Reviews: "Child of Fire", "Game of Cages", and "Circle of Enemies"

At the recommendation of a friend, I picked up the four books of the "Twenty Palaces" series by Harry Connolly. I finished the third one today.

Set in the modern day, the world of the Twenty Palaces is a world where magic is real. It's cast by ritual and involves putting spells on something (like a ribbon, a piece of paper, or a sword) or on someone (in the form of a tattoo).

Magic comes from three spell books that have been lost. The Twenty Palaces Society is a group that wants to keep magic out of the hands of others and is willing to kill anyone necessary to accomplish their goal. But it's not just enough to keep magic out of unsafe hands. There's also the predators.

In the Twenty Palaces world, there's things out there in the empty spaces outside of what we know to be reality. Those things are hungry and really want to be summoned here where they can feed. And they really, really don't like being imprisoned.

It turns out that most renegade magic users tend to try to summon predators for the powers they may grant. And they lose control. And then the predators feed. Predators are so dangerous that they can actually scour all life from the Earth, so when the Twenty Palaces Society learns someone's mucking about with predators, they destroy everything necessary to ensure that predator is dead.

Whew! So that's the setting. Enter Ray Lilly, Connolly's protagonist.

Ray used to be a car thief and petty criminal. He has a dislike of firearms (a childhood accident crippled his best friend) and has managed to get out a recent bought of legal troubles. He's now working for Annalise, a peer of the Twenty Palaces Society (and scary badass) as her "wooden man". He doesn't have to take this thankless job... he could just let her kill him.

Fun times. So Ray's job is to do what Annalise tells him, and she's not inclined to tell him much. He's a "wooden man". He's not expected to last long enough to matter. Lucky for Ray, he's got a couple of spells of his own to help him out, one of which he managed to cast himself.

And so we enter "Child of Fire". With Annalise, Ray goes to a sleepy Oregon town to investigate some magic. It doesn't take long for a tattooed ex-convict and his scary, tattooed, homicidal boss to wind up in trouble with what's going on and before long, Ray's having to step up against a powerful predator.

"Game of Cages" takes place a short time after "Child of Fire". Ray's living a normal life and trying to do what ex-cons do when they go straight. But a part of him misses the insanity and the rush of life in the Twenty Palaces Society. When a Twenty Palaces investigator gets him to accompany her on a job, he jumps at it. And winds up in a deadly struggle between magicians as they vie to claim a captive predator. It's no shock that the predator gets loose...

This leads into "Circle of Enemies". Ray's recovering from the events from "Game of Cages" when he's lured back to Los Angeles by his old gang friends. It turns out an old enemy is implanting Ray's friends with predators as part of a game with very high stakes.



So I loved the three books and am starting on the prequel - "Twenty Palaces" - now. Connolly's got a good, gritty world with some seriously messed-up Lovecraftian stuff going on. His narrative style is engaging and I find I like Ray Lilly as a character. There's a few points, mostly in "Game of Cages" when the story drags a bit, but every book has some solid payout.

I'm tempted to compare it with Jim Butcher's "Dresden Files" series. Both series are told via first person point-of-view. Both series have a hard-bitten protagonist in a modern world that possesses magic. Both are outsiders and both get the crap kicked out of them a lot. Both are badasses.

That said, it's an unfair comparison, I think.

Butcher's Dresden and Connolly's Lilly are just very different characters in too many basic ways. Both are awesome but they just aren't the same.

I have high hopes for "Twenty Palaces" and hope Connolly decides to revisit the world at some point. I've tried his foray into more traditional fantasy "The Way into Chaos" but haven't felt the story grip me in the same way as the "Twenty Palaces" books. I suppose I should give it another try at some point.

Late to the clone party

I'm finally hooked on Orphan Black. I got season one recently on DVD and have finally had time to sit down for a binge watch. I'm a disc and a half in and... wow.

For those who are unfamiliar, it's the story of Sarah Manning, a small-time grifter who is on the run from her abusive boyfriend and trying to get custody of her daughter.

Sarah sees a woman who looks just like her commit suicide. Sarah uses the opportunity to fake her death and assume the woman's identity. What follows is a series of weird events in which Sarah finds out she is one of an unknown number of clones. The clones are being monitored by an unknown party and being killed off, either by that same party or by someone else.

Sarah's life gets insanely-complex as she tries to figure out what's going on to save herself, her sister clones, and figure out how to get a life going with her daughter.

"Orphan Black" is utter genius. The stories are suspenseful, well-written, and well-paced. They really fly based on the insanely-good acting of Tatiana Maslany, who is able to play the varying roles of the clones.

It's good to find something original and solid out there. I'd almost given up hope. Thank you BBC!

BART

I gotta say: overall I like BART.

For those not of the San Francisco Bay Area, "BART" stands for "Bay Area Rapid Transit". The name is a bit of a joke at times (it's often not all that "rapid" and has moments when it's not even "transit").

It's an aging rail system that is in dire need of upgraded equipment and expansion of capacity.

This week had more than one snag in it, including a perfect storm of debris across the tracks, some jackass walking on the tracks, a power outage in a station (crippling one of the lines), and - best of all - a crack in the tracks of a main station. Not a small crack, mind you. A good six to twelve inches of track was missing from the footage I saw.

That was not a fun day to commute.

The bummer with the Bay Area is that public transit is a bit limited. Oh, there's the AC Transit buses, I suppose. And there's the odd ferry, if you happen to be fortunate enough to live near one. And there's CalTrain, for the Peninsula dwellers as well as Muni for the San Francisco dwellers.

But BART is the main lifeline of public transit for the greater Bay Area.

We're supposed to get new cars for the trains in a couple of years. I wonder how disastrous the increasingly-crowded trains will be by then?

Books

My recent BART fare has included:

• "The Shadow of What was Lost" by James Islington. An interesting world in which magic users of a certain type are bound to magically-enforced rules and shunned by society as a whole. A slightly different flavor of magic users was obliterated twenty years before the book and the fallout from that dominates the story. It's an interesting tale with multiple protagonists I enjoyed following but I found the antagonists a bit opaque and absurd. Overall a fun offering and I'll look for the next in the series.
• "Enchantress" by James Maxwell. Another tale in a fantasy world. This one involves a young woman learning to be an enchantress while her brother becomes some kind of badass warrior. Honestly, I thought this was entertaining enough but a bit choppy. The chapters with the brother were jarring when compared with the heroine's tale. And some of the other POV characters seemed really random. It was a fun read but I'm still deciding if I want to get the next book.
• "Way into Chaos" by Harry Connolly. I got about a quarter in and found it kind of tepid and not terribly engaging. It's still sitting, waiting to be finished.
• "Child of Fire" by Harry Connolly. The first novel in Connolly's "Twenty Palaces" series, this is very different fare from "Way into Chaos". It's set in the modern world with a sort of Harry Dresden feel to it. I've burned through about two-thirds of the book already and am trying to pace myself to finish it. I have the rest of the series and am kind of excited to get through it while wanting to savor the fun.

Review: Avengers: Age of Ultron

GodDAMN but Joss Whedon's still got it!

I've seen some tepid reviews of Age of Ultron floating about and I have to say I think any negativity is unjustified. That was a fun, action-packed film that's true to comic-book craziness.

Set in the events after Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Avengers: Age of Ultron starts off with action and keeps a steady pace until the very end. Long-time Marvel comic fans will get plenty of cameos and Easter eggs to keep one happy.

Oh, the plot is crazy as hell, but it's perfect for a comic book movie, especially an Avengers flick.

I can't believe the actress who plays the Scarlet Witch is the younger sister of the Olsen Twins. Good lord time has flown by.

It's really not much of a spoiler, but there's only one little mid-credits scene at the end. When a familiar face picks up something and makes a pronouncement, you're good to go. You don't really need to wait until the absolute end of the film for another scene.