The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson

Man, I really wish I'd read this later, so that I could read the next books in the series. It doesn't end precisely with a cliffhanger, but it's definitely a “to be continued.”

The setting is the part that strikes you first in The Way of Kings. The country in which it's mainly set stratifies society by hair and eye color (with “lighteyes” essentially being a synonym for “toffs.”). Literacy and scholarship are considered women's arts, and men are either illiterate or pretend to be to preserve their perceived masculinity. And that's just the land most of it takes place in. Each country has its own culture and traditions, without just being parallels to Earth countries. And despite the creativity of the setting, it never feels like a world-building exercise. It feels like a real place people live in.

The characters are what really did for me, though. I am a sucker for great characters, and Sanderson obliges. They always seem like real individuals, and they're still stuck with me, weeks after reading this book. Take, for instance Shallan, a scholar from a noble family who is trying to be accepeted as a pupil to a great lady, so she can steal her magic device and use it to pay off her family's debts. She is smart and brave and terrified and witty and desperate and moral. And that's only scratching the surface.

The plot is hard to summarize. There is the old fantasy trope of a coming storm/apocalypse, but everyone is so busy fighting and scheming that only a few people actually notice the various portents. By the end of the novel, though, things have definitly been set in motion.

I would recommend this for fans of epic fantasy (And it is epic, it clocks in at about 1,000 pages and there's more books to come!) but if you want to try Brandon Sanderson and not have to wait long years for the sequels, you could try his Mistborn trilogy, which I also loved. It's even odder, as it blends between epic fantasy, historical(ish) fantasy, and, in the first novel, a heist plot.

5 stars

Other Opinions: 

The Literary Omnivore

Grasping for the Wind

any others?

Changeless by Gail Carriger

The cover blurb says, “A Novel of Vampires, Werewolves, and Dirigibles” and Changeless does exactly what it says on the tin. This is the second book in the Parasol Protectorate series, so to recap: It is Victorian England but there are vampires and werewolves. They've integrated fairly well into Victorian society and werewolves serve in the queen's army. Alexia Tarabotti is a preternatural who negates powers, meaning that when supernatural creatures are touching her, they are human. I really enjoyed the first book, but the problems I had with Changeless also apply to the first book, Soulless.

This book isn't exactly a masterpiece. Carriger tries to ape Victorian prose, which is clever in some places but falls apart a lot and just sounds like bad writing in other places. My favorite things about Victorian books, like a subtle sense of humor and the ways the authors knit social issues into the text, are not really present in this book. It's mostly a fun action/romance with Victorian trappings.

Without getting into spoilers, I had some problems with the way the main love interest behaved. He kept Alexia in the dark, even though he should really trust her by now, and the two got into an argument that really bothered me. (Vague spoilers: He thinks she's been unfaithful and starts shouting and calling her names) Thankfully, in the book, Alexia was bothered by this as well, so I don't necessarily see it as being condoned by the author, but it's still pretty obnoxious behavior on the part of someone we're supposed to like.

Still, it was incredibly entertaining and made me laugh at a few points, and after the way it ended, I wanted to pick up the next book immediately.

I've been thinking about star ratings. I feel like ratings can become perfunctory, but they are a good way to express something that can't really be measured in any other way. I'm going to try them out for a while.

So, 3 stars for this for not really being anything more than entertaining.  

Maledicte by Lane Robins

I don't quite know what to think about Maledicte. On the one hand, it has lots of court intrigue and balls and that sort of thing like Ellen Kushner's The Privilege of the Sword, one of my favorite books. But on the other hand, something about it just left me unsatisfied.

A shady lord steals his bastard son Janus from the slums because he needs an heir. Miranda, the son's lover/friend/partner in crime swears revenge and seeks out Black-Winged Ani, the goddess of love and vengeance. She dresses as a boy, changes her name to Maledicte, and become the ward of another lord who has his reasons to hurt the shady lord.

Maledicte, as interesting as the idea of him was, did not really do anything for me. His solution for, like, 90% of his problems is to kill the cause of them. There isn't really any motivation for what he does, except for the broad category of “revenge.” This may be because he's being ridden by a goddess of vengeance, or maybe because Robins is trying to make a point of the destructive power of revenge. Either way, Maledicte never really became a real person to me.

I've been using the pronoun “he” because that's consistently what Robins uses. It's made clear that Maledicte is much more comfortable performing as male instead of female. This was probably my favorite aspect of the book. We need more genderqueer characters who don't always fit into convenient labels because people often don't.

Actually, what this book reminded me of most was the movie There Will Be Blood. Like Daniel Plainview, Janus and Maledicte leave a trail of destruction in their wake . But, like the movie, I never saw any reason that they were using to justify their actions. It mostly seemed they did it because they could. And that leaves me a little uneasy with the way things ended in the book. I would recommend this book (I still found it very gripping), just maybe with some reservations.