Reading roundup
29. Cate Tiernan, Immortal Beloved -- less addictive than SWEEP or even those Chalice books I never read the end of, but still oddly readable. This is YA paranormal stuff not nearly at its best, but it wasn't as bad as it could have been based on the premise. The premise is that Nastasya is an immortal, has been alive for like 500 years, spending most of it partying to forget about the trauma of her childhood, when her entire family was killed before her eyes by a raiding party of other immortals. The bulk of the book is her coming to "immortal rehab" ("combination of kibbutz and rehab," as its leader puts it) where she gets in touch with her inner child and learns to use light magic, and also comes face-to-face with an immortal she eventually learns was part of the family that destroyed hers and who also led raids against villages where she lived a bunch of times after that, including nearly raping her and nearly killing her infant son once. Of course, they are irresistibly drawn to each other before they figure out who the other person really is, and even after, to some degree.
It's not as bad as that makes it sound, mostly because I enjoyed "Nasty"'s jaded first-person narration ("I was literally on my hands and knees on the kitchen floor, scrubbing the flagstones. I mean, flagstones are rocks Rocks are inherently dirty. That is their freaking nature. I was going against their nature in trying to make them be clean.", "I had to was those suckers [quilts and blankets] three more times, because the expensive, cologically sound detergent that River bought worked like crap. I mean, the invention of bleach was a step forward for mankind, you know?"), but the whole thing between her and Reyn required a bit too much in the way of suspension of disbelief, especially when he continued to be initiating things without her consent in the present day, which made it difficult to see him as reformed, although the fact that Nasty had the hots for him when she first met him in rehab made it maaarginally less skeevy. The worldbuilding -- which is a bit flimsy -- has a couple of marginally interesting things to say about immortality of the kind where you age very slowly, and the resulting effect on self-perception, guilt, forgiveness, etc. And Nasty is originally from Iceland, which was a little unusual/interesting.
The book has a sort of non-ending -- it's getting a sequel, but basically it ends with only a single very minor plot point resolved -- Nastasya's rival / girl who doesn't like her at rehab tipping her hand and being expelled -- but everything else -- the thing with Reyn, Nasty's old gang, including the scarily codependent Incy, looking for her -- everything else is left hanging.
So, not the best book I read this year, but it made for acceptable interstitial reading between some more interesting books.
30. Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven -- I'd been quite apprehensive approaching it, because I was mixed at best on the last couple of GGK books I read, and I came pretty close to outright hating Tigana. But this one was good! It didn't make me want to roll my eyes at the author, or stab any characters, or chew off my own leg and escape -- very refreshing! Spoilers!
This book has a lot of the things GGK does well -- the feeling of history being real, the numinous magical elements, lyrical, moving prose (at least sometimes). It has a lot of the quirks I'm less fond of or indifferent to, also -- villains whose motivations aren't really believable, which especially stands out alongside nuanced shades-of-gray characters, prose that's overly stilted in places, overreliance on repetition -- but overall I enjoyed it a lot. It definitely didn't feel like it had enough plot for a ~600 page book (well, there's stuff happening, but most of the big actions are offscreen or sketched in between the last chapter and the epilogue), but it moved along at a good clip and was very readable even when all the main characters were doing was traveling and waiting.
I liked Tai (and also it took me, like, to the third page of chapter two to start shipping his with Bytsan, and I was disappointed that they didn't spend more of the book interacting -- although the last chapter and the epilogue made me happy in that regard. I don't have any *strong* feelings for him, although his awed admiration for the Banished Immortal early on endeared him to me, but he is a likeable main POV, and I could sympathize with his frustration at being out of his depth and having people using him and things happening to him. I found his reaction to both Jian (in the sedan chair) and to the emperor, when he visits his rooms, funny and sympathetic.
I liked Li-Mei quite a lot, though I would have really liked to see her interact with people more, not just Meshaq when he is still half-wolf. I liked her indomitable curiosity, her insistance on washing her hands and face as a way to enforce a semblance of normalcy on her situation, I liked the fact that she seemed to be more like her eldest brother than like Tai, and that she has the same thought as Tai does about killing Roshan, even though it would cost her life and other things, too, and that she went on to marry the Emperor and influence policy and stuff. It would've been good to have more of that in the actual book, though. As it was, she felt like a great character who was underutlized, and the kiss with Meshaq felt both tacked on and perfunctory.
I kind of felt like Rain's POV was a bit tacked on, especially given where her arc led. I actually like it that it's not a straightforward boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy wins girl back storyline, that both Rain and Tai find happiness with other people despite missing each other narrowly, that even Rain's letter never finds its way to Tai (and he never learns that his note probably saved her life). But, I don't know. I felt like her decision to go home to Sardia was just there for the symmetry with Tai and Li-Mei also coming home.
I also didn't really buy Tai's sudden realization that he'd been in love with Wei Song all along. I really liked Song, her competence, courage, and insistence on tweaking Tai every chance she got -- her I could definitely see being in love with him -- but Tai was clearly still all about Rain. And the thing is, the Tai/Song relationship could easily work without the sudden realization that he'd dreamt of her since that first night wherever and that he was already in love and blah blah blah -- it felt like GGK took a lazy shortcut -- that didn't even work.
I liked Tai's brother Liu a whole lot, especially his last conversation with Tai ("I forgive you [for thinking he had been involved in the assassination attempt[. What I did for our family, Li-Mei made a princess, I would do again. Tai, it was a master stroke. [...] So was Kuala Nor," Liu added softly.) and his last scene in general, where he is being pragmatic, self-sacrificing, willing to do the distasteful but necessary, and unapologetic all at once. I also liked governor/general Xu, and was happy to hear he lived to retake the pass, and the steward Tai inherited from Jian, who kept the home fires burning so efficiently and make sure to prudently kiss up to the rebel government while quietly despising them.
The political intrigue worked decently well, I thought -- the elderly emperor, who is aged and likely besotted but not at all senile for either of those; Jian, who is masterful and ruthless and also quite fun (I especially enjoyed the scene of her tormenting poor Tai in the sedan chair with the lychees) and young; slowly dying Roshan; Shinzu, who exploited the disaster to have the first minister lynched, Jian killed along with him, and his father to step down -- I liked the contrast of that ruthlessness (and Liu's) with, say, Tai's inability to kill Roshan when he had the chance (with the impact in the number of deaths that could have avoided carefully underlined). Unfortunately a lot of the intrigue circles around Wen Zhou, and he just didn't carry it very well IMO.
Wen Zhou was the weakest thing about the book for me (structural quibbles aside). It felt like GGK wanted him to be both a competent courtier and a total idiot, depending on what he needed his villain to do. Sending assassins to the ends of the empire after a kid who was no threat to him is not just arrogant -- it's insane. Executing Roshan's son was dumb. And, of course, ordering a major battle that was a tremendous error just because he was scared -- I have a hard time buying any of these things. Or, if Zhou really is such a total idiot, how could Jian have encouraged the emperor's favor of him, since it's clear she is working in the best interests of the empire (and they don't seem all that close). I mean, if he is capable of all these things, Zhou is a liability rather than an asset.
Unless GGK was trying to show the disintegration of a once-competent personality under pressure -- but it doesn't come across that way. Zhou is, basically, Cersei, only without any of the sympathetic traits or excuses. Still, overall, quite a good book. And I liked the way the epilogue seemed to "zoom out" on the story, first dropping the names and then talking about two men coming to the lake and then ghosts and then nothing -- lovely, bittersweet closure for a poetic volume.
Quotes (which ended up being all about poetry, huh):
"There was some sadness in how that could happen, Tai thought: falling out of love with something that had shaped you. Or even people who had? But if you didn't change at least a little, where were the passages of a life? Didn't learning, changing, sometimes mean letting go of what had once been seen as true?"
"Or maybe some readers had the image before they even came to the poem and found it waiting for them there, an affirmation? The poet offering words for thoughts they'd held already."
Tai, deciding to trust Sima Zian, the poet, whom he'd just met in person: "He would acknowledge, after, that some of it had to do with the sense of the person that came through in the poetry, and that this might not be a sound basis for judging a man."
cancan_cadenza, if you're on LJ atm, I remember you read and like Under Heaven, but only found a one-paragraph blurb in your journal. Is there more of your reaction elsewhere?
31. Usula Vernan (ursulav), Attack of the Ninja Frogs (Dragonbreath #2) -- very cute! I didn't find it as funny as the first one, but maybe it's just 'cos I find ninjas less interesting than undersea creatures. It's still very cute, and I learned something (that shuriken means "sword hidden in the hand"), and Danny continues to be an amusing protagonist in a Calvin-esque sort of way. I like Suki, the exchange student who is the reincarnation of a ninja warrior but wants to be a veterenarian instead, and missed some of the Danny and Wendell interaction from the first one, even though Wendell, of course, appeared in this one, too.
32. Robin McKinley, Sunshine -- I'm generally a fan of McKinley (read The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown back when I was actually in the target audience, read Chalice a couple year back and really liked it), and I've been hearing about Sunshine for years as the vampire book for people who don't like vampire books (which category I belong to), and I kept hearing about it on my flist, too, so I knew I wanted to read it. And I liked it! But it was different than I had been expecting, and less, I think, subversive of the sub-genre than I thought it would be. So I liked it, quite a lot actually, but it still felt like a vampire book and therefore Not My Thing. Spoilers
I like Sunshine a lot. She feels very fleshed out, multi-dimensional. There's all this minor stuff about her, gradually revealed, and some of it is relevant to the themes of the book, either straight or ironically, like the feeding people gene, or being the person on a camping trip mosquitoes always seek out, or always wearing bright colors, or being a vegetarian, or reading horror novels, and some of it is just there, like not drinking coffee or filling her apartment with roses when she thinks she's about to die or being a bad student when at school or having a difficult relationship with her mother.
I liked Constantine a lot, too (but cringed a little every time Sunshine referred to him as "Con"), and I loved the two of them being action buddies together. Platonic action buddies, with UST, OK, but. I'm still rather puzzled by that whole thing where she wakes him up from the vampire coma or whatever and all of a sudden the four-letter words come out and there are a couple of pages that really felt like they'd been stuck in from a different book. (BTW, I found the book at the library shelved with YA, but it didn't read like a YA book to me, particularly, not just for the fairly matter-of-fact way it talks about sex, but for the general perspective. Sunshine is young, but she is not YA!young -- she is definitely an adult.)
I also liked a lot the way the book dealt with consequences of trauma ("Post-traumatic shock, phooey. Seemed to me the trauma was trotting right along with me, like a dog on a leash with its owner. I was the dog."), with the difficulty of healing (and Constantine saying, "There is no shame in healing" even though Sunshine finds the process distasteful and shameful), with a "civilian" preparing to go into a hopeless situation, with the effect of unexpected survival, with someone finding their sense of self turned upsidedown. So many fantasy books -- so many books, period -- sort of gloss over that because that sort of stuff always happens to protagonists and they bounce back and are kicking ass two paragraphs later to keep the momentum going, but Sunshine's reactions were actually, you know, normal, and quite unusual for that.
I liked the worldbuilding OK, I guess, but some bits of it more than others. My favorite part was the interwoven description of how wards had become a part of industrial life, essentially. The actual Others and partbloods weren't very interesting to me, although the social impliactions of being Other in society were (mention of loners with cats being torched as suspected vampires during the Wards, "people who too regularly call in sick the day after the moon is full" never getting promoted, kids who show demon blood having to move away and switch schools, etc.). The descriptions of vampire perception and Sunshine traveling through nowheresville and those aspects actually dragged on a bit for me, and Sunshine doing magic I found neat symbolically -- the tree and the sunlight and the doe, even, but it didn't really resonate for me. I did like the thing with Sunshine's names, though, where she goes from being Raven Blaise to being Rae seddon and mostly just being Sunshine, the counterblanace of light and dark in those names.
What I really liked, in terms of worldbuilding, is how everything was introduced, from the fantastic -- 'ubis, Voodoo Wars and their aftermath, bad spots, SOF -- to the mundane -- the way right at the beginning you get a dozen plus names associated with Charlie's without the relationships being explicitly explained, just like walking into a family diner full of staff and regulars all of whom know each other even though they're strangers to you. That was neat, and managed not to be too confrusing for the reader, even. (Speaking of Charlie's, it was, indeed, a very food-intensive book, though it didn't make me quite as hungry as Dzur -- I think it's because the baking was pervasive but not explored quite so in depth, and also because the focus was on making food rather than consuming it.)
I liked all of the secondary characters mentioned in various ways -- easy-going but mysterious Mel, Sunshine's mother, Yolande (who from first description rmeinded me a bit of Granny Weatherwax; she turned out to be a lot sweeter, but the magical prowess did not surprise me one bit after that, of course), Pat of the SOF, Aimil, Rae's grandmother.
Quotes:
"At the last minute I didn't burn the dress."
"Then Mel, who had been left more or less singlehanded to run the coffeehouse while all the drama went on in the office, began collaring the staff who had crammed into the office door to watch and be a kind of Greek chorus of horror, and one by one heaving them physically toward what they ought to be doing, like minding the customers, before they all came back to see what was going on too, which, given Charlie's kind of customers, they would be quite capable of."
"This is really stupid, but I also discovered that I somehow belived that [Mel] was the one human at Charlie's who might be able to stop me in time if my bad genes suddenly kicked in and I picked up my electric cherry pitter and went for the nearest warm body. That he'd drown me efficiently in a vat of pasta sauce while everyone else was standing around with their mouths open wringing their hands and saying, who are we going to get to cover the bakery on such short notice? [...] As a romantic fantasy I don't think it's going to make it into the top ten -- most women pining for the presence of their lovers aren't worrying about needing their homicidal tendencies foiled -- but it did mean I felt a little safer with Mel around."
"Mel used his charm as deliberately as laying an ace on the table, so you could see exactly what it was."
"But something had happened and the law enforcement guys wanted to get out there and enforce something. They weren't fussy. If it was people, the cops were happy to do it. If it wasn't people, SOF was happy to do it. But I was supposed to choose my dancing partner and I wouldn't, and this was making the troops restless."
"And if I'd delivered the world of one sucker, sort of accidentally having preserved it another one, then my final effect on the vampire population was nil, invisible, void. Which was exactly the profile I'd choose."
"I didn't want to know that the monster that lived under your bed when you were a kid not only really is there but used to have a few beers with your dad" (on the subject of Constantine having had dealings with the Blaises)
"[A]nd there was one of those weird bits of mental slippage that trauma produces: I thought, oh, what a good thing I'm not dead, I never did write that recipe down for Paulie..."
Constantine, after Rae revived him: "'After your--' He paused. 'You need food,' he said. 'I can't even feed you.' He glanced down at himself as if perhaps he was expecting a peanut-butter sandwich to be suspended about his person."
And later Rae, when Constantine is spending the day with her after being released by the SOF: "I stood there holding a skillet with three beautifully fried eggs in it and said miserably, 'I can't even feed you.'"
Anyway, I liked the book a lot, and I would happily read a sequel to it, if one existed or was forthcoming, which I know it's emphatically not. But I'm still not really a fan of vampire books. :P
Currently reading: Should finish up Dragon, which has moved to my bedstand, and also The Broken Kingdoms, which I haven't touched in over a month.
It's not as bad as that makes it sound, mostly because I enjoyed "Nasty"'s jaded first-person narration ("I was literally on my hands and knees on the kitchen floor, scrubbing the flagstones. I mean, flagstones are rocks Rocks are inherently dirty. That is their freaking nature. I was going against their nature in trying to make them be clean.", "I had to was those suckers [quilts and blankets] three more times, because the expensive, cologically sound detergent that River bought worked like crap. I mean, the invention of bleach was a step forward for mankind, you know?"), but the whole thing between her and Reyn required a bit too much in the way of suspension of disbelief, especially when he continued to be initiating things without her consent in the present day, which made it difficult to see him as reformed, although the fact that Nasty had the hots for him when she first met him in rehab made it maaarginally less skeevy. The worldbuilding -- which is a bit flimsy -- has a couple of marginally interesting things to say about immortality of the kind where you age very slowly, and the resulting effect on self-perception, guilt, forgiveness, etc. And Nasty is originally from Iceland, which was a little unusual/interesting.
The book has a sort of non-ending -- it's getting a sequel, but basically it ends with only a single very minor plot point resolved -- Nastasya's rival / girl who doesn't like her at rehab tipping her hand and being expelled -- but everything else -- the thing with Reyn, Nasty's old gang, including the scarily codependent Incy, looking for her -- everything else is left hanging.
So, not the best book I read this year, but it made for acceptable interstitial reading between some more interesting books.
30. Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven -- I'd been quite apprehensive approaching it, because I was mixed at best on the last couple of GGK books I read, and I came pretty close to outright hating Tigana. But this one was good! It didn't make me want to roll my eyes at the author, or stab any characters, or chew off my own leg and escape -- very refreshing! Spoilers!
This book has a lot of the things GGK does well -- the feeling of history being real, the numinous magical elements, lyrical, moving prose (at least sometimes). It has a lot of the quirks I'm less fond of or indifferent to, also -- villains whose motivations aren't really believable, which especially stands out alongside nuanced shades-of-gray characters, prose that's overly stilted in places, overreliance on repetition -- but overall I enjoyed it a lot. It definitely didn't feel like it had enough plot for a ~600 page book (well, there's stuff happening, but most of the big actions are offscreen or sketched in between the last chapter and the epilogue), but it moved along at a good clip and was very readable even when all the main characters were doing was traveling and waiting.
I liked Tai (and also it took me, like, to the third page of chapter two to start shipping his with Bytsan, and I was disappointed that they didn't spend more of the book interacting -- although the last chapter and the epilogue made me happy in that regard. I don't have any *strong* feelings for him, although his awed admiration for the Banished Immortal early on endeared him to me, but he is a likeable main POV, and I could sympathize with his frustration at being out of his depth and having people using him and things happening to him. I found his reaction to both Jian (in the sedan chair) and to the emperor, when he visits his rooms, funny and sympathetic.
I liked Li-Mei quite a lot, though I would have really liked to see her interact with people more, not just Meshaq when he is still half-wolf. I liked her indomitable curiosity, her insistance on washing her hands and face as a way to enforce a semblance of normalcy on her situation, I liked the fact that she seemed to be more like her eldest brother than like Tai, and that she has the same thought as Tai does about killing Roshan, even though it would cost her life and other things, too, and that she went on to marry the Emperor and influence policy and stuff. It would've been good to have more of that in the actual book, though. As it was, she felt like a great character who was underutlized, and the kiss with Meshaq felt both tacked on and perfunctory.
I kind of felt like Rain's POV was a bit tacked on, especially given where her arc led. I actually like it that it's not a straightforward boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy wins girl back storyline, that both Rain and Tai find happiness with other people despite missing each other narrowly, that even Rain's letter never finds its way to Tai (and he never learns that his note probably saved her life). But, I don't know. I felt like her decision to go home to Sardia was just there for the symmetry with Tai and Li-Mei also coming home.
I also didn't really buy Tai's sudden realization that he'd been in love with Wei Song all along. I really liked Song, her competence, courage, and insistence on tweaking Tai every chance she got -- her I could definitely see being in love with him -- but Tai was clearly still all about Rain. And the thing is, the Tai/Song relationship could easily work without the sudden realization that he'd dreamt of her since that first night wherever and that he was already in love and blah blah blah -- it felt like GGK took a lazy shortcut -- that didn't even work.
I liked Tai's brother Liu a whole lot, especially his last conversation with Tai ("I forgive you [for thinking he had been involved in the assassination attempt[. What I did for our family, Li-Mei made a princess, I would do again. Tai, it was a master stroke. [...] So was Kuala Nor," Liu added softly.) and his last scene in general, where he is being pragmatic, self-sacrificing, willing to do the distasteful but necessary, and unapologetic all at once. I also liked governor/general Xu, and was happy to hear he lived to retake the pass, and the steward Tai inherited from Jian, who kept the home fires burning so efficiently and make sure to prudently kiss up to the rebel government while quietly despising them.
The political intrigue worked decently well, I thought -- the elderly emperor, who is aged and likely besotted but not at all senile for either of those; Jian, who is masterful and ruthless and also quite fun (I especially enjoyed the scene of her tormenting poor Tai in the sedan chair with the lychees) and young; slowly dying Roshan; Shinzu, who exploited the disaster to have the first minister lynched, Jian killed along with him, and his father to step down -- I liked the contrast of that ruthlessness (and Liu's) with, say, Tai's inability to kill Roshan when he had the chance (with the impact in the number of deaths that could have avoided carefully underlined). Unfortunately a lot of the intrigue circles around Wen Zhou, and he just didn't carry it very well IMO.
Wen Zhou was the weakest thing about the book for me (structural quibbles aside). It felt like GGK wanted him to be both a competent courtier and a total idiot, depending on what he needed his villain to do. Sending assassins to the ends of the empire after a kid who was no threat to him is not just arrogant -- it's insane. Executing Roshan's son was dumb. And, of course, ordering a major battle that was a tremendous error just because he was scared -- I have a hard time buying any of these things. Or, if Zhou really is such a total idiot, how could Jian have encouraged the emperor's favor of him, since it's clear she is working in the best interests of the empire (and they don't seem all that close). I mean, if he is capable of all these things, Zhou is a liability rather than an asset.
Unless GGK was trying to show the disintegration of a once-competent personality under pressure -- but it doesn't come across that way. Zhou is, basically, Cersei, only without any of the sympathetic traits or excuses. Still, overall, quite a good book. And I liked the way the epilogue seemed to "zoom out" on the story, first dropping the names and then talking about two men coming to the lake and then ghosts and then nothing -- lovely, bittersweet closure for a poetic volume.
Quotes (which ended up being all about poetry, huh):
"There was some sadness in how that could happen, Tai thought: falling out of love with something that had shaped you. Or even people who had? But if you didn't change at least a little, where were the passages of a life? Didn't learning, changing, sometimes mean letting go of what had once been seen as true?"
"Or maybe some readers had the image before they even came to the poem and found it waiting for them there, an affirmation? The poet offering words for thoughts they'd held already."
Tai, deciding to trust Sima Zian, the poet, whom he'd just met in person: "He would acknowledge, after, that some of it had to do with the sense of the person that came through in the poetry, and that this might not be a sound basis for judging a man."
cancan_cadenza, if you're on LJ atm, I remember you read and like Under Heaven, but only found a one-paragraph blurb in your journal. Is there more of your reaction elsewhere?
31. Usula Vernan (ursulav), Attack of the Ninja Frogs (Dragonbreath #2) -- very cute! I didn't find it as funny as the first one, but maybe it's just 'cos I find ninjas less interesting than undersea creatures. It's still very cute, and I learned something (that shuriken means "sword hidden in the hand"), and Danny continues to be an amusing protagonist in a Calvin-esque sort of way. I like Suki, the exchange student who is the reincarnation of a ninja warrior but wants to be a veterenarian instead, and missed some of the Danny and Wendell interaction from the first one, even though Wendell, of course, appeared in this one, too.
32. Robin McKinley, Sunshine -- I'm generally a fan of McKinley (read The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown back when I was actually in the target audience, read Chalice a couple year back and really liked it), and I've been hearing about Sunshine for years as the vampire book for people who don't like vampire books (which category I belong to), and I kept hearing about it on my flist, too, so I knew I wanted to read it. And I liked it! But it was different than I had been expecting, and less, I think, subversive of the sub-genre than I thought it would be. So I liked it, quite a lot actually, but it still felt like a vampire book and therefore Not My Thing. Spoilers
I like Sunshine a lot. She feels very fleshed out, multi-dimensional. There's all this minor stuff about her, gradually revealed, and some of it is relevant to the themes of the book, either straight or ironically, like the feeding people gene, or being the person on a camping trip mosquitoes always seek out, or always wearing bright colors, or being a vegetarian, or reading horror novels, and some of it is just there, like not drinking coffee or filling her apartment with roses when she thinks she's about to die or being a bad student when at school or having a difficult relationship with her mother.
I liked Constantine a lot, too (but cringed a little every time Sunshine referred to him as "Con"), and I loved the two of them being action buddies together. Platonic action buddies, with UST, OK, but. I'm still rather puzzled by that whole thing where she wakes him up from the vampire coma or whatever and all of a sudden the four-letter words come out and there are a couple of pages that really felt like they'd been stuck in from a different book. (BTW, I found the book at the library shelved with YA, but it didn't read like a YA book to me, particularly, not just for the fairly matter-of-fact way it talks about sex, but for the general perspective. Sunshine is young, but she is not YA!young -- she is definitely an adult.)
I also liked a lot the way the book dealt with consequences of trauma ("Post-traumatic shock, phooey. Seemed to me the trauma was trotting right along with me, like a dog on a leash with its owner. I was the dog."), with the difficulty of healing (and Constantine saying, "There is no shame in healing" even though Sunshine finds the process distasteful and shameful), with a "civilian" preparing to go into a hopeless situation, with the effect of unexpected survival, with someone finding their sense of self turned upsidedown. So many fantasy books -- so many books, period -- sort of gloss over that because that sort of stuff always happens to protagonists and they bounce back and are kicking ass two paragraphs later to keep the momentum going, but Sunshine's reactions were actually, you know, normal, and quite unusual for that.
I liked the worldbuilding OK, I guess, but some bits of it more than others. My favorite part was the interwoven description of how wards had become a part of industrial life, essentially. The actual Others and partbloods weren't very interesting to me, although the social impliactions of being Other in society were (mention of loners with cats being torched as suspected vampires during the Wards, "people who too regularly call in sick the day after the moon is full" never getting promoted, kids who show demon blood having to move away and switch schools, etc.). The descriptions of vampire perception and Sunshine traveling through nowheresville and those aspects actually dragged on a bit for me, and Sunshine doing magic I found neat symbolically -- the tree and the sunlight and the doe, even, but it didn't really resonate for me. I did like the thing with Sunshine's names, though, where she goes from being Raven Blaise to being Rae seddon and mostly just being Sunshine, the counterblanace of light and dark in those names.
What I really liked, in terms of worldbuilding, is how everything was introduced, from the fantastic -- 'ubis, Voodoo Wars and their aftermath, bad spots, SOF -- to the mundane -- the way right at the beginning you get a dozen plus names associated with Charlie's without the relationships being explicitly explained, just like walking into a family diner full of staff and regulars all of whom know each other even though they're strangers to you. That was neat, and managed not to be too confrusing for the reader, even. (Speaking of Charlie's, it was, indeed, a very food-intensive book, though it didn't make me quite as hungry as Dzur -- I think it's because the baking was pervasive but not explored quite so in depth, and also because the focus was on making food rather than consuming it.)
I liked all of the secondary characters mentioned in various ways -- easy-going but mysterious Mel, Sunshine's mother, Yolande (who from first description rmeinded me a bit of Granny Weatherwax; she turned out to be a lot sweeter, but the magical prowess did not surprise me one bit after that, of course), Pat of the SOF, Aimil, Rae's grandmother.
Quotes:
"At the last minute I didn't burn the dress."
"Then Mel, who had been left more or less singlehanded to run the coffeehouse while all the drama went on in the office, began collaring the staff who had crammed into the office door to watch and be a kind of Greek chorus of horror, and one by one heaving them physically toward what they ought to be doing, like minding the customers, before they all came back to see what was going on too, which, given Charlie's kind of customers, they would be quite capable of."
"This is really stupid, but I also discovered that I somehow belived that [Mel] was the one human at Charlie's who might be able to stop me in time if my bad genes suddenly kicked in and I picked up my electric cherry pitter and went for the nearest warm body. That he'd drown me efficiently in a vat of pasta sauce while everyone else was standing around with their mouths open wringing their hands and saying, who are we going to get to cover the bakery on such short notice? [...] As a romantic fantasy I don't think it's going to make it into the top ten -- most women pining for the presence of their lovers aren't worrying about needing their homicidal tendencies foiled -- but it did mean I felt a little safer with Mel around."
"Mel used his charm as deliberately as laying an ace on the table, so you could see exactly what it was."
"But something had happened and the law enforcement guys wanted to get out there and enforce something. They weren't fussy. If it was people, the cops were happy to do it. If it wasn't people, SOF was happy to do it. But I was supposed to choose my dancing partner and I wouldn't, and this was making the troops restless."
"And if I'd delivered the world of one sucker, sort of accidentally having preserved it another one, then my final effect on the vampire population was nil, invisible, void. Which was exactly the profile I'd choose."
"I didn't want to know that the monster that lived under your bed when you were a kid not only really is there but used to have a few beers with your dad" (on the subject of Constantine having had dealings with the Blaises)
"[A]nd there was one of those weird bits of mental slippage that trauma produces: I thought, oh, what a good thing I'm not dead, I never did write that recipe down for Paulie..."
Constantine, after Rae revived him: "'After your--' He paused. 'You need food,' he said. 'I can't even feed you.' He glanced down at himself as if perhaps he was expecting a peanut-butter sandwich to be suspended about his person."
And later Rae, when Constantine is spending the day with her after being released by the SOF: "I stood there holding a skillet with three beautifully fried eggs in it and said miserably, 'I can't even feed you.'"
Anyway, I liked the book a lot, and I would happily read a sequel to it, if one existed or was forthcoming, which I know it's emphatically not. But I'm still not really a fan of vampire books. :P
Currently reading: Should finish up Dragon, which has moved to my bedstand, and also The Broken Kingdoms, which I haven't touched in over a month.