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Book Blog: Reviewlets
May. 25th, 2016 05:45 pmBurning Paradise is a newish novel by Robert Charles Wilson. 2013. He's been writing for a while, hasn't he, quietly putting out excellent standalone works while huge doorstop fantasy series regularly fall off the stands.
It's an alternate history where the War to End All Wars really was, and the centenary of Armistice Day is being celebrated across the world. But humans haven't done this on their own. Wrapped around the world is an extraterrestrial entity which has tweaked their history and rewritten their communications for 100 years. There's a secret society of scientists and thinkers who were mostly destroyed for finding out this secret. There are pseudohuman assassins sent by the entity, like the ant queen of a mindless hive to hunt the young characters, 18-year-old Cassie, her 12-year-old brother and their friends, children of the society, But is the struggle for freedom a fight for the right to war?
My other recent read is Eight Million Gods by Wen Spencer. An urban fantasy set in Japan. This one is a fun, light sort of read, despite the pretty grim situation of a protagonist whose mother wants to lock her up because of her mental illness. Nikki has a condition some writers would really want, until they thought about it. Hypergraphia; an obsessive compulsive disorder meaning having to write. I'd never heard about it before. Combine this with the reality of Japanese magic and you have a character trying to wrangle a really cool, but troublesome superpower. The author seems to know what she's talking about re the experiences of a gaijin in Japan, and as regards the manifestations of various gods. "I was kicked out of the shrine by a cross-dressing god."
Good to read if one is feeling low. The characters seem like my people.
It's an alternate history where the War to End All Wars really was, and the centenary of Armistice Day is being celebrated across the world. But humans haven't done this on their own. Wrapped around the world is an extraterrestrial entity which has tweaked their history and rewritten their communications for 100 years. There's a secret society of scientists and thinkers who were mostly destroyed for finding out this secret. There are pseudohuman assassins sent by the entity, like the ant queen of a mindless hive to hunt the young characters, 18-year-old Cassie, her 12-year-old brother and their friends, children of the society, But is the struggle for freedom a fight for the right to war?
My other recent read is Eight Million Gods by Wen Spencer. An urban fantasy set in Japan. This one is a fun, light sort of read, despite the pretty grim situation of a protagonist whose mother wants to lock her up because of her mental illness. Nikki has a condition some writers would really want, until they thought about it. Hypergraphia; an obsessive compulsive disorder meaning having to write. I'd never heard about it before. Combine this with the reality of Japanese magic and you have a character trying to wrangle a really cool, but troublesome superpower. The author seems to know what she's talking about re the experiences of a gaijin in Japan, and as regards the manifestations of various gods. "I was kicked out of the shrine by a cross-dressing god."
Good to read if one is feeling low. The characters seem like my people.