2017 books in review
A bit late, but here it is. Sorry i didn't review every single thing, but a list of non-reviewed books & their ratings is at the end of the main list.
** Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruins of Ymr by John Crowley
About a million years ago, when I was in my early teens, one of the very first books I got that could be considered ‘furry’ was Beasts, by John Crowley. It featured genetically engineered lion-men and a fox-man, and included hot (at the time, anyways) lion-man & human woman action. After a few SF books early on, Crowley went on to write a lot of large fantasy tomes that were not ‘relevant to my interests’ and I never read anything else he wrote. Now, a lifetime later, he wrote another book with an animal protagonist, this time a crow named Dar Oakley.
Unfortunately this turns out to be what I call a ‘gimmick’ book. I’ve read a number of other books just like it-the main character or narrator is an animal, but the book is really about the humans the animal meets and interacts with. Through some vaguely described process the crow learns to talk with particular humans, which results in discussions about life, death and human customs. The crow also accompanies the first human he befriends into the human afterlife, where he somehow becomes immortal. But it’s an immortality like in video games-when he’s killed he just pops back up in another body.
This is a gimmick to talk and interact with humans through the ages-a bronze-age pagan girl, a monk from the middle ages, an American Indian, etc. There’s a few hints about what the book could’ve been if he’d ditched the humans and concentrated on the crow; a sequence where he befriends some terns and they try to teach him how to fly like them, and the earlier scenes that describe life in the crow flock, but most of the book is his talking with the various human characters.
Since crows are often considered harbingers of death and feed on the dead, there’s lots and lots of talk about death, the afterlife and feeding on corpses. So if you’re into that, this book has it in spades. Otherwise it’s a lost opportunity to write something unique that ended up being just like a bunch of other books out there.
**** Skeleton Crew by Greg (Gre7g) Luterman
A multi-generational ship is crewed by the Geroo--cute, furry somethings (drawn kind of like a cross between bears and wolves). Obstentialy ‘employees’ of the Krakun, their (literally) draconian overlords, they are actually slaves, crewing a ship to find inhabitable planets for their masters. Because resources on the ship are finite, there’s a very strict limit to the number of births, and everyone has to commit suicide at age 60.
Unauthorized births are punishable by death, but the protagonist is a result of an unauthorized pregnancy, hiding in plain sight. For some reason, the Krakun supervisor of the ship becomes obsessed with the idea that there’s a bunch of unauthorized Geroo on the ship (there’s no particular reason why he has this idea, except as a plot driver) and threatens the captain with mass killings unless he can find these hypothetical ‘stowaways.’
The Geroo are basically humans in fursuits-their family structure, entertainment and personalities are human. The Krakun are giant dragon/dinosaur creatures, big enough to eat the Geroo in one bite. What’s not made clear is whether the Gerro are tiny and the Krakun are human-sized, or the Gerro are human-sized and the krakun are giants. And while the initial plot arc is resolved, there’s obviously supposed to be more to the story (which may or may not ever appear) so just be warned about that. TLDR: The book succeeds as entertainment, but not in showing any type of alien culture or a unique plot.
*** The Tower and The Fox by Tim Susman
Any book that takes place in a school for magic is going to be compared to Harry Potter. Any book that features a downtrodden protagonist that has to deal with prejudice despite his magical birthright is really going to be compared to Harry Potter.
The story takes place in an alternate America of 1815, where the revolution never happened and magic is real. Magically created animal-people called Calatians are a part of society. They have some rights and live as free people, but still face discrimination by humans. When a disaster of unknown origin kills most of the student body of the local magical college, they agree to take anyone as students, including Calatians and women.
The rest of the book is a very typical ‘despised minority trying to prove themselves’ scenario, including the requisite bully, nasty prejudiced teachers, sympathetic teachers, and resistance from within the Calatian community about the protagonist Kip trying to rock the boat. Of course Kip is better than any of the human students, but everyone is so prejudiced against him it hardly matters.
Where this fails in comparison to Harry Potter is the school itself. The world of Hogwarts was fascinating, richly imagined and made you want to visit it. This school is dreary and boring, with little attention paid to its magical aspect, instead concentrating on how nasty the other students and teachers treat Kip and his friends. It’s also unclear how people learn to work magic, since one of Kip’s friends, an otter who never had any inclination to study magic, is accepted into the school and can learn to work magic, while a wealthy human student is accepted and apparently never is able to master any spells at all.
But honestly, the magic is just a device, and the real thrust of the story is an oppressed minority trying to break through barriers. In that respect, the protagonist could be black, female, gay, a Jew, or any other oppressed group rather than a furry, and the setting could be any exclusive place that holds the key to a better life.
**** Kismet by Watts Martin
I did an extensive review of this earlier. It’s here if you want to read it again.
*Lobster by Guillaume Lecasble
I honestly didn’t know what category to put this wretched book into, but I guess this is as good as any. If you ever wanted to read a book where a lobster and a woman fall in love and the lobster gives the woman the best orgasm of her life, then this is the book for you. It’s a translated French book, so that might tell you all you need to know.
*Miss Kitty, Rocky and the Immortals by Jay A. Stout
This had kind of an interesting premise-some people are reborn as angels in the bodies of animals (or humans) to help people on earth. They are truly immortal (at one point the protagonist gets run over by a car and is able to just shake it off) but there are some angels that have gone bad over the years, which adds another layer of complexity to their story.
Rocky is a hotshot Air Force pilot who is killed in a fighter accident and is reborn as a (of course) raccoon, who goes back to help his buddies he left in the Air Force. This all sounds more interesting than it actually is. The writing is not very good, and most of the action centers around the humans, who are all cliché characters. The worse aspect of trying to read this (in the e-book) is the horrible formatting, which has no breaks between scenes or POV changes, which made it really hard to follow.
***The Strange Bird: A Borne Story (Kindle Single) by Jeff VanderMeer
Jeff VanderMeer is a highly respected mainstream SF author. This is a novella related to his recent novel Borne, a SF story about genetic engineering run wild in a future dystopia. (I have not read the book, but I’ve read enough reviews to get the general gist of it.) The Strange Bird takes place in the same universe at the same time, with some of the same characters. The Unnamed Strange Bird is briefly liberated from a genetics lab, but hardly enjoys her freedom before she’s captured-first by an eccentric hermit, then by the mad doctor from hell, who dissects her while still alive to turn her into some sort of a living camouflage coat. If you haven’t yet guessed, this is a nasty, depressing story. Well written, yes, but not worth reading unless you’re really into ‘life sucks and then you die’ plots.
*****D’Arc: War with No Name 3 by Robert Repino
The third book in the ‘War with No Name’ series. An immortal ant queen manages to transform mammals into anthropomorphic form, and uses them (along with her own ant soldiers) to overthrow and wipe out humanity. The first book followed Mort(e), a housecat, the second Culdesac, a wild bobcat, and this one follows the dog friend of Mort(e) from the first book. At this point, some years after the war, some humans and animals are trying to live in a mixed society, with uneven results. There’s strife between human extremist terrorists, animal terrorists, and a new aquatic species who doesn’t want to live with either. Probably one of the best books I read this year, although you really need to read the first book (Mort(e) ) to get the full background to the story. There is an open ending, so hopefully there will be more books in this fine series.
****Crosscurrents (Rise of the Penguins 3) by Steven Hammond
****Whispers of Shadows (Rise of the Penguins 4) by Steven Hammond
****The Royal Creed (Rise of the Penguins 5) by Steven Hammond
***Order of Kings (Rise of the Penguins 6) by Steven Hammond
The continuation of the Rise of the Penguins series I reviewed a couple years ago. The premise is kind of dopey (penguins revolting against humanity in a war, as well as civil strife among the various penguin factions ) but if you can swallow that, these actually are pretty entertaining books. Most of the story is told from the penguin’s POV, which is a big plus.
***Avaritia: A Fable by M.D. Westbrook
What would happen if rodents got their little ratty paws on a copy of Atlas Shrugged, and decided to apply Objectivist beliefs to a new society free of humans? You would get this book, which even has a John Gault-type speech in the middle of it. I did give this 3 stars because it was definitely entertaining, in a train-wreck kind of way. It does over-simplify the issues, but that's to be expected in a story with a very defined good vs. bad mentality. I'm not sure I'd recommend this for younger kids, what with the violence, cannibalism and sexual slavery that shows up in the latter half, but on the other hand, it never got boring.
***The Wayward Astronomer by Geoffrey Thomas
A fan-written novel set in the Dreamkeepers (comic) universe, inhabited by a mix of furry, feathered and scaly creatures. Everyone has a special power, but they’re outlawed using them by an oppressive government (seriously-if everyone had super-powers, how long would outlawing the use of them last?) The astronomer of the title finds a mysterious meteor that fell conveniently close to his observatory, and gets caught up in a plot by religious extremists to use the meteor’s powers for ill ends. The story is so-so, but the book is worth getting for David Lillie’s fine illustrations.
***Monkey Wars by Richard Kurti
A troop of langurs versus macaques in a modern Indian city. Add in a Romeo and Juliet plot involving a young male langur and a young female macaque, and you have lots of action and intrigue! Not the best book I read this year, but worth picking up, especially if you like nonhuman primates.
**Fifteen Dogs by Andre Alexis
Two Greek gods make a literal bar bet about whether dogs would be happier given human intelligence, and thus 15 random dogs in a kennel are given the ‘gift’ of sentience. This is another ‘life sucks and then you die’ story. Don’t read unless you’re really into seeing dogs suffer.
***Who is Willing (Alysha Forrest 3) by M. C. A. Hogarth
This takes place in the author’s Pelted universe setting-genetically engineered furries, humans and aliens in a Star Trek-like scenario. Alysha Forrest is a feline furry newly assigned to a starship, where she runs into a human antagonist from an earlier story, Mike Beringwaite, who is so over-the-top prejudiced against the anthro characters he enters the realm of caricature. The main thrust of these stories is ‘can’t we all just get along,’ so Alysha spends most of her time trying to figure out how to make friends with Beringwaite, with a lot of dialogue to that effect. Hogarth’s stories are light on action and tension and heavy on discussion, and this is no exception, but still is worth reading if you enjoyed her other stories.
***Redfeather by Heidi Richter
Where have I read this scenario before? A gorgeous young female scientist and a studly male scientist get together on a groundbreaking discovery, which they then have to protect from nefarious forces. The discovery in this case is a relict population of sentient bird-like dinosaurs. The story really picks up about halfway through when we actually get to the dinosaurs, and the book switches to their POV for a lot of the action. The book has some indy novelist problems, including a strange subplot involving a human/chimpanzee hybrid that ends up going nowhere at all, but the book did hold my interest. So that’s something.
***God’s Elephants by Michael Tod
A sort of new-agey saga of elephants and people. Apparently elephants can ‘read’ the memories from the tusks of dead elephants, so a young female goes on a quest to find the lost tusks of a particularly important elephant, and bear them to a semi-mythic safe place for elephants. There are also a couple of white safari guides, and a black poacher guiding a rich great white hunter-type, and a native pastoralist searching for the perfect husbands for his daughters (don’t ask.) The human characters were a lot less believable than the elephants, for what it’s worth…
***The Fox of Richmond Park by Kate Dreyer
A fox living in a city park in England is driven from his den by some overbearing deer, and is forced to wander the city trying to find a new home. Along the way he meets friends and foes, as well as some parodies of home owner & neighborhood associations. Not a bad book, but doesn’t really have anything new to add to the talking animal genre.
****Star Wars: Thrawn by Timothy Zahn
Grand Admiral Thrawn, who first appeared in the very first Star Wars sequel trilogy way back when (and why couldn’t they have just adapted those books for the new movies??) is finally given his own book, and it’s definitely worth the wait. Evidently the first part of a trilogy, this first volume covers him arriving in the Empire’s space, and his rapid rise through the Imperial ranks. Definitely worth picking up if you’re at all interested in the character or a good book set in the Star Wars universe.
*****Scythe (Arc of a Scythe Book 1) by Neal Shusterman
Usually I avoid those teenage dystopia-type novels like the plague, but this had an interesting premise and was very well written. Instead of a dystopia, this future is controlled by a benevolent AI called The Thunderhead. Death has ceased to be an issue-people can ‘reset’ their clocks back to their 20’s whenever they want, and bored teens jump off tall buildings just for the kick of being ‘deadish’ and regenerating. The only way a person can die is to be ‘gleaned’ by a Scythe-one of a group of professional death-dealers who have to kill a certain number of people per year to keep the population in check. So in this world, death can literally come knocking on your door.
The story centers around a teenage boy and girl who are selected by a Scythe as apprentices. Neither of them want to do it, but Scythes are above the law, and if they accept, then their families will be exempt from gleaning as long as they serve. With such absolute power, it’s inevitable that some of the Scythes become corrupted by it, and the secondary plot deals with a particularly nasty Scythe and his cronies, and how they intersect the lives of the two protagonists.
This was one of the best books I read last year.
***Hell Divers II: Ghosts by Nicholas Sansbury Smith
There’s a phrase used to describe a particular type of dystopia: Crapsack World. The world of the Hell Divers definitely fits into that trope. Two centuries after war has left the surface of Earth uninhabitable, the remnants of humanity live in an ancient, failing airship. Everyone is on the cusp of starvation, and if they don’t starve, then they die of cancer from leaking reactors on the ship. Their survival depends on the Hell Divers-people who skydive down into the toxic surface to scavenge supplies to keep the ship running. Not only is the surface toxic, there’s cannibalistic mutants running around.
In this second volume of the trilogy, the Hell Divers have to deal with corrupt leaders as well as cannibal mutants and killer plants. Will they survive to find a possibly non-existent haven where they can settle on the surface? We’ll have to wait until volume 3 to find out.
**The Girl Who Dared to Think by Bella Forrest
Now this was a really dumb teenage dystopia book. The premise sounded kind of interesting-people are assigned a number based on their thoughts and actions-if you go below a 3 you have to be drugged or sent to a reeducation center. Like the excellent Silo series, this takes place in a huge silo-type structure, except this is an above-ground silo.
What made it so dumb? You know those stories where people tell the protagonist not to do something because it’s dangerous or something bad will happen? And they do it anyways, and something bad happens? Well, this protagonist did that throughout the entire book. And with dire consequences that will happen if her score drops below a four, the protagonist is preoccupied with some handsome stranger guy she met. She was such a nitwit seeing her sent to reeducation center would’ve been a delight.
There’s 4 or 5 books in this series already, all of them Kindle bestsellers for some reason, but man this was a dumb story.
*Twisted by Miranda Leek
This was a uniquely bad book. As I’d stated previously, a book with a stupid premise can often be salvaged by good writing. Unfortunately, this has the double-whammy of a stupid premise and very bad writing. And it’s really long.
If you ever wondered (and who hasn’t??) where old amusement park rides go when they’re scrapped, wonder no more. They go to some type of fantasy rollercoaster world called the Amusement Park Between, where they’re reborn as sentient beings-half organic and half machine.
However, most of the action takes place on our own earth where the protagonist (I forget his human name, but his rollercoaster name is Railrunner) discovers he’s the lost red rollercoaster, destined to be the leader of the rollercoaster world. He can turn into a were-rollercoster, and every time he does so he ends up killing and eating innocent bystanders. Not exactly a sympathetic character. He also has a girlfriend, but can a human girl and a rollercoaster find love?
It’s all as dumb as it sounds, and the writing is split between third and first person, which is very confusing and awkward. On the one plus side, the author is a graduate of the Ringling art school and the book has some pretty neat illustrations.
A sequel is promised, and if it comes to pass, for the love of all that is holy, please find an editor!!
****Prophets of the Ghost Ants by Clark Thomas Carlton
This is another one of those dumb premise books that still turned out to be pretty entertaining. In the far, far future humans have inexplicably shrunk to the side of insects, and live in tribes alongside ants, cockroaches and other bugs. The plot follows a lowly ‘roach boy’ that works in the trash middens of the leaf-cutter ant colony, and how he gets caught up in a war between the leaf-cutter ant humans and another group of humans allied with ghost ants. Some interesting world-building.
****The Prophet of Panamindorah trilogy by Abigail Hilton
Author of the excellent Hunters Unlucky series, this is an older trilogy from her that takes place in her Panamindorah fantasy world. The main race are fauns (human upper half, deer lower half), but there are also goat-fauns, wolf-fauns, large sentient cats that have been warring with the fauns for a long time, and human wizards that are mostly gone from the world. If you like high fantasy with a bunch of different nonhuman races, all of the author’s Panamindorah books are well-written and very readable.
*****The Book of Dust: Le Belle Sauvage by Phillip Pullman
It’s been a long time since the end of the His Dark Materials trilogy. Finally there is a new book-set when Lyra (the protagonist of the initial trilogy) was just an infant. This follows Malcolm, the son of an innkeeper, who lives along the great river Thames. His life changes when he encounters the infant Lyra, who is being cared for by the nuns in a convent he does occasional chores for. This has most of the elements from the first story, including Lyra’s father, the Golden Compass, and the overbearing church authorities. The story moves into higher fantasy during at catastrophic flood, where Malcolm, Lyra and a teenage girl meet mythic beings as well as worldly threats.
I enjoyed this book as much as the first trilogy. Along with Scythe and D’Arc, it was one of my favorite books of the year.
The rest of the books I read last year. A mix of SF, fantasy and thrillers.
***The Crescents by Joseph Lallo
*The Collectors: A His Dark Materials story (Kindle Single) by Phillip Pullman
***Origin (Robert Langdon)by Dan Brown
***Sleeping Beauties by Stephen & Owen King
***The Naturalist by Andrew Mayne
***Dinosaur Lake IV: Dinosaur Wars by Kathryn Meyer Griffith
****Gwendy’s Button Box by Stephen King and Richard Chizmar
***The Haunted Forest Tour by Jeff Strand
***Renee by Jessica Eise
**Extinction Reversed (Robot Geneticists book 1) by J. S. Morin
***Sky Dance- A Panamindorah Story by Abigail Hilton
***Awake- A Hunters Unlucky story by Abigail Hilton
****Infinite by Jeremy Robinson
***Song of Dragons trilogy by Daniel Arenson
** Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruins of Ymr by John Crowley
About a million years ago, when I was in my early teens, one of the very first books I got that could be considered ‘furry’ was Beasts, by John Crowley. It featured genetically engineered lion-men and a fox-man, and included hot (at the time, anyways) lion-man & human woman action. After a few SF books early on, Crowley went on to write a lot of large fantasy tomes that were not ‘relevant to my interests’ and I never read anything else he wrote. Now, a lifetime later, he wrote another book with an animal protagonist, this time a crow named Dar Oakley.
Unfortunately this turns out to be what I call a ‘gimmick’ book. I’ve read a number of other books just like it-the main character or narrator is an animal, but the book is really about the humans the animal meets and interacts with. Through some vaguely described process the crow learns to talk with particular humans, which results in discussions about life, death and human customs. The crow also accompanies the first human he befriends into the human afterlife, where he somehow becomes immortal. But it’s an immortality like in video games-when he’s killed he just pops back up in another body.
This is a gimmick to talk and interact with humans through the ages-a bronze-age pagan girl, a monk from the middle ages, an American Indian, etc. There’s a few hints about what the book could’ve been if he’d ditched the humans and concentrated on the crow; a sequence where he befriends some terns and they try to teach him how to fly like them, and the earlier scenes that describe life in the crow flock, but most of the book is his talking with the various human characters.
Since crows are often considered harbingers of death and feed on the dead, there’s lots and lots of talk about death, the afterlife and feeding on corpses. So if you’re into that, this book has it in spades. Otherwise it’s a lost opportunity to write something unique that ended up being just like a bunch of other books out there.
**** Skeleton Crew by Greg (Gre7g) Luterman
A multi-generational ship is crewed by the Geroo--cute, furry somethings (drawn kind of like a cross between bears and wolves). Obstentialy ‘employees’ of the Krakun, their (literally) draconian overlords, they are actually slaves, crewing a ship to find inhabitable planets for their masters. Because resources on the ship are finite, there’s a very strict limit to the number of births, and everyone has to commit suicide at age 60.
Unauthorized births are punishable by death, but the protagonist is a result of an unauthorized pregnancy, hiding in plain sight. For some reason, the Krakun supervisor of the ship becomes obsessed with the idea that there’s a bunch of unauthorized Geroo on the ship (there’s no particular reason why he has this idea, except as a plot driver) and threatens the captain with mass killings unless he can find these hypothetical ‘stowaways.’
The Geroo are basically humans in fursuits-their family structure, entertainment and personalities are human. The Krakun are giant dragon/dinosaur creatures, big enough to eat the Geroo in one bite. What’s not made clear is whether the Gerro are tiny and the Krakun are human-sized, or the Gerro are human-sized and the krakun are giants. And while the initial plot arc is resolved, there’s obviously supposed to be more to the story (which may or may not ever appear) so just be warned about that. TLDR: The book succeeds as entertainment, but not in showing any type of alien culture or a unique plot.
*** The Tower and The Fox by Tim Susman
Any book that takes place in a school for magic is going to be compared to Harry Potter. Any book that features a downtrodden protagonist that has to deal with prejudice despite his magical birthright is really going to be compared to Harry Potter.
The story takes place in an alternate America of 1815, where the revolution never happened and magic is real. Magically created animal-people called Calatians are a part of society. They have some rights and live as free people, but still face discrimination by humans. When a disaster of unknown origin kills most of the student body of the local magical college, they agree to take anyone as students, including Calatians and women.
The rest of the book is a very typical ‘despised minority trying to prove themselves’ scenario, including the requisite bully, nasty prejudiced teachers, sympathetic teachers, and resistance from within the Calatian community about the protagonist Kip trying to rock the boat. Of course Kip is better than any of the human students, but everyone is so prejudiced against him it hardly matters.
Where this fails in comparison to Harry Potter is the school itself. The world of Hogwarts was fascinating, richly imagined and made you want to visit it. This school is dreary and boring, with little attention paid to its magical aspect, instead concentrating on how nasty the other students and teachers treat Kip and his friends. It’s also unclear how people learn to work magic, since one of Kip’s friends, an otter who never had any inclination to study magic, is accepted into the school and can learn to work magic, while a wealthy human student is accepted and apparently never is able to master any spells at all.
But honestly, the magic is just a device, and the real thrust of the story is an oppressed minority trying to break through barriers. In that respect, the protagonist could be black, female, gay, a Jew, or any other oppressed group rather than a furry, and the setting could be any exclusive place that holds the key to a better life.
**** Kismet by Watts Martin
I did an extensive review of this earlier. It’s here if you want to read it again.
*Lobster by Guillaume Lecasble
I honestly didn’t know what category to put this wretched book into, but I guess this is as good as any. If you ever wanted to read a book where a lobster and a woman fall in love and the lobster gives the woman the best orgasm of her life, then this is the book for you. It’s a translated French book, so that might tell you all you need to know.
*Miss Kitty, Rocky and the Immortals by Jay A. Stout
This had kind of an interesting premise-some people are reborn as angels in the bodies of animals (or humans) to help people on earth. They are truly immortal (at one point the protagonist gets run over by a car and is able to just shake it off) but there are some angels that have gone bad over the years, which adds another layer of complexity to their story.
Rocky is a hotshot Air Force pilot who is killed in a fighter accident and is reborn as a (of course) raccoon, who goes back to help his buddies he left in the Air Force. This all sounds more interesting than it actually is. The writing is not very good, and most of the action centers around the humans, who are all cliché characters. The worse aspect of trying to read this (in the e-book) is the horrible formatting, which has no breaks between scenes or POV changes, which made it really hard to follow.
***The Strange Bird: A Borne Story (Kindle Single) by Jeff VanderMeer
Jeff VanderMeer is a highly respected mainstream SF author. This is a novella related to his recent novel Borne, a SF story about genetic engineering run wild in a future dystopia. (I have not read the book, but I’ve read enough reviews to get the general gist of it.) The Strange Bird takes place in the same universe at the same time, with some of the same characters. The Unnamed Strange Bird is briefly liberated from a genetics lab, but hardly enjoys her freedom before she’s captured-first by an eccentric hermit, then by the mad doctor from hell, who dissects her while still alive to turn her into some sort of a living camouflage coat. If you haven’t yet guessed, this is a nasty, depressing story. Well written, yes, but not worth reading unless you’re really into ‘life sucks and then you die’ plots.
*****D’Arc: War with No Name 3 by Robert Repino
The third book in the ‘War with No Name’ series. An immortal ant queen manages to transform mammals into anthropomorphic form, and uses them (along with her own ant soldiers) to overthrow and wipe out humanity. The first book followed Mort(e), a housecat, the second Culdesac, a wild bobcat, and this one follows the dog friend of Mort(e) from the first book. At this point, some years after the war, some humans and animals are trying to live in a mixed society, with uneven results. There’s strife between human extremist terrorists, animal terrorists, and a new aquatic species who doesn’t want to live with either. Probably one of the best books I read this year, although you really need to read the first book (Mort(e) ) to get the full background to the story. There is an open ending, so hopefully there will be more books in this fine series.
****Crosscurrents (Rise of the Penguins 3) by Steven Hammond
****Whispers of Shadows (Rise of the Penguins 4) by Steven Hammond
****The Royal Creed (Rise of the Penguins 5) by Steven Hammond
***Order of Kings (Rise of the Penguins 6) by Steven Hammond
The continuation of the Rise of the Penguins series I reviewed a couple years ago. The premise is kind of dopey (penguins revolting against humanity in a war, as well as civil strife among the various penguin factions ) but if you can swallow that, these actually are pretty entertaining books. Most of the story is told from the penguin’s POV, which is a big plus.
***Avaritia: A Fable by M.D. Westbrook
What would happen if rodents got their little ratty paws on a copy of Atlas Shrugged, and decided to apply Objectivist beliefs to a new society free of humans? You would get this book, which even has a John Gault-type speech in the middle of it. I did give this 3 stars because it was definitely entertaining, in a train-wreck kind of way. It does over-simplify the issues, but that's to be expected in a story with a very defined good vs. bad mentality. I'm not sure I'd recommend this for younger kids, what with the violence, cannibalism and sexual slavery that shows up in the latter half, but on the other hand, it never got boring.
***The Wayward Astronomer by Geoffrey Thomas
A fan-written novel set in the Dreamkeepers (comic) universe, inhabited by a mix of furry, feathered and scaly creatures. Everyone has a special power, but they’re outlawed using them by an oppressive government (seriously-if everyone had super-powers, how long would outlawing the use of them last?) The astronomer of the title finds a mysterious meteor that fell conveniently close to his observatory, and gets caught up in a plot by religious extremists to use the meteor’s powers for ill ends. The story is so-so, but the book is worth getting for David Lillie’s fine illustrations.
***Monkey Wars by Richard Kurti
A troop of langurs versus macaques in a modern Indian city. Add in a Romeo and Juliet plot involving a young male langur and a young female macaque, and you have lots of action and intrigue! Not the best book I read this year, but worth picking up, especially if you like nonhuman primates.
**Fifteen Dogs by Andre Alexis
Two Greek gods make a literal bar bet about whether dogs would be happier given human intelligence, and thus 15 random dogs in a kennel are given the ‘gift’ of sentience. This is another ‘life sucks and then you die’ story. Don’t read unless you’re really into seeing dogs suffer.
***Who is Willing (Alysha Forrest 3) by M. C. A. Hogarth
This takes place in the author’s Pelted universe setting-genetically engineered furries, humans and aliens in a Star Trek-like scenario. Alysha Forrest is a feline furry newly assigned to a starship, where she runs into a human antagonist from an earlier story, Mike Beringwaite, who is so over-the-top prejudiced against the anthro characters he enters the realm of caricature. The main thrust of these stories is ‘can’t we all just get along,’ so Alysha spends most of her time trying to figure out how to make friends with Beringwaite, with a lot of dialogue to that effect. Hogarth’s stories are light on action and tension and heavy on discussion, and this is no exception, but still is worth reading if you enjoyed her other stories.
***Redfeather by Heidi Richter
Where have I read this scenario before? A gorgeous young female scientist and a studly male scientist get together on a groundbreaking discovery, which they then have to protect from nefarious forces. The discovery in this case is a relict population of sentient bird-like dinosaurs. The story really picks up about halfway through when we actually get to the dinosaurs, and the book switches to their POV for a lot of the action. The book has some indy novelist problems, including a strange subplot involving a human/chimpanzee hybrid that ends up going nowhere at all, but the book did hold my interest. So that’s something.
***God’s Elephants by Michael Tod
A sort of new-agey saga of elephants and people. Apparently elephants can ‘read’ the memories from the tusks of dead elephants, so a young female goes on a quest to find the lost tusks of a particularly important elephant, and bear them to a semi-mythic safe place for elephants. There are also a couple of white safari guides, and a black poacher guiding a rich great white hunter-type, and a native pastoralist searching for the perfect husbands for his daughters (don’t ask.) The human characters were a lot less believable than the elephants, for what it’s worth…
***The Fox of Richmond Park by Kate Dreyer
A fox living in a city park in England is driven from his den by some overbearing deer, and is forced to wander the city trying to find a new home. Along the way he meets friends and foes, as well as some parodies of home owner & neighborhood associations. Not a bad book, but doesn’t really have anything new to add to the talking animal genre.
****Star Wars: Thrawn by Timothy Zahn
Grand Admiral Thrawn, who first appeared in the very first Star Wars sequel trilogy way back when (and why couldn’t they have just adapted those books for the new movies??) is finally given his own book, and it’s definitely worth the wait. Evidently the first part of a trilogy, this first volume covers him arriving in the Empire’s space, and his rapid rise through the Imperial ranks. Definitely worth picking up if you’re at all interested in the character or a good book set in the Star Wars universe.
*****Scythe (Arc of a Scythe Book 1) by Neal Shusterman
Usually I avoid those teenage dystopia-type novels like the plague, but this had an interesting premise and was very well written. Instead of a dystopia, this future is controlled by a benevolent AI called The Thunderhead. Death has ceased to be an issue-people can ‘reset’ their clocks back to their 20’s whenever they want, and bored teens jump off tall buildings just for the kick of being ‘deadish’ and regenerating. The only way a person can die is to be ‘gleaned’ by a Scythe-one of a group of professional death-dealers who have to kill a certain number of people per year to keep the population in check. So in this world, death can literally come knocking on your door.
The story centers around a teenage boy and girl who are selected by a Scythe as apprentices. Neither of them want to do it, but Scythes are above the law, and if they accept, then their families will be exempt from gleaning as long as they serve. With such absolute power, it’s inevitable that some of the Scythes become corrupted by it, and the secondary plot deals with a particularly nasty Scythe and his cronies, and how they intersect the lives of the two protagonists.
This was one of the best books I read last year.
***Hell Divers II: Ghosts by Nicholas Sansbury Smith
There’s a phrase used to describe a particular type of dystopia: Crapsack World. The world of the Hell Divers definitely fits into that trope. Two centuries after war has left the surface of Earth uninhabitable, the remnants of humanity live in an ancient, failing airship. Everyone is on the cusp of starvation, and if they don’t starve, then they die of cancer from leaking reactors on the ship. Their survival depends on the Hell Divers-people who skydive down into the toxic surface to scavenge supplies to keep the ship running. Not only is the surface toxic, there’s cannibalistic mutants running around.
In this second volume of the trilogy, the Hell Divers have to deal with corrupt leaders as well as cannibal mutants and killer plants. Will they survive to find a possibly non-existent haven where they can settle on the surface? We’ll have to wait until volume 3 to find out.
**The Girl Who Dared to Think by Bella Forrest
Now this was a really dumb teenage dystopia book. The premise sounded kind of interesting-people are assigned a number based on their thoughts and actions-if you go below a 3 you have to be drugged or sent to a reeducation center. Like the excellent Silo series, this takes place in a huge silo-type structure, except this is an above-ground silo.
What made it so dumb? You know those stories where people tell the protagonist not to do something because it’s dangerous or something bad will happen? And they do it anyways, and something bad happens? Well, this protagonist did that throughout the entire book. And with dire consequences that will happen if her score drops below a four, the protagonist is preoccupied with some handsome stranger guy she met. She was such a nitwit seeing her sent to reeducation center would’ve been a delight.
There’s 4 or 5 books in this series already, all of them Kindle bestsellers for some reason, but man this was a dumb story.
*Twisted by Miranda Leek
This was a uniquely bad book. As I’d stated previously, a book with a stupid premise can often be salvaged by good writing. Unfortunately, this has the double-whammy of a stupid premise and very bad writing. And it’s really long.
If you ever wondered (and who hasn’t??) where old amusement park rides go when they’re scrapped, wonder no more. They go to some type of fantasy rollercoaster world called the Amusement Park Between, where they’re reborn as sentient beings-half organic and half machine.
However, most of the action takes place on our own earth where the protagonist (I forget his human name, but his rollercoaster name is Railrunner) discovers he’s the lost red rollercoaster, destined to be the leader of the rollercoaster world. He can turn into a were-rollercoster, and every time he does so he ends up killing and eating innocent bystanders. Not exactly a sympathetic character. He also has a girlfriend, but can a human girl and a rollercoaster find love?
It’s all as dumb as it sounds, and the writing is split between third and first person, which is very confusing and awkward. On the one plus side, the author is a graduate of the Ringling art school and the book has some pretty neat illustrations.
A sequel is promised, and if it comes to pass, for the love of all that is holy, please find an editor!!
****Prophets of the Ghost Ants by Clark Thomas Carlton
This is another one of those dumb premise books that still turned out to be pretty entertaining. In the far, far future humans have inexplicably shrunk to the side of insects, and live in tribes alongside ants, cockroaches and other bugs. The plot follows a lowly ‘roach boy’ that works in the trash middens of the leaf-cutter ant colony, and how he gets caught up in a war between the leaf-cutter ant humans and another group of humans allied with ghost ants. Some interesting world-building.
****The Prophet of Panamindorah trilogy by Abigail Hilton
Author of the excellent Hunters Unlucky series, this is an older trilogy from her that takes place in her Panamindorah fantasy world. The main race are fauns (human upper half, deer lower half), but there are also goat-fauns, wolf-fauns, large sentient cats that have been warring with the fauns for a long time, and human wizards that are mostly gone from the world. If you like high fantasy with a bunch of different nonhuman races, all of the author’s Panamindorah books are well-written and very readable.
*****The Book of Dust: Le Belle Sauvage by Phillip Pullman
It’s been a long time since the end of the His Dark Materials trilogy. Finally there is a new book-set when Lyra (the protagonist of the initial trilogy) was just an infant. This follows Malcolm, the son of an innkeeper, who lives along the great river Thames. His life changes when he encounters the infant Lyra, who is being cared for by the nuns in a convent he does occasional chores for. This has most of the elements from the first story, including Lyra’s father, the Golden Compass, and the overbearing church authorities. The story moves into higher fantasy during at catastrophic flood, where Malcolm, Lyra and a teenage girl meet mythic beings as well as worldly threats.
I enjoyed this book as much as the first trilogy. Along with Scythe and D’Arc, it was one of my favorite books of the year.
The rest of the books I read last year. A mix of SF, fantasy and thrillers.
***The Crescents by Joseph Lallo
*The Collectors: A His Dark Materials story (Kindle Single) by Phillip Pullman
***Origin (Robert Langdon)by Dan Brown
***Sleeping Beauties by Stephen & Owen King
***The Naturalist by Andrew Mayne
***Dinosaur Lake IV: Dinosaur Wars by Kathryn Meyer Griffith
****Gwendy’s Button Box by Stephen King and Richard Chizmar
***The Haunted Forest Tour by Jeff Strand
***Renee by Jessica Eise
**Extinction Reversed (Robot Geneticists book 1) by J. S. Morin
***Sky Dance- A Panamindorah Story by Abigail Hilton
***Awake- A Hunters Unlucky story by Abigail Hilton
****Infinite by Jeremy Robinson
***Song of Dragons trilogy by Daniel Arenson