More of the past
Nibbling away at my backlog with some re-reads; for these ones, either the books or I have changed since our first encounter.
Tanya Huff, Summon the keeper and The second summoning. I read the first of these years ago and liked it - humorous urban fantasy where the keepers are humans with magical powers who must stop evil creeping in from other dimensions. Some of it doesn’t hold up that well on a re-read; some still works (the romance is clumsy, and the virginal super-nice male lead a bit much, but at least the female lead gets to both have more sexual experience and be more realistic), and the elderly sarcastic talking cat allows for some nice moments about the vulnerability of ageing pets (companion animals, sidekicks, whatever). I was also looking for urban fantasy with no elves, werewolves or vampires; this works pretty well in the first book, but subsequently such elements creep in. I was fine with the vampire bit part in book two, but by the time I got about 100 pages into the third book (Long Hot Summoning) I was confronted with elves in shopping malls taken over by other dimensions, and am currently on hiatus until I can face that again.
Steven Brust and Emma Bull, Freedom and Necessity. This is a clever book, and admirable in many ways, but it’s also rather smug, and this re-read tipped the balance of these elements just far enough that I don’t know if I’d read it again (this is either my third or fourth read, though). It's an epistolary/journal novel that revolves around four protagonists (2 het couples) and their interactions in England in the late 1840s, after the collapse of the Chartist rebellion. All four send detailed literary letters to each other while they deal with multiple conspiracies, revolving chiefly around class revolution and a more specific, magical thinking type approach to gaining power within a given family.
It’s an enjoyable book - interesting topics, nice feel of the world (although I am not entirely convinced by the characters as belonging fully to their time - they share a lot of values convenient for the presumptive modern reader), and well written, but James in particular is rather hard to take (lots of glowing physical description, lots of internal angst and agonising over him being such a good revolutionary and therefore having a duty to do it despite being upper class and heir to nobility and threatened in an angst-provoking fashion for this). I realise not everyone can be Lymond (thank god), but it unbalances the book for me to have James be quite so important when there are three other narrators. And all four do bear charmed lives; others die, and the main characters suffer, but never in a way (unlike Dunnett) that feels like it endangers their very selves.
Tanya Huff, Summon the keeper and The second summoning. I read the first of these years ago and liked it - humorous urban fantasy where the keepers are humans with magical powers who must stop evil creeping in from other dimensions. Some of it doesn’t hold up that well on a re-read; some still works (the romance is clumsy, and the virginal super-nice male lead a bit much, but at least the female lead gets to both have more sexual experience and be more realistic), and the elderly sarcastic talking cat allows for some nice moments about the vulnerability of ageing pets (companion animals, sidekicks, whatever). I was also looking for urban fantasy with no elves, werewolves or vampires; this works pretty well in the first book, but subsequently such elements creep in. I was fine with the vampire bit part in book two, but by the time I got about 100 pages into the third book (Long Hot Summoning) I was confronted with elves in shopping malls taken over by other dimensions, and am currently on hiatus until I can face that again.
Steven Brust and Emma Bull, Freedom and Necessity. This is a clever book, and admirable in many ways, but it’s also rather smug, and this re-read tipped the balance of these elements just far enough that I don’t know if I’d read it again (this is either my third or fourth read, though). It's an epistolary/journal novel that revolves around four protagonists (2 het couples) and their interactions in England in the late 1840s, after the collapse of the Chartist rebellion. All four send detailed literary letters to each other while they deal with multiple conspiracies, revolving chiefly around class revolution and a more specific, magical thinking type approach to gaining power within a given family.
It’s an enjoyable book - interesting topics, nice feel of the world (although I am not entirely convinced by the characters as belonging fully to their time - they share a lot of values convenient for the presumptive modern reader), and well written, but James in particular is rather hard to take (lots of glowing physical description, lots of internal angst and agonising over him being such a good revolutionary and therefore having a duty to do it despite being upper class and heir to nobility and threatened in an angst-provoking fashion for this). I realise not everyone can be Lymond (thank god), but it unbalances the book for me to have James be quite so important when there are three other narrators. And all four do bear charmed lives; others die, and the main characters suffer, but never in a way (unlike Dunnett) that feels like it endangers their very selves.