Jupiter - Illusions of Faith by Kynan Waterford (3.5 stars)

Fans of Matthew Reilly will find a lot to like in this book. It's packed with intricate action scenes featuring "the most dangerous man in the solar system" Garen Maertikye deploying a dizzying array of body enhancement technology to move stealthily, outsmart, and when forced to, destroy his enemies. In fact, the body enhancement tech was one of my favourite aspects of the novel, with the highlight being the "type-seven augmented plantim" (i.e. plant matter) body. The description of the surgical implantation of a new occupant into this body and subsequent adaptation to the user was fantastic, as was seeing its capabilities tested through a number of violent encounters.

For me the piece that was missing here was a back-story on how Maertikye came by all of his amazing tech, especially since it is far more advanced than that available to the well-funded Coalition soldier elite. Presumably there's a thriving and dangerous black market for body enhancements, an exploration of which would make a great novel on its own. But we're given little insight into how Garen has survived all of these years - how is he funded? Being an emotionless badass might be a tactical advantage, but it doesn't fuel and repair a spacecraft, or make a stormsuit.

The body tech and fight scenes sit more towards the science end of the science-fantasy spectrum, but there are also elements of the story that are much more solidly at the fantasy end: energy transfer between heavangels and humans, direct manipulation of human emotions by heavangels, and a spontaneous complete body transformation. I found these aspects hard to reconcile with the preturnatural body tech and fight scenes that were full of much more realistic physics - I've never read the term "angular momentum" so many times in fight scenes before!

I'm not against science-fantasy, but my personal preference would have been for these aspects to have a pseudo-science grounding: like the heavangels are nano particles that move through the atmosphere in clouds but can inhabit humans as brain parasites. There's a great potential twist here if the humans try to stop killing them, only to be overtaken as hosts for an alien parasite. Garen's stormsuit could have been specially designed to harvest energy from a cooperative cloud of nano particles.

While I'm on my high-horse writing my wishlist, I also wished there was more ship slang, which is bound to develop on a closed ecosystem like the Golgotha, and less use of the word terrorist, which is cringe-worthy in a couple of cases. Like when a soldier is supposed to be verbally abusing a captured Maertikye, and the best he can muster is "You're in more trouble than you know, terrorist".

While the action has a Matthew Reilly flavour, it is far from being mindlessly dumb like those novels. A lot of thought has gone into the Coalition's economic stranglehold on the population and life on board the Golgotha. Character development isn't spectacularly deep, and having a main character with deliberately suppressed emotions doesn't help in this regard, but it isn't completely absent. To its credit, things don't get tied up in a neat bow at the end, it's suitably complicated, and suitably open for plenty of sequels.

Looking forward to the next one.

3.5 stars

The Sunne in Splendour by Sharon Kay Penman (2 stars)

Have you always been upset about Shakespear's portrayal and longed for a different perspective on Richard III? Are you ready to pick up minor inaccuracies about 15th century Catholic law, know your Plantagenet and Lancastrian family trees off by heart, sell white boar embroidery on etsy, and have your own extensive opinions on the various scenarios re the demise of the "princes in the tower"? Well, this is the book for you. There's apparently a lot of you, judging by the overwhelmingly positive reviews this book has had on amazon.

If, like me, you forgot there was a Shakespeare play about Richard III, had never heard of the princes in the tower, thought plantagenet was something related to blood clotting, and thought The Tudors TV series would have been drastically improved without fighting the same stupid war with France and Spain every other episode, you should probably give this 1000 page tome a miss. How did I, terrible history student, get here? I blame goodreads recommendations.

This book is a very extensively researched and, as I now know, unusual perspective on Richard III (i.e. he's an insufferably good guy). By which I mean that it's perhaps the most entertaining history textbook ever written. It is however, a pretty ordinary novel.

It begins with lots of incredibly dry exposition, that's screaming "Look! Look at all the research I did!" Honestly I could not care less about why Edmund is a little bit sad at Christmas, it doesn't matter. I don't care how long it took to figure all this out, it's just boring.

After the July battle that had delivered the Kind into Warwick's power, Marguerite had retreated into Wales and then Yorkshire, long an enclave of Lancastrian loyalties. There she'd been reunited with the Duke of Somerset and Andrew Trollope, who'd spent several frustrating months trying to dislodge Warwick and Edward from Calais. These Lancastrian lords...Marguerite herself had ventured up into Scotland...And so Edmund found himself spending the Christmas season in a region he little liked...

The imagery and raw emotion of Marguerite d'Anjou sinking to her knees in the snow was a welcome break from all the wooden third-person exposition, and things get a little better from there, but it's still a tough slog.

In trying to paint Richard in such a positive light Penman goes too far and makes him unbelievable. He's such a beacon of principles, loving father, faithful husband and all round honour-bound we-could-never-accept-French-wine-when-we-could-die-in-battle caricature that I found myself wishing for his downfall, anticipating a spectacular fall from grace. Sadly Penman only allows a little incompetence and poor character judgement.

To combat the dryness, exactly halfway through Penman decides it is time for sex. All of a sudden it's all kirtles, and body parts "gleaming soft and wet", and "feeling desire start to quicken again". This made things a bit more interesting at the expense of making the history nerds angry. Why are you ruining a perfectly good textbook?

But it takes until about page 715 before I get the first "huh, THAT's interesting" moment when Dr. Stillington drops his bombshell. At this point things start to unravel and the long, long, long anticipated climax made for good reading. A nice payoff, but it wasn't worth all the pain.

The subject material certainly has all the ingredients for a fantastic story, but history is a terrible editor. It could be a far better novel if the author was willing to give up on some of her research and make the history nerds angry by taking more liberty with the facts.

2 stars.

The Girl With All The Gifts by M. R. Carey (4 stars)

This book has an interesting early reveal that if you come to the book in just the right way, i.e. without reading anything at all about it, is probably worth preserving. So I'm putting the spoiler warning right up front, since it's impossible to talk about otherwise. Consider yourself warned.

Having said that, I knew it was a zombie book before I started reading. I think it's actually very obvious before the reveal, but it's hard to judge that objectively. The start of the book is very strong. The idea of high-functioning zombie children being studied for clues to help a mostly-annihilated human population survive in the post-apocalyptic world is very novel. It feels more like a government-gone-crazy dystopia novel to begin with, especially as Melanie notices lots of little cracks appearing in the facade that the teachers and Sergeant Parks present.

After the Junkers storm the base in a brilliantly conceived attack, everything changes. The novel switches to Walking Dead mode, where survival means defending against attacks from both humans and zombies. This is definitely entertaining, and Melanie's encounter with a partially conscious zombie sitting on a bed, singing and leafing through photos is one of the creepier things I've ever read.

"The raven... croaked... as she sat... at her meal..."

It's so apposite to her thoughts, Caldwell is thrown for a moment. But he's not answering her, he's only singing the last line of the quatrain. She knows the song, vaguely. It's "The Woman Who Rode Double", an old folk ballad as depressing and interminable as most of its type - exactly the sort of song she'd expect a hungry to sing.

Except that they don't. Ever.

But the story seems to start losing its way, especially after entering London. Dr Caldwell goes somewhat nuts, and the madcap adventure with the armored vehicle bordered on slapstick with the car careening around through buildings with zombies attached. I get that this was supposed to be the last desperate actions of a species on the brink of extinction, but by this stage I felt like the book had lost almost all of its early promise.

The ending was fitting I think, and I liked the use of an actual zombie fungus as the basis for the infection. Overall there are great ideas here, the execution just wasn't that strong.

4 stars.

Swan Song by Robert R. McCammon (3.5 stars)

My first goodreads recommendation, it was certainly on-target with the post-apocalyptic genre, one of my favourites. The obvious comparison for Swan Song is with Stephen King's The Stand. On the face of it there are a number of similarities: there's an apocalypse and the survivors are caught up in a good versus evil struggle with a fantasy component, i.e. the devil has a real physical form and people are drawn to each other through dreams. Good and evil population centres form and come into conflict.

But there's lots of differences too. Swan Song is much more of an action/horror book, with modest effort spent on building characters, paling in comparison to the masterful character construction in The Stand.  It is also almost purely post-apocalyptic, not much time is spent before the apocalypse, and because it's nuclear the apocalypse itself plays out very quickly, in stark contrast to The Stand where both of those phases are very long.

Swan Song draws inspiration from TS Eliot's The Waste Land and quotes from it are used extensively throughout the book, including as the password prompts for the nuclear launch.  (Incidentally, using a well-known poem verbatim as challenge-response is a terrible choice of authentication strategy).

Minor spoilers ahead.

McCammon's devil is fairly supernaturally creepy in the early stages of the book as he sits in an untouched theatre in NYC amidst the nuclear wasteland, and during his first encounter with Sister Creep.  Later in the novel though he seems impotent when confronting Swan, for seemingly little reason.  Her ability to wield "forgiveness" had a deus ex machina smell to it.

On at least a couple of occasions this book crossed my gore and horror threshold.  This is when I stop enjoying the other-worldness and thought experiment of survival after an apocalypse, and start wondering why I'm reading about babies getting clubbed to death to assert a warlord's evil-ness.

Sans these sections I thought the evil side was fairly well imagined.  I liked the image of the people living in holes surrounding the camps with lights and guns, picking off survivors as they are attracted to the lights of the settlement.  Lord Alvin of the K-Mart was pretty well-done too, very Mad Max.

The character development was fairly weak, and we don't get a deep feeling of being inside the head of any character, but I have to give McCammon some credit.  He certainly picked interesting character trajectories.  A homeless lady turns into a strong township leader, and a teenager, Roland, gradually reveals a mad and utterly ruthless appetite for survival at all costs.

There's a few cringe-worthy moments, e.g. when Sister Creep is saved from a pack of wolves, not once, but twice, under increasingly improbable circumstances.  And Macklin's whole shadow-soldier business.  It should have been really creepy, but instead it just felt going through the motions to apply the obvious stereotype for a post-apocalyptic warlord: psychologically unstable war vet.

He blinked.  The Shadow Soldier was smiling thinly, his face streaked with camouflage paint under the brow of his helmet.

The other similarity this book shares with The Stand, is that the ending is pretty poor.  All of the supernatural struggle is cast aside for a very real, very improbable, and fairly Matthew Reilly action sequence (it even involves a bunker).  After which everything is pretty much fine and things are looking great for the human race.  *sigh*.

Definitely a page-turner, post-apocalyptic fans who were bored with the pace of The Stand with a high tolerance for gore would find lots to like.

3.5 stars.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (5 stars)

In one of the best starts to a book that I can remember, this classic Pulitzer Prize winner begins with a quote:

Lawyers, I suppose, were children once
--Charles Lamb

Writing this review feels a little too much like a high school English assignment so I'm going to keep it (somewhat) brief.  It's an incredible book, and every bit deserves its Pulitzer and place on many Top 100 lists.

Once you've suspended your disbelief that your 8-yr old tom-boy narrator, Scout, is a natural wordsmith with an uncanny talent for deconstructing the messy, complex adult world into powerful and moving observations you'll love it.

Scout's father Atticus is a beacon of progressive thought and moral standing in deeply racist 1930s Alabama.  This from Miss Maudie:

"What I meant was, if Atticus Finch drank until he was drunk he wouldn't be as hard as some men are at their best. Thre are just some kind of men who - who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results."

And I completely agree with his philosophy on answering kids' questions, here he reproaches his brother after he evades Scout's question about the meaning of "whore-lady":

"Jack! When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness' sake. But don't make a production of it. Children are children, but they can spot an evasion quicker than adults, and evasion simply muddles 'em."

This quote also shows his intense desire to be the best he can, when faced with a moral crisis right at the end of the book:

Sometimes I think I'm a total failure as a parent, but I'm all they've got.  Before Jem looks at anyone else he looks at me, and I've tried to live so I can look squarely back at him...if I connived at something like this, frankly, I couldn't meet his eye, and the day I can't do that I know I've lost him.  I don't want to lose him and Scout, because they're all I've got.

Some spoilers coming.  If you didn't read it in high school, you should go read it now.

There are some incredibly powerful scenes in the book, particularly Atticus camping outside the jail to protect his client.  Scout defuses an angry mob with a big dose of childish naivete that humanises and personalises Atticus, changing him from the man defending the subject of the mob's hatred, to a father and neighbour.

After the dramatic events of the trial, the denouement seems a little weird.  Basically you know there's something bad still coming, and we just have to sort of wait around for it to show up.  Once it does show up it's shocking, and Scout's simple "Hey, Boo", after the dramatic events is incredibly raw and emotional.

Boo was our neighbor.  He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives.

 5 stars.

The Bloodletter's Daughter by Linda Lafferty (2.5 stars)

This was my backup book, purchased for $1 through some promotion and left on my kindle in case I found myself without a book or internet. That happened recently and it served its purpose, but was fairly unremarkable.

I appreciated the historical fiction aspect and the research that went into it: the descriptions of the Cesky Krumlov bathhouse, bloodletting and application of leeches were all fairly interesting.  Kepler was thrown into the story in a clumsy fashion, I guess his sidebar was supposed to be background on the conflict between religion and science, but it felt very disconnected.

The writing is amateurish, but not in a terribly distracting way.  Marketa and Don Julius are the only characters we get to know in any sort of detail.  Marketa's pure white virginity and passion for medicine and academic study seemed fairly implausible for a poor bathmaid in the 1600s, but I was willing to put that aside.  Don Julius is actually pretty good.  Where the story really falls apart is shortly before the climax.

Spoilers ahead.

Marketa's friend and protector drugs and date-rapes her true-love sweetheart, which is completely forgiven by all parties, because Annabella wants a child and the guy was being too precious about his virginity.  Right then.

I shall have the child I long for, and you - you no longer have your priestly virtue to confuse your heart and deny love.  I have set you free.

Marketa blindly accepts that Annabella's plan is the right course, even though she has no idea what it is.  Everyone else also appears to be on board, including Jakub and Marketa's dying aunt.  When the completely implausible plan comes to fruition I could see why it needed to be kept secret from Marketa and the reader - it's so incredibly complicated and unlikely that it would never work.

It's not like there were no other options. Putting aside the bizarre notion that Don Julius would call on the barber he has imprisoned and whose daughter he is promising to kill to cut his hair and shave him with a straight razor, having Pichler kill him at that point would have been far more plausible.

In the early part of the novel I thought Don Julius was going to turn out to be some sort of autistic savant and solve the puzzles of the Coded Book of Wonder, leading us on an Indiana-Jones meets Dan Brown quest for treasure.  I'm glad this book didn't turn out that way, but I still wasn't very impressed.

2.5 stars

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks (4 stars)

I'm a zombie fan, so it was about time I got around to reading this.  I have to admit being largely put-off by the fairly average movie inspired by the book, but I was assured that the book was much better.  It definitely is.  In fact, they could have stuck closer to the book and made a much more interesting movie.

Brooks has put a considerable amount of thought into many aspects of the world's military and political reaction to a zombie apocalypse.  I was fascinated by the catastrophic failure of traditional military weapons and tactics in the face of an enemy completely without fear at the battle of Yonkers.

But what if the enemy can't be shocked and awed? Not just won't, but biologically can't?

Troops with high-tech "Land Warrior" network centric communications and satellite imagery, a key strategic advantage in normal warfare, were quickly demoralized and running in fear after getting detailed images of the horde and seeing their friends eaten on live video uplinks.  Tanks, artillery, air-craft, navy, the jewels of a modern military were all very expensive and very inefficient ways to kill Zombies.  Eventually all of this is supplanted by far more efficient simple rifles and simple hand-to-hand weapons.

My 2c on zombie eradication.  At the point where they were rounding up zombies to send them towards highly efficient sniper emplacements I thought they should have been using a mobile slaughterhouse corral and pneumatic bolts to destroy the brain.  A lot more automated, cheap, and less prone to mistakes than snipers.  Similarly for the underwater zombies problem, nets and a floating slaughterhouse would work the same way.

I liked that the interviews spanned a large time period, so we got a birds eye view of the whole history of the war.  Particularly interesting was the period after the humans carve out some viable territory and need to re-organise all of society for war and reconstruction.

The first labor survey stated clearly that over 65 percent of the present civilian workforce were classified F-6, possessing no valued vocation.

This is totally me, useless after the zombie apocalypse.  Well, perhaps not completely useless if computer communications are still a thing, but certainly no civil engineer or carpenter.  You can imagine this doesn't exactly sit well with everyone:

The more work you do, the more money you make, the more peons you hire to free you up to make more money. That's the way the world works. But one day it doesn't. No one needs a contract reviewed or a deal brokered. What it does need is toilets fixed. And suddenly that peon is your teacher, maybe even your boss. For some, this was scarier than the living dead.

The idea of Quislings, living people who act like zombies out of some Stockholm-Syndrome-like impulse, was fantastically imagined.

This novel is really quite a strange format.  It's basically a series of short stories, so you don't spend much time with any of the characters.  It's part academic paper, part military after action report, and part touching personal news reporting, all about a very fictional subject.  At times it is powerful and almost inspirational:

There's a word for that kind of lie. Hope. 

This novel probably appeals most to people who have spent considerable amounts of time pondering what the best zombie survival strategies are, what weapons are most effective and durable, and generally how you would survive this invented apocalypse.

4 stars.