Man in the Empty Suit

Written By Sean Ferrell
Original Publication Date: 2013

Rating: 4 Stars

Book Notes:

I received this ebook for free from the publisher, via NetGalley.

I wish I'd finished it yesterday (the 5th of February), as that was it's publication date, but I'd gone away for the weekend and didn't have any time to read.

2%

"Port Authority Terminal - redundant stairs, inexplicable turns, and filthy dead ends ..."

Yes!  Yes!  and Yes!  Gods, I hate that place.

9%

So many paradoxes.  Brain.  Ouch.

100%

Beautiful last passage, but, wait?  what?  I want more.

Review:

Image source: www.reclusland.com

My brain feels something like this after reading this novel: full of explosions.  The Paradox Problem has always been an issue when a good author takes on time travel.  Sean Ferrell not only takes on the Paradox Problem, but throws it in your face.  The book has a little bit of a Doctor Who in Pompeii feel to it.

A time traveler, whose first name is never given (correct?  Unless I missed it somewhere) decides, when he's 19, that every year on his birthday, he is going to travel to 100 years after the date of his birth and get drunk with all past and future versions of himself.  Everything changes on his 39th birthday when he is The Suit, that year, he finds the Body.  The Body appears to be 6 months to a year older than he is.  How could this be?  There are Elders in attendance of the party, and Youngsters that are far younger than the Inventor.  On top of all this, there is a mysterious woman who has been invited by some version of himself and he's never noticed her before.  What has happened!?  Can he possibly save the Body's life and the life of this woman?!

Wait, What?  Yes, it really is just that confusing and terrifyingly awesome and wonderful.  I'm writing this review and still trying to figure out exactly what happened in this novel.  Any book I can finish and then immediately decide it deserves a re-read because everything loops into everything else earns some serious points in my book.  

There are rules that the versions of himself are supposed to follow at the party, to prevent Paradoxes.  Of course, he doesn't always follow these rules, because you can only watch yourself break your nose so many times before you try to stop it.  Every choice The Suit makes that doesn't follow the expected timeline of the Elders, untethers more and more of them, freeing them to make their own choices and to change their own lives.  As is put succinctly quite a few times, "Fuck the rules."  The more I think about it, the more I'm deciding that "Fuck the rules," is really the point of the novel.  Rules are made to be broken, and we can only truly be free when we follow our hearts and own ideals, rather than listening to how other people expect things to go.

My favorite quote of the novel is the last few sentences, and I'll share them with you, because I really don't believe it gives anything of the plot away.

"The future vibrated with uncertainty.  I had failed.  I had ignorance.  I had hope."

I do think this requires a re-read in 6 months, after I've mulled it over for a while.  I need to let my brain soak in it before I start again.  I think I'll take even more away from it, the second time around.

In summary:  Wait, what?!  Oh!  Sweet!  Awesome.

and all the stars

Written By Andrea K. Host
Original Publication Date: 2012

Rating: 3 Stars

Book Notes:

I received this ebook for free from the publisher, via NetGalley.

3%

Toxic ... glitter?

92%

I just spent way too long trying to figure out how these people were flashing their torches.

Torches = Flashlights.  Derp.

Silly Australians.

Review:

Firstly, this cover is friggin' gorgeous.  I thought the little thumbnails I'd seen were beautiful, but when I blew it up for this review I realized how much detail I was missing, in the model's eyes, specifically.  and all the stars, obviously refers to the stars under the model's left eye, but honestly the more I look at this cover, the more I like it - it also could have been a reference to the sparkle in her eyes, or even the freckles on her neck.  Basically, the cover art gets a full five stars from me; the photographer in me enjoys all the details.

The books opens on Madeleine, regaining consciousness, in what used to be a train station - used to be.  She's surrounded by rubble, dead bodies, and a bizarre glittery dust is in the air.  All this destruction is caused by giant, featureless towers that seem to have sprouted from the Earth, spraying the strange dust that sparkles.  Finding her way out of the rubble, she is able to call her parents, and make her way to her famous cousin's apartment, where she showers off the glittering dust that she has become coated with.

Watching the news, and her own body, Madeleine discovers that she is turning ... blue.  Some of the population, like her, is turning blue, and some are turning green.  Not everyone is surviving this transformation, however, and soon those that do are seeking each other out to test what other changes this dust has brought to them.

The answer?  Hunger Games for body-hopping aliens!

I must say, I enjoyed quite a lot about this book.  The story was interesting and a bit unique in that it's definitely a post-apocalypse, but cell phones and news networks are still working and running - being taken care of by those that survive.  Usually post-apocalypse stories have a much more pessimistic view of the population, that people would chip in and actually keep things running, even if they're teens?  I don't know if I love it because it's got an optimism to it, or hate it because I'm not sure I can believe that that would happen.  I chose to love it.

I really liked the people that Madeleine teams up with, I find them to be fairly accurate representations of our teenage population.  My problem however, with these people is that they're fairly interchangeable.  They all different skills, but I had a really hard time remembering which one was which person.  It was rather confusing.  

I also found the flow of the writing not quite right.  Personally, I was definitely thrown by the amount of Australian slang, but that wasn't the only reason that I didn't think it flowed well.  Some of the sentences, I read quite a few times and they still didn't make sense, even within the context of the sentences before and after.

My last complaint was the Epilogue.  The book ended in a satisfying way, and then there was this epilogue that felt like someone screaming AND THEY ALL LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER!  THE END!!!  This is a problem I've seen in quite a few YA novels, the authors want to tie everything up, but it doesn't need to be gift wrapped for us.  Nothing wraps up that nice in the real world, and it seems like a cop-out.

In Summary:  Good book, with some problems.

Extras

Written By Scott Westerfeld
Original Publication Date: 2007

Rating: 4 Stars

Book Notes:

Seems that I don't write a lot of page-specific notes when I'm at my boyfriend's place (especially when I'm not on my Kindle).  My youngest sister bought me this book because I'd read her copies of the first three novels in the series, Uglies, Pretties, and Specials but she had lost this one!  I read those before I had this blog - see their review on my Goodreads Account.

I was very amused by the dedication of this novel: "To everyone who wrote to me to reveal the secret definition of the word 'trilogy'."

Review:

This takes place some years after Tally takes down society, and vows to protect the Earth.  

Aya is 15 in what is today's Japan.  Her parents won't allow her to start having surge until she is 16.  Aya thinks they wish that it were still the Prettytime.  Her rank in the city is far too low for her to afford any, anyway.  Her feed is read by almost nobody, so her facerank is too low to receive merits for the writing in it.  All she wants is to get famous and stop being a self-named-ugly.  She found a story to kick in a secret clique that despises fame and wants to stay off of the city feeds. Her story about a secret clique turns into a story about city-killing missiles and the end of the world.  Someone doesn't want her story to get out and Aya is forced to go on the run with the famous Tally Youngblood.

Basically, this is a city run by how many people follow your Twitter and Facebook feeds! Eek!  I don't know about you, but that sounds terrifying. We self-rank ourselves enough because of these twisted social networks, we don't need economy based on it as well!

It seems a common review of this series that people liked it less and less as the novels went on.  Somehow I found myself in the minority and enjoying these novels more and more.  They were all four star books, but were I  to rank them, I liked Extras more than Specials more than Pretties more than Uglies.  I think that for me it was the widening world more than anything else that did it for me.  While the stories were all fairly similar, it made me think of what each new division of the culture was doing in the previous book.  What were the Specials up to in Pretties and Uglies?  What were the Crims up to in Uglies?  What have Tally and friends been doing since Specials?  Yes, there's a formula, and yes, I can see how the books were predictable.  But you know what?  I thought they were fun to read.  I found the issues they addressed to be important enough, that the predictability was forgivable.  I found the writing flowed well enough that I simply didn't have time to be bored.

Elegy Beach

Written By Stephen Boyett
Original Publication Date: 2009
Sequel to: Ariel

Rating: 3 Stars Out Of 5

Book Notes:

Page 13

Ariel came out in 1983, and takes place 6 years after the Change.  Elegy Beach takes place some 27 years after the first book, but it was also written almost 30 years later.  They're learning about the Internet in history class?  Me thinks that when the lights went out in 1983 the internet didn't exist.  Continuity fail.

Page 24

Pete from book one named his sword "Fred," in the first novel.  The second book focuses on his son... also named Fred?!

Page 79

Questions: they require question marks.  Boyett seems to have forgotten that question marks aren't optional. Did anyone actually edit this book?

Page 145

The smart ass unicorn is by far my favorite character in this series.

Review:

Fred has grown up in a post-Change world.  Magic has become a new tool for protection as well as for trinkets - but no one really understands the way it works.  It's all part of the trading world that has become the commerce industry.  He is 17 and apprenticed out to the resident caster, but he feels as though he has more talent than PayPay is allowing him to use.  His best friend, Yan, is learning casting from Fred, but they're also going further and faster than PayPay would have allowed.   They have a theory that magic is the science of the post-Change world. that it's similar to programming a computer, in that there is a language that the universe understands.

I really like the way magic is approached in this novel.  It makes the very vague Change from the first book make a little bit more sense.  They explain that somewhere in the world at 4:30 on the day of the Change, something - we don't know what - happened that changed the laws of physics.  As the world rotated into that spot in the universe, the whole of the world changed.  Some of the old rules of the world still applied, like gravity, but for the laws of physics just changed in such a way that magic became the new science.  It became the new reality.  I really like this approach.  The author gets big props for this after how randomly vague the first book was.  This was still vague, but in a more thoughtful, thought out approach.

Yan at one point in the novel is offended by what PayPay says, and burns down his shop.  Finding this out, Fred kicks him out of town.  This is when Ariel, the unicorn, returns.  She has a story of caster who killed her mate, which from the kind of magic that was done, Fred assumes it was Yan.  With Pete, Yan's father, and of course Ariel they head out to find and stop Yan.  Finding his grimoire, Fred learns that what Yan really wants to do with the power that he has discovered is reverse the Change, in effect killing Ariel and all the supernatural creatures that came with her.

This book in some ways is leaps and bounds better than Ariel, in that it had a much juicier plot and it was less skittish about sex.  It seemed like a much more grounded novel, even though it wasn't any less fantasy-driven.  However, do you have any idea how difficult it is to read a book when the author doesn't always use question marks.  It's hard to tell what is a question, versus a statement.  Isn't it.  He used them sometimes, but damn it was difficult to read other times.

A fun read, for sure, better than Ariel, but not really anything special at the same time.

Ariel

Written By Stephen Boyett
Original Publication Date: 1983

Rating: 2.5 Stars Out of 5

Book Notes:

Page 84

"Fred"?  He named his new sword "Fred"?

Page 134

"You moved around a lot in your sleep.  You kept ...rubbing yourself.  You know, on your ... crotch.  It bothered [her]."

HEADFUCKINGDESK

Page 143

He categorizes his sex dreams as "bad dreams."  Whatnow?

Page 224

Ugh.  A Twin Towers: Two Towers reference.  I remember when the movie came out I had to explain to numerous people that no, they didn't need to change the name of the movie out of respect for those who were lost on 9/11, because the Twin Towers didn't exist when Tolkien wrote The Two Towers.  Pet Peeve of DOOOOM.

Page 272

"A bit Tolkien-ish, isn't it?  Washington going to war with New York."

If by Tolkien-ish, we mean that there's a necromancer, like there is in The Hobbit?  Then sure it's Tolkien-ish.  Otherwise, no, not really.  This author seems to like to compare himself to Tolkien.  It is inaccurate and cocky as hell.

Review:

I'd recommend this book for mature-ish 15/16 year old boys.  It's gory and sex-filled.  However, it reads better if you think of Pete as a 16 year old boy rather than a 20 year old.  It doesn't quite qualify as Young Adult, but it comes close.  Pete is a good Young Adult hero, what doesn't make it Young Adult is the length, sex and gore.  The writing style even puts it at borderline Young Adult.

I'm pretty sure I just read a 400 page metaphor for a boy going through puberty; either that or it's a 400 page metaphor for a boy losing his virginity.  Five or six years is a really long time to go through the worst of puberty.  The lights, cars, and guns stopping working is even called The Change! 

The fact that guns stopped working was pretty damned arbitrary, by the way.

When The Change happened, Pete was 14 or 15, just a normal nerdy teenage boy.  He went to his debate event and even when the lights went out, at 4:30, they opened a window shade and kept going.  He walked his girlfriend home in the dark, and when her folks weren't home, they walked to his place with the plan to go back the next day.  They'd spend opposite nights in each others' houses until one set of parents made it home.  Surprisingly enough, that plan didn't work, and that night Pete headed out on his own.

Two years after The Change, Pete was bathing in a clean stream musing on how quickly the waters cleaned up after technology stopped working.  When he looked up, there was a unicorn standing amongst his clothing.  When he got out of the stream, Pete could tell that the creature had a broken leg, and it spoke!  After the Change, mythological creatures started cropping up everywhere.  Unicorns, however, only show themselves and allow them to befriend the purest, the virgins.  Pete names it Ariel.

The sex thing in this novel is so weird.  Pete is so afraid of his own sexuality.  He is so afraid of his sex dreams and when he masturbates in his sleep he really bugs out.  I know he's afraid of losing Ariel, but dear Gods, he's supposed to be 20 or so.  I know the world is different, but it's not so different that men and boys stop physically maturing.  Even though it may have been weird having no one to talk him through puberty, he clearly knows what sex is from the way he describes his dreams.  But he's so goddamned afraid of it and every time someone comes onto him or admits to have had sex, he gets nasty.

Five or six years after The Change is when the bulk of the novel takes place.  (In the novel it says six years, but on the blurb, it says five.  Consistency fail.)  Ariel and Pete have been wandering from town to town, when they meet men on the road who will do anything to posses Ariel, especially her horn.  These men are led by an evil necromancer, who lives in New York City.  They go on a quest, to defeat him, walk to New York where Ariel is taken.  Making a few friends along the way, Pete is able to free Ariel, but only after it is too late for his innocence.

Oh, he wants to kill us with his powerful magics?  We should walk right into his lair!  HERP DERP!

Also, what is it with these characters crying all the fucking time?  After The Perks of Being a Wallflower, I thought I was done with the sobbing main male characters for a while.  I picked up a post apocalyptic book, for Godssake.  But no, Pete cries at everything.  Come on!  Every time he's over tired, scared, confused, angry, etc. etc. etc.  He's been living in this world for 5 or six years, by himself.  Why hasn't he grown up a little more?  At the end of the book Pete finally grows up.  There's an event that forces Ariel to turn away from him.  He couldn't stay a child forever.  Thank Gods.

Two and a half stars because, regardless of how weird and unsettling and arbitrary the sex, gore, and world was, it was actually a fun read.