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jeriendhalSummary: Isaac Vainio, small town librarian and libromancer in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, with the ability to pull magic and even objects from the printed page, finds himself in trouble again when magical mechanical bugs attack the tree of his dryad lover Lena Greenwood, which drags him into a crisis involving half-wendigos, laid back Yooper werewolves, Chinese book ghosts, and the Destroyers, dark beings that seem to exist inside magic, ready to take over the minds of unwary magicians who overuse their abilities.
Oh yeah, and his boss, Johannes Gutenberg, inventor of the printing press and immortal magician, is still kind of a dick.
Review: This is another fun entry in![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jimhines’s Libromancer series, though it does suffer a bit from Middle Book Syndrome, as we move past the world set up from the first book to the introduction of a major crisis in this one, which is left for the most part unresolved. Particularly, a new character is introduced seemingly to resolve the question as to whether you can pull magic from e-readers as well as the printed page (Answer: Yes. Assuming your mind is a bit more flexible than Isaac’s), and she looks like she’s going to form a major portion of the plot, but in the end is shuffled off to the side only to appear in the epilog to set up the next book.
Aside from that, things move along briskly, with the threats to Isaac and Lena being ratcheted up steadily, as Isaac has to deal with both enemies that are hissable, and others that are sympathetic, and his nominal boss whom Isaac is growing a lot more uncomfortable working for.
My only major beef with the story is that I listened to the audiobook edition, and while narrator David DeVries does a competent job with most of the female characters, his take on Lena is, er, subpar. In the story she’s a sexy, Rubenesque dryad warrior pulled from a pulp science fantasy novel of the sort that would make John Norman wince at the bad writing. To portray her, DeVries using a voice that in theory should sound sexy, but generally comes across as a guy with a cold doing a bad Marilyn Monroe imitation. In the story proper I could mostly ignore it, but in the chapter openings narrated by Lena as she tells her life story it gets mighty painful.
Other than those points, this book is Recommended.
Oh yeah, and his boss, Johannes Gutenberg, inventor of the printing press and immortal magician, is still kind of a dick.
Review: This is another fun entry in
jimhines’s Libromancer series, though it does suffer a bit from Middle Book Syndrome, as we move past the world set up from the first book to the introduction of a major crisis in this one, which is left for the most part unresolved. Particularly, a new character is introduced seemingly to resolve the question as to whether you can pull magic from e-readers as well as the printed page (Answer: Yes. Assuming your mind is a bit more flexible than Isaac’s), and she looks like she’s going to form a major portion of the plot, but in the end is shuffled off to the side only to appear in the epilog to set up the next book.Aside from that, things move along briskly, with the threats to Isaac and Lena being ratcheted up steadily, as Isaac has to deal with both enemies that are hissable, and others that are sympathetic, and his nominal boss whom Isaac is growing a lot more uncomfortable working for.
My only major beef with the story is that I listened to the audiobook edition, and while narrator David DeVries does a competent job with most of the female characters, his take on Lena is, er, subpar. In the story she’s a sexy, Rubenesque dryad warrior pulled from a pulp science fantasy novel of the sort that would make John Norman wince at the bad writing. To portray her, DeVries using a voice that in theory should sound sexy, but generally comes across as a guy with a cold doing a bad Marilyn Monroe imitation. In the story proper I could mostly ignore it, but in the chapter openings narrated by Lena as she tells her life story it gets mighty painful.
Other than those points, this book is Recommended.
