The Dragon's Path by Daniel Abraham

I had high hopes for The Dragon’s Path, the first book in a new medieval fantasy series by Daniel Abraham. Having read and thoroughly enjoyed his previous series, The Long Price Quartet, I somewhat naively assumed that Abraham’s new series would demonstrate the same level of creativity and cleverness The Long Price Quartet showed. Sadly I was disappointed.

It is not that The Dragon’s Path is badly written. It is not. Nor is it that Abraham lacks compelling elements. He has them. But The Dragon’s Path failed in making me care enough about the characters to hold my interest.

The story is set in a world vaguely modeled after medieval Europe. There are kingdoms, free cities, twelve types of human-like races, and a strange religion that involves spiders living within the practitioners’ blood. So far so good. There is an interesting premise and interesting plays on typical fantasy. The story focuses on a few people, all of whom are closely or lightly linked together. There is war, betrayal, power lust, regular lust, greed and any manner of things that promise more intrigue in books to come.

We begin with one of the free cities, Vanai, being threatened by the possibility of war from the King of Antea. A ward of a bank there, Cithrin, is sent undercover with the bulk of the bank’s wealth to another city in case Vanai is conquered. The story vacillates between her adventures, politics of Antea and the story of the brief war. What should work in the book is the narrow focus on characters and how the events playing out personally and profoundly change them. In theory, this is a great way to tell an epic fantasy. Unfortunately this focus on the human element proves to be one of the major downfalls for the book.

The characters are not bad per say but, for the most part, are fairly predictable. There is Marcus, an ex war hero who makes his living now doing guard contract work and has regular nightmares about the day he saw his wife and daughter killed in front of him. There is Cithrin, an orphaned young woman who ends up with more responsibility than she thinks she can handle. SPOILER ALERT, she can handle it. Kit is the leader of a traveling theater company who, while a good guy, clearly has more secrets than he is willing to tell. Dawson is the loyal friend of the king who is trying to save the kingdom from its somewhat incompetent ruler (oh shades of A Game of Thrones). And so forth.

There was only one character that I felt was not utterly predictable. This was Geder, a young nobleman who has always been mocked for his scholarly pursuits and lack of battle prowess. At first he seems like a sympathetic character, then a monster, then an easily manipulated weakling. However, instead of feeling like I got an interesting complex character, I more had the sensation of whiplash and flying between different extremes that did not necessarily make sense.

In the end, this book lives and dies on how the reader feels about the characters and because of my lack of overwhelming interest in what the characters went through, the story fell flat for me. I appreciated the ideas, the political power play and some of the menacing fantastical forces creeping in at the edges of the tale, but I mostly felt as if I had just finished the first draft of a novel in progress, one that needed to be revised to make the characters more interesting in order to keep the audience curious enough to come back for book two. When the second book does come out, I may look for it but only if I hear that it has truly improved on the flaws from book one.

2666 by Roberto Bolaño

This is short but yeah...

Spoiler alert: There is no plot. For almost 900 pages, Roberto Bolaño takes you on a journey through five “stories”, each with seemingly less of a point than the previous. All sections relate to each other in sometimes the smallest way, resulting in a precarious web that often threatens to disintegrate all together. One by one, we are dropped unceremoniously into each of these stories with little or no warning and are challenged by the author to swim. I admit that I nearly sunk several times, but somehow made it to the finish line, mentally battered and bruised though I was. The main reason for this is Bolaño’s obvious skill as a writer. His prose and language are so rich that he could write about food in his refrigerator and you would read the entire thing, riveted the whole way through.

The story begins with four scholars who are the top experts of the author Benno von Archimboldi. Beyond the love of his work is an obsession with the mystery that surrounds him. Archimboldi is a hermit that only surfaces long enough to occasionally publish a book and the absurdity of his name when paired with his German background only heightens the air of intrigue. Guided by several tips haphazardly pieced together, they embark on the journey to Santa Teresa, a Mexican border city, in an attempt to find him.

The minutiae that in most books would be cut out is kept and cultivated until we are given a picture of scholars’ lives heavily saturated with color and depth. Just as you begin to find the rhythm of the narrative through all the excessive detail, its over and section two begins. Here we meet Amalfitano, only we’ve meet him before, as he was the Santa Teresa guide for our scholars that we have left behind and will not encounter again. So it progresses; each section with its own story and theme (love, insanity, race, murder) until we come face to face with Archimboldi himself in section five.

It’s worth noting that Bolaño had originally intended for each section to be its own book. Upon his death, the people responsible for it felt that these stories were one, and published them as such. It’s possible that as separate books the structure would feel less like fragments glued together. I don’t mean that as a criticism (at least I don’t now), because ultimately when you are done, you realize that none of it was important, but somehow it was. The human experience is a big and intricate web, with a beginning that we do not know and an end that we cannot see. It constantly shifts and changes, grows and shrinks and the individual parts hardly matter. In my opinion, Bolaño has handed us a snap shot of a small section of the web. So take it, read it, and when you’re done, put the book away and let it go because like life, full of wonder and detail it may be, it was never meant to be held onto.

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

To start off reviews, I decided to begin with one of my favorite books. Part mystery, part horror, part thriller, part romance, The Shadow of the Wind is a complex story written for people who love books.

The plot starts out in a relatively straightforward manner. As a young boy, Daniel Sempere’s father takes him to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. Half the most maze-like library ever described and half a tomb, the Cemetery of Forgotten Books is where books are taken to be saved. According to tradition, when someone goes to the Cemetery for the first time they are allowed to take a book on the condition that they will always protect it. A book called The Shadow of the Wind written by a man named Julián Carax intrigues Daniel on his first trip. He takes it home and falls in love with the story, thus setting off a multi-year quest to find out more about both the book and the author. Throughout the story, he runs afoul of corrupt policemen, liars, thieves and a shadowy man determined to burn everything Carax ever wrote. Daniel finds intrigue, love and pain as his own life becomes more and more intertwined with the mysteries presented by both The Shadow of the Wind and Julián Carax.

What makes this book so unique is the way Zafón presents his story. He keeps you teetering on the edge through most of it, unsure of whether it is grounded in reality or has a magical presence. There is Laín Coubert, a the mysterious man who smells of smoke, has the same name as the devil in Carax’s book and wants to destroy everything Carax ever did. Is he a man or is he a demon? Is the house where the love of Carax’s life lived truly haunted or just abandoned? These questions and more follow the reader through the book from the poignantly sweet realizations of Daniel’s first love, to the truly haunting moments of terror, to the funny antics of various side characters around Daniel.

While The Shadow of the Wind flirts with form and style, it remains steady throughout with wonderful characterization and evocative settings. The people that fill up the world are complex and thought provoking. Most of them have several sides that turn up throughout the novel, leaving the reader unsure of whom to trust outside of Daniel’s core group of friends and family. Much like Daniel himself, the reader must sort through half-truths and lies, told to protect or destroy others in order to get a clear grasp of what happened to Julián Carax.

Set in post-Civil War Barcelona, the book draws the reader into a rich and fully realized world. Given the level of detail and the loving way Barcelona is described, it is unsurprising the book has now inspired walking tours in Barcelona. The city becomes as much as a character as anyone else in the book, seeming loving and warm in one instance or cold and hard in the next.

When all is said and done, The Shadow of the Wind is a book about loving books and how loving literature can drive a person’s life for good or ill. Zafón clearly adores his own medium and wants his readers to love it as much as he does. Personally, I think he succeeds. The Shadow of the Wind is a wonderful book, the kind of book you do not want to put down and, especially, do not want to ever end.

Testing

1 2 3

This post is just a test.

Is everything working the way I think it should?  Let's test some stuff!

Here's a link to an awesome YouTube video.

Have a photo!

Say hello to the Alice in Wonderland night crew!  You can see some of the frames dying in the background.  Don't worry, we made them all work before they could go in the movie.

Consider this test complete!