After two books, I think the thing I find most fun and exciting about Lynch’s stories is that he doesn’t have extra-ordinary characters. None of his characters, (aside from the bondsmagi) possess latent super-powers or even an unnatural bend towards some kind of skill. They’re just ordinary humans who get where they are by hard work and tenacity. And even when they’ve done their best, they still face very real and dangerous failure, and it’s that possible failure and its consequence that keeps me picking […]
Because Survival Is Insufficient
Oh God, this book….this wonderful, wonderful book. The present-day world is crumbling as a deadly flu pandemic spreads like wild-fire and kills its victims in under 48 hours. Within weeks the entirety of modern civilization has been reduced to buildings full of corpses and eternal traffic jams of driverless cars. Air travel is history, satellites go down, the internet disappears, lights go out, and the world is plunged into the literal dark ages. So why is this wonderful? Mandel takes what could be just another […]
A Gentleman Bastard Is Still A Bastard
In a nutshell this is a fantastic, fun ride. It has all the elements of a great modern fantasy: excellent characters, awesome world-building, and a fast-paced, well timed plot that keeps you interested. A lot of Amazon reviewers are comparing Scott Lynch to Mark Lawrence and Patrick Rothfuss, and as a reader of all 3 authors, I feel that Lynch’s Locke and Company are NOTHING like Jorg or Kvothe. While Jorg is a downright bastard (see Kaykay’s Cannonball 6 review) and Kvothe is cocky (see […]
Merely Respectable
The height of literary comedy? I don’t know. A Confederacy of Dunces follows the day-to-day lives of a cast of characters that all ultimately end up at the same place at the same time due to the ridiculous antics and poor choices of the main character, Ignatius. Ignatius is a 30 year old hyper educated, egotistical and out-of-touch bum living on the good will of his retired mother in New Orleans in the early ‘60s. After his incessant back seat driving gets her into an […]
John Snow Knows How to Save the World
London, 1849, you are a doctor and the dreaded disease, Cholera, is literally hitting the city the like the Bubonic plague. Your neighbor was fighting fit on Monday, and Wednesday morning you watched him go out on the corpse cart. The epidemic will go on to take over 50,000 lives before petering out a few months later. But based on its track record, you know it will be back. What do you do? If you’re John Snow, anesthesiologist and part-time medical investigator, you march through […]
I Wasn’t Charmed
I wanted to like this book, and there were moments of it that I enjoyed, but the sixty or so pages in between these precious paragraphs were enough for me to not recommend this book to any serious urban fantasy readers. The bones of a good story are there: a fairly congenial and funny protagonist, a supernatural world, a believable love interest, and a manageable cast of semi-interesting major characters. Where this book failed to capture my attention was in the protagonist’s narration and the […]