Hard Luck Hank: Prince of Suck by Steven Campbell (3.5 stars)

Even darker again. Belvaille is barely functional, socially chaotic, and falling apart. Hank is so dense he is effectively crippled and close to death. And yet somehow he is in charge of everything. Unfortunately, most of the humour was lost in the dark plot. It's getting close to sci-fi noir.

In a number of cases, it's actually fairly clever social commentary:

I don’t even think any of them had given their positions on issues. Stating your position might piss people off who disagreed with you. But attacking someone else only hurt them, especially if you did it through third parties

There's even a little to learn about free markets and how they are important to society. In this case the bankers are an alien race called the Ankh, who are very interested in Hank providing some stability.

3.5 stars

Hard Luck Hank: Basketful of Crap by Steven Campbell (4 stars)

Highly entertaining, not too much thinking required just like the first in the series, but with a darker bent. Hank takes some actions that gets lots of people killed and he shows very little remorse. There's still plenty of funny moments, but fewer laugh-out-loud situations than in the first. Hank's prodigious hunger after injury provides some of them:

But the ache in my stomach was primordial. It was twisting my mind. I was looking at doors and wondering if I could eat them. They looked so similar to large crackers. I wondered why the asses who had constructed this city hadn’t left great piles of food lying around. What if people got hungry? It seemed a massive oversight. There was all this metal and no food.

And many more from Hank's apparent cluelessness, hiring an army via newspaper ad, and, well stuff like this:

I heard you were walking around barefoot, killing people, leaving their bodies all over the city, while wearing a diaper.

4 stars.

Little Big Man: A Novel by Thomas Berger (2.5 stars)

I got excited at the start of this novel as we were being introduced to Jack Crabb, our 111 year old narrator, mostly because of the fantastic visual descriptions Berger delivers:

He grimaced, which involved the total disappearance of his eyes and mouth and most of his nose, only the very end of which protruded like one fingertip of a clenched fist wearing a shabby leather glove.

But sadly, the rest of the novel is all Crabb, in a dialect that is too well-structured to match the character, and certainly with none of the beauty we get in the introduction. In fact, I didn't care about Crabb at all. He wasn't an interesting character personality-wise, and I just couldn't buy the tall-tale format where he's present at every major event (right beside Custer at his last stand), and knows everyone from wild west legend including Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane etc.

Old Lodge Skins the Indian chief was one of the most interesting characters in the whole novel. And while Crabb has some respect for him, Crabb's view of Indian's in general I think was probably fairly accurate for a white man of the time. This is very far from the Dances With Wolves noble savage romanticized view of Indians:

Indians sure made me sick. I could hardly breathe for the smell inside my own home, where them sloppy women I supported stirred up the muck we was going to eat for supper. We didn’t have no fresh meat, on account of instead of hunting that afternoon I had set and ate dog prepared by my natural wife in the tepee of her unnatural husband.

As historical fiction it was fairly interesting to learn more about Custer's military actions, and how Indians were hounded from one place to the next as the trains made the west accessible. Honestly though, the tall-tale format detracted from the historical aspect, leaving me unsure if there was anything real to believe at all.

If you're looking for a western, True Grit and Lonesome Dove are far better reads.

2.5 stars.

Hard Luck Hank: Screw The Galaxy by Steven Campbell (4.5 stars)

This is noir sci-fi comedy. Wrap your head around that, or "Eat suck, suckface". Hank is an amazing character, I loved him from the beginning. He's a self-described thug and a mutant with a superpower - he's very dense (heh), which makes him very hard to hurt. He has an offbeat, self-deprecating sense of humour that is just perfect. I can't remember the last time I liked a character so much.

 The story is exciting and ridiculous. Hank ends up negotiating on behalf of the human race with a vastly technologically superior race in a monogrammed pink bathrobe:

I looked at the robe for some time, wondering if I should get them to exchange it, but they had gone to the trouble to get it monogrammed. Besides, just because pink was a pansy color where I came from didn't mean anything out here. For all I knew it could be the galactic color of death and destruction.

The Colmarian world Campbell has built is hilarious in a dark way, and every bit as dysfunctional and contradictory as you'd expect a space station run by criminals to be.

The only thing Colmarians found more frightening than effective government was Ontakians: the race that had designed my very special plasma pistol.

I'll be reading more of this series.

4.5 stars

Son by Lois Lowry (2 stars)

This was the final novel in The Giver quartet, which I approached with much trepidation given the previous two were pretty awful. The start is a completely pleasant surprise.

We're back in the land of The Giver, seeing events from a different perspective. This section is moving, disturbing, and the reader grows to love Claire's determination to see her son. Great stuff, just like the original. The section describing her being forced to give birth with a mask on so as not to get attached to the "product" (i.e. baby) is horrifying.

The plot comes to same climax as in the first novel, except we're only one quarter of the way through. And then this novel completely loses itself. Claire ends up in a completely different community, with memory loss, and we endure a long boring account of her daily life that eventually firms up into a rock climbing training montage. The catch is that it's a 7 year training montage.

Once we're done with the lengthy rock climbing descriptions we step into the supernatural with our creepy friend from Trade Mart. And then we find out that Gabe, beautiful Gabe that Jonas risked his life for, and countless real-world parents named their real babies after, is actually kind of a little brat. Way to take the wind from the sails there.

So, there's an incredibly preachy biblical-parable-style end, and some closure to the whole series, but I'd be amazed if you're happy about how it turned out, I wasn't.

2 stars.

Messenger by Lois Lowry (2.5 stars)

The Giver quartet continues. This one steps well out of the norms of the previous two books and adds lots of fantasy. People can see the future, the forest comes alive to trap and kill you etc.

By far the strangest thing that happens is that the high technology world of The Giver, the medieval sew-fest of Gathering Blue, and Village (where Jonas ends up) are all linked. As in, they are all within multi-day walking distance and set in the same time period.

This is incredibly jarring. A technology discrepancy between rich and poor is common in the real world, but it seems implausible that the rich from Gathering Blue's medieval society wouldn't have gained more technology via trade or force given how close they are.

This book followed the formula from Gathering Blue: heavy on the symbolism, light on the plot. This time the former is about what we give up in pursuit of material possessions and physical perfection.

At least Trade Mart was an interesting, ominous side-bar. I wish the story had developed more in that direction.

2.5 stars.

Gathering Blue by Lois Lowry (2 stars)

I was so impressed by The Giver that I resolved to read the whole quartet. Having done so, my advice is don't bother, none of the others are nearly as strong. Gathering Blue may actually be the worst. Or perhaps it's just that the contrast with The Giver is still so fresh.

In any case, Gathering Blue is that incredibly boring book you're forced to read in English class so you can explain all of the vague symbolism and wax lyrical about how Kira was going to change and revitalise society through the power of art.

But if you ignore the deeper meaning and just look at plot: a girl with a bad leg in a medieval society survives her mother's death, gets a somewhat sinister government patron, learns how to dye threads, fixes a dress, and might add some new stuff to the dress one day. Note that I said might.

On top of being weak on its own, the novel doesn't even have the benefit of providing resolution of the events from the end of The Giver, or even obvious relationship to them.

2 stars.