Books 27-29
We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
It hurts to rate this so low. Usually I'd bail on something before this but I was reading it for a challenge and I kept thinking I'll get into it. 80s nostalgia, girl power, magic, all of this is in my wheelhouse. I just couldn't get past the things bothering me.
For one, it has a strange choice in narration. It's like someone doing a voice over...for the entire book. Which of the girls is this? We don't know. And then it breaks that narrative by including points of view that they should have no way of knowing (like the thoughts of one of the girl's father's for example) It keeps the reader at a distance.
But for me the killer was how amazingly overwritten this whole thing is. First we have the weird quirk of almost always referring to every character by full name every time (Mel and Little Smitty being exceptions) And everything is so over described it's dense and wearying to wade through. Tell me they dropped their dufflebags, no need to tell me everything that's in them unless it's important later. Everything is described at least three times in a row so if the narrator wants to say something is hot as a summer's day, add in at least two other analogies more often than not.
By fifty pages in we know they're wearing a strip of blue sweat sock on their arms, no need to bring it up every other paragraph. Ditto Jen and her 'claw', her overly teased up 80s bangs. We get it. No need to make it its own character in the book. By the time we really got into the magic, I was fatigued by the prose and no longer cared.
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The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies by Alison Goodman
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
If the Popsugar challenge hadn't issued a hard to find prompt of a character who's 42 I probably would have walked away from this. I can't begin to say how deeply disappointed I was (and I don't usually review books that I'm this disappointed with but since it was for the challenge) I was SO looking forward to this. Historical mysteries are one of my most favorite subgenres (I have nearly 200 of them reviewed here. This is my 4th one of the year and we're only 6 weeks in)
My problem? Gus & the book's focus. The main character annoyed me. Gus and her twin Julia are supposed to be smart. Gus is too arrogant for that and makes dumb choices (especially at a time when one small mistake could 'ruin' a woman and if you were cast out in this highly overromanticized time period, you were going to end up dead, prostituted or put into a work house) There were several TSTL moments, too many for me. For instance, Gus's big plan to rescue a woman from her husband was to go in, tell them who she and Julia were and then sneak her out. She TOLD him their real names. It's not until dozens of pages later do we get clued in that she had planned to have an even higher ranking aristocrat give her an alibi (by then I thought she was an idiot) and she does this not thinking things out thing multiple times.
Now for the focus. The blurb leads you to believe Gus is going to try and help clear Lord Belford's name. He was convicted of murder (during a duel) and transported to New Zealand 20 years ago. They meet as he tries to rob her on her way to save the aforementioned wife and Gus shoot him (she is more violent than most historical sleuths and I'm okay with that). I struggled to look past the insta-love Gus has for him (he tried to rob you at gun point but yeah he helps you later but still...) when we had nearly 500 pages that we could have built to that.
But that is not the book's focus (and mild spoiler alert, not something that is cleared up) Instead it feels like Goodman found out so many atrocities visited upon women in the early 1800s that she had to include them all in this. There are three separate cases, each a different atrocity (all set against the background of how worthless she and Julia are as they never married and reproduced like a good little girl). So rather than focus on one or two of these and save something for the series (which this will be) it's all shoe horned in with judgy, self righteous Gus. I won't be around for more.
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The Night Eaters, Vol. 2: Her Little Reapers by Marjorie M. Liu
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I loved this. Takeda's gorgeous lush art speaks for itself. The story here is even better (for me) than volume 1 as Milly and Billy have stopped being sort of whiny and are stepping into their own. They're still rocked by their otherworldly lineage and still pretty peeved at their parents for hiding it.
What they don't know (and Ipo, their mother, suspects) is they're being drawn into some dark, world threatening stuff. There is a cult that is wish granting at a very steep price and one of the people affected by this reaches out to Milly via a doll (a very creepy one) as the twins keep investigating what happened in last volume.
There is a 'ghost' attached that Milly can see/speak to and bonds with. She's the more aggressive (if you will) of the twins and is leading the show. In the meantime, Ipo is looking into things as well (while her husband, Keon, calls in some reinforcements) only to learn something is taking out top tier entities (the kids' uncle doesn't like the demon term).
We learn how rare the twins are and what their cold, hard mother has done to protect them. THe adults are drawn into this mess along with their younger generation. So we have two parallel, dove tailing stories. My only regret was I didn't have time to read this in one go because it time skips all over the place so it takes paying attention to all the details.
It ends on one heck of a cliffhanger and now I have to wait until the fall to see how it concludes. Ah well.
Oh and one cw there is some anti-Asian prejudice in this in a couple characters. Yes there is blood and gore too but it is a horror comic, probably goes without saying.
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