Reading roundup, etc.
65. Lindsay Buroker, Emperor's Edge -- this title, which I'd never heard of before, came up in a comment exchange with et_tu_lj about heist books (we were bonding over the fun of Locke Lamora and similar), and when I googled it and saw the first book was a Kindle freebie, I decided to check it out. It was cute, in a sort of sitcom-y way, but also drove home for me the way that a successful heist book for me relies on grandness and sleight-of-hand on the author's part; like, certain things about the POV that would've normally been positives for me in a different book actually worked against the heistness in this case, because I didn't feel like there was enough FORWARD MOMENTUM! / refuge in audacity zaniness to drive the plot.
I liked Amaranthe well enough, but she worked for me better as a diligent cop than as a heist-pulling mastermind. Her neat-freakness (which seems to border on OCD) was an interesting trait; I liked the way it was consistently present but not the focus, just a quirk of hers. What I don't get from her is the sense of charisma that lets me believe in people like Miles Vorkosigan and Locke Lamora entraining all and sundry in their schemes. I've wondered for a long time whether this particular sort of FORWARD MOMENTUM-ing Guile Hero -- who is usually not even a character I love -- like, Miles grew on me after a while, but mostly through the fond exasperation of other characters in the Vorkosiverse whom I love a lot more (Aral and Cordelia, Gregor, Galeni, Ivan, Simon), and I still don't actually like Locke all that much, I just love the Locke-and-Jean dynamic, but all my caring about Locke as a person is because Jean cares about him, BUT who are protagonists whose stories are so much fun to read -- anyway, I've wondered for a long time whether this type of character is a gendered trope for me, because I can't think of any female examples who work for me. Like, Alianne in Tamora Pierce's Trickster books is an attempt at one, and I pretty much hated her -- least favorite Tortall protagonist by a looooong shot; I feel like Kami Glass in the Lynburns was trying for something similar (well, less heist, more plucky girl reporter, but with a similar "character juggling flaming torches by sheer force of personality" attempt, and that didn't work for me either. The one who came closest was, hilariously enough, Jen Cho, the gecko shifter from Dragon's Luck -- but she actually had the zany, hyperactive personality to go along with that sort of role, and Amaranthe... does not. Spoilers from here
I liked the team that she assembled around her OK, but it felt very sitcom-y -- the older guy in charge of book-learnin', the surly teenager who makes bad decisions, the good-looking rake type -- I enjoyed reading comic relief involving all of them, especially Maldynado (and his chickens), but they were all very stock character. Sicarius, of course, is in a different category, and is actually treated seriously. I do like him, because competence porn and a general kink for the deadly mysterious types, which apparently I haven't outgrown. But he is also rather too mysterious to feel like a full-blown character to me at this point, even with the revelations at the end. (And I'm not really feeling the pre-Amaranthe/Sicarius thing either, at this point.) And then there's Sespian, who... well, I suppose it's not very fair to judge him when he spends a lot of the scenes we see him in under the influence of dulling drugs, but still -- the naivete comes across quite strongly, the (presumed?) brilliance, not so much.
The worldbuildiung is odd; et_tu_lj described it as low-key, and I wasn't entirely sure what that meant before I read it, but that's actually a rather accurate description. It's a secondary world, so I defaulted to 'generic medieval fantasy setting' at first, but the technology is more Industrial Revolution than anything -- there are steam carriages and printing presses and firearms, and also things like business schools apparently. Actually more than anything, it made me sort of think of Ankh-Morpork -- not in the sense that the worldbuilding is equivalent to Pratchett's (it's obviously not, and it wouldn't even be a fair comparison, given that this is a first book in a series and Discworld is considerably broader than that) but in the blending of the blending of modern, industrial, and fantasy cliche. The thing is, that kind of setting works better for me in a satirical series than here. And actually the worldbuilding feels rather sketched-in, possibly in an intentionally minimalist fashion, but to me it read more like picking up a fanfic for a canon I'm not familiar with. I don't need setting or worldbuilding to be a focus, but I wanted to see more here, because it's not the paint-by-numbers Ye Olde Medieval Fantasy Land -- there are actually some interesting aspects I would've liked to have more background for, like how it came to be that the world of business is seen as the women's domain, what is behind this country's technological superiority over their neighbors, what the deal is with all the noble families having the "-crest" suffix in their surnames. I did like the brief bit of history we do get, with the decapitated religeous statues leading to the capital being affectionately called Stumps -- that was a great bit of worldbuilding, and I would have liked to see more like that.
I usually prioritize characters and worldbuilding over plot, but heist stories are different -- the plot really has to do the work. It didn't really work for me here, but thinking about it more, I think that's less because the plot is particularly out there, and more just the way the book is written. Like, I think ridiculous heist plots are probably inherently not-very-likely, right? They're convoluted and rely on split-second timing and the heist-master being able to predict everything or set up a Xanatos Gambit. So, really, they just work on a willing suspension of disbelief from the reader. Here, several times Amaranthe reflects that the plot is improbable, and I think that shakes the suspension of disbelief, even though in a different kind of plot, "oh man, what are we doing /o\" kind of reflection from the protagonists would probably appeal to me. Also, this is where the FORWARD MOMENTUM! (or lack thereof in this case) comes in; I guess in order for me to enjoy a heist plot, it has to just sort of... skate blithely through increasingly ridiculous stakes without giving the reader pause to reflect on how ridiculous things are. I would say that's a matter of both driving character and also writing style, and neither worked for me here. Which is not to say that the BOOK as a whole didn't work for me -- it just didn't work as a HEIST story.
There were a number of things that felt all-too-conveniently set up, such as Larocka overhearing Amaranthe and Sicarius's conversation about Sespian's parentage, and a couple of late reveals that I wasn't sure how I felt about. Like, while Lt Dunn was bringing Sespian information about his enemies in a matter of days, I kept thinking, "...but this is ridiculous", and then it turned out to be an actual plot point, and when Hollowcrest backed down without a fight, I thought that was rather silly, too, and then Sespian himself reflected that he probably hadn't really, and Hollowcrest turned up in a different part of town, apparently undeterred by Sespian dismissing him. But there was something off about the pacing of these things, because the reveals just didn't have much impact for me -- I'd neither been blithely carried past those points on the tide of the story so that the reveal came as a shock NOR had I felt like the twists were sufficiently well seeded for me to be confident they were coming when the characters did not, because a lot of other things DID very conveniently work out -- like the several times Amaranthe was conveniently left alone/unguarded and was able to make an escape. Or conversely, Amaranthe slipping up and calling magic "mental sciences" at the worst possible moment so she'd get captured again felt equally contrived and implausible, in the other direction. Basically, things went right and wrong for the protagonists when it was convenient for the author, but it all felt artificial and contrived, without either feeling realistic or narratively inevitable. Which, heist plots are hard! And I had some form of this complaint even in heist stories I thought very highly of (as heist stories), such as Locke Lamora, so it's not that I was disappointed, but still.
One thing I did like about the political situation was a sort of nod at complexity -- Hollowcrest makes the point that Sespian's vision of everybody getting along with a kinder, gentler Turgonia is unrealistic, and, to my pleasant surprise, Amaranthe actually acknowledges that he has a valid point and that Sespian is being naive and overly optimistic. Her problem with Hollowcrest is not that he's wrong about the politics, it's that he's betraying the emperor instead of reasoning with him. Usually in a fluffy little book you'd have everything black and white and the benevolent monarch would be right about everything and the evil vizier would be self-serving and wrong, rather than motivated by patriotism as he sees it and the realization that the young king's lovely sounding ideas would screw everything up.
The writing is a bit too... simplistic for me, but there were a couple of cute moments, like:
Sicarius, after he kills the man attacking Amaranth: "Any assassin who allows himself to be distracted by his work deserves a knife in the back. It's not professional."
Amaranthe: "I guess I'm lucky to have recruited a professional assassin."
Sicarius: "Yes."
Amaranthe: "Am I work?"
Sicarius: "You're a lot of work."
So, there you go. Characters, worldbuilding, and plot all had elements of the sort of thing I enjoy, but the book nailed none of those aspects for me, and I wasn't sure this particular set of characters, plot, and worldbuilding really fit together. (Are we back to my food analogies? I think we are... In this case, we're talking a salad which combines the ingredients that I usually enjoy in salads, but although cucumbers are usually my favorite, they don't go with the rest of the ingredients, and the hard-boiled egg is chopped too fine, and this dressing would've worked better on a different salad, or possibly needs more lemon juice, and I'm left feeling like the whole thing would've been better off assembled some other way, even though the salad itself is perfectly edible as it stands.) I did, however, enjoy it enough (and am in the mood for light fiction like this enough) that I'm keeping an eye out for the sequels.
66. Larry Correia, Monster Hunter Vendetta (book 2) -- I'd suspected (and also been told) that the subsequent books are better than the (self-published) book 1, and that proved to be true, at least in this case. We'e still not talking Great Works of Literature, but it does not pretend to be, and it was a fun book that (unlike the first one) actually kept my attention throughout, with less skimming and eyerolling.
Either the addition of a professional editor helped, or Correia has a better grasp on his strengths as a writer in this one, but I appreciated the reduction in Guns n' Ammo porn -- it's definitely still there, but toned down enough not to bore a layperson -- as well as the reduction in attention paid to some sort of Epic plot. Owen is still the Chosen One, and still has weird powers unlike anyone in the world, and is still being set up as a savior of mankind, but the scenes where those things come up are not just doing Gary-Stu hagiography -- there's either family interaction or banter or something else more interesting going on, so it was less of a turn-off for me here. And, unlike in the first book, the flashbacks were actually interesting, because they concerned (for the most part) characters we already knew and had some sort of feelings about, rather than a bunch of long-dead people. So while my initial reaction to Owen having visions again was the same as Harbinger's ("Not this shit again..." XD), I actually didn't mind them at all here, and even looked forward to them. And I do continue to like that for all his world-saving Gary-Stu-ness, Owen has some dorky qualities, too, from being awkward with girls to his allergies being triggered by Julie's flowers and Harbinger's smoking. Spoilers from here!
I also liked the villain much better -- Lord Machado and various mysterious ancient powers were BORING in book 1, but I actually thought the villain motivation was pretty good here, that Hood genuinely seemed to believe he was working to subjugate humanity for the greater good (not a super-original idea -- it reminded me, actually, that exactly the same thing had come up in the last Whyborne & Griffin book I read (is that a genuine Lovecraftian thing? since both series are drawing from the Cthulhu mythos, or just a case of convergent evolutions? -- but at least it was A motivation, which the first book seemed to lack). Anyway, I'd guessed Hood was involved from the very first mind-reading flashback -- since he was the only character at the scene who was not already part of the regular cast, so he had to be significant -- but it was still fun to see HOW he was involved, and I was surprised by the late reveal that both Julie's father and Myers had been aware of what he'd been doing, and protected his secrets for different reasons.
Another thing I was genuinely surprised by -- and then went, d'oh, of course! XD at myself -- was the reveal with Agent Franks. I mean, it's very clear in this book -- and has been highly likely from everything in book 1 -- that he is NOT human, but WHAT he is wasn't dropping for me until the "Agent Franks was made from spare parts" line, at which point I finally connected his name to the changing eye color and the trucker's arm. (Till then, I had been thinking he was something like a golem, with his fixation on carrying out a mission. Which, Frankenstein's monster is a sort of golem, I suppose, but anyway.) In general, I was surprised by how much I liked Franks in this -- the way he is still the same implacable and brutal asshole he was in book 1, but now that he's working with rather than against Owen for the most part, those same traits show up in a more admirable light. Franks (and Julie, fine) following Owen into the Elder Gods' dimension and him taking out the Dread Overlord was pretty damn cool, I admit. And although I am still not enthused about Correia's way of doing epilogues -- non-protagonist POV that sets up the conflict in the next book, presumably -- it was interesting to learn what is animating Franks' shell of body parts -- apparently a fallen angel? Anyway, I thought the Franks reveals were better set up than the ones around Earl being a werewolf in book 1.
Speaking of plot twists, one that didn't work for me particularly well was the MCB security detail assigned by Myers being there to ferret out the mole in his organization. As an idea, it's fairly neat -- I'm willing to believe that Myers is exactly the sort of cold "good of the many outweighs the good of the few" bastard who would feel comfortable orchestrating a scheme like that, but it hardly seems like the most reasonable/expedient way to go about it (like... given that it's only three people, why not just assume ALL of them are moles and treat them accordingly?) But even though I didn't believe this part of the plot, the multiple moles and hidden allegiances -- Torres, Jefferson Grant, Dawn the doppelganger (which made me think of the Witcher short story I recently read, also featuring one) -- made for an exciting book, so, whatever, I'll live with it.
Speaking of Jefferson Grant, that was another thing that pleasantly surprised me. When Owen fixated on him as the mole, I was annoyed, because I had expected him to be proven right, given the track record of book 1, but I was pleasantly surprised that Grant's intentions were pure even though he was a spy for the MCB. I actually quite liked his conversation with Owen where he talks about why he came back -- because he is not used to failure. It was also interesting the way he was talking about living a mundane life after being aware of the real world of monsters and how it was both similar and different to what Julie was telling Owen in book 1 -- neither of them could stand ignoring the truth they knew was out there, but Julie came back to monster-hunting because she was motivated by compassion and wanting to save people, and Grant because he was motivated by pride. Anyway, I liked that Grant was allowed to be competent here, which he had not been in book 1 (when he was competition for Julie's affecitons), and liked watching Owen and Grant work together despite mutual personal dislike. This was more nuance than I had expected on the basis of book 1, so, good.
It was good to meet Owen's family, and I liked his father, even though I'm a little "eh" on the implications that his behavior as a parent was OK because it was for the good of the world and he felt really bad about it. I mean, I suppose that could be just Owen's view, because his Daddy Issues are satisfied knowing that it was all due to his father preparing him for something greater and actually he is proud, but, whatever. Silly action flick, good enough. For a while there I was pretty convinced that all the random obstacles that came up when Owen's father tried to tell him the story meant that the father would die before he was able to tell it at all, but fortunately that proved not to be the case (fortunately both because I like Owen's father as a character, he's entertaining, and because that would've been beyond cliche). And Owen's father eyeing Harbinger suspiciously because they'd served together in Vietnam was pretty neat, too. The dynamic with David/Mosh was also fairly fun. I would've liked to see more of Holly and Trip, but what we did get was nice, the news that Holly is volunteering at the asylum, and her being Julie's maid of honor at the impromptu orc-officiated wedding "only instead of flowers, she had a .308 Vepr carbine." Oh, and I liked the brief cameos from Albert Lee, and the news that he's walking around with a sword-cane now. And I was sad at Sam's death.
The worldbuilding continues to be rather too video-game-y for my taste, but there were some fun moments. I was sure wee!Julie's shoggoth friend, Mr Trash Bags, would show up at some point, but didn't expect it to be quite so dramatic, and definitely wasn't expecting to get its POV, so that was neat. Hood's zombie bear and zombie elephant don't quite stand up to Dresden Files's Sue, but made for some fun (if gross) action moments. The thing with Melvin the troll (who is an internet troll) was pretty cute. But the running joke with the gangster gnomes didn't work for me and just seemed really unnecessary; I'd liked the trailer park Elves in book 1, but that was both a LOT shorter and had the advantage of subverting expectations bout Elves. The gnomes didn't feel like they were subverting anything (small belligerent creatures that will kick your ass are not a new idea, and were done better by Pratchett anyhow) and just felt in poor taste without being actually funny.
Some amusing quotes:
Owen explaining PUFF to the Mexican detective interrogating him:
"Teddy Roosevelt, uh... he was our president back in--"
"I know who Theodore Roosevelt was. I attended UCLA."
"Go Trojans," I said.
"You're thinking of the wrong school." He sighed and rubbed his temples with his fingers.
Owen, to Susan (a vampire): "You can't come into a home if you aren't invited. And this is currently my home."
Susan: "Owen, honey, don't lawyer up on me now."
"I wasn't sure if the government man or Susan had been more intimidating, but for totally different reasons. One because it representd a soulless entity with the power to suck the very blood from the innocent, and the other because it was a vampire." [Obviously saw that one coming, but it was still pretty funny.)
"Franks was on his fourth sandwich and apparently had a metabolism like a blast furnace."
"though the MCB weren't the kind of cops who read people their rights... Last rites, maybe."
The doppelganger's insult: "Go suckle your warm-blooded young, filthy mammal."
Mordechai, whose ghostly cameo I was actually pretty happy to see: "Werewolf can't turn you. Zombie can't turn you. Vampire can't turn you, if stupid enough to get bit by vampire too you are."
Also, I looked up Konrad Dippel (actually Johann Conrad Dippel, according to Wikipedia) and learned some stuff about him.
I'm now about a quarter into book 3, which is also being fairly entertaining. (Thanks again for the loan, bearshorty's dad! :)
67. Sarah Rees Brennan, Tell the Wind and Fire -- When I first heard about this book (a fantasy ~retelling of A Tale of Two Cities, or a riff on it, or... something to do with Two Cities, anyway), I was fairly baffled but slightly intrigued (despite post-Clockwork Whatever YA fantasy Sydney Carton trauma). When I started reading this book, I was baffled and skeptical. Now that I finished, I'm still fairly bemused, to be honest: it did manage to make me feel engaged, by the end, but through a layer of "WTF Dickens WHY", and I'm still not sure it needed to be an actual ToTC retelling or benefited from being one; that it needed to display its serial numbers in quite so gilded a fashion instead of quietly filing them off. There were maybe a couple of scenes at the end where the explicit connection paid off for me, because I knew what was coming and appreciated the riff, but I think those scenes would've worked on their own, too? And for the rest of it, I found the names distracting, and the changed relationships, and the more Dickens-flavored parts of the prose unnecessarily drawn out and melodramatic (because, Dickens). So I think it was a net negative for me on the whole, the Dickens thing (I say as a reader who dislikes Dickens, so, YMMV).
And overall, all that aside... it wasn't bad? SRB is good at writing complex family relationships, and that's what I appreciated here as in her other books, although the focus on those is less here than elsewhere. I did not love it like I loved Demon's Noun (and I don't think it's Dickens that's to blame for that entirely), but I also don't feel personally betrayed by it as I did by the Lynburns, so... it was OK?
SPOILERS for this book and Tale of Two Cities
So, OK, the names. Our protagonist is Lucie Manette, and she and her fragile and traumatized father are being looked after by friends of said father, who are ToTC's Miss Pross and Mr Lorry, except in this version they are married and have a young daughter (who ends up playing the role of the little seamstress in the finale, albeit with a happy ending); M(is)s Pross in this is named Penelope, and is a doctor, a colleague of Lucie's father. So far, so straightforward. The Sydney Carton character ends up being named Carwyn (which is a Welsh name with the "gwyn" root meaning 'white', interestingly enough) -- possibly because at this point Sydney is mostly a girl's name, or an octogenarian name, and not 'sexy' enough for one of the male leads? The Charles Darnay character gets named Ethan for some reason, although his father does get to be Charles. I wasn't sure if the Stryker surname was a derivation of Mr Stryver in ToTC, or just because it sounds like a good name for a powerful antagonist family, which it does. The character who is very clearly Madame Defarge is Lucie's Aunt Leila -- she is the one who says the "tell the wind and fire" line, and she even gets a brief but important physical confrontation with Penelope Pross at the end, which was a scene I didn't like much in ToTC and liked less here. I think that's all for the names correspondence (except that I'm guessing Bright Marie the celebrity wife/fashion icon is meant to be Marie Antoinette, especially as she's married to a guy named Anton Lewis, who is "the abbot of Light". But neither of them are really characters, just names).
The names, Lucie's name in particular, with its derivation from "light", actually leads into the worldbuilding, which I found probably the most interesting and also the most underserved part of the book. So there are Light magicians and Dark magicians, and the Light magicians need Dark magicians to siphon off the poison that builds up in their blood when they're doing magic, and Dark magicians are distrusted because of that, and families where Dark magic runs are segregated ("buried", which was a lovely coinage) in the Dark cities. And this is interesting! And the imagery of Light magic in glittering rings and shining blades, and Dark magic writhing along the bars of cages is really pretty. And there are doppelgangers, born of Dark magic in saving a person's life, an underclass even in the Dark city, hooded and collared. And this is all really interesting! But I felt like the shape of the book was too constrained by the plot of ToTC, and a lot of the interesting worldbuilding ended up being allegorical for the French Revolution rather than explored on its own terms or just not delved into very much, outside of the concept of doppelgangers. I did like the names, though, Lucie the Light magician and Leila (which means 'night' in Arabic) the Dark magician -- or at least I assume that's what SRB was going for, since Madame Defarge is canonically named Therese.
The plot, as I mentioned, is heavily constrained by ToTC, but with additional cross-linkages and complications due to those. Like, there's an actual and fundamental connection between Ethan and Carwyn, rather than the two of them just randomly resembling each other a lot -- that was a very nice touch. There's the relationship between Lucie and the Madame Defarge character, which I got really excited about at first, because Madame Defarge was the most interesting and memorable aspect of ToTC for me, but ultimately ended up being disappointing more than anything (more on which below). Carwyn and the Strykers have a connection to the death of Lucie's mother, which is what leads to Lucie's father's imprisonment here. Extraneous characters are trimmed off, and it ends up being a much smaller, more intertwined cast -- e.g. Ethan goes to the Dark city in order to rescue Mr Lorry, whom he suggested sending there to improve the lot of the denizens. There's also some plot stuff associated with just the worldbuilding, but honestly that stretched my credulity somewhat. For example, Lucie undoing Carwyn's collar so he could get something to eat never rang true to me -- while it is something I can see some character doing, Lucie seems so consumed by keeping herself and her father safe, a reckless act like this -- not for the sake of saving someone, like on the platform, interfering to stop the guards grabbing Ethan -- really did not feel sufficiently motivated for me, and just like something that was contrived because it was necessary for Carwyn to be uncollared and mistakeable for Ethan. I also had a hard time buying that, given the power of the Strykers, the guards would grab Ethan and be ready to execute him right on the platform, whatever their orders said. The other not so believable things are probably character rather than plot related, so I'll talk about them in that context. But I liked the revelation of Ethan cooperating with the resistance and wanting to make a difference in deed as well as word, which Lucie had not realized; that was a nice touch.
TtWaF's Lucie is obviously an improvement over Dickens's, who is a passive and saintly non-entity of a character. Which is not to say that this Lucie was someone I was particularly invested in, but I do think she raises some interesting issues. I understand from a meta perspective why SRB chose to tell the story from her point of view, but I did find that decision constraining, and I think I would've liked a less focused look for this book. Omniscient is one of the things I quite like Dickens for, and while SRB was obviously not aiming for the same scope, I did feel its lack. Unexpectedly, I rather liked Ethan, the Charles Darnay character, when I found ToTC!Charles pretty useless, too. Charles is well-intentioned but naive, and Ethan is too, but it felt more believable in a teenager born with a silver spoon in his mouth than in an actual grown man. I could also more readily believe his self-sacrificing impulse when he was reeling not only from Lucie lashing out at him, in the wake of Mr Lorry's disappearance, but also from his father's death, for which he was blaming himself (not unjustly, because however sympathetic you are to the revolutionaries, maybe don't let them into your house when your family is the symbol of what their oppression; there's naively optimistic and then there's... that).
Well, if Lucie and !Darnay were improvements in this retelling, it's not unexpected that the characters I had actually liked best in ToTC were more disappointing here. Carwyn is no Sydney Carton, alas. The redemption-and-martyrdom arc is interesting in his context -- created as a byproduct of saving someone else's life, "buried" and dismissed, saved by Lucie's mother (as it turns out). Except I didn't believe his martyrdom; I didn't believe -- once it was revealed that Ethan *was* the one the guards were looking for -- that Carwyn would step forward to help out someone like Ethan under circumstances where making him disappear permanently would be the easiest thing. And I *really* didn't believe in Carwyn's love for Lucie. It's not any less believable than Sydney Carton's, and possibly more, since this Lucie has a personality actually, but the way Carwyn is in his interactions with her -- since they actually have some, unlike in ToTC, I wasn't feeling it at all. And the final sacrifice just felt over-the-top in this context -- but that's also partly because I had a problem with the revolution itself. Which I guess leads me to Aunt Leila (!Madame Defarge), who was my biggest disappointment. Not just because Madame Defarge was my favorite in the original (I hesitate to say "favorite character" because she feels more like a force of nature than a character), but also because I've really liked the way SRB has written harsh, unyielding women in her other books -- Aunt Lillian in the Lynburns, even Mae and Jamie's mother in the Demon's Noun, heck, even Olivia in that series, for all that she is not very sympathetic. But, like, the one thing I didn't think the original Madame Defarge needed was to be made into even more of a villain... :/ Because Madame Defarge is ruthless and implacable and bloodthirsty, and, of course, threatens those who our sympathies are meant to lie with -- but what are those people to her? But Aunt Leila manipulates her own flesh and blood, and sends a little girl -- the daughter of the people who took Lucie and her father in and sheltered them -- to the cages as a "contingency plan".
I liked the way Dickens showed the revolutionaries being just as brutal and full of hate as the nobility, and with better reason, the hatred and violence of the victims being rooted in their oppression; I guess I still like it here, but it feels more over the top -- maybe because it's not depicting real events the way ToTC is (reality is allowed to be more over-the-top than fiction :P), maybe because the modern-like setting of this book makes it more jarring (though, obviously, bloody revolutions happen in modern times, too), maybe because the personal connection between the Light city elite (the Strykers) and the Dark city revolutionaries (Aunt Leila), via both Lucie and Lucie's murdered mother, makes it feel more contrived... Anyway, for all that it's basically the same plot, it worked less well for me here, although I still appreciated the message. Also, the cages are even creepier/less excusable than the guillotine, although kind of a neat magical substitute for it.
Speaking of the cages, the moment when Lucie saw that the cages that had been torn down in the Dark city had merely been transplanted to the Light one, to hold the Light elite prisoners was when the Hunger Games connection clicked for me. (And no wonder Aunt Leila bugged me so; she is basically Coin all over again, and I was so annoyed with Coin. I have no love whatsoever for revolutionary leaders, but a little nuance would've been nice in both cases.) Apparently the connection is intentional (SRB talks about it in her Tumblr post). I do find Lucie an interesting take on the "face of the revolution" heroine. Unlike Katniss, who sort of obliviously finds herself the symbol and is not very good at playing that role, having Lucie aware of the power of her image as the Golden Thread in the Dark, having her use that power (however guilty she feels about the false front she presents) was an interesting departure. But the Hunger Games is a much more over-the-top dystopian world than Lucie's world feels like, so things that I would have accepted in THG-verse strained my credulity here, like the ball for the guards who are all going unarmed as a show of power and are all slaughtered by the revolutionaries. Apparently, Marie, the daughter of Penelope Pross and Jarvis Lorry, is also intentionally meant to echo Rue (it seems like this is the reason SRB made the family POC). While I approve of the Rue character surviving (and the little seamstress character surviving, too), this part didn't work especially well for me -- I didn't believe the Moral Event horizon for Aunt Leila, as already mentioned, I didn't think having a random snippet from non-Lucie's POV before returning to Lucie again worked from a form perspective, and the scene had a lot less pathos for me than the scene in ToTC that it was adapting (which was one of the truly powerful scenes in the book for me).
Speaking of discourse (with works of literature and otherwise), I thought there were fewer Tumblr-style PSAs in this one than in the last Lynburn book, but they were still there and I'm still not a fan. The most jarring was the one on male gaze in media ("That was television: if you had a woman's body, you were expected to show it off." etc.) -- not saying it's not a problem, but it felt like such a jarring Authorial Soapbox moment to me, and I hate those, even in service of worthy causes. I thought the other moments of commentary were at least better integrated (e.g. the various 'consent' conflicts between Lucie and Carwyn, like, "Do you think it's funny to touch me without my permission, when you know I don't want you to? Does it make you feel good about yourself?"), and the one I actually liked -- the way Ethan's position of privilege, having not known anything else, and Lucie's position, of someone who's actually known the other side, who has conditional acceptance only and is very aware of it, manifested very differently when they were at the Light Council and in their arguments about what the right thing to do was. Oh, and I quite liked the quick moment where Lucie is 'privilegesplaining' doppelgangers to Carwyn and he responds with, "Please inform me on the subject of doppelgangers. They sound like such interesting yet widely misunderstood creatures." -- it's quick, it's a joke that Lucie gets in on once he calls her on it, and then they move on. Unlike the other instances, it felt natural and not belabored.
Speaking of Lucie and Carwyn, one thing I did like was that, contrary to my expectations, there was no love triangle stuff at all -- Lucie's love for Ethan never swerved towards Carwyn (or anyone), even when she was angry enough at him to tell him she never wanted to see him again; Lucie never for a moment considered that Ethan could be cheating on her with Nadiya, and instead of a stupid misunderstanding, the information that Nadiya and Ethan were closer than she'd known led her to realize that both of them were working with the revolutionaries; Lucie feels compassion for Carwyn, but no attraction; Lucie knows immediately and at all times when Carwyn is pretending to be Ethan and is not the least bit confused in her feelings when he's touching her as Ethan. So, that was nice. Too bad I had a really, really hard time believing that Jim and Mark Stryker did not realize that "Ethan" acting totally out of character meant that it was Carwyn -- when they KNOW that Carwyn exists and Mark at least has seen him. SRB/Lucie actually takes a moment to explain it in the text as them believing this was Ethan acting out in his grief for his father, combined with Stryker arrogance, but, nope, don't buy that.
Speaking of the Strykers, I like what SRB is going for there -- people who are awful institutionally but do care about each other, but this was undermined for me by Mark hitting Ethan, which seemed to come out of the blue and never happen again, and after that I just couldn't get a fix on Mark. Overall he just seemed to be a conglomeration of fairly random negative "men in power" tropes, rather than a coherent character. I did like Jim, Ethan's cousin, the way he's an oblivious and arrogant child of privilege, kind of a jerk, but not actually a bad guy, and his death at the party was fairly poignant. And I kind of liked that Lucie and her father have a conversation about him being a burden on her, and her not denying that but also not holding it against him -- this was another echo of the Hunger Games for me, actually -- but it also came at a weird moment, really late in the game, so it felt kind of like an afterthought.
The style of writing didn't work for me particularly well, but a couple of quotes nevertheless:
"Nobody seemed to have any more to eat in this just new world."
Leila: "Lucie, we need to talk. You need to listen to me."
Lucie: "that's not what 'We need to talk' should mean."
"Look what you accomplished at the clock tower. Think of how much you could do if you joined our cause properly. You have so much power as a symbol."
"It's unlucky that I'm a person too, isn't it?"
So, basically, I have a lot of complaints, apparently, about things that half-worked or almost-worked and didn't work for me, or things Dickens had done better, or just authorial choices I don't agree with. Which, when I look back at all of it, I guess this was a book that frustrated me more than it entertained me, but it did frustrate me in fairly interesting ways, which is not a bad thing in itself. But I do hope that at some point in the future SRB will again write a book that I actually LIKE if not love, another Demon's Lexicon or Team Human. That doesn't seem to be happening currently...
*
I don't think I've posted about this yet, but after Back to School Night, when I asked O's English teacher if, with his twelvth grade reading level, he should be reading more sophisticated books and Mr M said, "Absolutely", O picked up The Fellowship of the Ring again. He'd given it a shot after we'd finished watching some installment of PJ's Hobbit movies, but stalled out in the Shire, which frankly I don't blame him for, because the same thing had happened to me when I first picked up the book. But this time he went back from the beginning, and got to the more actiony parts, and has been reading pretty fast since then. He's actually about a third into The Two Towers right now, at the part where do I have to mark spoilers for LotR? Gandalf reappears, and he shares my skepticism about Gandalf the White. The original flavor Gandalf was his favorite character in the first book, followed by Strider (which I'm not surprised by; he looooves ranger types).
Some observations from his read-through, for posterity:
As I mentioned, Gandalf was his first favorite, and after Moria, he demanded that I tell him if Gandalf was really dead or came back. (I didn't tell him, but I think he kind of expected him back anyway.)
When he was almost done with book 1, but hadn't yet gotten to the last couple of chapters, he picked up the second one and was looking through the table of contents, and was like, "'Departure of Boromir'? Boromir is leaving?" And I yelled at him to put that book down right now and go finish Fellowship. XP (O was surprised that Boromir died so early because I'd told him that Boromir was my favorite character. But, yep, that's actually par for the course for my favorites :P)
When he first started Two Towers, he was like, "I've been reading for 40 pages and there are still no Frodo and Sam," and I explaind that the book was split up so that Frodo and Sam only showed up in the second half. And O was like, "Did he split them up to draw things out longer?" Good guess, but no XD
Not an observation about the book itself, but O is reading my old copies, the ones I got as presents from my grandparents when I was just a year or so older than he is now. They are the editions with the TERRIBLE 80s covers, this set. Because the covers are so awful, I'd wrapped the books in plain white paper, on which I wrote the title and the Ring inscription and some decorative swoosh things, so I never had to look at them. O asked me why I had covered up the books, and I told him it was the covers were awful, but he didn't particularly believe me. Anyway, this was done 25+ years ago, you understand, so the paper has gotten very brittle. I had wrapped clear plastic around the paper on all the books, but the plastic had come loose and gotten lost on The Two Towers, and the brittle paper cracked and startd flaking off (O is pretty rough on my paperbacks, but this is specifically my "lending out" set, not the nice boxed set with Tolkien's own drawings on the cover, so while they have sentimental value because of how long I've had them and the hand-drawn covers, I'm OK with a little abuse). So I took off the paper "jacket" to preserve it, and O saw the real cover for the first time: "Legolas" and "Gimli", and, like, physically recoiled XD "I don't think I want to read this anymore," he said. Told you it was this bad, kid! XD
*
More Buffy rewatch with the rodents:
"The Wish" -- L likes vamp!Willow and thinks her bustier thing looks cool. I found that I was pleased to see Anya (even though I didn't really care about her at this point the first time around, not until she started working in Giles's shop). I do like AU episodes, but it's one of those that's less interesting on rewatch, I found, because the most fun was seeing all the changes wrought about by Buffy not being there, and I already knew all that. Also, during the demonstration of the Master's factory machine thing, O said the same thing I was thinking -- an entire body for half a glass of blood? Not very efficient. XD
"Amends" -- Ugh, I remember this episode and being annoyed by it, and, sure enough, still don't like it. But what I mostly remembered was the Angel and Buffy/Angel angst, and there were actually other things in this episode that were fairly nice -- Faith coming to Christmas dinner after all, Giles opening the door and seeing Angel and returning with a crossbow (and "I am aware of that.") I did kind of like the furies-like spirits haunting Angel (or maybe I just liked seeing Jenny again; I miss Jenny), and one thing I could appreciate this time that I couldn't on first watch was the way Buffy's speech to Angel about making amends actually leads into Angel the show. Also, L remarked, correctly, that Joyce looks a lot like her friend Sam's mother. In fact, THAT must be who Sam's mother reminds me of XD
*
Anybody seen any good new character/fannish memes going around? If so, please point me that way. I really feel like doing one, but even on Tumblr they've been awfully sparse...
I liked Amaranthe well enough, but she worked for me better as a diligent cop than as a heist-pulling mastermind. Her neat-freakness (which seems to border on OCD) was an interesting trait; I liked the way it was consistently present but not the focus, just a quirk of hers. What I don't get from her is the sense of charisma that lets me believe in people like Miles Vorkosigan and Locke Lamora entraining all and sundry in their schemes. I've wondered for a long time whether this particular sort of FORWARD MOMENTUM-ing Guile Hero -- who is usually not even a character I love -- like, Miles grew on me after a while, but mostly through the fond exasperation of other characters in the Vorkosiverse whom I love a lot more (Aral and Cordelia, Gregor, Galeni, Ivan, Simon), and I still don't actually like Locke all that much, I just love the Locke-and-Jean dynamic, but all my caring about Locke as a person is because Jean cares about him, BUT who are protagonists whose stories are so much fun to read -- anyway, I've wondered for a long time whether this type of character is a gendered trope for me, because I can't think of any female examples who work for me. Like, Alianne in Tamora Pierce's Trickster books is an attempt at one, and I pretty much hated her -- least favorite Tortall protagonist by a looooong shot; I feel like Kami Glass in the Lynburns was trying for something similar (well, less heist, more plucky girl reporter, but with a similar "character juggling flaming torches by sheer force of personality" attempt, and that didn't work for me either. The one who came closest was, hilariously enough, Jen Cho, the gecko shifter from Dragon's Luck -- but she actually had the zany, hyperactive personality to go along with that sort of role, and Amaranthe... does not. Spoilers from here
I liked the team that she assembled around her OK, but it felt very sitcom-y -- the older guy in charge of book-learnin', the surly teenager who makes bad decisions, the good-looking rake type -- I enjoyed reading comic relief involving all of them, especially Maldynado (and his chickens), but they were all very stock character. Sicarius, of course, is in a different category, and is actually treated seriously. I do like him, because competence porn and a general kink for the deadly mysterious types, which apparently I haven't outgrown. But he is also rather too mysterious to feel like a full-blown character to me at this point, even with the revelations at the end. (And I'm not really feeling the pre-Amaranthe/Sicarius thing either, at this point.) And then there's Sespian, who... well, I suppose it's not very fair to judge him when he spends a lot of the scenes we see him in under the influence of dulling drugs, but still -- the naivete comes across quite strongly, the (presumed?) brilliance, not so much.
The worldbuildiung is odd; et_tu_lj described it as low-key, and I wasn't entirely sure what that meant before I read it, but that's actually a rather accurate description. It's a secondary world, so I defaulted to 'generic medieval fantasy setting' at first, but the technology is more Industrial Revolution than anything -- there are steam carriages and printing presses and firearms, and also things like business schools apparently. Actually more than anything, it made me sort of think of Ankh-Morpork -- not in the sense that the worldbuilding is equivalent to Pratchett's (it's obviously not, and it wouldn't even be a fair comparison, given that this is a first book in a series and Discworld is considerably broader than that) but in the blending of the blending of modern, industrial, and fantasy cliche. The thing is, that kind of setting works better for me in a satirical series than here. And actually the worldbuilding feels rather sketched-in, possibly in an intentionally minimalist fashion, but to me it read more like picking up a fanfic for a canon I'm not familiar with. I don't need setting or worldbuilding to be a focus, but I wanted to see more here, because it's not the paint-by-numbers Ye Olde Medieval Fantasy Land -- there are actually some interesting aspects I would've liked to have more background for, like how it came to be that the world of business is seen as the women's domain, what is behind this country's technological superiority over their neighbors, what the deal is with all the noble families having the "-crest" suffix in their surnames. I did like the brief bit of history we do get, with the decapitated religeous statues leading to the capital being affectionately called Stumps -- that was a great bit of worldbuilding, and I would have liked to see more like that.
I usually prioritize characters and worldbuilding over plot, but heist stories are different -- the plot really has to do the work. It didn't really work for me here, but thinking about it more, I think that's less because the plot is particularly out there, and more just the way the book is written. Like, I think ridiculous heist plots are probably inherently not-very-likely, right? They're convoluted and rely on split-second timing and the heist-master being able to predict everything or set up a Xanatos Gambit. So, really, they just work on a willing suspension of disbelief from the reader. Here, several times Amaranthe reflects that the plot is improbable, and I think that shakes the suspension of disbelief, even though in a different kind of plot, "oh man, what are we doing /o\" kind of reflection from the protagonists would probably appeal to me. Also, this is where the FORWARD MOMENTUM! (or lack thereof in this case) comes in; I guess in order for me to enjoy a heist plot, it has to just sort of... skate blithely through increasingly ridiculous stakes without giving the reader pause to reflect on how ridiculous things are. I would say that's a matter of both driving character and also writing style, and neither worked for me here. Which is not to say that the BOOK as a whole didn't work for me -- it just didn't work as a HEIST story.
There were a number of things that felt all-too-conveniently set up, such as Larocka overhearing Amaranthe and Sicarius's conversation about Sespian's parentage, and a couple of late reveals that I wasn't sure how I felt about. Like, while Lt Dunn was bringing Sespian information about his enemies in a matter of days, I kept thinking, "...but this is ridiculous", and then it turned out to be an actual plot point, and when Hollowcrest backed down without a fight, I thought that was rather silly, too, and then Sespian himself reflected that he probably hadn't really, and Hollowcrest turned up in a different part of town, apparently undeterred by Sespian dismissing him. But there was something off about the pacing of these things, because the reveals just didn't have much impact for me -- I'd neither been blithely carried past those points on the tide of the story so that the reveal came as a shock NOR had I felt like the twists were sufficiently well seeded for me to be confident they were coming when the characters did not, because a lot of other things DID very conveniently work out -- like the several times Amaranthe was conveniently left alone/unguarded and was able to make an escape. Or conversely, Amaranthe slipping up and calling magic "mental sciences" at the worst possible moment so she'd get captured again felt equally contrived and implausible, in the other direction. Basically, things went right and wrong for the protagonists when it was convenient for the author, but it all felt artificial and contrived, without either feeling realistic or narratively inevitable. Which, heist plots are hard! And I had some form of this complaint even in heist stories I thought very highly of (as heist stories), such as Locke Lamora, so it's not that I was disappointed, but still.
One thing I did like about the political situation was a sort of nod at complexity -- Hollowcrest makes the point that Sespian's vision of everybody getting along with a kinder, gentler Turgonia is unrealistic, and, to my pleasant surprise, Amaranthe actually acknowledges that he has a valid point and that Sespian is being naive and overly optimistic. Her problem with Hollowcrest is not that he's wrong about the politics, it's that he's betraying the emperor instead of reasoning with him. Usually in a fluffy little book you'd have everything black and white and the benevolent monarch would be right about everything and the evil vizier would be self-serving and wrong, rather than motivated by patriotism as he sees it and the realization that the young king's lovely sounding ideas would screw everything up.
The writing is a bit too... simplistic for me, but there were a couple of cute moments, like:
Sicarius, after he kills the man attacking Amaranth: "Any assassin who allows himself to be distracted by his work deserves a knife in the back. It's not professional."
Amaranthe: "I guess I'm lucky to have recruited a professional assassin."
Sicarius: "Yes."
Amaranthe: "Am I work?"
Sicarius: "You're a lot of work."
So, there you go. Characters, worldbuilding, and plot all had elements of the sort of thing I enjoy, but the book nailed none of those aspects for me, and I wasn't sure this particular set of characters, plot, and worldbuilding really fit together. (Are we back to my food analogies? I think we are... In this case, we're talking a salad which combines the ingredients that I usually enjoy in salads, but although cucumbers are usually my favorite, they don't go with the rest of the ingredients, and the hard-boiled egg is chopped too fine, and this dressing would've worked better on a different salad, or possibly needs more lemon juice, and I'm left feeling like the whole thing would've been better off assembled some other way, even though the salad itself is perfectly edible as it stands.) I did, however, enjoy it enough (and am in the mood for light fiction like this enough) that I'm keeping an eye out for the sequels.
66. Larry Correia, Monster Hunter Vendetta (book 2) -- I'd suspected (and also been told) that the subsequent books are better than the (self-published) book 1, and that proved to be true, at least in this case. We'e still not talking Great Works of Literature, but it does not pretend to be, and it was a fun book that (unlike the first one) actually kept my attention throughout, with less skimming and eyerolling.
Either the addition of a professional editor helped, or Correia has a better grasp on his strengths as a writer in this one, but I appreciated the reduction in Guns n' Ammo porn -- it's definitely still there, but toned down enough not to bore a layperson -- as well as the reduction in attention paid to some sort of Epic plot. Owen is still the Chosen One, and still has weird powers unlike anyone in the world, and is still being set up as a savior of mankind, but the scenes where those things come up are not just doing Gary-Stu hagiography -- there's either family interaction or banter or something else more interesting going on, so it was less of a turn-off for me here. And, unlike in the first book, the flashbacks were actually interesting, because they concerned (for the most part) characters we already knew and had some sort of feelings about, rather than a bunch of long-dead people. So while my initial reaction to Owen having visions again was the same as Harbinger's ("Not this shit again..." XD), I actually didn't mind them at all here, and even looked forward to them. And I do continue to like that for all his world-saving Gary-Stu-ness, Owen has some dorky qualities, too, from being awkward with girls to his allergies being triggered by Julie's flowers and Harbinger's smoking. Spoilers from here!
I also liked the villain much better -- Lord Machado and various mysterious ancient powers were BORING in book 1, but I actually thought the villain motivation was pretty good here, that Hood genuinely seemed to believe he was working to subjugate humanity for the greater good (not a super-original idea -- it reminded me, actually, that exactly the same thing had come up in the last Whyborne & Griffin book I read (is that a genuine Lovecraftian thing? since both series are drawing from the Cthulhu mythos, or just a case of convergent evolutions? -- but at least it was A motivation, which the first book seemed to lack). Anyway, I'd guessed Hood was involved from the very first mind-reading flashback -- since he was the only character at the scene who was not already part of the regular cast, so he had to be significant -- but it was still fun to see HOW he was involved, and I was surprised by the late reveal that both Julie's father and Myers had been aware of what he'd been doing, and protected his secrets for different reasons.
Another thing I was genuinely surprised by -- and then went, d'oh, of course! XD at myself -- was the reveal with Agent Franks. I mean, it's very clear in this book -- and has been highly likely from everything in book 1 -- that he is NOT human, but WHAT he is wasn't dropping for me until the "Agent Franks was made from spare parts" line, at which point I finally connected his name to the changing eye color and the trucker's arm. (Till then, I had been thinking he was something like a golem, with his fixation on carrying out a mission. Which, Frankenstein's monster is a sort of golem, I suppose, but anyway.) In general, I was surprised by how much I liked Franks in this -- the way he is still the same implacable and brutal asshole he was in book 1, but now that he's working with rather than against Owen for the most part, those same traits show up in a more admirable light. Franks (and Julie, fine) following Owen into the Elder Gods' dimension and him taking out the Dread Overlord was pretty damn cool, I admit. And although I am still not enthused about Correia's way of doing epilogues -- non-protagonist POV that sets up the conflict in the next book, presumably -- it was interesting to learn what is animating Franks' shell of body parts -- apparently a fallen angel? Anyway, I thought the Franks reveals were better set up than the ones around Earl being a werewolf in book 1.
Speaking of plot twists, one that didn't work for me particularly well was the MCB security detail assigned by Myers being there to ferret out the mole in his organization. As an idea, it's fairly neat -- I'm willing to believe that Myers is exactly the sort of cold "good of the many outweighs the good of the few" bastard who would feel comfortable orchestrating a scheme like that, but it hardly seems like the most reasonable/expedient way to go about it (like... given that it's only three people, why not just assume ALL of them are moles and treat them accordingly?) But even though I didn't believe this part of the plot, the multiple moles and hidden allegiances -- Torres, Jefferson Grant, Dawn the doppelganger (which made me think of the Witcher short story I recently read, also featuring one) -- made for an exciting book, so, whatever, I'll live with it.
Speaking of Jefferson Grant, that was another thing that pleasantly surprised me. When Owen fixated on him as the mole, I was annoyed, because I had expected him to be proven right, given the track record of book 1, but I was pleasantly surprised that Grant's intentions were pure even though he was a spy for the MCB. I actually quite liked his conversation with Owen where he talks about why he came back -- because he is not used to failure. It was also interesting the way he was talking about living a mundane life after being aware of the real world of monsters and how it was both similar and different to what Julie was telling Owen in book 1 -- neither of them could stand ignoring the truth they knew was out there, but Julie came back to monster-hunting because she was motivated by compassion and wanting to save people, and Grant because he was motivated by pride. Anyway, I liked that Grant was allowed to be competent here, which he had not been in book 1 (when he was competition for Julie's affecitons), and liked watching Owen and Grant work together despite mutual personal dislike. This was more nuance than I had expected on the basis of book 1, so, good.
It was good to meet Owen's family, and I liked his father, even though I'm a little "eh" on the implications that his behavior as a parent was OK because it was for the good of the world and he felt really bad about it. I mean, I suppose that could be just Owen's view, because his Daddy Issues are satisfied knowing that it was all due to his father preparing him for something greater and actually he is proud, but, whatever. Silly action flick, good enough. For a while there I was pretty convinced that all the random obstacles that came up when Owen's father tried to tell him the story meant that the father would die before he was able to tell it at all, but fortunately that proved not to be the case (fortunately both because I like Owen's father as a character, he's entertaining, and because that would've been beyond cliche). And Owen's father eyeing Harbinger suspiciously because they'd served together in Vietnam was pretty neat, too. The dynamic with David/Mosh was also fairly fun. I would've liked to see more of Holly and Trip, but what we did get was nice, the news that Holly is volunteering at the asylum, and her being Julie's maid of honor at the impromptu orc-officiated wedding "only instead of flowers, she had a .308 Vepr carbine." Oh, and I liked the brief cameos from Albert Lee, and the news that he's walking around with a sword-cane now. And I was sad at Sam's death.
The worldbuilding continues to be rather too video-game-y for my taste, but there were some fun moments. I was sure wee!Julie's shoggoth friend, Mr Trash Bags, would show up at some point, but didn't expect it to be quite so dramatic, and definitely wasn't expecting to get its POV, so that was neat. Hood's zombie bear and zombie elephant don't quite stand up to Dresden Files's Sue, but made for some fun (if gross) action moments. The thing with Melvin the troll (who is an internet troll) was pretty cute. But the running joke with the gangster gnomes didn't work for me and just seemed really unnecessary; I'd liked the trailer park Elves in book 1, but that was both a LOT shorter and had the advantage of subverting expectations bout Elves. The gnomes didn't feel like they were subverting anything (small belligerent creatures that will kick your ass are not a new idea, and were done better by Pratchett anyhow) and just felt in poor taste without being actually funny.
Some amusing quotes:
Owen explaining PUFF to the Mexican detective interrogating him:
"Teddy Roosevelt, uh... he was our president back in--"
"I know who Theodore Roosevelt was. I attended UCLA."
"Go Trojans," I said.
"You're thinking of the wrong school." He sighed and rubbed his temples with his fingers.
Owen, to Susan (a vampire): "You can't come into a home if you aren't invited. And this is currently my home."
Susan: "Owen, honey, don't lawyer up on me now."
"I wasn't sure if the government man or Susan had been more intimidating, but for totally different reasons. One because it representd a soulless entity with the power to suck the very blood from the innocent, and the other because it was a vampire." [Obviously saw that one coming, but it was still pretty funny.)
"Franks was on his fourth sandwich and apparently had a metabolism like a blast furnace."
"though the MCB weren't the kind of cops who read people their rights... Last rites, maybe."
The doppelganger's insult: "Go suckle your warm-blooded young, filthy mammal."
Mordechai, whose ghostly cameo I was actually pretty happy to see: "Werewolf can't turn you. Zombie can't turn you. Vampire can't turn you, if stupid enough to get bit by vampire too you are."
Also, I looked up Konrad Dippel (actually Johann Conrad Dippel, according to Wikipedia) and learned some stuff about him.
I'm now about a quarter into book 3, which is also being fairly entertaining. (Thanks again for the loan, bearshorty's dad! :)
67. Sarah Rees Brennan, Tell the Wind and Fire -- When I first heard about this book (a fantasy ~retelling of A Tale of Two Cities, or a riff on it, or... something to do with Two Cities, anyway), I was fairly baffled but slightly intrigued (despite post-Clockwork Whatever YA fantasy Sydney Carton trauma). When I started reading this book, I was baffled and skeptical. Now that I finished, I'm still fairly bemused, to be honest: it did manage to make me feel engaged, by the end, but through a layer of "WTF Dickens WHY", and I'm still not sure it needed to be an actual ToTC retelling or benefited from being one; that it needed to display its serial numbers in quite so gilded a fashion instead of quietly filing them off. There were maybe a couple of scenes at the end where the explicit connection paid off for me, because I knew what was coming and appreciated the riff, but I think those scenes would've worked on their own, too? And for the rest of it, I found the names distracting, and the changed relationships, and the more Dickens-flavored parts of the prose unnecessarily drawn out and melodramatic (because, Dickens). So I think it was a net negative for me on the whole, the Dickens thing (I say as a reader who dislikes Dickens, so, YMMV).
And overall, all that aside... it wasn't bad? SRB is good at writing complex family relationships, and that's what I appreciated here as in her other books, although the focus on those is less here than elsewhere. I did not love it like I loved Demon's Noun (and I don't think it's Dickens that's to blame for that entirely), but I also don't feel personally betrayed by it as I did by the Lynburns, so... it was OK?
SPOILERS for this book and Tale of Two Cities
So, OK, the names. Our protagonist is Lucie Manette, and she and her fragile and traumatized father are being looked after by friends of said father, who are ToTC's Miss Pross and Mr Lorry, except in this version they are married and have a young daughter (who ends up playing the role of the little seamstress in the finale, albeit with a happy ending); M(is)s Pross in this is named Penelope, and is a doctor, a colleague of Lucie's father. So far, so straightforward. The Sydney Carton character ends up being named Carwyn (which is a Welsh name with the "gwyn" root meaning 'white', interestingly enough) -- possibly because at this point Sydney is mostly a girl's name, or an octogenarian name, and not 'sexy' enough for one of the male leads? The Charles Darnay character gets named Ethan for some reason, although his father does get to be Charles. I wasn't sure if the Stryker surname was a derivation of Mr Stryver in ToTC, or just because it sounds like a good name for a powerful antagonist family, which it does. The character who is very clearly Madame Defarge is Lucie's Aunt Leila -- she is the one who says the "tell the wind and fire" line, and she even gets a brief but important physical confrontation with Penelope Pross at the end, which was a scene I didn't like much in ToTC and liked less here. I think that's all for the names correspondence (except that I'm guessing Bright Marie the celebrity wife/fashion icon is meant to be Marie Antoinette, especially as she's married to a guy named Anton Lewis, who is "the abbot of Light". But neither of them are really characters, just names).
The names, Lucie's name in particular, with its derivation from "light", actually leads into the worldbuilding, which I found probably the most interesting and also the most underserved part of the book. So there are Light magicians and Dark magicians, and the Light magicians need Dark magicians to siphon off the poison that builds up in their blood when they're doing magic, and Dark magicians are distrusted because of that, and families where Dark magic runs are segregated ("buried", which was a lovely coinage) in the Dark cities. And this is interesting! And the imagery of Light magic in glittering rings and shining blades, and Dark magic writhing along the bars of cages is really pretty. And there are doppelgangers, born of Dark magic in saving a person's life, an underclass even in the Dark city, hooded and collared. And this is all really interesting! But I felt like the shape of the book was too constrained by the plot of ToTC, and a lot of the interesting worldbuilding ended up being allegorical for the French Revolution rather than explored on its own terms or just not delved into very much, outside of the concept of doppelgangers. I did like the names, though, Lucie the Light magician and Leila (which means 'night' in Arabic) the Dark magician -- or at least I assume that's what SRB was going for, since Madame Defarge is canonically named Therese.
The plot, as I mentioned, is heavily constrained by ToTC, but with additional cross-linkages and complications due to those. Like, there's an actual and fundamental connection between Ethan and Carwyn, rather than the two of them just randomly resembling each other a lot -- that was a very nice touch. There's the relationship between Lucie and the Madame Defarge character, which I got really excited about at first, because Madame Defarge was the most interesting and memorable aspect of ToTC for me, but ultimately ended up being disappointing more than anything (more on which below). Carwyn and the Strykers have a connection to the death of Lucie's mother, which is what leads to Lucie's father's imprisonment here. Extraneous characters are trimmed off, and it ends up being a much smaller, more intertwined cast -- e.g. Ethan goes to the Dark city in order to rescue Mr Lorry, whom he suggested sending there to improve the lot of the denizens. There's also some plot stuff associated with just the worldbuilding, but honestly that stretched my credulity somewhat. For example, Lucie undoing Carwyn's collar so he could get something to eat never rang true to me -- while it is something I can see some character doing, Lucie seems so consumed by keeping herself and her father safe, a reckless act like this -- not for the sake of saving someone, like on the platform, interfering to stop the guards grabbing Ethan -- really did not feel sufficiently motivated for me, and just like something that was contrived because it was necessary for Carwyn to be uncollared and mistakeable for Ethan. I also had a hard time buying that, given the power of the Strykers, the guards would grab Ethan and be ready to execute him right on the platform, whatever their orders said. The other not so believable things are probably character rather than plot related, so I'll talk about them in that context. But I liked the revelation of Ethan cooperating with the resistance and wanting to make a difference in deed as well as word, which Lucie had not realized; that was a nice touch.
TtWaF's Lucie is obviously an improvement over Dickens's, who is a passive and saintly non-entity of a character. Which is not to say that this Lucie was someone I was particularly invested in, but I do think she raises some interesting issues. I understand from a meta perspective why SRB chose to tell the story from her point of view, but I did find that decision constraining, and I think I would've liked a less focused look for this book. Omniscient is one of the things I quite like Dickens for, and while SRB was obviously not aiming for the same scope, I did feel its lack. Unexpectedly, I rather liked Ethan, the Charles Darnay character, when I found ToTC!Charles pretty useless, too. Charles is well-intentioned but naive, and Ethan is too, but it felt more believable in a teenager born with a silver spoon in his mouth than in an actual grown man. I could also more readily believe his self-sacrificing impulse when he was reeling not only from Lucie lashing out at him, in the wake of Mr Lorry's disappearance, but also from his father's death, for which he was blaming himself (not unjustly, because however sympathetic you are to the revolutionaries, maybe don't let them into your house when your family is the symbol of what their oppression; there's naively optimistic and then there's... that).
Well, if Lucie and !Darnay were improvements in this retelling, it's not unexpected that the characters I had actually liked best in ToTC were more disappointing here. Carwyn is no Sydney Carton, alas. The redemption-and-martyrdom arc is interesting in his context -- created as a byproduct of saving someone else's life, "buried" and dismissed, saved by Lucie's mother (as it turns out). Except I didn't believe his martyrdom; I didn't believe -- once it was revealed that Ethan *was* the one the guards were looking for -- that Carwyn would step forward to help out someone like Ethan under circumstances where making him disappear permanently would be the easiest thing. And I *really* didn't believe in Carwyn's love for Lucie. It's not any less believable than Sydney Carton's, and possibly more, since this Lucie has a personality actually, but the way Carwyn is in his interactions with her -- since they actually have some, unlike in ToTC, I wasn't feeling it at all. And the final sacrifice just felt over-the-top in this context -- but that's also partly because I had a problem with the revolution itself. Which I guess leads me to Aunt Leila (!Madame Defarge), who was my biggest disappointment. Not just because Madame Defarge was my favorite in the original (I hesitate to say "favorite character" because she feels more like a force of nature than a character), but also because I've really liked the way SRB has written harsh, unyielding women in her other books -- Aunt Lillian in the Lynburns, even Mae and Jamie's mother in the Demon's Noun, heck, even Olivia in that series, for all that she is not very sympathetic. But, like, the one thing I didn't think the original Madame Defarge needed was to be made into even more of a villain... :/ Because Madame Defarge is ruthless and implacable and bloodthirsty, and, of course, threatens those who our sympathies are meant to lie with -- but what are those people to her? But Aunt Leila manipulates her own flesh and blood, and sends a little girl -- the daughter of the people who took Lucie and her father in and sheltered them -- to the cages as a "contingency plan".
I liked the way Dickens showed the revolutionaries being just as brutal and full of hate as the nobility, and with better reason, the hatred and violence of the victims being rooted in their oppression; I guess I still like it here, but it feels more over the top -- maybe because it's not depicting real events the way ToTC is (reality is allowed to be more over-the-top than fiction :P), maybe because the modern-like setting of this book makes it more jarring (though, obviously, bloody revolutions happen in modern times, too), maybe because the personal connection between the Light city elite (the Strykers) and the Dark city revolutionaries (Aunt Leila), via both Lucie and Lucie's murdered mother, makes it feel more contrived... Anyway, for all that it's basically the same plot, it worked less well for me here, although I still appreciated the message. Also, the cages are even creepier/less excusable than the guillotine, although kind of a neat magical substitute for it.
Speaking of the cages, the moment when Lucie saw that the cages that had been torn down in the Dark city had merely been transplanted to the Light one, to hold the Light elite prisoners was when the Hunger Games connection clicked for me. (And no wonder Aunt Leila bugged me so; she is basically Coin all over again, and I was so annoyed with Coin. I have no love whatsoever for revolutionary leaders, but a little nuance would've been nice in both cases.) Apparently the connection is intentional (SRB talks about it in her Tumblr post). I do find Lucie an interesting take on the "face of the revolution" heroine. Unlike Katniss, who sort of obliviously finds herself the symbol and is not very good at playing that role, having Lucie aware of the power of her image as the Golden Thread in the Dark, having her use that power (however guilty she feels about the false front she presents) was an interesting departure. But the Hunger Games is a much more over-the-top dystopian world than Lucie's world feels like, so things that I would have accepted in THG-verse strained my credulity here, like the ball for the guards who are all going unarmed as a show of power and are all slaughtered by the revolutionaries. Apparently, Marie, the daughter of Penelope Pross and Jarvis Lorry, is also intentionally meant to echo Rue (it seems like this is the reason SRB made the family POC). While I approve of the Rue character surviving (and the little seamstress character surviving, too), this part didn't work especially well for me -- I didn't believe the Moral Event horizon for Aunt Leila, as already mentioned, I didn't think having a random snippet from non-Lucie's POV before returning to Lucie again worked from a form perspective, and the scene had a lot less pathos for me than the scene in ToTC that it was adapting (which was one of the truly powerful scenes in the book for me).
Speaking of discourse (with works of literature and otherwise), I thought there were fewer Tumblr-style PSAs in this one than in the last Lynburn book, but they were still there and I'm still not a fan. The most jarring was the one on male gaze in media ("That was television: if you had a woman's body, you were expected to show it off." etc.) -- not saying it's not a problem, but it felt like such a jarring Authorial Soapbox moment to me, and I hate those, even in service of worthy causes. I thought the other moments of commentary were at least better integrated (e.g. the various 'consent' conflicts between Lucie and Carwyn, like, "Do you think it's funny to touch me without my permission, when you know I don't want you to? Does it make you feel good about yourself?"), and the one I actually liked -- the way Ethan's position of privilege, having not known anything else, and Lucie's position, of someone who's actually known the other side, who has conditional acceptance only and is very aware of it, manifested very differently when they were at the Light Council and in their arguments about what the right thing to do was. Oh, and I quite liked the quick moment where Lucie is 'privilegesplaining' doppelgangers to Carwyn and he responds with, "Please inform me on the subject of doppelgangers. They sound like such interesting yet widely misunderstood creatures." -- it's quick, it's a joke that Lucie gets in on once he calls her on it, and then they move on. Unlike the other instances, it felt natural and not belabored.
Speaking of Lucie and Carwyn, one thing I did like was that, contrary to my expectations, there was no love triangle stuff at all -- Lucie's love for Ethan never swerved towards Carwyn (or anyone), even when she was angry enough at him to tell him she never wanted to see him again; Lucie never for a moment considered that Ethan could be cheating on her with Nadiya, and instead of a stupid misunderstanding, the information that Nadiya and Ethan were closer than she'd known led her to realize that both of them were working with the revolutionaries; Lucie feels compassion for Carwyn, but no attraction; Lucie knows immediately and at all times when Carwyn is pretending to be Ethan and is not the least bit confused in her feelings when he's touching her as Ethan. So, that was nice. Too bad I had a really, really hard time believing that Jim and Mark Stryker did not realize that "Ethan" acting totally out of character meant that it was Carwyn -- when they KNOW that Carwyn exists and Mark at least has seen him. SRB/Lucie actually takes a moment to explain it in the text as them believing this was Ethan acting out in his grief for his father, combined with Stryker arrogance, but, nope, don't buy that.
Speaking of the Strykers, I like what SRB is going for there -- people who are awful institutionally but do care about each other, but this was undermined for me by Mark hitting Ethan, which seemed to come out of the blue and never happen again, and after that I just couldn't get a fix on Mark. Overall he just seemed to be a conglomeration of fairly random negative "men in power" tropes, rather than a coherent character. I did like Jim, Ethan's cousin, the way he's an oblivious and arrogant child of privilege, kind of a jerk, but not actually a bad guy, and his death at the party was fairly poignant. And I kind of liked that Lucie and her father have a conversation about him being a burden on her, and her not denying that but also not holding it against him -- this was another echo of the Hunger Games for me, actually -- but it also came at a weird moment, really late in the game, so it felt kind of like an afterthought.
The style of writing didn't work for me particularly well, but a couple of quotes nevertheless:
"Nobody seemed to have any more to eat in this just new world."
Leila: "Lucie, we need to talk. You need to listen to me."
Lucie: "that's not what 'We need to talk' should mean."
"Look what you accomplished at the clock tower. Think of how much you could do if you joined our cause properly. You have so much power as a symbol."
"It's unlucky that I'm a person too, isn't it?"
So, basically, I have a lot of complaints, apparently, about things that half-worked or almost-worked and didn't work for me, or things Dickens had done better, or just authorial choices I don't agree with. Which, when I look back at all of it, I guess this was a book that frustrated me more than it entertained me, but it did frustrate me in fairly interesting ways, which is not a bad thing in itself. But I do hope that at some point in the future SRB will again write a book that I actually LIKE if not love, another Demon's Lexicon or Team Human. That doesn't seem to be happening currently...
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I don't think I've posted about this yet, but after Back to School Night, when I asked O's English teacher if, with his twelvth grade reading level, he should be reading more sophisticated books and Mr M said, "Absolutely", O picked up The Fellowship of the Ring again. He'd given it a shot after we'd finished watching some installment of PJ's Hobbit movies, but stalled out in the Shire, which frankly I don't blame him for, because the same thing had happened to me when I first picked up the book. But this time he went back from the beginning, and got to the more actiony parts, and has been reading pretty fast since then. He's actually about a third into The Two Towers right now, at the part where do I have to mark spoilers for LotR? Gandalf reappears, and he shares my skepticism about Gandalf the White. The original flavor Gandalf was his favorite character in the first book, followed by Strider (which I'm not surprised by; he looooves ranger types).
Some observations from his read-through, for posterity:
As I mentioned, Gandalf was his first favorite, and after Moria, he demanded that I tell him if Gandalf was really dead or came back. (I didn't tell him, but I think he kind of expected him back anyway.)
When he was almost done with book 1, but hadn't yet gotten to the last couple of chapters, he picked up the second one and was looking through the table of contents, and was like, "'Departure of Boromir'? Boromir is leaving?" And I yelled at him to put that book down right now and go finish Fellowship. XP (O was surprised that Boromir died so early because I'd told him that Boromir was my favorite character. But, yep, that's actually par for the course for my favorites :P)
When he first started Two Towers, he was like, "I've been reading for 40 pages and there are still no Frodo and Sam," and I explaind that the book was split up so that Frodo and Sam only showed up in the second half. And O was like, "Did he split them up to draw things out longer?" Good guess, but no XD
Not an observation about the book itself, but O is reading my old copies, the ones I got as presents from my grandparents when I was just a year or so older than he is now. They are the editions with the TERRIBLE 80s covers, this set. Because the covers are so awful, I'd wrapped the books in plain white paper, on which I wrote the title and the Ring inscription and some decorative swoosh things, so I never had to look at them. O asked me why I had covered up the books, and I told him it was the covers were awful, but he didn't particularly believe me. Anyway, this was done 25+ years ago, you understand, so the paper has gotten very brittle. I had wrapped clear plastic around the paper on all the books, but the plastic had come loose and gotten lost on The Two Towers, and the brittle paper cracked and startd flaking off (O is pretty rough on my paperbacks, but this is specifically my "lending out" set, not the nice boxed set with Tolkien's own drawings on the cover, so while they have sentimental value because of how long I've had them and the hand-drawn covers, I'm OK with a little abuse). So I took off the paper "jacket" to preserve it, and O saw the real cover for the first time: "Legolas" and "Gimli", and, like, physically recoiled XD "I don't think I want to read this anymore," he said. Told you it was this bad, kid! XD
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More Buffy rewatch with the rodents:
"The Wish" -- L likes vamp!Willow and thinks her bustier thing looks cool. I found that I was pleased to see Anya (even though I didn't really care about her at this point the first time around, not until she started working in Giles's shop). I do like AU episodes, but it's one of those that's less interesting on rewatch, I found, because the most fun was seeing all the changes wrought about by Buffy not being there, and I already knew all that. Also, during the demonstration of the Master's factory machine thing, O said the same thing I was thinking -- an entire body for half a glass of blood? Not very efficient. XD
"Amends" -- Ugh, I remember this episode and being annoyed by it, and, sure enough, still don't like it. But what I mostly remembered was the Angel and Buffy/Angel angst, and there were actually other things in this episode that were fairly nice -- Faith coming to Christmas dinner after all, Giles opening the door and seeing Angel and returning with a crossbow (and "I am aware of that.") I did kind of like the furies-like spirits haunting Angel (or maybe I just liked seeing Jenny again; I miss Jenny), and one thing I could appreciate this time that I couldn't on first watch was the way Buffy's speech to Angel about making amends actually leads into Angel the show. Also, L remarked, correctly, that Joyce looks a lot like her friend Sam's mother. In fact, THAT must be who Sam's mother reminds me of XD
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Anybody seen any good new character/fannish memes going around? If so, please point me that way. I really feel like doing one, but even on Tumblr they've been awfully sparse...