October 2024 Book Review Roundup!

After a slow-going September, I wanted to power through my October reads, so I decided to run through my lighter books first.

Three children’s books, two of them spooky in time for Halloween. Mallory Vale and the Curse of Maggoty Skull (full review) was a fine way to start the month. It is light-hearted with some excellent characters and a story that romps along at a great pace. Following that was the first Spooksmith’s Investigate novel, The Cinderman (full review). For slightly older children than Mallory Vale, this is a ghost story of restless spirits and unfinished business. I very much enjoyed both novels. Both promise sequels, and I look forward to reading them.

My final children’s book was the third in the Mysteries at Sea series. Despite being called The Hollywood Kidnap Case, this book goes nowhere near Los Angeles. A Hollywood starlet has gone missing, but the action is split between Egypt and Malta. Alice and Sonny are once again on the case in their third and possibly final case. These books have been excellent, drawing on an unexplored period of history just before the Second World War. The locations and characters typify the times—a time that feels more innocent. The books have a feel of Enid Blyton about them, updated for a more modern audience.

Next up, I finished another great “hard” sci-fi read, Darkome by Hannu Rajaniemi. This near-future tech-thriller posits some fascinating ideas for the evolution of vaccines and medical treatments via mRNA and gene-hacking technology.

Why Read Chain-Gang All-Stars?

Chain-Gang All-Stars almost derailed me. Not because it was a bad book, but because it was significantly deeper than I expected. I had to work much harder at reading it than obvious comparison novels such as The Hunger Games. Indeed, while I can see this comparison is excellent for marketing purposes, it does Chain-Gang All-Stars a disservice.

This is a brutal yet razor-focused examination of the American penal system and the prejudices rife within it. The story is set in the near future where part of the US prison system has been given over to CAPE (Criminal Action Penal Entertainment), a “voluntary” scheme where prison inmates fight in a gladiatorial tournament instead of seeing out their custodial sentence. In theory, they can fight for their freedom. In reality, the toll of the games sees everybody killed before they ever see the outside world.

The book mostly follows two mega-stars of the game. They’re two fighters who have survived many bouts and who fight for the same loose team. (The structure of the games is all explained in the book.) The two of them also have formed a romantic relationship—something that we know is unlikely to end well.

Chain-Gang All-Stars is a dense read. It has a large number of footnotes that explain how events in the book mirror or extrapolate (barely) real events inside the US prison system. This gives the book an unexpected scholarly tone. It’s hard not to read Chain-Gang All-Stars and come out thinking that, perhaps, one ought to give a whole lot more thought to the idea of prison reform. Over here in the UK, the prison system is on its knees, but successive governments have shied away from tackling the issue because a) there are almost no votes in it and b) they’re terrified of being found soft on crime. We don’t have the death penalty over here, and reading Chain-Gang All-Stars only makes me happier that this is the case.

I did find the book rather pedestrian in the middle and not the thriller I was expecting. But over time I realized that isn’t what the book is about. It’s about the desensitizing nature of prison and that of our media and our media consumption. It’s about the forgotten side of the incarcerated and it’s very much about the racism that is baked into the system. The last 50 pages or so see author Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s complex world-building payoff. What I first considered to be the pedestrian middle was laying the foundations of a powerful, thoughtful novel. One that does what all the best science fiction does—make you reconsider the world in which you live and question some of your basic assumptions about the topic in question.

As far as I can tell despite rave reviews, Chain-Gang All-Stars has been criminally under-read in the UK. Don’t make the same mistake. This is well worth a look, and, as at the time of writing, the world perhaps stands atop an electoral precipice. The themes of the book might be about to become more important than ever.

Why Read Faebound?

The Waterstones SFF choice for September was Faebound by Saara El-Arifi. It’s very of its time. It has great diversity in its characters and some lingering looks in the first two-thirds of the novel before a payoff of a couple of steamy pages in the final third. But is it any good? This is (I think) the third “romantasy” novel I’ve read this year—all three were from the Waterstone’s picks, so this probably tells you something about the current fantasy market—and it’s probably the third best. That said, perhaps if I had read the books in a different order I would put it at the top. If there is one thing you can say about romantasy books it’s that they have a formula.

The “spice” in these books is always telegraphed, but in Faebound it felt very clunky. Pulses inexplicably racing, glances not quite caught, that sort of thing. I’m not the target audience for this sort of thing, so perhaps it’s unfair for me to comment.

The world-building is interesting. A trio of peoples are locked in eternal conflict, even though one, the humans, has been driven to extinction. Indeed as the novel opens, the elves are the only one of the races still in existence. The elves have split into three factions and are locked in a “forever war,” fighting endlessly over a precious and scarce magical resource.

The three main characters are expelled from their tribe and forced to roam in the wilderness. Here they stumble on the Fae, a race held to be extinct. Instead, the Fae have retreated below the ground where they happen to have lots of the aforementioned scarce, precious resource.

Captured by the Fae, the elves slowly learn there is an alternative way of life. Not that the politics of the Fae kingdom are straightforward. The political/power interplay is where the strength of this novel lies. I liked that all the characters grow in some way as they learn more about the world and other people’s actions. A second book, Cursebound, is on the way.

Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory

I’ll be back with more about Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory in November, with a full review as part of the blog tour. The novel has echoes of the Dark Tower and is about warring nations, macabre magic, and, perhaps not surprisingly, the power of memories and the stories we tell.