Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay

I read Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry many years ago and loved it. His other novels, however, I believe I was not quite mature enough to enjoy. I checked out Tigana from the Cincinnati Public Library.


Tigana, above all else, is a story exploring the concept of home and honor.

In a fictional peninsula shaped like a palm, and appropriately called The Palm, separated into 9 provinces ruled by Govenors. This fictional land owes much to historical Italy.

The Palm is invaded by two different powers: Ygrathians and Barbadiorians. Brandin of Ygrath invaded Tigana, the only province in The Palm ruled by a prince, and incidentally, a prince from a line born of a liason between a god and a mortal woman. Brandin's son is killed at the first battle of the Deisa. In response, Brandin stripped the land of Tigana of her name. Only native born Tiganans can hear, remember or say the name. In addition, the land has been renamed Lower Corte, because Corte was the ages-old enemy of Tigana. The royal family was killed, and the fabled towers of learning and light destroyed.

The novel is about a group of Tiganans trying to fight Alberico of Barbadior and Brandin of Ygrath. However, even though you know Brandin is the bad guy, he doesn't seem that bad. The characterization of the individuals is deep and detailed. You understand these people, and you can empathize on a deep level as they grow and learn and fail and love.

I really can't do this novel justice in any summary or description. It was, simply put, amazing.

The Gathering Storm by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson

This novel made me want to reread the previous books in the Wheel of Time series.

Robert Jordan died some time ago and the completion of the series was given to Brandon Sanderson.

The novel moved, I actually found myself liking the female characters more, and I wasn't frustrated with the lack of character growth.

There were some moments in which I was thinking... I don't think that Robert Jordan would have done this that way...but Brandon Sanderson isn't Robert Jordan. And he delivered a fantastic installment to the Wheel of Time. I am very much looking forward to the next.

The Mermaid's Madness

Meh.

Mirage and Rhapsody

Mirage by Pauline Gedge = fantastic! I was starting to see the conclusion before it happened... but there were still surprises. I loved the book, especially the very end. The best book out of the recent lot I borrowed from The Public Library of Cincinnnati and Hamilton County so far.

And, on to Rhapsody: Child of Blood by Elizabeth Haydon. I mentioned in an earlier post that I didn't really remember anything that happened in the book - I read it some years ago when I lived in Athens, Ohio. Turns out, this may have been a defensive mechanism for my brain.

The book opens with an entity in a film editing room, editing the "films of time." He takes a boy in one cell of film and transfers him into another reel. Boy wakes up, meets girl, girl is sad, boy and girl do the nasty, boy gets transported back to his film reel by entity.

I was a little wierded out by the whole Watchmaker into Filmmaker premise, but willing to let it go. However, I'm most of the way through the book, and other than some other wierd things going on with time, Haydon hasn't revisited the Filmmaker.

Back to the story, the main body of the novel starts out with a girl named Rhapsody (yes, the titular character) composing music (how original! I shall write a book and name the main character Sword. She shall be a... warrior!) and rebuffing the advances of a henchman who wants to take Rhapsody to his master. Because Rhapsody used to be a prostitute. And, by the way, everyone, from the innkeeper to the bad guy LOVE Rhapsody. And she interests all men sexually.

Some time during her flight from Michael, the Wind of Death (...) she runs into two half-breeds who look semi-monstrous and asks to be adopted. Through this, you learn Rhapsody is a Namer/Singer: someone who sees into the truth of things, and when she speaks the truth of things, she can change things.

The two individuals she runs into were recently under the thumb of a demonic entity, but Rhapsody's skillz in Naming changed all that. And here, things get wierd. The threesome travel along the root of a tree, moving in time and being fundamentally changed. This was actually somewhat interesting - a world-tree that holds together the world and regulates time. But during the entire time, much is made of how small Rhapsody is, and how hard she has to work to keep up with her companions, and how difficult it is for her to be away from the sun and how terrible her nightmares are. They emerge on the other side of their world, more than 1000 years after they left their homeland.

And then you find out that Rhapsody has become MORE beautiful and that she has no idea she's beautiful. Let me clarify: she is so unobservant and idiotic, that no matter how many people tell her she's beautiful, or how many accidents are caused by people staring at her amazingness, she thinks she must be terrible to behold. Really? This lack of self-awareness and consideration really started to drive me insane. That, and the fact that EVERYONE ALWAYS LURVES HER. And to top off her interestingness, she adopts children as her grandchildren will-he-nill-he and declares that she loves them all (after meeting them once) and gasp! She's a half-breed! Because that is so much more amazing than just being one race... and... breaking new ground in the fantasy genre... she's much more than either race by itself. I'm not even going into the powers she has that she doesn't really have to work for - they just work perfectly well every time she needs them! Even though she's never done some of this shit before!

Really. I would like to say... MARY SUE! As wikipedia says "Perhaps the single underlying feature of all characters described as "Mary Sues" is that they are too ostentatious for the audience's taste... The author may seem to push how exceptional and wonderful the "Mary Sue" character is on his or her audience, sometimes leading the audience to dislike or even resent the character fairly quickly... While the label "Mary Sue" itself originates from a parody of this type of character, most characters labeled "Mary Sues" by readers are not intended by authors as such." To which I have to say... Rhapsody.

Rhapsody lacks any flaw: even her history as a prostitute is colored by the fact that she was so kind and sweet and thoughtful and... pushed into it by circumstance. And she advocates to her companions about why prostitution is bad for women, absolving her of the stain prostitution could confer. There is even a storyline about how she prostitutes herself to save a child. Because if you save children, its not a flaw. Even the tripe about how she doesn't recognize her beauty is supposed to be flattering - instead, Rhapsody comes off as an idiot.

I'm a big fan of knowing your strengths and trying to work around your weaknesses. Rhapsody not only doesn't have weaknesses, she doesn't know her strengths. She just tries stuff that she thinks up with no real effort and IT ALWAYS WORKS. Not only do I not identify with this character in any meaningful way that would invest me in this novel, I actively DO NOT LIKE HER, which, I'm fairly certain, was not the author's intent.

There are things going on with this book that deserve more scruitiny, but I can't move past my dislike of Rhapsody right now. The difference between this novel and Lord Foul's Bane, in my eyes, is the rest of the novel- Donaldson creates and interesting and compelling world and I very much liked the other characters. I hated Thomas Covenant's guts, but I really wanted everyone else in The Land to be alright. In Rhapsody, I don't really care what happens to them. I think part of this antipathy is Haydon's worldbuilding - the world seems to have been constructed around the story, rather than as the backbone of the story. Need to get people to live a long time to fit your fantastic 1500 year old journey over a root? Well, if everyone crosses part of the world, just make it so they never die! Which begs the question, how do you travel and trade if you cross over part of the world and then live forever? Pretty soon, you're going to have way too many people. And why doesn't everyone just go travel over that part of the world? I have no clue, because the author pretty much drops that info in our lap and then walks away.

I'm going to try to finish this book, mostly because I don't like to leave books unfinished, but I think I'll move on in the meantime. More interesting reading awaits.

Including this:

Which is the first book in the concluding trilogy to the epic fantasy series The Wheel of Time by the late Robert Jordan. The series is being concluded by Brandon Sanderson. Given that this series, specifically The Eye of the World, was the first real fantasy book I ever read, I'm very interested to read this The Gathering Storm.

Mirage by Pauline Gedge

By next up, in this case, I meant I was behind and had already read part-way through Mirage (also known as Scroll of Saqqara) by Pauline Gedge.

Mirage focuses on Khaemweset, fourth son of Ramesses II, known as the Great. Khaemweset, in the novel, lives in Memphis, with his family. He is a physician, a magician, and according to history, possibly the first achaeologist. His passion is Egypt's past; Khaemweset, similar to many people, consider the past to be a simpler, better time, and Khaemweset, with privelege, power and wealth, pursues it. In addition to an interest in a time when Egypt was not full of foreign influence, Khaemweset very much desires the Scroll of Thoth, believed to confer upon the holder the power of life and death. He and his son (Hori) open burial sites, investigate them, restore them if they've been desecrated by thieves, and make the proper offerings to appease the ka of the inhabitants. In the mean-time, Khaemweset hopes that one of these tombs hold the scroll.

Khaemweset determines his horoscope, along with that of his family, and finds that he and his shy and plain daughter, Sheritra, are going to have a very bad afternoon. In fact, they will both have a very bad month. His steward comes to him with information that they have found a tomb with the seals still present, indicating no breach since the burial. Khaemweset, as well as others, have a bad feeling about this tomb, but decide to open it anyway.

Inside, they find gorgeous art on the walls depicting a prince and his wife, as well as their son. In all the images, there are gamboling baboons and, oddly, the royal family is always depicted standing in water. They walking in wavelets, or even standing in a bowl. This is remarked upon curiously. Many curious details are described, giving the interlopers an even more ominous feeling about the tomb. Finally, they find two funerary statues; the Prince's name is not present, there is some defect that has made the name unreadable. The sarcophagus of both individuals are open, unlike most burials. And most curiously, the boy depicted on the wall friezes is not present. Within the open sarcophagus, Khaemweset finds a scroll attached to the hand of the mummy. And takes it.

At this point, the real story of Mirage begins, replete with mystery, lust, betrayal, and wonderful story-telling. Unlike The Hippopotamus Marsh, the story is engrossing. The main character Khaemweset is approachable, relatable and interesting. He sees the people around him clearly, his wife, his daughter, his son, the courtiers, as well as his much storied father, Ramesses the Great. I particularly like him for his defense of his daughter. Sheritra is a plain, shy girl, constantly being criticized by her mother. She is described as though she would be pretty, if only she lacked the extremely large and hawkish ramessid nose. Khaemweset makes special time for her, and indeed, it is she who knows about his obesession for the woman he sees after uttering a spell from the scroll taken from the tomb.

Khaemweset's obsessive feelings toward Tbubui are compelling, mainly because the behavior he exhibits is so unlike his normal calm, contemplative demeanor. Not only that, I wonder what is going to happen with shy, sweet Sheritra and Tbubui's attractive young son. Given the disaster in both Khaemweset's and Sheritra's horoscope, it seems a given that this will not end well. Especially when you realize that Tbubui, her son and her brother avoid water at all costs.

I'm very interested to see how this ends.

If you're interested in the Khaemweset of real life, check out his wiki page: the first archaeologist.

The Hippopotamus Marsh by Pauline Gedge

I've read many books by Pauline Gedge and always find them intricately detailed, carefully plotted and generally interesting. The books tend to cover vast periods of time (Child of the Morning covered Hatshepsut's life from her early teens to her death), which gives the reader a little bit of a feeling of unreality, given the scope. For me, I feel Gedge's books tend to move slowly, which can be frustrating while I'm reading, but at the end, I reflect and feel that on the whole, I have enjoyed a great story told properly.

However, in the case of The Hippopotamus Marsh, it seemed that the entire book was a set-up to introduce the second and third books in the trilogy. Seqenenra Tao is governor of a section of Egypt which has been ruled by foreign kings from Hyksos. Seqenenra is descended directly from the pharoahs of the 17th dynasty. His family is relegated to obscurity in Weset, which doesn't cause as much angst as I might have thought. Pharaoh is seen as a god in Egypt, and irregardless of the fact that the current pharaohs happen to be conquerors not native to the area means little. Deeply ingrained in the characters is a respect for Pharaoh as well as something called Ma'at, which I gathered to mean a sort of 'divine rightness of things' but the wikipedia entry is more clear. Rebelling against the foreign pharoahs would be to go against the gods and unbalance Ma'at, and Seqenenra's family is very much against that idea.


Apepa, in order to test Seqenenra, sends ridiculous requests. He claims that the hippopotamuses are disturbing his sleep far away with their cries. Seqenenra sends a clever reply that he will make muzzles for the hippopotamuses, but the absurd requests do not cease. Eventually, Seqenenra feels forced to gather an army and move against Apepa. Which he does, not knowing that his own son has been providing information (against his will) to Apepa's agents. The battle against an overwhelming force leads to Seqenenra's death and eventually the death of Seqenenra's oldest son Si-Amun as well as Apepa's agent. Apepa makes an appearance in Weset and pronounces his judgment that the family will be broken up and sent into internal exile, with the youngest daughter, Tani, to be held for the good behavior of her siblings (Kamose, Ahmose, Ahmose-nefertari), her mother Aahotep and her grandmother Tanisheri, as well as her nephew (Ahmose-onhk). Kamose, heir to his father's position, decides to revolt. And that is where we are left at the close of the novel.

I know what happens here, thanks to a 3 week long obsession a few months ago that consisted of me reading every wikipedia entry on the dynasties of Egypt. Kamose takes up the mantle of revolt, falls in battle, his mother Aahotep as well as his sister Ahmose-nefertari, become warriors and fight until Ahmose is able to take up the fight. Ahmose eventually reconquers Egypt and becomes the founding father of the 18th dynasty, typically considered to be the peak of Egypt's power. Famous members include Akenaten and Nefertiti, Ramesses II, Nefertari and Khaemweset.

My feeling about this novel can be summed up thusly: throughout the book, everyone was concerned with disrupting Ma'at. However, if the foreigners seized control of Egypt to become pharaohs, did that not firstly disrupt Ma'at and therefore, acts to restore power to the royal family would therefore be attempting to bring Ma'at back into balance. Of course, this is not considered until the last few pages of the novel. I, however, wanted to shake the characters until they recognized this starting at the beginning.

Given reviews on Amazon.com, the second novel in this trilogy The Oasis, is far more interesting. We shall see. Next up, Mirage, published as The Scroll of Saqqara elsewhere.

I do highly recommend some of Gedge's other novels:

New Books

So, after voting yes on Issue 7 (support your public library!), I stopped by my branch to pickup some books I had on hold. This is what I have on my TBR list!

Rhapsody: Child of Blood by Elizabeth Haydon - I've read this before but have little or no memory of it.
Winterbirth by Brian Ruckley
Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay - I very much loved the Fionavar Tapestry books when I was young
Mirage by Pauline Gedge
The Eagle and the Raven - by Pauline Gedge
The Hippopotamus Marsh: The Lord of the Two Lands Volume 1 by Pauline Gedge
The Shadow of Ararat (Oath of Empire Book 1) by Thomas Harlan
Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock
Cleopatra's Daughter - Michelle Moran


I'm trying to decide which to read first... perhaps Tigana, The Shadow of Ararat or Mirage?

Thomas Covenant

I've finished The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant: Lord Foul's Bane. And really, I don't think I liked it any more at the end than I did at the beginning.

Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever, was brought to The Land for reasons unknown. He was brought both by Lord Foul, the Despiser and possibly by a little known and understood Creator. Other than the fact that Thomas Covenant was charged to bring a message to the Lords of The Land, he has no real purpose. He stumbles along on a quest to find the Staff of Law, which, according to the message, in the possession of the Lords, will postpone Lord Foul's takeover for 47 years. All along the way, when anything is asked of him, his response is "don't touch me... I'm a leper." He takes responsibility for nothing, always leaning on the crutch of his illness.

Finally, at the home of the Ramen, who serve the Ranyhyn, Covenant comes to a sudden realization that he raped Lena and that he did wrong. However, rather than taking full responsibility, Covenant still denies his complete culpability by believing that Lord Foul had something to do with the act, that it was part of Lord Foul's plan. In order to "make it up" to Lena, he sends one of the Ranyhyn to see her once a year. If only the emotional and physical repercussions of rape could be solved by a visit from a magical horse.

Beside my obvious dislike of the main character, I feel that this book resembles The Lord of the Rings very closely. Both stories have a disembodied main evil acting through agents to take over a medieval and bucolic land. There are engineered evil creatures (because, clearly, if they're not natural, they're bad) ur-viles in The Land, orcs and uruk-hai in Middle Earth. The main difference is the characterization of the individuals involved in The Quest (or The Fellowship, in LOTR). The inhabitants of The Land are respectful and considerate to a fault, making them mere caricatures of humanity, rather than fully-fleshed and realized individuals. Frodo, the hero who carries the ring, has enough strength of character to allow forgiveness of his less admirable qualities. Thomas Covenant, however, is soundly unlikable to the point that the entire novel had a negative flavor for me. I kept waiting for him to become more, but, unfortunately, it never happened.

I will read The Illearth War, supposedly one of the best installments of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.

My Bookshelf

After several instances in which I have borrowed books from the library or purchased books, only to read the first few chapters and realize... I've read this before... I've decided to keep track of all the books I'm reading and what I'm thinking while I do.

First, I'm going to start with the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant: Lord Foul's Bane by Stephen Donaldson.


I've never read any of the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, though I've read a lot of positive things about them. I'm currently having a really difficult time, mainly because I detest the main character.

To start at the beginning: Thomas Covenant is a leper. While writing the follow-up novel to a best-seller, he becomes ill and is taken to the hospital with a necrotic hand. He wakes up several days later, missing two of the fingers on his hand and is told by his wife that he is a leper and she is leaving him and taking their newborn son. Covenant becomes bitter and angry, inflicting his presence upon the people in his town as a type of punishment for his illness. Just before he is hit by a car, he is transported to a place called The Land by the villain of the piece, Lord Foul. Lord Foul has given him a message for the chief caretakers of the land, as well as offering Covenant a place by his side. Covenant refuses, which is the only truly "heroic" thing I've seen him do thus far.

In the land, he is aided by a young girl named Lena who mistakes him for an ancient hero: Berek Halfhand. Not only does Covenant vehemently deny his connection to this long-dead hero, he denies the reality of his experience and names himself Unbeliever, as he does not believe in The Land, prefering to call it a dream.

As repellent as I find the main character, The Land is compelling. The Land aids those who care for it, curing them of illness and despair, feeding them when they are hungry, helping them when they travel. Inhabitants of the land see health and disease not only in the plants and animals, but in eachother. They can see the hopes and dreams of their fellow inhabitants, which results in increased respect for life. Inhabitants swear an oath of peace, in which they promise not to hurt one another or the land. It might seem that these qualities would come off as saccharine, but I truly believe, when I read, that these people care deeply about other people as well as their land.

This is a very brief description of the action thus far, and I have left out important information regarding a ring of white gold, Lena's mother and the cavewight Drool. The novel is good- the writing is evocative and lyrical and most of the characters are sympathetic. I'm just really having a hard time getting past my dislike of Covenant.