Scoundrel? I Like The Sound Of That: Reviewing the 'Rogues' Anthology

When I say I'm weak for a good heist story, I mean weak. Ocean's Eleven, Locke Lamora, Holly Black's Curse Workers trilogy, The Sting, the list goes on. Give me a person (or, preferably, a group of people) robbing some rich asshole blind and having a snarky fantastic time while doing it, and I'll eat it up like candy.

Greg Van Eekhout wrote a great blog last summer about the magic involved in a successful heist, and he's right-- there is something irresistible about that sleight-of-hand smile-at-me-while-my-partner-steals-your-wallet kind of character. As it turns out, George R. R. Martin feels the same way, and so he went about assembling a collection of stories all featuring rogues in one form or another. As with any anthology, this was a bit of a mixed bag, with some stories sticking more successfully to the theme than others. I've briefly reviewed each story in terms of its relevance to the theme, and its overall awesomeness, below the cut.

Fuck the Higher Bird: A Review of 'Yoga Bitch' by Suzanne Morrison

More often than not on this blog, I've reviewed genre fiction-- that is, sci-fi or fantasy or something other than straight-up "literary" fiction. What I've never done is review nonfiction, simply because I don't, as a rule, read nonfiction. David Sedaris notwithstanding, my experience with other people's memoirs has more often than not been an exercise in eyerolling at the self-aggrandizing navel-gazing contained therein. Memoir is what people write when they think they're more special than they are.

When I went to the AWP conference in Seattle this past February, I went to a panel about book reviews where the editors of several review publications offered advice on how to make reviews pop. The best piece of advice I got was that a review shouldn't be a summary of the events of a book-- it should frame the book in context. Simply laying out the events of the book isn't enough; you can get that by going to Amazon. A good review tells a reader not if the book is good or bad, but why it's relevant.

It was also at AWP that I, on a whim, attended a panel on humor in memoir, and got to hear Suzanne Morrison read from her book Yoga Bitch. When I tell you I laughed so hard I cried, I'm not exaggerating. Her sarcasm, her unflinching honesty about her own inner failings, and most of all, the unbelievable story of a group full of grown adults who willingly drink their own pee, had me hooked.

An immortal wizard walks into the World Series of Poker... : "The Incrementalists" by Steven Brust and Skyler White

It sounds like the setup to a bad joke. A guy sits alone in a bar in Vegas, waiting for his next poker game to start. He flirts with the waitress, has a drink, thinks about the fact that his ex-girlfriend recently committed suicide; nothing really to set him apart from the sludge of humanity around him. But underneath his baseball cap sits a mind that's been reincarnated through dozens of bodies over the course of many centuries-- a mind that remembers every era of history and every time he used his magic to change things for the better. And the best part is, our wizard isn't alone. He's got 200 friends just like him-- a secret society who's been magically nudging people toward working for the greater good, operating between the lines since the dawn of time. This is the premise of Steven Brust and Skyler White's The Incrementalists-- the foundation for a story that is simultaneously fantastical and everyday, mixing magic both wondrous and mundane. 

'A Thousand Perfect Things' by Kay Kenyon

Hey everyone, sorry for my absence the past few weeks-- I went on vacation and then started a new job, and it's taken me until now to get my blogging brain stuffed back inside my head. :)

I'm returning with a review of A Thousand Perfect Things by Kay Kenyon. I want to start by saying that this book surprised me. I've never read anything by Kay Kenyon before, so when I got the ARC of her newest book I didn't know what to expect, and my reaction was mixed.

Like a lot of books, I started it on the train on my way to work, which made it really awkward when I started crying less than twenty pages in. So, something I haven't talked about here is that my grandfather passed away in July, at age 85 and after a long battle with heart and lung disease. We were very close; I'm still trying to metabolize the fact that he's gone, and I'm pretty sure I'll be trying for a long time to come. So reading about our protagonist Tori and her bond with her grandfather was a wrench-- even more so when Sir Charles takes sick and dies (the part that had me in tears-- good work, Ms. Kenyon), leaving behind a family who thought he was crazy, and an idea that consumes Tori's focus and is the basis for the entire story to come.

Dark Triumph by Robin LaFevers

So, what's a little ridiculous about this is that I actually read an advance copy of this book in March and had the review ready to go at the time the book was released, which was mid April. And then real life interfered in a big three-strikes-you're-out sort of way, and I sort of forgot about the internet for awhile. SO. Here, at long last, is my review of Dark Triumph by Robin LaFevers. It's a bit shorter than my last few have been, because as it's probably clear I'm still struggling with posting more frequently here, I'm going to try a few shorter reviews in the hopes that they'll go faster.

'Hounded', 'Hexed' and 'Hammered' by Kevin Hearne

Normally I would split these books up into three posts, one review for each. But they fit together so seamlessly that it felt like one long book-- one long, action packed, deeply awesome book-- so I'm going to review them all together.

Let me start by saying that I downloaded these books onto my Nook on a whim. A friend of mine had praised them highly on her Goodreads page, and I thought hey, why not. It was a wise move; once I started I was hooked. The trilogy stars Atticus O'Sullivan, the last Druid on Earth, who looks like a twenty-year-old college kid but is really over two thousand years old. He's living under cover, owning and managing an occult bookstore/tea shop combo in Arizona, hanging out with an old Irish widow who lives nearby, flirting with the cute bartender at the local pub. On the surface it seems like he's living a totally normal life. Except for the part where he gets visited by the Irish goddess of Death, his lawyer is a Viking vampire who accepts payment in goblets of blood, and oh yeah, his dog can talk to him-- in his mind.

"The Company Man" by Robert Jackson Bennett

If you've ever sat down with a Philip Marlowe novel and thought, 'Hm, you know what would make this book even more awesome? Airships and mind-readers!' then you'll probably enjoy The Company Man as much as I did. Which, you know, not that I ever had actually had that thought before, but damn if I won't be having it about stuff pretty regularly from now on...

'Embassytown' by China Mieville

If you're a big enough geek to think about the ethics of the Prime Directive outside of the times they actually discuss it on Star Trek, AND to wonder how that principle relates to breaching the language barrier once you have actually made contact with an alien species, you might come close to understanding how China Miéville came up with the premise of Embassytown.

Others (including the inimitable Ursula K. LeGuin) have already written detailed and thought-provoking reviews of this book, so I'll try not to reinvent the wheel here. But I will say that for me, I loved this book in spite of its flaws, because it's a spectacular piece of genre fiction that is no less literature for its being housed in the construct of sci-fi. Miéville has become known for sampling classic genres and giving them his own New Weird spin, and he's done it again here. This reads like a classic piece of science fiction writing, recognizable in form, yet entirely Miéville's own. And, fitting to the running message of the book, it is the language of it that makes it not only a brilliant meld of the classic and the modern, but a truly compelling and emotive story.

'Crossed' by Ally Condie

I finished Embassytown and am working on my review. But in the meanwhile I read Crossed and wanted to toss up a quick review of it while you wait for what will undoubtedly be a longer and more detailed review of a longer and more interesting book. :)

In reviewing Matched, the first in Ally Condie's young adult trilogy about a futuristic version of America tightly controlled by the ruling Society, a friend of mine on her Goodreads page said it felt like Condie was running through a checklist of things to include in a YA book in order for it to be popular. I agree with her. But it didn't stop my friend from liking the book, nor did it stop me, and in reading the sequel I found myself with the same mixed feelings.

'Green' by Jay Lake

I picked up Green because its description reminded me of Kushiel's Dart, one of my favorite fantasy books of all time. Upon reading the first chapter inside the bookstore, the narrative voice was so compelling I had to bring it home with me to keep reading. It's this voice that carried me through the entire book, start to finish.