Lamentation

Lamentation is Ken Scholes first novel with a strong fantasy bent set in a post-apocalyptic world.  Scholes uses a rotating viewpoint among the main cast, which keeps the pace of the novel moving and adds insight to each character’s personality. The characters are of varying interest; however, the leads generally hold up well over the course of the novel. This is important as the characters are fundamental to drive the novel forward much more so than the action, which is often depicted via second hand accounts.

The novel is part of a five book arc and, in as much as it is discernible from the opening work, follows a well worn fantasy trope of an ancient, displaced evil returning to conquer its former home. Whether this turns out to be the true thrust of the over-arching storyline for the planned quintet, will hinge upon factors that are almost impossible to know after reading Lamentation.

The sectionalized plot for this novel is rather mundane. An ancient magic is unleashed upon a city wiping it from the map. Neighboring nation-states proceed to wage a war in order to avenge the wrong doing.  The initial perpetrator turns out to be a decoy guided by the hand of another.  By the end of the novel, allegiances have shifted and the decoy is killed to sate the desire for punishment among those remaining.

Quotable

      Instead she would wait and see what honest thing could be built between them without deception. Jin Li Tam realized she knew very little about love.
      But this much she knew — those who love should not require reciprocity.

- Lamentation by Ken Scholes

The Rise of the Iron Moon

The Rise of the Iron Moon is Stephen Hunt’s third adventure set in the world of Jackals. The novel is an unequivocal mess, destroying most of what Hunt had built in the previous two novels. Another dual thread narrative exposes the inability of Hunt to balance his stories creating inevitable peaks and valleys in the enjoyability. At times interesting and other times a horrible slog, the book sacrifices most of the compelling characters to create an incoherent, disjointed and lunatic plot.

Quotable

Sometimes, little author, the only way to destroy your enemy is to make them your friend.

- Colonel Paul-Loop Keyspierre
The Rise of the Iron Moon by Stephen Hunt

The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

The second novel set in Stephen Hunt’s Jackelian World, The Kingdom Beyond the Waves, is a clear improvement from its predecessor The Court of the Air. Both stories, while they share a common setting, are self contained despite the presences of overlapping characters in both novels.  (I actually read The Kingdom Beyond the Waves first by happenstance.)

Professor Amelia Harsh, who made a brief cameo in The Court of the Air to rescue  Molly Templar from the criminal undercity, opens the book on an archeological expedition searching for clues of an ancient civilization called Camlantis. Representing an era of peace and prosperity in the distant past, Camlantis is regarded as heretical by the senior university officials throughout all of Jackals. This leaves Professor Harsh bereft of school funding and forced to engage in questionable personal adventures to try and find tangible proof of the Camlanteans.  Unsurprisingly, the questionable personal adventure she is currently on contains questionable people who betray her once the treasure is found. She is left limping back to Jackals further disgraced and marginalized.

Quotable

Tell them that I didn’t find Camlantis. Tell them that you can never find it. You can only build it.

- Professor Amelia Harsh
The Kingdom Beyond the Waves by Stephen Hunt

The Court of The Air

With the opening novel set in the Jackelian world, The Court of the Air is a thrill ride that contains more ideas than it knows how to deliver.  Author Stephen Hunt pits two orphans against a menacing evil, gives them power they don’t understand, allies that they can’t trust and asks them to save the world as they know it. The two primary story lines are uneven in execution and one protagonist fares better as a character than the other.  The novel is, at times, a daunting read and Hunt fails to fully execute on some of the grand ideas but, on balance, it’s a fun adventure tale with elements of steampunk and fantasy.

Crack’d Pot Trail

Steven Erikson is a master of modern epic fantasy. His opus, a 10 book series named The Malazan Book of the Fallen, is a masterpiece on par with George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time. Erikson creates a menagerie of fascinatingly amoral or ambiguous characters and proceeds to wind them all together in sub-plots that build off the primary thread. Some of those secondary plots fall away and some stay in tune but all of them are interesting. He is a tremendous writer.

That is why the novella Crack’d Pot Trail is such a collasul disappointment. Nominally about Bauchelain and Korbal Broach, two necromancers who provide an element of comedic relief through parts of Erikson’s The Malazan Book of the Fallen, who are pursued by a band of knights and hunters sworn to kill them, the book is, in reality, a violent assault on the fourth wall (the “wall” between the stage and the audience) and role of the audience in artistic affairs. Narrative is a secondary concern, if at all, and the titular characters are absent for all but two pages of the book.

The Man Who Went Up in Smoke

The second detective novel by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo featuring Martin Beck as the lead, The Man Who Went Up in Smoke, lacks the charm of the first novel. Even attempts to contextualize the book, written in 1966, offer few positives to take away. Where Roseanna featured a wider array of characters and a better crime narrative, the sequel focuses too much on Beck’s introspective and uses a grating twist to solve the case.

The White Dragon

The final book in the initial trilogy by Anne McCaffrey, The White Dragon is both the farthest reaching in scope and the most enjoyable to read. With the focus of the book away from F’lar and Lessa and a better developed cast of characters, the world-building is allowed to shine along with the growth of the new protagonists.  While the dragons were a pleasant diversion previously, they now take center stage with the namesake of the novel.