This book begins with a woman raising demons from skeletons, as a timid bard creeps up and begins gently drawing her story out of her; in turn, she divulges details about him that she should not know. By all rights it should have ended with their stories meeting together at the present, then proceeding together into a satisfying climax… but as her story dragged on and on, crammed with irrelevant detail and bloated with extraneous characters, I reached page 668 of 714 and realized that there was no way in this book we were going to reach the end of her story. Epic battles and inter-kingdom wars had been hinted at, and she’d barely graduated school. I felt extremely cheated and in no mood to read any further in the series. I was also not a fan of her culture, in which women with magic powers were required to train as warrior-geishas who could sing, dance, kick butt, and still simper and giggle around powerful men while entertaining them. Seriously. Meanwhile male magic-users have to join a killing squad with a high death rate. I was briefly interested when a male magic-using character showed up and wanted to train as a geisha, but we never learn where his story goes because 700 pages later we’re only a fraction done with the story. Definitely not continuing on with this series. (Unless someone tells me it gets more worthwhile.)
Tag: author-rin chupeco
Hungry Hearts: 13 Tales of Food and Love, ed. Elsie Chapman and Caroline Tung Richmond
The connection between these short stories is that they all take place on Hungry Hearts Row, a neighborhood of restaurants featuring very different cuisines and very different stories. There’s some interplay between characters but only enough to unify the scene. Only a couple of the stories take the prompt literally and use food to bring characters together romantically; others were about relating to estranged family through food, or using food as a way to make peace with one’s past. I particularly liked the ones that were more out of left field, like the one where the Chinese restaurant was actually an integral part of a gang war, or the one where the Muslim superhero literally fell out of the sky in front of a food cart. Some duds, but a strong collection overall; I appreciated the wide variety of ethnicities and cultures represented in both the foods and the stories.