Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 36

Book review: Abandon by Meg Cabot

I NEVER ask for refunds on books, but this is one time I wish I could. I got Abandon based on the blurb, and it started out okay. That’s probably the only reason I’m not giving this dreck one star. But I started feeling annoyed by the midway point when I still had no clue what the plot was about, and then around 75% I actively loathed the main character because she’s dense enough to become a singularity.

Pierce Oliviera is a girl who died and came back after meeting a “death entity,” John Hayden. John is totally in love with Pierce, but he goes about showing it in that special abusive stalker kind of way. John reminds me of Patch from Hush, Hush, and for all the same reasons. He’s manipulative, creepy, and acts like a dick 99.9% of the time. And of course Pierce can’t stop thinking about him. Because abusive boyfriends are on every girl’s wish list this season, right?

So I didn’t like John from the start, but I figured oh well, maybe like Hush, Hush, the story in Abandon will make up for the shitty romance. But no, the story is scattered and intentionally told in the most confusing ways possible to delay getting to the point of the story in the final chapter. And Pierce goes from being slightly dense to utterly, irredeemably stupid. Near the end, the villain says that she’s too stupid to even stay dead, and I found myself agreeing with the villain. The whole plan was meant to hurt John? Great, he’s a dick and deserves some pain. When you’ve got me rooting for the villain to kill your heroine and hero, YOU’RE DOING SOMETHING WRONG.

And after thinking over it for a few hours, I kinda hate the author for the villains being so poorly thought out. They’re supposedly the furies, those pissy women from mythology, but the author claims that they’re just “angry spirits” who don’t like where they’ve been damned. SO THEY ENFORCE THE RULES OF THE UNDERWORLD and torment John. Yeah, and they also aren’t exactly damned, since they go wherever they want, and can possess almost any human, kinda like demons. And the main villain isn’t even a human. They’re a fury in physical form that had children on earth. THIS MAKES NO SENSE. The author obviously went to the trouble of looking up the Hades/Persephone myth to write this, but then she not only screws up who the furies are, she also screws up her own interpretation of them.

Plus, what a convoluted and useless plan the furies had. They spent something like 30 years working on this idea to torment John, when earlier chapters make it clear they can just go to his castle at any time and rip him to pieces at will. Why bother with all this other bullshit when you can already hurt the guy? It make-a no sense.

In the end, John “protects” Pierce by stripping her of her freedom. And that’s the ending? No resolution of the problem, just the dick boyfriend proving how pathetic he really is by sticking his woo-man property in a prison? Oh be still my beating heart. Or actually, I think that’s nausea making my stomach gurgle.

About the only good thing I can say is, at least I won’t have to waste any more money on this series. I give Abandon two stars, and wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.

Game Review: Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation for PS Vita

I think it was a year ago that I bought Assassin’s Creed: Liberation at Lucca Comics and Games, and I didn’t get much play time out of it for a proper review. I had Project Diva f holding my attention, and after getting back from the con, I reached a point in the third sequence of the game that was so agonizingly stupid that I just quit. It was a chase scene where, to draw out the chase, the floor of a ramp collapses under my character like balsa wood even though a much larger male character had just stomped up it with no problems. But I’m finally burning out on Project Diva f after putting into 180 hours into it, and since I’m a little short on funds for new Vita games, I thought I’d take out AC:L for a second attempt.

Before I get to the review, I want to mention that the way I game is different from the way I read books. If I’m loving a book, I’m gonna burn through the pages in an all-night bender to try and finish as fast as possible. If I love a game, I tend to play it in little chunks, and when I hate a game is when I play it all in one night. The logic being that I might as well get it over with and limit my suffering. Well I played AC:L from sequence three where my previous game last year had been saved until I got to a glitched mission in sequence six. I couldn’t sort out how to go back to a previous sequence to fix the glitch, and I had to restart the game and start from the beginning. So when I say I played this all night long, I mean I played the whole thing, start to finish. This means the story, such as it is, is still fresh in my mind, and it might not have been so clear if I’d been able to play the game through on my old save.

I should also go ahead and mention the stuff that didn’t bug me too much. The voice acting was decent, and the character models looked pretty good. The music is okay. Not great, but not annoying. In some games, that’s really the best one can hope for. And I kind of liked Aveline’s character, and her comrade in arms, Gerald. Gerald has a crush on Aveline, and sometimes it shows when he gets all flustered and cute. I’m going to head-cannon the ending so that Gerald and Aveline eventually got married to make lots of little assassins.

And now we’re done with stuff I liked. I don’t even know where to begin with the stuff I didn’t like, or outright despised. There’s so much to cover, from the kludgy controls to the frequent glitches, from the shoehorned Vita features to the lousy story; it’s all just one long blur of bleh.

The story is a hodgepodge of cliche plot twists, none of which were hard to guess, and yet, they also didn’t make much sense. But then, lots of things don’t make sense in this game, like why the remaining guards of a gubernatorial character I assassinated would all just leave the room and give us time for a private chat, or how every single one of Aveline’s stabbed victims managed a lengthy death speech without couching up a single blood bubble. Or how a slave rescued by Aveline speaks with one accent as a slave, and then manages to pick up a posh English accent in a relatively short time. Or why Aveline can kick down water wooden towers with one stomp, but couldn’t shoulder open a wooden door. Or how Aveline isn’t gutted and/or hung by the local constables because SHE LOOKS EXACTLY THE FUCKING SAME IN ALL OF HER OUTFITS AS SHE DOES IN HER WANTED POSTERS. She doesn’t even wear glasses, so she doesn’t get out on the Superman defense.

But I’m gonna give most of the story a pass because it’s video game writing, which is like several steps below your average Hollywood action movie hack job. It DOES bother me that in video games, we’ve had all these advancements in graphics, music, and sound effects, and yet, the writing is still somewhere under the quality of fan-fic as written by a sugar-stoned twelve-year-old.

But no, let me set that aside and bring up the enemy AI, which is pathetic. Enemy guards can’t see me if I’m over ten feet away, even if I can easily see them, and then they turn around and develop the ability to see through walls and floors as soon as I get close enough to them to trigger their attack mode. There’s no really finesse to fighting with them, nor do they have any fighting tactics aside from “Let’s all rush her!” You whack the one attack button over and over unless it’s a boss or one of their slightly more skilled minions. Then you have to circle them and step in for a one-shot-one-kill backstab death.

That’s another goofy thing I noticed. If I stab someone in the back, bam, dead in one blow. But if I stab them in the chest and face, some enemies, even low-level thugs, take a LOT more stabs to put down. It’s not even a case of being aware of the attack or not, because I can let a guy run me down an ally, circle around him, and splat, he’s a new organ donor. Nobody in this game wears armor, either, so why does a frontal assault with the same weapons take all that extra time over stabbing them in the back?

Then there’s the controls. OH MY GOD, those controls. I could be running straight ahead over the rooftops of New Orleans, and at the edge of a roof, instead of jumping straight where I had my analog stick aimed, Aveline just veers off at some random angle to the left or right, usually plunging down to a painful fall right next to a bunch of startled guards. This happened frequently enough that I sometimes just walked on the ground to avoid the problem altogether.

Also, when you have to do an escort mission, you command your escorted character to wait or follow with the same button you use to open and close chests or interact with objects. Well, guess what? You can’t open a treasure chest on an escort mission. All it does is issues commands to the escorts. This particular problem is really galling because if you needed to make a “stay/follow” command for the occasional escort and you ran out of buttons, the touchscreen is right there. You can add buttons to the screen, really. Lots of my Vita games do this with no problems.

This game doesn’t even really use the touchscreen except for one gimmick of opening envelopes, (yes, really) but the game does shoehorn in lame as fuck and glitchy gimmicks for the back tough panel, internal accelerometer and rear camera. You use the back touchpad to “row” canoes, and they control worse than a battle tank with a busted tread. You use the rear camera to “expose” secrets on documents by holding the camera up to a bright light. Only, it doesn’t work so well, and even waving my Vita in front of our chandelier with all the lights on couldn’t convince the game that it was quite bright enough. And then there’s a puzzle with a rolling ball in a maze, hands down one of the most infuriating obstacles in the game because the accelerometer simply does not recognize how the device in oriented. Laying the Vita flat down on a table, the ball was still bouncing back and forth like I’d tilted it. And then I could tilt it hard in any direction and watch the ball roll the other way. A pathetically simple maze that should have taken me thirty seconds to whip through instead took ten fucking minutes to complete.

And then there’s the map problems, where I would see that some loot was available in an area, but even after turning on my “eagle vision” I still couldn’t find the loot. Oh, and I collected a whole bunch of diary pages, none of which registered in my inventory because I hadn’t yet triggered the cut scene with Aveline’s father giving her the first page. I made all that effort to try and gather all of them, and according to the game, I only found three pages. (And while I’m on the topic, most of the pages were just laying out in the open. Uh, no. After close to a decade exposed to the weather, those pages would have disintegrated. These pages could have been hidden inside buildings, and then maybe I might believe they survived. Though why all these diary pages were hidden around town doesn’t make much sense in the first place. It’s more video game logic, to give the completists something else to drive themselves nuts looking for.)

The main thing to keep in mind is, I wasn’t having fun with this game even when everything was working right. Even during my best runs over the roofs or trees, I never felt immersed in the game. I was given a checklist of things to do, and I did them. At no time did I feel good about completing a sequence or killing my mark. But I lost count of the numbers of times I growled or launched into a cussing tirade about the problems in this game.

And while I’m growling about problems, even though I said the character models looked great, most of the rest of the 3D models look like something held over from the PS2 days. We’re talking octagon trees with single plane images simulating pine needles. The smaller plant life looks equally as hidious, and most of it isn’t able to bend around the character. So Aveline’s blazing run can be halted by tall plants in some cases.

Oh, and the invisible corridors. At one point, Aveline became incapable of even climbing a mild incline because the game has a set path for her to play in, and until you unlock the whip, they just pretend that their super-duper assassin is temporarily too derpy to climb stairs.

And there’s visible corridors too. During my second run-through of the Bayou missions, I thought I’d just unlock all the scenic viewpoints all at once. But no, roughly a hundred yards out from two of these outposts was a glimmering wall. Should one manage to get past the wall, the game says, “Area unavailable. Desynchronization imminent.”

There’s also no sense of progression to the game, as you never level up or get new combos. Occasionally, you’re given new items, and I admit the whip did help in dealing with larger crowds of enemies a little. A LITTLE.

There’s shops to buy new weapons and clothing with, but the clothing is just color variants, and the other weapons for sale don’t really do anything to change things up. I didn’t even have to buy ammo because I sorted out that I got free reloads when I died. So sometimes I’d let some guard kill me to reload rather than pay 2500 dollars for five fucking blow darts. When I got to the end of the game, I had 60,000 dollars because the shops were just about fucking useless. And there’s supposedly trade vessels so I can make even more money, but I couldn’t give two shits about owning every costume and weapon when they all do pretty much the same job as my starting equipment.

I’m giving Assassin’s Creed: Liberation two stars, and I’d have a hard time recommending it to anyone besides the folks who like the other Assassin’s Creed games. I felt like it was a waste of time and money, and I’ve had more fun with cheaper indie games with low-res graphics and chiptune music. Ubisoft released this game recently as an HD upgrade for Xbox and PS3, supposedly to recoup lost profits because the Vita hasn’t moved many units. But really, I think the game didn’t sell well because it’s a dog, and an ugly dog at that.

Book review: The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

The Night Circus is one of the few books that I bought based off of glowing praise from people online, and after forcing myself to finish it, I cannot see what the appeal is. There is no personality in any of the characters, nor the narrator, and the premise falls as flat for me as the romantic elements did.

This is a story about two old dickheads who have a centuries long disagreement about which school of magic is more versatile, so they force other people to train using their techniques and force said students to fight each other until one dies. This story focuses on the fight of the current crop of students, Celia and Marco, both of whom might have a molecule of personality between them. The titular circus is the venue for their competition, a place in which both students seek to outdo the other in their tricks.

It’s an idea that has potential in theory, but there’s nothing in this story that provoked a reaction in me. I should at least feel something for Celia, who is trained by way of physical torture by her father. But her story, much like Marco’s, is told as a series of uninteresting passages leading up to the competition itself, and neither character is given any chance to develop a personality. Their romance is just as bland as their backstory, and as bland as the circus they work in.

The magic system is pure nonsense. Physical torture somehow makes Celia capable of being an illusionist, while Marco’s scholarly pursuits allow him to manipulate people’s minds. Both cast spells that in more capable hands might be interesting. But the execution is flat and dull, always feeling like it might get more exciting within a few pages. It never does, and the final chapters are an even slower drag than the rest of the book.

I’m left wondering what I was supposed to take away from this. Is it that love conquers all? Because if so, the ending doesn’t do much to inspire romantic sentiments. Is it meant to sell me on the power of stories and their effect on others? I cannot say, and if it is the case, this particular story fails on all counts to inspire me. I kept reading because the premise had potential to be fascinating. But it’s an unrealized potential, and this is a long slow ride following a cast of dull, flat characters.

I give The Night Circus two stars, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. I can’t say I’ll be looking forward to anything else by this author, and I wish I could have cut myself off instead of holding out hope that this might eventually get interesting. It never does, and I consider that a worse travesty than a book I openly despised. I feel nothing at all for this story, and the only plus side I can mention is, at least it won’t be on my mind much longer past the point of me posting this review.

Book review: City of Fallen Angels by Cassandra Clare

Feh. That was the first word out of my mouth at the last page of this book, and I am all kinds of annoyed by the villain and the ending of City of Fallen Angels. I can’t say I hated the entire book, because the various subplots kept me going though roughly 75% of the book. But the whole way there, I was wondering, can we just get to the point and say how this is related to Sebastian; AKA Jonathon, AKA: The really real Clary’s brother?

When it finally does get around to that point, the point is stupid. All of the heroes become dense as fenceposts, and the villain is able to slip through everyone’s collective enchantments and attack Jace and Clary without anyone noticing. Why? Because none of the heroes feels like talking to each other this week. About anything.

“How are you, Clary?”

(Her boyfriend got possessed by a greater demon and tried to kill her. He’s in therapy now.)

“I’m fine, Simon. You?”

(Cultists have been trying to kill him. An elder vampire is stalking him. He has two girlfriends, and no plans to enlighten either until they found out themselves. His girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend just showed up. He fucking ate someone. DHOOM IS ON HIS HEAD. )

“Never better. Lovely weather we’re having this time of year.”

This is like every single conversation paraphrased. Nobody wants to bother anybody else about their “leeeetle” problems. So nobody talks, and nobody notices half the cast just wandering off into a trap.

And then that ending. FEH.

I can’t say the trip was all bad, but it was slow. Painfully slow at times. When the most exciting reading in a paranormal book is a vampire double dipping from the friends’ dating pool, you’re doing something wrong. And really, it’s only the soap opera relationship bits that were keeping me reading.

But I think right around the point that Claire finds a book with a diagram neatly outlining the villain’s plot in four scary illustrations that the whole thing took a dive in a puddle of stupid, and everything having to do with this villain’s insertion into the backstory feels like a long slow waddle in the same stupid puddle. This is one of those villains who can be everywhere, and was, we just didn’t know it yet. They can somehow sneak into Shadowhunter headquarters despite being a greater demon, and their whole plan summed up in short is “At long last, I can be a good mommy.”

FFFFFFFFEEEEEEHHHHH!

The thing is, the villain didn’t even need Simon, or Clary. All she needed was Jace, and involving all the others is actually kind of pointless. For all her ancientness and supposed brains, her plot…it’s like, “Man, I’m so confident I can win this fight, I’ma bring along two of your most resourceful friends to my big reveal and let them plot to kill me.”

And then that ending. It’s a plot twist cliffhanger, and the person pulling it IS DEAD. D-E-A-D. As a fucking doornail. The first part of the ritual actually made him deader-er-er. But hey, the book is already this stupid, why not take a few more laps in the stupid puddle?

Which leaves me in a bit of a pissy place. Because the whole plot of the next book is laid out in the last three sentences of this book, and I know eventually, I’ll have to read the next. The first three were decent, (but book one was close to this for the same convenient but dumb reasons) and maybe the next book can recover from the fumble and work something worthwhile out of this. The first half of this story was mildly interesting during the touchy feely bits. But I hate the laziness of this villain’s story, and I really hate the ending.

I’m giving City of Fallen Angels 3 stars. It’s the latter quarter of the book where my eyelid started twitching, and before that I was mostly okay with the slow ride through teenage angst-land. So I can’t say I completely hated it. I only partially hated it. And I hate even more that I have to read what happens next. If it ends up sucking, I might just self-erase the memories of the last two books and pretend this series ended as a trilogy.

And in conclusion, FEH.

Book review: The Dream Thieves by Maggie Stiefvater

After the ending of the first book in this series, The Raven Boys, I knew I had to find out what happened next. But months went by with no sign of The Dream Thieves at my local shops, so I had to finally resort to buying this one online.

I think it took me maybe three days to read this, and it’s rather good. Not as strong or tense as the first book, but definitely still a fun ride. And, it ends on a similar cliffhanger, and there’s no chance of seeing the sequel anytime soon. Well…shit.

There’s two new characters introduced this time, one that won me over slowly, and one that irritated me not for his actions, but for his sudden appearance. First is the one I liked, Mr. Gray, or the Gray Man, a contract killer who’s been sent to look for Ronan without knowing that’s who he’s looking for. He’s been told he’s looking for an object, not a person, and learning what he’s really meant to find comes as a major shock to him. Mr. Gray, like everyone else, comes to the town psychics to consult with them, but more surprising is that romantic sparks fly between him and Maura, Blue’s mother. This relationship is interesting and helps flesh out Mr. Gray as a real person instead of just being a hired heavy. (Maura didn’t need help being fleshed out because she’s already interesting, being a psychic mom.)

On the other hand, there’s Kavinsky, another member of the Aglionby boy’s school where Gansey, Ronan, and Adam attend. My problem isn’t with his character, it’s with his sudden appearance and importance. The way he’s described, it seems he should have had a presence somewhere in the first book, even if only as a passing reference. He’s described as being as well known as Gansey, up to the point that even Blue knows all about some of his legendary exploits. And yet, he also seems to just appear out of nowhere, conveniently serving as a foil to Ronan as well as being a mentor, and then ultimately, an antagonist who “just wants to watch the world burn.” Except he didn’t exist until this moment, when he was needed to service the plot. One might almost think Ronan invented Kavinsky as a convenient target for all his pent up rage, and everyone else has fallen victim to Ronan’s super dream powers.

A lot of the book is made up of arguments. Adam argues with Blue, Adam argues with Gansey, Gansey argues with Ronan, Ronan argues with Declan, Ronan argues with Blue, and nobody really resolves anything. In between these fights are where the good stuff lies, and almost all these topics feel like retreads from the first book. It’s a lot of loose ends that I just have to assume will be left over for the next book.

The end result of these arguments is that I now feel more invested in the budding relationship between Maura and Mr. Gray than I do in whether Blue will kiss Gansey or not. I also feel cheated because the blurb said, “And a kiss will be shared,” but the kiss in question isn’t with who I expected it to be shared with, nor is it really all that emotional. The side story romance between Maura and Mr. Gray is way more interesting than anything that happens to Blue, Gansey, or Adam.

The story plays out to two conflicts, both of which feel a bit anti-climatic after all the buildup. Both were over so fast that I was left asking, “Wait, that’s it?” And then the epilogue resolves Adam and Ronan’s conflicts while ending on a cliffhanger that makes me more invested in the side characters than the main cast. Also, I have a random thought that Mr. Gray’s car should have died during the slow chase scene, but I can’t explain why without spoiling a lot of the story.

In the end, The Dream Thieves leaves me wanting more and less. I wanted more answers and less arguments. I suppose this makes it sound like the book was a disappointment, and it really wasn’t. It’s just that the questions I wanted answers for remained out of reach. The direction the story took drained my interest in the main characters and instead distracted me with tangents and delaying tactics.

I have no idea when the next book will be out, and I know I’ll be eager to read it when it finally ships. But it’s not for the reasons that I had coming out of the first book. I have new questions that take precedence over the ones I’d cared about in the first book. I also have this sinking feeling that the third book will only offer me new questions before ending in another cliffhanger.

I’d still give The Dream Thieves four stars. It’s an interesting story, just not the one I’d been hoping for. And it’s not always a bad thing to be disappointed for a little while, if the trip in between is memorable. This one certainly was, even if it at times seemed to be drawing my attention away from the main plot and into several random tangents.

Book review: Carpe Corpus by Rachel Caine

I’ve plowed through the first six books of this series in what feels like record time for me, but that’s because I did NOTHING ELSE besides read. But at long last comes a book that doesn’t end on a cliffhanger, answers a lot of questions about the current plots, and leaves just enough closure where I can pause from the series and take a breath before diving into the next book.

Carpe Coprus did not start off exactly where the last book left off, so some of what was missed out on in the following months is briefly recapped before moving ahead with the story. Bishop still has Claire, Shane, Eve, and Michael separated, and now has full control of Morganville. Or so it seems, and soon Amelie makes an appearance to explain where she’s been, and how she plans to fight back in the face of what seems like certain defeat. Bishop, who is certain of the degree of control he has over his victims, decides to allow Shane to be released from custody, in exchange for a very heavy price. Shane, Michael, and Eve then suggest as usual that Claire should just sit at home and ride out the storm. But obviously, this isn’t and hasn’t been Claire’s style right from the start.

Claire at the start of the book is being slightly silly in insisting over and over “there’s no such thing as magic.” She’s working with and fighting against vampires and aided by a steampunk-style difference engine powered by the soul of one of Myrnin’s former victims, and she’s intimately familiar with teleporting around town using magic doorways. Denial at this point is stubbornness of a satirical level, in my opinion. But aside from this streak of denial, she’s also become a much harder and more focused person. No shock, as life in a war zone will either make you faster and sharper, or it makes you dead.

Shane and Claire finally get their moment alone with no interruptions, although having it happen a day after Claire’s birthday in the circumstances as they were, it felt…kinda like a penny porn setup. “Oh, she’s legal now, time to get buck wild.” I suppose I knew it had to happen this way, because YA is all about the “wait until you’re legal” lecture. But considering what had just happened not hours before said deed, I can’t find it all that likely that Shane would just turn on like a lamp. But again, I expected things to turn out like this, cause some rules in YA, you don’t break unless you don’t really want to be marketed as YA.

From this point on, the book returns to the endgame between Amelie and Bishop, and because Claire is a creature of habit, it’s not too hard to guess when her random trips out will lead her in a roundabout way to the location of the final battle, even though everyone and her mother told her not to be there. This is always the case. Claire says, “I’ll just go to classes and pretend to be normal,” and normal gets ripped out from under her and rolled off like a used carpet.

Also given that I’ve been reading all the books so close together, it wasn’t hard to see the foreshadowing about certain characters showing up late in the game, nor was it hard to predict how the last few chapters would go. I got to a point of almost too perfect closure at 85% into the book, and I thought, “No, there’s still time for one more disaster.” Yep, there was, and yep, I knew how that would go down, too.

But then the last chapter closes on a “happy for now” kind of ending. It’s like the season finale to a TV series, with enough closure to cap the events from the past books, while still leaving enough wiggle room to move on to new stories in the next season. Amelie regains control of the town, and new changes go into place granting the humans more security from the vampires, even including them being allowed to carry stakes and other weapons for self-defense. There’s still plenty of work to be done to rebuild in the wake of this war, but the humans and the vampires have reached a state of compromise that could make future stories very interesting if both sides honor the truce. Part of me expects trouble from both sides, and soon.

I’m glad to take a small break and breathe before moving into that new territory, but I’m also impressed at how quickly this series addicted me. I really haven’t read anything quite this engrossing in a long time, and even series I really liked, I didn’t feel this much need to keep pushing forward and ignore everything else. (And I do mean everything. I may need a bath now. I know, TMI.)

I give Carpe Corpus five stars, and I highly recommend this series to anyone looking for a new vampire addiction.

Book review: Lord of Misrule by Rachel Caine

Getting into Lord of Misrule just minutes after I finished the last book, Feast of Fools, I knew this was going to be a grim book, and I can’t say I was disappointed. With the vampires of Morganville engaged in the opening salvos of a war, the human characters find themselves put in a bad position. By remaining loyal to the town vampires, they are provoking the hostility of Bishop, a vampire who is willing to destroy Amelie’s army and turn her carefully crafted experiment into a stockyard of free snacks. Either way, the humans are slaves, but in this case, the new master is much, much worse than the old ones.

This does not stop a lot of humans in the town from rising up, sensing the chance to tip the balance of power away from their vampire masters. The humans also lash out at other humans who are still loyal to their masters, or to those who abused their patronage to torment other humans. Think along the lines of field slaves rising up and including the house slaves in their quest for mob justice. Adding to these various warring factions is the return of Shane’s vampire hunting father, who also sees this war as the perfect chance to take over and wipe out the vampires for good.

At this point the pace of the books is rushing by so fast, it’s hard to keep track of everyone. But there were several characters who were “off-screen” for a long time, and I found myself worrying about where they were, and how they were holding up in the meantime. Even the school bully Monica had me worried in her absences, although her past actions have set her up for the things she suffers through in this book. But she’s a psychopath incapable of empathy, and even after yet another rescue by Claire, she’s still a wretched person incapable of the slightest hint of gratitude. Which shows the level of writing talent on display here. I know Monica is a hose monster, and I still worry about her when she’s put in danger.

Between the plotting of Amelie and Myrnin, Claire and her friends are pushed right into the heart of Bishop’s new lair, and then…the book cliff-hangs at probably the worst possible moment. Seriously, I was dead tired after reading three books back-to-back, but that ending was so very messed up, and I almost thought of starting another book to keep reading until dawn the next day. As it is, I barely made coffee this morning before picking up Carpe Corpus from Amazon.

Claire’s character becomes a lot harder in this book, as she’s forced to make some really tough decisions with very little time to think on them. She also openly speaks up to all of the vampire elders, and even to Bishop before the situation goes all pear-shaped. This does not seem particularity wise, especially now that her parents have moved into town and everyone knows it. But it is brave, and it shows how much stronger Claire is than the vast majority of townspeople who just nod and bow their heads. Claire may be a slave like everyone else, but she’s one of the few willing to speak to her masters in something less than a respectful tone.

But as the book creeped toward the end, I just knew there was no way to resolve this conflict, or even to reach a lull in the war. And I was right, and the ending puts Claire and her friends in even greater danger, with all of them separated, and most now slaves to a new, much crueler master. I want to hope the next book will bring the town back to some kind of status quo, but the tone of this book combined with my understanding that this is a fifteen-book series tells me that the next book could be very grim, and with no sight of a resolution anywhere on the horizon. This war could go on for a very long time, and it’s entirely possible that Amelie might abandon Claire and her friends, sacrificing them as pawns in her long war strategy against Bishop.

None of this is a complaint, by the way. The story has upped the stakes into a full-out war, and no one is safe at this point. Not from the vampires, and not from other humans either. And one of the things that’s keeping me hooked in so deeply is that sense that there’s no easy resolutions around the corner. This story is only going to get uglier as it goes along, like any war should.

Which is why I’m giving Lord of Misrule five stars, and why, as soon as I post this review, I’ll be jumping into book 6, Carpe Corpus. I need to know where this is going, and I really cannot wait to find out. I mean, I have to put everything else on hold until I can find a place to breath and pause. Given the tone of the series so far, I have a sinking feeling that won’t happen until book 15. And even then maybe not.

Book review: Feast of Fools by Rachel Caine

“Zoe, you didn’t really read two books from the same series in one day did you?” you ask. No, I read THREE books from the same series in one day. I would have posted the other two reviews last night, but after plowing through three books and roughly 820 pages in a little under ten hours, I was just slightly brain-fried and in need of sleep.

So, in my review of the last book in this series, Midnight Alley, I said I couldn’t see how they could keep making the stakes higher for everyone involved before one of the books had to back down on the danger level. Well Feast of Fools isn’t the book to do it, and neither is the next book, Lord of Misrule. Both ended on such huge cliffhangers that I literally HAD to buy and start the next volumes to find out what happens next. As soon as I’d had my coffee made this morning, I bought book 6, Carpe Corpus. There’s 15 books in this series, and at the rate I’m going, I expect to be done within a few weeks, provided my debit card doesn’t run out of funds first.

So, what could raise the stakes higher after the revelations in the last book? Oh, how about a war among the vampires? A new arrival in town, Bishop (or Mr. Bishop, as both get used throughout the book a lot) claims to be Amelie’s father, and at his arrival, Amelie and all the elder vampires begin advising Claire and friends to keep their heads down and let the vampires sort this out. Which would be easier if one of Bishop’s lieutenants wasn’t actively stalking Shane with nothing short of rape on her mind.

And at this point, aside from Claire’s dad, not one father in this series is really worth a shit. Eve’s dad was ready to sell her off as meat at eighteen. Shane’s dad was an abusive drunk long before he became a vampire hunter, and Bishop is the classic male vampire, eternally fixated on his place of superiority over everyone else. Nobody is good in this town, not even the people who are aware of the situation and just turn their heads to keep up the motions of life.

Which brings me to a rambling complaint about repeated the use of the word pedophile on one of the vampires. One of the bit characters, Miranda, is a fifteen-year-old psychic who is being abused by a vampire named Charles, and he’s repeatedly referred to as a pedophile by various other characters. This is a hypocritical moral judgement, especially considering other events in the previous books. It’s okay to the townspeople that the vampires eat some of the college students as “surplus stock,” and the human males who use roofies to date rape college girls are just let off with warnings multiple times like it’s no big deal. But a vampire preying on someone under the age of eighteen is somehow morally reprehensible? Seriously?

At one point, Claire does get around to thinking how Miranda became a victim because everyone pushed her away. They’re uncomfortable with her visions and shun her, but almost nobody bears any responsibility for her. With no one to protect her in a town full of predators, it isn’t that surprising that she would fall into the clutches of anyone willing to treat her with some small sign of affection. Miranda is alone because the other people don’t want to see the truth, and once she’s been made a victim by way of their neglect, suddenly all those people who turned away feel justified in their moral outrage. Even Eve falls into this mental trap, and she was supposedly one of Miranda’s friends before pushing her away, too.

More than that, it’s a hollow sentiment, a false morality that doesn’t fit with the tone of the town. Parents beating their kids in this town is okay and is swept under the rug. The cops actively cover up murders for the vampires, and the college campus is a factory for date rapists. But somehow, this one vampire is supposedly more evil because he isn’t willing to wait three years to sink his fangs into virgin flesh? Yeah….no, I’m not feeling that.

I’d want to say this is a carefully crafted comment about the hypocrisy of the characters casually dropping the word pedophile, but then there’s the relationship between Shane and Claire. Shane’s an impulsive character, one prone to make rash and rushed decisions on everything except Claire, and then suddenly he goes all white knight and won’t have sex with her despite her repeatedly asking him for it. The discussions that come up around this subplot, in particular with Eve, feel like the characters are being pushed out of the way for an adult lecture on abstinence. I know, it’s a staple of YA to enshrine female virginity as all-important, but again, in this town, in this setting, it feels a lot like the author stepping into the story to deliver a lecture that feels forced every single time.

This is something that’s bugged me about several of the books, but I think for further reviews, I’ll just let it go. Whether the author intended to make a point or not about the hypocrisy of her characters, the use of this one word rubs me the wrong way because of how readily people in this town accept other equally terrible crimes, Claire and her friends included. It doesn’t feel like a commentary on their flawed morals, but instead feels like a nestled lecture hidden among all the other crimes that don’t receive this much attention.

But okay, setting that aside, the rest of the book was all about this looming war between the vampires, and the story cliff-hangs on the opening attack and puts Claire and her friends in the middle of the two armies. It’s a grim setup for the next book, and the rising intensity made it impossible not to buy the next book in the series just minutes after I finished reviewing the last book. I didn’t even bother writing up a review on this book before I’d bought the next and dug into it. I feel like I need to know how this story unfolds, and I can’t even wait a day to get back into the story. So, setting aside my rambly complaints about a recurring subplot, I have to say this series is hitting all the right buttons to keep me hooked in.

I give Feast of Fools four stars, and I cannot recommend this series highly enough without resorting to novella-length tomes of gushing.

Book review: Midnight Alley by Rachel Caine

Damn. How in the hell can I possibly review Midnight Alley, book three in the Morganville Vampires series, without massive spoilers? Whatever I talk about, it’s going to spoil something from the first two books. I feel like you should walk into this cold, like I did, because it’s really so much better if you don’t know what’s coming.

Okay, let me start with something simple: I don’t usually read series books back-to-back. I like to stew a little bit and move on to read something else before coming back to the next sequel. But I’ve read three of these books one right after another, and I’m probably going to buy book four sometime tonight. (Okay, scratch the probably, I know I will.)

There’s so much to like in this series. It’s the kind of morally grey story that muddies the issues of who’s good or bad, and there’s a crap-ton of escalating tension as the stakes to each book get higher and higher.

Claire, who in the last book agreed to a contract of patronage under the vampire Amelie, is presented with her new job doing alchemy research with a very old and very demented vampire. And by demented, I mean Myrnin’s going senile, making him even more dangerous than a vampire with all their mental faculties intact. But this research job is vitally important to the vampires, and now at last, we know the reason why Amelie founded this sanctuary for vampires. So Claire has to take on a huge responsibility that she has no choice about accepting, because if she fails, Amelie will most likely destroy Morganville and everyone in it, vampires included. With stakes this high, I have to wonder when the books are going to have to back down and take on something less…less dangerous, I guess.

I love the way the story is shaping up, and how the various characters are developing. Claire’s still prone to crying at the drop of a body, but hey, that’s a typical reaction to seeing people die, even if you didn’t like that person much. Shane and Michael are having a strained friendship because of Michael’s choices in the last book. Meanwhile, Eve and Michael are getting closer together, and Shane and Claire…are kind of coasting somewhere between first and second base. The one big lesson I’m taking away from this series so far is, no matter who’s hosting a wild party in Morganville, TURN THE INVITATION DOWN.

This book ends on another cliffhanger, though not quite as dire as in the first book. It feels like the last chapter is actually the first for the next book, and so I’m forced to get the next book soon. Like, today.

This stuff is like text-based crack. I can’t remember the last time I read a series with vampires that I could not wait to see the next. Hey, I loved Twilight, but I still went months between the books without thinking too much about NEEDING to keep reading. I even went almost a year between Eclipse and Breaking Dawn, and by that point, I was totally hooked into that world.

But this…it’s like, the vampires are evil, yes, but so are the humans. Even the main characters are willing to do some seriously messed up stuff to survive in this hell-hole of a town, and everyone’s decisions are made not with some altruistic moral values, but with the cold, calculating need to survive at all costs. I can believe a town like this exists somewhere in Texas, and I feel just as invested in the town villains as I do in the heroes at this point. Even the human college bully Monica had me worried when she ended up in the hospital after doing something exceedingly stupid.

It’s a fantastic story, and one I can’t seem to get enough of. I give Midnight Alley five stars and would recommend it to any fan of vampires. These blood suckers are nasty, but they’ve got plenty of personality and depth, and I care about their story as much as I do the main characters. That’s some damn fine writing skills, and…and I’m going to stop now or I really will start spoiling it. But really, do pick up Glass Houses and give this a shot. But possibly make plans not to do anything else for a while.

Dragon Age: Awakenings and some final thoughts on Origins…

As I said in my last post, I played through Dragon Age: Origins again to run through as the mage, who I named Sparkles. (Clearly, I take naming characters very seriously.) I had a great time with my team of mostly magi pummeling everything from a distance, and even when we got swamped, I had enough bigger spells for crowd control. I also unlocked a Battlemage specialization, allowing me to substitute my magic attribute for strength. So I turned Sparkles into the team tank to keep the softer and squishier magi safe. Loads of fun.

I do have some random thoughts after playing almost 200 hours of Origins:

Alistair is a whiny snot. I got that from the first playthrough, but my later campaigns really brought out his pissy side, and if I didn’t hate Loghain so much, I’d almost choose him and let Anora execute Alistair. Seriously, he’s that whiny.

Leliana is a lousy fighter if left to her own AI directives. I adore her character, being that she’s one of the few companions who isn’t whiny or abrasive, and when I’m micromanaging her talents, she’s absolutely lethal. But if I let her go off on her own, nine times out of ten, she’ll run up to spring an ambush, die, and then drop another ten to twelve bad guys on my remaining three characters.

Origins is really hung up on this idea of heroes being able to do whatever they want, no matter how evil, because they did ONE good thing once. Which makes Wynn’s final comment about the love of the people being fleeting a little wonky. I might make the people stop loving me by doing one bad thing? Then how did Loghain actively piss on EVERYONE and still end up with people begging him for his help?

Anywho, after beating the game with a magi-heavy team, I decided to roll up a new character to play Awakenings, and I chose to go with a mage. (I went with the default random name, as I ran out of stupid names to give my characters.) This expansion gives you a character at level 18, so you get to start with a buffed badass instead of having to climb all the way from level one. So I picked out all the good spells and set up a specialization as a battlemage to wear armor, and I got started on the story of this new Warden Commander showing up to take over Vigil’s Keep on the same night it’s attacked by darkspawn. The story is that despite the Archdemon being dead, the darkspawn are not skulking off underground to rebuild as they have in previous blights, and instead seem to be organizing two huge armies that are at war with each other as much as they are with the various races on the surface. Oh, and some of these darkspawn talk, which is apparently unheard of.

I gotta say, overall I liked this story more than the one told in the main game, but damn, my companions this time around are irritating, like sandpaper on the butthole. ALL of them complain when I click on them to issue orders, and the banter between characters that made the first parties so interesting was just tedious here. This is a shame, because there was a LOT of potential that could have been used to develop Anders, Nathaniel Howe, Valenna, and Justice much like the short chats in Origins between Alistair, Morrigan, Leliana, and Wynne. Even the ending recaps for the characters writes them all off as unimportant in the greater scheme of things, and almost all of them “left one night, never to be seen again.” The stuff of legends, this is not.

But setting that aside, the plot was really good, and the two leaders of the darkspawn armies were equally interesting. When they finally reach a confrontation, their argument helps answer a LOT of questions about what’s going on in this game and about how the blight started in the first game. So that was good stuff.

I also liked how the game was more aware of time constraints, so if I chose to take on one mission over this other one, it meant someone was going to die. This is not a “choose a good or evil path” routine, but more like a strategic decision where you have limited resources and limited time to accomplish X number of goals. So if you choose to save one city, know that the other will fall. You can’t be everywhere, so your decisions have a meaningful impact in the world.

And this is something I rather liked about both the Dragon Age stories. I felt like I was role-playing a character for once instead of trying to make decisions that were right for me. Once I got into a character, the decisions I made affected the plot and kept it from ever feeling like a ride on rails. This despite the game’s very linear corridor designs for most dungeons. Being a veteran of the old paper and pen role-play games, it’s nice to feel like I have an active role in the story, and to feel like my decisions change the plot in meaningful ways.

I do have some complaints, albeit very minor ones. First, the game is really short. It’s like one lap around the map, and then you’re set up for the final battle and no other options can be explored. Which is interesting in that you know you have to get certain things done in this limited time, but you can only do a few before your time runs out.

The other problem was the maps for this expansion, which were extremely confusing at certain points. I’d gotten lost many times trying to retrace my paths through areas, and the squiggly lines cast about on the maps aren’t clear on what’s an open corridor and what leads to a sheer cliff wall.

With the main game and the expansions, I’ve now sunk 230 hours into this game, and I’d say that’s time and money well spent. I still have several other options to play through, and if Dragon Age III is anything like the first game and expansion, I foresee spending a great many hours battling the darkspawn. I give Awakenings four stars and recommend it to fantasy gamers looking for a new addiction to lose a lot of hours on.