Lately I’ve been playing a lot of Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. It’s a video game in which you assume the persona of an assassin in Renaissance Italy. (There’s a whole frame story involving modern-day Templars and a machine that lets you relive genetic memories, but let’s not get into that right now.) Although nowhere near as captivating as my gold standard, Mass Effect, Assassin’s Creed is a fun franchise that I’ve followed since its inception. It’s fun because the entire point of the game is that you get to go around and live out the fantasy of assassinating people in a well-constructed historically-based setting, with parkour-like open-world mechanics that work well if you don’t have the hand-eye coordination and reaction time of a sloth. (Alas, I do.) Indeed, I like reading stories where the protagonist is an assassin—but that’s nothing compared to playing one in an interactive medium.

In my review of the previous book in this series, I commented on how boring Fitz’s story is compared to the one we don’t get to see, Verity’s quest for the Elderlings:

Verity’s departure, and his quest, merely serve to highlight the lack of action happening at Buckkeep. In the previous book, it was Fitz who set off on a journey west, while Verity stayed back at Buckkeep to mind the store. Now we are stuck in the castle while another character searches for the beings that might save the kingdom—and frankly, that sounds like an adventure. I’d like to read that book.

So, yeah … should have been more careful with that wish.

Assassin’s Quest is the poster child for books that are longer than they have any business being. Fitz spends entirely too much time in this book trudging from location to location. At first this is all novel and interesting, in part owing to the way Robin Hobb depicts Fitz as incredibly incompetent (more on that in a moment). By the time Fitz meets up with Kettricken in the Mountains, however, my patience had worn thin. I was ready to get to the climax, to the good stuff, but Hobb insisted on hundreds more pages of a small party travelling through poorly-described wilderness toward a vaguely-described objective. And when they finally arrive, there are still chapters more of deliberation and dialogue before the dragons finally wake up and solve everyone’s problems in about five minutes (otherwise known as thirty pages and an epilogue).

I have to hand it to Hobb, though. There is no way FitzChivalry Farseer could be called a Mary Sue (or Marty Stu, or Gary Sue, or whatever). This guy can’t get any breaks or do anything right. He fails at killing Regal, fails at staying hidden and playing dead, and he doesn’t even get the girl. All in all, this is rather refreshing for a book that so neatly embraces the standard fantasy setting. Fitz sucks at being an assassin, and he sucks at being a protagonist in general. So I have to give Hobb credit for giving her main character a tough time. In particular, although Molly’s new paramour in Burrich is a little … age-defying … I like that Fitz manages to save the kingdom and end up alone. It prevents the book from becoming a trite little romance and shows that, once again, Fitz was oh so wrong to get involved with Molly in the first place. Idiot.

Unfortunately, having an idiot as a protagonist is not as entertaining as one might think. Fitz’s incompetence at assassination, intrigue, and statecraft provides plenty of fodder for conflict and obstacles in his hero’s journey—but it also means we don’t get the satisfaction of watching an assassin coolly carry out his duties. (We get close at one point, but then it all goes pear-shaped.) Indeed, in general, Assassin’s Quest suffers from some kind of malaise. It’s as if the book dares me into calling it out: “what, you were expecting something interesting to happen? Hah!” Well, all those taunts worked: most of Assassin’s Quest is just dull.

A book in which the main character is an assassin should never be dull. A book with the word “assassin” in the title should never be dull (unless it’s Arthur the Assassin Takes a Day Off, but I suspect even that would have some intense pancake-making action sequences). Yet Hobb adheres to a linear, plodding progression of events that turns this narrative into a chore. And just when it should get good, when the dragons take flight … suddenly we are fifty pages away from the end of the book. Assassin’s Quest is another one of those epic fantasy tomes that takes forever to reach its climax and then abruptly yanks that climax away, replacing it with a hasty and unsatisfying denouement. Whereas chapters could once be measured in days, pages suddenly became years. Everything else works out happily ever after, as if dragons are the solution to all problems.

So there you have it, the moral of Assassin’s Quest:



But what’s with Kettle/Kestrel? She’s the type of character I hate the most: the know-it-all minor character who shows up in the middle of the book, schools the protagonist like nobody’s business, and then suddenly turns out to be a smug immortal (or nearly immortal) with a lot of guilt and baggage. It’s not my fault if you didn’t set up your exposition properly, Hobb, and I would have appreciated it if you could find a way to tell us more about the Skill and its relationship to dragons without introducing a new character. But since you did, you raised a few important questions. Where has Kettle been this whole time? Why didn’t she seek out the Fool, her White Prophet, before now? He didn’t exactly keep a low profile at Buckkeep. And it’s rather convenient she just happens to be making a pilgrimage across the Mountains at the same time Fitz shows up there. Characters as plot devices are fine—except when they so obviously scream “plot device”.

The rushed ending is a shame purely from the perspective of one’s enjoyment of the book. It also does no favours, however, to the characters. For instance, Hobb deals rather brusquely with the vendetta between Fitz and Regal. Fitz chooses not to kill Regal—it’s unclear whether this is because he can’t or won’t give up his ability to Skill or because he thinks what he did to Regal is more fitting. In any event, he decides instead to brainwash Regal into being loyal to Kettricken and her child, Prince Dutiful. Because that’s a moral and heroic thing to do? I’m OK with Fitz making poor choices that turn him into more of an anti-hero, but I would have liked some more introspection beforehand. Instead we just get a glib comment after the fact about how he was going to make Regal erect a statue in his honour as well, but then he reconsidered and thought it might be a little too much. Hah hah hah.

It’s a shame, too, because despite my reservations about Hobb after the disastrous Soldier’s Son trilogy, I don’t think she’s a poor writer. She has plenty of imagination, and I look forward to reading more of her books. This one, however, is not very good. What began as a promising if not perfect trilogy about a bastard trained to be an assassin quickly nosedived into a tangled mess about a failure who gets lucky. Assassin’s Quest has its moments, but they aren’t nearly enough to compensate for all the words, words, words in between.

And now I leave you with a bonus dragon-themed poster, specifically for all those Game of Thrones fans:



My reviews of the Farseer trilogy:
← Royal Assassin

I had little but praise for The Alchemist of Souls, the first adventure of Mal Catlyn and Coby Hendricks in an alternative Elizabethan England. Anne Lyle had a keen eye for characterization and an ability to weave a tight, dramatic story that held my attention and left me wanting more. So more’s the pity that The Merchant of Dreams was quite a different experience!

This sequel picks up a little while after the first book, with Mal and Coby living in France while the fallout from their actions in England dissipates. When they learn that the skraylings are going to Venice to seek an alliance with this republic, they return to England to inform Walsingham. Naturally, they get tasked with going to Venice and learning as much as possible about this potential alliance and how it will affect England. Meanwhile, Mal continues to grapple with what it means that he and his twin brother, Sandy, share the soul of a departed skrayling named Erishen. And Coby, who has lived most of her life in the guise of a boy, starts wondering what it would be like to don dresses again and become Mal’s wife.

My disappointment is easily explained through the book’s title. The Merchant of Dreams is a character who shows up in Venice. He’s a shady dealer whom Mal encounters as he begins to send out feelers into the Venetian underworld. And then he dies.

For a book to be named after a character, that character usually has a big role to play. Certainly they are so important, so pivotal, that they don’t die so soon after being introduced (unless their death is itself the event that changes everything, which it doesn’t here). We don’t learn that much about the Merchant of Dreams, beyond the fact that he is a scheming traitor. Mal and friends have very little interaction with him; they don’t cross paths more than once or twice, and they don’t really butt heads.

And this seems to be the issue with the book as a whole: I never really had a clear idea of what story it was trying to tell. Mal’s mission to Venice is vague. He’s "gathering intelligence", and his goal for accomplishing this seems to involve gaining admittance into the skrayling quarters in Venice and talking to his buddy Ambassador Kiiren. Lyle pads out the book with a series of comical and serious mishaps and misadventures. While these are, in their own way, delightful, they also muddle and mask the true nature of the plot, and I confess that by the end of the book, I wasn’t really sure what England had lost or gained. Whereas, in the first book, the stakes were clear and quite dangerous, the stakes here seem … tepid at best.

Mal and Coby’s relationship becomes strained as the question of a marriage looms over them. To achieve this, Coby would have to give up living as a boy, losing the freedom such a disguise allows her. Her insecurities about living as a woman, and her love for Mal, are all natural and touching. Lyle once again does an excellent job of portraying differences that gender make in the power dynamics of 16th-century Europe. Yet the actual will-they-or-won’t-they subplot, complete with flashes of comical indignance from each character, is tired and boring.

Then there is a wholly different subplot involving Mal and Sandy’s older brother, Charles, who has apparently gone to ground in Venice (what a coincidence!). A Huntsman, Charles was initiated into a secret society devoted to wiping out the supernatural (including the skraylings). Or something. Anyway, he blathers on about how there are more frightening threats than the skraylings to human society, and one of these threats just happens to materialize at the climax. So it goes.

The Alchemist of Souls was electrifying in the conflict it presented and the way the characters had to handle it. With each chapter, Lyle left me wanting more. The Merchant of Dreams is the opposite. With each chapter, I was left scratching my head and wondering how these events would all come together. In the end, as the characters converged and the conflict intensified, I began to entertain a glimmer of hope. Alas, that’s all it remained: a glimmer. Although Lyle produced a great standalone story in the first book, this second book has not resulted in the ignition of a brilliant new series. I find myself most apathetic towards all the elements of the world here: I don’t really know or remember who the Huntsmen are, and I don’t really care about that. I’m somewhat vague on the whole skrayling reincarnation process, and this doesn’t bother me. A great series embeds this information in a memorable but subtle way within the stories themselves, and it does so in a way that makes me care.

I still find this universe an intriguing one, with all the deviations from established history that Lyle has carefully made. I’ll happily pick up the next book when it arrives and give this series another shot—no author can get it right a hundred per cent of the time. And I still recommend The Alchemist of Souls for those who have yet to meet Mal Catlyn. I just wish this book had lived up to the high expectations established by the first.

My reviews of the Night’s Masque series:
← The Alchemist of Souls | The Prince of Lies →

Now this is how you write a novel!

I love fiction set in Tudor and Elizabethan England. It seems an era particularly rich in epic, empire-spanning events and internal religious and royal conflict. If an author can make historical figures come alive and explore the emotions and motivations that might have been involved in these intrigues, the resultant novel can be an intense, interesting invocation of history. This era is also a rich source of inspiration for historical fantasy, and sometimes even alternative history. What if Henry VIII hadn’t killed Anne Boleyn? What if he had lived to take a seventh wife? Or what if, as Anne Lyle posits here, Elizabeth I did not remind the virgin queen, but instead married Robert Dudley and bore him princes? And what if, upon expanding into the New World, European explorers encountered more than just the indigenous human inhabitants? They found the Skraylings, non-human beings steeped in mysterious traditions and magic.

The Alchemist of Souls falls into the category I like to call, “What a Great Read.” It’s not a book that is going to keep me up at night pondering its themes and subtext. But it’s far more than just a competent or compelling narrative. Rather, Anne Lyle has achieved something in between the two, and that’s definitely cause for celebration. I enjoyed the few hours I spent with Maliverny Catlyn and Coby Hendricks, and Lyle’s alternative Elizabethan England is a fascinating setting without becoming overbearing or over-the-top.

Mal Catlyn has seen better days. Down his luck, in debt, suddenly he becomes appointed the bodyguard to a Skrayling ambassador. There are deeper reasons for this, which we learn later, but the upshot is that Mal is caught between several masters. He is working for Walsingham, who of course is trying to control everything. He is working for Leland, the Queen’s man in this matter, and theoretically Mal’s direct superior. But mostly he becomes loyal to Kiiren, the young Skrayling ambassador whom he is assigned to protect. Mal overcomes his initial prejudice and distrust of the Skraylings and comes to consider Kiiren a kind of friend—that is, until a close encounter with Skrayling magic and the abduction of his insane brother threatens Mal’s relationship with Kiiren, as well as Mal’s life.

The other half of the book follows Coby, short for Jacob, an adolescent member of an acting troupe. Except she’s a boy (which isn’t a spoiler, because we learn it when we first meet her). As the tireman for Suffolk’s Men, Coby works on the costumes for the troupe. She finds it easier to live as a boy rather than endure the attention that would fall upon her as a parent-less girl. The threat of discovery looms over Coby at every corner, but Lyle never makes it melodramatic. Rather, she plays upon the ambiguous attitudes towards sexuality and sexual orientation among the Elizabethan classes. Coby falls hard for Mal after he teaches her how to fight in return for lessons from her on Skrayling tradetalk. He notices the attraction, but of course he sees it through the lens of Coby’s apparent masculine gender performance and lets Coby down gently. Later in the book, another man who has relations with men assumes it is Coby’s attraction to Mal that makes her so anxious to find and rescue him from the clutches of an adversary.

This kind of play on mistaken identity or misinterpreted relationships and sexuality is nice to see, particularly in a book set in the time of Shakespeare, who was such a master of it. I won’t pretend to any kind of expertise in this area, so rather than saying that Lyle’s portrayal of sexuality and gender lends the book authenticity, I’ll say that it at least demonstrates a keen awareness that ideas about gender in Elizabethan England were very different from ideas about gender now. So many writers of historical fiction nail the events, dates, names, even clothing, but their men act like 20th- or 21st-century men, and their women act like 20th- or 21st-century women. Lyle’s characters have the prejudices and pre-conceptions of 16th-century Europeans, something that becomes all the more obvious when they deal with the Skraylings.

The principal conflict in The Alchemist of Souls concerns one of the many secrets the Skraylings have yet to reveal to humans: they reincarnate. I won’t go into more detail so I don’t have to attach a spoiler warning. Suffice it to say that Mal and his twin brother play an important role in a gambit between Kiiren and another important Skrayling. In the balance lies not only Mal’s life but the alliance between the Skraylings and England against the staunchly-Catholic French and Spain. Lyle includes both personal and very big-picture stakes in the conflict.

Indeed, in general I am impressed not just with the story but with how tightly written this book is. It’s easy to turn historical fiction into sprawling epics, with descriptions and careful flashbacks and long-winded explanations of genealogies and precedents. Lyle manages to establish a lot with very little in the way of exposition. We quickly learn that Mal is the son of a diplomat who married an heiress from the French court. This gives him a half-French, secret Catholic heritage he has to hide, lest it bring him under suspicion. (Lyle drops a few more hints throughout the book that Mal will eventually renew his connection to France in the service of Walsingham’s spy corps, but I assume that will be another book.) Similarly, we learn about Coby’s background and former life in the Netherlands in about a single conversation between her and Mal. No lengthy flashbacks here, and only a few disjointed dream sequences!

I’m not quite as sold on the way Lyle portrays the magical and supernatural in The Alchemist of Souls. Magic doesn’t play an overt role until the last part of the book, and then there’s quite a bit of it, and it can be a little confusing to try to work out what’s going on, especially during the climax. In the end, all becomes clear once the dust settles. But this is an exception to the otherwise skillful use of action and suspense that makes this book so satisfying to read.

This is definitely a refreshing take on Elizabethan England, and one that I will be happy to follow as a series. The addition of the Skraylings into the political and religious fray between England and the Continent can only deepen the amount of carnage and intrigue that will be forthcoming. I can’t wait to see what Mal gets up to next. But far from serving merely to set up any sequels, The Alchemist of Souls is a fine novel that stands alone. It’s entertaining and action-oriented, but with a keen sense of history, neat new supernatural allies and enemies, and worthy characters to cheer (or boo).

My reviews of the Night’s Masque series:
The Merchant of Dreams →

One of the background themes of The Prisoner of Heaven was the ongoing conflict between nationalist/fascist and socialist/communist ideologies in Spain in the middle of the twentieth century. History class in Canada focuses on fascism almost exclusively as seen in World War II. It elides over the Spanish Civil War (I’ve had to remedy that on my own time). It mentions Mussolini in passing as a buddy of Hitler’s rather than a fascist dictator in his own right. And everything after World War II is the vague era known as the “Cold War”, with no explanation that, in countries like Turkey, the conflict between communism and fascism was really just beginning.

From this perspective I approach Silent House. Set in 1980s Turkey, and also written in that era but only recently translated into English, this book examines the polarized atmosphere of the country through a single family returned to the house of their matriarch. Fatma has outlived her husband, who had delusions of scientific grandeur, and her son. Her grandchildren come now to visit her, and they bring with them the scents and sounds and sights of a modern age. Fatma, who has lived her whole life in this grand house since relocating from Istanbul, does not embrace this change. Ever since the days of listening to her husband rant about the death of God and the rise of Western modernism, Fatma has been fearful of what such change might bring. Yet change is coming to this village.

The New York Times Book Review has a blurb on the front cover of my edition, calling this “a microcosm of a country on the verge of a coup”. I am somewhat put out at them, because I would have liked to use microcosm to describe this book. But now that would look like copying, wouldn’t it? Because they are right: Orhan Pamuk uses the device of these characters and their interconnected, tangled lives to represent the Turkish state at large. Each character is diverse in their goals, values, and actions. In this way, Silent House exemplifies the ability of historical fiction to tell grand tales of history through the lives of small, insignificant figures. One does not need to recount the deeds of generals on battlefields to explain how a country rises and falls.

I confess, however, to struggling with Silent House. It offers very little to capture one’s attention. The narration is curiously flat. Each chapter is told from the first-person perspective of a different character, as indicated by the chapter title. Sometimes it’s easy to forget which character is the narrator at the time, though; they sound very similar. And Pamuk tends to include flashbacks in which other characters suddenly start narrating, or engaging in dialogue without quotation marks, that can make it very confusing to follow. This is particularly evident in Fatma’s chapters, where she tends to recall conversations she once had with her husband, who was obsessed with somehow realigning Turkey along scientific principles imported from the West. I can appreciate what Pamuk is trying to do from a technical standpoint, but it leaves me cold.

The other difficulty lies within the characters themselves. There is little to love about them, or even sympathize with. For example, Hasan is supposed to be a classical tragic figure. He is a misguided youth who has fallen in with some hotheaded fascists but also fallen in love with Nilgün, who has communist sympathies. Torn between these loyalties but ultimately too weak to decide for himself, Hasan is carried along on a tide of anger and violence that ends in injury and death. It really is a well-executed character arc—except that I never really felt connected to either Hasan or Nilgün. The latter doesn’t actually get a viewpoint chapter, while the former spends most of his chapters whining about how he doesn’t have enough money and doesn’t want to study.

Overall, this combination of unsympathetic characters and difficult narration creates a scattered impression of the story. I feel like I’m viewing Silent House down the wrong end of a telescope: there is something intriguing here, but it didn’t quite work for me. I much preferred My Name is Red, which was also difficult to read but had some redeeming qualities in its characterization. What Silent House does is reaffirm Pamuk’s abilities as a writer while also hinting that, perhaps, he isn’t quite the writer for me.

The librarians at my school alerted me to this book. I knew Neil Gaiman had written a special short story, “Nothing O’Clock”, for the 50th anniversary, but I hadn’t been particularly bothered about finding it. Aside from the fact that I tend not to read fan fiction, the state of ebooks these days is still deplorable enough that finding a non-DRM copy would probably have been tricky.

Luckily, I was clever and made sure I’m on the good side of the librarians, and this is the payoff! Eleven Doctor Who stories by celebrated authors. Given the names on the cover, it’s possible to assume these stories are pitched towards a younger audience. I think that assumption would be a mistake, a mistake similar to assuming that Doctor Who is a children’s show. We’re all children compared to the Doctor.

I’m not going to go through every story and give a play-by-play of what I think worked and didn’t work. Suffice it to say that some of these stories were excellent and some were … not so much. Some authors captured the voice of their Doctor, and some seemed to have trouble recreating the magic of the silver screen through the written word. (Another reason I tend not to read fan fiction of TV shows.)

The first story that really jumped out at me was the Third Doctor’s story, “The Spear of Destiny”, by Marcus Sedgwick. I’m glad I enjoyed it, since I was not fond of the only other work I’ve read by Sedgwick, Midwinterblood. My roommate and I have been watching many of Jon Pertwee’s adventures, and Sedgwick captures the Third Doctor’s voice and mannerisms extremely well. He carries off that stern and slightly smug tone that Jon Pertwee likes to don in the face of danger. Like most of the stories in this book, the plot suffers for being slightly rushed—but let’s be honest, one Doctor Who fan to another: we’re seldom in this for the plot, right? We come for the Doctor …

… and stay for the companion. Most of these stories tend to follow the companion more closely than they do the Doctor. (Notably, the Sixth Doctor’s story is told from the first-person perspective of Peri.) Only the First and Eighth Doctors’ stories follow them in a limited, third-person perspective, and I don’t think this is a coincidence. The former’s is an adventure with … Susan … so the choice of perspective was limited. Likewise, the Eighth Doctor did not have a constant companion in his single television appearance (I know this is not the case in the audio adventures), so again, not much choice.

This focus on the companion’s perspective makes the Ninth Doctor’s story all the more interesting. I like it mainly because of when it’s set, between the split second when Rose refuses the Doctor’s first invitation to travel and he rematerializes and says, “Did I mention it also travels through time?” The Doctor visits the planet Karkinos (that is a hint) to stop a Starman. He impresses a local girl, and she inveigles her way into the TARDIS for his trip to ancient Babylon, where another Starman threatens to destroy Earth. Charlie Higson plays on our humanoid prejudices to create a very interesting companion who eventually persuades the Doctor to try to recruit Rose again.

Just because some of the other stories didn’t work as well for me doesn’t mean that they are unappealing across the board. It’s worth noting that my experience of some of the Doctors is negligible or virtually nil, so that can colour how I enjoyed their stories. And this is a collection for Doctor Who fans; this is not a good place for newcomers to suddenly dive in and say, “Wow, I guess I should probably try Doctor Who, what with it being so popular and all!” Fans will appreciate these stories, even if they don’t enjoy all of them. Every one of these stories is united simply by being a crazy, somewhat nonsensical adventure through time and space.

So, I am an idiot and did not realize this was a book of short stories until I was well into it. Don’t ask me why. I have an ebook copy, and so there was no real description or anything to clue me into it. I just started reading, assuming it was a novel. After a few chapters there were no obvious connections between these characters and their respective stories, but that’s Ekaterina Sedia for you: she’s good at building parallel plots and then bringing it all together. Except when it turns out that she’s actually writing short stories, and you’re just being stupid.

So this has made me feel exceedingly guilty about not enjoying Moscow, But Dreaming very much. It’s probably not Sedia’s fault at all. Clearly this entire book has gone over my head.

I’d like to think it’s a mood thing. That is, if I were in a more relaxed state of mind, perhaps I could have sunk into this book, soaked in it for longer, and meditated upon what each story is trying to say. Sedia offers a diverse buffet of meal choices here. Although they all have a fantasy element to them, some are more surreal than others. As the title implies, they are all connected by Sedia’s fascination with the character of Moscow and its inhabitants after the fall of Russian communism.

Most of the protagonists in these stories are dissatisfied and disaffected. They want something their life cannot give them, something unobtainable because of their circumstances. They live in harsh worlds, with cold, unforgiving edges. Sedia likes to show the grime and grit that builds up in the spaces between our thoughts and deeds. This should be depressing, but I don’t think that’s the point—rather, Sedia is drawing upon the tradition of the darkest of those unrevised European fairytales, the ones told to children to terrify them just before bedtime.

All of this makes for very effective and compelling stories, even if they don’t always make sense on a first reading. And this is where we come back to the idea of mood and how it affects one’s experience with a book. I don’t want to say these are bad stories, because when I look at them from a craftsmanship point of view, they are exquisite. However, Sedia brings it, and that can be exhausting to read at times.

These are excellent stories if you are looking for a short collection of short fiction that you can read by the fire on a dark, stormy night. It appeals to the primal and visceral parts of us, the parts that most want to believe in fear and magic—as well as hope and romance. Don’t look to this to be a quick and easy read with likeable, or even comprehensible, characters and plots. But these stories are beautiful in their own way, and each one demonstrates Sedia’s strong ability not just to write but to create amazing, mythical places.

I wasn’t sure I would like Picking Up the Ghost before I started it. The back cover copy bills it as a coming-of-age story about a kid from an impoverished background learning more about himself and his absent father through magic and encounters with ghosts. None of that pushes my personal urban fantasy buttons. But I gave it a try, and it just goes to show why reading widely and keeping an open mind can be rewarding. Tone Milazzo presently surprises with a story that is both endearing and somewhat original in its emphasis and expression. It’s not a book about beating a bad guy or saving the world. It’s about learning who you are and having confidence in yourself rather than relying on others.

Cinque seizes an opportunity to find out more about his father when he receives a letter informing him of his father’s death. He hitches a ride from St Jude’s into Chicago (this in and of itself is ill-advised) to claim his father’s effects. As a fourteen-year-old black kid from a very poor city, part of him is hoping for money, and lots of it. Instead he gets an unopened letter from his mother and a book about the Black Arts. Coupled with strange dreams and seeing ghosts, this leads Cinque down a very dark rabbit hole indeed.

A spirit steals Cinque’s heart. As he tries to discover what to do about it, he meets an African guru by dreamwalking, a mysterious woman named Iru who oversees important moments of change, and a cynical ghost named Willy T. Cinque continually trusts and listens to these characters and others, and this proves to be a bad idea. For this is the primary lesson of Picking Up the Ghost: don’t trust people until they earn it. By far the majority of the bad mojo that visits Cinque is a result of him blindly following the lead of another character, simply because they are explaining something to him. Cinque takes their explanations on faith rather than being critical, and this gets him into progressively hotter and hotter water.

Eventually Cinque realizes his problem and starts fighting back. And this is where Picking Up the Ghost starts to shine: Cinque is a very empowered young adult protagonist. Though he makes a few shady deals with some spirits, on the whole his redemption is of his own making. He takes matters into his own hands, and instead of looking for an instruction book to help him get of trouble, he writes his own. The climax truly is a thrilling turning point, where Cinque begins to stand up against the threats that have, until that point, thoroughly trounced him.

The events leading up to that climax are a little confusing. Cinque goes through this whole trial in which he must discard his identity and become no one, nameless, in order to escape the antagonist. Before he can turn the tables, he must reclaim his identity. This is a powerful sequence, but Milazzo doesn’t invest it with the greatest clarity. I wish there had been more detail to explain exactly what was happening. This is one of the reasons I’m leery of books in this vein—they use some of the trappings of magical realism that I like the least, namely a taste for surreal descriptions that I have trouble reconciling with reality. Cinque isn’t really Cinque any more, but everyone tells him he is Cinque. He had a hook in his skull, but presumably there was no mark, no blood—so it was a magic hook of some kind. It’s all just very vague and dreamy and magicky (as opposed to magical).

Some of the other plot points could also have been integrated more organically. Without delving too deeply into the spoiler bag, the whole thing about Cinque being the seventh son of a seventh son comes out of nowhere. The antagonist lets it slip during a particularly nasty confrontation between the two of them, but aside from furnishing him with slightly more motivation for his relentless attack against Cinque, it doesn’t seem to have much bearing.

This are rough edges around an otherwise very enjoyable book. Picking Up the Ghost is a novel of confrontation and transformation. I’ve shelved it as young adult, because it would definitely appeal to young adults—but it is a very adult young-adult novel; it is dark, not in an explicit way but in a profound one. Cinque learns tough lessons and becomes stronger for it. In the end, his relationship with Eshu—the being claiming to be a god that helps Cinque in return for some favours—is never fully resolved, so there is a strong hint of a potential sequel. But with the main plot wrapped up, this is a thoroughly satisfying novel that can stand alone.

William Gibson once said, “The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.” I’m starting to think this is the case with the Singularity as well. By its very definition this would seem to belie the idea of a Singularity at all, but bear with me.

Singularity generally deals in two closely related concepts: artificial intelligence and posthumanism. Once we get an AI that no longer relies on humans to improve its own processing capability, we’ve hit Singularity: the AI is god and we are its primate crash-test dummies. Beyond the point of the AI’s emergence, we can’t really predict what the future will hold for us. Similarly, any attempt to guess at what will happen to the human species once it shares the universe with a posthuman species (other than, you know, extinction) is largely futile.

A great deal of Singularity fiction embraces a “hard” Singularity, where the AI or the posthuman threat outpaces humanity in a very short period of time. But perhaps a softer Singularity is more realistic: posthuman technologies emerge not all at once but gradually. Computers that you wear like glasses. Computers that you stick to your skin like bandages. Computers that you swallow, like a drug.

The first two are real (if only prototypical). The third is Nexus.

Nexus is part techno-thriller, part spy novel, and entirely dystopian in its outlook on the near future. Ramez Naam explores how governments will attempt to control the dissemination and use of technologies that fundamentally alter the capability of human bodies and minds. His conclusions, that such technologies will force redefinitions of what it means to be “human”, to be a “person”, to have rights and liberties as recognized by documents like the Constitution, are both predictable and terrifying. The slider setting with “security” on one end and “freedom” on the right has been tilted entirely too far in the former’s direction. Yet—and this is the kicker when it comes to posthumanism—the alternative could well be chaos on an extinction level.

Kade Lane, the protagonist, is one of the primary innovators of a new version of Nexus. Arrested by the ERD, Homeland Security’s posthuman division, Kade agrees to a dangerous mission in return for the freedom of his friends. He’s sent to a neuroscience conference to infiltrate the circle of Su-Yong Shu, a Chinese scientist who turns out to be far more posthuman than even the ERD suspect. Shu is on to Kade from the start, and she tries to recruit him as a double double agent. But the ERD has another target on its radar at the same time, and in attempting to apprehend him—using Kade and his handler as bait—everything spirals out of control. Kade, who at this point has been contemplating how he can avoid being used by both the ERD and by Shu, finds himself struggling for his survival.

The titular technology, Nexus, is a network of nanomachines. Imbibed like a drug, Nexus sets up shop in the brain and provides direct, programmable access to a human’s cortex. Through Nexus, it’s possible to take control of someone else’s body, to program them or even adjust the emotions they experience. A group of people running Nexus can link and network their thoughts and feelings into a gestalt, conjuring up the terrifying images of a cyborg collective or a hive mind. Naturally, governments have banned the technology. Naturally, it’s flourishing in the underground.

The plot of Nexus is nothing special. However, it immediately grabbed my attention by giving all the characters three-dimensional motivations. Watson Cole is not a flat, megalomaniac with delusions of grandeur. Kade is not the one-note hacker hippie who wants information to be free. Sam is not the mindless government agent who only turns because she falls in love with the hero. Even Director Becker’s motives are understandable: he genuinely believes what he does is necessary to safeguard the United States and keep the world safe so that his daughters can grow up and flourish. By avoiding straw men and creating genuine actors, Naam illustrates the difficulty of deciding how to regulate, restrict, and use technologies like Nexus: sometimes, there are no "right" answers, no good answers.

This is not a story of the evil government attempting to quash a new technology (though the government certainly tries to do this). Kade is trapped between two unappealing alternatives: the ERD wants to control Nexus; Shu would use it to kick off a brand new generation of posthumans and launch a pre-emptive strike against humanity to "minimize" the loss of life. Both sides are committed to an us-or-them mentality when it comes to the future of humans and posthumans. Kade desperately wants to find middle ground, but he is having trouble doing so.

This is the reality of emergent technology. While nothing like Nexus exists today, there are plenty of examples of governments trying to come to terms with new technology. We’re still playing catch-up with copyright in the Internet era. And as exciting as these technologies are, they are nothing compared to what might be coming in the decades ahead. That’s what Naam portrays in Nexus: technology that alters us, biologically and psychologically. It might not be real yet, but it’s a possibility. When this technology appears, you can bet that governments will react as they do in this book: with extreme prejudice. While the individual players will insist they are doing it to safeguard citizens, the system as a whole will be working to do what it always does: preserve its own power in the face of inherently disruptive developments.

Nexus ends ambiguously, which is as it should be. Though its timeline is quite rushed, it is not so much extrapolative as descriptive: Naam describes the questions we are beginning to ask now and will be asking in decades to come. There aren’t easy answers for these questions. We’ll have to draw new lines in the sand, decide on new definitions for what it means to be human. There will be some messy mistakes along the way. Ultimately, I hope we stumble less and make fewer pitfalls than we see so far in the Nexus timeline. I’m not sure there’s reason for such optimism though.

Nexus reminds me of Postsingular, which also depicts a global crisis of nanotechnology. Whereas the latter ultimately succumbs to Singularity absurdism, this book remains relatively grounded (as much as thrillers can be). Like much good science fiction, it wraps a cautionary tale into an entertaining story. Naam packages action with moral dilemmas, producing a book that makes you think about big issues even as it keeps you extremely entertained.

A good book works because it tells a good story about interesting people. Full stop. These two qualities, narrative and personality, intertwine to create a unique and worthwhile experience. If the story isn’t compelling or the people aren’t interesting, then all the tricks and gimmicks and set pieces are not going to elevate the book beyond mediocrity. That being said, I don’t think that the best books are always those with the most hyper-realistic characters. Sometimes, the best books are those whose characters are a little larger-than-life, a little bit incredible.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s characters in this series are like this. Daniel Sempere, and especially his protégé Fermin Romero de Torres, could only exist in the pages of a novel—yet thanks to Ruiz Zafón’s writing, you want to believe they could exist in real life. The Prisoner of Heaven, like The Shadow of the Wind before it, is a novel written in hushed yet bombastic tones, a daring tale of adventure, romance, and tragedy.

The Shadow of the Wind was Daniel’s coming-of-age story and a mystery about Julián Carax, a reclusive author. The Prisoner of Heaven is Fermin’s story, in which Ruiz Zafón explains how Fermin acquired his current name, became deceased, and lived again in an epic escape from prison. Most of the story is a flashback to these days, framed by Fermin’s upcoming wedding to Bernarda and the troubling appearance of a character from his past.

According to Ruiz Zafón, one can read the Cemetery of Forgotten Books series in no particular order. Indeed, I haven’t read The Angel’s Game (yet). That being said, I would strongly encourage one to read The Shadow of the Wind before embarking on The Prisoner of Heaven. The former book introduces all of these characters far better than this one, which assumes a familiarity that readers of the first novel will embrace far better than newcomers.

This is both my chief criticism and my chief celebration of the book. It is a triumphant return to the world I first encountered in The Shadow of the Wind. I loved spending more time with Daniel and Fermin. I relished Ruiz Zafón’s descriptions of the Barcelona streets and the characters who populate them. However, the book also feels more like an echo of its predecessor than a fully fledged story in its own right. While Fermin recounts his backstory, I kept waiting for the story proper to begin; elements that feel like they could have taken a hundred pages, like Daniel’s plot to forge Fermin new identity documents, are resolved without much difficulty at all. The most sinister plot element is introduced near the end of the book and left dangling (presumably for book four) without any satisfying developments.

In this respect, The Prisoner of Heaven is interstitial. Fermin’s story is definitely interesting and fascinating. I enjoyed reading it. But it lacks the suspense of the Carax mystery—we know he escapes alive, after all—and even the mystery itself is flaccid. I enjoyed it because it was more in the vein of what I had read in The Shadow of the Wind rather than for its own merits.

This is a beautiful book that only confirms my initial judgement of Ruiz Zafón as a very talented writer. In his “suggested reading” at the end of the book he mentions Umberto Eco, and some critics liken the two authors as well. I find the comparison fitting. Both are very good at creating characters who feel like people but simultaneously seem to embody certain archetypal qualities; this is a delicate balancing act that not every writer achieves.

And, as always, the translator, Lucia Graves, deserves heaps of praise. She makes Ruiz Zafón’s prose shine in English. The writing is so melodious that it’s difficult to believe it wasn’t written in English originally, and I’m very glad that the book has so skilled a translator.

The Prisoner of Heaven is a good book, with a good story and fantastic characters. Yet I feel that it will live in the shadow of The Shadow of the Wind—not necessarily, mind you, such a bad thing.

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The public domain is a wonderful concept. Copyright is a useful tool during a creator’s lifetime, but when a work passes into public domain, something special happens. Anyone can reproduce it and indeed use its characters and ideas without worrying about any associated legal encumbrances. In this way the public domain becomes a treasure trove of mutual cultural touchstones. Of course, to do this, one needs access to public domain materials. Hence why, in my review of Dracula, I praised Project Gutenberg for providing such access. It’s thanks to the public domain that Syrie James is able to create such an interesting book as Dracula, My Love.

You may also recall that my review of Dracula is not particularly favourable with regards to Stoker’s treatment of his women characters. This is but one area that James seeks to rectify as she retells the events of Dracula from Mina’s point of view. She also seeks to (possibly) clear Dracula’s name—he wasn’t a monster, as a matter of fact, merely misunderstood.

My expectations going into this were pretty low. I haven’t had a good track record with modern adaptations of classics; the prospect of a "romance" version of Dracula did not seem enticing. So I’m pleased to say that I was wrong. Dracula, My Love is very well-written. James has clearly paid close attention to her source material. She expands upon the characters of Mina and Dracula and manages to create a convincing romantic subplot in the interstices of the original story’s events.

I began reading this literally as soon as I finished Dracula. This was both annoying and useful, for James cribs many scenes, lines of dialogue, and even descriptions from the novel verbatim—as one might expect. So it was interesting to see the correspondences, even though at times it felt repetitive. Like its original, Dracula, My Love feels a little too long—but perhaps that was because I knew, this time, the general twists and turns of the plot, even if the exact details are somewhat different.

This book is essentially a second, secret journal that shadows the journal from Mina that Stoker presents in the original story. Herein Mina confesses that her interactions with Count Dracula go far beyond the dine-and-dash dramatics that Stoker describes. Rather, Mina meets Dracula while in Whitby, where he poses as the affable young Mr Wagner. She falls in love with Wagner, only learning his true identity much later into the book (though it is painfully obvious to the reader for the duration). This connection made, the novel slips into the standard mould of the romance plot in which the heroine is torn between two loves: the mysterious, sexually appealing Dracula, who offers Mina eternal life and eternal learning; and Jonathan, who has known Mina almost all her life, and who offers her a kind of stable existence impossible with the dynamic and terrifying Count.

James’ rendition of Mina is refreshing and illuminating. She makes Mina feel more real, certainly more of a person than Stoker’s Mina. Yet she is careful also not to let any modern anachronisms slip into Mina’s characterization either. The result is a heroine who is a complicated mixture of natural, human emotions and Victorian-inculcated morality. Though she shares the inexperience of Stoker’s Mina, she is far more frank and open with us about the extent of her longing for Dracula than her counterpart ever could have been. Her aspirations to "be a good wife" to Jonathan, to have children, maybe teach some piano on the side, are all quite normal considering her social standing and upbringing.

Yet, unlike Stoker’s Mina, these are not all she is. James includes an episode in which Mina discovers the identities of her parents, something that isn’t strictly necessary but goes a long way towards filling in the blanks of her past as well as demonstrating the kind of person Mina is in the present. Though she discovers that her father is now a man of some standing, she declines to make herself known to him. She says that having the mystery solved is satisfactory enough, and that announcing herself to him would only cause him pain.

Mina doesn’t want to bring pain either to Jonathan or to Dracula. It seems, for a time, that she and Dracula hit upon a plan that allows her the best of both worlds: he will wait for her while she lives a natural life with Jonathan, coming for her at the time of her death to make her into a vampire. It’s creepy and weird, but it makes a kind of ruthless sense. This plan is sabotaged by a conflux of circumstances that culminates in the climax of the original novel, only this time, Dracula fakes his death for the benefits of Van Helsing and company. Afterwards, he and Mina reunite in his castle for the true climax of the story, as she must make her choice once and for all.

James never definitively illustrates whether Dracula is, in fact, "good". It’s possible to read the story either way—he could still be a monster who has duped and misled Mina into loving him. Ultimately, though, James takes Stoker’s original story and adheres quite faithfully to the original sequence of events while putting her own spin on things. It’s a fascinating example of this type of literature, and as a romance novel it manages to be satisfying without being too over-the-top. I can’t speak for how a more experienced romance fan will find it, but aside from some overly flowery prose in the sex scenes, it’s tolerable.

If you haven’t read the original Dracula, you’ll not have any trouble following this story. If, like me, you’ve read Dracula quite recently, then you’ll have an added bonus of seeing the same things unfold, just rotated ninety degrees. And sometimes, that makes all the difference.