Silverfin - the Graphic Novel

I thought Charlie Higson's first Young Bond novel, Silverfin was all kinds of fantastic - the suspense, the atmosphere, the bad guys, the action sequences and narrow escapes. All parts of it made me into an instant Bond fan. This is saying a lot because I was a girl who had at that time never (yes, never), watched a Bond movie. I knew nothing of Sean or Pierce or Daniel. I do now. Since Higson's first book, I've not only caught myself up on the films, I've tried to keep up with the rest of Higson's series (now at 5 books), but I'm a tad behind. I'm thinking the best plan is a Bond marathon over Christmas break? Until then, I picked up Silverfin - the Graphic Novel to get me back in the spy spirit.

Now, for fans of the novel, there's quite a bit that isn't in the graphic version in terms of plot. That's understandable of course, since given the length of the original, a whole lot of exposition and dialogue had to be cut out. I like exposition and dialogue. That's the kind of reader I am. I wonder if I had not read the novel beforehand, would I still have felt that the graphic version moved a bit too rapidly, without quite enough time spent on each of the various plot threads and character development? Perhaps not. But that's how I felt. I found myself rounding the characters out, filling them in in my mind based on my memory of the novel. There's an interesting interview with Higson, in which he comments on the challenges of converting his text to the new format, and he notes that it wasn't easy to do, that ideally, more length would have been nice. Still, it works quite well, and most definitely the pages keep on turning. The brisk pacing and excitement is still there in full force.

The art work by Kev Walker and the layout design pack a real the visual punch. I loved the way the colour palette shifted as the story moved from one place to another, signaling a new sequence and setting. The opening section at the loch, all red and black, is super creepy and matches the horror of the events to perfection. The Eton sections are pale, quite muted, as if you're watching an old film - just right in spirit for the classy and legendary school. When James comes face to face with the true evil secret of Hellebore's Castle, everything suddenly turns deep shades of bright green, you know the "scientist gone bad" green colour (think Hulk). The colouring supported the text the same way music might in a film, changing as the mood changed, but not in a way that was heavy-handed.

My overall assessment? Well worth reading. Good fun for those who are already fans of the novels, who can fill things in a little along the way. You might be wondering about the first chapter? I know I was. The first chapter of Silverfin has to be one of the spookiest, most suspenseful openings I've ever read, period. Let's just say the graphic version of the opening was good enough to inspire an immediate second reading. If you're not shuddering by page 5, you should have your head examined.

Silverfin - the Graphic Novel by Charlie Higson & Kev Walker is published by Puffin.

Creepy fun book post!

So, at least six months ago, the publicist (or agent—some publishing beast or other) got in touch with us about reviewing Royce Buckingham’s novel Goblins! I immediately jumped at the chance because, here at Little Shop of Stories, the bookstore where I work in Decatur, GA, we love Demonkeeper, his other book. Demonkeeper is both scary and funny, and I figured, between Demonkeeper and Goblins!, I could get a good October-scary entry for Guys Lit Wire.

I thought I might try and interview Buckingham, or track levels of kidslit scary writing from James Howe (Bunnicula) to John Bellairs (The House with a Clock in its Walls), to Darren Shan’s series (Cirque du Freak and The Demonata) and on and on. But then I lent Goblins! to a cousin of mine, and I discovered what this is really all about…


See, I took the book with me last summer on a visit to our family cabin in western Kentucky—in a town called Fair Dealing, which is near Benton, which is near Paducah. Have I hit a place you’ve heard of yet? Anyways, we had dinner with cousins, and I discovered that my second cousin, Joseph Price, is an avid reader. Loves to read, actually. So I couldn’t resist; I wanted to put a book in his hand. I grabbed the only thing I had with me—Buckingham’s Goblins!

Brief aside: here’s what Joseph thought of the book, according to his mother (who sent me the email before I even got home from Kentucky):

Joseph has finished Goblins! by Royce Buckingham. In a nutshell, he really liked it! He particularly liked the mystery at the end of the book. He read the book quickly -- finished it in 2 days so it must be a page-turner. He says the characters were always interesting, the 5 main characters being the most interesting. There was a "whole lot of" action, which he liked. He wishes the author wrote more about the mystery at the end and more about the great goblin. He hopes there's a sequel or perhaps a series based on this book. He says it's just a "plain good book." Nothing bad to say, really.

I don’t want to delve much more into the plot of the book, because I like to think an enthusiastic review beats a synopsis any day. However, as a quick context, the book involves a world of goblins living underground, who begin to escape out to the world above, our world—and it’s up to some kids from the wrong side of the tracks to help prevent a horde of goblins from swarming into our everyday aboveground world.

But, as I said, I discovered that this is not really about one great book. What I discovered by talking to my young cousin is how great the community of books is. I live in a city outside Atlanta, I’m a father of a daughter not too much younger than Joseph, and yet he and I, two guys from very different worlds, were able to connect over great books. He told me what he had read recently, and I talked about those books and other books he might like. And then I gave him the Goblins! book, and he read it and thought about it, and talked to his friends about it, and they told him other books they like, and on and on. I like to think of our collective love of books like a big fall bonfire, with flames going ever higher, and everybody dancing around it and having a grand old time. Corny, yes, but then I have a soft spot for book mania.

Anyways, I guess this is really about a big public thank you to my cousin Joseph Price. Thank you for a fantastic evening of talking books, and thanks for being a fellow book lover!

(kind of cross posted here)

King of the Big What If

For years, whenever people would ask for a good teenage introduction to Stephen King I would suggest Different Seasons without hesitation. The collection of four novellas includes "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption," "Apt Pupil," "The Body," and "Breathing Lessons" which is a great way to experience the breadth of King's ability to tell a story. Or it used to be until I read his recent collection of short stories entitled Just After Sunset.

For many, King is one of the modern masters of horror and suspense, but beneath the genre is solid storytelling that rests heavily on explorations of The Big What If. Every Stephen King story is built on one idea and explored down the avenues he chooses to travel.

In Just After Sunset The Big What If could be what goes through the mind of a recent graduate in the moments leading up to a major American city being engulfed in a mushroom cloud. Or What If, at a roadside rest stop, you heard a domestic dispute nearby and had an alter ego that could possibly intervene, what would you do? And What If miscellaneous items appeared in your home and seemed to be transmitting images of their former owners in their final moments? Would you keep those items or try to find a way to return them?

In the introduction, Stephen King talks about how he'd been writing fewer and fewer short stories in the 80s and 90s. When asked to edit The Best American Short Stories a few years back King suddenly got the bug to write stories again and this collection is the result. Some of these stories are shorter than others – a few pages versus dozens of pages – all of them packed enough with solid storytelling to be a book in themselves.

As a warning, these stories do carry with them some adult themes, occasional language, and violence. Nothing any teen whose seen his share of movies would find too shocking, and certainly nothing they should be kept from reading, but I sometimes find people want to know these things in advance. What Stephen King does well is get under a reader's skin and he does this by understanding what and how things get under our skins. As a chronicler of our modern psyche he sometimes unearths some pretty dark aspects of humanity, but he wraps it up in some sturdy writing that gives readers a chance to really think about and feel these things.

I still like the Different Seasons collection, but I think Just After Sunset is my new go-to introduction for teens looking for an entry into the world of Stephen King.

Just After Sunset
by Stephen King
Scribner 2009

Different Seasons
by Stephen King
1982

Love is the Higher Law

I put Love is the Higher Law on hold at the library because I love David Levithan. I didn’t know what it was about, just knew that I’ve enjoyed all of this guy’s books, so of course I want to see what he’s giving us next. The book arrived at my library on September 10, and I saw from the cover that it was a novel about September 11, 2001. Three teenagers in New York City, their experiences on that day and in the following months and years. Where they were and what they did. How everything changed that day, and kept changing in the days following. Connections that may not have happened otherwise. It’s a story of the power of love—love between friends, love we have for places, moments of grace, and hope for our best selves.

Yes, I was totally absorbed in the book, and the voices of Jasper, Peter, and Claire. Told in alternating chapters from each of their points of view, it was easy for me to keep track of who was narrating, I think Levithan did a good job at giving each of them a distinct voice. Jasper slept through the morning of 9/11, enjoying his freedom before returning to college while his parents are in Korea visiting his grandmother. He awakes to a frantic phone call from his mother and then wanders the streets of Brooklyn, picking up pieces of paper that he realizes are files from the Trade Center that have blown over the river in the explosions. Peter is waiting for Tower Records to open to buy the new Bob Dylan CD. In an instant, the music that he defines his life by is gone—he can’t imagine wanting to hear a song that would later make him remember this day. Claire is at school, indulging in worry about her mother, when something she’d never even thought to worry about comes to pass. She immediately thinks of her 2nd grader brother, and goes to his classroom to help keep the kids calm and to help try to make order in the chaos as the entire school is moved to a safer location. Claire knows Peter from school. Peter and Jasper had met at a recent party, and made a date to go out this evening. Their lives intersect in the days and weeks following 9/11, and they ultimately help each other start to deal with something that, at the core, each one of them experiences uniquely and alone.
I wasn’t in NYC during 9/11. David Levithan was. From what I’ve heard, he has captured the moods of the city during this time wonderfully. (I would love hear what someone who was there thinks of this book). Claire can’t sleep, gathers with other New Yorkers at memorials and tries to process what is fundamentally not understandable. She throws herself into volunteering. After being rejected as a blood donor because he’s gay, Jasper withdraws. He tries to keep his date with Peter a few days later, but neither of them quite know how to act, and their time together ends awkwardly and uncertainly. Peter returns to music, and finds new meanings in songs and lyrics, in the unique energy that people gathering for a live music performance can have. They connect and reconnect with one another. Claire in particular tries to keep believing that something good will have to last from the way people were with one another—kinder, more patient, more understanding—in the days following 9/11. She says to Japser "I think that if you were somehow able to measure the weight of human kindness, it would have weighed more on 9/11 than it ever had. On 9/11, all the hatred and murder could not compare with the weight of love, of bravery, of caring. I think we saw the way humanity works on that day, and while some of it was horrifying, so much of it was good." (p. 106). Jasper wants to believe her. He really wants to.

Levithan writes in a note at the end of the book that, while he wrote things down as they were happening on 9/11, he never thought he’d write a novel about it, but he realized he wanted to capture the immediacy of that time as well as he could. He wanted readers who were very young at this period in history, or who weren’t even born yet, to know what it was like. That there was terror and fear and panic, but also that there were people giving away shoes and bottled water. That 9/11 wasn’t just a day that tore people apart, it had the possibility of bringing people together and bringing out humanity's better selves.

Also posted at Dwelling in Possibility.

What's Scary?

So, what’s scary? With Halloween in shouting distance, it seems like a fair question to ask. Speaking for myself, I’ll say this. Something jumping out of the dark is good for a shock, and exploding eyeballs (for instance) are always good for a gross-out, but what’s actually scary is what you almost see, the things that disappear around a corner before you can focus on them, the things just beneath the surface of the world; the things that, if you did see them, would show you that the world we know is merely covering something vast and dark and horrible.

It's been nearly a year since I talked about the first Hatter M book here, and when I received the second I guess I’d forgotten just how much fun it was. The second one, Mad with Wonder (by Beddor, Cavalier and Makkonen), has actually ratcheted up the fun factor and has an even more wicked sense of humor. Royal Bodyguard Madigan is still on a quest through 19th Century Earth for the lost Princess Alyss, but this time he’s splitting his time between Europe and Civil War America, has acquired an enjoyably nefarious archenemy, and winds up with an assorted array of the truly mad in an insane asylum (though the true lunatics appear to be the doctors). Meanwhile, that hat of his has gotten even cooler – whirling its blades, deflecting bullets and managing to escape on its own from capture – and seems to be developing a rudimentary consciousness of its own. What’s this got to do with scary, exactly? Well, the heart of this baby is the weirdness of its profoundly strange art. The atmosphere, especially in the asylum, and the figural work are so beautifully stylized that they scratche the malleable surface of the surreal at times, making for a deep and at times deeply disturbing experience that feels like actually being shanghaied into a different world. There’s an uneasiness at the periphery of every panel, madness beneath the smiles of every figure, a sense of true darkness lingering at the edge of every action and motive.

Okay, before I scare myself too much, let’s move on. One that seems to have come in beneath the radar is Marquis (by Davis). The tale of a masked and cloaked avenger during the hideous era of the Inquisition, we follow the Marquis through the fear-oozing streets of Paris as he hunts the demons who’ve taken the over the bodies of normal people. The Marquis is armed with the instruments of a greater power: a pair of massive pistols, a holy sword and a mask that allows him to see the demons beneath the surface. Things get even more intense, however, as the Marquis begins to see that the world he lives in is not the world he thought it was and the power he holds faith in may be something very, very different than he believed. And if a screaming world of chaos just beneath the world you know isn’t scary enough, have some monsters to go along with it. Though the sub-title is Inferno, this book owes its visions of Hell less to the works of Dante than to Bosch’s surreal nightmares and Francis Bacon’s visions of distorted flesh. These demons are the foulest thing this side of John Carpenter’s The Thing, all twisted human forms and huge, toothy orifices.

Scary enough?

Admit it. You want a pet tarantula!

Jean Craighead George has written a lot of good books, including the Newbery Medal winner, Julie of the Wolves. Another of her books, My Side of the Mountain, is a Newbery Honor book.

I especially like her nonfiction. In (What a great title!) The Tarantula in My Purse and 172 Other Wild Pets she tells about raising crows (one of which learned to speak), ducks, geese, skunks, snakes, a raccoon, and, yes, a tarantula, among others.

Her daughter's favorite pet was a screech owl named Yammer. Yammer loved the shower. "He would fly into the bathroom... sit on the top of the shower-curtain rod... then drop into the puddles at our feet. Eyes half-closed, he would joyfully flip the water up and into his wings and dunk his breast until he was soaked... Having bathed, Yammer couldn't climb out of the tub. We would... pick him up and put him on a towel by the hot-air vent to dry.

"This was a perfectly satisfactory arrangement until we failed to tell a visitor about Yammer's passion... unaware of his presence, she showered, stepped out of the tub, and left him there...

"Craig (her son) promptly put up a sign, 'Please remove the owl after showering.' It hung over the shower faucets for as long as Yammer lived with us."

Jean Craighead George shares her love of, and knowledge of the ways of, all sorts of animals in this book. She hatched and raised seven bobwhites. "...they let me into their secret of survival. Bobwhites form coveys. At night these coveys sit in circles with their tails in and their heads out so that they may see or hear the enemy in all directions."

Her daughter complained about Crowbar. "I'm not going to play with that crow anymore," she said. "He takes all my toys."

"Why don't you slide down the slide?" I suggested. "Crows can't slide down slides. Their feet have pads that hold them fast to perches."... Crowbar watched, then "stepped on the steeply slanted board -- and was stuck... We had outwitted a crow, which we both knew was a very hard thing to do.

"...Crowbar flew to the sandbox. He picked up a coffee-can lid, carried it to the top of the slide, stepped on it, and -- zoom -- we had a sliding crow."

So I enthusiastically recommend this book. Ms. George knows animals. If you like this one, you might also try her How to Talk to Your Dog, and How to Talk to Your Cat. They're aimed at a young audience, but the dog information, especially, was new to me (I know cats.).

Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli

Confusion. That was my first reaction after reading David Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp. Normally, an experience like that would be endlessly frustrating. I mean, who wants to finish reading a book only to be left dazed and confused by the process? This time, however, I found the perplexity exhilarating, like a well-designed puzzle that must be savored and relished before it is solved.

Intrigued yet? You should be.

Like many comic book fans, I first encountered David Mazzucchelli through his work on Marvel's Daredevil, first with writer Denny O'Neil and then with Frank Miller. To be honest, the work with O'Neil was interesting, but ultimately forgettable - pretty standard comic book fare for the time. It was Mazzucchelli's collaboration with Miller on Daredevil: Born Again that really made me aware of what untapped talent he had. Many were initially upset that Miller himself was not pencilling his triumphant return to the character that made him famous. After reading the first issue with Mazzucchelli, all fears and doubts were put away. Mazzucchelli's work on Daredevil was quickly followed by another collaboration with Miller - the oft-mentioned (and inspiration for the film Batman Begins) Batman: Year One.

None of this work, as great and spectacular as it is, can possibly prepare you for the monumental evolution of Mazzucchelli's work that is represented by Asterios Polyp. Gone are the pulp heroes, the realistic character depictions and the melodramatic storytelling techniques. These are replaced by philosophical musings wrapped in the tale of one man's undoing and redemption, conveyed by a loose-lined, cartoonish art style. If it sounds heavy and depressing, it is surprisingly not. In fact, it is both ebullient and contemplative, a delicate balance that is deftly handled throughout the work.

The title character of Asterios Polyp is a college professor and architect of some renown, though he is a "paper architect" - his designs are theoretical and thus are never actually built. The story begins at what we think is the end of a rather pathetic and paltry existence (and through a series of flashbacks we learn just how much goodness Polyp has thrown away or wasted in his life), but turns out to be the beginning of self-revelation for this intensely inward-looking man. Along the way, the graphic novel covers territory as diverse as: love, duality, rivalry, design, aesthetics, religion, auto mechanics and (perhaps most importantly) the illusion of male power.

If it sounds as though I completely understand this work, well, remember that confusion I mentioned at the start of this review? Yeah. I'm in the dark still about much of what Mazzucchelli is trying to say. But I'm ok with that. Even if I grapple with one-tenth of the subject matter of Asterios Polyp I think I'm doing pretty well. If this graphic novel teaches nothing else, it's that the the experience of life is more important than the knowledge gained, catalogued and hoarded. Confusion is just another part of the ride.
Cross-posted at PastePotPete.

Young Spenser chases the bear

I'm such a big fan of Robert B. Parker's Spenser series that my youngest son's middle name is Spenser. But I'm less certain about Chasing the Bear, Parker's first "Young Spenser" novel. On one hand it gives longtime readers their first glimpse of something new: the character as a child, in this case age fourteen. But as a YA novel, it's that familiarity with the character that presents the biggest problem.

The book begins with the adult Spenser (a Boston private eye as adept at quoting literature and cooking gourmet dinners as he is at busting heads) telling his long-time girlfriend Susan about his childhood, and these interludes frequently interrupt the main story. Since Susan is a psychiatrist, this lets her discuss motives and explanations for the younger Spenser's behavior, as well as pointing out how those adolescent patterns manifest in his adulthood. And this is the first of the book's issues for YA readers. While longtime fans understand the dynamic between Spenser and Susan, the intended audience might feel talked-down-to by these sections. And yet in the larger sense of the Spenser series, these sections are indespinsible. So this creates a conflict between the two intended audiences that the book never satisfactorily resolves.

The second, larger issue is the character of Spenser himself. Before this, the most we'd ever learned about his childhood was in the 1991 novel Pastime: he was raised in Wyoming by his father and his mother's bachelor brothers, his mother having died in childbirth. Chasing the Bear shows that masculine dynamic at work, filtered through a kind of benign male righteousness that Spenser himself would one day embody. His father and uncles treat him as an equal, take their cooperative parenting very seriously, and spend a great deal of time teaching him both how to fight, and how to know when to fight.

The problem for YA readers is that the teenage Spenser is essentially no different than the adult one. He has doubts, but he seldom errs, and he's never overcome by fear. The adult Spenser has years of experience to explain this; the teen Spenser has only his instincts. To present him as perfectly formed, even at age fourteen, makes it awfully hard for other doubt-filled adolescents to sympathize with him.

Still, Parker can surely tell a rip-snorting story, and the book moves like a shot; I finished it in an afternoon. In the main plot, one of young Spenser's friends, a girl named Jeannie, is kidnapped by her abusive father, and Spenser has to improvise a rescue and escape. To Parker's credit, Spenser's tactics are entirely reasonable and not beyond the capabilities of a teen. This adventure gives Spenser a reputation in his small town, which becomes an issue as racial tension between Latinos and whites come to a boil.

The book has the Spenser formula: plenty of action, a few funny lines and a string of moral dilemmas. As an adult fan, I welcomed this as insight into one of my favorite literary characters; but I had a hard time imagining myself at fourteen, reading this book and identifying with the self-assured, mistake-proof teen Spenser.

I'll tell my son about his namesake, of course. And when he's older, I'll recommend some of the best in the series (Ceremony, Pale Kings and Princes, Cold Service). In between those times, will I recommend Chasing the Bear? I don't know yet. It's a good book, but maybe not for its intended audience, and that presents a dilemma worthy of Spenser at his best.

The Magicians -- Lev Grossman

Quentin Coldwater isn't a very happy person. He's brilliant and well-off, his parents are nice enough, though vague and mostly absent. His two best friends, James and Julia, are happily dating, though Quentin wishes he was the one dating Julia.

The world is grey and cold and boring and predictable. Secretly, he dreams of magic. He daydreams about Fillory, wishes it was real.

Fillory is a Narnia-ish (very, very Narnia-ish) fantasy world described in a series of children's books originally published in the 1930s. Most people Quentin's age left them behind years and years ago, but he didn't. He still returns to them -- when he's bored (which is often), when he's upset (ditto), when he wants to escape (again, ditto).

Then, after a death at his Princeton interview leads to an encounter with a strange paramedic leads to an invitation to apply to Brakebills, a school in upstate New York that specializes in, you guessed, magic:

This was everything he'd always wanted, the break he'd given up on years ago. It was right in front of him. He was finally on the other side, down the rabbit hole, through the looking glass. He was going to sign the papers and he was going to be a motherfucking magician. Or what the hell else was he going to do with his life?

There was much chatter about The Magicians when it came out this summer. It was touted as "fantasy for grown-ups", Harry Potter in the real world, Harry Potter in college. It was described as original and epic and ground-breaking.

That's a whole lot of hype to live up to.

Is the hype accurate? Well, as always, it depends on who you talk to. The people doing the hyping, obviously, would say yes. The people giving it one-star reviews at Amazon, obviously, would say no.

My opinion lands somewhere in the middle. It was, for sure, a book that kept me reading -- I happily read all 400 pages in an afternoon. As in any other fantasy novel set in a secret corner of our world, I enjoyed discovering it with Quentin:

Quentin was pretty sure that if he stood very still for a few seconds everything would snap back to normal. He wondered if he was undergoing some dire neurological event.

I enjoyed most of the nods to previous works -- I didn't, as some readers have, see it as derivative -- because Quentin is such a fan, much of the book read like a tribute to fantasy-that-came-before. And I loved the fact that the students took ideas for their offensive spells from D&D.

My major personal difficulty with the book boiled down to this: Quentin Coldwater is not very likable. He's selfish and apathetic, never happy with what he has, even when what he has is exactly what he originally thought he wanted. He's the personification of the-grass-is-always-greener. I never doubted him as a character -- he seemed very real to me -- but I didn't like him. But I'm not sure if I was supposedto like him. If this was a book about Magic in the Real World, it stands to reason that the hero wouldn't just not be heroic -- he wouldn't be a hero. And, ultimately, I didn't see him as one. He was just a protagonist. Which, really, made sense.

Oddly, I seem to have talked myself into liking it more than I did originally. Actually, maybe appreciating it is a better description.

I think that many readers who pick this one up expecting a Grown-Up Version of Harry Potter will be disappointed. The similarities pretty much begin and end with: Unhappy kid gets accepted into School of Magic. The Magiciansisn't about the plotting (which, especially towards the end, was pretty weak) or about the world-building. It's a coming-of-age story (though I don't know if I really believe that Quentin has actually come of age by the end) about a self-absorbed, not-very-impressive, extremely angsty young man.

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Book source: An ARC given to me by a library patron.

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Cross-posted at Bookshelves of Doom.

Discordia: The Eleventh Dimension by Dena K. Salmon

Discordia: The Eleventh Dimension by Dena K. Salmon
"For Lance (level 19 zombie sorcerer), and his friend, MrsKeller (level 23 hobgoblin brigand), life's a battle, and then you die. And then you rez. And then you battle again. At least that's how it is in Discordia, the addictive online game that makes real life seem dreary in comparison. At his new school, Lance feels weird and out of place, but in beautiful and complex Discordia, his zombie sorcerer is doing great: leveling fast, learning new skills, and making friends. He's even met a level 60 toon, TheGreatOne, who has recruited him and MrsKeller into his guild: Awoken Myths. Lance wishes he could spend all his time in the game - until TheGreatOne transports Lance and MrsKeller to the real Discordia, the perilous world in the eleventh dimension which inspired the game. Before they're allowed to leave, they must complete a high-level quest that may determine Discordia's survival - and Lance's, too. If they don't get out soon, Lance could permanently mutate into the character he plays in the game: a zombie. The friends accept TheGreatOne's quest and meet Rayva, a runaway who may have been lured into Discordia against her will. The three make their way through a country on the brink of war, fighting monsters, traitors and spies - yet their greatest danger may be Lance himself."- summary from Amazon

While I am not an MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) player, I still really enjoyed this novel. It can be a bit difficult to get into since it starts off with Lance playing the game and if it's not something you're used to, the plot can drag a bit, which it did for me. But once Lance has been pulled in, it becomes like a regular fantasy novel dealing with adventures and quests. The concept is really intriguing, especially in this age of WoW and other MMORPGs, and I loved how Salmon built the game world and the world that Lance gets pulled into (there are differences between the two).

The story is told in third person and it really feels that way- there's a distance between the reader and the characters and so I didn't feel like there was much depth in the characters; it's definitely more of a plot-driven novel than character-driven, which can be very good for reluctant readers, but not necessarily for avid readers (unless of course it's your preference).

I thought the ending was pretty rushed and everything came to an abrupt end in the last 15-20 pages. The story ends on a big cliffhanger, which definitely leaves me wanting more. Overall, I'd say it's an above average novel but nothing to write home about. If you're into fantasy and/or MMOs, this is the book for you. For people new to MMOs though, there is an introduction and user manual plus glossary in the front and back of the book, respectively.