Reading in April

Yes, I'm aware that this is a tad late. As is probably fairly obvious, I've been quite busy lately, but, on the upside, my summer's shaping up to be filled with nothing but hot air and writing, redundant as the combo might prove to be. Future articles might - might - be a shade more on the timely side. In the meantime, let's bust out a time machine and figure out what I was reading two months ago.

Tau Zero boasts shallow characters, lax pacing, and a hard Science Fiction core so incredible that I'm still shaken a week after reading it. For the first time, I understand Hard Science Fiction. As it happens, there really are ideas strong enough to carry novels entirely on their own.

There's no denying that Aickman is a masterful writer. His prose is elegant, his atmospheres pervasive, his ideas fascinating. And yet I'm not sure that we're always on the same wavelength, to speak (as Robert Aickman certainly would not) in clichés. The Model felt like one of the lesser stories in Cold Hand in Mine. Masterfully done and subtle, certainly, but composed of a subtlety too urbane to bother with meaning or gratification.

Classics are always an odd experience. The light jokes of the time are, when looked at from six decades' distance and through a classic's deific airs, bizarre. The Martian Chronicles feels dated in parts, and some of the stories felt too reliant on unbelievable actions to me. That being said, there's no denying the brilliance of several of Bradbury's pieces here, including There Will Come Soft Rains, Usher II, and The Million-Year Picnic. This was my first Bradbury, but I'll be reading more for sure.

Crass, rude, and absurd, Exponential Apocalypse is a hilarious read. Review here.

Daniel Kraus's YA horror novel is equal parts grave robbing and coming of age, and both are pulled off with skill and wit. There are a few discolorations here and there, but they do little to damage the whole. Review here.

Death Poems is one of Ligotti's rarest works and getting it probably serves as a good road sign of the purchaser's loss of sanity. So, is Death Poems worth the exorbitant price (while I won't quote what I paid, I will say that most editions go for over a dollar a page)? In an objective sense, no, it's probably not. Death Poems is interesting and often highly amusing, but it is not Teatro Grottesco. This is the kind of work that's enjoyable, perhaps even thought provoking, but is certainly not life changing. And, for that price, life changing would be a fair expectation. Then again, if you're at the point where you're even considering such an insane purchase, I can almost guarantee that you'll find yourself sliding into it, wise decision or not. Ligotti becomes a bit of an obsession like that.

Like most Ligotti, I read Death Poems twice.

Kafka on the Shore has talking cats, jobs in the library, murderous corporate icons, teen runaways, and gateways to isolated dimensions, and it’s all painted in Murakami’s beautiful but understated prose. This book feels like the fulfillment of much of the man’s style, complete with the bizarre ordinary world of After Dark and the questions of identity and humanity filling Hard Boiled Wonderland. If I can ever wrap my mind around this properly, there will be a review. In the meantime: highly, highly recommended.

Black Halo improved on many of Tome of the Undergates’ flaws and proves a damn entertaining read. Review here.

Valente writes with imagery so thick it would be suffocating if it weren’t so deftly handled. Almost every paragraph here is filled with wonders, but Deathless is not just great prose. Valente manages to create a gripping plot of bizarre creatures and circumstances out of folklore and dreams. This is the rare book than can – and should – be called magical in every sense of that word.

Simply written but awesomely imaginative, Scott Westerfeld's YA steampunk novel is an engrossing read. The ending is rather abrupt, but Westerfeld twists world war one into a shape both amusing and fascinating. Recommended.

The Picture of Dorian Gray’s an interesting horror-style concept wrapped around a book of witty dialogue and fascinating ideas. There’s the occasional moment that drags – such as the seemingly endless chapter describing the minutia of our dubious protagonist’s life – but Wilde proves equally adept at making the reader laugh and think.

I won't be reviewing Historical Lovecraft due to the whole being in it thing, but I will say that it's filled with excellent stories, including Tobler's If Only to Taste Her Again, Meikle's Inquisitor, Reiss's The Chronicle of Aliyat Son of Aliyat, Joshua Reynolds' the Far Deep, and Tanzer's The Infernal History of the Ivybridge Twins among others. You know you're interested...

Sam Sykes - Black Halo

To those reading who enjoy stories that end with noble goals reached, lofty morals upheld, and mankind left a little better for the experience, I would suggest closing this journal now, should you have stumbled upon it long after it separated from my corpse.

It only gets worse from here. (p. 9)

Black Halo is Sam Sykes's second novel. His first, Tome of the Undergates, had many interesting elements, but had an annoying or disappointing feature to match each of them. It was a new kid striding onto the dance floor with a bizarre style that was intriguing but didn't always work. Black Halo is him coming back the next year with not only his original maneuvers but also the skill to make them succeed. All of which, of course, is not to say that those maneuvers (or the preceding tortured metaphor) succeed all the time.

Black Halo is not a book focused on plot. Though there's a lot of action, the characters never advance significantly towards their goals. In my review of Tome of the Undergates, I said: At the beginning of the book, the characters have a magic book, hate each other, and have a series of interesting internal debates. At the end of the book, the characters have regained their magic book, still hate each other, and still have several philosophical puzzles to grapple with. Black Halo doesn't even cover that much ground. The characters start with a magic book, lose the magic book, and have yet to regain it by the time the book ends.

But that's not to say that the book stands still. When it comes to the overall plot, Black Halo doesn't so much move forwards as move sideways. That probably sounds like a condemnation, and it no doubt is to some extent, but the expansion in scale is massive and elevates the book above its predecessor. The majority of Black Halo follows the same adventurers as Tome of the Undergates did, but now there are numerous perspectives that give us further information on the Venarium, the Netherlings, and other groups. Tome of the Undergates was like following a specific, albeit important, sub plot of an epic fantasy. The events seen were interesting, but we were too close to them to grasp their importance. Black Halo, on the other hand, is like witnessing a widescale conflict – with a certain rogue group of adventurers running around in the middle of everyone's plans and wreaking delightful havoc.

The pace is half sprint and half crawl. Within scenes, events often move at a rapid clip, and circumstances often change drastically from one page to the next. In terms of the overall plot, however, it's not unusual to find a thirty or forty page segment that doesn't seem to move the characters in any particular direction. Overall, it's like sprinting into every nook and cranny on a long run and so not getting particularly far at all. The occasional faux-cliffhanger also makes its appearance, chapter endings where the tension would have been resolved with another eighth of a second (or sentence), but where, due to the book's multi-pov structure, the answer doesn't come for three dozen pages.

Still, such things are ameliorated by the general awesomeness of all the aforementioned nooks and crannies. Sykes's world is bizarre, varied, and, above all, interesting. Characters encounter friendly and talkative lizardmen, debate hallucinatory monkeys, antagonize gigantic sea serpents, piss fire and vomit acid after magical mishaps, and get into a dozen other varieties of trouble, trouble solved as often by further catastrophe as by the endangered's quick thinking of skills.

Most of our unmerry adventurers are more fleshed out this time around, and Sykes allows us to peer inside them a fair bit. Lenk, the group's leader, in particular comes into much clearer focus, and the conflicting voices in his head are ominous and speaking of great and dark things. His relationship with Kataria, too, advances, or at least goes deeper.

Of the other characters, Denaos grows the most. Interesting facts about his background come to life, and our glimpses inside the rogue's skull serve to make him more fascinating than despicable – or, at least, a mixture of both. Dreadaleon spends most of his time suffering rather badly from his overuse of magic in Tome of the Undergates. He's got some funny scenes, but his portions only get really interesting at the end.

Asper continues on her path of gods-doubting and strange-powers-experiencing. She's by far the most moral character of the bunch, and the question of the group's rightness (let alone righteousness) rests primarily in her evaluation, but she herself is still mostly an enigma. We get the broad outlines of her conflict, but she probably has the least sections of any of the major characters and reveals little in those she does have. Gariath spends most of his time alone or conversing with a certain ghost. Like in Tome of the Undergates, I found myself enjoying his character far more from other eyes than his own; his perspective is interesting in small doses, but his doom-drowned monologue can grow grating.

In addition to being amusingly written, every one of the character arcs above also share a major trait: repetition. Sykes has a deft hand for characterization and for momentous decisions, but his characters have the annoying habit of making those same decisions again and again.  The first time Lenk surrenders control to the voices in his head is a powerful moment. Every time after that, however, suffers from the law of diminishing returns, and further debates on the issue feel redundant once an answer's been reached time and time again.

Sykes's prose is powerful and irreverent, and it's easy to imagine the malicious grin on his face as he sullies the most romantic and solemn of scenes with messy realities: The firelight bathed her sweat-slick skin in gold, battling the pervasive moonlight's determination to paint her silver, both defeated by the smudges of earth and mud that smeared her pale skin from where she had fallen more than a few times. (p. 350) That being said, Sykes does not just render all moments coarse. His writing is often even poetic, reveling in the edges of human experience and turning flaws into virtues, such as his characters' often "sweat-kissed" skin (p. 32). Furthermore, when it comes to his creations and environments, Sykes is capable of summoning grace and atmosphere to the scene:

The wind picked up, sending the mist roiling about her ankles and her torch's light flickering. It carried with it a stink of salt and the faded coppery stench of dried blood. The moon shifted overhead, exposing a scant trace of light over her.

And with it, a shadow. (p. 143)

There are still quite a few issues that bug me with Sykes's writing, but those issues have been, for the most part, relegated to a background role. If the Aeon's Gate series is a long stretch of road, the end of Black Halo leaves the reader with the feeling that they can still quite clearly see the beginning of the book – and, perhaps, even the beginning of the first book. But the stretch of ground covered was, nonetheless, an exhilarating journey filled with misadventures so preposterous that they cease to be anything other than freaking awesome. Black Halo is messy, meandering, funny, gory, exciting, and fun – all at the same time, all the time.

Black Halo and Fuzzy Nation [Cover Art]

The cover for the sequel to Tome of the Undergates is a tad over the top. Still, it's, as far as I'm concerned, the way an overly epic cover should be done. If you're going to go over the top, you might as well go absurdly, stupidly, awesomely so. My only real objection is the glow around the figure, as it seems a tad too pronounced for me.


The new cover art for Scalzi's re-imagining of Piper's Little Fuzzy is very different from the original cover art for the project. Overall, I think I liked the first version more, but I don't dislike this one, and I'm intrigued enough by the idea of the project to read both the original and it when it comes out.

Reading in April

Absolutely mind-blowing. The Master and Margarita is the kind of book that is both hilarious and disturbing, and it has enough layers that every time you reread a passage something else jumps out at you. All that being said, I’m more than a little hesitant about doing a review. First of all, this is (rightly) a classic; if I butchered the review I’d be quite pissed at myself. Then there’s the fact that I’m writing a research paper on the novel, so I’m unsure if I’ll be in the mood to do more writing on it after that. Until I make up my mind, this website has some very interesting information on the novel.


When I read American Gods, I found it interesting but slow to the point that I had trouble sticking with it. When I finished it, I decided to not read any more books by Gaiman. As time passed, however, I kept thinking about American Gods. It took me a while, but I finally gave Gaiman another chance…and I’ll admit it I was a hundred percent wrong about him. Neverwhere is both incredibly fun and quite touching at parts. Aidan's reveiw is here; my review will be up on Tuesday. UPDATE: my review will be delayed for a bit, though it is still coming.


I may not be the intended audience for Wit, seeing as my entire experience with Donne’s poetry consists of one poem read immediately before the play and the one sonnet quoted in full within the play. As for the play itself, I’m rather mixed. The main character’s dilemma is interesting, but I had trouble with the endless scenes that were, essentially, descriptions of medical procedures. I understand that they were necessary to some extent, and most did try and liven things up, but after a point the wit and meaning of some parts seemed to drown in scans and their ilk. Of course, all of that is likely quite different performed on stage.


For the first thousand pages, Return of the Crimson Guard had me convinced that Esslemont was, without a doubt, in the same league as Erikson. And then it all goes to hell. If you’ve read the book, you can see precisely why I despised the ending on Westeros. If not, suffice to say that a brilliant schemer turns out to be an idiot and an idiot turns out to be…well, still an idiot, but everyone’s convinced that he’s some sort of genius. If you want more information, Pat’s review is quite informative.


When I first started Hat Rack, I read Hamilton’s Fallen Dragon because I was too intimidated to jump in with this trilogy. For the first three hundred pages, The Reality Dysfunction felt like everything I’d feared. The three main plotlines were interesting, but the sheer scope of it prevented everything from fitting wholly together. Then everything clicked, and by page four hundred I couldn’t put this down. I’ll probably write my review once I’ve finished the trilogy, but in the meantime there’s Wert’s review to give you a good idea of the contents and strengths of the book, as well as my post on Westeros from immediately after my reading.


This is the slight outlier on the list, I think. I found this around the house and was actually somewhat curious about how my second oldest reading memories would hold up. (My first were for a book that I took out so many times that librarians said I couldn’t have it anymore, and I don’t even remember the title or author anymore. Damn those librarians!) The answer is…well, I’m not really sure. The book’s kind of amusing, I guess, if in a somewhat painful way. In the end, how can you not root for a pig-esque dude who climbs Mount Everest for the hell of it?


Watchmen taught me a fairly obvious lesson: never discount something just because of the medium. Watchmen is, without a doubt, one of the bleakest things that I’ve read, and the detail that went into the setting is amazing. Of course, the actual mechanics of the ending could’ve been a bit better (a…giant alien squid? C’mon.), but it wasn’t enough to ruin the impact of the story. After taking a bit of time to get used to reading graphic novels (something I’m going to definitely try and do more of, now) Watchmen paid off in spades. If you’ve already read it, you may be interested in Writing Excuse’s “critical reading” podcast on the book. In addition, there's a compilation of other Watchmen-related stuff here.


Anubis Gates was fast paced, filled with great action, and great twists. All that being said, it occasionally got to feel like a tad too much. I read the first half of the book or so in a sitting, but after that the amount that everyone could run in place before getting anywhere began to grate a bit. This is especially prominent when the book’s penultimate battle, ending with the death of a major villain, felt noticeably less climactic than several earlier, entertaining but ultimately pointless, bouts to the degree that I actually only realized it was supposed to be the climax when it, well, ended. Still, Anubis Gates is more than deserving of its reputation; this book contains amounts of sheer fun to rival just about anything else you’re likely to ever find.


I found Fall of Hyperion to be just as ambitious as Hyperion, but not as successful in living up to those ambitions. That’s not say that it’s a bad book, however; Fall of Hyperion still manages to combine fast paced space opera and somber passages on the lives of romantic poets, and that’s a damn fine accomplishment, even if the execution’s a bit marred. Full review here.


As I said back in my beginning-of-the-month post, I bought Tome of the Undergates primarily for Sam Sykes’s personality in interviews and on his blog than because the blurb drew me in. To some degree, Sykes does incorporate the questions he raised in interviews into the novel, but it wasn’t enough to save the book. My full review is here.

Negative Reviews

There was a time when negative reviews were my favorite to write. This was back when I wrote reviews for Metal Archives, and I couldn’t get enough god awful albums. First of all, negative reviews are generally easier to write. Justifying why you like something is hard; pinpointing the element that stuck in your craw is usually quite easy. Second, they’re just god damn fun. Back then, I would throw down all pretenses of objectivity and wade into the offending album armed with nothing but rage and sarcasm.

Then something changed. I got an email from a band member who’d seen my review (and it was just a mixed one, at that). He tried to come off as fairly glib, but I could tell I’d really hurt him. It felt like I’d just punched someone in the face. Since then and the time I finished on Metal Archives, I wrote negative reviews, but the malicious glee was gone.

Now, an easy solution to this problem would be to just not write negative reviews on Hat Rack. The only problem is that, when I hear statements like “I don’t waste time with the bad stuff,” I cringe a bit (and this isn’t a condemnation of any particular bloggers, just a personal thing). I can’t trust a reviewer who likes everything. If you’ve posted ten reviews, and they’re all positive, how do I really know your tastes? I need to see something you loved, something you liked, and something you did not like, for me to even begin thinking about whether we’re compatible. Besides which, ignoring the issue of recommendation for a minute, I just have a problem with the mindset that negative thoughts shouldn’t be articulated. Why on earth not? Don’t we, as reviewers, have as much of a duty to expose the bad as we do to highlight the good?

Up to this point, I’ve written negative reviews on Hat Rack. The difference was that those weren’t books were I felt like the author was going to hear and feel like I insulted them. I don’t think that Philip K. Dick cares much anymore, and I have a feeling that Stephen King isn’t reading my blog.

But Tome of the Undergates is different. I don’t think that Sam Sykes is going to start bawling, of course, but a large part of the reason that I read Tome in the first place was that I loved Sykes’s online personality. I can’t really say that I know him, of course, but I read enough to realize that he was a cool guy who would probably be awesome to hang out with. I could’ve just not reviewed the book, of course. It would have been easy; I don’t put something in the Upcoming Reviews slot until the review’s finished, so none of you would have ever known it was even being contemplated. I considered doing that, but I felt like I was lying to you, reader, even if it was just a lie of omission. So here we are; the reviews up, and I forced myself to be honest and to not sugarcoat my opinion. In conclusion:

I’m sorry, Mr. Sykes, but I had to do it.

Sam Sykes - Tome of the Undergates

“I need more. I need …to know that I’m doing the right and proper thing.”

“You’ll never figure that one out,” he answered decisively. “There’s no way to know what the right and proper thing is, you see. Ask a Karnerian, a Sainite, a shcit and a dragonman the same question, they’ll all tell you something different.”

In a lot of ways, I think that we’ve reached the point where subversions have simply gone too far. Tome of the Undergates is about a merry group of adventurers, going off on a fetch quest. Except that they’re not merry, and, while they are adventurers, they’re far deeper than that cavalier title conveys. Each of them is a fair bit more interesting than they first appear. In a twist that is perhaps realistic for a group of severely flawed, violent characters thrust together, everyone hates everyone else. This is not the kind of hate that is eventually replaced by hugs and I Love You’s. No. This is the kind of hate where hugs and I love You’s are met with dialogue like:

“Is this the part where I’m supposed to cry?”

The thunder stopped with her heart; her face screwed up.

“Wh-what?”

“After this delightful little chat about standing tall against the human menace, are we supposed to be charming little friends? Am I supposed to break down in your puny arms and reveal, through tears, some profound insight about the inherent folly of hatred as you revel in your ability to bridge the gap between peoples? Afterwards, we will go prancing through some meadows so you can show me the simple beauty of a spiderweb or a pile of deer dung or whatever it is your worthless, stupid race thinks is important?”

And, at first, I thought it was an awesome concept. But there’s a problem. When you have six people who fight constantly, and they never come to like each other, and they’re together for the whole book, it never ends. The standard arc of: Dislike -> Fight -> Tearful Make Up, which I’m confident every one of us is thoroughly sick of by now, is replaced with: Dislike -> Fight -> Ma-no, Fight -> Fight -> Make u-, no Fight -> Fight. Sykes’s characters seem promising to start, but, at the end, you realize that the promise is all there is. You never get a centimeter deeper than you were in the first half; their relationships never change one iota.

Besides characterization, the book’s other main element is combat. In this department, things are also a mixed bag. The fighting is, frequently, quite well done. Abysmyth demons are suitably powerful to scare the crap out of the reader the first few times they appear. Unfortunately, their appearance is rarely enough for character’s to shelve whatever witty remarks they were about to make. Now, these are frequently hilarious, but they sap all of the energy out of the fight. The book’s opening battle felt something like Obliveon’s dialogue trees, where everything freezes frame while you calmly discuss rumors with your companions until you’re ready to get back to the killing. Still, it’s not even close to enough to break the battle scenes, and some fights, especially toward the end, are great sources of visceral chaos.

In his interview with Aidan, Sykes said:

It’s actually a surprisingly philosophical book. Not the overt, beard-stroking, “what is a chestnut” kind of philosophy, but the sort that delves deep into the psyche of people without being boring. It takes the standard idea of the adventurer in fantasy and asks the questions that are presumed to be answered in the genre: what drives someone to become an adventurer, who is largely presumed to be a graverobber, thief and unprofessional assassin? Would a group composed of many different races, religions and professions really get along so well as to perform a quest? How can they presume a benevolent deity is on their side when they continue to suffer and die? How can they presume that they are in the right when they continue to cause others to suffer and die?

It’s true, Sykes does bring up several interesting questions. The problem is that, like with the characterization, a fascinating premise is all you get. None of the issues are ever explored. Instead, they’re simply voiced by one character or another. Asper questions how she can be doing good while she follows such a bloodthirsty bunch. At the end of the book, Asper still questions exactly the same thing. There are no answers here. Again, perhaps that’s more realistic, but it’s certainly not more satisfying.

The prose is the only great thing about Tome that I don’t have to qualify at all. It’s descriptive, and manages to be atmospheric when appropriate, but it’s also down to earth and always amusing. That being said, Tome has some of the most unflinchingly modern prose I’ve ever read in fantasy, so if you had trouble with Morgan’s ‘55s, you may have some issues here. It’s well worth acclimatizing yourself, though, because some moments are truly hilarious:

[When having a conversation with a Siren]
“I …I do not have a name, I am afraid,” she replied meekly. “I have never had a use for one.”

“Everyone needs a name,” Dreadaeleon quickly retorted. “What else would we call you?”

“Screechy.” Denaos nodded. “Screechy MacEarbleed."

Tome is quite big. Alright, it’s not quite Steven Erikson’s Dust of Dreams, but it’s a respectable 692 pages, hardback. And it should not be. Tome is not a sprawling epic fantasy; it is a book of a single group of characters that go on a simple mission. The pacing in the book feels fast, and there is generally always at least one character in mortal danger, but it goes on for far too long to be effective. The book opens with a (now infamous) fight scene. It could be a dramatic way to open the book, but it goes on for one hundred and sixty pages. It is not a massive engagement featuring thousands of soldiers and munitions that crack the earth. It is six adventurers killing some pirates. Then some more pirates. Then some more pirates. Then some frogmen allied with the pirates. Then some more frogmen. Then some more frogmen. Then things finally get interesting, but by that point I just wanted everyone to calm down and do something that doesn’t involve killing someone. Like have tea.

Essentially, Tome of the Undergates is a seven hundred page book that has the content of a novel half its size. If fifty percent of the fighting was removed, and seventy five percent of the infighting went the same way, it could be quite good. As it is now, however, it is a colossal exercise in maintaining the status quo. At the beginning of the book, the characters have a magic book, hate each other, and have a series of interesting internal debates. At the end of the book, the characters have regained their magic book, still hate each other, and still have several philosophical puzzles to grapple with. Yes, it’s not quite the ordinary set up for adventurers, but, by that point, we’ve seen it before. At the beginning of the book. And I don’t think we needed to see it again.

I realize that this review is a bit harsh on Sykes. Tome of the Undergates is not a bad book. It’s entertaining, even laugh out loud funny on occasion, but I was expecting more. I haven’t given up on Sykes, but I can’t say that I wasn’t disappointed.

FURTHER READING:

This review by The Book Smugglers does an excellent job outlining the faults of the novel. On the other side of the equation, Wert's review also does this quite well. On the opposite side of the spectrum, both the Mad Hatter and The Speculative Scotsman were fans. In addition to reviews, the three interviews (Mad Hatter, Speculative Scotsman, and A Dribble of Ink) were all fascinating and hilarious in equal measure.

Up and Coming (and Essential?) in April

I'm not presenting an objective list. What would the point of that be, when someone else is doing just that, but a dozen times better than I could? This is, instead, just a personal list of books that I'm interested in and the reasons that I am. Perhaps our tastes will line up and you'll find something, or perhaps not. Let's find out, shall we?


I’m generally hesitant about doing something like promoting book two of a series I haven’t read, but I think I may have to make an exception here. I’ve heard quite a few good things about The Painted(/Warded)Man, though not all positive, but Aidan’s review convinced me to give his books a shot. The excellent cover art for The Desert Spear might’ve just given me the push I needed to do just that…though Aidan seems a bit less thrilled with this second volume, here.


If there is a poster child for internet promotion, it’s Sam Sykes, as far as I’m concerned. I wasn’t wowed by the concept, and Wert’s lukewarm review countered the Abercrombie comparisons and left me mildly interested but unlikely to purchase. Then I read Syke’s interview on A Dribble of Ink. Sykes has the kind of online personality that it’s hard to not get taken in with at least a little bit; he’s so over the top you just can’t help but laugh with him. And then I read Syke’s thoughts on reviewing in general over at the Speculative Scotsman, and I was sold. Can you really tell me that that combination of comedy and insight isn’t something you want to investigate further?


I was first introduced to Kay through Ysabel, and I was more than a little mixed. The prose was excellent and the atmosphere and glimpses of past cultures superb, but the modern world’s intrusions became more infuriating each time they occurred. Thankfully, I’ve been told again and again that Ysabel’s a bit of an outlier in Kay’s catalogue, and Under Heaven looks like the perfect book to give him another chance. If you have any doubts in your mind about this one, I’ll refer you to SF Review’s glowing review. Or, if you need still more convincing, what about Pat’s equally awed take?