Daniel O'MalleyStiletto: A Novel

Intro:Every year, there will be at least a few books where I'll finish the book and think: "Damn it. Can I just write a GIF-filled review and call it a day? Because there's no way I can do the awesome of the book justice, with my review." PictureBecause an Emma Watson GIF should be enough to convince anyone, right?​Unfortunately for me, and fortunately (?) for all of you: I don't have good GIF game. So I'm going to hunker down and do my damnedest to explain:* Just why Stiletto was worth the four-year wait,* How Daniel O'Malley is clearly a badass feminist, who writes excellent female characters, and* Why I will be highly suspicious of anything citrus-scented from here on out.​Ready? Then read on for more!Things that worked:Characterizations:If there's one thing readers likely learned from The Rook, it's that Dan O'Malley writes damned good female characters. Myfanwy Thomas was a super powered everywoman, with the humor, snark and organizational capabilities that made her unforgettable to every reader.So it's probably unsurprising to say that the two female leads of Stiletto: Pawn Felicity Jane Clements and Grafter Odette Leliefeld, are every bit as compelling as Myfanwy. Though Felicity and Odette are clearly from two very different worlds, O'Malley does an exceptional job of showing how they both fit seamlessly into the greater Checquy/Grafter merger puzzle.Felicity and Odette's relationship naturally evolves as the book progresses, beginning with them meeting as adversaries, and eventually moving into hesitant friendship. Along the way, O'Malley does a nice job of using their personalities and backgrounds to flesh out the institutionalized hatred between the two groups, and also helps to emphasize the challenges of being young and female, in changing, complex environments.Through trial and error, both girls individually come to learn that the other has strengths and gifts that are not dissimilar to their own, and their eventual friendship is a great reminder of just what it means to have an ally in challenging situations.Writing/World-Building:So let me get this out of the way: yes, Stiletto is a very long book. It's actually about 100 pages longer than The Rook, which was already a very long book.(Fun fact: the Stiletto audio book is about twenty three hours to Rook's sixteen.)But it's evident from the first few chapters, that the added length is exactly what O'Malley needed to flesh out this new and slightly more complex world. He uses those pages to great effect; not only building on the quirky, super powered world of the Checquy, but also crafting - pun intended! - a convincing, heartbreaking foundation for the GraftersThere's an inherent logic for how the Grafters came to be, and just how the hatred between the Checquy and the Grafters initially developed. Though the history was a tad more than I needed a times, it's an absolutely convincing look at just how everything has been building to this moment, and for Odette's delegation to pave the way.As for the actual writing? Dan is as funny, detailed and necessarily succinct as ever. Both of his female voices are strong in third person, and have quirks, tics and thoughts that soundly differentiate them from one another. Just like The Rook, there were bits of dialogue and description that I just wanted to reread over and over, which made the reading process probably longer than it had to be.The supernatural elements/the surgical elementsOutside of outdoing himself by coming up with more inventive powers - a conversation with a group of Pawns about white people and wasps had me chuckling out loud - O'Malley also uses the Checquy powers and the Grafter surgical skills to ask some pointed questions about talent, power and how one can chose to use and/or misunderstand those gifts.Both the Grafters and the Checquy are initially equally fascinated/repulsed by each other's abilities, and O'Malley shows what it takes to get the two sides to bridge their differences. It's a process that takes repeated effort and diplomacy, and the hurdles scaled are often painful moments that come with trial and error.The distrust on both sides serves as a reminder of just how easy it is to judge because of institutionalized behavior, and how often it might take extraordinary circumstances to bridge that gap. O'Malley gives repeated nods to the fact that it's not, and will never be easy to find a steady peace between the two groups, but also shows how easy it can be - vís-a-vís Myfany, of all people - to not hate, if it's not part of the culture - something that readers will likely ruminate over.Interpersonal power politics aside, O'Malley also asks readers to consider just how easily it is to abuse an extraordinary gift like a Checquy power or Grafter skills. It's an acknowledgement of the idea that with great power comes even greater responsibility, and will likely encourage many a reader to consider just how they'd handle such gifts.(On a slightly less serious note: Thanks for ruining my love of citrus forever, O'Malley.Just kidding. I kid.)​On relationships, and how it relates to the greater good:While The Rook was more or less centered on the idea of Myfanwy learning how to come to terms with her new self, Stiletto is very much a book about relationships.There's the core relationship between Felicity and Odette, which has its ups and downs, and super-powered learning curve. But there are also the relationships that the two women have within their own lives, which impact their development and contribute to the overall story.Without giving spoilers away, O'Malley meticulously uses these relationships to ask time and time again, what individuals like Felicity and Odette value in a world where one wrong move in the merger can result in a supernatural war.There are repeated challenges to just what both women hold to be true, including some fairly specific instances that question their agency, and whether the two women are willing to surrender their own beliefs to the merger - both voluntarily and involuntarily. It's tricky territory to navigate, but O'Malley hits the right note on how he chooses those relationships to ask those larger-scale questions, including some brutal moments where both women are forced to question what they know to be true.Outside of our two female leads, the book is sprinkled with family relationships, friendships - including some familiar faces (!) - and even adversarial relationships that really help emphasize the point that as intriguing as their supernatural or surgical powers may be, the Checquy and Grafters are still at their core, made up of interpersonal relationships which help drive the narrative (and drama!) forward.And finally...The ending:Though he shines when it comes to writing action scenes, O'Malley also has a gift for writing quieter, introspective moments.As the book winds down, O'Malley does a nice job of not only tying together loose ends, but setting up a firm foundation for the potential future of his cast of characters. We see how Felicity, Odette and the secondary characters have reached and evolved to this point, and it sets up a nice, optimistic foundation for the future of the merger.Though it seems clichéd the call the ending cinematic, it really is. And this is a good thing.Things that didn't work/Things to consider:While I'm tempted to say absolutely nothing, I will acknowledge that the synopsis of the book is a tad misleading.It definitely gives readers the impression that Myfanwy is the protagonist of Stiletto, when the focus of the book is solidly on Felicity and Odette. Though I personally didn't mind this shift, I do think that some of the readers who were especially attached to Myfanwy may initially feel a bit let down.However, let me just reassure all prospective readers right now: Felicity and Odette more than make up for any lack of Myfanwy. They're collectively badass in their own right, and Myfanwy's brief appearances just round out an already solid novel.Final verdict:After four years of waiting for a return to the world of the Chequy, I can absolutely say that Stiletto was worth it.Outside of being a fun, well-written romp in a world where every minute spent is a worthwhile one, Daniel O'Malley has also written a great tale on what it means to be young, female and living in a supernatural world on the brink of change.Felicity and Odette begin Stiletto with seemingly nothing in common, but conclude the novel recognizing that there is a universality in their goals, aims and even their very understanding of the world around them. O'Malley's essentially written a parable on learning how to walk a mile in another's shoes, and readers will likely come away having learned a little bit from that journey.Highly recommend for all readers, full stop.(In fact, why are you still reading this review? Go buy the book already!)

Mash together James Bond and the Marx Brothers and you come close to Daniel O’Malley’s Stiletto, five hundred pages of mayhem, skullduggery and prat falls, the humor as well as the mayhem delivered in impeccable comic deadpan. This is the second novel to feature agent Myfanwy (rhymes with “Tiffany”) Thomas, who works for the Checquy, a very secret British agency that protect the British Isles from supernatural threats. The agents all carry chess titles. Myfanwy’s a Rook, pretty high up the hierarchy. That means she mostly gives orders for other people to carry out. Except it doesn’t work that way. Most of the time chaos is the order of the day, not order. Myfanwy and her colleagues have to improvise and Myfanwy gets her hands dirty time again. A lot of blood flows en route. This kickass caper is about a merger: the Checquy (composed of agents with supernatural powers) is burying the (three-hundred-year-old) hatchet with another secret agency, the Grafters, which is the Checquy’s name for members of the Wetenschappelijk Broederschap van Natuurundigen (they have no supernatural powers but using surgery and drugs, have modified their bodies beyond belief. One of the advantages of the union for Grafters agents will be nationalized medical insurance.Someone’s determined to sabotage the talks between the two groups. A succession of terribly bad and then terribly badder things descend on Britain. Myfanqy, Pawn Felicity (first seen in the book clothed in urine-drenched rags –it’s heartening what a Checquy agent will do to disguise herself on duty), and Grafter Odette, who‘s in England as part of the Grafter delegation, must work together to solve the mystery of who’s behind these attacks and stop them. Unfortunately, Felicity and Odette loathe each other on sight –that’s another issue to be resolved. Along the way, there is the routine work of the Checquy to be done. Englishmen must be protected from various supernatural threats without ever knowing what is going on or there’d be panic. (Politicians don’t like panic. It loses them votes.) So there are cases to be dealt with: a house with missing people and tongues coming out of the walls and ceiling; a church that seems to be eating its parishioners; a behemoth that climbs out of the sea to rot away on land. (“Its shape put Odette in mind of a lumpy butternut squash, if as butternut squash were several stories high and smelled like the gym socks of a lesser god.”)O’Malley achieves the difficult task of writing whimsy without making it at all fey. The humor is robust, the action fast and furious, the characters eccentric (and possessed of very odd powers) but human. There are laugh-out-loud moments along the way, teasing touches that lift the book high above the conventional in capers like this. A few examples will suffice. One of the Checquy’s Bishops is a vampire: he appears only after the sun goes down and Felicity finds his presence oddly alluring. One of the Pawns is accompanied everywhere by a cloud of butterflies circling around his head, and the body and head of a second Pawn is composed of matching parts separated by a several inch gap: Odette asks how the parts hold together and is told it has something to do with magnets. (This is a good example of the level of specificity O’Malley uses in explaining the ‘science’ of his odd phenomena. His characters are scientific illiterates so he gets away with being one too.) Felicity’s power is that she can “read” the past of inanimate objects (except for water, cedar wood and one or two other blocking substances). Let her touch an object or building or dead body and within minutes she can trace its path back in time. In one scene, she has to fight a battle relying on this sense because she has been temporarily blinded.As for the Grafter Odette, starting as a teenager, shehas taken out, replaced and rewired her own internal organs -literally taken them out. She is a master surgeon, whose eyes have been rebuilt to allow her microvision, muscles and bones strengthened to allow micro-control over her hands and fingers, and who carries two razor sharp scalpels made of her own bone in a sac under the skin of one thigh -they pop out when she needs them. And in one of the most delightful touches in a book filled with such delights, Odette loans Felicity an evening gown for a dress ball: it’s made of living flesh and can be molded to the body and its colors changed (cuttlefish and octopus cells are woven into the cloth) by touch. Lastly, when Felicity is called upon to read the corpse of the behemoth from the sea, it’s considered a Category C risk, which means “she would be supervised by a doctor, a lawyer, and a guard, each of them armed with a handgun and a machete. Once the observation was over, she’d have to submit to weekly medical, toxicological, psychological, and religious examinations for a month. It was inconvenient but it could have been worse.” How much worse? Category E included a nuclear-style decontamination; category F, mandatory exorcism rituals in all known religions; category G had twelve marksmen pointing guns at her from a hundred meters away on an isolated oil-rig in the middle of the North Sea. You don’t want to know what happened at category S and above.

Stiletto è il secondo romanzo ambientato in Gran Bretagna in cui uno strepitoso Daniel O'Malley racconta con ironia "british" e un perfetto senso del ritmo narrativo le avventure di una organizzazione filo governativa segretissima di X men (e women) alle prese con disastri soprannaturali e con una complicatissima fusione con i nemici n. 1 di sempre, gli "Innestatori" una organizzazione supersegretissima di scienziati assurdamente brillanti che nel corso dei secoli hanno imparato a manipolare la chimica la fisiologia e l'anatomia del corpo umano riuscendo a realizzare delle modificazioni genetiche indicibili.Alla fine del romanzo precedente, la Torre Thomas (una interessantissima eroina - vale la pena di leggere il romanzo solo per la sua figura) viene avvicinata dal capo degli Innestatori per provare a stabilire una sorta di negoziato di pace. In questo successivo volume diventa chiaro che c'è qualcuno che questa pace proprio non la vuole e si sta adoperando per sabotarla alla grande.Ritornano in questo volume alcuni personaggi del libro precedente: Torre Thomas, l'Alfiere Aldrich, il Cavaliere Eckart, ma le protagoniste principali sono indubbiamente il Pedone Felicity Clemens (dello Scacchiere) e la Signorina Odette Leliefeld (degli Innestatori).Il Pedone Clemens (che ha poteri psicometrici) diventa guardia del corpo di Odette Leliefeld che è arrivata a Londra con la delegazione degli Innestatori in quanto discendente di Ernst, i capo indiscusso.Odette è apparentemente la classica fanciulla ricca che svolazza di party in party nelle capitali europee e che fa intensa vita sociale. In realtà è una scienziata e chirurgo di grande abilità con molte sicurezze ma una assoluta incompetenza in combattimento.Felicity Clemens invece è un soldato con abilità sociali praticamente nulle ma grande esperienza di situazioni estreme.Queste due ragazze, che si guardano con estremo sospetto e non poco disgusto, costrette a collaborare stabiliscono gradualmente una sorta di rispetto reciproco, scoprendo alla fine di piacersi anche per ciò che le accomuna: entrambe sono pedine spendibili nel grande gioco delle loro fazioni.Nel libro abbondano i momenti divertenti (e il primo di tutti è il fatto che entrambe le parti hanno ferocemente coltivato per secoli una assoluta avversione reciproca, considerandosi reciprocamente degli abomini) e momenti di terrore perché le minacce che affronta lo Scacchiere sono spesso terrificanti, molto violente e la conta dei morti è alta.Certo non mancano elementi poco coerenti nella trama: l’autore si sforza di calibrare i diversi poteri dei personaggi per muovere correttamente la storia, ma vi sono esempi in cui, anche a sforzarsi, non si capisce proprio come alcune scene siano possibili. Questi momenti tuttavia non detraggono dal globale godimento delle avventure nell’universo dello Scacchiere.A quando il prossimo volume?

Funny and well written. My only complaint is really that there are a lot of new characters being introduced in this book, and the evolution is not so detailed as the previous book ( rook). Hope to see more background going forward

I ALWAYS wondered what the X-MEN would look like if they were not the hated mutants they are. Now I Know and I like IT a lot. This is a very fresa way to approach the theme of super powers and How to use them for the Good of the many. I hope there will be more.

Stiletto is such a fantastical and absorbing read. I love the whole secret society being placed right in the city I know so well and the way the relationship between the two female protagonists was really well-done. It did take a little while to get going, which is what stopped me from giving it a full 5 stars - even so I'd highly recommend this book. A fabulously intricate and pacy 4 stars.

Stiletto starts off where The Rook ends: Rook Myfanwy Thomas and the Checquy have declared a truce with Graaf van Suchtlen and the Grafters, and they have started the delicate process of working together. But not only are there centuries of well-stoked fear and suspicion on both sides impeding progress, there is a hidden faction actively out to sabotage the deal.The bulk of the book alternates the viewpoint between Felicity Clements, a Chequay Pawn with aspirations to be a warrior Barghest, and Odette Leliefeld, a high ranking Grafter. After some typical Checquy-style horrors, Felicity is assigned as Odette’s bodyguard. Neither will be the same again.I am slightly disappointed that this time round we don’t get Myfanwy’s viewpoint, except in a few scenes. And there is one scene from her point of view that doesn’t ring true for me. Myfanwy is at the Races investigating a gruesome murder, when she bumps into her brother Jonathan, and agrees to go up to his box to meet his friends later. After he leaves, she is attacked. The plot promptly proceeds to forget everything about this promised visit. Poor Jonathan, he must be worried sick!Apart from this minor plot oversight (or maybe it is something incredibly subtle that will come back to haunt her later?) we get to see Myfanwy as others see her, in all her fearsome sarcastic efficiency. We are still in the wonderfully bizarre, dangerous, gross, complicated, surreal world of the Chequay, as two groups of people struggle to overcome perfectly understandable hatred and fear of each other, whilst surrounded by extraordinary and incomprehensible goings-on.This is a great second book in the series. I hope it won’t be a four year wait for the third one! (There is going to be a third one, is there?)