Ren Crewell-Fuerst

Wonderful continuation

Revisado: 11-06-22

This was an excellent continuation of the other books set in this world, and while you might want to read them first, it also stands very well on its own. I loved fantasy murder mysteries, and the queer love story was wonderful too.

To the one-star reviewer in front of me who called this book “just gay porn”, I’d love to know—since this is the third in a series and the sixth book set in this universe, I assume you’ve read at least some of the author’s other works. Most of them have as much (or a good deal more!) sex and sexuality in them as this one. That makes me wonder, what exactly is it that you find so outrageous? The characters in this volume were quirky, secretive and loveable, and the story by turns action-packed, funny, angsty and heartfelt—very much in the same vein as previous volumes, with just one small difference… 🤔

Tl;dr: Ignore the homophobic reviewers and enjoy this excellent story. 💗🏳️‍🌈

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Intricate story & characters, iffy narration

Revisado: 01-29-22

Four Roads Cross is the fifth novel in the Craft Sequence (4th chronologically, but read it 5th) and is an ambitious, intricately plotted courtroom epic that ties the previous four books together in story and theme. Its pages are alive with conflicted magic users, reluctant saints, gods who show up in your kitchen for advice, and legal battles (with weapons. and bloodshed). There’s also vampires, a dragon airbus and a skeleton king wearing sunglasses. The controlled chaos is glorious and the payoff of so many storylines into one another is a work of mad genius. Seeing these characters grow and become feels amazing. It’s a worthy close to the first “season” of the Craft Sequence.

Here’s the thing about the audio version though. I LOVE that the studio hired a Black woman to read a book starting a Black woman. Love isn’t even the right word. It’s not only emotionally right, it’s ethically right as well. I just don’t think this particular performer (who has a gorgeous voice and has won two Audie awards) was right for this novel. Ojo has a lovely reading voice, but reads the whole text in the same gentle, musical tone, where sometimes the words should have been infused with fear or grief or rage. I actually got frustrated with her. It affected my experience with the novel.

Ojo doesn’t give the story a quick pause to breathe between in-chapter scene changes, which could be confusing in a story with so many different points of view. She also isn’t consistent with character voices, even dropping them sometimes mid-sentence. In an ensemble cast novel with more characters to juggle than any so far in the series, this is a drawback. Kat’s character in particular suffers from an awkward, prim accent that comes and goes, and since her metamorphosis is central to the payoff of the story, it hurts the whole narrative. (And this after her laconic drawl as read by Natalie Naudus stole just about every scene in Full Fathom Five!)

So that’s the thing—strong, complex novel that needed an extremely skilled performer and didn’t get one. I very much hope the studio continues to hire readers that represent protagonists. It’s the only right thing to do. I just hope next time they choose a representative reader who is right for the story. It will absolutely create a stronger, clearer and more positive experience for audio readers. 💜

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Max Gladstone must be stopped

Revisado: 01-24-22

A good writer creates an antagonist you hate and fear. An excellent one does that, then shifts the focus without moving the camera, and suddenly that antagonist is a three-dimensional person whose perspective you understand and whose future you care about saving, and dammit, when did you start to love them? What the hell, Gladstone? He needs to knock it off.

More seriously, a content warning: this novel contains pretty intense descriptions of violence ^MINOR SPOILER^ in protest that is tipped into armed conflict and ultimately quashed by a war crime on a government’s own people. The story explores difficult themes like the aftermath of war, police brutality, colonialism, capitalist gentrification and oppression. It was hard to read. It hurt. Because of that, I didn’t love this book the way I’ve loved some of the others in the Craft Sequence—but for exactly the same reasons, it’s probably the best thing Gladstone has written in the series so far. The characters are complex, flawed, biased, afraid, tied together by love and guilt and obligation and written with incredible empathy. No “suddenly this occurred” narrative here: everything that happens in this novel, happens as a direct result of someone’s choices. The protagonist (an antagonist in a previous book set later in time) is one of the best written characters in the whole damn series. It’s so good. It’s so extremely good.

The only criticism I have concerns the narrator of the audio version of the novel. He did a stellar job, don’t get me wrong. I would be delighted to listen to other books he’s read. But how hard would it to have been to hire a Black or Native reader instead of asking a white guy to essentially read in the style of James Earl Jones? Here’s a book that is very much about colonialist systems of oppression, and they give the voice of the narrative to a white guy. It’s so sharply pat, so perfectly tone-deaf ironic that it’ll cut you.

Despite that move by the studio, the book is super worth your time whether you read with eyes or ears. A word to the wise: this novel is the earliest so far chronologically but 4th in the series; it should NOT be read first. Start with Three Parts Dead and go in publication order from there. But definitely start. Do it. Right now. <3

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Gladstone just gets better

Revisado: 01-20-22

So this book is… well. It’s part murder mystery, part horror movie, part caper, with poetry readings and pickpocketing and the looming threat of colonialism and a secret gods and number of dangerous night swims. It defies your attempt to categorize. It dares you to read it instead. Each book in the Craft Sequence is better than the one before, and tackles complex moral ideas without easy solutions while building flawed characters that make you fall in love. I loved Izza immediately, while Kai took a little longer, but that’s intentional on the author’s part. He’s very good at writing characters who are prickly and complicated and difficult to like until their stories unfold, at which point you will love them forever, unshakably. The end of this book made me cry, in the best way.

I especially loved this book because one of the protagonists is trans, and not only is there zero transphobia or misgendering for the sake of “authenticity” (or inner struggle around being trans for that matter)—and not only is Kai a complex, idealistic, stubborn woman whose character absolutely does not ride on her gender—but ALSO, when her back is to the wall it turns out that her trans-ness, and the strengths it represents in her, are absolutely her superpower. 💖

It’s honestly fine if you jump in here without having read the first two, because each story is self-contained. But you’ll recognize other characters if you read them first, and there are one or two spoilers inherent in their presence, so I’d recommend it. Start with Three Parts Dead; read the first two and come back for this. It’ll be all the sharper, and all the sweeter.

I left off one star on the performance of this novel because the reader pronounced a number of place names differently from previous readers (which may not be her fault, but feels like an overlook on the editors’ part) and sometimes came across a little stiff (which may have been intentional because she was after all reading a bunch of super inflexible characters) and intentional or not, both of those issues kept me at arm’s length from the story occasionally when I wanted to be in the midst of it. But she did a fantastic job all told and I appreciated her.

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Killer story, B+ narration, fantastic series

Revisado: 01-15-22

Not my favorite reader. Re It took me a little longer to get into this excellent story because the reader’s performance took me a bit to get into. I also wish the publisher had chosen a Native or Latinx performer (this guy’s website bio says his heritage is Italian). It’s a fine performance, just not amazing, and that’s literally the only negative thing i can say about this book. The entire Craft series is FANTASTIC and you should absolutely read it.

Max Gladstone’s Craft series is a feminist, anticolonialist masterwork of diamond point writing and authentically written characters. Each book is super well plotted but still surprising, and may include such challenges as necromancy, demons, murder mysteries, terrifying monsters made of water, dead gods, and (shudder) *company mergers*.

My favorite thing about Gladstone’s books is that his characters are smart. In a horror movie situation, they’ll do the clever thing. That’s not to say these books are horror novels—they are spec fic that defies genre—but I love that his characters, especially his female characters, have agency and make smart choices and carry the weight of their decisions.

These books are so good that if you like science fiction or fantasy AT ALL, you’ll find reasons to love them. Make sure that first you go read (listen to) Three Parts Dead, the first book in the series, and then come back and read this one. Right now! ASAP! You’ll want to immediately download the other four books in the series. And since both this novel and the first one are available on the Plus catalogue right now, you don’t (if you’ll forgive the quote) have to take my word for it. :)

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Superb storytelling and performance

Revisado: 01-30-21

When I started this book, I thought it was a fairy tale. And it is. But it’s the older sort of fairy tale, with blood and darkness, exile and otherness, where monsters are real and terrible, and possibly they are your own family. (There’s a *serious* CW here that I won’t mention specifically, but if you have trauma/PTSD or are sensitive to certain topics you might want to do a quick search before you read this.) Despite the dark subject matter, the story is also full of light and courage, and I never felt like it was too heavy to keep reading. Beneath the Carnival music of her joyously Afro-Caribbean world, Hopkinson deals with a number of heavy subjects, from abuse to diaspora to colonization to technology and the threat of subjugation or genocide, but the magic of her words is the way they still buoy up instead of pulling down. Beneath that darkness there is light again, like a lantern flame that stubbornly won’t go out.

And can we talk for a minute about Robin Miles’s performance? She has been excellent in everything I’ve heard her read, easily juggling a dozen accents and two dozen characters with staggeringly genuine execution. Here, unless she already spoke Creole or Patois, she legitimately learned a new language for this novel, and spoke different accents in THAT. I MEAN. And don’t worry that the language will be distracting or that you won’t understand the story. You might need a chapter to adjust, and you might expand your vocabulary a bit, but it won’t, and you absolutely will.

I can’t talk about the climax and denouement, or even much of the plot, without dropping too many spoilers, but I promise you this. You will walk away from this book with a profound sense of rightness. You will feel satisfied and emboldened. You will know that fairy tale monsters will try to eat you alive, and that this scars a person in more ways than one. You will also know that if you fight the monsters, with weapons, wits or words, the one of the lives you save may be your own.

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Gut-punch whodunnit, immersive fantasy world

Revisado: 01-15-21

This noir novel’s greatest strength is its tremendous fantasy worldbuilding. Its use of language, too, is a love-letter to old-school private eye simile and metaphor. Happily, it strongly eschews the hackneyed and sexist tropes of the noir genre, as well as the heroic save-the-day tropes of most genre fantasy. Instead, the story comes off as fresh, interesting, occasionally disturbing, with that touch of regretful nostalgia that all good gumshoe stories require.

The novel’s structure, flashbacks that explain the protagonist’s tattoos interspersed with the present-day action, slowly reveals the convergence of the setting’s old and new worlds in a clever way that simultaneously builds a solid world and slowly establishes the protagonist’s secrets. The audio version’s greatest strength is the author’s beautifully nuanced performance. He provides plenty of flexibility and variation for the secondary characters, and performs his antihero protagonist with a clear love for the character. Fetch’s inner narrative is drawn with such self-loathing, regret, anger, heartbreak, and hope that the story feels immediate and genuine. In all, a gut-punch whodunnit with something serious to say about hate crimes, but that never takes itself too seriously. A killer tall-drink-of-water of a novel that’ll make you regret leaving Sunder at the end, and leave you hopeful for a sequel.

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A great ride

Revisado: 01-12-21

Great storytelling, diverse character, a novel concept for a whodunnit, and utterly fantastic narration by Zachary Quinto. As usual, Scalzi’s prose sparks and crackles with kinetic energy in the best of ways. A great follow-up to The Dispatcher. I hope we get to hear more stories about these folks.

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Wonderful performance, awful audio

Revisado: 01-02-19

NIGHT WATCH is Sir Terry at his best. It’s difficult to say good things about only because one doesn’t know where to start or stop! It’s very nearly perfect. It’ll make you laugh, and think, and feel things.

Stephen Briggs is a master performer, and his reading of this novel is fantastic. His inflections, his pauses, give the story a remarkable weight of emotion. The accents he uses for side characters are very thoughtful. Briggs was a friend of Pratchett’s, and I’d like to think that knowing the author personally added even more to his ability to do the story justice.

The only problem with this audiobook is that it’s a terrible recording. It’s quite tinny, and there’s a lot of background echo and fluff—it sounds like an old record, a bit scuffed in places. Why the transfer was so bad I’m not sure, as his other Pratchett audiobooks don’t have this issue that I’ve noticed. But make sure you listen to the sample before you purchase—just to make sure it’s an issue you can deal with for ten hours. :)

I am often sensitive to angry white noise, and didn’t have a big problem with this. It’s not untenable. But Audible shouldn’t be charging $30 dollars, more than any other Pratchett audiobook, for this iffy recording. And again, I strongly suggest you make sure you can deal with the sound issue before you purchase.

If you can overcome the bad sound quality, I highly recommend this book despite the price. It’s a strong performance that hits all the right notes in a novel I’d call Pratchett’s masterwork. In fact, it’s everything but the hard boiled egg.

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Disillusioned and disappointed

Revisado: 12-31-17

I wanted to love this book. I loved Bardugo’s Six of Crows, and couldn’t wait to read her other series set in this universe. But this one just isn’t as good.

From the description and the reviews I read, I’d been expecting a fantasy adventure. Honestly, though, this book reads more like a romance set in a fantasy universe. YMMV on this issue, but it wasn’t what I’d expected. Worse, the romantic plot line feels an awful lot like a Twilight reimagining set in a magical school. I did appreciate that—without getting spoilery—the plot doesn’t follow the same, emotionally abusive path as Twilight. But it takes a long time to get there. And even then, it reads like a romance first, fantasy adventure second.

The other thing that disappointed me was the lack of diversity in the novel. I read an interview with Bardugo where she talked about how the original Grisha series is very “straight and white,” and wow, she wasn’t kidding. I’m glad she heard that criticism and worked to change it in later books, but I really wish it hadn’t been necessary.

Also, this book barely passed the Bechdel test, and really only because of conversations about makeup and clothes. From a female writer, that’s especially disappointing. And there are almost no tertiary characters who are women. No soldiers, merchants, sailors, farmers—the only female walk-on character is a maid. There’s a difference between choosing to write about a patriarchal society and upholding the messages it delivers. And besides, this is a fantasy universe. Why not choose representation and equality?

There are things about this book that I thought were amazing. The writing is gorgeous. Even in her first novel, Bardugo’s turns of phrase are lyrical and fresh. The setting, based lovingly on Tsarist Russia, is a stellar departure from Western European, medieval fantasy worlds. The magic is smart and different as well, and the ways it’s described have an emotional resonance and make sense. And the narrator, Lauren Fortgang, is superb.

I wish all of that were enough to overcome my frustrations. I wanted to like this book. I chose to go back and read the original Grisha series before going on to the sequel to Six of Crows, Bardugo’s later novel set in this universe. At this point, though, I’m out of patience. I’m going to take a break from Bardugo for a bit, and hope that this series gets less frustrating in future volumes.

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