Category: Book Reviews: Literary Fiction

Book Review: City of Dark Magic by Magnus Flyte

The Prague of City of Dark Magic is a city steeped in legends of magic, a history of blood, and a legacy of secrets. It has been home to geniuses and eccentrics. It is also a city of secrets as music student Sarah Weston discovers. Sarah has come to the Prague Castle for the summer with a team of colorful academics to restore the Lubkowicz Palace to its former glory and turn it into a museum filled with centuries old treasures. There, she finds clues that might finally unravel the mystery of Beethoven's famous immortal beloved. What follows is a tale of mystery, politics, murder, a time traveling prince, a centuries-old dwarf, and even a portal to hell. Yes, and its a romantic comedy. This isn't a book that follows genre conventions, it lays them out like toys and plays with them.

Book Review: “The Night Circus” by Erin Morgenstern

Wow, the last quarter of 2011 has been a grand one for books. Erin Morgenstern's lovely and haunting The Night Circus continues a string of truly good reads that began with Among Others and The Magician King. It's a book I'll be thinking about for a while, and one I'll alms certainly read again some day ... something increasingly rare when my to-be-read stack reaches the ceiling. It's certainly one I'll be pushing on my friends. It's one that I can recommend to a wide swath of them, because The Night Circus will appeal to a very broad range of tastes. It's romantic, it's mysterious, it's evocative (certainly that!), magical, it's lovely, and it's (at times) heartbreaking. And it's almost impossible to describe. I wanted to rush through The Night Circus, and I wanted to savor every word. I couldn't wait to get to the end; I wanted it to go on forever.

Book Review: “The Magician King” by Lev Grossman

I went to hear Mr. Grossman speak when his author tour brought him to Atlanta, and while I found his talk and reading delightful, I didn't think The Magician King was a book I'd be reviewing. Largely because, when someone asked about a third book, Mr. Grossman joked about writing as many as his agent thought he could sell. Great, I thought. This isn't a book. It's an episode. I couldn't have been more wrong. While The Magician King assumes familiarity with the first book (although it does a fine job of reminding you of the hight points if it's been a while since you read it), this is a sequel with it's own beginning, middle, and very definite end. And darned if it's not an out an out better book. More, Quentin Coldwater (how great is that name?), the main character, grows and changes in this book.

Book Review: Jo Walton’s amazing “Among Others”

I readily confess: I am not above flights of hyperbole. Nonetheless, I don't think I am indulging in it even in the least when I say, Jo Walton's lovely, startling Among Others is more than amazing. It's a book that's going to save someone's life some day.

Belated Book Review: “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell” by Susanna Clarke

If there was ever a book I truly don't know what to say about, it's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Don't get me wrong—I adored it. I've recommended it to dozens of my friends. But not all of them. I don't even recommend it to all of my friends who like fantasy, or mythic fiction, or British drawing room comedies of manners. It's a massive book, something like 400,000 thousand words (that's a guess; I haven't actually counted them). Nonetheless, I found myself enchanted from page one. Magic and sly witticisms were so thick I had to swat them away like flies, and the oh-so-English narrative delighted me. The characters are engaging and well-drawn, and the period voice, complete with obsolete spellings and elaborate, fanciful footnotes (don't dare skip them!) delighted me. All the same, when I was nearly halfway through, I found myself still wondering when the actual story was going to get started. It had been going all along, but Ms. Clarke, like any good magician, had distracted my attention.

Book Review: “Mr. Timothy: A Novel” by Louis Bayard

I am not generally a fan of writers making use of another author's characters. While I have enjoyed more than a few modern takes on, say Sherlock Holmes, more often, we wind up with something like Scarlet, the unworthy followup to Margaret Mitchell's brilliant Gone With The Wind. Mr. Timothy: A Novel succeeds largely because in Dickens' original, Tiny Tim is little more than a caricature, a sort of cherubic plot point with a crutch. Building on our shared memory of "God bless us, every one!" Bayard shapes Timothy into a fully realized character—one that fascinates and, yes, makes us care.

Book Review: “The Meaning of Night” by Michael Cox

A few months ago, I wrote a blog post listing my fifteen favorite first sentences in literature. At the time, I hadn't read Michael Cox's The Meaning of Night: A Confession, or I would have been forced to give serious consideration to including it. It begins: After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off to Quinn's for an Oyster Supper. Now that's a pretty good start. It's an opening that hooks us immediately on the story, certainly. It's hard not to wonder what's going to follow that. More, it hooks us on character—who is this narrator, and how can he describe an act of terrible violence in such a casual manner? I'm happy to report that the book lives up to the promise of that first sentence. It is a dark, chilling read, and an utterly compelling one.

“The Angel’s Game” by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Yesterday, I reviewed Carlos Ruiz Zafón's brilliant novel, The Shadow of the Wind. Continuing with the "holy crap this is good" theme, today I'm taking a look at his follow up, The Angel's Game. While both The Shadow of the Wind and The Angel's Game are completely stand-alone novels, they are subtly connected. The two novels both a part of what Zafón says will eventually be a four-book cycle of loosely connected stories with overlapping narratives and characters. While either can be read alone, reading both makes each a deeper and richer experience. In fact, I read The Angel's Game at the same time that my wife Carol and I were reading The Shadow of the Wind aloud to one one another, a strange and wonderful experience.