I highly recommend Flesh and Spirit by Carol Berg, but be warned; although the book doesn’t say so, it’s the first of two. However, since the sequel, Breath and Bone, is due out in January 2008, you might as well read it now. The book is about Valen, a pureblood refugee from his abusive family and the restrictive Pureblood Registry. Unable to read, a failure at magic, skilled at nothing in particular, and addicted to a drug that alleviates the symptoms of a regularly occuring disease — yet stubbornly determined to wring the most out of life and possessed of a reluctant sense of honor — Valen finds himself near death at the door of a monastery. Offered sanctuary, he decides that spending a season or two as a novitiate sounds better than freezing outside the monastery walls. However, he can’t escape politics, religious conflict, and his family’s secrets for very long. Valen’s an interesting character, the kind of duty-driven antihero I tend to like, the world is reasonably original, and the story is chock-full of politics, madness, and war, which of course pulls all the right strings for me….
I also recommend The Orphan’s Tales II, The Orphan’s Tales: In the Cities of Coin and Spice (Orphan’s Tales), by Catherynne M. Valente. I read the first of this duo, The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden, last summer and was blown away by its imagery, and this one’s just as good, if perhaps a little darker. They’d be a good set of books to read back-to-back, though, as I forgot some of the intertwining stories in the time gap and so probably missed a few references. The stories are told by a near-feral child who lives in the sultan’s gardens to the sultan’s young heir, and they wind around and are embedded inside each other like The Arabian Nights. I didn’t like The Arabian Nights, though, whereas the stories here kept me engaged, perhaps because they more clearly link together and provide clues to the mystery of the little girl’s identity. They also, for those of you who like the political/feminist implications of retold fairy tales, contain some interesting comments on the role of women in myth and fairy tale. The two books together form the complete set, and although the ending is a little sudden, it’s satisfying.
I should have liked The Necropolis Railway: A Jim Stringer Mystery (Jim Stringer Mystery Series) by Andrew Martin more than I did, since it’s not only set in London at the turn of the century and filled with all sorts of street slang but is also written about the curious railway that ran a funeral service only — a railway I’ve wanted to write a story around for some time. But although it’s readable enough, and Martin brings the noisy, rowdy, dirty neighborhood to vivid life, the mystery itself just didn’t excite me that much; it seemed like, with that setting, the author could have done something a lot more imaginative. It also ended with threads dangling, which I suppose you have to expect when a debut novel is subtitled “A Jim Stringer Mystery,” guaranteeing that even though it’s the author’s first, he’s already contracted for more. Sigh. What I wouldn’t give for more standalone novels, nowadays. This serial nonsense just has to stop…. I’m sure I’ll give the next book in the series a try, just because of the setting, but if more isn’t done to make the mystery as rich as the neighborhood, I’ll be disappointed.
