firstfrost | A bunch of books (Reply)

# Infinity Blade: Awakening (by Brandon Sanderson): Brandon Sanderson is like an actor who does Shakespeare and action movies and commercials for pancake syrup. I could think "Did you need the money that badly?" but no, he really seems to be having a blast chewing the scenery about pancake syrup, and I can appreciate that. So, Infinity Blade is an iPad video game, with a very minimal plot. There isn't much beyond:
A man in armor stands outside a castle. He says 'Father... I will avenge you.' He goes and fights a bunch of foes (it's a good fighting game) until he reaches the God King, and, if you are me, the God King slays him. Then, the screen says "Eighteen years later..." and there's a guy in the same armor, standing outside a castle, saying 'Father.... I will avenge you.'
It's almost elegant. So they asked Brandon Sanderson to write an ebook (more like a novella than a novel) to go with it, and he did, and it's really not bad. It has character and plot twists and grounds the game premise - though I am a bit disappointed that it stopped where it did, as it's apparently also a leadup to Infinity Blade II (which had not come out at the time I read the book, but is out now). Okay, it's not Mistborn, but sometimes ("I'm on a horse!") a commercial is really fun to watch.
The Alloy of Law (also by Brandon Sanderson): This is a 300-years-later sequel to the Mistborn trilogy, and now we're back in pretty good action movie territory. Sanderson really does the best three-dimensional fight scenes of anyone, since all his magic systems involve weird movement powers. I am mildly dubious at the convergent evolution towards something much like the US of the 1800s, but "looks like a society we recognize, despite having no reason to" is the traditional suspension of disbelief of the steampunkish genre. I figured out some of the surprises but not others, which is my ideal, though I wasn't expecting quite as much of a "To be continued..." as there turned out to be. Anyway, a lot of fun and certainly a lot lighter than things like The Way of Kings. Four stars.
The Fox, King's Shield, Treason's Shore(by Sherwood Smith): The rest of the Inda quadrology. I thought Inda was really good; I thought the rest wasn't quite up to it, though still good. I liked that the story so clearly takes place in a wider world, with corners of plots poking in from elsewhere - it didn't quite push me into thinking "whoops, I have missed reading some prereqs", as sometimes happens. I liked the way even the soldiers you only see for a scene have their own plots - it's reminded me of how Stephen King gives characters mundane plots at the beginning of the story, to humanize the characters before the monster jumps out at them. The names kind of drove me crazy - multiple characters have the same name, and each character has multiple names. And Evred, who I adored early, becomes less sympathetic, so that was sad. Call this four stars too.
Hard Magic (by Larry Correia): It's pretty much exactly what it tries to be - a kind of campy alternate history (zeppelins!) with People With Powers, with some interesting twists. The thug being the one who thinks hardest about how his powers work was nice. The fierce teleporter girl was nice. Amusingly, mjperson was just telling me about a different book in which the people with TK were called Movers, which this also did. It felt very Champions or Wild Cards - not quite to comic books, but very much people with powers and mechanics put into the real world all higgledy piggledy. It's very action-y, and the final confrontation was a bit more satisfying than the "and then he strove extra bonus harder against the insurmountable odds, and the striving won the day!" that you sometimes see. The thing that wins the day is actually *clever*. I'll give it my standard three and a half for "I really enjoyed this but need not sell it to everyone else."
# The Secret Country, The Hidden Land, The Whim of the Dragon (by Pamela Dean): Charming, and beautifully written, somewhat confusing, and very funny in places. The plot starts with the standard "Children are transported to a strange fantasy world" premise, but in this case the fantasy world is more or less the imaginary world they've been playing a complicated make-believe with every summer, and they've replaced the princes/princesses whose roles they sometimes played. So while they try to pass for the people they're replacing, they're also finding the plot differences from the story they made up, and trying to avert the disasters they plotted, and doing a lot of arguing. Argument is both about whether or not where they are is real, and what that means, and also something that's very much like a party trying to flail about understanding the plots in a role-playing game. There's a lot of piling up what facts they know for sure with their instincts about how the world works, which might be right or might not, and coming up with lists of important unanswered questions. I was often a little confused, but that often fit with the characters being their own sort of confused. Four and a half stars.
Wild Life (by Molly Gloss): I think this is a desireearmfeldt book. Poetically written, writery, feminist, and only barely fantasy (plausible sasquatches), it doesn't feel like the sort of book I read, but I liked it. Plot: free-thinker/mother/writer goes to join a hunt looking for a lost girl in logging woods. There are eventually some sasquatches.

(edited to add: # is ebook. I didn't finish any audiobooks this time; Kindle is starting to beat ipod for convenient handless reading).