a quest through the realms

The Library of the Unwritten by A. J. Hackwith

Rating: 3.5 stars (out of 5)

Genre: fantasy

Review: Did you ever think about what happens to the book that don't get written?

In A. J. Hackwith's imagination, they reside in the Library of the Unwritten, a lesser known part of Hell.  There, they are presided over, protected by, and under the care of the Librarian.  The Librarian is in charge of keeping the books quiet, and making sure none of the character escape from between the covers (except for a few Damsels, who can clearly do better in life).  When Claire Hadley, the current Librarian, gets word that, not only has the main characters of one of the books gotten loose, but is talking to its author, she heads topside to intervene and get the character back into its book where it belongs.

Unfortunately, she and her team get caught up in a dispute over the Devil's Bible, a book believed by those in both Heaven and Hell to hold great power.  In an effort to keep it out of the hands of a demon who wants to use it for his own nefarious purposes, they seek to return the book to the Library for safekeeping, but must travel through several realms, including Valhalla, on their way.  Meanwhile, the Library itself is under seige, and the team must split up.  Will they be able to win the fight on two fronts, and still remain strong enough to keep the Lirbary intact?

As with any work of fantasy, this book requires more than a little suspension of disbelief, and readers who characterize themselves as religious may have an ever harder time, given that the subject matter includes a somewhat jaundiced approach to Heaven and Hell, demons and angels.  Other readers may appreciate Hackwith's multi-cultural mythologizing, her notion of a literary duel, and her ideas about what can happen when characters become separated from their books.

For fans of The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde, The Library of the Dead by T. L. Huchu, and The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep by H. G. Parry.

unclear

Trinity Sight by Jennifer Givhan
Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)
Genre: apocalyptic fiction
Review: What happens when Pueblo and Zuni myths meet The Stand (and a little bit of Outlander)?  You get Trinity Sight, where there's been some kind of cataclysmic event and suddenly almost all the people are gone.  Some of those who remain band together and try to make their way to safety, where, hopefully, they will also find their lost families.  What do these survivors have in common, so that they stuck around?  Unclear.  What happened to cause the upheaval?  Unclear.

Maybe it's just me, but overall this whole book was just very unclear.  By the end, I felt like I had a sense of what was going on, but I never felt like I had a clear picture.  Likewise, many of the characters felt hazy.  Perhaps this is appropriate for a book that is based in myths, but it makes reading somewhat challenging.  A little more clarity would have gone a long way toward helping me to understand what Givhan's ultimate message is.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

modern reading, feh

Vellum: The Book of All Hours by Hal Duncan
Rating: 0.5 stars (out of 5)
Genre: science fiction/fantasy
Challenges: TBR, A-Z (title)
Review: This book was actually painful to read. I'm not entirely sure why I didn't just put it down. It was like reading modern art or listening to modern music, which, if you're into it, is fine, but if you're not, you just see something meaningless or hear disharmonies, that's only art or music because someone said so. Reading this, I felt like Duncan wrote bits of assorted stories on cards and then shuffled them together and called it a book. Some of the bits are chronological, some of them even make sense. Some involve the same characters, although it's hard to always be sure, since everyone seems to have the same name, or to change names several times. But it's not a narrative. There are bits, no more than a few pages each time that tell a coherent story, and the only reason I give this book even part of a star is because some of these bits are good. If he'd stuck with one of these ideas and fleshed it out, instead of flitting all over the place, Duncan might have had something worth reading.