Review: The Wind in His Heart

The Wind in His Heart by Charles de Lint
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I love de Lint's work, and this is genuinely quite good... but it's not his best book. I think much of what I like about him normally is the way he makes you genuinely believe in the reactions of his characters - often encountering elements of magic in their world for the first time. And yet this time I kind of failed to believe. Apart from the odd moment of someone commenting that they're a little bit freaked out, I never really believed that I was looking at someonehaving the entire underpinnings of their model of the universe ripped out from beneath them. They all pretty much take it in stride, which gives it less emotional impact on me.

He does an excellent job (I thought, from the point of view of someone who has lived _near_ the Navajo res, but never experienced tribal life from the inside) of depicting the culture of a modern Native American tribe, with it's deep links to the past but also it's grounding in modern problems.

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Review: Splintered Suns

Splintered Suns by Michael Cobley
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I struggled with this a bit, and did finish it in the end, but can't go much better than "ok". The characters are all caricatures of themselves: Pirate Captain, Sneak Thief, Steely Woman Merc, Psycho - they have no depth, and don't feel at all like real people. It's like watching an old Black Adder episode: the situation may be amusing, but you don't believe any of the people are real. The plot is convoluted - involving alternate dimensions, virtual realities, and time travel - and full of Trekkian technobabble explanations, but none of it really seems to matter to the story. Which seems to boil down to:

Bunch of humans do some largely irrelevant stuff.
Drone character introduced in a flashback touches a magic crystal ("offscreen", even from the flashback) and is loaded into a virtual world.
Copy of drone in virtual world does everything of significance from this point forward - including saving the world from Evil Menace - occasionally popping back to explain things to the hapless biologicals in the midst of their irrelevant adventures.

The irrelevant adventures _were_ amusing at times, when you could disentangle them from the convoluted twists of time and dimension. So I didn't hate the book, but I didn't care about it much either.

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