Today at Veni, Vidi, Legi: Rampant by Diana Peterfreund

3.5 Stars for Rampant by Diana Peterfreund

Stardust by Neil Gaiman

My Rating: 4.5 / 5.0

Amazon Rating: 4.20 / 5.00

Goodreads Rating: 4.03 / 5.00

Note: I read this as part of a Read Along.   Week 1   Week 2  

The town of Wall is pretty normal, apart from the fact that it is next to the wall that separates our world from the land of Faerie. Every nine years the Faerie Market is held just on the other side and Wall is inundated with the many strange people who want to visit the Market. Dunstan Thorn is a young man eager to experience something a little different, so he goes to the Market where he meets the beautiful Una who is a slave to a witch who sells magical flowers. She gives him a glass snowdrop in exchange for a kiss and tells him to return later. One thing leads to another and nine months later Dunstan is surprised to receive a baby in a basket.

Eighteen years later, baby Tristan is all grown up (at least that is what he thinks) and is madly in love with Victoria Forester. One night they see a shooting star flash overhead and land somewhere over the border in Faerie. In a moment of madness Tristan promises to find it and bring it back to Victoria in exchange for a kiss and possibly marriage. She agrees because she assumes the task is impossible, but Tristan heads into Faerie full of determination to fulfill his quest. Once there he discovers that he is not the only one seeking the fallen star. The dying King of Stormhold knocked the star from the sky by throwing the Power of Stormhold at it, so his murderous sons are competing with one another to be the one who finds it and claims the throne. There are also three witches who want to capture the star as a way to restore their youth by cutting out her heart and eating it. The star herself is not very happy about any of these alternatives and is actually rather cross at being knocked out of the sky in the first place.

Having only discovered Mr Gaiman’s books last year I can safely say that I am rapidly becoming a rather enthusiastic fan of his writing. While Neverwhere was good it suffered from being the novelization of a television series, but The Graveyard Book was one of my favorite reads last year, so I was eager to read another of his better-known titles. I am pleased to report that I found it as delightful and entertaining as I had expected, making me even more certain of my appreciation for this writer’s wit and sideways look at life.

As with The Graveyard Book we have a story that suggests familiar stories and situations and yet presents them in novel and interesting ways. It seems to be a familiar fairy tale and yet none of the elements are actually all that close to the traditional stories that we have all grown up with. Yes, we have a hero who has a quest to fulfill, but he is not exactly heroic at the start of his journey and after that things just get increasingly complicated for him. He has to deal with other competitors for the star and his prize is none too happy about being dragged across the world just because he wants to kiss some girl in his village. Even the Happy Ever After ending is not standard issue, but that is what I have come to expect from Mr Gaiman and he has not let me down yet.

Our ‘hero’ Tristan is really not a hero at all. It is not that he is an anti-hero; just that he is very, very normal. He does not have any superlative qualities or skills; he is actually rather dull and average. He has a huge crush on Victoria, who is the prettiest girl in the village, but he does not LOVE her in the epic way that heroes are supposed to. It is not so much that she is his True Love, in The Princess Bride way of things, but rather that she is the first girl to catch his attention. She is out of his league and is stunningly uninterested, so that all adds to the pangs of longing that his teenage brain transmutes into LOVE writ large. He makes a stupid, melodramatic gesture to ‘prove’ his love to her and she calls his bluff, which is why he heads into Faerie and starts on the path that finally leads him to self-discovery and real love.

He is really quite endearing because he spends a lot of the story being confused about what is going on and why he is even bothering to continue with his journey. It does not take very long for him to realize that he is on a fool’s errand and that it is only his desire to save face that keeps him plodding along. He does the best that he can and has a good heart, which eventually leads him to mature enough to become a rather useful hero who can fulfill his destiny and save the woman he loves. It takes lots of time and many hardships, but gradually the world transforms him into the Prince Charming of the fairy tales.

On the other hand, Yvaine, the star, does not show as much development. When we first meet her she is a furious immortal who has been ripped away from her place in the sky and it takes quite some time for her to calm down and start to notice the world around her. Gradually she begins to accept her changed circumstances and finally she resigns herself to her life within the limitations imposed by living on the ground. Ultimately, hers is a sad and lonely story, but she finds what joy she can in her life with Tristan, making the most of their time together. Her acerbic wit is very refreshing in a world that normally presents the heroine as a useless and drippy bit of froth who serves no purpose but to be rescued by a hunky male. Yvaine has some great dialogue and refuses to take any crap from anyone, so she is very entertaining to read.

As one would expect, the supporting cast is also full of bizarre and entertaining characters. The Stormhold brothers are hilarious in their attempts to murder each other. This is made all the funnier because the brothers that are already dead get to hang around and comment on their living siblings’ lives. This is all very black, but it does allow some wonderful scenes of sibling rivalry that will have you laughing out loud. However, even though they are all murderous in their intentions, the brothers remain relatively sympathetic characters because they are simply competing to become king and do not actually hate one another. I know that this sounds strange, but they simply do not read as evil psychopaths, even as they are concocting the most elaborate plans to kill each other. This is also true of the three witches. Whilst it is true that they want to cut out Yvaine’s heart to eat it, they also display little overt malice towards our hero and heroine. Again, she is a means to an end and this makes them much more interesting because they have a reasonable motivation and their emotional responses extend beyond the typical cackling of the typical insanely evil antagonist.

I could wax lyrical about the other characters, especially the little hairy man and Billy, the goat-turned-man, but I would rather leave them for you to discover for yourself. Whilst this is not quite as enthralling as The Graveyard Book, it is still an excellent read and I would thoroughly recommend it.

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Cinder by Marissa Meyer

My Rating: 4.5 / 5.0

Amazon Rating: 4.50 / 5.00

Goodreads Rating: 4.06 / 5.00

Linh Cinder is a cyborg, with a mechanical hand and leg as well as some really interesting internal wiring that gives her a retinal display amongst other useful features. This makes her a second-class citizen in the city of New Beijing, where the part-mechanicals are barely tolerated and always run the risk of being ‘chosen’ to help the government in its research for a cure for the plague that kills everyone who becomes infected, including the current Empreor. Her past is a mysterious blank and she is a virtual slave to her evil stepmother, who hates Cinder but is quite content to take all the money that she earns to support the family. Her stepfather is dead and her only comforts are the friendship of one of her two stepsisters and Iko, her outmoded and strangely personality-ridden android.

Then, one day, Prince Kai brings a malfunctioning android to her store to be repaired and her life suddenly becomes very, very complicated. Her beloved stepsister becomes infected and Cinder is found to be immune to the disease’s ravages. Could she be the source of the cure and why is the Lunar Queen so eager to force Prince Kai into a wedding? Somehow, Cinder must try to save her sister without drawing too much attention to herself whilst wrestling with her growing attraction to the gorgeous Prince.

Knowing that this title was meant to be a reworking of the Cinderella tale, I have to admit that I was concerned that it would be too derivative. Yes, I know that I had read lots of glowing reviews, but I was still a little wary. However, I did not need to be concerned because the structure of the old fairy tale has been seamlessly worked into a fresh, new Science Fiction world whilst keeping the traditional elements very understated. I thoroughly enjoyed it and had only one minor complaint, but I will get to that later after I have waxed lyrical about the aspects that I really enjoyed.

Cinder herself is a wonderful heroine. She is competent, caring and complex, making poor decisions for the right reasons and always fighting for what she believes to be right. She is strong, independent and feisty, but not in an irritatingly teenage “me-against-the-world” kind of way. She is simply hard working and dogmatic, doing what she can to keep her family going and trying to get some small enjoyment out of her very restricted life. I was very pleasantly surprised that her relationship with the prince was not the usual overly sweet confection that I find so annoying in some YA novels. Yes, she is mesmerized by his handsome awesomeness from the very start, but he is the most famous bachelor in the city, so that is not all that surprising: I might be a bit flummoxed if Johnny Depp turned up at my stall to ask for help! :D

Prince Kai himself is a lot more interesting than the standard two-dimensional pretty boy providing the love interest. He is drawn to Cinder because she is so different from the other people that he has met, but he is totally capable of placing the needs of his country above his own feelings. We see him struggling with the imminent death of his father, which comes with the added burden of knowing that he will need to take over as the ruler of almost half the world. Rather than stomping around like a typical lovelorn teenager, he conducts himself with great decorum and self-control, which was refreshing to see.

The only character that I struggled with was the evil stepmother. I never really felt as if we were given a suitable reason for her selfish behavior and mistreatment of Cinder: she was simply ‘evil’. Given that Cinder’s identity could have caused her husband’s death, I was expecting an explanation about why she hated the girl so much. I felt that this omission was a shame, because all the other characters were so well drawn and acted within understandable parameters, even the androids.

This brings me to Iko, Cinder’s faithful, and delightfully eccentric, android. She was such a wonderful sidekick and so beautifully created that her ultimate fate was very moving and made me cry. Perhaps I am just a sucker for crazy individualists, but I really loved her and felt fear for her when the stepmother was being angry and violent. I would not say that she fulfilled the role of a dog, because she could communicate and was very human in her quirkiness, but she certainly had that emotional feel to her: totally loyal to Cinder and unendingly brave in her support.

The setting was very well done, with a futuristic setting that felt entirely possible. The Earth has been through two more World Wars and part of the population moved to the Moon many generations ago. These Lunars are now very different from the other humans, with highly developed mental powers, so that they can control normal humans very easily and cast glamors to alter their appearance. The ability for humans to replace body parts is a very natural progression from modern prosthetics and the addition of very personal Wi-Fi was an interesting extrapolation from the present. It also made perfect sense that appearance-conscious humans would not be very tolerant of those individuals who show obvious mechanical additions: we see exactly the same bias against disabilities in modern societies.

However, I did have a slight problem with the geopolitical structure of this future Earth. There were now five powers in the world: the Americas, Africa, Europe, Asia and the United Kingdom. It is this last one that caused me problems. As a Brit, I was very surprised that the UK had not joined Europe, but had somehow managed to remain independent during two World Wars. This seemed highly unlikely to me, especially as it is no longer the power that it was, even before World War II. Perhaps the author thinks that the UK is adamantly anti-Europe, but that is most definitely not true, and would certainly not be true in a war setting: we joined both World Wars to defend continental Europe against the German threat, not because we were actually invaded. No doubt the idea that we would be next in the move to conquer the whole of Europe was a factor, but we could have stayed out of the fighting and remained neutral, like Ireland and Switzerland did. I was also dismayed by the choice of ‘Camilla’ as the name for the Queen: I was not sure if this was supposed to be some sort of joke about the present Duchess of Cornwall or a hint that Charles’ ancestors had come to accept her name as appropriate. Either way, it was in poor taste and made me wince because the relationship between Camilla and Charles has caused a lot of strife for the Royal Family.

Moving past that very minor problem, I enjoyed the story very much and it kept me turning the pages. I was caught up by the plot and carried along with barely a bump as it moved swiftly along. The pacing was pretty much spot on, with enough time given to world building and description that I had a good mental image of the world and its inhabitants. In the end, we reach a reasonable conclusion, although this is the first in a series, so there are plenty of issues that remained unresolved. I was so caught up with the story telling that I immediately bought the second novel, Scarlet, and the two short stories that the author has published: Glitches, which is set before Cinder, and The Queen’s Army, which fits between books one and two. I am eager to find time to read them.

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I read this title as part of a whole heap of challenges:

Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor

My Rating: 5.0 / 5.0

Amazon Rating: 4.50 / 5.00

Goodreads Rating: 4.10 / 5.00

Karou lives a double life. Most of the time she is an art student in Prague, dealing with her horrible ex-boyfriend and enjoying hot chocolate and other goodies at her favorite cafe with her BBF Zuzana. Although she looks a little different, mainly because she has bright blue hair, Karou is a good student and retiring character, who does not stand out from the crowd too much. She does have an amazing notebook full of fantastical hybrid creatures, though . . .

In her other existence she is the delivery person for Brimstone, her ‘father’. He is a Chimera, with the head of a ram but the eyes of a crocodile and the legs of a lion. He is known as the Wishmonger, and exchanges teeth from many different animals for wishes. His shop occupies a space in a different dimension, so that it can be accessed from anywhere in our world so, when Karou runs her errands, she can be in Paris, New York, Hong Kong or anywhere else that a door can open.

One day when she is returning from an errand she notices that a handprint has been burnt into the doorway back to the shop. She thinks nothing of it until she travels to meet a regular client in Marrakesh and encounters a being that appears to be an angel. They fight, but she is able to defeat him by facing both her palms towards him: something about the eyes tattooed onto them causes powerful magic to flash towards him.

Then all the doors to the shop are closed, leaving Karou alone and fearing for her Chimera friends. Meanwhile, we follow flashbacks to a romance between the angel, Akiva, and the beautiful but mysterious Madrigal. As we learn more of their history it becomes increasingly clear that Brimstone and the other Chimera are keeping some important secrets from Karou.

I saw so many 5 star reviews for this title that I was a little concerned that it would not live up to my expectations. I could not have been more wrong!

From our first introduction to Karou, I was grabbed by the perfectly toned writing and excellent world building. I have never been to Prague, but I have visited enough old European cities to recognize a great description of the sights, sounds, smells and general atmosphere that she captures for us. I could say the same for all the locations that we visit. The market in Marrakesh had me picturing the Egyptian market scenes from Raiders of the Lost Ark, while the more fantastical places also had a solidity that served the story well. I had one little niggle about the races created, in that the Chimera seem to hold the human shape as being the most desired and beautiful. Given that their adversaries are ‘perfectly’ humanoid, this seems a little contradictory, but the writing was so strong that I could forgive it.

The structure of the story is also a little strange, which some people might find off-putting. However, once the ‘big reveal’ occurs, the plot arc actually makes a lot of sense and also explains some of the ‘insta-love’ that I found irksome earlier in the book. As I am not a massive fan of Romance, I was a little worried that the relationship between Karou and Aviva moved far too quickly considering their positions on the opposite sides of an ancient war, and I was preparing myself for some serious eye-rolling and annoyance about this cliché. Instead, I was totally invested in their story and found it poignant and moving rather than nauseating, which I found to be a very pleasant change.

So, taking those negatives into account, why have I given this book five stars? Well, that would be because the strength of the characterization and writing overrode my concerns well before the end of the book and left me raving about this book to random people who happened to ask for a book recommendation.

Karou is one of my favorite heroines in the books that I have read this year. She is pretty, but not in a way that has attractive men throwing themselves at her all the time, and is more attractive in an otherworldly, intriguing way than in simple good genetics. She even has the problem of having dated the world’s worst boyfriend, who is amazingly narcissistic and is determined to get her back into his bed, mainly because she dumped him, which is not what is supposed to happen. The way that she deals with his sudden appearance in her life drawing class (yes, that is the one with the naked human model!) is hilarious and had me snorting coffee out of my nose. In fact the humor of the life classes and the various models is a very good reason to read the book all by itself.

Although Karou does exhibit some rather annoying self-absorption and lack of assertiveness, such as when she forgets to mention the handprints appearing on all the portal doors back to Brimstone’s shop, this does seem consistent with her age. She is a fairly typical teenager and so she does not always do everything perfectly, and sometimes lets her emotions over-rule good sense. In many ways this is refreshing and makes her seem less ‘special’ and more real, in contrast to many teenage heroines who can often be far too perfect and level-headed to be realistic. She certainly shows enough good sense to have dumped the awful Kaz, even though he seems to be a god amongst men. However, I really liked her use of the wishes she has earned from Brimstone to make her hair naturally blue so that she does not have to keep dying it: Brimstone says that this is frivolous, but it seems to be the obvious choice for a teenage girl.

Akiva is much less well developed, but he is also an interesting character who behaves in an understandable way. Bred to be a warrior in an eternal war, he has come to question the policies behind the fighting and, as we learn more of his past, we see that he has good reason for this. He is full of doubts and regrets, and yet he is locked into the only life that he knows: he is trained for only one role and does not know how to break away from that.

Of the secondary characters, my absolutely favorite is Zuzana. She is so sarcastic and hilarious that I wish that she had been given more book time. She is a wonderful BFF for Karou, and handles the things she learns with an amazing amount of good grace and with no evidence of prejudice. She is a perfect support for Karou and is also massively entertaining to read. I would like to see her become the heroine of her own series!

The various Chimera at Brimstone’s shop are all loveable and absurdly ‘human’. The bravery and feistiness of little Kishmish, who is like one of the Game of Thrones ravens on crack, was actually touching, which is great for a non-speaking character. The love and motherliness shown by the part-snake Issa was a nice counterpoint to the brusqueness of Brimstone, who is a caring but slightly remote character. As we learn more about the Chimera, their work in the shop becomes increasingly less grizzly and more poignant as it becomes obvious that they are not the evil, demonic beings that we might expect.

I cannot wait to read the second book in the series: Days of Blood and Starlight.

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