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The Mongoliad: Book Three (The Foreworld Saga)

By: Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear, Mark Teppo, Nicole Galland, Erik Bear, Joseph Brassey, Cooper Moo

Disclaimer: I received an Advanced Reader’s Copy of this book to review. As is my policy with books that I receive for review, if I don’t like it, I don’t review it.

You might want to read my reviews of Mongoliad: Book One and Mongoliad: Book Two before moving on.  I don’t do spoilers, but it might make more sense to start at the beginning.  In the reviews for both of the first two books, I make mention of how the multiple, seemingly disjointed, plot lines bothered me.  And, in the review of Book Two, I closed by saying how it would be a sad thing to see the whole series fail if those plot lines weren’t brought together in some way.  In book three, the plot lines did finally merge.  While that, in and of itself, doesn’t make the series a success, it will certainly help it.

Much like in Book Two, it took me a while to get back into the story.  Book Three is nearly twice as large as Book Two, so even the 50-100 pages it took me to reacquaint myself with the characters and plot lines left me with plenty of book left to enjoy the story, and the ways that the authors finally tied all the lines together.  It was never dull.  In fact, being the last in this series of the saga, it was filled with plenty of action as the different plot lines were brought to a conclusion.  It becomes obvious, at the end of the book, that, while the series might be over, the saga is not.  We’ll be seeing far more of this world before the authors are done with it.

Throughout the series, the writing has been well done.  Despite having seven different authors contributing to the novels, it’s impossible to tell who wrote what, or notice any differences in style.  I can only imagine that is a hard task for even two authors.  I can’t imagine just how hard it is to do when there are seven authors contributing.  It’s either a testament to the aptitude of their editors, or to the skill of the authors themselves.  Either way, well done!

Overall, the series is wonderfully crafted.  I had a few moments where I got lost, or wasn’t entirely sure who the character was, but once I got my bearings, I fell right back into the story and was easily lost in it.  I’ve long been a fan of medieval fiction (must be all the Arthurian legend I read), and have read a few other stories set in the Mongolian Steppes, and the way the series melds and molds those two worlds together is very nice.

If you’re a fan of epic fiction, or historical fiction (which tends to be epic), you’ll be doing yourself a disservice by not reading this series.  It may soon be remembered as the Wheel of Time of historical fiction.

• The Mongoliad: Book Three (The Foreworld Saga)
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Tears in Rain

By: Rosa Montero

Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book to review. As is my policy with books that I receive for review, if I don’t like it, I don’t review it.

When I read the blurb on the back of the cover, and it said “Inspired by the movie Blade Runner”, I knew it was a book that I needed to read.  I’ve always been a fan of Blade Runner, although I haven’t read the book (don’t hate me), and so something inspired by the movie, that was about bionic clones called replicants, sounded like it was off to a good start.

Set in a future world where political and social lines have been broken, redrawn, and then broken and redrawn again, we are led into the story by detective Bruna Husky.  Montero does an excellent job of keeping the pace of the book moving, while filling the world she’s created.  It’s a world, significantly advanced from ours to be unrecognizable, and yet has many parallels.  Corruption, greed, and crime still fill the streets and back offices.  When a replicant shows up at Husky’s door and tries to kill her, it sets Husky off on a case that could affect the course of several nations.

Tears in Rain was originally published in Montero’s native Spain, and her native language, Spanish.  It’s been brought to us by Amazon’s amazoncrossing imprint, and translated.  While I found a few places where the translation didn’t come across as well as it probably should have, the majority of it was very good.  It’s hard to tell how much of the writing, and style is Monteros and how much is in the translation, but it came out very well.

If you’re a fan of Blade Runner, and would like a quick foray into a similar world, give Tears in Rain a try.  It’s a good detective novel on it’s own, and the addition of the Science Fiction elements only makes it better, in my opinion.

• Tears in Rain
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Devil’s Gate

By: F.J. Lennon

Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book to review. As is my policy with books that I receive for review, if I don’t like it, I don’t review it.

I’ve recently found myself being dragged into paranormal books.  There’s something about them that I really like.  Perhaps it’s the fact that I’m a huge fan of Stephen King, and a fan of science fiction and fantasy novels.  Paranormal books seem to bring the psychological thriller aspects of a good King novel together with the fantastical elements of scifi/fantasy novels.  Devil’s Gate started off a bit rough.  Normally, there’s a big event that drags the plot and story into full gear right away, but there really wasn’t here.  The main character, Kane, is an up and coming rock star who just happens to be a retired ghost hunter.  Well, he thinks he’s retired until his partner shows up with a deal too lucrative to pass up.

Once the novel gets rolling and you get into the plot, it’s a fast moving book.  There’s plenty of action, and plenty of paranormal activity.  Lennon does a really good job of melding some real occult history into the story to give the events some credence.  If there’s one thing that continued to drag the novel down a bit, it was the attitude of Kane.  Is that important?  Well, he is the main character.  But, I have to discount that feeling a bit, since this is a novel in a series of novels about this character.  It isn’t the first novel in the Kane Price series, so it’s terribly likely that I’m missing some of the backstory on Kane.  Perhaps knowing some of that might have given me a different perspective on Kane.

The writing of Devil’s Gate is tight and easy to read, which makes it a pretty quick read.  The characters are believable, and the research that Lennon has put into the setting and occult elements is evident.  If you’re up for a good paranormal book, you should give Devil’s Gate a try.

• Devil's Gate: A Kane Pryce Novel
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Bloodman

By : Robert Pobi

As my disclaimer, I did receive an ARC of this book from the publisher for review.  As with any book I receive for review from an author or publisher, if I don’t have anything good to say about it, I just don’t review it.  If I buy the book, all bets are off.

As you will probably guess from the title, Bloodman is a book deeply settled into the crime/horror genre of books.  Not exactly my usual reading fodder, but, as I told the publicist that sent me the book, I cut my adult reading teeth on very near the entire Stephen King library, so it’s not out of my realm of reading.  Just not in the Sci/Fi and Fantasy realms that I’ve been reading more of lately.

The book takes us along with Jake Cole, Special FBI investigator, on a trip home.  To a home he hasn’t been to in 33 years, to take care of a father who has somehow set himself on fire and jumped through a plate glass window.  And, honestly, that’s about as normal as the book gets.  Shortly after arriving at his fathers home, he Cole receives a call from a local sheriff who needs his help with a fresh homicide.  I can’t tell you much more than that without getting spoilerish, but I can say that the story doesn’t leave you hanging.  The pace is quick.  All told, the entire book is over in the matter of a couple of days, but I found myself stopping several times when I realized just how much had happened in just a few short hours of story time.

There are a couple of bits that I found to be “off”.  Things that I thought an investigator of Cole’s obvious talent wouldn’t overlook.  Or at least, I didn’t think so.  Later, most of those things turn out to be plot devices, though.  Perhaps Pobi could have found a way to make them less obvious?  On the other side of the coin, there are several plot devices that he make so obvious that you find yourself waiting to see what part it is that they play in the story.

I won’t comment much on the writing itself, since the book was an ARC and probably had a bit of editing done between the version I had and the version Amazon has.  Pobi’s writing style is quick and concise.  He manages to dump a fair bit of necessary information on the reader without meandering into the long winded expository passages that some authors seem to favor.

Finally, I have to make a small comment on the ending of the book.  I’m going to attempt to be as spoiler free as I can, but just a warning.

If you’re like me, you’ll read the majority of this book and fall right into the plot twist that Pobi has set up for you.  My advice? If you’re even half way interested in the book, do yourself the favor of reading it all the way to the end.  Especially the last 10 pages!  In my mind, it took the book from a ho-hum readable to a good readable.  Looking back at it, I probably saw it coming a bit, but Pobi did a good job of directing the reader away from the same conclusion and then springs it at the very last.

Well done, and worth a read.

• Bloodman
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The Mongoliad: Book One (The Foreworld Saga)

By: Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear, Mark Teppo, E.D. deBirmingham, Erik Bear, Joseph Brassey, and Cooper Moo

Disclaimer: I received an Advanced Reader’s Copy of this book to review.  As is my policy with books that I receive for review, if I don’t like it, I don’t review it.

The Mongoliad is a “saga about the complex, bloody history of Western martial arts.” Or, at least, that’s what the press release I received with the book says.  My suspicion is that the saga part that includes the history of western martial arts will be a bit clearer as the series continues.  While there are certainly some elements of it in the novel, it is not much more than a few passing details during battles.

A few things bothered me about the book.  First, it’s a collaboration between 7 authors.  I’m not sure exactly how that works, but it seems like that would be a classic case of too many cooks in the kitchen.  The second thing may actually be a result of that, I don’t know.  The method of delivery of the story is somewhat intermittent.  It jumps back and forth from the viewpoint of the Mongol side of things to the Christian side of things and then, within those sides, it jumps from one character to another.  A ways into the book, I suddenly found myself reading a section from the viewpoint of a character that hadn’t had a section before.  Which, if he were a new character, wouldn’t have been so jarring.  But, he had been a character from the beginning of the book.  The next thing is more of a personal pet peeve.  It annoys me when a book that is part of a series doesn’t have an “ending” of it’s own to stand upon.  The ending of this novel isn’t really an ending at all.  None of the plot points are wrapped up, and the reader is simply faced with a blank page and the story pauses until the next novel.

Annoyances and bothers aside, the book is fairly well written.  I think I would have been left wondering had it not been, considering there were 7 authors to contribute tot he writing.  For an ARC, I actually found very few typos, which is a bit of a surprise.  Usually, an ARC is loaded up with typos and lost sentences.  Kudos to the editor that edited the ARC.

I found the characters to be believable, dialogue was well thought out, and very rarely felt out of place with the characters.  The plot lines follow well, and served to drag me right into the novel.  It is highly readable, for a book of nearly 450 pages.  It rarely is dry, and isn’t loaded up with momentum killing monologues and remembrances.  It’s well worth a read, and I’ll be looking forward to the next one in the series.

I’m With Fatty

By: Edward Ugel

I’m With Fatty is the story of Edward Ugel coming to the realization that he’s let himself get out of control.  His relationship with food, and, with life in general, has gotten out of control.  A trip to the doctor and a resulting trip to a sleep clinic results in a CPAP machine, and an epiphany of sorts.  He then decides that he’s going to lose 50 pounds in 50 weeks.  It’s unclear whether he decides to write the book before, or after, he decides that he needs to lose the weight.

Parts of the book read a lot like they are excerpts from a personal diary, while other parts are clearly him recollecting the events.  Which is part of the problem I had with the book.  The personal diary parts are written in first person while the other parts are written in a past tense first person.  There’s no clear delineation between one and the other, and I found myself having to shift mental gears often as the tense changed.  The other thing that I found a bit disappointing in the book is that there isn’t really a clear ending to it.  I’m sure that Ugel underwent some pretty extensive changes, personally, during the 50 weeks, but he doesn’t cover them much.  He tells us all about his failings.  But, at the end of the book, he goes straight from a failing to the end.  Maybe that makes it more real for some, but, for me, it just made it a book about 50 weeks in his life.

If the book was meant to be inspirational, I think it failed.   It is a good book in that Ugel does a great job of covering the reasons behind how he got to where he was, and the struggles that he went through as he “recovered” from his condition.  The tense changes, and the lack of any clear resolution (still a requirement in non-fiction, I think.) make the book an average book, at best.

Pharmacology
By: Christopher Herz

Somewhere around 1993, the digital revolution was happening. The internet was starting it’s meteoric rise to the top, and headed for everyone’s homes. Pharmacology is set in the San Francisco of 1993, where the world is about to change. Herz writes a powerful character who’s trying to find her way, away from home, in a world that’s changing about as fast as she is. The book is written in a diary-like first person, that actually was a bit off-putting to me at first. As I got into it a bit more, it felt much more natural for the story. We follow Sarah, the POV character, through her life in the city as she finds herself, and finds out how much she can go through.

The writing is well done, with only a few minor things that made me pause. The language that Sarah uses is very difficult to get the hang of, but with the diary style, I think it was pretty necessary. Not many of us would write with perfect English in a diary. We’d do just as Sarah does and stick to the hipsterish jargon that’s peppered throughout. It’s an interesting story, delving into the pharmaceutical industry, and life as a young adult. On thing’s for sure, it’ll make you think a bit about some of the things that you do.

Herz, himself, is a bit of a indie-author success story. He self-published his first book, and hand-sells the copies of it as he walks about New York City. At some point, he caught the eye of an editor ad Amazon Encore and they picked him up for Pharmacology. He’s a big advocate of storytelling as well, holding a weekly skype meeting with a class of school children where they create ideas and tell stories based on the ideas of their classmates.

Pharmacology reminds me a bit of a Max Barry book, full of discontent and, in the end, a bit of eye-opening. I wasn’t sure what to think of the book when I started, but found that I couldn’t put it down after a while. A good read, especially if you like your stories with a side of distopian paranoia.

disclaimer: I was sent an ARC copy of this from the PR agency. As is my policy, review copies only get reviews if I liked the book enough to find something good to say about it. If I don’t like review copies, I don’t review them. Simple as that.

Nascence: 17 Stories that failed and what they taught me

By: Tobias Buckell

When most authors have a story that failed, they bury it somewhere deep in a drawer or closet somewhere.  What they most assuredly don’t do, is bring it out into the daylight and publish it for everybody to read.  Thank goodness Buckell isn’t one of those authors.  Nascence is an incredible journey through 17 of Buckell’s short stories that failed.  For each story in the collection he gives a short foreward explaining what it is that he was trying to do, and how the story failed.

What I found most interesting, is that for several of the stories, he has a second and third attempt at the same story and we can easily see how Buckell’s writing improved from one to the next as well as how the story evolved along with it.  It’s not often that we, as readers and authors, get that kind of view into the progress of an idea.  I won’t comment on the writing itself here, as Buckell does plenty of that (sometimes a bit too critically, in my opinion) in the collection, itself.

If you’re a fan of Buckell, you won’t be disappointed by this venture into his older works and the evolution of some of the elements that appear in the Xenowealth series.  If you’re an author, I think this belongs on the digital bookshelf right along-side the “how-to-write” books you’ve already got.  It’s a rare peek behind the curtains of short story creation and author evolution.

Pick it up from Buckell’s online store, or at Amazon.

Transfection

By: David Gaughran

Tranfection is a short story with lots of plot packed into it.  In fact, I think it could have easily been novella length or longer, and maybe one day Gaughran will do that for us.  It’s a story about a scientist that works with Genetically Modified foods, and a discovery he makes during his research.  I can’t say much more about the plot without giving half the story away, so I’ll stop there.  Gaughran has a talent for creating that feeling of suspense that is so very necessary in the short story format.  He also has a talent for the unwritten plot.  Several times in the story, there are parts of the plot that weren’t expressed, but that came through just as clear as if they had been through the way that Gaughran delivered the response to those plot points.  It’s an old-school science fiction story that reminds me of the stories we used to get through Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits.

It’s a great read, and well worth the affordable price on Amazon.

Mercury Rises

By: Robert Kroese

Disclaimer: I was sent this book as a review copy.  As is my policy with all review copies, I don’t review them unless I liked them in some way.  If I don’t like them, I don’t review them.  Simple as that.

Mercury Rises is the second book in a series of books about an angel named Mercury.  He’s a bit of a wayward angel.  Down on his luck, you might say, eternally.  I haven’t read the first book in the series, Mercury Falls, but I don’t think that’s actually necessary in order to understand what’s going on in Mercury Rises, as Kroese does a good job of filling in the backstory without it becoming intrusive to the story.  This was one of those books that I had a hard time getting into.  Part of that, I think, was the ensemble cast that took some introducing.  Maybe that would have been lessened by having read the first book.  Maybe not.  Quickly, though, as the plot lines began to form, and the action picked up, I was drawn into the story and it read fairly quickly.  The writing isn’t the best I’ve ever read, but it is far from the worst.  And, don’t let that keep you from reading the book.  Especially if you’re a fan of authors like Terry Pratchett.  I found the story and humor in the book to be very similar to Pratchett’s.  Of course, I’m not a big fan of Pratchett, so that means that I am not really a big fan of this book either.  More a problem with taste than with anything else, and entirely my fault rather than the book or author.

One other small reader beware here.  The book is about an angel.  As you can probably imagine, there are other angels in the book, and some biblical themes.  And, it’s a satirical humor that Kroese uses.  There were at least two places in the book where my more Christian leanings were a bit off-put by the way the story went.  But, like I said, it’s a satirical piece, so remember that and it isn’t as bad as all that.  Fair warning though.

Overall, the book was decent.  Like I said, I’m not a big fan of similar books, so this one didn’t do all that much for me, but I can see fans of this type of fiction really loving this book.  You can pick it up at Amazon.