The Blue Sword

And yet another one from my picking up books my wife has left around the house. Robin McKinley is one of her favorite authors.

There is a theme amongst the heroines in the novels I have read so far. At least one parent is dead. They like reading a lot. The heroines also generally have a malcontent with their lives and yearn for something more, they would be open for an adventure.

From here on there are plot spoilers.

I liked how this story was told, if at times it came across as formal. An interesting aspect of the writing style, going against general convention, was that there were paragraphs in which two different characters both had dialogue.

There were two primary cultures presented. One was imperial and appeared to have a “women in the home” mentality. There was a queen but it appeared that women in general were meant to be “ladies”. In the other desert / mountain society it was again male dominated but there had been prior women heroines is the past, though the role of women had since subsided and they were less involved in defense and war then they had been previously. Thus, our heroine, Harry, becomes an inspiration to women in the of the desert / mountain society to play a more active role in the more honored warrior caste.

While there is a rather large cast of characters there is relatively little dialogue, the story is not very heavy on dialogue. Furthermore, as with most of McKinley’s novels I have read so far, you spend a lot of time in the head of the characters and are told how they think things through rather than being presented thought processes through dialogue.

Overall I think this made for a significantly better read than Shadows.

Shadows

Another one from my picking up books my wife has left around the house collection. Robin McKinley is one of her favorite authors. I am going to leave plot alone in this review.

Overall there is a fairly interesting story to be found within this book. But… first there are about one hundred pages of non-story. Essentially you get snippets of world building while the narrator of the book rehashes the same issues more or less over and over again and pretty much from the same angle and/or perspective. It is extremely frustrating. Throughout this section of the book I keep hearing God’s line of “GET ON WITH IT!” from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. There were a few moments later one where I felt this was true as well, but nowhere near as much as in the first hundred pages.

Sometimes we are getting a stream of consciousness narrative from the narrator. This would be fine with me if this was consistent throughout the book and was not so mundane for the first one hundred pages but we rarely get this thereafter, and not during the rising action and climax of the plot which would have perhaps added something more.

My wife admits that when she rereads this book she often skips very large sections of the book until it gets into the action. The book does ultimately present an interesting world and a good story but when over 25% of the book (by page count) is superfluous I feel like the story either needed to be shorter or have a lot more substance and consequence to it.

The Swarm

This is the first book in the second Ender’s Game prequel series which covers the Second Formic War.

What I am really enjoying about these prequel series (relating to the First Formic War and the Second Formic War) is that they are filling in a lot of history. In the original books we know that there are two formic wars, that Mazer Rackham is supposedly responsible for killing the Queen and winning the second formic war, but also having previously been severely demoted and not in a combat ship. Somehow we need to get there (or get an explanation for why it has been told to us differently before).

As someone who likes to read plot summaries of movies, books, manga, etc. before I go through them I like to have a sense as to whether or not I would find the story interesting before I devote time to exploring it. And the present books are awesome to me in that they fill in the details of this previously told story, but told in an extremely skeletal form.

As for the book itself I do not really want to give spoilers. But, what we do get is we finally have some inkling of the origin of the ansible and its early usage. Similar to Earth Unaware the Formics play a very minimal role early on.

None of the books in the Ender’s Saga have been particularly kind in their framing or opinion of military bureaucracy. I would say this books is probably the least kind to date.

If you like science fiction, particularly if you are hooked on the Ender Saga I would read this. One day I hope to read the whole series in chronological order and then I would hopefully have a good opinion as to whether the series is best read chronologically or with the prequels as a supplement once you’re already immersed in that universe.