booksthatburn's Reviews (1.46k)

THE RING OF SOLOMON features the djinn Bartimaeus, narrator of the Bartimaeus Trilogy, thousands of years earlier when he was enslaved to a magician working for King Solomon.

Bartimaeus discusses details about the world (both important and of importance only to him) in an upbeat, irreverent style. He does most things with irreverence, quippy to the utmost, with cheer and frustration alternating depending on the circumstances. I wish that fatphobia wasn't part of his banter. It's not often, but it happens enough that it got to be rather frustrating. 

This is can be understood completely separately from the main trilogy, though this does provide a slice of Bartimaeus' past associations with a particular one of his fellow djinni who appears elsewhere in the series. Even in this distant past he's already been enslaved for thousands of years, though the way he's speaking (and using the Gregorian calendar to refer to dates) implies that he's narrating from some point much after these events, but likely before the rest of the series. Bartimaeus ends up in service to someone who came to kill King Solomon and take his ring, and most of the story revolves around how they end up attempting this. I like the setup of how the ring works and how King Solomon's court has been functioning, it allows for a cool reveal late in the book which is consistent with everything else that happened while still being a bit surprising. 

Great for fans of the main trilogy and for those who like wisecracking narrators.

I don’t like the pacing, nor the main characters. There’s a dizzying amount of detail about objects and surroundings but almost nothing about the magic that’s supposed to be of such importance to the story. I struggled to get through the first 18% and then stopped.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC.

Immediately disliked the style and main character.

BLOOD HEIR is set in the same world as the Kate Daniels books, and serves as both a sort of sequel and as a new story which can be enjoyed by readers who are unfamiliar with the earlier book. It has its own story with Julie, renamed Aurelia Ryder after she left Atlanta at the conclusion of the earlier series. One of the draws to this book is that it continues a world readers will already know, but there have been a lot of changes in Julie as a person and in Atlanta as a city so this is very approachable for new readers. 

Aurelia returns to Atlanta after a long absence, magically changed and now (hopefully) unrecognizable to those who knew her before as Kate and Curran's ward. At the word of a Witch Oracle she's trying to avert a prophecy which promises terrible things for the people she loves. In addition to her powers as a sensate, Aurelia has magic learned from her (sort of) grandparents and years of physical training to back it up. 

The worldbuilding does a good job of explaining things that are relevant for Aurelia, without getting bogged down in the tangled mass of relationships and events which were established in the earlier series. It presents people as they matter to Aurelia, not necessarily commenting on whatever role they played before unless it becomes relevant. This means that characters like Conrad, Derek, and Asciano (who play important roles) get far more attention than even Kate, since she's far away and needs to stay there long enough for Aurelia to make a difference.

The main plot is a combination of a murder mystery and mind games while Aurelia tries to solve the murder of a pastor who ministered to the poor in the city. Atlanta has become a much harsher place in recent years, not that it was particularly kind when Julie was a child.

A good follow-up to Kate Daniels, I'm hopeful that this will be the start of a great new series.

TRAVELERS ALONG THE WAY takes place during the Crusades (just as in the original Robin Hood tales), and features characters whose archetypes and circumstances are recognizable, but don’t require that similarity to be enjoyable. I like Rahma, and the generally breezy rapport between the party members. There are moment of tension, especially related to the actual war which is the whole reason Rahma and her sister are here in the first place. My favorite bit is the sequence with the Templars, and I like how the whole thing wraps up. 

I enjoyed it while reading but I’m having trouble teasing out anything in particular for comment afterwards that wouldn’t be a huge spoiler. The audiobook narrator did a great job, and I’m glad this is part of the Remixed Classics collection. 

 

BLOODHOUND doesn’t specifically wrap up anything from TERRIER, but it does answer the question of what happens once Beka is a Dog instead of a Puppy. There’s a new storyline related to counterfeits in the money supply and a trip away from Corus, as well as a romance for Beka, both of which are introduced and resolved. It’s not the final book and it leaves open Beka’s next steps and new partnership to be continued later. Beka’s narration is consistent with TERRIER, though she’s a bit wiser after her Puppy year. The backstory is explained enough for this to make sense to anyone who started here without reading any other Tortall books.

The worldbuilding has some pretty egregious lifts from real-world cuisine in terms of seafood and Beka’s inland reactions to it. The details listed food without celebrating it, mostly focusing on whether or not Beka liked it on her first time. It's perfectly fine for fantasy stories to use real-world food, but it felt like "westerner's first visit to a seafood restaurant" and the whole vibe was off.

The plot is slow, meandering through the investigation, and letting the supposed craziness of the villain be the justification for a scheme that makes no sense and could ruin a whole country's economy for very little actual profit in the long run. When the villain and their motivation is revealed there's an implicit shoulder shrug of resignation that they didn't care about the long term and were just bad. It feels sloppy and makes the story frustrating to solve, a far cry from the neat way things were intertwined in the first book. There, the resolution of a particular hanging detail could feel triumphant when solved. Here, it's obvious who's doing it but not why, and the answer turns out to be they didn't care that it's a bad plan.

There’s a weird vibe around Beka’s reactions to Okha once she finds about Okha’s alias, Amber Orchid. Amber states plainly that’s she’s a woman’s soul in a man’s body as a result of the Trickster god. Beka’s reaction is acceptance of the statement, but it’s treated in the text that Amber/Okha is grateful she didn’t react violently to the news. When Beka spends the rest of the novel misgendering Okha by using he/him even when she’s in women’s clothes and using the name “Amber”, it just feels like performative allyship that doesn’t actually respect what Okha said. I’d have less of an issue with it if Beka used “he/him” when Okha was in men’s clothes, and she/her when Amber was in women’s clothes, but it’s very off-putting when Beka’s with Amber, surrounded by people who don’t know she spends part of her time answering to any other name, and still Beka writes of her using he/him. Gender is complicated, and gender in a second-world fantasy setting shouldn’t have to map neatly onto reality, but it seems off for a setting which has terms which seem to mean gay and lesbian, while not having one for another kind of queerness that’s prominent in the story. Amber could say what the proper word or common (non-derogatory) slang is when she says she has a woman’s soul. Instead, it’s this halfway ground that tries to show Beka as good for not being horrible, while not having her actually behave as though she believes Amber about her own identity. It’s especially frustrating when details like clothing, customs, and food are lifted nearly unaltered from real peoples and cultures in order to build out the worlds, and that worked out rather badly once again. As a trans person myself, we may joke about being a soul in the wrong body as an attempt to convey to cis people how distressing it can be to be chronically mistreated and misgendered, and there may even be individuals for whom that feels like what happened, but it seems like the author heard that explanation at some point and decided to make it literal in Tortall. The end result misgenders a lovely character who had a chance at being an example of a queer person using drag to explore or display their gender expression in a safe context, or it could have been tweaked slightly to let Amber live publicly as a woman the whole time. Instead, Amber is referred to as either “Okha” or “Amber/Okha”, and her identity is discovered like a badly-kept secret. 

TERRIER is about an ancestress of George Cooper, a character important to other series set in Tortall. It serves as a prequel of sorts, and is best read after the Song of the Lioness quartet for readers who intend to read all of the Tortall books. However, after the prologue which establishes the connection to George Cooper, the rest of the story does not require any additional knowledge from the other books in order to be appreciated. 

The story is told in a journal format, with a few entries to establish Beka's backstory and place in the Tortall books, then it switches completely to Beka's journal that she keeps as part of her Dog training. 

Beka is from the slums of the Lower City, and she lives near the Kennel she's assigned to as a Dog. She has some friends among the Puppies, she gets to know her training Dogs (Tunstall and Goodwin), and she ends up making a few friends with rushers new to the court of the Rogue. She has a cat with purple eyes, and a magical ability that lets her get information that other Dogs cannot. She ends up on the trail of two sets of murders: someone hiring workers and then killing them to keep their efforts secret, and someone who’s been extorting poor people by kidnapping their kids. Beka trains, goes on patrol with her Dogs, and tries to make things right in a city with too few good Dogs to handle ordinary crime, let alone spree and serial killers. 

Beka makes friends, straight and crooked, and tries to keep from crossing any lines that can’t be uncrossed. The camaraderie in the morning group which develops is a bright spot in her world of patrols, fights, and death. She has strong friendships with individuals and as a group. The journal format of the book lends itself well to conveying their growing friendships, which are a strong point of the novel. 

TERRIER closes with Beka still a Puppy but wiser than when she began, and ready for her next challenge. The story closes off so neatly that it feels like it could have been a stand-alone, but instead it’s the first in a trilogy.

DWELLERS is a twisting story, where two brothers fleeing something terrible end up in a situation with its own set of problems when they take over the bodies of two strangers. Tightly constructed, this winds through tense boredom and fear as Jonah and Louis try to figure out why the people they replaced have a dead body in the basement. 

I love doppelganger stories, and this fits into that general type while weaving something new-to-me along the way. Part of what's so unsettling about it is that other than the mental body-snatching which brings Louis and Jonah (not their real names) into someone else's life, most of the horror is so plausibly mundane. Jonah broke his leg in the crash when he took over this life, and he's trapped inside while he waits for his (new) body to heal. Louis is technically more mobile, but their need for secrecy means that he's nearly as trapped as Jonah.

The ending is suitably ambiguous. This is a story of loose threads, mistakes, malice, and unsettled things, and the strangeness of the ending suits it well. 

CHANGLESS is a pretty good book which is utterly ruined by a terrible ending. 

CHANGELESS begins with annoyances and crises, the regiment has appeared on the lawn and a mysterious plague of mortality has fallen upon London’s normally supernatural residents. This introduces Madame Lefoux, a hat-maker and inventor who affects masculine dress as a matter of course. There’s an entirely new storyline related to Madame Lefoux, Ivy, the mortality plague, and a sudden need to travel to Scotland. This doesn’t wrap up anything left hanging, though it is nice to see Alexia and Conall as a married couple. Several things related to the mortality issue and Conall’s past are introduced and resolved. This isn’t the final book and has a very sudden cliffhanger which demands to be addressed in the next volume. Alexia is still the main narrator and her voice is consistent, though there are some sections following other characters. I like Madame Lefoux, she's a great addition to the ensemble of characters.

There’s enough backstory given that this could mostly make sense if someone started here and hadn’t read the first book, but this book thrives on banter and relationships, so it will be much more impactful for anyone who started the series at the beginning.

Because the setting is based on real-life Victorian England (and Scotland), but with supernatural elements and steampunk, it ends up engaging with Great Britain as an empire and not just a country. The regiment which shows up was returning from serving the British military in India, apparently some kind of colonialist possession, though I’m not sure how precisely it aligns with the real trajectory of that situation. There are also mentions of British military presence in North Africa. The main characters are supernatural representatives in Queen Victoria’s government, but this is the first real reference to British colonization in the series.

I hate the ending. It’s technically in keeping with the various characters’ personalities, but it’s sudden and stressful and I’ve never liked it.