Review: Dead Reckoning (Sookie Stackhouse #11)

 Title: Dead Reckoning (Goodreads)
Author: Charlaine Harris
Series: #11 of the Sookie Stackhouse books
Genre: Urban Fantasy, Adult
Age restriction? (Much) Older Teens, 16+
Published: 3 May 2011
Recommended for: Die-hard fans of Sookie and/or Eric and/or Beel
Buy: Dead Reckoning @ Amazon

Disappointing. Weak story, weaker characters, lots and lots of telling. I wouldn't bother unless you're already a fan.

DESCRIPTION: Well, if you need a description, you probably don't want to read this book. Seriously. Sookie and Eric have trouble in their relationship. Sookie messes up. Lots of people (and non-people) are out to kill Sookie. Vampire Politics Plot. Fairy Politics Plot. Cue Curtain.

REVIEW: Dead Reckoning left me feeling flat. I've enjoyed all the books in the series so far (yes, even 9 and 10, which fans bitched about), but this? This was beyond pale. Weak, flat story with no real action, danger or mystery. Predictable to the extreme and all of it told instead of shown. No character development at all. 

A flicker of interesting happened when Sookie went with Hunter to size up his new school, but once again, everything was told and then it's the last we hear of Hunter (whose relationship with Sookie could be a really invigorating change to what's become a plot-by-numbers series). When I say "everything is told", I mean "everything is told". Almost zero showing going on. Like with Tara's baby shower, we are told there are some women and a few names are mentioned, and we are told Sookie is told a really nice story about her gran and we're assured that this makes her feel better. 

Yeah. The whole book is basically like that.

I don't know, it's as if the TV series has sucked the blood and originality out of the books, which is funny considering that they're only similar in an "inspired by the books" kind of way, and it's almost as if Charlaine Harris herself is getting bored with it all.

THIS IS WHY SERIES SHOULD END AT SOME POINT. Ahem. Just sayin'. 

Still, I did find it intruiging enough to finish, and it had one or two fun moments, so two stars it is.

RECOMMENDED FOR: Die-hard Sookie book fans (not the series, the books), who hope that the next one will be better or will finally end the damn series.

Review: Game of Thrones

Title: A Game of Thrones
Author: George R. R. Martin
Genre: Adult, Fantasy
Age restriction? R. Deals with very mature themes like incest, prostitution and other material unsuitable for young readers.
Series: A Song of Fire and Ice #1
Pages: 831
Edition: Mass Paperback
Published: August 4, 1997
Publisher: Bantam Publishing

REVIEW SUMMARY: This book is not for everyone. It is entirely character-driven, and it jumps between the P.O.V.s of a HUGE cast of characters, which can be confusing and sometimes abrupt. However, I have never read a book with more realistic characters - there is no character that is the Good Guy, no Bad Guy that doesn't also have a heap of redeeming and endearing characters.

Though not without its flaws, a compelling and highly enjoyable and provocative read with incredibly well-developed and real characters driving the story.

Please note that I haven't watched the TV series yet, so this is a review of the book alone.

DESCRIPTION:  In a world where seasons last for years or even decades at a time, at the end of the longest summer ever recorded, Winter is slowly approaching at last - and not only the season! The kingdom of Westeros is in a world of trouble, though most of them do not know it. Far to the North, beyond the Wall, strange and supernatural forces are stirring, while to the South, an exiled princess comes into her power and gathers her forces to reclaim the throne that was usurped from her family. 

REVIEW: Following a vast cast of characters, A Game of Thrones chronicles both the political and social games played for the acquisition and conservation of power and the personal lives of the various players in this game. 

The main focus is on the Stark family, Wardens of the North and descendents of the Old People, who reside in their citadel in the far North just below the Wall, Winterfell. Neddard Stark is a man of honour, integrity and loyalty, so when his boyhood friend and king asks him to come south to become his Hand after the death of the previous Hand, Ned has no choice but to agree. Leaving his sons (one of whom was grievously injured when he discovered a deadly secret while the King visited at Winterfell) and devoted wife behind, Ned and his two daughters must join the King's party at King's Landing, where feasting and tournaments drain the treasury more every day, corruption and betrayal are part of the day-to-day court mechanics and the population is becoming increasingly impoverished and desperate. Further, the courts at King's Landing is seeping with poison and no one is who they seem to be. Soon mired in politics he is ill-suited to navigate with his honesty and integrity intact, Ned finds himself fighting for his own life and the lives of his daughters while his wife must fight for those of their other children. 

Ned's bastard son, Jon Snow is sworn into the Brotherhood who guards the Wall; an oath for life where desertion leads to death but remaining to serve may lead to even worse. The undermanned and overwhelmed contingent of soldiers is made up mostly of criminals forced to take the life-long oaths as a form of community service, and most of them no longer believe in the dangers that lurk in the Northern snows - that is until Jon's uncle, Ned's Brother, who is First Ranger, leads an expedition beyond the wall to find out the whereabouts of a previous expedition... and never returns.

What I like the most about these books is the complexity of the characters. There is not one character that you can purely loathe or purely love. Everyone is doing what they think are the right thing, even though the consequences to others are devastating sometimes. Even though the cast is HUGE, each character has their own, unique personality with flaws, strengths and moments of great weakness and stupidity as well as moments of great strength and nobility.

I don't want to spoil the book too much (if I hadn't already ;p), but the complexity of these characters and their interwoven stories, told from the varying limited third person POV really makes this book and this series unique and incredible.

There are some flaws, though, no denying that. The chapters are sometimes more like paragraphs, and since each paragraph takes you into the POV of a different character, it takes a while to get used to the abruptness of the transitions and keep track of the million side-plots.

There is also a lot of brutality, injustice, gratitious sex and misogyny and other unpleasant subjects (including rape and infanticide) that are addressed in various ways throughout the story, which can become truly upsetting and triggering. It is certainly not everyone's cup of tea.

Also, if you are a believer of easy morality, moral absolutes and a "good guys are good and pure and wear untarnished white and bad guys are evil and irredeemable and rotten to the core" kind of reader, this is CERTAINLY not the series for you.


That being said, reading this book and living through these incredibly diverse and real characters and the complexities of things like morality, accountability, and power was one fantastic experience - an experience that left me a better and more empathetic and tolerant person.

Review of Zoo City

Title: Zoo City
Author: Lauren Beukes
Genre: Adult, Urban Fantasy, Sci-Fi
Age restriction? YES - rated R. This is a gritty and raw book, dealing with adult themes. Not for sensitive or young readers.
Series: None
Pages: 416
Publisher: Angry Robot; Original edition (December 28, 2010)

WINNER of: The Arthur C. Clarke Award for the best Sci Fi book of 2010.

Rating: 

 Incredible and virtually flawless. Buy and read ASAP!

Description: Zinzi has a talent for finding lost things. To save herself, she’s got to find the hardest thing of all: the truth.

I have the full description up on an earlier post, if you want to check it out, and I also blogged about this South African author winning the Artur C. Clarke Award (which is a HUGE deal!) and how inspiring I found that.

However, I want to make it clear that I'm not just lovin' on this book coz it was written by my South African countrywoman, although that is awesome and inspiring in itself. Not at all. This is a mind-blowing read, although I'll admit that placing it in the Sci Fi genre seems a bit odd to me, since this is a textbook example of excellent Dark Urban/Contemporary Fantasy in my opinion - one of precious few!


Review Summary: I have rarely read a book that I so thoroughly enjoyed and admired - and this comes from someone with a degree in Literature working postgrad in Classics!

Full Review: Zinzi December is in a heap of trouble, and not just with the police. She's got a guilty conscience, gets forced by poverty and desperation into working for an even guiltier group of people, trying to uncover a guilty secret before the guilty get her killed or locked up.


Zoo City is not only an incredible adventure and first-rate Urban Fantasy, it also regards issues of prejudice, muti (South African traditional medicine controversial for its occasional use of human body parts), substance abuse, immigration, poverty, crime and punishment and what people are willing do for success and money. However, it regards these issues with so light a hand that you almost don't notice yourself thinking about these things until a few days later.

Using a first person present tense narrative is something that takes guts in spades, something which very few writers can pull of successfully, but Lauren Beukes rises to the challenge with seemingly effortless ease and grace. I think that the frequent breaks in the narrative by way of newspaper reports, magazine articles and other informative pieces provide just the correct amount of distance and explanation to keep the story fresh and fast-paced without feeling overdone or fake. The present tense gives this story a feeling of immediacy and urgency, while the first person draws you right into the thoughts, secrets and actions of the protagonist, Zinzi - and what a brilliant protagonist she is!

Zinzi is an amazingly complete and compelling character - smart, intelligent, cynic and brave, she's flawed, in some ways very deeply so, but these very flaws strengthen her credibility. Zinzi grew up comfortably as a member of one of South Africa's emerging black upper-middle class, to go to university and become a respected journalist and develop a nasty drug habit. However, as she says, that is her Former Life, before she had Sloth.

In this alternative version of Johannesburg in 2011, those who have committed a crime find their guilt manifested in the form of a symbiotic animal magically tied to them (or at least, that's one theory; the appearance of aposymbiots is rather recent, still being studied and not fully understood) and granting them minor, mostly useless gifts, called shavi.

The animals are referred to as mashavi and with an Animal comes the Undertow - a cloud of blackness that will sooner or later swallow and/or obliterate the Animalled person. You can never be certain of when the Undertow will take you, for take you it will, eventually. The only thing you can be certain about is that if your Animal dies, the Undertow will come for almost instantaneously; yet while your Animal remains alive you're still living on borrowed time.

Some of the examples of shavi mentioned includes being able to find the scene of a murder, being charming, shielding from magic and inciting or heightening lust slightly. Zinzi's mashavi is Sloth, and her shavi is to see the connections people have to their "lost things" - small objects of personal value to the person in question that may or may not be currently lost.

Zinzi can see either the person with a cloud of the objects important to that person tied to them in a way which she describes as "a thread" between the person and the objects. So, it follows that when touching an object that's important to someone, she can feel the "thread" pulling the object back to the person, and then it's just a matter of following the sometimes frustratingly frail thread and finding the person who lost something for some quick cash and the ability to eat that night.

Now "Animalled" and therefore marked as a criminal and possibly dangerous to the rest of society, struggling to find work, acceptance and absolution, Zinzi's living in the most dangerous of neighbourhoods surrounded by the most desperate denizens of society and making ends meet (and trying to repay her drug debts) by writing letters for 419 scams and hoping to stumble across things people lost that are valuable enough that the person would pay her for returning it.

This is how she ends up being suspected of murder, being contacted by dodgy individuals working for a huge-name music producer with a questionable past and looking for a teenaged superstar that no one must know has gone missing. As if that's not enough, her lover just found out that his wife and children didn't die in the DRC civil war, as he had thought, with the always-present additional threat of the Undertow.

I do have some very slight criticisms, mainly because I'm a detail-oriented control freak: I'd have liked to know what exactly the aposymbiosis is - is it a manifestation of guilt? If it is, why is it that some sociopaths who feel no guilt over their crimes still find themselves Animalled? And if it's not, why is it that only those guilty of the most grievous of crimes have one? And who decides what makes up those crimes that deserve an Animal?

Also, why are all the Animals written in Capital Letters? I don't know about you, but when I see Capital Letters strewn around like that, I hear the words spoken in the booming voice of a Cecil B. Demille version of God, although I'm fully willing to admit that that is my own issue and has absolutely nothing to do with the merits of the book. Still, it's a bit jarring to read about this one's Cobra and that one's Butterfly and that one's Hyena, etc. with constantly booming echoes.

I will also admit that I was at first slightly uncomfortable with the thought of a white woman writing the personal narrative of a black woman, especially in this society of ours in this time we find ourselves.

Lauren Beukes explains it beautifully and sensibly in a guest post for The World SciFi Blog, arguing that when we write, we are basically always writing the other, using our imagination to fill in the gaps of that which we didn't actually live and experience, but which our characters did.

This is a completely valid point of view which makes a lot of sense and which I fully support, although I myself would not yet feel comfortable writing in the voice of a black person in South Africa (which is most probably a personal failing!), given my historical and very often very largely invisible privileges that came with growing up white mostly in post-Apartheid South Africa (including but not limited to: being able to study by electricity, living in a house, never going to bed hungry, never having to go without blankets and sweaters and shoes winter because there just isn't money to buy it, etc. etc. which, unfortunately, is still the predominant experience of most South Africans in a society in which the chances of your suffering abject poverty increase dramatically the darker your skin is), but I truly admire Lauren for her braveness, integrity and dedication in worrying, in her words, more about whether Zinzi was Zinzi enough than worrying about whether she was black enough.

Despite these nitpicks, I thoroughly enjoyed the book. It was not only a great read, it was a thoughtful read, without shoving its thoughtfulness down your throat or hitting you over the head with it at all. The writing, too, is beautifully crafted with some unexpectedly hilarious and unpretentiously sensitive and touching moments. The setting comes alive through Lauren Beukes' incredibly vivid descriptions and the slums of the city of Johannesburg almost becomes its own character in this book, which I found delightful (and envy-worthy! How many writers can do that, seriously?).

I don't know what else to say about without spoiling the book, so I'll stop here and just say: this book, although not for the overly sensitive or young, is amazing, if you're willing to deal with some hard facts of reality when reading. The characters are full and real, the setting is so familiar (at least to me :) ) and yet so filled with new and strange things that it remains eternally fascinating, and the story is a fast-paced edge-of-your-seat whirlwind which will keep the adrenaline pumping to the very last page. Also, I'd just like to add, I thought the ending was amazing. I'm hard pressed to think of another character that I loved and admired as much as I loved and admired Zinzi in those last couple of paragraphs.

Read it as soon as you possibly can - and please let me know what you thought of it! Even if it is months or years later and you absolutely hated it, I truly want to know.

This is a book I'll be reading again and again and again, and I hope the same is true for you.

Review of Regina's Song

Title: Regina's Song
Author: David and Leigh Eddings
Genre: Murder Mystery (?) with some stuff that could possibly be inferred to be hypothetical supe elements (?).

Rating:

 Zero. I would have liked to go into the negatives here, in fact.

Description: Regina and Renata are truly identical twins. They are so strikingly alike, even their mother can't tell them apart. Since their DNA is identical and their infant footprint records were lost by the hospital, no one can be sure which is which.

This doesn't bother the twins. In fact, they're inseparable--until one of the young women is murdered. The other has no memory of the event, no idea who she is. In her near-total amnesia, she can remember only family friend Mark, who has always been a surrogate big brother to the twins. And Mark finds himself fearing that the effects of the trauma don't end with amnesia, for now a series of vicious murders terrorizes Seattle, accompanied by the howl of wolves....

Review:

From the description, this book sounds like a zinger, right? I mean, what more do you want? Identical twins so identical that they frequently swop roles without anyone knowing! Their personalities so entwined that it's impossible even for them to say where one ends and the other begins! Then one of them is murdered!

I mean, the possibilities here for good, compelling fiction (with or without supernatural elements - although I obviously prefer with) are virtually endless.

To my vast disappointment, however, the book is not only composed entirely out of stale prose, canned dialogue, pre-packed stereotypes and cardboard flat characters, but there is just about no plot at all. The surviving twin gets released from a mental hospital because she wants to attend university; suddenly a mysterious spates of killings with victims that are known for their criminality turn up. Whodunnit?

That's basically it, I'm very sorry to say.

The premise and mystery of the twins and their twinhood and how the loss of it affects the one left behind is just not explored at all. Instead, it's basically a revenge story (which you already knew, right? I mean, do you need spoiler tags to know that the "murder mystery" part of the novel is the surviving twin hunting down the dead twin's killer, killing anyone she thinks it may have been coz they deal drugs sometimes until she actually gets the right guy?) told from the incredibly distant point of view of a person who is a family friend of the parents of the surviving twin.

So through the eyes of Mark we follow Renata, the surviving twin, as she attempts to reintegrate in society. Mark is a postgraduate in English Lit, and at the beginning of the story he finds a student house filled with FIVE PEOPLE JUST LIKE HIM.

I'm dead serious.

Sure, three of them are girls and they all study different thingies, but they all agree on everything all the time, they use the exact same dialogue and phrases as the other characters, and even the same conversational tone! Constantly! It's like one person talking to himself, that person being the Prototypical Eddings Creation Tee Em, which is a smart-ass wannabe comedian with... no, that's about it.

They all hold exactly the same views on just about everything, although it's just damn convenient that one of them is a philosopher, who can ask very deep, yo questions about the nature of personality and morality without ever really discussing these things, since everyone agrees with everything instantly.

Also, luckily one of them is a lawyer, who can help Mark and the Surviving Twin(TM) out when legal troubles arise in a way which everyone agrees with and is perfectly happy with, despite it being, in my view, ridiculously unethical and immoral. Also, luckily one of them has a brother on the police force, very handily getting all the inside info that help them figure out who's committing the murders and how to get that person out of this damn mess they made.

Also, one is a psychology major, so we handily have analyses on hand, all of them uncontested, naturally, explaining everything Renata goes through and the why the who what and etc. These things don't need to make sense or have any kind of underlying logical structure, because what this psych major tells us is what we all already know from living in the "real world" and its obsession with Pop psych and easy explanations, so obviously it's the true and only answer possible.

Alright, I'm letting my snark get out of hand, but I was truly aggravated by this book. Not only are there no actual characters at all and no plot to speak of, there are no supernatural elements! No horror! No nothing! I mean, the cover of the hardcover version I have says right there, very explicitly: "A chilling story of a nightmare come true." The blurb has hints of wolves howling. I don't feel that an expectation of chills and/or explanations of the wolfy howlings are unreasonable here. Instead, we get none of those with a huge side-serving of Nothing Much Happening for Most of the Goddamn Book.

We're just told that wolves and dogs howl when the murders are committed, and that Regina listens to some freaky music with wolves howling.

Rage! Frustration! But back to the review.

Even though the authors employ first-person narrative, readers are constantly kept at an oceanic distance from the main character (or who the main character, the one doing the action and driving the story, is supposed to be, at least) and you feel at best a bit of sympathy for the poor surviving twin while getting constantly irritated at the narrator and his incessant lame joking. You're also told by our narrator that yes, losing her twin was so horrible for Renata that she went mad and so on so he'll keep an eye on her now and again, all very sad, but hey, English Paper due and class to give, mysteries of Milton to talk about exploring, lame-ass comedy to perform. I'm trying very, very hard to think of what else the narrator does, but I honestly can't add anything to it.

I'm so extremely disappointed in this novel mainly because I have such a soft spot for David Eddings. When I was something like 13, I saw a novel of his at the library and the cover so enthralled me that I picked it up. It was the middle book of a series (the Elenium, if I remember correctly), and that hooked me on fantasy for life. So I wanted this book to be good, and I was willing to like it even if it was just mediocre or slightly bad.

It wasn't even that. It was awful. Truly, soul-wrenchingly awful. The only redeeming quality I can think of is that there are no spelling or grammar errors.

Please avoid. Trees shouldn't have to die for this crap, and there are so many actually good books to read out there that you don't even want to waste the 5 or so hours that it takes to read through this book. That's time you'll never get back!