Book Chop: Hard Magic (Grimnoir Chronicles #1)

Title: Hard Magic
Author: Larry Correia
Genre: Noir/Historical Fiction/Speculative/Probably a few others
Verdict: A complete success.

When Larry Correia said that the first Grimnoir Chronicles title was the best book he'd ever written, he wasn't just being his usual animated self. The juice is worth the squeeze with this one.

History gets a nice shakedown with this series. People all around the world start developing magical abilities (mostly akin to superpowers, think X-Men) during the 1800s, and this changes the course of several worldwide wars. The most notable among these is World War One, in which America employs "actives" (people who use magic) along with high-tech weapons and equipment developed by the likes of Nikola Tesla. Because of these developments, World War Two never happened, Hitler was executed before rising to power, Japan becomes America's biggest threat, and a brewing social conflict between actives and normals looms on the horizon.

Enter Jake Sullivan, an active "heavy" (he prefers the term "spiker") with the ability to manipulate gravity. He's a veteran of the Great War, the youngest of three boys, and a convict who was sprung early from jail so he could help the FBI bring in criminal actives. Sully works with the likes of Melvin Purvis and J. Edgar Hoover (both portrayed well in the book), and he's one job away from full freedom. Things are looking fine until he has a run-in with the Grimnoir, a group of organized actives who are actually fighting to save the world from evil magicians.

From there, the story is a rip-roaring ride of fun and intrigue. Correia shows his very adept hands when it comes to manipulating history and science for interesting storylines. The writing is an improvement over what he's shown in the MONSTER HUNTER books, and I think the fact that this one is written in third person really lends itself well to revealing the deep characters. Everyone in here has a good backstory, and it's all relevant to telling the tale as a whole.

I listened to the audiobook version, narrated by Bronson Pinchot, who also did ON STRANGER TIDES. The guy is awesome. I think it was better than it would have been, had I read it in print. To put a rating on it, it's a solid R, for language and violence (lotta gore) but no sexual content.

A fun book, and I'm looking forward to the next book in this series even more than I'm looking forward to the next MONSTER HUNTER.

Enjoy.

Book Chop: The Forgotten Locket (Hourglass Door #3)

Title: The Forgotten Locket
Author: Lisa Mangum
Genre: YA Paranormal romance
Verdict: A solid finale.

Two years ago I got to read an advanced copy of The Hourglass Door at work. I occasionally spice up my reading list (robots/dragons/explosions) with some YA paranormal romance, because despite the large amount of crappy books in that genre, there are some that I enjoy--maybe even as a guilty pleasure.

Mangum's trilogy doesn't have to be a guilty pleasure, though. Even dudes can enjoy this one, though it is a straightforward romance. In the first book, Abby meets a new boy at school, Dante. Dante is a time traveler from Italy...500 years ago, to be precise. They hook up. (That's the point.) In the second book, Dante is taken from her, and she actually has to work to get him back.

This is the third book, the end of the story.

I liked it, as I liked the previous two. One of the great strengths of the trilogy is that the main character girl is smart (without reminding you on every page,) attractive (without pretending she's not, or assuming she is,) and capable of taking initiative. A common staple of this genre is the helpless stupid whiny girl who sits around and spends 400 pages describing how hot the Main Guy is while he does all the heavy lifting for her.

Not so with Mangum's books.

The first big challenge of this book is when Abby goes backward in time, and has to leave behind the familiar setting of her hometown. Granted, a lot of that town changed in the second book when Dante's rival, Vicenzo, really started to bugger things up with the timeline. I guess the next biggest challenge was dropping her 500 years in the past, away from Dante, who was--when she last saw--blinded by Vicenzo's knife.

What happens in the next 400 pages...well, it's not relevant for me to tell you hear if you haven't read the previous two books. Suffice to say that it's an intriguing exploration of Mangum's previous time travel ideas--building on it, evolving it, keeping it exciting.

If I have one complaint, it's that it took a long time to get to the crowning moment of the trilogy; it was really near the end of the book, and I went from feeling suspenseful to getting impatient. Maybe I'm just a guy. If you've read these, let me know in the comments.

Overall, I'm glad to see the series ended well, and that while it's a romance, it played its sci-fi elements very well. Even a dude can enjoy this. So check it out.

Movie Chop: X-Men First Class

X-Men: First Class

I think I've managed to see every X-Men movie on opening day, with the exception of this one. It wasn't for any lack of excitement, but more of a case of practicality--I like taking the missus to the theater when it's not so crowded, so these days we wait a week.

But anyways...

This one's a prequel to all the other X-Men flicks. As I said on Facebook the other day, I like how it completely made X3 and that lousy Wolverine movie into something of the past. Granted, there were a few things that were inconsistent with all of the previous X-men films, but this one on its own was a really good story.

You've got Erik Lensherr in a Nazi concentration camp in WWII Poland. At the same time, Charles Xavier is in New York. They're children, they don't know each other, but we see how they meet each other and how they end up working together. Erik is on a revenge-bender for the murder of his family, while Charles is trying to figure out his role in the next phase of human evolution.

Ultimately, Erik's scenes were more fun to watch, but that's not to say Charles was a waste of screen time either. In a lot of ways they were the same character, just with a different set of circumstances behind their upbringing. They share equal levels of passion in the pursuit of their goals.

It's cool to see that Professor X wasn't always the moral bastion that we know from the previous films. There was a time when he wouldn't hesitate to mess with someone else's mind if he thought he needed to. And there were other times when he did it and really shouldn't have. His discipline had to come from somewhere, and it comes from the experiences he has in this flick.

We get a taste of how Magneto got his start, and what it was like when he worked with Xavier. However, the amount of time they worked together in this story is inconsistent with the other films. (In X3, they were still together well into their sixties, and Prof. X was still walking. The events of First Class make that impossible.) But if one movie has to lose in the annals of franchise history, I say screw X3. First Class was better.

Saw some cool mutants, too: Havok and Banshee being my favorites. Ultimately I can't pick just one, because McAvoy as Xavier and Fassbender as Magneto were flat-out brilliant picks.

Overall, if there is one thing about that flick I didn't like, it was the F-bomb that Hugh Jackman dropped during a really cool ten-second cameo scene mid-movie. And if there are two things I didn't like, the second one is January Jones as Emma Frost. She belongs on a soap opera, not my movie screen.

So go see it. It's a really fun one.

Book Chop: Good Omens

Title: Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
Authors: Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
Genre: Magical Realism/Fantasy/Satire
Verdict: A real gem

Note: I listened to the audiobook.

Prior to picking up this book, I'd only read three titles by Neil Gaiman: Stardust, Anansi Boys and The Graveyard Book. The first was a case of "the movie was better than the book " (IMO), the second was something a sleeper that I rather enjoyed, and the latter was quite a treat. I think Gaiman's a cool guy and a talented author, based on those three. I've never read any of Pratchett's work, though I understand he's something of a heavy-hitter.

Good Omens is the story of an angel and a demon who team up to bungle the Apocalypse by causing the delivery of the infant Anti-Christ to go awry. He's raised by an American living in England, and plays with other children like normal. These scenes where he's playing are some of the more philosophical parts of the book, without being preachy or featuring characters that speak much higher than their age level would permit. In the category of "kids say the darnedest things," you see real wisdom in the words of eleven year-olds. (One of my personal favorites was the scene where they decided to be the Spanish Inquisition.)

The exchanges between Aziraphale (the angel) and Crowley (the demon) are also entertaining. You have one character who can't see the faults of being so uptight and rigid and obedient, and another who can't be trusted or valued based on any system of morals because he has none.

There's actually a whole array of interesting characters--a witch-hunter and his apprentice; the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, in various forms; and an antique book dealer who holds the titular collection of prophecies. My personal favorite was the group of bikers who followed the Four Horsemen, adding themselves to the mix with such titles as "War, Famine, Grievous Bodily Harm, Really Cool People," etc. That scene alone makes me want to own the book in print so I can go back and re-read it often.

I appreciate how each scene, each chapter, stood out as its own short story in a way. You could read one portion independent of the rest of the book (at least until you get to the climax) and have plenty to discuss and ponder, theologically speaking.

And above all, the humor is top-notch. I laughed aloud at plenty of it, and stopped to recount certain portions to my wife as I read it. I've been told that Pratchett is a remarkable satirist, and if that's the case I'll be looking into his work (especially since this one was written all the way back in the early 1990s.)

Be warned that there is some profanity speckled here and there. A few S-bombs, one F-bomb, and some Adult Topics that pop up without much warning. Still a PG-13, but not a light one.