The Readventurer
  • Home
  • YA Reviews
  • Adult Reviews
  • Contests and Giveaways
  • Policies
  • About Us
    • Flannery's Challenges
    • Catie's Challenges
  • Contact Us

Adult Review: The Scar by China Miéville

4/24/2012

0 Comments

 
The Scar cover
The Scar (New Crobuzon #2) 
Author: China Miéville 

Publication Date: 1/1/02
Publisher: Del Rey

Blurb(GR):
 Aboard a vast seafaring vessel, a band of prisoners and slaves, their bodies remade into grotesque biological oddities, is being transported to the fledgling colony of New Crobuzon. But the journey is not theirs alone. They are joined by a handful of travelers, each with a reason for fleeing the city. Among them is Bellis Coldwine, a renowned linguist whose services as an interpreter grant her passage—and escape from horrific punishment. For she is linked to Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, the brilliant renegade scientist who has unwittingly unleashed a nightmare upon New Crobuzon.

For Bellis, the plan is clear: live among the new frontiersmen of the colony until it is safe to return home. But when the ship is besieged by pirates on the Swollen Ocean, the senior officers are summarily executed. The surviving passengers are brought to Armada, a city constructed from the hulls of pirated ships, a floating, landless mass ruled by the bizarre duality called the Lovers. On Armada, everyone is given work, and even Remades live as equals to humans, Cactae, and Cray. Yet no one may ever leave.

Lonely and embittered in her captivity, Bellis knows that to show dissent is a death sentence. Instead, she must furtively seek information about Armada’s agenda. The answer lies in the dark, amorphous shapes that float undetected miles below the waters—terrifying entities with a singular, chilling mission. . . .


Review: 
Scars are funny things. They are traumas long past. They are reminders of people we’ve known and places we’ve been. They are healing; they are memory; they are history. Scars can change us into something brand new; scars can show the world that we’ve been irreparably broken. Scars are full of Possibility.

And so, The Armada: a place where new scars are made and old ones fall away. A massive floating city, cobbled together with stolen and salvaged boats, stolen and salvaged people. Slaves, servants, the remade, the ab-dead, all the oppressed lower castes of Bas-Lag: in The Armada they are reborn as citizens or even leaders. The Armada is a blurred place, a place of change. It’s a place where a man like Tanner Sack, medically altered into something inhuman and imprisoned aboard a slave ship bound for a new world, can breathe free. It’s a place where a young sailor with too much experience and too many prejudices can let them all go and find love. It’s a place where a young maid and a boy from a misogynistic village can join and become the most charismatic leader The Armada has ever known.

And then there’s Bellis Coldwine, standing out in sharp definition against all the blur. She’s a woman who decided long ago who she was going to be and she doesn’t want to change. She’s tightly contained within her fully-realized self. Reluctantly fleeing from the scrutiny of the ruthless New Crobuzon authorities, she wants nothing more than to return home someday – a goal which becomes impossible when she’s captured and claimed by The Armada. Bellis can see the opportunities that some of her less fortunate shipmates have been given, but still she is stubborn. She holds onto her need to return home like it’s armor.

“No, she thought fiercely, uncompromisingly. Whatever the truth, whatever the case, however hopeless the cause – I do not give up on escape. It had taken her quite some effort to reach this coldly burning pitch of anger, of desire for escape, and to relinquish it now would be unbearable.”

What happens next is a thrilling, mind-blowingly imaginative high seas journey through nightmares and mysteries – each more jaw-dropping and unique than the last. This author just knocks my socks off with the sheer power of his imagination. There are enough ideas, worlds, and species in this book alone to kindle a hundred others. And yet, he just tosses them out there like peanuts. 

This story could have so easily become garish b-movie material, with its panoply of grotesqueries: flesh-melting neon green spit, anus-mouths, insectoid people, cactus people (seriously), and giant underwater behemoths. But it NEVER does! Everything he writes is so…emotional and profound; it never feels cheap. How he managed to break my heart with slavering, murderous mosquito women I’ll never know!

The writing here really shouldn’t work and yet somehow it feels absolutely right and perfect. The story shifts from past to present tense, from first person to third person, from one narrator to another. It seems almost cobbled together. And yet it never feels stilted or odd. It flows. Like The Armada itself, this motley assortment of prose somehow bridges together and reforms into a sweeping, effortless picture.

And here’s the thing I love the most about this book: that picture, that story, with all of its suspense and catharsis and death, was just a beginning. 

“And I feel, for all that has happened, as if it is now, only now in these days, that my journey is beginning. I feel as if this – even all this – has been a prologue.”

I have been a fan of China Mieville for a while, but this book is by far my favorite.

Perfect Musical Pairing

Bon Iver - Perth

I originally picked a song from this album for Perdido Street Station because I’d been listening to it non-stop for weeks and I was physically incapable of choosing anything else. But now I’m happy I did. This artist, with his weird falsetto voice and combination of 80’s-style synthesizers and brass instruments, really does sound different and sometimes odd. But his music is also undeniably beautiful and affecting. He wrote this song for a friend who had recently lost someone (Heath Ledger), and I think it’s about the marks that people leave on us: “I’m tearing up, across your face.”

5/5 Stars 
Readventurer C Signature
0 Comments

Adult Review: Midnight Riot by Ben Aaronovitch

4/23/2012

2 Comments

 
Midnight Riot cover
Midnight Riot (Peter Grant #1)
Author: Ben Aaronovitch
Publication Date: 2/1/11
Publisher: Del Rey

Blurb(GR): 
Probationary Constable Peter Grant dreams of being a detective in London’s Metropolitan Police. Too bad his superior plans to assign him to the Case Progression Unit, where the biggest threat he’ll face is a paper cut. But Peter’s prospects change in the aftermath of a puzzling murder, when he gains exclusive information from an eyewitness who happens to be a ghost. Peter’s ability to speak with the lingering dead brings him to the attention of Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale, who investigates crimes involving magic and other manifestations of the uncanny. Now, as a wave of brutal and bizarre murders engulfs the city, Peter is plunged into a world where gods and goddesses mingle with mortals and a long-dead evil is making a comeback on a rising tide of magic.

Review:

I have to admit that a moderate portion of my liking for this book is probably due to the fact that I am one of those Americans who is instantly charmed when faced with a page of British slang and references. I don’t know if it’s in the genetic memory or what, but I pathetically cannot help myself! Guh…it’s like thar speakin’ mah language but diffrint! However, this book isn’t just a compendium of British slang. I found quite a lot more to love within these pages.

Peter Grant is a young constable with the London Metropolitan Police who has just completed the required stint as a street cop and is about to be assigned to a higher duty. He’s hoping for something flashy like the murder squad, but is disappointed to learn that he will instead be asked to make a “valuable contribution” as a paper pusher. But fate takes him in a different direction one night when he ends up interviewing a ghostly eye witness to a strange murder. Soon he’s signing on as apprentice to the enigmatic Inspector Nightingale of the Economic and Specialist Crime Unit, where he must begin training in magic, arrange a truce between two river deities, and track down a raging revenant.

This book is hilarious, in a dry and silly way that will appeal to fans of Terry Pratchett. The main character is a young man, with a love of risk, high definition television, and his petite blonde coworker (not to mention the flirty river spirit), but he’s also cunning and analytical. It’s exciting to see him come into a world inhabited by ancient beings and traditions, and breathe new life into it with his more contemporary attitudes. He’s a science geek! He ponders the force required to levitate an apple, and where that energy might come from; he runs sensitivity trials on his own magic; and he counters the magic of an enemy using wave interference. He really comes across as authentically young, but clever. Here is one of my favorite quotes:

”I’d like to say that I remembered the practice of exchanging hostages from school history classes or from stories of precolonial life in Sierra Leone, but the truth was that it came up while playing Dungeons and Dragons when I was thirteen.”

He tends to view everything and everyone in a humorous light, but he has a complicated relationship with his family, and there’s a bit of mystery surrounding his past and why he ultimately decided to join the police that I can’t wait to find out more about. Basically, I love everything about this guy. I wish that there had been more explanation about how the magic works, but I understand that that’s probably in the cards for later books in the series. I’m really looking forward to some more mad science out in the carriage house!

I’m not sure if I would classify this as urban fantasy, but I guess it’s more like that than anything else. It reads like a humorous police procedural with just a dash of the paranormal. So, I wouldn’t go into this expecting lots of thrilling action or heavy magic use. 

Perfect Musical Pairing
Belle & Sebastian – Funny Little Frog

The dry, witty lyrics of Belle & Sebastian really remind me of this book. I know they’re from Scotland and not England but…oh, hang on a second. Really? Huh. Okay then. 

I’ve just been informed that Scotland and England are actually both a part of the U.K. So yay! This is a love song for an imaginary girlfriend, which is just perfect because I have a little announcement: I am officially throwing over my current fictional boyfriend for one Peter Grant, science geek, constable, and apprentice wizard. Sorry Gilbert, but we’ve had a good twenty one years. I’d be lying if I said that things haven’t gotten a little dry lately. I mean seriously, I’ve had Anne of Windy Poplars on my currently-reading shelf for over a month. Look at this guy…he runs validation studies on his own magic powers and uses fun words like, “faffing, “gastropub,” “knickers,” and “fancy” (as a verb!). Can you really blame me? 

4/5 Stars
Readventurer C Signature
2 Comments

The City & The City by China Miéville

4/6/2012

0 Comments

 
Picture
The City & The City
Author: China Miéville
Publication Date: 5/26/09
Publisher: Del Rey

Blurb(GR):
New York Times bestselling author China Miéville delivers his most accomplished novel yet, an existential thriller set in a city unlike any other–real or imagined.

When a murdered woman is found in the city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks to be a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad. But as he investigates, the evidence points to conspiracies far stranger and more deadly than anything he could have imagined.

Borlú must travel from the decaying Beszel to the only metropolis on Earth as strange as his own. This is a border crossing like no other, a journey as psychic as it is physical, a shift in perception, a seeing of the unseen. His destination is Beszel’s equal, rival, and intimate neighbor, the rich and vibrant city of Ul Qoma. With Ul Qoman detective Qussim Dhatt, and struggling with his own transition, Borlú is enmeshed in a sordid underworld of rabid nationalists intent on destroying their neighboring city, and unificationists who dream of dissolving the two into one. As the detectives uncover the dead woman’s secrets, they begin to suspect a truth that could cost them and those they care about more than their lives. 

What stands against them are murderous powers in Beszel and in Ul Qoma: and, most terrifying of all, that which lies between these two cities.

Casting shades of Kafka and Philip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler and 1984, The City & the City is a murder mystery taken to dazzling metaphysical and artistic heights.

Review:

I think that this is the absolute worst choice for someone who’s never read China Mieville.  Like me.  All I have to say is: it’s a good thing that I have an endless store of patience and I like being confused.   In audiobook terms, it took eight miles, three loads of laundry, four bathrooms, and a huge batch of vegetable korma for me to start liking this book.  My interest was sparked by his creative, highly detailed world building, and my brain was completely engaged by the dozens of philosophical tangents that this world initiated in me.  Oh, and there’s also a murder mystery, but that feels more like window dressing for some Very Big Ideas.

This book begins like so many other murder mysteries – with a young, beautiful, dead girl in an alley.  Of course everyone assumes that she’s a prostitute, and of course, she ends up having a much larger story to tell.  Inspector Tyador Borlu of the Beszel Extreme Crime Squad is one of the first to arrive at the scene. He soon begins to suspect that the murder is a precursor to a much more significant crime: breach.  In Beszel, the people are conditioned from childhood to “unsee” and not perceive in any way the people of Ul Qoma, a city which occupies some of the same geographic space as Beszel and is distinguished only by the learned habits of the citizens and the architecture and language endemic to each area.  To see, acknowledge, or cross over into Ul Qoma from Beszel is a taboo – the severest of crimes, policed by a shadowy and seemingly all powerful force named for the crime itself.  But when it is revealed that breach has in fact not taken place, Inspector Borlu must investigate the murder, which necessitates a journey through Beszel, Ul Qoma, and all the places in between.

Somewhere around halfway through this book, the foreground of the murder mystery faded for me and the backdrop of the cities took center stage.  This book made me think about the ways that we all define ourselves and our homes, and how they have very little to do with geographic location.  It made me think about all of the social constructs and taboos that aren’t in place because of logic or natural inclination, but because of generations of training and conditioning.  It made me think about how easy it is to see the absurdity of these behaviors as an outsider, but how impossible it is to see them from the inside.  It made me think about revolution:  how complicity and pack mentality can keep a belief in place, but how minds are inevitably opened and changed one at a time.  It made me think about how some people go out looking to have their beliefs undermined and others hold violently to what they have, but most of us fall into neither category.  And this book made me think about how lonely and debilitating it can be to have even the most illogical of beliefs dissolved away.  Once your eyes are opened, you can never go back to the way you were.

So yeah, with all of these thoughts swimming around in my head (and really, I’m pretty sure that I didn’t even scratch the surface of this thing), it’s easy to understand why I found the murder plot and even the main character to be a bit flat.  So, if you are new to China Mieville, I would suggest starting somewhere else (I’ve already checked out Perdido Street Station and Un Lun Dun to attempt a catch-up) and if you already love China Mieville, then you will probably get way more out of this book than I did!  I highly recommend it for current fans, or people who like to be thrown in the deep end.

Perfect Musical Pairing
Radiohead – Little by Little

If a hypothetical cave-dwelling friend of mind had never heard anything from Radiohead, and wanted an introduction, I would never give her the latest album.  For Radiohead fans, The King of Limbs is another complex, haunting work of genius.  But I can see how the uninitiated might find it dense and strange.  This song speaks to the nature of growth and change: it must be accomplished in small steps, and we must not be afraid to take them.  The lyrics also relate to the way that this book grew on me – little by little.

4/5 Stars
Readventurer C Signature
0 Comments

Perdido Street Station by China Mieville

2/16/2012

0 Comments

 
Perdido Street Station cover
Perdido Street Station (New Crobuzon #1)
Author: Chine Mieville
Publication Date: 2/27/01
Publisher: Del Rey

Blurb(GR): Beneath the towering bleached ribs of a dead, ancient beast lies New Crobuzon, a squalid city where humans, Re-mades, and arcane races live in perpetual fear of Parliament and its brutal militia. The air and rivers are thick with factory pollutants and the strange effluents of alchemy, and the ghettos contain a vast mix of workers, artists, spies, junkies, and whores. In New Crobuzon, the unsavory deal is stranger to none—not even to Isaac, a brilliant scientist with a penchant for Crisis Theory.

Isaac has spent a lifetime quietly carrying out his unique research. But when a half-bird, half-human creature known as the Garuda comes to him from afar, Isaac is faced with challenges he has never before fathomed. Though the Garuda's request is scientifically daunting, Isaac is sparked by his own curiosity and an uncanny reverence for this curious stranger.

While Isaac's experiments for the Garuda turn into an obsession, one of his lab specimens demands attention: a brilliantly colored caterpillar that feeds on nothing but a hallucinatory drug and grows larger—and more consuming—by the day. What finally emerges from the silken cocoon will permeate every fiber of New Crobuzon—and not even the Ambassador of Hell will challenge the malignant terror it invokes . . .

A magnificent fantasy rife with scientific splendor, magical intrigue, and wonderfully realized characters, told in a storytelling style in which Charles Dickens meets Neal Stephenson, Perdido Street Station offers an eerie, voluptuously crafted world that will plumb the depths of every reader's imagination.


Review:
When we’ve turned this world into a dried up husk and have to resort to shutting ourselves in to life sustaining pods and “living” within some sort of virtual environment, I vote we nominate this guy to imagine and design our virtual
realities.  Sure, we’ll probably end up with some weird shit, like fire breathing iguana flowers and pulsating organic clouds that rain mucus and blood (he won’t be able to help himself) but we’ll get the most detailed, complete, panoramic world, and I can guarantee that it won’t feel imaginary. 

I think that’s China Mieville’s greatest strength:  his limitless imagination and 100% commitment to his ideas.  Reading this book feels a bit like watching this video; like living in a place where nothing behaves as you are
accustomed to, but somehow it’s all still graspable.  This is my third Mieville, and I keep feeling like, when is he going to run out of ideas?!!  I mean, everything that I’ve read from him feels completely original and new…and
this book in particular just has one new and original idea stacked on top of another ad infinitum.  At times I did feel like I needed to slow down.  It’s like driving 100 miles per hour through an abomination of the Emerald City:  everything’s flashing by and I just want to slow down and focus on one of the disgusting, hideous details but I can’t, because…here’s another one!

So yeah, maybe I should actually write something about what this book is about.  Just as in the other two Mieville novels that I’ve read, the environment is a major character in this book.  New Crobuzon is a putrescent, festering, melting pot of a city, with combustible tension between its highly varied denizens and the city’s leaders (both formal and illicit).  It’s a place with a long memory, inhabited by recent arrivals, desperate and ignorant, building their lives up on top of waste, pollution, and the corpse of a desiccated behemoth.

In addition, this book has a large cast of compelling characters, which is something that I felt was missing from The City & The City.  Isaac is naïve in the way of scientists: he’s insular and so focused on his own ideas that he doesn’t pay enough attention to their potential impact on the world.  He’s a bit of an antihero: he’s impulsive and rash, sometimes lacking in bravery and integrity.  I found Lin and Yagharek to be the most fascinating characters.  I think there’s some interesting mirroring between them.  Lin was born down in the filth and muck, and managed to lift herself out and find a new life, but she can’t help but miss her old home.  Yag was born free and powerful, and through his own reprehensible actions, brought himself down to the gutter, and now he can’t get out.  Yag is also the only character to be gifted with first person narration for a few passages throughout the novel, which are my favorite
parts.

Isaac and Lin are in love, which is difficult because they come from two different worlds, and their relationship is viewed as taboo and perverted.  Isaac worries and guards the secret, but Lin is less concerned, as she is already an outcast among her own people.  When Yagharek arrives at Isaac’s laboratory, desperate to regain his former power, and Lin is commissioned to create a life size statue of a grotesque underworld boss, events are set in motion which could lead to the destruction of New Crobuzon.

The writing is elaborate and ornamented with a surfeit of big big words.  For the most part it feels appropriate, like he’s using just the right word at the right time.  It doesn’t feel overdone.  However, he definitely has a few favorites that appear frequently enough that I took note:  palimpsest, vestige, palimpsest, exudations, ineluctable, palimpsest, autopoiesis, ichor, and uhh…did I mention palimpsest? I wonder; if these words weren’t so conspicuous (because of their big big-ness) would I have even noticed?  I mean, if he had used “layered” or “inevitable” twenty times I doubt it would stand out in the same way.

I just have one more thing to add:  I’m onto you, Mr. Mieville!  That climactic slake moth battle scene?  I know exactly where that idea came from.  Do you get all of your material from cheesy 90’s movies or what?

Perfect Musical Pairing

Bon Iver – Holocene

Because I listened so obsessively to the new Bon Iver album for the entire time I was reading this book that they melded and layered themselves together.  Parts of each were visible, but they had combined and concealed each other as well…they had become a blend, a…oh god, what is that word?  I know it…if I could only just remember...it’s on the tip of my tongue….
4/5 Stars

Readventurer C Signature
0 Comments

    Archives

    April 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012
    November 2011
    August 2011
    June 2011

    Categories

    All
    Adult
    Booker
    Contemporary Romance
    Crime
    Dark
    Disturbing
    Drugs
    Erotica
    Faeries
    Fantasy
    Favorites
    Funny
    Futuristic
    Historical
    Horror
    Hot Guys
    Lesbian
    Medical
    Memoir
    Murder
    Mystery
    Nonfiction
    Paranormal
    Paranormal Romance
    Politics
    Post-Apoc/Dystopia
    Pregnancy
    Published: 1920
    Published: 1954
    Published: 1956
    Published: 1977
    Published: 1984
    Published: 1986
    Published: 1989
    Published: 1990
    Published: 1992
    Published: 1994
    Published: 1999
    Published: 2000
    Published: 2001
    Published: 2002
    Published: 2006
    Published: 2008
    Published: 2009
    Published: 2010
    Published: 2011
    Publisher: Bantam
    Publisher: Berkeley
    Publisher: Circlet Press
    Publisher: Crown Archetype
    Publisher: Delacorte
    Publisher: Del Rey
    Publisher: Dorchester
    Publisher: Golden Apple
    Publisher: HarperCollins
    Publisher: Jove
    Publisher: Leisure Books
    Publisher: NAL Trade
    Publisher: Night Shade Books
    Publisher: Orbit
    Publisher: Pocket
    Publisher: Random House
    Publisher: Riverhead Books
    Publisher: Roc
    Publisher: Shaye Areheart
    Publisher: Signet
    Publisher: Silhouette
    Publisher: Viking
    Publisher: Viking Adult
    Publisher: Vintage
    Publisher: William Morrow
    Relationships
    Reviewed: 2010
    Reviewed: 2011
    Reviewed: 2012
    Romance
    Science Fiction
    Setting: Canada
    Setting: Chicago
    Setting: Hawaii
    Setting: Ireland
    Setting: Maryland
    Setting: New York
    Setting: South Africa
    Setting: Sweden
    Setting: Texas
    Setting: Virginia
    Short Stories
    Space
    Synesthesia
    The Year Of The Classics
    Thriller
    Time Travel
    True Crime
    Urban Fantasy
    Vampires
    Witches
    World Building
    Zombies

    RSS Feed


Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.