Review: Ilka Tampke – Skin

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Skin
Ilka Tampke

Ailia has no Skin. She doesn’t know who her parents were, and so she cannot learn or do anything in society. Like any other untutored woman, she wants to learn more of the world – and in learning more of the world she will either save or destroy it.

I could accuse this book of taking a slow pace of progression, and spending too much time on the details. But I wouldn’t, because it’s deftly crafted in that I didn’t feel the passage of time (just as Ailia does in the Mothers’ world) and I slipped fluidly from scene to scene. The world building, while it has the support of being crafted on a real-world geography, felt nicely fleshed out, despite focusing on such a small part of a landscape.

Ailia is all you could want in a gritty heroine. Like others of her kind, she is different from the rest of the community. But she is able to reach out past that – she isn’t always lonely, other people still see some good in her. Despite not being able to completely be treated like a true member of society, she has friends, she’s protected to some extent, and for what she is, she has a good place in life. She doesn’t mean to go off-track, it just happens!

It’s amazing how often I am drawn to historical fantasies without realizing it. This novel takes fact and fiction and intertwines them in a manner that means you can’t see how history could have happened without magic.

While I could predict some of what Ailia’s journey would be, other parts of the novel surprised me. I didn’t see a number of twists coming (although many of them appeared to happen from the same instance), but they were nicely woven into the rest of the storyline, and there wasn’t anything that came completely out of nowhere.

What frustrated me was the comment from Isobelle Carmody on the back, saying this novel had something to do with human yearning. No! This novel is so much more than that! While Ailia wants to learn things, that doesn’t mean she’s a love-sick idiot. She knows exactly what she should expect from life, and instead of yearning after it, she goes and does it.

I finished this novel on a very satisfied note. No, not everything turned out the way the reader might expect, but at the same time it was so so satisfying. I didn’t feel like the author had set it up to be a cash cow and write more sequels, I felt like she had reached the end of that saga, sat back, and been pleased with her work.

This novel suckered me in. I should have been doing some housework, and instead I sat down with a doona and a cup of tea to read this novel. 4.5 stars from me, simply because I’m not sure it’s good enough for a reread. Otherwise, highly recommended.

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Review: Stephen Merlino – The Jack of Souls

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The Jack of Souls
Stephen Merlino
Trickster Harric has a curse he needs to break, set by his loving mother. Caris longs to be a knight, but is hindered by her horse-sense. Willard carries an ambassador and gift towards the Queen. As their lives intertwine through a series of accidents, each must fight for what they want.
The blurb on the back of the book suggests a lot more action than what actually occurs in the novel. To me, it felt like the action dragged, and I hardly brought myself to finish the last chapter. I didn’t spend very much time thinking about the novel while I wasn’t reading.
I didn’t really realize or like Willard as a character.  He felt like a ‘classic’ downtrodden knight. He was a grumpy, irritable old man who didn’t deserve any kind of sympathy or care. Or maybe that was the point? None of the characters really made me worry for their welfare. Except perhaps Kogan, who provided some light hearted relief to the storyline.
I did like the way that Harric and Caris’ relationship developed, and the factors influencing that. One wonders what will happen in the next novel. Will they remove the rings? Will Caris still want to kill Harric?
I felt conflicted about Harric’s story and his mother. Yes, she’s doomed him, but I also don’t understand why the magic he is fighting with is so horrible. In this way, the author positions the reader to feel the same way about magic as the general populace. It’s frustrating and confusing though! The same way that Harric must feel…
Sadly, I wouldn’t call this an ‘Epic Fantasy’ novel. A fantasy novel yes, but it’s not nearly long enough to be considered epic in my book. I didn’t feel like the story had enough content in it to make the book the length it was, and I would have coped with it being condensed down into a snappy narrative.
Fascinating! I discovered when I googled for the cover art to put here, that this book was funded by a KickStarter. I didn’t know that that was even a ‘thing’ for authors. I’ll have to keep an eye out for novels on there.
I wouldn’t consider this novel an outstanding example of its kind. If you see a copy at the library, or perhaps an ebook of it, then it could be for you. For me, I wanted more action and less character repeats. It is possible that the next two books in the trilogy will prove me wrong, and make reading this first one worthwhile. 3 stars from me.

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Review: Julie Anne Peters – Grl2Grl

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Grl2Grl
Julie Anne Peters

This is a collection of 10 short stories by Julie Anne Peters, one of my favourite queer authors. It covers a range of ‘first-date’ situations and getting over breakups of young lesbians.

Normally for a book of short stories I would be reviewing each one individually. But I don’t have the book here, and all of the stories are by the same author, so I’d pretty much be just giving you a synopsis of each one, and you can do that elsewhere on the internet.

I gave this book to my partner to read while we were on vacation. She didn’t get past the first story! And she suggested that since I hadn’t reviewed it yet, I should reread it. When I finally got down to reading it, one night when I just wanted something light to read, I opened it and was instantly disappointed.

The writing seemed stilted, I couldn’t connect with any of the characters, and there seemed to be too many extremes. Teen drama novels often go that way, but this wasn’t what I had expected from Peters. The first time I read it, I might have been a bit forgiving, but now that I’ve read a wider variety of queer fiction, this one isn’t anything special.

Am I just up to reading big girl lesbian fiction now? Will I never find another queer teenage fiction book to fall in love with? I don’t think so. I just think that the combination of short stories which I don’t like in the first place, and unfinished endings, which I like even less. Line me up for more ‘proper’ fiction please!

I’ll give this 3 stars, because it’s not awful, but it’s not anything particularly special either. Well worth stocking in a public or high school library.

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Review: C. Robert Cales – The Bookseller

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The Bookseller
C. Robert Cales
John is going to be responsible for releasing evil. Carlos is an evil dictator. The Booksellers are both the captain and the slave of otherworldly disasters. When their lives come together, it is payback time on evil.
Half-way through the novel, the three sets of stories being told still hadn’t interacted. I had pretty much no interest in John and Sally’s storyline, Carlos’ one was just brutal and not all together manageable, and the only one I did have interest in, the one of the booksellers, seemed so plain and wrapped up in love that I felt vaguely sick.
Why did I keep reading this novel? I can’t say for sure. I wasn’t particularly interested in the characters, but I did want to see how things turned out. Surely it would improve? I’d read one or two pages at a time, while waiting for the rest of my work to finish, then drift away again with no regrets.
I felt sometimes like I was just floating outside the world. I looked in on the novel, observed the painstakingly slow progress of its characters through a too-familiar landscape, and looked away again without having felt any richer for the attempt.
I was just so disappointed in the style of the novel. I think I found it online through one of the traditional/mainstream publishers, and I expected it to be polished and to be completely spellbound by it. Instead I got a novel that wanted to tell me things, had an incredibly annoying style of dialogue and a frustrating, ever changing world view.
So, let’s talk about the characters. Each of the roughs in Carlos’ gang were pretty much identical. They all had the same motivations of money, and they were all evil bastards. The author tried to give them distinguishing characteristics, continually referring to tattoos and hairstyles, but I would have remember those myself had they had been introduced to me in a memorable way, with names that didn’t all end with ‘o’. I can appreciate the cultural setting, but ugh, it just wasn’t enough.
The blurb of the novel gave away what was happening too soon. I spent most of the novel waiting for things to happen, and then when they did happen, the storyline, which so far had been quite believable, took a turn for the worse.
This is one of the most promising storylines I have read in a book I would rate 2 stars. If you have a ‘thing’ for good vs evil novels, then this could be for you. But for me, the glacial pace of the novel, combined with the poor storytelling style had me waiting for the novel to finish, rather than enjoying reading it.

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Review: Aimee Carter – Pawn

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Pawn (The Blackcoat Rebellion #1)
Aimee Carter

Kitty Doe has just been tested and found wanting. In a society where worth is dependant on one test, the number of stars you have makes a huge difference to your quality of like. Kitty has been given a three, and rather than resign herself to cleaning sewers, she chooses prostitution instead. Little does she know that she is going to become the next Lila Hart.

I picked this novel out to listen to, because the idea of complete face-lifts fascinated me. Then I kept listening because Kitty wanted to make me like her because she was ‘spunky’. Then I was half-way through the novel, and I’d become invested in her. But then the novel neared the end and the author lost me for the sheer repetitiveness of Kitty’s actions and issues.

I didn’t understand the picture on the front of the novel. Not that I spent too much time looking at it since it was an audio book. For a long while, until Kitty discovers that someone else has been masked, I didn’t even realise that the three marks on the back of her neck were Roman Numerals (there we go, I gave you a heads-up).

The exposure of the class system seems obvious to me, even as Kitty protests that ‘everyone is equal’. Breaking down the system that holds everyone in place seems dangerous, and it is dangerous. But Kitty is always consoled by the fact that she just has to protect Benji.

Oh Benji. You are so one-dimensional. And your relationship with Kitty is just as simple. You love her, she loves you, we kiss, we never do anything wrong. Ugh. Sickening. It’s all about them! Not anything else. Kitty seems selfish and entirely too self-reliant to ‘deserve’ someone as ‘pure’ as Benji.

At the beginning when I realised this was a series, I was quite excited that the adventures would continue after this novel. But at the conclusion, I was quite set on the idea that I didn’t want to read the next ones. Three stars – it’s readable, but you need to be tolerant of Romeo and Juliet love stories combined with a somewhat repetitive inner dialogue.

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Review: B.R. Collins – Gamerunner

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Gamerunner
B.R. Collins

Rick is a Gamerunner – he tests The Maze to check if there are any glitches or bugs. Sent on a midnight errand by the man he things of as his father, Rick is going to suffer as he never has before.

I picked this novel up because I hoped it would be like The Maze Runner or Gillian Rubinstein’s Space Demons. Much to my horror, it wasn’t in any sense of the word. Yes, they are similar – outside the Game/Maze is a disaster zone, and there is an overarching mind coordinating it all. But the anticipation of The Maze Runner is completely missing from Gamerunner.

This is an apocalyptic  novel of what happens when the world falls apart and there are only video games left to immerse yourself in, and hope to find something to make your miserable life better.  If anything, I can see it as a highly suitable primary school novel that would be kicked off as soon as possible from the list, because it might place gaming in a too positive light.

Two stars. I’d give it 1 star, but I didn’t finish it. Maybe it would have improved later in the novel? I tend to be a lot less tolerant of talking books that fail me in the first couple of chapters, because the reader doesn’t grab me and I can’t bear to listen any longer. Has someone else read this and enjoyed it? The Goodreads stars don’t look all that positive to me.

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Review: Katerina West – Witchcraft Couture

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Witchcraft Couture
Katerina
While Oscar Pellegrino has had bursts of creativity, he finds himself in a creative slump again. Fleeing from himself into Russia to visit his mother’s birthplace, he himself undergoes a transformation to become the slave of the Sampo.
Oscar seems like he got all the wrong things from his mother, and it seems fitting that the Sampo, while bringing Oscar’s creations to life, seems to be sucking the life out of his mother. Is it a metaphor of the Sampo’s abilities? Is it really happening? Oscar refuses to ask himself these questions for fear of the answers. It is a story of magic having its price, yet with an air of reality that makes the reader doubt his or her own mind.
Sarah is just a rotten egg. She’s ambitious, driven and an all around killer. I felt like she was responsible for all of the failures in Oscar’s life – her and his mother do an excellent job of breaking him If it wasn’t for them, Oscar could have held it together! Instead he’s off on a chase in Russia, which begins his rollercoaster ride to the top of fashion and back down.
Something the author brought in for me was that the fashion houses were always undergoing changes, their popularity changing over time.  I’ve never been very interested in fashion, but I do know that certain clothes suit certain people. This is an exploration of the concept of that it is ‘truly the clothes that make the woman’. Anyone can look good in Oscar’s clothes.
I didn’t understand why Ben would destroy the dress. Veronica wears the dresses without any ill effects. Some of the people just seem so suspicious. I think it is somewhat absurd that ordinary people would believe that dresses can have such an effect on people – that’s what the novel seems to ask the reader. This reminded me of the feminist ideas that are always being rolled around somewhere in the world. It is ‘always’ the woman’s fault for being raped, because if she didn’t dress provocatively, no one would have been raped.
While the drawn-out descriptions of colours and tastes might put you off, instead read them as another insight into Oscar’s mind. The text is beautifully written and edited. I wasn’t even put off by a small detail being out of place, in fact the world felt so complete to me that I stepped into it and I was lost within it while reading. I finished reading this novel feeling like something profound had happened to me while reading it. This is what I expected from Strum, but failed to find.
Even if literary fiction isn’t your thing, I really suggest giving this novel a go. While the beginning is a little slow, it speeds up until you can’t bear to put it down. I became so invested in the outcome of Oscar’s designing that I continued thinking about it even when I put it down.
I think I’d give this 4-5 stars. It’s unlikely that I will re-read it so I can’t give it an unequivocal 5 stars, but it’s so worth reading even if you have just a crumb of interest in literature.

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Review: Cassandra Clare & Holly Black – The Iron Trial

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The Iron Trial
Cassandra Clare & Holly Black

Callum doesn’t know what he is, or why he’s at the Magisterium. But he knows he doesn’t want to go somewhere that there are eyeless fish waiting to eat him, and there is magic running rampart that is the same as that which killed his mother.

Apparently this is a middle grade series, but maybe that was made it so pleasant to listen to. Each word was perfectly chosen, and I didn’t find myself impatiently waiting the narrator to move through the scenes.

I loved the reader, his deep grumbly voice was perfect for Master Rufus. I did feel like sometimes I didn’t know who was speaking, but it was entirely context dependant. I think some of the text could have become readily boring, but because it was read and I didn’t have a perfect memory of the sentence structures, it worked for me. This was especially true of the sand-herding exercises.

This could feel like a rip-off of Harry Potter, but it really isn’t. The dangers feel much more real, and they are consistent, like the authors have actually worked out what the complete series is going to be like. Also Harry is always a hero, and he’s always nice to everyone. Doesn’t that get a bit cloying at times?
Callum doesn’t make you like him. And he seems to be going out of his way to get on everyone else’s nerves. But inside there is a soul that wants to do the right thing, as angry as it is. Aaron and Tamara provide a more rational backdrop to him, and make it possible for Call to change.

The end is a twist! You guess from the beginning what might have happened, but there isn’t anything to support your thoughts until later, and by that time it’s too late! You’re already committed to reading the novel from page 1.

I don’t think this novel is meaty enough for me to want to read it a second time, so that makes it a 4-star novel. But it’s a very good one, and I’d highly recommend it to beginning fantasy readers. I can’t wait for the second book in the series to be released as an audio book – I’ll gladly spend some of my commuting time devoted to it.

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Review: Katharine Kerr & Mark Kreighbaum – Palace

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Palace
Katharine Kerr & Mark Kreighbaum

Vida is destined for sexual slavery, even as she tries to escape the protective confines of anonymity in a brothel. A lucky ‘chance’, set up by the previous generation means that there could be a way out – if only her fiancé would stop drinking and she can manages not to be killed by the Lep assassin sent against her. Meanwhile, someone is destroying the Map and making a mess of the whole basis of Palace’s society.

While I was most interested in Vida as the strong female protagonist, the cheeky Rico got a lot of my attention too. The rapid changes in perspective seemed clean and sensible, and I didn’t find myself wishing that I was back with the last person. It kept me reading frantically to the end. 

Look, I thought it would be hard for me to keep track of which character was which, and which person acted for each faction. The factor/mentor/mentee relationships became more clear over the course of the novel. And indeed, I feel like I’d like to read it again, just to make sure that I got all the points in it. But my complaint was that the novel felt unfinished. Yes, some people suffered, but other people just got away with things!
The torturing methods described were a little graphic. But then I have a thing about eyes. So if you don’t like torture, just skip over that paragraph or so. The death of a thousand cuts is fine though. Just not my eyes, my poor eyes!
Ah, to live in a world with a true mix of fantasy and sci-fi. The cyber-hardware could have been explained in more detail. I found it interesting that the different pieces of a person’s body could have different implants, but it wasn’t really clear why this was the case. The world building on the other hand was detailed, and the authors made a point of reminding us readers why each place was important, but did it as subtly as possible that I didn’t just skip over those parts.
While I was drawn to this novel because it had Katherine Kerr as an author, I’ve actually only enjoyed a subsection of her prolific writing. That was way back before I got into fantasy proper. The promise of an equal collaboration, combined with the attractive blurb got me eager to read it. However, once I got into the novel, I felt like the blurb wasn’t actually very accurate. Yes, it has those characters in it, but the focus is not at all on Arno. In fact, I’m not sure he even ever gets a change to ‘speak’ with his own written voice during the text.
I picked this novel up from my local Op-Shop for a grand total of, um, maybe 50c? Or $1? Totally worth it. 4 stars from me, only because I don’t feel the need that I have to reread it right now, and I was content to move on to another book, even though this one left me gasping for air near the end.
I have just had a look on Goodreads and it seems there is a sequel. Given that my copy is a beaten up old one, is there anyone out there who has a copy of the second novel? It looks like these novels haven’t been touched by reviewers anywhere in recent history!

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Review: Ally Carter – All Fall Down

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All Fall Down
Ally Carter
Grace has been thrown back into the life of Embassy Row, where countries stand side by side in buildings that could fall at any moment. After she left it, when her mother was murdered,  she was put away for her own mental health. Now released into the wild-world again, Grace isn’t coping with being back near her remaining family, or the potential killer of her mother.
So I liked the idea of the novel. Embassy Row sounds pretty cool really. The chance to socialise with a whole bunch of different people and speak 7 different languages? Nothing but awesome! Although I think a couple of foreign words could have been thrown in for good measure. Then I could even pretend I was learning something from this novel.
Grace is so certain of these three things:  she’s not crazy, her mother was murdered, and she wants to hurt the killer., that she can’t listen to reason. She’s determined to isolate herself. In fact, she’s so self-willed that you feel like some of this has got to be her fault, but also that the adults are just being idiots and not helping at all.
Grace seems to be suffering from some kind of post-traumatic stress disorder, which is basically belittled by any adult in her life, and which alienates her from other young people around her. It’s the reason she’s lost any friends, but doesn’t explain why she didn’t make any in the first place.
The sequences of events left me feeling disorientated. At the same time that Grace was trying to protect other people, she was caring little for her own life. If she’s dead, she can’t stop the next person from being killed. If anything, this novel wants you to empathise with Grace, but then throws you up in a very ugly manner near the end. The twists and turns and promises all turn flat.
I hated the ending. Absolute garbage. It was not a satisfying conclusion, and even as it left the ending open, it didn’t leave Grace as having grown as a character. I felt like the book didn’t actually achieve anything.
This novel is well written, and I can see that if it was part of a series (which it appears to be the first book of), and I had the next book to read right away that was going to give me some satisfaction and character growth, maybe I could score it higher. There are other things to read though, and so I’ll give this one 2 stars, with the promise of three if the next book can tie up the loose ends.

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