The Killing Moon by N.K.Jemisin

My Rating: 4.5 / 5.0

Amazon Rating: 4.40 / 5.00

Goodreads Rating: 3.85 / 5.00

The great city-state of Gujaareh is a peaceful place, for that is what the Goddess demands. In order to maintain this peace, her priests use the power of dreams to heal the sick and relieve the tormented. They balance the various dream ichors, drawing excess from some and infusing it into others. Most potent of all is the Dreamblood that can only be drawn from a dying body at the point of death.

Ehiru is a Gatherer: trained to lead dying souls to the Goddess’ peace. Some of these souls go eagerly to their eternal rest, grateful for his ability to ease their pain and suffering. However, those judged to be corrupt are not so willing to accept his ‘help’ and when Ehiru is sent to Gather a foreign diplomat he is horrified as the man fights for his life, even in his dreams. Shaken by this experience, he starts to question his control over the allure of Dreamblood and is unwilling to Gather a second diplomat that has been labeled corrupt. Allowing her to go free brings him into conflict with the ruling Prince and threatens to destroy everything he has been taught to believe.

I have seen Ms Jemisin’s titles recommended in several places, and this particular title has received a number of enthusiastic reviews (see below) and was nominated for several awards. I know that this is not her first series, but I was intrigued by the setting, which is heavily influenced by the culture of Ancient Egypt but with some intriguing fantasy elements.

At first, I was not quite sure what to think of the book because we are introduced to several of our lead characters in quick succession. I have to admit that I almost gave up after about thirty pages because I was starting to feel somewhat lost and overwhelmed by this sudden immersion into at least two distinctively alien cultures. However, I am glad that I persevered because I quickly became caught up in exploring the rich landscape of cultures, religions and magic. I wish that the publisher had included a map so that I could have made a little more sense of some of the geography, but picturing Gujaareh as Alexandria in Egypt seemed to work fairly well for me.

The Egyptian influences are clear, especially in the dependence upon the annual river Flood to support agriculture and life within a desert environment. There were also nods to Egyptian dress, etiquette and architecture. The society also shared a similar caste system and range of methods of writing their language, from detailed pictograms to less formal cursive scripts. However, there were enough differences to make the world unique and interesting. We hear mention of plants and animals that seem to have no cousins here on Earth, and the dream-based religious system is like nothing I have read before.

The religion that is so fundamental to this series is an interesting amalgam of the most ancient forms of moon worship with the theory of the four humors that was prevalent from the time of the Ancient Greeks right up until the rise of modern medicine. The priests attempts to cure people by balancing these humors is very similar to treatments, such as bleeding and purging, that used to be so common. I was also intrigued by the concept of death being a transition to a spiritual plane that could be made to resemble paradise by an experienced practitioner so that the dying soul could be happy eternally. This seemed like a very worthwhile goal for the Gatherers and was a good of the gray aspects of so much of this title: this religion has so many good things to be said about it, and yet it is open to abuse and perversion.

This refusal to paint anything or anyone as truly black or white was one of the aspects that I truly appreciated about this book because it made it seem much more realistic and also more difficult to predict what would happen next. This is also true of the characterizations: the people that we follow may or may not be heroes, and they do not always do good or noble things, but they are compelling because they seem so real. This does have the disadvantage that it is rather difficult to fall in love with them, but it makes for a very satisfying, character-driven storyline. By the end of the book you do care about the various leading characters, but there is no real feel of them being massively special or heroic, just normal humans placed in unusual situations.

I would recommend this title to anyone who wants to read about a truly original world and immerse themselves in some alien cultures. My only criticism is that it was a little slow to catch me at the beginning, so it may take a little longer than usual to get into it. However, keep going: it will be worth it and I am interested to know how the rest of the series plays out.

Other Reviews:

Bookworm Blues

Gossamer Obsessions

Starmetal Oak Reviews

SFF World

Tethyan Books

The Ranting Dragon

 Worlds Without End

The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells

My Rating: 4.5 / 5.0

Amazon Rating: 4.60 / 5.00

Goodreads Rating: 3.97 / 5.00

In the Three Worlds there are three realms: sea, earth and sky. Each realm has creatures that live within it, although those in the sky realm are mostly forgotten by those who live below.

Moon has led his life on the run. At first he was protected by his mother, but when the family was attacked by a predatory species of groudlings he was the only one to escape because of his ability to fly when in his shifted form. His clutch-mates did not share this ability and were killed, as was his mother who remained to protect them. Alone he wanders from one group of groundling to another, trying to fit in but always doomed to being exiled when they discover that he resembles the evil Fell when in his shifted form.

All this changes when he is cast out again and rescued by another shifter who looks remarkably similar to himself. Stone is a lone Consort (breeding male) of the Raksura. He is long past his breeding years, but has been visiting the various Raksura colonies to find help for his own, which is failing. He offers Moon a place where he can live amongst others of his kind, welcomed as a valuable member of the colony. However, the Fell also have designs upon Stone’s colony and Moon soon becomes embroiled in a fight for survival amongst a people that he does not understand or trust.

Martha Wells was an author that I had not come across until I read her Guest Post for Women in SF&F Month at Fantasy Cafe. Since then I have had her on my TBR list, but it finally took the Women In Genre Fiction Reading Challenge at Worlds Without End to put this book on my coffee table. I am only sorry that I ignored it for so long because it was a great read and I look forward to reading the other volumes in this series as well as more of Ms Wells’ titles when I can fit them in.  

One thing I always appreciate in Fantasy writing is a world that is well drawn, whether it is loosely based upon Earth at some point in its history or is totally alien. Ms Wells creates a pleasantly unique world, inhabited by a wide variety of interesting creatures and races inhabiting the three realms. Although we do not explore the sea at all, we see several examples of the groundling races, which show adaptations to various habitats and climates. They also display a variety or temperaments, beliefs and cultures, which were sketched out with sufficient detail without a heavy-handed need for exposition. By making Moon an outsider in almost all situations, Ms Wells was able to let us explore this world through his experiences and so the world building did not feel forced or boring.

Although we have no idea how the Raksura or the Fell are able to shift between two forms, I did appreciate attempts to explain some of the other more alien concepts that we encounter. Most delightful of these were the floating sky-islands, which we learn are supported by a special type of magnet-like rock. This is revealed because one of the races harvests the stones to ‘power’ sky ships in a very neat piece of alternative technology. The scientist in me is always happy to have a seemingly impossible aspect of nature explained by a relatively straightforward nod to science.

The Raksura have a fairly complex social structure, which adds to their alien appearance to make them distinctly non-human. In fact, they are rather reminiscent of bees or other social insects in their organization into colonies. They also have specific social roles depending upon their biological form: in some books we might have had a sub plot about the injustice of certain castes being down trodden, but here they are all treated as equally valuable and there is no feeling of suppression or exploitation. I appreciated this willingness to present an alien culture without trying to insert human thinking or prejudices into the mix. My only criticism of the Raksura and their realization was that they seemed somewhat complacent and insular: a feature that created the problems that drove the main part of the plot. On the whole they seem very conservative and wary of changing how things are done. This timidity did not seem to really fit with their evolutionary design because they are fundamentally hunters not farmers. When trouble arises they are reluctant to take decisive action and this makes them seem overly weak and helpless.

However, this rather unexpected passivity allows Moon to step into the role of Hero because they surely need someone to stand up and be decisive. He finds an ally in the form of the junior Queen, Jade, which was not an entirely unexpected plot twist. Indeed, I would say that their developing relationship was one of the weak points in the book. It was simply too easy for the young Queen to fall for our Hero and support him from the beginning. I would have preferred a little more distrust and coolness at first as they got to know one another, which would have seemed more natural for an established colony member interacting with a dubious stranger. However, many of the Raksura seemed to make snap decisions about Moon, trusting or hating him on sight, so perhaps this more a reflection of their psychology than a failure in complex characterization.

Moon is inevitably the most complex of the characters that we encounter, although he is not the only one to change and develop over the course of the story. His caution when faced with a new group of people is perfectly understandable because of his background and we learn that he had some pretty terrible experiences when he chose to trust people in the past. I thought that his changing relationship with the Raksura rang true and was handled deftly. He is a genuinely sympathetic character, so we are drawn to him and want him to succeed. The fact that he has doubts and concerns makes him more believable than some of those macho Heroes out there, although he can certainly kick some Fell butt when required. I like my lead characters to be more than the usual stereotype, so he was pretty much guaranteed to keep me engaged and reading.

I would recommend this title to anyone who likes their Fantasy worlds beautifully drawn and well realized. Some of the character work is a bit simplistic, but the plot will pull you along so thoroughly that you will not notice this minor issue.

Other Reviews:

Bookworm Blues

Fantasy Cafe

Fantasy Literature

Janicu’s Book Blog

The Book Smugglers

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

My Rating: 4.0 / 5.0

Amazon Rating: 3.80 / 5.00

Goodreads Rating: 3.93 / 5.00

Nick Dunne returns home on his fifth wedding anniversary to find his house in a mess and his wife, Amy, missing. He is the most obvious suspect in her suspicious disappearance and it does not take the police very long to start grilling him and tearing apart his supposedly happy marriage. As we follow Nick’s struggles with the police and local media we follow their initial courtship through Amy’s diary. This reveals that Amy comes from very wealthy parents who have a totally ideal partnership and write children’s books about Amazing Amy. She and Nick are both brilliant and beautiful, making the perfect couple as they waft through life on a cushion of Amy’s money and their charm.

Then life goes wrong. They both lose their jobs and are forced to move from the glamor of New York to the backside of nowhere, Missouri, where they need to care for Nick’s ill parents. Amy hates living without the vivacious whirlwind of the big city and her diary entries outline the cracks that appear in their marriage and Nick becomes increasingly resentful of Amy’s money, even though it is the only thing keeping them afloat. It soon becomes clear that she is scared for her life and Nick is not being entirely truthful.

It is impossible to really review this title without revealing at least one massive spoiler, so I will begin with a few points that will not spoil the ending and then give you fair warning of when to stop reading.

The initial premise of this title sounded very intriguing and I was not quite sure what to expect when I started it. Unlike most Thrillers, we do not have a simple exploration of the facts by a detective. Rather, we follow all the events through the eyes of some highly unreliable narrators so that our perceptions of the main characters are constantly shifting. This makes it a very enjoyable read, especially if you like character-driven fiction, as I do. However, it can also be a little frustrating as you attempt to sort through the facts trying to find the underlying truth of the situation: just when you feel that you have a good handle on what happened you will suddenly learn an important fact that turns everything on its head. I loved this, but I know that not everyone will.

Another problem that some of the book group expressed was with the rather unpleasant characters involved. On the whole, everyone of any importance is revealed to be an unrelentingly awful human being, which some of the group found a little too negative for their taste. Although I can understand their desire to have at least one ‘good’ character to follow, I am also willing to accept that most people are not perfect. It is also clear that most of the ‘bad’ characters are products of their upbringing, circumstances and bad decisions rather than simple, two-dimensional ‘evil’ people. We also see people who are trying to be good but who simply cannot manage to live up to that ideal.

In short: if you want an uncomplicated story of nice people doing sensible things, you should probably avoid this title.

Spoilers Ahead!

I mentioned above that we have few ‘good’ people in this book and that most definitely refers to our leads: Nick and Amy. Just as we are convinced that Nick is guilty of Amy’s murder we discover that his big secret is an affair and also that she has faked her own abduction to punish him. After this turning point our opinions of the couple swerve backwards and forwards as we uncover more and more about their personalities and lives. Ultimately, we learn that they are both narcissistic and unable to take responsibility for their own lives and emotions.

Their marriage is all sparkle and show, but is based on what they both thought would be a good idea at the time rather than love and respect. It is doomed to failure and collapses when placed under the strain of lost jobs and ill parents. Amy is too much of a perfectionist, demanding and overly critical of Nick, who is happy to simply slide through life. He resents her easy access to money, while she hates the parents that supply it because she is constantly expected to live up to the fictional Amazing Amy that they created. They are two people who should never have made the commitment to marry, but did and were than too stubborn, in Amy’s case, or indebted and lazy, in Nick’s, to realize that they should walk away from one another. 

Once it is revealed that Amy is alive it is easy to feel sorry for Nick, but it soon becomes clear that he is a man-child who is just as responsible for this mess as she is. He has drifted through life and developed an amazing ability to whine and moan about the Things Holding Him Back. He loses his job because of the rise of e-magazines and blogs, even though there are still plenty of journalists working for these organizations. Could it be that he is actually not very good as a writer? I think so. We see him spending his life stroking his own ego and occasionally condescending to dispense some of his genius as a written article to his highly unimpressed editor. Believe me, if I had been his editor he would have been the first out of the door when the downsizing came into view.

His attitude to women made me want to kick him in the balls . . . repeatedly. He is so tired of women throwing themselves at him and forcing him to have sex with them. They are so needy and always trying too hard or, if they are bitches, they simply drop him and move on. Poor baby: his life is so hard! He resents Amy for effectively paying for everything and yet he still does not get off his backside and make a serious effort to earn some cash. But it is still her fault that he feels unmanned, so he has to have an affair to make him feel better about himself. Vomit!

So, what about Amy: if Nick is such a total loser, then surely she is the good person that we should support and cheer on as she frames him for her murder? Erm, nope: she is almost exactly as irritating and deserving of physical pain as her errant husband. She is nauseatingly brilliant, beautiful and talented, but that is just a mask to hide the true psychopath lurking underneath. She is utterly ruthless about getting what she wants and nobody, NOBODY, gets away with saying “No!” to her. It is slowly revealed that she is a master manipulator who has destroyed a man by falsely accusing him of rape at least once in her life. She hates and despises all other women for some totally illogical reason and yet she can appear to be quite nice and normal when she wants to.

Basically, I wanted to lock both of them in a room and then burn down the house so that they would not be able to continue their navel-gazing, self-deluding behavior. Oh, and I would have chucked Amy’s amazingly irritating parents in their with them for good luck. It is a terrific read as long as you do not have a problem with wanting to punch many of the characters! :D

Other Reviews

Annette’s Book Spot

Novel Reveries

The Book Smugglers

I read this as part of:

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

My Rating: 5.0 / 5.0

Amazon Rating: 4.10 / 5.00

Goodreads Rating: 3.97 / 5.00

In a frighteningly possible future, the United States government has all been assassinated and the constitution over turned. In its place there has arisen the Republic of Gilead, a totalitarian Theocracy that ruthlessly imposes Old Testament ideals upon its entire population. The world is suffering from a sharp decrease in fertility and an equally worrying increase in non-viable babies being born. In response to this, a woman’s place in Gilead’s society is dictated by her ability to reproduce or fulfill another useful role in the production of viable offspring. All women are categorized and forced to wear clothing of a certain color to advertise their role in life. They must not stray from their roles, they must not question those in authority, they are forbidden to read and are encouraged to think as little as possible: they must simply accept the role that God has prescribed for them. This is especially true for the Handmaids who have proven to be capable of producing healthy babies.

If a high-ranking official, like the Commander, has the misfortune to have an infertile Wife he can be assigned a Handmaid. She is a non-person, a receptacle for carrying his baby and nothing more. She is known only by the word ‘of’ plus his name. She must do nothing other than receive the gift of his seed once a month and then carry his child. If she fails in this task than she will be passed to a different man, but if she has not had a child after the third man she will be discarded and sent to the work camps cleaning up the toxic zones: for the law states that no men are sterile and so the fault must lie with her.

Offred has already failed to become pregnant with two men and we follow her thoughts as she settles into life with The Commander. She remembers her marriage to Luke, who had divorced his first wife to marry her. This made their union illegal under the new regime and allowed the state to annul it and separate them by force. She also remembers her daughter who was stolen away and given to an influential infertile couple. Then there is her mother, the raging feminist, who became an enemy of the state for believing that women had the right to do things other than reproduce. She also remembers her friend Moira, the lesbian, who escapes from their Handmaid training camp in search of the resistance movement and a way to reach the utopia of Canada.

The Handmaid’s Tale is a book that I had been recommended many times and I remember watching the film version many years ago, but I was still surprised by its power. What surprised me the most, unfortunately, was how relevant it is to modern America, with its debates about access to birth control and abortion and the rape culture that commiserates about the sentencing of young men who make a ‘mistake’ while the victims are vilified for all the ways that they were ‘asking for it’. I am afraid that women’s rights are several decades behind those in my home country of Great Britain, which I find both painful and dismaying because in general I like living here in the US and I hate to criticize a whole country based upon some prevailing attitudes.

I have always considered myself a feminist in that I believe that men and women should hold equal value and that a person’s gender should never be the factor that determines their role in life. As a biologist, I am aware that total equality will never be possible because of the very unequal method by which we reproduce, but other than making allowances for this fundamental difference in physiology, I firmly believe that neither sex has an intrinsic superiority to the other. These beliefs made it very difficult for me to read about a society where women are either walking wombs or solely concerned with making babies or looking after men. The later revelations about the men who go against their own rules to visit prostitutes, whilst condemning any form of female sexuality was sadly all too predictable to raise much more than sadness from me.

The fear of the female ability to reproduce lies like a stink over Gilead, and it is a stink that also pervades modern America so I found it all too easy to believe that the great democracy that is constantly touted as the leader of the free world could be replaced by a misogynistic theocracy. It is too easy to see how such a society could arise from the absurd statements that we regularly hear in the media here about a rape victim’s body “shutting that whole thing down”, only “sluts” wanting contraception and masturbating male fetuses (that last from a pediatrician, no less). We are bombarded by so much moral criticism aimed at the female of the species that you would think that men had nothing at all to do with the reproductive process.

I fear that the American attitude to women and childbirth is reflected in the frankly appalling provisions that are made for pregnant women here. Coming from the UK, with its mandatory maternity leave of 39 weeks paid leave for the mother at the moment, plus 4 weeks for the father, and an employer’s obligation to hold a woman’s position during this period, I was shocked to discover the situation here. In the US, a woman is legally mandated to receive 0 days of maternity leave. That is correct – when a woman is pregnant in the US she is expected to treat it as if she has an illness, saving up her allocated sick leave so that she can actually take the time off work while she delivers her baby and recovers from a process that is accurately called ‘labor’. What does this say about the American attitude to women?

As a non-slut who made full use of contraception whilst finishing my university education and beginning my career as a high school teacher, I resent the implication that I, as a woman, am not allowed to enjoy a sex life without the fear of an unwanted pregnancy. I have to add that my partner at the time, the man who is still my husband, was equally unwilling for us to have a child at that time. He was also beginning his career and the financial burden of a child would have been hard for us, especially as it would have made it much more difficult for me to gain my qualifications and get a full time position. I resent the implication that we should simply have abstained when there were so many methods that could be used to allow us to have a non-productive sex life. It is not as if contraception is a modern invention. Papyri from ancient Egypt outline recipes for contraceptive plugs whilst the Greeks used an extract from the plant silphium so much that it was harvested to extinction. And I will not even begin to relate the number of things that have been used to make condoms.

However, women are not the only victims of the Republic of Gilead. The Sons of Jacob are given the opportunity to emigrate to Israel shortly after the democratic government is overthrown, although it seems that some enterprising captains would dump them into the sea after receiving payment and to increase the number of ‘passengers’ that they could carry. We also know that many Jews remain in Gilead but have to worship in secret because the Theocracy is exclusively Christian. The fate of the Children of Ham is far more disturbing. It seems that many of these African-Americans are considered suitable as the infertile Marthas who run the houses of their wealthy, white superiors. However, most are resettled into Homelands, mimicking the Reservations used to isolate and control the Native American population by the European invaders. No doubt these Homelands allow the people to live in the idle luxury that you would expect for those forcibly removed from a society. Again, this mirrors the continuing anti-immigrant rhetoric and racism that still pervades US society.

I imagine that when Ms Atwood wrote this novel in 1985, she saw it as a commentary on the US of the time or the recent past. We know that the feminism of the 1960s provoked a conservative backlash from the Christian right, and I am quite sure that she was inspired by seeing this during her studies at Harvard at this time. I can appreciate how her Canadian upbringing would have made her very aware of the power that religious groups wield in the US, which was a shock to me when I first arrived. I find it frightening to think that many in the States would actually like to make the country into something so scarily similar to Gilead, and it seems like a real possibility to me. Needless to say, I would be packing my car and heading north shortly after such a disaster occurred.

As a footnote, I was surprised and delighted that a revelation is made at the end of the book that shows that the grand state of Maine was a hotbed of moderates and people willing to help women escape to free Canada. As I live just outside Bangor, it was particularly gratifying that the city was marked out as a particular place of tolerance.

This was not a pleasant book to read, but it was powerful in a visceral, thought-provoking way that makes me understand why so many people rate it as one of their favorite books of all time. I would recommend that every person should read it, man or woman, because it shows us what could happen to the US if the right wing, religious conservatives ever get enough power to impose their beliefs on the rest of us.

I read this title as part of: