The Enemy of My Dark Rounds Review
Jun. 28th, 2016 10:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bluegargantuaHey,
So long flights and tech week hell means you get a lot of reading done. So let's get to it.
First up: Enemy by K Easton. It's a fantasy novel where the Illhari Republic used magic human and divine to conquer their enemies. Then the followers of the gods got a little out-of-hand and now there's no more religion, just magic.
Snow is a mage and were it not for her mixed-blood ancestry, she might have risen a lot higher in the Republic. As it is, she works for an ex-lover doing various smuggling jobs. After a deal went sour, she's out with a green recruit to meet a contact at a nearby village. Said village has been burned to a crisp and the local legion thinks she probably did it.
On the run, Snow runs into Veiko, a hunter from the far north who was kicked out of his land. The two of them form a working partnership and start to unravel the mystery of who burnt the village and why god symbols are starting to appear.
Overall, I thought this was a pretty good book. The magic was handled well and never got anyone painted into a corner, the pace was good, the characters were interesting and bounced off each other pretty well. Most of the characters are POC and it passes the Bechdel Test pretty handily. It does claim to be the first in a series, but the book stands on its own pretty well. I'll probably poke at the next book in the series when it comes out.
Next up: Dark Run by Mike Brooks. A sci-fi tale almost as old as time. You've got a rag-tag group of legally-shady folks who take on One Big Score that turns out to be a complete set-up. So they make a plan and take the fight back to the guy who screwed them over.
The book is pretty frothy and breezes along the way you'd expect a book like this to do. No sentient aliens, it's an international group of misfits, but it does use the Alcubierre drive as it's FTL mechanism. I'll be curious to see if that gains more traction in SF as we go along. One neat fall-out from that is that the description of the ship is perfectly matched by the cover illustration so that's nice.
I liked the book. Nothing too deep but perfect when your flight's delayed by three hours.
Finally, I blazed through the short novel Making the Rounds by Allan Weiss. Eliezer ben-Avraham, Kabbalist wizard quested after forbidden knowledge and as a result is cursed to wander the Earth. He must offer magical assistance to anyone who asks in exchange for bread and board aided only by his trusty telepathic horse Melech.
So this is less a single story than a bunch of loosely connected short stories where Eliezer arrives at the behest of some calling or strange occurrence and then has to sort out some weird magical problem. Often the horse helps. Again, another fun, breezy book with a Jewish mysticism slant on it. The mysteries didn't play completely fair (the solutions relied on information you the reader didn't know), but they were entertaining.
Overall, a nice set of books. They weren't stand-out but they made for some decent reading and are recommended if you've got some downtime to fill up.
later
Tom
So long flights and tech week hell means you get a lot of reading done. So let's get to it.
First up: Enemy by K Easton. It's a fantasy novel where the Illhari Republic used magic human and divine to conquer their enemies. Then the followers of the gods got a little out-of-hand and now there's no more religion, just magic.
Snow is a mage and were it not for her mixed-blood ancestry, she might have risen a lot higher in the Republic. As it is, she works for an ex-lover doing various smuggling jobs. After a deal went sour, she's out with a green recruit to meet a contact at a nearby village. Said village has been burned to a crisp and the local legion thinks she probably did it.
On the run, Snow runs into Veiko, a hunter from the far north who was kicked out of his land. The two of them form a working partnership and start to unravel the mystery of who burnt the village and why god symbols are starting to appear.
Overall, I thought this was a pretty good book. The magic was handled well and never got anyone painted into a corner, the pace was good, the characters were interesting and bounced off each other pretty well. Most of the characters are POC and it passes the Bechdel Test pretty handily. It does claim to be the first in a series, but the book stands on its own pretty well. I'll probably poke at the next book in the series when it comes out.
Next up: Dark Run by Mike Brooks. A sci-fi tale almost as old as time. You've got a rag-tag group of legally-shady folks who take on One Big Score that turns out to be a complete set-up. So they make a plan and take the fight back to the guy who screwed them over.
The book is pretty frothy and breezes along the way you'd expect a book like this to do. No sentient aliens, it's an international group of misfits, but it does use the Alcubierre drive as it's FTL mechanism. I'll be curious to see if that gains more traction in SF as we go along. One neat fall-out from that is that the description of the ship is perfectly matched by the cover illustration so that's nice.
I liked the book. Nothing too deep but perfect when your flight's delayed by three hours.
Finally, I blazed through the short novel Making the Rounds by Allan Weiss. Eliezer ben-Avraham, Kabbalist wizard quested after forbidden knowledge and as a result is cursed to wander the Earth. He must offer magical assistance to anyone who asks in exchange for bread and board aided only by his trusty telepathic horse Melech.
So this is less a single story than a bunch of loosely connected short stories where Eliezer arrives at the behest of some calling or strange occurrence and then has to sort out some weird magical problem. Often the horse helps. Again, another fun, breezy book with a Jewish mysticism slant on it. The mysteries didn't play completely fair (the solutions relied on information you the reader didn't know), but they were entertaining.
Overall, a nice set of books. They weren't stand-out but they made for some decent reading and are recommended if you've got some downtime to fill up.
later
Tom
