Tag Archives: genre: sci-fi

Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children, Hollow City & Library of Souls

fantasy, fiction, science fiction December 11, 2017 Leave a comment

Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children, Hollow City, and Library of Souls are a trilogy of young adult novels written by Ransom Riggs which I thoroughly enjoyed.

I picked Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children, the first book in the series, up off the table at Barnes & Noble because of the cover. It was a little girl levitating. And I bought it because of the pictures inside, which were all of children in pictures doing hard to believe things. Some of the pictures were funny, some were creepy, all were in black and white, all were intriguing, and it convinced me to buy the book without really investigating it first.

So when I started it, I had no idea it was a YA book.

People piss all over YA books as if they can’t be enjoyed as adults because they aren’t sophisticated enough, and act as if you are an immature neophyte simpleton if you do enjoy them. While I find a lot of them not so good (paranormal romance isn’t much my thing – romance in general isn’t much my thing), every so often I find a YA book (or series of books) that I really, really enjoy. People are really snobby about this, but I have nothing against YA books, just STUPID YA books. But, to be fair, I’m pretty against ALL stupid books, YA and adult alike.

The premise of Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children is that 16 year old Jacob Portman watches his grandfather die, killed by a monster that only he can see. It sends him into kind of a PTSD depression, which is understandable, since after telling his story, everyone thinks he’s crazy. Following a series of clues, some suggestions from his psych doctor, and taking advantage of the fact his parents are desperate for him to recover from his illness, he convinces his father to take him to Wales, where his grandfather had supposedly survived in a children’s home as a Jew during the Holocaust.

Exploring the house, which is now in ruins, Jacob meets and follows a girl who can create fire with her hands and who calls out his grandfather’s name upon seeing him. Jacob is later confused to find that the inn where he and his father were staying is different, as are the town residents. He’s rescued by the girl, named Emma, and a boy, Millard, and finds himself transported to the children’s home of the stories his grandfather told him when he was a kid. The children in the home are all “peculiars” (children with some sort of supernatural/enhanced/strange ability; Emma can create fire, Millard is invisible,  Olive can levitate, etc…) and the headmistress is Miss Alma Peregrine, an Ymbryne (a woman who can transform into a bird and create time loops).

After some investigating, Jacob discovers that his grandfather was also a peculiar, with his  ability being that he can see hollowgasts – monsters that feed on peculiars for their souls. Jacob realizes that he has inherited his grandfather’s gift and that the monster that he saw kill his grandfather was a hollowgast.

The story goes on from there over the course of that book and the other two books.

I loved these books – loved, loved, looooved. They were a fun story with all the things that make a great fantasy story – fun, adventure, epic consequences, quirky characters, friendship, loyalty, and even a dash of romance (fairly well done romance, as far as romance goes).

I also enjoyed the appearance of new characters throughout the series, but not so many it was overwhelming (looking at you, George R.R. Martin). One of my favorite characters was introduced in Library of Souls. Sharon is a boatman who ferries and guides the kids through Devils Acre. I find Sharon very darkly funny and very relatable. The books had a lot of humor in them as well – some of it rather dark, which always appeals to me.

So it’s YA lit but it’s enjoyable for any age. If you want something fun to read with your kids, or just for you, these books are it.

The Gunslinger

fiction July 5, 2013 Leave a comment

Two of my friends and my mother have read ‘The Dark Tower’ series by Stephen King and loved it, and since I needed a break between ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ books, I started The Gunslinger, the first book of the series.

Now, I was in a beach house for four days about two weeks ago, and I have to say I blew through The Gunslinger in record time. Even for me. I don’t know how I got through it so fast, although it’s not very long.

The one thing everyone did tell me about The Gunslinger is that I should be patient. It doesn’t make a ton of sense in the beginning. There are more questions than answers, but what is made very clear is that there is one guy, the Gunslinger, chasing another guy, the Man in Black, who seems always to be one step ahead.

We get some of the Gunslinger’s history, as well as some of the history between him and The Man in Black. I found the whole thing very compelling, particularly his relationship Jake (and how he ultimately betrays Jake to catch the Man in Black).

You begin to realize that the Gunslinger is in a universe other than our own. It’s similar, but not exactly the same, and that there are other universes out there that can be traveled between (and dying in one doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve died in all of them).

How to travel between said universes isn’t made clear, but that’s part of why the Gunslinger is chasing the Man in Black and has something to do with The Dark Tower, which seems to be the point at which all the universes are connected.

Right now, the genre of the series seems unclear. It seems a dark sci-fi/fantasy/horror series, and I can’t wait to see how the series continues. Since King considers ‘The Dark Tower’ series his magnum opus, I expect big things.

So far, beyond this book, I’ve read It and some short stories by King, and my mom says a lot of his books borrow from this series. I don’t consider King an incredible writer, per se. His writing is average in terms of expression and beauty of prose; however, he’s a hell of a storyteller. I got sucked into The Gunslinger within the first few pages and read the whole thing in three days. I would have finished It much faster, but that book involved my two biggest fears – spiders and clowns – so I had to keep putting it down and kept having nightmares about a clown with pointed teeth that was out to kill me.

I’ve bought the next book, called The Drawing of the Three, which is supposedly more like a regular book than like reading a comic book, at least according to my friend.

But The Drawing of the Three will have to wait, at least until I’m done with one of the two books I started. I’m currently in the middle of both A Storm of Swords (the next book in the ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ series) and Blue Magic, the sequel to Indigo Springs, by A.M. Dellamonica.

The Newsflesh Trilogy

fiction April 29, 2013 1 Comment

I read the ‘Newsflesh’ trilogy by Mira Grant (a pen name for Seanan McGuire) on the recommendation of a friend. The three books are Feed, Deadline, and Blackout.

The basic premise of the series is that the human race has cured cancer and the common cold, but in doing so, accidentally created a virus – called Kellis-Amberlee – that turns people who die into flesh eating zombies. 15 years after ‘The Rising,’ the name of the era when the zombies first appeared and nearly wiped out the human race, Georgia and Shaun Mason run a news website and are selected to cover the United States presidential campaign of Senator Peter Ryman.

I liked this trilogy. A lot. It’s sci-fi and horror and a political thriller all wrapped into one delicious ball of page-turning goodness. But the author lost me a bit towards the last 150 pages of the third book. I’ll get to it. Hold on.

This post contains some spoilers – nothing too major, but spoilers none-the-less, so consider this your heads up!

Feed, the first book, was by far the best book in the series, although the latter two weren’t bad. Feed was narrated by Georgia, who is much more interesting and insightful than her twin brother, Shaun, who narrates the second and part of the third.

The larger mystery about the Kellis-Amberlee virus is captivating. The virus itself is captivating. McGuire really knows her stuff about pathology and sociology and history. The world building in this series is also incredible. I liked all the imagined tech and dystopia, and the continual shooting of zombies was also fun.

I liked the way McGuire used blog entries (written by the characters) to expose the characters innermost thoughts, particularly of the characters we didn’t get inside the heads of…so anyone who wasn’t Georgia and Shaun.

And I loved the way McGuire used Georgia to critique the current day news media. Georgia herself is a character to love: she is tough – rough around the edges – smart, and obsessed with the truth. In fact, it is Georgia who has given me a real motto to live by, especially when I write:

“Tell the truth as you see it and let everyone else decide if they believe it or not.”

…or at least that’s the gist of it. I can’t find the bloody quote now that I’m actually looking for it.

Anyway, I enjoyed just about everything about this series except for a few things: the end of the story happened too abruptly. Blackout was like, 600 pages, and the wrap up was maybe 10? Not what I wanted.

Second, and this is where the story kind of lost me: the relationship between Georgia and Shaun was too convenient. It gave Georgia something that had never been published, yes, but this relationship had been going on for how long? Nearly ten years? So this relationship had been going on as long as they said, and we’ve been inside their heads for 1000+ pages, and they’ve never acknowledged this relationship? Not even in their own thoughts? Come on.

Plus, even though they’re only adopted twins and not actually related, I found this more incestuous than I like to get in my stories. I really hate incest as a plot point.

Finally, the last 150 pages or so of Blackout feature a bizarre scene at the home of a male computer genius who seems to keep emotionally damaged girls to do his bidding. He’s clearly emotionally abusive and manipulative, and the girls he’s got with him are both clearly a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic, but the whole series of events at the house is confusing. I had to read the episode three times and I’m still not sure I fully understand what happened.

The editor really could have cut this “mad scientist’s mad apprentices gone extra mad” scene and nobody would have been sorrier for it. It felt like a very contrived way to get the good guys into a confrontation with the bad guys.

Anyway, yes, the last 150 or so pages of Blackout were not up to par with the rest of the series, but the series itself was still good.  I think the last dystopian future alternate universe novel I read was Mockingjay (the conclusion of ‘The Hunger Games’ trilogy) by Suzanne Collins, and that book paled in comparison to Blackout. Plus, Georgia Mason’s character at the end of Blackout was much better than what Katniss had become by the end of Mockingjay.

Overall, I highly recommend the Newsflesh trilogy. It’s smarter than a lot of books featuring supernatural creatures, but the beauty of it is that it’s so much more than a zombie book. Most zombie books are 200 pages tops, but this is a thriller trilogy that goes on for 1000+ pages. The science is obviously pseudo-science, but it’s very convincing pseudo-science, and there is clearly a lot of background research that has gone into this story. It’s not just virus pathology science either, there’s tech research in there, research about government agencies and how they operate, etc…

It all becomes a very well built alternate universe that features all the action you’d expect in the post zombie apocalypse, but what makes it a page turner is the mystery and political intrigue. It’s also the sheer drive of Georgia Mason and her tireless quest for the truth that really makes this series so worthwhile.

She’s really the great triumph of the trilogy because she reveals the human condition: at the end of the day, the truth really does set us free.