three books down!
22 Nov 2006 07:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaigouI figured today was really close enough to a holiday to take the time to read, instead (plus reading last night), and I got news that another former coworker would be happy to give good reference, so that was enough and I went back to reading. Kept out the worst of any spoilers, best I can.
Since this time yesterday, I've read three books, and I was up to 4am reading, too, damn it. I'll go to bed, in a minute! One more paragraph!
Song of the Beast, Carol Berg. I was warned before hearing Berg read, at WFC, that this woman likes to torture her characters. As in, really torture her characters. It's not gratuitous, just...they don't get off easy. Hell, they don't get off hard. More like frickin' miserably. On the down side, yes, it's about dragons (an overdone line if I've seen one, and I say that as someone with a dragon triology in my own noggin), but instead of these beasts being necessarily wise and wonderful and hoard-happy, they're crazed, dangerous, beasts of prey used as some kind of zeppelin-like monsters of war.
To start off: Aidan, the protag, is imprisoned at 21, and kept in darkness and silence for seventeen years, and hasn't the foggiest clue why. The entire book is pretty much everything he goes through to find that out.
Okay, right there, major plus. I'm sick of fifteen- to eighteen-year old prodigies. 21 is a decent age to reasonably have some major skills as a musician or singer, and 38 is a reasonable age for someone to tire a little faster, be a bit more worn-down -- that is, let's be blunt, Aidan is human. The horrible torture of his imprisonment also means his hands are so mangled he can barely hold a fork, let alone play an intrument, and that torture happened anytime he learned to sing, so he learned to keep his mouth shut and silence the music in his head. It's a little unusual to read a book in which it's first-person POV and yet the main protag doesn't even speak for the first two or three chapters.
There are a few twists I didn't see coming (but I'm not one who tries to guess the endings of detective novels, either, so don't look to me on that one), and the character development from antagonistical to slightly combative to cooperative is awkward, rough, and believable. There are a few times where the alternating POVs (all in first person) got a little too misty-eyed about the other (especially from the female POV toward Aidan), but not so much I started glaring at the pages. And yes, there's angst of the romantic kind, but the situation was tense, the stakes high enough, the history long enough, that the usual "just fricking TALK damn it!" yelling I'd do at that point was not an option, so the tension could continue unabated and still be believable.
What I did enjoy more, in some ways (if caught off-guard by) was the ending. Emotionally satisfying on a mature level, but without the puppies and roses I've learned to expect at the end of a stand-alone. More like...well, I won't spoil it. Just trust me that it's satisfying but not necessarily in the usual way. Good, but different-good.
Path of Blood, Diana Pharoah Francis. Again with the "not my usual genre!" disclaimer, so it's hard to guess sometimes whether I'm reading a trope as new and fresh when it's done a bazillion times (like, say, if I read Louis L'Amour, how would I know he's derivative or what?). But I can say this: three points to note of a book.
One, first chapter of high fantasy is where the tone gets set and where I (so often) get bored. It's all sweeping skirts and deep bows and fancy-schmancy names and romanticism and that crap. (I didn't mind Swordspoint on the whole, but that fairy-tale opening made me want to choke up dinner.) On the other hand, two paragraphs in and your idyllic, pastoral scene with young woman walking along a dirt road, humming a tune and then...tripping and falling face-first into the dirt? It's like Saturday Night Live, or a Monty Python skit. La la la WAH *thump*
And there, my lovely readers, is a great way for an author to thumb her nose and say, "in case you weren't sure, this character isn't perfect."
Another note -- and again, I may be ignorant of the finer details of high fantasy tropes/stereotypes but I do know this one -- I really, really hate gods descending from On High to grant Speshull Powerz toMary Sue the protag. The once or twice I've seen it varying, the author seemed to do it on principle, but without a significant reason. Look, if your entire world said being quarterback for the [insert football team here] is THE end-all and be-all, and God On High said, poof, I shall make you a quarterback, we'd all think you're crazy for getting pissy about it.
Unless, of course, you -- or the character's -- got good reason. Then you can have some fun with it, and Francis spends the first chapter or so laying out all the reasons her protag, Reisil, is Quite Pleased with the way things are going. She's in her probationary period as the local healer, she's studied for thirteen years (another non-young insta-prodigy! yay!), and now she's back and Things Are Going To Work Out. I mean, you can practically see the capital letters in her characterization, touched with a little bit of apprehension anyone would feel during what amounts to an extended benchtest.
God On High: Hey. You, over there. I'm going to make you Speshul.
Probationary Healer: Uhm. No.
GOH: What? No, really.
PH: Thanks, but I'm fine.
GOH: No, really.
PH: Look, I said I'm FINE.
GOH: NO REALLY.
PH: ow!
My bias slipping in here, in that I don't really care for books with gods inserting themselves into the action, not unless there's several things going on. First, god insertion doesn't work in a monotheistic system. It just doesn't. So much for free will, then, people, and you can't get more deus ex bad frickin' writer than that. Second, god insertion doesn't work unless you're consistent. If a god has powers in this region, or area of expertise, then you can't say a god elsewhere or with a different expertise isn't as powerful or as good. If one god is so all-fired speshul, then what's retaining him/her/it in that region or expertise? (We're getting back to the Greek concept of a damn soap opera, now.)
Which is to say, I was riding on Reisil's characterization between the lady/god's first appearance, the second, and the usually-inevitable woo-woo of female things being all powerful and healy-like and that general woo-woo female mystery crap I hated so much in college. It didn't happen. Yay!
The Dark God comes along, which is when I started really, really hoping it didn't get botched. I get truly annoyed when Dark means all things bad and foul, and Light is all things growing and happy, blah blah blah, do gardeners never write these books? We need more gardeners writing books, and then Fall and Winter would have as much goodness as Spring and Summer, and Summer would be as terrifying and potentially harmful as Winter. More so, maybe!
But Reisil, as a healer, is also the pragmatic kind, like your average sadistic nurse: look, sometimes, that peroxide MUST go in the wound and stop crying now, it doesn't hurt that much. (The entire audience rises up as one to insist they, too, know a nurse just like that.) And so is the sort-of-creepy crawled lady/god, who protects her own, has her own priorities, but also knows when it's time to cut off that dead branch. Get the saw, honey, time to lop.
Anyway, point is, in reading the scene, you have to strip away what (on the surface) looks like the usual tropes -- growing things versus dark twisty shadows -- and just look at the content and the context of the gods that intervene, they're both essentially pretty much saying the same things, and they treat their subjects the same, too. We may get to see the Dark God in a slightly more irked role, but a scene with him/it and you realize, it's possible the Lady/God would've reacted the same way in the situation.
Plus, a character who is not a virgin, and is not five-foot-one! *pumps fist*
Singer of Souls, Adam Stemple. I think this book actually suffers, on the surface (err, so to speak) from a halfway okay cover that really doesn't do it justice. I expected a comedy, maybe dated, even, in that the cover -- a rather amusing line-drawn art of a busker -- looks like something I would've seen for Coffee, Tea, or Me or maybe Confederacy of Dunces -- that kind of late-60s to mid-70s cover style.
Unfortunately, the book's interior has much grittier potential. It begins in Minneapolis, kicking you right in the teeth with a young man, Douglas, trying to decide if he's really going to go clean from heroin this time, or sink back down. Somehow he manages to walk away, decides he'll visit his grandmother in Scotland, he'll save up his money, get away from the drugs and crime, and six weeks later he's in Edinburgh. His grandmother takes no truck from him, but lets him move in, supports him as a busker, and things look like they'll work out. His "job" is singing for people, making up ditties/music for them as his street act, all on the fly.
Then a striking woman asks him to "sing" her, and in return, she pays him with a vial of something white. Lovely for the junkie -- and soon his self-control's gone and he shoots it. Nothing happens -- until the next day, when he realizes he can see fairies. The rest of teh story, well, I think Stemple was playing Berg's tune of taking the character down to the bottom and then kicking him in the teeth a few times. The girl he likes/maybe-likes? Another junkie. The woman he sang for? Powerful fairy. The priest? Not really...well, figure that one out if you read.
The ending, unlike Berg and Francis, is not really satisfactory at all. Maybe it's a completion of a sort, but there's something...cruel. And he'd started out as a struggling, falliable person, and where he ends up is not what I'd say is any sort of improvement. In fact, it's a significant de-volution. Pity, but I think I also lost interest when his risk was gone -- that is, when it became clear that the one thing tying Douglas, that makes it all matter for him -- is gone, then he stops caring, and so did I. Except the not-caring turns to not-cruelty. I suppose if the author had intended to write a short piece (maybe 80K? I almost thought it was YA) on the oppressed becoming the oppressor, then I would've liked a bit more warning earlier in the game instead of rooting for him for so long.
Also, book ratings: no sex/cussing in Berg's book, though a lot of violence and a lot of suffering. Off-page sex in Francis' (the characters are in their twenties or older), off-page violence against women though she handles quasi-aristocratic notions about 'women as possessions' well given the genre's limitations, but no cussing and violence isn't gratuitous; Stemple's book is definitely R for violence, cussing, drug use, and sex. FYI, for those of you to whom this matters.
I think what gets me sometimes in urban fantasy is teh struggle to balance the traditional folklore of fairies/good-folk having no conscience, that whole 'capricious' element that's so big in the folklore. The problem is that this 'capriciousness' must be only on the surface; a society whose internal rules are not consistent just annoys the piss out of me. You'd think some authors just say, "what doesn't make sense in this situation?" and have the fairies do that, just to be mean, instead of looking at it like, "what if the fairies believe themselves better, what other society believes itself better than us, in what ways do they no make sense?"
Hello, read something about the Plains Indians' reactions to meeting white men, and how the white men made no sense, dressed themselves funny, reacted all wrong at simple things, got offended at stupid things, and just generally were unpredictable and violent when there was no reason for it. Tadah, who's the goddamn fey-folk now?
EDIT: Since I probably wasn't clear enough, I paid for all three, I'm glad I paid for all three (even with Stemple's ending, the book on the whole was well-done and fast-paced, so it gets gladness), and now I think you should experience this gladness, too. Pick your genre (or rating?) and BUY THESE BOOKS. And for friends. Buy several copies for friends. Like, six each.
Since this time yesterday, I've read three books, and I was up to 4am reading, too, damn it. I'll go to bed, in a minute! One more paragraph!
Song of the Beast, Carol Berg. I was warned before hearing Berg read, at WFC, that this woman likes to torture her characters. As in, really torture her characters. It's not gratuitous, just...they don't get off easy. Hell, they don't get off hard. More like frickin' miserably. On the down side, yes, it's about dragons (an overdone line if I've seen one, and I say that as someone with a dragon triology in my own noggin), but instead of these beasts being necessarily wise and wonderful and hoard-happy, they're crazed, dangerous, beasts of prey used as some kind of zeppelin-like monsters of war.
To start off: Aidan, the protag, is imprisoned at 21, and kept in darkness and silence for seventeen years, and hasn't the foggiest clue why. The entire book is pretty much everything he goes through to find that out.
Okay, right there, major plus. I'm sick of fifteen- to eighteen-year old prodigies. 21 is a decent age to reasonably have some major skills as a musician or singer, and 38 is a reasonable age for someone to tire a little faster, be a bit more worn-down -- that is, let's be blunt, Aidan is human. The horrible torture of his imprisonment also means his hands are so mangled he can barely hold a fork, let alone play an intrument, and that torture happened anytime he learned to sing, so he learned to keep his mouth shut and silence the music in his head. It's a little unusual to read a book in which it's first-person POV and yet the main protag doesn't even speak for the first two or three chapters.
There are a few twists I didn't see coming (but I'm not one who tries to guess the endings of detective novels, either, so don't look to me on that one), and the character development from antagonistical to slightly combative to cooperative is awkward, rough, and believable. There are a few times where the alternating POVs (all in first person) got a little too misty-eyed about the other (especially from the female POV toward Aidan), but not so much I started glaring at the pages. And yes, there's angst of the romantic kind, but the situation was tense, the stakes high enough, the history long enough, that the usual "just fricking TALK damn it!" yelling I'd do at that point was not an option, so the tension could continue unabated and still be believable.
What I did enjoy more, in some ways (if caught off-guard by) was the ending. Emotionally satisfying on a mature level, but without the puppies and roses I've learned to expect at the end of a stand-alone. More like...well, I won't spoil it. Just trust me that it's satisfying but not necessarily in the usual way. Good, but different-good.
Path of Blood, Diana Pharoah Francis. Again with the "not my usual genre!" disclaimer, so it's hard to guess sometimes whether I'm reading a trope as new and fresh when it's done a bazillion times (like, say, if I read Louis L'Amour, how would I know he's derivative or what?). But I can say this: three points to note of a book.
One, first chapter of high fantasy is where the tone gets set and where I (so often) get bored. It's all sweeping skirts and deep bows and fancy-schmancy names and romanticism and that crap. (I didn't mind Swordspoint on the whole, but that fairy-tale opening made me want to choke up dinner.) On the other hand, two paragraphs in and your idyllic, pastoral scene with young woman walking along a dirt road, humming a tune and then...tripping and falling face-first into the dirt? It's like Saturday Night Live, or a Monty Python skit. La la la WAH *thump*
And there, my lovely readers, is a great way for an author to thumb her nose and say, "in case you weren't sure, this character isn't perfect."
Another note -- and again, I may be ignorant of the finer details of high fantasy tropes/stereotypes but I do know this one -- I really, really hate gods descending from On High to grant Speshull Powerz to
Unless, of course, you -- or the character's -- got good reason. Then you can have some fun with it, and Francis spends the first chapter or so laying out all the reasons her protag, Reisil, is Quite Pleased with the way things are going. She's in her probationary period as the local healer, she's studied for thirteen years (another non-young insta-prodigy! yay!), and now she's back and Things Are Going To Work Out. I mean, you can practically see the capital letters in her characterization, touched with a little bit of apprehension anyone would feel during what amounts to an extended benchtest.
God On High: Hey. You, over there. I'm going to make you Speshul.
Probationary Healer: Uhm. No.
GOH: What? No, really.
PH: Thanks, but I'm fine.
GOH: No, really.
PH: Look, I said I'm FINE.
GOH: NO REALLY.
PH: ow!
My bias slipping in here, in that I don't really care for books with gods inserting themselves into the action, not unless there's several things going on. First, god insertion doesn't work in a monotheistic system. It just doesn't. So much for free will, then, people, and you can't get more deus ex bad frickin' writer than that. Second, god insertion doesn't work unless you're consistent. If a god has powers in this region, or area of expertise, then you can't say a god elsewhere or with a different expertise isn't as powerful or as good. If one god is so all-fired speshul, then what's retaining him/her/it in that region or expertise? (We're getting back to the Greek concept of a damn soap opera, now.)
Which is to say, I was riding on Reisil's characterization between the lady/god's first appearance, the second, and the usually-inevitable woo-woo of female things being all powerful and healy-like and that general woo-woo female mystery crap I hated so much in college. It didn't happen. Yay!
The Dark God comes along, which is when I started really, really hoping it didn't get botched. I get truly annoyed when Dark means all things bad and foul, and Light is all things growing and happy, blah blah blah, do gardeners never write these books? We need more gardeners writing books, and then Fall and Winter would have as much goodness as Spring and Summer, and Summer would be as terrifying and potentially harmful as Winter. More so, maybe!
But Reisil, as a healer, is also the pragmatic kind, like your average sadistic nurse: look, sometimes, that peroxide MUST go in the wound and stop crying now, it doesn't hurt that much. (The entire audience rises up as one to insist they, too, know a nurse just like that.) And so is the sort-of-creepy crawled lady/god, who protects her own, has her own priorities, but also knows when it's time to cut off that dead branch. Get the saw, honey, time to lop.
Anyway, point is, in reading the scene, you have to strip away what (on the surface) looks like the usual tropes -- growing things versus dark twisty shadows -- and just look at the content and the context of the gods that intervene, they're both essentially pretty much saying the same things, and they treat their subjects the same, too. We may get to see the Dark God in a slightly more irked role, but a scene with him/it and you realize, it's possible the Lady/God would've reacted the same way in the situation.
Plus, a character who is not a virgin, and is not five-foot-one! *pumps fist*
Singer of Souls, Adam Stemple. I think this book actually suffers, on the surface (err, so to speak) from a halfway okay cover that really doesn't do it justice. I expected a comedy, maybe dated, even, in that the cover -- a rather amusing line-drawn art of a busker -- looks like something I would've seen for Coffee, Tea, or Me or maybe Confederacy of Dunces -- that kind of late-60s to mid-70s cover style.
Unfortunately, the book's interior has much grittier potential. It begins in Minneapolis, kicking you right in the teeth with a young man, Douglas, trying to decide if he's really going to go clean from heroin this time, or sink back down. Somehow he manages to walk away, decides he'll visit his grandmother in Scotland, he'll save up his money, get away from the drugs and crime, and six weeks later he's in Edinburgh. His grandmother takes no truck from him, but lets him move in, supports him as a busker, and things look like they'll work out. His "job" is singing for people, making up ditties/music for them as his street act, all on the fly.
Then a striking woman asks him to "sing" her, and in return, she pays him with a vial of something white. Lovely for the junkie -- and soon his self-control's gone and he shoots it. Nothing happens -- until the next day, when he realizes he can see fairies. The rest of teh story, well, I think Stemple was playing Berg's tune of taking the character down to the bottom and then kicking him in the teeth a few times. The girl he likes/maybe-likes? Another junkie. The woman he sang for? Powerful fairy. The priest? Not really...well, figure that one out if you read.
The ending, unlike Berg and Francis, is not really satisfactory at all. Maybe it's a completion of a sort, but there's something...cruel. And he'd started out as a struggling, falliable person, and where he ends up is not what I'd say is any sort of improvement. In fact, it's a significant de-volution. Pity, but I think I also lost interest when his risk was gone -- that is, when it became clear that the one thing tying Douglas, that makes it all matter for him -- is gone, then he stops caring, and so did I. Except the not-caring turns to not-cruelty. I suppose if the author had intended to write a short piece (maybe 80K? I almost thought it was YA) on the oppressed becoming the oppressor, then I would've liked a bit more warning earlier in the game instead of rooting for him for so long.
Also, book ratings: no sex/cussing in Berg's book, though a lot of violence and a lot of suffering. Off-page sex in Francis' (the characters are in their twenties or older), off-page violence against women though she handles quasi-aristocratic notions about 'women as possessions' well given the genre's limitations, but no cussing and violence isn't gratuitous; Stemple's book is definitely R for violence, cussing, drug use, and sex. FYI, for those of you to whom this matters.
I think what gets me sometimes in urban fantasy is teh struggle to balance the traditional folklore of fairies/good-folk having no conscience, that whole 'capricious' element that's so big in the folklore. The problem is that this 'capriciousness' must be only on the surface; a society whose internal rules are not consistent just annoys the piss out of me. You'd think some authors just say, "what doesn't make sense in this situation?" and have the fairies do that, just to be mean, instead of looking at it like, "what if the fairies believe themselves better, what other society believes itself better than us, in what ways do they no make sense?"
Hello, read something about the Plains Indians' reactions to meeting white men, and how the white men made no sense, dressed themselves funny, reacted all wrong at simple things, got offended at stupid things, and just generally were unpredictable and violent when there was no reason for it. Tadah, who's the goddamn fey-folk now?
EDIT: Since I probably wasn't clear enough, I paid for all three, I'm glad I paid for all three (even with Stemple's ending, the book on the whole was well-done and fast-paced, so it gets gladness), and now I think you should experience this gladness, too. Pick your genre (or rating?) and BUY THESE BOOKS. And for friends. Buy several copies for friends. Like, six each.