Retribution Falls - Book Review

Retribution Falls
by Chris Wooding

Sky piracy is a bit out of Darian Frey’s league. Fate has not been kind to the captain of the airship Ketty Jay—or his motley crew. They are all running from something. Crake is a daemonist in hiding, traveling with an armored golem and burdened by guilt. Jez is the new navigator, desperate to keep her secret from the rest of the crew. Malvery is a disgraced doctor, drinking himself to death. So when an opportunity arises to steal a chest of gems from a vulnerable airship, Frey can’t pass it up. It’s an easy take—and the payoff will finally make him a rich man.

But when the attack goes horribly wrong, Frey suddenly finds himself the most wanted man in Vardia, trailed by bounty hunters, the elite Century Knights, and the dread queen of the skies, Trinica Dracken. Frey realizes that they’ve been set up to take a fall but doesn’t know the endgame. And the ultimate answer for captain and crew may lie in the legendary hidden pirate town of Retribution Falls. That’s if they can get there without getting blown out of the sky. (Synopsis from Goodreads)

---

Retribution Falls is a really fun story. Really fun. Pirates, airships, a steampunkish feel, magic, demons, adventure, conspiracy... it has all the elements that let you know you’re in for a quick, exciting read. It’s an extremely fast paced book, barely pausing at any point for filler or downtime, and yet there are a surprising amount of back stories thrown in, all of them interesting. Chris Wooding is an expert at worldbuilding, slipping in facts and fascinating details that give such a vivid feeling of the world, without ever slowing down the plot or distracting from the story.

The rag-tag crew of the Ketty Jay will draw inevitable comparisons with the TV series Firefly. The book has a similar kind of roguish-twinkle feel to Firefly; they’re pirates, but they’re not the really bad kind of pirates, and there’s something unavoidably lovable about their underdog position and their attempts to stay ahead of everyone who’s out to get them. The characters in Retribution Falls can be a little one-note – they’re a character type and in general they stick to it – but the back stories here do add a little more depth to certain people. In particular I liked Crake, the daemonist who aids the crew with his daemon-based magic, and Jez, the new navigator and the ship’s only woman. I found these two the most human of the characters, and I really felt for Crake. The more minor characters were less explored but did add some tension and humour. I liked the doctor the best of the side-character bunch and would like to learn more about him in later books.

The captain, Darian Frey, was a hard character to like, but felt like a very honest portrayal of the kind of man that might end up in his position. He’s always running away, always trying to find someone else to blame for his problems. There were points where I became very frustrated with him, and other points where I honestly hoped Draken would capture him and the rest of the crew would get away. However, though Darian is often unlikeable, his slightly car-crash approach to life is fascinating to read about.

As the book goes on, most of the crew members begin to reveal a darker side, aspects that make the reader question whether they are really the good guys. This isn’t explored very deeply in this book; we’re still supposed to want them to come out on top, but I’m hoping this may be touched on a bit more later in the series. The book also succeeds in making the reader feel sympathy for Draken, the woman chasing down the Ketty Jay, though it perhaps succeeded a little too well with me. There were points where I honestly wanted her to win, but then, perhaps that was the point. This is a book about pirates, and I like that lines of morality were hard to draw. No-one should feel like they are entirely the good or bad guys here.

With an interesting storyline involving conspiracy, pirates and murder, memorable characters, action, plenty of humour, adventure, airships, daemon-magic, and a malevolent ship’s cat, Retribution Falls is a quick, fun read. There isn’t really anything surprising in the book, with some elements being quite predictable, but it’s done so well there is a great amount of satisfaction in how the events roll out. There is a lot about this world that I love, and I’m looking forward to exploring more of it with the Ketty Jay’s crew in later books.

I listened to this as an audiobook, so wanted to quickly mention the narrator, Rupert Degas, who does an absolutely fantastic job and really brings the book to life. Each character felt pitch-perfect to me, and his reading combined with Chris Wooding's excellent writing kept me engrossed throughout. I'll be looking for more of Rupert Degas' work too!

The Rithmatist - Book Review

The Rithmatist
by Brandon Sanderson

More than anything, Joel wants to be a Rithmatist. Chosen by the Master in a mysterious inception ceremony, Rithmatists have the power to infuse life into two-dimensional figures known as Chalklings. Rithmatists are humanity’s only defense against the Wild Chalklings — merciless creatures that leave mangled corpses in their wake. Having nearly overrun the territory of Nebrask, the Wild Chalklings now threaten all of the American Isles.

As the son of a lowly chalkmaker at Armedius Academy, Joel can only watch as Rithmatist students study the magical art that he would do anything to practice. Then students start disappearing — kidnapped from their rooms at night, leaving trails of blood. Assigned to help the professor who is investigating the crimes, Joel and his friend Melody find themselves on the trail of an unexpected discovery — one that will change Rithmatics — and their world — forever.

Bestselling author Brandon Sanderson brings his unique brand of epic storytelling to the teen audience with an engrossing tale of danger and suspense—the first of a series. With his trademark skills in world-building, Sanderson has created a magic system that is so inventive and detailed that that readers who appreciate games of strategy and tactics just may want to bring Rithmatics to life in our world. (Synopsis from Goodreads)

---

I really enjoyed The Rithmatist, though I have to admit I wasn’t at all sure about it at first. The chalk magic was... weird, and to be honest, didn’t seem that useful. So rithmatists can battle other rithmatists in impressive chalk-magic duels, but in real life, isn’t any normal person with a gun or a bucket of water at a fairly big advantage? Scribbling protective circles and chalk monsters takes time, after all, and chalk’s quite easy to scrape or wash away.

Well, actually, I was wrong to doubt, as all these things are explained and become much clearer later. As the book progressed, it became obvious that chalk magic is actually a lot more powerful than I’d thought, and that the seemingly arbitrary rules of it do actually make a lot of sense. I’m not sure I still fully understood the chalk magic by the end, but I did have full confidence that the author knew exactly how it worked, and that the world was working on great internal consistency. No getting out of situations by suddenly introducing new abilities, but instead by using the established rules to outwit the enemy. I really enjoy that kind of thing, and appreciated it here.

I do think, however, that it took a little too long to get to this stage. I spent quite a long time frustrated by the chalk magic and even a bit bored by it. The main character is obsessed with it, and so talks about it constantly, and his enthusiasm didn’t really spark my own. This is a shame, as, by the end of the book, I was really getting into the magic and enjoyed the various battles and duels that came up. I liked how there was a maths aspect to the magic – the circles must be as precise as possible, the angles of any lines just right, and so on – but also a more creative element – the more detailed and imaginative the chalklings, the more effective they are. By the end of the story, the magic is fascinating, and I was impressed that the author could make chalk drawings such a creepy concept.

The story itself is very slow. The book spends a long time with Joel and Melody in the school, learning about rithmatics in detail and trying to solve the mystery of the kidnapped rithmatists. Everything had a familiar feel, and at points felt very similar to Harry Potter (not necessarily a criticism; I love Harry Potter!). The mystery element was very good, and I enjoyed Joel and Melody’s growing relationship, but I couldn’t help wishing that the whole thing would move along a little faster. I wanted to know more about Nebrask and the Wild Chalklings, the ceremony, and so many other things, and felt like this book was perhaps too much a 'scene setter' plot, introducing the world so that later books can go on to more interesting places and stories.

But, as I said, I did really enjoyed this book. It has a fascinating world, a kind of alt.history steampunk with a fun setting. It’s not quite our world (the States of America are the Isles of America, for one thing), but similar enough to be almost the same. The connection of the church to the rithmatic magic is intriguing, and I can’t wait to find out more about why that’s the case. The chalklings are surprisingly creepy, and once we get past all the theory, the magic is exciting. I liked all the characters, and particularly the fact that Joel is not a rithmatist or ‘super special’. He and Melody really have to work together to achieve greatness, which was nice. I also liked Melody’s melodramatic character. I love the idea of the Wild Chalklings and the strange figure that Joel encountered. I think they may not turn out to be the unambiguous enemy that the characters think of them as, and I can’t wait to find out more in later books. Finally, the book itself is so nicely presented, from the gorgeous cover to the illustrations and diagrams inside.

So, while The Rithmatist had a slow start, and took a while to convince me about the magic, I did really enjoy it in the end, and I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next. A fun read!


Thank you to Orion Children's Books for providing a review copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

James P. Blaylock Interview and Giveaway

James P. Blaylock is regarded as one of the founding fathers of Steampunk, as well as being the winner of a Philip K. Dick award and two World Fantasy Awards. The Aylesford Skull is his first full-length steampunk novel in twenty years! You can read my review of the book here.

James kindly agreed to stop by and answer some questions about his writing and his latest exciting book.

(There are also two chances to WIN A COPY of The Aylesford Skull, one of which is a limited edition signed hardcover, so be sure to check that out at the bottom of this post!)

---

Hi James! How does it feel to be called a ‘father of Steampunk’?

It makes me feel quite nice actually, although if I’m in fact the father (or grandfather, according to Locus magazine) then I share the honor with Tim Powers and K.W. Jeter. We were all writing Steampunkish stories and novels and hanging out together in the 1970s. I had the distinction, such as it was, to publish a Steampunk short story, and not long after that K.W. published his novel Morlock Night. K.W. also coined the word “Steampunk,” although not until 10 years later, when it had taken on the trappings of a subgenre. By that time the three of us had published a number of Steampunk novels and short stories. We were all influenced, of course, by other writers and by each other. Questions of origin are always murky. I’m happy to think that the rise of Steampunk culture, so to speak, was due to the three of us. What would have happened, I wonder, if we had been busy writing books about hedgehogs. Hedgepunk?


What is it that attracted you to Victorian England? What made it an interesting setting to write about?

I was and am attracted to Victorian England for two reasons. The first is that the era was wildly colorful; it produced amazing art, furniture, fashion, and a thousand and one other cool-to-look at and read about things. It was a very rich period, culturally speaking, (and was also a gritty, impoverished, cruel, and enormously fascinating era in other ways). It arguably produced the greatest literature of any literary period anywhere in the world, which is the second thing that attracted me to it. When I was ten years old, I read Verne and Wells for the colorful, adventurous elements of their books. I was big on illustrations of finny submarines and archaic looking rockets built by backyard explorer-scientists wearing beaver hats. Later, when I read Dickens and Tennyson and Ruskin, I developed a love of the language, while increasing my attraction to the nifty stuff of the period. I’ve never lost any of that, I’m happy to say, and so I take the same pleasure in writing about the era today. I’m going to bet that Steampunk readers and writers and artists and costumers would say something very similar. I’m not at all surprised at Steampunk’s broad appeal.


One of the things I really liked about the book were the little eccentric, supernatural details, like the skull lamps, the corpse candles, the pagan graveyard buried deep under London, etc. Are any of these actual myths or stories from Victorian times, or did you invent them? What gave you the ideas for them?

Although I invented the incidents of the novel, many of the elements that you mention I simply found doing casual reading or while doing research: the corpse candles, for instance, the subterranean graveyards, the old smugglers inn hidden in the marsh below Egypt Bay, etc. The skull lamps were a product of my fascination with Japanese magic mirrors. I thought a lot about how to turn the interesting but innocent magic mirrors into something more sinister, and what came of that were the skull lamps. Thinking all of this through led me to articles on early photography and coal dust explosions and a plethora of other things. That’s the problem (or perhaps pleasure) of writing stories that requires research, one thing inevitably leads to another. There’s virtually no limit to the things you can discover, although there’s an absolute limit to the things you can actually use in your book.


I thought all your heroes seemed like very real people, each with their own little quirks. Do you ever see yourself in any of your characters?

All of my protagonists are constructed of pieces of me, so to speak, although ultimately they resemble me in over-the-top ways. Their eccentricities are inflated examples of my own eccentricities, and their weaknesses and enthusiasms are exaggerations (usually). I don’t engage in adventurous behavior, so I’m thankfully not called upon to be heroic, or to shoot people or to be shot. All that being said, in some sense I always write about what I know, and my characters are often very much related to people I’ve known or that I know, including myself. I’m fond of the quirks and oddities that differentiate us from everyone else, but I’m not fond of sword wielding heroes who have no reason to sometimes be unhappy with themselves. (Lots of weird negative constructions in that sentence, not to mention the split infinitive. Hope it makes sense.)


So I’m assuming the character Arthur Doyle is the Arthur Conan Doyle. Why did you decide to include him in the story?

Arthur Conan Doyle

He is indeed Arthur Conan Doyle. On a whim I bought a biography of Conan Doyle, which I was reading at about the same time that I was reading about early photography. Conan Doyle (merely Doyle back then) was an avid amateur photographer, and the more I read about him, the more interesting he seemed to be, for reasons that had nothing to do with his Sherlock Holmes stories. At the time The Aylesford Skull takes place, Doyle would have been about the same age as Jack Owlesby, who is a character in all of my Langdon St. Ives books and stories, and in fact narrates many of them, in which case he functions as my Watson, in his small way. Doyle was just starting to write and publish short pieces, as was the fictional Jack Owlesby. It seemed right and natural that Doyle should be a character in the book, as long as he remained a peripheral character. I had the idea that if he became cumbersome, I’d simply cut him out. That didn’t happen. More on the Conan Doyle influence below.


Who are your biggest writing influences or favourite authors?

My favorite authors are most often also my biggest influences. When I was ten years old I started reading books from my mother’s library, and at that same time I began to receive books as gifts at Christmas and on birthdays from relatives who weren’t themselves readers. This deluge of books was a plot, in other words, fomented by my mother.

One of the earliest books I remember reading was The Return of Sherlock Holmes. I had no idea who Conan Doyle was, or Sherlock Holmes, or that Holmes had anyplace to return from. I loved the foggy mystery of the stories, however, and it didn’t matter a bit that I couldn’t understand parts of them. (I was also trying to read Walter Scott; “The Adventure of the Empty House” was a cinch compared to Ivanhoe. At the same time, I found half a dozen Steinbeck novels and story collections among her books and read them. I was particularly fond of In Dubious Battle, which was a weird thing given my age. I read it three or four times. I was so smitten by the language and settings that I launched endless copycat Salinas Valley stories that went nowhere. My uncle and aunt gave me the collected short stories of Mark Twain at about the same time my parents gave me Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. My enthusiasm for books was pretty much solidified by that time, so my mother hauled my sister and I down to the local library once a week after school, and over the next couple of years I read through Verne and Wells and Burroughs and the seafaring novels of a writer named Howard Pease.

By the time I was thirteen I had read virtually all of the books that would become the most influential to me as a writer, and my brain was so full of Victorian and Edwardian science fiction stories that I was virtually condemned to write what became Steampunk. The biggest influence on my writing, however, were the stories and novels of Robert Louis Stevenson, which I read in my early twenties. At that same time Tim Powers gave me some P.G. Wodehouse to read, and it was this weird mixture of Stevenson and Wodehouse that inspired “The Ape-box Affair,” my first Steampunk story. My novel Homunculus was heavily influenced by Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights and by The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The Wind in the Willows (along with Huckleberry Finn) inspired The Elfin Ship, my first novel.


What do you think of where Steampunk has gone in the years since you first started writing it? Is there anything you particularly love or dislike about the Steampunk craze?

Steampunk Jewellery (sodacrush)

I’m completely in favor of Steampunk going anywhere and everywhere. I recently heard that people are writing Steampunk porn, and that seems a little bit sketchy, not to mention cumbersome, but I’m amazed and elated to see Steampunk leaking into fashion and architecture and film, etc. One nice result is that the market for Steampunk books is more solid than ever (although I’ll continue to write the stuff whether or not there’s a market for it. Better a good market than a bad, certainly.) There’s not much about the Steampunk craze that I dislike, except for those things that I dislike about all crazes, especially the production of derivative, unimaginative, bandwagon, shoddy things that fly under any suddenly fashionable banner.


Are there any more Langdon St. Ives books to come? What’s next for you?

There’s a Langdon St. Ives book in the works, in fact, The Pagan Goddess, a companion volume to two previously published short novels, The Ebb Tide and The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs. At the moment there’s yet another St. Ives novel whirling around in my mind. Ideally it’ll quit whirling sometime soon so that I can see it clearly enough to get started writing it. I’m also quite happy with my novel Zeuglodon, the True Adventures of Kathleen Perkins, Cryptozoologist, which came out a few months ago. I’m currently working on a sequel to that one, and having so much fun with it that I’m contemplating writing more of them. Who knows how many?

Thanks, Jim.


Thank you for stopping by James!

(Is it just me, or does anyone else kind of want Hedgepunk to be a thing?)

---

GIVEAWAY!

This Giveaway is now closed. Congrats to Katrina Day-Reilly, who won a copy of The Aylesford Skull!

I’m giving away a paperback copy of The Aylesford Skull to one lucky winner. Just fill out the rafflecopter form below and good luck! Giveaway open worldwide. 

Thanks to Titan Books for providing this giveaway copy!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

The Aylesford Skull - Book Review and Giveaway

The Aylesford Skull, by James P. Blaylock: It is the summer of 1883 and Professor Langdon St. Ives - brilliant but eccentric scientist and explorer - is at home in Aylesford with his family. However, a few miles to the north a steam launch has been taken by pirates above Egypt Bay; the crew murdered and pitched overboard. In Aylesford itself a grave is opened and possibly robbed of the skull. The suspected grave robber, the infamous Dr. Ignacio Narbondo, is an old nemesis of Langdon St. Ives.

When Dr. Narbondo returns to kidnap his four-year-old son Eddie and then vanishes into the night, St. Ives and his factotum Hasbro race to London in pursuit... (synopsis from Goodreads).

 ---

James P. Blaylock, one of steampunk’s founding fathers... winner of a Philip K. Dick Award and two World Fantasy Awards... his first full-length steampunk book in twenty years... another in the famous Langdon St. Ives series, pitting hero-inventor-explorer against his evil arch-nemesis Dr. Narbondo. When Titan Books asked if I might like to review this book, I may have fallen off my chair.

First off, is it necessary to have read the other Langdon St. Ives books to enjoy The Aylesford Skull? No, absolutely not. The story stands alone very well, and the plot and great characterisation convey the history between St. Ives and Narbondo perfectly, as well as St. Ives’ relationship with other characters, too. And readers who are familiar with St. Ives are also sure to find plenty to enjoy.

As you might expect with a steampunk story, The Aylesford Skull has a really good sense of setting. London, in particular, feels very real, from its respectable establishments to its grimy and dangerous back alleys, and the author uses various locations in spectacular ways throughout the plot. It’s also not as overtly steampunky as you might expect. The place isn’t packed with cogs and goggles and clockwork and strange puffing machines, but instead blends the fantastic with the real in more subtle ways. Things like the skull lamps, which to me instantly conjure up that Victorian obsession with science and the macabre, and the odd way in which the rational and irrational often became blurred. It feels like something that really could have existed. If steampunk is often a genre packed with things, the things in this novel always feel realistic and serve the plot.

The one exception is the airship, which felt as though it had been shoehorned into the story in order to add this vital steampunk touch. Sure, everyone loves a blimp, but I did think it was misplaced here. There were times when Langdon St. Ives genuinely seemed more interested in his invention than saving his son, and I did not understand why he felt the need to fly it to London while his friends took a perfectly serviceable train and still arrived there first.

This was a small hiccup in otherwise brilliant character writing. I loved St. Ives and his friends, particularly how each ‘sidekick’ to the hero was given specific traits and tasks. Everyone got a chance to shine, and St. Ives by no means took on all the most glorious adventures. In fact, if there was a real hero in the book, for me it was Finn. This was refreshing, as often the side characters only seem to be hanging around to make the hero look good. Either that, or the hero gets some foolish notion that to be a true hero he or she must do things alone. Not St. Ives... he goes straight to his friends for help, and that’s a character I can really support.

The villain Dr. Narbondo (great name), and the plot in general, were not quite as strong. I wasn’t sure about Narbondo; he was perhaps a little too one-sided – Evil with a capital E – a traditional black-clothed villain who kidnapped and killed children, wanted to open a path to the land of the dead, and even had a hunchback. However, this did add a sense of melodrama to the story, which actually complemented the Victorian setting very well. Everything about Narbondo and the plot was a little larger than life, and since this feeling ran throughout the whole book, it gave it a fun – if somewhat clichéd – atmosphere.

In terms of the plot, there’s kidnapping, chases, fights, more chasing, more fights, creeping through London’s seedier streets, infernal devices, murder, treason, daring rescues, more chases, even bigger fights! There’s certainly no lack of excitement, and as soon as St. Ives (rather inexplicably) gets into that airship, you just know it’s going to be one heck of a showdown (and it is). It’s entertaining stuff, but – slightly disappointingly – it never moves beyond ‘fun’ into something a bit more subtle or really breathtaking. And because of that, parts of it felt a little flat to me. For a light-hearted, exuberant and fun read, however, this book does the trick.

Thank you to Titan Books for providing a review copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Giveaway

This giveaway is now closed. Congrats to Katrina Day-Reilly, who won a copy of The Aylesford Skull!

a Rafflecopter giveaway