Kareem Abdul-Jabbar & Anna Waterhouse: Mycroft Holmes
This book wants to give us an origin story for Mycroft and show him before he turned into the man we know from the Sherlock Holmes stories but also wants to make sure that we recognise Mycroft as the man from the Sherlock Holmes stories. The result is sadly not a less extreme version of Mycroft but a character that acts like a lovesick teenie in one chapter and in the next fails to take anybody’s feelings into consideration and is such a genius that he can tell how much a body that was dropped into the water weighed, just from the sploshing-sound he heard. It felt like reading about two different characters.
Oh, and feminism makes you evil. I mean, I grant the author that he might have wanted to say something about White Feminism™ but to make that point clear he should have included more than one female character that was relevant to the plot.
Tyler Whitesides: The Thousand Deaths of Ardor Benn
This book lost itself in too many (repeated) explanations. There are no mages and non-mages in the world of this book, everybody can do magic – provided they have the right grit – powder harvested from dragon dung (yup) – and know how to use it. And the “how” gets explained everytime a character uses some (and they do so very often). In great detail. In very great detail. Now, I vastly prefer fantasy novels that do a bit more explaining than necessary to those that just throw you in the middle without any explanation and by the time you figure out how everything works, you’re halfway through the book. But this isn’t just “a bit more”. This 800-page doorstopper could have been a 600-page doorstopper and I’d still have understood how the magical system works. And another 100 pages could have been knocked off if the narration had replaced the repeated assurances that the character’s feelings had changed, with a few scenes that showed us that.
I also read Without Pretense and you can read my full review over at Love in Panels.
And don’t worry: I still read good books. In fact I recently read a book that was so good, that I’m still trying to figure out how to write a review that isn’t just full of capslock and gifs of cute animals.
