Magician's Gambit

The third book in the Belgariad series is my favorite of the first three.

It picks up directly where Queen of Sorcery. Running out of the snake country, through Maragor, the Vale of Aldur, and Ulgo Land all to get to sneak into enemy borders to get the Orb of Aldur in on of the most well guarded and scary temples of Torak.

I enjoy this book so much because of the diversity of cultures that are presented as well as the background we get on Bargarath. Mara is so sad and my heart breaks for the God. Relg, the zealot of UL, can be annoying to some but he grew on me. He also gets better when he meets a certain woman who makes me laugh.

As always in this series, the map and culture explanation was very important to David Eddings. So there is a lot of traveling in here, but unlike those cultures we explore in Queen of Sorcery I think these people and cultures are so vastly different which makes the comparison more interesting. Ulgo Land and Maragor are one of the most intriguing.

We, again, have many of the same recurring characters who are up to their old tricks, so much so that Silk gets himself in major trouble and has a little PTSD from his experience all the while Barak makes fun of him for it. They are my favorite characters throughout most of the series. Comic relief, okay. I love them.

I recommend this whole series to anyone who is starting to get into fantasy, teens for sure.

Tell No One

Tell No One by Harlan Coben is a mystery novel I had recommended to me by a friend when I was in search of an audiobook. Steven Weber did a great job reading and getting different voices in. There was a large bunch of segments that gangers from the harder parts of New York and I believe he did them justice. They seemed the most visual and realistic of the characters, from listening to them.

This mystery starts out with a husband and wife off on their anniversary down by the lake where no one is around. But as Beck goes to a raft in the middle of the lake, Elizabeth, still on the beach, screams. Beck is knocked unconscious and when he comes to Elizabeth is gone. Her body is found a few days later dumped on the side of a road and the serial killer that has been rampant torturing and killing young girls is caught. Eight heartbreaking years pass and Dr. Beck, Pediatrician, is going through life though "life" is a big word for what he is living. Suddenly, he receives a strange email with odd clues that only Elizabeth would know. A hyperlink sends him to a website and there she is. Elizabeth. Could she really be alive!

Poor Dr. Beck. He goes through hell once he opens that email. More bodies are found near the lake where Elizabeth was kidnapped, he does in for questioning, people are tapping his computer and phone, suddenly he is on the run and the only people that can help him crack dealers from the wrong part of town. He is beaten up, dressed up, and wanted for murder. All on the same day. Yay! *sarcasm*

It was a very interesting novel, though probably not one of my favorites. If I, personally, was reading it I would have had a hard time, but listening to it I was able to get through it. Not that it is a bad book. Probably just not my cup of tea. It had a good premise and solid enough characters. But I found the ending to be rather predictable. The foreshadowing was good and let me make my predictions.

I do wish the other characters had been more developed. We had a very telling description of one character and but very little to describe the personality of the others. I get that Dr. Beck loved Elizabeth, but I felt no reason to love her, no longing for her to be alive. her father had more of a personality as being a gruff cop who was in the service for a long time. I even feel like Beck was just a cookie cutter person. He had no interests. He went to work and that was it. We get nothing really before Elizabeth's abduction of what he was like, nothing of what he stopped doing. Stopped going to games or playing poker or anything. I think it mentioned he drank when he was feeling really down. And I guess he had a dog for about two seconds in the book. But there was very little about him that actually made me like him or any of the other characters. Tyrese was the most likable but in the end he seemed like and means to an end.  :/ I want some good bad guys that I like and full, deep main characters. I don't feel like I got that here. Instead we got some cookie cutters.

Setting lacked a lot and we seemed to jump from one place to another rather quickly. There were parts where the scenery was very well described, but they weren't ever in the action. There would be long blocks of passive description. A few of my friends would probably skip them while reading because they were so blocky.

The big that it has going for it was the story. I really liked the plot and how things flowed. There were some parts though that didn't make sense. The ending was too easily wrapped up except for some loose threads that didn't make it into the bow. Like Coben had an idea and how he wanted it to end, but when the tell all at the end happened it didn't quite match the ending he had in mind. The rest of it though, the weaves and curves were pretty cool.

Would I suggest this book, not so much. Might I give Coben another chance? Maybe. Though not in the near future.

Carve the Mark

I was in desperate need of a new audio book to run too. I looked on the back of this one at the library and found that Austin Butler read for Akos. I recalled the name, and thought it was the same guy who voiced for Cassandra Clare's Infernal Devices Series. I was mistaken and when looking it up, the narrator is actually the main male character in the Shannara Chronicles. Pleasant surprise.

Even with my mistake I listened to and and wasn't too thrilled by it.

The story happens in a universe where a group of planets are in connection with each other. Space travel is a thing and there is a strange occurrence that happens across their universe that changes people as a type of puberty where they get different powers depending on the type of person and personality they have.

While most of the planets are aligned as one people, there is one that is split by two peoples that have a volatile vendetta against each other. Akos is kidnapped with his brother, an Oracle and taken to the other side of the Divide. He is physically abused to "thicken his skin" and later given to Cyra, a girl who constantly is in pain and can give that pain to others often killing them, as a steward to help her with her pain. However Cyra isn't the "knife" that most people see her as. Only he can actually stop her pain and open her eyes the how things really are.

This story if full of plot and intrigue. The characters are very well developed and do grow as people. I really like how Cyra was developing and continued to do so throughout the novel. The plot was very good.

Much like her Divergent series though, it felt like she lacked in setting. Not nearly as bad as her first series, but there was still some. I don't know what the main city looked like besides old mixed with new. I don't know what their ships or guns look like. There was many things missing that it felt like there were holes in the world. This is very important, I think, to not miss especially when making a new universe, not only world. I feel like she did miss this.

In other books I have this feeling of "I need to know what happens next!" but for this one I didn't mind waiting until Monday when I was a the gym again. I didn't care for Akos. It might have had something to do with Austin Butler's reading of the Akos parts. Butler's reading wasn't the best. It actually seemed rather monotone and dull comparative to Emily Rankin who read for Cyra. His voice didn't change for the characters unless the girls were whining or screaming. It was very dull to listen to.

I do understand that reading it yourself is different than listening and you can come away with different experiences, so I would give it a good review for mid-teen readers. They would enjoy it. An older audience who doesn't care for setting would enjoy it too.