Reading roundup
32. Michael Stackpole, The Secret Atlas (Book 1 of the Voyage of Discovery) -- This was an odd book. I'm usually all about the characters when I read "fun" books like fantasy/mystery/YA, and it takes something the scope of LotR to outweigh that natural tendency to care about character/dialogue more than worldbuilding/setting, plot, grand central idea, etc. In Secret Atlas, there was not a single character who appealed to me (and the dialogue was clunky, with the exception of a few decent "portentous" lines, which were OK, but still surrounded by clunky dialogue) -- and yet I did actually sort of enjoy the book, on the strength of the worldbuilding. Mainly, I just wanted the characters to shut up and get out of the way of learning more about this world -- which, I'm sure, is not what the author was aiming for, but it sort of worked...
What I didn't like: The characters -- I think their problem, mostly, is that they don't have enough conflict. They... ought to, what, with broken hearts, and lack of place in the family, and the prospect of being locked up for life, but it doesn't strum in their inner thoughts, it's all "tell not show" -- I guess, coming right down to it, their inner voices are not very believable. Keles is boring. He is a scientist type, but someone like that can be done non-boringly, like in the Steerswoman books. And his character growth on the journey is neither subtle nor dramatic enough to make him interesting. His brother Jorim, the adventurer, is not actually any better -- there are throwaway attempts to show his character, but they don't actually add up to anything coherent, or interesting. Nirati and her whole arc (so far at least) felt so incredibly tacked on that, really, my impression was that Stackpole had decided, at the outset, that Keles had a twin sister, and then was forced to come up with something for her to do when, really, there wasn't anything. And the whole BDSM thing was just weird, 'cos it came out entirely of nowhere... Moraven is a little better, mostly because the blandness of character that pervades everything has some explanation in him -- it makes sense for his personality to be constrained/muted by both his schooling and his amnesia. Ciras and Borosan were caricatures, and not very interesting/amusing ones at that. I get the feeling that the princes Pyrust and Cyron *could* be interesting characters in the hands of somebody who was better at writing characters, but they're not quite there -- I have some slight hope for them, though... In fact, the only character I found the least bit interesting was Qiro, the grandfather who is an utter bastard or insane or very possibly both. At least with him, one could spend some time pondering how much of the apparent inconsistency in that character's interpretation was due to unreliable narrator vs. lack of consistent vision. I do wonder whether that will be set straight in later books...
The shape of the plot is fairly generic -- main character(s) travel the land, weathering adventures/attacks and acquiring sidekicks/allies. The politics/ministerial intrigue/military feats are rather unremarkable and don't feel sweeping enough -- they're all too academic, I think, and not visceral enough -- but perhaps it is again the fault of the characters for lacking the viscera to begin with...
I did, as I mentioned, like the worldbuilding. The idea of magical storms, magic as a largely destructive force, the transformations wrought in the landscape and the people by magic -- that was just really cool. And along with it, the system of jaedunto, the idea that you can work up to a magical, nearly immortal status by becoming really good at your craft -- whatever it is (pity that more was not done with it). The "mechanical magic" aspect was also intriguing -- the idea itself, of magic as technology, is not anything novel, but I haven't seen this sort of execution of it. It doesn't really make "scientific" sense (or, at least, not yet), which bothered me a bit, but it's still kind of neat. Basically, having three (four, five, six, counting the Viruk version, and the "New World" magic, and whatever weirdness Nirati and Qiro find themselves having generated) very separate, but reasonably well thought-out, systems of magic coexisting is just cool. I just hope we will learn more about how they are all related as the series goes on.
The assorted creatures are also cool. I hope we learn more about the Viruk (which are a nice departure from Elves-like creatures for a magically gifted, elder race). The fish-devils and the devil frogs are appropriately scary. The Fenn are a nice idea for critters, with the chameleon-like shape-shifting, though I kind of doubt one really needs a furry pet sidekick in a book like this -- it's not a Disney movie (and not Star Wars Episode I, either...) -- which is to say, Shimick didn't annoy me, but I felt that he *should*.
The part of the world-building I *was* disappointed by was the New World. It was just too historically America in 1492-ish, and it had no reason to be. You get the same sort of thing in Jaguar Knights, but at least there the whole world is recognizably an "Earth history" AU, whereas Atlas is set in a clearly different world, with a different number of moons, and alien creatures, etc., etc. The is no *reason* for the languages of the "New World" to sound heavily Amerindian, for their dress and architecture to be the same, for them to be unfamiliar with horses and to have llama-type things instead. It's not a clever magically-flavoured reworking of real history, the way things are in the Dave Duncan books, or Guy Gavriel Kay's, or The Crown of Stars cycle, it's just *lazy*.
I did already check out a second book and am looking forward to reading it, though I'm sure it will annoy me in places as much as the first.
33. Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man -- so, yes, confession time -- I haven't actually read a lot of the "early" Pratchett, except for the Night Watch books, which I have purposefully sought out because that's my favorite series. I *have* read The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic (and wasn't all that impressed, honestly, coming to them after Night Watch and The Truth and other later-Discworld favorites of mine). I did like Reaper Man better than those first two, but... and this is odd to say about a fantasy novel -- it was a bit too metaphysical for my taste. Turns out I like DEATH the way I like the Wizards -- as cameo appearances rather than the focus of the novel. Which made "Reaper Man" amusing in a sort of disjointed way but not really my favorite. My favorite bits are probably the "I can remember when this this was all X" running gag, and the origin of the Death of Rats (I can't recall if I ever questioned its autonomous existence before), and I did like the lifecycle of the mall. I also liked the (very brief) appearance by Vetinari ("Almost all.") But at the same time I felt that a number of the funny bits were still disconnected -- there for a laugh rather than for some deeper reason / tying things together (the way they are in later books) -- Ridcully and his swearwords, "Yo!", and, honestly, the Mrs.Cake thing got rather wearying after a while. Bill Door didn't touch me much as a character -- actually, no-one in this book did, certainly not the way Vimes and his crew or the Witches do. Well, now I've read it -- that's pretty much my impression.
34. Patricia Cornwell, Predator -- OK, I don't read Pat Cornwell for great prose (her style always slightly annoyed me, being overly dramatic), but I used to be able to count on her Scarpetta mysteries being a quick read, exciting and engrossing, even if they were annoying on some level. Maybe the last couple of books have been weaker, but they still met the expectations of making me want to read them through in a sitting. I think it took me a month (at least!) to finish Predator, and I was partly motivated by the fact that my mother lent me this book and was asking about it at regular intervals, wanting to discuss it with me. It didn't actually become interesting on its own merit until about 400 pages into a 460 page book, which is just ridiculous.
It's a combination of things, most of them stylistic. A couple of books ago, Cornwell drifted away from the first-person Scarpetta-POV narrative and started adding other POV characters, including that of the bad guy du jour. This, to me, is a problem in a book series whose main attraction was figuring out what's going on via forensic pathology. Because if you know what's going on? Why bother reading the drawn-out technical detail of the good guys trying to figure it out? I do have to admit that the bad-guy-POV is actually handled better/more interestingly here than in the other Scarpetta books that have it, because there's a twist at the end. A twist that actually made me want to re-read, or at least re-skim, this book I had been slogging through for a month -- not necessarily in a "Whoa! I never saw that coming! I have to go back and marvel at the incredibly clever way this was set up" (the way I felt when reading, say, Chronicles of Amber) but more like "Whoa, where did that come from? I have to go back and see if it's actually guessable from the text and in fact consistent with what's been said." But, you know, at least there was something.
The other reason I strongly dislike the multi-POV thing in Cornwell's hands is that reading Scarpetta-POV only was already somewhat annoying because of the disproportionately heightened drama ("I dropped my keys. My heart pounded. The elevator doors opened, and I nearly fainted in relief" -- not a direct quote, but actually pretty close to a scene from an earlier book, I forget which one), but at least you could write that off as an (annoying) character quirk and concentrate on thinking about/empathizing with characters whose emo angst you were *not* being showered with. In a multi-POV setting, the emo angst is multiplied -- Scarpetta is stil angsty, Marino is angsty, Benton is angsty, Lucy is super-duper angsty, the real bad guy is angsty, and the decoy bad guy is angsty, and newly introduced unimportant secondary characters are angsty too -- and there is no place to hide!. I think the only character in this whole mess who does not angst is Rose the secretary. She may have just become my favorite character in the series. Also, what we get with multi-POV is not sequential first person (Scarpetta: "I dropped my keys. My heart pounded." Marino: "I watched her pick up her keys and thought about how I was never going to be good enough for her.") It's, what does matociquala call it? Sequential third person limited omniscient? ("Scarpetta dropped her keys. Her heart pounded." Next chapter: "Marino watched Scarpetta pick up her keys and though about how he was never going to be good enough for her.") Ridiculously overblown emotions? Look even more riduculous in third person, apparently.
Cornwell also has a new trick in this book -- it's told in present tense. Which, guess what, only serves to highlight the ridiculously overblown nature of the drama-angst. If she was going for a sense of immediacy, this move totally failed.
So, yeah -- didn't care much for the style. The plot was... I dunno, I guess the plot was OK, but the pacing was off -- the twist/reveal comes too late in the novel, which I think diminishes its payoff, and some plot threads are not tied up (what's up with the red handprints, for example? was that ever explained? if so, neither my mother nor I caught on to it). And was a motive ever supplied for some of the murders? I couldn't account for some of them, for example. Also, I felt like the plot was bogged down by extraneous detail (introduced by the multi-character POV/angst fest). It just felt... all over the place, loosely tied together by the revelation, but not adding up to anything complete.
Will I continue reading her? Sure. But much less eagerly than I have even up till now. And I hope the drops the annoying present tense, even if she probably won't go back to first person.
35. E.E.Knight (eeknight), Dragon Champion, Book 1 of Age of Fire -- this was one of those "generic fantasy by author I haven't read before" I picked up because I was intrigued by the premise -- a fantasy novel told from a dragon's point of view (and I remembered enjoying the dragon-POV bits in Dragonbane and sequels, for instance, so it seemed worth a shot).
I thought this book had pacing problems as well -- the first 100 pages or so were pretty boring (well, better than 400, eh?) and repetitive -- basically, the protagonist (Auron the dragon) getting pursued and hunted by an assortment of creatures and fighting/evading them in various clever ways. This got boring fast because I find action uninterrupted by dialogue fairly boring, but that could be just me. Really, though, it felt more like a computer game than a novel for a while. Things did pick up, I thought, after Auron met the human child, and the interaction with the senile old black dragon were downright poignant, and the best part of the book, IMO. But I may just have a thing for ancient black dragons... And then, towards the end (the last 60-80 pages or so) everything happened too quickly -- characters he had encountered episodically before coming back together tied up into a neat little package (suspension of disbelief issues, rather), tell not show development and convenient (but not very believable) shortcuts, not one, but two, "This is how I got to be the way I am" explanatory monologues, one of them by the chief bad guy, stuck in there all of a sudden (totally threw me out of the story), and the conclusion being essentially the equivalent of "And then they killed some bad guys and they won." It didn't feel built up to, not at all. And then another mini-climax/twist piled on top of that, not really set up any better, and... yeah, too much.
I suspect this author is attempting foreshadowing without having a particularly deft hand with it -- for instance, there is another minor plot point that *really* annoyed me -- Auron briefly meets his future (soul)mate while he is still a hatchling -- they are both prisoners on a ship. There is a totally-irrelevant-to-the-moment scene where he finds out her name (it's set up as a gag), before running off and not meeting her again for another 300 pages or so -- and at that point you can clearly say -- OK, they'll pair off at the end of the book. And it's OK not to have suspense around that sort of thing -- but even an obvious "fated couple" can be introduced deftly, and this was done clumsily, almost childishly.
The dragon physiology (stages of development, how they breathe fire, how their wings unfurl, two hearts, why they pursue gold) was actually quite interesting though not super-deep. But some parts of dragon psychology felt inconsistent -- if you have a dragon POV-character, I would expect a dragon's voice, and most of the time you get that -- but why would a dragon refer to a rival male dragon as "it"? I suppose this could be some kind of subtle dehumanizing psychological move, but it just felt weird and inconsistent to me... The dragon philosophy... well, seems to be the Seven Deadly Sins cast as some pretty lame poetry, so, hm...
I did find it interesting to get a glimpse of "stock fantasy races" through a dragon's eyes: there are industrious and highly hierarchial Dwarves; sing-songing,lovely (but also vicious) Elves; a (hinted at) lost "greater" race of Men subjugated currently to more common stock, and, interestingly, a tribal race whom I would map to (not really evil) Orcs -- antagonistic towards the other races and more primitive than they -- who were actually shown in a rather sympathetic light. And it's nice that there is conflict between the human races, and within each group, as well as the conflict between various strains of humanity and the dragons. One minor quibble -- all of these are referred to as "hominids" by the dragons (I can't recall at the moment whether "humans" is reserved for Men, but I think it might be), and that threw me out of the story every time -- it's just too technical a word for a high fantasy setting. If "human" would've been too confusing and something like "two-legger" too cumbersome, even using a "Drakine" word (like he does for certain dragon body parts) might have worked.
Speaking of Drakine -- some effort has been put into remarking on the languages of the different races, dialects, peculiar modes of speech (e.g. the howl of the wolves that Auron takes up with), and also accents when creatures of one race learn the language of another. This is neat in theory but fairly intrusively executed in practice, and I'm not entirely sure whether the intentions were good and pure here but limited by skill, or if the author decided, "Hey, high fantasy, got to have different languages and stuff" and just threw all of this in to check off a box.
It's one of those series that I'll continue reading even though each new volume is likely to annoy me somewhat -- and will be pleasantly surprised if the storytelling improves in the sequels (apparently, three more are planned -- one about Auron's sister, one about his crippled brother, and a grand finale tying all three siblings together; I did think Wistala's disappearance was a loose end, given the stated value of female dragons, so I'm pleased to hear that it was an intentional loose end that will eventually get resolved.)
(BTW, I think eeknight is the first author I stumbled onto accidently on LJ. That is, I knew pegkerr was a writer when I followed a link to her journal, and from there, and matociquala's LJ, and communities, I found my way to a bunch more -- skzbrust, pameladean, jimbutcher, grrm, etc. But eeknight I bumped into totally randomly -- reading through the comments on binky_betsy (the For Better or For Worse commentary/sporking blog) and noticing his username and thinking, hey, that sounds familiar... Hee, small world.)
36. Elizabeth Kerner, Lesser Kindred -- this is the sequel to Song in the Silence, and actually preceeds Redeeming the Lost, which I read (out of order, as you can see) some time ago. I still don't really know how I feel about this trilogy, even now that I've finished it.
I think I'm likely to be overly demanding in this particular case because the central premise of the book is a theme that I find particularly intriguing and have explored somewhat (though not in this particular way, and not this centrally) on my own -- the human and dragon who are in love with each other, and what they do or do not go through in order to be together. (I do want to say, for the record, that I think Kerner did a 1000 times better job of this than Mercedes Lackey in One Good Knight (which I wrote about here. And for anyone possibly interested in my take on the subject -- two ballads from awhile back. Anyway, moving on.)
So, I do think that central difficulty and conflict are managed quite well, if a trifle dramatically. Warning -- SPOILERS from here on: In the first book (Song in the Silence) the dragon Akhor is transformed into a human when he should have died, and is thus able to unite with his human love, Lanen. It's not all kittens and rainbows for the two of them from then on, which I really liked -- Akhor (called Varien now) has some difficulty adjusting to life as a human, and especially the loss of his wings. The moment when the realization that he will never fly again strikes him was rather poignantly done, I thought -- although I do think POV choices and the overall heightened level of drama made it less effective than it could have been. At the same time, Lanen conceives by him and has a lot of trouble with the unborn child(ren), and there is some underlying fear and resentment and sense of loss that they both must work out -- and do. This was a lot more realistically done than it could have been, so I liked it.
I thought the plot was alright -- multi-threaded without seeming too episodic, because connections were fairly strong between the different parts of the text -- but, again, I felt the multiple first-person POV segments did not do the story any favours. Only two or three characters' voices were at all memorable or distinctive (and one of those was a minor character -- a former mercenary -- who never appeared again), and, as I'd remarked on the previous book, the segments were too short to really get into the story before being jerked to another POV character (sometimes dealing with the same plot thread) -- and a lot of those transitions were totally arbitrary. I think, for instance, that even if Kerner *really* wanted to go this route, she could have easily dispensed with the POVs of Rella, Jamie, Vilkas the healer, Marik, Idai, and the mercenary, leaving "only" Lanen, Akhor/Varien, Will, Salera, Shrikhar, and Berys the bad guy. The other problem with the first-person POV is that the narrator actually *still* isn't clear -- that is, it's not clear where the various "I"s are narrating from. Lanen's narration is clearly reflective, looking at the past after many years, and Varien's appears to be the same (for instance, he intentionally provides a key bit of foreshadowing for the third book), likewise for the former mercenary, who is talking about his boyhood from the vantage point of a grown/old man, and Salera, who talks about a time pre-consciousness as a fully verbal entity now. And then you have characters who cannot be narrating from a distant future -- there are two others, but most notably, the healer Maikel, who pretty much narrates his own death. How the hell does that work, really? I thought his death -- realization and then fighting a demon inside him step by step and breath by breath -- could actually be a very powerful moment, but the whole time I was distracted by the "how is he telling us all this?!" thoughts. And then there is Berys, who takes the trouble to point out that his narrative is one that is magically captured by a magical dictaphone spell or something. Why take the time to make the nature of the narration clear for one character but totally omit it for some others, making the reader wonder about those circumstances? All this could've been easily avoided with third person narration (omniscient or sequential limited or what have you).
As for the characters themselves... I've remarked previously that what makes me love rather than simply enjoy a fantasy novel is either the setting or the characters. The setting here is very much in the background -- you get city names and some geographical features, but not even a map. Not a whole lot of world-building, and very little sense of anything beyond the immediate confines of the story. And the characters... I've been thinking about this for a bit, and what I can say, I think, is that I like the archetypes/motifs these characters represent far better than the actual characters themselves -- the lonely girl who find her soulmate in a dragon, the dragon who wants to be (and becomes) human, the eldest dragon pining for lost days, the powerful mage who is afraid of the destruction his power can lead to, the spunky, spitfire, diminutive healer -- these are all characters I could get behind. Heck, these are all characters I've *written* (and one doesn't write what one doesn't love), except the lonely girl with a thing for dragons was an odd boy, in my case -- and the spunky, spitfire, diminutive healer was my self-insert Mary-Sue from when I was thirteen.
But, while I like Ahkor/Varien (the dragon/human) well enough, I think Lanen is a Mary-Sue -- she's not attractive, true, but she's got the famous flaw of short temper (actually, she comes across as a real bitch some of the time, in the way she behaves with Akhor -- which, OK, she's under a lot of stress, but the problme is, I didn't actually find her very sympathetic while everybody else extolled how wonderful she is. Which could be a trick of the first-person POV -- the older Lanen who is narrating may be particularly unflinching on the subject of her youthful bitchiness, while everyone else is blind to it... which, if that is the case, is admirable, but somehow I don't think it is, and, in any case, it doesn't work very well...) Shrikhar the eldest dragon is overly emo and I'm guessing more annoying than he is intended to be. Vilkas the powerful mage feels too ordinary (in his head, I'm left to assume, since it doesn't look like he is telling the story to anyone) and just didn't strike me as a believable manifestation of the archetype -- the "Woe is me, I shall be the Death of the World" (yes, with the capitals) felt kind of tacked on, relative to the rest of his character, and the girl healer just wasn't that well developed (at least in this book... I don't remember whether she plays a bigger role -- or gets a POV -- in the next one). And Berys the bad guy... Kerner actually makes a point of thanking someone in the acknowledgements for helping her flesh out his motivation more, and yet... that motivation never really made sense to me -- he wants to rule the world, but... he doesn't actually care about anything, including if he lives or dies. It's all a game to him, and he does it for the thrill of torturing people. It just doesn't feel like a coherent psychopath's vision of the world...
So what *did* I like about this book? I feel like I actually like older!narrator!Lanen, even though she exists only ephemerally in the narration. Some of the scenes that rang most true to me in the book were the quiet interludes that Lanen reflects on even though they don't move the story forward -- like the shopping for belts one -- because you can feel the nostalgia in them, and that's quite well executed. I thought Akhor's anguish and feelings of being torn between worlds was well done, and struck a believable note. Also there's a scene where a dragon mind-speaks to a dying dragon, and the circumstances and conversation are very chilling. In fact, the last scene in the book is from the POV of the dying dragon -- and it's the only one not told in first person -- and it's one of the more effective passages in the book, IMO, which makes me wish even more that Kerner had stuck to some kind of omniscient, maybe with first person Lanen bits for colour as epigraphs.
I half-feel like locating the third book of the trilogy again and scanning it to see if any of the stuff I thought weak becomes any stronger having read the middle, but it's probably not worth the bother...
What I didn't like: The characters -- I think their problem, mostly, is that they don't have enough conflict. They... ought to, what, with broken hearts, and lack of place in the family, and the prospect of being locked up for life, but it doesn't strum in their inner thoughts, it's all "tell not show" -- I guess, coming right down to it, their inner voices are not very believable. Keles is boring. He is a scientist type, but someone like that can be done non-boringly, like in the Steerswoman books. And his character growth on the journey is neither subtle nor dramatic enough to make him interesting. His brother Jorim, the adventurer, is not actually any better -- there are throwaway attempts to show his character, but they don't actually add up to anything coherent, or interesting. Nirati and her whole arc (so far at least) felt so incredibly tacked on that, really, my impression was that Stackpole had decided, at the outset, that Keles had a twin sister, and then was forced to come up with something for her to do when, really, there wasn't anything. And the whole BDSM thing was just weird, 'cos it came out entirely of nowhere... Moraven is a little better, mostly because the blandness of character that pervades everything has some explanation in him -- it makes sense for his personality to be constrained/muted by both his schooling and his amnesia. Ciras and Borosan were caricatures, and not very interesting/amusing ones at that. I get the feeling that the princes Pyrust and Cyron *could* be interesting characters in the hands of somebody who was better at writing characters, but they're not quite there -- I have some slight hope for them, though... In fact, the only character I found the least bit interesting was Qiro, the grandfather who is an utter bastard or insane or very possibly both. At least with him, one could spend some time pondering how much of the apparent inconsistency in that character's interpretation was due to unreliable narrator vs. lack of consistent vision. I do wonder whether that will be set straight in later books...
The shape of the plot is fairly generic -- main character(s) travel the land, weathering adventures/attacks and acquiring sidekicks/allies. The politics/ministerial intrigue/military feats are rather unremarkable and don't feel sweeping enough -- they're all too academic, I think, and not visceral enough -- but perhaps it is again the fault of the characters for lacking the viscera to begin with...
I did, as I mentioned, like the worldbuilding. The idea of magical storms, magic as a largely destructive force, the transformations wrought in the landscape and the people by magic -- that was just really cool. And along with it, the system of jaedunto, the idea that you can work up to a magical, nearly immortal status by becoming really good at your craft -- whatever it is (pity that more was not done with it). The "mechanical magic" aspect was also intriguing -- the idea itself, of magic as technology, is not anything novel, but I haven't seen this sort of execution of it. It doesn't really make "scientific" sense (or, at least, not yet), which bothered me a bit, but it's still kind of neat. Basically, having three (four, five, six, counting the Viruk version, and the "New World" magic, and whatever weirdness Nirati and Qiro find themselves having generated) very separate, but reasonably well thought-out, systems of magic coexisting is just cool. I just hope we will learn more about how they are all related as the series goes on.
The assorted creatures are also cool. I hope we learn more about the Viruk (which are a nice departure from Elves-like creatures for a magically gifted, elder race). The fish-devils and the devil frogs are appropriately scary. The Fenn are a nice idea for critters, with the chameleon-like shape-shifting, though I kind of doubt one really needs a furry pet sidekick in a book like this -- it's not a Disney movie (and not Star Wars Episode I, either...) -- which is to say, Shimick didn't annoy me, but I felt that he *should*.
The part of the world-building I *was* disappointed by was the New World. It was just too historically America in 1492-ish, and it had no reason to be. You get the same sort of thing in Jaguar Knights, but at least there the whole world is recognizably an "Earth history" AU, whereas Atlas is set in a clearly different world, with a different number of moons, and alien creatures, etc., etc. The is no *reason* for the languages of the "New World" to sound heavily Amerindian, for their dress and architecture to be the same, for them to be unfamiliar with horses and to have llama-type things instead. It's not a clever magically-flavoured reworking of real history, the way things are in the Dave Duncan books, or Guy Gavriel Kay's, or The Crown of Stars cycle, it's just *lazy*.
I did already check out a second book and am looking forward to reading it, though I'm sure it will annoy me in places as much as the first.
33. Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man -- so, yes, confession time -- I haven't actually read a lot of the "early" Pratchett, except for the Night Watch books, which I have purposefully sought out because that's my favorite series. I *have* read The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic (and wasn't all that impressed, honestly, coming to them after Night Watch and The Truth and other later-Discworld favorites of mine). I did like Reaper Man better than those first two, but... and this is odd to say about a fantasy novel -- it was a bit too metaphysical for my taste. Turns out I like DEATH the way I like the Wizards -- as cameo appearances rather than the focus of the novel. Which made "Reaper Man" amusing in a sort of disjointed way but not really my favorite. My favorite bits are probably the "I can remember when this this was all X" running gag, and the origin of the Death of Rats (I can't recall if I ever questioned its autonomous existence before), and I did like the lifecycle of the mall. I also liked the (very brief) appearance by Vetinari ("Almost all.") But at the same time I felt that a number of the funny bits were still disconnected -- there for a laugh rather than for some deeper reason / tying things together (the way they are in later books) -- Ridcully and his swearwords, "Yo!", and, honestly, the Mrs.Cake thing got rather wearying after a while. Bill Door didn't touch me much as a character -- actually, no-one in this book did, certainly not the way Vimes and his crew or the Witches do. Well, now I've read it -- that's pretty much my impression.
34. Patricia Cornwell, Predator -- OK, I don't read Pat Cornwell for great prose (her style always slightly annoyed me, being overly dramatic), but I used to be able to count on her Scarpetta mysteries being a quick read, exciting and engrossing, even if they were annoying on some level. Maybe the last couple of books have been weaker, but they still met the expectations of making me want to read them through in a sitting. I think it took me a month (at least!) to finish Predator, and I was partly motivated by the fact that my mother lent me this book and was asking about it at regular intervals, wanting to discuss it with me. It didn't actually become interesting on its own merit until about 400 pages into a 460 page book, which is just ridiculous.
It's a combination of things, most of them stylistic. A couple of books ago, Cornwell drifted away from the first-person Scarpetta-POV narrative and started adding other POV characters, including that of the bad guy du jour. This, to me, is a problem in a book series whose main attraction was figuring out what's going on via forensic pathology. Because if you know what's going on? Why bother reading the drawn-out technical detail of the good guys trying to figure it out? I do have to admit that the bad-guy-POV is actually handled better/more interestingly here than in the other Scarpetta books that have it, because there's a twist at the end. A twist that actually made me want to re-read, or at least re-skim, this book I had been slogging through for a month -- not necessarily in a "Whoa! I never saw that coming! I have to go back and marvel at the incredibly clever way this was set up" (the way I felt when reading, say, Chronicles of Amber) but more like "Whoa, where did that come from? I have to go back and see if it's actually guessable from the text and in fact consistent with what's been said." But, you know, at least there was something.
The other reason I strongly dislike the multi-POV thing in Cornwell's hands is that reading Scarpetta-POV only was already somewhat annoying because of the disproportionately heightened drama ("I dropped my keys. My heart pounded. The elevator doors opened, and I nearly fainted in relief" -- not a direct quote, but actually pretty close to a scene from an earlier book, I forget which one), but at least you could write that off as an (annoying) character quirk and concentrate on thinking about/empathizing with characters whose emo angst you were *not* being showered with. In a multi-POV setting, the emo angst is multiplied -- Scarpetta is stil angsty, Marino is angsty, Benton is angsty, Lucy is super-duper angsty, the real bad guy is angsty, and the decoy bad guy is angsty, and newly introduced unimportant secondary characters are angsty too -- and there is no place to hide!. I think the only character in this whole mess who does not angst is Rose the secretary. She may have just become my favorite character in the series. Also, what we get with multi-POV is not sequential first person (Scarpetta: "I dropped my keys. My heart pounded." Marino: "I watched her pick up her keys and thought about how I was never going to be good enough for her.") It's, what does matociquala call it? Sequential third person limited omniscient? ("Scarpetta dropped her keys. Her heart pounded." Next chapter: "Marino watched Scarpetta pick up her keys and though about how he was never going to be good enough for her.") Ridiculously overblown emotions? Look even more riduculous in third person, apparently.
Cornwell also has a new trick in this book -- it's told in present tense. Which, guess what, only serves to highlight the ridiculously overblown nature of the drama-angst. If she was going for a sense of immediacy, this move totally failed.
So, yeah -- didn't care much for the style. The plot was... I dunno, I guess the plot was OK, but the pacing was off -- the twist/reveal comes too late in the novel, which I think diminishes its payoff, and some plot threads are not tied up (what's up with the red handprints, for example? was that ever explained? if so, neither my mother nor I caught on to it). And was a motive ever supplied for some of the murders? I couldn't account for some of them, for example. Also, I felt like the plot was bogged down by extraneous detail (introduced by the multi-character POV/angst fest). It just felt... all over the place, loosely tied together by the revelation, but not adding up to anything complete.
Will I continue reading her? Sure. But much less eagerly than I have even up till now. And I hope the drops the annoying present tense, even if she probably won't go back to first person.
35. E.E.Knight (eeknight), Dragon Champion, Book 1 of Age of Fire -- this was one of those "generic fantasy by author I haven't read before" I picked up because I was intrigued by the premise -- a fantasy novel told from a dragon's point of view (and I remembered enjoying the dragon-POV bits in Dragonbane and sequels, for instance, so it seemed worth a shot).
I thought this book had pacing problems as well -- the first 100 pages or so were pretty boring (well, better than 400, eh?) and repetitive -- basically, the protagonist (Auron the dragon) getting pursued and hunted by an assortment of creatures and fighting/evading them in various clever ways. This got boring fast because I find action uninterrupted by dialogue fairly boring, but that could be just me. Really, though, it felt more like a computer game than a novel for a while. Things did pick up, I thought, after Auron met the human child, and the interaction with the senile old black dragon were downright poignant, and the best part of the book, IMO. But I may just have a thing for ancient black dragons... And then, towards the end (the last 60-80 pages or so) everything happened too quickly -- characters he had encountered episodically before coming back together tied up into a neat little package (suspension of disbelief issues, rather), tell not show development and convenient (but not very believable) shortcuts, not one, but two, "This is how I got to be the way I am" explanatory monologues, one of them by the chief bad guy, stuck in there all of a sudden (totally threw me out of the story), and the conclusion being essentially the equivalent of "And then they killed some bad guys and they won." It didn't feel built up to, not at all. And then another mini-climax/twist piled on top of that, not really set up any better, and... yeah, too much.
I suspect this author is attempting foreshadowing without having a particularly deft hand with it -- for instance, there is another minor plot point that *really* annoyed me -- Auron briefly meets his future (soul)mate while he is still a hatchling -- they are both prisoners on a ship. There is a totally-irrelevant-to-the-moment scene where he finds out her name (it's set up as a gag), before running off and not meeting her again for another 300 pages or so -- and at that point you can clearly say -- OK, they'll pair off at the end of the book. And it's OK not to have suspense around that sort of thing -- but even an obvious "fated couple" can be introduced deftly, and this was done clumsily, almost childishly.
The dragon physiology (stages of development, how they breathe fire, how their wings unfurl, two hearts, why they pursue gold) was actually quite interesting though not super-deep. But some parts of dragon psychology felt inconsistent -- if you have a dragon POV-character, I would expect a dragon's voice, and most of the time you get that -- but why would a dragon refer to a rival male dragon as "it"? I suppose this could be some kind of subtle dehumanizing psychological move, but it just felt weird and inconsistent to me... The dragon philosophy... well, seems to be the Seven Deadly Sins cast as some pretty lame poetry, so, hm...
I did find it interesting to get a glimpse of "stock fantasy races" through a dragon's eyes: there are industrious and highly hierarchial Dwarves; sing-songing,lovely (but also vicious) Elves; a (hinted at) lost "greater" race of Men subjugated currently to more common stock, and, interestingly, a tribal race whom I would map to (not really evil) Orcs -- antagonistic towards the other races and more primitive than they -- who were actually shown in a rather sympathetic light. And it's nice that there is conflict between the human races, and within each group, as well as the conflict between various strains of humanity and the dragons. One minor quibble -- all of these are referred to as "hominids" by the dragons (I can't recall at the moment whether "humans" is reserved for Men, but I think it might be), and that threw me out of the story every time -- it's just too technical a word for a high fantasy setting. If "human" would've been too confusing and something like "two-legger" too cumbersome, even using a "Drakine" word (like he does for certain dragon body parts) might have worked.
Speaking of Drakine -- some effort has been put into remarking on the languages of the different races, dialects, peculiar modes of speech (e.g. the howl of the wolves that Auron takes up with), and also accents when creatures of one race learn the language of another. This is neat in theory but fairly intrusively executed in practice, and I'm not entirely sure whether the intentions were good and pure here but limited by skill, or if the author decided, "Hey, high fantasy, got to have different languages and stuff" and just threw all of this in to check off a box.
It's one of those series that I'll continue reading even though each new volume is likely to annoy me somewhat -- and will be pleasantly surprised if the storytelling improves in the sequels (apparently, three more are planned -- one about Auron's sister, one about his crippled brother, and a grand finale tying all three siblings together; I did think Wistala's disappearance was a loose end, given the stated value of female dragons, so I'm pleased to hear that it was an intentional loose end that will eventually get resolved.)
(BTW, I think eeknight is the first author I stumbled onto accidently on LJ. That is, I knew pegkerr was a writer when I followed a link to her journal, and from there, and matociquala's LJ, and communities, I found my way to a bunch more -- skzbrust, pameladean, jimbutcher, grrm, etc. But eeknight I bumped into totally randomly -- reading through the comments on binky_betsy (the For Better or For Worse commentary/sporking blog) and noticing his username and thinking, hey, that sounds familiar... Hee, small world.)
36. Elizabeth Kerner, Lesser Kindred -- this is the sequel to Song in the Silence, and actually preceeds Redeeming the Lost, which I read (out of order, as you can see) some time ago. I still don't really know how I feel about this trilogy, even now that I've finished it.
I think I'm likely to be overly demanding in this particular case because the central premise of the book is a theme that I find particularly intriguing and have explored somewhat (though not in this particular way, and not this centrally) on my own -- the human and dragon who are in love with each other, and what they do or do not go through in order to be together. (I do want to say, for the record, that I think Kerner did a 1000 times better job of this than Mercedes Lackey in One Good Knight (which I wrote about here. And for anyone possibly interested in my take on the subject -- two ballads from awhile back. Anyway, moving on.)
So, I do think that central difficulty and conflict are managed quite well, if a trifle dramatically. Warning -- SPOILERS from here on: In the first book (Song in the Silence) the dragon Akhor is transformed into a human when he should have died, and is thus able to unite with his human love, Lanen. It's not all kittens and rainbows for the two of them from then on, which I really liked -- Akhor (called Varien now) has some difficulty adjusting to life as a human, and especially the loss of his wings. The moment when the realization that he will never fly again strikes him was rather poignantly done, I thought -- although I do think POV choices and the overall heightened level of drama made it less effective than it could have been. At the same time, Lanen conceives by him and has a lot of trouble with the unborn child(ren), and there is some underlying fear and resentment and sense of loss that they both must work out -- and do. This was a lot more realistically done than it could have been, so I liked it.
I thought the plot was alright -- multi-threaded without seeming too episodic, because connections were fairly strong between the different parts of the text -- but, again, I felt the multiple first-person POV segments did not do the story any favours. Only two or three characters' voices were at all memorable or distinctive (and one of those was a minor character -- a former mercenary -- who never appeared again), and, as I'd remarked on the previous book, the segments were too short to really get into the story before being jerked to another POV character (sometimes dealing with the same plot thread) -- and a lot of those transitions were totally arbitrary. I think, for instance, that even if Kerner *really* wanted to go this route, she could have easily dispensed with the POVs of Rella, Jamie, Vilkas the healer, Marik, Idai, and the mercenary, leaving "only" Lanen, Akhor/Varien, Will, Salera, Shrikhar, and Berys the bad guy. The other problem with the first-person POV is that the narrator actually *still* isn't clear -- that is, it's not clear where the various "I"s are narrating from. Lanen's narration is clearly reflective, looking at the past after many years, and Varien's appears to be the same (for instance, he intentionally provides a key bit of foreshadowing for the third book), likewise for the former mercenary, who is talking about his boyhood from the vantage point of a grown/old man, and Salera, who talks about a time pre-consciousness as a fully verbal entity now. And then you have characters who cannot be narrating from a distant future -- there are two others, but most notably, the healer Maikel, who pretty much narrates his own death. How the hell does that work, really? I thought his death -- realization and then fighting a demon inside him step by step and breath by breath -- could actually be a very powerful moment, but the whole time I was distracted by the "how is he telling us all this?!" thoughts. And then there is Berys, who takes the trouble to point out that his narrative is one that is magically captured by a magical dictaphone spell or something. Why take the time to make the nature of the narration clear for one character but totally omit it for some others, making the reader wonder about those circumstances? All this could've been easily avoided with third person narration (omniscient or sequential limited or what have you).
As for the characters themselves... I've remarked previously that what makes me love rather than simply enjoy a fantasy novel is either the setting or the characters. The setting here is very much in the background -- you get city names and some geographical features, but not even a map. Not a whole lot of world-building, and very little sense of anything beyond the immediate confines of the story. And the characters... I've been thinking about this for a bit, and what I can say, I think, is that I like the archetypes/motifs these characters represent far better than the actual characters themselves -- the lonely girl who find her soulmate in a dragon, the dragon who wants to be (and becomes) human, the eldest dragon pining for lost days, the powerful mage who is afraid of the destruction his power can lead to, the spunky, spitfire, diminutive healer -- these are all characters I could get behind. Heck, these are all characters I've *written* (and one doesn't write what one doesn't love), except the lonely girl with a thing for dragons was an odd boy, in my case -- and the spunky, spitfire, diminutive healer was my self-insert Mary-Sue from when I was thirteen.
But, while I like Ahkor/Varien (the dragon/human) well enough, I think Lanen is a Mary-Sue -- she's not attractive, true, but she's got the famous flaw of short temper (actually, she comes across as a real bitch some of the time, in the way she behaves with Akhor -- which, OK, she's under a lot of stress, but the problme is, I didn't actually find her very sympathetic while everybody else extolled how wonderful she is. Which could be a trick of the first-person POV -- the older Lanen who is narrating may be particularly unflinching on the subject of her youthful bitchiness, while everyone else is blind to it... which, if that is the case, is admirable, but somehow I don't think it is, and, in any case, it doesn't work very well...) Shrikhar the eldest dragon is overly emo and I'm guessing more annoying than he is intended to be. Vilkas the powerful mage feels too ordinary (in his head, I'm left to assume, since it doesn't look like he is telling the story to anyone) and just didn't strike me as a believable manifestation of the archetype -- the "Woe is me, I shall be the Death of the World" (yes, with the capitals) felt kind of tacked on, relative to the rest of his character, and the girl healer just wasn't that well developed (at least in this book... I don't remember whether she plays a bigger role -- or gets a POV -- in the next one). And Berys the bad guy... Kerner actually makes a point of thanking someone in the acknowledgements for helping her flesh out his motivation more, and yet... that motivation never really made sense to me -- he wants to rule the world, but... he doesn't actually care about anything, including if he lives or dies. It's all a game to him, and he does it for the thrill of torturing people. It just doesn't feel like a coherent psychopath's vision of the world...
So what *did* I like about this book? I feel like I actually like older!narrator!Lanen, even though she exists only ephemerally in the narration. Some of the scenes that rang most true to me in the book were the quiet interludes that Lanen reflects on even though they don't move the story forward -- like the shopping for belts one -- because you can feel the nostalgia in them, and that's quite well executed. I thought Akhor's anguish and feelings of being torn between worlds was well done, and struck a believable note. Also there's a scene where a dragon mind-speaks to a dying dragon, and the circumstances and conversation are very chilling. In fact, the last scene in the book is from the POV of the dying dragon -- and it's the only one not told in first person -- and it's one of the more effective passages in the book, IMO, which makes me wish even more that Kerner had stuck to some kind of omniscient, maybe with first person Lanen bits for colour as epigraphs.
I half-feel like locating the third book of the trilogy again and scanning it to see if any of the stuff I thought weak becomes any stronger having read the middle, but it's probably not worth the bother...