The beginning: A man called Andrew owns a house, a cobbled-together magically animated manservant that used to be a dog, and a horde of stolen Russian magic. One day a water sprite with whom Andrew is loosely affiliated murders a man who turns out to be the son of Baba Yaga, and all hell is unleashed upon Andrew and his world.

The end (spoilers in this section only, so skip down to “the whole” if you don’t want to know): Andrew appears to be occupying the body of his opponent, and it seems to be permanent. One assumes from this that he won the battle, but that it was a Pyrrhic victory. A character I haven’t met yet has died in the battle, as have a few characters I did meet, and Andrew decides sadly to turn his cobbled-together magical manservant back into a dog and let it die. So that is sad. Not quite as sad as just a regular dog regular dying, but still pretty sad.

The whole: This book had such cool magic. I haven’t encountered such an interesting, weird, varied magical world in I don’t know how long. Whenever Andrew or any of his magical friends did a spell, the ingredients and effects of it surprised and pleased me. Buehlman uses tropes you’ve seen a hundred times before, but twists them in weird wonderful ways, so that the magicians appear to be both insanely gifted and also, I don’t know, rather practical and ad-hoc? Does that make sense as a descriptor? I mean that they usually act with deliberation, but there is an extent to which they are also throwing everything they can think of at the wall to see what sticks.

Not only was the magic cool, but the magical community was really interesting: As just one example, Andrew is able to take VHS tapes with recordings of dead people and open “trap doors” in them, which allows you to have real conversations with the people recorded on the videotapes. He does this for money sometimes, or in exchange for spells from magicians with different specialties to his. (For once, Jeanne, necromancy pays. Actual dollars.)

The magic was so consistently cool and creepy that I was able to overlook some aspects of the book that would ordinarily have bugged me. The writing gets very herky-jerky whenever any action is happening. Viz.:

The following year, Salvador chases a doe into the road.

The big Swede in the pickup truck misses the doe.

Not the dog.

Andrew drinks for two more years.

Thinks that’s when he calls Ichabod.

Thinks that’s when he botches the spell to send him back.

Thinks it’s time to stop drinking.

When really it’s long past time.

This sort of writing is okay sometimes. In fact, sometimes I really like it (see also, Patrick Ness). But as the book kept on going, I did not always agree with Buehlman that the action merited such an extremely high predicate to subject ratio. I sometimes wished he would write regular, and save the predicate extravaganzas for climactic action sequences.

As I said, though, the magic is just so cool. And most of the book is about the magic. It’s not clear to me why the Russian witch has such unstoppably vicious magic — I suppose just because she is Baba Yaga, and Baba Yaga knows these things? — but I loved the inadvertent nature of the precipitating event. Just that someone Andrew knew, someone who is a water sprite and kills people in that vicious water-creature-way of mythology, killed a man she shouldn’t have, and it all came back on Andrew. For Andrew, a very small thing that he might have somehow prevented, and he didn’t, and the result was that someone came in to tear his world apart.

(Magically.)

(Seriously, the magic was so m.f. cool.)

If Those across the River has any of these same practical-minded spookiness, I think I will be very much into reading it. It may be a better book for reading in hard copy, and not on my Nook. The Necromancer’s House was better as a hard copy. Have you found some books are like this?

Cover report: The British and American covers are the same. It’s fine, as far as it goes — that is just what you would imagine Andrew’s house looking like — but it doesn’t capture anything of the way Andrew’s magic feels. Oh well. Can’t have everything.

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Cover report: Same cover in England and America. I like it!

To begin with the good things about The Imposter’s Daughter (affiliate links: Amazon, B&N, Book Depository): It’s a fascinating portrayal of the way Sandell’s father’s dishonesty permeated her life. As a little girl, Sandell is told that she’s her father’s favorite, and you can see that she’s subconsciously fighting hard to hang onto that designation. She sits at his feet and listens to his stories, always trying to get him to keep talking–a habit that serves her well when she gets a job as a celebrity interviewer. But as happy as little Laurie’s relationship with her father appears to be, her cartoons from the time (reproduced in the book) make it obvious that she knew more than she knew she knew.

Sandell is funny and insightful, and she doesn’t spare herself any more than she spares her father. Her years of listening to crazy stories from her father have given her a wonderful taste for the absurd, and it comes out in the writing and the art.

She also addresses head-on the concern that I always bring up when I’m reviewing family memoirs, which is her family’s response to what she’s doing. Prior to writing this book, Sandell published an anonymous article that discussed her father’s insane lies and the effect they had on her. Her father was predictably outraged, cutting off contact with Sandell, and her mother and sisters were angry too. Rather than engaging with Sandell about what she had found out, they clearly wished that she would just stop talking about it. Sandell includes these reactions in The Imposter’s Daughter, which didn’t alleviate my discomfort with the Family Memoir as a genre (it’s not alleviate-able — Family Memoirs are an uncomfortable genre), but at least acknowledged the inevitability of its presence. I couldn’t help wondering what a piece of life writing by Sandell’s mother or sisters would look like: How do they tell their father’s story to themselves? Or do they steer clear of it in their minds, as Sandell seems to think?

For all the positives, though, The Imposter’s Daughter ends up feeling more like a therapy session than like a story that needed to be told. Jennifer Finney Boylan, whose book She’s Not There I am going to read and review later this month (I hope), was born to write stories; she can take four disparate events in her life and weave them into something that feels like a narrative. Sandell doesn’t have the same gift. There is urgency in The Imposter’s Daughter: you can see that it is important that Sandell have some medium to insist upon her own reality when her whole life has been predicated on this other, not-real reality. But that insistence isn’t the story Sandell spends most of her time on, and the book suffers for it.

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The beginning: A boy called Seth drowns. When he wakes up (from death), he is at the house in England where, through some unspecified but terrible fault of Seth’s, an unspecified but terrible Event with lasting neurological consequences befell his younger brother Owen. Seth has not lived in England for years; his family lives in America now, and he goes to an American school and has American friends. But here he is — dead, evidently — and all alone in this long-empty house on a long-empty street in a long-empty British town.

This is…a lot of aloneness. Where are the other people? There is too much aloneness! Is this going to be a mystical sort of book where he’s all alone the whole time and the only other characters we meet are in the flashbacks? And then it ends with him finding peace? I really don’t want that to be what’s up.

The end (spoilers in this section only; highlight blank spaces to see them): Oooo, wow, y’all, that is not at all what is up with this book. I discovered many juicy details from the end. I also did some judicious searching around to discover what exactly happened to Owen, because the last chapter or so wasn’t giving up the secret. Evidently Owen got kidnapped by an escaped convict and found three days later, and he was not the same after that (Seth was supposed to be watching him). Also, apparently, Seth drowned himself on purpose. The other characters (hooray, there are other characters) and Seth all seem to be substantially unimpressed with him about this.

But the real news from reading the end is that something is legitimately up with the world Seth is in. It seems like a sci-fi kind of situation (unclear), and Seth has these two afterlife buddies who are figuring shit out with him. I am so glad I read the end. I am now very excited for the rest of the book.

Note from the future: Turns out there were some fairly key plot points I did not catch on to by reading the end. That’s okay. That can happen sometimes. I’d like to mention them here, but I want to be truthful about what it is like to read the way I read.

The whole: Fwoof. At the beginning of this book, Patrick Ness describes what it is like for Seth to drown, how he keeps getting buffeted by wave after wave, and he can’t catch his breath, and it never ends. This is not altogether dissimilar to the experience of reading a book by Patrick Ness. The night before the day I finished reading More Than This, I stayed up late reading — intending to finish it! — but I hit the two-thirds mark and needed a breather. Because Patrick Ness really really does not let up. (You will know this if you have read his Chaos Walking books.) It’s just event after revelation after revelation after event.

To be clear, I loved it, and I expect I will love it even more when I own my own (physical) copy. There is something about the experience of turning the pages of a Patrick Ness book that is imperfectly recreated when reading electronically. I loved so many things about it that I just want to rave and jump up and down, but instead I will be try to be chill and enumerate its virtues in measured tones.

The fault in More Than This is that it is a little slow to get going. Ordinarily one does not imagine that one will have to read the end of a Patrick Ness book to gain momentum, because if there is one thing the Chaos Walking books have, it is momentum. More Than This begins with Seth spending an awful lot of time alone in his new world, being pleased that he’s found a windbreaker or whatever. Luckily there are flashbacks to his life before, and the events that led up to his drowning, and those were wonderful and melancholy and touching. But Seth’s aloneness depressed me. I wanted more things to be happening in his weird afterlife present.

Maybe a third of the way through, Seth meets up with two other denizens of his strange afterlife world, Regine and Tomasz, and then we are off to the races. The events in the afterlife are suddenly so gripping, and meanwhile we continue to learn more about Seth’s life and what happened with Owen and what happened with Gudmund. This moment — when he meets Regine and Tomasz and the Driver — was the moment at which I realized I was going to be up very, very, very late reading this book.

I love about Patrick Ness how he treats diversity like a given. I am not sure how to describe this. Regine and Tomasz and Seth all come from very very different backgrounds, and their gender and ethnicity and sexuality has made a huge difference to the people they are, but none of those things are the point of them — as people or as characters. Indeed, one of the themes of this book — a theme I loved so hard and I bet Ana did too — is that no one thing is the point of anyone. Not your demographics nor your saddest day nor the worst deed you ever did are the point of you. People are always more than this.

More Than This also features a healthy dose of plausible deniability. Regine and Tomasz are certain they know what’s happening, and they are able to find plenty of evidence to bolster their beliefs. Seth believes them, mostly, but there are times when he thinks that this might all be happening inside his head. Because he and his friends are in perpetual danger, he has to act as though the world is real. Still, there are times when he has serious, serious doubts about its reality. The case for what Seth believes is not weak. The case for what Regine and Tomasz believe isn’t weak either. Patrick Ness doesn’t resolve this, and I love him for not resolving it.

Again I say: This book is wonderful. If you have been curious about Patrick Ness but haven’t wanted to commit yourselves to a whole trilogy, pick up More Than This. You can thank me later.

Note: I received this review copy from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

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