Debris

She can control pions, the building blocks of matter, shaping them into new forms using ritual gestures and techniques. The rewards are great, and she is one of most highly regarded people in the city. But that was before the “accident”.

Stripped of her powers, bound inside a bizarre powersuit, she finds herself cast down to the very lowest level of society. Powerless, penniless and scarred, Tanyana must adjust to a new life collecting “debris”, the stuff left behind by pions. But as she tries to find who has done all of this to her, she also starts to realize that debris is more important than anyone could guess.

Debris is a stunning new piece of Science Fantasy, which draws in themes from Japanese manga, and classic Western SF and Fantasy to create this unique, engrossing debut from the very exciting young author Jo Anderton.

The world of Debris is a fantastic place. I think the author did a fantastic job of creating this world without overloading us with information all at once. I did take it upon myself to look up the definition of a pion. For the record, a pion is:  a meson that is a combination of up and down quarks and antiquarks, that may be positive, negative, or neutral, and that has a mass about 270 times that of the electron (from Merriam-Webster). Basically, it’s a really small bit of energy, which is what you get from the book anyway.

The entire book is very cleverly imagined. It’s the most original sci fi/fantasy story I’ve read in a long time. It’s a world where energy – little bits of energy – is everything. The worldbuilding elements are all there. There is a lot of description in a lot of points, but it is not burdensome. We see the world as Tanyana does; we follow her every step up of the way from her fall and the lost of her power. When Tanyana loses her ability to see or manipulate that energy, the world goes dark, to a certain extent. Things like paper and gas lamps are nearly unheard of among higher circles. Only those who can’t see the energy – can’t see pions – use those sorts of things. While there is a lot of description in certain parts, there are sometimes where there is not enough description. I think it was a bit unbalanced, there were chapters where I wished the circumstances were better described, and still other chapters where they were described far too well. It was well done and clever enough that this didn't bother me as much as it might have in another book.

I’m going to assume that Tanyana was not supposed to be likeable in the beginning. Sometimes, I would feel sorry for her and I would wish her better luck, but then the very next page and I’d change my mind. She’s selfish and she believes she deserves better treatment than the entire rest of  the population. Tanyana was skilled, she was the best there was, and she lost it all. She was used to being treated better for what she could do, now she has to learn how to prove herself for who she truly was. She grows toward the end of the book, just as a character should. At the beginning, she is insistent that no one could possibly know or understand her. I mean, how in the world could these people possibly know what happened to her? I wouldn’t suppose that there’s something like gossip in her world? If there is, she seems to think she’s above it. By the end, she is more willing to understand. By the end, Tanyana has formed a bond with the people she never would have looked at before and was willing to fight for them, as we see in the final pages of this book. I found that I enjoyed watching her journey from rich snob to understanding debris collector. She learns throughout the book, exactly as a good character should. At the end of the book, I appreciate her journey and I'm excited to see her grow more in the next one.

The book was captivating. It not only bought my attention but it also earned it. Except for the slow beginning, there wasn’t a moment where I didn’t want to flip to the next page. Most of this book was read during my breaks at work. I hate taking breaks because I hate not doing anything, it’s just a character flaw, but this book made me look forward to my breaks. It made me wish they were longer so I could read more. I loved that there was no dumping of information in the book. There were things in the book that were never exactly explained, they simply had to be discovered or inferred. Other things were explained later as they were explained to Tanyana. It was very well done, though, and I never really felt confused or lost in the book.

There were a few things about the book that bothered me. First was the unanswered questions. So many questions were raised in the process of this novel and only a few were answered or sort of explained. I suppose thats what the sequel is for, but now I'm concerned that this will turn into an infodump in the next book. I felt like the promise of this novel wasn't particularly fulfilled within the pages of this book, but I guess I had originally assumed it was standalone. I guess we'll see with the sequel. Part of me wishes it was a standalone novel, if simply for the fact that I generally tend to prefer standalone against series. I also didn't appreciate the abundance of sex scenes in the novel. Ok, so I use abundance a bit liberally, but my point remains: there was no point. They served no purpose and did nothing to push the plot along. Nevermind the moral issue of it for a minute, there was no reason for them. Even the romance itself approached too quickly for me, although that was a little more forgivable. The romance itself helped to push the plot along, it made sense for Tanyana and where she was at that time. The sex didn't. I think it was just an unnecessary plot point and could have very well been excluded.

Over all, a great debut novel from Jo Anderton. I’m looking forward to seeing more from her in the future – especially a certain book two coming out next year – and I definitely think she has a lot of potential as a science fiction author.

I received a eBook review copy of Debris from the publisher, Angry Robot. Debris comes out in October 2011. See the publisher site for more information.

Rating: 8 - Excellently Done. I wavered on the edge of 9, but settled for 8. There was enough that bothered me that I couldn't give it a 9, but the novel was great and the series definitely has potential.

»»  read more

Tiger's Curse

Passion. Fate. Loyalty.

Would you risk it all to change your destiny?

The last thing 17-year old Kelsey Hayes thought she’d be doing this summer was trying to break a 300-year-old Indian curse. With a mysterious white tiger named Ren. Halfway around the world. But that’s exactly what happened. Face-to-face with dark forces, spellbinding magic, and mystical worlds where nothing is what it seems, Kelsey risks everything to piece together an ancient prophecy that could break the curse forever.

Tiger’s Curse is the exciting first volume in an epic fantasy-romance that will leave you breathless and yearning for more.

Oh goodness, where do I start? I'm not sure that this book as a single redeeming quality, and I don't mean that to say that I simply didn't like the book. No, it truly was that the writing, the characters, the storyline - all were done terribly and I seriously wonder what the author was trying to get at. The book initially drew my attention when the bookstore I work at began promoting its sequel, Tiger's Quest. The menacing black tiger on the front cover caught my interest, and upon researching it, I found it was the second in a series. Naturally, I decided to start from the beginning. I did read a few of the reviews on goodreads.com, so I definitely did not go into the book with high expectations. That being said, I was severely disappointed in the novel.

We begin with Kelsey, an 18 year old who has just graduated high school and is now looking for a summer job. She finds a job at a circus where she fills in doing a bunch of odd jobs, including feeding the white tiger the circus keeps. Naturally, as is custom in recent fiction works, Kelsey immediately becomes obsessed with the tiger. You don't even need to read the back-of-the-book blurb to know that something's up. The tiger is being taken to India by someone with a rich employer and this man asks Kelsey to help transport the tiger to the other side of the world. She agrees, and adventure ensues!

I don't think I need to tell you why this book got me interested in the first place. The captivating cover, the interesting blurb. This book had serious potential that I really believe it wasted. The plot feels contrived and loosely strung together. I feel like there were so many ways for the events in this book to happen, and everything seems to follow a over-used, unoriginal formula that barely keeps me entertained. There is no emotional pull to anything in the novel. I feel no connection to Kelsey or Ren. It's like reading a string of facts, one after another. There was no reason for me to want to connect to it. It lacked any sort of voice beyond what you might find in a history book.

I know I pick on writing a lot, but there are some things that just shouldn't be done. One of those things is writing a character's thoughts in past tense. It only makes sense to write a thought in past tense if they are thinking of something that has already happened. Just because the book is written in past tense, that doesn't mean you have to continue that through to thought processes. If I was in the middle of eating a piece of cake, I would not think, "That piece of cake tasted really good." It doesn't make sense. People don't think in past tense all the time. Also, overexplaining everything the character comes into contact with does not reassure me that you did your research. Every time I finished a paragraph the detailed the exact type of plane they were in or exactly what was in the food she was eating, I only found myself completely annoyed and I still wondered if she really did her research.

And does nobody else find it creepy that while in tiger form, he keeps licking her? I mean, first of all, I don't think it's normal tiger behavior. I know that he's not a "normal tiger" but I feel like the author is trying to push it across as if that just him behaving as a tiger. It doesn't feel like that way at all. I feel like Ren-as-tiger could find so many better ways of comforting Kelsey than licking her. It's creepy and weird. Also, even if she was supposed to be the one to break the curse, Ren's behavior is oddly uncharacteristic of the society he grew up in, and even still of the society he would belong to today. I don't see any of his princeliness or proud heritage or upbringing in his behavior. You could count it toward 300 years as a tiger, I guess. Still, it's strange to me.

One redeeming thing, though small, was that she certainly got the traffic situation down. While I don't know how Kelsey managed to drive around with a tiger in her car and have no one ask question, the way the roads in India were described were perfectly accurate. It made me remember my own time in India. It would be nice to go back one day.

In the end, not the greatest book I've ever read. However, I will call say that toward the end, it got a little bit more entertaining. Once I let go of any expectation whatsoever, I found myself enjoying the mindlessness of it. Though, I think I might have enjoyed it more when I was younger and more unwise to the ways of the world. Ha.

Rating: 5, Mediocre
Recommendation: Eh. Could go either way. Don't waste your money, get it from the library or borrow it from a friend. Don't expect anything of it, bad or good.

»»  read more

Leviathan/Behemoth

It's the brink of World War I and in different parts of the European continent, two young people are making decisions and doing things that will change their lives. They are convinced to do so my circumstances that are beyond their control, and by the decisions and things, they are tossed right into the middle of what would become a global war. In this alternate history, Alek is heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary and Deryn is a girl who has disguised herself as a boy to join the fight. It is Darwinist versus Clanker, fabricated beasts versus advanced technology.

I'll give two thumbs up for an interesting premise. And if I had two more thumbs, I'd give it four thumbs up for the excellent illustrations. Leviathan and it's sequel, Behemoth, are definitely fun reads. The intricacy and detail are amazing to me, it's a world that I definitely would not mind living in. The writing is also done very well. I was a little worried at the beginning of Leviathan with the second-person POV switching between characters, but I like the way it was done. Both Alek and Deryn have their own voice, enough so that when we got to a point in the books where they were in the same place at the same time, the chapters would switch and I felt like I would know whose POV it was immediately, without having to look for clues as to who is currently "speaking." 

My only little quibble with the characters is that they were written much younger than we are told they are. When I read the book, I feel more inclined to think of thirteen- or fourteen-year-olds, not sixteen-almost seventeen-year-olds. I know this isn't an issue with Scott Westerfield's writing ability, because I read his Midnighters series and the Uglies series, and both of them contained characters written to the age they were intended to be. I suppose, in some way, we get to see a little bit more of their maturing throughout the books this way. Alek started as a spoiled young prince who had nothing to gain but also nothing to lose. Deryn began the story as a girl whose dreams of flying made her dress as a boy, though her ideas were of glory and adventure, and nothing could have prepared either of them for what would follow. So I guess, in some ways, they matured as a result of their young writing. Even so, they still seem a little young for the age they're intended to be. 

That's only a little thing though, and it definitely didn't detract from the story. I wouldn't say that the story is one that I took super seriously, or really took anything away from it when I was done. It's also not a story that I will probably remember forever, though I do want to read the third one when it comes on this year and I probably will buy the series for myself once the third one comes out. Over all, it was a good story, fun to read, and very well written. Definitely another good series for Scott Westerfield, who is quickly becoming one of my favorite YA authors.

Last thing, I can't believe I almost forgot to mention it, is the illustrations in both books. There are almost 50 illustrations in each book, both full-page and smaller drawings. They're beautifully illustrated by Keith Thompson and definitely make the book just that much better. I absolutely adore books with illustrations, and I wish authors used them more often than they do these days.

So overall, very good series. Not life-changing or anything, but certainly worth reading and enjoying for yourself.

Rating: 8, Excellently Done
Recommended For: I'd say it is a must read for steampunk and fantasy fans. It's a fun story,  nothing serious, I think, but it is beautifully written and takes place in a world where I would certainly like to visit, sans World War I. 

»»  read more