Category Archives: Reviews

The Shannara Chronicles – a review

Posted by Lindsay Kitson on

I’m recovering from a cold here, but I recently finished catching up on the Shannara chronicles second season.

I never read the books when I was younger, so I went into watching this show with no real expectations other than that it was going to be some high fantasy YA stuff. But I was game for something light.

It’s set in a wold that’s clearly supposed to be extremely distant future earth, judging from the ruins of a collapsed civilization reminiscent of ours. Laid on top of that is a world of elves and trolls and humans battling demons and warlocks. The elves have a magic tree that keeps the demons bound in their own realm, but of course the tree is dying and the characters must go off on a quest to save the tree and keep the demons where they are, all the while trying to work through their adorable teenaged love triangle.

It is light. It’s a steaming trash heap of YA fantasy tropes.

I love it.

There’s something about campiness when they just go all in and don’t try to hide the campiness. It’s like Xena Warrior princess for the new generation, only where the bisexuality is right out in the open and not just hinted at in subtext. I feel like they just took all those nineties shows – Xena, Hercules, Sinbad, etc, and studied them to figure out why they stayed on the air so friggin’ long, and updated the format for the modern audience who doesn’t have the patience for filler episodes and loves the story arcs that take a whole season to tell.

The costumes look like cosplays. Well constructed cosplays, but cosplays nonetheless, that are constructed to look like some geek boy’s fantasy that he drew up for a video game or comic book and was never intended to be an actual practical outfit. Fake plastic boned corsets abound, and leather tube tops pass as adventuring gear. How do they move in those skintight leather pants? Must be magic. The ball gowns though – over the top delights.

I did note that while there was LGBT representation in the first season, there was far less POC representation. They did bring in more POC characters in the second season though, if you hold out for that, including a princess and her mother the queen of the human kingdom, which is extra awesome because black girls don’t get to be princesses often.

There wasn’t anything racy or coarse – I’d rate it PG, it would be perfectly suitable for a fairly young audience as long as you’re not one of those people who seems to think LGBT content is automatically adult only content. There was implied sex, but they drew the curtains at kissing.

It’s junk food for your brain, but sometimes you just want to eat garbage, and that’s ok.

Book Review: Updraft by Fran Wilde

Posted by Lindsay Kitson on

Spoiler alert: I freakin’ loved this book. Secondary world fantasy is my go-to subgenre, and anything to do with flying, even if it’s not explicitly aeroplanes will capture my interest, so I was already interested. When a friend read it and said it was amazing, I bumped it to the top of my reading list, and do not regret it.

It’s a fantastically imaginative world – there are towers that rise above the clouds that people live on, made of bone, and to move about, people fly on wings made of silk and bone. The clouds, as far as I can tell, never disperse, and no one flies below them on purpose – in fact, their methods of exacting capital punishment is to strip someone of their wings and drop them into the clouds. Their mythology is all about how they rose above the clouds and how terrible it was before that, and their religion uses the threat of stopping a tower from growing taller to keep it above the clouds to keep it’s people in line.

I’m a sucker for imaginative worlbuilding, so all of this drew me in. The main character is also dark skinned, so POC representation there. The original cover didn’t show the main character’s skin colour so much, but the newer cover that I got did, and I like that cover a lot better.

Plot wise, character wise – everything was great. I was thoroughly enthralled by the world, the characters, everything.

The other thing I wanted to mention is I have a sneaking suspicion that the author has at least some little bit of aviation experience. I can’t tell how much, and I haven’t been able to find anything in any of her bios that mentions aviation involvement. But there was little things – the sort of things that creep into my own writing because I can’t stop it, having the background in aviation that I do. The one that stands out was a mention of the rules of right-of-way being part of the flight training. But the whole idea of flight testing that comes up in the opening made me feel like even though the flight testing in the book doesn’t go the way flight testing does in aviation, the worldbuilding might have been guided or inspired by some knowledge of it.

But anyway, it was fantastic, I loved it, and you should definitely read it, and I’m really excited to start the next book.

Black Dove, White Raven by Elizabeth Wein – Book Review

Posted by Lindsay Kitson on

Usually my go to subgenre that I enjoy the most is secondary world fiction, because I like to be taken away to a different world. But often historical fiction set in far away countries can do the same thing, and this one takes you away to Ethiopia.

The main characters are a boy and a girl growing up together, who’s mothers, Rhoda and Delia, were the best of friends. Em’s father is largely absent, and Teo’s father died of an illness when he ws young, and so the two women have a sort of little combined family. The fact that one mother was white and the other was black never bothered them or their mothers, except when they reach America, where racism was what it was in the thirties.

The mothers are both pilots, and they’re a two-woman travelling flying circus, one flying, the other wing-walking. All this changes though after a bird strike kills Teo’s mother. That particular scene was heartbreaking to read – the  whole story is told in the form of journal entries, flight log entries and letters written by the two children, and that scene, as it’s written, it’s so brief, as if they’re too heartbroken to dwell on it or put in any more detail.

To honour Delia’s dream, Rhoda takes both children to Teo’s father’s home country, Ethiopia.

It’s one of those books that paint a beautiful picture of a beautiful place, and I got settled into loving their new home, Beehive Hill. The descriptions of Christianity as it exists in Ethiopia was facinating, because it like nothing we’re familiar with in the west. It’s a branch of Christianity that split off before Catholicism existed, so while everything we’re familiar with is a product Catholicism’s evolution, the Coptic church is just completely different.

At this point in history, slavery in Ethiopia still exists too, with complicated laws governing it. In order to prevent a sudden economic crisis, it’s being phased out slowly, via various ways of slaves being freed.

All the while, news on the radio foreshadows the Italian invasion of Ethiopia.

There’s something eerie about reading a story set in a place that exists though, and events that actually happened, even if the characters themselves are invented. I almost hate Italians now, have read about how they invaded Ethiopia, with the intention of pushing the Ethiopians out and take their land, to settle poor Italians there the way other countries settled their poor in the Americas. And how they used mustard gas to do it.

At about the half way point, I had to remind myself this is an author who kills main characters sometimes, so when the invasion started, I bit my lip to keep reading, not sure how many of these characters would make it out alive. I bet she feels magnanimous when she lets characters live.

Overall, wonderful book; if you like historical fiction and planes, definitely pick it up.

Sully – Movie Review

Posted by Lindsay Kitson on

I went to see Sully Saturday, and it was very good.

The most obvious comparison is the movie from a couple years ago, “Flight.” Both movies depict the NTSB setting their sights on crucifying pilots, even when they made the right decisions and saved people. Apparently, especially in Sully, the NTSB agents were made more into villains, for the sake of drama, and the real life investigators were considerably more objective and professional.

The big difference though is the captain in “Flight” was drunk and on cocaine in the cockpit, while Captain Sullenberger was much more like the pilots I know – diligent in being sure his faculties were not compromised while he had lives depending on him.

Other things I liked – the flight attendants were played by women who looked like actual flight attendants, not models. They looked like they might be in their forties, and not Charlize Theron fourties. Actual real people.

I liked how, when he’s being lauded as a hero, Sully acknowledges the importance of the role the rest of the crew played, including the flight attendants, who he listed by name in that scene.

When you’re doing a movie that’s trying to stay true to the original events, I imagine it can be hard to squeak in more female characters, and so very often. Obviously it wouldn’t seem right to gender swap the pilots or flight attendants, who all fit the stereotypes of pilot = male, flight attendant = female. I’m willing to bet there was likely no women at the front of the room in the NTSB hearing through, but they stuck one in anyway. Those NTSB agents are apparently made up – that’s where the movie takes the most dramatic license to up the suspense, and rather than vilify real people, the understandably made up a villain.

And then there’s the background characters that that people don’t notice are usually exclusively male. But I noticed effort put in there too. It’s probably not accurate to have had a female pilot among the simulator test crews, and considering the number of female pilots working at that level, it’s probably not even likely that they would have been able to find a female pilot available to participate, but they squeaked in female pilots in not just one of those simulator test crews, but one on each of the two – one is the first officer in the pair, and the other is the captain. That’s making an effort.

On the other hand, the cast was pretty white – I don’t know if there was so much as a black or other POC passenger on the plane.

Good movie, not horrifically long, and I enjoyed it.

Book Revew of Jay Kristoff’s Kinslayer up on The Punkettes

Posted by Lindsay Kitson on

I finished reading Kinslayer yesterday, sequel to Stormdancer, so there’s a review up on the other blog I contribute to, http://www.thepunkettes.com. Spoilers: it was awesome.

Also, I have an advance reader copy of Endsinger, so there’ll be a review of that one soon too, as well as a giveaway of a free copy, so keep watching The Punkettes and here for details!

The Lake And The Library by S. M Beiko

Posted by Lindsay Kitson on

Wishing for something more than her adventureless life, 16-year-old Ash eagerly awaits the move she and her mother are taking from their dull, drab life in the prairie town of Treade. But as Ash counts the days, she finds her way into a mysterious, condemned building on the outskirts of town—one that has haunted her entire childhood with secrets and questions. What she finds inside is an untouched library, inhabited by an enchanting mute named Li. Brightened by Li’s charm and his indulgence in her dreams, Ash becomes locked in a world of dusty books and dying memories, with Li becoming the attachment to Treade she never wanted. This haunting and romantic debut novel explores the blurry boundary between the real and imagined with a narrative that illustrates the power and potency of literacy.

I had a lot of books on my TBR list, but at Keycon, I attended a reading where this author read from her second book, and what she read was so messed up wtf, that I went and bought her first book.

Disclaimer: I grew up in a small prairie town, loved books and art and spent most of my time lost in fantasy worlds of literature, and wanted nothing so much as to get out of the stupid dick town I was stuck in. In other words, the main character of this book is basically me at that age. It was a little eerie.

And thus, the first thing I noticed was the main character’s voice, and the narrative voice. The narrative actually reminded me of Peter S. Beagle, or Neil Gaiman, honestly, both of whom I love for their elegance of prose. I’m not one to obsess over well written prose, so when I notice it, it’s because it’s especially good.

The story straddles reality and magic in a surreal sort of way. The magic doesn’t jump out and slap you in the face, it sneaks up on you, kind of, in a slow, subtle sort of way, and builds it’s way to immersion.

A beautiful book, and I’m looking forward to that author’s next one.

Tombstone Blues by Chadwick Ginther – Book Review

Posted by Lindsay Kitson on

Catching up on book reviews here.

After beating back the might of Surtur, Ted Callan is getting used to his immortal powers. The man who once would stop at nothing to rid himself of his tattoos and their power might even be said to be enjoying his new-found abilities.

However, not everyone is happy the glory of Valhalla has risen from the ashes of Ragnarok. With every crash of Mjolnir, Thor, former god of thunder, rages in Niflheim, the land of the dead.

Now that Ted’s woken the dead, there’s going to be hell to pay.

Even better than book one. If you thought Ted’s sort-of romance with Tilda was going to go smoothly, you’re worse than wrong. I love that the relationship between the two of them seems so real. I mean, he’s a middle aged guy, hooking up with a teenager. And on the one hand, she has a lot of wisdom she’s gained from what happened in book one, but on the other hand, she’s still a teenager, and she ultimately acts like it. She’s not emotionally ready for the things she’s dealing with, and helping her cope is a task greater than all the power Ted’s been given.

The handling of the mythology too is one of the things that makes this series stand out. It picks up where ragnarok left off, rather than being a retelling. That gives the author a lot of freedom to introduce plot twists, and yet, Ginther seems to be trying to be as true to the source material as he can, playing on the emotions of the mythical characters in logical ways, like Loki’s anger and sadness over the Asgardians murdering his children. Many interpretations put characters like Thor up as a heroic nice guy, but Ginther makes him a villain, and when he reminds the reader of some of the awful things Thor did, according to the stories, he’s really not stretching at all, from the perspective of modern sensibilities.

Loki has significantly less presence in book two – in fact, you spend most of book two wondering every once in a while where the hell is Loki in all this? But the raven’s, Huginn and Muninn actually do a good job of filling in for comic relief, which is important in a story where the emotions run so dark. The scope of the book is a little more epic, since rather than trashing a little town in Manitoba, Ginther’ has the minions of Hel trashing Winnipeg itself.

I’m looking forward to book three in the series. We’ve made a request that the Winnipeg Human Rights Museum* be destroyed, and I do hope he gets to that at some point.

*Before you think I’m a horrible person for taking joy in the destruction of a human rights museum, this building went horrifically over budget, which all came out of taxpayers pockets. On top of that is the controversy that it’s not actually a *human* rights museum, it is a remember-what-happened-to-the-jews-in-wwii museum, and when people asked why the place wasn’t going to be exhibiting anything to do with human rights violations towards black people or first nations people, they just said that’s not what this museum is for.

Throne Of The Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed – Book Review

Posted by Lindsay Kitson on

This was another book I’d been meaning to read just because it was a non-eurocentric traditional fantasy, and also because it was recommended by a friend. Beneath Ceaseless Skies had a twitter contest that I entered and won an audiobook copy, which was great – I love audiobooks, but they’re so expensive!

There’s a bunch of 1-star reviews on this book on good reads, and almost all of them justify it by saying they didn’t like the amount of blessed this and by the grace of the almighty god, etc. I don’t think that’s fair at all. I think those are all prejudiced Americans who are terrified of other cultures. I rolled my eyes at those reviews.

It was a great book, and nice to see something set in a middle-east inspired setting with such a balanced cast of characters, not to mention not being filtered through a lens of western hatred of Islam. Not only is there a variety of different character personalities – from the uptight, uber-religious Raseed right through the irreverent Doctor Adoulla, but also represented are varying cultures within the middle east, to remind us that there is as much, and probably more, variety of cultures within the middle east as there are in North America. From the crowded city, to the nomads, to ancient empires, I’d say it was richly imagined, but I don’t think it’s far from the reality of the region.

Aside from the golems and alchemists and child eating man-jackal, of course.

As far as the plot, I’ll say what others have said – it’s a good old fashioned traditional fantasy. The author doesn’t hide behind any bullshit “Women didn’t do anything important back then” and has several prominent female characters. I loved that the main character, Adoulla is an aging wizard, and yet he’s not pushed to the background and denied a romantic plot for being the age he is.

The reader was great and I think he did the story justice with different accents and voices. Thanks go out to Beneath Ceaseless Skies for providing the audiobook.

I’m definitely looking forward to the next installment.

Find it on Goodreads.

Why I Stopped Reading George R. R. Martin

Posted by Lindsay Kitson on

This is not a post about how George R. R. Martin is a bad writer, or his books are lousy. Nor am I here to trash people who love George R. R. Martin and say they have no taste.

This is a post about how, if you don’t want to invest the amount of time required to enjoy his books, or the investment required does not justify the reward for you: it’s okay.

Now, before you go and say I didn’t give it a proper chance – I got to the end of book two. I think I probably read more material written by GRRM than some authors ever publish. I really wanted to like it, and to an extent I did (though, IMHO, he doesn’t write female characters as well as some people think he does). It’s really not the content that bothers me, and I did appreciate his skill in constructing a climax to a scene. I *can* see why he is well loved. And if you’re one of those readers who love him, all the power to you, go enjoy. (What, you’ve read book five and there’s no more? Well, uh, sorry, I got nothing for ya.)

It’s not even because I read it at a time when I was a tad disillusioned with epic fantasy. I read other epic fantasy before and after, and enjoyed that.

My husband has read the first four books, and he’ll go on about how much he enjoyed them. He convince me to start reading them. He has the fifth book in his possession, and has not finished it. He’s tried several times to get into it, and just can’t. He says he got to the part where (yet another) new point of view character is introduced, and he couldn’t get past that point.

What it is, is a severe inefficiency of prose. The only reason I got through book one is because multiple people told me “You have to give it at least to page 100, and then it gets good.” Okay, I gave it to page 100. It actually starts to get good at, I believe, page 81, but that’s neither here nor there. And then I thought, “Okay, we’re getting into the swing of things now, right?”

Nope. Every scene takes forever to get going. It’s like he’s starting things from scratch every time. There’s *so* much buildup.

Speaking of buildup: Arya. She learns sword fighting in book 1. Somewhere in book 2 she gets her sword taken away, and hasn’t got it back yet. Then she’s got another plot line starting with this magician, implying she’s going in a different direction than the sword fighting thing. But it all feels like up to where I left off everything to do with her has been setup. The problem is the whole I-made-it-to-the-end-of-book-2-and-we’re-still-in-setup-mode.

Which results in me losing faith in the author. And I know people are going to run up to me screaming, “Oh, but later she ______!” Only, again, I got to the end of book two. I’ve given it a fair shot, and it’s failed to convince me that this character’s plot line is going to progress at a satisfactory rate. I’ve given up. I no longer care.

Then those people will say, “But…but…You’re going to miss out on all the awesome events that happen later! It gets even better in book three! You stopped at the wrong spot! Sansa gets less pathetically annoying!”

And to that I say, “I’ll watch the TV show.”

See, since I did get as far as book 2, I know exactly how true to the books they were in the first two seasons. And the parts they changed were changed for reasons that made sense to me from a storytelling perspective. They’re true to the characters and the spirit, and any changes to the plot are minor adjustments to make the telling more efficient (see that word? *efficient*) or in some cases to add interest to sections that were not as exciting in the books, like the dragons being kidnapped, or something that was implied, but there were not POV characters to tell the tale, like Renly and the Knight of Flowers hooking up. They’re taking all the awesome stuff and condensing it so that it’s a steady stream of awesome, instead of a dragging scene, dragging on, dragging you along because you know when you get to the end, *something* will happen, and you’re waiting for that little bit of payoff at the end of the scene. I think Daenerys is a psychopath, just like the rest of her family, and people just haven’t realized it yet because she’s doing nice things for brown people. I’m waiting for her to go off the deep end.

And like I said, I was enjoying it. Tyrion is awesome. Tyrion and Bronn are golden. I liked Arya. It’s just, I wasn’t enjoying it enough to keep investing the amount of time it took to get to the good parts. YMMV.

It’s just that I know there are books out there that I will enjoy more thoroughly than that. Even within epic fantasy. You don’t have to resign yourself to slogging through a book to enjoy epic fantasy. It’s like eating ten bowls of chicken noodle soup with one tiny piece of chicken in it, versus a one bowl with lots of chicken.

And saying that is not saying that GRRM is a bad writer. He’s obviously a good one, to have managed the success he has. There’s lots of people for whom this is just their cup of tea, and to them, all the power to you – enjoy. And I applaud GGRM for his success. My criticisms are as a reader, not as a writer. It’s personal taste. Chacun son gout.

Anyway, that’s all I have to say. Lets see how many page hits I get for dissing the Martin.

Book Review: Rose Under Fire by Elizabeth Wein

Posted by Lindsay Kitson on

This is a companion book to Wein’s book Code Name Verity, which I loved, and which was one of several things that inspired me to take up flying. Apparently I’m not the only one to start taking lessons after reading it, but I’m the only one the author knows of who’s gone on to get my licence, and she was quite tickled over it.

Anyway, as a companion book, and not a true sequel, it has a different main character, and can be read without having read the previous one. There are a few recurring characters, and it takes place chronologically after Code Name Verity, but it contains minimal spoilers.

In this one, Rose is another ATA pilot, who gets intercepted over france and taken to germany. She ends up in one of the concentration camps, Ravensbruck.

The story begins with Rose writing down her story, much like Code Name Verity did. One of the weaknesses of that format is that you know the character is going to live. In the opening, she’s back in Paris, shortly after her escape. (This wasn’t the case in CNV, as the characters were writing things down more or less as they happened, and there was still uncertainty on their survivability.) The suspense still there was whether her friends escaped. These friends are people you haven’t met yet, but as the story goes on, you do, and then the reminder that the main character doesn’t know what happened to them or if they survived means more and more.

The description of the conditions in Ravensbruck are suitably horrifying. One of the things mentioned early on is the fact that the information coming out of the camps is so horrifying that western Europeans and Americans don’t believe it. They literally didn’t believe it. The stories about the women who were experimented on, the starvation, mass executions, etc. And the Nazis, of course, are trying to hide it, by killing these women they experimented on before the allies can rescue them.

Rose, as she writes, is suffering some pretty severe PTSD. In some ways it made it even harder to read than CNV because I get the PTSD. Maybe nowhere near as severe as Rose would have to have suffered from it, but I understand. I’ve been there, with the nightmares and the waking up not sure where I am, and the panic attacks when someone calls my name or opens the door, or pulls into the driveway. So I get why she’s reluctant to testify in the war crimes trials, which, reading other reviews, seems to be one of the things people have complained about being disappointed by.

Another thing that made me think as I read it, is having just finished the Hunger Games trilogy, and comparing it to Rose Under Fire. In the Hunger Games, Katniss’ suffering and mental breakdown gets a little tiresome and boring. So I had to think to figure out why that doesn’t happen in Rose Under Fire. Rose goes through likely more trauma, sees more death, than Katniss. Why is Rose not annoying in an endless train of poor me‘s? And I think it’s because Rose is constantly reminding herself that she’s not one of the women who got experimented on (the experiments had stopped before she was taken prisoner.) She has people around her who have suffered more and longer than she has, so a lot of her descriptions of suffering are not “poor me”, but poor them. The times when she’s so badly hurt she can’t actually do anything but lay there and feel sorry for herself are mostly glossed over.

Overall, I really enjoyed it. It was cathartic.