Blood Magic by Matthew Cook first caught my eye as it sat on the megabookstore shelf because of its striking cover art. Yep, without that cover and the fact that the bookstore chose to put the book cover-out I never would have picked it up. A sad state of affairs, really. I picked up the book and noticed that it was the debut for the author. I was wavering at that point, but decided that first-time authors need every break they can get. Plus I’ve read plenty of stories by established writers who have stopped really trying and started phoning it in. It occurred to me that maybe a new author must clear taller hurdles to find himself cover-out at a megabookstore. Finally, I got the feeling that while there would be no life-changing prose inside, it did look like a good read from a pure entertainment perspective. So, next to Cormac McCarthy and Truman Capote in my bag I added Matthew Cook.

Tellingly, with five new books to choose from, the one I went for first was Blood Magic. I like light reading for pure entertainment. In that I was not disappointed. The main character is Kirin (or is it?), a solitary woman making a living as a scout for the army. She’s not too bad at old-fashioned kicking ass, but the cornerstone of her ability is that she can use blood magic – the blood of living creatures (especially people) gives her power, and she is able to bind the souls of the recently dead to her purposes.

Most of society thinks these abilities are evil — especially organized religion — but Kirin is constantly doing altruistic things. She is certainly not evil, but, well, there’s a not-so-nice side to her as well. She is a satisfyingly complicated character. In the world, there are very few things that are distinctly good or evil. You’ve got monsters killing lots of people, but they don’t come across as evil so much as dangerous. We don’t have any insight into their motivation, so it’s hard to judge them. The closest to evil we find is blind intolerance among some of the people — but even those people have their good sides.

A couple of nit-picks: the author overuses a couple of phrases (one of those phrases was one that I had to purge in several places in The Monster Within, so I might be over-sensitive to it), and there were some paragraphs that just didn’t read well, but overall it is clear that the writing group that supported Mr. Cook took the job seriously and helped him a great deal.

Towards the end of the book I was thinking, “There’s no way he’s going to wrap this all up,” and I was dreading the classic fantasy “Book that isn’t really a book but just the first pages of a larger volume.” I’m happy to report that while there is plenty of stuff unresolved at the end, there is a satisfying ending to this episode. Characters have changed and learned. There has been little progress in solving the larger problems, but it’s the people who make this story interesting, and that’s where the change occurs.

If you’re looking for an enjoyble read from an new author, consider Blood Magic. As I set up the link to Amazon, I discovered that the full name of the book is Blood Magic: Book One Of The Ballad Of Kirin Widowmaker. Luckily, the cover doesn’t have all that Ballad/Widowmaker junk or I probably wouldn’t have bought it.

Note: if you use the above link to buy this book (or a Kindle, or a new car), I get a kickback.

Sweet!

Thanks!

A friend of my loaned me Danté’s Equation, by Jane Jensen, with very high praise. It’s a big book, and perhaps I should have saved it for my upcoming (but still ill-defined) transatlantic adventures, but after the genteel, well-mannered, and rather slow prose of my last read (not reviewed here yet), I was ready for someone to let loose and just tell a good story. I was not disappointed.

The book centers around a group of five people, each of whom represents life out of balance in different ways, along the different axes defined in the Jewish mysticism of kabbalah. Superficially it’s a science fiction story, enough so that the characters are each uprooted and transplanted to a universe that matches their own imbalances – essentially they are plunged into a world every bit as messed up as they are. With such a mirror to look into, the characters are given the opportunity to change — or not. Behind it all is a genius physicist and mystic who disappeared while in Auschwitz. It seems he came up with a pretty dang amazing theory, and now, sixty years later, rumors are starting to get around that there exists a manuscript that could hold the key to a new sort of super-weapon.

The “scientific” idea that underpins the whole thing (and is echoed in the mysticism) is elegant and nicely described, but when it needs to interact with modern physics, that interface is a bit shaky, and sometimes just incorrect. It’s fiction, so that’s all right, but don’t take any science morsels you pick up here and try to apply them elsewhere. Remember, kids — stay away from mini black holes!

It took me a while to get started with the story; the first few chapters suffer from similitis (inflamation of the simile gland) and some rather lengthy As-You-Know-Bobs (discussions between people who really should both know this stuff already, staged so the writer can explain them to us). Early on I was tripped up by chunks like “He always left home before the crack of dawn so he could watch the sunlight warm the stones. There was a cold bite in the air this morning. His black wool coat and hat absorbed it like a sponge.” I’m not sure I want my coat to absorb the cold like a sponge, but if (as is likely, grammar aside) the author meant that it was the sunlight that is being absorbed, then sponge really isn’t a very useful image. There were many places in the early going I hesitated, tripping up on phrases where the author was just trying too hard.

The story never completely gets over the similitis, but after a while one gets the feeling that the author is no longer trying to come up with particularly choice similes, and is content to let her natural language tell the story. Once she reaches this stage, her easy voice does quite well, and I spent two very late nights watching the intertwined lives of the characters… um… intertwine. The narration is in third person, but Jensen does a good job changing the voice of the narration to match character who’s point of view we are sharing at that moment. It’s really quite fun to understand the characters through their vocabulary and the way they interpret the world.

In the framework of the “People ending up in the place they are (literally) most in tune with” rule, there is a monster coincidence – two people ending up in the same place out of an infinite continuum of possibilities. “Ah Ha!” I thought when Coincidence Guy A was explaining the rule to Coincidence Guy B, “That they are having this conversation at all is a refutation of that rule! When they work that out, it’s going to be cool!” They never worked it out; no one ever blinked an eye at the staggering impossibility of it. I even came up with a good explanation that would have made a very interesting plot point.

You know, when I write these reviews, I spend a lot more time on the problems of a story than what was good. Maybe this is because that’s how I treat my own writing now, always looking for things to improve. So, I’ll just leave you with this: This story has interesting people who grow and change, people who find balance and maybe (just maybe) a little peace. In the end you are rooting for these people, even the jerks, and when they do change it is believable (well, mostly…) and rewarding. And that’s what makes a good story, no?

Note: if you use the above link to buy this book (or a Kindle, or a new car), I get a kickback.

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Sweet!

Thanks!