Parrots, Hamsters, Ifrit-dogs, and Vampires, Oh My!

Oh: and bad graphic novels about Templars.

25. (Vine) Solomon's Thieves by Jordan Mechner, LeUyen Pham and Alex Puvilland (4/3)

Pick:
I was going through the Vine newsletter, not seeing anything that was terribly exciting but determined to look at all of my options; I had already picked the parrot book when I saw this little graphic novel, and I thought, "Hey, how long could it take me to read a comic book?" So here's one more to pad out my reviewer's resume.

Thoughts:
I'm a fan of graphic novels from way back; I'm also a fan of medieval tales, of knights and rogues, loyalty and chivalry, betrayal and dastardly deeds. But I'm not a fan of this book.

The story isn't bad, though there is a confusing jump right at the beginning when you change narrators without warning; I kept wondering how the hero of the book could have been in the Templar battle at Acre in 1291 when it clearly said that he had joined the Templars in 1295; turns out it was some other Templar at Acre for the first few pages. But overall, it's a fairly intriguing tale; it is the story of the downfall of the Order of Solomon's Temple, the Templars, in the infamous purge on Friday the 13th which has been written about in several other novels and movies, as the author mentions in his afterword. This one has a nice spin on the story, as it focuses on a group of knights who aren't the most chivalrous or upstanding: rather they are the knights who sometimes try to sneak out of the Temple to drink, gamble, and find women, though they do try to sneak back in in time for the Crusade.

Unfortunately, the short length of the book and the timeline the author chose doesn't offer very much time for these uncouth knights to get into trouble, which is really too bad, as it means we don't get to enjoy their defining characteristic. They sneak out once, but by the time they stumble home (their night out having been disrupted by a romantic side story that will presumably be wrapped up in later issues, since it was left badly hanging in this one), the Templars have been arrested en masse by the French king, jealous of their power and wealth and determined to defy the all-powerful Catholic church.

The story has a nice bit of hidden treasure and valuable secrets, and ominous bad guys chasing fugitive Templars; there are fights, of course, and a chase scene involving a carriage and several Royal Guards on horseback. There is quite a lot of torture, though not as graphically depicted as I've seen it in some other books -- say, The Watchmen, for one. And the historical details are often quite interesting, particularly the attempt to capture what it meant to an ordinary man to call himself a Templar.

So there are good and bad things about this one. But there is one fatal flaw in this graphic novel: not in the novel part, but in the graphic. This book has some of the worst character art I've ever seen. The backgrounds are generally good and sometimes stellar, but the characters are poorly rendered, badly proportioned, and in some cases, indistinguishable from one another -- I completely missed one important moment the first time through simply because I genuinely didn't recognize the character; I had to flip back and forth several times to figure out who it was before I understood what was going on. It made it much harder to enjoy the interesting parts of the story, so unless you are a big Templar fanatic, I'd give this one a miss.


26. (Vine) Winging It: A Memoir of Caring for a Vengeful Parrot Who's Determined to Kill Me by Jenny Gardiner (4/6)

Pick:
I liked the idea of a book about a vicious parrot, which the author cared for. Reminded me of Toni and her Romeo.

Thoughts:
As I suppose anyone would, I wanted this author's experiences to resemble my own: I, too, owned a vengeful parrot who was determined to kill me, at least by proxy through my wife, whose parrot it was. So I was disappointed when Jenny Gardiner's memoir of her life with Graycie the African Gray did not really come close to our time with a Blue Crown Conure with a nasty disposition. But despite that, this was, I thought, a nice book overall.

Gardiner starts out by making some good and valid points about the dangers and complications inherent in buying parrots, particularly when her family adopted Graycie twenty years ago: at the time, and to a lesser but still serious extent now, many of the parrots on the market are captured from the wild and smuggled into the US. This is not only illegal, of course, but it is harmful to the environment -- the birds are often captured through the simple expedient of cutting down the tree where the young birds are in the nest, and then picking up the stunned chicks out of the wreckage -- and extremely damaging to the birds, which, of course, makes them, shall we say, problematic pets. Since parrots are highly intelligent, curious, and possessed of some pretty dangerous weaponry, in beak and claws, and since they can live for decades -- some even longer than the humans who "own" them -- having a psychologically scarred wild animal for a problematic pet is really not a good thing.

Fortunately for Gardiner, Graycie isn't nearly that bad. Oh, she has her troubles -- she is not affectionate as some parrots can be; she is aggressive and attacks Gardiner constantly; for the first few years of their life together, Graycie plucks out her own feathers and chews herself bloody, a fairly common parrot problem. But once the family learns to work around Graycie's habits and moods and needs, they get along fairly well; Graycie is as clever and entertaining, and sweet and affectionate at times, as all parrots can be, even when they do have nasty temperaments. Gardiner shows some nice humor when she relates the more amusing stories of her life with a parrot.

The problem I had with this book (and my wife, who lived with her parrot Romeo for fifteen years more than I did, had an even larger issue with this) is that the title is somewhat deceptive. Graycie is not actually a vengeful parrot, and she does not want to kill her owner; she's just a parrot with some bad pet-habits that are completely understandable considering Graycie's origins and the mistakes the Gardiners made when they first got Graycie -- particularly putting the parrot into a windowless, isolated room in the basement, when intelligent birds need lots of visual stimulation, natural light and air and scenery, and lots of company and interaction. The worst source of friction is actually Gardiner's expectations: she seems resentful throughout when Graycie doesn't live up to her ideals of life with a parrot. Graycie is not a performing wonder, amusing the family and their guests with her myriad of tricks; she does talk and whistle and sing and make noise often, but not always amusingly and not on cue. But then, no parrots really do that, other than the ones trained to perform: parrots are pets, living creatures with wants and needs and dislikes, not wind-up toys. Graycie is not affectionate, being more willing to snap at Gardiner than to sit on her shoulder and gently coo, or perhaps squawk "Polly want a cracker!" And Graycie, like all pets, creates a large mess; since parrots are caged animals, a lot more of that mess needs to be cleaned up by hand; you never really appreciate how nice it is that dogs can be housetrained until you care for an animal that can't go outside to relieve itself. Gardiner does learn to appreciate Graycie for what she offers as a pet, but only after a whole lot of what seemed to me somewhat whiny complaining about Graycie's downside.

Perhaps more to the point, the book is only somewhat about Graycie: it is really a memoir of the growth of Gardiner's family, including the story of her marriage, the birth and raising of her three children, their adoption of dogs over the years, and their various homes over two decades. The parrot is a part of that, as she is part of the family; but not the largest part. The book is, honestly, more about the children than about the parrot. For all that, it is well-written and interesting, but if you are looking for a book written by someone who had the same experience that you had with a misanthropic parrot, this isn't really it.



27. (9) New Tricks by John Levitt 4/11

Pick:
The first one was pretty good, as I recall -- though I don't remember very much about the story. I remember liking the main character and his dog, and the idea that his best skill magically was his jazz-inspired ability to improvise. Plus it's on the shelf and I need to read those.

Thoughts:
This one was pretty good too, and fortunately I didn't need to remember the first one to follow this story; I remembered the characters, Victor and Eli and Campbell, along with Mason and Lou the Ifrit, and that was good enough. I still really enjoyed the musical parts and the magical parts, and I think Lou is a great character; the problem with this book was that it was far too predictable. It's about a practitioner (a magic-user) who is attacking other practitioners, apparently with the intention of possessing them; there is an obvious suspect, a black magician named Byron, but it is readily obvious that he didn't really do it. The reader is guided to suspect another character almost from the beginning, and in the process of being guided to that character, I picked up on the twist ending from about 100 pages in. Perhaps that was my own natural genius, but since I didn't know the guy was dead in The Sixth Sense until after my wife explained it to me, I don't think it was me.

I did really like the world created in this book and the first one; these remind me very much of Jim Butcher's Dresden Files, though these do pale a bit in comparison to those. I especially enjoyed the larger world hinted at in this one, and the slow unraveling of the mysterious origin of Ifrits like Lou the "dog." And even though I knew it was coming, the final confrontation was excellent. So I will look for the next one, and hope that it's a little more surprising.



28. (Non: Bought it for Le Title.) The World According to Humphrey by Betty G. Birney 4/12

Pick:
I saw this at Fred Meyer; had to pick it up, of course. It's about a hamster named Humphrey. That was good, but the clincher? He's the class hamster for Room 26. Which would be my classroom number at school. It's kismet!

Thoughts:
This book is very cute, though obviously a little too young for me to really get into. Humphrey is brought to Room 26 by a long-term sub -- it's a fifth grade class or so -- who treats him as a pet; but when the original teacher comes back, Humphrey seems to be in trouble: she doesn't want him there, considers him a rodent, won't take him home at night or over the weekends. But the kids in Room 26 step up and take over Humphrey's care over the weekends, and it turns out to be a good thing when he is left in the classroom overnight, as he makes friends with Aldo Amato, the night janitor at the school. In fact, Humphrey makes friends with everybody, and in the process, he teaches them all important life lessons -- like how to overcome shyness, and the importance of turning off your TV sometimes, and how to get your children to listen to you, and never to give up hope. Like I said, very cute, but a little young. I might grab another one, but all in all, I much prefer Bunnicula.


29. (Still re-reading!) White Knight by Jim Butcher 4/16

Pick:
Must . . . Finish . . . Series!

Thoughts:
This was great, because I didn't remember the story very much at all. I certainly didn't remember who the bad guys were, or exactly how everything would play out -- though I did remember the final denouement, and also the big reveal about Thomas's new job and his manner of feeding himself. But the majority of the book was a nice surprise, and as enjoyable as all Butcher books are. Now I really want to get on to the new one. Pardon me: new ones. Sigh.

Dragons!

24. (Vine) Dragon Haven: Book Two of the Rain Wilds Chronicles by Robin Hobb 4/3

Pick:
Well, I read the first one for Vine; why would I pass up the sequel and conclusion?

Story:
The first thing you should know is that the story doesn't end here.

This book, the sequel to "Dragon Keeper" and the conclusion of the Rain Wilds Chronicles, is not the end of the story. Things remain unresolved on the last page, and some of the most interesting possible story lines remain open; I can only hope that Robin Hobb will see fit to continue the tale in subsequent works.

Because this one's a beaut.

The first book (DEFINITELY required reading; this is more of a single story in two volumes than it is separate novels in a sequence.) tells several parallel stories: the story of Alise Fincarron and her marriage of convenience (and perhaps love) to the dashing and wealthy Hest Finbok, the best evidence in these books that despite Robin Hobb's brilliance as a storyteller and creator of genuine, full-color and deep-hearted characters, she has trouble thinking up good names; the story of Thymara, child of the Rain Wilds whose deformities (claws instead of fingers and scales instead of skin, in some places) should have led to her being exposed and abandoned at birth; the story of Leftrin, captain of the livebarge Tarman, oldest and perhaps wisest of the Liveships; and, of course, the story of the newborn dragons, the transformed remnants of Maulkin's tangle from the Liveship series. All of these people (and dragons, who are not, as this book points out, either people or animals, but something else entirely) have serious troubles in their lives, and some don't even realize how serious those troubles are. They come together when the Traders' Council of Trehaug, the ruling body of the Rain Wilds, sends the dragons, for whom they cannot properly care, up the Rain Wild River to find the lost (and perhaps vanished) city of Kelsingra, where the Elderlings of old once made a home for the dragons they loved and served and perhaps even worshipped.

They don't make it to Kelsingra in the first book, and for nine-tenths of this book, the party is still traveling up the Rain Wild River. They do reach a destination at the end, or at least an end of their journeying; I won't say more to avoid spoiling the ending, which is quite nice, despite leaving room for much more story.

In this book, most (but not all) of the interpersonal frictions are resolved. Secrets are finally revealed, some voluntarily and some not; arguments are brought from a long, slow simmer to a raging boil (most of them involving either Thymara, or her dragon Sintara, or both --fitting for the two most defensive, combative, and snarling-stubborn queens of the group), and all of the dragons, and the people, begin to find either their true potential -- or the light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak.

The book is long, but never slow; some of the characters bog down slightly as they try to work through painful and difficult issues, which quite naturally takes time, and might seem repetitive in the hands of a less capable writer. But Hobb is her usual brilliant self, showing sides and nuances and depths to all of her characters that some people never see in real life, let alone in fiction. There is some action, some blood (How could there not be, when there are more than a dozen proud, and hungry, dragons in the mix?), some disasters and some triumphs. Not everything came to the conclusion I would have liked to see, but then, isn't that always the case?

What is also always the case is: I loved it, as I have loved all of Robin Hobb's books, and I would recommend these two highly to all fantasy fans. These are, in my opinion, the best dragons since Smaug. As a brief note to those who have not read Robin Hobb's other works, you should know that nearly all of her fantasy is set in this same world, revolving around the same geopolitical structure and sometimes the same world-changing events --such as the rebirth of dragons, begun in the Liveship series and continued here. Therefore, reading all of her books is necessary to get the real depth; however, these two novels, "Dragon Keeper" and "Dragon Haven," can stand alone and would be a good place to start, if you can stand missing some background details that will be filled in later.