A Minor Posting Note

I’m not going to be posting a review today and the only thing I’ll be posting tomorrow is my Best and Worst of September article.  There’s a pretty nasty stomach bug travelling around my community and of course I got it.  So obviously I’m not going to be around here very much for the next few days.  Mostly I’ll be sleeping and feeling sorry for myself.

See you guys later and may your own health be better than mine!

Oh, and here’s a picture of my cute kitten Tyrion to make up for the lack of a review:

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Aegis Rising by S. S. Segran

Aegis Rising by S. S. Segran(Cover picture courtesy of Goodreads.)

Over a remote northern forest, a small plane carrying five teenage friends flies into a freak storm. Struck by lightning, the aircraft crashes and the passengers find themselves cast into a life-changing adventure.

In a hidden valley, a mysterious people gaze at the stormy sky as a glowing object with fiery wings disappears behind a mountain ridge. The astonishing sight reignites an ancient prophecy foretelling the arrival of five chosen ones destined to become bearers of light against a dark storm gathering on humanity’s horizon.

In a distant city, a secretive organization led by a shadowy figure initiates a sequence of cataclysmic events designed to wreak havoc across the planet, beginning with a remote mining site in a northern Canada.

As the three worlds collide, unlikely heroes arise. Armed with powers entrusted to them by the ancient prophecy and the resilience of their life-long bond, the five teens take a stand against a malevolent foe.

[Full disclosure: I received a free paperback in conjunction with the blog tour in exchange for an honest review.]

One word I would use to describe Aegis Rising  is ‘solid’.  Not ‘great’ or ‘amazing’, but solid.  Why?  Simply because it was a solid novel: good characters, a decent enough plot and fairly good world-building.  However, it never had that wow factor.

As I said, the characters were okay.  The five teenagers who crash in the plane are named Aari, Jag, Kody, Mariah and Tegan and they react about as well as you’d expect to suddenly being surrounded by a strange culture in the middle of nowhere.  Especially since Kody doesn’t know where his dad (who was flying the plane) is.  Still, they at least realize that they can’t do a thing about their situation until they’ve got their strength back up so they hunker down and make the best of things.  My only real problem with the teens is that they’re just a little too perfect.  They never whine, complain or angst at any point (even when an adult would be) and they’re all described as drop dead gorgeous.  I like to have teen characters that don’t constantly angst, don’t get me wrong here, but you have to be just a little more realistic.

The plot was decent enough.  It sort of combines elements that both fantasy and science fiction fans will be familiar with.  There’s a prophecy set to come about and the teens must train to use their powers in order to save the world.  Only, the water supply of the valley is being poisoned and they must stop the Big Bad from doing that.  I think you can guess who the Big Bad is, especially if you watched Avatar or Fern Gully: The Last Rainforest.  There’s a little bit more depth to it than that, but I really would have liked for some plot twists toward the end instead of having Segran play the tropes straight.

The world-building was actually pretty good, but as I’ve said it never crossed into amazing territory.  At first it seems ridiculous that people in the valley have stayed hidden for so long, but the explanations provided by Segran are reasonable enough.  They build their huts for camouflage up in the Canadian wilderness, they have the Guardians protecting them (who are enormous bear-spirits) and they truly are self-sufficient.  Heck, they even have their resident scientist to think up new innovations to make life in the Dema-ki quite modern.  The magical powers portion of Aegis Rising is pretty typical, with no magical powers you probably haven’t seen in fantasy before.  However, it was reasonably well done and I wasn’t left asking “What’s going on here?” by the end of the novel.

All of these elements (characters, plot and world-building) are good enough, but they never really crossed into ‘amazing’ territory for me.  Segran’s writing was a little too simplistic for that, to be honest.  I would have appreciated more in-depth descriptions of the beautiful world around them as well as how they practiced their powers, rather than their banal conversations with each other.  Still, I honestly can’t think of anything that went ‘wrong’ with this novel so it is a solid book.  Not good, but pretty solid for me.  I think that most people out there would call it ‘good’ or ‘enjoyable’ but my problem is that I’ve read too many novels similar to this.  If you haven’t, then I can’t recommend Aegis Rising enough.

I give this book 4/5 stars.

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Discussion: The Most Overhyped Book (For You)

I’ll admit that sometimes I get caught up in the publisher’s hype of new releases and immediately buy or request them.  Or, I’m browsing through some of the blogs I read on a regular basis and I notice that everyone is giving five stars to this one new book.  Either way, I do end up getting swept up into the hype of a book on occasion.

For me personally, most of the time I find that an overhyped book is good, but that it’s not the greatest novel ever written like some people say it is.  It’s very rare that a book lives up to its hype.  Perhaps I’m just overly critical, though.  There are certainly hyped books that were worth the hype for me, like Graceling or Mira Grant’s Feed.

By contrast, there are books like If I Stay by Gayle Forman (which I read before the movie came out).  That’s probably one of the most overhyped, overrated books I’ve ever read, not counting some ridiculous ‘classics’ like The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton.  The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory was certainly disappointing as well.  It was supposed to be an entirely new take on a rather forgotten woman, Mary Boleyn, but it just ended up being the TMZ of the Tudor period.  Gregory took the most scandalous accusations of the time and didn’t bother researching much to slap together a novel purely designed for shock value instead of realism.

Those were some of the most overhyped books I’ve ever read.  What are some of yours?  Were there any books that have absolutely lived up to the ridiculous hype for you?

Partials by Dan Wells

Partials by Dan Wells(Cover picture courtesy of Dan Wells’ site.)

For fans of The Hunger Games, Battlestar Galactica, and Blade Runner comes the first book in the Partials Sequence, a fast-paced, action-packed, and riveting sci-fi teen series, by acclaimed author Dan Wells.

Humanity is all but extinguished after a war with Partials—engineered organic beings identical to humans—has decimated the population. Reduced to only tens of thousands by a weaponized virus to which only a fraction of humanity is immune, the survivors in North America have huddled together on Long Island. But sixteen-year-old Kira is determined to find a solution. As she tries desperately to save what is left of her race, she discovers that that the survival of both humans and Partials rests in her attempts to answer questions about the war’s origin that she never knew to ask.

Playing on our curiosity of and fascination with the complete collapse of civilization, Partials is, at its heart, a story of survival, one that explores the individual narratives and complex relationships of those left behind, both humans and Partials alike—and of the way in which the concept of what is right and wrong in this world is greatly dependent on one’s own point of view.

I’ve had my eye on Partials ever since it was on NetGalley as an ARC.  I couldn’t get it because requests were not open to Canadians, so being the cheapskate that I am I waited until it was out in paperback to actually buy it.  So I guess you could say I’ve been greatly anticipating reading this book.

You know what?  It’s actually pretty good.  For YA, it’s quite science-intensive, even if that science is slightly simplified (particularly the virus talk).  I was very impressed when Dan Wells actually took the time to show the long, laborious process of research as Kira tries to discover what’s killing all of the human babies.  It’s an interesting dilemma from a science point of view: How are these babies dying in a sterile room?  If they really are dying in a sterile room it means that the virus is transmitted to the fetus from the mother.  And how on earth does a sixteen-year-old new doctor fix something like that?

Kira is an interesting main character because her generation has been forced through adulthood very, very quickly.  She’s already trained as a doctor and she’s only 16 years old, so she’s fairly mature.  At the same time, she feels like every other sixteen year old would when the rumours in the community are that all women will have to be pregnant by 16 now.  (Since a certain percentage of adults survived the initial virus eleven years ago, they hope that the more people being born, the greater the chance one of them will be immune.)  She rages against it, rebels and eventually commits treason against the Senate, the rather dystopian ruling body of the community.  Trust me on this: Kira is no shrinking violet and will do whatever it takes to save humanity.

The plot was both fast-paced and incredibly interesting.  For me, it was the characters that I was more interested in, but Dan Wells did an excellent job of creating a believable but unpredictable plot.  It twists and turns constantly; I did see the big reveal coming but only because it was used in a few other similar novels and movies.  Of course the cliffhanger on the end ensures that I’ll most definitely be reading the next book, but Partials was so good that I wouldn’t have needed such a cliffhanger to keep reading the series.

What surprised me most of all, aside from the fairly heavy science, was the world-building.  Eleven years ago, most of humanity was destroyed by a war with the Partials and the virus they supposedly unleashed and now the only remaining humans (as far as they know) are struggling to survive.  Everyone scavenges in empty homes, there’s farming but not always enough to live on alone so everyone scavenges old food.  Apparently expiration dates in the future will be longer.

There are no pharmaceutical manufacturing companies any longer, so some of the most important missions are scavenging for medicine in old veterinary and medical clinics.  It’s a harsh picture of what an apocalypse would really look like, even if there were pockets of survivors: they’d be highly concerned about the basic necessities like medicine and food from scavenging, but also about the remaining energy.  Gasoline destabilizes after a few years so humanity has reverted to the good ol’ horse and cart.  It’s a very realistic picture of what would probably happen in the event of most of humanity dying out.  Most post-apocalyptic YA novels don’t put this much thought into the day-to-day survival needs of their narrators.

So we have realistic and interesting world-building, a pretty cool main character and a reasonably paced plot.  Even though I still say this book was over-hyped in the blogging community, I can’t really criticize it.  It was a very good read.

I give this book 5/5 stars.

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The Secret Lives of Sgt. John Wilson by Lois Simmie

The Secret Lives of Sgt. John Wilson by Lois Simmie(Cover picture courtesy of Goodreads.)

John Wilson came to Canada from Scotland in 1912, leaving his wife and family with the promise to return in a year. In 1914 he joined the Mounties, and while stationed in Saskatchewan village, he caught TB and fell hopelessly in love with the young woman who took care of him. He would do anything for her, anything at all.

Winner of the 1995 Arthur Ellis Award for Non-Fiction, The Secret Lives of Sgt. John Wilson is played out against a backdrop of catastrophic events; World War I, economic depression, the TB and Spanish Flu epidemics. It is the riveting account of a mounted policeman and the women who loved him.

I initially picked up this book because it was semi-local.  (When you’re in Saskatchewan, any fiction vaguely mentioning your province is ‘local’, no matter how far away the story plays out from where you actually are.)  I like true crime books, even if I don’t necessarily always review them.  But this one I had to review.

Now, the main problem with The Secret Lives of Sgt. John Wilson is that it tries so hard to be both a novel and a nonfiction account of a cold-blooded murder.  In the end, it works as neither.  In some respects, this has to be a fictional novel because (despite the award for nonfiction!) Lois Simmie really does insert her own flair into it and speculates highly on what John Wilson was feeling at the time.  This is without backing it up with evidence like testimony from his trial or something similar, mind you.

And that’s why, despite the award, I also don’t consider this to be nonfiction.  This is more of that hybrid genre, creative nonfiction. Normally the genre of something wouldn’t matter to me at all except for the fact that this book works as neither fiction or nonfiction for me.  As fiction, it’s boring and as nonfiction it’s not exactly strictly true to the facts the way you see with other true crime.

Enough of my griping about categorization, though.  It’s not all that relevant when a short read like this (something like 200 pages) was threatening to put me to sleep.  As I said, part of it was the fact that Lois Simmie included almost verbatim the letters of Polly Wilson’s relatives, who had sent them to so many different policeman it made my head spin.  Frankly, the first part of the book leading up to the murder was boring as well.  There was too much focus on mundane events whereas the murder itself barely had any page time at all.

It shouldn’t have been because it really had the potential to let us watch John Wilson’s slow descent into madness and murder, but it was because Lois Simmie has a very dry writing style.  It’s like she’s writing a textbook for schoolchildren, not an actual book (be it nonfiction or fiction).  Even nonfiction writers can insert their own flair as long as they’re not playing with the facts, just like Toby Wilkinson in his book The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt.  He was very factual and backed up his speculations with evidence, but he also added in his own commentary of events on occasion in very cynical one-liners.  He also wrote in such a way that his audience was engaged whereas Simmie doesn’t seem to care whether anyone is interested in her book by the second half.

I had been interested in this murder case, having never heard of it before, which is why I picked up this book.  However, had I known it was going to be such a dull affair as this, I never would have wasted my time with it.  I can’t honestly recommend it.

I give this book 1/5 stars.

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