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kaigouVarious reviews. Minor spoilers; major ones whited out (highlight to read).
Valiant, Holly Black
Read this one a few weeks ago, but just never said anything online because I was still processing to some degree, both what I liked, and didn't like. Holly's probably one of the most evocative writers when it comes to setting; she honestly blows away 90% of the other writers I've read in the past few years. Things don't just smell in Holly's world, they reek, rot, creak, and groan. New York is more than just some alleyways and a few cabs, it's entirely populated and most of it's filthy.
I haven't read much YA since I was in the actual age group, so Holly's two books have been real eye-openers for me in terms of what you can actually write in YA. This story revolves around drug abuse, and it pulls no punches both with the lure of drugs, and the struggle to walk away from them.
It took me a bit to figure this out, but I realized my dissatisfaction (which, I admit, may be standard for the YA genre; I don't know) is due to the lack of consequences. Val, the lead character, runs away to NYC for believable reasons, and ends up with a bunch of subway kids, one of whom introduces her to a fairy medicine that hits humans like an intense, hallucinogenic experience, like E and LSD in a blender, with heroin thrown in for good measure.
While under the influence, humans can use glamour/persuasion just like the fairies (and Holly's fairies are not your grandmother's flower pixies, thank you). What got me is that during the course of the story, Val and her friends do some seriously out-there stuff, downright cruel and vicious, like glamouring dog crap into donuts and giving it to humans to eat, or glamouring a cop into a dog that then attacks the cop-partner, who shoots the dog only to discover he's just shot his own partner...
The story ends on a somewhat-happy note, or at least a hopeful note, which is as it should be for YA. It's not completely "everyone ends happy" which wouldn't be believeable and would clash with the rest of the story, but... I expected consequences. Even if not from the outside world, definitely from Val's own mind. At the beginning of the book, she didn't come across as a conscienceless child, but a thinking person with some level of compassion, and she shows that through the course of the story.
And I'm down with the notion that while high, she'd potentially be less likely to suffer any pangs over her behavior--it's after the fact that I expected to see guilt, or some difficulty grappling with what she'd done/seen, or something. But it doesn't even get a mention; the end almost feels like an epilogue of several months later, tagging on and just explaining, without at least a scene (or even a hint) of Val still reconciling (or even having reconciled) the person she'd become, however temporarily, with the person she'd believed herself to be.
But perhaps the lack of serious, lasting consequences is a hallmark of YA. I'm not sure.
Game of Thrones, Clash of Kings, Storm of Swords, George R. R. Martin
I'm not sure, to be honest, that I'll purchase more. I liked the storytelling, and the plot's certainly complex enough, and some (though hardly all) of the characters have really captured me. Jon Snow, Arya Stark, Danys Stormborn. But reading the reviews for the most recent release (A Feast For Crows) made me think, woo! more Jon Snow! and then to find out he's mentioned not at all.
The problem with a massive world and text like this is that things don't always move at light-speed, and there must be pauses while the author/characters set up, regroup, and prepare for the next onslaught. But short of "and then ten years later" and start all over again, Martin's covering it, which means the fourth book in the series was one big honkin' work and had to be split into two, and I'm just not sure I want to bother reading the first half if I then have to wait for two more years to read the rest.
Good story. Complex. Pushes the characters harder and harder, brutal and credible and believable in the conflicts, but sometimes it was hard to find someone to connect to, what with everyone going in so many directions.
Also, noticeably, no viewpoint chapters for those characters for whom the reader isn't supposed to relate (that's my suspicion as to the reason, at least). Once you get a viewpoint chapter, then it's a big clue this is a character with at least some redeeming quality, or in the process of redeeming himself. For whatever reason, Martin seems to prefer standing on the outside with the baddies, which is surprising given how brutal he's not afraid to be with just about all of the characters.
Black Sun Rising, CS Friedman
I didn't even finish it. I was willing to give it a shot, and I tried, and okay, it wasn't nearly as boring or pedantic as American Gods, but at times it felt up there. It just seemed too...disembodied. I've learned to expect a certain level of grounding in place (see notes about Holly, and even Martin), and while I got lots of worldbuilding in this story, it didn't feel solid.
That, and the characters just didn't pop out at me; perhaps the concept itself was so novel that the characters could take a back-seat for being less of a draw, the author might've hoped, than the ideas hiding in the work. Not really sure.
My real frustration actually started as the story kicked in. The priest (cleric?) has come to a town, and begins an affair with an adept. When she's viciously attacked and suffers retrograde amnesia, the cleric and the adept's assistant decide they need to get her memory back, so off they go in search of whomever stole the memory, to kill the attacker and that will...return the memory.
I ended up rereading the chapter twice, trying to figure out their logic. It's not that I doubted they were on the wrong path -- having read that other chapter where the bad guys do just what the cleric had concluded -- but I wasn't sure when the cleric got to read that chapter, too.
Because he sure as hell must've for the plan to be so right, all the way down the line. Any twists after that weren't twists for me, as a result of that one massive blood-gushing plot hole in the middle of the story. Hell, the story felt like it died when it couldn't answer, explain, or believably justify the apparent ease with which the two heroes had decided how to handle the adept's amnesia. After that, the story might as well have been the walking dead, and a few chapters read like it, too.
Sailing to Sarantium, Guy Gavriel Kay
Hell, I didn't even make it through the prologue. When the frickin' prologue is twenty something chapters, you know you're in trouble. I get the idea of setting the scene (or something) but come ON, give me some goddamn conflict with characters I can pay attention to: seeing the title 'prologue' on the first chapter makes me automatically think, "these are people who will not exist in another ten pages or so." I'd never really thought about it until this time, trying to parse out what had me frustrated.
I think it's that when I read prologues, I know it's either past history, or way future history, or it's blonde chick in alley about to get killer by ruthless asshole, whatever, snap. No need, in any direction, to really care about the characters other than culling out what I need to know to understand the story's opening. That's fine if we're talking a thousand words. Nine thousand? No way.
Nightlife, Rob Thurman
A close second to Holly, and another NYC-based story, but maybe it was hampered by its short length (it only took me about three hours to read, and not all in one sitting). See, I've lived in cities, and there are people everywhere; one reason I love Holly's writing is that she has people going in all directions, even if they're not named characters, her streets are full.
Rob's city feels like there are five or six characters...and, uh, maybe some other folks but they're all on some other street right now. I liked the voice, which was alternately snarky, thoughtful, lazy, and gut-honest of a nineteen-year-old kid-voice. Cal, the main character (it's told in 1st person) does go on at times, but it wasn't too egregious.
What actually got me was something that maybe might not bother anyone else, but it bothered the hell out of me. Okay, two brothers, orphaned in their teens. Older brother, Niko, has smarts and potential and got into college on full ride, but appears to have given it up (or graduated? not clear) to protect his little brother. Cal is half-human, half-Elf (and the elves in this world aren't your Tolkein beauties by any stretch); Cal and Niko have spent the past five years running and hiding from any/all elves, which they call Grendels.
Now, I can get that anyone can read Shakespeare and Beowulf and whatnot, and thus have reams o' trivia in the skull, despite moving on a regular basis at the merest sign of elf-threat. Libraries are open to the public, after all. But the contrast between Cal and Niko is that Cal's all american-boy-hunger, cheeseburgers and grease. Niko's about the classes at the dojo, the sword hidden under the jacket, the twelve knives deposited around, and...the wheatgrass juice and the vegetarian food and the eating-healthy.
Did the author never stop to think how much those things cost?
There's a reason we ate hamburgers while living in digs as rundown and beatup as those Rob describes for Niko & Cal. When you're working in a bar, you don't make enough to pay for veggie burgers, which are triple the cost of plain ground beef. Wheatgrass tea? Why spend the five bucks, when ninety-nine cents will get you a two-liter of generic soda? A good sword goes for over a grand, if you want an edge that really cuts and any balance. A Sig Sauer 45? Try around nine hundred dollars.
Knives? For the throwing-balanced ones, maybe $30 to $50, depending on quality. We carried scalpels and exacto knives and switchblades; these weren't just easily hidden, they were cheap and when you're making $6 an hour, and paying $300 a month in rent for some place that only has hot water half the time, you learn to make your money stretch, and it won't stretch far if you're insisting on fresh veggies and frickin' top-quality green tea. Sorry, it won't. I sense phantom income o' two boys raised in a trailer, and it really turned me off.
Okay, that, and Niko's some early-twenties kid who's trained in dojos and eats soooo healthy and he gets part-time gigs working as a body guard. If he'd been a bouncer, I might've gone for it, but a bodyguard just seemed a bit...hrmm, convenient, if not a bit on the romantic side, too. As in, the not-really-credible romanticized side.
I've known people who hire bodyguards, and if you're living your life in the shadows, the last thing anyone'd want is to hire you to protect them; how are they going to do a full check on who you are if you don't exist? And if you're trying hard to not exist, why the hell would you want them to check on your references? Wait, what references?
The last annoyance was that by three-quarters of the way through the book, when the shit really hits the fan, and Cal is possessed by an unexpected bad guy, whose internal monologue just would not shut up. During his time possessing Cal's body, he goes on about "things are happening, everything's falling into place and I'm working all angles" and I don't see any of this, other than a shitload of talking and very little action. When I finally see the badguy-elves preparing, their preparation consists of...cleaning up an old building. Whoop-de-doo. A lot of talk about the bad guy's prep is one thing; it's another thing when, in hindsight, I can look back at the plot and say, that's it? That's the extent of the bad guy's action? Why all the noise; none of that was needed. Quick in & out, people, the plot wasn't really that complex!
Anyway.
YMMV, of course, as always.
Next up, Bujold's Paladin of Souls and Naomi Novik's His Majesty's Dragon. I have high hopes for both of these, but first I have some revising of my own to do. After all, can't frickin' publish what I don't frickin' finish. Sigh.
EDIT, son of: Wow, Novik's gonna make me cry, damn it, it's like Napoleonic era warfare and dragons and impeccable titling and formality all wrapped up in one, and the lovely semi-colons, too. *sniff* I adore a writer who knows the semi-colon. Halfway through already, and haven't found a damn thing yet to fuss about, this is rare, and a beautiful thing.
EDIT, revenge of: why do fantasy novels so often feel the need to end the frickin' world? It makes me think of Riley's question to Buffy: "what's the plural for apocalypse?" I mean, Buffy could pull that off because, hey, JOSS WHEDON, and what's impossible for the rest of us is never impossible for Whedon.
90% of teh writers out there are, sadly, NOT Joss Whedon. Instead, their "the world will end!" comes across like a string-jerker, like I'm supposed to care because, hey, the world is gonna end! Holly Black doesn't pull this shit (or at least, hasn't, yet); Alma (Secrets of Jin-Shei) didn't, either, being more focused on the political, nor does Martin, but that's why I found both refreshing; Tanya Huff had a few that didn't pull that stunt but then a few that did, which annoyed me. Thurman pulled it with Nightlife, and I must admit I see the "or the world will end!" cry and something in me just gets annoyed.
So the question is: after reading a good stretch of fantasy, do any of you find "the world will end" to be a Big Cost and useful in a story's plotline, or do you find it a cop-out, or over-the-top? In which stories did it work for you, or did it stop working, or does it only work in certain instances? Just curious.
EDIT, pt 3.5: OMG His Majesty's Dragon is fucking flawless. Not a single frickin' complaint. I ripped through that book in maybe five hours. Okay, one complaint. TOO SHORT. Crap, now I shall go cry for not being able to write like that. OMG. OMG. Fucking A.
Read this one a few weeks ago, but just never said anything online because I was still processing to some degree, both what I liked, and didn't like. Holly's probably one of the most evocative writers when it comes to setting; she honestly blows away 90% of the other writers I've read in the past few years. Things don't just smell in Holly's world, they reek, rot, creak, and groan. New York is more than just some alleyways and a few cabs, it's entirely populated and most of it's filthy.
I haven't read much YA since I was in the actual age group, so Holly's two books have been real eye-openers for me in terms of what you can actually write in YA. This story revolves around drug abuse, and it pulls no punches both with the lure of drugs, and the struggle to walk away from them.
It took me a bit to figure this out, but I realized my dissatisfaction (which, I admit, may be standard for the YA genre; I don't know) is due to the lack of consequences. Val, the lead character, runs away to NYC for believable reasons, and ends up with a bunch of subway kids, one of whom introduces her to a fairy medicine that hits humans like an intense, hallucinogenic experience, like E and LSD in a blender, with heroin thrown in for good measure.
While under the influence, humans can use glamour/persuasion just like the fairies (and Holly's fairies are not your grandmother's flower pixies, thank you). What got me is that during the course of the story, Val and her friends do some seriously out-there stuff, downright cruel and vicious, like glamouring dog crap into donuts and giving it to humans to eat, or glamouring a cop into a dog that then attacks the cop-partner, who shoots the dog only to discover he's just shot his own partner...
The story ends on a somewhat-happy note, or at least a hopeful note, which is as it should be for YA. It's not completely "everyone ends happy" which wouldn't be believeable and would clash with the rest of the story, but... I expected consequences. Even if not from the outside world, definitely from Val's own mind. At the beginning of the book, she didn't come across as a conscienceless child, but a thinking person with some level of compassion, and she shows that through the course of the story.
And I'm down with the notion that while high, she'd potentially be less likely to suffer any pangs over her behavior--it's after the fact that I expected to see guilt, or some difficulty grappling with what she'd done/seen, or something. But it doesn't even get a mention; the end almost feels like an epilogue of several months later, tagging on and just explaining, without at least a scene (or even a hint) of Val still reconciling (or even having reconciled) the person she'd become, however temporarily, with the person she'd believed herself to be.
But perhaps the lack of serious, lasting consequences is a hallmark of YA. I'm not sure.
I'm not sure, to be honest, that I'll purchase more. I liked the storytelling, and the plot's certainly complex enough, and some (though hardly all) of the characters have really captured me. Jon Snow, Arya Stark, Danys Stormborn. But reading the reviews for the most recent release (A Feast For Crows) made me think, woo! more Jon Snow! and then to find out he's mentioned not at all.
The problem with a massive world and text like this is that things don't always move at light-speed, and there must be pauses while the author/characters set up, regroup, and prepare for the next onslaught. But short of "and then ten years later" and start all over again, Martin's covering it, which means the fourth book in the series was one big honkin' work and had to be split into two, and I'm just not sure I want to bother reading the first half if I then have to wait for two more years to read the rest.
Good story. Complex. Pushes the characters harder and harder, brutal and credible and believable in the conflicts, but sometimes it was hard to find someone to connect to, what with everyone going in so many directions.
Also, noticeably, no viewpoint chapters for those characters for whom the reader isn't supposed to relate (that's my suspicion as to the reason, at least). Once you get a viewpoint chapter, then it's a big clue this is a character with at least some redeeming quality, or in the process of redeeming himself. For whatever reason, Martin seems to prefer standing on the outside with the baddies, which is surprising given how brutal he's not afraid to be with just about all of the characters.
I didn't even finish it. I was willing to give it a shot, and I tried, and okay, it wasn't nearly as boring or pedantic as American Gods, but at times it felt up there. It just seemed too...disembodied. I've learned to expect a certain level of grounding in place (see notes about Holly, and even Martin), and while I got lots of worldbuilding in this story, it didn't feel solid.
That, and the characters just didn't pop out at me; perhaps the concept itself was so novel that the characters could take a back-seat for being less of a draw, the author might've hoped, than the ideas hiding in the work. Not really sure.
My real frustration actually started as the story kicked in. The priest (cleric?) has come to a town, and begins an affair with an adept. When she's viciously attacked and suffers retrograde amnesia, the cleric and the adept's assistant decide they need to get her memory back, so off they go in search of whomever stole the memory, to kill the attacker and that will...return the memory.
I ended up rereading the chapter twice, trying to figure out their logic. It's not that I doubted they were on the wrong path -- having read that other chapter where the bad guys do just what the cleric had concluded -- but I wasn't sure when the cleric got to read that chapter, too.
Because he sure as hell must've for the plan to be so right, all the way down the line. Any twists after that weren't twists for me, as a result of that one massive blood-gushing plot hole in the middle of the story. Hell, the story felt like it died when it couldn't answer, explain, or believably justify the apparent ease with which the two heroes had decided how to handle the adept's amnesia. After that, the story might as well have been the walking dead, and a few chapters read like it, too.
Hell, I didn't even make it through the prologue. When the frickin' prologue is twenty something chapters, you know you're in trouble. I get the idea of setting the scene (or something) but come ON, give me some goddamn conflict with characters I can pay attention to: seeing the title 'prologue' on the first chapter makes me automatically think, "these are people who will not exist in another ten pages or so." I'd never really thought about it until this time, trying to parse out what had me frustrated.
I think it's that when I read prologues, I know it's either past history, or way future history, or it's blonde chick in alley about to get killer by ruthless asshole, whatever, snap. No need, in any direction, to really care about the characters other than culling out what I need to know to understand the story's opening. That's fine if we're talking a thousand words. Nine thousand? No way.
A close second to Holly, and another NYC-based story, but maybe it was hampered by its short length (it only took me about three hours to read, and not all in one sitting). See, I've lived in cities, and there are people everywhere; one reason I love Holly's writing is that she has people going in all directions, even if they're not named characters, her streets are full.
Rob's city feels like there are five or six characters...and, uh, maybe some other folks but they're all on some other street right now. I liked the voice, which was alternately snarky, thoughtful, lazy, and gut-honest of a nineteen-year-old kid-voice. Cal, the main character (it's told in 1st person) does go on at times, but it wasn't too egregious.
What actually got me was something that maybe might not bother anyone else, but it bothered the hell out of me. Okay, two brothers, orphaned in their teens. Older brother, Niko, has smarts and potential and got into college on full ride, but appears to have given it up (or graduated? not clear) to protect his little brother. Cal is half-human, half-Elf (and the elves in this world aren't your Tolkein beauties by any stretch); Cal and Niko have spent the past five years running and hiding from any/all elves, which they call Grendels.
Now, I can get that anyone can read Shakespeare and Beowulf and whatnot, and thus have reams o' trivia in the skull, despite moving on a regular basis at the merest sign of elf-threat. Libraries are open to the public, after all. But the contrast between Cal and Niko is that Cal's all american-boy-hunger, cheeseburgers and grease. Niko's about the classes at the dojo, the sword hidden under the jacket, the twelve knives deposited around, and...the wheatgrass juice and the vegetarian food and the eating-healthy.
Did the author never stop to think how much those things cost?
There's a reason we ate hamburgers while living in digs as rundown and beatup as those Rob describes for Niko & Cal. When you're working in a bar, you don't make enough to pay for veggie burgers, which are triple the cost of plain ground beef. Wheatgrass tea? Why spend the five bucks, when ninety-nine cents will get you a two-liter of generic soda? A good sword goes for over a grand, if you want an edge that really cuts and any balance. A Sig Sauer 45? Try around nine hundred dollars.
Knives? For the throwing-balanced ones, maybe $30 to $50, depending on quality. We carried scalpels and exacto knives and switchblades; these weren't just easily hidden, they were cheap and when you're making $6 an hour, and paying $300 a month in rent for some place that only has hot water half the time, you learn to make your money stretch, and it won't stretch far if you're insisting on fresh veggies and frickin' top-quality green tea. Sorry, it won't. I sense phantom income o' two boys raised in a trailer, and it really turned me off.
Okay, that, and Niko's some early-twenties kid who's trained in dojos and eats soooo healthy and he gets part-time gigs working as a body guard. If he'd been a bouncer, I might've gone for it, but a bodyguard just seemed a bit...hrmm, convenient, if not a bit on the romantic side, too. As in, the not-really-credible romanticized side.
I've known people who hire bodyguards, and if you're living your life in the shadows, the last thing anyone'd want is to hire you to protect them; how are they going to do a full check on who you are if you don't exist? And if you're trying hard to not exist, why the hell would you want them to check on your references? Wait, what references?
The last annoyance was that by three-quarters of the way through the book, when the shit really hits the fan, and Cal is possessed by an unexpected bad guy, whose internal monologue just would not shut up. During his time possessing Cal's body, he goes on about "things are happening, everything's falling into place and I'm working all angles" and I don't see any of this, other than a shitload of talking and very little action. When I finally see the badguy-elves preparing, their preparation consists of...cleaning up an old building. Whoop-de-doo. A lot of talk about the bad guy's prep is one thing; it's another thing when, in hindsight, I can look back at the plot and say, that's it? That's the extent of the bad guy's action? Why all the noise; none of that was needed. Quick in & out, people, the plot wasn't really that complex!
Anyway.
YMMV, of course, as always.
Next up, Bujold's Paladin of Souls and Naomi Novik's His Majesty's Dragon. I have high hopes for both of these, but first I have some revising of my own to do. After all, can't frickin' publish what I don't frickin' finish. Sigh.
EDIT, son of: Wow, Novik's gonna make me cry, damn it, it's like Napoleonic era warfare and dragons and impeccable titling and formality all wrapped up in one, and the lovely semi-colons, too. *sniff* I adore a writer who knows the semi-colon. Halfway through already, and haven't found a damn thing yet to fuss about, this is rare, and a beautiful thing.
EDIT, revenge of: why do fantasy novels so often feel the need to end the frickin' world? It makes me think of Riley's question to Buffy: "what's the plural for apocalypse?" I mean, Buffy could pull that off because, hey, JOSS WHEDON, and what's impossible for the rest of us is never impossible for Whedon.
90% of teh writers out there are, sadly, NOT Joss Whedon. Instead, their "the world will end!" comes across like a string-jerker, like I'm supposed to care because, hey, the world is gonna end! Holly Black doesn't pull this shit (or at least, hasn't, yet); Alma (Secrets of Jin-Shei) didn't, either, being more focused on the political, nor does Martin, but that's why I found both refreshing; Tanya Huff had a few that didn't pull that stunt but then a few that did, which annoyed me. Thurman pulled it with Nightlife, and I must admit I see the "or the world will end!" cry and something in me just gets annoyed.
So the question is: after reading a good stretch of fantasy, do any of you find "the world will end" to be a Big Cost and useful in a story's plotline, or do you find it a cop-out, or over-the-top? In which stories did it work for you, or did it stop working, or does it only work in certain instances? Just curious.
EDIT, pt 3.5: OMG His Majesty's Dragon is fucking flawless. Not a single frickin' complaint. I ripped through that book in maybe five hours. Okay, one complaint. TOO SHORT. Crap, now I shall go cry for not being able to write like that. OMG. OMG. Fucking A.
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Date: 22 Apr 2006 05:58 pm (UTC)He's a great foil for Lawrence, who wants to do the right thing, but is sometimes torn between England's right thing, his own right thing...and what's right for Temeraire. Lawrence doesn't always do the right thing, and he blunders at a few points, but his saving grace is that he figures it out relatively quickly and does what he can to fix it, but it's not too easy for him nor too hard.
Go on, if anyone would enjoy it, I'd think you'd be on that list. ;D