Book Review: Welcome to Bordertown

From Goodreads:

Bordertown: a city on the border between our human world and the elfin realm. Runaway teens come from both sides of the border to find adventure, to find themselves. Elves play in rock bands and race down the street on spell-powered motorbikes. Human kids recreate themselves in the squats and clubs and artists' studios of Soho. Terri Windling's original Bordertown series was the forerunner of today's urban fantasy, introducing authors that included Charles de Lint, Will Shetterly, Emma Bull, and Ellen Kushner. In this volume of all-new work (including a 15-page graphic story), the original writers are now joined by the generation that grew up dreaming of Bordertown, including acclaimed authors Holly Black, Cassandra Clare, Cory Doctorow, Neil Gaiman, Catherynne M. Valente, and many more. They all meet here on the streets of Bordertown in more than twenty new interconnected songs, poems, and stories.

Yes, yes, this is my second anthology review in as many weeks. Shut up, I've been finding some really good ones.

I'm not quite sure why I didn't pick up Welcome to Bordertown when it first came out, other than A) I was busy with finals and I forgot about it, and B) I'm occasionally really stupid and doubt the awesomeness of authors. Thankfully, Cassandra Yorgey saw that I was blind and showed me the light. Namely, she did this by scoring me a pass to FaerieCon East where I got to meet AND HAVE TEA with Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman (Guys! Ellen Kushner bought me tea!) so that I would understand their awesomeness, and then she lent me her ARC to read. Now I keep this book next to my bed, beside my Ultimate Hitchhikers Guide, in case of emergencies.

The Good:

Beautiful writing by a ton of authors, many of whom I know and others I am looking forward to reading more from. Welcome to Bordertown really explores and makes use of the best aspects of writing in an anthology. There is a world - Bordertown - that has established rules, geography, history, which must be obeyed by everyone. But working within those rules, writers can do whatever they want. And that leads to a collection of stories as varied as the dwellers of Bordertown themselves. Characters of every ethnicity, gender, species, age, sexual orientation, etc can find a place and a voice in the stories of Welcome to Bordertown - which, by the way, is a great way to make readers feel welcome.

The stories progress in a sort of chaotic order. In the first few stories, we're introduced to this hopeful new world, where the misfits and unorthodox have a place and anything is possible. More stories expose us to everyday life in Bordertown and the risks it poses to its' occupants, both old and new, stripping away some of the promise of Bordertown and turning into a place like any other. Full of dangers. Full of opportunities. Just like everywhere else. Finally, as we near the end, we see the darker side of Bordertown, with its injustices and the people willing fight against them. It's a beautiful storytelling arch, showing us that even with magic and faeries, you can't run away from your problems forever. Happily ever afters must be fought for constantly.

The Bad:

There's not so much Bad in this anthology as there are personal requests. More comics. Fewer poems. More poems. No comics at all. Why is there a motorcycle on the cover?

The Rest:

My standard warning for anthologies applies here: Not all stories are created equal. It is more than likely that readers are not going to like every story in here. But you're going to like an awful lot of them, I promise.

Final Thoughts:

Beyond being great YA, this is just a great book period. I would recommend it to anyone interested in fantasy, and frequently do. I sincerely hope it won't be another 13 years before the next Bordertown book comes out.

My Rating: 5/5 Mushrooms.

Book Review: Boneshaker

GOGGLES AND AIRSHIPS! WIN! Ooo, and a quote from Scott Westerfeld. Shiny!

 From Barnes and Noble:

In the early days of the Civil War, rumors of gold in the frozen Klondike brought hordes of newcomers to the Pacific Northwest. Anxious to compete, Russian prospectors commissioned inventor Leviticus Blue to create a great machine that could mine through Alaska’s ice. Thus was Dr. Blue’s Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine born.

But on its first test run the Boneshaker went terribly awry, destroying several blocks of downtown Seattle and unearthing a subterranean vein of blight gas that turned anyone who breathed it into the living dead.

Now it is sixteen years later, and a wall has been built to enclose the devastated and toxic city. Just beyond it lives Blue’s widow, Briar Wilkes. Life is hard with a ruined reputation and a teenaged boy to support, but she and Ezekiel are managing. Until Ezekiel undertakes a secret crusade to rewrite history.

His quest will take him under the wall and into a city teeming with ravenous undead, air pirates, criminal overlords, and heavily armed refugees. And only Briar can bring him out alive.

All I can say is that it was a good thing I waited until my Thanksgiving break to read this book because once I picked it up, it was impossible for me to put down.

The Good:

Where do I start? I'm not used to reviewing books I love this much. Compliments are anathema to my being.

This book is like an action-adventure movie on paper. By which I mean, we get all the thrills, danger, and edge of your seat tension that we love about movies, plus the detailed exposition and character insights that we can only get via books. Plus, mad science.

Let me make it clear that I am not a fan of the zombie-zeitgeist that's taken media by storm over the past years. They're a metaphor which has been played out and overused by people seeking to criticize our capitalistic and apathetic society. However, in Boneshaker, there's no metaphor beating us over the head to be heard. (Okay, well, yes, you can probably find meaning in the sap-drug that's made from the same gas that causes people to become zombies, but Priest doesn't let social commentary get in the way of the story. It's like an optional side dish; you can examine the book for hidden meaning and symbols, or you can choose to enjoy people living in a walled-off city. Your choice. Much like whether or not to eat the carton of rice with your Chinese take-out. Where was I again?) These zombies are only monsters that were created by a disaster that's half man-made/half natural and they want to eat you. All of you. Every last tasty limb. Watching your weight by eating only brains is such a waste of time when you're already dead. I digress.

My point is that Priest has made zombies fun again. I kind of want to hug her for it.

The cast of characters is typical of adventure novels, but still fun. I never had to stop and reread a previous chapter to remind myself who someone was. We never get too deep into who they are, so they remain in this in between space - more filled out than cardboard, but not quite individuals. The main narrators, Briar and Zeke, provide contrasting narratives: Briar's maturity, her world-weariness, and her mama-bear-like focus and determination to rescue her son versus Zeke's youthful exuberance, then faltering confidence in his meticulously planned escapade as it all goes to hell.  There isn't exactly anything new about them except the situation they're in. But still, fun.

The plot is also fairly familiar. Parent has to rescue child from stupid adventure, gets sucked into larger drama that invariably prompts protagonists to save the day, after which parent and child become closer and understand one another better. But this plot takes place a walled off city filled with blighted gas, shambling horrors, and a mad man living in a train station. Like I said. Really fun.


Also, mad science.

The Bad:

Briar has a secret. It's supposed to be a doozy. Unfortunately, I figured it out about halfway through the book. Maybe sooner.

Furthermore, while I enjoyed the premise of the Civil War having lasted for decades longer than it really did, I wish the author had done more with it. I understand that the author probably had her hands full with main plot of the novel, but a bit more focus on the politics, on what else is happening in the world, the factors that have kept the war going on like this, etc, would have been really, really nice filler for world-building.

For that matter, the alternative history of it in general, while enjoyable to me, is a factor that other readers may not enjoy. Suspension of disbelief allows us the understand and accept that things are different in this world, but we're expected to just accept this without ever getting a full or satisfying explanation. I was able to overlook that and enjoy the book despite this (I've been programmed to accept these things by a lifetime of reading Stephen King), but I can understand how other readers may not be get past that.

The Rest:

The writing is not the greatest in the world. My rhapsodizing about Laini Taylor a post or so back? Not gonna happen here. However, that doesn't mean that the writing is bad. As my mother said when I gave her the book, Priest's writing is innocuous; it gets out of the way of the story. And what a story it is.

While this book isn't marketed as YA, I could easily young adult readers enjoying this book, despite the lack of romance and the middle-aged heroine. Teenage girls should be reassured that they can still rock in their old(er) age, in my opinion.

Boneshaker also marks the beginning of the Clockwork Century series. While I normally gripe about book series - so long, more books to buy, what will I do with my dashed hopes if the series starts to suck - Boneshaker and its sequels have so far been immune to those issues. Despite being over 400 pages long, I read this book in less than a day, and since they're all first released in paperback I've been able to easily afford the sequels on my college student budget.

Final Thoughts:

Before it is anything else, I think that this book is fun. It's quick, it's exciting, it has equally quick, fun, and exciting sequels. It takes a bunch of pop-culture curiosities, like zombies and steampunk, and throws them in a pot, and gives us some tasty book-chili. Not everyone likes chili. Not everyone likes the same type of chili. Few people want to eat chili every day. If you like zombies, walled-off secret cities, mad science, and fierce heroines, don't mind liberties being taken with history, and just want to read something slightly mindless without being stupid or crude, give Boneshaker a ride. And even if you don't like the book, go follow Cherie Priest on twitter anyway. She posts pictures of cats.

My Rating: 4/5 Mushrooms

Book Review: Daughter of Smoke and Bone

See this cover? This is a nice cover. I like this cover.

From Goodreads:

Around the world, black hand prints are appearing on doorways, scorched there by winged strangers who have crept through a slit in the sky.

In a dark and dusty shop, a devil's supply of human teeth grown dangerously low.

And in the tangled lanes of Prague, a young art student is about to be caught up in a brutal otherwordly war.

Meet Karou. She fills her sketchbooks with monsters that may or may not be real; she's prone to disappearing on mysterious "errands"; she speaks many languages—not all of them human; and her bright blue hair actually grows out of her head that color. Who is she? That is the question that haunts her, and she's about to find out.

When one of the strangers—beautiful, haunted Akiva—fixes his fire-colored eyes on her in an alley in Marrakesh, the result is blood and starlight, secrets unveiled, and a star-crossed love whose roots drink deep of a violent past. But will Karou live to regret learning the truth about herself?

In this particular case, it's more than appropriate that I start the review with a Goodreads description, as it was on Goodreads that almost all my friends recommended this book to me. Given the sterling recs I'd been given, when the birthday B&N gift-cards came around, it was a no-brainer to pick this one up. I'm thrilled to say I wasn't disappointed.

The Good:

The writing, as promised, was beautiful. Taylor has a way with words that makes you want to wallow in them, without succumbing to overly ornate purple prose. Writing like this makes me think of foods - maybe my mom's fruit parfaits - which are delicious and I can enjoy them everyday, guilt-free. Okay, yes, Laini Taylor writes like my mom's fruit parfaits. Let's go with that.

The world is enthralling. The more I read, the more I wanted to know. Even had I hated the story, I would probably read the rest of the series just so I could know more about how everything worked. Luckily, the story is pretty cool. The mechanics for the price of magic are maybe not the most original, but they're presented in a way that is fresh and emotionally wrenching. And Taylor's theology - the chimera versus the seraphs -is a delightful twist on familiar religious lore. It makes my theology and cosmology loving heart happy.

Sweet Ceiling Cat, the characters. I love the secondary characters. I want more of all of them. These characters are vibrant and real - at least, as real as secondary fictional characters can be. But you don't have to guess about Brimstone's disapproval or Zuzana's delightfully charming threats of violence and mischief as they are integral to the characters personalities, ascending the realm of 'quirks' to being a part of who that characters is. As for our protagonists....

Karou is perhaps my favorite YA protagonist since Katniss. She's strong and smart, but heavily flawed and we know it. She's self-centered and cruel at times, ungrateful and indecisive. These aren't "I'm so clumsy" traits to make her relatable. These are real, difficult obstacles for her to overcome in herself. But for as awful as they could be, these traits make me like her more. When she's kicking ass, she's not some untouchable Wonder Girl. When she's torn between wanting to hang out with Zuzana while Brimstone is sending her on another extraordinary errand, you can appreciate that she really is just a teenager caught between worlds with absolutely no middle ground. Her complaining and self-centeredness is made sort of forgivable by merit that, while it isn't necessarily harder than any other teenagers life, it is so other that there is no one she can talk to about it. There is no one else like her, no one to understand. At the end of the day she is always alone. Until Akiva.

 I don't know how to feel about Akiva. He feels a little like every romantic interest. I'll leave him up to the interpretation of others and withhold my own judgment until another book.

The Bad:

The writing in the second part fell apart at points. Maybe it's just me, since I haven't seen this complaint elsewhere, but after all the gorgeous, luxurious writing of the first half, certain chapters and scenes in the story of Madrigal seemed almost clinical and detached. It was, in a word, disappointing.

The Rest:

I won't put the romance under The Bad, because honestly, it's one of the best and most believable 'love at first sight' stories I've ever read. But I really wish it hadn't consumed so much of this first book. It felt like the plot had suddenly been jerked hard toward the second star on the right and straight on til morning. It was super dark and then abruptly sunshine and puppies and twu luv! It felt like the romance became its own, almost separate story, tangential to the original plot.

Okay, it wasn't that bad, but it certainly felt that way at times. Probably because I'm the enemy of all romance.

Final Thoughts:

If there isn't more of Brimstone in the next book, I'm going to riot.

The sequel, Days of Blood and Starlight, is due out November, 2012.

Rating 4.5/5 Mushrooms