This Is Beautiful: Birthday Parties

 This past weekend I hosted a birthday party. Ok it isn't exactly news that parties are fun if you're into it, but I'm really happy that I was able to get different groups of friends together and they all got along. People that work in my lab were able to meet friends that I do theater with! And everyone was cool with it. It's just really nice to see other people having a nice time and knowing that you made this possible. Having my hands in many different pots allows me to do this, and it isn't often that I feel like all of these different parts of me come together. It's really nice. 

“The Hidden Oracle” by Rick Riordan

This is the first book of The Trials of Apollo series! I’ve never read this one from Riordan. We’re now getting into new territory, I’m excited! This whole book is all from Apollo’s perspective which is really different, and honestly I was pretty amused throughout. There are these haikus at the start of each chapter talking about how he feels or what happens in the chapter, and it’s a nice nod to him being the God of Poetry without it getting overwhelming. A big part of the story is how Apollo is a god, but he can still grow and change and become less annoying. So I wonder if his narration will get less amusing as we go as he learns to be a decent person. I think Riordan can manage that balance, but we will see.

Also this book is really GAY, Apollo is canonically bi and talks about how he likes girls and guys, plus Will and Nico are dating and really sweet together. Having a bi protagonist who is also a god? This is really great to see, I bet it means a lot to teens that are questioning their sexuality.

Anyways plot of the book is that Apollo is dumped somewhere in Manhattan as a mortal boy. There he meets Meg, another demigod, and they travel to Camp Half-Blood with the help of Percy (who has a minor role in the book, and good for him to be honest he needs a break). At camp, the Oracle isn’t working and campers have started going missing. Apollo figures out that the woods have become the Grove of Dodona, an ancient way of getting prophecies, and it’s been calling to demigods hence the disappearances. He travels to the woods to figure it out, and finds out that his son, Nero, from Rome wants to control the Grove and is there too. Plus he’s Meg’s step-father and has been manipulating her this whole time. Meg runs away at the end; Apollo wants to go after her but doesn’t know how. Just then, Leo and Calypso return and the plan is for Apollo to get a ride to the West Coast with them!

This book hit a really nice balance of old and new friends, great examples are Percy and Leo appearing but not taking starring roles. It allows us to see some familiar faces and get to know the new cast of characters. The ending battle is sort of underwhelming, like the ending fight in the last series. It feels like the author threw that in just to have it (honestly I didn’t even think it was worth including in the summary). I am excited for the next one though! This series is shaping up to be a good time.

This Is Beautiful: The Heart of Robin Hood

 Alright this past weekend I saw a pretty cool show at my university, "The Heart of Robin Hood." Now this wasn't an entirely perfect production, but there were a lot of really cool things about it. Plus it's just nice to see a show about my obsessions haha.

The good things included the scenic design being really cool. It was in a forest with a ton of ramps, and they had an alcove in the back for a band to play during the show. It also was just a fun production with a lot of funny aspects and some camp. There was this one character, Pierre, who was very funny and constantly broke the fourth wall. In the end, he wraps up the play saying that this show is about how he found his heart, meaning that he found kids that he ends up adopting. Which is really sweet!

The play suffered though from what I think a lot of Robin Hood media suffers from which is that it didn't know what tone it was going with. There was so much camp and silly things, especially in the second half. But the first half involved one man getting beheaded, another losing a tongue really bloodily, and a person being hanged and physically hanging there. Which does not match up. It's a common issue though, I think a lot of people want to make this an intense story about good and evil, but also the villains are comically incompetent and there's anachronisms throw around to be self-aware. And you can't really have both.

The other thing I want to mention is that the play was interesting because it mostly was about Marion, and her dressing as a boy and going into the woods as Martin, who is the idealized Robin Hood. But while that's cool and all, the play is still "The Heart of Robin Hood." I guess we shouldn't mistake who the original legend is about!

But still it was such a fun time, and it kind of was about storytelling and nature which is rad. I had a lot of fun.

"Shadows of Self" by Brandon Sanderson

This book is the sequel to The Alloy of Law and similarly I did get it for free off of Tor.com. However, this one feels very different, I think the author wrote the two pretty far apart temporally. And I suspect that he changed his mind with where he wanted the series to go. One big change is that the narration is slightly different, instead of full chapters from a characters POV we get sections from multiple depending on what’s happening (one isn’t necessarily better but I think indicates a different approach to this book).

The book starts after the previous one: Wax is a constable, Wayne is tagging around with him, and Marasi has gone into law as well (she’s an assistant at the moment). Then there’s been a mysterious mass murder and Wax is on the case when he receives communication (a full conversation really) from Harmony, this universe’s god. (This is where things start to get weird.) It turns out that one of Harmony’s servants has gone rogue and is doing the killing. Their name is Bleeder and they want to free the world from Harmony’s dictatorship. (There’s a LOT about their religion and things like that in this book, I wasn’t able to follow all of it but you get the general idea that they’re up against a very powerful supernatural being.) It turns out that Bleeder was the governor all along and they end up having the constables take charge instead and use the mob mentality of the city (stirred up by Bleeder) to root out corruption. Meanwhile Wax is facing down Bleeder and finds out that Bleeder used to be his old lover Lessie out in the Roughs. Wax thought he killed Lessie and then ends up killing Bleeder. Again.

I honestly liked the original basis of a fantasy mystery book more so than the mystical gods stuff, so take all of this with a grain of salt. It is a cool way though to explore free will, for a lot of the book Wax is dealing with how Harmony tells him to do things, or puts him in situations, just to fulfill a plan of his. This connects to Bleeder who wants to end this and give people full autonomy/chaos really, but that comes with a lot of murder and stuff.

I don’t know, we’ll see where this goes. I didn’t love the turn that this took, having the god stuff was pretty heavy handed for what the author wanted to talk about. But I do have the next one so I might as well read it.

This Is Beautiful: Holiday Celebrations

 I'm a bit of a Scrooge around the holidays, but there is something nice about these. I think it's the time being spent together, especially after this semester when I haven't had a ton of time to hang out with people. So it's making me a little less of a Scrooge. I still have a ton of work before the holiday itself, but the celebrations have already started and I'm enjoying them.

“The Alloy of Law” by Brandon Sanderson

This is another free ebook that I got from Tor.com. I didn’t realize that this author worked on the Wheel of Time series! That made me pretty excited to dive in.

This is essentially a steampunk mystery novel about Wax, a lawman who has spent time in the Roughs until accidentally shooting his partner and coming home to settle down. His old friend Wayne comes to annoy him about a villainous crew kidnapping women and stealing things, so he ends up getting dragged back into it when his fiancée is among the captured. Her cousin Marasi also joins them as a student of law. They end up saving the day and solving it, but all of the women except for his fiancée are still out there in captivity. And Wax learns that his uncle that he thought was dead is behind it all.

 It's a really compelling story, and the magic system with using different metals to do different things (restore health, speed up time, act like a magnet and push/pull steel…) is quite cool. I really enjoyed that aspect, you can tell that the author put a lot of work into that part of the world building.

My main critique is that the romance between Wax and Marasi felt forced. Marasi plays the girl who is so flustered by this guy, flustered by everything really, but falls for him and he thinks he’s damaged goods so he turns her down. It's not even that it's necessarily bad, it's just sooooooo tired. And it's not that great of a trope! Not to mention that Wax killing his previous partner (who was female) feels like "kill the girl so that the man can have some character growth" and that I don't need. It's just you can tell that the author is male when you read this.

 The names are also a lot of fun while reading, there's Wax and Wayne obviously. But there's also the bad guy Max versus good guy Wax. That's all I noticed on first pass, I bet there's others I missed.

The whole idea of an alloy is a prevalent theme as well, that you can mix together two different things to create something new. It gets remarked on a lot in the dialogue in relation to character growth and in relation to the metals themselves since metal figures heavily in the magic system.

Other interesting thing to note is that there's sections from newspapers of the area that I’m sure have SOMETHING to do with the story but I can’t figure it out. They're just snippets of articles and some ads and I know there's something here but I can't figure it out!

 Ok so having thrown all these thoughts together, I adore the characters and the world and will keep reading. There's three more books in this series and I'm excited for them!