Words from a Stone

In the Castrima Comm, Essun struggles to navigate the many threats assailing her: her mentor is unwell, her daughter is missing out in the world somewhere, there are scheming Stone Eaters, and, oh, just a little thing about how the current Season won’t end in her lifetime and humanity, as she knows it, seems doomed to extinction. Y’know, normal stuff that happens every day. Also, what the heck is a moon....?

The Fifth Season had me stumbling a bit over Jemisin’s use of the Second Person voice and, if that was rough for the reader in that book, well, book two continues that same device. By now, I’ve settled into it, it doesn’t bother me. On the contrary, use of the Second Person voice makes it easier to accept moments in which the narrator withholds information.

That latter scenario is what convinced me that I actually was enjoying The Obelisk Gate; the narrator alluded to events but provided no details. Something inside me shrieked, “tell me!” From that point on, I was committed.

Even as I write this, I realize how cagey is the language I employ. Another bit of oblique evidence for how much I really liked the title: I don’t want to spoil anything for another prospective reader.

Essun is well-written, to my mind. She’s very capable in many ways, although she doesn’t always succeed in the way she hoped. Sometimes, her victories come at a cost, and sometimes that cost is paid by people she cares about. It helped keep me grounded in the world!

I have, however, discovered that I can’t comfortably read these books back-to-back. The setting, the characters, the unfolding events, all of them are GRIM. Moments of levity are rare. It wasn’t so severe that I needed to take a break mid-novel, but I did need time between to cleanse the palate a bit.

Woooo! It’s been a while. I have a new book club! They’re actually reading the sequel to this book, so I gotta catch up, and that means: more book reviews! People who dwell in the Stillness must shelter in communal Comms, living in fear that one of their number could be revealed as a dreaded Orogene. Fortunately, the Guardians exist to wrangle those not-people, carting them off to the Fulcrum, where they can be properly made to serve mankind. At least, that’s what most folk believe.... Initially, I was disoriented by The Fifth Season; Jemisin deliberately employs the rarely-used Second Person voice, a dangerous and forbidden literary technique, and I needed a chapter or two to adjust to the unfamiliar perspective. It isn’t there all the time, mind you, just for, oh, about a third of the chapters. That, bundled with a substantial sum of setting-specific terminology, made the early chapters an exercise in patience.

Jemisin never becomes didactic, however. Rarely does she indulge in having one character explain something to another purely for the benefit of the reader, accomplishing much of her conveyance via show-don’t-tell and trusting that we will grasp her meaning in the fullness of time. I count this as a positive feature and laud her authorial skill! By the end, I didn’t feel like I lacked for detail and am very much anticipating The Obelisk Gate.

The story winds through the lives of three main protagonists, moving among events in three separate and distinct time periods, and the cast around them is fairly sparse. Readers beware of that: this isn’t three stories taking place concurrently, so keeping track of what is happening when may, at first, be a bit rough. (Personally, I very much enjoyed Andrew Hussie’s Homestuck, which is, what, four timelines across two separate universes? The Fifth Seasons was, if anything, rather refreshing!) I must, here, spare a moment to applaud the performance by Robin Miles in the audiobook version! She fills every line with a deft nuance that pulled my heart whichever way she pleased. I have favorites among the narrators I have heard in books past and she may have just launched herself into first place.

I liked Red Rising. As a character, Darrow is straightforward and uncomplicated: he loves what he loves, hates what he hates, and wants to wear his heart on his sleeve. He learns how to control some of his impulsiveness, but never becomes a sterile, emotionless ubermensch.

The pace of the book is brisk. Early on, I caught myself wryly checking off items from an imagined list, as if playing some sort of 'radicalization bingo' card. Here's where he has an achievement stolen by a corrupt system, here's where he decides to just deal with it, (until) here's where it gets personal. In spite of that, it's easy to identify with Darrow's plight and Brown takes the time to emphasize just how mortal he is. Darrow isn't an impervious, stoic badass, he's a young, passionate man with strengths and weaknesses.

An inevitable comparison must be drawn to works like The Hunger Games and Divergent. I've not read the latter, but I generally liked the former. The Hunger games is, however, a Young Adult series, and, now that I've read Red Rising, I can better express what I felt was missing from it: the government. From what I recall, the Capitol was mostly represented by President Snow and his unfailingly loyal, mostly-faceless minions. The Government was Bad and the only redeemable people were secretly rebels or hapless bystanders.

In Red Rising, there's a bit more nuance: Darrow discovers that, regardless of which caste they are born into, there are good people among the bad. He reflects on and is troubled by it, and it helps enhance a sense that the world is real. The Society is not a single, soulless entity, it is composed of many competing factions and egos, some of which can be turned against the others...

Siri Keeton joins a diverse crew of transhuman specialists to investigate an unknown artifact in deep space. Possibly, this will be the first contact with an extraterrestrial species, and so the Theseus has a Linguist and a Biologist aboard to study them, a Soldier to direct the ship’s defenses, a Vampire to offer his alien perspective, and Siri himself to act as an impartial observer. Nothing bad’s gonna happen on this trip! 

In the first two hours of the novel, I appreciated how Watts kept the narrative tight and quick, not bogging down in descriptions of the whole world. He kept to the essentials and effectively used context to direct the reader’s imagination to fill in the gaps. The post-scarcity society that spans the Earth, Moon, and Mars, the commercially available Heaven that functions as a sort of long-term retirement crossed with an even more futuristic Holodeck, and the occasional oblique reference to a possible Singularity are all given just enough detail to entice the reader. 

Unfortunately, I couldn’t get invested in the story. Siri rather belabors his own cognitive state as a half-man, half-machine mind, the perfectly impersonal observer who can’t feel his way through any kind of human interaction, instead he intellectually digests facial expressions, body language, and subtle tonal variations to act as a sort of high-tech mentalist. He doesn’t get emotionally engaged with anything, and we are subjected to his anecdotes of a now-deceased girlfriend of his as an example of what can happen when he makes an attempt. Because of that emotional distance, I was never able to feel like I connected with the events unfolding in the text. 

There was a point where Siri talks about the various epithets that others have applied to him: synthesist, jargonaught, comissar, and one or two others. On the following page, he casually labels Jukka Sarasti as “the vampire.” I was wondering if there would be a moment spent to reflect on the irony of this, but, no, that didn’t happen. 

None of the characters really have anything invested in the outcome. They have one thing to lose: their lives. Paradoxically, this single unit makes for poor drama, because the tension doesn’t really have anywhere to go: it starts at “I could die” and pretty much stays there. The few moments of comparative intensity end up feeling wan and robbed of immediacy, because I don’t care what happens to these “people,” they’re only vectors for exposition. It doesn’t help that four out of five crew members have back-ups in hibernation, so a death just means their replacement gets to wake up. 

I have, in the past, begun more than one, uh, “intense verbal disagreement” by explaining how much I disliked A Game of Thrones (the novel, not the HBO adaptation). In it, Martin got my hopes up by introducing an interesting cast of characters, then failed to deliver on my raised expectations. Watts hasn’t even accomplished that first feat, so I can’t even feel properly disappointed. The twelve hours I invested reading Blindsight have not inspired much of anything aside from a desire to be reading something else. 

Did you ever read Harry Potter and think, “this is good, but what if Harry was a girl, and instead of school she was at a convent, and instead of magic she learned kung fu,” and then just stared into space while reading this because of how I perfectly captured your thoughts? Yeah, uh, me neither....

Nona is a young girl, perhaps nine years old, living on a world where the space left for people to live in is ever shrinking, crowded inward by encroaching ice. The dim, dying sun yields little warmth and the only hope, the only relief, comes from the Focus Moon, shining light and heat down to the narrow corridor where people still try to scratch out some kind of life. 

Red Sister took a long time to grab me. Part of the delay stemmed from the different narrator of the audio book occasionally using an odd pronunciation of a common word and having a very different attitude from what I’m used to. James Clamp was a great fit for Jorg Ancrath, very matter-of-fact and ruthless in his delivery, but still maintaining a veneer of civility. Tim Gerard Reynolds nicely interpreted Jallan Kendeth with all the swagger, pathos, and flippant egoism that really made the character for me, then turned right around an voiced Snorri as a man I’d be proud to call friend. 

Heather O’Neil has a cast mostly consisting of ten year old girls, so it was tough to differentiate them all. She acquits herself well, but Nona didn’t feel real, to me, until very late in the book. 

That’s what lies at the core of my issues. The sisters of the Sweet Mercy Convent are interesting, having distinct personalities and hints at broader lives. Nona, by contrast, is very secretive, which makes it difficult to engage with her. 

Ultimately, though, this pays off, and the last third of the tale takes flight. It finally feels like a proper Mark Lawrence book. Events have far reaching repercussions and often delayed resolutions, and Lawrence has a talent for the tragedy of small things.

The world is going to end in fire.

A strange disease, Dragonscale, has swept around the globe, and the people it infects develop swirling black marks, like tattoos, all over their bodies. Then they spontaneously combust. As civilization collapses, young nurse Harper Grace tries to comfort the sick and suffering, including a young deaf boy brought to the clinic by a man dressed in a firefighter’s coat and gloves. 

Then the hospital burns down. Then she discovers she, too, has been infected and sends her husband Jakob to live somewhere he won’t risk infection. Then she discovers she’s pregnant, decides to carry the child to term despite the many risks, and sets out to find a place to deliver her baby into the world safely. 

I’ve read that Joe Hill has referred to The Fireman as “The Stand soaked in gasoline.” It is fortunate for him, then, that I have never read The Stand, as I’ve also read that many fans of Stephen King regard it as his finest work. If The Fireman is Joe Hill’s finest work, I doubt I’ll be reading anything else he has written. 

I had high hopes at the start. King is often hit (Eyes of the Dragon, The Wizard and Glass) or miss (Song of Susanna) with me. Several members of my book club had read Hill’s works and said they’d liked them, though in retrospect they didn’t gush with praise for them. Still, I was optimistic, and I suppose that means I am partly to blame for my own disappointment. 

My biggest problem with the book lies in the laziness of its composition. The Dragonscale is interesting and Hill successfully preserves the Fireman’s air of mystery and danger throughout most of the book. But Harper’s character can be summed up in three words: Nice Pregnant Nurse. There. That’s it.

Emphasis on ‘pregnant,’ by the way. So much emphasis. No one ever lets you or anyone else ever forget it. “Careful, Harper, remember that you’re pregnant.” I expect I was mostly cranky about my gripes with the book, but it started to feel like Hill didn’t trust me as a reader to keep track of that fact on my own. 

Early on, the pace is rushed. We are allowed to read a brief vignette, then time skips ahead days, weeks, or even months to another vignette. If I were feeling charitable, I might describe it as creating a sense of lost control, talk about how it underscored the fast fall into a post apocalyptic society. 

Regrettably, Hill rapidly exhausted my charity, so I’ll instead describe it as more lazy writing. He had the opportunity to organically build up the relationship between Harper and Jakob but he wanted to get to the action faster, so he rushed past what should have been establishing scenes. As a result, Jakob goes from a slightly-rough-around-the-edges young husband, to a stressed out hipster prick, and finally to violent sociopath in a shockingly short time. It was also space in which he might have convinced me to invest myself in Harper’s plight, but there appears to have been an assumption that I would automatically empathize with the Nice Pregnant Nurse. 

Part of what broke my immersion was the way Harper doesn’t seem to have existed prior to the start of the story. She doesn’t have any friends! She seems to never have had any! None worth mentioning, at any rate. As a nurse, she’s attended university and works in a school in the very first scene, places where a person can’t help but be surrounded by people. Yet, her life has been distilled down to herself and Jakob. There isn’t even a mention of anyone she knows catching the Dragonscale and combusting to explain this comprehensive absence of anything resembling a social life. I dimly recall her reminiscing on things she did in her youth, but can’t think of a single friend or relation aside from Jakob or her parents. 

It feels especially egregious after we learn that Jakob has been cheating on Harper with some of her friends. I had thought we would slowly learn how subtly abusive Jakob had been, slowly isolating Harper from her friends, but that doesn’t seem to be what happened. Still, she doesn’t have any mementos or fond memories to share with anyone else. I guess she’s only close enough to these other women for Jakob to prove he’s an irredeemable asshole. 

The other characters are written to about the same level, though they’re easier to accept because we don’t live inside their heads. It should be noted that Hill appears to have an aversion to dialogue as a vehicle for character development. Every character worth talking to simply drops an information dump on Harper. It’d be understandable if it happened once, maybe twice, but it’s the norm rather than the exception. “Oh, I guess we’ve got some time alone, might as well tell you my life story and all my relevant motivations.” 

If there’s something that a character doesn’t directly exposit, most often Hill fills it in for us as narration and then attributes it. It’s a literary shortcut that snips out even more opportunities for characterization through dialogue and further underscores the theme of laziness I’ve been banging on about. 

It’s a shame because, taken as a whole, the book fits together very neatly. Hill has a pretty consistent in-universe explanation for everything that happens and almost every question is eventually answered. In the few non-info dump places where characters do interact, they almost convinced me they could be real people, and he adds many small sensory flourishes (scents, visual details) to help set scenes in the reader’s mind. 

Prince Jalan Kendeth has a problem: he’s an out and out scoundrel who would like nothing better than to spend the rest of his life indulging in fine wine, fine food, and fine women. How is that a problem? The world might well end before the year is out....

This review can’t avoid spoilers for The Liar’s Key, so readers may want to read that one first! 

Adamat, a private investigator with a knack for remembering everything, is called to discover the meaning behind the cryptic last words of the Royal Cabal killed in a coup. The man who executed the coup, Field Marshal Tamas, has plenty of larger problems to tackle, such as finding a way to pay his men, feed the people of Adro, and discover which of his allies might be a spy. He calls his son Taniel back to the capitol to aid in the hunt for an escaped sorceress who might hold the key to some of his problems.

With a title like that, I was almost expecting vampires to show up. Fortunately, I went into this book knowing it was the first title in the Powder Mage Trilogy. I suppose there could still be vampires, but the title probably wouldn’t align quite so well. 

The McClellan made a lot of solid choices regarding the setting. Immediately following a violent military take over presents plenty of opportunity for dissent and intrigue. The Napoleanic-era level of technology in the world means the powder mages have access to weapons better than muskets without having the ridiculous rate of fire that later revolvers or magazine fed firearms provide. 

The three different kinds of sorcery are tremendously interesting, though I feel like they were conceptually added to the world after the countries had been finalized. It makes it feel like the magic didn’t really have an impact on the shaping of events. The Knacked can have tremendous potential in niche roles, but it seems that they mostly are left to apply their skills on their own. 

We are told that the Privileged are the most powerful and versatile of sorcerers, but most of what we see them accomplish is combat magic. I was kind of let down by that, though the events justify things going the way they did. 

The eponymous Powder Mages feel a lot like Sanderson’s Mistborn, with a bevy of abilities that make them potentially very powerful. Sadly, Sanderson has spoiled me, so quite a lot of what should have been ‘wow, cool!’ moments came across tepid. Allomancy is sometimes described as a brutal art, but readers are treated to a depth of description that strongly demonstrates how much personal skill is involved in wielding the power effectively (see Kelsier’s battle with the Steel Inquisitor near the end of Mistborn: The Final Empire). By contrast, McClellan tries to get away with saying, “trust me, this is super difficult, but he’s really skilled and he did it.” It takes the excitement out of what should have been very tense moments. 

McClellan also seems averse to letting his characters fail in the clutch. When the chips are down, they always have what it takes. Authors like Jim Butcher will do this with a little more wit, allowing his protagonists to have an easy solution that works, then revealing that it only has limited use and there are way too many problems to solve that way. Now the hero has to improvise and his new solution is probably going to hurt. 

In spite of this list of gripes, the story itself is genuinely interesting. The characters are varied and the twisting plot is absorbing enough that I want to read the second book. 

Daniel McEvoy has had a comparatively peaceful six months since the events of Plugged. His sort-of girlfriend is starting to get her life straightened out. He’s just starting to think that maybe, just maybe, life will turn out to be pretty sweet. We can’t have that! 

The death of Irish Mike’s mother means that his stay of execution has just run out, but Mike has a deal for him: deliver an envelope to a particular mobster in New York and that execution can be put off a little longer, perhaps indefinitely, if all goes well. Knowing McEvoy, this will probably turn out to be a milk run... right?

I almost didn’t pick up this sequel for a few reasons. The first book was a little over-the-top and the reviews I write for sequels tend to go something like, “yep, more of what we saw in the previous novel.” Happily, I did read it, and I was pleasantly surprised.

Compared to Pliugged, Screwed has a much smoother execution. There isn’t any need to establish McEvoy as a badass, so we can instead focus on building a little more of the world around him. I’ve compared him to Harry Dresden in the past, and that impression sticks: he’s smart, but not the smartest, he’s clever, but not the cleverest, and he’s strong, but not the strongest. If he has any traits that make him stand out, I’d say he’s resourceful, he’s lucky, and he thinks fast in a bind. 

Unlike the Dresden Files, however, the stakes are kept personal. Daniel McEvoy isn’t saving the world, or the country, or even his city. Mostly, he’s trying to get his own bacon out of the fire. That, coupled with his inner monologue, tends to play most things for laughs instead of drama, though Colfer proves he’s can hit the drama switch effectively when he wants to. 

Daniel McEvoy is an Irish guy working as a bouncer in a small casino in New Jersey. Life could be better: his job is pretty gross, his apartment is beneath a crazy lady who shouts at him all night, and, top it all off, he’s losing his hair. 

Still, things could be a lot worse. His girlfriend could get murdered, the crime pinned on him, and he could get mixed up with a drug running operation and a local mafia boss. Oh, wait. Yeah, things get worse. 

Have you ever read the Dresden Files? Did you think, “this would be great without all the magic, faeries, and other fantasy stuff”? If you did, two things, 1) maybe you’ll like Plugged, and 2) you can go now, ‘cause on this blog, we rep #teamDresden. 

That’s... really a pretty close approximation, though. Plugged is the Dresden Files without all the fantasy stuff. It’s not Urban Fantasy, it’s just... Urban. For better or for worse. 

In the hands of a less capable author, McEvoy would be a boring character to read. He’s ex-special forces, deadly in hand-to-hand combat with his bare hands or with a blade, he’s also a competent marksman, and *yawn* always prepared for blah blah blah. What kept me reading was the internal monologue, filled to the brim with anecdotes and humorous asides. 

The thing really missing was a consistent character foil. “Ghost Zeb” tries to fill in, but seeing as he’s just a projection of McEvoy’s wandering subconscious mind, he can’t really fill those shoes. There needed to be someone else who was capable of covering a few of McEvoy’s weaknesses. It would have diversified the challenges that could be sent against him and presented a wider array of interesting failure modes. 

I didn’t think I’d ever need to write this review, but I’d like to have my thoughts nicely summarized in one place. That way, if someone asks me what I think about Deadpool, I can paste them a url and say, “basically, that.”

Let me begin by establishing my credentials: Deadpool is the only Marvel character whose comic I have read of extensively. I haven’t read everything, but I’ve got a solid foundation on the various backstories he’s been given and his character in general. In terms of where the character currently stands, I’m firmly in the camp that feels he’s in danger of getting played out, reduced to a caricature with the phrase “quirky and violent comedic sociopath” scrawled at the bottom. Still, he hasn’t been run into the ground yet, and Reynold’s portrayal is as faithful as I could have dared to hope.

This film manages to fit in a pretty good origin for DP without actually telling the whole origin story. The film doesn’t waste time building Wade up from a normal dude to a badass, doesn’t get caught up in maudlin reflection over internal struggles. Instead, boom, he’s a badass, he never shuts up, he’s a little crazy, and he’s... human. 

That’s the part of Deadpool that seems to be in danger of vanishing. Underneath the violence, snark, fourth wall breaks, more violence, profanity, gross body humor, violence again, sadism, and general weirdness, Wade is still a dude with no family, scarcely a friend in the world, and a face that could sour milk at thirty paces. His tragedy isn’t that his home planet blew up, that his parents were murdered, or even that he’s being unfairly persecuted. He’s a genuine badass with an arbitrarily huge bank account that can’t be permanently killed. He has nothing to fear in the whole world. Nothing, aside from loneliness and rejection. Reynolds’ Deadpool doesn’t dwell on it, but it’s there, woven into the character, all the same.

I’m just going to lay out an opinion that is probably going to draw a lot of flak in future conversations: Deadpool is a better movie than Star Wars: The Force Awakens. I’ve already recorded my criticism towards that film, and there’s nothing that it does that Deadpool doesn’t do better. The pacing, the characterization, the dialogue, even the sets were more interesting to look at, more engaging. 

Best of all, the protagonist, indeed the entire film, take themselves just seriously enough. The heavy moments hit home with gut-wrenching thuds, but never so hard that they steal any momentum from the lighthearted quips, the silly references, the tightly paced action, or the gross humor. Better, the humor never feels forced or out of place. 

Speaking of the gross humor, I was pleasantly surprised! It was there, no mistaking that, and it certainly went beyond what I normally see at the theatre, but it never quite reached the level of shocking-simply-for-the-sake-of-shocking. 

As a long time fan, there were plenty of staple characters in place and, while some of the details had been changed, the whole remained recognizable, like a familiar face from not so long ago. At the same time, almost everything about the film is accessible enough that a newcomer would still come away from the film feeling entertained and probably grossed out. But, like, in a good way? Probably. 

If I have one criticism to level at Deadpool, it was the use of the character Vanessa. She’s great, and she makes you love her from the moment she steps into the frame, but that’s almost her entire role. Granted, she sees more screen time than Kim did in Taken. I’m not sure what I might have done differently. Perhaps a more active role in her own rescue... Morenna Baccarin already shows off her skill as an actress, despite the relatively little space she was given and, even though it may sound ungrateful, I’d like to see more than just Flirty, Devoted, and Angry. 

I should mention that, even now, weeks after opening in theaters and given plenty of time for reviews to circulate, a few people got up and left within minutes of the film starting. So, here’s the disclaimer: this film is packed to bursting with violence, profanity, and full frontal nudity. If you (or the person you are reading this to) believe I must be exaggerating, that Deadpool is a super hero movie like The Avengers or Iron Man, let me emphatically reassure you that, if anything, I have understated the case. If that kind of content is offensive to you, don’t see Deadpool. It really puts in work to earn that R rating. 

“There is always another secret.”

Six months after the chaos sown by Bleeder, Waxillium Ladrian is approached by a Kandra and asked to seek out a missing spike. When he vehemently declines, they ask Marasi. After she accepts the mission, Wax is shown a photo of... his missing sister! 

It’s a group trip to New Seran to discover the fate of Telsin Ladrian, the location of the stolen Kandra blessing, and one more thing: the mythical Bands of Mourning, the bracers that once belonged to the Lord Ruler himself. Legends say they hold the power to make anyone possessing them into both a full misborn and feruchemist, and that they are full to bursting with stored power...

Wax, Wayne, Marasi, MeLaan, and... Steris is going, too!? They’re going to need every advantage they can wrangle if the Set is involved in this business. 

This is the book that finally pushed Sanderson into my #1 Favorite Author slot. For a long time, Pat Rothfuss had held that spot, which is frankly a little shocking. Sanderson has him wholly overmatched for sheer quantity and breadth of Crowning Moments of Awesome. Still, as Wit once said, the highest virtue is timeliness. This book arrived when I needed it, desperately, and not just because I love the Mistborn series. Following Wax as he struggled with his mistrust of Harmony helped me grow past a problem I was facing, and I can’t place a high enough value on that. 

In my review of Shadows of Self, I mentioned how my regard for Steris had changed from the time I first met her in Alloy of Law. At first blush, she was a stiffly mannered lady with list for everything that seemed to exist only to keep Marasi and Wax from being the couple I really expected them to be. But I now remember that Kelsier and Vin didn’t need to be lovers and, indeed, Vin married someone else. 

Steris got treated pretty shabbily by Wayne in Shadows of Self, but that’s where she started to show the other side of herself. She’s awkward, analytical, and academic in her approach to life. I know I can relate to that, and I imagine many readers can, too. With that simple revelation, the person who seemed cold and aloof suddenly became easy to relate to, and Bands of Mourning only makes her more awesome. She does her best to prepare for everything. 

If you’ve read Alloy of Law, then you already know that Wax and Wayne are awesome, and that hasn’t changed here. Marasi gets to show off a lot of the ways she’s matured since Alloy, too. 

I think the what shocked me the most was the way Sanderson handled Harmony’s interaction with Wax near the end of the book. I don’t know what I expected. After Shadows of Self, I felt I had been firmly reminded that Shards shape their holder, and, for all that Sazed had been the gentlest of souls, half of his power now flowed from Ruin. How had that changed him in the three hundred years since the fall of the Final Empire? 

If you read both Alloy and Shadows, then you know that the former is pretty lighthearted and the latter is one of the darkest novels Sanderson has ever published. Bands is somewhere between the two, with the worst things, especially those perpetrated by the Set, occurring off-screen. It’s still pretty awful, if you take the time to think about it, but having it be at such a distance makes it easier to deal with. 

Overall, I have tremendous difficulty saying whether I like the Stormlight Archive or Mistborn better. They’re both so full of wonder, sorrow, and... and... conviction, that I must recommend both series. Mistborn was my introduction to Sanderson, though, and this is a Mistborn review, so I’ll give it the nod here. If you read Shadows of Self and haven’t yet read The Bands of Mourning, you owe it to yourself to pick up the sequel. If you haven’t read Mistborn: The Final Empire, please, pick it up and read it. You won’t be disappointed. 

Ok! Ok. I’ve finally caught up to the rest of the world and seen the latest Star Wars film. I have to believe that it’s not too late to add my voice to the maelstrom of opinions already roaring over the movie’s merits. 

I liked it! I didn’t spot any glaring plot holes on the first viewing, and can say that, with only his few early scenes, Poe Dameron rocketed into place as my favorite character in the new trilogy. He’s the first main character we meet and he makes a powerful impression. The Phantom Menace lacked a real protagonist, and Luke was plagued by his doubts and fears, but Poe, even as a supporting character, has all of the old swagger that Solo brought, blended with Luke’s altruism, and an infectious energy that made me feel like, yeah, we can do this. We’re gonna win, and we’re gonna do it in style!

The real protagonists are Finn and Rey, though, and I very much enjoyed them, too. Both of them worked, Rey being independent and strong without needing to be venomous or aggressive, Finn being competent without being good at everything. Finn gets a special mention for being very human. I expected him to fall into Luke’s role of being a wide-eyed fellow, trying to do his best at all times, but he surprised me by turning out to be a very sympathetic coward. 

Perhaps that’s unfair. He was a lot like the guile heroes I love in literature. He makes it up as he goes, always with his primary goal (escaping the reach of the First Order) firmly in mind. Although, I feel like his decision to change, to stop running and turn back to rescue Rey, didn’t get enough fanfare. 

Friends had told me that this film was very much an homage to the original trilogy, and I can see why they said so. The figures are mostly there, Han filling in for Obi Wan, and even a stand-in for Yoda. Old artifacts crop up, familiar sequences and visuals iterating on the modern screen.

I do have some nit-picks, though. For reasons best known to himself, Abrams decided to go light on the dialogue, and I feel the film suffers for it. From the start, there are two tightly scripted action scenes, the attack on the village when Poe is captured and then Finn’s betrayal and escape to Jakku. Next, we get Rey scavenging in solitude, and the next time we have two protagonists in the same place it’s time for another harrowing battle and chase. When it finally looks like Finn and Rey will actually have some time to talk, their ship is captured, then their captors are attacked, and then it’s time for another escape sequence. And so on. 

There’s very little breathing room, nothing like A New Hope’s scenes on the Millenium Falcon between Obi Wan and Luke, and I started to suffer from action fatigue. On top of that, what little dialogue we are given is mostly stilted, full of dramatic pauses between characters who seem to already know what the other means to say. I’m always a proponent of show-don’t-tell, but there can be too much of a good thing. The breakneck pace made the film very choppy, as if it were supposed to have been two or three films and had to be roughly condensed into a single movie. 

The film is very quippy. Too often, there’s a tense atmosphere building and it gets undermined by someone tossing out an off-handed joke. Once or twice would have been okay, especially from a character like Han Solo, but it was overdone and robbed several scenes of their impact.  Frankly, The Force Awakens feels like a second or third film instead of a third. The presentation I described fits better when the setting and characters are all well established and the stakes are all known.

In spite of that, I want to see the next one, at the very least. Kylo Ren has some strong potential as a conflicted antagonist, although I quirked an eyebrow at his struggle with being ‘tempted by the Light.’ It makes him a little ridiculous, and I imagine him struggling with a hidden desire to cuddle with a puppy instead of kicking it, hoping that Vader-senpai will someday notice him. Will he be redeemed by the end of this new trilogy? I genuinely want to find out and see, if so, how? 

The easy way would be ‘redemption equals death,’ Ren taking himself out, Vader-style, to save the heroes and give them a chance at winning the climactic battle. But that’s been done before. What if... what if one of the other heroes sacrifices their life for him, bringing him down firmly down on the side of Light, leaving him to take up their cause and fight for the good guys? He’d have an uphill battle ahead of him, convincing the other heroes that he’s totally on their side now... 

Anyway, if there’s anyone reading this who hasn’t seen the film... hey, sorry if I spoiled anything.