Category: Book Review

Chapter 12

This chapter opens up with the protagonists getting over all that petty bickering they were engaged in last chapter. They apologize and then Alister launches into more of his backstory. Characters are still sleepwalking through the beats of a tired old arc, but on the bright side at least this came in chapter 12 and not in, like, chapter 23 or whatever the chapter right before last is. In fact, since this is book one of a duology, this petty bickering could’ve dragged itself out past the end of the book. Turns out Alister’s father designed his ship, and the Abaric pirate king stole it and some others and killed his father and then pressganged him into the crew. Alister was way more interesting when his background was just having the personal enmity of a single ship full of pirates, rather than having been personally wronged by the leader of some globe-spanning pirate confederation.

Also, Alister’s fault in all this is supposed to be that he’s more interested in getting his bounty cleared than in Charlotte as a person, but Charlotte still has no right to Alister’s affection, so what the Hell? The book phrases it as Alister “treating [Charlotte] like a piece of cargo,” but it’s not like he shoved her in the hold and told her to stay there and keep quiet until they arrived at their destination. The actual “fault” here is apparently keeping a professional relationship instead of obeying the plot and falling in love with the female lead.

Also, they visit some sandy ruined village and get attacked by a giant monster.

Chapter 13

In which the giant monster attack continues. Our monster here is a giant serpentine monster with no eyes or nose, just a giant maw and a bunch of human arms out front that feel around. It’s basically a dune worm that hunts by feeling vibrations on the sand, but unfortunately it doesn’t care how rhythmic your vibrations are so you can’t escape it by grooving to the colors. You can escape it by standing on a rock, though, because it can’t swim through solid stone and dislikes emerging from the sand intensely enough that it won’t pop out and eat something sitting on top of it, plus I don’t know if it can feel vibrations through rock the way it can through sand. Charlotte ends up separated from the group and attacked by a slightly different snake-y worm-y sort of golem, before being saved by some doll golem that can talk. It’s all…okay? There’s nothing wrong with the chapter itself, it’s just suffering from how much I don’t care about these characters or their journey.

Chapter 14

The chapters aren’t getting shorter. I just have less and less to say about them. Quality is actually climbing a bit overall, as we get more weird and interesting ideas and fewer references to Charlotte’s tits, but we’re 55% of the way in. It’s pretty late in the game to try and win my attention just by mostly shedding some early flaws.

The doll golem is named Annie and leads Charlotte to her home in a ruined city. Annie used to be a human but then got golem’d. Also, Alister and Giovanni are stuck on a rock because the one snake chimera is constantly circling it waiting for them to step off so it can murder them. And that’s basically it.

Continue reading “The Immortal Cure: Desert Snakes” →

Chapter 10

My review so far has been a litany of small complaints, and that’s never a good sign. It could be worse. Small complaints, at least, are not large complaints. There’s no Zuula moment here where there’s a scene so horribly, self-righteously self-indulgent and counter-productive that it becomes a massive black mark on the entire book. It’s theoretically possible that the book will suddenly start to take off and I’ll be quite positive on it overall when we come to the end. But as I’ve said many times before, even though the book can recover, it’s not very likely that it will recover, because if CJ Olsen can write a great second half of a book, why can he not also write a great first half of a book? Why would he wait this long to start trying? Probably he is trying, and this is just the best he’s got.

Not to say the book has been devoid of interesting ideas. There’s some reasonably interesting setting work going on in the background, with the golems and chimeras and airships. But while that is reasonably interesting, it’s not the kind of Morrowind-style wild and imaginative world that makes me happy just to walk through it regardless of how bland the characters I’m following are. This world is a decent foundation with just the most boring house in the world built on top of it. The story needs its characters to be propelling it, and they’re not. There’s no chemistry in the budding romance that’s meant to be at the heart of this story, nor to the friendship with Tatiana that Charlotte left behind – that friendship being her driving motivation to assassinate Harthum rather than just walking away. And that lack of chemistry means that I don’t much care whether or not Charlotte succeeds in her quest, nor am I happy to have any excuse to watch her and Alister go on a wacky steampunk adventure together.

What I’m getting at, here, is that part of the reason this review has been delayed is because of how much I’m not especially excited to get back into it.

So anyway, Alister’s new pet golem crashed through the wall of the pirate tavern where they’ve just recruited Giovanni to the party. Everyone escapes, but Alister does so by firing a little grappling hook from his techno-gauntlet to latch onto the fleeing golem, and ends up getting dragged along the ground long enough to end up badly shredded. He’s unconscious by the time they reach the ship, so Giovanni flies while Charlotte plays nurse. She leaves him in his cot to go and grab a canteen, and that’s when the ship is attacked, presumably by pirates. Charlotte is below-decks and can’t tell. The book really tries to sell me on the romance here, though.

Another whistle echoed down the corridor. Charlotte tucked her head between her knees as The Ephrait shook from an explosion, this one on the opposite side. The Ephrait pitched and the canteen rolled to the wall with a metallic ping. Charlotte squeezed into a tight ball. Her knuckles were white as she held tight to the ship. She suddenly recognized where she sat. It was the same pipes she had clung to her first time boarding The Ephrait.

Alister had sat there, she looked to her right. He promised I would be safe.

She looked up at the canteen.

…I must help him.

The little scene where Alister convinced her not to be so afraid of heights isn’t doing nearly the work this book wants it to, and worse, it doesn’t even particularly have to. Humans have a natural instinct to protect their in-group, and Charlotte and Alister are very definitely in this together. She doesn’t need a special reason to help her allies survive, she just needs to not be a sociopath. Hell, even a sociopath would want to keep what few allies they have in good condition in Charlotte’s situation, provided they were smart enough to think that far ahead (which, granted, many of them are not).

Anyway, there’s another escape scene that doesn’t really bear commenting on because we just did this. Maybe some of the things it establishes are going to come up later, but we just escaped from Callan, escaped from Prawle, and are now escaping from the airspace around Prawle. Every other scene in this book is an escape scene, and every effort at character interaction during or in between has been interminable.

Continue reading “The Immortal Cure: Chase After Chase” →

Chapter 7

Alister is distracting the chimera in a manner that just so happens to require Charlotte to take her clothes off. Probably we’ll see how Victorian her undergarments are at some point. For now, Alister is swearing poorly.

This is the most eternally damned thing I have ever done.

Trying to adapt swears from regular English, where they’re largely religious, to worlds with different religions or none at all can be tricky, but it’s not just that “eternally damned” doesn’t roll off the tongue very well. Translate that into regular Earth swears and look at it:

This is the most goddamned thing I have ever done.

Clearly, CJ Olsen is just continuing his tribute to Brandon Sandersen by imitating his inability to swear from Sandersen’s early career.

Continue reading “The Immortal Cure: I Guess We Care About Gregor Now” →

Chapter 5

It’s tomorrow and Charlotte is heading to the library to speak with Jonathon. Look at the way it’s framed, though:

Traumatized, Charlotte had decided that in the morning she would speak to the only person she thought could help.

Jonathon.

Now, I’ve read the back of the book and I know that Alister and Charlotte both get name dropped in capital letters and Jonathon is not even mentioned. Plus, in Jonathon’s previous appearance, he assumed that Charlotte was researching alchemy out of a desire to better understand and be closer to Harthum. What I’m saying here is that while it’s possible Jonathon is arranging to have her smuggled to safety, I’m not gonna be as shocked as the book wants me to be when he instead turns out to be evil. The whole “Jonathon is my only friend” thing not only gets dropped here, but emphasized again on the next page. There’s really only one place this could be going, dramatically. If Charlotte were all “is anyone in this city trustworthy? Is Jonathon in on it, too?!” then I’d actually be uncertain, ’cause that one could go either way.

“Do not be afraid Lady Lotte,” he interrupted with a reassuring smile. “This is a time to celebrate. The Lord Eternal has chosen you as his next consort. I knew he would!”

Charlotte straightened in shock as Jonathon kneeled in front of her and took her hand. “You have been blessed,” he said excitedly. “You have been chosen by the Hero of Eternity.” He looked into her eyes. “He deserves you,” he said with the same sickening smile Lindris had given her the day before. “You will make him so happy.”

…I am alone

At least it was more subtle than I thought. I was bracing myself for some stunning moment of betrayal where Jonathon does a Hans-from-Frozen sudden reveal that he was a villain all along.

Continue reading “The Immortal Cure: Escape From Megacity One” →

Chapter 4

Charlotte is getting all gussied up for her evening with Daddy Sauron. Servants are compressing her body into that universal symbol of Victorian oppression of women, the corset.

Charlotte let out her breath as the three servants standing behind her pulled the corset strings tight. Charlotte felt her rib cage squeeze together, her breasts forcibly spilling out the top. It was extremely uncomfortable and she could barely manage to take a breath.

I wonder sometimes if the reason the references to Charlottes breasts stand out to me is just because A) I had come relatively recently off of a story where it had been a noticeable problem not long before I picked up the Immortal Cure, making me unusually aware, and B) I’d written about it in that first post, which fixed the hyper-awareness in my mind. Definitely it’s a common criticism that books often bring up a woman’s breasts often enough to distract from the narrative, but corsets were actually designed to accentuate breasts (as well as minimize the waist), and it’s not CJ Olsen’s fault that corsets became the universal symbol for Victorian oppression.

Then paragraphs like this bail me out.

Charlotte turned to the side, then twisted to see the back. She had told herself that she would control the outcome of this meeting. She had to show Harthum that he did not own her. But now, standing in a gown likely hand-picked by Harthum himself, Charlotte’s confidence wavered. The dress was gorgeous and, despite the fact that it’s design drew attention to her breasts, Charlotte loved it.

Continue reading “The Immortal Cure: Dinner With Sauron” →

Chapter 2

Charlotte left the marketplace, spotting a trolley stopped on its rails taking on passengers. She hurried over, holding to the strap of her satchel, and stepped up into the cramped compartment, brushing past passengers who stood, holding onto leather handholds hanging from the roof. Men and women filled every crevice of the trolley and Charlotte had to shove her way past two arguing men. She finally spotted an empty seat near the center.

Funny enough, this is actually two separate paragraphs in the print version, but is a single paragraph in the Kindle version.

The main question here, though, is what is Sauron’s princess doing on public transit? It’s hopefully not an “I just love to mingle with the commonfolk” thing, considering the neighbor she ends up with:

A slumbering man in a worn, filthy suit lay beside her. He cradled a bottle of Dresht Rum in his arms as he slumped over the seat, snoring like a starved mist-hound.

And it’s not like this book can’t be judged by its cover. Dude tries to grope her later on, something that provokes no reaction at all from Charlotte, so apparently this Stalker that’s following her around either has a mandate to only intervene if Charlotte faces some kind of existential danger or else it’s just asleep at the wheel.

Continue reading “The Immortal Cure: Immortal Incest Sauron” →

Our author today is CJ Olsen, whose previous work on Amazon is almost entirely non-fiction stuff, which is almost entirely about the LDs church, because Utah. He sold me a copy of the book at the Salt Lake Comic Con, and since I have no idea if it’ll be any good, I figured it fit well into the whole “let’s find out how good this book is together” theme I have going on this blog. The book also came with a free bookmark, which, like, I didn’t realize people still did that. I thought we’d reached the point where the idea that free bookmarks aren’t really effective in advertising your book had reached total saturation. It’s right up there with “begging book stores to let you host a signing” on the list of cliche things authors do to feel more successful that don’t actually help. I guess I just read ebooks so often these days that it doesn’t come up.

I think if CJ Olsen ever reads these blog posts, he might regret selling me a book.

Prologue

That’s never a good sign.

People following these as they come out will be aware that this came out a couple of days late. I bring this up because the fact that this prologue has kind of a boring opener definitely isn’t the reason why it’s late. It’s late because my Sunday video was late, and my schedule slipped from there. But this book does have an opening line that could’ve used some more workshopping:

The cool morning breeze blew through a narrow canyon ruffling light green weeds protruding from the hillside.

Hold onto your hats, this book has light green weeds in it. I’m compelled to read on.

The first line of the second paragraph gets us to the part of the scene we care about:

A bulky airship rested anchored close to the canyon’s side, its slightly rusted, dull iron exterior a sharp contrast to the naturally formed rock to which it was tethered.

Nothing about this airship leaps out as particularly special among airships or anything, but there’s an audience for “this book has airships in it” in a way there is not for “this book has weeds in it.”

Continue reading “The Immortal Cure: Sauron’s Princess Saves A Cat” →