Singer of Souls by Adam Stemple Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Singer of Souls
Book Review: This Isn't Your Little Sister's Fantasy
Summary: 4 Stars
There are books that stick in your head long after you have read them, an undigested lump. You worry over them, like a dog trying to get the last bit of meat off a bone. Books that do that are either very bad books, or very good books. "Singer of Souls" is not a very bad book. In the end, I don't quite know what to make of it, other than to say that it is a very good book which is stuck in my head.
Douglas "Doc" Stewart is a junkie. He's been clean for 20 days. How do you kick the habit? What do you need to do to actually get off the junk and stay off? If you stay where all your friends are junkies, it's just a matter of time, really. Looking the at the sharp point of the needle, Doc finally decides to implement his "emergency" plan: leave Minneapolis, fly to Edinburgh, and ask his Grandmother McLaren to take him in for a little bit.
He does, and she does, and Doc settles down to earn some money the way that he knows best: as a street musician. Turns out Edinburgh is a great town for busking. It's not even illegal.
Doc has the gift of rhyme. He can come up with unique couplets instantaneously and continue to reel them off for hours. For a dollar, he'll make up a song about you on the spot. If you like it, he'll record it on a cassette and sell it to you for five. He makes good money, as good as if he was working a steady job -- in fact, busking is a steady job, really. He gets up early, and plays until the sun goes down It's not an office, but it is work. It's a good life, until he sings a song for a beautiful woman, who turns out to be a faeiry. Suddenly, he's enmeshed in another world, with lives at stake, including his own.
The Faeiry aren't good, but they aren't precisely evil, either. Sensible people have always tried to avoid drawing their notice. The Faeiry are supernatural and dangerous, sometimes beautiful and sometimes ugly. They are bound by a set of moral rules that are unlike humans'. The humans, in turn, are bound by our own common morality; murder and stealing and hurting other people are bad, kindness and love are good. This intersection of values is opens an opportunity for one race to manipulate the other.
Stemple doesn't bother with a careful taxonomy of Faeiry. There's no discussion of the Seelie and the Unseelie court, a detailed history of the conflict between them, nor any long tellling of legends about their powers and their past. If the reader knows a lot of folk lore, then what they know fits into what they are reading. and If the reader isn't a mythology buff, everything they need to know is there in the book, without obscure references or long explanations.
It allows the author to cause mystical edges and vistas to form for all of his readers, not just readers who know much, or little, about this cluster of myths. It also neatly gets Stemple out of the problem of resolving conflicting stories, which would require explanation rather than experience. The story is immediate, you feel it in your skin, instead of looking down to watch it from a great height.
"Singer of Souls" rarely goes where you expect it to. The sudden turns, while jarring, are also consistent with the characters, their history, and their motivations. There is nothing gratuitous about the abrupt corners "Singer of Souls" takes. It all follows logically from an illogical world.
There is almost nothing sweet in this novel, though there is kindness and strength. There is even heroism. It is cold and uncompromising, which is as it should be. Humans rarely come off with the better end of a bargain with Faeiry, and all who encounter the Queen of Faeiry are profoundly changed by the experience.
Book Review: What the %$#@ happened to the end of this book?
Summary: 2 Stars
I gotta tell you, this book started out well. Nice pacing, nice character development, nice dialog. It was impressive, and I read quite a bit. I metion that because it's important to note that I rarely come accross a book that grabs me, that I think about when I'm doing other stuff. This one did. For the first hundred and fifty pages or so.
Then...Adam got the bright idea of letting his retarded twelve year old brother write the ending. While on crack. And watching animated porn.
I really don't know what happened. There was obviously some serious failure on the writer's part, and even more failure on the part of his agent, his editor, and his publisher. This was not a subtle problem here. And while it was bloody, that was not what made it bad. And while there was a really bad sex scene, THAT was not made it bad.
What really made the ending so sub par was the lack of a grasp of the story's previous tempo, (I think there's about twenty thousand words missing,) the lack of a flowering of any real relationships, the lack of a cause for the reader to believe in, the lack of conflict, and I think more than that, growth, for the main character, as well as an absence of a price paid for influence, and the incredible narrowing of the scope of the author's world at the end of the book.
You'd probably have to reead it to get what I'm saying, and there are definately worse things you could be reading, this will only take you a few hours.
don't get me wroong though, I'm not writing this becasue I like to slam on people. (Although it can be fun.) I'm writing this because the guy had great potential. If I had to take a guess, I'd say he wrote the first hundred and fifty pages for NaNoWriMo and once he hit the end of November he just wrapped it up in a funky fifteen page masturbatory fantasy.
But hey, at least it has an end, right? That alone makes it better than ninety percent of the fantasy out there.
Book Review: wild urban fantasy
Summary: 5 Stars
An addict trying to quit, guitarist Douglas knows he must leave Minneapolis and the temptation of his friends. He is estranged from his siblings and parents, so to dry out he heads to his Grandma McLaren in Edinburgh. While awaiting a passport he cuts a deal with Twin Town Guitar owner Zack Johannson.
A few weeks later, his grandma welcomes Douglas, but sets three conditions that if he does any he is out. Douglas makes money with his guitar and a gift for rhyme. When the city hosts the annual Edinburgh International Festival and the Fringe Festival, Douglas performs and does quite well until he meets Aine. She gives him a vial promising him he will see the world from a different light. He resists at first but finally takes the drug. Douglas questions his mind as he see fey folks walking the streets of the city; worse they see him with each wanting to either recruit him to their cause or kill him as Douglas learns how dangerous the war between the fey is even as humans thinks he tripped out one time too many.
SINGER OF SOULS is a wild urban fantasy starring a likable expatriate American struggling with controlling his addiction while wondering if he finally went over the edge as the only human who sees the Fey and more terrifying they see him. The story line starts off as a character study as the audience sees Douglas trying to kick the habit, but once he takes that step he feels like Alice through the looking glass. Fans will enjoy Adam Stemple's zany joy ride in the streets of Edinburgh from a distinctly weird perspective.
Harriet Klausner
More Singer of Souls reviews:
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