There were two books I read in June that were truly outstanding, both in different ways.

Geraldine McCaughrean is not a well-known author in the United States, which is a shame, because her young adult fiction stretches the boundaries of any genre she chooses to write in. The White Darkness is a contemporary adventure with elements of the supernatural, a journey to the bottom of the world and back. Sym has always been fascinated by Scott’s doomed expedition to reach the South Pole, and particularly by the romantic young Captain Titus Oates–throughout her childhood and teens, he’s been her imagined companion, the voice inside her head she shares all her problems with. When her uncle takes her on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Antarctica, Sym is so excited that she doesn’t pay attention to the signs that this is not an ordinary trip. When catastrophe strikes and the trip turns into a desperate fight for survival, everything Sym has ever believed is put to the test, and her connection to the imaginary Captain Oates becomes her last link to reality.

The most astonishing thing about this book is that despite the blindingly obvious hints that something is fishy about Uncle Victor, the clues that the reader interprets easily but that Sym totally misses, none of that feels annoying, like so many books where the author has heard of dramatic irony but doesn’t realize that it shouldn’t be wielded like a Louisville Slugger. Sym’s innocence is so plausible that it makes perfect sense that she wouldn’t know that Uncle Victor has been lying to her not just about the trip, but about everything, her whole life. If McCaughrean had gone the other route–of making Victor seem honest to the reader as well as to Sym until some dramatic reveal–it would have been just as much a cheat. The reasons for Victor’s behavior have to be obvious to the reader in order for the story to have an impact. I also like that Sym’s almost-total deafness isn’t revealed until several chapters in; it’s a challenge that doesn’t define her, but isn’t trivial either–and it makes possible one of the most moving events in the entire book. Personally, I like the uncertainty of the supernatural elements: is Oates’s presence in Sym’s head imaginary, or is it something more? The story doesn’t hinge on this question, so it’s possible for it to stay uncertain if the reader doesn’t want to resolve it one way or the other.

The other excellent book, of course, is Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings. I groused about this one publicly through Facebook status updates. I used to love giant fantasy epics, and then I didn’t anymore. And there’s something about Sanderson’s novels (barring the Alcatraz books) that makes me antsy and impatient, something I can’t identify. It’s not like they’re bad books; I’ve read all but Warbreaker and I like them very much. And it’s not the length; I read Anathem in almost one sitting and it’s almost as long as The Way of Kings. I don’t hate the prose, I’m interested in the plot both long- and short-term, and I mostly care about the characters. And every hundred or so pages I just had to put the book down and do something else.

In discussing the book with a friend, I realized that part of my problem was probably that I was only truly interested in one of the three plots, in the sense that it was the one I wanted to come back to. The other two, I cared about while I was reading them, but…it’s a military campaign, I’ve read about dozens of military campaigns, and the girl in the other section was an academic, a researcher, and practically a librarian, so give me a break, where did you expect my attention was going to go? So it’s possible that my impatience is a desire to get back to the story I care about, but it shows up only as low-level mental itchiness because the other two plots are at least worth reading. Usually with books like this (multi-plot stories) I either like all the plots, or I’ve got one I love and I’m bored or annoyed by the others, so my reaction is a lot more extreme. It could also be that the density of the material is just overwhelming. It took me a month to read the unabridged Count of Monte Cristo, because I’d read for a couple of days and then have to put it down before my brain exploded. And I love that book with an unseemly passion. Still, I’m sort of leaning toward the first reason.

But as much as I would have enjoyed a book that only had that one plot, The Way of Kings simply wouldn’t have worked without all three intertwined. The Stormlight Archive, of which this is the first volume, is going to be an extraordinary work of fantasy, and Sanderson is either a genius or completely off his nut to even contemplate it. I’m interested in the world, I’m interested in the mystery of what happened to it, I’m interested in where the characters will go next. I want to know what Dalinar got that was worth losing all memory of his wife. I want to know what Jasnah’s research will turn up about the world’s history. I want to know how many hints Kaladin has to have dropped on his head from a great height before he works out what kind of power he has. I’m interested enough that I will stick with the next book despite putting it down at least a dozen times before I’m done. This is a different kind of achievement than Anathem, but if Sanderson can keep it together, I expect it to be marvelous.

Next up: July’s books. More of them, and a higher number of really good ones.

In the middle of the range–books that were excellent but not mind-blowingly so–were three books. Dunk, by David Lubar, was as good as I’d expect from that author–and that’s very good indeed. Chad’s admiration for the skills of the Bozo, the guy in the dunk tank who taunts and ridicules passersby so they’ll pay to take a fling at him, leads him to want to be the Bozo–to have that gift of gab. What he learns is that the Bozo’s talent isn’t just about hurting people, but about making a connection with them, good or bad. Lubar’s brilliant twist on this is that Chad is the kind of guy who in another book would be the juvenile delinquent, the loser, the thug; he gets us inside Chad’s head so that his attitude is understandable but never excused.

Nightingale Wood by Stella Gibbons was a late addition to the list, replacing a book I changed my mind about reading. Stella Gibbons is probably best known for the brilliant Cold Comfort Farm, and if you don’t feel like reading it, you might try the movie–Kate Beckinsale before she became an action hero, Ian McKellen as family patriarch and itinerant preacher of a weird Protestant sect, and source of many obscure quotes in our family. Ahem. Nightingale Wood is a hybrid between 1930s literary fiction and romance novel, and I think it would have been better if it had stuck to one or the other. The romance aspect is especially troubling because the romantic hero is kind of a selfish git and not really someone you can root for; the secondary romance, though, is very satisfying.

Finally, Billie Letts’ second novel, The Honk and Holler Opening Soon, suffers only by comparison to her first, Where the Heart Is. Like that one, it’s got quirky characters, an unusual setting, and a redefinition of the meaning of "family," and Letts is really good at that…but she’s done it before, and while the situation is different, the core of both stories is the same. I realize that this sounds like damning with faint praise, so I want to be clear—this was a very enjoyable book. I liked reading it and was never dissatisfied with the plot or characters or prose. It just didn’t grab me like I think it could have.

Next: the exceptional books.

I got behind on my reading schedule in June, partly because I spent six days wading through The Way of Kings and partly because I read a lot of other things in between. Most of what I’ve read so far I’ve really liked, so if you break it down by month there’d be maybe one or two that were okay (or worse) and the rest would be very good. June’s reading was split more evenly between excellent and meh. (I do have a rating system that I keep track of in my database, but I don’t post those with the reviews because for me, the fine gradations between Super-Fabulous and Poke-My-Eye-Out-With-A-Stick are not consistent. I’ll mark a book as Enjoyable and later realize that it was actually better than that. So I don’t like associating those ratings with a public review.)

Two of the books, Death in Florence by George Alec Effinger and Armor by John Steakley, were on the lower end of the ratings spectrum I don’t post. Death in Florence is one of Effinger’s early novels, a story about a utopian experiment that, like all utopian experiments, is rotten at the core. The premise is interesting as long as you read it as absurdism, but it doesn’t feel like it goes any deeper than that.

Armor, on the other hand, is beautifully characterized, has a well-realized fictional world, and is also a kind of philosophical exploration that I think is more successful than Effinger’s. Where it loses points with me is how hard Steakley hammers on the philosophical point he’s making. This science fiction novel focuses on a soldier in a future war whose main weapon is the armored suit that gives him protection, weaponry, and life support. When his entire unit is wiped out by the enemy, a computer glitch keeps sending him on mission after mission, sometimes while he is seriously injured, simply because none of the human personnel believe that sort of thing could happen. Steakley’s point about humanity and needless war is unfortunately obscured by his unrelenting portrayal of all things military as either stupid or evil. It is a pointless war of aggression, and the high leadership is totally ignorant of the situation on the ground, but–not a single officer who shows humility or understanding? Not one leader who, with boots on the ground, can admit that the strategy is doomed to failure? I recommend reading this book in conjunction with Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, which uses the same basic premise but with a completely different attitude. (Armor is one of my husband’s favorites, and our disagreement about how good it was made for great tension because he wouldn’t admit I was right.

Next: the mid-range books, ones that were good but not outstanding.

The Tomorrow Code starts out with an interesting premise: if people invent time travel in the future, why can’t they send the information back in time to certain individuals so they can invent it sooner? Call it paradox, but New Zealander teenagers Tane and Rebecca think it might work—and if their future-selves can do it, who else would they tell about it? Rebecca, a young science whiz, knows about a project that uses theoretical aspects of physics to encode information, and she and Tane tap into the data stream to find a pattern that, when decoded, turns out to be…the winning Powerball number. Their future-selves have made them rich, but surely time-travel/communication could be used for more noble purposes, right? As more and more messages arrive, Tane and Rebecca begin to piece together the parts of a mystery that, if they don’t do something about it, could cause untold destruction to the human race.

Interesting plot hook, right? And Falkner’s writing is good, considering this was his first real YA book. He deals with the complications of sending and receiving information from the future, particularly the circularity of learning something from the future only *because* you learned it from the future and later sent it to your past selves; where would the ideas have come from in the first place? The characterization is serviceable but nothing to write home about—young friendship turning into unrequited love, kids maybe a little too much smarter than the adults around them. Rebecca’s backstory of a dead scientist father and a clinically depressed mother is too large a history for the small role it plays in the story, and I’m not sure I buy how wealthy Tane’s dad is. Overall, not a bad adventure.

Would that that were true.

Rebecca is established early-on as an environmental activist, always participating in rallies and stuff like that. It’s the foundation for the main plot complication: scientists have engineered a kind of retrovirus that attacks and destroys certain complicated life forms. Specifically, humans. Chimps, our nearest biological relatives, are safe; it’s just humans who are affected, leaving the land and lower life forms untouched. Naturally, this virus—more like a living entity; I don’t care enough to go into the details and probably you don’t either—escapes from the lab where it’s being studied and drifts across the New Zealand peninsula, killing every human in its path. It’s very creepy the way Falkner describes it.

You can see where this is going, right? Yeah. According to Rebecca, the moral voice of the novel, humans DESERVE TO BE KILLED. We’re a cancer on the Earth, a virus the planet’s trying to get rid of, because we pollute and kill animals and torture fluffy bunnies for medical research and have technology and basically have lost our pure and unsullied connection to Mother Gaia. There’s no counter-perspective; the adults fighting the outbreak are Wrong (we know this because they’re willing to kill poor defenseless research animals to, I don’t know, SAVE THE HUMAN RACE), people who don’t believe in environmental causes are Wrong, all humans are ultimately Wrong because they don’t live in small towns and grow their own food. At one point Rebecca not only voices the opinion—whoops! See what I did there? Not really an opinion, coming from her—that the mysterious life form should be left to sweep the Earth clean of the human plague, but is willing to take action to let that happen.

How self-loathing. How arrogant. How stupid.

Notice that this attitude is a long way from the desire not to pollute our shared resources, not to kill unnecessarily, not to waste the wonderful richness of the natural world. This attitude says that humans, of all creatures on the earth, are somehow not natural—that our intelligence damns us, that we are the only creatures who despoil the environment or kill our own kind (neither true), or that human development equals human culpability. It also suggests the bizarre notion that any environmental damage humans do is somehow equivalent to “destroying the earth,” which is itself an arrogant notion because the so-called “destruction” amounts to making Earth unlivable for humans. In this novel, love of the environment means believing humans are pollution—and I don’t believe that’s a requirement of environmentalism in general.

What really gets me is that people who think this way (and they exist) seem to have forgotten that their leisure to agonize about philosophical pap like this depends entirely on the technological advancements of humankind, all of which have come at an environmental cost. In the book, Rebecca is a computer genius; she uses powerful tools to receive and decode this message from the future; she and Tane spend most of their lottery winnings on an advanced submarine that will let them survive the oncoming disaster. Humans may be a disease, but that doesn’t stop her taking advantage of their technologies. This also accounts for one of the flaws in the plot, because future-Rebecca sends those warning messages back in time to PREVENT the disaster…so how does that explain present-Rebecca whingeing about evil humanity?

There’s plenty of room for disagreement about the role of humans vis-à-vis the earth. My attitude is that humans are stewards of the earth who should use its resources wisely—a perspective that some would deride for being too soft and others would criticize for being too anthropocentric. But even the most hard-core moral relativist can care about environmental issues without turning to self-loathing. Rebecca’s attitude in this book represents an extreme point of view that I can’t respect—and it’s a pity that an otherwise interesting book had to hinge on such a suspect moral question.

So the reason I picked this up at the thrift store was because of the song “A Town Called Malice” by The Jam. That and I liked Nevil Shute’s most famous book On The Beach back in my ill-spent youth of bingeing on postapocalyptic fiction. Then the reason I read it was that the cover blurb sounded interesting—two people survive the Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia, each in their own way, and end up together because of or despite it.

But the book is kinda weird in how it’s put together. The original title was The Legacy, because the frame story is about this elderly lawyer who is responsible for an estate that’s left to a young woman by her uncle (great-uncle? can’t remember). So it starts with this extended passage from the lawyer’s POV about the uncle, and what kind of person he was, and how the lawyer had to track down the right inheritor, blah blah blah. It takes a long time to get to the girl’s story, which is fascinating, but there’s this niggling little reminder that even when the story moves into her perspective, it’s actually the *lawyer* retelling what the girl told him. Every time it moves back to the lawyer’s perspective, it’s jarring.

But the actual story is interesting enough to overcome that. Jean Paget is a young Englishwoman working for a company in Malaya (sic) when the Japanese invade early in World War II. She, along with a handful of wives and children of other British employees, are captured. Since no Japanese official wants responsibility for them, they are made to walk hundreds of miles from camp to camp with little food, rest, or medical care. Nearly half of them die along the way, and Jean ends up caring for a toddler whose mother and sister are among that number. On the road, the little group meets a pair of Australian POWs who work for the Japanese in exchange for not being locked up in prison camp. One of them, Joe Harman, befriends and helps Jean, and ends up being executed for it…or so she believes. Long after the war is over, when Jean’s lawyer finally gives her the inheritance, she learns that Joe survived his near-death. Joe, for his part, assumed Jean was married (because of the child she carried) and around the same time learns that she’s single. The two go through long journeys before finally meeting again and falling in love. Joe is a cattle station manager, and a good one, and Jean doesn’t want him to give that up—so she learns to love the town near his station, and even turn it into something wonderful…a town like Alice Springs, an anomaly in the 1940s Australian outback.

Jean’s journey is based loosely on a true story, in which a handful of Dutch women were transported from camp to camp in Sumatra during WWII; Shute misunderstood the story and believed the women were made to walk the whole time, which makes the novel oddly more powerful than the reality. Shute clearly loves Australia, and his portrayal of the small towns and the realities of life in them make the book come alive. Though the novel contains the language of racism endemic to white civilization at the time, the non-white characters (both in Malaya and Australia) receive sympathetic treatment and even respect. The white women, for example, have to adapt to tropical life by giving up the trappings of Western culture during their pseudo-imprisonment, with Jean leading the way. On the other hand, Jean’s first business efforts (opening an ice-cream parlor in a small Australian town—it makes sense, trust me) involve a brief conversation about the need to segregate their services because they just “can’t” serve blacks and whites at the same counter. Since the book isn’t actually *about* race relations, I didn’t wince too often.

Shute’s cultural myopia is reserved primarily for the very specific field of women’s sexual desires, but boy, does he miss not only the boat but the entire 8th Fleet on that one. The scenes leading up to Jean and Joe declaring a mutual love are awkward—they each carried memories of the other for years before learning there was no impediment to their being together, so the reality is, well, awkward. Eventually Jean realizes she’s going to have to make the first move, so she dresses in her native sarong (the way he’d seen her long before) to show Joe that she’s attracted to him. The next moment, she’s literally swept off her feet by his embrace. It would be very romantic, except that Jean just stands there like a log and lets Joe kiss her, protests that they’re outdoors where they could be seen, and then lets him carry her inside to his bed.

And there it just gets ridiculous. Although Joe is a virile, attractive man to whom Jean is clearly physically attracted, she barely responds to his caresses, thinking things like “I suppose it had to happen sooner or later, and isn’t it nice that it’s Joe who’s going to do it to me?” and “If he really needs it, I suppose I should let him do it, even though we’re not married.” I realize that women have not always been as unashamed of their own sexual desires as they are these days, but I find it very difficult to believe that someone as culturally uninhibited as Jean Paget would display such a prudish attitude. The whole thing comes off as Nevil Shute never having met an actual woman—or, worse, believing that nice women only ever lie on their backs and think of England when it comes to sex.

I liked this book a lot, but it would have been far more enjoyable without the awkward frame story. Also, it turns out that there are worse ways to write about sex than including a healthy smut scene.

The reason I have an abiding passion for Cormac McCarthy’s books is the reason it’s hard for me to review them and also the reason I couldn’t finish reading The Road. It is that the landscape, the environment, is always a vital if silent character in his books. Reading The Road, a postapocalyptic novel, made me psychologically ill because it is obvious that the land is dead, and the characters wander through its corpse. Sound strange? McCarthy is brilliant, but not in a comfortable way. His characters only find themselves by losing, sometimes by dying; his prose style, with its lack of quotation marks for dialogue and frequent omission of apostrophes in contractions (cant for can’t, etc.), is not made to be accessible; and tragedy abounds, the kind of tragedy where you know that if just one thing had gone differently, it could have been averted. Not your typical pleasure reading, certainly.

So if I’m uplifted, cheered, satisfied by McCarthy’s books, it’s not for any reason I can give as a basis for other people reading them. The art of book recommendation requires an understanding of *why* each reader loves the books they do and correctly matching those desires to other, similar books. Matching genres, subgenres, thematic elements, subject matter, all have some objectivity to them, but how can you match a book based on the way it made you feel? Or the sound of the language in your mind’s ear? There’s no good vocabulary for discussing books, outside the shared insider jargon of the literary critic, and saying that you love a particular book carries the implication that there is something intrinsically worthwhile about it that anyone could share. This is totally untrue and leads to recriminations later, when your friend can’t get past the second chapter of The Dollmage and thinks you are crazy to rave about it. (Even though it is one of the best YA fantasies ever written.)

Cities of the Plain is the third volume in the very loosely connected Border Trilogy, set in the 1940s and ‘50s (I think) in the Southwest and northern Mexico. The book brings together for the first time the protagonists of the first two books, John Grady Cole from All the Pretty Horses and Billy Parham from The Crossing. Both men are cowboys in the old sense, in a time when ranching is changing dramatically and their way of life, while not gone, is coming to an end. John Grady is a savant when it comes to horse training, young and stubborn and not like the others. When he falls in love with a prostitute, his older friend Billy tries to make him see sense. Billy can tell that John Grady is different, knows that it’s a mistake for him to go up against the pimp who owns the girl and is in love with her, but the story still ends in tragedy. McCarthy is the sort of writer who will use the phrase “The last time John Grady saw her alive” and yet give us a heartrending scene of two people in love who can’t hear the authorial narrator’s voice, so add that to the list of reasons his books aren’t your typical pleasure reading. In Cities of the Plain, the tragic ending is more overtly foreshadowed than in the first two books, which makes for a different experience; bad things are coming, and the only question is how will they play out?

Still—it’s beautiful. It hurts because you know these men, you know their lives and their perspective so well that it’s you who’s hurting with them. The Border Trilogy, as the name implies, deals with liminality—the concept of crossing a line or a doorway from one reality into another. The border to Mexico is more than geographical, it’s almost mystical, a line that marks the place where the rules no longer apply. It could not be more different from the border we in the US are so concerned about these days, the invisible line that fails to make a difference in our immigration policy. Though that border isn’t tangible, it’s liminal both to McCarthy’s characters of 60 years ago and to the people who cross it looking for a better life, or wealth through drug smuggling, or who knows what else.

For me the series has been about mysticism rather than politics. So Cities of the Plain was in that sense a disappointment, lacking either the stepping-out-of-the-world quality All the Pretty Horses has or the quasi-fantasy quest motif of The Crossing. But in every other respect it delivers exactly what one expects of a Cormac McCarthy novel. I thought it was beautiful.

I picked up this book in New Orleans last summer, while shopping for books about the region. Julia Reed was raised in the South, moved to Washington and New York for school and work, and recently moved back to New Orleans. The essays in this collection are ones she wrote for various papers and magazines about being a Southerner, living in the South, and how neither of the most common perceptions of the region (that it’s stuck in the 1900s, or that it’s hopelessly homogenized) are true.

While the topics interested me, Reed’s writing doesn’t rise to the level I expect from a contemporary essayist. Compared to contemporaries such as Susan Orlean or Anne Lamott, David Sedaris or Michael Chabon (though that last may be unfair, given Chabon’s fondness for the sound of words—and I say that not in scorn) Reed’s work is serviceable but not beautiful, and I think it’s not too much to expect beauty in the contemporary essay. There’s also a hint of special pleading that only shows up when you read all the essays back to back, as I did last Sunday; individually, each is a fond tribute to the quirks of Southerners, but together, it sounds like Reed is trying too hard to prove a point. I’m not sure whether the point is that Southerners are quirky, or that everyone else is too, but it’s a little awkward.

On the other hand, the material of her essays is usually original and sometimes amazing. Food is a major theme, something I already knew from eight days of gorging myself on every kind of cuisine New Orleans had to offer. But Reed also points out that in her experience, people who are not from the South, when asked about their favorite meal ever, will talk about the restaurant they went to and how hard it was to get a table, and Southerners invariably recite a menu with the kind of dreaminess usually reserved for talking about one’s first love. Other essays go into the history of debutantes and how the tradition is maintained in the New Orleans Mardi Gras krewes, or why Southerners love their guns and their freedom so much, or how it’s common for people in the Southern states, plagued by hurricanes and bugs the size of a Volkswagen bus, to speak of problems as if they are beyond human control—even problems like drinking yourself to death or shooting your husband.

I’m more likely to recommend this to readers who are actively interested in getting a taste of one Southerner’s take on life, rather than those who are fans of contemporary essay. Overall, it was an enjoyable read.

I was really getting into this book when I ran into a roadblock. A huge, frustrating, book-killing roadblock. Right around page 155, a printer’s error had inserted the wrong pages: it went 154, 155, 154 again, 157, 155, and then to 159, or something like that. So basically two non-consecutive pages were missing and a couple of pages had been printed twice, right at a point where the information on the missing pages was crucial to the mystery. I was willing to put up with it once, but it happened two more times in the exact same pattern. This is not something you want to discover in an exciting book two hours after the library has closed. Fortunately, the nearest branch had a copy without errors, and I finished it the next day. It still irked me, mostly because I wondered if the entire print run (3rd printing) had the same problem, and hundreds of other readers around the country had also screamed in frustration. (Also, I had to destroy the book so no unsuspecting reader would fall into the trap, and I hate doing that.)

The Christopher Killer really is that gripping a mystery—a forensic mystery, as the series title says, meaning that it’s the literary kin of CSI:All Those Cities. The main character is Cameryn Mahoney, whose father is the coroner for the small town of Silverton, Colorado, that’s not so small that he doesn’t need help.  When the sheriff hires a new deputy, but refuses to hire Mr. Mahoney an assistant, Cammie asks for the job. She’s fascinated by forensics and wants to become a forensic pathologist when she grows up, she’s smart and intuitive, and best of all, she works cheap. Cammie’s being hired for such a responsible and gruesome job when she’s barely 17 is a bit of a stretch, but once you’ve accepted the premise, the story works very well.

Most of the deaths Mr. Mahoney handles are ordinary, but things heat up when a young woman Cammie worked with at the local (and only) hotel is found murdered with a St. Christopher medallion tucked into her bra. The murder method, and the medallion, are the mark of the so-called Christopher Killer, who has killed three other girls in places all across the country. Suspicion lands on a young man named Adam, a Goth-type who’s just plain weird and therefore suspect by the locals, but Cammie wonders if it might not be the mysterious and handsome young deputy, who’s also new to the town. Cammie’s friend whose name I’ve forgotten, Haven or something like that, is convinced that a talk-show psychic named Dr. Jewel can contact the dead girl’s ghost and learn her murderer’s name, and when Dr. Jewel comes to town for that purpose, Cammie’s skepticism about psychics is tested to the limit.

One aspect of this book that I liked is that Cammie is both scientific-minded and a faithful Catholic. Her thoughts about how she reconciles the conflicts between science and faith, and her questions about how psychic ability might fit with both of them, make this story unusual. The focus of the story is not on “proving” one way of thinking correct over the other, but it adds depth to Cammie’s character and gives her a good reason to start believing that Dr. Jewel may have extrasensory powers. The mystery is well-played, and the secret of the murderer’s real identity stays secret right up to the end.

It’s a new series, and for all its intensity, the book feels a little undeveloped, but that’s something that should develop over time. I’m interested to find out more about Cammie’s wayward mother, who left the family when Cammie was very young and in this book is reaching out to reconnect with her daughter; I also like the accuracy of the forensic aspects of the story, which may be too gory for some readers. My biggest problem is with Cammie’s unofficial nemesis, the forensic pathologist who believes (reasonably) that she is too young to have this job, and who (unreasonably) belittles and ignores her input right up until the point where he doesn’t, which coincidentally saves her life. Cammie’s also a little too much cleverer than the adults in the story, which is something YA authors have to balance carefully; teen readers want teen characters who are competent and able to cope in the adult world, but when teen characters are surrounded by stupid adults it’s either parody or one of those awful Disney Channel sitcoms.

I liked The Christopher Killer enough that I’m planning to read the rest of the series—just as soon as I buy a replacement copy for the horribly mangled book.

I think I expected something better from this book. Simon Green’s writing style is enjoyable and clever, and I liked the idea of the book—the two worlds of Veritie (the real world) and Mysterie (where magic happens), someone from our world being drawn into the other, that sort of thing. It’s not an original idea, but it hasn’t been done to death yet either. In the end, though, it just wasn’t very compelling.

For one thing, there are three different “first chapters” in a row—each chapter introduces a different subplot of the book, all of which end up connected, but each of them felt like the beginning of a new book instead. The main storyline follows this guy named Toby Dexter, a random schmoe whose extremely boring life takes him from his boring apartment to his menial job in a bookstore and back to his boring apartment again. The one bright spot in his life is a beautiful woman he sometimes sees on the train between these two locations. She’s clearly out of his league, but he imagines someday falling into conversation, finding out who she really is, and developing a relationship with her. One day, he gets his chance; it starts pouring rain just as they both get off the train, and the woman has no umbrella. But when he tries to approach her, the woman makes a door appear in the station wall, and Toby follows her…into a place that looks a lot like the real world, only the rain is gone, and the woman is extremely annoyed that she has a tagalong.

Things aren’t going well for the folks in Mysterie. The oldest evil, the Serpent in the Sun, is stirring; his son is trying to find a way to free him and remake the world; and the people who should keep this from happening, among them the mysterious woman Gayle, are at a disadvantage. Gayle reveals that Toby is the key to everything, a human with the power to change Mysterie. Toby, who as I’ve said before is a schmoe, doesn’t like this idea at all, but goes along with it because he’s in love with Gayle. Gayle warns him that she can’t love him in return, and he will get hurt, but Toby doesn’t care—so when he does get hurt by her, it’s hard to feel sympathetic. As the final confrontation approaches, nobody’s sure that Toby has what it takes to save both worlds, least of all Toby himself.

I was with the author for about the first sixty pages. There’s a lot of mythological detail in the story that interested me, and I was a little curious about how much of a whiner Toby would continue to be. When Green started dragging me around while Gayle introduced Toby to all these different people in Mysterie, all of whom had variations on the theme of “you’re the chosen one, but you’re a waste of space while I am immense and immortal,” I got bored real fast. It wasn’t a story, it was a fantasyland tour. The bad guys weren’t much better, despite being the son of the ultimate evil and an angel whose exact origins are a mystery. Lots of sitting around talking, not a lot of action. When the action finally started, it was too little, too late.

What really killed it for me was the awesome super powers of every Mysterie resident we met. There’s a point at which characters are just too powerful for a particular story, and when you have embodiments of natural forces who are, naturally, immense and immortal, it’s hard to see how they connect with ordinary human life, let alone fall in love with a human, LET ALONE a human who is as passive as Toby Dexter. Even the descendant of Thor, who was the least powerful of Toby’s allies, is still far, far beyond the average human guy. It would have been less of a stretch if Toby had ever really become someone creatures like that could respect or need, but despite the author’s trying to make him so, there wasn’t enough in the story to support the transformation. There was the kernel of an interesting story there, but if gormless British milquetoasts as heroes is what you want, you’re better off reading Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere.

I really didn’t expect this to be as good as it was. I have a bad attitude about the generic tripe that takes up too much space on the fantasy literature shelf these days—heroes with a worldshattering destiny; characters who are just so Beautiful and Powerful and Magical that they rise against overwhelming odds to become, well, whatever is the most Beautiful, Powerful, Magical person around; weirdly spelled and pronounced names with too many apostrophes and not enough vowels; evil enemies who are so evil they defy all logic. I’m not sure why I put this book on my list, except that when my husband picked it up, I glanced through it and was drawn by…something, who knows what. Something that suggested it might not be the same old story.

This first book of the trilogy is the story of a backwoods girl named Dar whose family turns her over to the army as part of an agreed-on tribute. Her mother died in childbirth, and her spineless father married a shrew with whom he started a new family, and Stepmamma didn’t like having resources diverted from her own kids. Also, Dar’s father sexually abused her after her mother’s death, so Dar’s just as happy to be rid of them, even as she’s outraged by the betrayal. So far, the whole abused-woman-despised-by-all is a bad sign, and it sounds worse when I put it as baldly as this. Stay with me.

The story gets interesting when we learn that Dar is going to be serving in the king’s regiment of orcs. The orcs are not Tolkienesque monsters; they’re big, brutal, but reasonably humanoid creatures who fight like demons and, for some reason, insist on their food being prepared and served by women. Dar, whose behavior is that of a woman with nothing to lose, rather than a self-assured feminist icon, catches the attention of an orc called Kovok-mah. He’s surprised at her fighting spirit and at first treats her like a kind of pet (the orcs believe humans are a kind of animal, for several reasons) and then, as she gains his respect by learning the orc language and customs, as a human talisman. When Dar is claimed by one of the human leaders of the regiment, Kovok-mah defies his own people by putting her under his protection. Dar’s horrible experiences with the brutality of human men leads her to adopt orcish ways instead, and eventually she gains the respect of the entire band.

What keeps this book from being an eye-rolling anthem to the superiority of women over brutish men is that Dar is never once out of danger because of her defiance, either from men or from orcs. When she stands up to her would-be rapist, he has her beaten; when she humiliates him, she’s only saved from gang-rape by a bunch of the soldiers (with the officer’s approval) by Kovok-mah’s intervention. Similarly, Kovok-mah is ostracized by his own fellows for treating Dar like a “human” in opposition to everything the orc culture believes. At one point, he’s even demoted in rank because the orcs believe his foolish whim is the sign of a weakness that would get any warrior who followed him killed in battle. Dar and Kovok-mah form a kind of alliance based on the fact that both of them see the world differently than their peers: Kovok-mah figuratively, when he extends the respect orcs bear for females to an “animal,” and Dar literally, in the form of mysterious visions she believes are coming from the Earth itself.

Dar’s negative attitude toward men in general, and sex in particular, is well-supported in her backstory, despite how overly dramatic it is in places. Having seen her mother die in childbirth, and later watching a friend die after giving birth alone in the wilderness, Dar links sex to pregnancy and most of her aversion to a sexual relationship with the aggressive officer stems from that. Her attitude is also balanced by her relationship with a member of the King’s elite guard, a good man who grows to care for her and wants to free her, even if she never loves him back. His presence in the book goes a long way toward turning the viciousness of the soldiers in the orc regiment into a result of their environment rather than some Y-chromosome-linked biological failing. Howell also spends just enough time on orc culture (which is matriarchal without being generically so) to relieve the tension of the constant physical and sexual danger Dar lives with.

If I have reservations about this book, they’re due to that very premise. A story in which so much of the tension is provided by putting a woman in constant threat of rape and sexual degradation teeters on the edge of prurience, of being interesting more for that dark thrill of what might happen to her than because of the story itself. While I don’t believe this book goes that far, Howell’s second trilogy again centers on a woman in danger, this one a slave who falls in love with her master yadda yadda yadda, so I’m not entirely of the author’s motives here.  Still, King’s Property was an enjoyable book, the more so because my low expectations were entirely unjustified.