This is the newest fantasy from Patricia McKillip, whose books I always snatch up as soon as they come out. Even though I got burned out on fantasy in the early 90s and mostly avoided it for a long period of time, McKillip is one of the handful of fantasy writers I continued to read, along with Terry Pratchett and Steve Brust.
McKillip's works are dreamy and fairy tale-like. The Bards of Bone Plain has a multi-thread plot that takes place across two time lines, in which the more modern time line is trying to figure out what happened in the past time line, because it's important to their present day. It has bards, of course, and a princess who is struggling for self determination, and it seems that the fate of the kingdom hangs in the balance. McKillip weaves in many things she has used before: bards, towers, plains, riddles, war, music, and magic.
Like many of McKillip's fantasies, The Bards of Bone Plain turns out to be about healing old wounds and setting things right again. This is a fairly common theme for her, as she has used it in The Book of Atrix Wolfe, The Tower at Stony Wood, Od Magic, and The Bell at Sealy Head, just off the top of my head, and there are probably more I'm forgetting. It would probably fall under the definition of consolatory fantasy, a term China Mieville coined in 2002 as he sneered at fantasies that were about restoring order and had a happy ending that made the reader feel good. I'm not sneering at it, though. I find the theme of healing and repairing what has been broken to be a humane and mature thing to write about.
McKillip writes quite a bit about music in this one, and has in several others in the past. Music is a difficult thing to write about, and McKillip does it better than most. The Bards of Bone Plain features bardic competitions where the stakes are high, and in this world a select few can do powerful magic through their music. Perhaps the magic is why she equates outstanding music with deep feeling, but it's a concept I find somewhat offensive. Now, if two equally skilled musicians are playing the same piece and one breathes and feels the song they are playing and the other is an impersonal but brilliant technician, it may be that the first performer's rendition could be considered superior. But ultimately what makes for good music is skill, years of practice, and some innate talent. Desire or depth of feeling are not an adequate substitute. You cannot make yourself a great musician just because you really want it, without having to do all the work. Now, McKillip isn't really saying that, either. But it's hinted at in a couple of places, when the characters give outstanding musical performances because they have feeling behind their performance. And as anyone who has ever watched the American Idol auditions knows, there are a lot of people who seem to honestly believe that because they really want to be a great musician, they can be a great musician. And that's just not true.
But back to The Bards of Bone Plain: I enjoyed it. The characters are likable, the recounting of the historical events is quite compelling, and the ending is fairly happy. That said, this isn't one of my favorites by this writer. It's a good, solid McKillip, but not one of the ones that blew me away.
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Friday, December 24, 2010
A Superior Death by Nevada Barr
I have just finished A Superior Death, and am also in the process of listening to Endangered Species, by the same author, in my car. So some of my observations about the character and the writing are based on both books, not just A Superior Death.
The protagonist of these stories is Anna Pigeon, a forty-ish national park ranger. In A Superior Death she is working at Isle Royale National Park in Lake Superior. She has come to this assignment after working in Texas, and she isn't adjusting well to the climate and landscape of the new park. For those of you whose sense of this geography is as foggy as mine, Isle Royale sits off the very northeastern point of Minnesota. The nearest city is actually Thunder Bay, Ontario, but when the rangers head for the mainland they usually cut across the lake to Houghton, in the upper peninsula of Michigan.
Anna lives in a damp, squalid little ranger station where she issues permits and cuts fishing hooks out of park visitors, and sometimes she goes out on patrol in a park service boat. On her days off she camps and kayaks. Her station is pretty isolated, but she still gets to know the other park service staff and the others who work in the area. She is distracted from her daily routine by the mystery of a missing woman, Donna, who is married to one of the other rangers. Her husband is obnoxious and lies about his wife's location, and then gets surly and threatening when people try to push for more details.
There is also the matter of Carrie, the surly 13-year-old daughter of Patience, who manages the lodge. Carrie is staying out until the wee hours of the morning, and since there isn't much of anything to do on the island, she's pretty well got to be seeing a boyfriend. It is, of course, Anna who decides to do some snooping and realizes who it is hanging out with the inappropriately young girl.
But the big problem of the novel is the discovery of Denny Castle, who owns a boat and takes tourists diving the wrecks under the lake, dead inside a wreck under the lake. This is a surprise to everyone, because they all thought Denny was on his honeymoon. But since he is inside a deep and dangerous wreck with no scuba gear, he can't have gotten himself there, so there is an investigation. Despite the arrival of an FBI agent, Anna pretty much decides to keep him in the dark while she does her own investigating, only taking information to him until after she has figured things out herself. It's probably a good thing that A Superior Death wasn't the first of this series for me--as I said, I'm listening to one in the car and frankly I'm enjoying that one more than I did this one--because this might have been my last Nevada Barr otherwise. I really don't have a lot of use for amateur detectives who decide to take on crime-solving and bumble around on their own. The FBI agent was neither stupid nor corrupt, and she could and should have told him some of the things she was keeping from him.
Which leads to the second problem--Anna is a vigilante. She doesn't just ask nosy and intrusive questions and dig around in people's personnel records, she periodically decides to stake out people she's suspicious of, and sometimes confronts them. And I've got no use for the character (all too common in mystery novels) who decides to go off alone at midnight to confront the killer by themselves and usually gets into trouble because of it, instead of either handing it off to the proper authorities or at least bringing help along. Anna is that annoying character.
Anna is not always likable, but at least she's not a cardboard character. She is middle-aged and not entirely comfortable with herself or her life, which I certainly can empathize with. Anna was happily married until her husband died in an accident, and after she climbed out of the bottle and her crushing grief, she joined the park service and fled into the wilderness. She really enjoys being outside, and loves the wilderness, and enjoys being alone, but also sometimes worries about being alone too much. Which is the sort of mental conversation I frequently have myself, so I found that very believable. One thing that is striking to me from the two novels, however, is how often Anna is terrified. She's terrified of the lake, terrified of fire, often afraid as she's off on her hare-brained sleuthing adventures. I found that a little harder to empathize with. Of course, she wouldn't need to be so afraid if she didn't insist on doing stupid and dangerous things. However in her defense, she usually pulls through and does what she needs to do despite her fear. I just found it very striking and a bit uncomfortable how often her reaction to things is deep, paralysing fear.
A Superior Death was okay, but not great. The one I am listening to, on the other hand, is really very good and I'm enjoying it immensely. I think this is largely down to the reader. It's read by Barbara Rosenblat, and she's wonderful. I think in the future I will listen to the other Anna Pigeon stories, rather than reading them.
The protagonist of these stories is Anna Pigeon, a forty-ish national park ranger. In A Superior Death she is working at Isle Royale National Park in Lake Superior. She has come to this assignment after working in Texas, and she isn't adjusting well to the climate and landscape of the new park. For those of you whose sense of this geography is as foggy as mine, Isle Royale sits off the very northeastern point of Minnesota. The nearest city is actually Thunder Bay, Ontario, but when the rangers head for the mainland they usually cut across the lake to Houghton, in the upper peninsula of Michigan.
Anna lives in a damp, squalid little ranger station where she issues permits and cuts fishing hooks out of park visitors, and sometimes she goes out on patrol in a park service boat. On her days off she camps and kayaks. Her station is pretty isolated, but she still gets to know the other park service staff and the others who work in the area. She is distracted from her daily routine by the mystery of a missing woman, Donna, who is married to one of the other rangers. Her husband is obnoxious and lies about his wife's location, and then gets surly and threatening when people try to push for more details.
There is also the matter of Carrie, the surly 13-year-old daughter of Patience, who manages the lodge. Carrie is staying out until the wee hours of the morning, and since there isn't much of anything to do on the island, she's pretty well got to be seeing a boyfriend. It is, of course, Anna who decides to do some snooping and realizes who it is hanging out with the inappropriately young girl.
But the big problem of the novel is the discovery of Denny Castle, who owns a boat and takes tourists diving the wrecks under the lake, dead inside a wreck under the lake. This is a surprise to everyone, because they all thought Denny was on his honeymoon. But since he is inside a deep and dangerous wreck with no scuba gear, he can't have gotten himself there, so there is an investigation. Despite the arrival of an FBI agent, Anna pretty much decides to keep him in the dark while she does her own investigating, only taking information to him until after she has figured things out herself. It's probably a good thing that A Superior Death wasn't the first of this series for me--as I said, I'm listening to one in the car and frankly I'm enjoying that one more than I did this one--because this might have been my last Nevada Barr otherwise. I really don't have a lot of use for amateur detectives who decide to take on crime-solving and bumble around on their own. The FBI agent was neither stupid nor corrupt, and she could and should have told him some of the things she was keeping from him.
Which leads to the second problem--Anna is a vigilante. She doesn't just ask nosy and intrusive questions and dig around in people's personnel records, she periodically decides to stake out people she's suspicious of, and sometimes confronts them. And I've got no use for the character (all too common in mystery novels) who decides to go off alone at midnight to confront the killer by themselves and usually gets into trouble because of it, instead of either handing it off to the proper authorities or at least bringing help along. Anna is that annoying character.
Anna is not always likable, but at least she's not a cardboard character. She is middle-aged and not entirely comfortable with herself or her life, which I certainly can empathize with. Anna was happily married until her husband died in an accident, and after she climbed out of the bottle and her crushing grief, she joined the park service and fled into the wilderness. She really enjoys being outside, and loves the wilderness, and enjoys being alone, but also sometimes worries about being alone too much. Which is the sort of mental conversation I frequently have myself, so I found that very believable. One thing that is striking to me from the two novels, however, is how often Anna is terrified. She's terrified of the lake, terrified of fire, often afraid as she's off on her hare-brained sleuthing adventures. I found that a little harder to empathize with. Of course, she wouldn't need to be so afraid if she didn't insist on doing stupid and dangerous things. However in her defense, she usually pulls through and does what she needs to do despite her fear. I just found it very striking and a bit uncomfortable how often her reaction to things is deep, paralysing fear.
A Superior Death was okay, but not great. The one I am listening to, on the other hand, is really very good and I'm enjoying it immensely. I think this is largely down to the reader. It's read by Barbara Rosenblat, and she's wonderful. I think in the future I will listen to the other Anna Pigeon stories, rather than reading them.
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Right Hand Magic by Nancy Collins
This is yet another paranormal. I'd heard good things about this one online, though I no longer recall where, but it sounded interesting enough for me to put it on my list of books to look for. On the whole, I'd have to say it did not live up to the hype.
We have a love story between two beautiful young overprivileged folks who are slumming it and playing at trying to make a living on their own instead of living on their parents' wealth and fame. Not that I'm sure one could even classify living off trust fund payments while making sculpture to be an honest attempt at earning a living. Honestly, neither one of them have any real problems. Their lives are pretty easy compared to most everyone else on the planet, and even when the conflict finally arrives right at the end, they aren't the ones in any real trouble, they are just trying to save an acquaintance, who does have real trouble.
Tate's father is one of the wealthiest men in the country, and she has a comfortable income from her trust fund. She lives in Manhattan and likes making metal sculptures, but her neighbors don't like the noise of her metalwork, so she decides to find a new place. She sees an ad for a room for rent in Golgotham, the neighborhood where all the magical folks live, and decides to go look at it. The landlord, Hexe, is a Kymeran, a sort of elf-like creature who is exotic in ways that human women find extremely attractive. He works as a right-hand sorcerer, practicing white magic and unravelling curses placed by those who do left-hand magic. The house belongs to his family, and was given to him to help him support himself. Though it is supposedly a boarding house, and the place is very large, Tate is the only tenant except for a fellow who lives in the basement in a self-contained apartment and is never seen. The room she rents at a ridiculously good price is much bigger than her old place, and ideal for her metalwork. Odd that she saw the place and decided to move in without ever mentioning to the landlord that she's going to be welding and hammering metal in his spare bedroom ... One would think it's the sort of thing a reasonable person would make clear in advance, so there are no nasty surprises later.
Anyway, she moves to Golgotham and Hexe invites her to spend a lot of time with him and shows her around and introduces her to people and takes her out to dinner and helps her solve all her problems. Oddly enough, she doesn't figure out that he's attracted to her until someone tells her, near the end. Does she think that is normal behavior for a landlord? Tate keeps making stupid assumptions that are awkward and embarrassing. One might hope that she would learn to keep her eyes open and her mouth shut, but she never does. That, and her obnoxious ex-boyfriend who seems to have a lot more power over her than she should allow him to have, are the only real problems in her otherwise idyllic life.
It seems that the entire novel is just going to be a travelogue of what a cool place Golgotham is, until finally near the end a friend of theirs is abducted and they need to rescue him. This was extremely predictable, and I figured out that was going to be the problem the plot centered around about 80 or 100 pages in. It was just a matter of waiting for it to happen, since it was obvious it would. And then it was obvious they would succeed, so it was just a matter of skimming through to find out what happened afterward.
Right Hand Magic was oddly paced, predictable, and shallow. Nothing much happens until the last couple of chapters, and then it's a rush to solve the problem. Tate is not a character I can really care about, because her life is so artificial and easy there's nothing to sympathize with. Was I supposed to feel sorry for her that she didn't have the balls to kick free of the smarmy ex? Was I supposed to be pleased that she found a man so perfect he wasn't any more believable than she was? Mostly I was just rolling my eyes at how everything aligns so perfectly for the two of them in their perfect little lives. Right Hand Magic isn't terrible, the writing is fine at a sentence level, but the pacing is wrong and the characters not at all compelling. It was like a soft serve vanilla cone--sort of smooth and fake and sweet but also dull and not good enough to be worth the calories. I prefer something rich and interesting.
We have a love story between two beautiful young overprivileged folks who are slumming it and playing at trying to make a living on their own instead of living on their parents' wealth and fame. Not that I'm sure one could even classify living off trust fund payments while making sculpture to be an honest attempt at earning a living. Honestly, neither one of them have any real problems. Their lives are pretty easy compared to most everyone else on the planet, and even when the conflict finally arrives right at the end, they aren't the ones in any real trouble, they are just trying to save an acquaintance, who does have real trouble.
Tate's father is one of the wealthiest men in the country, and she has a comfortable income from her trust fund. She lives in Manhattan and likes making metal sculptures, but her neighbors don't like the noise of her metalwork, so she decides to find a new place. She sees an ad for a room for rent in Golgotham, the neighborhood where all the magical folks live, and decides to go look at it. The landlord, Hexe, is a Kymeran, a sort of elf-like creature who is exotic in ways that human women find extremely attractive. He works as a right-hand sorcerer, practicing white magic and unravelling curses placed by those who do left-hand magic. The house belongs to his family, and was given to him to help him support himself. Though it is supposedly a boarding house, and the place is very large, Tate is the only tenant except for a fellow who lives in the basement in a self-contained apartment and is never seen. The room she rents at a ridiculously good price is much bigger than her old place, and ideal for her metalwork. Odd that she saw the place and decided to move in without ever mentioning to the landlord that she's going to be welding and hammering metal in his spare bedroom ... One would think it's the sort of thing a reasonable person would make clear in advance, so there are no nasty surprises later.
Anyway, she moves to Golgotham and Hexe invites her to spend a lot of time with him and shows her around and introduces her to people and takes her out to dinner and helps her solve all her problems. Oddly enough, she doesn't figure out that he's attracted to her until someone tells her, near the end. Does she think that is normal behavior for a landlord? Tate keeps making stupid assumptions that are awkward and embarrassing. One might hope that she would learn to keep her eyes open and her mouth shut, but she never does. That, and her obnoxious ex-boyfriend who seems to have a lot more power over her than she should allow him to have, are the only real problems in her otherwise idyllic life.
It seems that the entire novel is just going to be a travelogue of what a cool place Golgotham is, until finally near the end a friend of theirs is abducted and they need to rescue him. This was extremely predictable, and I figured out that was going to be the problem the plot centered around about 80 or 100 pages in. It was just a matter of waiting for it to happen, since it was obvious it would. And then it was obvious they would succeed, so it was just a matter of skimming through to find out what happened afterward.
Right Hand Magic was oddly paced, predictable, and shallow. Nothing much happens until the last couple of chapters, and then it's a rush to solve the problem. Tate is not a character I can really care about, because her life is so artificial and easy there's nothing to sympathize with. Was I supposed to feel sorry for her that she didn't have the balls to kick free of the smarmy ex? Was I supposed to be pleased that she found a man so perfect he wasn't any more believable than she was? Mostly I was just rolling my eyes at how everything aligns so perfectly for the two of them in their perfect little lives. Right Hand Magic isn't terrible, the writing is fine at a sentence level, but the pacing is wrong and the characters not at all compelling. It was like a soft serve vanilla cone--sort of smooth and fake and sweet but also dull and not good enough to be worth the calories. I prefer something rich and interesting.
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Blood Song & Once Bitten
Yesterday I read Blood Song by Cat Adams. I generally enjoyed it, but was struck by the similarities between it and another book I've been working on, Once Bitten by Kalayna Price. So I'm going to talk about both of them in one entry. There will be some mild spoilers.
Both novels take place in a world where supernatural creatures exist. In both, after a short intro, the heroine is attacked in an alley. In Once Bitten, she is attacked by a shapeshifter and rescued by a vampire who changes her. In Blood Song, she is attacked by vampires and then saved by shapeshifters before she is completely changed, so she's caught somewhere between human and vampire.
Both heroines are pretty upset about their change, and kind of in denial. Both of them, despite being told they will lose control and attack someone if they don't feed regularly, disregard this advice, with unpleasant consequences. That may be one of the hardest things for me to accept, actually: I realize that there are people who don't have much appetite, and at times in my life when my health was going haywire I have had a very low appetite, but I still don't believe in characters who going running around all day or all night and never get around to eating anything. In the case of Kita in Once Bitten, her vampire sire keeps trying to get her to eat, and she just refuses, like she thinks she can just decide that blood isn't for her, and that's final. Which is absurd, and is one of the many reasons why Kita is an immature and unlikeable character, and I couldn't finish the book. Celia, in Blood Song, isn't a full vampire and can eat some things, she just usually doesn't get around to it or plan ahead far enough to have food handy when she needs it. For a supposedly fairly smart woman, she was sometimes remarkably dense.
In both novels, the heroines are special vampires because they weren't entirely human before they were turned. Because the heroine of the novel is always a special snowflake, isn't she? Kita is a shapeshifter, something we know in advance, though she seems to lose her shapeshifting abilities when she becomes a vampire. But the fact she was a shapeshifter makes her more interesting and attractive to the other vampires, which is actually why she was turned in the first place. Her sire just found her irresistible. Celia keeps claiming that she's a plain vanilla human despite the fact that ghosts seem unusually attracted to her, but we later find out that she's got some supernatural blood in her family tree, which gives her an advantage in controlling some of her vampire tendencies and that she also has other special powers she uses to get herself out of a couple of jams.
Both heroines have their support crew of attractive men who are attracted to them, who help them with their problems. Kita has a deadline to find a bad guy, so she gets her own little posse of her vampire sire, her old boyfriend who's still in love with her, and an odd researcher who has been assigned to observe her. Nearly all their actions are to help Kita deal with her shit, as if the other characters' only function for existing is to support her. This, and the fact Kita is so childish and obnoxious, may be why Once Bitten felt more like paranormal romance than urban fantasy to me. Romance heroines are so often infantilized, which is one reason why I prefer gay romance.
Celia's situation is slightly less annoying than Kita's, as it seems a more mature situation, but nevertheless the population of the novel can be roughly divided into the people who are her opponents and the people who are there to help her. There's the werewolf who rescued her and apparently loves her, though they aren't really in a relationship. There's the police detective who is remarkably helpful. There is her old boyfriend and his brother, who show up and immediately throw in with her. And the psychic psychiatrist who gets her through some rough moments. And the priest who saves her and her mother. Plus her receptionist, who she relies on very heavily. Yeah, she has a large cast of characters who leap in to help her out, and pretty much everyone else turns out to be an antagonist. So in Blood Song the world revolves around the heroine, too.
And finally, both heroines have a big mouth and an antagonistic personality, and frequently make situations worse.
There are differences between the novels, however, as evidenced by the fact that I completed Blood Song and mostly enjoyed it, but could not force myself to finish Once Bitten.
I say I enjoyed Blood Song, and I did, but upon reflection I'm not sure the plot really holds together when I think about it. There's so much action that it can just pull you along, but still--I don't really know why some of the things that happened in the story happened. There are mysterious forces at work behind the scenes and Celia doesn't know all of it, but still it's not clear to me why certain characters did what they did, or how Celia and her friends came to be involved. One particularly confusing bit was that when she wakes as a human/vampire mix there's a fellow there who seems to belong to some sort of government agency. He looks her over coldly and tells her that he intends to follow her in order to find her sire and kill him, (and we later find that he knows that with mixes like her the first feeding is always fatal to the person they attack) and yet then he backs off and promises to leave her alone and not follow her and we don't see him again until near the end. Maybe I missed something important, but it doesn't make any sense that he would drop his interest in her, or let her wander off on her own in the full knowledge she will almost certainly kill someone. It makes no sense that both he and her friends would allow her to take off on her own at that point. It also isn't entirely clear why her friend was killed on the same night she was attacked, or ... well, so many things now that I think about it. Perhaps these things will be explained in volume two.
I'm not sure that I'll read volume two, though. Blood Song was a sort of entertaining read with a not entirely likeable protagonist with not really believable dark secrets in her past that are only hinted at, but at the end is a setup for book two--someone shows up out of the blue for no apparent reason and announces that they are now enemies--and it was an incredible turn-off. It was immature plotting, inexplicable and unlikely in the story as presented so far, and felt childish. And it makes me retroactively like the book less because of the way it ended. So, though Blood Song was competently written and action-packed, I probably won't bother to read farther. I like plots that make sense, characters who aren't so preoccupied with telling me how tough they are (she's a bodyguard), and foreshadowing more subtle than the sledgehammer used in the last chapter of Blood Song.
Both novels take place in a world where supernatural creatures exist. In both, after a short intro, the heroine is attacked in an alley. In Once Bitten, she is attacked by a shapeshifter and rescued by a vampire who changes her. In Blood Song, she is attacked by vampires and then saved by shapeshifters before she is completely changed, so she's caught somewhere between human and vampire.
Both heroines are pretty upset about their change, and kind of in denial. Both of them, despite being told they will lose control and attack someone if they don't feed regularly, disregard this advice, with unpleasant consequences. That may be one of the hardest things for me to accept, actually: I realize that there are people who don't have much appetite, and at times in my life when my health was going haywire I have had a very low appetite, but I still don't believe in characters who going running around all day or all night and never get around to eating anything. In the case of Kita in Once Bitten, her vampire sire keeps trying to get her to eat, and she just refuses, like she thinks she can just decide that blood isn't for her, and that's final. Which is absurd, and is one of the many reasons why Kita is an immature and unlikeable character, and I couldn't finish the book. Celia, in Blood Song, isn't a full vampire and can eat some things, she just usually doesn't get around to it or plan ahead far enough to have food handy when she needs it. For a supposedly fairly smart woman, she was sometimes remarkably dense.
In both novels, the heroines are special vampires because they weren't entirely human before they were turned. Because the heroine of the novel is always a special snowflake, isn't she? Kita is a shapeshifter, something we know in advance, though she seems to lose her shapeshifting abilities when she becomes a vampire. But the fact she was a shapeshifter makes her more interesting and attractive to the other vampires, which is actually why she was turned in the first place. Her sire just found her irresistible. Celia keeps claiming that she's a plain vanilla human despite the fact that ghosts seem unusually attracted to her, but we later find out that she's got some supernatural blood in her family tree, which gives her an advantage in controlling some of her vampire tendencies and that she also has other special powers she uses to get herself out of a couple of jams.
Both heroines have their support crew of attractive men who are attracted to them, who help them with their problems. Kita has a deadline to find a bad guy, so she gets her own little posse of her vampire sire, her old boyfriend who's still in love with her, and an odd researcher who has been assigned to observe her. Nearly all their actions are to help Kita deal with her shit, as if the other characters' only function for existing is to support her. This, and the fact Kita is so childish and obnoxious, may be why Once Bitten felt more like paranormal romance than urban fantasy to me. Romance heroines are so often infantilized, which is one reason why I prefer gay romance.
Celia's situation is slightly less annoying than Kita's, as it seems a more mature situation, but nevertheless the population of the novel can be roughly divided into the people who are her opponents and the people who are there to help her. There's the werewolf who rescued her and apparently loves her, though they aren't really in a relationship. There's the police detective who is remarkably helpful. There is her old boyfriend and his brother, who show up and immediately throw in with her. And the psychic psychiatrist who gets her through some rough moments. And the priest who saves her and her mother. Plus her receptionist, who she relies on very heavily. Yeah, she has a large cast of characters who leap in to help her out, and pretty much everyone else turns out to be an antagonist. So in Blood Song the world revolves around the heroine, too.
And finally, both heroines have a big mouth and an antagonistic personality, and frequently make situations worse.
There are differences between the novels, however, as evidenced by the fact that I completed Blood Song and mostly enjoyed it, but could not force myself to finish Once Bitten.
I say I enjoyed Blood Song, and I did, but upon reflection I'm not sure the plot really holds together when I think about it. There's so much action that it can just pull you along, but still--I don't really know why some of the things that happened in the story happened. There are mysterious forces at work behind the scenes and Celia doesn't know all of it, but still it's not clear to me why certain characters did what they did, or how Celia and her friends came to be involved. One particularly confusing bit was that when she wakes as a human/vampire mix there's a fellow there who seems to belong to some sort of government agency. He looks her over coldly and tells her that he intends to follow her in order to find her sire and kill him, (and we later find that he knows that with mixes like her the first feeding is always fatal to the person they attack) and yet then he backs off and promises to leave her alone and not follow her and we don't see him again until near the end. Maybe I missed something important, but it doesn't make any sense that he would drop his interest in her, or let her wander off on her own in the full knowledge she will almost certainly kill someone. It makes no sense that both he and her friends would allow her to take off on her own at that point. It also isn't entirely clear why her friend was killed on the same night she was attacked, or ... well, so many things now that I think about it. Perhaps these things will be explained in volume two.
I'm not sure that I'll read volume two, though. Blood Song was a sort of entertaining read with a not entirely likeable protagonist with not really believable dark secrets in her past that are only hinted at, but at the end is a setup for book two--someone shows up out of the blue for no apparent reason and announces that they are now enemies--and it was an incredible turn-off. It was immature plotting, inexplicable and unlikely in the story as presented so far, and felt childish. And it makes me retroactively like the book less because of the way it ended. So, though Blood Song was competently written and action-packed, I probably won't bother to read farther. I like plots that make sense, characters who aren't so preoccupied with telling me how tough they are (she's a bodyguard), and foreshadowing more subtle than the sledgehammer used in the last chapter of Blood Song.
Friday, December 17, 2010
Charlie Chan: The Secret Service
This is a film from 1944 in which Charlie Chan, who is now working for the Secret Service, is called in to investigate the death of a scientist. The man is dead of unknown causes, the secret bomb plans he had in his pocket are missing, and he had a houseful of guests over for cocktails at the time. Which of them have stolen the plans? Only Charlie Chan can figure it out.
The first thing that must be said of the film is that it is racist. This is largely a product of the times it was created, but still--really racist. Charlie Chan, the obscure but very intelligent Chinese detective from Hawaii, is played by a white man with a goofy goatee and a terrible accent. Two of his children decide to tag along for comic relief, and they are fortunately played by actors of the correct ethic background. And then there is the character of Birmingham Brown--he is the chauffeur of one of the party guests, a black man with wide bug eyes who is played for laughs. I just looked up the details on the film to remind me of the character's name, and he apparently became a regular character in the Charlie Chan movies that followed. I can see why, in that he is funny, and the actor's performance was really very good.
Which is more than can be said for most of the rest of the cast. The various party guests are herded into the living room while the Secret Service searches the house to look for the missing plans, and they are barely introduced. What little dialogue they have is badly delivered and forgettable. (Well, mostly. When one man places his hand on the shoulder of another, and says something to the effect of "He's been with me for four years" for a moment I thought they were being surprisingly modern in their portrayal of a gay couple, until I realized they were referring to employment, not personal attachment. Personally I find the first interpretation more entertaining.) So we have the nearly interchangeable party guests, the completely interchangeable lawmen, Charlie Chan exchanging wisecracks with his two children, and a creepy old housekeeper, I suppose because at the time all mysteries needed a creepy old woman in them.
Charlie pulls a solution to the scientist's murder out of thin air, and then that suspect is shot dead through an elaborate booby trap that I'm pretty sure is not actually physically possible. Though I'm not sure the scientist's murder was acutally possible to set up, either. When are the killers supposed to have snuck into the house and altered the wiring and set up an electromagnet in a lamp that can trigger a gun mounted on the wall to fire at someone sitting on the sofa if triggered by a switch concealed under the piano? It's not the sort of thing you can set up on a moment's notice, and I doubt that the second killer could have anticipated that their co-conspirator was going to make a full confession while sitting on a particular piece of furniture.
The entire thing is paper thin and falls apart under any scrutiny at all. On the other hand, it's light and entertaining and even a bit funny in places (though not as funny as the filmmakers probably intended), and in 1944 I think Hollywood figured this was exactly the sort of thing people would want to see. And they may have been right. The Charlie Chan films are not good, but they are sort of entertaining, and I kind of enjoy them despite their flaws.
The first thing that must be said of the film is that it is racist. This is largely a product of the times it was created, but still--really racist. Charlie Chan, the obscure but very intelligent Chinese detective from Hawaii, is played by a white man with a goofy goatee and a terrible accent. Two of his children decide to tag along for comic relief, and they are fortunately played by actors of the correct ethic background. And then there is the character of Birmingham Brown--he is the chauffeur of one of the party guests, a black man with wide bug eyes who is played for laughs. I just looked up the details on the film to remind me of the character's name, and he apparently became a regular character in the Charlie Chan movies that followed. I can see why, in that he is funny, and the actor's performance was really very good.
Which is more than can be said for most of the rest of the cast. The various party guests are herded into the living room while the Secret Service searches the house to look for the missing plans, and they are barely introduced. What little dialogue they have is badly delivered and forgettable. (Well, mostly. When one man places his hand on the shoulder of another, and says something to the effect of "He's been with me for four years" for a moment I thought they were being surprisingly modern in their portrayal of a gay couple, until I realized they were referring to employment, not personal attachment. Personally I find the first interpretation more entertaining.) So we have the nearly interchangeable party guests, the completely interchangeable lawmen, Charlie Chan exchanging wisecracks with his two children, and a creepy old housekeeper, I suppose because at the time all mysteries needed a creepy old woman in them.
Charlie pulls a solution to the scientist's murder out of thin air, and then that suspect is shot dead through an elaborate booby trap that I'm pretty sure is not actually physically possible. Though I'm not sure the scientist's murder was acutally possible to set up, either. When are the killers supposed to have snuck into the house and altered the wiring and set up an electromagnet in a lamp that can trigger a gun mounted on the wall to fire at someone sitting on the sofa if triggered by a switch concealed under the piano? It's not the sort of thing you can set up on a moment's notice, and I doubt that the second killer could have anticipated that their co-conspirator was going to make a full confession while sitting on a particular piece of furniture.
The entire thing is paper thin and falls apart under any scrutiny at all. On the other hand, it's light and entertaining and even a bit funny in places (though not as funny as the filmmakers probably intended), and in 1944 I think Hollywood figured this was exactly the sort of thing people would want to see. And they may have been right. The Charlie Chan films are not good, but they are sort of entertaining, and I kind of enjoy them despite their flaws.
Monday, December 13, 2010
Clockwork Scarf
This is one of the things I've been working on over the last few weeks, especially in the last week as I was avoiding reading two paranormals that are annoying and stupid.
This scarf is called Clockwork, and it was designed by Stephen West. It's a pretty time-consuming knit, but I found it pretty entertaining, so I zipped through it. There is enough variety, with the two colors of yarn and the increases and places where you slip stitches, to keep it from getting monotonous.
This photo doesn't really capture the colors very well. The lighter colored yarn is dyed to gradually change color, from green to blue to purple to pink, but it's fairly subtle. Anyway, I've finished it except for weaving in the ends, and it was a fun project.
This scarf is called Clockwork, and it was designed by Stephen West. It's a pretty time-consuming knit, but I found it pretty entertaining, so I zipped through it. There is enough variety, with the two colors of yarn and the increases and places where you slip stitches, to keep it from getting monotonous.
This photo doesn't really capture the colors very well. The lighter colored yarn is dyed to gradually change color, from green to blue to purple to pink, but it's fairly subtle. Anyway, I've finished it except for weaving in the ends, and it was a fun project.
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Comeback by Richard Stark
I am a mystery reader as well as a science fiction reader, and for years I've been hearing good things about the Parker novels by Richard Stark. Until now, I never got around to reading one.
Parker is a career criminal. He agrees to pull off a heist with his associate Mackey and Liss, a guy he'd never worked with before. Liss has an acquaintance who works for an evengelical preacher and has become disillusioned that the man is vain, corrupt, and that the vast sums of money he takes in are used for his own profit instead of doing the good he is collecting it for. The acquaintance can get them into an event, to steal about $400,000 in admission fees collected from the faithful.
The heist itself goes off without a hitch, except that they do not intend to give the inside man the cut he is expecting. But things go pear-shaped when Liss tries to kill Parker and Mackey and scoop all the money for himself. They chase him off, but he will try to find them again, and there is the added complication that the inside man blabbed about the heist to someone else who blabbed, and now there are three inept would-be criminals on their tail as well to confuse matters, and they need to find a place to lie low until law enforcement backs off, but of course Liss knows their intended hiding places.
This is not a mystery, it is a crime novel. Come to think of it, the other works I've read by this author (Richard Stark is a pen name of Donald Westlake) were also crime novels. I generally prefer mysteries. That said, it was very entertaining. Quite bleak, too, frankly. There isn't a happy ending for anyone, though we're sort of rooting for a successful escape for Parker. Lots of bad things happen, people are wounded or killed, buildings burned down. Parker doesn't go out of his way to hurt people, but he doesn't hesitate if he thinks he needs to, and Liss is actually does go out of his way to hurt people.
Comeback is a nice, compact story, not too long and moving right along. I like that in a novel. It's a quick an compelling read, and though I don't usually seek out crime novels this one is entertaining enough I might read another, if I come across one. Recommended.
Parker is a career criminal. He agrees to pull off a heist with his associate Mackey and Liss, a guy he'd never worked with before. Liss has an acquaintance who works for an evengelical preacher and has become disillusioned that the man is vain, corrupt, and that the vast sums of money he takes in are used for his own profit instead of doing the good he is collecting it for. The acquaintance can get them into an event, to steal about $400,000 in admission fees collected from the faithful.
The heist itself goes off without a hitch, except that they do not intend to give the inside man the cut he is expecting. But things go pear-shaped when Liss tries to kill Parker and Mackey and scoop all the money for himself. They chase him off, but he will try to find them again, and there is the added complication that the inside man blabbed about the heist to someone else who blabbed, and now there are three inept would-be criminals on their tail as well to confuse matters, and they need to find a place to lie low until law enforcement backs off, but of course Liss knows their intended hiding places.
This is not a mystery, it is a crime novel. Come to think of it, the other works I've read by this author (Richard Stark is a pen name of Donald Westlake) were also crime novels. I generally prefer mysteries. That said, it was very entertaining. Quite bleak, too, frankly. There isn't a happy ending for anyone, though we're sort of rooting for a successful escape for Parker. Lots of bad things happen, people are wounded or killed, buildings burned down. Parker doesn't go out of his way to hurt people, but he doesn't hesitate if he thinks he needs to, and Liss is actually does go out of his way to hurt people.
Comeback is a nice, compact story, not too long and moving right along. I like that in a novel. It's a quick an compelling read, and though I don't usually seek out crime novels this one is entertaining enough I might read another, if I come across one. Recommended.
Sunday, December 5, 2010
New Model Army by Adam Roberts
New Model Army is a near-future science fiction novel that explores the issue of war. The narrator, Block, was a member of Pantegral, one of the New Model Armies that have sprung up by the time of the novel. They are a military force without the heirarchy, with no officers or strategists. Instead they run by consensus, as a democracy. Technology allows them to communicate instantly, and most larger decisions are voted on by the troops, and they follow the decisions of the majority.
They are much more decentralized than a regular army, and are much cheaper to operate, for many reasons which our narrator explains. Because they are cheaper to operate, it makes military conflict more accessible to groups other than large governments, which is not necessarily a good thing.
The narrator explains all this, and details his experiences as part of Pantegral as they fight the British Army on behalf of Scotland. It's a very interesting idea to explore, even if the explanation of how they came to be fighting that particular war is farfetched. But I'm more interested in the story than the background, so I am able to forgive that.
New Model Army's structure is remisicent of Stone in that the narrator is explaining himself to an interrogator after the fact. I was curious, of course, to find out how he ended up there, and the central section of the book was spent in some anticipation of that event. Nevertheless the middle section was my least favorite part of the book. The beginning is spent introducing the character and the New Model Army and how it works. In the middle section things aren't going quite so well, and we know that something is going to happen to land him in the hands of the enemy. My favorite part was the final section, in which he is set off to do something that doesn't go according to plan. By this point Block is broken and passive, tossed around by others as they try to decide what to do with him.
I enjoyed New Model Army a lot. It isn't a happy book, and isn't as funny as Yellow Blue Tibia was (though that isn't a very happy book either, but it is funny). There are a few moments that I found amusing, and the ideas were interesting. I don't actually get that much of a sense of what sort of person Block is, but he says right at the beginning that he isn't the hero of the novel. He's telling it, but it isn't about him. The final chapter was hard to follow and seemed kind of pointless, but otherwise I found it to be a great read, and quite interesting. That's three books now by Roberts that I have liked--it is an encouraging sign, and I must track down all his others.
They are much more decentralized than a regular army, and are much cheaper to operate, for many reasons which our narrator explains. Because they are cheaper to operate, it makes military conflict more accessible to groups other than large governments, which is not necessarily a good thing.
The narrator explains all this, and details his experiences as part of Pantegral as they fight the British Army on behalf of Scotland. It's a very interesting idea to explore, even if the explanation of how they came to be fighting that particular war is farfetched. But I'm more interested in the story than the background, so I am able to forgive that.
New Model Army's structure is remisicent of Stone in that the narrator is explaining himself to an interrogator after the fact. I was curious, of course, to find out how he ended up there, and the central section of the book was spent in some anticipation of that event. Nevertheless the middle section was my least favorite part of the book. The beginning is spent introducing the character and the New Model Army and how it works. In the middle section things aren't going quite so well, and we know that something is going to happen to land him in the hands of the enemy. My favorite part was the final section, in which he is set off to do something that doesn't go according to plan. By this point Block is broken and passive, tossed around by others as they try to decide what to do with him.
I enjoyed New Model Army a lot. It isn't a happy book, and isn't as funny as Yellow Blue Tibia was (though that isn't a very happy book either, but it is funny). There are a few moments that I found amusing, and the ideas were interesting. I don't actually get that much of a sense of what sort of person Block is, but he says right at the beginning that he isn't the hero of the novel. He's telling it, but it isn't about him. The final chapter was hard to follow and seemed kind of pointless, but otherwise I found it to be a great read, and quite interesting. That's three books now by Roberts that I have liked--it is an encouraging sign, and I must track down all his others.
Saturday, December 4, 2010
The Bookman by Lavie Tidhar
The Bookman is a work of steampunk. I have to admit, I'm not wildly enthusiastic about steampunk as a genre. I don't really understand the fascination with writing or reading stories harking back to the Victorian era, except with anachronistic machines and attitudes. It wasn't a particularly good time. Nevertheless, I've been wanting to read The Bookman for a while. It's published by Angry Robot Books, a new imprint that starting publishing in the Commonwealth last year, and in the US this year. They've got some interesting books on their list, and they've recently started selling e-editions of their works at very reasonable prices.
Anyway, The Bookman: It begins in London, with a character named Orphan. He is a writer and poet, and lives in a bookshop with his friend, who is a revolutionary. He has a girlfriend named Lucy, who works with the whales that live in the Thames. He is a fairly happy young man, and looks forward to a happy future with Lucy. This is all shattered, however, when his friend Gilgamesh is killed, he witnesses two terrorist attacks by the legendary Bookman, and he is recruited by Inspector Irene Adler of Scotland Yard to help her track him (The Bookman) down.
Orphan is wrenched from his normal life and bounced around the various factions like a ping pong ball. He is a pawn, used and moved with little understanding of what is happening to him. Orphan isn't in control of his life, he is merely being shoved from place to place.
That said, his adventures are very interesting and entertaining. He travels, meets many interesting people and witnesses many interesting things, and in the end he helps change the course of the Empire. Tidhar has created a very enjoyable alternate British Empire, peopled with many familiar characters, both historical and literary. And then there is the added twist that the Empire is run by lizard men. I have read other steampunk works that do interesting or horrible things to Queen Victoria, like making her a cyborg, but this is the first one I've read in which she is a lizard.
The Bookman is a very entertaining story with lots of action, airships, pirates, and lizard men. It's a hell of a lot of fun, and I can't wait to read the sequel when it comes out. Highly recommended.
Anyway, The Bookman: It begins in London, with a character named Orphan. He is a writer and poet, and lives in a bookshop with his friend, who is a revolutionary. He has a girlfriend named Lucy, who works with the whales that live in the Thames. He is a fairly happy young man, and looks forward to a happy future with Lucy. This is all shattered, however, when his friend Gilgamesh is killed, he witnesses two terrorist attacks by the legendary Bookman, and he is recruited by Inspector Irene Adler of Scotland Yard to help her track him (The Bookman) down.
Orphan is wrenched from his normal life and bounced around the various factions like a ping pong ball. He is a pawn, used and moved with little understanding of what is happening to him. Orphan isn't in control of his life, he is merely being shoved from place to place.
That said, his adventures are very interesting and entertaining. He travels, meets many interesting people and witnesses many interesting things, and in the end he helps change the course of the Empire. Tidhar has created a very enjoyable alternate British Empire, peopled with many familiar characters, both historical and literary. And then there is the added twist that the Empire is run by lizard men. I have read other steampunk works that do interesting or horrible things to Queen Victoria, like making her a cyborg, but this is the first one I've read in which she is a lizard.
The Bookman is a very entertaining story with lots of action, airships, pirates, and lizard men. It's a hell of a lot of fun, and I can't wait to read the sequel when it comes out. Highly recommended.
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Grave Witch by Kalayna Price
Grave Witch came home with me from my recent trip to Barnes & Noble. It was an impulse buy off a free-standing display near the front of the store, so in this case that extra bit of marketing was successful. It's an urban fantasy.
Alex Craft is a grave witch--a medium, essentially, she can see ghosts and raise the spirits of the dead--in Nekros City. This is set in a timeline in which the fae and witches are known to the public, and Nekros City sits on a bit of land created, or found, by the fae. It is a city with a large magical population, and yet the government seems to be controlled by Humans First, a movement that disapproves of the magical portion of the population. Alex's father is one of them, which is why they haven't spoken to each other in years.
Alex is broke, as private investigators often are, so she accepts a job from her estranged sister, Casey. The governor, Theodore Coleman, disappeared, and now his body has been found. The police are looking suspiciously at the lieutenant governor, their father. Casey wants Alex to raise the dead man's shade and find out what happened to him. She exchanges favors with a homicide detective friend, which gains her access to Coleman's body in exchange for her doing some work for him on a dead Jane Doe. Neither operation is successful, and she is interrupted by the arrival of Falin Andrews, the detective who is investigating the Coleman death. He is angry and she gets angry back, which makes it inevitable, in story-logic, that they're going to end up in bed together.
Alex has various adventures which include attempted murder and kidnap, and she and Andrews get closer, unsurprisingly. She walks into a couple of forseeable traps, but at least she had self-doubt about the second one, and tried very hard to extricate herself in a sensible way, rather than just charging in bull-headed like many heroines in this sort of book. In the end it turns out, more or less, that she's the only one who can stop the evil plot of the evil guy.
There are a lot of things to like about Grave Witch. There is a nice cast of supporting characters, including her fae landlord, the neighborhood garoyle, her two girl friends who are warm and supportive but keep pushing her at men, and her goofy little dog, Prince Charming. Alex gets herself into avoidable rouble a couple of times, but at least she/'s cautious about it and thinks before plunging into danger. There is a bit of a love triangle in which two hunky desirable guys are both interested in her, a story that I always have trouble believing in, but it didn't bother me too much. There's a lot of action, and it sweeps you along briskly. I read it straight through in an evening, and if there were a sequel out I would happily go buy it right now. It was highly entertaining, and I will certainly seek out the next one.
Alex Craft is a grave witch--a medium, essentially, she can see ghosts and raise the spirits of the dead--in Nekros City. This is set in a timeline in which the fae and witches are known to the public, and Nekros City sits on a bit of land created, or found, by the fae. It is a city with a large magical population, and yet the government seems to be controlled by Humans First, a movement that disapproves of the magical portion of the population. Alex's father is one of them, which is why they haven't spoken to each other in years.
Alex is broke, as private investigators often are, so she accepts a job from her estranged sister, Casey. The governor, Theodore Coleman, disappeared, and now his body has been found. The police are looking suspiciously at the lieutenant governor, their father. Casey wants Alex to raise the dead man's shade and find out what happened to him. She exchanges favors with a homicide detective friend, which gains her access to Coleman's body in exchange for her doing some work for him on a dead Jane Doe. Neither operation is successful, and she is interrupted by the arrival of Falin Andrews, the detective who is investigating the Coleman death. He is angry and she gets angry back, which makes it inevitable, in story-logic, that they're going to end up in bed together.
Alex has various adventures which include attempted murder and kidnap, and she and Andrews get closer, unsurprisingly. She walks into a couple of forseeable traps, but at least she had self-doubt about the second one, and tried very hard to extricate herself in a sensible way, rather than just charging in bull-headed like many heroines in this sort of book. In the end it turns out, more or less, that she's the only one who can stop the evil plot of the evil guy.
There are a lot of things to like about Grave Witch. There is a nice cast of supporting characters, including her fae landlord, the neighborhood garoyle, her two girl friends who are warm and supportive but keep pushing her at men, and her goofy little dog, Prince Charming. Alex gets herself into avoidable rouble a couple of times, but at least she/'s cautious about it and thinks before plunging into danger. There is a bit of a love triangle in which two hunky desirable guys are both interested in her, a story that I always have trouble believing in, but it didn't bother me too much. There's a lot of action, and it sweeps you along briskly. I read it straight through in an evening, and if there were a sequel out I would happily go buy it right now. It was highly entertaining, and I will certainly seek out the next one.
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