Happy New Year my friends! I hope that Christmas, Thanksgiving, Hannukah, New Year's Eve, and any and all celebrations that I might have missed in my time off
went well for you. As for me, I had a great Christmas. I saw
Into the Woods and loved it because Meryl Streep nailed the witch role and made me think she'd be a good manager for a business run by capitalist pigs. I played plenty of games of
Bananagrams and
Mare Nostrum (maybe I'll blog about these later because it makes for great fun on the "cheap"). And speaking of "cheap," I don't think that authors
David Powers King and
Michael Jensen have anything to worry about in that respect with their book,
Woven, coming out this year because
it's absolutely brilliant, and if it doesn't sit at the top of the
New York Times "bestseller lists" for fantasy for at least twenty weeks...I may just lose faith in the barometer of what I consider "good taste."
 |
"Woven" in hardcover. Not every book from a Big Five publisher is graced
with a hardcover print. The fact that Woven is means that there's a big marketing
push for this book, and honestly it deserves every penny. I hope King and Jensen
become millionaires over and over. It's raining hundred dolla bills y'all! |
Okay, so I've known David for quite a while now, and he sent me an arc of "Woven" in November (for the first time in my life, I actually felt like I knew somebody important--thank you, David!), and I basically read all 365 pages in three days.
Woven is the kind of rare, original fantasy that I was thirsting for. In a way, I felt like a man that hasn't had a drink while attempting to cross the Sahara desert on foot and is about to collapse with exhaustion and dehydration when suddenly there's this oasis with Palm Trees and a Four Seasons hotel.
"Woven" came along at just the right time (kinda like a 90-minute massage at the Kura Door spa in Salt Lake City), it's fingers kneading my jaded temples back to life with respect to a genre that I think has grown stale with copycats and nerds who all played
Dungeons & Dragons as a kid and decided they'd write stories about their characters and expect people to read about them.
Woven is free of magic schools and universities! It is free of hipsters and
man-scaped spornosexuals that bounce between the real world and the world where magic, fairies, and vampires are real! It's free of "fantasy bloat" (which is how I describe pretty much any of the
Wheel of Time books). It's free of the narcissistic author: the writer that sets out to dazzle and horrify you with his
epic-ness because no one has ever thought of anything as
epic as weirdly-named
epic monsters and
epic labyrinths and
epic seasons that last ten years and
epic walls and
epic power struggles and
epic descriptions of food and
epic battles and the
epic idea that killing off beloved
epic characters makes the story
epic, dammit! Hell, I don't even know what "epic" means anymore since it has become as useless in describing things as the word "very."
Much like its cover,
Woven is simple and that makes it beautiful. Let's look at the cover for a moment. It features a ring and a needle, both of which are important for the story. The ring is something Tyra gets from Gleesel (the coolest goat witch ever), and it isn't
The One Ring. However, it does allow the wearer to distinguish between truth and lies. I'd love something like that. As for the Needle? It's a bit more on the cool side of things. It's called the Needle of Gailner, and it has the ability to alter reality in the same way that a weaver can alter a pattern on a loom.
Woven is also clever. Nels is a strapping lad that's had his "thread" woven together with that of a beautiful princess named Tyra (when they were babies). The idea of "arranged marriage" is very medieval (I didn't really like this part but understand that for the majority of history, arranged marriages are how things got done). I do like how it is essential to the story, because without it Nels would have stood no chance at all.
Because Tyra's "thread of life" was woven together with Nels, she could always find him even in death. As romantic as that seems to
Notebook lovers everywhere, each possesses a personality that's like a cheese grater with respect to the other, and this is mined to great effect by the authors for comedy. As expected, circumstance (and the fact that they are both gorgeous people) pretty much ensures that they grow to love each other (which ends up being something even more powerful than
the most powerful artifact in the world, a.k.a. the Needle).
The engine behind the whole story is the diabolical Rasmus who is a powerful magician bent on destroying Nels because, as Shakespeare wrote in the
Merchant of Venice, "The sins of the father are to be laid upon the children." Rasmus is a well-developed villain, having been the apprentice of Ickabosh (a master fabricator/sorcerer) and a person that's willing to do anything in the grasp for power, even if it means murdering lots of people and using his magic to impersonate them once their dead.
Although I've never met Michael Jensen in person, from what I know about him, the idea of
Woven's magic system came to fruition in his mind over the course of ten years. Forgive me, Mr. Jensen, if I get that wrong. But in reading this book, and thinking of the hard work both of these authors did, I can say that all that time and dedication shows in the pages.
Woven is a polished jewel among books. It deserves it's Big Five publishing contract hands down, because this thing is a masterpiece. The pacing in
Woven is perfect, every single character has a purpose, every place the characters journey to moves the story forward, and "fabrication" is probably the most original and elegant magic system I've encountered in books since David Eddings introduced me to the
Will and the Word in the
Belgariad over thirty years ago
.
Woven is a book whose peers are
Stardust by Neil Gaiman,
the Belgariad by David Eddings, the
Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny, and the
Prydain chronicles by Lloyd Alexander. It's a book that can be read and enjoyed by all ages, and I hope it gets made into a big budget movie. Disney are you listening? I own your stock so making this into a movie would make us shareholders happy :).
Anyway, for clarity's sake (and for that old Amazon bone), I give
Woven five stars out of five, and it's honestly one of those books that
had I known something was going to be this good, I might have rated other books lower in comparison. Alas, these are the challenges in life I must face when it comes to reviewing books.
I hope you all stop by David Powers King's website, congratulate him on
Woven, mark it "Want to Read" on Goodreads, buy the book when it's out, and shout out some love for #teamScholastic (they brought you such fun stories as
Harry Potter and
The Hunger Games and now, well
...Woven). Please stop by on January 30th of this month when
I'll be honored to be an official stop on the
Woven blog tour! Let's hope that Mr. King and Mr. Jensen's literary agent and publicist don't mind the interview questions I sent them (and answer them) because they are some pretty good ones. But if they don't get answered, well that's what twitter (and sequels) are all about.
Above is a picture of The Paris Bistro in the summertime. It's one of my favorite places to go (especially when the weather is warm) because you can sit outside, and they hire local musicians to come by and play accordion music which just kind of heightens the atmosphere of the place. David ordered a filet mignon (it was his first!) on my recommendation, and I'm glad he liked it. Then we talked lots of book stuff. At this point in my life, Mr. King is the most famous person I know, and he happens to be rather well connected with friends like James Dashner (who wrote The Maze Runner) on essentially "speed dial." I told him if he's ever hanging out with George R.R. Martin, to snap a selfie in the car and send that to me with a message: "Just me and George cruisin' around town."
