Travis
You're probably familiar with the McElroys if you are interested in this book. The audiobook edition is unsurprisingly excellent, full of that trademark McElroy brother humor and overflowing with practical, actionable advice for how to start a podcast.
The advice is fairly 101 level, so if you've already been podcasting for a while it likely won't be anything you haven't heard before, but it's a great way to jump start your show if you are new to the game.
A bunch of teenage beauty queens are stranded on an island. Sure they could go all Lord of the Flies, or they could tackle capitalism, the patriarchy, and the beauty industry. Each chapter is led with a “commercial” that both parodies a real world commercial with scathing accuracy and foreshadows plot developments in unexpected ways.
Without spoiling the actual story, you can expect sexy pirates in tight pants, Scottish James Bond preferring his haggis “boiled, not stir fried,” and sensational boy bands.
Also, add Libba Bray to the list of ridiculously skilled people I'll forever be in awe of.... She narrated the audiobook version of this herself and it's incredible.
My thoughts are pretty divided on this one.
Pros: Gods all over the place actively making appearances, totally epic in scope, interesting magic system, some philosophical nuggets of wisdom, and the Bridgeburners
Cons: Some occasional clunky prose, never truly getting inside characters' heads, oddly withholding information for the sake of drama, failing to give a reason to care for several hundred pages
Overall I ended up liking this quite a bit, but I probably would've DNF'd without all the praise the series gets.
It's fascinating to see interactive fiction designed for such a young audience. Cotter deftly gets inside the head of baby readers, skillfully utilizing reverse psychology to encourage them to follow through on a call to action more powerful than many nonfiction works can manage.
Major spoilers ahead!
The button will be pushed. You or your child may think you are living dangerously, but it's all part of Cotter's grand design.
Have you ever read a book that you feel was just too smart for you? Because that's Piranesi for me. It was brilliant and I enjoyed it far more than I expected (i.e. I was expecting reading it to be a chore I had to force myself through and it was an incredibly pleasant read).
I don't think I love this on the same level that many others do, but it's hard not to appreciate what a powerful story it is.
Find this review and more at The Fantasy Inn
It's always a risky move for a reviewer to try their hand at the craft they critique. If their work doesn't live up to their own standards of quality, they may lose some of their audience. Daniel Greene has taken a risk with the publication of Breach of Peace. So the question is... Does it pay off?
The story opens with a macabre crime scene described in bloody, gristly detail. A family has been murdered and it's up to Inspector Khlid to get to the bottom of it. She's helped by her husband and fellow Inspector, Samuel, and the star of the Seventh Precinct, Chapman. The dynamic between these three core characters is one of the highlights of the story.
Sam and Khlid are happily married and seem to do an admirable job trying to keep their professional and domestic lives separate, and Chapman is a gets-shit-done asshole with the emotional intelligence of a brick. Taken together, the clash of colorful personalities accomplishes a lot in the brief number of pages we get to spend with the Inspectors.
If I had to be picky, I wish that we'd either gotten more time inside the heads of Sam and Chapman. We do get a brief, brilliant passage from Chapman's point of view, but it feels out of place in a story almost entirely told from Khlid's eyes.
Breach of Peace will feel like coming home for fans of Brian McClellan, Brandon Sanderson, and Joe Abercrombie. I imagine it's what you'd get if the lovechild of McClellan's Promise of Blood and Sanderson's Elantris had to spend an hour in Glokta's torture chamber.
With that said, there were some aspects of the novella that didn't quite work for me. This is a world where in which the characters are all police working directly for God.
Now, children didn't grow up wishing to be soldiers, but officers... Since their founding, The Capitol Police had been a force for good in the community. Those who had been among the first to join were all heralded as local heroes.
Yes, this is a fantasy world. But most of us reading this novella live in a world where glorifying cops comes with quite a bit of baggage. There's also an uncomfortable attitude of “violence solves problems” in how the book talks about the interactions between police and civilians.
In a pinch, police could usually count on help from armed bystanders...
I've never been a fan of the mentality that the best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. Again, this is fantasy—and edging toward the grimdark side of the genre at that. But this line took me out of the story and made me question it's inclusion.
Disobeying an officer of God during a raid was punishable by death. Khlid pulled her trigger.
Putting me into the perspective of a cop who shoots people in a surprise raid is not what I was expecting in this fantasy story. Again, it's hard not to draw real-world parallels here in a genre considered by many to be a temporary escape from reality.
From a craft angle, Greene balances action scenes, quiet character moments, and vivid description with ease. I can typically determine an author's strengths pretty quickly, but I thought all of these aspects were handled well. There's a recurring use of foreshadowing at the end of key scenes to hint at the direction the plot will take that kept me at the edge of my seat while reading. And though this is shorter than a full novel, it captured me attention enough to finish in one sitting, which for various reasons has only happened a handful of times in the last year.
Breach of Peace also takes hold of a few tried and true tropes from heroic fantasy and twists them into something beautifully horrific. I'd say more, but I'd rather you be traumatized like I was.
And finally, the closing chapter leads rather nicely into where I'm assuming the next novella will begin. It's compelling, emotional, and sets the tone for the world and the story to come.
There's a ton of hype surrounding Breach of Peace. Hell, it was an Amazon bestseller hours after the preorder went live. So, does this risky novella pay off?
Let's just say that I think this book only improves Daniel Greene's standing as a critic, and if you discovered his work through a shared love of writers like Brandon Sanderson, I doubt you'll be disappointed.
You can also check out our podcast chat with Daniel Greene here, where we discuss Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames and The Last Sun by K.D. Edwards.
I received an advanced review copy of this novella in exchange for a fair and honest review.
Octavia Butler doesn't miss, and this was unsurprisingly a great read. But wow was it uncomfortable at times.
The main vampire is actually 53 years old, but looks like a 10-year-old girl. She has amnesia and doesn't remember anything from before, including that she is a vampire. Vampires regularly have sex with humans who are 20+ years old. Taken together, these points lead to some extremely uncomfortable moments early on.
That said, Butler excels at writing “alien” characters. The vampires here are different than any I've read before, and learning about their culture was one of the main draws of the book for me.
Overall, this was a very good book, but I fully understand why this is not what Butler is remembered for.
Compulsively readable, utterly infuriating.
I like to think writing can broadly be divided into two area: the creative decisions the writer makes and the skill in which they portray their vision the reader. Butcher's skill is as excellent as ever, and the pacing is a nonstop roller coaster from start to finish. But I have major issues with his creative decisions.
Dresden is as misogynistic as ever, though his growth has at least helped him to see that. But the misogyny baked into the story is just too much. When's the last time Harry encountered a beautiful woman he didn't a) bang b) think about banging or c) tip his fedora to m'lady? I sure can't remember. For a series that goes on and on and on about how powerful a wizard's death curse can be, they are nowhere near as deadly as the curse of sleeping with Harry.
It's very telling who lives and who dies in this book, even more so when those deaths only serve to make Harry angry. Great power is great responsibility and all that. After this book Harry is more powerful than ever, but the Dresden Files has the responsibility to do better.