Mark Andrew Edwards

Review: Caszandra

This is the last book in the Touchstone series by Andrea Host.  The whole series has been entertaining and I’m glad I read it. 

In this last book we have the true enemies revealed (no, it’s not the cats) and the true threat to the world(s) revealed.  We also see the pendultimate expression of Cassandra’s power: she can literally create things from pure imagination, will and pain. If there’s a more clear parallel to being a writer, I don’t know of it. 

Although we do get a clear resolution to personal relationship plots as well as the world-shaking events of previous books, this was my least favorite of the trilogy. It’s the Return of the Jedi of the series, if you will.  I’ll try to explain.

Things I liked:

I loved seeing the ultimate expression of Cassandra’s power. The ability to replicate objects, settings and even people from sheer imagination is something I haven’t seen in literature very often. Not unless we go back to the ‘Lathe of Heaven’ by Ursla K. Leguin.

Relatedly, the author’s use of these powers, but the main characters as well as the supporting character’s, shows imagination and a clear vision.  The action is always easy to visualize and exciting.  Which is why I wish there was more of it.

Cassandra finally comes into her own as a hero here, acting and moving to shape events as opposed to being a tool moved around by others.

The conflict is also huge here, with mass death and destruction –mostly off stage- and very high stakes drama in everything but the main character’s personal life.

Speaking of relationships, I did like the way Cassandra and Kaoren’s relationship is depicted. It’s a little idealized but, damn it, I like that sometimes.  Real relationships are full of disappointments, it’s nice to see fictional characters having a happy ending.

What I didn’t like:

The action, so vivid and exciting, starts to wind down in this book.  Cassandra is considered too valuable to go on monster-clearing patrols, to the book’s detriment.  Too much of the story takes place in bedrooms and hospital labs, moving those scenes to locations of danger and action as in the second book would have helped.

The main characters, who is 18, ends up adopting three children and this REALLY slows down the pace and drama in the story.  As happens elsewhere in the book, with the loss of liberty and privacy, the main character raises the issue that maybe an 18 year old newlywed isn’t the right person to be raising three children. But that is papered over pretty quickly and the main character starts playing house.  That doesn’t mean that those scenes aren’t well written. They were and Cassandra’s actions all seemed in character. It just felt slightly more unbelievable than her ability to create dragons. (Which might be unbelievable but is also very awesome)

There isn’t enough cost to victory.  Lira’s eventual fate has Deus Ex Machina that had me saying ‘Come on’ aloud when it was revealed.  There is a lot of death and destruction and one previously-high-profile character does get badly wounded.  But that isn’t enough. The author is good enough to recognize these issues and even address them but she seems to shy away from ‘pulling the trigger’ as it were.  But maybe the Mega-Happy Ending is expected in YA.

Characters that we spent a lot of time with in the first book are pushed to the background and nearly forgotten. I’m thinking most of Zan and Maze, who were so prominent and supportive when she needed it. But once she hooks up with Kaoren Ruuel, he and his Forth Squad take center stage.  This actually is very realistic, new relationships can crowd out old friendships, but I think it’s a flaw from a story viewpoint.

I didn’t like Ys as a character.  She doesn’t play ‘hard to get’, she plays ‘hard to want’, to quote Ford Fairlane.  I just didn’t like her and couldn’t really see why Cassandra would spend so much time and attention on her.  It could be that Cassandra is just a pushover. I’d buy that as a reason.

There is a clash of cultures that is barely touched on.  One culture has slavery. One is a very Liberal technocracy.  This would be a great novel in and of itself, so I almost don’t blame the author for glossing over it.  But that begs the question: why bring it up if you’re not going to explore it? There’s no plot reason for slavery or indentured servitude.

The climax happens too fast. The whole series has been building up to this moment. It deserved a lot more time and resolution to give an appropriate emotional climax and release.

The ‘dénouement’ after the climax goes on too long.

Summary:

  The last book in an interesting trilogy, this is a required purchase and it should charm readers of the first two books. Indeed, there is even an inexpensive fourth book-let for those readers not yet ready to say good bye to living, breathing characters of the Touchstone books.

  The book does go off in the last third into ‘what happened after’ rather than staying focused on the story. This is one area where an editor’s voice would have helped but on the whole, I am very impressed by the author and this series.  Those same rough spots were deliberate choices by the author and lets her voice and her decisions drive the story. 

I think Andrea Host is a potent counterpoint to anyone who says there’s nothing by a self-published author is any good.

Reccomended

Like any good sequel, Lab Rat One raises the stakes from the first book, deepens the characters but continues to deliver solid worldbuilding, exciting action and fully-realized characters.  This is definitely a series that does not suffer from ‘saggy middle’.  Cassandra begins to develop powers of her own, in a slow and painful kind of way. Her relationships also deepen.

She also must deal with unwanted fame and the unending surveillance of the Tare State.  Still a virtual prisoner, Cassandra tries to adapt to the world she is increasingly thinking of as her new home.

What I liked:

  The main characters are well realized. The action is good with vivid battle scenes and inventive use of the Setari’s psychic powers.  Cassandra is easy to sympathize with, the first person POV is immersive. The story pulls you along. The stakes are high and you do want the ‘good guys’ to win. 

Cassandra’s new-found power and her struggle to learn how to use it is handled well. She does not suddenly gain great  power and skillful mastery of it.  She is not an action hero, more like a regular girl who becomes important.

The short story chunks of each diary entry keep the story moving.  The worldbuilding is very good, showing a sci-fi world that feels more contemporary than futuristic.  The technology’s impact on this culture is very clearly depicted.

The relationship evolution between characters is handled fairly well.  There isn’t any sudden, grand passion that sweeps the main character off her feet. Though I did wonder from time to time if Cassandra was falling for the object of her desire or if their respective powers were pulling them together, though that thought only occurred to me after I’d finished the series.

What I didn’t like:

Cassandra remains far too passive as character. She is slow to speak up for herself, something even the characters in the novel comment on. (The author’s subconscious speaking to her and us?)  Things mostly happen to her, she rarely makes things happen.  She also seems to spend half the book in the hospital, which sort of makes the ‘Lab Rat One’ reference make sense, though strictly speaking that was more appropriate in the first book, Stray.

The society remains problematic for me. This may well be realistic, when everyone is interconnected via implants and computers, universal surveillance is a wonderful gift to any government.  To the author’s credit, one of the major plot points shows how this can be abused. But there are no consequences to it. The author raises the point but doesn’t follow it through.  Cassandra is a virtual and literal prisoner for the entire book.  First because she is helpless then later because she is valuable. She belongs to the State, not to herself. I could go on at length but I'll stop there.

There is also a LOT of Cassandra longing for Kaoren Ruuel.  I’ll buy that it’s realistic and might ring true to teenaged girls. But I’m not a teenaged girl, I found it a little tiresome, though I know what it’s like to long for someone.

I whole-heartedly recommend this book.  It is an excellent example of a sequel done right (though I suspect the whole trilogy was written as one, large work).  Good characters, great conflict, cool powers and a well-thought out setting.

Good story, deserves a wider audience

There are strengths and weaknesses in letting an author off their editor’s leash and letting them write the story they want to write in the way they want to write it.  I don’t think you’d read a story like this from one of the big New York houses and that is one of the strengths.  The story is told epistolary (or blog post) style, as entries in Cassandra’s diary.  These bite-sized pieces give the book structure and keep the plot moving, which it needs from time to time.

This first book in the Touchstone trilogy starts with Cassandra just trying to survive an expected and unexplained transplant into an empty, abandoned world.  Some readers may get a little impatient with this section.  My advice to them is: stick with it. I enjoyed reading this whole series.

The story takes off in a new direction as she is discovered by a group of psychics, here on a survey mission of this, their abandoned home planet. Where the story goes from there is a long, fish-out-of-water story as Cassandra struggles to adapt to her new surroundings and to get treated as something other than a lab rat.

Her new home is a technologically advanced society and the worldbuilding is one of the best fascinating and horrifying elements of the story.  The author adds a tremendous amount of detail to her worldbuilding.  It feels very real, despite the implanted virtual reality networks, psychic powers and nanotechnology.  All of the fantastic elements are anchored by Cassandra’s reaction to her situation.  She always remains sympathetic and though she becomes the focus (or Touchstone) of her new home’s battle for survival, she never loses her sympathetic qualities. This is not a story about a superhero. This is the story about a girl.

There are some cultural bumps along the way. Australians are not Americans, though we’re close enough for the differences to stand out. I hesitate to generalize too much, so let me focus this specifically on Cassandra and her situation.

I had a hard time figuring out if the setting of Tare is a Fascist or Socialist utopia. 

Cassandra is handled by people with good intentions but with little regard for her rights to her body, her privacy or anything else.  Everything is very orderly, very neat and clean. But the implications of the society bothered me a lot.  In fairness, they seem to bother Cassandra as well, though not to the point of confronting anyone or asserting herself. 

Her relative powerlessness made it easy to sympathize with Cassandra but it also made her a fairly passive character in this book.  I do like that she does make a positive decision to help of her own free will. But her treatment made me grind my teeth.  To the good, it also makes some of the other characters grind their teeth as well, though again, not to the point of standing up for her.

There is some great action in this series, the psychic powers are very cool. But there is a lack of conflict, which is an odd dichotomy. Everyone gets along far too well. This is one area where there is a weakness in being able to ‘go her own way’ as a writer. A great editor might have helped interject more conflict. But, I am very impressed, on the whole, with the author and this series.

Recommended.

Hi folks. Sorry for my silence yesterday, fell under the weather.  Which is odd, since the weather is glorious for Feburary. In other, better news, I got an offer to work for Amazon full time, which I’m taking with both hands. I’ll still be working on the Kindle Fire and such. This is awesome for me and I fully intent to work on the Kindle Fire with the mindset of a writer and a reader.

Back on to writing, my Write 1, Submit 1 for last week is a failure.  I was focused on preparing for my Amazon interview, so I didn’t do a ton of writing. I do have a short story idea and I’ll be tapping out tonight or tomorrow, though.  I also need to write my synopsis for The Mageborn Mechanic and send that out.

I was reading Bob Mayer’s “Duty, Honor, Country” but gave up.  That gave me no satisfaction. The book is set just before the Civil war and has U.S. Grant as a main character. This book should have been right up my wheelhouse but it didn’t work for me. 

Part of the problem for me was the two fictional characters Bob Mayer inserted into the historical narrative. (there was a third character but he didn’t bug me as much) I didn’t find the two characters sympathetic, which is death for me.  I realize the author is trying to create a character arc and a redemption arc or two but it took too long for me. I wasn’t hooked.  I also disliked the way the two invented characters ‘stole the thunder’ of real people and real events. Making one of them ‘best buddies’ with Kit Carson was a bridge too far for me.

The author seemed to have definite opinions about the character of historical figures like Fremont and Robert E. Lee.  I get that there is a tendency to over-romanticize Lee, especially; but it felt like Lee was written to be a dick.  Lee may have been ‘merely human’ but even his worst enemies might have a hard time recognizing him here.  The fictional characters also have a sub-plot that wouldn’t have been out of place in Mandingo (Sexual slavery! Incest! Fun for the whole family!), which didn’t help.  On the other side, Grant is made a little too saintly, particularly on slavery. From what I recall from his autobiography, he didn't have strong opinions on slavery until the War. The real people are complex enough to make for compelling stories; I don’t see why they needed to be reinterpreted like this.

What did work well for me was the setting at West Point, those scenes felt alive.  If the whole novel had been set there, I’d have devoured it, melodrama or not.  Spending four years with figures destined to cast a long shadow over the coming war while they were still students would have made for fascinating historical fiction.  Likewise, a novel that focused on the Mexican-American war back in the 1840’s would have been another part of history that has been under-told. Or simply focusing on the historical character’s real, compelling stories could have been made fresh and interesting. But that’s not what we have here.

I ended up buying, again, Shelby Foote’s Civil War narrative instead. This time for my Kindle Fire. I also picked up U.S. Grant’s autobiography, along with Sherman’s and Longstreet’s.  Again, the real stories are dramatic enough and the people themselves abounded with flaws and contradictions. There’s no reasons to make up new ones.  Especially not with the fictional characters created here.  I really, really wanted to like this book and it gives me no pleasure to write a negative review of it.

Onward Christian Soldiers

I’m a long (LONG) time Baen Books reader and I damn near cut my teeth on David Drake’s Hammer’s Slammers series, so I’ve been reading military science fiction since the ‘good old days’.  Knox’s Irregulars is a worthy addition to the genre, not just because of the solid military action but because of the worldbuilding and the unique take on theology in war.

The plot is pretty straightforward, good guys verses bad guys.  And that’s ok. The bad guys in this book are semi-Islamic extremists who slaughter the moderates in their own government and promptly invade their infidel neighbors.  The ‘infidel neighbors’ are a smallish colony of Calvinist Christian colonists who purchased some land from the original settlers and had the audacity to build a successful, technological society.  The good guys are outnumbered, pushed aside and war in all its ugliness ensues.  The protagonist, Randal Knox, is son of the Prime Minister, groomed to succeed him but he rejected that life to enlist and rise to the heady rank of Corporal in the infantry.  When the invasion hits, he’s trapped deep behind the front lines and ends up organizing a partisan force to harass the bad guys and ultimately play a pivotal role in ending the war.  It’s Red Dawn meets Starship Troopers.

The book is polished and professional.  It really would fit in magnificently in the Baen roster, and who knows, maybe it will some day.  The military details are authentic, which makes sense since Mr. Bush was Airborne Infantry.  The tech is functional, the powered armor feels a bit like John Ringo’s but with a little less ‘fantasy tech’. You get the feeling that these suits could be made and used sometime this century.  There is a cost for every victory, which is something a lot of military sci-fi seems to miss.  Logistics matter, civilians suffer as well as the partisans.  Good guys die, bad guys win, though the ending is satisfying enough.

A few criticisms: The final partisan raid seems almost too easy, though not without cost.  I’m having a hard time picturing partisans raiding, say, Rommel’s Headquarters at Pontcarre in June 1944.  So the success of the main characters there at the end feels a little…off, but not disastrously Deux Ex Machina-esque.  The characters feel real, with a couple of exceptions.  Jeni Cho seems to have some sort of ‘most favored character’ status in this book. I wanted someone to smack her but no one ever does.  The female romantic interest, Ariane Mireault, is a bit of load.  She also feels cold and is the only character I considered preachy in the book.  There is a real lack of sexual tension in the book. In fact, that’s one of the only things that didn’t feel authentic. I realize these are all first or second generation religious pilgrims (or Pilgrims, if you prefer) but the main characters seem to have their libido turned off.  Ariane has a bastard child (using the word advisedly) but seems oddly sexless on the page.  For a group of soldiers, from my experience, this lack of ‘earthiness’ seems to be the only whitewashed part of the book. I think the ‘spiciest’ thing to happen in the book is a kiss. For some, this is a bug for others, it’s a feature.

Ok, let’s get into the ‘controversial’ part of this book.  The good guys are Christian.  This is basically a group of Revived Swiss-style Calvinists who fled Earth looking for religious freedom in the stars.  They settle on this planet, make a successful colony and end up fighting for their lives.  This is not C.S. Lewis allegory here, this culture wears its Christian bona fides openly.  Christian theology is part of their everyday life and conversation.  For a lot of readers, this is going to feel a little weird.  Actually, I think that it works. It’s almost an examination of an alien culture (and let’s be honest, this kind of open Christianity is alien to a lot of sci-fi readers).  Taken in that spirit, it’s difficult to be offended by anything here, at least for me.  This culture is Christian, the book says.  I shrug and say ‘ok’.  It works in another way, as well.  It has a theme of rejecting hate while opposing evil. That’s rare, in real life and in fiction. It reminds me a bit of Quo Vadis, in that way.  Again, religion is part of everyone’s daily life, so there’s not a lot of attempts to convert characters or the reader.  There are no Ayn Randian diatribes pushing the author’s worldview.  Faith is part of what keeps the characters together and even serves for redemption for one character but it never feels oppressive. It reminds me a lot of Gordon Dickson’s ‘Soldier, Ask Not’, especially the novella (which won the Hugo for best short story in 1965).  In that vein, this book firmly belongs in the sci-fi pantheon.

Final verdict, this is a solid Sci-Fi novel with an interesting culture.  I recommend buying it. So far, it’s only available as an ebook (http://www.amazon.com/Knoxs-Irregulars-J-Wesley-Bush/dp/1466487046/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1). At 2.99, it’s even more attractive.

I’m looking forward to the author’s next book.

It's never fun giving an 'C' review. If you utterly love a book, the review flows from you in a rapture. If you despise a book it can bring out invective that is as much fun to read as the book was not.  But with the middle of the road reviews...that's tricky.

Let me start off with some caveats.  I've met Sam Sykes. I like him and I'm going to read the next book in his Aeon's gate series.  Sam is a young writer but a serious one, no matter what his twitter feed is like.  He's also well-read in the Fantasy genre.  He even has one of his characters, almost meta-texually, complain about "...now we're just sitting around in furs, talking instead of killing people."

So, that's a good review tag: Too much sitting around, not enough killing.  

It's a touch trick. Sam Sykes clearly wanted to develop his characters more in this follow up to his action-packed debut, Tome of the Undergates.  However it comes at the expense of plot and movement.  Character revealed through action works better than sitting around and talking.

I will say this: if you can get through the first 120 pages, things do pick up.

Pros:
  When the action happens, it is intense and gory and sure to please fans of the first book. Sam also has a knack for some very beautiful and insightful prose.  He's at his best when he's musing upon the philosophy of violence, the nature of faith and how emotional pain can be greater than any physical injury.  Inventive monsters, races and an interesting world.

Nope.  Couldn't do it.  I was geared up for an in-depth discussion of A Dance with Dragons and all the enthusiasm ebbed away.  I got a big slice of 'what's the point' served up and gobbled it down.


It's a well-written book that kills of characters and a big chuck of my enthusiasm for the series.  Unless he kills off Daenerys in the next book, and despite the prayers of many I doubt he'd do that, I don't know how he can make things more bleak.  I hate bleak.  I suspect we're heading for a fantasy novel equivalent of Dawn of the Dead.  That's fine, so long as you have a protagonist you can root for.  We're fresh out of that, for me.


Anyway, got about six pages done for my next short story.  I'm going to have to trim or re-write about three of them but that's the way the game goes sometimes.


On the good side, I'm reading Soul Hunter by Aaron Dembski-Bowden and I am really impressed.  He writes in the Warhammer 40k universe but his media books do not suck.  Along with Dan Abnett, he's one of the only authors I feel comfortable reccomending unreservedly. He has a gift for finding the humanity in his characters.  I like that.  "He reminds me of me," he said with humility.  Seriously, check him out if you like Warhammer 40 or just like military Sci-fi...or just sci-fi in general. He's that good.  I may have a review up for Soul Hunter soon.

It’s hard to overstate just how much I have been anticipating this book.  Certainly since Martin’s A Storm of Swords, I have been eagerly awaiting the continuation and perhaps resolution of plots set in motion by the Red Wedding, Jon Snow’s ascension to lead the Night’s Watch and Daenerys’ capture of Meereen.  Well, after finishing the book yesterday and a literally sleepless night over how upset I was by certain deaths, I almost wish I hadn’t read it.

 

Let’s start at the beginning. I’ll try to keep this review spoiler-free and tomorrow perhaps I’ll dig into some of the surprises that pleased me and into the majority that did not.  First the good stuff.

 

George R. R. Martin excels at making you care about these characters.  All of people, major and minor, have the ring of truth about them.  They feel real, you care about them or hate them but you understand them.  I don’t think anyone does this better than GRRM.  The dragons are growing up and when they appear on the page, they are vivid, fascinating monsters a world away from the empathetic beasts of McCaffrey or Novik.  GRRM also delights in playing with reader expectations.  No one is safe, in this, A Song of Ice and Fire feels more like a horror story than traditional fantasy.  Finally, the world is gritty and real in a way fantasy simply wasn’t before, outside of a few Sword and Sorcery tales from Leiber or Howard.  Martin is telling a huge tale and I can’t think of anyone else telling a story this big, this successfully.  That said, Martin’s reach exceeds his grasp, or so it seems at this point.

 

The book follows three main plot threads with a spattering of scenes that advance the story a tick from A Feast for Crows.  The first is Tyrion’s trajectory from Westeros to Daenerys. The second is Jon Snow’s struggles leading the Night’s Watch and preparing for the coming of Winter and the White Walkers.  The third is Daenerys’ attempts to rule Meereen.  An honorable mention should be made for Quentyn Martell’s attempt to reach and woo Daenerys but this plot line is buried in the latter half of the book.  Additionally we have: Stannis Baratheon’s struggle in the North, the fate of the Iron Born in the north, the ascendancy of House Ramsay and Frey, the fallout from Queen Cerci’s stupidity, Davos Seaworth’s attempt to woo House Manderley, the fate of Bran and Rickon Stark, and last but not least, a new appearance of a Targaryen quite literally out of nowhere.   This doesn’t include additional plot threads that also poke their heads up from A Feast for Crows.  As you can see, there’s a lot going on here.

 

One of the things that makes this book so frustrating is how few plots are resolved or even moved along significantly. A Dance with Dragons feels like half a book, despite its heroic size.  There is so much going on that there simply isn’t enough progress accomplished.  I have to question some of the plot lines Martin chose to write.  Sorry but there it is.  Readers hoping that there would be a resolution of the legendary “Meereenese knot” that tied GRRM up and stranded Daenerys a world away from the main action in Westeros will be disappointed. Not only by the fact the Daenerys show no sign of going to Westeros but by the fact she’s not even in the third act of the book.  Battles between the Boltons and Stannis are literally bogged down and left unresolved on the page, making a mysterious note from Ramsay Bolton (nee Snow) at the end of Jon’s chapter ambiguous to say the least.  Tyrion never even meets Daenerys, let alone advises her.  The Martel plot is so futile and unreceived that I wonder why Martin bothered to write it.  Almost NOTHING is settled in this book.  We are given cliffhangers and ‘downer endings’ but few resolutions.  We aren’t even moving towards resolution and with only two books left (supposedly) that is worrying.  Two plot threads appear to be resolved in the most final way possible, which leads me to my second problem with the book.

 

There has been a recurring theme that those who try to do good, who try to act honorably will be killed, mutilated and disgraced.  Time and again, characters you know and love and sympathize with are cut down, corrupted, maimed and murdered.  A Dance with Dragons continues this fine tradition.  Martin is nothing if not consistent.  Again and again in this series, characters are warned but ignore these warnings, to their doom.  In a way, this is a classical tragedy where a character’s flaw or virtues even, bring about their destruction.  Or virtues…that’s not the way it’s supposed to work.  Flaw, yes. In classical tragedy, a character is supposed to fail due to their tragic flaw.  In Martin’s world, there are tragic virtues.  Like Honor. Honesty.  Compassion.  Decency.  Humanity. Loyalty.  Any of these qualities will get you killed in these books. The characters that thrive are the most devious, the most ruthless, the liars, the torturers and the corrupt.  I am weary from watching good men die and watching good women suffer.  At this point, I’m not sure who I should be rooting for or if I should even keep reading.

 

I will, of course.  Martin is writing the epic fantasy of the past fifty years.  Even if it fails, it will be an epic failure and be worth watching in the same way that watching Rome burn must have been worth seeing.

 

In addition to the betrayal, murder and torture, there’s the sex.  Now, I’m no prude, I write about sex and violence in no small amount myself.  However, this book is particularly drenched in sex and for gratuitous reasons, it seems.  There are long, loving descriptions of random naked women we never see again.  Rape and near rape, both on the page and ‘off stage’.  Sodomy is mentioned frequently among Eastern kingdoms and sell sword companies.  There’s always been a lot of sex and deviant sex at that in this series. So I’m sure most readers won’t be put off at this point, but brace yourself. There’s a lot of sex in this book.

 

Do I recommend the book?  It hardly matters.  Readers have been waiting 6-8 years for this book, depending on how you look at it.  It is essential and that makes it a crying shame.  It is well-written, though not quite to the levels in the first three books.  I worry that the seven books we’ve been promised will sprawl further, as the later Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series did.  This is epic fantasy and epic tragedy.

 

Tomorrow, I’ll dig into specific nits and let my shock and horror flow with full spoilers.  Assuming my job and my soul will let me.