It’s been a while since I’ve read a graphic novel and I didn’t realize that’s what this was! And so I took out three of them and ended up finishing them in a night.
The story follows Echo, a young girl who drifts off in her history class and finds herself in the midst of the era of the Pemmican Wars, the Red River Resistance, and the Northwest Resistance depending on which book you’re in. While here, she experiences the historical events firsthand, meeting the key players and seeing in graphic detail what the fallout of these instances were for the Métis of the time.
Her home life also exists.
I don’t know what the point of the framing device is. I mean, I know. The idea of this kind of thing is typically that these visions are helping Echo connect to a cultural heritage that she feels disconnected from. But nothing is ultimately done with that aspect of the story, or with her home life in general, and the only real conflict or character building things that happen are relating to what happens in the visions of the past where we’re getting the history.
Overall, it’s interesting and it’s a quick read. And it covers Canadian history from the Métis perspective, which is definitely not the one that we got in school, but is a lot more interesting. If you can get it, check it out.
Today in picking up random library books because it was available and it seemed like it could be interesting, a whole book about crows for some reason!
I don’t really have a structure for these nonfiction reviews so let’s get into the thoughts. The book is all about crows, but about the things I really care about in terms of crows: Anecdotes of how people interact with them and folklore about the things people thought they were responsible for in the past. There are stories from both Native American myth and Norse, as well as other cultures, which makes for an interesting mix where you can see the parallels in how people used to see them. And, of course, there’s the general stories about how crows are chaos incarnate in very odd and unusual ways.
And I love it.
It’s a quick read and I can definitely recommend it. It is full of really interesting stories and information about crows, how they interact with one another, their environment, and humans specifically. And who doesn’t love to hear more about crows?
Today in Random Library Recommendations, another one that showed up in the same section as a bunch of award winning books. I think I’m getting over my distrust of these at last! They aren’t all pretentious and frustrating! Although I’m not sure if this one actually won anything…
The story follows Ines as she starts her time at Catherine House, an exclusive post secondary school where the students are cut off from the outside world so they can focus on their studies. The school has a reputation for turning out the best and brightest, but the longer Ines is in the school, the more she realizes that the people who have been accepted come in with their own baggage and the school is not all that it seems.
The story feels very much like it’s being told from the perspective of someone suffering from a deep, undiagnosed depressive episode.1 It’s very atmospheric and the events that happen seem to be focused on because Ines thinks there should be meaning in those events, rather than them having any actual significance to the story. I get the sense that this is what gothic horror is like, with it being more atmospheric than narrative driven. It’s very much the sort of style I think I need to be in a specific mood for.
Overall, I did enjoy the read. Ines is an interesting narrator to follow, and the style is a lot different than what I’m used to. I do kind of want to know more about the mechanics behind the school, but ultimately I don’t think that was important to the story and I’m good with not knowing. If you’re in the mood for it, check it out.
Today in working through the TBR pile, some super villain stuff! Because I need to get a bit more up to date on modern super hero books as research for Cloned Evil.
Vicious follows Victor Vale on his quest for revenge. In college, he and his roommate, Eli Cardale, attempted to give themselves super powers and make themselves ExtraOrdinary, or EOs. They succeeded, but Victor ended up spending the better part of the next decade in jail while Eli went on a quest to murder every EO he could find.
Neither Eli or Victor come across as good people, and I am a fan of it. Victor is selfish and is ultimately driven by his obsession with Eli. His journey to get powers was largely based around his need to be an equal to Eli, and his subsequent revenge has him pointing all of his attention on him.
Conversely, Eli’s motivation is one of a twisted self-righteousness. He thinks he’s been given this power by God and he is doing good work, even as he’s going around and murdering people who have not done anything wrong. He doesn’t really seem interested in Victor so much as the idea of what he represents.
Other characters are more sympathetic. Both of Victor’s companions, the small child and the thug with a heart of gold, are lovely people that help temper his darker impulses and provide a little levity and perspective to the two leads.
The world building is interesting and there’s a feel to it like this is the start of a larger universe. I don’t know if that’s the intent, but with the way the exposition goes into the theory and detail of how someone becomes an EO and why their powers manifest one way or another, it feels like setup for a much larger series than the one that’s being told right now.
The narrative is also a little jumpy. It flickers back and forth in time, telling many distinct stories on top of one another to give you a fuller picture of everything that is happening. It makes sense together, though there are moments where a chapter will end and you’ll have to wait a while before the action picks back up again.
Overall, though, I really liked the story. Definitely worth at least checking out if you like superhero stuff on the darker side.
Today in I have had this on my TBR list forever and I’m finally getting around to reading it, Dying for a Living finally made it! The more I’m going through this list, the more I’m realizing I should have gotten to more of these books sooner.
The story follows a woman named Jesse, a death replacement agent with a very particular ability. A small percentage of the population has a rare genetic ability to survive death and to stop someone else from dying. Jesse works for the NRD, an organization that arranges this service to the highest paying clients who they have found are going to die soon. Unfortunately, Jesse gets set up to be killed permanently on a job and the story follows her and her friends as they try to figure out why, and who. And, of course, her past comes back to haunt her.
Jesse is a total dick and I love it. I have a thing for protagonists who are terrible as people, but who are that way for ultimately understandable reasons. She’s under stress for the entire story, and deals with it by lashing out at the people around her, being sarcastic, and making poor choices. It all feels very realistic, especially as you get into her backstory and how she came to be in this position in the first place.
And now I’m going to talk about the bisexual love triangle. I never felt that it intruded on the narrative, but that I have thoughts about it as a whole is a pretty good sign. Namely, Ally deserves someone much better than Jesse, let Jesse just be with the bland but also kind of an asshole Lane.
Overall, it was a really fun story, even though the ending felt a little… well, given that this is a series I guess it had to end that way, but I would have liked a little more consequence at the end. I still liked it and the rest of the series looks like it has a lot of great promise to it.
I’m finally reading again! It took a bit for me to get back into it, but I’ve made my list of books in my TBR and I’m going to start working through all of them. To start off, Graveyard Shift by Angela Roquet, a book I have two copies of with different covers because I have been meaning to read it for that long.
The story follows Lana, a reaper who is passable at her job. She was created as a reaper and it’s a fine way to make a living, even if the pay isn’t that good and she is more inclined to bend a few rules if she likes a soul than follow them to the letter. She’s a fun character, with the personality of someone who’s sunk into complacency but doesn’t really want to be there. And when she learns that she’s going to get a promotion1 she looks at it with suspicion rather than as an opportunity.
The promotion leads into the bigger story, to the quest from Grim, the first reaper who acts now as their boss, and learning that Lana isn’t all she thought she was. She gets put on a quest and has to navigate some political intrigue2 in order to find the right soul to keep Eternity from devolving into a civil war.
Overall, it’s a really interesting concept and I really liked the way the world worked as a whole. The idea is Eternity is where all souls go, and they are shuffled off into their respective afterlives by the reapers. Every possible historical afterlife, from Heaven and Hell to Nirvana are all real, and they need souls to maintain their power in Eternity. During the story, for example, the Egyptian realm has been losing power and Grim’s been shuffling more souls off to them to appease them.
The story worked really well to reveal how the universe worked. You get a good look at the political climate of the world, of what does and does not register to who as an issue, and the worldbuilding really does work well in the narrative. I’ll admit to being more enamoured by the universe over some of the subplots,3 but the universe is just so much fun.
Also, Lana gets two giant hellhounds pups and I love those babies.
I would recommend checking it out. I really enjoyed the story, the world, and am thinking about checking out the next in the series.
I picked upUrban Heroesback at Creative Ink, but I heard TJ Lockwood reading from the book back at VCon. Side note, if you ever get the chance it’s worth going to see her read. I think she’s doing that more often now, and I came in knowing just as much as the first chapter reveals about the book. Which is to say not a whole lot, but I was interested.
The story follows a woman named Cal as she navigates a world where humans and androids are not so peacefully coexisting so much as humans are distrustful of androids after an incident. Complicating the ethics of the matter is the fact that humans are often cybernetic ally enhanced to the point where the lines between the two are conceivably blurred. After rescuing a young girl, she and her partner, Axton, are on the run from the life Cal once had. You don’t really get the details of why they’re running for a while.
The book does feel in large part like it is a middle book, which apparently it is. The girl they rescue doesn’t play a very large part in this story, but there’s hints dropped that there’s something special about her. Cal’s father is only mentioned and never shown. Her friend, Bree, mentions that she has allies but we only really see one of them. This whole story seems to be setting up Cal on a path to redemption and this book focuses largely on the narrative of that first step.
I particularly liked her usage of Canada, which is a weird thing to latch onto. The city names are used in the same way I’ve seen American cities used in other media, with the expectation that the names mean something and are enough to orient you. It feels natural and uses Canada in the way I wish it would be used in more media. As a Canadian, it just makes me happy.
Overall, I really enjoyed the story. The world and the way it unfolded throughout the narrative was interesting, and the story kept me engaged. I could sympathize with Cal’s choices1 and I liked the dilemmas that it came up. The sci fi is much more urban, and the focus stays very much on the characters, which I’m a fan of. If you like the sound of any of that, definitely check it out.
Oh hey, the plot kicked back in! They’re actively doing things to find Glendower again, which is the main thrust of the series! Find the old dead Welsh king and then… something. Have a wish granted, gain is favour, I’m still not actually sure what they think is going to happen or why it will happen when they find the tomb.
This book tries very hard to give Blue an arc outside of being in love with Gansey and it doesn’t quite land for me. It’s a lot of things happening to her to try and give her other things to do. Her mother is missing and it is something that she has to deal with. It could have been an arc but it kept feeling more like something she was reacting to than something she was part of.
And they gave Gansey a magic which no. He was going to be the one non-powered character bringing them together in the quest by his personality and his drive to do all this, but giving him the power to command things as an actual power tosses that out.
Adam and Ronan are fine. Adam is still a dick and being portrayed as not a dick. Ronan realizes he likes Adam in this book but, as he’s a male character, he had his character arc established outside of this relationship and he gets to have his own story that isn’t dependent on the love story and guys I do not care about Blue anymore and it makes me sad.
So let’s talk a little about the plot and structure of the series as a whole. Each of these books could conceivably be about a single character’s arc and how other people interact with that arc to further their own larger narrative. The first being Adam, second Ronan, this one Blue, and fourth will be about Gansey. Of those four book, only one has not been about the hunt for Glendower, which makes the beats of the series a little weird.
If there had been one more book in the series, I think the pacing might have been better. As it is, Blue Lily, Lily Blue feels like it was trying to cram in a lot of setup for the climax.1 There were new things introduced, including characters, that don’t really get much time to land properly. Like Henry Cheng and the “Vancouver crowd” which I will go on about in the next book.2
Unfortunately, the pattern of Glendower, something else, Glendower, something else, Glendower couldn’t be maintained because it is only four books. If Noah were a more prominent character instead of being relegated to having as much screentime as an animal sidekick, it could have been a bit better paced as a series, but ultimately this is what we get. Which is fine. I liked it a lot more the first time around, though.
Dream Thieves is the second book in the Raven Cycle and I can see why Aiden1 likes it so much. It’s all about Ronan, and it’s also a book where the plot and the characters feel like they are actually connected to one another in a substantial way. Mostly because this is a book where Ronan is the plot.
Which means I actually have something to talk about other than structure.
Ronan develops into an interesting character in this one, not only because he has developed magic powers. He gains some depth in the form of his backstory, in the form of how he deals with stress, in the form of how he deals with success. We see what he cares about and what he doesn’t care about. And all of that builds him into a wonderful character that I was happy to follow through the majority of the book, even if he has a questionable choice in crushes.
Weird thing is that I liked Adam a lot more the first time I read this series. Adam played a much larger role in the first book, with his quest out of his abusive home life, but this book left me realizing that he’s a dick. Yes, growing up around abuse makes people process the world differently and he may not be able to relate to people in typical ways, I know. But there’s a constant sense that he sees himself as lesser than the people around him and that makes him better than them that permeates through his perspective. Not to mention that scene between him and Blue, which plays out all too familiarly to any female who had male friends who expected that their friendships meant more than they did.
This is also where I really notice that Blue is the only female voice in the story, really. There’s mention of her being a raging feminist that is only forgivable because they are teenagers and eye rolling in pretty much any other context. There are things that happen to her where I really feel that lack of female peers around her because there were conversations that really should have happened that never happen. Does she really have no one to talk to about boys? Not one? Hell, not even her mother or cousin or one of the other women in the house who could have pointed out any of these things to? At the very least to talk to about what happened with Adam? Or anything else?
The love story kicks in and I do not care you guys. Romance is not my thing. I always feel bad when I stop caring about female characters, but their plots always seem to devolve into something related to romance and Blue is no different. In the first book, she was sort of seeing Adam, but in this book she falls in love and the prophecy that she’ll kiss her true love and he’ll die develops a firm target. Gansey, who we knew would be her true love in the first book, is now someone she has fallen for. And just… I stopped caring about both of them in an instant.
Gansey, though. Let’s have a moment to talk about why he’s so hard for me to sink into despite him still having another plot around him. I don’t know why he wants to find Glendower. He has a lot of reasons. He thinks he’s not dead because of the grace of Glendower. He has an intellectual curiosity about him. He’s got a weird obsession. It’s about the pursuit of him more than what the end goal is, and when there’s no real end goal, I have a lot of trouble hooking into the character’s motivations.
However, this book is in large part about Ronan. And Ronan is fantastic. I know I’m being a little harsh about the rest of the characters, but it overall is a pretty entertaining read.
I read this series before and I’m revisiting it now. I’m realizing that I’ve got different feelings about it this time than I did the first time, which happens. I’m looking at the formatting of the book for one1 and paying more attention to the structure and how the series itself is constructed. Which is interesting, loose, and a little on the hybrid pantser/plot side of things.
So the book itself is about Gansey. The back of it claims it’s about Blue, but she is honestly treated as an observer to the series, watching as three out of the four boys go about their lives with an easy out if she ever doesn’t want to deal with it anymore. She has the most interesting setting around her, with her psychic mother and her being a battery for the supernatural rather than having any psychic abilities herself, and she wants to have an experience that will make her feel more like the rest of her family.
Gansey is the centre of it all, but also the least interesting part in the cast of everyone else. He is a rich kid looking for Glendower, an long dead Welsh king that has for some reason been buried somewhere near Henrietta, the town this all takes place in. He and his friends go to Algionby Academy, and the book is less about this story than it is about the individual characters.
Which works well for me, because some of the individual characters are far more interesting than this idea of wake up dead king and he’ll grant you a wish. Ronan is a main focus, though he is never a perspective character, for instance. Whether this is to shroud him in mystery or because he just doesn’t have much to do besides set up how others see him in this book, I’m not sure, but just using this book to establish the resident badass with a cute pet raven and tragic backstory is fine by me.
And then there’s Adam, who really needs a bit of a trigger warning on him. He’s also got a tragic backstory, but you actually get to see it unfold in this book. He’s a poor kid on a scholarship and working many jobs to cover the rest of the cost and comes from an abusive household. You get to see how that unfolds over the course of the book and probably should come with a trigger warning for anyone who may find the scenario familiar.
The main plot running through it turns out to be about the sidekick character, Noah, who is just… there. I love him, but narratively he’s serving as motivation to move the plot forward, and structurally the plot only serves to make the characters interact with one another. It’s not ultimately treated with as much importance as the individual characters and what they are doing.
Which is to say, I still really like the book, but I’m having a lot more fun this time around taking apart the story on a structural level and examining the pieces of it. Bring to decide if it was really meant to be four books for the series, or if it was made that way because of editorial demand. This book is, in large part, just set up for the rest of the series, with more time spent establishing where the characters came from and where they stand as opposed to telling the core story about the kids trying to find the old king. And I’m wondering if that’s because she wanted to make the series as long as she could manage, or if it was actually because that’s how long the story she wanted to tell was.
