Kay's Bookshelf

Prepare yourselves to be amazed. Mr. Fforde has created a very original world where everything is based on color. While I was somewhat aware of that, having read some reviews previous to reading the book, I was nevertheless very pleasantly surprised to discover the actual thing.

The world has changed after Something That Happened. Even the people have evolved (or rather devolved) into Homo coloribus, people who can see nothing at night and only a certain set of colors by day. According to colortocracy, the highest ranked people are the ones who can see the most colors, for example a Grey (someone with no color sight to speak of) is lower than a Red (someone who can mostly see red, and very little of the rest), who is lower than a Purple (someone who can see lots of red and blue).

The people’s very names are based on this system too, as anyone who can see color gets to pick an appropriate name (like Russet, or deMauve, or McMustard; my favorite name was Floyd Pinken), whereas the Greys have to contend with using their own address as a last name (G-23 or G-8). Even the diseases are treated by showing people certain colors: what we know as doctors are called swatchmen there, and their medicine cabinets have been replaced by swatches of colors. Making me a wee bit dreamy as you have to agree it would simplify seeing a doctor tremendously :)

One of the elements I love in Dystopian books (or other forms of SciFi) is when the author manages to make the reader as familiar with current technology as can be. Mr. Fforde’s ingeniousness has dealt with that very well in this book: the powers that be decide, periodically, to give up some pieces of technology that they deem useless, or subversive, or whatever. The chosen technologies are then Leapbacked, meaning the artifacts are destroyed and no one is allowed to make or use them ever again. The society thus goes backwards and backwards, ending up, at the time the book opens, at a level more or less equivalent, technology-wise, with the beginning of the 20th century. A bit worse actually, since the bicycles have been Leapbacked, the books too, and who knows what else.

The country (world?) is ruled by the Munsell, whose statues are in every village and whose rules are never broken. Everything is constant, from the number of people (carefully guarded) to the shortage of spoons. The rules are incredibly strict, regulating from what outfit can be worn in a certain occasion to the minimum number of meals per day. More on the rules:

“The Word of Munsell was the Rules, and the Rules were the Word of Munsell. They regulated everything we did, and had brought peace to the Collective for nearly four centuries. They were sometimes very odd indeed: The banning of the number that lay between 72 and 74 was a case in point, and no one had ever fully explained why it was forbidden to count sheep, make any new spoons or use acronyms. But they were the Rules—and presumably for some very good reason, although what that might be was not entirely obvious.”

Unsurprisingly, loopholery abounds, people in charge always finding ways to do what they want (usually by declaring some things as being something else; my favorite example is the “chicken is a vegetable” one but there were more).

And the spoons, let’s not forget the spoons. For some reason spoons are missing from the list of items allowed to be manufactured, so the number of spoons is always constant (or even decreasing if we think some may be destroyed, or lost, now and then). So

“Acceptable rules of conduct were suspended when it came to the spoon shortage. The deficit had gotten so bad that prices were all but unaffordable, and dynastic spoon succession had become a matter of considerable interest. Spoons were even postcode engraved and carried on one’s person to eliminate theft, and good table manners, one of the eight pillars upon which the Collective was built, had been relaxed to allow tea to be stirred—shockingly—with the handle of a fork.”

Interestingly enough, although no one can see full scale, color is very important to people. Everything is colored and recolored using pipes with liquid, very expensive colors (colors that can only be obtained from artefacts that have belonged to the Previous, the ones before). And yet, color is going away from the world: everything colored falls prey to the Saturation Dispersion Index (or simply put, is fading). I sort of see a similarity with oil here, as there’s a limited quantity of it, huge yet but still limited, in our world, as are artefacts in theirs, and I thought it a nice touch (and also couldn’t help feeling sorry for those condemned to live in a black and white world after all color is gone).

To speak about the characters a little too (can you see I was head over heels fascinated by the world building?), they too are interesting, most of all by the way they grow throughout the novel. Taking Eddie Russett, he starts out as a naive person, yet with a good heart and always ready to do the right thing. Jane on the other hand is the very opposite: she knows lots of hidden secrets about their seemingly ordered world, and is ready to do anything to reach her purposes (I think I even detected a touch of cruelty in her, given how she treats people who mention her nose). Yet Eddie loves her and gradually she started to grow on me too (not to mention I was so happy to find such an atypical heroine :) )

Thoughts on the ending: show spoiler

What I liked most:
The charm is, as always, in the details. For example I have been wondered for a bit why the people in the book use the word Beigemarket instead of black market. And then it hit me: black is not a color, so it would not exist in a color-ruled world :) (speaking of beige, for the people in the book it is the color equivalent to Hell — I imagine it is so because it is so complete and utterly boring, but I may be wrong).

Other such details I revelled in were (marked as spoilers in case you want to find them for yourself):
show spoiler

What I liked least: I have found nothing to complain about. :)

Recommend it to? Anyone who loves dystopias, anyone interested in quirky worlds. Anyone else should at least give it a try :) (I was bound to say that, I love Fforde in general and I found this book in particular charming).

Written by the same author:
The Eyre Affair
Lost in a Good Book
The Well of Lost Plots

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From the very moment the book opens (the last day of Egypt as a free country), the characters have fallen a bit flat for me. We get a glimpse of Marc Antony, whom I have rather despised (his last words were about wine? really? I understand he loved wine and horses but this was a bit too much for me), and of Cleopatra (who had too few pages to make any impression on me; she was just there, and then she died, and that was that). Fast-forward eleven months, and there is our first chance to get to know the three children of Cleopatra and Antony’s. We learn that Selene is very talented when it comes to drawing, and Alexander knows a lot about horses. Other than that, they (or at least Alexander) seem to have gotten over their pain at seeing their parents dead and have been transformed into slaves pretty well. The depth of feeling seemed to me lacking all throughout the book, and it probably was one of the reasons I did not enjoy it that much.

Sadly, the fact that I did not resonate with the character affected my relationship with the whole story, because there is very little plot to speak of. Sure, there’s the Red Eagle mystery, but I kept thinking of it more as a tangent to the story, something that didn’t actually affect any of the characters, so I wasn’t particularly drawn into that either. What did give a bit of flavor to the book was the actual historical part: what Octavian did and when, his decisions and the way they affected others, plus the descriptions of Rome in that day and age. It can be said, in a broad sense, that Octavian was the one that made the book worth reading for me (otherwise there were only shopping trips or some other form of entertaining; oh, and Selene’s pining for someone she could never have).

One of my disappointments in the book was the fact that it mostly narrates Selene’s childhood (ages 11-15), a time far less interesting than her adulthood probably was. Even the author mentions, in the afterword, that Selene and her husband had “one of the greatest love stories ever to come out of imperial Rome, and for twenty years they reigned side by side in an extraordinary partnership”; I for one would have loved to know more about that, rather than a few years in the life of a more or less ordinary child.

Speaking of which, sometimes I felt the connection with Cleopatra a bit forced. That was most likely because Selene had no particularity to mark her as Cleopatra’s daughter. She could have been any other child lucky enough to belong to a patrician family. Or so it seemed to me (while she does prefer Egypt to Rome whenever she has the chance, these moments occupied way too little space to actually matter).

It can be argued that at least Selene remained attached to the land of her forefathers. To my surprise that wasn’t the case with her brother, Alexander, who adopted the Roman way in all the aspects of his life. He enjoyed betting on horse races and going to the Circus with his Roman friends, very rarely thinking about his previous life with his mother and father. This may be only an impression of mine, since we only see Alexander through Selene’s life, but I have often wondered how could he adapt so completely to his new way of life (sure, history tells us that Juba did the same, but he was “adopted” by the Romans when he was 4 or 6, not 11 as Alexander was).

I did not yet decide what I think about the fate the author has chosen for little Ptolemy, Selene and Alexander’s brother. There is very little known about him, however there are some historians that state all the three children were at the Triumph, and all three of them were then taken into custody by Octavia. As such, I was a bit surprised to see Ptolemy not being there. I also was surprised to see Antony criticised for sending away Octavia’s daughters with her previous husband, a move clearly intended for the reader to find Rome even more outrageous; however history (or at least some historians) tells us that the two Claudia Marcellas have lived with their mother and Marc Antony for a while, so they were not simply turned away when Octavia remarried.

Thoughts on the ending: I loved the last few pages the most in the entire book. Of course I knew how it was going to end (history tells us who Selene married), and yet there was a surprise twist near the end that I have vastly enjoyed.

What I liked most: The number of real-life characters mentioned in the novel. There are so many people I learned about and I am happy and grateful because of that. (for starters, secondary cast Wiki pages: Juba, Marcellus, Julia, Livia, Tiberius, Vipsania)

What I liked least: Why is the book named Cleopatra’s Daughter yet all throughout the book the name is spelled Kleopatra? There is a mention in the book that the name is spelt thus in Greek — and yet, why should we care about the Greek spelling, since the Cleopatra everyone’s known for all their life is spelt with a C? Or, if it mattered that much to the author, shouldn’t the name have been spelt with a K on the cover too?

Recommend it to? Anyone interested in a historical fiction novel set in ancient Rome. As usual, I seem to be the only one not liking this book so I do recommend it despite my own opinion about it.

See also
Michelle Moran’s website
Michelle Moran’s blog
Places in Rome where Selene has been
Q and A with the author about the book

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Popularity: 3% [?]

The book poses some interesting issues: Can one protect people by forbidding them things? Should one do that? If the answer to the last two questions is yes, how does one draw the line? Do all people want a simple, safe life anyway?

It was fun to notice the fact that all the castaways on the island had names inspired from other books. There’s a little girl names Friday, for example. Her mother is Mrs. Caliban. The facilitator of the island is Ishmael (“Call me Ish“). And many more, some of whose origins I did not identify (but Wikipedia did so there’s a list of them here :) )

There are also some religious allusions related to the island. Ishmael acts as their Messiah in a way (and even has a flock of sheep he lives in the same tent with), complete with wonders (predicting weather by “magic”). Keeping with his role of God, there’s also an apple tree whose fruits he forbids eating. And one of those is given to the Baudelaires by Ink the snake :)

The volume is dedicated to Beatrice (and alas, we finally get to know, without a doubt, who Beatrice is), in a couplet that shows off Lemony’s poetic side (or lack of it): “I cherished, you perished / The world’s been nightmarished.”

The usual warning to the reader:

“In this way, the story of the Baudelaire orphans is like an onion, and if you insist on reading each and every thin, papery layer in A Series of Unfortunate Events, your only reward will be 170 chapters of misery in your library and countless tears in your eyes. Even if you have read the first twelve volumes of the Baudelaires’ story, it is not too late to stop peeling away the layers, and to put this book back on the shelf to wither away while you read something less complicated and overwhelming.”

And with this, here I am, at the end of a series that took me a bit over one year to read through. Am I happy I read it? Yes, definitely, because I enjoyed most of the books and their quirky characters (not to mention Mr. Handler’s writing style plus the way he has chosen to insert an alter-ego of his in the story). Was the conclusion worth all the time spent waiting for it? Um…

Thoughts on the ending: While I loved reading this series all throughout, the ending was somewhat disappointing. show spoiler

Another thing I was less than enthusiastic about is the presence of a chapter fourteen. I remember reading somewhere that the series has thirteen books, each with thirteen chapters, and I thought that was cool. Until very recently when I discover the said chapter fourteen. I know it’s supposed to be the epilogue of the book, but I thought that the 13/13 thing was somewhat cooler.

What I liked most: The fact that the Baudelaires, after having all those guardians over the past few months, now end up being guardians themselves (and they do, of course, a much better job out of it than anyone else present in the series) was a nice touch.

Plus the Incredibly Deadly Viper, the one I was sorry to see go at the end of Book 2, is back :)
Not to mention the fact that the island log is named A Series of Unfortunate Events :)

What I liked least: Dare I say the ending?

Recommend it to? Anyone who has read the previous twelve books and is curious what happens next.

See also:
A Series of Unfortunate Events – the website

This book is a sequel to:
The Bad Beginning
The Reptile Room
The Wide Window
The Miserable Mill
The Austere Academy
The Ersatz Elevator
The Vile Village
The Hostile Hospital
The Carnivorous Carnival
The Slippery Slope
The Grim Grotto
The Penultimate Peril

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Popularity: 5% [?]

This is the second book in the Wheel of Time series and I have enjoyed a very small bit less than the previous one, yet still a lot. First of all, I love the writing style, because it has what I call “cinematic quality” (every visual detail is so aptly described that it sometimes feels like watching a movie). This book needed less world-building than the one before, since the reader is now familiarised with the location; however there were still new concepts introduced, and new places, giving me the occasion to bask in visual details, just as I like.

The plot is also well written, and quite unpredictable too — I very rarely knew what to expect, if at all. This is another reason why I’m on the way to becoming a fan of the series: the fact that there’s always something happening, with never a moment of boredom. Many people say that will change once the series reach book six or seven, but until then I really really love this part.

As for the characters, my, there’s plenty of them. I was happy to meet again most of those introduced in Book 1. Rand, desperately trying to adjust to who he is, trying to get rid of the yokel of prophecy but at the same time preparing himself for it, taking swordfighting lessons and learning to channel. Mat, sick, doing nothing but participating in the search for his dagger, now a bit more likable to me than before because he has less pages to complain in. Perrin, still communicating with wolves, also with less pages allotted. Loial, always with his nose in a book and one of my favorite characters. Surprisingly enough, Bayle Domon, the owner of the ship Rand crossed the river seemingly eons ago, makes an appearance in this book too, piquing my interest in his fate. There are also a few new characters, of which Huron, a “sniffer” (a man who can smell deeds done by others) seems the most promising one, and I am looking forward to meeting him again. A notable absence is Lan (yup, the one that I liked most of them all), who only appears a little in the beginning and a little at the end since Moiraine Sedai is kept busy elsewhere almost all throughout the book.

The female characters get to grow and develop, especially Egwene, whom I dismissed as childish before, but whom I have actually liked in this volume. Nynaeve is trying hard to learn to become the best Aes Sedai she can be, dreaming to punish Moiraine later on for everything Nynaeve thinks she has brought to “her people”. We meet Elayne again, and, although the Daughter-Heir, she is so very down-to-earth that it’s impossible not to like. Another old acquaintance is Min, who, while only met once in Book 1, already seemed like a promising character and I was happy to see her again. As secondary characters we also get to meet a few more Aes Sedai (including their leader, the Amyrlin Seat, an old friend of Moiraine’s), some more interesting than others, and about whom I am curious whether we’ll get to see them again or not, but none of them particularly captivating and/or likable for me.

Speaking of Aes Sedai, I was happy that the author chose to give at last a bit more details about the notion of Ajah. While I have already surmised that each Aes Sedai belonged to an Ajah, and the said Ajah’s color meant something related to the Sedai’s personality, I knew no more than that. In this book though I found out a bit more details, some even funny ones, such as the way the Green Ajah women treat men (the more the better, they even have more than one Warden each). Their opposite is the Red Ajah, who despise men altogether, and never choose Wardens for that reason. There’s also the Brown Ajah, whose members thirst for knowledge and as such are always studying one thing or another. I have no idea yet of the particularities of the other Ajahs (including the Blue, Moiraine’s colors), but I am looking forward to finding out in the next book or books :)

As a small detail, I was amused by the names of the fighting stances Rand had to learn. “Cat Crosses the Courtyard” is my favorite, but there’s also “Parting the Silk”, “Hummingbird Kisses the Honeyrose”, “Heron Wading in the Rushes”, “The Kingfisher Takes a Silverback”, “Bundling Straw”, “The Dove Takes Flight”, “The Falling Leaf”, “The Swallow Rides the Air”, “The Boar Rushes Down the Mountain”, “The River Undercuts the Bank”, “Stones Falling From the Cliff” and many more :)

Thoughts on the ending: Unsurprisingly, I absolutely loved the ending (more so than the one in the previous book). show spoiler

What I liked most: It’s a tie between two things:
1) the three tests that Nynaeve had to go through in order for her to become Accepted. While the idea of testing someone by making him (or her) confront his (or her) innermost fears is not new by far, I very much loved the buildup and the way each test was more intense than the one before. Plus the fact that we got another glimpse of Emond’s Field and of Lan. :)

and

2) the portal stones!!!
The very idea of there existing “worlds our world might have been if things had happened differently.“. Much like some people believe in parallel universes, people in the WoT world also believe that “The Pattern has infinite variation [...] and every variation that can be, will be.“. Well actually, that’s not just a belief of theirs, because those worlds of variation actually exist and can be visited too, using portal stones. So, so very cool (I seem to use this word a lot lately). Not to mention the moment when Rand focused on one portal stone and actually got to “live” some of these variations for himself.

What I liked least: I have no major complaints but
1) I could have done without the Children of the Light (they served no major purpose anyway)(or perhaps there is a purpose and it will be revealed later?)

and

2) I was a bit annoyed at the beginning by all the drama surrounding the fact that Aes Sedai might want to “gentle” Rand because of who he is. Now, I understand that the male Aes Sedai broke the world once; I also understand that the prophecies state that the Dragon Reborn “shall break the world again by his coming, tearing apart all ties that bind“. I understand that people might want to stop the world from breaking again and thus harm Rand to keep him from doing so. But the prophecies also state that “the Dark One shall once more lay his hand upon the world of man [...] yet shall the Dragon Reborn confront the Shadow at the Last Battle, and his blood shall give us the Light“. So, considering that somewhere in the near future the said Dragon Reborn will be the only thing keeping the world from being conquered by the Dark One, why would anyone do anything to the Dragon and interfere with his doing so?

Recommend it to? Anyone who read and liked the first book, of course. While I imagine it may work as standalone too, many of the events are based on what had happened before so the enjoyment of it would be considerably reduced. Or so I think :)

See also
Wheel of Time wiki :)
Moiraine’s Facebook page :)

This book is a sequel to:
The Eye of the World


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The mythology of the imaginary world the author has created is very detailed; so much so that at first I had a bit of trouble keeping the hang of who was what — however, I soon got to know everyone and things started making sense. Started being wonderful, actually. There are, at first, two clearly separated kinds of things: real, the ones everyone met with at times in their daily life (gleemen, the village Wisdom (a wise woman who is said to be able to heal people and to read the future in the wind), Winternight, the Bel Tine festival, etc.) and the ones everyone heard about in stories only (the Trollocs, the Aes Sedai, the Fades, and lots more). Some of the things in the latter category are even thought to be the product of someone’s too vivid imagination, that’s how rare they are.

And yet, all of the sudden, Rand’s world and the others’ is turned upside down, all things they barely believed in coming to life. Trollocs attacked, all of a sudden. A Fade/Myrddraal made itself known to boys of certain age. An Aes Sedai and a Warden turned out to have been in their midst. And I, I was fascinated by this sudden process of legends becoming tangible :)

There are a lot of concepts that were obviously inspired from real life, and it was interesting to see Jordan’s take on them. To name but a few, the Light is their good force (makes one think of God, especially when one sees the way it’s mentioned in daily life — “Light keep you!”, “Light, did you see that?”; they believe in a Creator too but the Light is the divinity they refer to in their every day life). The name of the evil one is Shai’tan. The Children of Light, an organisation with its own rules and ranking system, is the Andorian equivalent of Inquisition. Saidin and saidar, the male and female forces, make one think of Yin and Yang (especially as their symbol seems to be quite similar too). The Tinkers, the travelling people, are very much like the Gypsies of old: earn mend pots, travel in wagons, dress in vivid colors and are said to steal whatever they can get their hands on (what I liked most about them is that “They’re looking for a song. That’s what the Mahdi seeks. They say they lost it during the Breaking of the World, and if they can find it again, the paradise of the Age of Legends will return.“). And so on.

People often say that Jordan was heavily influenced by Tolkien, and that the plot is similar to the one in the Lord of the Rings. They are more or less right, as there are many elements in the book that make one think of Tolkien. However I would dare to say that the plot, albeit very interesting (with a few incredibly captivating moments now and then), is not necessarily the main attraction of Jordan’s work. Neither is the character development — I could say that it is actually the book’s weak point, because while the characters are believable and interesting, their emotions and dialogue aren’t always up to par. I for one felt quite meh about the relationship between Rand and Egwene, especially when the latter was being jealous — but I digress. As I was saying, the most interesting feature of the book, what makes it truly special, is the way Jordan has managed to create a living and breathing world around his characters. We are treated to detailed descriptions of villages, monuments, cities and people altogether, all forming in a colorful background behind our characters’ deeds. And it’s worth mentioning that, at least in this first volume, the author managed to present it all in such a manner that is never boring. I understand that this becomes a flaw later on, as the amount of detail tends to overcome the actual plot in some future books, but right now, after reading just this one, I am charmed.

When it comes of the characters, I very much liked the way Jordan chose to treat women. There are no damsel in distress in this book. The women are just as willing to go the needed lengths as men are; they are also, magic-wise, the more powerful, since they are the only ones able to touch the True Source. Quite a cool concept for a novel set in a medieval-like world.

Interestingly enough, my favorite character of them all was Lan. Even the author said about him that “Lan is simply the man I always wished I could be.“. My teenage self would have been head over heels fascinated with him. He is a very capable warrior, with a noble heart, always putting the interests of others ahead of his own. He is not talkative, but spends his time studying the surroundings, as any Warden on the run is supposed to be do. Yet he does notice things one would think he wouldn’t, and that shows most of all when it comes to who his love interest is (unfortunately I can’t spoil that but I was very excited about that part). Oh, and did I mention he is also of (very) noble blood?

Opposed to him, the three main characters (Mat, Rand, and Perrin) are nothing but boys. I liked Rand a lot because his emotions are very believable, and his heart is good. Perrin is the strong one, who thinks slowly but always thinks things through. As for Mat, he is the claimant of the “my least favorite male character” honor. He is supposed to be a mischievous lad, but not a bad one. However he doesn’t know when to keep his mouth shut (annoying!!) and is too preoccupied with finding treasure for my taste (this happens to also be his doom, at least in his book, haha).

Mat’s female equivalent, “my least favorite female character”, is Egwene (pronounced eh-GWAIN). She is very young and she’s also Rand’s love interest, so I suppose she is meant to be likable rather than not. Well, she does have her qualities — strong willed, courageous, loves being part of an adventure even if it’s scary at times — but she is also a bit of a bully, and also a bit annoying towards the end. I probably named her as my least favorite not because I disliked her but because I fully liked the others. Moiraine (pronounced mwah-RAIN), the Aes Sedai (EYEZ seh-DEYE), powerful and with lots of knowledge. Nynaeve, the young Wisdom, very capable and taking her responsibilities very seriously. Quite annoyed with men, but a good tracker herself. Both (Moiraine and Nynaeve) are promising characters and I am quite curious to see how they’ll develop in the future books.

Two tiny quotes I liked:
At one time, this is said about one of the Travelling People: “he moved as if he were about to begin dancing with his next step“. A bit of nice imagery. :)

The folks in the Two Rivers are said to be pretty stubborn, and I liked their way of thinking: “[...]the Light will take care of us all. And if the Light doesn’t, well, we’ll just take care of ourselves. Remember, we’re Two Rivers folk.”

Thoughts on the ending: There are people who call it rushed, but I have actually liked it. show spoiler

What I liked most: Interestingly enough, although in real life I’m not fond of the idea of predestination, I was quite captivated by the idea of a Pattern comprising all lives.

“The Wheel of Time weaves the Pattern of the Ages, and lives are the threads it weaves. No one can tell how the thread of his own life will be woven into the Pattern, or how the thread of a people will be woven.”

It seemed to me that somehow being a part of a bigger pattern gave everyone’s lives meaning, and I liked that. Not to mention I enjoyed trying to imagine how the said pattern might actually look (yeah, I know it’s not a literal pattern, but I love imagining it nevertheless). As such, I was also bound to like the notion of Ta’veren:

“You see, the Wheel of Time weaves the Pattern of the Ages, and the threads it uses are lives. It is not fixed, the Pattern, not always. If a man tries to change the direction of his life and the Pattern has room for it, the Wheel just weaves on and takes it in. There is always room for small changes, but sometimes the Pattern simply won’t accept a big change, no matter how hard you try. [...] But sometimes the change chooses you, or the Wheel chooses it for you. And sometimes the Wheel bends a life-thread, or several threads, in such a way that all the surrounding threads are forced to swirl around it, and those force other threads, and those still others, and on and on.”

I love the imagery of that :)

What I liked least: Can I say the Prologue? It started out so sudden I was finding it all very confusing, so much so that I almost put the book down (of course I didn’t consider it seriously, as I knew the book must be quite good to have sparkled such interest, but for a moment I did consider it nevertheless).

Recommend it to? Anyone who enjoys epic fantasies? Actually, I fell in love with it while reading so I heartily encourage anyone to at least give it a try :)

See also
Schema of the places where the characters travelled in this book
A background of the history of the world in the Wheel of Time series

This book is followed by:
The Great Hunt

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Popularity: 17% [?]

At last another book in the series that I can actually like! I started it with a “meh” attitude but I was soon won over by how fast paced everything around Percy was. Now, I do realize that all of the books in the series are just as fast paced as this one, but for some reason (Percy being less annoying?) this one I do like quite a bit. So much so that it is a serious contender for the “favorite book in the series” spot, and that’s saying something because I have really loved book one :)

The recurring characters are just the same as in the previous books. Percy is still Percy (and lucky me, he didn’t have to read many things so I didn’t have to hear about his dyslexia that many times), and I actually spent the whole book liking him (though I wouldn’t have expected it after the previous one). He seems to have matured a bit, and his choices are always the good ones (not necessarily correct, but good, as he is indeed the loyal person one would expect him to be after the previous book), so I ended up liking him just as much as I did at the beginning of the series. Speaking of which, my feelings for Annabeth seem to have reverted to those I had in the very first book too, namely most of the time I cannot stand her. She is clearly the smart girl of the series (Hermione, look out), and I would have expected her to be likable because of that, but she is way too careless with others’ feelings for that.

Nico di Angelo, the brother of Bianca is also back with a vengeance. I imagine him to be about twelve (I may be wrong), but I find him to be quite cool, what with his being always dressed in black and able to summon skeletons and such. A true son of Hades, more so than Percy is Poseidon’s son to me (well, Percy can do interesting things too, summon water out of nowhere, keep himself dry in the middle of a storm and so on, but what Nico can do is way way cooler). Also, there is a new character introduced, a young “mortal” girl named Rachel Elizabeth Dare, who just happens to be my favorite character in this book (her and Calypso). I do wonder what will become of her later on, as I am certain she’s been introduced in the book only as a possible love interest for Percy, because Annabeth is still pining for her traitorous Luke — but we’ll see :)

It probably shows that I had a lot of feelings invested in (almost) all of the characters, right? I did like and did root for most of them indeed, but that doesn’t mean that the characters are all that’s interesting in the book. On the contrary, the author seems to be really good at describing visuals (a thing that for some reason I don’t remember noticing until now), plus his imagination (places, events) leaves nothing to be desired. Oh, and the battle of the Labyrinth is great!

A quote I liked, a thing Poseidon tells Percy, when asked what he thinks about Antaeus sacrificing all sorts of creatures to him:

“Percy, lesser beings do many horrible things in the name of the gods. That does not mean we gods approve. The way our sons and daughters act in our names… well, it usually says more about them than it does about us.”

Thoughts on the ending: It’s a good prelude to book five, I would say. So here Percy is on the roof, when Nico appears all of the sudden and tells him, “Wait, I know how to beat Kronos, and this is the only way you’d stand a chance!”. So Percy invites him in and… ta-daaa! the book ends :)

What I liked most: I very much loved the visuals this book made me imagine: the cherry-colored cattle, the labyrinth, with its various everchanging rooms, the scene with the skeletons who fall apart when they are no longer needed, Kampe, who was half woman and half dragon and “around her waist, where the woman part met the dragon part, her skin bubbled and morphed, occasionally producing the heads of animals—a vicious wolf, a bear, a lion, as if she were wearing a belt of ever-changing creatures“, Briares, who had no less than one hundred arms and “his chest sprouted more arms than I could count, in rows, all around his body. The arms looked like normal arms, but there were so many of them, all tangled together, that his chest looked kind of like a forkful of spaghetti somebody had twirled together” and more. Speaking of Briares, try to imagine this particular scene for example:

“Briares wiped his nose with five or six hands. Several others were fidgeting with little pieces of metal and wood from a broken bed, the way Tyson always played with spare parts. It was amazing to watch. The hands seemed to have a mind of their own. They built a toy boat out of wood, then disassembled it just as fast. Other hands were scratching at the cement floor for no apparent reason. Others were playing rock, paper, scissors. A few others were making ducky and doggie shadow puppets against the wall.”

Isn’t it really cool?

What I liked least: First of all there’s my usual qualm about people substituting “hell” with “Hades” in day-to-day expressions (“all Hades broke loose”, “Hades if I know”) that are so automated I find it hard to believe whoever says them actually thinks of what they mean (so I have trouble imagining Percy thinking something along the lines of “and then, all hell broke loose — oh wait, there’s no hell, just Hades — and then, all Hades broke loose”). Also, I hated the way Annabeth kept calling Miss Dare “mortal”, with disdain, at every chance she got. As far as I noticed half-bloods can very well die too, so they are by no mean immortal and I hated Annabeth feeling so superior over what was actually nothing (yeah, and more than once too).

Recommend it to? I am not sure it shows in the review but I have really loved this book! As such, I dearly recommend it to everyone who has managed to read the previous three books :)

This book is a sequel to:
The Lightning Thief
The Sea of Monsters
The Titan’s Curse


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This is a children’s book, which means that most characters are quite nice (and no one is actually evil). I for one have very much liked Charlotte, mostly because she seemed to me quite smart to figure it all out, and also because she was quite a proper young lady (that’s the adult in me speaking). I bet I would have liked Clare very much too (although from what Emily said of Clare she was a bit too proper for me to like), however unfortunately the author has chosen to follow Charlotte everywhere she went, so the reader had no chance to know Clare first hand. Other interesting characters were Emily (who was a wee bit too spoiled for me to actually like) and Miss Agnes Chisel Brown (the daughter of the family where Emily and Charlotte lived for a while), a young woman I couldn’t help feeling rather sorry for because she led a seemingly dreary life, the only highlight being her memories of her dead brother Arthur.

A part that I have found most interesting was the one regarding the idea of identity. Lost in a time not her own, Charlotte tries hard to hold onto her idea of self, her knowledge of being Charlotte not Clare. Also, she is always very interested in the way people around them reacted to Charlotte becoming Clare and Clare becoming Charlotte, because one would expect that anyone knowing one of them would realize that something was wrong the very moment the switch happened. And yet it seems like no one ever suspects the change, at least not at first, a thing that confuses Charlotte quite a bit. This reminded me in a way of a book I read a while ago (I think it was Terry Pratchett’s) stating that people only see what they expect to be seeing, and they sort of imagine away the rest — precisely what happened in this circumstance, with people who expected to see Clare seeing Clare, and people expecting to see Charlotte seeing Charlotte. Speaking of which, I am quite curious actually about how much different were they exactly (from the physical point of view), too bad we are never told (although people who knew them both usually said they were very different, but only after a while).

Two quotes I liked:

“And, she thought, uncomfortably, what would happen if people did not recognize you? Would you know who you were yourself? If tomorrow they started to call her Vanessa or Janet or Elizabeth, would she know how to be, how to feel, like Charlotte? Were you some particular person only because people recognized you as that”

and

“But when she put her fingers into the water and pulled a marble out, it was small by comparison with those still in the glass, and unimportant, too. It was like the difference between what you long for and what you find–the difference, for instance, between Arthur’s image of war and his experience of it.”

Thoughts on the ending: The ending was just as nice as was fitting for such a book and partially predictable too. show spoiler

Also, I was very sad to discover that what I have read is a “revised edition” and it lacks a scene (nothing very important, according to Wikipedia, (show spoiler

What I liked most: I absolutely adore the title :)

The idea of having the two characters try to communicate with one another was also quite cool (too bad it wasn’t expanded on a little).

What I liked least: Too short and a bit too vague? I very much liked this book but I would have loved it to have a bit more “flesh”, to tell us about the experience from other people’s point of view too (Clare’s is the one I was more curious about, since she went into the future not the past).

Recommend it to? Anyone enjoying children’s books. This is a very light volume (I read it in one sitting) but quite enjoyable (albeit I for one would have like a bit more detail hehe).


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