Tag Archives: fantasy

Blood of Dragons

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I have now finished four out of five Robin Hobb serieses. Look at me go!

Blood of Dragons was on the one hand extremely satisfying, because I feel that one of the stories she’s been telling has reached a natural conclusion. I now feel that I know the fate of dragons and the Elderlings, in this world. Of course there’s room to tell more stories if she wanted to, because isn’t there always? But I mean, in broad strokes, this ending has told a complete story.

On the other hand, some of the plot turns were not particularly satisfying at all, because there was no real sense of danger. Which is a very strange thing to say about Hobb, who in the past has been willing to do almost anything to destroy her characters. Example, and without wanting to go into specifics, but there’s a character who is in legitimate danger of death, except that a different character depends on the survival of the first character, and I could not for a second believe the second character was actually in danger, and so therefore, transitively…

At other times, I still felt the danger, so I’m not saying she’s lost the touch or that this was bad, exactly. It just… is not what I was expecting. And maybe one way to reset my expectations is to return to my prior point about how it was clearly the end of a storyline in the overarching tale, and maybe that should leave some room for expecting a happy ending.

But that’s just it. I want Fitz to have a happy ending in the next trilogy, whenever I read it, but I don’t want to feel like it’s a given. Then again, none of the relationships that were in danger felt safe at all, until they were fully resolved. And Fitz’s failures, at least after the first couple of books, were always mostly on the relationship side. So maybe I should stop worrying about not having to worry about.

The Palace of Glass

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I have now read three books out of four in the Forbidden Library series, just really quickly compared to my usual pace. This is directly because the boy is just about obsessed with them. When I finished the third book a couple of nights ago, he asked me to immediately start book four, even though I have several books from the library he wanted to read and also a lot of new books in his very favorite series, Press Start[1], chronicling the video game adventures of Super Rabbit Boy, who he dressed as on “bring your favorite book character to school” day.

All of that to say, these are popular in the household. Also legit good; thanks to whoever recommended Django Wexler as an author. I should read one of his adult books sometime!

In The Palace of Glass, our heroine Alice makes plans to support her reactions to the information she gained in book two. …okay, yes, I’m trying to avoid spoilers, but that’s too damn vague. Let me try again.

As I was saying, Alice makes plans to take her revenge on the party or parties that were revealed in the second book as responsible for the death[2] of her father, back at the beginning of book one. But along the way to executing those plans, she gains an inkling of the cost that may accrue if she does. And, as it happens, the inkling she gains is not a fraction of the true cost that might exist. It’s a middle grade book, so I’m not surprised Wexler didn’t dig out the old chestnut about digging two graves, but if he had, he could quickly have turned it around to “or a thousand, and that’s only if you’re lucky.”

The only real kidbook sin the series commits is making Alice maybe a little overpowered. But honestly, I think he does a decent job of earning it? That said, what she’s been relying on so far shouldn’t help nearly as much in the final book. I look forward to learning how things land. Only, not for a few weeks yet. Maybe a couple months?

[1] Too short/young to bother reviewing, but they’re decent. Graphic novels, basically, which in addition to telling game stories have underlying lessons about sharing, family harmony, perseverance, that kind of thing. Good way to push life lessons, if you ask me. There’s a TV series on Peacock, which I should investigate sometime.
[2] Apparent death? Call me a softie, but I’m still not convinced that’s truly what happened. It remains to be seen!

Wicked: For Good

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Well that was certainly a sequel to Wicked.

Okay, look, I’m not trying to be mean to Wicked: For Good. I mean, yes the title is kind of dumb and completely undercuts what makes the song it is referencing clever. And yes that song is virtually the only good song in the second half of the musical, but you can hardly blame the movie for its source material, except insofar as it should not be slavishly devoted to it, but, I think creating new, better songs is more difficult to accomplish when you’re adapting a musical, versus just leaving out bad parts or creating new better parts when you’re adapting from some other medium.[1]

My point is, those caveats aside, I did like the first movie, and this has many of the strengths of that movie: lavishly beautiful sets that fulfill the promise of The Wizard of Oz 85 years later and fantastic main character chemistry, for examples. Of course, it is missing some strengths from the first movie as well, such as the aforementioned much less good music and 100% less Peter Dinklage.

Honestly, the biggest problem is that you cannot really just watch the first one and then stop. Maybe in a row without a break, the flaws are less obvious? That is my hope.

[1] Try to diagram that. Haha, I’m kidding, nobody except Mr. Candler remembers how to diagram sentences. I wish I could find him, to say hi.

The Mad Apprentice

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Learning that you can just search for stock at Half Price Books on the internet takes away pretty much all of the fun treasure hunting aspect of shopping at the bookstore, but at times like these when you don’t really want to just wait and see how long it will take to find a book and in the meantime your kid just completely forgets what happened last time, there is definitely something to be said for the gains in efficiency.

Which is to say, I’ve read the second book in Django Wexler’s Forbidden Library series, The Mad Apprentice. And yes, okay, it’s a middle grade book about an orphan who discovers she is heir to a magical world but also maybe there’s a guy she wants to kiss even if the physical act of kissing has not crossed her mind as a literal fact yet, even after two full books. But also, I really kind of love the concept.

  1. All books have some capacity for magic, even if it’s just one perfect turn of phrase
  2. Some books are a lot more magical than that, and open portals between locations on earth or to distant real or imagined worlds
  3. Some books imprison creatures, and defeating the creatures within the book (or getting them to agree to serve you) gives you their powers, in a variety of possible ways
  4. The people who have this power, Readers, are kind of the bad guys if you think about it much at all

Alice, the orphan I mentioned, has learned quite a bit about how to be a Reader, so now she’s ready to be thrust into their world due to an unexpected violent circumstance: the death of one of the Master Readers[1], and at the hands of his apprentice no less. Apparently, the other apprentices, in these circumstances[2], gather together and capture the offending apprentice and either deal with him themselves, or else bring him back for the justice of their masters. Which is how Alice finds herself in a group of four other apprentices as well as her friend(?) Isaac, hunting through a labyrinth that is slowly losing its magical power to a) perform whatever justice they decide but also to b) make sure none of the other apprentices loot any powerful book artifacts along the way. Because being able to trust the other people in your posse is way too much to ask, of course.

But also, shouldn’t the labyrinth be a lot more bereft of power and a lot less dangerous than this, without anyone to maintain it?

See what I mean? Good stuff.

[1] She is an apprentice, and the apprentices call them the Old Readers, since among other things they’re basically immortal, and it makes you wonder why have an apprentice system if you don’t really intend to pass on your power at some point, but why ruin a great premise by poking perfect logic at it? But my point was, I think Master Reader fits better.
[2] The fact that it happens often enough for there to be an accepted process is another reason to wonder why have an apprentice at all, but I said I wasn’t doing that.

City of Dragons

I’ll start off by saying for the record that there will be spoilers for earlier books in here. Couldn’t be helped. So if you’re just here to know whether I like Robin Hobb’s third Rain Wilds book so you can decide via my oh so timely intervention whether you ought to read it for yourself, the answer is I do.

As of Dragon Haven, all of the stunted, deformed dragons were successfully relocated. Also, the nice bird keepers really like each other, the musical elderling is having a rough time, the regular dragons remain completely self-absorbed, and that one guy from Bingtown who is a total dick is still a total dick. Thusly opens the second half of the series.

City of Dragons is about two things, more or less. The first thing it is about is exploring Kelsingra. Why do the dragons ancestrally remember this city so fondly? Does the fact that Fitz came here once have any bearing on the plot? Too bad none of them can fly and get here, due to the implausible geography of a vastly wide river that is also constantly in flood, innit? (It’s to a lesser extent also about Thymara’s continued inability to come to grips with her sexuality. She’s still less annoying than Katniss, to be clear.)

The second thing it’s about is the plot’s slow but inexorable progression towards… comeuppance? consequence? confluence? simple climax? Honestly, given the characters involved, I think all of these things apply. In short and with no important specifics, there are a lot of characters heading to Kelsingra. Tarman the liveship barge with supplies, for example, or Hest the trader’s son with perceived privilege.[1] And I think that of the many characters headed in that direction, very few of them have the slightest idea what they’re sailing into. And I think it’s going to be pretty explosive. (Mostly figuratively.)

Of course, this kind of thing can be problematic, cf some of The Wheel of Time. So knowing the next book is the last one helps a lot towards not being extremely disappointed by a book that is more than half “moving pieces around the board”, as does my confidence that this is again the first half of a long book instead of actually two books, even if (happily!) the ending is a lot less abrupt than the first time it happened.

[1] For reasons that make no sense if you have somehow read the previous books but not this one, his scenes were among my favorites.

How to Train Your Dragon (2025)

So, remember when that one movie about training dragons came out? And then 15 years later, they did a live action remake?

Look, I don’t want to say this How to Train Your Dragon is a shot for shot remake of the animated feature, just with human actors in place of the animated voice actors. For one thing, the new one is longer.

But… yeah, the truth is, it’s the same movie. And I already reviewed it once, so.

The Forbidden Library

I randomly found a Django Wexler book in the kid section of the library, which was a bit of a surprise. Turns out he wrote a YA series ten years ago, and since my son has a heck of an attention span for books, I took a chance. At usually a chapter a night, it took close to a month including one auto-renewal, but then again how fast do I read to myself?[1]

Important ingredients for a young adult fantasy series are a) an orphan b) who was orphaned deliberately by an external force who will later drive the plot, and also c) the orphan later discovers an unanticipated talent for a magical world that they previously had no awareness of. Also, if you’re a girl orphan, probably d) you’ll meet someone your age in similar but not necessarily identical circumstances, who you most likely cannot trust, and yet you really want to. I’d say I’m not sure why this is less common with boy orphans, but the truth is, I’m pretty sure of why.

Alice Creighton is an intelligent 12 year old girl living her best life (good at school, science, math, all of that) in Manhattan (I think) with her father at the height of the Great Depression (which does not really affect anyone in the story, they’re all rich here especially by the standards of the day), up until she learns fairies are real. A week later, her father is lost at sea and his estates are sold off to pay his debts, and she is the ward of her uncle Geryon, a man she had not previously known existed but who seems to be doing even better financially than her father had been (debts notwithstanding), what with his massive estate outside, I don’t know, Philadelphia maybe?[2]

There’s only one rule: don’t go into Geryon’s personal library at the edge of the forest without permission. But when you’re surrounded by vague maids who do only what they’re told and literal-mindedly at that, and then just kind of wind down waiting for their next instruction, and with talking cats and evil wasp fairies and distant uncles who have no real interest in you, and above all when you are the protagonist of a YA novel who has been given one rule to follow, plus also you like to read?

Well, I think we all know where this is going. (In case you do not: it’s going into The Forbidden Library.)

[1] It’s the comics, is what it is. Well, and the parenting. The storytimes, just for example, most of which are regarding books that are unreviewable, such as Geronimo Stilton and Dragon Masters. And the Three Investigators, which I should have continued to review, but failed. (I’m not sure what happened there.)
[2] If you’re wondering why I don’t know where anything happened, it’s because the cities are mentioned like once each at the beginning of the book and then never matter again. If everything happens at your massive country estate, who cares what state it’s in? Or nation, honestly.

Fairest Vol. 3: The Return of the Maharaja

I don’t even know the last time I read a Fables-adjacent book, nor what it was[1]. And I’m not even sure how many books are left. I think not many? I should probably zerg rush the ending, but that would make it still months away. Just not years.

In any event, this book was way way off in the periphery of the series. The land of Indus (think The Jungle Book) is no longer threatened by that one woodcutter’s evil empire, since it doesn’t really exist anymore. But all the villages and palaces and suchlike have been basically emptied of able-bodied men who went off to lose the war, leaving only the elderly, the infirm, the very young, the harems[2], and of course the [other] women.

Which brings us to the main character, Nalayani, protector of her village from roving packs of dhole, which are wolf-adjacent animals from the Indian subcontinent. (I had heard of them before, but not with any commonality.) Anyway, she must now quest to the new maharaja I mentioned to ask for help with the problem, only to find herself embroiled in a civil war and with a pretty unlikely ally, at least if you remember previous events in the series, which I must admit I did not very well.

I have no idea if I should know who Nalayani is as a fabled character? I definitely do not, which did not negatively impact my enjoyment of the story, and anyway there were other characters I did recognize. If the series wasn’t nearly over, I’d think big things were afoot in the main sequence as a result of this one. As it is… maybe this was a happy ending?

[1] I mean, now that I’ve searched it and linked it, I maybe know. But I did not before.
[2] If you happen to live in the maharaja’s palace, at least, and this I suppose explains the presence of the new maharaja, Shah Ah Ming.

Psycho Goreman

You learn basically everything you need to know about Psycho Goreman[1] in the opening text crawl, when we learn that he comes from the planet Gigax. These are people who are definitely in a joking mood, and want you to be in on it. …for certain values of “you”.

There are these two siblings, and the younger sister is abusive to the nebbish older brother. (10 and 7, maybe?) For example, in their regular game of crazy ball[2], if he wins he gets something pretty regular, I forget what because it was reasonable, while if she wins, he has to dig a hole and then bury himself in it. And of course he never wins.

Anyway, in the course of digging the hole, they uncover the hidden burial site of an immortal dark power bent on galactic domination, and wacky hijinx ensue. It’s astonishing how close this comes to being a family-friendly movie[3]. You would have to change almost none of the plot, but man would you have to change a lot of the special effects.

My point is, you shouldn’t watch it with your kids. Even if it does have a little bit of a lesson right at the end. You should watch it if you like gross-out horror comedy or were ever kind of a dweeb, and if you’re not allergic to children in movies.

[1] PG for short, but since the movie is unrated, I guess they did not compromise on their artistic vision.
[2] Dodgeball but with a Calvinball-influenced ruleset
[3] There’s even a musical interlude in the middle, almost more of a music video, entitled Frig You. Which is a perfect encapsulation of how it’s almost family-friendly.

How to Train Your Dragon (2010)

Fifteen years later, and also a remake, and I’m only just now seeing the original How to Train Your Dragon. In fact, it’s because of the remake. There are new toys, and my kids like dragons, so they have the new toys, which begged the question, shouldn’t they know what’s the deal with these toys? And Bob’s your uncle.

The plot twist [that I’ve already revealed] being, shouldn’t I know what’s the deal with these toys? Which brings me to a fun fact, in which I can objectively prove that previews are getting worse. I did not learn until 2025 that the dragons were nominally the bad guys of the movie. I always took it straightforwardly that the loser kid who never fit in found a way to be awesome via dragon training, not that he was supposed to be dragon killing this whole time! And I mean, it’s not really a spoiler for the movie, since you learn it during the opening scene narration. But I thought it was a clever subversion of the original previews’ expectations, and now the current previews are all, we cannot subvert anything, as our audience is dumber than ever. Or something like that. My point is, fuck[1] screw previews.

Anyway.

So there’s this Viking kid who is scrawny and engineering-minded, instead of being large and strong and (let’s say) single-minded. Which means he doesn’t fit in. Oh, sure, he still wants to kill dragons, same as everybody else, he just wants to use tools instead of muscles to do it. What a maroon! But once he actually manages to use said tools to get a dragon in a position where he can kill it, he… comes up with a new plan.

This is a kid movie, so the result of the new plan is that he ends up fitting in after all, and everyone learns a valuable lesson about accepting people for who they are. And, okay, as a parent, that’s a good lesson. Also, as a parent, I recognize that sometimes it’s a lesson parents need to learn as much as kids do. But the real point is, the actual plot underlying these lessons is at least halfway decent as well. Plus, riding around on a dragon is cool. I would not, I think, affirmatively recommend this movie to anyone unless you really like dragons and can live with kid movies, but I would not disrecommend the movie to anyone, if they were about to be in front of it. Because, you know, it’s fun!

[1] Family movie, I should watch my language.