Saga: Volume 2

So of course after finishing Saga: Volume One last night I went and put the other four volumes the library has on hold.  And luckily they were all in at the branch I work at!  So I now have volumes two to five to fly through!  :D

Volume Two picks up exactly where Volume One left off.  Marko's parents have shown up.  They knocked Izabel (the ghost teenager who helped them in exchange for going off world with them) onto a nearby planetoid.  So Marko and his mom go to find her.  Meanwhile Alana makes an alarming discovery about Marko's father - he has a terminal illness but refuses to tell his family (he doesn't want his last month to be full of pity). 

Meanwhile Freelancer The Will is off moping because the woman he loves, The Stalk, was recently killed.  But Gwendolyn, Marko's ex-girlfriend who works for the Secretary General of Wreath high Command, comes looking for him.  She agrees to help him save Slave Girl from Sextillion as long as he will stop moping and get back to his job (which is to kill Marko and Alana).

Volume Two is full of a lot more backstory than Volume One, which kind of made it not as good in my opinion.  But by "not as good," that basically means it's a 4 or 4.5/5 rather than the 5/5 I gave Volume One on Goodreads.  So yes, I am still excited to be reading this story and can't wait to see what happens next!!!

Saga: Volume 1

Wow! I was totally blown away by Saga! Volume 1 is about the birth of Hazel. Her parents are from opposing sides in a galactic war. Both sides know she has been born; they're hunting her little family in the immediate aftermath of her birth.

Hazel's parents come into possession of a map that will lead them to a rocketship forest on the mostly unexplored planet of Cleave. While avoiding the people pursuing them, they meet the ghosts of Cleave's natives. One of them offers to help them in exchange for taking her off world with them.

My explanation makes Saga sound kind of boring, but honestly it was anything but! It's full of all kinds of crazy creatures including the robot people and the cat who can detect lies. Hazel's parents are badasses who are willing to fight the galaxy to keep their family together and safe (well maybe not her dad, Marko, who is now a pacifist). This was an awesome story and I can't wait to read more!

Old Man Logan: Warzones!

I saw Old Man Logan: Warzones! at work last week. The idea of an old man Wolverine wandering around appealed to me so I put it on hold. (Personally I thought his healing factor means he stays pretty much unaging, but I guess that's wrong). Of course I didn't think about the rest of the premise of the book: Wolverine is in some weird dystopia that is the remains of other realms. I'm not a huge comic book reader, and I tend not to like getting caught up in comic multiverses (except for how it was handled in Supergirl - that was brilliant). And add to that how I found the artwork confusing in a few places (fights of course), and this really wasn't for me.

Logan is in some wasteland. After somehow killing the other X-men, he was peacefully living life with his family until the Hulks killed them. He retaliated, killing all the Hulks except a baby, which he took for himself to raise (I'm actually sad that we didn't get to see this - his Hulk battle would've been quite interesting to read). But then he started going on random other adventures (I have no idea why). When he finds an Ultron head from over the wall, he decides to investigate. This takes him on a crazy adventure to other worlds where people he thought were dead are still alive.

Unfortunately Old Man Logan: Warzones! is book 0. I had hoped that meant it was a standalone; it means it's the prequel story to a series. I will reiterate that this really wasn't a story for me; I will not be reading any further adventures of Old Man Logan.

The Sleeper and the Spindle

I got The Sleeper and the Spindle out weeks ago from the library. I thought it was a graphic novel, but when I opened it to read, it actually is an illustrated prose story. So I put it aside because I wasn't in the mood for prose at the time (even Neil Gaiman's prose), and finally decided to read it tonight.

I knew The Sleeper and the Spindle was a Sleeping Beauty story. But I wasn't prepared for how Gaiman masterfully combined both Sleeping Beauty and Snow White (but looking back on it, it's a really obvious combination!)

The Sleeper and the Spindle starts with three dwarves travelling to the kingdom on the other side of an impassable mountain. There a group of people desperately asks for their aid in getting out of the kingdom because a plague of sleep is spreading. The sleep overtakes the people, but because the dwarves are magical they are immune. They return to their Queen to tell her what is happening.

The Queen herself had once spent an entire year sleeping due to magic. She and the dwarves agree that of all the bigger people, she has the best chance of also being immune. So she cancels her immanent wedding and goes with the dwarves to stop the plague.

The four of them journey to the other land and to the castle that is at the heart of the sleeping spell. There they find an old woman who remains awake in the castle and a beautiful young girl asleep. The Queen wakes the young girl with a kiss, only to discover the girl is the same kind of creature that the Queen's step mother had been. The girl stole the old woman's beauty, youth, and sleep years ago; the old woman was the young princess who had supposedly been sentenced to death when an evil fairy creature was slighted at her birthing ceremony seventy years ago. It was a fantastic twist to the Sleeping Beauty story that only Gaiman could have come up with (even though, like the combination of Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, it's surprisingly obvious).

Chris Riddell's art suits Gaiman's prose beautifully. This is one book I would love to add to my own collection one day!!!

Fifteen Dogs

I don't know what to really say about Andre Alexis's Fifteen Dogs other than the fact it was amazing! My brother was telling me about the book when it was on the short list for the Giller Prize and it sounded so-so. But then when I read the back of the book, even though it said the same thing as my brother had, it sounded amazing. So he lent it to me and I finished it yesterday.

Fifteen Dogs starts with a wager between Apollo and Hermes: if any other animal had human intelligence, they would all die in misery, too. So they wander into a veterinary clinic and give the fifteen dogs they find there human intelligence. What follows is the dogs' lives from that point on. They no longer fit into any world because they are physically dogs but mentally different.

And of course, right from the premise, this book is about their deaths.

I loved how the Greek gods kept intervening, too. Interference came mostly from Apollo and Hermes, but all the gods were interested in the outcome. And the Fates and Zeus had some sway in the outcome as well.

It was also interesting how no one was ever the bad guy in this book. Where one dog might seem to be in one chapter, you'd get to see things from their perspective in a later one.

While I admit that I haven't read any of the other books that were on the short list for this year's Giller, I'm glad Fifteen Dogs won. It was phenomenal!

The Secret Country

Pamela Dean's The Secret Country is the first book in her Secret Country Trilogy. Laura, Ted, and their three cousins Ellen, Ruth, and Patrick have been playing their make believe game, The Secret, every summer. But this year, the cousins have moved to Australia, so Ted and Laura are sent to stay with some of their other cousins. These other cousins are nice enough, but it isn't the same! They want to be playing the Secret.

But then the two of them find a sword under a hedge. Hanging onto it transports them into a magical world where their three cousins are already waiting. It seems that the Secret exists. They have been transported to the beginning of their game. And the five of them are expected to play their parts.

But how can they? Ted, playing crown prince Edward, is no sword-fighter. Princess Laura is supposed to be the most graceful person in the world (when in reality Laura is a klutz) and love horses (which Laura is terrified of). What's more, they don't know the people they are supposed to. How will they make it through the feasts and councils without being discovered?

Honestly, that's an excellent question. I'm not entirely sure how they made it through book one without much more than weird looks being thrown their way from time to time.

The Secret Country is the first novel I've read in over a month. I was feeling rather starved for story, which is quite possibly why I made it through reading it. I honestly had a bit of a hard time with the beginning of it, because it's a bit confusing at times. I had a harder time of it though once the story really got going; Laura is the main character, and she's really boring. You can expect her to fall every time she moves, or to drop the things she holds. And she has no courage at all, which translates into her just wanting to go home or hide whenever anything is happening. I do suspect this was on purpose, and that Laura will grow over the course of the trilogy. But much like in Mockingjay, when Katniss is confused and not caring, it makes for boring reading.

Another thing that I admit bothered me at first was how the solutions to things seemed to be something the children would think of with no real foreshadowing, like Shan's Ring. When Shan's Ring was first mentioned, it felt rather like a deus ex machina sort of thing. But the more I thought about it, Dean's introduction to the ring seemed fitting because this is a world that children made up; why wouldn't they be able to make up the solution as they go, too. So in the end I have to commend Dean; the world of The Secret Country really does feel like a children's make believe game.

I am torn on whether or not I'd be interested in reading the other books in this trilogy. All the way through I was thinking the answer to that question would be a resounding "no," but right at the end I admit I got a bit more intrigued. It felt rather like this was when the story really started. So I guess we'll see if it was intriguing enough or not.

Victor's Legacy: First of the Forsaken

What if Victor Frankenstein's monster survived into the zombie apocalypse and became a badass monster fighter? That's the question Matthew Jowett, Andrew Sookram, and Chris "Merk" Merkley set out to answer in Victor's Legacy: First of the Forsaken Book One. William, Frankenstein's monster has been providing for a village of survivors while remaining aloof from them; he knows what happens whenever humans encounter him. But when a new breed of zombies destroys "his" village, he seeks the road and a new destination. He falls in with Angel Eyes' crew of bikers when he saves one of them from the new zombies. After initially wanting to kill him for looking like a zombie, Angel Eyes agrees to keep him when William convinces them he can move through the zombies unharmed.

Unfortunately for the entire crew, Angel Eyes becomes more and more power hungry and mad, ordering them to attack and steal from (or possibly kill) innocents. And so William is left to either follow Angel Eyes into madness or betray the only real family he has ever had.

Merk's art brilliantly brings William's tale to life. I'm definitely going to have to check out the continuing adventure because I definitely want more!!!