Reading roundup, including Fallow and Forbidden Parabatai Het
58. Jonathan Kellerman, The Murderer's Daughter -- a non-Alex Delaware novel, although Delaware does make a brief appearance, and I think I remember Grace mentioned in a recent Delaware book? I mean, all of Kellerman's realistic crime books take place in the same universe, so that's nothing new, but it does drive home how much more I enjoy reading about Alex and company. This book totally worked for me as a thriller -- I stayed up reading to get to the end, was surprised by the connections, etc. But without any of the emotional attachment I feel to Alex and Milo and Robin and everyone over in the main narrative. Part of it is just that I've known Alex et al for so long, but I think an even larger part is just the kind of protagonist Grace is -- SPOILERS! solitary and detached and harder for me to like than Alex. Even the genuine connections she seems to have -- to Ramona, to Malcolm and Sophie -- come across muted, because of her trauma and the way she deals with it, and besides, they're all in the past: Ramona is dead, and the way Grace thought about Malcolm and Sophie, I was pretty sure from fairly early on that they were dead, too, although I had expected it to be a murder by the bad guy, not a random accident. The closest Grace has to a connection in the present timeline is Wayne, and the book did pick up for me a bit, emotionally, when she reconnected with him, but she was not very close to him either, and manipulating/lying to him consciously -- which makes sense, given her history, but which I don't like in a character. There are also her patients, I guess, but I didn't feel that from a human angle, it just felt like competence/good at her job thing.
I mean, Kellerman is really great at writing engaging, likeable characters. I'm pretty sure here he just set out to see if he could write a novel with a protagonist/POV character whose childhood trauma left her emotionally closed off and full of unhealthy coping behaviors (I know Alex has his own abusive childhood issues, too, but his childhood trauma was way less severe than Grace's, and his coping techniques are different, too). Anyway, noble effort, and I found Grace's POV interesting -- especially in the bildungsroman part, the flashbacks -- but I didn't care about her as a character, and I didn't like her much as a person. And while I can totally understand how Grace, who could never count on authority figures and had to take care of herself from birth on, would take care of her stalker herself and go the vigilante justice route with Samael and henchman, rather than talking to the police, it's a rather shocking departure from Alex's best-buddies relationship with LAPD and cops being protagonists or at least good guys everywhere else in Kellerman's work.
I also felt like the ending was too abrupt to be satisfying. It makes sense that Grace doesn't actually care what happens afterwards -- to Samael's wife, to the baby, to Lily -- but I kind of wanted to know, more than I wanted to see Grace ziplining in Costa Rica.
I did enjoy the visit to NorCal, though the Berkeley mockery was a bit too mocky. Also, Kellerman really seems to have it in for greenwashing, heh.
59. Jordan L. Hawk, Fallow (Whyborne & Griffin #8) -- I think I agree with aome on this being my favorite 'away' book; I'd like Necropolis, too, but that one dragged on for me at the end, and this one never did -- I think the addition Griffin POV does help make the climax move faster. I liked the eldritch horror threat in this book better than in any of the others, I think, so overall it was very enjoyable, and a fast read. Spoilers from here!
The only thing that realy bugged me was the return of "oh if Griffin only knew the truth he'd never love me" -- in this case, about Whyborne being a creation/manifestation of the maelstrom and Widdershins collecting/influencing everyone via ley lines. Like, we have already had that pointlessly angsty plot twice over, and it was annoying then, too. I did like the way Griffin and Christine accepted it, though, and the way Griffin found validation in Widdershins choosing him, seeing him at his lowest point and still finding him worthy, was actually sweet. Griffin's brief exchange with Whyborne's 'spark' while Whyborne is out after burning the corruption out of himself was quite nice, too, although it keeps reminding me of SPECTR and Gray coming to the surface in the early books to interact with John. Hawk definitely loves her specific tropes.
Whyborne's grumpiness during travel doesn't bother me, and in fact I find it amusing, but I was pleased to see he's getting used to 'roughing it' anyway, and Whyborne vs life on the farm was amusing enough on its own, especially Whyborne's nemesis, Diablo the rooster. I also smiled at Whybrne being retroactively scandalized to realize he and Griffin had made love while Griffin's mother was sitting downstairs (with Christine and Mrs Creigh), and also Whyborne clutching at straws/grain elevators at dinner to avoid being the field of competition for two young ladies. Oh, and I continue to enjoy the implied courtship between Persephone and Miss Parkhurst, which Whyborne, of course, is as oblivious to as his is to everything to do with Miss Parkhurst. It was cute to see that she does still have a bit of her crush on Whyborne, but it's been transferred almost entirely to his ketoi sister. Oh, and early on in the book, Whyborne and Christine in disguise pretending to be newlyweds was pretty funny, too. And I confess I LOL'd at the corrupted pumpkin pie.
There were a lot of things about the plot I guessed in advance, as usual -- I guessed Griffin's Ma was behind the letters that drove Benjamin to suicide from the conversation Griffin has with her early on, and I figured Marian was after Griffin specifically driven by grief over Benjamin quite a bit before Our Heroes figured that out, too, oh, and I guessed that Iskander was corrupted when he managed to get away without Griffin -- but that was particularly easy. But there were enough interesting twists -- I *hadn't* guessed that Mr Tate (the mayor's husband) was in on the plan, trying to save the town, I hadn't guessed the balance of power between Mrs Creigh, Vernon, and Marian, and I hadn't guessed the plan to infect Widdershins with rust, or what the Fideles were really after as a group -- so there was enough unexpected stuff going on, more than usual.
I was sorry to learn that Reverend Scarrow had died -- he was one of the side characters I liked. But having Mrs Creigh as a sorceress in opposition to Whyborne (but also not opposed to being allied with him when necessary) sounds promising. In general, I liked the conflicting agendas and loyalties that showed up in this plot, everyone having different motivations -- Creigh doing the work of the Fideles, dissent among that group, Marian and Vernon having their own goals which they hold above Creighs, Mr Tate getting cold feet.
As with the other 'away' books, I missed Whyborne's family in this one. It was interesting to see Whyborne feeling a bit of jealousy when Griffin admires Persephone's magic, and being grumpy with her in general. But I was very happy to see that at the end, when thinking about Griffin not being alone if Whyborne were to die in a Reichenbach Falls-type victory over Marian, Whyborne was listing off not just Christine and Iskander, Persephone and Jack, and Heliabel among the people Griffin would still have, but also Niles -- I hope that means the father-son relationship will have to retread less of the same ground over and over now (although judging by the return of the "Griffin would never love me" in this book, I'm probably being optimistic there). Speaking of family, I was sad to see that Griffin and his mother could not reconcile, but I did like the way most of that arc was handled, the joyous homecoming under mistaken pretenses, working together, caring for each other but not being able to accept (Griffin's bisexuality) or forgive (Ma driving Benjamin to suicide with her letters, however remorseful she is about it).
The other really interesting thing for me was that Whyborne could understand Marian's motivations very well, and did not judge her, really, for wanting the town destroyed for what it did to Benjamin. Really, in stopping her, he seems motivated primarily by saving HIS people (Griffin, Christine, Iskander, and those important to Griffin, like Nella and Lawrence's family) and HIS town (i.e. Widdershins). I've always enjoyed Whyborne's hint of darkness, the desire for revenge -- on Stanford, on his father, on Osborne, the various bullies in his life -- and this meshes into it perfectly. I was also surprised at first but then accepted that it makes sense, with this framework, that Nella's actions against Benjamin would mean that Whyborne has no sympathy for her at all. (It's interesting, actually -- Whyborne's such a textbook Ravenclaw when it comes to the WAY he acts, all book learning and head-in-the-clouds fumbling, but his moral core is actually very Slytherin -- whatever he can to protect HIS people -- and it's possible that one day he will realize just how much like Niles that makes him, and be horrified, probably.) I also found it neat that, seeing Marian in her avatar state, Griffin simply found her horrible, while Whyborne saw her as "something almost as beautiful as it was revolting."
The group hug at the end was sweet, if a bit too sitcom-y. Christine is now hyphenating her name, which gives her something else to correct people about, now that they've killed off Osborne and there's no-one to call her Miss Putnam instead of Dr Putnam.
Quotes:
Christine: "I love you, Whyborne. But you're an idiot."
Whyborne: "Thank you, Christine. I'm so glad Widdershins collected you."
Mrs Creigh: "I should have known better than to treat a tool as an equal. It isn't a mistake I'll make again."
Christine: "Yes, that's certainly the lesson we should all take from this."
This one comes with an author's note at the end, talking about poor farms and female suffrage in Kansas, but also featuring this statement: "Griffin has a lot of baggage;he's way more screwed up than Whyborne has ever been" which I find really baffling. I mean, Griffin obviously has baggage, and PTSD from his first encounter with the demons and his time at the asylum, but more screwed up than Whyborne? I don't think that's EVER been true. It didn't look to be true when all we had was Whyborne's POV, and it doesn't seem true to me now that we have both of theirs, either. Huh.
60. Cassandra Clare, Lady Midnight (The Dark Artifices #1) -- this was such a frustrating book for me, even more than the other Shadowhunter books, because this one was actually about things that I could have loved, in a different execution. But on the other hand, it came with the bonus of reading it in tandem with ikel89 and being frustrated together, about the same things, so, bonding experience! But if you genuinely enjoyed the book, you may want to skip this write-up.
I've known about this book for a while, also courtesy of ikel89, and when she first told me about it, the conversation back in 2013 went like this:
me: (in reference to something K posted on her then-new Tumblr) Also, is there really a planned new series about forbidden parabatai romance?
K: *provides link*
me: Wait wait wait, is the forbidded parabatai romance het? After unrequited Alec/Jace, and the love triangle with pretensions of OT3-ness of Jem and Will, she goes to write forbidden parabatai romance and it's het?
And since that day onward, I have never referred to that book/series as anything but "forbidden parabatai het", have introduced it to L as such, and it is referred to as FPH in all our communications with ikel89 on the subject. Spoilers from here!
So, I was probably a bit prejudiced against this book on the basis of it being forbidden parabatai het from the start, but having read it, the forbidden parabatai het-ness is still my biggest complaint about it, although not so much for reasons of het-ness as for the ludicrousness of the way in which parabatai romance is forbidden, and everything that implies about the Shadowhunter society. Because here's the thing, there's a line spoken by Livvy (a fifteen-year-old Shadowhunter girl) that sums up the whole thing beautifully: "Having to follow stupid rules makes us Shadowhunters?" which is (presumably) meant to be funny in context -- it's one of those things where multiple people are talking and the dialogue cues are potentially misleading, but it is actually the truest sentence in the entire book. Being a Shadowhunter means following stupid rules, whether they're about tearing families apart, levying punitive and counterproductive sanctions, refusing to make reasonable accommodations for a high-functioning autistic character, forbidding the use of modern technology for absolutely no reason, transferring a sentence of death for desertion onto the deserter's pregnant wife (the story of Tobias Herondale), or forbidding relationships between parabatai and never even explaining why. Why are these the good guys again? And why has Shadowhunter society not advanced one whit in social structure since the Victorian days?
(We do eventually learn the reason forbidden parabatai het is forbidden, and it's a stupid reason, worldbuilding-wise, but OK, I could even roll with that, but the way the Clave chooses to go about working around that situation, accepted as given, is even MORE stupid -- yes, by all means, let's encourage teenagers to dedicate their lives to each other, fight and train together all the time, and expect them never to fall in love JUST BECAUSE WE SAID SO, with no explanation, and in fact let's make the explanation a closely guarded secret that must never get out, because surely teenagers are going to obey arbitrary rules. There are so many other more sensible ways this could be handled -- allowing only close relatives or people who do not swing each other's way to be parabatai, or people who are already married, even if the secret must, for some stupid reason be kept secret, and literally all of them are less ridiculous than just relying on "don't fall in love with your parabatai, 'cos it's the Law." Well, but also none of them would allow for the plot of this book, so of course one side had to give, and it had to be the side of logic.)
It was also a frustrating book because there are some neat ideas that it raises and then sweeps away under the onslaught of forbidden parabatai het angst. Julian as reluctant killer of a monster wearing his father's face and conflicted parent to his younger siblings, the uneasy reunion between Julian and Mark, where Julian was hoping to get his older brother back, someone to take over the raising of the younger sibs, and instead gets back a fey and broken and suddenly younger brother, and navigating this new relationship between them -- all of that could be good. I'm here for, as I put it to K, "the on-the-surface-gentle person who is actually ruthless when it comes to protecting those they love and consider their own, this sort of Slytherin morality (in the matrix sense) with an outward Hufflepuff manifestation and Ravenclaw approach to problem-solving. [...] Like, I would actually happily read a book about a person who is the way Julian is described, raising a family on his own and running an institute in secret in his "still waters" ways. Just... not this book." -- and ikel89 helpfully pointed out to me that I *have* read this book, and it was called The Demon's Lexicon, and she is totally right, and Julian, sadly, is not Alan Ryves, more's the pity. And I never bought the half-assed explanation for why he didn't tell Emma about Arthur, either. That was so pointless, and contrary to the spirit of being parabatai, and the spirit of Emma/Julian as soulmates, too.
I was also on board with Mark's return from the Wild Hunt, because that does have some nice aesthetics going, and I'm a sucker for the Tam Lin after-the-rescue type stories, and there are moments with Mark that are actually effective and enjoyable to me -- the uneasy relationship with Julian, the anguish when he first returns and is convinced nothing is real, Cristina's calm understanding and help, and most everything to do with Kieran, the one good thing about his time with the Hunt, even the cloakroom makeouts. But Mark's faery trauma is so inconsistently written, I really couldn't suspend my disbelief fully. He's been gone for 5 years in real time but "countless years" to his perception but he's only aged two years? There may be some complicated explanation that accounts for this, but it was definitely not presented by the book, so it's probably just lazy writing. The inconsistency of fairy speak, what he does and does not remember -- he gets a James Bond reference but thinks you're supposed to smear butter on a microscope or that 'formal attire' means going naked under a fur coat? It's so erratic, and not in any sort of realistic way, just... things thrown at the wall to see what sticks, and not much did, for me. (I also didn't much care for the parallels set up between Mark's post-Wild Hunt trauma state and Ty's non-neurotypical way of thinking. I can be sold on autism-as-being-a-changeling, and the other way around, I guess, but this just felt both false and gratuitous...) And I'm so annoyed by the fake-or-is-it love triangle being set up with Emma, where Julian could handle her being with anyone but Mark, and Mark has more chemistry with DIEGO than he does with Emma, and it's just all so... arbitrary, characters being moved here and there in service to the Forbidden Parabatai Het and maximizing the angst. I had this problem with the Will/Tessa/Jem triangle, too, but this is waaay worse. Which is too bad, because Emma and Mark being platonically wild and death-wishy together was actually kind of fun, and I like this exchange:
Mark: You drive too fast.
Emma: You sound like Julian.
Mark: It brought me joy. It was as if I flew with the Hunt again, and tasted the blood of the sky.
Emma: Okay you sound like Julian on drugs.
Oh, and speaking of that, a thing that annoys me out of proportion: that Mark's faery steed was attached enough to him to stay with him in the form of a flying motorcycle, but when it is torn apart by the Mantid demons, Mark's only reaction is to "look glum". WTF, this is a living being with which he'd bonder over whatever "countless years" he's spent in the Wild Hunt... except of course it was only there for the purpose of giving Emma a flying motorcycle ride and setting up some UST with Mark for the ending, blech. I actually liked Mark/Kieran, and although the falloutis understandable and expected, I wish there'd been more of that and less of everything else to do with Mark, because that was the only part decently done. (And I'd say points for making Mark bi, but I have a sneaking suspicion it's just to maximize his love triangle potential...)
Other interesting ideas that are not actually engaged with constructively and just serve to show how dumb Shadowhunter society is: The possibility of being stuck with a parabatai who does not care about you and is in fact a sociopath, like almost happened to Cristina with Deigo's brother Jaime. (Although, if Diego knew Jaime was no good, and the two of them have known Cristina since she was ten, eight years is kind of a long time not to say anything, dude!). Similarly, the treatment of non-neurotypical Nephilim by the Clave could be something interesting to explore, driven home so thoroughly by Ty's autism and Arthur's condition, the latter of which has to be kept secret and the former which doesn't allow very simple accommodations (even though Julian and Emma, of course, are very accommodating and understanding, so understanding! give them a cookie) -- but nothing is actually done with that. It might actually come up in the sequels, but I'm not holding my breath.
Also, I actually like Ty, as the younger sib with the most actual personality, but the PSA-like blurbs that accompanied anything he said or did until about 60% into the book were very irritating. Like, I get it, he's non-neurotypical, high-functioning Aspergers, he doesn't get idioms and doesn't like eye-contact and he stims by fiddling with pipecleaner toys. There is no need to make every single action of his about his autism. But this is a general problem with the way CC has written the younger children, i.e. ...not well. Dru seems to exist just to be a misunderstood, slightly chubby, slightly gothy 13-year-old girl, possibly so the target audience can identify with her, but we also get a Very Important Conversation between her and Emma where Emma gives her a positive body image pep talk, to show how Awesome and Understanding and Non-Shallow Emma is. Livvy doesn't have a designated PSA role, which makes me wonder if she's going to die at some point, and Tavvy... At some point in the book I became convinced that CC had originally written him as a four-year-old, then realized he needed to be older for the amount of time she wanted to pass between the Dark War and the present day to work out properly, and went back and just adjusted his age, because he does not behave like a seven-year-old at any point in the first half of the book. Not even a particularly sheltered 7-year-old.
There's so much else that's just bad writing. The introduction of Kit Herondale, the way random sentences are repeated three times when, really, they neither require nor can pull off that level of emphasis ("'The last hunt was interrupted by Nephilim, and the value of the sacrifice was endangered.' [...] A jolt went through Emma. Nephilim. The woman had said 'Nephilim.' These people knew about Shadowhunters." and Mark's declaration of himsels as a Shadowhunter (a Shadowhunter)). I had an overall feeling that the book was just sort of piecewise continuous -- paragraphs do flow into each other, but stuff doesn't make sense if you remember what happened just a few pages ago. For example, Julian takes off for England, with the rest of his family, to separate himself from Emma to "cure" himself of being in love with her. So, while he's gone for these 2 months, who is running the institute in LA, when the rest of the time it's clear that Arthur is completely in capable of doing so? And at the Midnight Theater, I think Emma's dress is both open-backed and has a closed back, because she can feel Julian's hands on her bare back when they're dancing, but he's drawing letters through the material of the dress on her back; I guess there is a configuration of dress that would allow for this, but I think it's an inconsistency probably. The world feels tiny and stultifying, because every person Our Heroes interact with is connected to the plot or connected to the plot of the previous iterations of this, i.e. the prequels, and the heroes of preceding outings are described in embarrassingly fawning detail -- Jace and Clary are the most awesome Shadowhunters in the world, and Jace is so amazingly beautiful, and Tessa and Jem are so helpful and nice! Speaking of embarrasing detail, the whipping scene, ugh, so pointless and unnecessary and inconsistent. There did seem to be slightly less purple prose than before, but possibly I've just gotten so inured to it I don't even notice...
I notice I've gotten this far down and still haven't talked about Emma. That's because I found Emma boring. Her quips aren't funny, and that used to be the one thing I could count on the Jace/Will character for -- although I was amused by everybody correcting Emma's English. Her feats of martial prowess are ridiculous. She has a death wish, she lives for revenge... there could've been some interesting things done with that, with her determination to train BECAUSE she feels she's nothing special (but that's dropped), and feeling adrift once she learns there's really no reason for her parents' death (but that's swept under in a tide of FPH angst). But I will say that her using a llama avatar for Cameron's contact did make me laugh -- pretty much the only thing in this book that did.
And what about the Emma/Julian relationship? It left me cold 95% of the time, and considering I looove brothers-in-arms couples, and I can be on board with mutual pining -- but it didn't work for me here. As close as they are supposed to be, Emma being oblivious to Julian being in love with her just makes her seem sort of dense, and it makes their closeness feel artificial and inconsistent like everything else in this book. Maybe it would help if we'd gotten Emma's pining POV first, because I am willing to see Julian as pine-worthy, but the way it's presented, meh. I did like the scene in the car, where Julian is bleeding out and Emma is leaning over him and drawing healing runes. I'm actually genuinely impressed by just how coital that scene is, like, CC clearly set out to write it that way and nailed it. And Julian thinking wistfully of that scene afterwards was nice, too. And points for the (after the fact, but still) safe sex PSA in the beach scene, I guess. (One of the things I did also like about the book as a whole was Clary's "controvertial" invention of a contraception rune.) But those are my only complimentary feelings on the central relationship. And the letter-tracing on skin schtick annoyed me unreasonably, but at the same time I was rather surprised it did not figure in the confession of love, as I'd been almost certain it would. Such a missed opportunity! :P
There's a plot. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but more sense than forbidden parabatai het still, so, you know, whatever. If CC was going for a shades-of-grey villain who had an understandable point, maaaybe she shouldn't have had him trying to blithely sacrifice a seven-year-old. Trying to make him sympathetic by making the Shadowhunters of the past even BIGGER assholes is also not really a great approach, see the "why are these the good guys again?" question above. The summoning circle being a fakeout to distract them is a cop-out move, and the symbols being written on the victims' bodies being there so that the Shadowhunters would know why Malcolm is doing this is both annoying from a writing-a-mystery perspective and a dumb move in-universe -- it took him a year to collect all the muderers' hands for his Hand of Glory candelabra, what the hell kind of idiot leaves a calling card this early in the game? The clue to the faery poem being found in a book of Nephilim fairy tales -- which nobody but Tavvy knew about -- that's not how fairy tales WORK, and having this rhyme that Malcolm had to do a favor for the Unseelie King just to get in a book of Nephilim fairy tales... how? why?? And then we get a villain monologue or two, and not even a proper death for Malcolm, presumably to give Tessa and Jem something to look for. (And what is up with Diana's secrets? Even when the point was brought up that the Lightwoods were betrayed by their tutor, I was still not sure if that meant Diana was a red herring or if that was genuine foreshadowing, given how much CC likes to recycle and echo her own stuff.) I did think the foreshadowing with Malcolm Fade's motivation was done decently well -- eccentric talk about being in LA to bring love back -- and the switch with the realization that the victims didn't matter, the murderers did -- but everything else about unraveling the plot... not so much.
Apparently I haven't talked about Cristina yet, which is a bit weird, because I like Cristina a lot. Possibly too much to want her to be in this book, with its stupid love triangles and having to play straight (wo)man to Emma's frenetic Leader (it occurs to me that this dynamic doesn't work for me with two female characters -- it didn't with Kami and Angela in the Lynburns, and I don't see the appeal in general. I think because I just couldn't see myself putting up with a friend like that, or at least not in the same way, and the identification feels more forced when both the characters are female?). I'm assuming the Emma/Cristina lulz are intentional, because I cannot imagine that the "I love you" and proposals of marriage and Emma talking about Cristina's boobs for the entirety of a very awkward scene are all a coincidence, but it's such a joyless attempt...
What else? Oh, the titles taken from "Annabel Lee" annoyed me, and the fact that the poem proved significant to the point of the lost love ACTUALLY being named Annabel annoyed me even more. Just... WHY?!
Over the course of our discussion, ikel89 coined some wonderful terms, which have to be preserved for posterity. I commented that the Carstairs sword, Cortana, which Emma always carries in this book, made an early appearance in a totally grauitous scene in TID:
me: Actually, it [Jem not being the last Carstairs] is explained in a totally natural and not at all clunkily shoehorned in for the sake of sequel way in Clockwork Princess, where a Carstairs cousin of Jem's of some kind visits the London Institute and Tessa meets him and sees the speshul golden sword Cortana.
K: ...speshul Cortana of hetero continuity. Right. Shame on me, how dare I forget such brilliant hornshadowing.
and
me: *pointing out violin-playing continuity of the Carstairs*
K: I noticed the violin part! Eyerolled bc unecessary easter egg is unnecessary. In fact it's not egg hunt if it's a fucking инкубатор [incubator].
So, there you have it: hornshadowing (n., foreshadowing which is blatantly and awkwardly shoehorned into a scene where the detail otherwise makes no sense/difference) and Easter egg incubator (a writer's tendency to make sure their Easter eggs are really, really obvious and nobody misses them by accident).
Continuity note: so, Blackthorn family portraits feature Tatiana -- presumably the nee Lightwood one from TID -- but I don't think she can be an ancestor of the present-day Blackthorns because didn't her son die without issue?
Will I read the sequels? Probably, eventually, especially if I have company to do it. (L started FPH around the same time I did, but stalled out, and I can't say I blame her.)
61. Holly Black, The Darkest Part of the Forest -- I liked it, though it felt a bit slight and a bit abrupt. ikel89 and I decided to continue our tandem reading with this one, because it seemed like a good thing to follow FPH -- I think I pitched it as something like "bisexual fairy princes done right" (before having read the book, so, that's not a spoiler, that was my impression based on the cover blurb). And it was a good book. But while I think it was a step up from the other Modern Faerie Tales (i.e. Tithe and sequels), which are ALSO books that I like, so that's not knocking either the series or this book, it didn't feel quite up to the level of the later Holly Black books, Curseworkers or The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, and so I came away from the book slightly disappointed by that, after loving the beginning. (I also did not realize that it was set in the same universe as Tithe et al, and I think it is? Or at least one of the Faerie queens has the same name, and I think the events referenced towards the end are related to the events in the Tithe sequels, though this book definitely does not rely on any knowledge from those.) Spoilers from here
My favorite thing about this book was the sense of wild childhood full of magic (real and imaginary) that we get from Hazel in the beginning. It made me nostalgic for my own childhood chasing monsters through wild places, even though my monsters were wholly imaginary and my wild places were the overgrown abandoned orchard and heath behind our apartment complex, so not exactly a redcap-infested forest. Fairfold feels like a real place, the mix of concrete magical detail and everyday human lives, people being different and shades-of-grey and having their own conflicting priorities (this stood out to me especially after FPH, where nobody really feels real, and the entire world of which consists of about two dozen people, all of whom care deeply about Jace).
I also really liked the siblingness of Ben and Hazel; they felt very real -- devoted to each other but not always knowing what the other person needs or wants, keeping secrets and doing ill-advised things for realistically stupid but sympathetic reasons. And once we got a Ben POV chapter, it was interesting to see that he had envied/(resented?) Hazel somewhat, when he was younger, for being 'free' of a gift -- that she could do whatever she wanted with her time, not just music, because their parents did not have expectations of her. My favorite character was Jack Gordon, the changeling kept and raised (knowingly) by a human family alongside his human "brother", and I really loved Jack and Carter's mom, the pragmatism with which she forced the elf woman to return her child and mama bear-ness with which she kept and protected Jack, and their family in general, college brochures and family board games night and telling the rest of the town they can go hang. And Jack himself, sneaking off to be with his faerie family because he is NOT just a human boy, bargaining with his elf mother for the right to live out his human life with his human family, he and she have got infinite time and they don't.
The things that didn't entirely work for me (although I was able to enjoy all of them OK anyway): night Hazel and the way that reveal was done. I actually guessed a little ahead of Hazel herself that she'd been writing notes to herself, and it's a clever trick... but very difficult to pull off, revealing what is essentially the second half of your protagonist in the last two chapters of the book. This might have worked better for me if the book was longer... I found Severin interesting as an idea: the sleeper who wakes up and is suddenly real, not just what you had imagined him to be, doing what he wants, not following your script; the sleeper who knows all your secrets because he was inanimate/imaginary before and now he's not -- but he never gelled into a full-blown character for me, and so his romance with Ben didn't feel like much, either. I mean, I absolutely believe in Ben being in love with a sleeping beauty fairy prince who had existed for years only in his imagination, personality-wise, but I did't really care about them as a couple. (Though I did appreciate that the sibling love triangle which I'd been expecting turned out to be a) entirely in Ben's imagination and b) quite short-lived, generated, as it was, only by the conventions of narrative causality, which Ben is well tapped into.)
Another thing I'm ambivalent about is the reveal about Ben and Hazel's family. On the one hand, it's a pretty good deconstruction of the trope where young children can go have adventures in the woods; and it's clear that their parents of today are not the same people who didn't feed their young children or know when they spent the night outside, what with the kale breakfast bars and so on. On the other hand, I liked the benign neglect a lot better than the revelation that the parents were neglectful to the point of child endangerment. It may explain why Hazel has a saving people complex, and why she felt it was up to her to get Ben his opportunities, even if it meant bargaining a chunk of her life to the fairies, but... IDK, maybe if it wasn't just sort of dropped at the end... But I did like the way it fits into the background of Hazel being the hero-person she is, like she thinks in the end: "Her parents had changed so much since the day she'd found the dead boy and the sword in the woods. They'd become the sort of parents who could never have spawned a child like Hazel."
Overall, the book felt much more like an actual fairy tale than I had expected, which sometimes worked -- I liked some of the fairy tale tricks and twists, like Hazel sheating the sword which can cut anything in the stone floor, and using it to deprive the Alderking of the weapon which never misses. I really liked Ben playing Sorrow through her grief, and the way the monster at the heart of the forest was not the physically monstrous Sorrow but the father who had manipulated her into that shape. (And the chant of "dead and gone and bones" was nice and creepy.) And I think the abrupt-feeling ending is also part of the fairy-tale thing, actually, because what's the point of going on beyond an implied "and they lived happily ever after".
A few little details I liked, because Holly Black is very good at those small authentic details: Ben and Hazel's parents being "bound by a love of kids books that led to Ben and Hazel both being named, humiliatingly, after famous rabbits" (Tale of Peter Rabbit and Watership Down, presumably); Ben's Star Trek coverlet "the one he'd told Hazel was ironic but that secretly he just realloy loved", that Ben has talked with Kerem Aslan (the boy who kissed Hazel out of denial, sparking the situation which ended with Ben smashing his own hands so he couldn't play anymore) on Facebook and they've apparently worked things out; the chapter from Jack's POV where we get to see how he's always hungry and the lengths he goes to "gulp[ing] down cotton balls soaked in water when he was too embarrassed to ask for a fifth helping at dinner" -- his seems like such a normal life through Hazel's eyes, and it was chilling to see that it's NOT, even in little things. Oh, and I guess Hazel is reading Mira Gran's Feed? the book "where zombies chased around a brother-and-sister reporting team," I mean.
I also just really like the cover design, the title, and the epigraph: "Come now, my child, if we were planning to harm you, do you think we'd be lurking here beside the path in the very darkest part of the forest?"
A couple of quotes:
"Back then, it hadn't seemed weird to Hazel to have the same imaginary boyfriend as her brother. [...] They loved him as they loved lead singers of bands and actors in movies, loved him in suach a way that their shared love brought them closer together."
Severin: "Is it wrong that I like that you tremble? That you flinch?"
Ben swallowed. "I'm pretty sure it's not ideal."
62. Larry Correia, Monster Hunter International -- I got this book via the Baen free library, courtesy of bearshorty's dad. I'd been vaguely curious about the series ever since learning Larry Correia's name, in connection to the Sad Puppies, so I was a bit skeptical as to the likelihood of me liking it, but wanted to see for myself, and hey, free is a good price under the circumstances. Anyway, so I started reading it braced for "vile", but it wasn't that. About as subtle as a big dumb action flick (or maybe a FPS video game), ridiculously Gary-Stu-ish, with Tom Clancy-esque extended passages of guns-n-ammo porn, but occasionally amusing and occasionally fun. It certainly didn't need to be 700+ pages long, but then, neither did FPH.
The politics are fairly transparent: yay, guns! yay, private enterprise! the government is ineffective and mostly corrupt -- but that's neither a very rare view for a big dumb action movie, nor does it get too didactic/annoying. (There's also a random scene where Southerner Julie lectures Owen -- who grew up in California -- on how the South is not actually more racist than other places, which, OK, I don't have a personally informed opinion, but that scene rather stuck out.) There is actually more diversity than I'd expected, starting with the main character, who is a mix of all kinds of thing including Slavic and Portuguese, and his father seems to be Pacific Islander. The only thing it really contributes to is his Gary-Stu-ness, speaking a whole bunch of languages, and maybe his size, but still, I had not expected that. SPOILERS from here His team is also lampshaded as particularly diverse, consisting of a Black guy (Trip, who is a very religious small-town chemistry teacher), an Asian guy (Albert Lee, librarian who put himself thorugh school on the GI Bill as a demolitions engineer), and a woman (Holly, a former stripper/almost-nurse, whose monster encounter was particularly traumatic and who is a total badass; Holly is my favorite, followed probably by Julie's deranged father). Also, there's a flashback character who is Ashkenazi Jewish and -- like you do -- get to kill his Nazi vampire murderer (he's a ghost, and the Nazi was not a vampire yet at the point he'd killed him, but anyway, it's that kind of book). The characterization is all on the level of an ensemble action movie, i.e. pretty slight, lacking in nuance, and with plenty for Tumblr to find to complain about (but then, when is the last part not true), but fun enough, and one thing I do like about Correia's characters is that most of them seem to be a mix of book smart and street smart for various reasons, like Owen himself (the protagonist) being both a competitive shooter/illegal streetfighting champion and a (presumably good) accountant.
Of course, Owen is good at EVERYTHING (including Jeopardy), but especially the things Correia himself has done, which makes it a bit embarrassing, on the wish-fulfillment/Gary Stu level. Correia was a competitive shooter, worked as an accountant, has Portuguese roots... so Owen is the best EVER at shooting, with his first display of skill in training causing everybody's mouths to hang open and his instructors to explaim "Holy shit!" because they've never seen anyone that good, and Owen is an awesome accountant, top of his class or whatever, according to a summary of his resume we helpfully get from Julie when he's recruited, and Owen speaks Portuguese AND like six other languages (because OF COURSE merely having family from some background some generations back makes it likely that a kid is going to be able to speak those languages fluently *eyeroll*). But, honestly, this was all SO transparently Gary-Stu that it didn't even bother me per se, because it felt so childish and kind of awww, yes, when I was 13 I also had a self-insert who was the best at all kinds of things and the most powerful Earth Mage and got to marry my favorite character in LotR, points for not naming your protagonist after yourself, at least, Larry Correia.
One thing I will give this book unironically and uncondescendingly is the opening line, which is genuinely quite fun: "On one otherwise normal Tuesday evening I had the chance to live the American dream. I was able to throw my incompetent jackass of a boss from a fourteenth-story window." Events expand from there, with Owen being recruited by Monster Hunter International (MHI), a private enterprise that hunts monsters for bounty (courtesy of a PUFF fund established by Teddy Roosevelt, because of course; I kind of want to read a period story focusing on TR, tbh), dodging government bureaucracy and federal monster-hunting goons who are unscrupulous and not very good at the monster hunting. My favorite part was the training montage-y one at the start, although some of the action scenes are fun, too, and I really liked the reveal with Darne, where they think they're racing to save the French Hunters who've barricaded themselves from the vampires who've overrun their ship only to get to them and find that they've also been turned, and they walked right into an ambush.
What didn't work for me at all was the more epic part of the story, with the Cursed One and the artefact and stopping time and Owen's visions and the Tattooed Man/Guardian and a lot of related crap. It read like something Correia was making up as he went along and then had to figure out how to tie off, because all the "but actually, it was X all along!" type reveals and reversals make very little sense, and are delayed by a lot of tedious "I can't tell you because of reasons" nonsense, and even if they have been hammered to fit, the pacing and theme and, like, all those literary mechanics that make a story go and hang together are in disarray around those elements -- there is no coherent arc, just stuff that happens to let Owen shoot stuff and beat up stuff and be noble at Julie the love interest. I did like that at least in the end it turned out he WASN'T actually more special than the other average "one born every 500 years" guy, and that his victory was realizing he could not/should not use the Artefact, rather than being the sole person able to use it. Which is not a very tall bar to clear, but I was grateful for it at that point. (And the part where Owen does use the artefact to reverse the deaths of everyone who just died? I kept thinking of Jingo and the Dis-Organizer's alternate timeline, and this was not a comparison that favored this book.) And there's so much that's just... thrown at the wall, like Owen becoming a Newbie team leader around the middle of the book, even though he has very little experience, and then at the end being invited to join Harbinger's elite MHI team #1, which is what I'd been expecting from the start. So... what about the other members of Owen's team, then? Do they come along too? Do we just not care anymore? I assume Owen was only leading them for prophecy reasons, but still...
Oh, and I could see that the prophecy was going to turn out to be about Owen from some fairly early point on, with how much his father being a decorated warrior kept being stressed, and some of the other things were a bit of a stretch, but the part about being named after a weapon of his fathers was nicely played. And speaking of things I guessed, I also figured out that Harbinger was something supernatural *and* Raymond Shackleford II, the missing portrait, though not specifically what he was.
I should talk about Julie the love interest, because as much as the book has an actual coherent arc, winning Julie is it. Owen starts out as the best at everything and ends there, he doesn't actually gain any arcane powers, though he flirts with them for a bit over the course of the novel, and it's not even that he finds himself a place to belong in MHI, because he started referring to himself as a monster hunter from about 10-15% in, as soon as he arrived at the compound. So, really, the only thing that really CHANGES for him over the course of the book is that he starts out with a crush on Julie, who has a boyfriend she loves, and as the chapters wear on, it turns out the boyfriend is a smug insecure jerk, then that he's a smug insecure jerk who is also a coward and would leave a comrade to die, then he gets himself conveniently kidnapped for sacrifice and rescued nobly by Owen, dumped by Julie, who has meanwhile realized Owen is the one she loves, and then conveniently takes himself out of the picture entirely. So, like, "guy wins girl" seems to be the only actual arc of this thing, which I find faintly amusing. But the whole thing with Julie is just annoyingly done, because as much as she's presented as an awesome comrade-at-arms and someone with position of power over Owen (she's got seniority and is the granddaughter of the boss), she is still very much a prize the narrative awards him. Which, big dumb movie, yes, what do you expect, but meh.
The worldbuilding is mostly there to give the good guys monsters to shoot at, but there are some bits I found genuinely amusing and/or original, like the redneck Elves (which so disappoint Trip, who's a fantasy fan) and the Orc tribesmen, who are misunderstood by others but proteted by MHI, which was unexpected and therefore pretty cute, despite the broad comic relief.
A couple of other fun quotes:
"My grandfather formed a group of concerned citizens, best could be described as an angry mob"
"I did not know what a Spig 9 was, but if it was in fact a gun that she needed help to even move, I was very excited."
Mordechai: "Ooh. Tough talk for alive person. Haunting is much hard work. Kids today not work hard enough to do such things."
Harbinger: "I would take this crew against the gates of hell themselves if God would give us the contract."
So, my verdict: Not nearly as bad as I thought it might be, but not actually my thing. I could see reading on in the series if the books were a bit shorter, and maybe the subsequent one are better? I believe this one was self-published, so maybe the addition of an editor helped with the overly extensive gun porn and Gary-Stu-ness?
Currently reading: Jo Walton, The Just City (August's Tor.com book club book), and it's going pretty quick, even though it's not my sort of genre, really.
I mean, Kellerman is really great at writing engaging, likeable characters. I'm pretty sure here he just set out to see if he could write a novel with a protagonist/POV character whose childhood trauma left her emotionally closed off and full of unhealthy coping behaviors (I know Alex has his own abusive childhood issues, too, but his childhood trauma was way less severe than Grace's, and his coping techniques are different, too). Anyway, noble effort, and I found Grace's POV interesting -- especially in the bildungsroman part, the flashbacks -- but I didn't care about her as a character, and I didn't like her much as a person. And while I can totally understand how Grace, who could never count on authority figures and had to take care of herself from birth on, would take care of her stalker herself and go the vigilante justice route with Samael and henchman, rather than talking to the police, it's a rather shocking departure from Alex's best-buddies relationship with LAPD and cops being protagonists or at least good guys everywhere else in Kellerman's work.
I also felt like the ending was too abrupt to be satisfying. It makes sense that Grace doesn't actually care what happens afterwards -- to Samael's wife, to the baby, to Lily -- but I kind of wanted to know, more than I wanted to see Grace ziplining in Costa Rica.
I did enjoy the visit to NorCal, though the Berkeley mockery was a bit too mocky. Also, Kellerman really seems to have it in for greenwashing, heh.
59. Jordan L. Hawk, Fallow (Whyborne & Griffin #8) -- I think I agree with aome on this being my favorite 'away' book; I'd like Necropolis, too, but that one dragged on for me at the end, and this one never did -- I think the addition Griffin POV does help make the climax move faster. I liked the eldritch horror threat in this book better than in any of the others, I think, so overall it was very enjoyable, and a fast read. Spoilers from here!
The only thing that realy bugged me was the return of "oh if Griffin only knew the truth he'd never love me" -- in this case, about Whyborne being a creation/manifestation of the maelstrom and Widdershins collecting/influencing everyone via ley lines. Like, we have already had that pointlessly angsty plot twice over, and it was annoying then, too. I did like the way Griffin and Christine accepted it, though, and the way Griffin found validation in Widdershins choosing him, seeing him at his lowest point and still finding him worthy, was actually sweet. Griffin's brief exchange with Whyborne's 'spark' while Whyborne is out after burning the corruption out of himself was quite nice, too, although it keeps reminding me of SPECTR and Gray coming to the surface in the early books to interact with John. Hawk definitely loves her specific tropes.
Whyborne's grumpiness during travel doesn't bother me, and in fact I find it amusing, but I was pleased to see he's getting used to 'roughing it' anyway, and Whyborne vs life on the farm was amusing enough on its own, especially Whyborne's nemesis, Diablo the rooster. I also smiled at Whybrne being retroactively scandalized to realize he and Griffin had made love while Griffin's mother was sitting downstairs (with Christine and Mrs Creigh), and also Whyborne clutching at straws/grain elevators at dinner to avoid being the field of competition for two young ladies. Oh, and I continue to enjoy the implied courtship between Persephone and Miss Parkhurst, which Whyborne, of course, is as oblivious to as his is to everything to do with Miss Parkhurst. It was cute to see that she does still have a bit of her crush on Whyborne, but it's been transferred almost entirely to his ketoi sister. Oh, and early on in the book, Whyborne and Christine in disguise pretending to be newlyweds was pretty funny, too. And I confess I LOL'd at the corrupted pumpkin pie.
There were a lot of things about the plot I guessed in advance, as usual -- I guessed Griffin's Ma was behind the letters that drove Benjamin to suicide from the conversation Griffin has with her early on, and I figured Marian was after Griffin specifically driven by grief over Benjamin quite a bit before Our Heroes figured that out, too, oh, and I guessed that Iskander was corrupted when he managed to get away without Griffin -- but that was particularly easy. But there were enough interesting twists -- I *hadn't* guessed that Mr Tate (the mayor's husband) was in on the plan, trying to save the town, I hadn't guessed the balance of power between Mrs Creigh, Vernon, and Marian, and I hadn't guessed the plan to infect Widdershins with rust, or what the Fideles were really after as a group -- so there was enough unexpected stuff going on, more than usual.
I was sorry to learn that Reverend Scarrow had died -- he was one of the side characters I liked. But having Mrs Creigh as a sorceress in opposition to Whyborne (but also not opposed to being allied with him when necessary) sounds promising. In general, I liked the conflicting agendas and loyalties that showed up in this plot, everyone having different motivations -- Creigh doing the work of the Fideles, dissent among that group, Marian and Vernon having their own goals which they hold above Creighs, Mr Tate getting cold feet.
As with the other 'away' books, I missed Whyborne's family in this one. It was interesting to see Whyborne feeling a bit of jealousy when Griffin admires Persephone's magic, and being grumpy with her in general. But I was very happy to see that at the end, when thinking about Griffin not being alone if Whyborne were to die in a Reichenbach Falls-type victory over Marian, Whyborne was listing off not just Christine and Iskander, Persephone and Jack, and Heliabel among the people Griffin would still have, but also Niles -- I hope that means the father-son relationship will have to retread less of the same ground over and over now (although judging by the return of the "Griffin would never love me" in this book, I'm probably being optimistic there). Speaking of family, I was sad to see that Griffin and his mother could not reconcile, but I did like the way most of that arc was handled, the joyous homecoming under mistaken pretenses, working together, caring for each other but not being able to accept (Griffin's bisexuality) or forgive (Ma driving Benjamin to suicide with her letters, however remorseful she is about it).
The other really interesting thing for me was that Whyborne could understand Marian's motivations very well, and did not judge her, really, for wanting the town destroyed for what it did to Benjamin. Really, in stopping her, he seems motivated primarily by saving HIS people (Griffin, Christine, Iskander, and those important to Griffin, like Nella and Lawrence's family) and HIS town (i.e. Widdershins). I've always enjoyed Whyborne's hint of darkness, the desire for revenge -- on Stanford, on his father, on Osborne, the various bullies in his life -- and this meshes into it perfectly. I was also surprised at first but then accepted that it makes sense, with this framework, that Nella's actions against Benjamin would mean that Whyborne has no sympathy for her at all. (It's interesting, actually -- Whyborne's such a textbook Ravenclaw when it comes to the WAY he acts, all book learning and head-in-the-clouds fumbling, but his moral core is actually very Slytherin -- whatever he can to protect HIS people -- and it's possible that one day he will realize just how much like Niles that makes him, and be horrified, probably.) I also found it neat that, seeing Marian in her avatar state, Griffin simply found her horrible, while Whyborne saw her as "something almost as beautiful as it was revolting."
The group hug at the end was sweet, if a bit too sitcom-y. Christine is now hyphenating her name, which gives her something else to correct people about, now that they've killed off Osborne and there's no-one to call her Miss Putnam instead of Dr Putnam.
Quotes:
Christine: "I love you, Whyborne. But you're an idiot."
Whyborne: "Thank you, Christine. I'm so glad Widdershins collected you."
Mrs Creigh: "I should have known better than to treat a tool as an equal. It isn't a mistake I'll make again."
Christine: "Yes, that's certainly the lesson we should all take from this."
This one comes with an author's note at the end, talking about poor farms and female suffrage in Kansas, but also featuring this statement: "Griffin has a lot of baggage;he's way more screwed up than Whyborne has ever been" which I find really baffling. I mean, Griffin obviously has baggage, and PTSD from his first encounter with the demons and his time at the asylum, but more screwed up than Whyborne? I don't think that's EVER been true. It didn't look to be true when all we had was Whyborne's POV, and it doesn't seem true to me now that we have both of theirs, either. Huh.
60. Cassandra Clare, Lady Midnight (The Dark Artifices #1) -- this was such a frustrating book for me, even more than the other Shadowhunter books, because this one was actually about things that I could have loved, in a different execution. But on the other hand, it came with the bonus of reading it in tandem with ikel89 and being frustrated together, about the same things, so, bonding experience! But if you genuinely enjoyed the book, you may want to skip this write-up.
I've known about this book for a while, also courtesy of ikel89, and when she first told me about it, the conversation back in 2013 went like this:
me: (in reference to something K posted on her then-new Tumblr) Also, is there really a planned new series about forbidden parabatai romance?
K: *provides link*
me: Wait wait wait, is the forbidded parabatai romance het? After unrequited Alec/Jace, and the love triangle with pretensions of OT3-ness of Jem and Will, she goes to write forbidden parabatai romance and it's het?
And since that day onward, I have never referred to that book/series as anything but "forbidden parabatai het", have introduced it to L as such, and it is referred to as FPH in all our communications with ikel89 on the subject. Spoilers from here!
So, I was probably a bit prejudiced against this book on the basis of it being forbidden parabatai het from the start, but having read it, the forbidden parabatai het-ness is still my biggest complaint about it, although not so much for reasons of het-ness as for the ludicrousness of the way in which parabatai romance is forbidden, and everything that implies about the Shadowhunter society. Because here's the thing, there's a line spoken by Livvy (a fifteen-year-old Shadowhunter girl) that sums up the whole thing beautifully: "Having to follow stupid rules makes us Shadowhunters?" which is (presumably) meant to be funny in context -- it's one of those things where multiple people are talking and the dialogue cues are potentially misleading, but it is actually the truest sentence in the entire book. Being a Shadowhunter means following stupid rules, whether they're about tearing families apart, levying punitive and counterproductive sanctions, refusing to make reasonable accommodations for a high-functioning autistic character, forbidding the use of modern technology for absolutely no reason, transferring a sentence of death for desertion onto the deserter's pregnant wife (the story of Tobias Herondale), or forbidding relationships between parabatai and never even explaining why. Why are these the good guys again? And why has Shadowhunter society not advanced one whit in social structure since the Victorian days?
(We do eventually learn the reason forbidden parabatai het is forbidden, and it's a stupid reason, worldbuilding-wise, but OK, I could even roll with that, but the way the Clave chooses to go about working around that situation, accepted as given, is even MORE stupid -- yes, by all means, let's encourage teenagers to dedicate their lives to each other, fight and train together all the time, and expect them never to fall in love JUST BECAUSE WE SAID SO, with no explanation, and in fact let's make the explanation a closely guarded secret that must never get out, because surely teenagers are going to obey arbitrary rules. There are so many other more sensible ways this could be handled -- allowing only close relatives or people who do not swing each other's way to be parabatai, or people who are already married, even if the secret must, for some stupid reason be kept secret, and literally all of them are less ridiculous than just relying on "don't fall in love with your parabatai, 'cos it's the Law." Well, but also none of them would allow for the plot of this book, so of course one side had to give, and it had to be the side of logic.)
It was also a frustrating book because there are some neat ideas that it raises and then sweeps away under the onslaught of forbidden parabatai het angst. Julian as reluctant killer of a monster wearing his father's face and conflicted parent to his younger siblings, the uneasy reunion between Julian and Mark, where Julian was hoping to get his older brother back, someone to take over the raising of the younger sibs, and instead gets back a fey and broken and suddenly younger brother, and navigating this new relationship between them -- all of that could be good. I'm here for, as I put it to K, "the on-the-surface-gentle person who is actually ruthless when it comes to protecting those they love and consider their own, this sort of Slytherin morality (in the matrix sense) with an outward Hufflepuff manifestation and Ravenclaw approach to problem-solving. [...] Like, I would actually happily read a book about a person who is the way Julian is described, raising a family on his own and running an institute in secret in his "still waters" ways. Just... not this book." -- and ikel89 helpfully pointed out to me that I *have* read this book, and it was called The Demon's Lexicon, and she is totally right, and Julian, sadly, is not Alan Ryves, more's the pity. And I never bought the half-assed explanation for why he didn't tell Emma about Arthur, either. That was so pointless, and contrary to the spirit of being parabatai, and the spirit of Emma/Julian as soulmates, too.
I was also on board with Mark's return from the Wild Hunt, because that does have some nice aesthetics going, and I'm a sucker for the Tam Lin after-the-rescue type stories, and there are moments with Mark that are actually effective and enjoyable to me -- the uneasy relationship with Julian, the anguish when he first returns and is convinced nothing is real, Cristina's calm understanding and help, and most everything to do with Kieran, the one good thing about his time with the Hunt, even the cloakroom makeouts. But Mark's faery trauma is so inconsistently written, I really couldn't suspend my disbelief fully. He's been gone for 5 years in real time but "countless years" to his perception but he's only aged two years? There may be some complicated explanation that accounts for this, but it was definitely not presented by the book, so it's probably just lazy writing. The inconsistency of fairy speak, what he does and does not remember -- he gets a James Bond reference but thinks you're supposed to smear butter on a microscope or that 'formal attire' means going naked under a fur coat? It's so erratic, and not in any sort of realistic way, just... things thrown at the wall to see what sticks, and not much did, for me. (I also didn't much care for the parallels set up between Mark's post-Wild Hunt trauma state and Ty's non-neurotypical way of thinking. I can be sold on autism-as-being-a-changeling, and the other way around, I guess, but this just felt both false and gratuitous...) And I'm so annoyed by the fake-or-is-it love triangle being set up with Emma, where Julian could handle her being with anyone but Mark, and Mark has more chemistry with DIEGO than he does with Emma, and it's just all so... arbitrary, characters being moved here and there in service to the Forbidden Parabatai Het and maximizing the angst. I had this problem with the Will/Tessa/Jem triangle, too, but this is waaay worse. Which is too bad, because Emma and Mark being platonically wild and death-wishy together was actually kind of fun, and I like this exchange:
Mark: You drive too fast.
Emma: You sound like Julian.
Mark: It brought me joy. It was as if I flew with the Hunt again, and tasted the blood of the sky.
Emma: Okay you sound like Julian on drugs.
Oh, and speaking of that, a thing that annoys me out of proportion: that Mark's faery steed was attached enough to him to stay with him in the form of a flying motorcycle, but when it is torn apart by the Mantid demons, Mark's only reaction is to "look glum". WTF, this is a living being with which he'd bonder over whatever "countless years" he's spent in the Wild Hunt... except of course it was only there for the purpose of giving Emma a flying motorcycle ride and setting up some UST with Mark for the ending, blech. I actually liked Mark/Kieran, and although the falloutis understandable and expected, I wish there'd been more of that and less of everything else to do with Mark, because that was the only part decently done. (And I'd say points for making Mark bi, but I have a sneaking suspicion it's just to maximize his love triangle potential...)
Other interesting ideas that are not actually engaged with constructively and just serve to show how dumb Shadowhunter society is: The possibility of being stuck with a parabatai who does not care about you and is in fact a sociopath, like almost happened to Cristina with Deigo's brother Jaime. (Although, if Diego knew Jaime was no good, and the two of them have known Cristina since she was ten, eight years is kind of a long time not to say anything, dude!). Similarly, the treatment of non-neurotypical Nephilim by the Clave could be something interesting to explore, driven home so thoroughly by Ty's autism and Arthur's condition, the latter of which has to be kept secret and the former which doesn't allow very simple accommodations (even though Julian and Emma, of course, are very accommodating and understanding, so understanding! give them a cookie) -- but nothing is actually done with that. It might actually come up in the sequels, but I'm not holding my breath.
Also, I actually like Ty, as the younger sib with the most actual personality, but the PSA-like blurbs that accompanied anything he said or did until about 60% into the book were very irritating. Like, I get it, he's non-neurotypical, high-functioning Aspergers, he doesn't get idioms and doesn't like eye-contact and he stims by fiddling with pipecleaner toys. There is no need to make every single action of his about his autism. But this is a general problem with the way CC has written the younger children, i.e. ...not well. Dru seems to exist just to be a misunderstood, slightly chubby, slightly gothy 13-year-old girl, possibly so the target audience can identify with her, but we also get a Very Important Conversation between her and Emma where Emma gives her a positive body image pep talk, to show how Awesome and Understanding and Non-Shallow Emma is. Livvy doesn't have a designated PSA role, which makes me wonder if she's going to die at some point, and Tavvy... At some point in the book I became convinced that CC had originally written him as a four-year-old, then realized he needed to be older for the amount of time she wanted to pass between the Dark War and the present day to work out properly, and went back and just adjusted his age, because he does not behave like a seven-year-old at any point in the first half of the book. Not even a particularly sheltered 7-year-old.
There's so much else that's just bad writing. The introduction of Kit Herondale, the way random sentences are repeated three times when, really, they neither require nor can pull off that level of emphasis ("'The last hunt was interrupted by Nephilim, and the value of the sacrifice was endangered.' [...] A jolt went through Emma. Nephilim. The woman had said 'Nephilim.' These people knew about Shadowhunters." and Mark's declaration of himsels as a Shadowhunter (a Shadowhunter)). I had an overall feeling that the book was just sort of piecewise continuous -- paragraphs do flow into each other, but stuff doesn't make sense if you remember what happened just a few pages ago. For example, Julian takes off for England, with the rest of his family, to separate himself from Emma to "cure" himself of being in love with her. So, while he's gone for these 2 months, who is running the institute in LA, when the rest of the time it's clear that Arthur is completely in capable of doing so? And at the Midnight Theater, I think Emma's dress is both open-backed and has a closed back, because she can feel Julian's hands on her bare back when they're dancing, but he's drawing letters through the material of the dress on her back; I guess there is a configuration of dress that would allow for this, but I think it's an inconsistency probably. The world feels tiny and stultifying, because every person Our Heroes interact with is connected to the plot or connected to the plot of the previous iterations of this, i.e. the prequels, and the heroes of preceding outings are described in embarrassingly fawning detail -- Jace and Clary are the most awesome Shadowhunters in the world, and Jace is so amazingly beautiful, and Tessa and Jem are so helpful and nice! Speaking of embarrasing detail, the whipping scene, ugh, so pointless and unnecessary and inconsistent. There did seem to be slightly less purple prose than before, but possibly I've just gotten so inured to it I don't even notice...
I notice I've gotten this far down and still haven't talked about Emma. That's because I found Emma boring. Her quips aren't funny, and that used to be the one thing I could count on the Jace/Will character for -- although I was amused by everybody correcting Emma's English. Her feats of martial prowess are ridiculous. She has a death wish, she lives for revenge... there could've been some interesting things done with that, with her determination to train BECAUSE she feels she's nothing special (but that's dropped), and feeling adrift once she learns there's really no reason for her parents' death (but that's swept under in a tide of FPH angst). But I will say that her using a llama avatar for Cameron's contact did make me laugh -- pretty much the only thing in this book that did.
And what about the Emma/Julian relationship? It left me cold 95% of the time, and considering I looove brothers-in-arms couples, and I can be on board with mutual pining -- but it didn't work for me here. As close as they are supposed to be, Emma being oblivious to Julian being in love with her just makes her seem sort of dense, and it makes their closeness feel artificial and inconsistent like everything else in this book. Maybe it would help if we'd gotten Emma's pining POV first, because I am willing to see Julian as pine-worthy, but the way it's presented, meh. I did like the scene in the car, where Julian is bleeding out and Emma is leaning over him and drawing healing runes. I'm actually genuinely impressed by just how coital that scene is, like, CC clearly set out to write it that way and nailed it. And Julian thinking wistfully of that scene afterwards was nice, too. And points for the (after the fact, but still) safe sex PSA in the beach scene, I guess. (One of the things I did also like about the book as a whole was Clary's "controvertial" invention of a contraception rune.) But those are my only complimentary feelings on the central relationship. And the letter-tracing on skin schtick annoyed me unreasonably, but at the same time I was rather surprised it did not figure in the confession of love, as I'd been almost certain it would. Such a missed opportunity! :P
There's a plot. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but more sense than forbidden parabatai het still, so, you know, whatever. If CC was going for a shades-of-grey villain who had an understandable point, maaaybe she shouldn't have had him trying to blithely sacrifice a seven-year-old. Trying to make him sympathetic by making the Shadowhunters of the past even BIGGER assholes is also not really a great approach, see the "why are these the good guys again?" question above. The summoning circle being a fakeout to distract them is a cop-out move, and the symbols being written on the victims' bodies being there so that the Shadowhunters would know why Malcolm is doing this is both annoying from a writing-a-mystery perspective and a dumb move in-universe -- it took him a year to collect all the muderers' hands for his Hand of Glory candelabra, what the hell kind of idiot leaves a calling card this early in the game? The clue to the faery poem being found in a book of Nephilim fairy tales -- which nobody but Tavvy knew about -- that's not how fairy tales WORK, and having this rhyme that Malcolm had to do a favor for the Unseelie King just to get in a book of Nephilim fairy tales... how? why?? And then we get a villain monologue or two, and not even a proper death for Malcolm, presumably to give Tessa and Jem something to look for. (And what is up with Diana's secrets? Even when the point was brought up that the Lightwoods were betrayed by their tutor, I was still not sure if that meant Diana was a red herring or if that was genuine foreshadowing, given how much CC likes to recycle and echo her own stuff.) I did think the foreshadowing with Malcolm Fade's motivation was done decently well -- eccentric talk about being in LA to bring love back -- and the switch with the realization that the victims didn't matter, the murderers did -- but everything else about unraveling the plot... not so much.
Apparently I haven't talked about Cristina yet, which is a bit weird, because I like Cristina a lot. Possibly too much to want her to be in this book, with its stupid love triangles and having to play straight (wo)man to Emma's frenetic Leader (it occurs to me that this dynamic doesn't work for me with two female characters -- it didn't with Kami and Angela in the Lynburns, and I don't see the appeal in general. I think because I just couldn't see myself putting up with a friend like that, or at least not in the same way, and the identification feels more forced when both the characters are female?). I'm assuming the Emma/Cristina lulz are intentional, because I cannot imagine that the "I love you" and proposals of marriage and Emma talking about Cristina's boobs for the entirety of a very awkward scene are all a coincidence, but it's such a joyless attempt...
What else? Oh, the titles taken from "Annabel Lee" annoyed me, and the fact that the poem proved significant to the point of the lost love ACTUALLY being named Annabel annoyed me even more. Just... WHY?!
Over the course of our discussion, ikel89 coined some wonderful terms, which have to be preserved for posterity. I commented that the Carstairs sword, Cortana, which Emma always carries in this book, made an early appearance in a totally grauitous scene in TID:
me: Actually, it [Jem not being the last Carstairs] is explained in a totally natural and not at all clunkily shoehorned in for the sake of sequel way in Clockwork Princess, where a Carstairs cousin of Jem's of some kind visits the London Institute and Tessa meets him and sees the speshul golden sword Cortana.
K: ...speshul Cortana of hetero continuity. Right. Shame on me, how dare I forget such brilliant hornshadowing.
and
me: *pointing out violin-playing continuity of the Carstairs*
K: I noticed the violin part! Eyerolled bc unecessary easter egg is unnecessary. In fact it's not egg hunt if it's a fucking инкубатор [incubator].
So, there you have it: hornshadowing (n., foreshadowing which is blatantly and awkwardly shoehorned into a scene where the detail otherwise makes no sense/difference) and Easter egg incubator (a writer's tendency to make sure their Easter eggs are really, really obvious and nobody misses them by accident).
Continuity note: so, Blackthorn family portraits feature Tatiana -- presumably the nee Lightwood one from TID -- but I don't think she can be an ancestor of the present-day Blackthorns because didn't her son die without issue?
Will I read the sequels? Probably, eventually, especially if I have company to do it. (L started FPH around the same time I did, but stalled out, and I can't say I blame her.)
61. Holly Black, The Darkest Part of the Forest -- I liked it, though it felt a bit slight and a bit abrupt. ikel89 and I decided to continue our tandem reading with this one, because it seemed like a good thing to follow FPH -- I think I pitched it as something like "bisexual fairy princes done right" (before having read the book, so, that's not a spoiler, that was my impression based on the cover blurb). And it was a good book. But while I think it was a step up from the other Modern Faerie Tales (i.e. Tithe and sequels), which are ALSO books that I like, so that's not knocking either the series or this book, it didn't feel quite up to the level of the later Holly Black books, Curseworkers or The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, and so I came away from the book slightly disappointed by that, after loving the beginning. (I also did not realize that it was set in the same universe as Tithe et al, and I think it is? Or at least one of the Faerie queens has the same name, and I think the events referenced towards the end are related to the events in the Tithe sequels, though this book definitely does not rely on any knowledge from those.) Spoilers from here
My favorite thing about this book was the sense of wild childhood full of magic (real and imaginary) that we get from Hazel in the beginning. It made me nostalgic for my own childhood chasing monsters through wild places, even though my monsters were wholly imaginary and my wild places were the overgrown abandoned orchard and heath behind our apartment complex, so not exactly a redcap-infested forest. Fairfold feels like a real place, the mix of concrete magical detail and everyday human lives, people being different and shades-of-grey and having their own conflicting priorities (this stood out to me especially after FPH, where nobody really feels real, and the entire world of which consists of about two dozen people, all of whom care deeply about Jace).
I also really liked the siblingness of Ben and Hazel; they felt very real -- devoted to each other but not always knowing what the other person needs or wants, keeping secrets and doing ill-advised things for realistically stupid but sympathetic reasons. And once we got a Ben POV chapter, it was interesting to see that he had envied/(resented?) Hazel somewhat, when he was younger, for being 'free' of a gift -- that she could do whatever she wanted with her time, not just music, because their parents did not have expectations of her. My favorite character was Jack Gordon, the changeling kept and raised (knowingly) by a human family alongside his human "brother", and I really loved Jack and Carter's mom, the pragmatism with which she forced the elf woman to return her child and mama bear-ness with which she kept and protected Jack, and their family in general, college brochures and family board games night and telling the rest of the town they can go hang. And Jack himself, sneaking off to be with his faerie family because he is NOT just a human boy, bargaining with his elf mother for the right to live out his human life with his human family, he and she have got infinite time and they don't.
The things that didn't entirely work for me (although I was able to enjoy all of them OK anyway): night Hazel and the way that reveal was done. I actually guessed a little ahead of Hazel herself that she'd been writing notes to herself, and it's a clever trick... but very difficult to pull off, revealing what is essentially the second half of your protagonist in the last two chapters of the book. This might have worked better for me if the book was longer... I found Severin interesting as an idea: the sleeper who wakes up and is suddenly real, not just what you had imagined him to be, doing what he wants, not following your script; the sleeper who knows all your secrets because he was inanimate/imaginary before and now he's not -- but he never gelled into a full-blown character for me, and so his romance with Ben didn't feel like much, either. I mean, I absolutely believe in Ben being in love with a sleeping beauty fairy prince who had existed for years only in his imagination, personality-wise, but I did't really care about them as a couple. (Though I did appreciate that the sibling love triangle which I'd been expecting turned out to be a) entirely in Ben's imagination and b) quite short-lived, generated, as it was, only by the conventions of narrative causality, which Ben is well tapped into.)
Another thing I'm ambivalent about is the reveal about Ben and Hazel's family. On the one hand, it's a pretty good deconstruction of the trope where young children can go have adventures in the woods; and it's clear that their parents of today are not the same people who didn't feed their young children or know when they spent the night outside, what with the kale breakfast bars and so on. On the other hand, I liked the benign neglect a lot better than the revelation that the parents were neglectful to the point of child endangerment. It may explain why Hazel has a saving people complex, and why she felt it was up to her to get Ben his opportunities, even if it meant bargaining a chunk of her life to the fairies, but... IDK, maybe if it wasn't just sort of dropped at the end... But I did like the way it fits into the background of Hazel being the hero-person she is, like she thinks in the end: "Her parents had changed so much since the day she'd found the dead boy and the sword in the woods. They'd become the sort of parents who could never have spawned a child like Hazel."
Overall, the book felt much more like an actual fairy tale than I had expected, which sometimes worked -- I liked some of the fairy tale tricks and twists, like Hazel sheating the sword which can cut anything in the stone floor, and using it to deprive the Alderking of the weapon which never misses. I really liked Ben playing Sorrow through her grief, and the way the monster at the heart of the forest was not the physically monstrous Sorrow but the father who had manipulated her into that shape. (And the chant of "dead and gone and bones" was nice and creepy.) And I think the abrupt-feeling ending is also part of the fairy-tale thing, actually, because what's the point of going on beyond an implied "and they lived happily ever after".
A few little details I liked, because Holly Black is very good at those small authentic details: Ben and Hazel's parents being "bound by a love of kids books that led to Ben and Hazel both being named, humiliatingly, after famous rabbits" (Tale of Peter Rabbit and Watership Down, presumably); Ben's Star Trek coverlet "the one he'd told Hazel was ironic but that secretly he just realloy loved", that Ben has talked with Kerem Aslan (the boy who kissed Hazel out of denial, sparking the situation which ended with Ben smashing his own hands so he couldn't play anymore) on Facebook and they've apparently worked things out; the chapter from Jack's POV where we get to see how he's always hungry and the lengths he goes to "gulp[ing] down cotton balls soaked in water when he was too embarrassed to ask for a fifth helping at dinner" -- his seems like such a normal life through Hazel's eyes, and it was chilling to see that it's NOT, even in little things. Oh, and I guess Hazel is reading Mira Gran's Feed? the book "where zombies chased around a brother-and-sister reporting team," I mean.
I also just really like the cover design, the title, and the epigraph: "Come now, my child, if we were planning to harm you, do you think we'd be lurking here beside the path in the very darkest part of the forest?"
A couple of quotes:
"Back then, it hadn't seemed weird to Hazel to have the same imaginary boyfriend as her brother. [...] They loved him as they loved lead singers of bands and actors in movies, loved him in suach a way that their shared love brought them closer together."
Severin: "Is it wrong that I like that you tremble? That you flinch?"
Ben swallowed. "I'm pretty sure it's not ideal."
62. Larry Correia, Monster Hunter International -- I got this book via the Baen free library, courtesy of bearshorty's dad. I'd been vaguely curious about the series ever since learning Larry Correia's name, in connection to the Sad Puppies, so I was a bit skeptical as to the likelihood of me liking it, but wanted to see for myself, and hey, free is a good price under the circumstances. Anyway, so I started reading it braced for "vile", but it wasn't that. About as subtle as a big dumb action flick (or maybe a FPS video game), ridiculously Gary-Stu-ish, with Tom Clancy-esque extended passages of guns-n-ammo porn, but occasionally amusing and occasionally fun. It certainly didn't need to be 700+ pages long, but then, neither did FPH.
The politics are fairly transparent: yay, guns! yay, private enterprise! the government is ineffective and mostly corrupt -- but that's neither a very rare view for a big dumb action movie, nor does it get too didactic/annoying. (There's also a random scene where Southerner Julie lectures Owen -- who grew up in California -- on how the South is not actually more racist than other places, which, OK, I don't have a personally informed opinion, but that scene rather stuck out.) There is actually more diversity than I'd expected, starting with the main character, who is a mix of all kinds of thing including Slavic and Portuguese, and his father seems to be Pacific Islander. The only thing it really contributes to is his Gary-Stu-ness, speaking a whole bunch of languages, and maybe his size, but still, I had not expected that. SPOILERS from here His team is also lampshaded as particularly diverse, consisting of a Black guy (Trip, who is a very religious small-town chemistry teacher), an Asian guy (Albert Lee, librarian who put himself thorugh school on the GI Bill as a demolitions engineer), and a woman (Holly, a former stripper/almost-nurse, whose monster encounter was particularly traumatic and who is a total badass; Holly is my favorite, followed probably by Julie's deranged father). Also, there's a flashback character who is Ashkenazi Jewish and -- like you do -- get to kill his Nazi vampire murderer (he's a ghost, and the Nazi was not a vampire yet at the point he'd killed him, but anyway, it's that kind of book). The characterization is all on the level of an ensemble action movie, i.e. pretty slight, lacking in nuance, and with plenty for Tumblr to find to complain about (but then, when is the last part not true), but fun enough, and one thing I do like about Correia's characters is that most of them seem to be a mix of book smart and street smart for various reasons, like Owen himself (the protagonist) being both a competitive shooter/illegal streetfighting champion and a (presumably good) accountant.
Of course, Owen is good at EVERYTHING (including Jeopardy), but especially the things Correia himself has done, which makes it a bit embarrassing, on the wish-fulfillment/Gary Stu level. Correia was a competitive shooter, worked as an accountant, has Portuguese roots... so Owen is the best EVER at shooting, with his first display of skill in training causing everybody's mouths to hang open and his instructors to explaim "Holy shit!" because they've never seen anyone that good, and Owen is an awesome accountant, top of his class or whatever, according to a summary of his resume we helpfully get from Julie when he's recruited, and Owen speaks Portuguese AND like six other languages (because OF COURSE merely having family from some background some generations back makes it likely that a kid is going to be able to speak those languages fluently *eyeroll*). But, honestly, this was all SO transparently Gary-Stu that it didn't even bother me per se, because it felt so childish and kind of awww, yes, when I was 13 I also had a self-insert who was the best at all kinds of things and the most powerful Earth Mage and got to marry my favorite character in LotR, points for not naming your protagonist after yourself, at least, Larry Correia.
One thing I will give this book unironically and uncondescendingly is the opening line, which is genuinely quite fun: "On one otherwise normal Tuesday evening I had the chance to live the American dream. I was able to throw my incompetent jackass of a boss from a fourteenth-story window." Events expand from there, with Owen being recruited by Monster Hunter International (MHI), a private enterprise that hunts monsters for bounty (courtesy of a PUFF fund established by Teddy Roosevelt, because of course; I kind of want to read a period story focusing on TR, tbh), dodging government bureaucracy and federal monster-hunting goons who are unscrupulous and not very good at the monster hunting. My favorite part was the training montage-y one at the start, although some of the action scenes are fun, too, and I really liked the reveal with Darne, where they think they're racing to save the French Hunters who've barricaded themselves from the vampires who've overrun their ship only to get to them and find that they've also been turned, and they walked right into an ambush.
What didn't work for me at all was the more epic part of the story, with the Cursed One and the artefact and stopping time and Owen's visions and the Tattooed Man/Guardian and a lot of related crap. It read like something Correia was making up as he went along and then had to figure out how to tie off, because all the "but actually, it was X all along!" type reveals and reversals make very little sense, and are delayed by a lot of tedious "I can't tell you because of reasons" nonsense, and even if they have been hammered to fit, the pacing and theme and, like, all those literary mechanics that make a story go and hang together are in disarray around those elements -- there is no coherent arc, just stuff that happens to let Owen shoot stuff and beat up stuff and be noble at Julie the love interest. I did like that at least in the end it turned out he WASN'T actually more special than the other average "one born every 500 years" guy, and that his victory was realizing he could not/should not use the Artefact, rather than being the sole person able to use it. Which is not a very tall bar to clear, but I was grateful for it at that point. (And the part where Owen does use the artefact to reverse the deaths of everyone who just died? I kept thinking of Jingo and the Dis-Organizer's alternate timeline, and this was not a comparison that favored this book.) And there's so much that's just... thrown at the wall, like Owen becoming a Newbie team leader around the middle of the book, even though he has very little experience, and then at the end being invited to join Harbinger's elite MHI team #1, which is what I'd been expecting from the start. So... what about the other members of Owen's team, then? Do they come along too? Do we just not care anymore? I assume Owen was only leading them for prophecy reasons, but still...
Oh, and I could see that the prophecy was going to turn out to be about Owen from some fairly early point on, with how much his father being a decorated warrior kept being stressed, and some of the other things were a bit of a stretch, but the part about being named after a weapon of his fathers was nicely played. And speaking of things I guessed, I also figured out that Harbinger was something supernatural *and* Raymond Shackleford II, the missing portrait, though not specifically what he was.
I should talk about Julie the love interest, because as much as the book has an actual coherent arc, winning Julie is it. Owen starts out as the best at everything and ends there, he doesn't actually gain any arcane powers, though he flirts with them for a bit over the course of the novel, and it's not even that he finds himself a place to belong in MHI, because he started referring to himself as a monster hunter from about 10-15% in, as soon as he arrived at the compound. So, really, the only thing that really CHANGES for him over the course of the book is that he starts out with a crush on Julie, who has a boyfriend she loves, and as the chapters wear on, it turns out the boyfriend is a smug insecure jerk, then that he's a smug insecure jerk who is also a coward and would leave a comrade to die, then he gets himself conveniently kidnapped for sacrifice and rescued nobly by Owen, dumped by Julie, who has meanwhile realized Owen is the one she loves, and then conveniently takes himself out of the picture entirely. So, like, "guy wins girl" seems to be the only actual arc of this thing, which I find faintly amusing. But the whole thing with Julie is just annoyingly done, because as much as she's presented as an awesome comrade-at-arms and someone with position of power over Owen (she's got seniority and is the granddaughter of the boss), she is still very much a prize the narrative awards him. Which, big dumb movie, yes, what do you expect, but meh.
The worldbuilding is mostly there to give the good guys monsters to shoot at, but there are some bits I found genuinely amusing and/or original, like the redneck Elves (which so disappoint Trip, who's a fantasy fan) and the Orc tribesmen, who are misunderstood by others but proteted by MHI, which was unexpected and therefore pretty cute, despite the broad comic relief.
A couple of other fun quotes:
"My grandfather formed a group of concerned citizens, best could be described as an angry mob"
"I did not know what a Spig 9 was, but if it was in fact a gun that she needed help to even move, I was very excited."
Mordechai: "Ooh. Tough talk for alive person. Haunting is much hard work. Kids today not work hard enough to do such things."
Harbinger: "I would take this crew against the gates of hell themselves if God would give us the contract."
So, my verdict: Not nearly as bad as I thought it might be, but not actually my thing. I could see reading on in the series if the books were a bit shorter, and maybe the subsequent one are better? I believe this one was self-published, so maybe the addition of an editor helped with the overly extensive gun porn and Gary-Stu-ness?
Currently reading: Jo Walton, The Just City (August's Tor.com book club book), and it's going pretty quick, even though it's not my sort of genre, really.