Reading Roundup - April-June 2016

It's time for another reading roundup, as I quickly review the books I've read or listened to lately.

Part 2 of Tad Williams' epic 'Sorrow, Memory and Thorn' trilogy, Stone of Farewell, was kind of jarring for me as a kid, shifting book 1's child-principals - especially Simon and Miriamele - into young adult mode with what seems almost indecent suddenness, and there's a fair degree of the sex given that my impression of Book 1 was that they were about thirteen. In retrospect, they're older, it's just that they're both kind of spoiled and childish teenagers in their own way in The Dragonbone Chair, while here they are forced to grow up fast. There's a lot in here that is pretty stock quest fantasy, but it did a lot to at least reshape the mould at the time. I remember the third book - To Green Angel Tower - receiving one of the first favourable newspaper reviews I'd ever seen of a work of fantasy. The greatest strength of the book is also one I think I failed to appreciate as a young reader, to whit the depiction of a mundane and reasonable feudal empire being overtaken by magic, myth and insanity. It's interesting from a more mature perspective to see the degree of genre-blindness in characters who belong in a respectable mediaeval chronicle when not being forced to deal with bloody elves.

Like The Dragonbone Chair, this was read by Audible regular Andrew Wincott with characteristic gravitas.

China Mieville's Perdido Street Station is a gritty, thaumpunk scientific romance and a sprawling, Gormenghastly epic of intertwining plot threads and prose that occasionally forays into sweeping and ornate forms worthy of a star or two from Stella Gibbons. In narrative scope it is somewhat akin to Stone of Farewell, although set in a more confined geography and far, far more aggressively opposed to any sense of conventional fantasy. Mieville creates a dense and layered world of ancient mysteries, steampunk technology and rigorously analysed magic, of part-animal humanoids akin to the images of Egyptian gods and half-machine 'remades', of corrupt civil servants and exotically-armed murder-hobos hell-bent on 'gold and experience'. Into a city on the brink of either revolution or eternal tyranny comes a horrifying apex predator, capable of overwhelming the most powerful of opponents, and petty graft, scientific curiosity and dodgy associations combine to turn a city on its head and the life of one particular scientist and his friends inside out.

This audiobook is excellently read by prolific narrator Jonathan Oliver. Increasingly I find the Audible stable of readers to be a boon; not that I choose by reader, but with a few notable exceptions that I don't get on with, it does tend to mean they'll have someone good to do it.

Un Lun Dun is probably a less technically excellent example of Mieville's craft than Perdido Street Station, and having been written with a much younger readership in mind notably lacks much of the sex, violence and sheer unpleasantness of the earlier book. It begins as a (relatively) straightforward tale of two girls, one special and the other not so special. Zanna is the Shawzy, the prophecied hero of UnLondun who will save the abcity from the depredations of the Smog. Deeba is her sidekick; possibly the clever one, or the funny one, no-one is that bothered, at least until the Shwazy spectacularly fails to save the day. Faced with corrupt officials, nefarious schemes and the single-minded faith of most UnLonduners in obvious heroes, Deeba sets out to convince a city that they are wrong before her own life forgets her.

In its way, Un Lun Dun is as ground-breaking as Perdido Street Station, challenging the hell out of the preconceptions of young adult quest fiction with its offbeat, technofantastical secondary world, failed prophecy and 'wrong' hero. The reading by Karen Cass is overall good, although there is just something in the performance that can't seem to close a chapter.

Childhood's End was pretty groundbreaking at the time, although it's been long enough that it no longer feels it.

I read Arthur C. Clarke's classic tale of quiet invasion and parapsychological evolution in the wake of the recent TV adaptation, which sought to focus on fewer characters for clarity, and succeeded mostly in making the whole thing vastly more sensational by compressing the expansive timeline of the novel to about twenty years. I had previously only read the short story 'Guardian Angel', on which the first part of the novel is based.

It's hard to come at the novel these days without noticing how old-fashioned, even reactionary the future it envisions is. One of the characters is essentially polyamorous, but with no indication that his wife - whose life even in the Golden Age of mankind is as a mother and housewife - wishes for anything more than a stable marriage. The absence of mobile phones is always telling (see also Doomsday Book below) and the horror of the anti-Overlord characters that in the 'Golden Age' there are dozens of channels and people watch up to three hours of television per day makes me blush.

Greg Wagland's reading is good, but ultimately there is no getting away from the fact that this is a novel of its era. In many ways, the most fascinating part in this day and age is the foreword, featuring the ageing Clarke's reflections on his early work and assumptions.

Demigods and Magicians collects the three short stories which cross over between Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson/Heroes of Olympus and Kane Chronicles settings (which also take place in the same world as the Gods of Asgard series, because Riordan is not a man afraid to ask for the plural of pantheon.)

I've already read (and reviewed) 'The Son of Sobek' and 'The Staff of Serapis'. 'The Crown of Ptolemy' wraps up the crossover with the insane, less-dead-than-he-ought-to-be magician Setne attempting to consume the power of all gods and become himself a singular, all-powerful deity. With his mix of Egyptian and Greek magic granting him the ability to consume any power thrown at him from either pantheon, it is up to our heroes - Percy and Annabeth, and Sadie and Carter Kane - to find a way to cross the streams of their respective powers and thwart him.

I read this one the old fashioned way, and from the library no less. Kicking it old school.

'The Crown of Ptolemy' feeds naturally into the beginning of Riordan's new series, 'The Trials of Apollo'. In The Hidden Oracle the Sun God falls, powerless and mortal, into the heart of New York and becomes the slave of feral demigod Meg. As he struggles to reach the relative safety of Camp Half-Blood and to understand why his father has opted to take away not only his divine powers, but his strength, looks, clear-skin and washboard abs, he becomes caught up the attempt of another group of mortals to gain divinity, this time by controlling all of the world's Oracles and thus fate itself. While seemingly less threatening than Titans or Giants, these new enemies have a power and menace all their own, and may in fact have manipulated all of the preceding events in order to facilitate their own selfish designs.

Robbie Daymond is another good reader, and as with previous Riordan novels helps me to get into the correct American milieu for the writing.

While I've been on my current Riordan kick, I also looked to the library for Percy Jackson and the Greek Gods and Percy Jackson and the Greek Heroes. These are secondary works in which Percy narrates the stories of classical mythology in all their gruesome glory and his characteristic irreverent manner. More than just a money-making spinoff, they form a useful pair of companion volumes for a series which gets pretty damned into it sometimes on its mythology, and a decent primer on the canon for anyone old enough to recognise Percy's anachronistic insertions for what they are. Importantly, they don't romanticise the material in the way that a lot of authors do when recounting these much loved tales of bloodshed, parricide, infanticide, patriarchal attitudes, questionably consensual relations and gruesome mutilation.

A modern time travel classic, Connie Willis' Doomsday Book is set in a near-future Oxford where the Faculty of History operates an extensive time travel programme, sending historians to periods considered 'safe' in order to conduct field research. Taking advantage of the absence of the Head of History, Mediaeval plan to send a researcher to the middle ages for the first time, a period previously rated unsafe. Unfortunately, the question of whether or not she is safe in the fourteenth century soon pales as a terrible influenza epidemic sweeps the city, starting with the technician who operated the 'drop'.

Doomsday Book is notable for featuring a female time traveler, and is widely hailed as a classic of the genre. This historical sections are extremely well done, and the theory of time travel is well-developed enough for in-universe discussion, without being precise enough for strict debunking. On the other hand, the near-futurism is damned strange. Despite time travel and the near-elimination of disease, it's very much the 1990s still, with most if not all of the problems in the modern parts of the plot down to the absence of mobile phones, email and virtual networking. It is also quite noticeably an outsider's - specifically an American's - Oxford, with colleges operating their own academic facilities and staff, and archaeological research conflated with history (rather than operating in a separate academic division.) 

While dramatically apt, Jenny Sterlin's narration is perhaps a little too dry for the book's humour, mostly coming into its own in the more somber late sections of the novel.

Finally for this roundup, The Ables is a novel about preteen disabled superheroes learning to overcome their disabilities through cooperation and taking on a messianic cult. It is also, and this has not hurt the sales figures at all, written by Jeremy Scott, the voice of the popular Cinema Sins YouTube videos. The audiobook is also read by Scott, and that was a fascinating experience, as you can almost hear him learning to narrate as the book goes on. It's subdivided into - I think from memory - four books, and continuity references make me suspect it was written with some intent to be released serially as four separate parts. Throughout part one the reading is in the same quickfire delivery as Cinema Sins; so much so that I expected a ding at the end of every sentence. Further on, however, Scott's storytelling style became more relaxed and naturalistic, bending more to the dramatic needs of the story.

The Ables is a great idea, and a good novel. It's not perfect, in part because Scott is not able to get entirely into the perspective of a blind boy (I think; hell if I know what a blind boy's actual perspective is.) It also fails the Bechdel test hard, and I'm in two minds about that. On the one hand, d'uh; on the other, it's a book about a twelve year old boy, and twelve is often a very gender divided time. On the gripping hand, it's a book about a twelve year old boy with superpowers, and if we can get behind supergeniuses and telekinetics, we can surely manage to imagine a world in which one or more girls can be part of the gang without fear of an uncontrollable cootie epidemic.

Still, all in all it's not a bad book, and an impressive first effort for someone whose comfort zone is pure snark.

Necronomicon, The Long Utopia and Steelheart

Necronomicon is a compilation of readings of various stories by HP Lovecraft. There no particular theme to the collection, which encompasses most of the classics ('The Call of Cthulhu', 'The Colour Out of Space', 'The Shadow out of Time' et al, although not 'At the Mountains of Madness' or 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth'), but the resulting collection is 21 hours of very well read Lovecraftian horror, and like many first person narratives, Lovecraftian horror benefits greatly from a good reader.

The absence of 'At the Mountains of Madness' is the greatest omission, presumably because it's chunky enough to be published on its own. Other than that, the main problem with this and other Audible short story collections is the lack of any easily accessible indexing. If I wanted to go back and relisten to 'The Horror at Red Hook', I'd have to take pot luck.

--

The fourth book in the Long Earth sequence, The Long Utopia shares with its predecessors a combination of intricate world-building and faintly half-arsed plotting aimed more at making a philosophical point than servicing a conventional narrative. Each book jumps ahead five to ten years and seems to spend most of its bulk catching us up on what's happened in the interim rather than moving the story forward in any meaningful sense. The multitude of viewpoints also serves to distance the reader instead of increasing involvement, and the whole thing ends up rather dry. It feels that the series as a whole would have been better served by either abandoning conventional narrative altogether to create a pseudohistory, or more rigorously enmeshing the cosmological musings with the story of a specific set of characters.

It's rare that I have a serious complaint about Audible readings, and I have nothing but respect for Michael Fenton Stevens as an actor, but honestly the fact that so much of the book is set in America - and that Fenton Stevens range encompasses few, if any, convincing American accents - makes the choice of a British reader frankly baffling.

--

The nature of its own purpose and identity is not one that Brandon Sanderson's Steelheart shares. Sanderson's superhero deconstruction, the first of a series - The Reckoners - set in a world in which superhumans have appeared and proven to be universally megalomaniacs who despise ordinary humans and lesser 'Epics' for their weakness, is unabashed dark fantasy. In the city of Newcago - formerly Chicago - the word of Steelheart is law and humanity lives as an underclass in the transformed remnants of their old world. The Reckoners are the ones who fight back, humans who hunt Epics, and newcomer David thinks that they should be setting their sights on bigger game.

Steelheart is a pacy adventure, as well as a deconstructionist musing on the nature of absolute power. It's not a breathtaking work of existential genius, but it would be surprised if anyone expected it to be, and that is to its credit.

The Dark is Rising

For years I thought that circle on
my sister's copy was a stain.

Having recently suffered a self-inflicted viewing of the film known in the States as The Seeker, I decided I owed myself a return to the source: Susan Cooper's 'The Dark is Rising'. I first encountered this in a semi-dramatised reading that I borrowed from Fleet public library on cassette (I would make a joke about how the current generation basically don't know what cassettes are, if I weren't so concerned that the next won't know what a public library is,) and then borrowed the book and the rest of the series from my sister. Consequently, I have always viewed this as the first book in the Dark is Rising sequence, and while this is accurate in terms of neither internal chronology nor publication order, it is kind of true, in that prior to its writing, Cooper had no thought of a sequence, while after she had a complete plan for the other three books and the final page pre-written*.

As he turns 11, Will Stanton learns that he is an Old One, a being not merely human and the inheritor of great power and wisdom. As the last of the Old Ones to be born he completes the circle and is destined to seek the six Signs of the Light, which together hold the power to drive back the rising Dark and preserve the world for a little while longer. As Christmas passes and the cold, dark days take hold, the power of the Dark waxes, and only steadfast courage will carry Will through.

'The Dark is Rising' is the antithesis of more recent YA fantasy. Largely unconcerned with - but not heedless of - the trials of adolescence, it is built upon the lyrical flow of folklore and not on the dynamic beats of adventure fiction. Will's virtues are essentially passive - endurance, courage, and ultimately patience - and much of the story follows a course long set in which Will seems almost incidental, but this is not because he is irrelevant, but because Will and his story are but part of a greater tapestry.

I mean, seriously? Did the prop master get bored of
mandalas?

I love 'The Dark is Rising', both the book and the wider sequence, which is one of the reasons I hated the film so much (the other being that it's rubbish.) I am however grateful to The Seeker for giving me the impetus to go back and re-read an old favourite.

* And all respect due to JK Rowling, it's way better than the epilogue of Harry Potter.

Reading - A Review

I've been a little slack of late on keeping this blog updated, in part because there have been so many entries needed on my media blog (thank you, rich television season) and I find snarky TV reviews more fun than book reviews a lot of the time. Books - including audiobooks; especially audiobooks, since it takes longer to read a book aloud than to read it to yourself - require more investment of time and concentration, so I tend to try to only read good ones, and I kind of prefer reviewing bad things.

But, so you know I've not given up completely, here's a bit of a digest on recent reads/listens (in no particular order):

'Harmony Black' by Craig Schaeffer (Kindle)

'Harmony Black' follows the titular FBI agent, part of a double-secret counter-supernatural task force and a practicing witch, as she revisits her home town to tackle a horror from her childhood.

Black began life as a one-off antagonist to anti-villain Daniel Faust in a series I admit I haven't read. I picked up this, the first book in the series, via Kindle First and it proved one of the better picks from that programme (mentioning no The Gemini Effect.) Harmony Black is a breath of fresh air, a hunter of gribblies who maintains a solid professional attitude, even in the face of the thing that killed her father, and resists all inclination to swoon at dodgy allies of convenience or masterful vampire dipshits. Not that I've been burned before, you understand. The book pushed some buttons - the central plot revolves around the Bogeyman, a monster that leaps out of cupboards and abducts children who are never seen again - but managed not to be too horrid, and the central interplay between Black and her partner, half-possessed shitkicker Jessie, is a lot more fun than if Jessie were a smooth-talking warlock or sexy elf.

'Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits' by David Wong (Kindle)

Zoey Ashe is a regular gal with just the one distinguishing feature (or two if you count a peerless flare with the espresso machine): Her absentee dad is a multimillionaire of the kind who has become so successful that the word 'criminal' just sort of falls away. And then he dies, and Zoey learns that she is the key to his fortune, his only heir, and the target of superhuman killers hired by a megalomaniacal criminal showboater named Molech.

The first non-John novel by David Wong ('John Dies at the End' and 'This Book is Full of Spiders (Seriously Dude, Don't Touch It') takes a little getting into - bluntly, the casual slacker narrative voice is a little less effective when the book lacks a first person casual slacker narrator - but from about a third of the way in accelerates its pace into a funny, fast-paced, and at times surprisingly hard-edged techno-thriller about the gap between possibility and application, the nature of villainy and heroism (and the degree to which society and the wider world care about the difference,) the callousness of social media, and the danger of vast technological power falling into the hands of an infantile prick with a bad case of testosterone poisoning.

'The New Frontier' (Kindle)

Thanks to my Amazon Prime membership, I got a shit tonne of vouchers for getting my Christmas presents delivered no-rush (and all of the presents on time, I'm glad to say) which I blew on both volumes of Darwyn Cooke and Dave Stewart's electrum-age DC do-over.

Covering the transition from golden age to silver through the story of a giant, living island seeking to extinguish all life on Earth, 'The New Frontier' ropes in more characters than an Avengers movie, from members of the Justice League to the Challengers of the Unknown, presenting them as far as possible in their original character rather than updated to a common time period. The result is a lot of fun, with a surprising amount of dramatic punch.

You know you've made it as a fantasy
author when they give you a mono-
chrome reprint.

'The Dragonbone Chair' by Tad Williams (Audible)

Simon is a scullion at the King's court in the Hayholt, until the kindly old court physician, Dr Morgenes, takes him on as apprentice. This is an appointment which, together with Simon's native curiosity and adventurous spirit, will catapult him into the heart of deadly politics, black treachery and evil, ancient magics.

The first volume of Memory, Sorrow and Thorn is a bit of a blast from my personal past. I first read the series as a teenager, and going back to them my first impression is that I didn't notice at the time what a whining dick Simon is for the first half of the book. Such is the nature of the beast, I suppose, and he does get a bit better. On rereading, I also found myself wondering at some of the politics and economics of the thing, and how High King Elias can be so shockingly poor at domestic economy and yet manage such vast feats of military logistics. Surely there must be some crossover of those skill sets?

Regardless, 'The Dragonbone Chair' manages good epic, and for all that he starts out a bit whiny, Simon does demonstrate definite character growth across the course of the novel. With decent writing, a large cast, an epic scale and a fair degree of character mortality, it's interesting to wonder if HBO might be considering it for when Game of Thrones wraps up.

'Blood of Olympus' by Rick Riordan (Audible)

The seven heroes of prophecy continue on to face the Giants at Athens, but it will all be for nothing if the Greek and Roman demigods can not come together and heal the rift between the two faces of their divine parents. Reyna and Nico are rushing the Athena Parthenos to Camp Half-Blood, but teddy bear killer Octavian is determined to crush the Greeks once and for all.

Thanks in part to my girlfriend Hanna, I've been on a bit of a Rick Riordan kick lately (she started to catch up on me, so I hurried to finish Heroes of Olympus, which I have now done; yay!) He writes a cracking adventure yarn full of action and thrills and goofy jokes, and from time to time gets some serious dramatic punch; often from reminding you how young some of these characters are (in particular, the borderline diabolical Octavian is, what? Fourteen?) I also appreciate the fact that, despite all of his viewpoint characters basically feeling that the Gods are bastards, he manages to present them as a compelling mix of genuine cosmic good and mythological dickbags, with solid - if somewhat obscure - reasons for all that they do.

At the end of the book, Annabeth drops in that she has an uncle and a cousin in Boston that her dad doesn't talk to much. It turns out the cousin's name is Magnus, and coincidentally my next book is called...

'Magnus Chase and the Sword of Summer' by Rick Riordan (Audible)

Done with the Classics (not really; he has a series about a mortalised Apollo coming out soon,) Riordan is starting in on the Norse. Seriously, between him and Neil Gaiman there is basically nothing for the rest of us to work with. In the first book of the series, we meet Annabeth's cousin Magnus, and he dies. No, seriously, like in chapter three, since to differentiate the series only some of Magnus' abilities come from being half-god; the rest come from him being one of the Einherjar, the dead warriors of Asgard.

One of the nice things about this is that it lets Riordan use more of a range of characters. Magnus is a homeless kid from Boston, and joins a team of warriors including a thousand year old Viking with a doctorate, an Irish girl who - and I quote - tried to defuse a car bomb with her face - and a black soldier from the Civil War with a mad on for seizing hills. For his first adventure, he's the outsider, forced to go rogue with a dwarf, an elf and his Muslim Valkyrie (which sounds crazy, but I think it's good to see more inclusion in what has traditionally - and probably unfairly - been characterised as the very whitest of afterlives.

Also adventure (rollicking), humour (goofy) and punch (dramatic). Check, check and check.

'Career of Evil' by Robert Galbraith (Audible)

Success is a two-edged sword. On one edge, a fractional reduction in the struggle to make ends meet in the PI game; on the other, everyone wants a piece of you. There's a killer on the loose, he's gunning for Cormoran Strike, and he's planning to go through Robin to get to him.

The third Cormoran Strike novel is the first I've listened to. It helps a lot in this instance, because I have real trouble visualising Cormoran's Cornish accent. (Similarly, the American readers in the Rick Riordan books help me with the voices.) It's a creepy, claustrophobic novel, partly recounted from the killer's twisted perspective and somewhat reminiscent of some of Ian Rankin's Rebus novels. The shifting relationships between Robin, her fiance and Strike are a little less satisfying, mostly because I don't want to see Robin and Strike together (that ship does not appeal to me,) but her fiance is a 24-carat prick. I don't think this is about poor writing; it's intentional, it just doesn't entirely work for me.

'The Tales of Max Carados' by Ernest Bramah

My last entry is a bit of a cheat. It's actually the first two stories in a longer collection, offered as a free sample by Audible. Carrados, a contemporary of Sherlock Holmes in the Strand Magazine is a consulting detective whose schtick is that he is blind, but utilises his other senses and his intellect, all honed to as keen a razor's edge as Holmes's, to aid the police and museum authorities (his particular thing is antiquities forgery and smuggling) in solving crimes. It's interesting, but suffers from the absence of an in-story Watson in my opinion.

Heroes of Olympus - The Mark of Athena and The House of Hades

I've been getting caught up on Percy Jackson lately, inspired by my partner's run at the original heptalogy. The Mark of Athena was for a long time a sticking point for me, since my commute got bigger and more crowded and the hardback is fricking huge. So I bought the kindle edition as well and read that on the train.

Annabeth, Jason, Piper and Leo have flown to Camp Jupiter in the magical trireme Argo II, in the company of Coach Gleeson Hedge, action satyr. Percy and his friends Hazel and Frank are more than happy to sign on to the Quest of the Prophecy of Seven, but when Leo unaccountably opens fire on the camp, they are forced to set out straight off and pursued by Roman forces, heading for the forbidden Ancient Lands and a Greek treasure stolen long ago by the Romans. Banishing ghosts and battling monsters, they make their way across the Atlantic to the Mediterranean and Rome, where Annabeth has to go it alone in pursuit of the Mark of Athena, while Jason and Percy overcome their alpha-hero antagonism to take on a pair of giant twins.

Although technically victorious, our heroes begin the next book in the series, The House of Hades, separated, and indeed with Annabeth and Percy literally in Hell, or at least Tartarus.

With time running out, and at different speeds for those in and out of Tartarus, the heroes must make their way to the two sides of the Doors of Death in order to close them. En route, Annabeth and Percy must befriend those whom they might have thought implacable foes and learn the meaning of sacrifice. In the mortal world, Frank embraces his inner war god and Hazel is chosen by Hecate to learn to control the Mists. Meanwhile Leo, the perpetual seventh wheel of the quest, finds his destiny and proves that in some ways he is better than Percy Jackson, and Nico di Angelo comes out (which for a popular children's series is pretty huge.)

Riordan continues to combine rollicking adventure, snarky humour and mild horror to good effect. Especially effective is some of the soul-searching in The House of Hades, where Percy is faced with the consequences of his past heroism, not just in the resentment of monsters he has killed, but of those he has left behind and never thought of again (a not uncommon failing in ancient heroes.)

Dracula

Audible's new version of Bram Stoker's Dracula is a multi-voiced recording, each actor taking one of the epistolary narrators. Alan Cumming plays John Seward, while Tim Curry is Van Helsing (and thus has almost no lines; seriously, there's a couple of letters and some telegrams.) The promise 'all-star cast' is B-list at best, but competent. Especially interesting in terms of performance is the varied approaches to the dialogue of other characters. In particular, it is notable that Lucy mimics the accents of her friends, while Mina just reports their words.

Narratively speaking, revisiting Dracula always brings home that it's basically a story of a bunch of stuffy white blokes throwing money at a problem that happens to be a vampire. It's actually a very, very weird story by modern standards.

The Green Rider

Merchant's daughter Karigan G'ladheon is on her way home, having been expelled from school for whipping one of the posh kids in a fair fight, when she meets a dying royal messenger; a Green Rider. Entrusted with his last message and gifted with his horse and a golden brooch which grants her the power to become invisible, Karigan sets off on a desperate mission to deliver the message and protect King Zachary against a sinister plot, itself but a first move in a larger scheme against all that is good and right.

Some accuse fantasy, as a genre, of being too black and white, and Green Rider isn't about to change that. It's a tale of the virtuous against the vicious; a plucky young girl, a good and idealistic king and his loyal, courageous servants, against a soul-eating, monster loosing sorcerer, the king's selfish, sadistic brother, a gout ridden misogynist warlord and their drone-like soldiers. Karigan is a largely likable protagonist; if anything, too likable. An instant hit with anyone who isn't a complete and unmitigated villain, her path is largely untroubled by misunderstandings and even her sudden and unannounced mystical appearance in the throne room is soon glossed over. Very few characters are more than what they seem (two, I think) and the plot is pretty much a to b with detours at c, d and mortal peril at e.

Green Rider isn't a terrible book, and there are some interesting bits of world-building, but overall it lacks nuance and too much of Karigan's success is due to chance rather than wit or skill, despite establishing her as a capable fighter and survivor. It would have been good to see her working things out rather than being handed them in a machina.

Also, cream in tea. What the hell is wrong with you people?

Ellen Archer is a very capable reader, although I found it an odd choice to slip from narration in her slightly transatlantic New York accent to present the characters in faux-British of various stripes. Where is it written that fantasy belongs to Europe?

I sound really damning, and that's probably not fair, but I find I'm always less forgiving of a near miss than a total disaster.