Carlos Ruiz Zafón - The Shadow of the Wind (Book Review)

"The Shadow of the Wind" (Amazon: UK, US)
by CARLOS RUIZ ZAFÓN
Format: Paperback, 544/487 pages
Publisher: Phoenix / Penguin (October 2005 / January 2005)

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CARLOS RUIZ ZAFÓN was quite famous in his motherland Spain for his appealing YA literature even before he set his pen to write "The Shadow of the Wind" (which will, from now on, be referred to as "TSotW"). But it was "TSotW" that brought him international fame and recognition as one of the speculative fiction's most promising new authors (where 'new' is a relative term). Even though "TSotW" was written back in 2001 it took several years for the various translations to circle the globe and reach world-wide popularity and acclaim.

If we look at this novel at face value only, it's a pretty straightforward mystery/crime story set in Spain's lascivious metropolis Barcelona in one of it's more ominous periods - reign of fascism and general Franco. Our protagonist, a 10-year-old by the name of Daniel, discovers a spellbinding book and the more fascinated that he becomes with it, the more he prods into it's authors shady past, more dangerous, interwoven and jarring the discoveries and his everyday life become. But "TSotW" wouldn't be written by a Spaniard if it didn't include tinges of Mediterranean passion and love for life. But when you finish the book and think of it, this is so much more than a 'simple' mystery/crime story (which isn't all that simple to begin with), but a book about life itself and why it's worth living for - and what's worth dying for as well. So, like all great literature, "The Shadow of the Wind" transcends any simple genre labeling.

Telling you more about the story than I just did would be pointless and counterproductive to the message I'm trying to convey in this review, but let it be enough to say that the plot itself is as enigmatic, gripping and intense as one would want from a mystery/detective story. The pace - after a slow start - and suspension of disbelief are handled with the guile of a master storyteller for the better part of the novel as well.

Characters are, for the most part, complex and multi-layered, but also most vivid and sympathetic. ZAFÓN is prone to caricature his characters (i.e. representing them in a mildly exaggerated manner for the purpose of comic relief from the otherwise often bleak and dreary content). If there was a specific character in the novel, beside the main protagonist Daniel, that I'd want to expose, it would definitely be Fermin, once secret agent and now homeless person who played for the wrong side and attracted an unwanted attention from a certain vicious police inspector. His musings and dialogues are really an accomplishment of smart writing. ZAFÓN's history as a writer of YA literature is most clearly evident with how he approaches and handles his characters and this is one of the biggest appeals of "TSotW"; characters of this novel stir up the reader in a profound way, they bring out the awe, youth and innocence in us, and it's simply priceless.

If I had any grievances with the book they would be that the start is somewhat slow and that I didn't always like how Zafon handled the relationship between Daniel and his father. Well, when I think on it, quite a few families we meet in "TSotW" are portrayed as at least mildly, if not severely, dysfunctional and estranged, but with Daniel and his father it feels like there is a void in narration; the reader expects some kind of shift, closure or...something, but it never comes. But other than that, "The Shadow of the Wind" is a terrific example of how powerful - as in meaningful, smart and moving - can a scribbled slab of dead wood be. May ZAFÓN's fate never reflect that of Julian Carax*.

----(4,5/5 Fruitcakes)
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- Thrinidir -

* Julián Carax - The alleged author of "The Shadow of the Wind". Daniel desperately seeks to find out the truth about this mysterious man: the reasons for his journeys, the truth about his childhood, and the explanation for why his books are all being destroyed.

p.s. Definitely the best book I've read in the last year and a half (rivalled only by the brilliant "Flowers of Algernon" by Daniel Keyes - reviewed by Trin).

Frank Beddor - The Looking Glass Wars (Book Review)

"Looking Glass Wars" (Amazon: UK / US)
by FRANK BEDDOR
Format: Paperback, 384 / 400 pages
Publisher: Egmont Books Ltd. / Puffin (May 2005 / August 2007)

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Princess Alyss Heart’s life turns upside down when her vicious Aunt Redd beheads Alyss' mother and begins to rule over Wonderland with an iron fist. Alyss escapes from Wonderland and is exiled to Victorian London, where she is adopted into a new family, renamed Alice, and befriended by Lewis Carroll. Wonderland never leaves her mind, though, and at age 20 she returns to Wonderland in wish to overthrow Redd.

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Wonderland is real, folks. Carroll enthusiast, proceed to jump with glee. Someone--somewhere--has stepped forward, once again shedding the light on the classic adventure of a girl who stumbles upon a bustling rabbit and a strange little world. I, being one of the Wonderland-junkies, had to pick it up and make sure Carroll’s legacy was being kept properly.

Too bad that Looking Glass Wars was not much to my liking.

Not that it wasn’t an enjoyable read. It was. I read it in one sitting, almost entirely immersed in this vicious new Wonderland, where only the disloyal and heartless survive. I was incredibly impressed with Mr. BEDDOR’s imagination with the whole thing. He took a children’s book with roughly drawn characters and turned it into this maniacal world with armies and palaces … I could even go as far to say that he has created an entirely new world. The idea of turning the Cheshire Cat into a Cat assassin with nine lives was brilliant. The Mad Hatter has become a loyal but deadly guard for Queen Genevieve (aka the White Queen) and her daughter, Alyss Heart. The Red Queen/Queen of Hearts is, of course, the sinister Redd, and the wise scholar Bibwit Harte (an anagram for White Rabbit) is the royal tutor.

I’m not good at summaries in the least, so I’ll just get to the point: it was okay. Not marvelous, not terrible. Simple okay. The setting is fantastic, unbelievably creative, with such an amazing twist on everything. This might have, however, been the downfall of the whole thing.

It seems like the author spent SO MUCH DAMN TIME coming up with the setting, twisting these characters into generals and queens and princesses, that he forgot about the rest. It feels like he spent too much time exploring one scene, then remembered he had a plot to follow and rushed it through so he could quickly get to the next part. When I read books, the first thing I look for is a connection to the characters. Am I rooting for him/her? Am I invested in their life? Do I want them to win? I did not find any of this with Alyss Heart.
Looking Glas Wars is narrated in a cold, detached third person point of view, and the author separated the moment she fell into Victorian London and thirteen years later when she returns to Wonderland with a single paragraph. There is no time for the reader to relate to Alyss, or even to get to know her well.
First she’s seven and running around with a group of homeless orphans. The next moment she‘s ten and put in an orphanage. In a nick of time, she’s eleven and adopted and trying to push aside her Wonderland memories. Finally, she’s twenty and all of a sudden a powerful queen. I really wouldn’t mind reading an extra two hundred pages or so as long as there would be more insight, perspective and details. It would have been interesting to see how she adjusts to this new, drab world. She comes from Wonderland, a place full of color and imagination and strange creatures, to one of the bleakest places of the Victorian era, where women are meant to stay in their place and imagination is near-sin. There is a prince who proposes to her, their relationship is described in five paragraphs, tops, and when they’re about to get married, she’s suddenly back in Wonderland with little to no transitions explaining this.
She mentions that she loves the Liddels, who raised her, but she hardly even describes them or the rest of the family whatsoever. The only one she describes at length is Mrs. Liddel, and what she has to say about her is not really positive. How am I supposed to cares for these people when she left them without a thought, replacing herself with a figurative clone she created of herself (using imagination, which has obviously become a kind of superpower). There is no indication that she misses them, even though they were raising her since she was ten, or that she missed Wonderland during the time of her exile. Upon her return, everyone greets each other with quick, cold mutterings that hardly reflect the fact that none of them have seen each other for most of Alyss’ life.

Honestly, I could go on like this all day, but then my rating would make no sense. Despite the plot being rushed and detached from the characters, the setting was really imaginative and made "Looking Glass Wars" quite fun to read. "Looking Glass Wars" has brisk pace with a lot of action sequences, and some of the characters - such as Jack of Diamonds - are just hilarious to read about. While this may not be enough to overlook the sloppily written plot, it does make "Looking Glass Wars" an enjoyable light read.


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~ Dannie ~

Paul Kearney - The Mark of Ran (Book Review)

Paul Kearney might just be one of the undiscovered, rather than hidden, gems of fantasy fiction. His début “The Way to Babylon” (1992), two subsequent stand alone novels and a more traditional epic fantasy series “Monarchies of God” counting five books, all failed to bring a financial breakthrough even though these books were often praised by critics at least as competent efforts if not beyond that. His latest started (but never finished) trilogy “The Sea Beggars” – the first book of which I am about to review, was sadly dropped by Bantam, Kearney’s publisher at the time, just after the second book. The official explanation was not surprisingly of a financial nature. Hopefully his streak of bad luck will have ended this year with a new upcoming title “The Ten Thousand” (September 2008) backed by a new publisher - Solaris, which also plans to reissue the five Monarchies of God books as an omnibus duo.

Intrigued by Adam’s (The Wertzone) perseverant endorsement of Kearny as a severely underrated author, as well as by the blurb on the cover of “The Mark of Ran”, written by Steven Erikson, proclaiming Kearney as one of the best fantasy authors out there, I’ve decided to read the damned thing myself. And guess what, despite the fact that the book has its flaws, I was still pleasantly surprised and have to agree about the underrated part at least.

The World is slowly dying, forsaken by its Creator. Mankind schemes and plots and makes war across the world, forgetting that they are not its sole inheritors. Another race once dwelled here… We witness the story of Rol Corthisan, an orphan and a farm-boy, whose undisclosed heritage makes him unaware of his hidden potentials – now where have we heard that before? After his safe haven is destroyed he has to seek his only chance at help and knowledge. Afraid and alone he sails through a storm to a neighboring island state, where the mysterious figure of Michal Psellos takes him in. While under his patronage, Rol learns many skills (most of them are about being deadly) as well as finds himself in love with Rowen, his beautiful tutor and the only person besides Rol, who shares his ambiguous status in Michal’s household and is unfamiliar with her parentage. Without giving out too much let me conclude this brief synopsis by revealing that everything is not what it seems to be in the tower of Michal Psellos and after things get complicated and then resolved after a fashion, Rol sets out onto the sea, where a new life awaits him, a life full of danger and opportunities…but even as he tries to run from his personal past, a different kind of past rushes headlong into his direction instead.

“The Mark of Ran” reads like a simple and straight-forward story, which it is after a fashion, but Kearney also manages to transcend such trite generalization with his competent writing skills, fluid narrative, killer pacing, detailed world building (the annexed map and the mythos are intriguing at the least), carefully deployed mystery element of the general plot and the likeability of the characters, as well as plausibility of their actions. I’m not sure why, maybe the cover blurb is to fault for the comparison, but Kearney’s prose seems in a way akin to that of Erikson – the flow of narrative for example. If I tried hard enough I might also find some similarities between Rol and Crokus (a character in Erikson’s “Malazan Book of The Fallen” series).

Where the story starts to drop in intensity is well into the second half of the novel, which follows Rol as he traverses the seas as a sailor/officer. The seafaring part cannot possibly match up to the earlier chapters. Rol’s growth as a character seems to stall significantly in exchange for (in my opinion) filler action scenes and seemingly random courses in seamanship. The terminology itself didn’t bother me that much, but if you are not interested in principles of sailing and (old) sea vessels this sections of the book might bore you some.

Otherwise, I have to congratulate Kearney for not being afraid to kill people in his book, although the main cast seems a bit untouchable at moments. The body count is quite high in the end. One other thing I liked is how Kearney handles the love story - well not the love part of the story per se, it is only that he treads around this theme really elegantly, showing us love's bitter-sweet side without overdoing it.

With barely under 400 pages this novel rarely falters. “The Mark of Ran” is a well executed epic fantasy, which doesn't deserve to be buried under a heap of unremarkable fiction littering the market. (I will save the peculiar story of how I got this book for later.) All in all, this novel is more than a decent read and although a bit short of brilliant, it still made me eager to read its sequel - "The Forsaken Earth".

3,5/5

- Thrinidir -