Dreamer

by Brandon Sanderson
31 pgs

Dreamer is a short story Brandon Sanderson wrote, which was included in the Games Creatures Play anthology. As he’s done with some of his other short stories, he pairs two of them together and releases them as a small hard cover double book, where you read one story, then flip the book around and read the second. He paired Dreamer with Snapshot and brought them with him to this year’s Salt Lake Comic Con, where I picked up a copy.

Dreamer is the shortest thing Sanderson has ever published and it shows he doesn’t need hundreds (and sometimes many hundreds) of pages to tell a good story.

It’s a story about a group of friends who have the ability to jump from one person’s body to another, suppressing that person’s soul while they possess it themselves for a short time. The group likes to play games, like ‘capture the flag’ and ‘cops and robbers.’ The rules vary from game to game, but the group plays them without regard to the safety of those whose bodies they use. If the body they’re in becomes injured or dies during the game, they simply jump to the next body and continue their game.

Dreamer is a dark fantasy story and much different from what I’ve come to expect from Sanderson. But I enjoyed it nonetheless. It was well worth the 20 minutes it took to read.

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Gwendy's Button Box

by Stephen King & Richard Chizmar
170 pgs  (Gwendy series #1)

In Gwendy’s Button Box Stephen King accompanies friend and coauthor Richard Chizmar to Castle Rock. The small town in Maine which served as the locale for many of his earlier books. But don’t let the fact that there’s a second author’s name on the cover dissuade you from reading it. It has Uncle Stevie’s prints all over it.

As the story begins, Gwendy Peterson is a 12-year-old girl who is starting to feel self-conscious about her weight. She has decided that this summer she’s going to lose some of that extra weight and return to school in September looking better and ready to shed the “Goodyear” nickname some of her peers use when referring to her. So, each day Gwendy races to the top of the stairs at the park known as the Suicide Stairs.

One day, when she reaches the top, she’s met by a man wearing on old-fashioned hat. The man speaks to her as if he’s known her all his life and proceeds to give her a strange wooden box with different colored buttons and levers on it. The man tells her the box will give her gifts, but that the gifts are compensation for the responsibility she will bear in keeping it.

Each time Gwendy pushes one lever, the box dispenses a small chocolate animal. It’s delicious and satisfies her appetite to the point that Gwendy no longer overeats. When she pushes the other lever, the box dispenses an 1891 Morgan silver dollar, in mint condition. They’re worth hundreds of dollars apiece and will allow her to attend the Ivy League college she dreams about. But the buttons each have destructive powers, and Gwendy soon learns just how important it is to guard the box and make sure it never gets into the hands of someone who would use those buttons with evil intent.

The story is short, but is a prime example of what has made King so well liked. It’s a great story and I think it’s King providing an analogy to how he feels about what he has spent his lifetime doing. Pushing buttons and pulling levers on a small box his entire career has given him everything he has ever wanted, or needed in life, but it hasn’t come without a sense of importance and responsibility.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

The Champion

by Scott Sigler
625 pgs  (Galactic Football League series #5)

The Champion is the fifth instalment in Scott Sigler’s genre-fusing series about American football being played 700 years in the future. The sport is the largest spectacle in the galaxy and is played by members from six different races. Human athletes now dwarf their ancestors from 700 years ago, averaging over 7’ tall, and are stronger and faster than anything even contemplated in today’s game, and are joined on the gridiron by equally impressive athletes from five other alien races. Deaths are a common part of the game and are even part of the stat sheet.

Over the past four seasons, Quentin Barnes, the Ionath Krakens’ quarterback phenom, has taken his team from the developmental league to last year’s Galaxy Football League champions. He’s now the most famous individual in history. There’s even a religion named after him, which consists of millions of his worshippers. But along the way, Quentin has also made powerful enemies. He’s gone up against violent crime lords, including his team’s owner.

At the end of The MVP, Quentin learns that his sister has been kidnapped and taken into the Portath Cloud, a region of space no ship that has entered has ever returned from. It’s up to Quentin to rescue her and return in time for training camp and the Kraken’s defense of the GFL title.

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Since We Fell

by Dennis Lehane
418 pgs

Since We Fell is a great example of why I’m such a big fan of Dennis Lehane’s books. It’s got great characters and a plot that continually compels you to turn the page.

At the beginning of the story Lehane introduces us to Rachel Childs, a woman searching for the identity of her father. She was raised by her mother, an author who emotionally abused Rachel throughout her life and who kept the identity of Rachel’s father a mystery till she died.

Over time, Rachel establishes herself as a respected news reporter. But when she experiences a panic attack while on live tv covering a deadly earthquake in Haiti, she becomes famous as the “drunk reporter,” loses her job, and spends virtually all of the next 18 months secluded in her apartment.

When she finally starts venturing out into public again, she runs into Brian Delacroix, a private investigator she met briefly while she was trying to find her father. They fall in love and get married, and for me, this is when the story undergoes a paradigm shift and really takes off. Rachel, emotionally scarred from her mother’s influence and still feeling vulnerable from the panic attacks she suffers, begins to experience deep-seeded doubts about Brian’s honesty and fidelity.

It’s this sense of psychological uncertainty that Lehane is a master at and that sucked me in completely. When I started the it, I had no idea what direction the book was going to go. Had I known, it wouldn’t have sat on my shelf unread as long as it did.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

The Boy on the Bridge

by M.R. Carey
392 pgs  (The Girl with All the Gifts series #2)

The Boy on the Bridge is a prequel to M.R. Carey’s fantastic book TheGirl with All the Gifts. It tells the story of the Rosalind Franklin, the heavily-armed mobile laboratory that was found abandoned in The Girl with All the Gifts. The Rosalind Franklin was sent out from the city of Beacon on a last-ditch effort to analyze the Cordyceps fungus in order to try to synthesize a cure for the infection turning humans into mindless “hungries.”

The crew consists of ten members, half of them military personnel, the other half, scientists. Included among the scientists is 15-year-old Stephen Greaves, the scientific genius responsible for developing the chemical blocker that prevents hungries from picking up the scent of the uninfected. Greaves is a prodigy, and while it’s never confirmed in the book, he’s also clearly autistic. He can’t stand to be touched by others, is seemingly incapable of telling an untruth, and he deals with everything around him like it’s a scientific puzzle waiting to be solved.

I’m not going to say anything about the plot, since doing so would spoil too much of the story of both books. If you’ve read The Girl with All the Gifts—and even though this is a prequel to that one, you should still read that one first--, much of the plot of this one is going to be a foregone conclusion before you even start reading. Even though that’s the case, The Boy on the Bridge is still well worth the time to read. Carey is a fantastic story teller! His characters are three-dimensional and the story he places them in are compelling and wholly entertaining.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

The Kill Order

by James Dashner
327 pgs  (Maze Runner series #4)

The Kill Order is the first of two prequels to James Dashner’s Maze Runner trilogy. Set 13 years before Thomas arrived in the Maze, the book tells the story of Mark, Alec, Trina, and a small group of others who survived the solar flares that nearly wiped out humanity. But the survivors are far from safe, a new virus has begun spreading, one that turns those who catch it into raving, murderous, creatures.

The story doesn’t waste any time getting started. Mark, Alec, and the others in their small group live in a small village in the mountains of North Carolina. As they’re together, they hear the engine noises of a Berg approaching. When it arrives, it hovers over their village, the side doors open, and men wearing uniforms begin to shoot at them with darts. Mark and Alec are able to board the Berg and discover a box with a biohazard symbol on it containing 24 darts holding the Flare virus. As the story unfolds, Mark and Alec realize that some who are infected with the Flare are immune to its effects.

Who is intentionally infecting people with the Flare? And why? How are some people immune to its effects? Does that mean there’s cure possible?

The Kill Order is a solid addition to Dashner’s series. It sheds some light on some of the mysteries of the first three books, but leaves plenty of things unanswered. Enough to fill one more book.

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Alcatraz vs. the Evil Librarians: The Knights of Crystallia

by Brandon Sanderson
296 pgs  (Alcatraz vs. the Evil Librarians series #3)

I’ve already mentioned this in my reviews of the previous two books, but my son and I are really enjoying reading this series together. The action and the humor have kept him captivated, and in The Knights of Crystallia, he got a taste for what I’ve always enjoyed about Sanderson’s books: the worldbuilding. Sanderson is a master at creating new and vibrant worlds for his stories--no small accomplishment, considering how prolific a writer he is. In book three, Alcatraz and his friends finally make it to the Free Kingdoms, the magical world few of us Hushlanders even know exists.

Alcatraz finally makes it home to Nalhalla, but finds out as soon as he does, that negotiations are already underway to establish peace with the Librarians. The country of Mokia is being used as a bargaining chip in the negotiations, and Alcatraz quickly suspects that those trying to negotiate with the Librarians are actually in league with them, and that it’s all part of the Librarians’ plans to gain control of Mokia.

Despite Alcatraz’s ongoing claims that he’s not the hero of these books, he’s once again thrust into that role, and must find a way to expose the proceedings for what they really are and thwart the evil plans of the Librarians.

This was probably our favorite book in the series so far. The fact that it’s set in the Free Kingdoms helped bring a new level of magic to the story and once again, as soon as we finished it, my son went and grabbed book four off the shelf.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

Right as Rain

by George Pelecano
332 pgs  (Derek Strange & Terry Quinn series #1)

Right as Rain is the first book in George Pelecanos’s series featuring private investigator Derek Strange and Terry Quinn. Once again, this series is set in Washington D.C., but not the part of the District tourists ever visit. The book takes place in the inner city of Washington, where drugs and violence are a part of daily life for many.

Derek Strange is a black ex-cop who now owns his own PI company. He’s hired by a woman whose son, Chris Wilson, an off-duty black policeman, was killed by a fellow officer during a street altercation. The officer who killed him, Terry Quinn, came upon Wilson, who was holding another man on the ground with his gun pointed at him. During the altercation, Wilson turned his gun towards Quinn and his partner, and Quinn killed him. Wilson’s mother hired Strange in an effort to clear her son’s reputation. She knows her son was a good cop and not one of the many corrupted by drug money.

Quinn, who was exonerated by the department but decided to leave the force because of the cloud of suspicion that always hovered over him with his colleagues, is interviewed by Strange during his investigation. Quinn realizes his road to redemption tied to Strange’s investigation, and begins assisting him as he tries to uncover the truth behind the events of that fateful night.

This is the ninth book by Pelecanos I’ve read, and I’ve yet to read a bad one. Strange and Quinn are each compelling characters who could easily anchor a series of books by themselves. Together, they create a team that has me very excited to read the rest of the series. As with the other books of his I’ve read, the plot in this one is gritty but full of heart. The pace is slow at first, but it gradually accelerates to a thrilling conclusion. If you haven’t read any of his books before, this is a great one to pick up and try.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆