The Book of Three

4 out of 5 Covers

The Chronicles of Prydain are a much-loved children’s book series by Lloyd Alexander, and reading through them it is easy to see why.  The series is inspired by the legends of Wales (something the author came across while researching his first book, Time Cat).  Set roughly during the Middle Ages, Prydain is a magical land threatened by the forces of King Arawn, the Death Lord.  This first book establishes the world very well and introduces the main characters of the series.

The protagonist is Taran, recently promoted to assistant pig-keeper.  But this is no ordinary pig; Hen Wen is an oracular pig.  When the Horned King comes for the pig, Hen Wen runs off and Taran seeks after her, setting him on a course of adventure that forces him to realize that his dreams of glory don’t match up with reality. 

Along the way, Taran gathers a delightful cast of friends, such as the animal-like Gurgi; Princess Eilonwy, who always speaks her mind; Fflewddur Fflam, a minstrel whose harp strings break whenever he tells a lie; and the cantankerous Doli from the underground kingdom of magic folk.  All are delightful and well-rounded characters, especially Eilonwy; the story really comes alive when she is introduced.

The story itself is episodic in nature.  Each chapter brings a new threat or a new location, so it is milieu story exploring the land then really following a plot.  But the episodes are short so the reader can never really be bored with any location.  And the threat of the Horned King hangs over the whole story, driving it to the exciting conclusion.

If only Taran wasn’t so much of a pill through most of the book.  It is one thing to be headstrong, but to be uncompromisingly so becomes irritating.   Still, it is worth putting up with his temperament to explore the rich world of Prydain and reach the exciting conclusion.

The Last Dragonslayer

3 ½ out of 5 Covers

Jasper Fforde’s new series for young adults, The Chronicles of Kazam, features Jennifer Strange, a young 

woman who runs Kazam, an apartment complex for wizards in the kingdom of Hereford.  But there are problems in Kazam as magic is dying out, which means that means that none of the wizards can earn money to pay rent.

Things appear to look up when Jennifer is named, by prophecy, the last dragonslayer.  But this introduces Jennifer to a whole slew of new problems.  The dragon lives on a special reserve that only the dragonslayer can enter.  As the kingdom of Hereford is short on land, this means that the king anxiously awaits the new land that slaying the last dragon would make available, as well as the taxes he could charge.  But neighboring kingdoms are also interested in the land, leading to potential war.

These are a lot of heady problems to be dealt with and is evidence of Fforde’s talent at world building.  But the world building comes at the cost of characterization.  A lot of secondary characters are flat.  Beyond Jennifer, very few of the characters come alive.  There are also some problems with pacing, as it becomes quite frantic towards the climax. 

Jasper Fforde is a quite talent writer, but he hasn’t cracked the nut of young adult medium on this first effort. 

The Woman Who Died a Lot

4 out of 5 Covers

Jasper Fforde is one of the most wildly inventive authors on the market today.  This marks the seventh book in his Thursday Next series, which focues on the titular literary detective.  While the focus has been on literature, the world of Thursday Next in one where anything can happen: time travel, cloning, journeys into books.  As the title may in imply, this volume sees Thursday die a lot.

I thought the first four books in the series were fantastic, especially two and three.  However, books five and six showed a distinct drop in quality, with a lack of enthusiasm and plot threads left dangling.  I very glad that this book shows an improvement, though not quite to the same level as those earliest volumes.

As usual, there are a lot of plot elements: Thursday getting a new job at the local library, tracking down rare books, dealing with the multinational corporation that wants to kill her.  Then her son is fated to kill someone while her daughter has to develop a shield before God smites their town.  Oh, and she keeps dying a lot.

Fforde is an expert at world building, so that all these fantastic elements make sense and are resolved in often unexpected and delightful ways.  Though not always; some solutions are overly convoluted or make use of obscure information.  The characterization is rich and the prose is often a joy to read. 

The one real problem I have is all the dangling plotline that I’m still waiting to be resolved.  Some are from previous books, but the lack of resolution creates a source of anxiety.  But no matter what, I still look forward to the next Thursday Next book.

Who Could That Be At This Hour?

All the Wrong Questions Book 1: “Who Could That Be At This Hour?”

By Lemony Snicket

3 out of 5 covers

All the Wrong Questions is a new series that reportedly serves as a prequel to Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, though there is little in this first book to mark how the two series may be linked.  “Who Could That Be At This Hour?” introduces the readers to Lemony Snicket, an detective-in-training apprenticed to the worst detective in the company as they travel the poor town of Stain’d-by-the-Sea to help recover the missing statue of the Bombinating Beast.

One of the links between the two series is evident in the author’s continued use of the same linguistic flourishes, such as defining difficult words.  That worked very well in the Victorian stylings of A Series of Unfortunate Events, where it allowed the narrator to highlight the plight of the Baudelaire orphans. But it does not mesh well with the straightforward, hard-boiled narration of the detective Lemony Snicket.  This results in a dissonance between the expectation and the execution of the story.

I would say that this dissonance exists only in the expectation of the reader, but it seems to extend to the author as well.  There is a struggle to find a balance between his expressionistic excesses and the type of story for about half the book.  Balance is eventually achieved and the author’s style improves through a series of ludicrous adventures until the story just comes to an end without any resolution.

As the first book in a series one cannot expect everything to be resolved.  But there should be a resolution that leads to more complications that would be explored in later volumes.  Instead all plot threads are left dangling.

Despite all the flaws, Lemony Snicket is an excellent narrator and the the winning grace of the book lies in the author’s whimsical use of language.

Gods and Warriors

Gods and Warriors

By Michelle Paver

3 out of 5 Covers

Gods and Warriors is the first book in a new series by the author of the very good Chronicles of Ancient Darkness. While that series was set in the Stone Age, this one moves forward to Bronze Age Greece.  The author’s meticulous research shines through, but everything from the title on down has a certain generic quality.

Part of this stems from the familiarity of several elements.  There is a prophecy that drives the initial action, a boy who can communicate with an animal, and a girl that he initially doesn’t get along with.  These exact same elements appear in The Chronicles of Ancient Darkness.  They even both start en medias res with the protagonist being hunted, though in this case it is by a band of warriors called the Crows instead of a demon bear.

The protagonist is Hylas, a goatherd who doesn’t know why he is being hunted.  While the reason is eventual explained, there is a feeling that there is a deeper meaning that is still obscured.  Hylas has been separated from his younger sister and is desperate to get back to her, though his journey takes him further away to the Island of the Goddess.  He is helped there by a dolphin which he names Spirit and there he meets Pirra, the daughter of a priestess who ran away from an arranged marriage. 

The story is plagues by coincidence.  Hylas just happens to come across the macguffin, he just happens to come across Spirit and Pirra, there just happens to be someone else hunted by the Crows on the island.  Couple that with the fact that none of the characters are particularly pleasant, so wrapped up as they are in their own personal problems that they can barely recognize that working together would be better for survival, and you end up with a lot of artificial drama and generic problems.

The strength of the story lies in the author’s secondary purpose, which is to bring the culture and history of the Bronze Age to life.  Paver effortlessly weaves in facts about the lifestyle and religion of the people of the Greek Islands.  Some of the best moments are when she touches on these aspects.

I greatly enjoyed The Chronicles of Ancient Darkness, even though it featured some of the same flaws as this book.  I expected more from Gods and Warriors. The story just needed some more thought put into it.