Was this book really written by the same hand that penned the beautiful Samaria books? Two pages in and I kept checking the cover to confirm that yes, it was Sharon Shinn, and yes, she really was writing a dull, trite, flat story with abysmal characterization. Her Samaria books are filled with interesting ideas, moral crises, and characters you care for. This book is filled with predictable scene after predictable scene and characters who are (you guessed it) both predictable and one-dimensional. The romantic subplot never gets any true emotional traction, and despite the quest-centered plot, none of the actual journeying is at all realistic (horses only appear when riding is needed; provisions are inexhaustible, unless the protagonists need an excuse to go into a town; etc.). Character development happens but is entirely unmotivated (as one small example, consider how Cammon more or less immediately morphs from callow cringing youth to sensitive, mature, insightful, deep mystic). The central “mystery” of why the mystics are being pursued and killed is either no mystery at all (easily explained by fear of magic) or else entirely unresolved (if there was more to it, it never manifested itself). There are more books to follow, and maybe they’ll answer it one way or the other, but I can’t bring myself to care. I’m still shocked that this could possibly have been written by Shinn!

This is a somewhat odd book that nevertheless manages to tell an intriguing story. The viewpoint shifts radically from chapter to chapter (ranging from people to rocks to beavers to…), bumping the reader along. But if you hold on despite the turbulence, you can gradually piece together the story that is being told, and it does end up being worth the wait. Personally, I think I like the book better if I cut off the final chapter, although perhaps that is the punctuation mark that the author most wanted to reach—who knows!

Despite being composed of a series of multi-faceted, interwoven yet independent narratives, this book holds together as a novel. Although few characters persist longer than an episode or two, the plot itself carries throughout, drawing you along to the unraveling of the core mystery: where do the glorious hair-carpets, which each take the entire life of a master to weave, go? To what end is so much human effort and devotion invested? The carpet-makers believe that they go to carpet the palace of the Emperor, but early on we see reasons to doubt this. The original book was written in German, but the English translation is so smooth and fluent as to feel like no translation at all.

This is a mystery and a ghost story, a frustrated romance mirrored and reflected, a book about a book, and a story with such a strong sense of place that, if interrupted while reading, you look up with confusion that you are not, in fact, in 1945 Barcelona. It is well written, disturbing, and engrossing.

This book starts with, but ultimately reaches far beyond, the invention of Jacquard’s mechanical loom. I have always loved the idea that the first kind of “programming”, with punched cards, came from the world of textiles, and was only later adopted and extended with the invention of digital computers. This book does a great job of relating the history in a very personable fashion; the key characters are so life-like that I came away wishing I could sit in a room with Babbage or Lady Ada or any of their cohort, even just to listen in if not to converse!

This story revolves around the childhood and growth of Thorn, a human child being raised by an alien parent. At first it is not clear why Duun would have taken on this burden, which is viewed negatively by the rest of the alien society—but ultimately the reason for Duun’s self-sacrifice, above and beyond that which parents make for any child, emerges. The story is gripping and very readable… but it is almost painful to read, at least for anyone with typical Western attitudes towards child-rearing. Read it, and you’ll see what I mean.

I’ve been following this series off and on for years, reading each new book when I could find it. The writing isn’t stellar, but I love the characters. Books about young wizards are a dime a dozen now, but this series began quite a while ago—and Duane continues to have her own unique take on wizardry. One interesting aspect is that rather than consisting of a set of tricks or tools, wizardry itself is connected in a larger fashion to the universe as a whole, integrating concepts like energy and entropy. This particular book pulls in characters from all of the previous ones, reunion-style, as they tackle their largest challenge to date—the loss of wizardry itself.

This may have been the first fantasy book I ever read, back in grade school. I recently re-read it out of nostalgic curiosity. It’s so interesting to observe a book from the parallax provided by 25 years! I remembered it with more color and vitality—but also with less nuance, and with almost no sense of the overall story or geography. I’d still recommend it to young kids as a fun excursion, even though Taran doesn’t even make it up to one-dimensional as a character. (In contrast, Eilonwy was far more interesting than I had remembered her. She gets all the good lines!)

Sci-fi and mystery/intrigue plots often interleave well, and this story is a nice example. It is set on a world in the process of being terraformed, but then there’s a suspicious accident with the orbiting solar mirrors, and Miles Vorkosigan is sent in to figure out what’s going on. His sleuthing makes for good reading, and the romantic subplot is okay, although not one of the highlights. Great reading!

It took me a little while to get into this book. It has a very distinctive, unusual, fast-paced, breathless, bordering on ludicrous, sort of style, and just figuring out what’s going on can be a weighty task—but that’s okay, because the main characters can’t figure out what’s going on either. (Time travel always complicates things!) Once you sit back to enjoy the ride, and take it as the romp it seemingly is intended to be, it’s great fun. Don’t worry about the fact that the “strict Victorian etiquette” upon which several plot points hinge somehow doesn’t seem to apply to the main characters (e.g., the book makes a big deal about how single men and women cannot spend unchaperoned time together, and then the leading man and woman proceed to do so, several times, and somehow no one notices). Definitely don’t try to trace the timeline, through several time traveling episodes, changes, changes back, and the “theory” of time slippage. Just have fun! You may need to take a break between chapters, though, to let your head stop spinning.