Customer Reviews

Blood Engines (Marla Mason, Book 1)

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Finally something for those of us who like urban fantasy but are not too fond of romance novels.
A powerful. mostly immoral sorceress, Her possessed sidekick and a former hollywood star are out to save San Francisco, not out of any 'good' motive but because the bad guy has torqued her off and has something she needs to save her own life.
Fans of the Dresden Files and the early Anite blake books should love this, anyone who likes urban fantasy will probably not be disappointed.

Sorcerer Marla Mason has to stop Susan Wellstone from casting her spell. If she doesn't, it will have horrific consequences to both Marla and the city she guards, Felport. To stop Susan, Marla has traveled to San Francisco with her partner, Rondeau. But something is wrong in San Francisco, something seriously wrong that is leaving a trail of dead sorcerers. Marla doesn't want to intervene in the business of another city, but she will have to if she has any hope of saving her own city.

BLOOD ENGINES introduces readers to Marla Mason, a sorcerer who at first glance appears to be rather cold and forbidding. T.A. Pratt shows us the glimpses beneath this façade, glimpses that reveal the caring heart of this woman dedicated to protecting and preserving her city. It took me awhile to warm up to Marla, but as the story progresses I learned to admire her willingness to sacrifice even the people and things she cares about for the greater overall good.

T.A. Pratt creates characters who aren't simply good or evil, but rather have shades of both just like anyone else. Bradley "B" Bowman is the easiest character to like, as he doesn't appear to have any artificial artifices and his motives are much more apparent on the surface. Even Rondeau has his darker moments, as his background history is fascinating and I'm hopeful there is a story forthcoming about that. T.A. Pratt also does a fantastic job at incorporating various mythologies and legends into the motivations and histories of the characters, leaving readers with a fascinating tapestry of tales within tales.

BLOOD ENGINES is the first in what looks to be a promising new series. There are some uneven moments as one would expect in any new series, but these issues pale in comparison to the overall premise of this entertaining and fast paced story. BLOOD ENGINES is easily recommended.

COURTESY OF CK2S KWIPS AND KRITIQUES

When I first heard about Blood Engines, I was actually on the website of the wonderful Kim Harrison, author of the Hollows series (and if you haven't read it yet, go do it!). Mrs. Pratt has made a stunning entry into the world of scifi/fantasy. Her characters are a bit over the top, but they have a real-world feel to them. It's refreshing to find a female lead who is more than willing to mess with other people's idea of morality in order to protect that which is most important to her- the city of Felport. This book is packed with high-energy and powerful characters, each with a distinct agenda and all with their own quirks.

The book uses a stunning array of mythology, theology, practicality, and action to advance the storyline. The characters' motivations are well explained and detailed, there is more than a little use of humor and shock when dealing with the odd phenomena that seems to happen to Marla and her cohorts, and the villains of the piece are suitably nasty. This is one book I didn't want to put down. The only thing that tended to annoy me were the descriptions- we'd start getting a sense of what was going on from them, and then Marla's distaste for anything but information pertaining to her motivation would cut it off abruptly. Other than that, a great book.

Sorcerer Marla Manson is in San Francisco with her companion Rondeau, looking for a magical artefact that could save her life. Back in her hometown of Felport, a rival for her position as guardian of the city, is preparing a spell that could destroy her. Unfortunately the sorcerer who had the artefact has just been murdered. He's only the first victim, and it soon becomes clear that if Marla wants to save herself, she's going to have to save San Francisco and the rest of the world first.

First the stuff I had problems with. The beginning is rather like being hit over the head with a mallet. It's very 'tell the reader what's going on by having two characters talk about a situation they're already aware of'. This info-dumpy style pops up throughout the story. Though it does become less intrusive.

I loved the actual adventuring in San Francisco but found the whole reason for being there, to be weak. Causing me at several points in the story (whenever Marla mentioned the terrible spell her rival, Susan, was attempting to cast) to be on Susan's side, wishing she would just cast the spell already. Additionally the timing for this terrible spell felt contrived. Marla needed a reason to be in San Francisco and that was it.

Marla is difficult to like as a character, though this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Initially she appears completely amoral (one rule for her, a different rule for everybody else), but she has a strong sense of integrity not readily apparent. Indeed it's only as we come towards the end of the story that you appreciate she does have more depth than it first appears.

Now, for what I loved about this book. It has some of the most original stuff I've read recently in urban fantasy. People being killed by golden frogs and hummingbirds. Seers talking to sewer grates and trash cans to confirm their visions. Stealing a child's jawbone to use as an oracle in a jar. The train that doesn't go anywhere. A Giant Frog eating San Francisco. There's loads more packed in there, too much to list here. T.A.Pratt also has a way of painting a picture with words, so you can see the golden frogs hopping about the train station, or an impenetrable wall of hummingbirds.

The character of Bradley is fascinating. Initially dismissed by Marla as not having enough power for her to be interested in. He keeps crossing paths with her, in an intentional unintentional way. Circumstances have granted him power, but he uses it in a convoluted manner, in order to be able to cope with what he can do. Through him we get a completely different view of this world of magic and power, and of Marla.

Finally the dialogue, especially in the second half of the book is really well written.

"...we'll find the Parable Witch, or whatever her name is."
"If it's even a her. Or, rather, if it even appears to be a her. Because, honestly, it's going to be an 'it'."

Blood Engines starts off with a heavy hand, but the author's touch becomes lighter as you read through the story and are pulled into the world. Although at the end I find myself hoping a future book will follow B and Cole (a story I would be chomping at the bit for), I'm happy to see where Marla's arrogance and attitude will take her next.

Poison Sleep - Bk2 - Mar 2008

T.A. Pratt's Blood Engines is a full-blooded, fast-paced, urban fantasy, with perhaps a darker, more cynical, edge than much of that subgenre. It is the beginning of a series, though this book is self-contained, and I suspect the rest will be -- it has the look of a "template" series, like those so common in the mystery genre (see Robert Parker's Spenser books and Sara Paretsky's V. I. Warshawski books, for example). (I note that T. A. Pratt is the name Tim Pratt, author of The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl as well as last year's Hugo winning short story "Impossible Dreams," is using for this new series.)

Marla Mason is the sorcerer who runs the Rust Belt town of Felport. But her rival, Susan Wellstone, plans an intricate spell to overturn her, and Marla's only hope to foil her plans is to find a magical object called a Cornerstone. The only one of which she is aware is in San Francisco, guarded by her old friend Lao Tsung. So she and her sidekick, a not quite human young man called Rondeau, rush across the country -- only to learn that Lao Tsung has been killed, by a horde of South American poison frogs.

Marla needs help from the San Francisco sorcerers to find the Cornerstone. But she soon learns that they are being targeted for elimination by a crazy South American who calls himself Mutex, and who wants to bring back the Aztec gods, complete with blood sacrifice. She and Rondeau begin a sort of whirlwind tour of San Francisco sorcerers, including an Asian herb magician, a practitioner of sex magic, a cybermage, and more. They have one primary ally -- a gay actor named Bradley Bowman who had to quit the movies when he started having prophetic dreams and meeting oracles. And they have several enemies -- Mutex, of course, but also some treacherous sorcerers, and an old god that Marla manages to offend. Besides the magical tour, we get a nice look at some San Francisco history and geography. And a very fast-moving, well-constructed, and not predictable plot.

Besides the plot, I particularly liked the use of magic in this book -- it is fairly logical, and manages mostly to avoid the problem of magical powers scaling conveniently to fit plot needs that plagues so much fantasy. The characters are engaging enough, but I didn't feel I got to know Marla and Rondeau quite enough -- perhaps because they are not on their home turf in this book, perhaps because character developments for them are being saved for future volumes. We do get a good sense that Marla is not by any means a shining heroine -- she is plenty flawed: overconfident, too violent, only too ready to brush aside others in pursuit of her desires. (It is just that the other sorcerers mostly seem even worse!) Bradley Bowman is a nicely drawn character, though, and so too are a number of less important characters, particularly the old god Marla offends, and a San Francisco historical figure who appears late in the game. This is a nice opening to what could be a tasty series of urban fantasy adventures.

Well, it IS urban.

I guess if you like your main character to have less personality than say, that old rusty beater that just rattled in first gear down your blighted neighborhood street, then you will definitely like Marla, the protagonist of "Blood Engines". No offense to the car.

Marla is urban and oh so edgy. She knows what a city is supposed to be; polluted, decaying and stinking of human waste. Nature is too "cute" for her. She's tough. At one point, after obliterating a "swarm" of hummingbirds (hummingbirds!!) with a fireball, she kicks one of their burnt little corpses aside with her steel-toed boot. She thinks about how "This was the kind of S**T she lived for, What she got out of bed in the morning hoping for and what she went to bed at night dreaming of".

What a charmer.

But wait! There IS a sympathetic character in the form of an enslaved God who Marla "helps", if you could call working from a point of complete self-interest "helping". He is a part of "nature", not URBAN enough for Marla! He promises to kill Marla later in the book. I kept reading and hoping, ... waiting for it to happen.

Instead, he ends up fighting in "the main event", a poorly written and tired apocalypse, while the poorly defined and nondescript main characters (including Marla) watch while having snacks on a nearby hillside.

How gripping! (*snore*)

I guess I could pick up the next book to see if he kills Marla, .... ummm... but I don't feel like giving T. A. Pratt any more of my money.

WARNING!! --THE WORST BOOK I'VE READ ALL YEAR (save your money)

When I heard about the Marla Mason series, I was excited. The Anita Blake series has become too oversexed and the Kelley Armstrong "Otherworld" series too varied. I was looking for something different but that still had that gutsy, gritty realism in a lead heroine that the original Anita Blake stories had. But as I read through Blood Engines, I realized I don't feel anything for this book. Even with the great reviews by authors I really adore (Harrison, Armstrong, Murphy) and comparisons to the Dresden series, which I also adore, this book (and I'm betting this series) is disappointing to me. I don't care at all for the heroine, whose personality is gratting on my nerves. The humor in the book, which at times is good, is spread too thin to make the whole book enjoyable. And the characters I do find most interesting, are like shadows of the heroine, who doesn't interest me at all. I was looking forward to falling in love with this series, but regrettably the only "falling" happening, is this book falling short.

Blood Engines is a gritty, urban fantasy tale that doesn't pull any punches. That's how I would describe it, at least. It follows a sorcerer named Marla Mason, the guardian of a city called Felport, and her companion Rondeau, a spirit-in-a-bottle, if you will, who has, in the past, stolen the body of someone else. Marla has a big problem: one of her rivals is prepping a wicked spell that will end Marla's life and destroy Felport in the process. And Marla can't have any of that. Marla and Rondeau must go to San Francisco to find a magical artifact that will give Marla the power she needs to counter her rival's spell. Unfortunately, nothing is ever as simple as searching for buried treasure. There's a new boy in the City By the Bay and he's knocking off local sorcerers one by one; and Marla is caught in the middle of it. With the local talent suspecting her to be the local murderer, her wicked rival planning to cast Marla out death-style, and a disturbing murderer running around killing people with poisonous frogs, will Marla be able to get the artifact? Or will she go the way of the dinosaur?

What I like about T. A. Pratt--who is also known as Tim Pratt, by the way--is that he's not afraid to push the boundaries. I'll be honest in saying that I am not terribly familiar with urban fantasy, at least not in this very modernized vein, but there's something to be said about Pratt's ability to take what would seem outlandish and absolutely insane to us and make it seem normal or, at the very least, less shocking. In some ways I think this is both a compliment and a complaint. Certain things that happen within Blood Engines are alarming; it is a highly sexualized book, for example, and takes sex to a different level, although without the overly described vulgarity of certain urban fantasy authors (who shall remain nameless). In some ways the inclusion of such sexual content into normalcy is a good thing, because it can reduce the shock value; in other ways it can hurt the overall story by making things that would otherwise have a purpose as shock value be somewhat needless. Pratt, thankfully, doesn't overload on the sexual content and I only found one particular scene to be somewhat gratuitous, though not so gratuitous as to make me uninterested in finishing the book. (Generally I'm against content for shock value, by the way, although sometimes it does have a purpose).

Blood Engines is an intriguing book. It successfully creates an entire underground world in San Francisco filled with sorcerers and magical beings, although not in the fanciful and rather flashy fashion of Harry Potter, but more along the lines of what you'd expect from a Philip K. Dick urban fantasy novel, if PKD would ever have written such a thing. Pratt, interestingly enough, has created different kinds of sorcerers, each with specific focuses and leanings. For example, there are sorcerers who have an affinity with the dead (ghosts, particularly, and souls), which allows them to raise the dead and use them for their own purposes, and sorcerers who are connected with technology, allowing them to manipulate seemingly advanced objects into a lot of really mean stuff--imagine a magically enhanced electronic alarm system. Each is woven into the underground, highly urbanized feel of Pratt's magical portrayal of San Francisco. It's as if this underground culture could very well exist (and wouldn't it be interesting if it did?).

I share one complaint with SQT that seems rather prevalent within urban fantasy, although more so on the paranormal side (vampires, werewolves, etc.): sarcasm is getting somewhat unruly. Marla fits into this mold, although, to her credit (and Pratt's), she doesn't become annoying (I noticed it while reading, but it wasn't something that made me want to drop the book); my complaint is mostly focused on a lack of diversity and perhaps my desire to see a more rounded Marla than I think was presented. The story and the weirdness of Blood Engines, however, kept me going and this is probably the most important aspect of any novel. No matter how funny you might think your characters are, if the story surrounding them isn't enough to keep the reader interest, then it's a failure. Blood Engines is, thankfully, interesting, though not without flaws.

I enjoyed Blood Engines and I was always curious to see what Pratt would do next to make his vision of San Francisco more gritty, weird, or downright insane. I will be honest, though, in saying that urban fantasy is not my forte. While Pratt's novel was entertaining and a relatively quick read, I think my general low interest in the subgenre prevented me from enjoying it further. If you're an urban fantasy nut, I suspect you'll love this book as much as I love a good space opera. Pratt is a decent prose stylist, fitting into a popular fiction mode quite easily, and I will likely look at some of his other work before continuing with the Marla Mason books (Poison Sleep, Dark Reign, and Spell Games). This isn't to say I didn't like Blood Engines or Pratt's work within Marla Mason's world, I simply want to test the waters and see what Pratt is all about. And I think I may do that by looking at Little Gods, which has one of the most beautiful pieces of cover art I've seen in the last few years.

Ok, so the plot was mediocre and the characters were a bit two dimensionalish... but the world building was really unique. It was the world itself, with its unexpected 'rules' that kept me reading. This was definitely unlike any of the other urban fantasy on my shelves- grittier, darker and kind of addictive. I'm looking forward to the next book because the flaws I noticed in this one could be addressed with more experience with the characters.

I read a lot of urban fantasy. Not to get off on what this book isn't, when "what it is" is a very good read...

This is not a novel of a cute teen/20something who finds out she has spectacular magical abilities, which apparently include being able to run/fight in three inch stilettos and evening wear, and she must face off against the hidebound elders while choosing between the true love of the vampire king and werewolf chief.

This is the story of a kick butt magician who fought hard to control her city and is having to fight even harder to stay in control and alive. In her cutthroat world, she's a constant target by those that want to depose her. Leaving her own city to seek an answer to the latest challenge in San Fracisco, Marla becomes embroiled in solving the mysterious murder of the person she was seeking to help preserve her life.

Pratt's Marla is...raw? Uncouth? Focused? Demanding? I'm not sure of the right word to describe her. He's drawn a realistic image of someone that has the drive and motivation to succeed in a dangerous field and it is a refreshing change to see such a character in urban fantasy.