Shifting Shadows - Patricia Briggs
Title: Shifting Shadows
Author: Patricia Briggs
SpacePlotTime Affiliation: Mercyverse short stories (Mercy Thompson series, Alpha & Omega series)
Publishing Info: 1st edition hb had US release last week, isbn 978-0425265000
LitCrit Stats (Thank you, phoenixfalls)
My rating: 4.5 werewolves out of 5
Bechdel test: oddly enough, I think it fails - possibly due to the nature of writing a two-person hetero romance in short story format.
Johnson test: pass, for "The Star of David" and Mercy with her Native American relatives and the Asian-American vampire plus family in Butte.
Read this for: Asil, Sam, Bran, a sweet love story about vampires set in a Chicago apartment, an in-series reprint of the Anna & Charles origin story so you can sell off your battered paperback romance anthology.
Don't read this for: lots of plot focused on Mercy.
Books I was reminded of:
Contents List, albeit not as relevant here as it usually would be
(The stories are arranged chronologically in the collection.)
Silver
Fairy Gifts
Gray
Seeing Eye
Alpha and Omega
The Star of David
Roses in Winter
In Red, with Pearls
Redemption
Hollow
Outtake from Silver Borne
Outtake from Night Broken
I really enjoyed this collection. I like that it didn't leave any previously published Mercyverse stories out, so I can have all the ones written so far in one place (and possibly sell or gift a few old anthos too, if they were ones I bought solely for the Briggs story). I like that there was not just one new story written for the collection but four stories/novellas (31, 38, 39, and 68 pages long), plus two outtakes from the Mercy novels (Silver Borne and Night Broken, at 6 and 3 pages respectively).
I'd read four of the six previously published stories before. I've always loved Anna and Charles' meeting/origin story, "Alpha and Omega", and am very happy that it has an in-series publication so I don't have to keep shelving my battered copy of the On The Prowl anthology in the novels part of my library. I like "Fairy Gifts", which is a story about vampires and fae in Butte, Montana, and doesn't involve any of the series characters. "In Red, with Pearls" is about Warren and Kyle - which is a good thing - plus it's got a zombie, plus it's noir, and I'm sure a lot of people will like it for those reasons, but Warren's cowboyisms got on my nerves in this one. I like him in the novels, so I'm not really sure why his speech patterns annoyed me here.
I really liked "The Star of David" for being about David Christiansen, who appeard in Moon Called. I like his voice and perspective: having lived through so many hard things and not just making himself keep on moving but having learned about people from experiencing those events. And his self or soul has decided to not just learn the practical things that keep him or others alive while becoming cynical enough about people that the universe is cold and desolate. Instead he keeps all his experiences and insights in one great work of perspective (or perspectives) so that he learns about the horrible sides of people's natures but he still cares about people because they're people.
I do find a few turns of phrasing having to do with David being African-American troubling. I also find it kind of troubling to be a white person judging a character of colour thinking about race. On the other hand, the character is being written by another white woman. To state my theoretical position on fiction writing and race, I think it's not possible to make some sort of hard, fast, simple rule like 'don't write characters of colour having negative associations about their skin colour' and have that rule make a genre better. People are too complex and there's also the issue of internalized prejudice. Readers also get as tired of reading about perfect characters as they do of reading about angsty teenagers or sardonic pragmatists with no conscience or evil overlords or any other single type of character without a context of variety. I do think it's a good thing to have a large enough ratio of characters of colour with positive depictions to ones with negative depictions that kids don't interact with their media, then conclude all African-Americans are involved with drugs and they should transfer that idea over to real life. Unfortunately each written description in a book is mainly dependent on the individual book context and the individual author's mind. It's like the distinction between institutional racism and the actions of a single person. Sometimes that one person is acting out of racism, sometimes they're not, a lot of times you can't tell, and while that person is probably influenced by institutional racism, their actions are not determined by it.
So here's the passages that keep bugging me:
His own skin was dark as the night and kept him safely hidden in the shadows where he and people like him belonged. (p246)
This sentence is from a short paragraph describing characters' physical appearances. I don't have a problem with the first half of the sentence (ending right after shadows and right before where) and I don't have a problem with the last half of the sentence (beginning approximately after safety and before hidden). David has dark skin (here described with a metaphor) and David carries a lot of self-hatred for being a werewolf due to going into a berserker rage after his first transformation and killing his wife and her lover in front of their (David+wife's) children. However, if you put both halves - one saying something about David's skin colour and one saying something about David's being a werewolf/killer/guilty person - together, then it leaves an impression, at least to me, that they are related. I don't think Patricia Briggs intended this at all. It's really easy to to write sentences that don't specify everything in one's mind or relay it imperfectly. But when I run across it in a text without having gone over and over the text before trying to edit it and play around with it, it feels unpleasant to read.
The other passage is the juxtaposition of a few sentences that begin two successive paragraphs.
Maybe it was the name, or maybe the image that "foster kid" brought to mind, but he'd expected Devonte to be black. Instead, the boy looked as if someone had taken half a dozen races and shook them up - Eurasian races, though, not from the Dark Continent. [2 sentences of physical description]
Not that it mattered. He'd found that the years were slowly completing the job that Vietnam had begun - race or religion mattered very little to him anymore. (p252)
I have trouble thinking of this as an accurate phrasing of David's character voice. Since he has a werewolf lifespan and fought in Vietnam as a young man, he probably comes from my parents' generation, kids born right before or right after the end of WWII. I guess some people used the phrase "the Dark Continent" then. Did African-Americans? I don't know. It's still odd to hear showing up in a character's head nowadays, especially an African-American man's head. I'm also not sure someone of that generation would say race matters very little to him. David hasn't lived out his probable human lifespan yet, even if he looks like he's in his thirties instead of like a senior citizen. Race and religion may matter very little in whether or not he chooses to help someone or be friendly with them, but I can't really imagine the phrase "mattered very little" being accurate without that crucial modifier of "in".
The races listed as Devonte's possible ethnic groups after "Eurasian" are Native American, Asian, Jewish, and Italian. Italians had an odd status in America's already odd race relations and stereotypes for a while, but they are more arguably people classed by citizenship or birth or residence, not a race. And Native Americans aren't Eurasian. I'm pretty sure these two paragraphs as a whole result from sloppy writing or sloppy editing. But again, reading the final product makes me feel bad and jars me out of the story.
I also find that for me personally there was not enough shown or stated to indicate the reasons Stella changed her mind about including her father in her life. We see the events but we don't see her interpretation of them.
Again, apart from these concerns I found the story very enjoyable. I hope we get to read more things written in David's narrative voice (with better editing) in the future.
I also enjoyed Moira's voice in "Seeing Eye". She is admirably fierce with an admirable sense of humour. I do think it's overly emphatic symbolism or author in-joke to make the protagonist a blind woman with the family name Keller. I also think the protagonists letting this go without laughing about it in a story where they spend a half page explaining and laughing about Moira's personal names is highly improbable.
And now we come to "Gray". I love "Gray". I didn't buy the anthology it came out in, and I evidently missed out until now, at least with regard to this story. It is a truly sweet love story, a vampire story, a reverse gender role romance with the woman wooing the man, and a ghost story, and I love the intensely-drawn characters in their brief but unforgettable appearances. Elyna the vampire, Peter the cop, Jack with his sense of humour, Steven the African-American vampire with his practically visible aura of loathing for the vampire leader who makes him call him master. (I'm curious if Steven Harper the vampire is a tuckerization of Steven Harper the author, aka Steven Piziks and Penny Drake.)
I really hope Briggs writes more about these characters.
New stories.................we have four: "Silver", "Roses in Winter", "Redemption", and "Hollow". Silver is a novella about Sam and Ariana's first meeting, and I really enjoyed it. We find out more about Bran too. "Roses in Winter" is about Asil, whom I also really like, and his friendship with Kara Beckworth, who was apparently a character mentioned in Blood Bound but never seen and whom I'd completely forgotten. "Redemption" is about Ben and has a lot of geek humour and corporate absurdity humour, which I like, but I dislike the events of the ending. Ben is supposedly redeemed by feeling the desire to protect a young woman instead of hurt her, because he treats her like pack, which means he's learning to be a healthy, good dominant wolf who protects instead of hurts. I don't think Ben learning to like one woman he doesn't think is intelligent - once she's under his leadership in his mind - is a redemptive ending. Although admittedly for Ben it's probably an improvement. It was an enjoyable story to read and I'm glad Ben's made an improvement in his character, but as for redemption he's got a long way to go, baby.
"Hollow", the final story in the book, takes place after Night Broken and is another ghost story. Again, I really liked it. I think Briggs is succumbing to the desire to make everything happy for her characters though, which runs the danger of making everything too perfect, lacking realism and dramatic plot points. David Christiansen runs a mercenary/contractor group that only accepts contracts he thinks are ethical enough, and it gives him enough good PR amongst the ethical that there's sufficient good guys wanting to hire contractors to keep his company afloat and give all his employees the month of December off every year? I approve, but I'm not convinced. So yeah, Mercy's one car project that survived the destruction of the garage sells for $19,000 in an auction, giving her money to rebuild at exactly the moment when she's about to give up, bulldoze the ruins, and sell the real estate. Which she's doing without consulting Adam, because she worries about his finances and feels bad making him worry just to continue her life's passion. Mercy's actions and luck here are actually possible. She does good and creative work, and some guy finding the car of his heart at an auction, buying it at any price, and getting his friend to hire her for another car restoration job could happen. And while I think her feelings/actions regarding Adam are unhealthy and annoying (and meanwhile he's already called the building contractor and said rebuild without consulting Mercy), this part of her mindset is a problem Mercy has, and hopefully she'll deal with it in some upcoming book. This is still kind of a windfall that just drops out of the blue, without having much to do with "Hollow"'s main plot (although you can use it to contrast Mercy, Lisa, and Rick in terms of work and relationship fulfillment), and it also prevents Mercy (and Adam) from having to deal with the consequences of their insecurities. I've known series that degraded to the point of blandness because the author didn't want to make things un-utopian or couldn't stand to do horrible things to their characters. I'm pretty sure it's the aspect of the Star Trek universe that generates the most audience and writer complaints. (Well, that and the lack of fan service for people's OTP.)
The outtakes from the books are very short and I'm not going to comment on them, except to say I enjoyed the one from Silver Borne but thought the dialogue from the second outtake felt unnatural even though I enjoyed the plot and like that it came to Briggs in a dream.
Author: Patricia Briggs
SpacePlotTime Affiliation: Mercyverse short stories (Mercy Thompson series, Alpha & Omega series)
Publishing Info: 1st edition hb had US release last week, isbn 978-0425265000
LitCrit Stats (Thank you, phoenixfalls)
My rating: 4.5 werewolves out of 5
Bechdel test: oddly enough, I think it fails - possibly due to the nature of writing a two-person hetero romance in short story format.
Johnson test: pass, for "The Star of David" and Mercy with her Native American relatives and the Asian-American vampire plus family in Butte.
Read this for: Asil, Sam, Bran, a sweet love story about vampires set in a Chicago apartment, an in-series reprint of the Anna & Charles origin story so you can sell off your battered paperback romance anthology.
Don't read this for: lots of plot focused on Mercy.
Books I was reminded of:
Contents List, albeit not as relevant here as it usually would be
(The stories are arranged chronologically in the collection.)
Silver
Fairy Gifts
Gray
Seeing Eye
Alpha and Omega
The Star of David
Roses in Winter
In Red, with Pearls
Redemption
Hollow
Outtake from Silver Borne
Outtake from Night Broken
I really enjoyed this collection. I like that it didn't leave any previously published Mercyverse stories out, so I can have all the ones written so far in one place (and possibly sell or gift a few old anthos too, if they were ones I bought solely for the Briggs story). I like that there was not just one new story written for the collection but four stories/novellas (31, 38, 39, and 68 pages long), plus two outtakes from the Mercy novels (Silver Borne and Night Broken, at 6 and 3 pages respectively).
I'd read four of the six previously published stories before. I've always loved Anna and Charles' meeting/origin story, "Alpha and Omega", and am very happy that it has an in-series publication so I don't have to keep shelving my battered copy of the On The Prowl anthology in the novels part of my library. I like "Fairy Gifts", which is a story about vampires and fae in Butte, Montana, and doesn't involve any of the series characters. "In Red, with Pearls" is about Warren and Kyle - which is a good thing - plus it's got a zombie, plus it's noir, and I'm sure a lot of people will like it for those reasons, but Warren's cowboyisms got on my nerves in this one. I like him in the novels, so I'm not really sure why his speech patterns annoyed me here.
I really liked "The Star of David" for being about David Christiansen, who appeard in Moon Called. I like his voice and perspective: having lived through so many hard things and not just making himself keep on moving but having learned about people from experiencing those events. And his self or soul has decided to not just learn the practical things that keep him or others alive while becoming cynical enough about people that the universe is cold and desolate. Instead he keeps all his experiences and insights in one great work of perspective (or perspectives) so that he learns about the horrible sides of people's natures but he still cares about people because they're people.
I do find a few turns of phrasing having to do with David being African-American troubling. I also find it kind of troubling to be a white person judging a character of colour thinking about race. On the other hand, the character is being written by another white woman. To state my theoretical position on fiction writing and race, I think it's not possible to make some sort of hard, fast, simple rule like 'don't write characters of colour having negative associations about their skin colour' and have that rule make a genre better. People are too complex and there's also the issue of internalized prejudice. Readers also get as tired of reading about perfect characters as they do of reading about angsty teenagers or sardonic pragmatists with no conscience or evil overlords or any other single type of character without a context of variety. I do think it's a good thing to have a large enough ratio of characters of colour with positive depictions to ones with negative depictions that kids don't interact with their media, then conclude all African-Americans are involved with drugs and they should transfer that idea over to real life. Unfortunately each written description in a book is mainly dependent on the individual book context and the individual author's mind. It's like the distinction between institutional racism and the actions of a single person. Sometimes that one person is acting out of racism, sometimes they're not, a lot of times you can't tell, and while that person is probably influenced by institutional racism, their actions are not determined by it.
So here's the passages that keep bugging me:
His own skin was dark as the night and kept him safely hidden in the shadows where he and people like him belonged. (p246)
This sentence is from a short paragraph describing characters' physical appearances. I don't have a problem with the first half of the sentence (ending right after shadows and right before where) and I don't have a problem with the last half of the sentence (beginning approximately after safety and before hidden). David has dark skin (here described with a metaphor) and David carries a lot of self-hatred for being a werewolf due to going into a berserker rage after his first transformation and killing his wife and her lover in front of their (David+wife's) children. However, if you put both halves - one saying something about David's skin colour and one saying something about David's being a werewolf/killer/guilty person - together, then it leaves an impression, at least to me, that they are related. I don't think Patricia Briggs intended this at all. It's really easy to to write sentences that don't specify everything in one's mind or relay it imperfectly. But when I run across it in a text without having gone over and over the text before trying to edit it and play around with it, it feels unpleasant to read.
The other passage is the juxtaposition of a few sentences that begin two successive paragraphs.
Maybe it was the name, or maybe the image that "foster kid" brought to mind, but he'd expected Devonte to be black. Instead, the boy looked as if someone had taken half a dozen races and shook them up - Eurasian races, though, not from the Dark Continent. [2 sentences of physical description]
Not that it mattered. He'd found that the years were slowly completing the job that Vietnam had begun - race or religion mattered very little to him anymore. (p252)
I have trouble thinking of this as an accurate phrasing of David's character voice. Since he has a werewolf lifespan and fought in Vietnam as a young man, he probably comes from my parents' generation, kids born right before or right after the end of WWII. I guess some people used the phrase "the Dark Continent" then. Did African-Americans? I don't know. It's still odd to hear showing up in a character's head nowadays, especially an African-American man's head. I'm also not sure someone of that generation would say race matters very little to him. David hasn't lived out his probable human lifespan yet, even if he looks like he's in his thirties instead of like a senior citizen. Race and religion may matter very little in whether or not he chooses to help someone or be friendly with them, but I can't really imagine the phrase "mattered very little" being accurate without that crucial modifier of "in".
The races listed as Devonte's possible ethnic groups after "Eurasian" are Native American, Asian, Jewish, and Italian. Italians had an odd status in America's already odd race relations and stereotypes for a while, but they are more arguably people classed by citizenship or birth or residence, not a race. And Native Americans aren't Eurasian. I'm pretty sure these two paragraphs as a whole result from sloppy writing or sloppy editing. But again, reading the final product makes me feel bad and jars me out of the story.
I also find that for me personally there was not enough shown or stated to indicate the reasons Stella changed her mind about including her father in her life. We see the events but we don't see her interpretation of them.
Again, apart from these concerns I found the story very enjoyable. I hope we get to read more things written in David's narrative voice (with better editing) in the future.
I also enjoyed Moira's voice in "Seeing Eye". She is admirably fierce with an admirable sense of humour. I do think it's overly emphatic symbolism or author in-joke to make the protagonist a blind woman with the family name Keller. I also think the protagonists letting this go without laughing about it in a story where they spend a half page explaining and laughing about Moira's personal names is highly improbable.
And now we come to "Gray". I love "Gray". I didn't buy the anthology it came out in, and I evidently missed out until now, at least with regard to this story. It is a truly sweet love story, a vampire story, a reverse gender role romance with the woman wooing the man, and a ghost story, and I love the intensely-drawn characters in their brief but unforgettable appearances. Elyna the vampire, Peter the cop, Jack with his sense of humour, Steven the African-American vampire with his practically visible aura of loathing for the vampire leader who makes him call him master. (I'm curious if Steven Harper the vampire is a tuckerization of Steven Harper the author, aka Steven Piziks and Penny Drake.)
I really hope Briggs writes more about these characters.
New stories.................we have four: "Silver", "Roses in Winter", "Redemption", and "Hollow". Silver is a novella about Sam and Ariana's first meeting, and I really enjoyed it. We find out more about Bran too. "Roses in Winter" is about Asil, whom I also really like, and his friendship with Kara Beckworth, who was apparently a character mentioned in Blood Bound but never seen and whom I'd completely forgotten. "Redemption" is about Ben and has a lot of geek humour and corporate absurdity humour, which I like, but I dislike the events of the ending. Ben is supposedly redeemed by feeling the desire to protect a young woman instead of hurt her, because he treats her like pack, which means he's learning to be a healthy, good dominant wolf who protects instead of hurts. I don't think Ben learning to like one woman he doesn't think is intelligent - once she's under his leadership in his mind - is a redemptive ending. Although admittedly for Ben it's probably an improvement. It was an enjoyable story to read and I'm glad Ben's made an improvement in his character, but as for redemption he's got a long way to go, baby.
"Hollow", the final story in the book, takes place after Night Broken and is another ghost story. Again, I really liked it. I think Briggs is succumbing to the desire to make everything happy for her characters though, which runs the danger of making everything too perfect, lacking realism and dramatic plot points. David Christiansen runs a mercenary/contractor group that only accepts contracts he thinks are ethical enough, and it gives him enough good PR amongst the ethical that there's sufficient good guys wanting to hire contractors to keep his company afloat and give all his employees the month of December off every year? I approve, but I'm not convinced. So yeah, Mercy's one car project that survived the destruction of the garage sells for $19,000 in an auction, giving her money to rebuild at exactly the moment when she's about to give up, bulldoze the ruins, and sell the real estate. Which she's doing without consulting Adam, because she worries about his finances and feels bad making him worry just to continue her life's passion. Mercy's actions and luck here are actually possible. She does good and creative work, and some guy finding the car of his heart at an auction, buying it at any price, and getting his friend to hire her for another car restoration job could happen. And while I think her feelings/actions regarding Adam are unhealthy and annoying (and meanwhile he's already called the building contractor and said rebuild without consulting Mercy), this part of her mindset is a problem Mercy has, and hopefully she'll deal with it in some upcoming book. This is still kind of a windfall that just drops out of the blue, without having much to do with "Hollow"'s main plot (although you can use it to contrast Mercy, Lisa, and Rick in terms of work and relationship fulfillment), and it also prevents Mercy (and Adam) from having to deal with the consequences of their insecurities. I've known series that degraded to the point of blandness because the author didn't want to make things un-utopian or couldn't stand to do horrible things to their characters. I'm pretty sure it's the aspect of the Star Trek universe that generates the most audience and writer complaints. (Well, that and the lack of fan service for people's OTP.)
The outtakes from the books are very short and I'm not going to comment on them, except to say I enjoyed the one from Silver Borne but thought the dialogue from the second outtake felt unnatural even though I enjoyed the plot and like that it came to Briggs in a dream.