Conservative Book Talk

Plot: As I mentioned in my review of “The Thief,” there are four countries, Attolia, Sounis, Eddis and Mede.

Our story begins in Attolia, where we open to find Eugenides sneaking through the queen’s palace. The alarm has been set and they are hunting him down, unalarmed Eugenie’s makes his way to the palace’s outer wall, he becomes increasingly troubled, as soldiers seem to be at every corner. After a good chase through the town, Eugenides runs through the olive groves to the river. It being dark, our hero does not see the boards, nailed between two trees, blocking his path. Banging his head he falls to the ground, unable to rise, the queen’s dogs grab him and keep him down until the guards come for him. After much debate and thought, the queen of Attolia decides to hang him, but through the Mede ambassador’s persuasion, she has Eugenides hand cut off. After a few days lying in pain in his cell, Eugenides is returned to his worried queen. Enraged at the anguish brought to her beloved thief, the queen of Eddis captures the next ten large Attolian caravans that come through the pass, she sends the people home and keeps the merchandise. Attolia tells her to return the merchandise or she will deem it an act of war. War it is.

Eugenides’s hand is healed and he has started appearing in public every now and again. We find out later, that he did not know about the war, only because he didn’t want to. When he does ‘find’ out, he takes action, which the reader will find to be fairly humorous. (At least I did.) Through a series of events, Eugenides is led to leave Eddis and return with a glorious plot for bringing Attolia to her knees. He plans to take a brigade of men and capture the queen of Attolia.

Positive: In this sequel to “The Thief,” the plot is a little more obvious, but not much.

For a brief period in the book our hero sulks around for a bit, but his attitude improves and he stops sulking. Eventually he comes to find, that, even with one hand, he is still dangerous to his enemies. Humor is given at just the proper times, to relieve the stress of seeing our beloved hero go through pain, there also humor when he is not in pain as well. There is not as much humor in this book as in the first, but its still just as funny.

The Queen of Attolia, though bad to start out with, becomes good and repents. This book demonstrates forgiveness, loyalty and trust. Something all of us could use.

Negative: The main negative actions in this book are lying and several swear words, there is little stealing. There are a few references to torture, but nothing is put in detail. Our hero gets his hand cut off, that goes in to some amount of detail, but nothing unbearable. (Thankfully) Following the loss of his hand, he has constant nightmares, which he wakes up screaming to. A woman is threatened with drowning and our hero is slapped a few times. Again, there are gods in this book, (of earth, sky, thieves, mountains etc.) but in the back the authoress states that they were all invented by her imagination. That just about covers it.

Overall: Just as the first, I liked this book very much. I have read it, and its sequel several times over. They are the type that you can read over and over without becoming tedious. Our hero is pure genius, as is our authoress who gave our hero life. And even though we learned much of his character in the first book, it is still unclear what he is really up to many times throughout the plot. The authoress has a fine way of bringing you into her books, and giving you hints as well as keeping the main plot a secret.

I recommend this book to all. If you like a page turning work of fiction, you will love Megan Whalen Turners “The Queen of Attolia.”

Tags: fantasy, fiction, Hannasus, Megan Whalen Turner, Modern Fiction, Queen of Attolia, The Thief

Some books end to quickly. Others seem to never end. The Colors of Space falls into the former category. Too soon, the story came to a conclusion, though I think that might have been good. The story would either be a short story (this was) or a very long story, but couldn’t have been anything else.

Marion Bradley had an interesting premise: an eighth color that held the key to the stars. As the story develops, you learn that humans have found a second stellar race called the Lharie. The Lharie can travel faster than light and they guard this power jealously. Bart Steele (the lead) finds himself quickly thrown into a plot (against his will) to steal this knowledge for humans. The conspirators mostly desire to be on equal footing with the Lharie instead of reliant upon the Lharie for travel and communications. I say mostly, because the unequal footing and protectionism of the Lharie have promoted racial bigotry and distrust.

The Lharie cannot see colors and rely on humans to help pilot their great vessels. But, the Lharie have perpetrated a great fraud: no human can survive faster than light travel without being placed into cold sleep. So, the Lharie use humans where they can and then put them away to protect their power. Bart finds himself undercover on a Lharie ship attempting to prove that humans can survive the jump while remaining conscious. Through this Bart exploits the greatest weakness of the Lharie: their inability to see colors.

One could easily place the writing of this story: the 1960’s. The major point of the book was to demonstrate that all races are equal even if they have minor differences in appearance. Bradley does a pretty good job of making this appear natural and unforced. Definitely a pleasure to read.

Several caveats. First, there was very mild profanity. Second, and more importantly, I cannot and will not recommend Bradley as an author to read extensively. When preparing for this review, I did a quick check to see when the story was written. What I discovered was an author who wrote homosexual literature under a pseudonym (though she was married when she wrote them), promoted feminism, worshiped the divine femininity and wrapped it all together as a priest in the Gnostic Catholic Church. Wrap all of that together and one should be careful which of her books to read. This one was OK; I can’t speak to the rest.

Links:
Listen to it here
Read it here
Buy it here

Tags: fantasy, fiction, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Matt Gardenghi, Science Fiction, The Colors of Space

Lloyd Alexander is called “the grand master of fantasy”; I would argue he is the grand master of engaging writing, but it is neither great nor grand, rather, amusing. As long as you don’t think, it’s a fun ride. “Westmark” feels like a long series of character sketches. I was highly engaged, and read all three books in the trilogy, but I’ll also be the first to admit its mental junkfood at its finest. Since the story seems to lack a plot, I’ll recap the main characters. Okay, so there is a plot… its just holier than Swiss cheese, and if I told you one part, you’d look through the nearest hole and know the end!

Theo: Orphan with a pedigree in gutter scum, he somehow managed to work his whole life in a shop where every customer had to have a permit from the government before he could do a job for them, and totally forget that the first time someone doesn’t have one. And then, after said someone’s job gets his boss killed, he goes to work for said someone and involved in all sorts of illegal activities (mainly fraud). The only character in the book whose cleverness isn’t praised every SINGLE chapter; also the only character who occasionally, briefly, wonders why he’s breaking the law so much.

Count Las Bombas: Con man and aforementioned said someone. Competes with Fabian (below) for the title of village idiot. He is constantly swindling people out of their money, and usually getting other people in trouble for the same. He gets punished for it, once, but his rescue is a climax of the book. (I’m torn between being sorry he escaped, or sorry he was arrested, since anyone falling for his banal brand of “cleverness” ought to be crowned as village idiot. There is a lot of competition for that title. )

Mickle: Girl with a mysterious past, she is the author’s Deus Ex Machina. Every single idea she has serves to forward the plot by being incongruously right. Oh, and she can do gymnastics, sign language, perfect mimicry, cook, steal.. you name it, she’s master of the art by the end of this book. And did we mention she is exactly the same age, hair tone, and eye color as the princess who went missing from the kingdom many years ago? Theo is in awe of her talent and intellect (which surpass his own, but that isn’t saying much), as is…

Florian: He’s supposed to be a good guy because Theo looks up to him. You know that evil man, in Oliver Twist, who gets kiddies to like him and then uses them for his own ends? The guy who sings the “got to pick a pocket or two” song; name’s Fabian. Imagine he lived in the 60s and had become a den father to a group of hapless college-age-hippies who were all converted to communism under his vague tutelage. And he’d been smoking something for long enough he’d become a blathering idiot that was looked up to because… he has a certain charm. The only illegal thing Florian and his minions apparently don’t do is grow marijuana. Or go a single SOLITARY chapter without praising his cleverness and applauding his “certain charm”.

Chief Minister Cabbarus: apparently there was no room in the plot for someone who actually did anything bad, since so far everyone who breaks the law is considered clever. So this Cabbarus is stuck as the bad guy, and I’m not quite sure what he does to deserve it. The king has given him a lot of power, but, um… the king has spent the last ten years ignoring all his advisors in favor of trying to commune with his dead daughter via the occult. Anyway, I rather like Cabbarus; he brings in everybody else on my main character list (except the crowned village idiot, Florian) to have one of their fake séance’s for the king, facilitating a really fun climax. There’s a queen and a doctor who don’t get their own character headings, by the way, even though they have speaking parts, because despite how much power everyone credits them with, all they do is whine. And eventually retreat, so the king never listens to them, just Cabbarus, who is apparently the only person in the castle who bothers hanging out with the king.

Overall: The writing style is very engaging, so if you have a reader that needs some inspiration (say, ‘finish one chapter of that Martin Luther biography and you can read one chapter of this’), this is the book for you. I also enjoyed it from the sarcastic side of me that just loves a good argument with someone else’s worldview (especially since, without a real person doing any talking, or a plot to distract from the opinions, I could search out all the holes without interrupting my train of thought). Mental junkfood, by the way, is my family’s category for books that entertain without teaching anything in the process; not bad, just unhelpful.

Tags: fantasy, Lloyd Alexander, Sincerelyornot, Westmark