Black Gate

Red Country
By Joe Abercrombie
Orbit (480 pages, $16.00 paperback, $9.99 eBook, October 2013)

One of my earlier reviews here focused on Best Served Cold, the first standalone novel in Joe Abercrombie’s First Law world (but the fourth overall, for anyone playing the home game). You might remember that I was a little disappointed, but I still gave Abercrombie’s second standalone, The Heroes, a chance and was pleasantly surprised. Recently I cracked open the third (and most recent) of these standalone novels, Red Country – and though I was a little nervous at the beginning of the novel, I’ve decided this might be the best First Law of them all.

Since it was stated in a lot of promos for the book, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that Red Country presents the return of Logen Ninefingers, the conflicted and half-mad barbarian who was among the First Law trilogy’s stars. Presumed dead, the “Bloody-Nine” is living under an assumed name, though if you’re reading closely enough (and didn’t read the back cover) you’ll figure out in the first chapter who the cowardly “Lamb” really is. This was where I started to get worried, and decided that if Abercrombie was going to play some game at trying to be subtle with Lamb’s true identity, my review here would be very different.

But Abercrombie isn’t that kind of writer. Instead, Logen’s attempts to keep his past and his worse nature at bay becomes a key focus of the book, elegantly constructed in his interactions with the novel’s other characters, as the reader wonders when his loved ones will get the full story. The brief mentions of characters and events in previous books, and the moments when other characters admit that they know exactly who Logen is, are woven in expertly without certain names ever being mentioned.

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Ghost Talkers
By Mary Robinette Kowal
Tor (304 pages, $24.99 hardcover/$11.99 paperback, August 2016)

Every year I end up teaching at least one section of Grade 10 Canadian History as part of my day job (yes, I work with high school students by choice on top of writing) and begin the course by talking about the First World War. I’ve discussed trenches, the Battle of the Somme, German artillery, etc. so often that that particular stretch of history feels like a long-time colleague. Which meant that Mary Robinette Kowal’s Ghost Talkers (my first exploration of her work, though I’ve listened to Writing Excuses for years) was interesting for me not just as an avid reader but also as a historian, to see how introducing mediums and spirits to the front lines would change the nature of the war.

The amount of research that Kowal must have done for this novel shows. From the dialogue between the characters, to the references to actual events and aspects of period culture and slang, the characters in Ghost Talkers felt the same as individuals from primary sources I’ve read for my teaching. At the same time, the characters are realistic and easy to relate to; central protagonist Ginger, one of the senior members of the army’s Spirit Corps, is particularly compelling because she’s motivated by the death and grief around her (some of which is quite personal) but keeps pushing herself to discover the threat against her people before it’s too late.

Ginger’s entire story is set against the historical fact of women’s status and patriarchal society at the time of the First World War (in Canada most women couldn’t vote at the time) and since part of the story is about women proving their worth in a “man’s war,” I’m left wondering what would happen at the end of this alternate war. Would women be forced to go back to their traditional roles, like in our world, or would things be different?

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Icon
By Genevieve Valentine
Saga Press (336 pages, $24.99 hardcover/$16.99 paperback, June 2016)

On my Top Ten Books from 2016, I mentioned Genevieve Valentine’s novel Persona, a near-future ecofiction novel set in a world where the UN has been replaced by the International Assembly, a body where each country has a Face to represent their interests and those Faces are regarded like Hollywood celebrities. The sequel to that novel, Icon, continues to follow Suyana Sapaki, representative of the United Amazon Rainforest Collective, as she navigates the dangerous politics of the IA, which almost claimed her life in the previous novel. (You may have spotted this one in a Future Treasures post by John O’Neill last June.)

I mentioned the last time I discussed Valentine’s work that her storytelling has a very unique feel to it. A lot of the plot is left to the reader’s interpretation, to the point that even though I had read Persona and recognized most of the returning characters, I spent a few chapters with my head cocked like some confused golden retriever, trying to figure out exactly what was going on. The subtleties that Suyana and her allies are forced to deal with in their world translates exactly onto the page, so if you prefer direct storytelling and obvious clarity, you might not enjoy this series.

What drew me in and kept me reading, like with Persona, was the character work; once again we see paparazzi Daniel Park shadowing Suyana, for example, never admitting to himself that he’s in love with her and pained by the distance between them. My personal favorite was Magnus, Suyana’s personal handler, since once again we don’t know if we can trust him, even though we desperately want to because, like with Daniel, there’s a tragedy to the way Suyana keeps him at a distance, when apparently all he wants to do is protect her.

There are some big reveals with these characters, and intriguing twists that make Icon a great political thriller. However, I’d be lying if I said I enjoyed it as much as Persona. That first novel opens with an assassination attempt, and then follows Suyana and Daniel as they lay low through the streets of Paris, trying to figure out who wants Suyana dead and how to get the upper hand on them. That sense of urgency is missing here, and so I found this novel a lot less tense, even as the characters were discussing and dealing with things that carried a fair bit of weight. There is a pickup as the novel concludes, but it doesn’t really balance the more sedate nature of the rest of the novel.

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