I was surprised. (or: The Mysterious Stranger)
Okay, I gave Song of Arbonne a good try, and I... actually ended up liking it. Quite a lot. Unfortunately, GGK's style still drives me nuts, with the result that I read only about half the book (see last bullet point).
-The plot rocked, actually; the last hundred pages was very good. It completely took me by surprise. I had pegged the book as a certain sort of mediocre redemption story with the obligatory lines, yeah, whatever, and it turned out to be... a more subtle redemption story, kind of. Very nicely done, and very well done blindsiding me.
-I was happy to get the totally long deathbed scenes, cause they explained everything, but geez, I sort of feel like in real life they would not be able to, you know, tell their whole life story on the way to dying.
-A Song for Arbonne reminded me of Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel series. Everyone who recommended Arbonne to me, go read Kushiel.
-Shouldn't it be obvious if you just had a kid and there's, you know, still another kid inside of you? I didn't buy that one. Fortunately it was not essential to the plot, really.
Okay, here's why GGK still bothers me, even though I enjoyed the book:
-GGK thinks he can write moving high fantasy. Whenever he tries, it makes me laugh. ("Lisseut['s heart] had left her unknowing, like a bird in winter, flying north to a hopelessly wrong destination... [She] watched, even as she felt the flight of her heart from her breast across the bright green grass." This gives me the mental picture of a) a bird with a really messed-up compass in its brain, with all the other birds pecking at it: "Don't fly *that* way-- what are you, dumb?!" and b) a beating heart with little white wings, bouncing merrily across the grass.) Mercedes Lackey (for instance) actually bothers me less in this regard; I don't think in general that she is as good a writer as GGK, but she doesn't try to do things she can't do. Jacqueline Carey has her own particular style which sometimes works for me and sometimes doesn't, but she's true to that style and doesn't pretend to be working off of, I don't know, Chretien de Troyes when she is So Not. (Same with his Epic Poetry, which is an order of magnitude worse than Tolkien's.)
-The thing that annoys me most is GGK's irritating habit of having the mysterious POV character think of something mysterious-- "Ah, my brother's wife whom I had sex with but did not love!"-- that clearly is related to the character's mysterious Past, and then drop it without ever explaining who these people are or what the Past is or whatever, and without having any good reason to drop it except that it would be narratively inconvenient to reveal at that time. The point, I'm pretty sure, is to Build Tension about the Mysterious Past. The actual result for me was that I skipped the first half of the book and went straight to the part where the Mysterious Past is actually explained (again, for no particular reason; the character just decides to ruminate on it more closely just because it is now narratively convenient). It was really kind of surprising how little I actually missed by skipping the first half.
Now, don't get me wrong-- I understand that The Character with a Mysterious Past is a staple of fiction. But if you're going to have that character be the POV character, you've got to make it realistic and not so's I can tell it's convenience-driven. Let's take Bujold's character Caz in Curse of Chalion. (Is this whole LJ a love song to Bujold? Quite possibly.) He has a Mysterious Past to which he rarely alludes and that turns out to be useful to the plot. But. He's traumatized by that past; and furthermore, he has good reasons for not wanting to bring attention to that past, to even think about it more than he needs to, and there's no reason why he needs to think about it. (We, the readers, are hooked into the story by other hooks than That of the Mysterious Past.) So... he doesn't. It's only when events make that past directly relevant that he actually has to think/talk about it.
-The plot rocked, actually; the last hundred pages was very good. It completely took me by surprise. I had pegged the book as a certain sort of mediocre redemption story with the obligatory lines, yeah, whatever, and it turned out to be... a more subtle redemption story, kind of. Very nicely done, and very well done blindsiding me.
-I was happy to get the totally long deathbed scenes, cause they explained everything, but geez, I sort of feel like in real life they would not be able to, you know, tell their whole life story on the way to dying.
-A Song for Arbonne reminded me of Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel series. Everyone who recommended Arbonne to me, go read Kushiel.
-Shouldn't it be obvious if you just had a kid and there's, you know, still another kid inside of you? I didn't buy that one. Fortunately it was not essential to the plot, really.
Okay, here's why GGK still bothers me, even though I enjoyed the book:
-GGK thinks he can write moving high fantasy. Whenever he tries, it makes me laugh. ("Lisseut['s heart] had left her unknowing, like a bird in winter, flying north to a hopelessly wrong destination... [She] watched, even as she felt the flight of her heart from her breast across the bright green grass." This gives me the mental picture of a) a bird with a really messed-up compass in its brain, with all the other birds pecking at it: "Don't fly *that* way-- what are you, dumb?!" and b) a beating heart with little white wings, bouncing merrily across the grass.) Mercedes Lackey (for instance) actually bothers me less in this regard; I don't think in general that she is as good a writer as GGK, but she doesn't try to do things she can't do. Jacqueline Carey has her own particular style which sometimes works for me and sometimes doesn't, but she's true to that style and doesn't pretend to be working off of, I don't know, Chretien de Troyes when she is So Not. (Same with his Epic Poetry, which is an order of magnitude worse than Tolkien's.)
-The thing that annoys me most is GGK's irritating habit of having the mysterious POV character think of something mysterious-- "Ah, my brother's wife whom I had sex with but did not love!"-- that clearly is related to the character's mysterious Past, and then drop it without ever explaining who these people are or what the Past is or whatever, and without having any good reason to drop it except that it would be narratively inconvenient to reveal at that time. The point, I'm pretty sure, is to Build Tension about the Mysterious Past. The actual result for me was that I skipped the first half of the book and went straight to the part where the Mysterious Past is actually explained (again, for no particular reason; the character just decides to ruminate on it more closely just because it is now narratively convenient). It was really kind of surprising how little I actually missed by skipping the first half.
Now, don't get me wrong-- I understand that The Character with a Mysterious Past is a staple of fiction. But if you're going to have that character be the POV character, you've got to make it realistic and not so's I can tell it's convenience-driven. Let's take Bujold's character Caz in Curse of Chalion. (Is this whole LJ a love song to Bujold? Quite possibly.) He has a Mysterious Past to which he rarely alludes and that turns out to be useful to the plot. But. He's traumatized by that past; and furthermore, he has good reasons for not wanting to bring attention to that past, to even think about it more than he needs to, and there's no reason why he needs to think about it. (We, the readers, are hooked into the story by other hooks than That of the Mysterious Past.) So... he doesn't. It's only when events make that past directly relevant that he actually has to think/talk about it.