Vampires Never Get Old (CBR13 #50)

My Halloween read this year is this collection of new vampire tales edited by the team of Zoraida Cordova and Natalie Parker. I enjoy vampire stores because they offer so many different views onto the human condition, if you go looking for them. In Vampires Never Get Old: Tales with Fresh Bite Cordova and Parker, along with the assembled authors, take the time to dig in and explore these angles – with postscripts by Cordova and Parker after each story.

Let’s handle individual stories in groups, first up: the very good (4 stars).

Seven Night for Dying by Tessa Gratton is a great opener, exploring the choice to become the vampire and exploring a world where you need to drink a vampire’s blood for seven consecutive nights in order to turn, and what that time will afford to ponder as they contemplate eternal life. The Boys from Blood River by Rebecca Roanhorse pulled at my heartstrings, its lead character is an outcast, and following the death of his mother alone in the world. His heart cries out to not be alone, but at what cost, and with what creatures? The Boy and the Bell by Heidi Heilig is the one I wish was a longer work. Heilig is poking at so much in this 13-page story, gender identity, class warfare, power dynamics, resurrectionists, the panic surrounding being buried alive in the middle of the 19^th century… I want very much to spend more time with Will and find out what his life will be. In Kind by Kayla Whaley is a deliciously dark story of revenge that has important things to say about personhood and disability rights.

The quite good (3 stars):

A Guidebook for the Newly Sired Desi Vampire by Samira Ahmed is the funniest of the group, taking a unique angle into a vampire introduction plan. Eat the colonizers is perhaps the best plan when it comes for finding a food source. Bestiary by Laura Ruby had great atmosphere, Ruby easily plants the reader into a perhaps not to distant future where we’ve truly broken the planet, and the mega rich are the only ones living well. We are with Jude as she navigates her new world, and we are introduced to a unique version of being turned, and what gifts and curses come with it. The House of the Black Sapphires by Dhonielle Clayton is my second Clayton short story in two books. This one focuses on a family of Eternals, descendants of enslaved Africans who were turned by white vampires and then sent firebirds by their ancestors to give them their own path. Bea has lived her immortal life tied intrinsically to her family, but must decide if independence, and the possibility of love with the Eternals sworn enemies, is worth the risk.

The they’re good but could be better for me group (2 stars):

Senior Year Sucks by Julie Murphy is a light, but pointed, take on the teenage female slayer motif and while I found it a bit thin in development, I was very glad to see the kind of lead Murphy is known to write be the focus of a family of slayers defending a town from a reform home for vampires. First Kill by Victoria Schwab explores the romantic implications of the mismatched pairing of a slayer and a vampire, but works to make the power dynamic equal. Mirrors, Windows, & Selfies by Mark Oshiro was one that I wasn’t sure I liked until I was well into it, and even then, I think I’ve landed more on appreciating it. Oshiro uses blog posts to tell the story of a child of vampires who has lived is life isolated from the world, so isolated in fact that he has never seen his own image – told that he will die if he does. But his cries out into the internet void find the right audience and the calvary comes, but can he trust it? Vampires Never Say Die by Zoraida Cordova & Natalie Parker explores a queen vampire type who befriends a human on social media, and how it all goes wrong (or right?) when that human tries to throw her friend a birthday party without realizing that she’s managed to invite an entire New York coven and politics are not civil.

Dead Ever After & After Dead (CBR9 #25-26)

I had divorced myself from the world of Sookie Stackhouse following the terrible twelfth book in the series, Deadlocked, back in 2012. It was, to me, a complete destruction of all the reasons I had been gamely reading along with this series since my friend Meika can across it in 2007 and we rapidly consumed all the available books. When I reviewed Deadlocked I thought I’d eventually read this book because I have series completion OCD, but in the intervening years I’ve avoided it.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Southern Vampire Series, the character of Sookie Stackhouse, or HBO’s True Blood series these books have always been a bit of paranormal mystery fluff with a romance angle put in. These books are the definition of frothy, cheesy, relaxing reads that you can mostly turn off the world around you and sink into. In the beginnings of the series, Harris put in some social commentary, and that was fine.

The mechanics were never very good. My biggest problem with Harris as a technician is that she cannot naturally move a character from one place to another without a paragraph of exposition. Also, Sookie tells you exactly what she is thinking all of the time. There is no subtlety or nuance. The reader is also quite often treated to her daily to do list while Harris is working towards the next plot point.

However, as mental palate cleansers? Who cares!

So why did I read this book? Because ingres77 recently read the first book in the series,  Dead Until Dark, and it reminded me that I never did finish. There was a small amount of peer pressure from he and narfna, and here we are.

I drank a lot of beer while reading this. It was really the only way.

Listen, these aren’t good books. They aren’t all bad either, but other than bonkers werewolf, shifter, vampire, witch, and fairy shenanigans and a protagonist who cannot find the good in her ability to hear other people’s thoughts there isn’t much left. I’m sure there are better avenues to get your were/shifter/magic/vampire fix.

Or you could just watch the show, since for at least the first couple seasons it took and improved the core of the book series. Then it too went off the rails. However, it gave us Lafayette, so I cannot be mad.

You’ll notice that this is actually a review of two books. Harris, bless her, couldn’t fit all the characters in her 13 book series into the end, and because fans are rabid things, she wrote a compendium which lists off many of the characters in alphabetical order and gives you their epilogue style update. When I found out about it I also requested it from the library because maybe my favorite character in the entire series, the only one I truly wish well (besides Sam) is the vampire Bubba. You know, Elvis. He did not make it into the last book so I checked out the other one just to get this half page of closure:

Save yourselves the trouble, skip these.

With that, I have completed this year’s half cannonball and am one third of the way to my overall goal. Viva la Cannonball!

 

 

Beastly Bones (CBR8 #22)

I hate to say it, but William Ritter seems to have hit a sophomore slump with 2015’s Beastly Bones. I loved my experience reading Jackaby last year: it had so much of all the things that I love about books of the type. Much of that remains in book two, Abigail is still independent and self-assured, Jackaby is still his off-kilter self without being off-putting, we still have a live in ghost, and a shape shifter, and a relatively tightly paced mystery.

But… book two commits a sin that book one managed to avoid. Its main purpose seems to be setting up a larger story to be told in the next book (which is to be released later this year). Beastly Bones has a plot all its own – Abigail and Jackaby have been brought in to nearby Gad’s Valley, now home to the exiled New Fiddleham police detective Charlie Cane, dinosaur bones from a recent dig mysteriously go missing, and an unidentifiable beast starts attacking animals and people, leaving their mangled bodies behind. There is also the problem of bodies turning up with weird puncture wounds on their necks, and shapeshifting creatures on the loose.

All of that is resolved (mostly), some new characters get introduced, and things proceed as one would expect for a book aimed at a YA audience. But… I have this nagging dissatisfaction. Was Abigail still awesome? Yes. Was she given great feminist advice which she then turned to her own way of doing things re: her love life and career? Yep. Was there a plausible end to the mystery? You bet. Were characters given enough time on page? Mostly. Jackaby’s landlady ghost, Jenny Cavanaugh, is necessarily out of sorts in order to set up the third book which will focus on her (as book one focused on the titular Jackaby and book two focused heavily on Abigail’s interests and history), and off page because Jackaby and Abigail are away from New Fiddleham. However Jackaby quite literally does an infodump at the end of the book to explain how we’re getting from the events of this book to the ones upcoming. We didn’t need it. The YA readers didn’t need it. And after a bumpy start of the book it made me round this down to 3 stars. It simply wasn’t as strong as some of the other 4 star books I’ve read this year.

Do I still suggest this series to you? Absolutely. They are fun, clever, and quick-witted and I remain enthusiastic for book three, Ghostly Echoes.

This book was read and reviewed as part of the charitable Cannonball Read. 

Changeless (CBR4 #4)

 

I would like to start out by saying that if you have not yet read this series and would like to read Changeless by  Gail Carriger without knowing  plot details, please skip the rest of the review and know that I quite enjoyed the book: it was a nice easy read with plenty of plot and some great characterization. If you like crime/mystery solving, steampunk or think you might this is a good read and enjoy. Now off you go.

For the rest of us, who have read the first book Soulless, in the Parasol Protectorate series and fell as in love with certain characters, namely Lord Akeldama, Floote, and Prof. Lyall, as I did, you will be a little sad as they do not see much “on camera” time this book.  Where Soulless spent much of its time building the world of alexia’s London and didn’t get to the meat and potatoes of the mystery part of the plot until about half way through we are hit with the mystery up front in this novel. In the first lines of the book we are made aware that something is not right in London and Conall is off to figure it out, leaving his wife, Lady Alexia Maccon, behind.

But not for long, as is the standard Alexia move. She is rapidly using her connections and new position as muhjah in Queen Victoria’s shadow government to piece together why werewolves and vampires are returned to their human state (in essence they are change-less) and why ghosts exorcisms have occured. One of the problems I had with this book is that there are too many issues going on all at the same time and none seemed fully realized. But that may just be a sign of a small sophomoric slump.

For example: we are reintroduced to Ivy (and Ivy’s hats), find out she has a fiancé whom Alexia has never met and an increasing flirtations with the claviger Tunstell – who’s an actor (gasp!), Alexia’s sister Felicity is having trouble with dear old mama and has been foisted off on her sister, the rest of the Woolsey pack has arrived back from the Indian subcontinent and brought with them their human counterparts for a post deployment camp out on the castle lawns, Major Channing the Gamma of the pack makes an ass out of himself immediately upon meeting Alexia but may become useful at some point and we meet the male clothes wearing Madam Lefoux who is working as a hat shopkeeper and an underground scientist and the creator of Alexia’s newest parasol as ordered by Conall, who’s gone off to Scotland to attend to his former pack’s lack of an alpha.

This is all in the first three chapters.  No lie.

The mystery is solved; there is a trip through the aether on a dirigible, our heroine escapes from certain death. But it just wasn’t as fun as the first.  This is because I enjoyed reading the world building more than I enjoyed the mystery solving, particularly as this book didn’t have a satisfying big bad like the Hypocras Club from Soulless.

Would I tell you to read this book? Yes. Because in all honesty it was a fun enjoyable read, and I am just a little cranky about the ending and the fact that it is raining outside as I write this. But, I am looking forward to the next book.

Soulless (CBR4 #3)

Soulless by Gail Carriger sparked my interest when I saw a review of it over on io9.  I thought “hey that sounds like a fantasy/steampunk book I could get behind”. And that was great because we were working on Steampunk at work (I have a weird job) and I thought it would be a great place to jump in. Then I forgot all about it until several months later when a friend of a friend said she read it and enjoyed it. I subsequently begged to borrow said book and because she is a very nice person it was lent to me forthwith.

We meet Alexia Tarabotti right away, and I must say this character begins the story as she means to continue – with a healthy appetite and an ability to fight for herself, and I like that about her. The world Alexia inhabits is a re-imagined Victorian Era, if vampires and werewolves had been living openly in society for centuries. The author, Gail Carriger, does a great job of providing the ways in which this altered reality would affect the history of her new world (the pilgrims were leaving England for more than just religious reasons in this version of history).

Alexia is an odd creature even in this world. She introduces herself as an ugly spinster, on the shelf due to her ‘bad’ habits and Italian heritage. In fact, she harps on it so much you know the author is going to bring in someone who is of an opposing view (and she does). We also learn quite quickly that while vampires and werewolves are made from people with an excess of soul, Alexia is herself soulless.

This state makes her interactions with vampires and werewolves very different from regular humans. Skin to skin contact returns the supernatural to their human state. This also reasons to keep her identity a secret, since the soulless historically were supernatural hunters. But, needless to say, Alexia finds a way to be right in the middle of the supernatural set. And hi-jinks and mystery solving ensue.  I know I am leaving out the entire plot, and while the beginning of this novel is certainly an info dump, I wouldn’t want to spoil the story for anyone looking to read it, or its sequels for themselves (Soulless is the first in the Parasol Protectorate series, reviews for the rest of the books in the series will be following). There is a lot of great characterization here, characters who get stuck in your head and you wonder about, and I promise to talk about all of that more in my review of the next book, Changeless.