In the Garden of Iden

This is the first novel in what has become one of the most popular series in contemporary SF, now back in print from Tor. In the 24th century, the Company preserves works of art and extinct forms of life (for profit of course). It recruits orphans from the past, renders them all but immortal, and trains them to serve the Company, Dr. Zeus. One of these is Mendoza the botanist. She is sent to Elizabethan England to collect samples from the garden of Sir Walter Iden.
But while there, she meets Nicholas Harpole, with whom she falls in love. And that love sounds great bells of change that will echo down the centuries, and through the succeeding novels of The Company.

This book has been on my TBR list for quite some time, so I'm glad I finally got around to reading it. The writing was in a very easy to read style, and I got through it pretty quickly.

I loved the time travel idea, and I think I was hoping for a little more of it. Instead, we got one time travel to gloomy England, and there we stayed. And then it turned mostly into a love story with a typical obsessed heroine. There was more romance than science fiction in this story, it seemed.

With that said, I still liked the book, for the most part. There were definitely some interesting ideas here, and I'm quite looking forward to reading more in the series, especially if it gets better, as I've heard. I think this book could be read and enjoyed by fans of any genre. It seems to be pretty light on the science, and the writing style flows pretty nicely, except I felt that it started to fall apart a little bit near the end.  

Book Details

Title: In the Garden of Iden (Company)

Author: Kage Baker

Genre: science fiction

Page Count: 329

Publishing Info: December 2005 by Tor

Why I Read It: Beyond Reality group read

Grade: B- (good, but could've been better)

Cover Thoughts: I'm not in love with the cover, especially since it looks like some woman is driving a spaceship, and that doesn't really go along with the story at all.

The Mystery of Grace

On the Day of the Dead, the Solona Music Hall is jumping.  That's where Altagracia Quintero meets John Burns, just two weeks too late.

Altagracia – her friends call her Grace – has a tattoo of Nuestra Señora de Altagracia on her shoulder, she's got a Ford Motor Company tattoo running down her leg, and she has grease worked so deep into her hands that it'll never wash out.  Grace works at Sanchez Motorworks, customizing hot rods.  Finding the line in a classic car is her calling. 

Now Grace has to find the line in her own life.  A few blocks around the Alverson Arms is all her world -- from the little grocery store where she buys beans, tamales, and cigarettes (“cigarettes can kill you,” they tell her, but she smokes them anyway) to the record shop, to the library where Henry, a black man confined to a wheelchair, researches the mystery of life in death – but she’s got unfinished business keeping her close to home. 

Grace loves John, and John loves her, and that would be wonderful, except that John, like Grace, has unfinished business – he’s haunted by the childhood death of his younger brother.  He's never stopped feeling responsible. Like Grace in her way, John is an artist, and before their relationship can find its resolution, the two of them will have to teach each other about life and love, about hot rods and Elvis Presley, and about why it's necessary to let some things go.

This was an extremely slow moving book.  In fact, even though it was less than 300 pages, it felt like twice that.  There were times when I had to skim, because the story was just plodding along and was not even a little interesting.  There were interesting parts in the book, and the story idea itself was good, but the execution wasn't good at all.

The author had a very defined idea about who Grace was--she is tattooed, she likes to fix cars, she likes rockabilly music.  That's about it, and it's repeated over and over again throughout the book.  And then when John meets and falls in love with her, he gets interested in the same thing, and we hear a lot about that too, even though it's really not very interesting.

Speaking of John, the romance between Grace and John had so little to do with anything I'm not sure why it was included.  Actually, most of the story had little to do with anything else in the story.  I couldn't quite ever figure out what the point was.  It's definitely not something I'd recommend unless you're a big fan of Charles de Lint.

Book Details

Title: The Mystery of Grace

Author: Charles de Lint

Genre: Urban fantasy

Page Count: 269 (but felt much longer)

Publishing Info: March 2009 by Tor

Why I Read It: needed a book with the word "mystery" in the title

Grade: D+

Cover Thoughts: The cover is definitely the best thing about the book.  It's beautiful.

Review: The Great Hunt

Book Details

Title: The Great Hunt (The Wheel of Time, Book 2)

Author: Robert Jordan

Genre: Epic fantasy

Page Count: 681

Publishing Info: Tor, October 15, 1991

My Review

Why I read it: 2nd in a series

The Plot: After centuries of searching for the Horn of Valere which possesses the power to raise past heroes from the dead, it is finally found and then stolen.

The Characters: I don't really like any of these characters.  Rand seems to not have any character growth, and has the same fears and worries throughout the whole book.  I imagine at some point he'll embrace his powers, but it seems to be taking too long to get there.  I guess that's fitting since this is a very long series.  There are a lot of secondary characters, but none that I'm particularly attached to at this point.

The Setting: The world that Jordan has created is very intricate and it seems like he must have spent a long time thinking it out.  There's a reason epic fantasy is my favorite genre (or sub-genre), and this book is a fine example.

A Sample of the Writing:

"Some men," she said, not raising her eyes from his hand, "choose to seek greatness, while others are forced to it.  It is always better to choose than to be forced.  A man who's forced is never completely his own master.  He must dance on the strings of those who forced him."

 

Who Should Read This? Anyone who has already read book one.  If you haven't this isn't the place to start.  This is also a good one for epic fantasy fans like myself, and I almost feel like any true fantasy fan should have read this series, which is one of the reasons I'm reading it, even though I'm far behind.

Final Thoughts: It has been six years since I read the first book in the series, and I'm not really sure why it took me so long to get to book two. This one took me a really long time to get into, and I found the pacing very uneven throughout. Things would get exciting, and then almost deathly slow again. I've found this happens often with longer books. Most of the time they just don't need to be as long as they are.  I'll definitely be continuing on with the series, though.

Grade: C+

Cover Thoughts: My cover is like the one on the left, but I think the e-book edition (the cover on the right) is at least 10 times better.  Why are they making the covers so much cooler for e-books?
 

The Way of Kings

Book Details:
Genre: Epic Fantasy
Page Count: 1001
Publication Date: Aug. 31, 2010
Why I read it: favorite author
Grade: A+

Cover thoughts:
Beautiful cover! The artwork is amazing, and what's even cooler is there is artwork throughout the book. I love this cover!

About the author:
Brandon Sanderson is the author of Elantris, Warbreaker, and the Mistborn Trilogy. He's also finishing the Wheel of Time series. And he also wrote a middle grade fantasy series. He's a great author, and one every fantasy reader should read.

The plot:
Oh goodness, where do I even start? This is the first of ten planned books in The Stormlight Archive. I assume every serious fantasy reader has already read a plot summary, if not the book itself. The author himself has a hard time introducing the series, so, since I like to keep my blog posts fairly short, if you want to know what the book is about, check out this synopsis on goodreads.

Characters:
With a fantasy novel of this size, you'd think there'd be so many characters that it'd be hard to keep track of them. That's what I've generally found in these doorstopper epic fantasies. Not so in The Way of Kings. There really is only a small handful of main characters, and with the depth and detail in this book, you really get to know and love them, even the lesser characters. Kaladin was my favorite in the story, which I think it fitting since this book is mostly about him.

Setting:
This is the most amazing part of the book. The amount of worldbuilding that went into this book is quite possibly the best I've ever seen. Down to the smallest detail, Sanderson has created a world so different from ours, but not so alien that we can't relate to or care about the characters. I'll admit, I don't understand everything about how this fantasy world works, but I'm looking forward to reading more books and finding out.

Notable quotes:
"Too many of us," she said, "take great pains with what we ingest through our mouths, and far less with what we partake of through our ears and eyes. Wouldn't you say?"

"Let the Vorin believe as they wish--the wise among them will find goodness and solace in their faith; the fools would be fools no matter what they believed."

"'And so, does the destination matter? Or is it the path we take? I declare that no accomplishment has substance nearly as great as the road used to achieve it. We are not creatures of destinations. It is the journey that shapes us. Our callused feet, our backs strong from carrying the weight of our travels, our eyes open with the fresh delight of experiences lived.'"

Read this if you're in the mood for: an epic fantasy that has it all.

Continue or part ways? This one's obvious. Brandon Sanderson is one of my favorite authors, and I'll continue to read everything he writes, especially this series. The second book can't come fast enough for me. I can't wait to see what happens next.