Reading Roundup
28. Melina Marchetta, Froi of the Exiles -- well, this is a neat trick that I don't think any sequel has managed till now -- it retroactively made me like the first book less. Which is not to say that I hated Froi -- I didn't, and am in the middle of reading Quintana. But I had liked Finnikin a lot for the subversion of tropes I'm sick of seeing played straight, and Froi/Quintana Spoilers! seem to be taking a lot of those tropes and playing them straight if in a particularly grimdark setting. Like, I'd really liked the fact that Froi was a Lumateran, in exile since childhood, who did not feel a connection to the land and other Lumaterans -- I thought that was interesting. But no, apparently that's just because he is not actually Lumateran but Charynite, and as soon as he meets other Charynites he hears their souls sing or whatever, and feels instant loyalty to Charyn despite, well, everything, and it's all basically the opposite of what I liked about Froi (thematically) in the first book. Oops.
Also, Finnikin required a fair bit of stretching of disbelief in the way things like politics worked in pretty simplistic ways, but Froi requires soap opera levels of disbelief suspension, with switched twins and switched babies and dead babies (Lynn Flewelling did it beter with Tamir, I've got to say) and secret heirs and lovers separated for decades and all kinds of crazy stuff. Oh, and jumping from tower to tower to get places, WTF. This soap opera quality made it really difficult for me to take this book seriously, and the assorted horrible trauma also felt less impactful because of that. Also, Jasmina the toddler princess was meant to be cute, I suppose, but was just annoying, in that way children characters often are in narratives where they're just there to be children.
This is a pretty negative review so far, but there were some things I did like. I do like Froi, still. I was intrigued by Quintana and her split personality (though less so now that I know its origin). I liked the way the Lumaterans are really not as selfless and generous as they were asking the Belegonians to be when they were the ones in exile, when it comes to treating the refugees of Alonso -- it's nice to have those shades of grey. There's some dry humour I enjoyed, especially between Gargarin and Froi, and I was intrigued by Gargarin as a character -- although I would normally expect to love a genius identical twin, and I didn't love him -- I think it's that problem I had with Finnikin, too, where the characters feel like they're filtering in at some remove and have less impact than they would in the sort of narrative I usually read. Genre problem, maybe, with this being Marchetta's first outing into fantasy?
29. Ben Aaronovitch, Broken Homes -- well! So, I got the book (thanks to ms_geekette) and finished it in two sittings, and now I can't wait for the next one, because SPOILER whoa, way to set up an emotional cliffhanger! Plot tends to be the weakest part of this series for me, but the plot of this one worked for me best, in terms of tension building and resolution and then more tension and then the final punch. There was a part in the middle that dragged for me, while Peter was wandering around by himself and Nightingale was out of the picture, but what came later made up for the slow middle. I think the difference was, it felt like the plot kept building, as opposed to book 1, where the key gets figured out early and the big shock comes at an earlier point, too, or book 2, where I could see the key way before Peter could and didn't care about the shock, or book 3, where, once the Quiet People made an appearance, there wasn't much mystery anymore but I also didn't care what happened to them or the initial mystery that kicked everything off. The stakes felt much higher in this one, between Peter and Lesley being in jeopardy while held at gunpoint, and the evacuation of a building full of people, and then of course Lesley's apparent turn. Maybe it was more of a thriller plot than a mystery plot, but I thought it worked well.
Of course plot isn't what I read these books for, it's the characters and their relationships. I continue to love Peter, and his moments of both heroism (helping with the building's evacuation despite protocal because he wouldn't be able to live with himself otherwise, tackling the Faceless Man) and panic (when he first discovers the bomb and freaks out, when he is being held at gunpoint and can't make himself move even though he has nothing to lose), and moments of shock (like when he barely stops himself from babbling about zombies/giggling after seeing the body of a woman who took a shotgun blast to the face), and, of course, moments of geekery and dorkery, too numerous to count (but especially his experimentation with Toby and vestigia left in various materials. Oh, Peter, I want to brainstorm DOEs with you!). And Peter and his relationship with the other principals was really great, too -- asking himself what would Lesley do when he's trying to be a good copper, telling a paramedic he is going to call his dad and calling Nightingale to report in (I know it was just a cover story, but it still made me aww).
Speaking of DOEs, Dr Walid is growing on me, too, in his encouragement of Peter's empiricist side and apparent glee over his profession. And it's neat to see Abigail coming into her own, both as a trouble magnet (at the Court of the Thames) and as an asset, as when she comes up with a way to make Mr Nolfi the accidental magical entertainer keep mum. I was happy to see the cameo appearances by Kumar Jaget and Lord Grant's Irregulars (with the revelation that Daniel has found a boyfriend). And speaking of boyfriends and brief appearances, I really liked the berevead husband of the one-under victim, too (and not just because he was San Franciscan).
Of course if anything, Nightingale's prolonged absence in the middle of the book just confirmed for me (not that there was much doubt) that he is my favorite thing about these books. Nightingale and his texting habits, Nightingale sending off the kiddies for a walk while everyone is kneeling to the Court, Nightingale and his esoteric knowledge, Nightingale changing the subject when the subject is his family, Nightingale facing down Oberon, and, of course, Nightingale as the cavalry to the rescue when Peter and Lesley are held by Varvara, creating an illusion of the Jag driving up (while leaving it safely outside the splash radius), tearing apart the barn and coming in through the back, wiping the floor with Varvara while remaining immaculate, and -- one of my favorite moments in the book -- being unable to remember the modern caution (~Miranda rights), so Lesley supplies the wording from behind the cover of the Jeep where she and Peter and the assorted non-magical perps are hiding from the spell-slung flying objects. Just... yes. \flaily fangirling
Speaking of magical badasses, I was quite pleased with Varvara, whom I'd been rather skeptical of when she first appeared under the name Varuchka and in the guise of a nurse. But Varvara Sidorovna the Night Sorceress (and I appreciated Aaronovitch's note in the afterword about why he chose to go with Nochnye Koldunyi, but then you might as well go all the way and translate it more closely, but, anyway, it's not a one-to-one match, so, OK) and hero of the Great War was much more interesting (even before it turned out she was affected by the same variant of the Merlin Disease as Nightingale). There wasn't anything in the things she said that seemed out-of-character for a Russian to me (in fact, a certain fatalism that rang true), and I was also quite amused by what appears to be the bit of a crush she (or at least her long-ago self) seems to have had on Nightingale -- I'm definitely looking forward to more of their interaction, which there ought to be some, if she has to keep tagging along 'like an inconvenient little sister'.
I haven't talked about Lesley, because... Lesley ! I have a very hard time believing she turned in truth, because she doesn't strike me as the kind of person to be baited by the promise of restoring her face -- not for that sort of price. I do think there are enough little scenes that, in retrospect, could suggest that she was becoming disillusioned with the Folly and making some decisions -- but I think it's more to the point of there being enough scattered evidence that, in retrospect, Peter could believe she turned (with the principal evidence being her tasering him, of course), rather than strong evidence that she did in fact do so. Like I said, I don't believe it on a character basis, and on a story basis, I feel like it would be too similar to Lesley (unwittingly) being the bad guy in book 1, and also, what the hell kind of arc would that be? At the same time, I'm not sure how to make Zach's suggested explanation -- that she's turning double-agent -- work, either. Peter is obviously blindsided, but I could see her keeping it from Peter because he would try to talk her out of it. Nightingale doesn't seem to know -- and perhaps she wouldn't have told him, because he would feel the risk would be too great, but that sounds somewhat out of character too -- Lesley is a model police officer, so I would expect her to follow procedure. I guess Nightingale could be in on it and instructing Peter to check the Folly could be part of Lesley's cover, but that seems kinda farfetched, too. I suppose there's also the possibility that Lesley was acting involuntarily (after all, this is a book where one of the side cases involves a guy being mind-whammied into suicide -- but that's even more like what's already happened with Lesley. If Lesley is double-agenting, there's also the question of why. The only thing that would make sense is if the Faceless Man is not actually the person they need to nab (or if the guy Peter found on the rooftop isn't the real Faceless Man, although presumably Peter would recognize his voice?), and there's bigger game in town. The relative ease with which Peter was able to nab him may point in this direction, given that their encounter went rather differently the first time.
Or possibly I'm reaching at straws because LESLEY :((( Occam's Razor suggests that she did make a genuine alliance with the Faceless Man, but I don't want that to be the case... But, anyway, too many unknowns, and I can't wait to find out what's actually going on (and it better exhonerate Lesley, dammit!)
Also, much less major of a mystery, but a) what was Molly doing in Peter's tech-cave, and b) why did Peter have a keylogger on that computer anyway? (unless "activated" is just shorthand for "installed and activated"). I don't think he was expecting Molly to be snooping around, but was he thinking Nightingale might come in for more than just "illicit rugby"?
Leaving such fruitless speculation behind for the time being, though:
Other people seem to love the Rivers, but they don't do much for me, and neither did Sky the unfortunate dryad (I'm much more interested in the constructed, human magic, be it British "craft" or the industrialized German approach). And I really couldn't care less about Peter and Beverly, who just doesn't feel human (or maybe complex?) enough to be interesting to me -- Peter's relationship with other people, e.g. Nightingale and Lesley, is just so much more interesting, so if I were going to ship Peter with anyone (which I feel no particular need to do) it would be one of them. I did find Peter and Lesley's conversation about Beverly and Zach very interesting, though -- but much more as a reflection of my interest in Peter and Lesley and *their* relationship rather than any interest in either Beverly or Zach.
I also like the introduction and allusion to of different kinds of magic -- we saw a bit of that with the Chinese practitioner back in book 3, but the German equivalent of the Folly being mentioned, and the Russian SRIUP* that came up here make me hope we'll see more non-British wizards, too. And the there was Peter's speculation about magical kata, formae set to gestures rather than Latin words, and I wonder if that will prove to exist as well. And the things one can do with magic expanding in Peter's worldview was really neat, too -- the explanation of how staffs work and are made, the "canine capacitors" that can store up vestigia to be harnessed, the (catalogued by Germans, of course) types of vestigia and how useful or not some of them are, and, of course, the central concept of drilling for magic and concentrating it. And, as mentioned earlier, that way different materials retain vestigia (and I really do wonder why some plastics behave differently from other organics. It's because fluorine is magical and so is Teflon, I bet :P)(*which made me think of NIIChaVo, of course and wonder if Aaronovitch was familiar with the book, which he apparently is :D)
And, in the non-magical milieu, it's neat that different characters get to have different passions and areas of expertise (e.g. Peter's architectural geekitude vs Nightingale's knowledge of plant life). It was fun to have Nightingale make a cultural reference, too (Sherlock Holmes), rather than just being continually adrift in Peter's, and for someone to make a reference that Peter needs explaining (Lesley and her Moomins). And Peter's dorky references never get old for me, though I felt they were sparser in this book than in previous ones. Still, "Fuck me, we're living in Isengard" is an awesome line :D, and "Pocket Quidditch", hee! (I had to look up Voigt-Kampf on Wikipedia too, like Dr Walid -- it's a Blade Runner thing, but although I liked that movie -- we watched it for my English 1B dystopian lit class -- I think it might've been paired with Brave New World -- I don't remember the details.)
As a minor quibble, I heard that the reason there's such a big gap between UK publication and US publication is that the UK version was rushed to market, and I could definitely see evidence of it in the eBook -- lots of little mistakes, words missing, the wrong character named as dead in one place, Zach's last name appearing incorrectly in one spot. Not a problem in terms of interfering with my enjoyment, but definitely noticeable, and I tend to mostly not notice such things.
My other minor quibble is that Peter's conversation with his mother in Krio seemed odd to me -- it made the chapter stumble for me, and I wasn't sure what value having it there was adding. It was interesting, and I might be missing something of its importance, but it just kind of made me go "huh".
No quotes this time around because I have like half the book highlighted on my Kindle, not even kidding. Although strongly tempted to make quote icons for this series, since I've not seen any around...
Basically, everything I was hoping for from the continuation of this series and also some things I would've been way too chicken to want, but which make it a stronger book even so. Can't wait for #5!
30. Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince -- this was a birthday gift from aome, and I read through it very quickly, and it was just the right sort of book to distract me from the grimdarkness of Quintana and the punch in the gut of the book above and the crazy running around at work -- one that sucked me in but not one that I had to take very seriously or think about either while I was reading it or afterwards. I don't know how much of this is due to me reading it on the heels of Broken Homes, which I loved, and how much with Clockwork Prince apparently being commonly thought to be the weakest of the trilogy, but the writing -- the prose -- bugged me in this one more than in any other Cassie Clare book. The exaggerated physical descriptions usually don't jump out at me, but they did here. The other thing that jumped out was the amount of repetition -- especially in the first scene with the Consul, where he is described as "a big man" with minor variations three separate times in the space of a single scene.
I continued to feel that Tessa's powers were used inconsistently. Or, rather, they made her too powerful, and so reasons for why she couldn't just read people's minds had to be invented, like Spoilers! the Shadowhunter guy from York being senile, and mysterious blocks on Jessamine's mind. Also, Shadowhunter laws make no sense, or at least the thing with stripping a guilty party's entire family of Shadowhunter status not -- Ascendants entering the Clave from the mundane world seem rare, Shadowhunters who leave the Clave seem like it would be unlikely for their children to make their way back (Will and Cecily nonwithstanding), and they have a limited gene pool and a high risk job. Unless they are themselves guilty, why would you want to deprive yourself of trained warriors and/or perfectly good breeding stock?
But my biggest complaint with the book is actually the way everyone who was a shade of gray character in the previous one ended up being on the side of the bad guys. Like, I'd liked the fact that Jessamine was part of the Institute even though she was a brat and didn't want to be a Shadowhunter -- but now she's turned traitor, and in a way that I had a hard time believing -- she felt humiliated by Nate's deception at the end of CA, so I didn't really believe in her going back to him, essentially -- if all she was after was marrying a non-Shadowhunter, there were plenty of other ways she could've managed that. Similarly, I'd liked the idea that Benedict Lightwood was an ass and a hypocrite on the side of Shadowhunter establishment -- but, nope, he's a traitor too, and murdered his wife by demon pox, and literally consorts with demons. This leaves Gabriel as the only interesting character, really, because Will's wickedness is revealed to be driven by sheer altruism (more on this later), and everybody else who is not a shining paragon of good brimming with love for Tessa is on Mortmain's side. Well, except Starkweather, probably, but he's a warlock murderer with dementia, so not sure he really counts as grey.
Will's curse, oh boy. So, it does explain his behaviour towards Tessa and the Lightwood girl and him being a jerk to everyone (except Jem, and the "Jem is my one sin" actually did its work in my case and felt fairly powerful, as did a number of other scenes between the two of them). It's fairly transparent, but, OK, he was twelve and he knew nothing about demons and his sister died grotesquely, so he can certainly be forgiven for believing the demon. I can even buy that he would never tell anyone about the curse because he felt guilty about his sister's death, but it's kind of a stretch. So, OK, character-wise and plot-wise I can believe it, but thematically it's basically a cop-out -- because it's a way to have Will be the dashing Byronic anti-hero *and* at the same time to absolve him of any responsibility for being an ass because he was doing it for the greater good. Being self-sacrificing, even! At one point the comparison to Sydney Carton is brought up, and having now read Tale of Two Cities, like, no. The reason Sydney is interesting (to me, anyway) -- before the whole treacly martyr helping doomed innocent wauf bravely face death -- is that he really is someone who's wasted his life in drink and furthering other people's careers, because of his own self-destructive character traits, not out of some noble altruistic impulse. And let's not even talk about Tessa invoking Heathcliff as a romantic hero, because, dude, have you actually read the book, child.
Another minor thing that bothered me a lot was Gideon speaking Spanish when he is in a good mood, speaking Spanish to himself, or apparently code-mixing "dios mio" when training Sophie -- after less than six months in Madrid. Because adult language acquisition totally works like that :P (However, I will accept this as Gideon being a huge dork who is really excited to learn Spanish and is pointedly switching into it every chance he gets -- if that's the intent, I withdraw my complaint.)
I continue to feel like I'm supposed to like Jem more than I do. There were some moments I did actually like him genuinely -- his banter with Will over the "everyone thinks Will is a lunatic" meeting, the scene with Tessa where he loses control of himself and has that "you can't believe I could be healthy enough to want you" exchange with her, which was interesting. But for the most part, he feels too angelically pure (and his anger at Will over the demon drugs den didn't make him feel more complex/nuanced to me, it just made him feel irrational). I also don't really see his and Tessa's relationship, like, at all. I don't really understand why he is supposedly in love with her to this degree (at least she and Will have their vaunted love of books in common), and it doesn't feel to me at all like Tessa loves him. I think it's supposed to feel like a gentler sort of love than her conflicted but consuming passion for Will, but it just feels like... grateful fondness.
Charlotte and Henry are really cute, though (and Henry really reminded me of a Victorian Mr Weasley in this one). And Magnus is always a great addition to any scene, and I did chuckle at him kissing Will.
I totally do intend to read book 3, to see how everything comes together, and the secret of Tessa's heritage (is she a Lightwood, by any chance?), and the origin of the clockwork angel, and everything, basically. But I'm hoping for a better written book 3...
Currently reading: The False Prince on my Kindle (another gift from aome, in which I have now overtaken L, and Quintana, which I'm about 30% through but which I've set aside temporarily for reasons of heft and grimdarkness, and Red Seas Under Red Skies which I was having great fun with on the trip and now need to get back to. I should also read lunasariel's Tamir book, actually...
Also, Finnikin required a fair bit of stretching of disbelief in the way things like politics worked in pretty simplistic ways, but Froi requires soap opera levels of disbelief suspension, with switched twins and switched babies and dead babies (Lynn Flewelling did it beter with Tamir, I've got to say) and secret heirs and lovers separated for decades and all kinds of crazy stuff. Oh, and jumping from tower to tower to get places, WTF. This soap opera quality made it really difficult for me to take this book seriously, and the assorted horrible trauma also felt less impactful because of that. Also, Jasmina the toddler princess was meant to be cute, I suppose, but was just annoying, in that way children characters often are in narratives where they're just there to be children.
This is a pretty negative review so far, but there were some things I did like. I do like Froi, still. I was intrigued by Quintana and her split personality (though less so now that I know its origin). I liked the way the Lumaterans are really not as selfless and generous as they were asking the Belegonians to be when they were the ones in exile, when it comes to treating the refugees of Alonso -- it's nice to have those shades of grey. There's some dry humour I enjoyed, especially between Gargarin and Froi, and I was intrigued by Gargarin as a character -- although I would normally expect to love a genius identical twin, and I didn't love him -- I think it's that problem I had with Finnikin, too, where the characters feel like they're filtering in at some remove and have less impact than they would in the sort of narrative I usually read. Genre problem, maybe, with this being Marchetta's first outing into fantasy?
29. Ben Aaronovitch, Broken Homes -- well! So, I got the book (thanks to ms_geekette) and finished it in two sittings, and now I can't wait for the next one, because SPOILER whoa, way to set up an emotional cliffhanger! Plot tends to be the weakest part of this series for me, but the plot of this one worked for me best, in terms of tension building and resolution and then more tension and then the final punch. There was a part in the middle that dragged for me, while Peter was wandering around by himself and Nightingale was out of the picture, but what came later made up for the slow middle. I think the difference was, it felt like the plot kept building, as opposed to book 1, where the key gets figured out early and the big shock comes at an earlier point, too, or book 2, where I could see the key way before Peter could and didn't care about the shock, or book 3, where, once the Quiet People made an appearance, there wasn't much mystery anymore but I also didn't care what happened to them or the initial mystery that kicked everything off. The stakes felt much higher in this one, between Peter and Lesley being in jeopardy while held at gunpoint, and the evacuation of a building full of people, and then of course Lesley's apparent turn. Maybe it was more of a thriller plot than a mystery plot, but I thought it worked well.
Of course plot isn't what I read these books for, it's the characters and their relationships. I continue to love Peter, and his moments of both heroism (helping with the building's evacuation despite protocal because he wouldn't be able to live with himself otherwise, tackling the Faceless Man) and panic (when he first discovers the bomb and freaks out, when he is being held at gunpoint and can't make himself move even though he has nothing to lose), and moments of shock (like when he barely stops himself from babbling about zombies/giggling after seeing the body of a woman who took a shotgun blast to the face), and, of course, moments of geekery and dorkery, too numerous to count (but especially his experimentation with Toby and vestigia left in various materials. Oh, Peter, I want to brainstorm DOEs with you!). And Peter and his relationship with the other principals was really great, too -- asking himself what would Lesley do when he's trying to be a good copper, telling a paramedic he is going to call his dad and calling Nightingale to report in (I know it was just a cover story, but it still made me aww).
Speaking of DOEs, Dr Walid is growing on me, too, in his encouragement of Peter's empiricist side and apparent glee over his profession. And it's neat to see Abigail coming into her own, both as a trouble magnet (at the Court of the Thames) and as an asset, as when she comes up with a way to make Mr Nolfi the accidental magical entertainer keep mum. I was happy to see the cameo appearances by Kumar Jaget and Lord Grant's Irregulars (with the revelation that Daniel has found a boyfriend). And speaking of boyfriends and brief appearances, I really liked the berevead husband of the one-under victim, too (and not just because he was San Franciscan).
Of course if anything, Nightingale's prolonged absence in the middle of the book just confirmed for me (not that there was much doubt) that he is my favorite thing about these books. Nightingale and his texting habits, Nightingale sending off the kiddies for a walk while everyone is kneeling to the Court, Nightingale and his esoteric knowledge, Nightingale changing the subject when the subject is his family, Nightingale facing down Oberon, and, of course, Nightingale as the cavalry to the rescue when Peter and Lesley are held by Varvara, creating an illusion of the Jag driving up (while leaving it safely outside the splash radius), tearing apart the barn and coming in through the back, wiping the floor with Varvara while remaining immaculate, and -- one of my favorite moments in the book -- being unable to remember the modern caution (~Miranda rights), so Lesley supplies the wording from behind the cover of the Jeep where she and Peter and the assorted non-magical perps are hiding from the spell-slung flying objects. Just... yes. \flaily fangirling
Speaking of magical badasses, I was quite pleased with Varvara, whom I'd been rather skeptical of when she first appeared under the name Varuchka and in the guise of a nurse. But Varvara Sidorovna the Night Sorceress (and I appreciated Aaronovitch's note in the afterword about why he chose to go with Nochnye Koldunyi, but then you might as well go all the way and translate it more closely, but, anyway, it's not a one-to-one match, so, OK) and hero of the Great War was much more interesting (even before it turned out she was affected by the same variant of the Merlin Disease as Nightingale). There wasn't anything in the things she said that seemed out-of-character for a Russian to me (in fact, a certain fatalism that rang true), and I was also quite amused by what appears to be the bit of a crush she (or at least her long-ago self) seems to have had on Nightingale -- I'm definitely looking forward to more of their interaction, which there ought to be some, if she has to keep tagging along 'like an inconvenient little sister'.
I haven't talked about Lesley, because... Lesley ! I have a very hard time believing she turned in truth, because she doesn't strike me as the kind of person to be baited by the promise of restoring her face -- not for that sort of price. I do think there are enough little scenes that, in retrospect, could suggest that she was becoming disillusioned with the Folly and making some decisions -- but I think it's more to the point of there being enough scattered evidence that, in retrospect, Peter could believe she turned (with the principal evidence being her tasering him, of course), rather than strong evidence that she did in fact do so. Like I said, I don't believe it on a character basis, and on a story basis, I feel like it would be too similar to Lesley (unwittingly) being the bad guy in book 1, and also, what the hell kind of arc would that be? At the same time, I'm not sure how to make Zach's suggested explanation -- that she's turning double-agent -- work, either. Peter is obviously blindsided, but I could see her keeping it from Peter because he would try to talk her out of it. Nightingale doesn't seem to know -- and perhaps she wouldn't have told him, because he would feel the risk would be too great, but that sounds somewhat out of character too -- Lesley is a model police officer, so I would expect her to follow procedure. I guess Nightingale could be in on it and instructing Peter to check the Folly could be part of Lesley's cover, but that seems kinda farfetched, too. I suppose there's also the possibility that Lesley was acting involuntarily (after all, this is a book where one of the side cases involves a guy being mind-whammied into suicide -- but that's even more like what's already happened with Lesley. If Lesley is double-agenting, there's also the question of why. The only thing that would make sense is if the Faceless Man is not actually the person they need to nab (or if the guy Peter found on the rooftop isn't the real Faceless Man, although presumably Peter would recognize his voice?), and there's bigger game in town. The relative ease with which Peter was able to nab him may point in this direction, given that their encounter went rather differently the first time.
Or possibly I'm reaching at straws because LESLEY :((( Occam's Razor suggests that she did make a genuine alliance with the Faceless Man, but I don't want that to be the case... But, anyway, too many unknowns, and I can't wait to find out what's actually going on (and it better exhonerate Lesley, dammit!)
Also, much less major of a mystery, but a) what was Molly doing in Peter's tech-cave, and b) why did Peter have a keylogger on that computer anyway? (unless "activated" is just shorthand for "installed and activated"). I don't think he was expecting Molly to be snooping around, but was he thinking Nightingale might come in for more than just "illicit rugby"?
Leaving such fruitless speculation behind for the time being, though:
Other people seem to love the Rivers, but they don't do much for me, and neither did Sky the unfortunate dryad (I'm much more interested in the constructed, human magic, be it British "craft" or the industrialized German approach). And I really couldn't care less about Peter and Beverly, who just doesn't feel human (or maybe complex?) enough to be interesting to me -- Peter's relationship with other people, e.g. Nightingale and Lesley, is just so much more interesting, so if I were going to ship Peter with anyone (which I feel no particular need to do) it would be one of them. I did find Peter and Lesley's conversation about Beverly and Zach very interesting, though -- but much more as a reflection of my interest in Peter and Lesley and *their* relationship rather than any interest in either Beverly or Zach.
I also like the introduction and allusion to of different kinds of magic -- we saw a bit of that with the Chinese practitioner back in book 3, but the German equivalent of the Folly being mentioned, and the Russian SRIUP* that came up here make me hope we'll see more non-British wizards, too. And the there was Peter's speculation about magical kata, formae set to gestures rather than Latin words, and I wonder if that will prove to exist as well. And the things one can do with magic expanding in Peter's worldview was really neat, too -- the explanation of how staffs work and are made, the "canine capacitors" that can store up vestigia to be harnessed, the (catalogued by Germans, of course) types of vestigia and how useful or not some of them are, and, of course, the central concept of drilling for magic and concentrating it. And, as mentioned earlier, that way different materials retain vestigia (and I really do wonder why some plastics behave differently from other organics. It's because fluorine is magical and so is Teflon, I bet :P)(*which made me think of NIIChaVo, of course and wonder if Aaronovitch was familiar with the book, which he apparently is :D)
And, in the non-magical milieu, it's neat that different characters get to have different passions and areas of expertise (e.g. Peter's architectural geekitude vs Nightingale's knowledge of plant life). It was fun to have Nightingale make a cultural reference, too (Sherlock Holmes), rather than just being continually adrift in Peter's, and for someone to make a reference that Peter needs explaining (Lesley and her Moomins). And Peter's dorky references never get old for me, though I felt they were sparser in this book than in previous ones. Still, "Fuck me, we're living in Isengard" is an awesome line :D, and "Pocket Quidditch", hee! (I had to look up Voigt-Kampf on Wikipedia too, like Dr Walid -- it's a Blade Runner thing, but although I liked that movie -- we watched it for my English 1B dystopian lit class -- I think it might've been paired with Brave New World -- I don't remember the details.)
As a minor quibble, I heard that the reason there's such a big gap between UK publication and US publication is that the UK version was rushed to market, and I could definitely see evidence of it in the eBook -- lots of little mistakes, words missing, the wrong character named as dead in one place, Zach's last name appearing incorrectly in one spot. Not a problem in terms of interfering with my enjoyment, but definitely noticeable, and I tend to mostly not notice such things.
My other minor quibble is that Peter's conversation with his mother in Krio seemed odd to me -- it made the chapter stumble for me, and I wasn't sure what value having it there was adding. It was interesting, and I might be missing something of its importance, but it just kind of made me go "huh".
No quotes this time around because I have like half the book highlighted on my Kindle, not even kidding. Although strongly tempted to make quote icons for this series, since I've not seen any around...
Basically, everything I was hoping for from the continuation of this series and also some things I would've been way too chicken to want, but which make it a stronger book even so. Can't wait for #5!
30. Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince -- this was a birthday gift from aome, and I read through it very quickly, and it was just the right sort of book to distract me from the grimdarkness of Quintana and the punch in the gut of the book above and the crazy running around at work -- one that sucked me in but not one that I had to take very seriously or think about either while I was reading it or afterwards. I don't know how much of this is due to me reading it on the heels of Broken Homes, which I loved, and how much with Clockwork Prince apparently being commonly thought to be the weakest of the trilogy, but the writing -- the prose -- bugged me in this one more than in any other Cassie Clare book. The exaggerated physical descriptions usually don't jump out at me, but they did here. The other thing that jumped out was the amount of repetition -- especially in the first scene with the Consul, where he is described as "a big man" with minor variations three separate times in the space of a single scene.
I continued to feel that Tessa's powers were used inconsistently. Or, rather, they made her too powerful, and so reasons for why she couldn't just read people's minds had to be invented, like Spoilers! the Shadowhunter guy from York being senile, and mysterious blocks on Jessamine's mind. Also, Shadowhunter laws make no sense, or at least the thing with stripping a guilty party's entire family of Shadowhunter status not -- Ascendants entering the Clave from the mundane world seem rare, Shadowhunters who leave the Clave seem like it would be unlikely for their children to make their way back (Will and Cecily nonwithstanding), and they have a limited gene pool and a high risk job. Unless they are themselves guilty, why would you want to deprive yourself of trained warriors and/or perfectly good breeding stock?
But my biggest complaint with the book is actually the way everyone who was a shade of gray character in the previous one ended up being on the side of the bad guys. Like, I'd liked the fact that Jessamine was part of the Institute even though she was a brat and didn't want to be a Shadowhunter -- but now she's turned traitor, and in a way that I had a hard time believing -- she felt humiliated by Nate's deception at the end of CA, so I didn't really believe in her going back to him, essentially -- if all she was after was marrying a non-Shadowhunter, there were plenty of other ways she could've managed that. Similarly, I'd liked the idea that Benedict Lightwood was an ass and a hypocrite on the side of Shadowhunter establishment -- but, nope, he's a traitor too, and murdered his wife by demon pox, and literally consorts with demons. This leaves Gabriel as the only interesting character, really, because Will's wickedness is revealed to be driven by sheer altruism (more on this later), and everybody else who is not a shining paragon of good brimming with love for Tessa is on Mortmain's side. Well, except Starkweather, probably, but he's a warlock murderer with dementia, so not sure he really counts as grey.
Will's curse, oh boy. So, it does explain his behaviour towards Tessa and the Lightwood girl and him being a jerk to everyone (except Jem, and the "Jem is my one sin" actually did its work in my case and felt fairly powerful, as did a number of other scenes between the two of them). It's fairly transparent, but, OK, he was twelve and he knew nothing about demons and his sister died grotesquely, so he can certainly be forgiven for believing the demon. I can even buy that he would never tell anyone about the curse because he felt guilty about his sister's death, but it's kind of a stretch. So, OK, character-wise and plot-wise I can believe it, but thematically it's basically a cop-out -- because it's a way to have Will be the dashing Byronic anti-hero *and* at the same time to absolve him of any responsibility for being an ass because he was doing it for the greater good. Being self-sacrificing, even! At one point the comparison to Sydney Carton is brought up, and having now read Tale of Two Cities, like, no. The reason Sydney is interesting (to me, anyway) -- before the whole treacly martyr helping doomed innocent wauf bravely face death -- is that he really is someone who's wasted his life in drink and furthering other people's careers, because of his own self-destructive character traits, not out of some noble altruistic impulse. And let's not even talk about Tessa invoking Heathcliff as a romantic hero, because, dude, have you actually read the book, child.
Another minor thing that bothered me a lot was Gideon speaking Spanish when he is in a good mood, speaking Spanish to himself, or apparently code-mixing "dios mio" when training Sophie -- after less than six months in Madrid. Because adult language acquisition totally works like that :P (However, I will accept this as Gideon being a huge dork who is really excited to learn Spanish and is pointedly switching into it every chance he gets -- if that's the intent, I withdraw my complaint.)
I continue to feel like I'm supposed to like Jem more than I do. There were some moments I did actually like him genuinely -- his banter with Will over the "everyone thinks Will is a lunatic" meeting, the scene with Tessa where he loses control of himself and has that "you can't believe I could be healthy enough to want you" exchange with her, which was interesting. But for the most part, he feels too angelically pure (and his anger at Will over the demon drugs den didn't make him feel more complex/nuanced to me, it just made him feel irrational). I also don't really see his and Tessa's relationship, like, at all. I don't really understand why he is supposedly in love with her to this degree (at least she and Will have their vaunted love of books in common), and it doesn't feel to me at all like Tessa loves him. I think it's supposed to feel like a gentler sort of love than her conflicted but consuming passion for Will, but it just feels like... grateful fondness.
Charlotte and Henry are really cute, though (and Henry really reminded me of a Victorian Mr Weasley in this one). And Magnus is always a great addition to any scene, and I did chuckle at him kissing Will.
I totally do intend to read book 3, to see how everything comes together, and the secret of Tessa's heritage (is she a Lightwood, by any chance?), and the origin of the clockwork angel, and everything, basically. But I'm hoping for a better written book 3...
Currently reading: The False Prince on my Kindle (another gift from aome, in which I have now overtaken L, and Quintana, which I'm about 30% through but which I've set aside temporarily for reasons of heft and grimdarkness, and Red Seas Under Red Skies which I was having great fun with on the trip and now need to get back to. I should also read lunasariel's Tamir book, actually...