Nigel Quinlan's Blog, page 46

A view from Knockanacree.

A view from Knockanacree.

"The 5th Wave by Rick YanceyThe aliens arrive in a great big mothership and things don’t work..."

“ The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey



The aliens arrive in a great big mothership and things don’t work out too good for us. Three waves of diabolically long-distance remote control mass slaughter later, and we’re down to a handful of survivors who still aren’t quite sure what hit them. The the fourth wave comes along and starts picking off the survivors and setting things up for the fifth wave, which might seem like overkill, but as with any big cleaning job it’s getting into those tight corners that takes ages.

Cassie Sullivan has lost most of her family except her brother, Sammy, and she’s not really sure about him. She gets shot in the leg and stranded in the boot of a car during a blizzard and it seems like curtains for her until a strapping young farmer boy rescues her and takes her home. Meanwhile her old school crush is being indoctrinated into an army of children to strike back against the aliens, and the newest member of his squad is a kid called Sammy.

Horror and violence and death and destruction and more death and killing and death. That’s what you get in the 5th Wave. It’s grim stuff and the characters have to deal with grief and despair and PTSD by the barrelfull. But it’s smoothly written, pacy as hell, undeniably exciting and compelling. There’s troubling stuff there to do with the imagery of genocide and child soldiers and aliens-as-implacable-hostile-forces, and using these in a post-apocalyptic romp, but it doesn’t feel particularly rompy, to be fair. There’s hints of a developing love triangle of conflicted loyalities, but, I dunno, the whole thing seemed to work and I bombed through it, although I felt a bit wrung out by the end and not exactly up for another cheerful installment of happy funny puppy violence and genocide time just yet.


”

In Which I Post A Book Review Just To See What Happens

Half a King by Joe Abercrombie
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Something I noticed when I read Clive Barker’s Abarat was that when an author of extreme material turns to YA and operates withing the restrictions of YA - cutting down on the bad language, the gore, the plumbing of the murkier depths of human nature - you often end up with some of the author’s strongest works. Excess can be indulgent and gratuitious. Joe Abercrombie has excelled in flaying the fantasy genre, not only with violence and grim realism, but also in attacking the foundations of epic fantasy with a profound, almost nihilistic cynicism. The First Law Trilogy was an exercise in turning the very idea of quest-battle-siege-heroic journey into one long cunning trap of futility and waste in order to maintain rather than upset a balance of power. It would be a crushing read if not for a certain amount of wit and charm in the blood and mud.

Half A King is a YA fantasy about a young prince thrust into kingship and then thrust out of it, and his quest for revenge. Yarvi is a crippled younger son of the king of a warlike northern tribe, destined to escape the shame and humiliation by becoming a Minister - half adviser and half priest. The murder of his father and brother results in his sudden unwilling ascent to the throne. Betrayal follows, but Yarvi survives and ends up chained to an oar on a merchant ship. He must put his mind and his training to work in gaining his freedom and his revenge and his throne, and every step of the way sees him make hard choices with heavy costs and terrible compromises.

So in some ways a typical epic fantasy tale of an outcast rising and regaining their birthright, but tightly plotted and fast-paced with twists of the story and twists of the knife as nothing comes easy or clean. Relative to his other work, Half A King has a light touch, but that doesn’t mean Abercrombie pulls his punches, and when they land they land all the harder. On the other hand, there is a cast of likable, well-drawn characters surrounding our driven, self-loathing hero, and not all of them die horribly or end up completely alienated from Yarvi, so it’s not quite as soul-crushing as the First Law Trilogy. With a complete story told in volume one, I’m dying to see where this trilogy goes next.

View all my reviews

Raisin Dertry.

I am Nigel Quinlan and this is The Weatherbox, which I have created to promote my first book, a children’s novel called The Magic Maloneys And The End Of The World, which will be published by Orion in May, and by Roaring Brook Press as The Maloneys’ Magical Weatherbox in the US in June. That’s all. My friend Elizabeth at the Sheelagh na Gig Bookshop in Cloughjordan is putting out some press releases soon and I just wanted to have a website to put on them. Hello if you’ve been directed here by a press release! I haven’t talked to the PR people in Orion or Roaring Brook yet so I don’t know what I’m doing and this may all be a terrible, terrible mistake.

This is a sketch made of me by a Dutch artist when we were staying at the Annaghmakerrig Artists’ Retreat about two years ago. I can’t find her name right now and I hope she doesn’t mind me putting this up here. Anyway, this is me, overjoyed at receiving the news that Orion was giving me a contract.

Who are the Magic Maloneys? Why is the world going to end and...

Who are the Magic Maloneys? Why is the world going to end and what’s it got to do with them? Find out in May, 2015. Or shortly thereafter.

Here are some birds. Some angry, angry birds. They know what you...

Here are some birds. Some angry, angry birds. They know what you did.