This is entirely bookelfe's fault, because a little while ago she did a post on the terrifying profusion of YA high school AU versions of things that have been coming out lately. Things like So Shelley, which is Byron, Keats, and Shelley committing hijinks in a U.S. high school, or Falling for Hamlet, which is exactly what you think it is.

And the one on her list that seemed most cracktastic to me was Another Pan, in which Peter Pan is a hot supernatural gang leader at a ritzy Manhattan private school who is seducing Wendy and searching for-- I am not making this up-- the lost Egyptian secrets to immortality.

It is the sequel to Another Faust (which would be why the school is called the Marlowe School).

So, laughing hysterically the whole way, I went to the library, discovered that the book was sitting right there, checked it out, brought it back, and spent a few days cackling every time I looked at it. Today I read it, and the most surprising thing happened.

You guys-- I can't believe I'm saying this; something may have gone wrong with the karmic balance of the universe and/or me-- people, this is a completely reasonable and fairly proficient YA fantasy novel. It reminded me highly of Rick Riordan. It also-- I can't believe I'm saying this either-- although it is nowhere near as good-- it reminded me vaguely of Frances Hardinge.

It isn't even a paranormal romance. Because while there is a romance, it is completely and entirely not the point of the plot. It's like fourth or fifth down on the list of subplots.

The deal is that Wendy Darling and her younger brother John are faculty brats at a school full of rich kids, and their father is an Egyptologist who can't get tenure anywhere because he keeps babbling about unorthodox and poorly attested mythology, which is why he's teaching high school. But because he is personally liked by his old professors, and because the school and its students have more money than God, and because no one cares about the things he thinks are critically important to his research, the British Museum sends over some artifacts (not considered terribly valuable) so the school can have a little exhibition and he can teach an archaeology class. Among the things they send is a copy of something called The Book of Gates, which claims to be a text telling you how to find five mummies of people who died with horrible unresolved grudges. If you mix the dust of all the mummies together, you become immortal, but they're all in a terrible netherworld ruled by a powerful death goddess and guarded by horrible beasts.

Peter turns up on the mummy-hunt and figures the Darling kids are his door in to exhibit access, especially since John is desperately trying to become a social success in his first year of Terribly Rich High School, and Wendy thinks Peter's hot.

The thing that makes this book actually work is simple. Kindly take a moment to imagine what a Peter Pan would be like who knows, with absolute, bone-deep solidity, that if he accomplishes this one thing, he will be eternally himself, with the network of Lost Boys he's built up, with everything he is intact forever.

And if he does not do this one thing, he will grow old, and become human, and die.

... pretty creepy, huh? Yeah. He is. And the book takes it for all it is worth. He has all the heartlessness and charm of Barrie's original, all the ruthlessness, all the smarts, all the inability to remember or care about anything that doesn't affect him and his interests directly.

But the alternative to working with him is the triumph of a massively grudge-holding goddess of death who's going to take out anything around The Book of Gates and make the school property contiguous with Hell. Not an easy decision. (And you see why I said it isn't a romance.)

This is not a spectacularly good book. The prose is only solid, and there are maybe a few too many threads, and one too many subsidiary villains, and I am not sure there should have been any romance involved at all. Also there is some plot-coupon-type racing around to find mummy parts, and it's odd how Wendy keeps sitting down and sussing out in one session riddles Peter's had a lot of brilliant people working on for decades. But the creepy is creepy, the portrait of John as a kid who desperately wants to be some kind of cool and isn't making it is nuanced, the adults are as three-dimensional as the teenagers, and some things about the ending are nicely ambiguous. Given that this should by all rights have been a review I spent pointing and laughing, I am really very pleasantly surprised.

I actually unironically want to read Another Faust now. On the title page of this one it says 'Book Two of Another Series', and I laughed, and I know I was meant to and I appreciate the joke. If Daniel and Dina Nayeri, who are apparently that oddest of writing combinations, a brother-sister collaboration, want to keep this sort of thing going indefinitely, they can for all of me.

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Read August 9th.

Extremely fun YA centered around food and cooking. Elaine is a senior in high school whose mother is chef and part-owner of a nice-sounding fusion restaurant, and Elaine's been cooking since she can remember. She knows the kitchen is home, and she knows she wants to spend the rest of her life in it-- in fact, she would like her own cooking show. As she puts it, "Do you know how many African-American female celebrity chefs there aren't?" But her mother wants her to keep her options open about liberal arts colleges, and do things besides cooking absolutely all the time, and her best friend from when they were younger (and on whom she has a crush) is going through a rough patch with his parents, and it all collides.

There are many lovely things about this book. One of my favorites is the way that it is nuanced, the way that Elaine is being a teenager and knowing that her mother doesn't understand her, and in some ways her mother doesn't. But there're also bits like the thing where her mother's telling her, maybe pick up a business degree too? and Elaine doesn't notice, but in the background we can see her mother struggling with the bills and publicity and the whole business end of being a chef. Elaine thinks it's an attempt to sidetrack her, but it's an attempt to help her go forward. Except that it never occurs to her mother to sit down and say to her look, you will need business skills in the life you have chosen and should consider all angles, which means it is, in fact, her mother deciding what's best for her, which is what Elaine does not like. You see. Nicely complicated.

And the kitchen stuff is right. It's an unusually polite kitchen, but there are some like that out there-- I've heard that nobody uses language in the kitchen at Nobu that would shock anybody's grandmother. The logistics are right. The thing where Elaine gets yelled at viciously in a way that's never happened before during a rush and it hurts and she doesn't notice that it's because she's getting treated exactly like staff and not like a teenage intern/owner's daughter was perfect.

There are recipes, too, and they are that rarity that one basically doesn't see in cookbooks, or fiction, for that matter: recipes in restaurant format. They could have been torn out of the book of the place I worked-- there are places things are crossed out and rewritten just to make the print more clear, because someone's gonna have to consult it on the fly. There are notes on the process of coming up with the dish, notes about what could be changed, notes about directions to experiment and whether the recipe-writer has tried them, notes about possible menu accompaniments, all in the same legible, carefully responsible, someone-not-me-has-to-make-this-dish-recognizably-in-ten-years house-standardized manner. I haven't even tried any of them and I can tell you: these are good recipes. Whether or not one might happen to like the food. (I suspect I would. Carrot macaroons!)

The Great Peril of this sort of YA novel has been summarized neatly by buymeaclue in the review in which she stated about some book or other, "Too much boyfriend, not enough roller derby". There is boyfriend in this book. I do not think there is too much of him. I will freely admit that I would prefer it if there were none at all and it were an entirely kitchen-centered slice-of-life day-to-day teen cooking book, but that is me, and Elaine does, in fact, have to learn some things about people and the ways that they behave outside kitchens and the ways that food does and does not serve as a social aide under different circumstances. Her reaction to everything is to cook. One's reaction to some things should be, for instance, to talk to people about them. This is a fair point. It's just, I'm a person who stress-bakes myself. My reaction to the stresses Elaine has in this book can be summarized as 'clafoutis', which is, you know, worse than muffins but not as bad as brioche. (My reaction to the last couple of months of my own life is 'I MUST MAKE CHINESE DUMPLINGS FOR EVERYONE I CAN CRAM INTO THE ROOM FOR MY BIRTHDAY. SIX KINDS OF THEM. TRY TO STOP ME.') So when the guy was stressing Elaine and she wanted him to go away or stay put or just make sense so she could bake, I was right there with that.

In short, this is a very good book, and it gets a lot of complex things right without sacrificing readability. And, thank you, O marketing department, one reason I picked it up was that I thought 'Huh. Nice-looking teenage black girl on book cover with foodie title, which cover turns out to correctly represent the protagonist. When was the last time I saw that?' So good job there.

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Read August 2nd.

When I was growing up, my father had a large collection of Golden Age science fiction and fantasy, starting circa E.E. Smith and cutting off, very short, at Dangerous Visions, which was where he decided the field had gotten too post-modern and depressing for him. (Not for me.) So we had in the house Heinlein-Asimov-Clarke-Anderson-etc., and when I got to the point in life where I started looking for lists of Writers In This Genre I Should Know About, we had all of them-- before 1970.

What it took me longer to learn was that my father is not a completist. When you've had the work of an author sitting on shelves in your house for eighteen years, and there are a whole bunch of books by said author on those shelves to boot, it does not, necessarily, occur to you that maybe you should go the library and make sure there isn't more.

So I have some weird holes. And despite having been handed Have Space Suit, Will Travel at six, I had never read this particular Heinlein juvenile.

It's not bad. It feels scraped to the bone, edited to the point where some of what should be actual story is elided, but I think this is because of the limits of YA publishing at the time.

The protagonist is attending school on Earth when a war seems likely to break out between Earth and Venus (which has a Terran colony, but is also the home of its own intelligent species). He has dual citizenship, having been born in a spaceship near the Moon, and his parents are on Mars, so they send for him to get him out of the combat zone. Unfortunately, the fighting blocks all transport to Mars, the government of Earth is very interested in something his parents wanted him to bring them, and he winds up a hundred million miles out of his way washing dishes in a Chinese restaurant near the Venerian pole.

The parts of this story that are most interesting to me are the ones you can't get into a juvenile in the fifties: the mode-switch between frightened and displaced refugee kid to a man with a job and a livelihood is covered reasonably well, but he doesn't fall as far as he would, and bounces a lot more quickly than most people might on discovering that they're on the wrong planet and the currency all their funds are in is illegal. And the further mode-switch between man with a job and a livelihood to guerilla soldier in a nasty jungle war is really, really elided, because the narrative is not going to tell you what he did to gain his combat reflexes. This is a book that would be a lot different if it had been written in the last few years.

But it does have things I like in it, specifically the Venerian dragons, who are wonderful, and there isn't enough of them; and the way it becomes slowly obvious to the protagonist that war is real and he is in it; and the way that there are few women, but they are as competent or more than the men, and it's his mother who's the more important scientist/spy.

This feels like a bridge between the juvenilia and the later stuff, to me, and has the flaws I'd expect of that, but I'm glad to have read it, because it fills a hole in Heinlein's work I'd theorized might be have something in it but not been certain about. And it brings back the nostalgia of being very small and reading all these books for the first time, the same now, but different.

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Links to the reviews I posted during the recent LJ outage. I am not reposting, but anonymous and open ID commenting are open over there (though I would appreciate some kind of name signed to anonymous comments so as to be able to maintain continuity of conversation).

Day 325: Trilogy, H.D.. Poetry, unfairly overlooked lesbian author.

Day 326: Paying For It, Chester Brown. Graphic novel. Interesting but highly problematic memoir about prostitution from the perspective of a customer.

Day 327: Faerie Winter, Janni Lee Simner. Good YA fantasy by a friend of mine.

Day 328: The Invention of Morel, Adolfo Bioy Casares. Unfairly obscure Argentinian science fiction indirectly responsible for the movie Last Year at Marienbad.

Day 329: Earth X, Alex Ross and Jim Krueger. Graphic novel. Dark Marvel Comics AU with a very interesting take on Captain America.

Day 330: Dragonbreath: No Such Thing As Ghosts, Ursula Vernon. Fifth in Vernon's fun series of illustrated kids' books; not a strong entry.

And the two since made it through crossposting.

So on the one hand this is a fairytale retelling set in a world based on medieval Mongolia, which is not a common thing in a book. On the other hand, while the fact that it's very clearly Not Really Medieval Mongolia (different religion, kingdom structure, magic, class system) means that I should not be annoyed about inaccuracies in how it portrays medieval Mongolia, I... kind of can't help that.

I think the things that bother me are the places where reality is more complicated than what we get, and/or the worldbuilding is bent around the demands of the plot.

Said plot involves a highborn lady and her maid, who are shut into a tower for seven years because the lady refuses to marry as her father tells her to and insists on picking her own suitor. The book is an account of their imprisonment by the maid, Dashti. The tower scenes are very well done logistically, the descriptions of how they have to work at fighting off rats, conserving stores and candles, the ways in which imprisonment wears on them. And when the suitor the lady wants comes to talk to his betrothed through the small flap they use for waste disposal, it's plausible that the lady is no longer in any kind of psychological shape to cope with talking to him, and insists that Dashti pretend to be her and speak in her place. Things of course proceed from there about how you'd expect, and the man the lady's father picked is nicely menacing.

However, I think Hale was looking for a plot reason for Dashti to be unwilling to take her mistress's place, a reason stronger than the fear of getting caught, because Dashti has to keep insisting on her unwillingness for the entire book, even in circumstances where any sane person would just have gone with it (her employer doesn't want to be a lady anymore, and is actually pretty happy not being). Therefore we wind up with an entire culture centered around a belief that the gentry are more than mortal and favored of the gods and must be obeyed so that Dashti can keep being terrified that she isn't sufficiently shiny to do this. And because the lady has to be locked up in a tower, the gentry have to have towers, meaning they aren't nomadic, meaning that we then get this settled people as good/noble/etc. vs. nomadic people as dirty/poor/etc., so that Dashti is always managing to do useful survival-related things because of her nomadic background and talking about how much she enjoyed traveling with her mother and their herds while at the same time going on about how she is not worthy to even be a lady's maid and is just not cool or anything and ought to be killed for being so presumptuous.

THIS IS NOT HOW PEOPLE FEEL ABOUT NOMADS IN CENTRAL AND NORTHERN ASIA. And it bothers me because the USSR tried very hard to wipe out nomadism among the peoples of Mongolia and Tuvia and Kazakhstan and the other areas they conquered, spent years insisting that everybody settle in one place and build collective farms. While semi-European feudalism may be sometimes possibly be a better option than forced collectivism-- though there have been wars about that question; I can think of three without really having to work at it-- the imposition of semi-European feudalism into a nomadic culture as a scaffolding for story annoys me, because there have also been actual revolutions, plural, over the right of people to maintain their nomadic ways of living. ACTUAL MONGOLIAN NOBILITY STRUCTURE WAS TOTALLY DIFFERENT. I HAVE CITATIONS um if anybody cares there is an anthropological slapfight that's been going on for a while about whether you can apply the word 'feudalism' to a non-agrarian society and the general consensus is no, no you cannot.

The fairy tale is from the Brothers Grimm. If it could not be told in the setting Hale wanted without these changes to the setting, I would have made the setting less recognizable and/or changed the story more.

That said. Hale is trying. This is not a terrible book. It is well written, well characterized, the creepy guy is actually creepy, the romance is fairly believable. I don't like the way the shamans come off as villains because shamanism is something that has been persecuted in portions of Mongolia since the Buddhists moved in some several centuries back and started being the state religion and beating everyone else up, but hey, there is shamanism. Dashti is a pleasingly competent heroine and her mistress is convincingly crazy enough for it to be an issue in believable post-traumatic ways. You could really do worse.

I guess what I'm saying here boils down to 'when a particular way of life or custom has been oppressed and nearly wiped out for long periods of time, it would be nice if the only times it turns up in novels do not show it as bad/inferior/damaged/villainous'. Like, if there were seventeen other books out there set in pseudo-medieval-Mongolia, I would be a lot less annoyed about the class structure of this one. But there aren't.

Although on that note, it's not fantasy, but you all really, really want to read Kaoru Mori's A Bride's Story, v.1 available from Yen Press, which is the best volume of manga I have read this year. Set on the Silk Road, late 18th/early 19th century, somewhere Uzbek-ish, and oh God, so beautifully researched and gorgeously drawn and gently funny and the main characters are adorable and there is a bonus hilariously dorky British anthropologist living with the principal family whose purpose in life is to ask whether the ridiculous things that are going on are customary or are just, you know, this week. I go incoherently handwavy about this manga. SO GOOD. SO, SO GOOD. Absolutely one of those things I recommend to people who don't read manga. This is how to write fiction about places one does not live.

Hale... means well.

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Yesterday's review.

The second of Rick Riordan's Kane Chronicles continues to be a pleasant and erudite ramble through Egyptian mythology in the same way the Percy Jackson series is for the Greek. I think the Kane books are aimed one notch up in age of audience; they certainly have more factions and more complex motivations for the primary villains.

However, in basic outline, this is of course Egyptian mythology's Greatest Hits. Last book we had the Horus/Osiris/Isis story; this time we get the journey of Ra through the underworld in the boat of the sun-- well, not precisely the journey of Ra, but the journey of Sadie Kane and her brother Carter to try to get Ra back into the cosmic driver's seat so that there's a chance of defeating the evil chaos snake Apophis. Sadie and Carter have on occasion been possessed by Isis and Horus, which means that the human magicians who ought to be their greatest allies against Apophis don't trust them, because it is not reasonable to trust gods as far as you can throw them. (Very sensible.) This is a world in which it's plausible for everyone to be against the protagonists, even the factions which are actually on the side of good, and I appreciate the complexity of the various sides' motivations, which are thoroughly tangled but also expressed clearly and without confusion.

I think Riordan is generally improving as he goes; the Percy Jackson books got better as the series progressed, with the first book of series two being definitely his best so far, and the writing of the Kane books is at about that level. The major issue I have here is that the Egyptian stuff is sticking to the Greatest Hits, that I could predict the exact plot of the endgame of this book at fifty paces and the general outlines by reading the title. He did a lot better at making the Greeks surprising-- there are some references in those that are genuinely obscure. I get the feeling Egypt is not his primary field.

But this continues Riordan's wise-cracking voice, fast-paced action scenes, and ability to deliver good execution of the scenes you can see coming ten miles away, so it's completely readable and I'm sure I'll pick up the next. It just... well, if you'll forgive me, Throne of Fire never quite ignites.

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As I have mentioned before, sometimes the universe conspires to throw things at your head. I've had recommendations from four separate people in the past few days for every single one of Frances Hardinge's four novels.

This one did not disappoint. Apparently the British title was Verdigris Deep, which I prefer, because 'witch' is not the correct word for the thing that Ryan, Chelle, and Josh encounter. They're in a situation that happened to me far too frequently as a child-- namely, they're in a part of town they're not supposed to be anywhere near, and they've missed a bus and are out of cash-- and they take some coins from the bottom of a well for fare home. What lives there isn't very happy about that. It's a wishing well, and taking the coins means taking on the responsibility of granting the wishes. Each of them gets some degree of power to assist in paying off that debt, but of course wishes are never, ever a simple thing to deal with, or an easy one.

Hardinge is both writing a very good YA horror novel here, one which is genuinely profoundly creepy, and I say this as a person who is not easily creeped out, and also gleefully jumping up and down on the tropes of a certain kind of kid's book. Most writers would play this as social comedy, with the kids having to get themselves into all kinds of awkward situations granting wishes, and in fact Diana Wynne Jones did (Wilkin's Tooth/Witch's Business, early DWJ and inconsequential but not terrible). But if there's a Diana Wynne Jones this should really be compared to, it's The Time of the Ghost; the books share a knack at depicting messy and awkward relationships and distinctly unique and threatening inchoate evil powers. Everyone in the Hardinge would love this to be a social comedy. However, it isn't, even if some of the characters want to try to play it that way, and Ryan, the protagonist, knows that from day one: we get his perspective because he sees the most clearly what's going on, not that that's difficult to do after you grow a few subsidiary eyes.

The motor of this book is the characters, who are all three-dimensional, even the adults the kids initially discount in that kids'-book-adults-aren't-important way. (And it bites everyone in the ass that that happens.) At its heart, this novel is working with complex issues about desire and choice and the fact that it's possible for relationships to be terribly unhealthy even when you're too young to be able to notice and analyze what's wrong, and it is very clear on the sheer amount of total mental overthrow it can take to produce the faintest smidgeon of hope that things might get better. It never stops moving as a story, it never becomes a book I wouldn't have gotten at the protagonist's age (eleven), it has some extremely impressive imagery, and it refuses to cheat in either overly optimistic or overly pessimistic directions.

And it never stops shredding those tropes. How much do I love a book in which a) the protagonist remembers to go to the library to try to discover what to do about The Problem, only to b) find that the copious information available boils down to 'things are actually even more fucked than you had remotely imagined possible, and no one previously has come up with a solution'? Nobody does that! It was great.

I'm looking forward to the rest of Frances Hardinge very much.

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On the one hand, an unexpected flight delay meaning that we will arrive at our destination at ridiculous o'clock in the morning is annoying. On the other hand, this airport has free internet, so at least I don't have to write my book review at ridiculous o'clock in the morning, which is... something, I guess.

Anyhow! This is the third of the series which began with Dragon of the Lost Sea and Dragon Steel. The dragon princess Shimmer and her traveling companions have a list of things they need to do to set the world to rights that has become truly ridiculously long, and the unofficial motto of the series remains 'it is always more complicated'.

This is yet another notch up from Dragon Steel, although that may be a more purely fun book; this one is darker, concentrated on numinous and eerie instead of action and adventure. It's really good numinous and eerie, too, everything from soldiers who apparently spontaneously generate from snow to a woman who has a shell on her back like a snail, and not one but two of the better shut-into-a-small-space-with-something-whose-intentions-we-cannot-determine sequences I've seen. The plot threads from the first two are starting to cohere, and it's as interesting to see what Chekhovian guns haven't gone off yet as to note which ones have.

Also, because apparently the book just needed to be that much more awesome, this one is actually narrated by Monkey, who is of course a never-ending fountain of snark. I am extremely impressed by Yep's ability to communicate that things are actually creepy and serious while using a narrator who is constitutionally incapable of being anything other than perky and flippant. (I am devoutly hoping for at least a cameo by Tripitaka in the fourth book, as he has been mentioned several times and that could be very interesting. Don't tell me.)

All in all, this is some of my favorite of Yep's writing, definitely my favorite of his fantasy (although I do want to see where the series he's in the middle of now goes), and I hope he sticks the dismount, because the fourth book has the potential to be really impressive.

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This is the sequel to White Cat, and you should really read that one first.

These are a fascinating combination of boarding school book and fantasy noir, twisty and full of moral ambiguity and double-crosses. They take place in a world where a not insignificant percentage of the population has the ability to curse other people through the touch of a hand-- unsurprisingly, being seen without gloves is in some ways worse than being seen naked. Curse workers face discrimination on legal and societal levels and are heavily concentrated in criminal organizations and Mafia families as a result.

Cassel, the protagonist, comes from a family who are not quite entirely Mafia (though not quite entirely not), a group of professional con men and grifters. His mother, for example, is an emotion worker, who can make anyone feel what she wants them to feel, and as a result almost never pays her own way anywhere. Cassel is in a complex situation involving the general amorality of his family, the general ubiquity of the Mafia, and the to-him unusual fact that he has real friends in high school for the first time ever. Also, things about his life have attracted the interest of the federal government. I would not dream of telling you anything about the plot, except to say that this is one of those books where the ramifications of things that happened in the first book are fully gone into and explored and taken seriously, which is awesome because the nature of those things was such that that needed to happen.

The first one was actually based somewhat on the fairy tale of the White Cat, but if this one is based on a specific fairy tale I have yet to identify it, although I note that Cassel is the youngest of three brothers and therefore metaphysically Most Likely To Succeed, which does I think show.

There is one way in which this series is a little odd for me to read, because one of the principal characters shares my first name, and it's an unusual first name, so I have not had the opportunities to get used to that that people do who have common ones; this is in fact the character I've run into in fiction with my name who has the most pagetime, and also the only one who isn't some kind of succubus or sex android. So it feels weird, though of course I am not letting it stop me.

Seriously, read these. This is some of the best work going on in YA today, although I have trouble thinking of it as YA-- it's YA the same way that, say, Megan Whalen Turner is, where at least one bookstore I know of shelves copies of the Attolia books in both adult and teen sections.

Because this only just came out, please indicate in comment titles if you intend to put spoilers in a comment. I've been trying not to spoil the first one in this review, either, which isn't easy, so warning for that in comments would be nice of you but I don't require it.

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Very kindly lent me by dorothean.

And well worth waiting for; this is a really good book. It's the sequel to Dragon of the Lost Sea, and the thing is that Dragon of the Lost Sea has the kind of ending that could have been a one-off, that could have stopped there. So Dragon Steel is one of my favorite kinds of book, the kind that points out that endings are beginnings and that it is just never going to be that easy. This book is therefore quite intimately tied to its predecessor, and I would not start here, because there isn't really a recap-- well, there's an attempt at one, but it's a terrible poem, and it both could have been left out and doesn't help one remember any useful information. I think it's the book's major flaw, perpetrating terrible poetry on page one, but once you get past that everything is much better.

The thing that's not going to be so easy is getting that Lost Sea back. The exiled dragon princess Shimmer and her young human friend Thorn have defeated one of the major obstacles in doing so, but now they have to go to the High King of the dragons to explain the remaining issues, and things become... complicated, as they tend to do when you combine the words 'exiled' and 'High King'. Also, Monkey shows up, which is both a help and a hindrance no matter what one might happen to be doing. And there's a Chinese version of the Wild Hunt, which I can only describe as awesome.

This is a book full of beautiful atmospheric detail (since it takes place in an undersea dragon kingdom, primarily), interesting political factionalism, dragons fighting krakens, and various people facing various crises and growing from the experience. It's so good, in fact, that it retroactively makes me annoyed at Yep's entire later Tiger's Apprentice trilogy, which is, and I am in no way exaggerating, ninety percent of the plot/setting/characters of this redone except at half the quality level. I can go through this book and tell you who got translated into which character in that trilogy. I cannot imagine what he was thinking, and I retract my earlier recommendation of the later two books of that one, because it's become obvious to me that he was badly handling material there that he had already done very well. Why would a person do this sort of retread? I don't get it. Fortunately, his currently running fantasy series does not share the same subject matter at all.

I am now looking forward immensely to Dragon Cauldron and Dragon War, which ought to be easier to come by, since the library claims to have them both. (Another thing in life I don't understand: stocking books one, three, and four of a series.) If the next two live up to the first two, I expect I'll want to buy all four and keep them around, because they'll be quite an achievement.

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