Review: The Fireborne Blade

The Fireborne Blade by Charlotte Bond
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This novella didn’t quite work for me. To begin with, each of the nearly two dozen chapters of 170 some odd pages means that each was painfully short and the PoV changes fairly rapid. Not a fan. Add to that the six (6) info dump chapters presented as parts of a reference called “The Demise and Demesne of Dragons” that was used to wedge in most of the world-building and the four (4) flashback chapters that are needed to give the plot twist its punch, and you are left with a short story that simply tries to do too much in very little space … which is a shame, because what world building there was I found interesting for the most part. To be fair … a lot of readers might actually see this as a plus. At any rate, what is left is not enough to actually develop the characters, especially given that my initial reaction to all them was fairly strong dislike … so we are left with trope based caricatures that make the whole work feel like RPGLit (Not my favorite genre). I can’t help but wonder if this would have been better as a full length novel … the pieces are all there, just left undeveloped.

The basic story is a knight on a quest to retrieve a magic sword from a dragon (killing said dragon in the process). From the interwoven encyclopedia the reader is left with the impression that this is a fairly common pastime for knights, if quite dangerous. In this particular case, the knight is a woman who apparently disgraced herself over some imagined slight and thinks this legendary sword will return her into the good graces of the king … not exactly sure how that is supposed to work, but then again, I don’t really understand the whole motivation of the knight here to begin with … it comes across and a super contrived and poorly constructed plot device. Of course … every knight has a squire, even disgraced knights … but this squire is a tad off from the beginning, so it should come as no surprise this because an important factor at the end … which frankly seemed a bit rushed and deus ex machina to be honest (might have avoided that with more room to build up the final conflict, but then again, maybe not). There are some stylistic choices that didn’t seem consistent to me as well, and that detracted from the over all quality of the book, making seem like a debut story …

I was given this free advance reader copy (ARC) ebook at my request and have voluntarily left this review.

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Review: Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins

Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins by Jacob L. Wright

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) is one of the foundational sacred scriptures for three (3) [Abrahamic] religions. Each tradition takes a slightly different approach to interpreting what it actually says (exegesis), but few commentaries explore why each story is told the way it is told … perhaps because of a presumption that because they were inspired by God, they did not actually change or evolve … a presumption that is no longer the general consensus of biblical scholars. In fact, there is a significant wing that promotes the exact opposite supported by recent discoveries of ancient versions of the text that appear to illustrate how they evolved over time for different jewish communities. Stepping into that academic line of questioning, Why the Bible Began begins with accepting this evolution as fact and then takes it one step further by suggesting that there was a specific purpose to the work of these historical redactors and a specific reason these changes endured (why the work).

Most biblical scholars are familiar with the document hypothesis … this appears to take a slightly different approach. It starts with the idea that there really never was a United Monarchy … in fact, the starting point very nearly aligns with the minimalists view of early Israel. As such, we start to see parts of what appears to be conflicting traditions woven together for a specific goal … to create the idea of a people define by belief and practice instead of by territory or ruler in order to help the community survive being under the heel of external conquerors. What I found interesting is how this was a concept that was mostly driven by circumstances … in other words, it was the fall of the Northern Kingdom of Israel that provided much of the skill and source material to weave together disparate traditions to make a unified national narrative. Then it was the subsequent fall of the Southern Judean Kingdom that forced the creation of a people narrative to united the community throughout all of the diaspora.

Over all, despite being more of an academic piece, it was well supported and very accessible if you are interested and open to this approach … it won’t work for everybody. There are a lot of references to assumptions that represent current research that make this more of a companion work that provides a solid overview with a deeper dive into the support to fully understand the why the author takes the stance that he does.

The chapters and sections in this work are:

Introduction
Part I - The Rise and Fall
Chapter 1 - Abraham and Sarah: From One to the Many
Chapter 2 - Miriam: Empire and Exodus
Chapter 3 - Deborah: A New Dawn
Chapter 4 - King David: Between North and South
Chapter 5 - Ahab and Jezebel: Putting Israel on the Map
Chapter 6 - Jehu and Elisha: Israel’s Downfall and Judah’s Jubilation
Chapter 7 - Hezekiah and Isaiah: Putting Judah on the Map
Chapter 8 - Josiah and Huldah: Judah’s Downfall and Deportation

Part II - Admitting Defeat
Chapter 9 - Daughter Zion : Finding One’s Voice
Chapter 10 - The Creator: Comforting the Afflicted
Chapter 11 - Haggai the Prophet: Laying the Foundation
Chapter 12 - Nehemiah the Builder: Restoring Judean Pride
Chapter 13 - Ezra the Educator: Forming a People of the Book
Chapter 14 - Hoshayahu the Soldier: Peoplehood as a Pedagogical Project

Part III - A New Narrative
Chapter 15 - Jeremiah and Baruch: A Monument to Defeat
Chapter 16 - Isaac and Rebekah: The Family Story
Chapter 17 - Moses and Joshua: The People’s History
Chapter 18 - Hannah and Samuel: The Palace History
Chapter 19 - Solomon and the Queen of Sheba: The National Narrative
Chapter 20 - Jonah and the Whale: The prophets as Survival Literature
Chapter 21 - Yhwh and His People: Codes, Covenant, and Kinship

Part IV - A People of Protest
Chapter 22 - The Matriarch: Women and the Biblical Agenda
Chapter 23 - The Hero: Redefining Gender Roles
Chapter 24 - The Other: Tales of War, Outsiders, and Allegiance
Chapter 25 - The Soldier: Sacrificial Death and Eternal Life
Chapter 26 - The Prophet and the Priest: Open Access, Public transparency and Separation of Powers
Chapter 27 - The Sage: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes
Chapter 28 - The Poet: Song of Songs and Psalms
Chapter 29 - The Queen: Peoplehood without Piety
Chapter 30 - Conclusions: Nations, Nationalism, and New Bibles

Some of the other points that really got my attention are:

Through its destruction at the hands of the Assyrians and Babylonians, the nation became essentially a religious community held together by the cult. The precondition for this religious community was foreign control, which forced Jews from the political sphere into the spiritual

That Elohim created humans in his image was a radical claim. Traditionally, only the king is made in the divine image; here it is all humans.

Rather, the scribes who curated the biblical corpus consciously took what priests and palace members had long guarded as their special heritage and made it available, and indeed mandatory, for the education and edification of the entire nation.

Having forfeited territorial sovereignty, communities in both the North and South needed to create for themselves a space in a foreign empire. The space they carved out is not so much territorial and political as it is social, one demarcated by practice and behavior. And because this project was by and large the work of scribes, the tools they used for demarcating it were written traditions.

The answer to this question bears directly on two rival accounts of the nation’s origins. We have just explored how scribes created one account, the Family Story, by connecting the originally independent figures of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We now turn our attention to a competing work, the Exodus-Conquest Account, that begins with the stories of Moses’ birth and commission.

The People ’s History consists, as we saw, of two parts: the Family Story of Genesis and the Exodus-Conquest Account. At the heart of the Family Story are traditions related to Isaac, Esau, and Jacob; they likely originated before the downfall of the Northern kingdom in 722  but were clearly reworked – from both Northern and Southern perspectives – for centuries thereafter.

Over the centuries, Southerners came to see themselves as members of the people of Israel. As they did, the People’s History became a prehistory and preamble to the older Palace History, with the People’s History furnishing a framework for the most formative stories as well as collections of divinely revealed laws.

With this sacred object, scribes charted a path from Mount Sinai to Mount Zion. These two fixed points in the National Narrative correspond to two competing social circles, one that identified with the Torah and the study of texts, and the other that identified with the temple and priestly rituals. The Ark thread in the National Narrative ties them together by telling how Moses deposited the tablets of the Torah in the Ark, and then how later Solomon deposited the Ark containing these tablets in the temple.

The inception of the covenant thus provided a major impetus for scribes to embellish the National Narrative. Older portions of those books had already combined disparate histories into a common story, giving divided communities a shared past and sense of kinship. But after being reworked, the narrative’s overarching purpose is to demonstrate the validity of the covenant, culminating with the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of Judah.

The scribes who curated the biblical corpus clearly did not want make space for some form of heavenly afterlife. For them, future life and “resurrection”were to be sought in a revived community after its death in defeat–one with families finding their ultimate happiness in the enjoyment of the good, God-given earth that had been created to endure for eternity.

Thanks to these ambitious editorial moves, the Pentateuch punctures the bubble of priestly privilege. Prerogative becomes duty. It is no longer a matter of what the priests get to do but rather what they have to do. They are to perform their tasks on behalf of the nation, and they must neither shirk their duties nor bend them according to political influence.

I was given this free advance reader copy (ARC) ebook at my request and have voluntarily left this review.

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Review: Rise, the Quantamancer

Rise, the Quantamancer by A.R. McNevin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Book: ***
Performance: ***

An interesting if confusing fantasy

This is a difficult book to review. The initial publisher’s blurb was very interesting; however, the book struggled to deliver on that promise in several areas. Perhaps the most significant critique would the the overwhelming tendency to describe verse show that made it story something akin to reading an encyclopedia. There were long sections of data dumps that, while vaguely interesting, were also boring. The undifferentiated voices in the narration didn’t help with that as each chapter seemed to bleed into each other. There were for PoV hijinx as well where for some reason the storyline following the witch Danika was told by her bard companion where Edgar told his own story and Thaddeus had more of an anonymous narrator. Not a big deal … but when you title your chapters on the character PoV and then not tell it from their perspective … I found it to be a tad disorientating. Then there is the execution. The basic idea is that science stopped working, but the way that was actually done was extremely inconsistent and also confusing. It was not until the end that it started to makes sense and frankly my wife had already given up on the book by then. I did manage to stick it out until the end though and I found that the story does get better as it evolves.

The basic plot revolves around three (3) characters as they try to figure out their “post-science” world. Edgar is the science guy and has to totally reinvent himself after everything he knows no longer governs how the world works. For the most part, he drifts around the Washington DC area until he eventually aligns with the anti-magic (formerly known as science) faction and slowly corrects and adds nuance to the idea that science has failed. Along the way, we see a third faction that also seems to be opposed to the new world order … religion … and as expected, it was not portrayed in the best light. Danika is an earth witch in the Connecticut/NYC area and is basically on a quest (accompanied by her companion bard/narrator Jaskier wannabe) to make sure the evils of science don’t come back (as can be imagined, there is a lot of overly simplified pontificating by both sides). Thaddeus is the last character and arguable the most interesting … since he is over 1000 years old and a survivor from the original fall of magic to modernity. For this book, he adds a few interesting side quests but no real help in advances the plot … of which there is a minor resolution at the end as well as a huge epilogue and setup for the sequel. Over all it was a super light, if mildly entertaining, story that struggles to rise above the standard fantasy tropes.

I was given this free advance review/listener copy (ARC) audiobook at my request and have voluntarily left this review.

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Review: Women and Warfare in the Ancient World: Virgins, Viragos and Amazons

Women and Warfare in the Ancient World: Virgins, Viragos and Amazons by Karlene Jones-Bley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There is an interesting presumption about the participation of women in warfare, which is arguably an activity largely restricted to men; so I was very much interested in the potential for this book, especially given the fairly recent news of DNA results reclassifying some “warrior” burials (bodies interred with weapons) as female instead of their original classification of male. This had given me the impression that the historical record might be incorrectly over looking the contribution of woman warriors. Unfortunately, this book does very little to change what is arguably a consensus that actually taking up arms and fighting in the rank and file is a predominantly male activity. The focus here appears to be more on myth (gods and legends) and power (queens and commanders) which are more an exception to the rule than anything else and are not really anything new.

That is not to say I didn’t enjoy reading about these famous and powerful women, I did … but I was looking for something different here … evidence about what the “average” woman did in war … and as might be expected (although only hinted at here) is that this was primarily restricted to a defense of home and hearth (under or alongside the husband unless they were away) … with the potential exception of Scythian horse archers, the presumed inspiration for the amazon legends (which absolutely makes sense). In fact, the focus on female deities does not IMHO do anything to support the concept of human women in war (especially given the prevalence of such deities within societies that had near complete prohibitions of such). In addition, the area of investigation was restricted to what is largely considered to be the western world (and immediate influence such as Persia). So while the information was interesting, it remains a disappointedly incomplete treatment of the subject.

The chapters and sections in this work are

Chapter 1. In the Beginning: Mythological Figures
Chapter 2. Indo-European Goddesses Affiliated with War
Chapter 3. Legendary Figures - Mortal and Supernatural
Chapter 4. Archaeological Evidence
Chapter 5. Historical Women Through the Roman Period
Chapter 6. Historical Women from the Roman Period to 1492

Some of the other points that really got my attention are:

The military women we will examine in this work possess at least three characteristics in common. They are recurrently thought of, or described as, virgins, are characterised as viragos and very often labelled as amazons.

Although we have a fair amount of evidence for women working outside the home in antiquity (see Stol 2018: 339–90), for much of human history a woman’s place was thought to be in the home, bearing children and taking care of the needs of her family.

Although we might think that the archaeological evidence would clarify the question of what defines women warriors–she who has weapons is, she who lacks them isn’t–it does not. In fact, the archaeologists’ conclusions often lead to further questions. Some scholars take the presence of weapons as proof of ‘warriorhood’, but others do not. Weapons alone do not confirm military activities.

The weapons represented with the goddesses are, usually, less tangible and more generic, serving more as identifiers of their warrior aspects than weapons to be used in combat. The intangible weapons used by a number of the goddesses fall primarily into three categories: magic, interference or in a number of cases–particularly the Irish–sex.

Furthermore, other Semitic cognates of btlt render the term more as a ‘nubile girl, adolescent’, and not precisely ‘virgin’ in the modern English sense. The nubile designation also comports with the general depiction of her as ‘young and nubile, with small breasts and a thin body’ (ibid., 83), leading Walls to use the term ‘maiden’.

The term ‘virgin’ did not always refer to a physical state, one which implied chastity … [T]he term may well have been a figurative one which pertained to age, not necessarily chronologically, but qualitatively. A virgin was in the youth of her powers, in the process of storing them, and, as such, her ‘batteries’ were ‘fully charged’. Indeed, virgins not only stored untapped energy for men, but they were also able to transmit their powers to them in a nonsexual manner, without diminishing those powers.

There may be a memory also of the priestesses of the god of war, women who officiated at the sacrificial rites when captives were put to death after battle. The name Valkyrie means, literally, ‘chooser of the slain’, and in the eleventh century an Anglo-Saxon bishop, Wulfstan, included ‘choosers of the slain’ in a black list of sinners, witches, and evil-doers in his famous Sermo Lupi.

To the Greeks, the thought of Amazons brought fear of chaos. Amazons were a symbol of female aggression and this was no way for a woman to behave.

The shieldmaidens (skjaldmær) appear in Scandinavian mythology and folklore as young women who choose to fight as warriors. A shieldmaiden is said to keep men at spear’s length, approaching them only when she is armed with a spear or axe. These shieldmaidens are females (it is not completely clear if they were maidens in the chaste sense) who chose to go into battle.

The results concluded that the skeleton of the Birka warrior in grave Bj.581 was, indeed, that of a female, establishing her as ‘the first confirmed female high-ranking Viking warrior’, and that she also has a genetic affinity to the population of what we can consider the Viking world (ibid., 5).

The earliest reference to women engaging in this activity comes from a senatorial edict of ad 11 that bars women from the arena and a later, ad 19, edict that ‘banned the descendants of senators and equestrians (as well as the wives of the latter) from fighting in the arena as gladiators’ (ibid., 956).

This extraordinary woman was never directly involved in the military, but she lived through war and revolution. Her Book of Deeds gives diverse advice on how to select a campground, what was good camp food, how to attack a stronghold, how to defend a castle and what was required for a general’s bed.

I was given this free advance reader copy (ARC) ebook at my request and have voluntarily left this review.

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