Reviews – Page 3 – PALANTIR PRESS

REVIEW: IMPROMPTU SCRIBE

Impromptu Scribe
Alex Morritt
127 pages, $0.99

This collection of short stories by British author Alex Morritt offers a smorgasbord of delights.

Whistling through each of the thirty or so short stories is the ghost of the author, not mentioned in the text, but present in the viewpoint, the gaze, the objects and people noticed and ignored in each story. I found myself seeing past the characters on the page and wondering about their creator, about this man, a well-traveled wanderer, lonely perhaps, when he finds himself between romantic interludes, with an eye for the elegant, the well-turned out, who notices the magnificent facades of the buildings in the affluent parts of town, the dust in the rural market, the asymmetry in the hang of a perfect rocker’s smoking jacket hidden away in a thrift store.

The stories carry the reader through a dizzying array of locations and characters. Paris in Le Marais, Italy, a courtroom in Hollywood, a fancy restaurant, a rural English village, Milan, a prison cell, a war zone, a Guatemalan marketplace, a truck full of hopeful undocumented immigrants, Mexico City in the nicer parts. The characters are compassionately sketched, even the bad ones. These pages contain the child molester, the ladies’ man in various forms, snappy dressers, a peasant boy, a dishonored daughter killed by her father, a terrorist, an old British veteran visiting the poppy-filled fields of Amiens for the last time, a terminally ill base jumper, a vengeful babysitter, a pair of lovers feasting before the feast, a dog with a discriminating nose and a foot fetish …

The stories are mostly told from a decidedly male viewpoint, an honest and open one, delivered with a sheepish shrug for any sins and a sense that any female outrage is expected and already factored in and accepted as one accepts with stoic calm both sunshine and storm as Heaven shall find it meet to dispense one or the other. The author writes of the transgressions of men, men who are cads, unfaithful men, preying men, men who pray for the empty seat by the pretty girl, men who listen not well to their wives’ instructions, men who like their lady doctors and long for the visits of their nurses, men in love with their cars, men who long for a just-so artisan poncho, men who long for their dead wives, men robbed by thieves and by time, men abandoned by neglected wives, men with guns, men in disguise.

Some favorites from this box of chocolates: “Hubert and Hector,” “Words in the Wind,” “A Silver Lining,” “Poncho Man.”

The editing and formatting are clean and tidy, unmarred by errors, and the writing is poetically beautiful at times. I am not a reader of short fiction—my taste runs more to the epic—but I can well imagine a dozen or more of his vividly drawn characters taking flight and headlining novels of their own should the fancy ever take them. Perhaps this talented traveling writer will tarry somewhere a little longer someday, and stretch out a short story into a longer one, even a novel, perhaps of experimental format where his characters meander in and out of each other’s lives. I am certain this traveler with so keen an eye could construct a worthy journey through a longer story for his readers should he ever choose to do so.

As for those reviewers who carp that he has bundled up his writing group stories and made a book of them, I can only reply that they should go forth and do the same if they have even a handful of stories as fine as the best of these. Would you not buy a man a cup of coffee in thanks if he told you a charming tale and made you laugh?

REVIEW: BIRTH FORMATIONS

Birth Formations: What Multiple Home Births Teach about Living, Laboring and Mothering in the Now (New Moms, New Families Book 2)

by Gloria Ng (Author) $2.99

I was given a free copy in exchange for a fair and honest review of this independently published work.

This 74 page volume is the third book in healing arts practitioner, writer and mother of three children Gloria Ng’s “New Moms, New Families” series. As the author describes her book, it is “a nuts-and-bolts approach on how to actualize the New Age concept of living in the present moment before conception, during pregnancy, throughout delivery and in the midst of postpartum motherhood for the busy woman who desires to do and have it all.”

The author brings all three of her identities—healer, writer, mother—to every page of her book with passion, intelligence and eloquence. She is a clear and articulate writer, and the book is well edited and well-formatted. She begins by recounting some of her healing background before heading into the heart of her discussion, the labor, delivery and mothering experiences and ideas she wishes to share with other mothers-to-be. She ends with an open call to live a fulfilling life in each moment, integrating mothering with all the rest that life has to offer. She also generously shares her poetry and smaller essays with the reader through links embedded in her book and on her website.

I struggled a bit to review this book, not due to any jarring defect, but rather due to its unclassifiable nature. It is part memoir of her years birthing and mothering her three children, laced with insights into her struggles and joys in that role and her personal discoveries about her own cultural background, growth and history. It is a bit like a “The Mother’s Way,” a la Julia Cameron’s “The Artist’s Way,” a structured book of exercises for probing one’s life through meditations, writing exercises and daily practices in order to unleash the blocks that hold us back as writers or mothers. Every now and then it is a practical guide to the modern first world woman’s birth experience, with the hospital five minutes away, the midwife on speed-dial, the birthing tub fired up and ready, hubby well-trained on where to massage and when. Then there are the New Age incense-scented passages that glide in and out of the text. My tension over how to classify the work eased somewhat when she used the word “experimental” to describe her writing. “Aha!” I thought. “So this is what ‘experimental’ writing is.”

The label does not help me much though, as I still grapple with how to evaluate the work. As mentioned above, it is well-written, lucid and intelligent. As a reader, and perhaps one who is overly fond of knowing what I am reading and what to expect, I found myself confused and caught off balance at times by the shift from memoir to breathing exercises to in-depth practical discussions of when is labor going badly enough that you must bail and head for the hospital. I believe Ms. Ng is capable of writing an excellent memoir, an excellent New Age guide to labor and birthing exercises and practices for body and soul, and a practical “what to do when you are expecting”-type guide. I’m just not entirely sure that all these things belong in the same volume.

One other concern is the possibly polarizing way Ms. Ng chose to open her book, spending several chapters on the New Age ideas and practices of rebirthing to resolve past traumas, the importance of affirmations and other New Age ideas. She boldly outlines core premises like the idea that we must resolve past birth trauma in order to live free of the shadows it casts on our lives. Some readers who do not accept that premise and others in the same vein may be turned away at the gates of her book before it really gets rolling. On the other hand, those who do hold to such ideas will feel very comfortable and press forward.

The author then in her own words negates the need to resolve past trauma through these practices by discovering that such practices are irrelevant to the mission at hand, that of actually birthing a baby. “In other words, I can choose how I deliver my baby no matter whether I needed to complete birth traumas or not…the act of birthing seemed to be completely independent of one’s psychosocial and emotional past. Everything started from now, as if the past didn’t matter at all. Only the future mattered.” This I find to be an eminently sensible observation, and an excellent place to begin the book without running the risk of driving off the non-New Age adherents who might otherwise get a lot out of the rest of the book. This is of course the author’s choice, to be more or less inclusive and approachable versus quite clear in her viewpoint, but I found her choice to risk excluding the non-New Age reader interesting as she dwells somewhat in the memoir sections on her own struggles with cultural inclusion/exclusion.

Review: I believe the book will connect best with first time mothers-to-be who are open to New Age thinking and who wish to know vicariously as much as they can about the realities of laboring, birthing and new mothering. Ms. Ng is generous and open with her struggles and setbacks and inspirational and caring in how she shares the path forward that worked for her. The book shines brightest for me in the memoir-like sections where she shares these struggles and joys.

A star score is an irrelevant measure applied to a highly personal multi-faceted account of an individual’s felt experience. But a score I must give, and so I offer a blended score of 4, attempting to capture the experience of admiring the writing, the intelligence, the passion and the honesty (5); feeling confused at the kaleidoscope of genres vying for my attention (3); and finding much sensible and inspirational advice in the mix useful to new mothers (4).

REVIEW: UNITED STATES OF JAPAN

Author: Peter Tieryas. This is Mr. Tieryas’s third novel, and is hotly anticipated by much of the science fiction press.

Genre: Science fiction alternate history

Length: 400 pages

Summary: Beniko Ishimura is a man with a tainted heritage, a tangle of conflicting loyalties to navigate and dangerous colleagues and companions. He’s a game censor in a dystopian totalitarian regime, charged with hunting down dissidents who reveal their disloyal behaviors and tendencies through their gameplay choices. Playing the part of a ladies man and a bit of a slacker, falling far behind in the promotions race, he needs to decide who he can trust and who he must fight in a shadowy world of secret police, yakuza and loyalty enforcers.

Set in a mind-bending version of the 1980s in Southern California, Beniko’s adventure navigates a world in which the Axis won World War II and divided the United States between them, with the Japanese ruling the West Coast and the Nazis the Eastern United States. Beniko’s parents were liberated from a Japanese internment camp only when the Emperor dropped a nuclear weapon on San Jose, wiping it from the map. Flashing forward to Beniko’s timeframe…When a subversive video game positing that the United States of American actually won the war starts appearing everywhere, he teams up with a single-minded Imperial agent to find and stamp out the source of the dissident game. Their journey takes them into the dark underbelly of the Japanese regime, revealing dangerous truths they must confront about their government, each other and themselves.

Review: I came to this book with high expectations, excited about the author, the high concept plot about an alternate history in which Japan won the war, the video game angle and the bold comparison to a favorite Philip K. Dick novel, The Man in the High Castle. (Note: I read United States of Japan two months before publication in ARC form, headed by a prominent note that final editing and formatting had not taken place. While there were a few distracting typos and formatting glitches in the version I read, the strengths and weaknesses of this work are clear enough in the current version that I will ignore editing details in this review on the assumption they will be cleaned up before final publication.)

Tieryas tells a tale of ambitious scope and scale and creates a vividly imaginative high tech world of porticals (super smart phones), mecha robots, viral weapons and insanely sadistic torture instruments. Never mind that video games were just crawling out of the primordial ooze of Pong and mobile phones were still the size of workboots in the real late 1980s. If the Japanese had in fact won the war, I am certain they would have gotten on with developing these gadgets much faster. Without revealing details, let us just stipulate that the author has a vivid imagination for technology, setting and cruelty. I will never look at ants the same way again.

Tieryas is a visual writer, big-screen ready, who takes the reader to each clearly delineated scene in memorable fashion, whether it be the seamy cyber-yakuza gangster hangout, the antiseptic torture chamber, the huge shiny shopping and gaming arcade or the super-sized mecha battleground. He’s also a solid story-teller, developing complex and well-motivated characters who pursue their agendas believably enough in the elaborately imagined world he has created. Even his smaller side characters have complete backstories and unique goals, all of which adds texture and color to his richly detailed world. He mixes a punk-colored, neon-lit Japanese social scene set in appropriately modern gender-equal host and hostess bars with details of Southern California settings twisted inside out, like an upmarket Compton, and Catalina Island, a sunswept destination for pleasure boats in our world, converted into a labor and torture camp in his dark vision.

It’s probably politically incorrect to notice such things in 2016, but I also admire Tieryas’s development of his female characters. Akiko, an intensely loyal and single-minded Imperial agent, charged with enforcing internal discipline and rooting out the disloyal, is a fully realized character with subtle and shifting motivations and goals. While she possesses, of course, all the overachiever fighter skills and gender-transcending attitude and courage of the modern Lara Croftian female superhero, she also has a rich inner life and very much plays out her own agenda rather than being a mere foil for Beniko. The early-discarded girlfriend, the red-headed/blonde/constantly shifting babe-alicious Tiffany is also interesting and intelligent with her own busy and complex existence and goals, even if her main early function appears to be cheerful sexpot companion. Without revealing details of her evolution, she turns out to be so much more. It’s a pleasure to find this level of development lavished on female characters in what one might expect to be a pretty male-dominated flat character robot gamer world. In fact, Beniko, the slacker and ladies man, comes off as somewhat underdeveloped and passive in the first half of the book, partly in comparison to the active and dynamic Akiko and Tiffany. Akiko more than holds her own as an equal protagonist throughout the story without ever lapsing into the trope of the love interest, an admirable choice.

I find much to recommend in United States of Japan: the high concept plot, richly detailed tech world, complex characters and a certain gritty, dark atmosphere that permeates every page. Tieryas also drives a fast pace, moving swiftly from action to discovery and forward, always forward, with dialogue alternating with his vivid visuals to keep the action moving.

However, I am forced to admit I did not enjoy the book as much as I had hoped. Aside from the minor distractions of the editing and formatting lapses, which I am ignoring, I found his writing style fell somewhere between annoying to downright distressing, jarring me out of immersion in his terrific world and hurling me into a state approaching rage at times. Great storyteller, lousy wordsmith. While 95%–no, 98%!– of his prose is straightforward, muscular, action-oriented and clean, nothing fancy but not bad, perfectly suited to his fast-paced storytelling and chosen genre, every now and then he reached for a literary flourish that drove me nuts, and not in a good way.

“Akiko was in a store that sold memories, [cool, I like this, wonder where you are going, but I’m in for the ride] a mishmash of tawdry emancipation bottled into faked vulnerability and fingernails from forgotten musicians grilled on kebabs of misplaced desire. [Huh? Lemme read that again…kebabs, really? Never mind, I’ll keep going…] If only she’d had better taste, she could have escaped the corpulence of discontent. [wha—? Okay, so it must be a typo thing. Keep going.] But no, her belly swelled [did I miss a mating scene somewhere?] and her finger nails turned into claws as her nose gushed latex paint.”

Hrm. I am left befuddled and speechless.

This sort of passage is a frozen fish smacked across the reader’s face in the midst of an otherwise thrilling ride. To be fair, it was a dream sequence. But still. It happened far too many times, and not just in dream sequences. He has a few other style tics, merely annoying and not rage inducing, like occasional oddball word choices that are not quite wrong but are fairly weird, lapses into passive voice, or occasions when he starts off a sentence with one subject, and sticks in a clause with an unrelated subject at the end. Distracting but not deadly. But the occasional patches of purple prose, the abstract metaphors and the use of $500 words where $5 words would do must go, or readers will rise up like the Americans and revolt.

The other main difficulty I experienced as a reader, beyond suffering from the occasional bouts of purple prose, was feeling alienated from Beniko and Akiko. I found myself struggling to stay connected to them or care what happened to them for much of the first half of the book because, let’s face it, these were tough people doing a tough job in a dark and dystopian world, and that sort of thing takes its toll. They cannot be Disney princesses cavorting with cute bunnies while bluebirds sing overhead. But it took me to 50% through the book before I had a spontaneous experience of caring for Akiko and feeling empathy for her position and fully 60% through before I had the same experience for Beniko.

By the end, Tieryas had won me over for both characters, and I do not want to spoil the experience for readers by explaining why, but I fear many readers will not persist far enough to reach the payoff. I would encourage readers to persist, but the purple prose problem, while minor in the grand scheme of things, exacerbates the character alienation problem because the readers begin to mistrust the author’s character decisions partly BECAUSE the prose is so annoying.

In the author’s defense, I note it is probably worth trusting an author who takes such care with names and fusses in the early chapters with the details of names. Beniko’s mother Ruth, which means “compassion, or empathy with the suffering,” and his father Ezekiel, named for the Old Testament prophet who foresaw both the fall and the redemption of Israel did not, could not have, accidentally given their one and only son a girl’s name without reason, a name that can mean “red child” or “child of goodness” if you continue the cultural mashup and use the Latin meaning of bene and the Japanese meaning of “child” for ko. These are all very strange names for Japanese Nissei; they were not chosen randomly by the author.

My struggle with this issue of alienation from the major characters leads me to one final observation. As I said above, I did not enjoy reading this book. This tale is dismal, distressing and paints an unrelieved portrait of the hypocrisy, the violence, the fear, the self-doubt, the mistrust and unending stress of living under a totalitarian regime.

My lack of enjoyment points not to a fault in the book, but rather to its strength AS a portrait of life under a totalitarian regime. My distress was the distress of the characters forced to live in such a dark world. The author created in me the reader the experience of living in his bleak world. His marketing people want to claim the mantle of spiritual successor to Philip K. Dick because of a superficial resemblance to another tale set in an alternate history where Japan has conquered the U.S. West Coast.

Fair enough, and probably one that will sell books, but I believe the more relevant comparison is to George Orwell’s 1984. I also disliked the experience of reading 1984 but have found it lingers in my memory and my thoughts long after my visceral recoil from the reading experience has faded. So too, I suspect, will United States of Japan linger with readers, for Tieryas has done his historical homework. Under the glitz and eye-candy of the grand mecha fights and cool gangster sets is a powerful portrait of life under the all-seeing eyes of the secret police in wartime Japan. His characters are not particularly Japanese, and his regime is not particularly Japanese, but his depiction of life under a totalitarian regime rings true, frighteningly true, and this truth, in the end, is where the value and merit in his tale lies.

Recommendation: Read it if you have a strong stomach for gritty dystopias, love a good mecha fight, sexy strong women, video games and late-blooming heroes. I’m giving this ambitious, memorable and flawed work four stars out of five, an approximation attempting to blend five stars for scope, theme, ambition and historical roots and good fast-paced page turning plot; four stars for having complex characters but maybe making them one notch too hard to care about early on and three stars for purple prose lapses.

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REVIEW: BLOOD TIES

Blood Ties: Book 1 of the Blood War Chronicles

Author: Quincy J. Allen

Length: 276 pages

Genre: As the author puts it, a Western Steampunk Epic Fantasy. As this reviewer elaborates, a genre-blending mashup of Fantasy, Paranormal, Steampunk and Western.

Summary: Half-clockwork gunslinger Jake Lasater and his blue-eyed mulatto riding partner Cole McJunkins storm through a clockwork Weird Wild West battling werewolves, Chinese Tongs, crazed European soldiers and a deadly clockwork mercenary called Ghiss aided by a talented horse with a mighty kick named Lumpy, a beautiful Chinese tinker magician named Qi and his fast-on-her-feet ward Skeeter. Oh, and in the mix there’s a savvy mad emperor and sexy mysterious noblewoman in need of assistance as well.

Set in a vaguely post-Civil War American West, Jake’s adventure begins, after a few preliminary poker games, gunfights and assassination attempts, when he receives a telegram from Qi asking for his help on a job in San Francisco. San Francisco, where the Chinese Tongs who tried to kill him are headquartered. But does our hero turn down an opportunity to head straight for danger? Of course not! “Well, son, lemme tell ya…when a lady like Qi Lau Xing sends you an urgent telegram asking for help, you pretty much get off your tail and lend a hand. You’ll understand better when your suspenders are a little further from the ground.” Without spoiling the rest of the story, let it be said that mayhem and swashbuckling ensue, introducing a vibrant and well-drawn world, peopled with vivid characters and setting the stage for epic adventures to come in later stories, as this one rollicks to a cliffhanger ending.

Review: I enjoyed this book, straight up. Definitely a genre-blender, with steampunk showing up in airships, half-clockwork repaired veterans, green goggles and top hats everywhere, paranormal touches in the occasional werewolf, magicians and enchanted guns and prosthetics, and old school Western appearing in beautifully detailed Old West scenes sent ever so slightly askew by all the madness, like calculating whether your mechanical arm can draw faster than his when the poker game goes awry. If you are a genre purist, prepare to be appalled. If you can roll with author Quincy J. Allen’s mad mix, prepare to be enthralled as he builds a beautifully detailed, creative and markedly visual world.

Why did I enjoy it? Pace. Characters. World-building. Writing.

The dominant pace is breakneck page-turning madness, as we race from one shoot ‘em up to the next, with major battle scenes every other chapter or so, lovingly detailed in Wild West meets Steampunk tropes. But this skilled author knows when to slow the dance down and savor a moment, for high stakes poker games, encounters with lovely ladies or moving moments with Jake and his ward Skeeter. It’s a fast read, with snappy dialogue driving the action.

Author Allen’s characters are beautifully detailed, nuanced and vividly memorable. Our hero Jake is noble and good, in spite of the tough hand he’s been dealt, and skilled at vanquishing bad guys, but only the ones who earn it by making life hard for others. Not a bad philosophy. Cole McJunkins is loyal, quick-thinking and equally skilled at bad-guy vanquishing, and accepts his friend’s despised “machiner” half-clockwork nature as generously as his friend accepts his mulatto skin in a racist time. Skeeter is a fun character, a rebellious but fabulously skilled and street-savvy teenager who, guess what, breaks rules but is grown up enough to handle the consequences. From what I’ve seen so far of this author, I would guess Skeeter has bigger roles to play in future episodes of this epic adventure. Then there is the alluring Qi, magician and tinker, too busy with her own life and missions to take up as our hero’s girlfriend. I’ll leave it to readers to discover on their own Ghiss, mad Emperor Norton and the European lady in need of assistance, not to mention Grandfather Chung, just to mention the more important ones. But what’s great about this writer is even the one-off small characters carve out their own moment, like Marshal Billie Sisty—female, someone who could “speak softly and still know how to work a leg iron when the situation required it”—who had to reprimand Jake for shooting within city limits, although she did allow that he “did the wrong thing for the right reason…or is it the right thing for the wrong reason.”

On world-building, maybe I’m partial because I am from Colorado like the author, and he obviously loves Colorado and its colorful Old West heritage and uses that knowledge masterfully to create a firm foundation for the crazy world he goes on to build. From an overnight stay in the Horace Tabor House to quaffing a brew at the Colorado Brewery, Allen knows and loves the real Colorado, even as he covers it up with steampunks and werewolves and half-clockwork villains and heroes. He’s a visual writer, lovingly detailing the gadgets and gehaws, but never slowing the action down to do so. As mentioned above, he proudly refuses to color between the genre lines, or pick a genre for that matter, so buckle up for a few chapters as you rollercoaster from Old West to steampunk to paranormal, but trust that you will know and understand the rules of his mad world and they will eventually make sense. This is probably not a good book for someone who likes their reality real or objects to enchanted mechanical arms, but it’s a great book for someone who is delighted by creative surprises every few paragraphs.

And the writing. It is fine, damn fine. Writing in my mind is five things: the plot, the characters, the world-building, the prose and the quality of the editing. The dull stuff first—editing. I won’t suffer bad grammar or typos. I found one skinny little typo, which is miraculous in a newly published novel, so I take my top hat off to the author for delivering such clean prose. Full points for great well-motivated characters, a rollicking fast-paced plot plausible enough in its own madcap way and a beautifully detailed world, which leaves us to discuss the actual prose. I love this writer’s dialogue and humor. His style reminds me of my favorite Robert E. Heinlein stories, with swashbuckling, wise-cracking heroes, tongue-in-cheek at times with a knowing awareness and humor that leavens both dangerous and moving moments. Allen takes even the tiniest moment and gives it a little sparkle. Like when our hero has to jump naked from bed into a raging gunfight and find a way to present himself with some modesty a few minutes later to a beautiful woman, covered only by his holster. Or his description of a small moment in a card game:

““You’re called, mister,” the cowboy added.

Cole sighed and turned over his hole card. It was a king. The cowboy turned pale first, knowing he was beat, and just as Jake suspected, his face went from pale white to crimson in that slow transition far too many drunken cowboys get right before the shooting starts. Jake could see the alcohol coaxing liquid backbone into the cowboy.””

Recommendation: Read it if you are a fan of steampunk or Weird Wild West genre fiction. You will love the vivid characters, rollicking plot, madly creative world and snappy dialogue. May not have quite enough magic for fantasy and paranormal fans, and I promise there is far too much madness going on for those of you who like your reality real. As my motto is “Reality is for those who lack imagination,” call me a fan. I’m looking forward to the next installment in this madcap universe of the Blood War Chronicles.

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