Review: Ice Forged

Ice Forged
Ascendant Kingdoms, Book 1

Author: Gail Z. Martin
Pages: 592
Publisher: Orbit
Publication Date: January 8, 2013
Source: Unsolicited copy from publisher for review

Description from Goodreads:
Condemned as a murderer for killing the man who dishonored his sister, Blaine "Mick" McFadden has spent the last six years in Velant, a penal colony in the frigid northern wastelands of Edgeland. Harsh military discipline and the oppressive magic of the governor's mages keep a fragile peace as colonists struggle against a hostile environment. But the supply ships from Dondareth have stopped coming, boding ill for the kingdom that banished the colonists.

Now, McFadden and the people of Velant decide their fate. They can remain in their icy prison, removed from the devastation of the outside world, but facing a subsistence-level existence, or they can return to the ruins of the kingdom that they once called home. Either way, destruction lies ahead...

First Sentence: "'This has to end.'"

Review:

Ice Forged starts off with a real bang, one that lead me, temporarily, to believe that I might have found a new epic fantasy series to love. What happens is that Blaine's father, a real...honestly, I don't have an epithet strong enough for this guy...rapes his daughter. For Blaine, this is the last straw, and refuses to tolerate anything more from his father who has always been abusive but just upped the ante. Blaine kills him, with no Hamlet-like qualms; he just goes for it. Unfortunately, this scene is the most engaged that I was for the entirety of the nearly 600 page book.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think this is a bad epic fantasy novel, and I would be willing to recommend it to the right sort of reader. As a reader, I prefer character-driven pieces, and this is even more true in a genre like epic fantasy, where I need to stay interested through 500+ pages. Martin's fantasy, however, focuses more on political machinations and world building than on character, so I found myself floundering.

The characters are nice basic foundations, but, without any character development, I couldn't develop more than a surface-level interest in them. They go places and they do things, but the book isn't really about them so much as it is about the fantasy world. If that's your thing, then awesome, but I stay through these journeys for the friendships within the fellowship or for that one romance you know won't bud until the last book but that you can see tendrils of from the beginning. Wonderful world building is crucial, of course, but character comes first with me, because, if I don't care about the main characters, why should I sit through thousands of pages to watch them complete their quest?

The world herein depicted has a lot of merit, especially with the treatment of magic. In this world, people and places have varying amounts of magic, but, basically, it's used to aid in pretty much everything, like growing crops, medicine, fighting, etc. Countries are at war and, no one's sure why, but something breaks the magic. The breaking alone has disastrous consequences, but people may not even be able to survive without all of those little bits of magic they used every day, which seemed so minor at the time but all add up to serious difficulties.

One thing I do not understand is why there are vampires, talishte, running around. Everything else in the world seems pretty standard high fantasy, and then BOOM vampires. They seem a bit out of place, and, honestly, I've had enough vampires at this point that I only want really good ones. For a while, capitalizing off of the most popular trend works, but, after a while, the trend sort of runs its course and readers are going to be pickier about that particular subgenre.

What it comes down to is what you like to get out of your epic fantasy. If you want powerful character arcs, touching interpersonal relationships or for the book to pass the Bechdel test, Ice Forged is not your book. If, however, you like to really delve into the layout of the kingdoms, both physically and politically, then have at it. I will not be reading any more of this series, unless I hear characterization becomes a priority in the next volume.

Rating: 2.5/5

Favorite Quote:

"The red-haired man scowled at Piran. 'You mock the gods?'
     Piran laughed again. 'I can't mock what isn't real.'"

Review: Lucky Bunny

Lucky Bunny

Author: Jill Dawson
Pages: 384
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Source: Publisher via TLC Book Tours

Description from Goodreads:
'Crime's a man's business. So they say. Who was that small figure then, slender enough to trot along the moonlit track, swift and low, virtually invisible? Who was it that covered the green signal with a glove to stop the train, while the two others took care of the driver and his mate? Could it have been one Queenie Dove, survivor of the Depression and the Blitz, not to mention any number of scrapes with the law?'

Queenie Dove is a self-proclaimed genius when it comes to thieving and escape. Daring, clever and sexy, she ducked and dived through the streets of London from the East End through Soho to Mayfair, graduating from childhood shop-lifting to more glamorous crimes in the post-war decades. So was she wicked through and through, or more sinned against than sinning? Here she tells a vivacious tale of trickery and adventure, but one with more pain and heartbreak than its heroine cares to admit. Yes, luck often favoured her, but that is only part of the story.

First Sentence: "Queenie's not my real name, of course."

Review:
I went into this novel with such high hopes. Audra of Unabridged Chick loved it, and I typically find that I agree with her on books. Unfortunately, my experience of this one was quite different, partly, I think, because of my prior reading history and because of the way the book was billed. For me, this book was slow and torturous, the characters utterly loathsome.

Your enjoyment of this book will likely hinge on how you feel about Queenie Dove. If you find her clever, cool and alluring, then everything will be copacetic. If, like me, you find her obnoxious and really don't care what happens to her, the book will drag on seemingly endlessly. In part, my distaste stemmed from her name, as I read another book with a Queenie at the lead earlier this year: Code Name Verity. That Queenie has so much personality, strength, intelligence and charisma that this one paled in comparison.

My other problem with regards to expectation was that I thought this was a novel about World War II. It's mentioned in the blurb and on the back of the book it's described as "a world war II-era narrative," which may technically be true, but is quite misleading. World War II doesn't matter too much in Queenie's life, though she lives through it. She was evacuated briefly toe the country and survived one tragic bombing, but that's pretty much the extent of it.

Of course, had I read the synopsis more closely, I would have noted what the book is actually about: hoisting, theft, in so much as it is about anything. You see, this book doesn't have a plot. AT ALL. I have liked plotless books in the past, because if the writing and ideas and characters are marvelous than I don't need a plot to pull me through to the end of the book. Without it in this instance, it was a struggle to get to the last page. I had similar difficulties with David Copperfield, another fictional biography. Perhaps that subset of fiction is not for me.

I will say that the book improved when Queenie got older. The first 150 pages or so, though, were so entirely boring to me. A large portion of the book is devoted to Queenie's tragic childhood, I guess to promote sympathy in me and make me care about her. Well, that didn't work. Yes, her life sucked (gambler dad, insane mother, etc.), but I still found Queenie off-putting.

Precisely why I disliked Queenie so much, aside from expecting her to be like that other literary Queenie, is a bit hard to place my finger on. I suspect that lies in her narrative style. The book is written in a style that simply didn't work for me, filled with odd slang and long sentences. I read a little selection of it to my parents, who found it pompous and said it sounded like she was 'trying too hard.' The cadence of the sentences just didn't come off particularly naturally. With a really good narrator, though, I imagine this could be a marvelous audiobook.

As much as there was one, the main conflict of the book regarded domestic abuse. Like her mother before her, Queenie settles down with a man who beats her. He first hits her in public and not just once, yet she stays. In the narrative, she considers how much other people blame the abused woman for allowing the abuse, for staying; she calls this victim blaming. She has a point, of course, but I still feel wholeheartedly that she should have kicked him to the curb the first time he slapped her.

Undoubtedly this book will work for others and I urge you to check out Audra's review, which I linked to up above, for another viewpoint. The whole book just rubbed me the wrong way.

Rating: 2/5

Favorite Quote: "I've never been one of those women who looks at herself in the mirror and takes everything apart, critical, you know. What a waste of time that attitude is! Young girls today make me sorry for them, always dissecting their own bodies, like they're one of those maps of a cow in a butchers' shop. Me, I take my lead from Gloria. I look in the mirror, slap my lovely fat behind and say to myself: yep, Queenie, looking good!"

Childhood (1) - Yann Tiersen

Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Journey from North Korea to Freedom in the West

Author: Blaine Harden
Pages: 191
Review Copy Acquired from: Viking

Description from Goodreads:
North Korea is isolated and hungry, bankrupt and belligerent. It is also armed with nuclear weapons. Between 150,000 and 200,000 people are being held in its political prison camps, which have existed twice as long as Stalin's Soviet gulags and twelve times as long as the Nazi concentration camps. Very few born and raised in these camps have escaped. But Shin Donghyuk did.

In Escape from Camp 14, acclaimed journalist Blaine Harden tells the story of Shin Dong-hyuk and through the lens of Shin's life unlocks the secrets of the world's most repressive totalitarian state. Shin knew nothing of civilized existence-he saw his mother as a competitor for food, guards raised him to be a snitch, and he witnessed the execution of his own family. Through Harden's harrowing narrative of Shin's life and remarkable escape, he offers an unequaled inside account of one of the world's darkest nations and a riveting tale of endurance, courage, and survival.

First Sentence: "His first memory is an execution."

Review:
I wrote my Independent Study senior year of college about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's writings. One of the things I read was his Gulag Archipelago. For some reason, which I really don't want to consider too much (this may have something to do with my love for dystopias too), I have always been fascinated with books about the concentration camps and the gulag system. When I read in the blurbs sent to me by Penguin that the North Korean camps make those pale in comparison, I knew that I had to read this book.

The scale of the camps is simply staggering. Shin attended a rudimentary school with approximately 1,000 other children. This is mindboggling, considering that only the children of camp marriages were allowed any form of education within the camp. Marriages were used as a reward for the hardest workers, so just imagine how many people might be in this one camp, of which there were many more. And of all of those people, Shin is still the only person known to have escaped and survived.

Perhaps even more startling are all of the other facts about North Korea. It seems as though, horrendous as life can be in the camps, it's not actually that much better on the outside. In some instances, there may be more reliable food in the camps.

Harden did a great job with this. He includes a lot of details about North Korea in general, whatever he's managed to learn, that add context to Shin's story. Personally, I knew practically nothing about North Korea beforehand; apparently, there's only so much to know, because the North Koreans really don't want anyone else to know anything. Plus, he emphasizes the limits of our knowledge of North Korea and of Shin. There is often no way to corroborate Shin's tale, because he is the only one known to have escaped from a no-release camp.

[Random comment, but I really will never understand why photo inserts in history books/biographys are always put in the middle of a chapter. Hundreds of pages, between any of which the photos could go, but they always put them in the middle of a chapter (actually, usually a sentence), necessitating a back and forth shuffle through the pages. Why not just put them after a chapter and let me flip through the book the way I usually do?]

Although Escape from Camp 14 is a brief book, it packs a punch. For those with an interest in history or contemporary politics, this is a must-read.

Favorite Quote: "'I am evolving from being an animal,' he said. 'But it is going very, very slowly. Sometime I try to cry and laugh like other people, just to see if it feels like anything. Yet tears don't come. Laughter doesn't come.'"

Rating: 4.5/5

I'm Going Slightly Mad - Queen

Death Sentence
Escape from Furnace, Book 3

Author: Alexander Gordon Smith
Pages: 261
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giraux

Warning: This is part of a series. The review will contain spoilers for the previous books.

Brief Summary:
At the dramatic conclusion to Solitary, Alex, Zee and Simon had almost escaped (again). This time they had the good idea of climbing out the chimney of the incinerator. Unfortunately, it got turned on and they were all burning to death.

Or not. You may already have guessed that they probably didn't die, since there was another book in the series. Now Alex has to face the final horror of furnace: becoming an experiment, a monster, or dying in the process.

Review:
Although Death Sentence has all of the action and grossness of the prior installments, I definitely was not as engrossed (see what I did there?) as I was before. I found myself getting a bit bored in some parts.

The beginning was rough. I mean, he's undergoing the change and mostly just having nightmares. Then he wakes up and the Warden says things. He fights with himself to hold onto Alex Sawyer. He has Achilles-level rage. He feels guilt. There are some scenes that are reminiscent of the reprogramming in A Clockwork Orange, which I really hope was an intended reference.

So, in this installment, you actually do get to learn a bit more about the origins of Furnace. Actually, there were a couple of subtle hints before this point, which I noticed, but ignored, hoping that wasn't where Smith was going with this. Well, it is. Sigh. Maybe it will be cool, but I worry that it will just make me angry with stereotypes. I guess that remains to be seen.

The next book, The Fugitives, is poised to be hugely exciting. Even after having been less enthused with this one, I'm excited to find out what will happen next.

Rating: 2.5/5

"It finally happened - happened
It finally happened - uh huh
It finally happened - I'm slightly mad - oh dear!"

Down in a Hole - Alice in Chains

Solitary
Escape from Furnace, Book 2

Author: Alexander Gordon Smith
Pages: 232
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giraux

Warning: This is a sequel in a series and will contain spoilers for the book before.

Brief Summary:
Book one left off with the boys on the verge of escape. It should come as no surprise to anyone who knew the title of this book when reading that they did, in fact, not make it. They walk around, choose to take a path down instead of up, and swiftly are caught again. And put in Solitary. If you didn't see that coming, well, think harder next time.

Anyway, in Lockdown, the reader is informed that the longest anyone has ever managed to spend in Solitary was four days and that that person went crazy. The Warden gives these Zee and Alex a month. Best of luck, boys. If you can try to stay sane, you'll need it to try to escape from here.

Review:
Like the first book in this series, Solitary is an action-packed, tension-filled thrill ride. You might not expect that a book about a boy trapped in Solitary would be so exciting. Surprisingly, though, it totally was.

On the one hand, it's kind of ridiculous and silly that the boys still think they can escape from this incredibly creepy and heavily guarded prison. But still, it works, because considering the possibility of escape is the only way the inmates are able to keep their courage, sanity and regular personality. Whether or not the plans actually work, like the first one spectacularly did not, they do help the boys in a very real way, disregarding the consequences of failure.

Having a look at the guts of the prison was really interesting. This gets us (Alex, Zee, the reader) a closer look at what's going on in there. Still, I need some questions answered. So many of them. Somehow I suspect that won't happen until the final book in the series.

The books have been very consistent thus far. If you liked book one, you'll probably like this one just as much. Although I don't love these, they are interesting and fast-paced. I probably won't reread them but getting through the series isn't a struggle at all.

Rating: 3/5

"Down in a hole, losing my soul
Down in a hole, losing control"

Consequence - Incubus

Lockdown
Escape from Furnace, Book 1

Author: Alexander Gordon Smith
Pages: 273
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
Series: Escape from Furnace, Book 1

Brief Summary:
In response to an escalation in teen violence, a truly inescapable prison was created: Furnace. The saying goes that "Beneath heaven is hell. Beneath hell is Furnace." Alex Sawyer gets a one-way ticket to Furnace for murdering his best friend, Toby, after a robbery went south. He deserves to be locked away for life, right? Except that he didn't actually do it. He was set up. That's what they always say, but Alex is telling the truth. Plus, Furnace is no ordinary prison. This one's controlled by some serious monsters. And why are more and more kids claiming that they've been framed? Alex knows one thing: the possibility of death is better than the idea of giving up on escaping this worse than hell.

Review:
Kids these days are just a bunch of hoodlums. They don't got no respect. They're violent because of their video games and the like. It certainly is not too difficult to imagine that, should there be some event to set it off, that governments (and the people) might get the idea that some kids are irredeemable. Some people cannot be saved, cannot be turned into good citizens; they should be allowed to rot.

Of course, this is a serious waste of resources. They're not okay with the death sentence, but they're willing to condemn children to a life sentence without possibility of parole in a jail of horrors. Right. The logic of other people confuses me. Even though they don't give the boys much, this still has to be an incredibly expensive operation.

Then you have to factor in the fact that the folks running Furnace are framing boys for murder to add to the prison population, probably because they're dying off too fast, thanks to the violence of the guards and the violence of the inmates. I really am looking forward to continuing with the series. At the end of Lockdown, you don't know much. Basically, you know enough to know that some seriously bad shit is going down.

I mentioned that Alex was framed, and he was, but I what I have not yet stressed is the robbery part. Alex is not a good guy. He was a bully and graduated from stealing classmate's money to robbing homes. He definitely was a criminal. Even so, he does not deserve the treatment he's receiving in Lockdown. It's important to keep that in mind, because that's much of the point; this setting makes even the boys harsher than Alex seem somewhat sympathetic.

Lockdown will definitely appeal to teenage boys, full of violence and creepy monsters. Of course, don't let that limit you, because I enjoyed it. I'm looking forward to finding out more about the dystopian world that created Furnace.

Rating: 3/5

"You blink and you miss a beat, keep one of your eyes open at all times
You think that your on the brink, the shit hasn't even begun to hit the fan"

This Place Is a Prison - The Postal Service

Incarceron
Incarceron, Book 1

Author: Catherine Fisher
Genre: young adult, fantasy, dystopia
Pages: 448

Brief Summary:
Finn cannot remember a time before he awakened in one of Incarceron's cells at the age of 15. He fervently believes that he came from Outside the prison and that his visions (he is a Starseer to the people in Incarceron; one who has visions of the Outside, of escape) are actually memories of before he arrived here. No one else believes him, because they all no the truth: no one enters or leaves Incarceron. Except, maybe, for Sapphique, a legend who supposedly escaped ages ago. The appearance of a mysterious crystal key, along with a timely vision leads Finn on a quest to find out his past and to find a way out of Incarceron.

Meanwhile, Claudia, the daughter of the Warden of Incarceron, seeks the truth about Incarceron, a perfect community set up...somewhere. Her father keeps secrets and is incredibly distant. Her search becomes ever more frantic when she learns that her wedding to Prince Caspar, a horrible excuse for a human being, has been moved up. She wanted to marry Giles, her original betrothed who was killed in a horseback riding accident, but is stuck with this oaf instead. Perhaps if she can learn enough, she can escape, one way or another, this dreadful union.

Review:
For the last several months, I have been on a dystopia reading kick. Of the ones on my list to read, this one ranked highly on the expectations scale. In fact, the book was even highly recommended to me. Unfortunately, expectation does not by any means guarantee that the expected outcome will be the one to occur. Incarceron failed to grab me at any and all points. Not to say that it was awful, because it wasn't. It just failed to entice me; I read it out of some sense of duty, rather than a drive to find out what would happen or to enjoy the language.

I think, and I do use the speculative verb intentionally, that my problem here resulted from an inability to suspend disbelief for this book. Before anyone gets too accusatory, let me assure you that this is often not a problem for me. See previous reviews for support of this fact. Incarceron lacked some of the back story that would have helped me buy into this absurd society. Without some explanation of the crazy wars that lead to this situation or an example legal document setting the systems in place (as was done in Unwind), I had trouble figuring out how this system could possibly have been the chosen solution. There are documents at the beginning of the chapters but they say little more than "There was a crazy war, so we will do this" (paraphrased). This just didn't convince me entirely. A lot of the physical descriptions of the workings of Incarceron are also baffling and perhaps entirely inconceivable. I would give a specific example, but to do so would contain spoilers, so I won't.

What it all comes down to though is that I just did not care. One of the mysteries of the book is whether Sapphique escaped or not, assuming he existed at all. I suppose I should have been speculating about whether he did as I read and new information was revealed. This I did not do. I just read patiently and waited for information to be revealed. I could care only slightly less about whether the evil forces lost and whether anyone escaped from the prison, and even whether Claudia had to marry the obnoxious prince (especially since any descriptions of her given by other people were entirely unflattering personality-wise).

For my part, I would recommend reading The Maze Runner instead of this book, even though I had mixed feelings about that book as well. A lot of the themes within them reminded me of one another and I thought that one had a slightly better premise. Still, lots of people have loved this one, so if you're up for it, go right on ahead.

"This place is a prison
These people aren't your friends
Inhaling thrills through $20 bills
Tumblers are drained and then flooded again and again

There's guards at the on ramps armed to the teeth
And you may case the grounds
From the Cascades to Puget Sound
But you are not permitted to leave

I know there's a big world out there."