The Black Conspiracy - Ken Magee

Ancient magic has infected the Internet… is this the end for civilisation?

Previously - Ancient magic has transported Tung, a young thief, and Madrick, a has-been wizard, across a millennium. The powerful magic they brought with them was unwittingly spread over the Internet by Michael, a hacker whose good intentions far outstripped his common sense.

Problem - Civilisation simply can’t handle the unforeseen consequences of the magic and the only people who can prevent the ensuing catastrophe are the same three who created the mess in the first place.

Now - To make matters even worse, evil wizards have followed Tung and Madrick through time. They’re determined to hunt down and destroy the pair, and with them, our modern way of life. Saving the world has just got a whole lot harder.

Yet another amazing tale from Magee.

This book is so fun and amusing. It keeps you drawn in and just won't let you go. It is filled with a plethora of idioms, and Tung's attempts to use them correctly is just hilarious.

The introduction of the Universe was really well done. She is definitely a new favourite character. The way she related to things was clever and intriguing, and I might just have to start referring to Lady Luck as Lord Luck from now now on.

This book was wonderful and I would definitely recommend it. But read Dark Tidings first, just to increase the level of awesome.

The Good Fairies of New York - Martin Millar

Dinnie, an overweight enemy of humanity, was the worst violinist in New York, but was practicing gamely when two cute little fairies stumbled through his fourth-floor window and vomited on the carpet...

When a pair of fugitive Scottish thistle fairies end up transplanted to Manhattan by mistake, both the Big Apple and the Little People have a lot of adjusting to do. Heather and Morag just want to start the first radical fairy punk rock band, but first they’ll have make a match between two highly unlikely sweethearts, start a street brawl between rival gangs of Italian, Chinese, and African fairies, help the ghost of a dead rocker track down his lost guitar, reclaim a rare triple-bloomed Welsh poppy from a bag lady with delusions of grandeur, disrupt a local community performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and somehow manage to stay sober enough to save all of New York from an invasion of evil Cornish fairies.

If they can stop feuding with each other, that is.

I struggled, for the entire length of this book, to not simply walk away from it forever.

The story was presented in such a scatterbrained way that it got me dizzy with all its hopping about. Almost every paragraph was about a different group of fairies dealing with a different issue, all of which remained disconnected for the majority of the book.

There were many threads of story coming together in the end, yet somehow it miraculously got tied up in a tidy little bow that was far too easy for all involved.

However, I applaud the author for providing a wide variety of characters in his story. Unfortunately, his climax was un-climactic. It started to climb and as it was approaching the peak it just stopped and ended instead of talking the extra step to reach the apex before descending.

All in all, a very disjointed and uneventful book.

The Mushroom Shift - Joe Clifford Faust

As the year draws to a close, Monmouth comes to realize that the county's aging Sheriff will soon be succeeded by the political enemy who put Monmouth on the Mushroom Shift to begin with. Survival mode kicks in and he begins to consider his options, interrupted by his crumbling marriage, his drinking, and the never-ending parade of drunk drivers, family fights and perverts that make up small town police work.

This is most definitely not your average cop drama. And that's what makes it a good read.

 

I was intrgued by this small town and the goings-on of its citizens because, as we all know, small towns can be a little...shall we say 'odd'? Faust was able to really humanize his characters and their idiosyncrasies.

 

A few times I got confused with which nicknames belonged to whom, making certain situations and conversations difficult to follow.

 

The ending caught me off guard, it was not at all what I expected, but it was what I've been trying to find in a novel for a while now. Not your run-of-the-mill "happily ever after", but it left me content nonetheless.