This book has been on my to-read list for ages. Adding it was as simple as, “Hugh Laurie wrote a novel? Sold!” The fact that it’s a novel about a British ex-military freelancer trying to prevent the assassination of the American businessman he was hired to kill … well, that’s just a bonus. Some books keep their wit bottled up and dole it out carefully over the course of the story. The Gun Seller isn’t like that: from the very first page, Laurie makes it clear that this is a tongue-in-cheek, semi-absurd story that leverages the best of the dry humour I appreciate in my British comedy.

Thomas Lang is a hired gun—though for what, Laurie never bothers to make clear. I can’t imagine it would be for killing people, since he says that he doesn’t do that sort of thing. That’s why he chooses to warn Alexander Woolf instead of undertake Woolf’s assassination. This beneficent act puts Lang on the hit list of such luminaries as the Ministry of Defence, the CIA, and private arms contractors. Lang finds himself caught up in a conspiracy that, by the standards of 2013, is laughably straightforward and banal. I imagine that in the pre–Iraq War, pre-9/11 world of 1996, however, it seemed amazingly complicated and incredible.

As with any book in this vein of comedy, two things make it awesome: characters and voice. Laurie has both down. Thomas Lang, as the main character and narrator, is a quip-filled fellow with a surprisingly optimistic view of the universe. He loves observing other people, especially when he has just finished making them uncomfortable. And he has gall. He will lie through his teeth to make a plan work, and when the plan goes pear-shaped—which it inevitably does—he will just roll with the punches until he finds a way to get another lucky break.

If it were just Thomas, The Gun Seller would be a good novel. But Laurie puts that extra effort in to create a comprehensive cast of comedic characters. Solomon, Thomas’s sometimes assistant, is a combination of a sardonic butler and handler. His boss, O’Neal, is a delightfully slimy bureaucrat who enjoys trading barbs with Thomas. And there are both British and American antagonists, and Laurie does a good job differentiating between the two in terms of attitude, behaviour, and dialogue.

Thomas Lang’s voice is an even more compelling component than the characters. Laurie reveals himself as a writer with a skilled command of the English language. His descriptions, allusions, and metaphors are second to none. I love this line: “There's an undeniable pleasure in stepping into an open-top sports car driven by a beautiful woman. It feels like you're climbing into a metaphor.” Reading The Gun Seller is a funny experience on par with Douglas Adams, Nick Harkaway’s Angelmaker, or Laurie’s own favourite, P.G. Wodehouse. The wry descriptions that are hallmarks of such authors are present here, interspersed with periods of intense, staccato action.

While reading The Gun Seller, I couldn’t stop thinking about The Hitman Diaries. The two books are superficially similar, both humorous attempts to explore the world of contract killing. The latter, in my opinion, falls down because it tries too hard to be a love story in addition to all the other things it does well. The Gun Seller avoids this pitfall—this isn’t really a love story, despite the appearance to the contrary at the first.

Indeed, what most impressed me about this book was its unpredictability. There are plenty of twists that I didn’t see coming—and considering the rather simple nature of the plot and the conflict, that’s no small feat. I can read any number of books with this type of dry humour, but few of them will be able to keep me hooked as Thomas careens from one type of danger to the next. I certainly didn’t see the plot developing the way it did, branching out from assassination to international terrorism and hostage crises in the Middle East.

It might be strange to call The Gun Seller “cute” considering the subject matter, but it kind of is. It’s a delightful little package of a novel: slick and funny and fun, and on top of that a good story with a great main character. I’d read a sequel at the drop of a hat, but until such a thing materializes, I will have to content myself with the fond memories this book has created. Oh, and recommend it to a whole bunch of like-minded fans of dry British humour.

Come with me on a journey to the isle of Blessed, a remote island somewhere above the Arctic Circle. On this island, and only on this island—only on its western half, in fact—grows the Dracula orchid, a dragon-like flower that bequeaths health and longevity. For centuries, the inhabitants of Blessed have cultivated this flower and reaped its benefits. They have also covered up a dark secret.

Got shivers? Good. You should. I don’t.

Midwinterblood is the first of this year’s Carnegie Medal nominees that I’ve read—I’m reading them all because the school library has ordered them, and another English teacher mentioned she planned to read them and hopefully get some students to read some of them as well. Since I like reading books, and I do want to read more books for young adults so I can remain hip and fashionable, I decided to jump on board the bandwagon and see what Marcus Sedgwick could offer me.

Everything about this book, from its description to its title to its cover, screams horror or at least dread. It promises me blood sacrifices, vampires, and dark secrets. It delivers on all these things. So why don’t I feel very horrified?

I have to admit, the opening part of the book hooked me. In 2073, journalist Eric Seven travels to Blessed to learn more about its reclusive people. (Sedgwick actually doesn’t bother to spend too much time trying to explain how or why Eric chose to come to Blessed, because it ends up not being all that important.) As with the inhabitants of any remote island in fiction, the people of Blessed turn out to be slightly off, and Eric spends several chapters giving them suspicious sidelong glances as he cycles around the island, trying to figure out what—if anything—they are hiding. He does, and he winds up on a big stone table for his troubles. The first part ends without providing any closure, and Part Two takes us back in time to 2011.

From there, Sedgwick, like an archaeologist, continues to explore the island’s past in reverse chronological order, carefully brushing layer after layer of dust away from a treasured find. Part Two actually features a team of archaeologists, digging on the island for whatever they might discover. They unearth an ancient Viking burial cairn—as well as a much more recent bomb from World War Two. This proves to be the tangible link to Part Three, which follows a downed British pilot’s recovery in the hands of some islanders.

With each subsequent tale, Sedgwick builds upon recurring motifs and images. In fact, as much as I personally didn’t care for this book, upon further consideration I can see how this is a good book for younger readers. It’s intricately constructed in a way that makes for good training in how to read actively, how to pay attention to a book’s structure and content in order to understand what’s going on. With each part set further into the past, Sedgwick reintroduces the same names, recurring phrases like, “Speak of the Devil and his horns appear,” and recurring plot points. These are all very obvious (just as Eric Seven’s name becomes obvious in hindsight by the end of the book)—but obvious so that kids can pick up on it.

But if Midwinterblood is supposed to fill me with dread, it doesn’t succeed. The telescoping narrative is an interesting construction … but it means the book doesn’t actually have much of a plot. That is to say, the conflict has already occurred, and we are just tracing it back to its roots instead of following it to its natural conclusion.

So maybe this book isn’t meant to be horror but romance. Maybe this is the timeless tale of star-crossed lovers Eric and Merle. Maybe I’m supposed to feel sympathy for how, across time, they constantly find each other only to be ripped apart by the vagaries of fate or chance. Midwinterblood probably succeeds more in this respect—but in that case, I wish Sedgwick had spent more time building up the culture around which the story revolves. As it is, he has appropriated some vaguely Scandinavian traditions, but we get precious little in the way of explanation about the isle of Blessed and the Dracula orchid. The promised vampire is a bit of a disappointment.

The result is a book that is beautiful as a construct but unfulfilling as a story. I would love to laud Midwinterblood for its passionate characters or intense mood and atmosphere, but I can’t get excited about it. Eric and Merle live across time … but each chapter is more of a faint echo rather than part of an integral whole. I’m impressed by the writing here, but the book itself feels far too flat.

I really am not an adventurous person. Moving to England—having never lived on my own before—aside, I’m not the sort of person who enjoys embarking on “expeditions”. I took a trip up to Edinburgh back in October, and that was adventurous enough for me for a few months. These days, a train to Norwich is about as much adventure as I can muster. I read National Geographic and watch the Discovery Channel and soak up all these stories of adventure and exploration vicariously—but I cannot imagine actually doing such things myself. I can’t imagine journeying to Antarctica, struggling to survive in a land of endless night and blinding snow … so reading about the plight of Sym Wates was a mixture of shock and awesome.

The White Darkness fulfilled a hunger in me I wasn’t even aware I had. Thanks to the lucrative Twilight and Hunger Games series, it seems like every other young adult novel is some type of escapist, fantasy or science fiction story. I’m the last person who would complain about this. But it’s nice to have an example of a novel that is escapist and fantasy without actually being escapist or fantasy. That is to say, everything in The White Darkness is possible (if slightly implausible). At the same time, it is in the vein of escapism, and it has elements of a fantasy in the way it allows imagination to take over.

Geraldine McCaughrean’s writing is also amazing. With her simple but elegant descriptions, she manages to create the voice of a fourteen-year-old girl who is isolated but not particularly depressed. McCaughrean’s diction and description communicate a sense of remove from the surrounding world. Sym is bookish and academically inclined; she has friends but is not among the fastest-moving of them. She is a romantic who lives so much in her head that a romantic is about all she can be. Above all else, Sym is interested in polar exploration—so much so that she hears the voice of the late Lawrence “Titus” Oates in her head.

Sym joins her honourary “Uncle” Victor in a trip to Paris. Her mother can’t join them at the last moment—her passport mysteriously goes missing—so they go to Paris alone. Then—improbably, unlikely, bizarrely—this short trip away from home turns into an expedition to Antarctica, the one place in the world Sym would love to visit. As far away from home, friends, and family as Sym could possibly be, she finds herself among a group of strangers at the edge of the world—and her uncle might just be the most strange of them all.

From the beginning, McCaughrean insinuates something untoward about Victor’s relationship with Sym. It’s both delicious and unsettling at the same time, because we experience everything from Sym’s perspective of innocence and naivety. Mom can’t come—no passport. Victor eats the SIM card in their mobile phone as a “joke”. He takes Sym shopping for over-priced clothes that make her look more grown-up. As the evidence mounts, McCaughrean lets us draw our own conclusions about what Victor plans to do on this trip to Paris. Is he kidnapping Sym? Is he going to abuse her? Will she manage to figure it out and escape? But at each turn, McCaughrean twists away from the obvious answer.

It turns out that Victor’s designs on Sym are quite different from the more ordinary tale of sexual abuse at the hands of a family friend. No, though Victor is still guilty of abusing Sym, it’s an abuse that functions on a much more sophisticated level, something that has stretched back far into the past—beyond Sym’s birth, even, to his friendship with her late father. Their unannounced trip to Antarctica is the culmination of Victor’s plans—his schemes, if you will—the confirmation of the conspiracy theory that has captured his mind.

I love books where some of the most bizarre elements, the elements that you think have to be fictional because they are so outrageous—or just so specific, so convincingly told that they have to be lies—turn out to be the truth. Such is the case with the particularly nineteenth-century flight of fancy that powers the plot of The White Darkness. McCaughrean draws on names, like John Cleeves Symmes, that are probably obscure to the average reader, but are real enough to those with the right interests. She uses real historical people, places, and events to create a backstory, and from there she creates a plot that is fictional—both for us and, sadly, for Sym and her uncle.

As everything comes crashing down around Sym—both her faith in her uncle and her own certainty in the order of her world—she finds a sudden need to develop agency. Indeed, the first part of the book suffers only in that Sym is a passive protagonist. She just goes along trustingly with Victor, never gainsaying him, never wondering if she shouldn’t find a way to contact her mother. This is frustrating, and I suppose McCaughrean wants it to be that way so that we feel a growing sense of dread as we contemplate what Victor has in store for Sym. Nevertheless, the book doesn’t really come into its own until it lets Sym start acting instead of reacting.

From that point, The White Darkness turns into a story of survival. Though not my favourite genre, this transition worked for me because of the faith I had built up in Sym, and my need to see Victor laid low. McCaughrean delivers an ending that is satisfactory, albeit somewhat succinct for my tastes. Sym undergoes a crisis both physical and mental, enduring a level of deprivation that I doubt I would ever be able to tolerate.

It’s possible her imaginary Oates is what helps her through. Oates’ voice runs throughout The White Darkness like an authorial counterpoint, commenting upon events and providing a subconscious voice with which Sym can debate. Oates is funny and charming, warm and prone to reminiscing without being immodest. He is probably the type of adventurer Sym imagines herself being, if she were a man and alive at the turn of the twentieth century…. As it is, Oates becomes the only crutch she can lean on as everything else falls to pieces around her. It’s an interesting, very narrative way of externalizing the ways that people process emotional trauma and abuse.

The White Darkness doesn’t have zombies, or vampires, or giants or werewolves or angels. It doesn’t have a smooth-talking wizard, a mysterious goblin king, or even a Jesus allegory lion. It’s a skilled, highly satisfying combination of a (sadly) ordinary story of obsession and abuse coiled around the extraordinary tale of exploration, survival, and a quest for something that could never be.

I used to work at an art gallery. March and May usually see exhibitions of art by our local university and high school students, respectively. Across the two exhibitions, at least one would usually contain rendition of Girl with a Pearl Earring, after Vermeer. I would stare at the pencil, charcoal, or painted work and wonder what secrets it contains. To be honest, visual art can intrigue me but isn’t my favourite medium; I am and always have been more moved by words. But that portrait certainly captivates, so I’m not surprised that it has inspired a novel about a possible girl behind the pearl earring. Another teacher at my school passed this on to me as a World Book Day book. I had never read it, nor did I know about the movie, but it looked like something I would enjoy, so I gave it a try without hesitation. At the beginning of Girl with a Pearl Earring, I was content. I thought this would be a typical, easy read that would garner three stars and a good review. By the end, I was extolling this book to the people around me with a heart heavy with sympathy for Griet’s plight.

Tracy Chevalier creates a believable portrayal of a woman who could have been Vermeer’s model for this famous work. Griet is a Protestant girl whose family has fallen on hard times. She manages to get hired as a maid to Vermeer’s Catholic wife, who forms an instant dislike of Griet. Possessing a sense of intellect and curiosity that does not become someone supposed to serve, Griet attracts the eye of Vermeer—as well as one of his most frequent patrons, the womanizing Van Ruijven. Griet becomes the former’s assistant even as the latter schemes to acquire her. As a result of these events, she finds herself sitting for this portrait. And she knows that when it is finished, everything will change, and she will have to leave Vermeer’s house forever.

Griet is a satisfying protagonist. She is capable, if not particularly confident. She is quiet but has a strong and measured internal voice that makes her a satisfying narrator as well. Most importantly, she has both foes and flaws, essential ingredients for conflict, not to mention essential to preventing the onset of Mary Suedom. Griet has her share of enemies and adversaries, a diverse rogues gallery that includes the spiteful Catharina, the mischievous Cordelia, and the liscentious Van Ruijven. In addition to her quiet equanimity, Griet also possesses considerable pride and a sense of self that makes her far more formidable than a young, seventeen-year-old maid should be.

This clash between who Griet is and who she is expected to be is the ceaseless source of conflict throughout Girl with a Pearl Earring. As Maria Thins repeats several times throughout the book, “Never so much trouble with a maid before.” Griet isn’t particularly well suited, in terms of temperament, to being a maid. But it’s not really her fault that these misfortunes visit themselves upon her: Chevalier instead makes the connection between Griet’s position, her beauty, and the gender roles of seventeenth-century Europe. Vermeer, Van Ruijven, and Pieter the son are all driven to possess her, in literal and figurative senses of the word. Griet is trapped, caught in the double standard of society expecting her to be chaste and above reproach while these men each expect her to yield to them in different ways. Chevalier captures Griet’s discomfort with various techniques ranging from overt commentary on how precarious her position in the household is to more subtle reminders about her obsession with remaining modest and keeping her hair covered.

It’s not that Chevalier is saying much that is new here. Certainly there are plenty of explorations of women’s challenges in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Some are better than others; some follow noblewomen and others follow chambermaids. The genius here is that link with Vermeer’s painting. It’s more than a springboard or a MacGuffin; it is a central symbol around which the story can develop. Chevalier can use art and artistic terminology, the details of lighting and colour and pigment, to add a new dimension to Griet’s thought.

Griet’s story is truly a journey. She begins it as a wide-eyed and innocent sixteen-year-old who truly has no idea what is in store for her over the next two years. With each subsequent event, she changes and develops new opinions—and the reader’s impressions of Griet change as well. I think I was about 100 pages in when I realized I was really enjoying the book and anxious to keep turning pages. I noticed that, as she became more embedded in Vermeer’s operation, her vocabulary was changing. She was describing things differently in terms of colour, light, and shadow. This evidence of change and learning compelled me. I read another 80 before finally forcing myself to go to sleep so I wouldn’t be a total zombie in the morning. The book is just paced perfectly.

I’m ambivalent about the ending. On one hand, it isn’t as dark or tragic as I expected, and I’m happy with that. It makes sense, and it has a dull atmosphere of disappointment that is probably more realistic to the time period than anything truly over-the-top or dramatic. However, it is also a little predictable and trite, something that, in my opinion, the book manages to avoid otherwise. Maybe that’s exactly what it needs in the ending. I’m not sure.

Girl with a Pearl Earring promised to be good, but it surprised me and turned out to be great. It’s well-realized historical fiction with a sensitive eye towards gender roles, power relations, and the tribulations impoverished youth. Chevalier’s incorporation of Vermeer’s art allows her to explore some common themes while simultaneously creating a memorable, worthy story that escapes the realm of mediocrity to become truly special.

Panchaali enters this world through a holy fire, an unwanted boon granted by the gods in addition to her brother, the child destined to kill their father's greatest enemy. She marries the five Pandava brothers, the eldest of whom bets and loses his kingdom to their cousin. After twelve years of exile in the forest, the cousin refuses to return the kingdom, and the Pandavas go to war against the Kauravas. It is a story so epic that it has an epic name: the Mahabharata.

My reading of fiction involving Indian culture has been biased toward postcolonial works. This wasn't intentional; rather, I think it's because there are just so many well-known postcolonial authors, like [a:Salman Rushdie|3299|Salman Rushdie|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1217934207p2/3299.jpg]. My experience with epics in general is sorely lacking. The Palace of Illusions is no substitute for the real Mahabharata, of course, but it's a good place to start. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni has taken one of the fundamental pieces of Indian literature and focused on the story of Panchaali. Narrating the events from Panchaali's perspective, CBD explores Panchaali's role in the conflict between the Pandavas and the Kauravas. The result is a moving tale of human tragedy which, according to CBD, gives us insight into a character who is significant in the Mahabharata but largely silent on her motives, thoughts, and feelings.

Hmm . . . a female author re-telling an epic from the perspective of a female character. That sounds familiar. It reminds me of Lavinia, by [a:Ursula K. Le Guin|874602|Ursula K. Le Guin|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1244291425p2/874602.jpg]. Fortunately, The Palace of Illusions doesn't share Lavinia's stylistic shortcomings. I quite like the way CBD has written this book, for she warms up to Panchaali's voice as a person instead of trying to preserve any of the omniscient qualities of a more neutral narrator. A lot of what we hear is rumour or hearsay, filtered through Panchaali's own opinions and biases. I had to keep reminding myself that Panchaali is an unreliable narrator, that we don't really know if the Pandavas are as innocent as she makes them seem. (Well, OK, innocent isn't the right term. But she definitely wants us to think they are the righteous ones, even though some of her story belies this.) What would this story have been like from the point of view of Gandhari, mother of Duryodhan?

Since CBD embraces her first person narrator, the epic scope of the source material suddenly becomes more personal. This in turn leads to a good question: can one really distill the essence of something as long and convoluted as the Mahabharata in less than four hundred pages? Having not read the Mahabharata, I can't say for certain; however,, I suspect the answer is "no." One of the reasons mythology is beautiful is its enduring but flexible nature as a source material. What matters is not whether CBD distilled the entire epic into a novel but whether she remains true to the original's themes (something I'm not qualified to judge) and true to her own stated goal (which, thanks to her Author's Note, I can judge).

For the most part, The Palace of Illusions entrance me in the way only mythology can. Panchaali herself is literally a mythic character, as she was born from a fire; she associates with other mythical characters, like Krishna. She inhabits an India where magic is part of the quotidian fabric of life; people regularly interact with gods, who often bequeath boons, curses, or even powerful astras. Gods go around fathering children (poor Kunti!). Thanks to the Hindi concepts of dharma and reincarnation, however, the gods' often-capricious attitudes are much easier to understand than those of their eternal Greek counterparts. In particular, Panchaali ruminates a lot on the motives and loyalties of Krishna (whose divine status she denies until quite late in the book). All of the gods, Krishna included, seem to be aware that they are simply part of a narrative. As Vyasa puts it: "Why should I grieve any more at it than if I were watching a play?" Many of the characters are aware that they are, to some extent, merely actors in a play. And I love stories like that, stories that are self-aware without being self-conscious. It makes the story itself seem magical, fantastic instead of just fantasy. And it is an atmosphere and tone entirely suitable for an epic.

One thing about CBD's style did irk me. She glosses over a great many events that, to me, seem important. For example, after Panchaali's marriage to all five Pandavas, we get a brief explanation of how her marital situation works: she is married to each of the five brothers for a year, during which time she sleeps only with him, and the others don't touch her or speak to her in private. She mentions it several times, and once and a while she reflects upon it—but for something so central to her adult life, she takes it very much in stride. Considering that CBD is trying to explore Panchaali's feelings and motivations, I'm disappointed she did not include more detail on how this strange marriage affected the relations among the Pandavas and Panchaali. We only get vague details, like the fact that Arjun resents Panchaali for the situation, though it was his mother's doing. Sometimes it feels like we get a "digest" version of Panchaali's story, though CBD delves into incredible detail in other sections.

These narrative difficulties do not diminish the pathos CBD creates for Panchaali, the Pandavas, and even the Kauravas. Yes, it's silly that Yudhisthir loses his kingdom to Duryodhan in a game of dice, and then ends up betting Panchaali as well. It's silly that so many brothers, cousins, and old friends end up fighting each other because of vows, matters of honour, or prior obligations. But is that not one of the flaws of humans? In our hubris, we commit the greatest follies. Panchaali, humiliated by both her brothers and Dusassan, vows not to comb her hair until she "bathes in Kaurava blood," and it's safe to say that this ire contributes to the budding hostility between cousins. We are, at times, prideful, wrathful, vengeful, even as we can be compassionate, kind, and conciliatory.

I could spend a lot of time ruminating on why CBD chose the title The Palace of Illusions. Ultimately, I think it symbolizes the motif of mutability. Our personalities are complex, and our desires and convictions are evanescent. Krishna reminds Panchaali of this truth at the end:

. . . I asked, What if I forget?

He said, You probably will. Most of htem do. That's the beguiling trick the world plays on you. You'll suffer for it—or dream that you're suffering. But no matter. At the time of your death I'll remind you. That'll be enough.

We live, and while we live, we change so much. Past triumphs become regrets. We look back at our previous selves and shake our heads with wonder. We die, and our lives fold back in upon themselves. Was it real? Is this real? Do we go to heaven, reincarnate, or simply cease to exist? We are mutable, and like Panchaali's palace, always in flux.

I can't attest to how well The Palace of Illusions upholds the legacy of the Mahabharata. Regardless, it is a beautifully-written, moving story about Panchaali, the Pandavas, and the Kauravas. At times it doesn't go as deep into Panchaali's life as I would expect of a story narrated by and about her. But that's a minor quibble compared to the tragic story, one of personal and epic scope, unfolded against the landscape of an India where magic is commmonplace and gods walk among us.

An evil, corrupt sorcerer has a pact with a family of demons. Every few years, the big demon on campus rolls up and impregnates all of the women in the sorcerer’s family. In return for the demonic-looking hellspawn of this union, the demon uses its influence to get lesser denizens of the supernatural world to fall into line and obey the sorcerer’s commands. But now that demon has been slain, and with the time to renew the pact coming due, the sorcerer has to find the demon’s brother and free it from a prison.

Who better to help him then the two bumbling tomb raiders who killed the original demon in the first place?

Nix and Egil are your standard “buddy cop” fare: Nix is lithe and quick, the typical thief or rogue; Egil is a hulk, quick to anger but with his own sense of fairness. They are the smart-talking duo every writer might dream of creating. And, after that last big haul, which included slaying a nasty devil, they are supposed to be retired. Getting kidnapped and forced to do a sorcerer’s bidding through a magical compulsion certainly wasn’t anywhere near the top of their bucket list.

In The Hammer and the Blade, Paul S. Kemp takes a lot of the good, lighter side of fantasy and uses it to create a fun and fulfilling story. The way in which Rakon draws Nix and Egil into his nefarious scheme is believable and also rather sinister. Kemp is quick to establish our heroes as competent and effective—particularly as a team—but far from invincible. Nothing is worse, especially in a buddy comedy, when the team is both smart-talking and nigh-indestructible. No, though Nix is quick to throw off one-liners, too often he finds himself in over his head.

The conflict itself is a delicious mess of personal and political badness. Rakon is the adjunct to the Lord Mayor. This usually means “power behind the throne”, helped in this case by several spells on the Lord Mayor designed to weigh down his mental faculties. He needs this pact to maintain his position of power. At a more intimate level, however, the pact means allowing a demon to rape and impregnate his sisters for the first time. Now, rape itself is a terrible crime—and I’d say that orchestrating the rape of one’s sisters so that one can stay in power is about on par. There really is no sympathy for Rakon, despite Kemp’s careful use of narrative perspective to explain his motivations: he is a villain, through and through.

Rakon’s sisters don’t just lie down and accept this abuse. Although he has attempted to use his magic to contain them, physically and mentally, they have formidable mental powers of their own. Rusilla manipulates events to make it possible for Nix and Egil to challenge Rakon on their own terms and rescue herself and her sister. This helps mitigate possible “White Knight” problems with the basic plot of “two masculine heroes rescue the damsels in distress”—yes, Rusilla needs their help to save herself and her sister, but Nix and Egil wouldn’t even know the score if it weren’t for her.

Alas, although the plot is straightforward, it takes a while to really get going. Once it heats up, the pacing stays on target. For the first part of the book, though, there is an awful lot of build-up. This could have been a huge problem. Fortunately, Kemp’s writing steps up to make it easier on the reader: Nix and Egil’s dialogue is not only fun but funny. My favourite line comes just after Rakon captures them. Nix demonstrates some magical knowledge, and when Rakon wonders where he came across it, he mentions his year at the Conclave. Rakon then assumes Nix dropped out, and Nix—not a little exasperated—replies, “No, why does everyone assume I dropped out? I was expelled!”

Kemp’s sparse description and worldbuilding reminds me a little of Giant Thief. I’ve been trying to understand why I liked this book and not the other. One reason would be the pair of heroes here: Nix and Egil just work together, whereas Easie Damasco is hard to bear on his own. Also, Kemp makes me interested in the plot: I want to see how Nix and Egil escape from Rakon and foil his plans—and at one point, I genuinely believed they wouldn’t succeed and that Kemp was setting them up for a revenge sequel! This is a sharp contrast to Giant Thief’s somewhat lackadaisical plot.

The Hammer and the Blade might not have the most richly-imagined world, and from time to time I felt a case of name soup brewing beneath the surface. Kemp usually keeps it together, however. I’m just more used to the setting almost becoming a character in books like this, and we don’t get much of a sense of what makes Nix’s city a unique place. Everything is generic: taverns and brothels and the city “watch”. It works all right, but it’s a little lazy, and I would like to see the world expand later in the series.

Kemp demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt, however, that a book with lots of little flaws can still be an enjoyable read. There was no point where I felt like I needed to put The Hammer and the Blade down and pick up something else; quite the opposite, there were a few days when I stayed up a little later than I should have to read another chapter. As far as fantasy adventures go, this is an excellent example of how to create a story that is light-hearted on the surface but still full of dark and complex subtext.

I had trouble describing The Human Division to friends, because the Old Man’s War universe is military science-fiction, but this particularly novel isn’t so heavy on the “military” aspect. Following the events in The Last Colony (which I haven’t read yet), the Colonial Union has to let military operations take a back seat and resort to democracy to get what it wants. The State Department is suddenly important, meaning that even the diplomats who don’t get the crucial negotations—the “B-Team”, if you will—have a job to do. As the plot develops across the stories in the volume, it becomes clear that not everyone wants them to do it.

The Human Division explores the fallout that could happen when a political entity comprising the various colonies of humanity discovers that its homeworld, Earth, no longer trusts it. Having used Earth for decades as a source of colonists and soldiers, the Colonial Union is tilting into panic mode now that this source has virtually dried up. Meanwhile, it feels the pressure from the diplomatic and military juggernaut that is the Conclave, a union of over 400 alien species all interested in cooperating to continue colonizing the galaxy.

Most series tend to feature the same protagonists across a number of books. With this series, John Scalzi bucks that trend, focusing on different protagonists. Characters from previous books return, in an expanded or reduced capacity (depending on their schedules, I assume), but Scalzi chooses his cast based on the story he wants to tell, rather then telling a story centred on the cast he wants to use.

The majority of tales in this book follow Colonial Defense Forces (CDF) Lieutenant Harry Wilson, Ambassador Ode Abumwe, Hart Schmidt, and Colonial Union Captain Sophia Coloma. These characters form a combined military, diplomatic, and civilian backbone to show that, when it comes to being decent and heroic, no one type of person or vocation can lay claim to that mantle. Each of these characters get a chance to shine multiple times throughout the book.

Wilson is probably the runaway protagonist here, though it’s hard to say. Scalzi’s writing is, as usual, always humourous and occasionally hilarious. Unfortunately, his characters have a tendency to come off as one-note. That is to say, most of his characters are clever and witty and sarcastic—but that all such characters are clever, witty, and sarcastic in the same way. Hence, though The Human Division can at times be laugh-out-loud funny (or simply, “shake your head in rueful appreciation of the awesomely clever writing”), it lacks strong and diverse voices for its characters. Wilson’s voice—the way he talks, the way he slowly explains each step of his clever realizations—is aggravatingly similar to the way the alien Sorvalh explains why a racist colony leader is going to surrender:

“I want to talk to your leader,” Sorvalh said. “I believe his name is Jaco Smyrt.”

“He won’t talk to you,” said the first colonist.

“Why ever not?” Sorvalh asked.

“Because you’re a xig,” he said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

“That’s really unfortunate,” Sorvalh said. “Because, you see, if I am not talking to Mr. Smyrt in ten of your minutes, then those particle beams I mentioned to you will cycle through their targets, and you’ll all be dead, again. But I suppose if Mr. Smyrt would rather you all be dead, it’s all the same to me. You might want to spend those moments with your families, gentlemen.”

Scalzi does a great job coming up with diverse, non-humanoid descriptions for his aliens. But they sound, for the most part, like humans. Despite their alien customs and traditions, translation seems to overlay a human sense of humour and ennui as well. There’s something to be said for a writer’s style, of course, but in this case it’s a little more extreme, and it starts to grate.

I quite liked The Human Division’s focus on the relationship between Earth and the Colonial Union. It shares the trait with the other books in this series in that, although ostensibly involving stories about conflicts between humanity and other species, the book is more about how humans treat each other in a universe where space colonization has become commonplace. The introduction of a shadowy, third-party nemesis with unclear motivations lays the ground for further books in the series that will no doubt continue to threaten the uneasy peace between Earth and the Colonial Union and the Conclave.

The book’s structure as a serial of thirteen stories does not adversely affect its quality as a complete novel either. The stories are self-contained, to the extent that The Human Division is not a serial in the Victorian sense that Dickens would have recognized. In About Writing, Samuel R. Delany is sceptical of treating chapters of a novel like they are short stories, particularly opening chapters. He insists that the two formats have very different requirements—and he’s correct. Nevertheless, Scalzi pulls off a series of short stories that are also a novel with a clear beginning, middle, and end, and plot and character development along the way. The structure of the Old Man’s War universe itself helps with this task: Scalzi has created a universe that feels comfortable, drawing as it does on established tropes (like “skip” or jump drives for faster-than-light travel) that are refreshed through some new terminology and polished exposition.

The overall result is a novel that is enjoyable and accessible. Scalzi maintains that one doesn’t need to have read previous books in the series to understand or enjoy The Human Division. I have The Last Colony sitting around at home—in Canada, that is. I could have waited until the summer so I could read both books in the “proper” order. I took Scalzi at his word, however, and it pays off. There are some spoilers for The Last Colony, naturally, because this is set afterwards. However, they are spoilers to the book as the first three Star Wars movies are spoilers to the prequels: you know what’s coming, but you don’t know how you are getting there.
Anyway, if you haven’t read previous books in this series, don’t let that deter you from giving The Human Division a try.

I did not finish this.

It’s a nominee for the Carnegie Medal, which is why I started reading it. Unfortunately, it didn’t engage me enough to make me want to keep reading.

Nick Lake does a good job creating character and setting, and he makes a fair stab at plot. In Darkness is split in two time periods: one follows the Haitian Revolution; the other is set during the most recent Haiti earthquake. Through a good use of parallelism, Lake traces the use and abuse of power in oppressors and the oppressed.

See, In Darkness is far from bad. If it were bad, I could probably have finished it and given it a nice, critical review. As it is, I just couldn’t bring myself to care much about Shorty. He’s a sympathetic character, yet I found Lake’s style too dry. The narrative is mostly stream-of-consciousness, in Shorty’s case, but voice doesn’t come alive for me. It doesn’t help that Lake also uses the convention of beginning dialogue with an em-dash instead of wrapping it in quotation marks.

I always struggle with the decision to give up on a book. Would I return to In Darkness sometime? Perhaps. Perhaps this just wasn’t the right time, given how busy I was. Perhaps another time would have me more interested and more willing to work at the book.

I have wanted to be a teacher for as long as I can remember. And now I am. This year has been one of reshaping and redefining my identity—I’m no longer preparing to be a teacher, because I am one. Suddenly I’m frequenting staff rooms, going to meetings, filling out reports, and enforcing rules. I’m plugged into this system that is much larger than I am; it’s a sprawling behemoth of cogs, levers, and twisted chains of cause and effect that has sunk its roots deep into society. I love being a teacher, and sometimes the system works for me and my students. Other times, though, I’ve been dissatisfied with, disheartened by, or disillusioned by the system and all its attendant goal posts, bureaucratic doublespeak, and cracks through which people can fall.

So I was interested in reading The Curiosity of School, in which Zander Sherman explores the origins of compulsory Western education in nineteenth-century Prussia and some of its most recent consequences, such as standardized testing. My teacher training did not actually include much in the way of a “history of education” course … the closest we came was an overview of some the peculiarities of education in Ontario in our Educational Law class. I feel that it’s rather important to understand why our schools are the way they are, and to question whether there are alternatives—but there’s no point in doing the latter unless you’re aware of what alternatives have already been considered and tried, and whether they did any good or not. There’s plenty I like about schools these days, but there is also a lot that should change.

The first chapter is an interesting recounting of how several powerful individuals imported the Prussian system of compulsory education into the United States (and then to Canada). In essence, this means that compulsory public education has its origins in the military-industrial complex. Oppression and colonialism have been a part of it from the beginning. Sherman discusses the establishment of residential schools in Canada and the United States, including the involvement of the founder of Ryerson University. This is merely one of the most notable examples of how compulsory education has been used to indoctrinate and assimilate; it is not the most recent. Though there were times, I admit, where the sheer oddness of the bigotry reflected in quotations throughout this book made me smile wryly, I’m aware that we are by no means perfect ourselves these days.

I really took note in the second chapter, “The Test, and What It’s On”. Sherman tracks the emergence of the American SATs (once known as Scholastic Aptitude Tests, but now strangely meaningless as an acronym) from the intelligence assessments and IQ tests of old. I was aware of the association of IQ tests with racism, but the extent of their ties to eugenics wasn’t clear (and I think that Canadian and American history downplays how prevalent eugenics was in society, on account of that whole uncomfortable Nazi thing). I didn’t know about the link between SATs and IQ tests, though.

Sherman uses the confusion and controversy over this link and the meaningless nature of the SAT’s name to question why it remains a standard for college admissions in the United States. The fast-paced evolution of digital technology has led to a rise in data-driven culture and this idea that both individuals and companies should want to track people’s habits, that more data is within our grasp than ever before. Sometimes we forget that some companies have already been doing this for a long time. In particular, he singles out one of the providers of the SAT, the Educational Testing Service, or ETS. I was interested to learn that ETS produces a staggering number of tests: “in practical terms, you cannot become a firefighter, police officer, marine, naval officer, soldier, librarian, travel agent, realtor, mechanic, golf instructor, barber, or beautician without taking an ETS test”. Now, that in itself might not be disturbing. What’s disturbing is that “factual errors went unchecked”, according to MIT professor Les Perelman. So not only does the United States employ a standardized test for college admissions, the test itself is meaningless as an indicator of intelligence or anything else.

My prior dislike of standardized testing is coming through strongly now, I suspect. So, perhaps it is no surprise that this chapter resonated with me; it’s nice to have some specific examples of why standardized testing, at least as it is currently implemented in the United States, doesn’t achieve the goals it’s supposed to achieve. Canada has its share of standardized tests too, though they are fewer and farther between.

The corruption of education by the interests of capitalism and corporations continues to be a theme throughout The Curiosity of School. Sherman returns to it in chapter 4: “The Corporate Equation“. He discusses how various prestigious universities make deals with corporations, such as pharmaceutical companies: in return for funding, the university signs over the patent rights to any inventions or breakthroughs from its labs. Sherman points out the problems this can cause for academic freedom, not to mention scientific bias. This chapter reminded me a lot of Selling Sickness, particularly the anecdote about Nancy Olivieri, who blew the whistle on drug trials being performed at the University of Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children and was fired for her troubles.

In the second half of the book, Sherman shifts from the history of Western education in general to analyzing aspects of education, from private schooling and other alternative models to the changing opinions of what education should do for students. He discusses Montessori and Waldorf schools, as well as just the more generic idea of private school, concluding that “private schools select privileged students and, with them, create privileged people”. Although I am intrigued by Montessori, Waldorf, homeschooling, and private schooling, my allegiance has always been to the ideal of public education. There is so much that is broken about our public system, but it rests upon the fundamental promise that education should be accessible to everyone. Elite, private institutions are an aberration, and while alternative regimes like Montessori are not necessarily inaccessible, clearly they haven’t become mainstream despite their presence throughout the world.

Sherman devotes some time to analyzing the Finnish model of education. According to the metrics he cites, such as the Programme for International Student Assessment, Finland’s students rank highly in every category, coming out first place in reading, math, and science. He then points out a correlation: the Finnish government pays for education from kindergarten to university; Finnish children start school later and can drop out earlier, if they choose; teachers are more respected and students also seem to receive more freedom and respect in return. Sherman is positively head-over-heels about the Finnish system—and, I can understand why. I’m a little envious of how supportive Scandinavian countries are of their teachers! (He also claims that Finland has no private schools. A quick glance at Wikipedia—with citations—shows that this is not correct, though private schools operate somewhat differently than they do elsewhere in the world.)

Nevertheless, I find this optimism about the possibility of adopting the system wholesale in countries like Canada and the United States rather unsophisticated. He laments that all it would take is a willingness to pay more taxes. Leaving aside the fact that, at least in the United States, that’s never going to fly, Finland benefits from a population of only 5.4 million people. Canada’s is 6 times that, and the United states is an order of magnitude larger still. The infrastructure alone doesn’t necessarily scale.

Still, Sherman has a point when he lauds the philosophy of lifelong learning present in Finland. I’d like to see that imported into Canada. It’s present in certain respects, but there is still an emphasis on “getting through” education and on “getting a degree” so that one can go out into the world. Even I fell into that trap, in the sense that I focused on obtaining exactly the credentials I require for teaching. I like to think that I am continuing to learn—as my occasional foray into meatier books like this might suggest—but I’m not exactly typical of my demographic….

Towards the end of the book, Sherman throws in a rather low blow when it comes to cultural literacy:

In the nineteenth century, popular books included Wuthering Heights, Sense and Sensibility, and The Picture of Dorian Gray. By the twenty-first, it was The Hunger Games, Twilight, and Harry Potter…. The fifteenth prime minister of Canada, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, was a renown intellectual, poised extemporaneous speaker, and wide reader; its twenty-second prime minister, Stephen Harper, didn’t once respond to Yann Martel’s four-year-long campaign to get him to read a single book.

Firstly, Sherman isn’t telling the full story when he claims that a book like Wuthering Heights was the pinnacle of popularity: it had its ups and downs after its initial publication, and it was a controversial book for its time. It’s only now that it has become a classic, and hence a signpost of nineteenth-century literature. Secondly, I’m not going to argue that The Hunger Games or Twilight are better, in any way, than Wuthering Heights. but it’s disingenuous to suggest that the same books that were popular nearly two hundred years ago should be popular with the majority of society today. If that were the case, it would imply that our culture is changeless and stagnant. The fact that the majority of popular books of today aren’t of superior literary quality might be alarming, but it’s beside the point Sherman is failing to make here. Finally, I followed Yann Martel’s four-year project called “What is Stephen Harper Reading?”. It was an awesome stunt, but it was a stunt. Stephen Harper is a busy dude, what with running a country, and he doesn’t have time to read or even acknowledge personally every single book someone sends him. I don’t agree with many (or even most) of his actions and positions, particularly when it comes to how he and his party treat artists and the arts. Again, though, Sherman is being hyperbolic when he implies that this does not bode well for Harper’s reading. I’m sure Harper reads—I’m not sure what, maybe Twilight, but for all I know it’s Wuthering Heights. Curse you, Zander Sherman, for putting me in a position where I feel obligated to defend Stephen Harper!

Other interesting tidbits: in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one method of corporal punishment involved burning students with magnifying glasses, and another entailed threatening them with eternal damnation (somehow I don’t think that one would work so well these days).

The Curiosity of School is packed with interesting information and thoughtful discourse. In particular, I like how Sherman, as a Canadian, spends time discussing both American and Canadian education. Unfortunately, the book suffers from a lack of focus and no clear central thesis. In the epilogue, Sherman recounts a personal story that seems to champion his own homeschooling background. However, the rest of the book is far from a condemnation of public school and an endorsement of home school. It’s fair to say that The Curiosity of School does a good job illuminating certain aspects of compulsory education, including some that don’t get discussed much. I wish that Sherman had been able to construct a more unified narrative from his research.

Speaking of research, Sherman also declines to cite specific sources. In lieu of a traditional bibliography with proper endnotes, at the end of the book he provides a list of selected sources for each chapter, “so that others may re-create a similar picture should they wish”. This omission detracts from the book’s otherwise academic atmosphere. It relies a great deal on statistics and other specific information that really should be cited. Because he does not cite sources, it’s difficult to give credence to some of what Sherman says. Though I agree with many of his critiques of education, it’s difficult for me to point to specific facts that he mentions.

As a first-year teacher, I’m still struggling to find my new identity and find my way around education. It will be years, maybe even a decade, before I can start to understand how I can best serve my students—and that’s what education is for. It’s not a means to train soldiers, to build perfect workers. It’s a careful balancing act between inculcating individuality and cultivating civic virtues. It requires a strong, funded, confident system that nevertheless somehow manages to embrace creativity and lifelong learning. In many ways, that system is broken, and I wonder how successful I, as one fairly inexperienced teacher, can be in administering education under such a regime. But it’s too big a problem to do much about on my own. All I can do is keep teaching, keep learning, and contributing where I can.

So I enjoyed The Curiosity of School, if only because of how neatly it dovetails with a lot of the topics I am considering as they apply to my profession. I would still recommend it for non-teachers, particularly for anyone interested in education—which should be everyone! It doesn’t quite meet the standards of writing or research to make it awesome, but it presents a good mixture of history, philosophy, and argument to make it worthwhile and engaging.

I wasn’t too familiar with Dame Agatha’s forays into novels not associated with Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple. I’d read some of her Parker Pyne work, but that was about it. I really enjoy the Poirot mysteries in particular. My roommate lent me this slip of a story, and I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it at first. I’m still not sure now. Endless Night is a sneaky little devil of a story, classic Christie in that respect.

Michael Rogers meets a “poor little rich girl”, as he calls Ellie, and marries her. They buy the property of his dreams—the cursed Gipsy Acres—and hire a renowned architect to build the house of their dreams. Everything for Michael seems to be looking up, but the warnings of a gipsy haunt him and Ellie as they try to make their own life far away from Ellie’s grasping, greedy American relatives.

This novel, despite its small size, is a slow burn. Like a lot of Christie’s work, the meat of the story is the conflict between what characters want and what their social position allows them to have. Michael is a young, aimless man who doesn’t have much in the way of money or roots; it seems that his only relative is his mother, whom he visits more out of habit than attachment, and he doesn’t really have any friends. Ellie is practically smothered with companions, none of whom she would call a friend—with the exception of the exceptional Greta. As the heiress to a fortune, Ellie is the focal point of a massive operation to manage her wealth. Michael is exactly the kind of person her stepmother would not like her to meet—but she does, and they marry.

Christie uses the superstition surrounding Gipsy’s Acre to create an atmosphere of suspense. As Michael meets Ellie’s various relatives and retainers, his role as the narrator casts them in a suspicious light—which one of them will seize upon the idea of using the property’s shadowy past as a smokescreen for their own malfeasance? Everything seems to be going Michael and Ellie’s way, so much so that, given that this is a Christie novel, I started getting antsy, wondering it would all go horribly wrong.

You have to wait until very near to the end for Endless Night to pay off, and it’s really not worth discussing the book without venturing into spoiler territory. The twist is a brilliant use of the unreliable narrator, because it forces you to re-evaluate everything you think you know about these characters.

Suddenly, Michael becomes not a happy-go-lucky, wounded widower but instead a scheming, deceitful, cold-hearted murderer. Greta isn’t the friend but the unapologetic manipulator. Ellie is still a victim, but she is no longer the victim of superstition or the supernatural … she’s the victim of regular, old murder. Christie hints and teases and tantalizes with the supernatural, only to strip it away and reveal it as a red herring.

This isn’t a typical mystery novel. There is no detective using his little grey cells. Michael essentially confesses, both to us and to the doctor. Though the latter uncovered evidence that might eventually have led to Michael’s arrest, it’s possible he would have gone undetected if he hadn’t killed Greta as well. It seems, though, that he had developed a taste for killing. If anything, I think he was rather nonplussed about how easy the entire operation had been.

Some authors have probably delved into the minds of killers, and had killers as their narrators (unreliable or otherwise), and done this type of psychological thriller in greater or more intense detail. Endless Night is not a “light” work, but it is concerned more with plot than it is the characters that drive it. Which is not to knock Christie’s grasp of character—I think that’s pretty profound—but she doesn’t spend the time analyzing her characters more than is necessary for telling her story. This is an economical work, in keeping with the style that has made her such an enduring author.