The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss

4.5 stars

Visitors to the Waystone Inn would be forgiven for thinking that the mild-mannered innkeeper is just that. But having just laid waste to some demons who made the mistake of attacking a regular, it seems there’s a little more to this innkeeper than meets the eye. Tracked down by a famous scribe, The Chronicler, the innkeeper starts telling the story of how an orphaned travelling player survived a feral childhood on the streets, joined a magical university, and became a legendary badass.

Instantly sucked into Kvothe’s world, I am now desperate for my very own Bast (Please, Santa?) and can’t wait to find out more about him and how he fits into Kvothe’s world. If I had any quibbles at all with the book, it’s that it ended. 

I’ve already ordered the next.

Rogues, by George RR Martin & Gardner Dozois

3 stars

An anthology of stories all featuring - you guessed it - rogues, while the entries within have been gathered from across a variety of genres, my favourites – Joe Abercrombie’s blistering opener, Tough Times Ahead (featuring not one, not two, not three, but a whole town of rogues), Scott Lynch’s A Year And A Day In Old Theradane, and Patrick Rothfuss’ The Lightning Tree – were all plucked from the fantasy branch of the bookstore.

While there were a fair few stories of a high standard featured – as well as my favourites there were other great entries from Neil Gaiman, Carrie Vaughn, Daniel Abraham and Bradley Denton (the only non-fantasy flavoured that really got me going) – there were also more than a couple of duds. It was another fantasy that really scraped the barrel here for me, in the form of Matthew Hughes’ The Inn Of The Seven Blessings which really should have been read aloud by Jemaine Clement in Gentleman Broncos ("This part of the forest had become uninhabited after Olverion's final misjudgment and the large predatory beasts that now roamed free had no compunctions against dining on wereflesh.")

Ending with a short tale from George RR Martin, as with all of the other anthologies he’s busy putting together instead of writing the end of a particular story, I’m starting to find that these enders are neither here nor there for me. Detailing the lives of past Targaryen’s in a dusty, dry style that’s nowhere near as visceral and involving as what I’ve previously inhaled of Westeros, I’m starting to find that I now give no shits whatsoever what might have happened to whichever Targaryen was the sister-marrying psycho in charge at the time.

So, while there were a couple of 5 starred stories in there (the three mentioned at the top), the majority of the 21 stories (2/3 of them, in fact) dragged the score down a couple of notches to a mostly entertained (but not always) 3.

Half A War, by Joe Abercrombie

4 stars

Since the events of Half The World, the High King has turned his gaze from Gettland and Vansterland and settled instead on Throvenland. Having his champion, Bright Yilling, slaughter its king and anyone else he can get his hands on should mean that Throvenland will fall easily. Except there’s someone that Bright Yilling has overlooked – a young princess, Skara, who turns to the only people left who may be able to help her: our bunch of ‘heroes’.

Changing perspectives once again, this time around we get the POV’s of Skara, Koll (who we already know and, in my case, enjoy) and Raith – former cup bearer to Grom-Gil-Gorm and now Skara’s initially reluctant protector. With the odds surely stacked against them, each take their place amongst those we’ve already come to know and love (well, I love some of them) as they make their stand against the greed and ambition of the High King and his chief enabler, Grandmother Wexen. But to get their last stand, some difficult choices must be made.

As with the previous entries, each of our new characters get to grow and change throughout the course of the story - Skara grows from a scared young girl into a woman capable of leading a country at war, and Raith was a stone cold killer who is slowly developing a conscience, while Koll serves as our window into the activities of Father Yarvi and is struggling with the decisions being made ‘for the greater good’. Through them we’re forced to recognise the ways in which the years of war and vengeance have altered our ‘heroes’ and reconsider whether they’re actually that heroic after all, a more unusual approach than that usually taken in series aimed at a slightly younger audience.

Less unusual for YA but definitely unusual for Abercrombie was the more overt romantic element in Half A War (not that we haven’t had characters develop feelings for one another in previous books, but this time around it was one of the more central threads). While I wasn’t initially sure that I was that keen on this, I somehow seemed to find myself inexplicably turning into someone who internally bellowed ‘KISS HIM!!’ at Skara every five seconds, and I liked the pragmatic outcome of this relationship even more. But – and there is still a but in spite of my fangirling – I still think that Abercrombie’s true strengths lie in other areas and I’d have preferred if the romance had been shoved a little further to the side.

Definitely a series that’s well worth a read, I’m now counting down the days until Abercrombie’s next.

Half The World, by Joe Abercrombie

4.5 stars

Yarvi has come a long way since Half A King. Now Father Yarvi and Minister to his uncle, King Uthil, in Half A World we get to see him through new eyes – eyes that allow us to see just how deep cunning he’s become.

Thorn and Brand are in training to become warriors but when Thorn accidentally kills a boy in the training square, she’s named as a murderer. And when Brand approaches Father Yarvi to appeal on her behalf, they’re both soon swept along on a journey across half the world, seeking allies for Gettland against the power greedy High King.

I really enjoyed the first book of this series, but I flipping loved this one. The second book in a trilogy usually feels like something of a lull in proceedings but Half the World, while obviously building to something bigger, carried on the fantastically gripping pace already established and then ramped it up with action scenes that genuinely made me hold my breath.

Filled to the brim with yet more awesome characters that made me care about the eventual outcomes even more, Thorn has already snarled, spat and stabbed her way to the forefront as one of the more memorable Abercrombie characters (and half made me want to shave half my head while doing so), but even the secondary characters soon had me twisted around their little fingers. I can’t wait to find out who I’m going to meet in the last of the trilogy, so I’m diving straight in to find out.

Half A King, by Joe Abercrombie

4 stars

The youngest son of King Uthric of Gettland, Yarvi was always meant for a life as a minister. Destiny, however, has other plans and when his father and older brother meet their untimely deaths, Yarvi is called to the Black Chair.

Not a popular king – as well as his youth, Yarvi faces prejudice due to his half-formed left hand – one of Yarvi’s first lessons in kingship is in how hard it is to hang on to your throne. Especially when even those closest to you can’t be trusted. And so starts a quest for vengeance that sees Yarvi travel strange lands, in the company of strange companions, learning that you don’t have to be a fighter to be dangerous.

Clearly written for a slightly younger audience than his usual, Half A King is still recognisably Abercombie (if a little less bleak...but only a little) – a proper page-turner with plenty of banter, betrayals and blood, brilliant characters that are full of personality, desperate situations, deep friendships, and a main character that isn’t a perfect white knight but a flawed human being who makes mistakes and doesn’t always learn from them. For me, however, Yarvi wasn’t the star of this book. That honour goes to Nothing, who’s the sort of character that Abercrombie excels in creating and who wouldn’t be out of place amongst his Northmen (I reckon he could have been great mates with my old favourite, Cracknut Whirrun).

Having torn through this in two sittings (thank you, Joe, for helping me get my reading mojo back!), I’m now straight on to the next.

Circles of Hell, by Dante

2.5 stars

Some years ago, I bought a copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy, but a rather academic and intimidating introduction saw me soon putting it back down again. This Little Black Classic was the perfect taster, comprising as it does a sort of ‘Greatest Hits’ of a handful of cantos from Inferno.

I was surprised to find how easy this was to read in comparison to that dreadfully off-putting introduction from so many years ago, with a rich and evocative use of language that sometimes amused as well as conjuring hellish images (particularly when a thief came out with the terribly modern sounding ‘It pisses me right off’). However, the fact that this comprised only a handful of pieces of the whole also meant that big leaps were often taken between cantos, meaning that I’d often start a new one completely flummoxed as to how we’d got there. Additionally, it seems that it was largely taken for granted at the time that we would know the people and images Dante was conjuring up – aside from recognising the name of Judas Iscariot and the Emperor Constantine (thank you, Inheritance of Rome!) these all remained meaningless to me.

And so, in conclusion, while I’m glad that I read this (even if it was at a time when I was entering my very own personal Circles of Hell, from which it didn’t provide much relief) I think my copy of the Divine Comedy might continue to gather dust for a few more years yet.

The Hero of Ages, by Brandon Sanderson

2.5 stars

The Mistborn trilogy has put on a lot of weight since we started - where Mistborn: The Final Empire was tight, lean and exciting, The Well of Ascension became a bit flabby around the middle after getting bogged down with too much thinking and not enough action. The Hero of Ages tried admirably to perk itself up a bit towards its last stretch, but its ingrained bad habits proved to be just slightly too much to overcome, with too much of this feeling like a retread of what had gone before.

Having ended The Well of Ascension with Vin having been tricked into releasing Ruin into the world and with Elend Venture reanimated as a Mistborn, we pick back up to find the world still dying - the killing mists now come during the day as well as at night, and every day sees ash fall more thickly while the Venture crew are busy tracking down the secret caches left by the Lord Ruler in preparation for the end of the world. Which is how we find ourselves having yet another siege, with Elend this time at the head of the besieging army. Thankfully, this time around Vin isn't quite so riddled with self-doubt, but unfortunately that doesn't mean we've seen the back of all the whining. It's just Sazed's turn this time.

With the besieging and the whining taking up a good three quarters of the book, I started to take less and less kindly towards it as time went on and, where I'd previously at least enjoyed the characters that were being put in such a predicament, I started getting irritated that those that had fleshed out the crew were mostly forgotten and shoved towards the sidelines while those that remained in the spotlight were no longer very interesting. Where I'd previously thought Vin a bit of a badass, I now couldn't care less which metals she flared as she took down thousands upon thousands of enemies all by herself. And while I appreciated the work that had gone into crafting Ruin's long-con, I couldn't help but feel it would have been helped by some judicious editing during The Siege 2: This Time It's Less Interesting to have brought a little more of the excitement of the last quarter of the book to the 500+ pages that preceded it. 

Don't get me wrong, this is still a series I enjoyed, with an especially blistering opener. It's just a shame that the excitement didn't last.

The Well of Ascension, by Brandon Sanderson

4 stars

Ever wondered what happens after the good guys win? The Well of Ascension, the second in the Mistborn trilogy, takes us back to Luthadel one year after the fall of the Final Empire to find out. While the tyranny of the Lord Ruler has been thrown off, its fledgling government (now headed by King Elend Venture) is finding that transition has its own set of problems. Aside from meeting the needs of a population whose entire society has been thrown into chaos, rival factions both within and without the city quite fancy having themselves in charge. Which is how Luthadel finds itself under siege with two rival monarchs camped on their doorstep and a third, backed by a Koloss army, not far behind.

While still really, really good, The Well of Ascension is a very different book to its predecessor with a very different pace. Instead of the gleeful exuberance of Kelsier, this is filled with Vin's insecurities. Instead of planning audacious heists, our characters are pondering the problems of holding onto political power. In the place of victories are people struggling to make the right choices. And while the action still crackles, its sidelined by Vin's relationship problems and struggle to understand who she is. We say goodbye to a few of the crew this time around, but these were robbed of potential punch by the fact that they were those that clearly had nothing left to do and, while I did enjoy the new characters (particularly Allriane), I didn't buy the love triangle that Zane brought with him at all.

Still, there's not many fantasy trilogies where you can enter the last book with no idea whatsoever of what it may hold, and the above are all minor quibbles in a book that still held me captive until the last page.

Mistborn: The Final Empire, by Brandon Sanderson

5 stars

Over a year ago, Brandon Sanderson's short story Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell emerged as my favourite from the Dangerous Women collection. A friend (hi, Tamsin!) had long ago championed the Mistborn series and so, having had this sat on my kindle for way too long and with a stretch of free time ahead of me, I thought it was high time I gave this a go. I am so, so glad I did and am now going to be doing this for the foreseeable future as I devour everything of his that I can get my hands on. 

Brandon Sanderson has built a truly fantastic world - one ruled over by a tyrant who was once  a hero, destined to save the world. Now the days see ash fall from the sky, while at night ominous mists keep a beaten down populace - the slave class of the skaa (ruled over by a vicious nobility who are ruled over, in turn, by the Lord Ruler himself) - behind closed doors. A young but useful member of a thieving crew, thanks to her ability to push her 'Luck' and the emotions of those around her, Vin has never dreamed that life could be anything other than the way it is. That is, until she's recruited by the charismatic Kelsier for a truly audacious job - to overthrow the Final Empire.

As well as a well-crafted world for our characters to live in, Sanderson has also given us a new and really rather cool magical system, based on the 'burning' of metals - Allomancy. With each metal having its own powers based on Pushing/Pulling, those with an affinity for a particular metal specialise - there are the Thugs, burning Pewter for enhanced physical abilities, Tineyes, with enhanced visual senses, Soothers and Rioters, burning brass or zinc to influence the emotions of others, and a host of others besides, while the Mistborn - somewhat rarer and with an affinity for all of the metals - tend to be those of noble blood, each guarding a Noble House (who, like most nobility throughout history, tend to be a particularly ruthless shower of shits constantly at one another's throats). I loved this magical system and how it was used, as well as how it was affected by its limitations.

But, more importantly, Sanderson has given us a brilliant bunch of characters, each distinct and serving as an important piece of the whole, with personalities and a mission that I'm now wholeheartedly invested in, as well as some truly formidable villains. I loved the whole idea of the Inquisitors and even our Big Bad, The Lord Ruler, is more interesting that most having been given his own backstory in the legends that underpin this society, making us wonder at what might have made him what he is today.

A fantastic series opener (as well as working well as a finished story in its own right), if you're at all into fantasy then do yourself a favour and pick up Mistborn: The Final Empire today.

Drowning Mermaids, by Nadia Scrieva

1 star

Being up to my eyeballs in painkillers thanks to some extremely painful back problems, I thought I’d turn to some brain candy whilst I convalesce. Unfortunately, Drowning Mermaids was more fit for rotting the brain and I can only assume that the high rating this has garnered on Goodreads must mean that every other reader was on far stronger painkillers than I, with the highest dosage having been taken by the writer just before she started scribbling as most of this book made no freaking sense whatsoever.

Aazuria is working as a ballet dancing stripper to finance a mermaid war when she meets Trevain, an extremely wealthy fisherman. Taking him up on the offer of moving herself and her sisters into his home they fall in insta-love, although their happiness is threatened by the fact that Aazuria is the leader of an underwater nation at war and that Trevain can’t help but piss himself laughing every time she alludes to being a mermaid. Will their love survive? Will I find the book littered with incredibly strange sentences? Will I get pissed at the weird strain of sexism on display? Will I roll my eyes hard enough for them to fall out of my head every time a doorbell rings demurely? Will I become angrily confused by the shoddy world-building? 

In this world mermaids don’t have tails, which explains how Aazuria can get a job as a stripping ballet dancer. Instead, they’re human – albeit ones that have grown a second set of lungs (not gills) that can somehow filter oxygen from water (where these lungs are housed in their bodies is beyond me, as they don’t have extremely large ribcages to accommodate them). Their legs, however, become wracked with pain if they spend too much time on land – although this only seems to affect Aazuria (and someone who later turns out to be a merman) and didn’t seem to influence the mermaid architects when building their underwater ice palaces in which lots of waterless caverns have been carved out for some reason that made absolutely no sense (along with them having carpeted some of these caverns. Where did they get the carpets? Did they have to strip to pay for them? How were they fitted in the ice caves? And why??)

The mermaids seem to have some powers but they’re crap ones like being slightly intuitive, only aging on land and having your hair and skin change colour when not in the water (this is apparently due to tanning, which somehow turns your platinum blonde hair dark and which only affects some mermaids, but not all – the twins remained flame-haired and fair skinned whether they were underwater or not). Despite not having powerful tails, they’re still incredibly fast and strong swimmers, easily able to catch up with boats that have set off long before them. Which would have been fine, except that meant that I was incredibly bewildered by a bunch of mermaid reinforcements arriving by boat in the middle of an underwater battle – a battle in which bullets, kicks, punches, people and throwing knives all move in the same way that they do on land (ever tried to punch someone underwater? It seems my brother and I did more research during family holidays than Scrieva ever did). 

The characters and their love affair were written with the same lack of skill as the world in which they lived – Aazuria is apparently a brave and strong ruler of her people, although she constantly abandoned them to seek her own safety on land, and we’re constantly told that Trevain is kind, considerate and honourable although what we’re shown is a man who’s decided that visiting the mother he has installed in a psychiatric hospital is too much bother, who throws temper tantrums when things don’t go his own way, insults and belittles the woman he supposedly loves and even goes for her throat when they disagree. I spent rather a lot of time hoping that Trevain would get harpooned in the chest by the evil, black clad mermaids (that’s how we know they’re evil) that Aazuria was at war with, and that she’d be so grief-stricken that we’d get to see exactly how one would go about drowning a mermaid. Instead, after vanquishing her enemies Aazuria got her happy-ever-after, with Trevain’s mermaid genes (lucky!) enabling him to join her in her ice palace (good luck to her, I wonder if he’ll choke her every time he gets sick of seafood?).

Honestly, the only good things I took from this book were that reading it was so painful it made my back pale in comparison, and that if I decided to abandon my job and write instead, nothing I could produce (even out of my mind on painkillers) could be any worse than this.

Blood of Dragons, by Robin Hobb

(Rain Wilds Chronicles #4), 4 stars

We’ve finally come to the end of our journey and as our dragons and their keepers work to wake up the Elderling city of Kelsingra and uncover its hidden secrets, boats bearing Hest and the Duke of Chalced’s minions are also making their way up the river hoping to slaughter the dragons in order to release themselves from the Duke’s subjugation. Also hoping for relief is Selden, languishing in ill-health at the Duke’s abode where he’s unwillingly providing a temporary cure for the Duke’s old age in the form of his ‘dragon-man’ blood. But the Duke of Chalced is soon to discover that ordering a dragon’s slaughter is far easier than doing so, and that there are consequences– huge, flying, venomous, deadly consequences.

Finishing a Robin Hobb series always leaves me feeling a little bereft, as happened again here. And while this series never quite hit the giddy heights of the Fitz and Liveship trilogies, it also wasn’t anywhere near as emotionally devastating (though, perversely, that’s also probably why I haven’t rated this one quite as highly) and it also give me some moments of wild glee along with some brilliant characters that almost began to feel like real people to me (despite the fact that they were sometimes, y’know, dragons).

Robin Hobb has a real talent for building worlds that I never want to leave, and I’m already eagerly anticipating my next visit.

City of Dragons

(Rain Wilds Chronicles #3), 4 stars

With our dragons and keepers now settled, albeit on a different side of the unpassable river to Kelsingra, they and Tarman have fulfilled their contract with the Cassarick Trader's Council. Sadly,  the Council isn't keen on paying them their dues and news of their find has inflamed most with greed, ensuring that as Leftrin tries to make his way back to the colony (accompanied by some of our old friends, who have themselves fallen victim to Chalced's thirst for dragon parts) he does so with more than a few followers. Meanwhile, both dragons and keepers alike are discovering that there's more to Kelsingra than meets the eye.

Giving us some new viewpoints to consider (the bastardly Hest and the infinitely hateable Duke of Chalced - the man who most wants our dragons carved up), City of Dragons gave us a better view of how our group and their discoveries fit into their wider world, as well as reminding us that said world is about to rudely intrude on the one they're making for themselves.

I'm slightly concerned at the title of the next and last in the series - Blood of Dragons - but that's not going to stop me from diving right in.

Dragon Haven, by Robin Hobb

(Rain Wilds Chronicles #2), 4 stars

Accompanied by the livebarge Tarman and his crew, the dragons and their keepers are continuing their perilous journey toward the Elderling city of Kelsingra - if it still exists. But acidic water, flash floods and hunger aren't the only danger they must face - there's also those that come from within the group, and not just from those planning on enriching themselves through plundered dragon parts. 

As both groups are altered by the bonds between dragon and keeper, so are the relationships around them: as Alise is apprised of the true nature of her marriage and Sedric discovers just how wrong his previous notions of the dragons (and Hest) really were, Thymara is finding herself increasingly at odds with the 'choices' being imposed upon her by Grest's assumed leadership. Meanwhile, the dragons are growing stronger, and more dangerous, every day.

I love how Hobb takes things we already know, such as the Rain Wilds environment and its effect upon those who live there, and gives us a new light in which to see them, and I'm as intrigued by the metamorphoses of the keepers as I am by where we may go now we've reached this point in the journey. I can't bear to be outside of Hobb's world any longer than necessary, so I'm heading straight into City of Dragons.

Dragon Keeper, by Robin Hobb

(Rain Wilds Chronicles #1), 4 stars

Every time I read a Robin Hobb book I think there's no way I could possible become as invested as I was in her last and then, within a few hundred pages, I find I've almost forgotten that there's a 'real' world that exists outside of hers, and that I'm more invested in her characters than many of the actual people that I know. 

Dragon Keeper has continued that trend (Note: Those new to Hobb would probably find much to enjoy here, but I'd definitely recommend having at least read the Liveship Traders Trilogy first or risk missing out on the thrill of crossing paths with old favourites - hi, Paragon! - as well as the richness of the back story of this world).

Catching up with events in the Rain Wilds since the end of our journey with the Liveships, we find the ancient serpents, guided by Tintaglia, are now cocooning ready for the transformation into dragons. But they've spent too long in their old forms and reached the beach too hungry and too late in the year to emerge as anything but starving, stunted creatures that are soon an unwelcome burden to the humans who'd agreed to care for them. Stirred by ancestral memories of the Elderling city Kelsingra, the dragons manipulate the human's greed into a plan to transport them, along with a group of young Keepers (those most touched by the Rain Wilds, whose populace would like to be rid of such outcasts) on a quest to find the fabled city.

Newbies may find Dragon Keeper something of a slow start, but I relished the chance to really get to know our characters before their lives are irrevocably changed. Ahhh, the characters - the real gift to the reader in any Robin Hobb book and, much like with the Liveship Traders, the fantastic female characters were something I particularly revelled in. In this we have Alise, married to a man she doesn't like, let alone love; Thymara, a Rain Wilds outcast unable to shrug off the rules that have governed her world until now; and Sintara, the imperious dragon under Thymara's care who's haunted by memories of what she should have been.

I'm now desperate for Alise to launch herself into an affair with Leftrin, the barge captain who I still don't quite trust, for nothing but wonderful things to happen to Tats, and for someone to eat Hest (this one's for you, Hest):

But...I'm also very aware that Hobb's characters tend to get shat on by life, and so I'm diving straight into Dragon Haven with a little worried feeling in the pit of my belly.

Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

by Neil Gaiman, 4 stars

A genre-hopping collection of short fictions from Neil Gaiman, intended to unsettle and disturb, which overall worked very well (for me – someone who much prefers novels to short stories).

As with any short story collection, this is something of a mixed bag – I have zero time for Doctor Who, even if he’s written by Neil Himself, and so Nothing O’Clock was definitely not my kind of crack, and I could have also lived without the Sherlock story The Case of Death and Honey, but these were completely overshadowed by my favourites which either took already familiar tales and twisted them (The Sleeper and the Spindle) or took mundane-looking lives and shone a light on their weird underbellies (My Last Landlady, Jerusalem, Feminine Endings). But my favourite by far, and a tale which alone made the book a must-buy for me was Black Dog, in which we catch up with American Gods’ Shadow as he visits a typical English country boozer and gets drawn into the lives of a local couple.

Perhaps strangely, one of the others that really stood out for me was the book’s opener, Making A Chair, in which our author writes about – you guessed it - making a chair. Quite an odd one to become a favourite, but it illustrated perfectly to me how much of a writer’s work is less inspiration and more actual work and that, much like an aspiring athlete needs to train, the most important thing any aspiring writer can do is just that – write. This somehow makes my work chore of pulling ‘stories’ out of one word emails for the weekly bulletin so much easier to bear…

The Wolves of Midwinter, by Anne Rice

3 stars

Hmmmmmm. What did I think of this one? I'm not so sure that I know yet, so am hoping that as I write this review I'll discover what my true feelings were. On the one hand, it was deeply pleasurable to be reading Anne Rice again, with her vivid sense of place and sensual powers of description in full flow. But on the other hand, it all felt a bit (whisper it) pointless. Stuff might have happened, but it felt as though most of that stuff involved putting up Christmas decorations...

Following on from events in The Wolf Gift, Reuben is now fully ensconced at Nideck Point and surrounded by the Distinguished Gentlemen who share his gift. His girlfriend, Laura (she who likes schtupping while he's in his wolf form) is undergoing her own transformation mostly off the page, leaving Reuben and the lads to go about setting up a Christmas spectacle. Which they do wonderfully, for pages and pages and pages and pages and pages. And that's before the spectacle actually happens, which of course needs lots more pages devoted to it.

In the meantime, we're also introduced to some of the 'Ageless Ones' who've long acted as servants to the Distinguished Gentlemen (although what they get out of doing so is beyond me), the 'Forest Gentry'(spirits who inhabit the forest surrounding Reuben's home) and the others who are coming together to form Reuben's extended family. A bit of plot floats around during all of this - Marchent's ghost is haunting Reuben and seems to want to tell him something - but only in the loosest possible sense and the climax of this thread turned out to be completely underwhelming.

Continuing with the negatives, Rice's unfortunate habit of having her characters love positively everyone while pontificating at length on philosophy and morality was also present and correct and far more noticeable for the lack of much to get my teeth into, as was her insistence on including children who are terribly grave and precocious and speak like elderly Victorian gentlemen, who stretch my credulity far more than a bunch of Morphenkinder ever could.

Although it's probably starting to sound as though I hated this, I did still tear through this in just a couple of sittings and will still be making sure to read the next instalment. I just won't be getting as rabid as I did for Lestat.

God Is Dead - Vol 3, by Mike Costa

3.5 stars

In which Jesus returns, only to discover that we're now extremely trigger happy. Not to worry though, the hoodied hippy has that whole resurrection thing going on - as does everyone else now too (Jesus! Probably don't get quite so baked before your next big decision, yeah?), leading us to our next problem: If you can't die, then life is just unending suffering.

Which is the case everywhere: after some meddling by Hephaestus down in the Aztec Realm of the Dead, the gods are back for yet another supernatural smackdown, while the destruction unleashed upon Gaia in the second volume means that Earth is on its way out too...

What to do? Looks like I'll have to buy the next Volume to find out.

God Is Dead - Vol 2, by Mike Costa

3.5 stars

More than a century after the old gods were defeated by Gaia (the goddess formerly known as The Collective's tit-strap girl), she now spends her days being worshipped by the humans that remain. Except for a bunch hiding out in the The Dreamtime, biding their time to launch an attack. Meanwhile, some other pantheons have also been waiting in the wings, culminating in another supernatural smack down.

While many of the ladies in this volume still insisted on having at least one boob out in order to get anything done, the plot felt a lot tighter this time around and I'm still interested in seeing wherever it will take me.

God Is Dead - Vol 1, by Jonathan Hickman

3.5 stars

I love the idea behind this graphic novel, with the old gods returning to Earth (this time, it's personal!) to claim dominion over mankind, which they turn out to be rather good at.

As the remaining human population gets mostly sacrificed and the gods start a Battle Royale for control over all, a small band of people known as The Collective have gone underground, looking for a way to fight back.

While I enjoyed the way the gods were depicted, I have to admit that one of the humans made my shit start to ever so slightly itch - The Collective, made up of pudgy scientists, skinny nerds, old men and the physically impaired, also happens to have a girl in it. A girl who, of course, has breasts bigger than her own head which are forever straining to free themselves from the strip of material she wears across them, and who finds pudgy scientists with whom she's had little interaction or chemistry insanely arousing. 

Sigh.

Warrior of the West, by M.K. Hume

1 star

If this book had a face, I would happily punch it every day until next Christmas. As it doesn't, I'll have to settle for ranting about it instead. 

Its predecessor, King Arthur: Dragon's Child, was a decent bit of brain-candy imagining the younger years of Artorex that I enjoyed despite its flaws. Warrior of the West, catching up with King Artor twelve years later, compounded those flaws and nearly drove me to complete rage more than once - throughout the second half I had to take frequent breaks in order to swear at it profusely, nearly break my kindle in fits of temper, and wish a violent death upon virtually every character within.

Now High King of the Britons, Artor has spent the last decade murdering every Saxon he comes across. When his emissaries are killed while negotiating a truce, he mounts an assault on the Saxon stronghold of Glamdring Ironfist. The first half of the book builds slowly towards this, showing a little of how Artor has changed in the intervening years and introducing Ironfist and a few of his compatriots, including the slave Bedwyr. Considering the amount of time spent on him, Bedwyr would appear to be an important new character but it turns out that as soon as Artor has his victory he's promptly forgotten about and never mentioned again.

Unfortunately, this victory also kicked off the deeply problematic second half of the book, during which its focus on characters brought the problems of the first book into the spotlight. While Uther may be long dead, Artor's foster-brother Caius is still around and so subtly drawn that he may as well be called Rapey McStabs-a-lot and have the Death March start up whenever he walked onto the page. But Rapey has nothing on Wenhaver, Hume's version of Guinevere. There was really no need for Hume to mention her dislike of Guinevere in her accompanying notes, as her contempt shone through in one of the most flagrant examples of character bashing that I've ever come across. You could, in fact, replace the whole second half with this and you'd find no real discernible difference:

"Dear Wenhaver,

Love Hate,

M.K. Hume"

I have no problem with unlikeable and flawed characters, but I do have a problem with those obviously set up solely for unfavourable comparisons to a character the author does like. The Wenhaver of this book isn't really appalling for her own sake or that of the story, but so that we'll also worship Nimue (or as I soon came to call her, Fucking Nimue).

Having been saved as a baby in Dragon's Child and brought under the protection of the High King, Fucking Nimue is now grown up and serving as the apprentice of Merlinus, and is the most beautiful, most elegant, most interesting, most intelligent, most caring, most wonderful woman to have ever walked the earth. I suspect that not only do her farts smell like freshly baked cookies, but that she shits sunbeams too (and that eating them would probably cure world hunger and stop all wars forever). She's so fabulous that no-one (including the book) can stop themselves from commenting every five minutes on how bloody wonderful she is, and comparing her to Wenhaver who is portrayed as being every awful thing that has ever been said about a woman. Petulant, spiteful, rude, abusive, promiscuous, immature, irrational and thick (amongst many other awful things), no-one (including the book) can stop themselves from calling her a cow, a bitch, a slut or, more often, a whore any time her name is mentioned. Even when noting her beauty the book can't help but mention that her dress clashes with her skin making her look shit compared to Fucking Nimue (rhymes with Mary Sue!) who, of course, looks like a supermodel even while wearing a sack. 

It's at this point that I started sounding like Samuel Jackson having a vicious fit of Tourette's...

...which the stupid serial-killer sub-plot that sprang up here made even worse. While Merlinus shows off his psychological profiling and forensic skills and generally acts like he's a heartbeat away from pulling out a pair of sunglasses and a bad pun, it soon becomes apparent that even the serial killer is obsessed with Fucking Nimue, though he sadly doesn't succeed in murdering her before he's unveiled as - surprise! - the one bloke that we're constantly reminded is a shit.

If I do read the last in this trilogy (unlikely, although I'd already stupidly bought it after Dragon's Child) it'll only be so that I can root for Wenhaver to screw every man, woman and beast on Cadbury Tor and give Artor such a raging case of syphilis that his face falls off just in time for the Saxons to arrive and, hopefully, kick everyone's teeth in.