I finally got around to finishing V For Vendetta the other day. I’d wanted to read it before seeing the movie…how long ago did that come out?

Anyway, I have to say, and sorry comic book fans, but I didn’t much care for it. The story was just OK. In a nutshell, V is the name of a vigilante in a near-future England. There’s been some kind of limited nuclear war that’s left England pretty much an island unto itself (har har). The government is a melange of Nazi and Orwellian Big Brother regime, and V is trying to topple it. Heavy stuff for a graphic novel, and I bet the movie was pretty good.

But for me, it was the visual presentation that disappointed me. The art style felt muddy and out-of-focus. There were a lot of places where the details were so abstracted that I wasn’t sure which character was being represented. There were lots of expositional narrative ‘balloons’ but it often wasn’t clear who was narrating. If it was one of the characters’ voices or just an unbodied narrator. Sometimes these bubble would connect to dialog bubbles, but it didn’t make sense for the narrative and the dialog to be coming from one character.

Perhaps the problem was in the printing? Maybe the original comics were in a larger format and so things were more clear. Whatever the reason, though, I would steer you away from this print of V For Vendetta.

I’m still going to watch the movie though.

I stayed up much too late last night finishing Greg Keye’s The Charnel Prince. This was book 2 in the series started in The Briar King (see a couple posts down). Here’s my review: I LOVED IT!
Heh. Seriously, it was as good as Briar King, which I mean as the highest of praise because I truly loved that book. The story is getting rolling now. The Briar King is still out and about, and some evil clerics are trying to awaken some ancient and apparently evil saint. The law of death is broken. The princess is on the run. One of the new characters is a court composer, and it just blew me away what a great job Keyes did of turning him into a hero without him ever lifting a sword.
Some old friends have returned, others are gone forever. There are still a bunch of threads to follow but Keyes keeps things moving such that you don’t lose your place, or at least not very often. (Of course the fact that the book is hard to put down means that I devoured it in big chunks, which also helped.)
Its times like these that my lack of any kind of book reviewing skill frustrates the hell out of me, because I want to inspire you to go out and buy these books because they’re wonderful! And all I can manage is “OOOOhhh! SHINY!”
The next book is out in July. I can’t wait. I’ll be there the day it hits the store shelves (if I can figure out when that is)!

And once again I finish a book only to let it fade from my memory before reviewing it, or whatever you call what I do to books here. Brave Men Run by Matthew Wayne Selznick is a self-published book that gives me faith in the whole concept of self-publishing because it is a *really* fun read. It takes place in an alternate version of the 1980’s when, for all intents and purposes, super-heros come out of the closet. The protagonist is high school student who has always been a bit of an oddball, but now realizes that he is one of these people with special powers. And his classmates realize the same thing.

So think of it a bit like the beginnings of the X-Men.

Except its more a coming of age novel than anything. Nate Charters is in love for the first time, finding out his mother isn’t infallible for the first time, finding that other people aren’t always what they seem. In short, he’s growing up, and quickly. We get to go along for the ride. The special powers are more a catalyst for rapid change than the point of the book.

Now I listened to the podiobook version. It is read by the author and he does a great job of breathing life into his characters and evoking the feel of the ’80s. It doesn’t hurt that he uses Peril Dance’s Perfect World for intro and outro… it has a very strong 80’s vibe.

You can also buy the book from Amazon or Lulu.com. Links can be found at the Brave Men Run website. Brace yourself… Mr. Selznick is a wonderful writer and a talented storyteller, but he pretty much sucks as a web designer, and the cover of the book is about as appealing as a mud-pie.

But please don’t let that slow you down. There’s a sample chapter for you to read at the site, and the Podiobook is *free* to listen to, though donations are accepted. I was happy to drop $10 in the tip jar, and sent a print copy of the book to a friend.

Self-published books worth reading need our help to get the word out. I really, really enjoyed Brave Men Run and if one person finds it because of this post, I’ll be happy. Leave a comment if you give it a read or a listen. I’d love to hear what other folks thought of it.

I’ve been a lazy SOB. I finished Greg Keyes’ The Briar King quite some time ago but never got around to posting a review of it. Or whatever you call these short verbal spewings about books that I do…

And the damned thing is, The Briar King is the best fantasy book I’ve read in a long time! Keyes has a talent for breathing real life into his characters, making sure that each is an individual. And he has a talent for weaving several plot lines into a coherent whole. Like Mike Stackpole in The Secret Atlas, Keyes rotates through the various plots on a chapter by chapter basis. This does create the same problem that one could run into with Atlas, which is a loss of continuity if you’re reading one chapter every other night or something.

So what is it about? Well, its about the end of the world, apparently. The end of this fantasy world. The titular Briar King is a kind of boogeyman creature: used to scare small children but not considered real. Except, well, he is. And he’s wakened from his long, long sleep. Legend has it that him stirring means the end of the world is near. With him come all kinds of other things that go bump in the night.

We have a broad cast of charactors, from the forester (born as his mother was being hung!) who looks after the king’s forest, to the king himself, and his family. Toss in a very noble and pure of heart knight, a bookish monk, the king’s rather wild daughter, and the forester’s rather young love interest, and stir them up with lots of intrigue, gruesome sacrificial murders, forbidden texts, and spirits of ancestors, and you get an epic fantasy tale that isn’t even close to finished at the end of The Briar King.

Which is why I’m mid-way through the volume two, The Charnel Prince. Volume three is set to hit stores right around now, if it hasn’t already. [Ach! It’s been delayed until July!!! -dc]

In a lot of ways this series reminds me of George RR Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series. I don’t think this is a coincidence. Heck, the series is called “The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone.” If you liked Ice and Fire, you’re going to like Thorn and Bone. A lot.

An enthusiastic two thumbs up. If you love fantasy, you must read this book.

I actually finished reading Mike Stackpole’s The Secret Atlas quite a while ago, but I’ve been holding off on writing this review. Why? Because I like Mike Stackpole and I really wanted to like The Secret Atlas and, well, I didn’t.

We have here an interesting world that has been torn asunder by a cataclysm and is slowly rebuilding itself. There are political shenanigans going on as a few Machiavellian princes vie for power. There’s a subtle (at least at first) kind of magic that seems to arise from someone getting really good at something. There’s a whole passel of characters running hither and yon. In short, there’s a lot of good stuff in here.

But sadly, the execution fails. There are too many story threads going on here (four main ones) and the chapters rotate through them. So chapter x is about plotline A chapter x+1 is about plotline B, x+2 is about plotline C, x+3 about D, and then chapter x+4 is about plotline A again. And maybe I’m just getting old and senile, but by the time I come back around I’ve forgotten what’s going on and why I should care.

You see, the plotlines are so cleanly divided that it almost feels like I’m reading 4 books at once, reading a chapter of each before returning to the top of my stack.

Also, this is very much a volume 1. DO NOT read The Secret Atlas until the next volume is on store shelves, because there is very little closure at the end of this book. I think that the series can come together and be really fun, once you have them all in hand (and assuming you read your books in big chunks…these days I’m happy if I can squeeze in a chapter a night, which really made the rotating plotlines a big problem for me). But Atlas starts with a traveller entering a town, and half-way through the book, about 7 or 8 days have passed and we’re still in this town, talking a lot about the Big Adventures to come, but not actually going anywhere. We get a LOT of base material, though..we learn a lot about the world Stackpole has built, and it seems very rich indeed.

So although I didn’t like The Secret Atlas as a stand-alone volume, I still have hopes for the series as a whole, and I will read the next book when it hits store shelves.