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RYO Review: The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett
Terry Pratchett‘s The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents is the 28th book in his stand alone series of novels set in the magical realm of Discworld, it is only the 4th novel I have read but Discworld already feels like a safe and familiar home to me. It is funny that this is the first “Discworld” novel written for a YA audience because I have always felt that there was something incredibly sweet about the “Discworld”. That is not to say that there is not evil and maliciousness to be found in Discworld. Any land that has its own “Guild of Assassins” is not all lollipops and butterflies to be sure; there is just something, “nice” for lack of a better word about the entire world.
In this installment we see a reimagining of the “Pied Piper” story as only Terry Pritchett can tell it. The main theme of this novel is that things are not always as they seem. And this theme runs heavily through the entire novel. None of the characters are who they appear to be. Not the animals that talk, not the “Stupid-Looking Boy” Keith, not even the “Rat Problem” that is the cause of all the hardships in the town of “Bad Blintz”.
RYO Review: Time is the Simplest Thing by Clifford D. Simak
Clifford Simak has an important message for all wannabe McFly’s and TimeLords: Don’t bother. Life moves with time. It doesn’t hang around to be observed by time travelers. The past is deserted of life, and the future is a void.
More importantly, Mr. Simak also has a message for NASA: Stop what you’re doing. Humans are too frail for space. If we want to explore space, we must do so with our minds (cue wobbly theremin music).
That’s the basic premise for Simak’s 1962 Hugo-nominated novel Time is the Simplest Thing (a.k.a. The Fisherman). Shepherd Blaine, telepathic space explorer for Fishhook enterprises, embarks on a mental journey to a planet 5,000 light-years from Earth and encounters the Pinkness (not a sexual metaphor!), an equally telepathic creature. The creature automatically shares its mind with Blaine, without so much as a hello, (well, it shouts “Hey, Pal!”– because every planet shares a lexicon of wholesome epithets), and Blaine, fused with his new alien mind, returns to Earth and flees Fishhook’s greedy desire to collect alien life in any form.
RYO Review: The Broken Kingdoms by N. K. Jemisin
The Broken Kingdoms by N. K. Jemisin
Published: Orbit, 2010
Series: Book 2 of The Inheritance Trilogy
This is the second book of a trilogy, so the book description and review contains some spoilers of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.
The Book:
“After the events of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, much has changed in the world. The city of Sky is now called Shadow, since it lies in the shade of the World Tree, and godlings—children of the Three Gods—live among the humans. Many people are attracted to the magic of Shadow, and Oree Shoth is no exception.
Oree is a blind painter that is able to see only magic, so living near the godlings in Shadow gives her the opportunity to sometimes see. She spends her days selling trinkets to pilgrims, navigating her relationship with the godling Madding, and handling the silent, homeless man that she has taken in out of kindness. She names the man “Shiny”, due to the way he glows in her magic sight at dawn.
When someone begins killing the godlings of Shadow, Oree’s life will never be the same. She and her quiet guest are drawn into a dangerous conspiracy that involves the Arameri, the gods, and those for whom the murder of godlings is only the beginning.” ~Allie
RYO Review: The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe
** Beware Spoilers **
So, I was in the mood for starting a new multi-book fantasy and sci-fi saga and after reading a little about the New Sun series and a little about the author I was intrigued to give The Shadow of the Torturer a read and was hoping that this was going to be the start of a relationship with a well respected author who I had not previously read before. This was also part of a challenge to read twelve Damon Knight Grand Masters I had not read before in 2014.
To put my review in context I would like to say I really wanted to like this and also that I probably did enjoy the book more than the review suggests as there was quite a bit in the book that niggled me.
The book is set in Urth that is our Earth in the far-future. The Sun is dying and Urth is essentially a medieval society with some future tech (lasers, space travel etc.) The author states that the book is a translation from a ‘future language’ and it is the language of the book which was the most rewarding thing for me. Wolfe uses language and words from all over Europe, America, Africa. He uses words from the 16th, 17th and 18th Century as well as formal language from more recent times. I can imagine this grating on some people but I found much enjoyment in looking up words – it’s a book that benefits from the ‘future tech’ of built in dictionaries of e-readers. Quite often Wolfe makes words up. In 1980 I suspect many readers would be quite lost with this book due to the difficulty for most readers not having such an enormous vocabulary. I totally understand a reader’s opinion that Wolfe thinks he is smarter than his audience.
RYO Review: Orlando by Virginia Woolf
Hogarth Press, 1928
Intended Audience: Adult
Sexual content: Mild
Ace/Genderqueer characters: Yes
Rating: PG
Writing style: 3/5
Likable characters: 4/5
Plot/Concepts: 4/5
Orlando was a nobleman by birth, although all he really wanted was to be a poet. Throughout his years as a man he experiences love, lust, and loss, until one day he wakes up in a female body and must go about his/her life just the same. She quickly learns the ridiculous restrictions of behavior based on sex, but her goal remains… to transcend so much of life while still finding an anchor to hold on to.
Written as a fictitious biography, Orlando was apparently a love letter of sorts to Virginia Woolf‘s lover and friend, Vita. As such it has a logic (or lack thereof) all its own, verging on farce and fantasy. Most aspects of Orlando’s life are ordinary for the time she lives in—the most noticeably unusual thing is that the body she inhabits transcends both sex and age, allowing her to experience three centuries despite only calling herself thirty-something years of age. This can be taken as psychological symbolism or literal (and completely unexplained) magic. The important thing is that I found Orlando’s experience with gender and life’s deepest questions to be relatable even when made difficult through flowery run-on prose.
January RYO Review Poll Winners!
1st Place
Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
Alix Heintzman (alixheintzman)
2nd Place
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Rae McCausland (ParallelWorlds)
3rd Place
The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov
Val (valashain)
The January Roll-Your-Own Review Poll is closed and we have our three winners! Congrats to Alix, Rae and Val and thanks to everyone for all the great reviews! Our winners will find an Amazon.com gift card waiting for them in their email inbox for $25, $15 and $10 respectively.
Now that we’re caught up with the RYO we’ll be having another poll very shortly for February. You still have a few days to get your reviews in so don’t put it off. We could be sending you a gift card next month!
As you can see by the stats thus far the RYO is off to a roaring start! Well done everyone. Let’s keep it going and see how far we can take it.
| Challenges: | 27 |
| Participants: | 422 |
| Books Read: | 311 |
| Books Reviewed: | 159 |
RYO Review: Double Star by Robert A. Heinlein
To begin with a digression, I was never much of a Robert A. Heinlein fan. Growing up as a science fiction kid in the 1970s, I couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about, but back then, being indifferent to Heinlein made me question my tastes. Everybody seemed to love Heinlein. He was one of the “big three” (and I was a fan of the other two—Asimov and Clarke). So I kept giving him a try. I quite liked The Past Through Tomorrow—the collection of his mostly early-career future history stories. I can definitely see that he was writing some of the best short fiction of the Forties. But the novels—The Puppet Masters, Starship Troopers, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Stranger in a Strange Land—I thought they were okay, but just okay. It’s difficult to explain, but there always seemed to be something about each of his novels that rubbed my teenage self the wrong way. Then, in 1980, the first new (in my reading lifetime) Heinlein novel came out so, like all good SF fans in 1980, I made the mistake of reading The Number of the Beast, and swore off Heinlein forever. Based on what I’ve learned since, post-1960 Heinlein increasingly allowed his libertarian politics and “interesting” views regarding sexuality to overwhelm his storytelling (which could explain my half-remembered uneasy reaction to those novels), and most of the novels I tried were from this later period, so I’ve been meaning to take a look at an earlier novel at some point.
RYO Review: Gun, With Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem
I’ve wanted to read Jonathan Lethem‘s Gun, With Occasional Music (1994) since I heard someone give a paper about it in a detective fiction panel at an academic conference several years ago. Soon after, the book was a Kindle daily deal, so it has been sitting on my virtual TBR shelf for a while now. The 35 challenge pushed me to dust it off (virtually, of course) and read it. Lucky for me, the book fulfills three other RYO challenges: Socialists, etc. (Lethem grew up in a commune in Brooklyn); The End of the World (future dystopia); and The Second Best (nominated for a Nebula).
Lethem creates a bizarre dystopian world, full of new species, who live among human society. First, there are talking animals. These so-called evolved animals seem to be creatures who grow to the size of a small human, move bipedally, and talk and think as humans. In the course of the story, we meet an evolved ape, kitten, ewe, kangaroo, and other secondary characters. These characters are interesting and fully-imagined; their difference doesn’t really provide an obstacle for the reader. This cannot be said about the second group, a new form of children in this world. Lethem does not completely explain if these new “children,” called Babyheads, are in addition to or instead of human children. Babyheads have mature minds but inhabit miniature and deformed bodies. They are born very smart but not emotionally stable. As they live among humans, they grow more and more resentful about being trapped in a small body “in a six foot world” (234). The sub-culture of the Babyheads is the weakest part of the book because Lethem never takes the time to explain about their appearance or function in this new society. The reader is left with many distracting questions.
RYO Review: We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
D-503 is a model citizen of the One State society. As the designer of the Integral, the spaceship that will carry the wonders of One State to what they assume are the primitive people of other planets in the solar system, D-503 would be a distinguished citizen. But everyone in One State is equal, and D-503 does not question the wisdom of this system. He enjoys the regularity of his day, ordered by The Table of Hours: his wake-up time, his feeding hours, his work time, and his evenings in one of the huge auditoriums where citizens gather for instructive entertainment. He has a private hour, and sometimes a pink slip is issued that allows him a sexual interlude with the adoring and complacent O-90.
Life is good for D-503. But one day, walk walking like thousands of others during the walking hour and with O-90 by his side, he sees for the first time I-330, and she will acknowledge his glance. D-503’s life, from this moment, will begin to spiral out of control.
Roll-Your-Own Reading Challenge: January Review Poll
Well, this is more than a few days late in coming but finally it’s time to vote for the best Roll-Your-Own Reading Challenge reviews for January! We had well over 100 reviews submitted last month for the RYO and it took a little more time than we thought to get through them all and pick our 12 featured reviews:
- The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. – Stephen Poltz (spoltz)
- Theft of Swords by Michael J. Sullivan – Wendy B. (nightxade)
- The Forever Machine by Mark Clifton and Frank Riley – Megan AM (couchtomoon)
- The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov – Val (valashain)
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley – Rae McCausland (ParallelWorlds)
- The Red Tree by Caitlín R. Kiernan – Charles Dee Mitchell (charlesdee)
- Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link – Alexandra P. (everythinginstatic)
- Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie – Alix Heintzman (alixheintzman)
- Hell House by Richard Matheson – Maureen Mulinda (dustydigger)
- Abarat by Clive Barker – Bethe Besse (badseedgirl)
- The Clockwork Man by E. V. Odle – Rhonda Knight (RhondaK101)
- A Gift Upon the Shore by M. K. Wren – Dale Sheffield (HRO)
There are 3 prizes awarded each month for the best reviews: $25, $15 and $10 Amazon.com gift cards. The poll will stay open until February 26 so get your votes in now and please help us spread the word! Voting is open to all WWEnders not just those taking part in the RYO.
Happy voting and good luck to our contestants!
