The Great Zoo of China

The Great Zoo of China by Matthew Reilly

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


The comparisons between Matthew Reilly's The Great Zoo of China and Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park are inevitable. But Jurassic Park is smart, well told, and gripping. The Great Zoo of China is...not.

The story is about a American herpetologist, Dr. Cassandra Jane "CJ" Cameron, who is invited to tour a brand new zoo by the Chinese government. CJ is joined by her photographer brother and several other American bigwigs. CJ specialized in the study of large reptiles until one ate half of her face, leaving her permanently disfigured.

As expected, the minute Chinese start showing off the inhabitants of their zoo - dragons! - everything goes kerflooey. Turns out that winged, 9-foot tall carnivores aren't that easy to control, especially when they exhibit uncanny intelligence and cooperation. Oh, plus the ones that are 9 feet are the small end of the scale.

The dialogue is laughable (the NY Times writer is basically there to infodump and mansplain to everyone), the assertions about Chinese global ambition condescending, and the character development nonexistent. (As soon as shit hits the fan CJ - a veterinarian - turns into Rambo - and she's the only one with good ideas or half a brain, eyeroll.)

I might have been able to overlook all of that - after all, I'm not one to read a thriller about a dragon zoo expecting a modern masterpiece - except the writing is so terribly, terribly awful. There are exclamation points and italics everywhere. Not to mention shifts in tense and other clumsy errors. It reads like a story written by someone with the skills and interests of an 8th-grade boy. There are over 20 redundant, badly drawn maps. And I lost count of how many times Reilly wrote "Chinese" as a modifier when it was so unnecessary. We're inside of a super-secret zoo deep in the heart of China. We KNOW all of the workers and soldiers are Chinese.

Finally, my last gripe: the side characters. They are crushed, disemboweled, and torn to pieces without a flicker of empathy. All but two named Chinese characters die horribly, while only two American characters die. There is a little girl introduced just to have a cute kid in peril to tug at our heartstrings. All of the characters are so wooden and dumb that it's impossible to care. I wanted the dragons to win, because they seemed so much more interesting than every human in this book.

Reilly's explanation of how dragons could plausibly exist and have remained unknown to modern science is a fun one, and in the hands of a competent writer the story could have been fantastic. Sure, it's a Jurassic Park ripoff, but I loved Jurassic Park. All I wanted was to read a zippy story about badass dragons eating people who thought they had everything under control. Was that too much to ask?



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Touch

Touch by Claire North

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Most humans are defined by the one body we get. We change ourselves only through the slow agony of dieting, exercise, plastic surgery, etc. Or we experience the dark drawbacks of the physical body - from overeating, injury, chronic illness, drug abuse. Whoever we are, the grass is always greener in someone else's body.

The narrator of Claire North's Touch knows intimately what it means to inhabit another's body. She is a "ghost" who can wear another person's body like a suit of clothes, and has been doing this so long that her original name, gender, and ethnicity no longer really matter. When she slips into another's skin, she can experience the greener grass for a while and avoid the pain of aging or the inconvenience of suffering consequences.

But a ghost also knows human beings more accurately than they know themselves, and to know someone is to love them. Which is why when an assassin tries to kill her and murders her host, the ghost decides to get to the bottom of the shadowy organization that sent him.

The ghost narrator (who goes by many names but is assigned the name of Kepler by her enemies) likes to readjust her hosts' lives. Whether that means taming the reputation of a society flirt, becoming the loving husband to a previously ignored third wife, or throwing away the drug paraphernalia of a teenaged prostitute, Kepler likes to make projects of her hosts and leave them in a better position than before her arrival. Mostly.

North explores the fascinating implications of a consciousness that can flit from one body to another like a communicable disease. Ghosts suspend a host's consciousness and hijack his or her life, operating invisibly. Hosts may wake after minutes, weeks, or years, unaware of any passage of time or their body's actions in the meantime.

There is sadness and moral ambiguity in Kepler's life. She is very good at running, she tells us, and proves it both literally and also by refusing to question the morality of her own parasitic existence. Kepler prefers willing hosts, but mostly for the convenience. She likes those with good teeth because she has an aversion to pain and the ability to endlessly avoid it. She is also fascinated by the hosts she takes, and calls her attachment to them love. It's easy to like her, though when looked at another way it's a little like having the story told by the protean alien menace from The Thing. The idea isn't new (remember The Host by Stephenie Meyer or The Puppet Masters by Robert Heinlein), but North's execution is fantastic.

Touch is a complex, well-told story that moves at the pace of a thriller. I am looking forward to reading more of Claire North's books in the future.

A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in a Dumpster

A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in a Skip by Alexander Masters

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I've always found other people's diaries fascinating in theory, but in practice they tend to be pretty dull stuff. Most people chew over the same ideas with a dreary repetition, or else they only write when they are in a bad mood. The portrait tends to be skewed either way.

The most entertaining diaries present a self who has an idea of who he or she is, but is showing the reader someone quite different. The modest genius who spills gallons of ink on humbly reciting miniscule personal accomplishments. The argumentative person who insists that the real problem is everyone else.

What makes A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in a Dumpster by Alexander Masters (in the British edition, "Found in a Skip") a fun read is that Masters knows all of these things, but the diarist he discovers doesn't. And yet the mysterious diarist also knows plenty the author has no clue of - his or her gender, age, class, identity....

In places, Masters wants to pontificate over his find more than he wants to discover the identity of his mysteriously discarded diarist. This drags the book very slightly (and thanks to his wife for pointing this out to him!), but his narrative voice is one that I immediately liked because of his knack for describing others in a way that makes them seem fascinating and unique. Especially when they are as fascinating and unique as "Dido [Davies] - a historian, and award-winning biographer, author of two sex manuals under the pseudonym 'Rachel Swift' and the only person in the world who knows where the bones of Sir Thomas More are buried" (page 5). You can't beat a real-life character like Dido.

And in spite of a few dumb parts (handwriting analysis woo-woo), I enjoyed the piecemeal reveal of the secret identity of the overly prolific diary keeper. Although the book has left me with the squirm-inducing thought of how a random self-selected biographer in the future might look at my angsty teenage scribblings. Not a pretty picture.

In spite of it all, Masters has sifted a bit of gold from 148 notebooks packed with dross.

Quotable:

"Diaries are terrible liars. They record dramas out of context, encourage paranoia, rearrange facts, are deliberately biased and self self-justifying, blind you with irrelevance, sensor alternative opinion, exaggerate petty complaints into tragic emblems and, in particular, wallow in the fact that any fool can write about dejection, but describing happiness takes determination and skill." - 81

"Most people sound unbalanced in their diaries (if those diaries are honest), because that's one of their purposes: to let out unspeakable things for a little runaround." - 167

"The diaries teach us that it is too much to be inside anybody's head. It is a horrible place. All that repetition; that endless analysis that doesn't analyze, just mulls a point over and over until it drops dead from banality. What goes on in a persons brain is the opposite of what makes a story live." - 198

The Sorcerer to the Crown

Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



The Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho is exactly how I like my fantasy: eccentric, fun, with a touch of romance.

Zacharias is the newest Sorcerer Royal, wielder of the most powerful magic in England after his surrogate father's untimely passing. He's dealing with the slow ebb of English magic, accusations that he murdered his way into power, and the constant racism he faces as an outsider in a world of snobs - he is a manumitted African slave.

These issues pale in comparison with what he faces when he meets Prunella Gentleman. Prunella has ambitions, secrets, and more than her share of magic, which she as a woman is forbidden to use.

Seeing Prunella and Zacharias confront the world is entertaining. Their reactions to growing up in similar circumstances are very different. If there is a flaw in the plotting, it is Zacharias' passivity. He underreacts to everything from insults to murder attempts and political maneuverings. Prunella, on the other hand, is indomitable. But both are intelligent and principled - my favorite kind of characters.

If you are looking for diverse fantasy, this is your jam. I am looking forward to more of Cho's work, especially the continuation of Prunella and Zacharias' story.