octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

Three and a half stars, rounding up to four. I nearly gave this three stars, because enjoyable as it was, it didn't really have the depth that a couple of similar books I've read this year have. Dewey the Small-Town Library Cat was strongly connected to the role of libraries in small towns, and The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, which also had a homeless protagonist, had a greater emphasis on science and that appeals to me. But, you know, I plain enjoyed reading this. I'd read it again. It's good natured and hopeful and the idea of this man, Bowen, a recovering heroin addict who is one bare step from the streets and busking to feed himself, finding an injured moggie and almost immediately spending nearly every penny he had getting said moggie medical attention... not everyone would do that. I was rooting for the pair of them, and I'm so glad they found each other.

I read a lot of popcorn fiction because it's entertaining. I think this might be a popcorn memoir, and if it is I'd like to read more of them, because optimistic stories in a challenging world are rarely so accessible as this. Apparently there are follow up books. I want to read them too.

The third in the series, and I think it's the best of them so far. The problem with naming each of the books in the series after one of the four protagonists is that it gives the impression that the book will be primarily about that particular protagonist, whereas the first two in the series - and particularly Sandry's Book - have been more balanced. This one, though, very strongly features Daja, and as she's the one I find most interesting of the four that was a decision that worked for me.

Also, because the entirety of this book takes place out of Winding Circle, it gives an opportunity to see what some of the people who don't live in a community run by mages, or next to a community run by mages, think of it. That plays into the theme of distance and isolation that Daja, exiled from her own culture, experiences. It's interesting to read about how other, non-Circle mages react to the kids and their teachers, and it's not always good. Neither is it always bad, precisely - in some cases it's just different. Daja, for instance, is given the opportunity to re-join the Traders, but practicing magic in that culture means choosing a specialised focus for her magic, and it also means giving up smithying entirely. The Trader magicians are clearly competent in their fields, but it's a different experience of magic, a different culture of it, and the navigation of these multiple cultures gives the book an extra level of interest. I still find the kids ridiculously over-powered, but it's a quick, enjoyable read regardless.

I read and reviewed the two books collected here separately, so this is basically just for my own records. The Red Pyramid got three stars from me, and The Throne of Fire two and a half stars, rounding up, so the two together average out at three (again, rounding up).

It's sometimes odd with children's books. Some of them I read and know instantly that I would have loved them if I'd read them as a kid, and some I just can't tell. This is one of the latter. Maybe I'd have loved it as a kid, but my tastes have not changed that dramatically and I don't love it now, so I'm sceptical. Honestly, I rather feel like I should be more interested in this than I am, but the books are so long (too long) and they're too frenetic and the two child protagonists are so overpowered that there's no real sense of threat, here, at least not for me. Still, if they're not outstanding they're not awful either, and if they can instill an interest in mythology in their child-audience they'll have done something good, I reckon.

I've given this series a good go, now, and I think it's safe to say I think it's pretty average. That being said, I'm not the target audience here, so that could well have an impact on things. I expect that kids who read this series find the tone very appealing, but to me it just comes across as flippant and slightly irritating. And as much as I generally like the two main character - because they are likeable kids - they are kids, and I'm sorry, but I cannot take seriously a (barely) thirteen year old girl in a love triangle with a dying teenager and a god, I really can't. Perhaps that'd appear more believable if this were a more solidly young adult series, but as it is... ludicrous. Every time the story veered back to that child's love life I rolled my eyes.

Yes, I'm old. Tough shit. It's bad enough love triangles slink their awful selves into lots of the YA and adult fantasy I read, I don't need it seeping into middle grade as well.

I've read and reviewed each of the books collected here separately, so this is basically just for my own records. The truth is I've struggled with this series, and that's reflected in the stars I gave them. The first book got three stars, the second two and a half stars, and the third two stars. Together that averages out to two and a half, which rounds up to three - I round up in my Goodreads reviews, but honestly this was a case where if I'd rounded down it wouldn't have been completely dishonest. It's been a downward slide.

Look, there are genuinely likeable things about this series. I enjoy the two protagonists and their sibling relationship. I really enjoy the focus on Egyptian mythology. I don't know a lot about it, and this has exposed me to new things, so good. But the books strike me, consistently, as far longer than they need to be and in each case it's taken me weeks to make my way through each volume, because there's so much extraneous stuff bloating out the story, and I'm just not interested. I am especially not interested in pre-teen love triangles, or the romantic woes of either of these kids if I'm being honest. Furthermore the tone just seems so flippant that it undercuts, for me, any sense of real danger. Which, I mean, it's a book for kids. Riordan is clearly not out to write doom and gloom that gives his child readers nightmares, and good for him. He's obviously written a very successful children's series... I'm just not sure that it catches my adult attention. Nonetheless, I've given it a go, and I'll probably wander back to the Percy Jackson series sometime in the future, because I've read a couple of those before and liked them a little better, I think.

I've just finished reading The Kane Chronicles, to mixed reaction, and I stumbled across this spin-off novelette, and honestly I liked it much more unreservedly than I did the Chronicles. Carter Kane meets up with Percy Jackson to fight a giant crocodile, and they are clearly both extremely wary of the new magic system the other represents (new to them, anyway). This is the kind of thing I find really interesting: the politics of gods and magic, and how these two competing, secret understandings navigate knowledge of each other. Warily, is the answer, and I genuinely enjoyed the suspicion between the two boys. It's justified on both sides, and it doesn't stop them working together and even, I think, wanting to like each other.

The biggest advantage here, though, is the length. Because it's a novelette, there's no room for Riordan to drag everything out and overwhelm the narrative with extra stuff, which was one of my biggest issues with Chronicles. This is short and punchy and focused, and all the better for it.

A marginally haunted house nearly breaks up a marriage. The effects are somewhat horrifying, but I don't really class this as horror because it's all so muted, and really if the house acts as a catalyst, it's perfectly plausible that the two main characters could screw it up all by themselves. Clark, especially, is imaginatively tiresome in all sorts of petty ways, and I imagine he would be very hard to live with.

I hate rats.

Let's get that out of the way early on. I cannot stand them. They fill me with visceral, screaming revulsion. It's not their fault. They've never done anything to me, and it's a prejudice I should try and get over, which is one of my reasons for reading this book. I was, therefore, honestly pretty delighted to find that Sullivan can't really stand them either. Oh, he's fascinated by them... but only to a point. He'll watch them squirm about in a garbage bag, but to go over and open the bag to see them foraging inside it? Hell no, there are rats in there! There's a colony of them living in some pit in the alley he's stalking - he watches brown rats in an alley for a year - and does he go and take a closer look? He does not - the pit is deep and dark and there are rats in there. He experiences a sudden swarm and there are at least a hundred rats, a number which he admits is not at all inflated by a sudden hysterical over-reaction on his part. I laughed. I'd be the same. It's very entertaining, and book is certainly compulsive reading.

Lately I've been reading a lot of animal books, and the ones focused on a certain species tend to be strongly scientific. This isn't, and while I love science, it's a nice change. Sullivan's more concerned with the history of rats in New York. His experiences watching rats in this particular alley - from a safe distance, of course - are frequently interrupted by chapters on this history. There's the introduction of Norway rats to New York in the eighteenth century, the rat fighting pits of the nineteenth century, the rent and sanitation strikes of the twentieth century, and the extermination efforts around the ruins of the World Trade Centre after planes were flown into them in 2001. So, a wide range of histories, and they are all interesting... though it must be said, the final chapter veers off into lengthy irrelevance, shoe-horned in by a very thin metaphor, and this is clearly a darling that should have been killed, in my opinion, but other than that one digression, the book was focused and chatty and interesting.

I still hate rats though. Sorry.

Not a lot of substance here, unfortunately. I was expecting a more in-depth look at some of the mythology involved in the series, but there was very little, really, although I will say that the story folded in between the nonfiction bits at least had the advantage of brevity. To be honest, though, the whole thing fairly screams gimmick and it's probably really only for the die-hard fans.

Still, it has managed to remind me that there's a biography of Cleopatra I've been meaning to read, and so when I drop this back to the library today I can pick that up at the same time.

Not for me I'm afraid. It's an ambitious story, but there's just too much going on here. And, fair enough, novellas are a tricky length. But this is less than 30,000 words, if I understand it correctly, and it crams in demons, psychics, Greek gods, zombies, a brosnie (some kind of mythological reptile?), Druidism, human sacrifice, and dodgy goings on at the Russian embassy. It's too much, and as a result justice is done to none of it. There's no room to really explore anything, and the main character, who comes across all this strangeness on the first day of his new job, is given no real space to react to any of it.