call them “trickster tales.” I vaguely remember a children’s book of mythology that used that term about Coyote or some ancient schemer. There’s no doubt that they make for interesting heroes. They use their wits and guile, not brute strength, or magical junk to get things done. They rely on the villain’s greed and other vices to work against them. This book starts off well with that trope, but in the end, I felt like I had been fooled.

There’s this sad little crew that works out of a sad little tavern called the Red Rooster in a miserable kingdom (sorry, queen-dom) that’s fallen on economic hard times. Darin is the main schemer and leader who ran away from slavery in the neighboring empire. He can also use magic if he has silver and doesn’t mind draining his health away to cast every spell. Evie is the former noblewoman and seducer. Her father lost the family title to gambling and that’s all we’ll ever know about her past. Big Tom is the muscle. He also takes care of the horses. He doesn’t say much. Kat is the newly recruited wheelwoman that cares about two things, her homemade ale and her ever-growing brood of orphans. In the first chapters, they fail to pull off a big jewel heist and must now pay the regional crime lord, the Dame, or die. They need a big job in a big way. Fast. Or they could keep selling Kat’s cheap ale in the middle of nowhere.

They get two big breaks. First, a distraught family needs to get their youngest daughter, Lisbeth, out of a marriage with an abusive merchant husband named Jacob. Without spoiling too much, it won’t be easy because Jacob keeps her under close scrutiny, and he has the means to track her down. This takes up a third of the book. Then they hear about another noblewoman, Zora, that wants a shipment of imperial dream-wine to be stolen before it makes it across the border. This stuff is so valuable that there’s a whole contingent of heavily armed mercenaries called the Groktar protecting this stuff. That seems to be all that they do. I guess the other mercenary contracts just weren’t lucrative enough.

I’ll admit it, this book kept my interest for a good long while. I enjoyed reading about the high stakes crimes and the pressure on the team. I enjoyed the inside tension to the group and their history together. I also enjoyed the world building. For a while. Then I noticed that most of the chapters were from Big Tom’s or Kat’s points of view. The quiet muscle that didn’t like getting involved, and the cranky crone that only cared for her lousy ale and scores of unnamed orphans (seriously, I think only one or two of them had names or a real job on the team. “Tim. Go scout ahead”). I want to hear more from Darin and Evie. They’re the group leaders and schemers. This book is about con artists, so focus on them! Not the team-mates watching from the sidelines!

This book commits one of the great sins of storytelling; it has a big build-up for very little payoff. It spends multiple chapters building up the difficulty and severity of something just to have to be resolved in a sentence or two. Take the two schemes that the team conjures up. When they rescue Lisbeth from her abusive husband they gather as much intel as they can on the guy. His friends, his wealth, his connections to the merchant guilds, both above and below the law. This Jacob guy was not going to be a pushover, but he did have one weakness: coin and jewelry collecting. I thought, that’s interesting. They start by conning him into buying a rare coin that’s also rigged with a magic tracking spell. Then what? An elaborate jewel heist from his private collection? A daring midnight raid to his apartment?, Or maybe his private yacht where they all jump out a window with Lisbeth in tow, followed by a harrowing escape into the night? Nope, they get him drunk, pour a little pig’s blood on the bedsheets, and Evie tells the town guard he killed his wife after he had too many. All of this happened “off-camera” I might add. As for the great wine heist, Koboldt spent more time on saying how tough the Groktar mercenaries are, and in four pages, Big Tom has a sword fight with the captain while the rest of the crew makes off with the wine. I’ll be fair, they set up a decent canyon ambush with their own hired thugs and got the rest of the Groktar garrison sick. Clever thinking on their part, but for all the talk about how tough and unstoppable the Groktar mercs are they got beaten by the “head them off at the pass” trick. And how did they get the wine cart so easily? I feel I should mention all of the other chapters where each team member scouts ahead to uncover more information about the security, the wine, their mysterious client, or any other piece of relevant data. Here’s the problem; half the time they don’t learn anything. The other times the chapter ends, cuts to a different narrative, and then the original character just says, “I got it under control.”

I’ve read books that do much worse in this regard. I remember one book where the lead hero kills two or three dragons like houseflies. Big, fire-breathing titanic flies that lay waste to whole cities, and this guy can wipe them out in a single sentence. This book doesn’t have any dragons, but let me stick to their example by referencing one of the classic dragon-killing stories: The Hobbit by Tolkien. Smaug was no push-over. He has, in my opinion, the best descriptive speeches about dragons in all of literature, “My teeth are like swords. My claws are spears,” etc. I love that chapter. But (spoiler alert), Smaug has one miniscule weakness. He’s missing a single scale on his belly, right above his vital organs. When Smaug attacks Lake-Town, he obliterates that place, until Bard the Bowman nails that one-in-a-million shot. Now I’m the one reducing the story to a few sentences, but that’s because I’m some dumb-ass critic on the internet. What does this have to do with a bunch of thieves in a different book without any dragons? Dragons are metaphorical. The team from the Red Rooster has some difficult obstacles to overcome. The crime boss. The Queen’s wizards. The merchant’s underworld ties. The battle-hardened mercenaries and the potential for starting a war over this stolen shipment of foreign wine. All of which are given painstaking detail and nerve-wracking tension over their difficulty. Koboldt spares no effort in describing how, if they screw up in any way, they’ll all be running for their lives or swinging from the gallows. Then, when the big moment comes, it boils down to, “Distract the bad guys, let someone else do all the hard work, and poof, we have the prize. Hooray!” Even the steps that they took along the way were easy. It only took a few pints of beer and a friendly handshake for Big Tom to hire his own band of mercenaries, and he’s the quiet one in the group! Wait, for a bunch of suave, sophisticated con artists trying to avoid a war, they sure use a lot of brutal violence.

This book was just a disappointment, but not the worst I’ve ever read. I’ll give credit where it’s due, Koboldt knows how to write character banter that feels natural and authentic. What he doesn’t know is how to write banter that feels manipulative and persuasive, like a con artist would use. He puts up the pieces for an elaborate scheme, but then resolves it by having everyone whack each other with swords and then the crucial parts happen off camera. Maybe he practices old-fashioned sword fighting as a hobby. I know a few people that do that, but I think I’d trust them to write the next action novel. As much as I enjoyed it early on, the book feels like a watered-down version of Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Amongst Thieves, but with much less fantasy and special effects. I have to give Silver Queendom a…

C+

Maybe focus less on the minor characters and more on the major plot next time.