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Witch Queen of Redwinter - Ed McDonald

Witch Queen of Redwinter is the finale in Ed McDonald's Redwinter trilogy. And it has a looot to wrap up, given that the last instalment saw the start of the end of the world, and saw our heroine flung into an entirely different level of reality, whilst her ex-friend, now nemesis started the apocalypse, and her two best friends, both of whom she carrying a torch for, are less than pleased with her for some rather shoddy behaviour. So...lots to do. Does the story pull it off? Well, I think so. I had a good time with this one, and particularly enjoyed that even three books in, it was capable of surprising me. I think, on balance, that the series delivers on its promise, and this final novel sticks the landing pretty well to get us there.

Which brings us to Raine. The protagonist of the series, now wrapped up in seven shades of trauma. She's been betrayed, sacrificed friends, seen other friends murdered. She's fought demons from out of time and space, and dealt with the fact that some of her own magic is both deeply unpleasant, and would see her put to death if anyone knew about it. Raine has, honestly, had a bit of a time of it. Equally, that's shaped her, often not for the better. She can be cold and hard and lethal, uncaring and closed off, while at the same time yearning for some humanity, compassion and friendship. The Raine we have here is almost two people. One who thinks they need to do "what must be done", be it mass murder, using people like tools, or, you know, more discriminate, artisanal murder. That Raine is desperate to be an island alone, pushing her friends and connections aside in order to stop them from stopping her. On the other hand there's the Raine who knows that she needs those friends in order to be a person, in order to do anything worth a damn, in order to bring some humanity to being, you know, a necromantic magic user who can rip your soul out of your body and use it as a doormat. The tension between these two halves is a struggle for her, and it's hard not to empathise - though she's more able to realise her own agency here, Raine is still a creature of her past, of old hurts and old loves casting shadows from the past into the now. Her journey toward catharsis, toward recognising and absolving her own pain (whilst coincidentally causing her enemies to explode) has been a joy, and, well, a pain, and seeing it play out, seeing the shape that Raine pulls herself and the world into, in the end, is very much worth it.

Speaking of the world. We get to see all kinds of fun places this go around. Mostly notably the Fault, a weird not-reality filled with murderous undead, strange beasts, and shattered ruins from elsewhere and elsewhen. There's a crawling, sterile dread here, a sense that the other shoe is always about to drop, a sense that just existing in this space is inimical, is draining vitality and love and life from everything inside it, which either dies or turns homicidal as a result. Those of you who've read McDonald's other series, Blackwing may see some similarities here, in the eerie wasteland that is essentially a misery to get through. Still, the journey gives Raine time to try and deal with her baggage, and to work on her relationships with her friends, whom she absolutely definitely isn't in love with. And we also get to see more of the environs around Redwinter and the north, a place filled with peat glens and deep lochs, where all sorts of monsters and ancient legends lurk in the mist, ready to fuck up Raine's day - or those of her enemies, they aren't that picky.

Speaking of Raine's enemies - oh, they really are a bunch of small minded, awful people who just can't stop trying to make the universe all about their wants and needs, as opposed to just letting it be. Ovitus, in particular, returning for another round of being a terrible person, just has so much main-character syndrome it's untrue. And I am here to tell you that the story delivers on Raine's efforts to both save the world and get revenge. It has towering monsters. It has bloody, kinetic, occasionally unpleasantly graphic battles that don't flinch away from the cost, and show how glory is always soaked in blood. It has romance and found families, and the kind of raw emotion that makes your heart ache. And it wraps the whole story up with a denouement that left everything feeling, if not settled, then, well, done. The story delivers on tying up all the loose ends, on making us care, and on giving us a tale that puts your heart in your mouth and lets you sob and cheer in equal measure.

Anyway, it was a good time, and well worth the read!

Legends and Latte's - Travis Baldree

You know what, I'm late to the party on this one. People have been talking up Legends and Lattes for years, and I finally picked it up on sale the other day. And you know what, it's really very good. I'm hesitant to use the word "cozy", but I will say it has a delicious blend of gentle relationship building, action which if not epic in scale is extremely personally important, and  an overall, well, vibe of something comfortable. You're watching someone start fresh, build a new life, a new person, if you like, and deal with the consequences of that choice - and those don't always go the way you'd expect. 

Part of the reason for that is the person. Viv is a killer. Well, was a killer, an ex-mercenary adventurer who got up enough of a nest-egg to retire and do something else with her day. But instead of taverns or more hitting people with sticks, she's decided to do something different, and build a coffee shop. In a town which hasn't heard of coffee. Did I mention she's an orc, a species which make great adventurers due to being enormous and having muscles you could break rocks on, but who are perhaps underrepresented in the coffee sector?

Viv is, in fact, a charming protagonist. She defies our own expectations, as well as those from people around her. Always careful, thoughtful, industrious, Viv is less interested in combatting stereotypes than in reforming herself away from her past. If she has a penchant for wanting to hit someone over the head with a sword hilt when they're being annoying, she rarely ever does. And her interactions with the system around her are similar - when organised crime shows up for a bit of protection money, being seven feet tall with a huge sword is a good opener, but Viv recognises that cutting them all into teeny tiny chunks might not be the best fit for her journey of self-actualisation, so decides to do...something else. Anyway, she's smart and funny and seems thoroughly oblivious to a lot of personal emotional interactions - there's a romantic sub-plot in here that had me covering my head with a pillow at one point. Less "will they won't they" and more "Are they ever going to admit to each other...?" That particular plot point, by the by, is a work of art. Watching two adults figure out that they like each other and what to do about it like adults is (annoyingly) refreshing.

Speaking of which, something Baldree does well is build networks. Viv meets a lot of people, and at least some of them become customers, become friends, become people she'd put her life on the line for. And from that, we can see these friends as people, as something more than single-faceted voices. They're fully realised characters. My only complaint is perhaps that the antagonists are less well rounded, but you know what, sometimes you just have that one guy who's an arsehole and needs a comeuppance. 

This is, really, a fun book. It's telling a clever story that, if it doesn't twist at every turn, definitely has the capacity to surprise. It's telling a story with personal stakes and making them matter. It's a story about someone leaving their life behind and building themselves something better, building themselves into something more like the person they want to be. And it does that with warmth and love and humour that makes it deeply endearing as well as thoroughly entertaining.

Back next week!

 As we inch ever closer to the end of the year, it's been a longer one than usual, for various reasons. With that in mind, we'll be back next week.

Red Sonja: Consumed - Gail Simone

So, full disclosure. I know Red Sonja is a famous comic book character. And I know Gail Simone is a comics author with a strong reputation, and as someone with a highly entertaining Twitter feed. And I know she did some work on some recent Red Sonja comics. But that's all I knew going into this novel, and my expectations were, well, ambivalent. That out of the way...I was wrong. Red Sonja: Consumed is an adventure. It has blood and honour laced all the way through it, sure enough. And Sonja, as a protagonist, is largely focused on herself and her own needs, but she's also brutally honest about it. And its hard to judge her too harshly whilst she's carving up menaces in an arena, or getting into a fist-fight with a bear, or having the occasional unfortunate interaction with the forces of the nearest state. Sonja is who she is, a force of nature, a weapon, a killer. And sitting on her shoulder while she kicks arse and takes names is, in several senses, a bloody good time.

But also. Ah, but also, you see. Red Sonja isn't just a killer, a barbarian, a thief. I mean, yes, she is all of those things. And Simone manages to give her energy and fun with those things whilst not flinching away from what they mean. But Sonja is not just those things. She's a barbarian traumatised by a childhood that took a left turn into the horrifyingly unpleasant. A killer who still stands tall in matters of honour. A thief who has a near-spiritual relationship with her horse. There's more here than just a lone sword searching for profit and the next beer (and the next man). There's a depth and a history and a passion in here that make Sonja ring true, make her seem real. And at the same time, there's a flavour of the classic Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser about her - unapologetically fighting and screwing and drinking her way through today, and dealing with the problems that causes, tomorrow. Same as it ever was when Fafhrd and Conan did it, and more than equally entertaining. Sonja isn't a shy and retiring barbarian, contenting herself with daintily presenting her enemies with some mildly harsh language. This is a woman on the prowl, not afraid to get physical, and not afraid to make an end. She's a creature of passions, both sexual and violently visceral, and those do come up quite a lot in the text - but this is a story with the energy thrown all the way up to eleven, and the over-the-top nature of it all just makes it more fun.

So that's Sonja. And she really is great fun to read. I will say, that whilst I got a flavour of some of the world she travelled in, a little of its politics and history and old stories, enough to give it some context and flavour. I was left wanting more. Some of that we get from a diverse smattering of points of view through the text, dipping into, amongst others, some of her varied antagonists. We get a sense of where the spirit of things is, if not the exact geography. This is a story that is concerned with the story, with the highs and lows and emotions that the characters go through. Its a book of flash and glamour over pain and raw emotion, and if it doesn't delve lovingly into the mechanics of its magic systems, it knows that you can absolutely slow down a wizard by putting a knife between his shoulderblades. This is a story that isn't afraid to give you a protagonist who has no chill and no filter, but who has a vulnerability and a complexity that we can live with alongside the fiery sword, the monster slayer, the troubled lover, the lost daughter.

Ah hell, at the end of the day, this one is just a whole lot of fun. It draws from the sword and sorcery tradition, but puts a unique spin and flavour on it, with the protagonist being as unapologetically self-centred and as skilfully violent as those folks ever were, but also not being afraid to show us humanity and character, rather than caricature. This is a viscerally (and potentially viscera-lly, sorry) entertaining read, and I look forward to seeing more from Red Sonja in the future.

Martians Abroad - Carrie Vaughn

Carrie Vaughn is a new one for me, but not, I gather, for a lot of people/. She put out the Kitty Norville series, about a werewolf who hosts a radio advice talk show, which I have to admit was a fun sentence to type out. Vaughn, in other words, has form. So I took a chance on her foray into science fiction, Martians Abroad, and it's...well, it's fun, I'll say that.

Polly Newton and her brother, Charles, are the titular Martians. They're being packed off to an elite boarding school on earth, so that they can glad-hand with politicians children and influential industrialists grandsons, and generally get themselves prepared for a life of visibility and influence themselves. Their mother is, after all, part of the social elite on Mars.  Unfortunately for Polly and Charles, the Martians are rather more egalitarian than those Earthside - they don't see themselves as special -and the folks down on Earth thing that the Martians and the rest of the riff-raff from off-planet are about half a step up the evolutionary ladder from Smallpox, and about as welcome an addition to the school campus.

We ride along in Polly's head, and she's...I want to say likeable, but relatable is probably something more like it. Her story plays out in a conversationalist style, from one viewpoint. But she's definitely a teenager being taken from everything she knows and everything she wants, and being dumped into a deep pool  without much warning. Cue culture shock, whinging, complaints ad nauseam (justified and otherwise). It can be a little exhausting, looked at from the outside. But Polly is also smart and funny and sometimes brave. If she isn't super-special per se, she's competent and willing to make decisions, commit to them and then ride out the consequences. If I occasionally wanted to roll my eyes at the theatricality of her antics, I also went along for the ride happily enough when she pushed back on prejudice, and on the need to be better expressed through owning things. Polly has an honesty to her that makers her work as a protagonist, a willingness to just be herself which probably sits well with the intended audience (it is a YA book after all). 

Having said that, Vaughn expertly draws a world that's living in a post-climate-crisis interplanetary era. We still have the same elites and the same prejudices, with different targets, different names, different faces. But there's a sense of the world having opened up just a little, onto the wider stage. The school and its routine and occasional casual brutality seem very well realised, as does Polly's sense of isolation from her classmates, her and the others from off-earth, as they try to work with different dietary and gravitational needs, with not much by way of accommodations. There's also some points trekking around on Earth that feel melancholic, feel genuine, and those were a pleasure; there was a particular piece in a museum that stuck with me thereafter.

Sadly for Polly, and Charles, and, well, everyone else, something odd is going on at their new school for the terminally rich and posh. Accidents are happening a little too often. Things are going a bit wrong. Issues are escalating. And nobody is really talking about why. This mystery threads its way through the book, and if the denouement wasn't entirely satisfying, it did deliver in terms of tension and catharsis. The story itself is paced well up to that point, slowly giving us more and more of an insight into what's going on and why, the who the what the why the where and the how. That said, the close feels a little abrupt, and like there's more to come, more to be said - perhaps in a sequel. 

Overall, this is a fun short read, and one I rather enjoyed; I hope you do the same!

Away this week!

 We're away this week, we'll be back next week!