My Review of The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet, by Becky Chambers

 

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was longing for a good space opera scifi, and this story didn't let me down in that regard. The greatest strength of this book is the immersive way the reader is pulled into the characters and their interactions. This is, more than any other book I've recent in recent years, a fully character-driven novel. Chambers does an amazing job of describing the many different alien species, the interactions between crew members, and the differing ways they see the world through their respective lenses. She does so without being heavy-handed or info-dumping. It is done naturally, and you get to know the crewmembers in a very personal way despite them being very different alien species.

Do not expect a book full of action. In fact, there's almost no competition of any sort between characters, civilizations, or species. It's sort of nice, frankly. There are three or four points in story where there is tension, but it is over quickly. No one is shooting anyone else. No blaster fights or punching or anything. It's just a NICE read, which is refreshing. This is not a book for hard scifi or military scifi enthusiasts.

What the book lacks is a cohesive plot. It's basically a long series of character vignettes, with the loose thread of making a journey to a distant planet to "tunnel" a wormhole for the rest of space to travel there. [Slight spoiler] When they finally reach their destination, though, the end comes quickly and you are left realizing that the destination and the trip there were really just a macguffin. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I wasn't set up for that by anything in the description of the book or the initial "hook" (which had suggested the story was primarily around Rosemary faking her background and going on a long and dangerous journey, which turns out was only a small part of the book).

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My Review of The Lincoln Highway, by Amor Towles

 

The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book wasn’t what I expected, and that’s a good thing. I like surprises. The characters are very individualized and three-dimensional. The story had twists and turns, and by the end you realize there are deeper meanings to it. I found myself relating to the characters in different ways. 18-year old Emmett has lost his father, his mother, and then his father’s farm, all while dealing with having just been released from a juvenile work farm for unintentionally killing another boy in a fight. Now he has to make a plan for himself and his 10-year old brother, Billy, to make a new life together. But Emmett’s well-laid plans to travel the Lincoln Highway from Nebraska to San Francisco to start that new life are thrown into chaos by the unexpected appearance of two other boys his age, Duchess and Wooly, both of whom had been at the work farm with him and escaped. Duchess is mercurial and chaotic, though often well-meaning, and Wooly is intellectually challenged, but kind. Along the way, the four boys come to meet some other notable characters who sometimes help them and sometimes challenge them.

There are some almost-spoilers below, so stop here if you worry about it….

The name of the book is a bit misleading. The Lincoln Highway is really a “McGuffin” in that it triggers the plot but isn’t actually the planned route they ultimately follow. I didn’t mind that, but it did break the “contract with the reader” if you will, from the initial plan that was laid out early in the book. Really, the plot is driven by Duchess, a troubled boy who has his own motivations, which he justifies in different ways, that throws everyone else’s plans asunder. Frankly, all of the characters have tragic histories, which makes them very interesting. Another oddity about this book is that it starts sort of in the middle of the story (which is actually a plot point stated by Billy, who is obsessed with a book about heroes and their journeys), and at the end of the book you realize that the story hasn’t really ended for some of the characters yet. None of these things really take away from the quality of the story, it’s just something to note that sets this book apart from others and makes it unique. I will say, though, that Duchess was so much the driver of the story that all the other characters were a little weaker for it, where they were mostly reacting to Duchess in one way or another.

One thing I definitely did not like, though, was that the dialogue is written without quotation marks. Rather, Towles uses a dash to signify when a speaker has started dialogue, but nothing to signify when they stop the dialogue. Thus, it was occasionally confusing when they stopped and the prose began. Towles also needed more dialogue tags, as sometimes I was confused who was speaking which sentences.

Be prepared that this has a bit of a tragic ending that left me concerned for the motives of some of the characters I’d come to like. But overall, it was a worthy read.

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My Review of Anathema, by Keri Lake

 

Anathema by Keri Lake
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The good part about Anathema is that Lake has done a great job of worldbuilding. The magic system is reasonably unique, the land and civilizations are interesting, and there are unique and interesting monsters and supernatural creatures.

The story is told from the POV of two characters: Zevander, who is an assassin, and Maevyth, who is a waifish and innocent young woman. Zevander is a complex character with an interesting background, powerful in magic, and very dark and brooding, haunted by his past and his curse. Definitely an anti-hero. I enjoyed his part of the story. Zevander's part, and the worldbuilding, are the only reasons I bumped up to 3 stars.

Maevyth, on the other hand, is a very two-dimensional character and very weak. She (and to a slightly lesser degree, her sister) is constantly victimized. In fact, her entire community victimizes her, including her (stereotypical) evil stepmother and her lascivious uncles. So much so that nearly every page of her part of the story involves some sort of in-you-face disrespect or outright torment. Everyone is out to get her, and every man is lustful and rapey. It's so heavy-handed that it is nearly unreadable. It isn't entertaining. And just when you think she's finally escaped her repressive situation by fleeing to the other world through a portal, she is immediately captured, threatened with rape, and thrown in a cell. And then she is rescued... only to be thrown in a cell again. She doesn't drive her story, she just reacts to the constant victimization, pulled along by the winds of torment. Not fun. And then, in the midst of this victimization, somehow we are supposed to buy that she is getting attracted to and aroused by the other protagonist? It's the worst sort of forced romance.

The book then ends on a cliffhanger which is not satisfying in any way. I also didn't like the editing of this book, as there are frequent sentence fragments and modern allusions that bump me out of the story and setting. I don't recommend.

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My Review of "The Maid's Diary" by Loreth Anne White

 

The Maid's Diary by Loreth Anne White
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This story definitely has some twists in it. No spoilers, but it was getting to be near the end when a gigantic twist is revealed. Normally I see things coming, but this twist caught me by surprise. There is someone pulling all the strings, and they did it with panache. Another thing I liked about this book is that all of the characters in it are very three-dimensional, with complex backgrounds and skeletons in their closets. It leads the reader to wonder just who the bad guy is, and maybe the worst aren't actually the murderer.

White tells the tale from five points of view, which actually worked out okay. Stories with too many POVs can sometimes get a bit lost, but she held it together. But one thing that I found less than ideal was that there were two chronological storylines going at once: the "before the murder" storyline, told from the points of view of the three main protagonists involved in the crime, and the "after the murder" storyline, which is told from the POV of one of the detectives. I don't much care for jumping back and forth between chronologies like this, but I can see why the author did it: to put the reader into the mindsets of those involved in the crime, and the the other to piece the crime together afterward. Then it all comes together in the end. But not really my thing. The other thing that I didn't exactly love was how White uses "third person present tense" for everything other than the maid's (Kit's) diary entries. Again, I can see why she did it -- to put the reader in the moment -- but it doesn't lend itself to emotional storytelling, and sometimes the text read more like a police report and less like something I could get emotionally attached to.

Another thing that REALLY bothered me was that the author threw the reader a red herring at the end, which is typical for mystery stories (where there are many), but the one at the end was WAY too convenient to have me believe it. I can't say more without spoiling, but it involved the snooping old lady next door to the murder scene, and it had me rolling my eyes in annoyance. For this reason I wish I could drop from a rating of 4 to a 3.5, but half-stars aren't something I can put here.

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