Reading roundup and other fannishness
(crossposter still broken, ugh)
2. Everina Maxwell, Winter's Orbit -- part of a very fun sync read, although, exactly as I predicted, ikel89 mainlined the book in 24 hours (just as she'd done with the fic, only mostly during daytime) and did not stop to post about it, at least one sync read member got distracted by other fannishness along the way, but lunasariel and bearshorty (who is THE most reliable sync read buddy, heh) and I all finished at roughly the same time, and other people dipped in and out, which I think was a good format for a sync read of this book.
I really liked the fic ( reading roundup here -- I'd absolutely counted it as an original novel and had even nominated it for a Hugo back in the day), and I like its "real novel" incarnation as well, but since it was a semi-reread, I have less to say about it outside of the sync read comments. I'd loved the depth of the fic's worldbuilding, and it's expanded here in ways that mostly worked for me really well; the only thing I did not consider an unmitigated positive was the addition of galactics -- I like the idea of them, but the Auditor and his staff never actually gelled into anything interesting for me, and I wasn't able to tell how human or Other they were actually meant to be, which I found distracting. That seems like a setup for the sequel, though, so presumably we shall find out. I really enjoyed both main characters and pretty much all the secondaries in the fic, and continued to really like them here -- all the things I'd liked about them in the original were still here, plus some new ones, thanks to the expanded scenes -- no complaints along those lines at all. Plot had been the least interesting part of the fic to me, though I didn't think it was a negative -- just less strong than the other elements. I still feel that way about the novel. I feel like in trying to provide justification for the central "emergency arranged marriage" premise, which a fic could just handwave with Because Reasons, the novel just spent more time on trying to explain that setup, which doesn't actually hold up to any sort of logical justification, and I found the scaffolding distracting, because it didn't actually help, it just kept my attention on this weak part of the structure longer. But, well, that IS the premise of the story, and I understand why Because Reasons would not have worked for a published novel. Anyway, there was also a bunch of additional plot that I'm pretty sure wasn't in the fic, but it was still the least interesting part of the whole to me, so I'll probably forget it just as quickly as I forgot the fic's version. But nonwithstanding that, the whole package was a delight, and reminded me of both the Vorkosigan Saga and really fun fic, which is definitely a win.
Bonus: pretty art of Kiem and Jainan
3. Rhys Ford, Dim Sum Asylum -- aome read this book last year, and in her write-up I was intrigued by the combination of three things I really like in theory -- SFF police procedural, urban fantasy set in San Francisco, and urban fantasy with faeries, so I immediately expressed an interest, and aome obliged, giving me the book as New Year's gift. Sadly, I enjoyed it a lot less than I'd hoped to based on the combination of things in the blurb. (Possibly the lesson I should take away from this is not that these elements mean I'm more likely to like a book, but rather that I'm actually quite picky about them now that I've read enough examples to know what a really good version of the thing looks like.)
The San Francisco part did not add anything to the proceedings and I think actually subtracted from my enjoyment. I'm not familiar with the heart of Chinatown enough to say whether the picture it paints of alt-world Chinatown (there are fae and magic and stuff) is in any way accurate / plausible, but a lot of things about the city in general felt off enough to throw me out of the story, minor as they were -- BART in Downtown SF mentioned in a street fight (the trains go underground there, all you see is the stations), what I think was mixing up the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge if I'm reading a particular visual right, or being told that it's raining -- a thunderstorm -- at a time of year when it's not likely to be raining in SF, and thunderstorms do happen but are very rare (and also the storm just didn't feel like an SF storm -- WIND the is most noticeable thing here when it's storming). Also, there was this genuinely confusing to me thing where the narrator seemed to think parts of SF that are not downtown were the suburbs, which I actually could see a downtown dweller believing, but then he described actual suburbs, but by that point I was just pretty sure the author had no idea what she was talking about with SF, beyond having used Google Maps to see what streets connected to which or something. None of these are dealbreakers or even major goofs, right, but they're also not hard to get right if you're going to write a book set in a specific city, so they annoyed me.
The faeries are definitely a different take than I'd been expecting, and not something I've encountered in urban fantasy before, but I don't think I particularly care for this take. They seem to be people with insect-like characteristics -- wings, and something weird about the eyes -- and to belong to different insect-derived orders, which was rather odd. More significantly to me, other than a couple of physical differences and some different rituals, I did not get any good sense of the fae being different from humans -- they seemed to just be humans with wings, for the most part, which, tbh, is a pretty boring take on faeries. There's some background worldbuilding that's significant -- all the stuff about "splices" and regulations about them -- but it wasn't presented in a way that intrigued me or made me feel like the world was fleshed out at all.
The police procedural was also kind of lacking. I mean, I don't expect every urban fantasy cop to win me over like Peter Grant and Nightingale, but this seemed very paint-by-numbers noir -- our protagonist is an outcast (except he's also the best guy on the force), his mother was a cop who died defending the city or something, he lost his husband and daughters in some (anti-fey? this part was never clear to me) riots -- it just felt like a big bundle of cliches with nothing really interesting about him as a character. I think the only distinct character detail I learned, and that only a few pages from the end, was that he was lactose intolerant -- everything else was just... cop cliche with no sense of individuality. He's a detective (I guess?), but the action mostly seemed to involve chasing down things and getting (or not getting) into fistfights, and actually there was something about the pacing of the action scenes that made them not work for me at all -- they felt like they were dragging on and loaded down with unnecessary infodumps and description, so I just ended up skimming them after a while. It was after I learned to skim the action scenes that the book went faster, because there were a LOT of action scenes, and they'd been hard for me to get through otherwise.
In general the pacing was pretty bad. It was a problem for me both on the macro scale and the micro scale. On the macro scale, well, this is something like a thriller, but there's a sort of mystery-style reveal at the end about who is behind the abductions and murders, and the Goodreads reviews I looked through when I was stuck in the early part of the book and wondering if it was likely to get better, promised some kind of great plot twists. Well, SPOILERS there are some twists, but in addition to them being twists about the whodunit I don't particularly like -- it turns out that actually the whole thing was about luring the protagonist and/or his family into a trap, not just a case he's investigating as a cop, which is the thing I like about police procedurals -- but the reveals aren't even set up properly. Literally in the last 10% of the book, the protagonist learns the who the antagonist is and how he's connected to him personally, and then learns a shocking personal fact about a grandmother he'd never before met face to face -- that's just not how a suspenseful plot works. And on the micro level, the prose is full of sentences which go like this bit, which occurs in the middle of a fight with a giant animated stone statue at the novel's action climax: "Something snapped inside the dragonfly's body [...], but whatever it was, the spell the librarian and I had cobbled together under a bank of florescent lights on a stack of tea-stained pages did the trick" -- and, like, what is all that detail doing there? Nobody thinks like that! Even aside from messing with the pacing of the scenes, especially action scenes, this generally messed with my ability to read in a first-person POV (something I normally really enjoy), because the POV made no damn sense.
I had other issues with the sentence-level prose, too -- I don't know if Ford is just not a very skilled writer or if she was trying to do something fancy with her language and it backfired, but every once in a while I'd hit a sentence that I just had to stare at and be like, OK, that's not necessarily full-on WRONG, but it's jarring and a weird way to phrase something, and if you're doing that on purpose, it's not having whatever positive effect you're going for, at least not on me, like, "hinting at the rounded plumps of her breasts" or "Chinatown stayed in the shadows, a rollick of murmured voices" -- it's intelligible, but jarring, and not in a good way.
But, OK, this is, after all, paranormal romance, so I might be willing to cut it some slack in the worldbuilding and plot department (although, actually, the only paranormal romances I've actually enjoyed were once where I also enjoyed at least one of those two things to some degree). But it did not work for me as a romance either, any more than it worked for me as an urban fantasy or a police procedural. The protagonist is a collection of cliches with no personality I could discern, as I've already said, but the love interest is even more bland -- he is an ex-special ops soldier with a Tragic Past, he's big, and the protagonist thinks he's hot -- I think that's the entirety of his character. They have all the chemistry of two action figures being smashed together with a "Now kiss", nothing about their relationship felt at all realistic, and the book certainly wasn't worth reading for the porn (of which there is actually very little, as many readers on Goodreads complained).
Apparently this was expanded from a short story, and I wonder if I might not have liked the short form more. This certainly felt too padded to me, and not with anything worthwhile. But mostly it just means I will plan to stay away from this author, because I don't think she's a good match for me, simply.
4. K.D. Edwards, The Hanged Man (The Tarot Sequence, book 2) -- going back to read over egelantier's writeup, I see that I had this book on hold in December 2019, and it got to actually be my turn in mid-March, BUT THEN Covid happened and the libraries shut down for like six months, and then I had to figure out curbside pickup (because this is a book the library only got in hard copy), and anyway, I'm finally done reading it. It was a lot of fun!
I don't have a ton of distinct things to say about it, because what I like most about this series is the bond between Rune and Brand, and the kind of insane worldbuilding, and both of those things just continued to be my favorite things in this book as in the first. Rune hassling Brand about the swear jar when they're hanging out with kids, his inability to tie a tie, and teasing him about the phone autocorrecting all his fucks, the way the two of them are each other's Most Important Person clearly throughout, all that was very satisfying. SPOILERS I even enjoyed the sort-of fight they have when they have to visit the brothel, and Addam having to be the one to separate them and explain things to them (which was a scene very reminiscent of Vlad telling Morrolan and Aliera why they're always bickering in Issola). Speaking of Addam, I still don't find him to be all that interesting as a character, or his relationship with Rune (though I'm all for Rune having an understanding and caring boyfriend with a lot of resources and ready cash, because it makes things go smoothly and also Rune deserves to be happy), but the fact that he understands and values the Rune & Brand bond and gets along well with Brand makes it easy for me to not mind him. Although the whole thing about his supposedly-Russian accent and it being sexy continues to be completely ridiculous and makes me roll my eyes every time. Anyway, back to Rune and Brand -- I was very glad that Rune came clean with Brand about all his secrets (or at least all the secrets we as readers are privy to), and and his willingness to move to the US and be a barista if Brand wanted to get to know his birth family was adorable.
I was afraid, at the end of the first book, that Lord Tower was being set up to be revealed as a Big Bad, and while I still definitely don't trust him fully (nor should anyone), he came across more along the lines of a ruthless protector who definitely has his own secrets, and not someone who was cynically manipulating Rune / going to betray him in this one, which I really appreciated. I also liked Tower making a point, to Rune, that there are things he is unprepared to barge into on his own, not because he's not as good or as strong or as clever as the older Arcana, but just because there are things he doesn't know, things no-one has told him because until now they've not been allowed to tell him -- I think that was a really nice distinction, which I think does usually get ignored in Chosen One sort of narratives, and also was just good for Rune to hear. Tower using semicolons in his texts was a delightful detail to learn. Oh, and Mayan and Brand both "accidentally" bringing along some plastique and watching the two of them operate together was also neat.
Of the new characters introduced in this book, I enjoyed Corinne, the aging Companion who lost her scion, and the dynamic she had with Brand -- it's nice to have a sort of mentor figure around for him, but also to have the clash between their different priorities, since Corinne is motivated by protecting the children and Brand's key priority is always Rune. When she had her heart attack, I was convinced she was going to die so that Rune would have a reason to be fully responsible for the kids, so I was very happy about the solution that was not that. I really liked Anna, the very serious 13-year-old, and her disdain at Rune and Brand's lack of babysitting skills, and am intrigued by her heavy-hitter powers. I find the other kids -- Max and Quinn included -- too cutesy to feel invested in them, but her I like. Really like, actually -- at this point she's my third favorite character after Brand and Lord Tower, which I definitely had not expected.
I was not expecting Rune to ascend to the Sun Throne in book 2, but that was a cool scene and I enjoyed meeting the other Arcana and watching Rune play on a larger board (it felt reminiscent of something like the Harry Dresden books in the early teens, which is why I was pretty surprised at how early in the sequence it happened). Individually, only Lady Death seems interesting so far, and I liked her sort of siblingy relationship evolving with Rune, but it was neat to learn that Lady Moon married her Companion. The Hanged Man was suitably monstrous, if not particularly interesting as a character (as opposed to a threat). Oh, and speaking of Rune coming into his own, all of the scenes where he was behaving like an Arcana (OK, which is a lot like behaving like an asshole), like the one at the Green Docks, were pretty satisfying to watch.
I found the action climax to be a big weakness of book 1 (it felt like an interminable video game and I ended up being kind of meh on a book I had started out loving), and that was fortunately not the case here. I still feel like plot is not a strong point of these books -- there is a lot of cheating with ghost scenes and seers to set up stuff -- but also plot is not what I read them for, so it's OK. There were several tense sequences that kept me wanting to read faster, some cool twists, and I liked that there was some time at the end for a proper denouement (with arthritic dinosaur acquisition, LOL). I was not expecting Addam to end up with a permanent injury, given the level of what Atlanteans can heal, but it was actually set up quite neatly with the healing spell.
One thing that's becoming clear to me with this book which I had not expected based on book 1 is that this really seems to be a found family story rather than an action story or romance or anything like that. Well, found family and Rune's healing and coming into his own, but I did expect that latter part. But apparently Rune's household is going to expand, like, geometric sequence style, as he picks up wards and heirs and various random kids that are his responsibility now. Oh, and a dinosaur XD I mean, that's not what I thought I was getting into, but I like found family stories, and I am amused by the idea of Rune and Brand (and Addam, OK) needing to parent a bunch of teenagers and now also younger children. I'm looking forward to how they end up managing this whole lot in the next book (unless the older kids will all be away at school at that point).
Quotes:
Tower (to Brand): May I expect better of you as well? We are in a serious moment, Brandon.
Brand: Of course it's serious. You're not in pajamas, and you put on some fucking shoes.
Rune: "Oh gods," I whispered, and smothered my face in my hands. "I need a drink too. Brand? Please?"
Tower: It's all right, Rune. It couldn't have been easy for Brand. Mayan doesn't like to wait outside either. But, Brand, perhaps I should point out that the threat has not ended, which means I require you to do your fucking job.
5. K.D. Edwards, The Sunken Mall (The Tarot Sequence, book 1.5) -- this was a freebie novella Edwards put out, and it was a lot of fun. There was some very flimsy plot about buying presents for Max, and some actually interesting worldbuilding with elementals (although that's totally not what I'm reading the books for). What I'm absolutely here for, though, is Brand and Rune's entire household giving him shit about day-to-day things, and this novella was basically 80% that, so I enjoyed it at least as much as the full-fledged novels. My favorite moments: spoilers, such as they are Rune's entire household spying on him via Brand-installed cam as he is getting ready for his date and dropping by "for no reason" to silently critique his wardrobe choices, Brand teaching Max street fighting techniques under fancy names like "The Beholder's Red Curtain" and "Finding the Flower's Seed" (gouging out eyes and kneeing in the nuts respectively), Rune and Brand bickering about hypothetical doggy bags from the fancy restaurant ("He's buying my love, not yours."), Rune pretending to Addam that he went for a run and finished his shopping ("It's as if you think Brandon and I don't talk"), Rune explaining a pre-cellphone world to the kiddies ("There was actually a time when I could have walked to the corner cafe by myself without Brand having a way to immediately tell me what a dumbass I was. Then pagers came along, which is sort of a way for Brand to let you know that you needed to get to a landline and call him because he wanted to tell you what a dumbass you were."), Rune earworming Brand in retaliation, Rune and Brand bickering over who fucked up ("Oh," I whispered. "Oh, you set it off. You broke the ward." "Are you going to let this go? Is this going to become a thing? "I will write it on your birthday cake."; "I winked! I winked before I did it!" "You twitched." "I looked at you with great deliberation and twitched?"), and Brand admiring a store's layout ("You can't walk in without being in swinging distance of a salesperson. Whoever created this fucking studied Sun Tzu."). I also really enjoyed the flashback to infant Rune and Brand agreeing Barney was terrible and Brand trying to scare him away from the TV set, Brand's approach to ensuring Rune's date is secure, Addam taking lessons in being a regular person by attempting to buy a bucket of chicken, and Brand throwing away Rune's favorite snacks in retaliation. And yes, that's basically the whole thing XD
On a more serious note, the psychological/emotional version of the los desmembrados, which makes Quinn talk (and later itself talks) in the voices of the last things said by people before they die, was really nicely chilling and well done. And like I said, the spirit society was neat, and I especially liked the idea that them forming this kind of a society was the result of their prior service to the Emperor: "We were also unified in our grief. That unity we'd felt in his service led to a sense of belonging. We had learned what it meant to be a group, and we feared losing it."
I do get the sense that I enjoy Ciaran less than I'm meant to -- like, I certainly don't dislike him, but I find him less entertaining (except in small doses) than a lot of readers seem to? So he was kind of wasted on me as an addition to the cast, but overall it was still a very fun ride.
Random note: The department store which had "started its life in Pripyat, the twon closest to the Chernobyl catastrophe" which is described as "Some of the original Soviet signage was still framed in the windows, including advertisements for Chanel No 5 and vegetable juices." My brain ran aground on the concept of Chanel No. 5 being available for sale in a store in Pripyat, before catching up to the fact that advertisements just weren't a thing in the USSR, period.
Quote:
"Paying attention to prophecy was like tossing real diamonds in the air mixed with shards of broken glass. The grab was rearely worth the injury."
I haven't been able to find a pub date for book 3 (The Hourglass Throne), although there are mentions of it coming out this year. But he wrote a bunch of holiday stories which I'm hoping he will collect in a single thing I can download and read.
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And the Friday Five book meme that was going around:
1) Have you read more books, or fewer books, this past year than usual?
Way fewer. And it looks like this trend is going to continue, although I am reading more now than a year ago. Really, it's just harder to find time to read without my commute, which used to be basically ~10-15 hrs of mostly-reading time a week. I've been trying to read before bed instead, but the result tends to be that I fall asleep...
2) What book are you reading now (or what book did you read most recently)?
I'm actively reading The Unspoken Name by A.K.Larkwood, which has kind of taken my focus away from the two things I was reading before that, which are Master of One by Jaida Jones and Dani Bennett and A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking by T.Kingfisher. I'm also less actively reading Gideon the Ninth and my first Elric novella.
3) What is the best book you read in the past few years?
The last book that seriously hijacked my brain was Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning, but that's been a few years ago now. Looks like the books I called out for the "best book you read" yearly memes in the last couple of years have been Silver in the Wood and Among Others.
4) Do you read more than one book at a time, or just one?
As you can see from my answer to the second question, I usually read more than one, though I might be reading in nested fashion -- i.e. there's probably one book that I'm reading most actively, and several that I can choose between to go back to and finish after I'm done with that one. But sometimes I also just alternate between books, e.g. a hard copy book I'll read at home and a Kindle book I'll read on my commute when I have a commute.
5) How big is your to-be-read pile (or list)?
I'm not doing TBR piles right now, because they usually come from the library, and the library is not really functional right now.
Non-meme-ly, I seem to be actually reading again? Like, it's definitely still not the pace of pre-Covid reading, for the reasons mentioned above, but I'm enjoying books and looking forward to books, and the thought of talking about books? At the moment it's The Unspoken Name, which I picked up as the Tor.com e-book freebie of the month, and was fully expecting to belong to the class of modern fantasy books that I think of as "bisexual mermaids are valid", which tend to really not work for me, but it's actually not at all that vibe and I'm really enjoying it so far (25% in) -- the characters are great, the worldbuilding feels like a fully-baked fantasy world, the writing is really lovely, and it's funny and thoughtful and just... good. I'm honestly impressed this is a first novel, just from what I've read so far. And I have two books on hold at the library, that I'm keeping an eye on: The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry by C.M.Waggoner (loose sequel to one of the most fun books I read last year) and A Desolation Called Peace (sequel to A Memory Called Empire which was one of the biggest disappointments of my 2019 reading, BUT which I found to be very interesting scab-picking, and so I'm curious to check out the sequel to see how it takes me, with suitably adjusted expectations). Perhaps the Stars got pushed to later in the year (from June 1 to September, I guess?), but there's also that to look forward to. So, like, I'm feeling optimistic about reading? Like, as an activity, not just specific individual books, though I can't really explain the difference. But it's nice, and I hope it lasts.
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In non-book media/fandom consumption, though:
I looked through AO3's options for She-Ra fanfiction and found them rather baffling, but it turns out that this fandom does songs, and some of them are pretty cool. My favorite that I've come across has been this one: Ghost
Also, some time ago Screen Junkies/Fandom Entertainment (the guys behind Honest Trailers) did a documentary on Galaxy Quest, called Never Surrender. I'd been meaning to watch it for a while, and then lost track, but some time last week YouTube's algorithm tossed a version of it in my path (it's copyrighted material, so it shouldn't be on YouTube, but apparently it was, for half a year, though now it's been taken down, because probably the same algorithm that made it show up for me also made the creators aware it was there. Anyway, once I was aware of it, it turned out that it is now included with Amazon Prime (Never Surrender), so I could've watched it anyway. I love Galaxy Quest a lot, despite not being a Star Trek fan and actually being fairly anti-Trek at the time I first watched GQ, but I knew pretty much nothing about its history and the people behind it, so this documentary was full of interesting information, cool tidbits, and lovely interviews with fans, actors, and other people behind the movie, so this was a very enjoyable 90 minutes.
2. Everina Maxwell, Winter's Orbit -- part of a very fun sync read, although, exactly as I predicted, ikel89 mainlined the book in 24 hours (just as she'd done with the fic, only mostly during daytime) and did not stop to post about it, at least one sync read member got distracted by other fannishness along the way, but lunasariel and bearshorty (who is THE most reliable sync read buddy, heh) and I all finished at roughly the same time, and other people dipped in and out, which I think was a good format for a sync read of this book.
I really liked the fic ( reading roundup here -- I'd absolutely counted it as an original novel and had even nominated it for a Hugo back in the day), and I like its "real novel" incarnation as well, but since it was a semi-reread, I have less to say about it outside of the sync read comments. I'd loved the depth of the fic's worldbuilding, and it's expanded here in ways that mostly worked for me really well; the only thing I did not consider an unmitigated positive was the addition of galactics -- I like the idea of them, but the Auditor and his staff never actually gelled into anything interesting for me, and I wasn't able to tell how human or Other they were actually meant to be, which I found distracting. That seems like a setup for the sequel, though, so presumably we shall find out. I really enjoyed both main characters and pretty much all the secondaries in the fic, and continued to really like them here -- all the things I'd liked about them in the original were still here, plus some new ones, thanks to the expanded scenes -- no complaints along those lines at all. Plot had been the least interesting part of the fic to me, though I didn't think it was a negative -- just less strong than the other elements. I still feel that way about the novel. I feel like in trying to provide justification for the central "emergency arranged marriage" premise, which a fic could just handwave with Because Reasons, the novel just spent more time on trying to explain that setup, which doesn't actually hold up to any sort of logical justification, and I found the scaffolding distracting, because it didn't actually help, it just kept my attention on this weak part of the structure longer. But, well, that IS the premise of the story, and I understand why Because Reasons would not have worked for a published novel. Anyway, there was also a bunch of additional plot that I'm pretty sure wasn't in the fic, but it was still the least interesting part of the whole to me, so I'll probably forget it just as quickly as I forgot the fic's version. But nonwithstanding that, the whole package was a delight, and reminded me of both the Vorkosigan Saga and really fun fic, which is definitely a win.
Bonus: pretty art of Kiem and Jainan
3. Rhys Ford, Dim Sum Asylum -- aome read this book last year, and in her write-up I was intrigued by the combination of three things I really like in theory -- SFF police procedural, urban fantasy set in San Francisco, and urban fantasy with faeries, so I immediately expressed an interest, and aome obliged, giving me the book as New Year's gift. Sadly, I enjoyed it a lot less than I'd hoped to based on the combination of things in the blurb. (Possibly the lesson I should take away from this is not that these elements mean I'm more likely to like a book, but rather that I'm actually quite picky about them now that I've read enough examples to know what a really good version of the thing looks like.)
The San Francisco part did not add anything to the proceedings and I think actually subtracted from my enjoyment. I'm not familiar with the heart of Chinatown enough to say whether the picture it paints of alt-world Chinatown (there are fae and magic and stuff) is in any way accurate / plausible, but a lot of things about the city in general felt off enough to throw me out of the story, minor as they were -- BART in Downtown SF mentioned in a street fight (the trains go underground there, all you see is the stations), what I think was mixing up the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge if I'm reading a particular visual right, or being told that it's raining -- a thunderstorm -- at a time of year when it's not likely to be raining in SF, and thunderstorms do happen but are very rare (and also the storm just didn't feel like an SF storm -- WIND the is most noticeable thing here when it's storming). Also, there was this genuinely confusing to me thing where the narrator seemed to think parts of SF that are not downtown were the suburbs, which I actually could see a downtown dweller believing, but then he described actual suburbs, but by that point I was just pretty sure the author had no idea what she was talking about with SF, beyond having used Google Maps to see what streets connected to which or something. None of these are dealbreakers or even major goofs, right, but they're also not hard to get right if you're going to write a book set in a specific city, so they annoyed me.
The faeries are definitely a different take than I'd been expecting, and not something I've encountered in urban fantasy before, but I don't think I particularly care for this take. They seem to be people with insect-like characteristics -- wings, and something weird about the eyes -- and to belong to different insect-derived orders, which was rather odd. More significantly to me, other than a couple of physical differences and some different rituals, I did not get any good sense of the fae being different from humans -- they seemed to just be humans with wings, for the most part, which, tbh, is a pretty boring take on faeries. There's some background worldbuilding that's significant -- all the stuff about "splices" and regulations about them -- but it wasn't presented in a way that intrigued me or made me feel like the world was fleshed out at all.
The police procedural was also kind of lacking. I mean, I don't expect every urban fantasy cop to win me over like Peter Grant and Nightingale, but this seemed very paint-by-numbers noir -- our protagonist is an outcast (except he's also the best guy on the force), his mother was a cop who died defending the city or something, he lost his husband and daughters in some (anti-fey? this part was never clear to me) riots -- it just felt like a big bundle of cliches with nothing really interesting about him as a character. I think the only distinct character detail I learned, and that only a few pages from the end, was that he was lactose intolerant -- everything else was just... cop cliche with no sense of individuality. He's a detective (I guess?), but the action mostly seemed to involve chasing down things and getting (or not getting) into fistfights, and actually there was something about the pacing of the action scenes that made them not work for me at all -- they felt like they were dragging on and loaded down with unnecessary infodumps and description, so I just ended up skimming them after a while. It was after I learned to skim the action scenes that the book went faster, because there were a LOT of action scenes, and they'd been hard for me to get through otherwise.
In general the pacing was pretty bad. It was a problem for me both on the macro scale and the micro scale. On the macro scale, well, this is something like a thriller, but there's a sort of mystery-style reveal at the end about who is behind the abductions and murders, and the Goodreads reviews I looked through when I was stuck in the early part of the book and wondering if it was likely to get better, promised some kind of great plot twists. Well, SPOILERS there are some twists, but in addition to them being twists about the whodunit I don't particularly like -- it turns out that actually the whole thing was about luring the protagonist and/or his family into a trap, not just a case he's investigating as a cop, which is the thing I like about police procedurals -- but the reveals aren't even set up properly. Literally in the last 10% of the book, the protagonist learns the who the antagonist is and how he's connected to him personally, and then learns a shocking personal fact about a grandmother he'd never before met face to face -- that's just not how a suspenseful plot works. And on the micro level, the prose is full of sentences which go like this bit, which occurs in the middle of a fight with a giant animated stone statue at the novel's action climax: "Something snapped inside the dragonfly's body [...], but whatever it was, the spell the librarian and I had cobbled together under a bank of florescent lights on a stack of tea-stained pages did the trick" -- and, like, what is all that detail doing there? Nobody thinks like that! Even aside from messing with the pacing of the scenes, especially action scenes, this generally messed with my ability to read in a first-person POV (something I normally really enjoy), because the POV made no damn sense.
I had other issues with the sentence-level prose, too -- I don't know if Ford is just not a very skilled writer or if she was trying to do something fancy with her language and it backfired, but every once in a while I'd hit a sentence that I just had to stare at and be like, OK, that's not necessarily full-on WRONG, but it's jarring and a weird way to phrase something, and if you're doing that on purpose, it's not having whatever positive effect you're going for, at least not on me, like, "hinting at the rounded plumps of her breasts" or "Chinatown stayed in the shadows, a rollick of murmured voices" -- it's intelligible, but jarring, and not in a good way.
But, OK, this is, after all, paranormal romance, so I might be willing to cut it some slack in the worldbuilding and plot department (although, actually, the only paranormal romances I've actually enjoyed were once where I also enjoyed at least one of those two things to some degree). But it did not work for me as a romance either, any more than it worked for me as an urban fantasy or a police procedural. The protagonist is a collection of cliches with no personality I could discern, as I've already said, but the love interest is even more bland -- he is an ex-special ops soldier with a Tragic Past, he's big, and the protagonist thinks he's hot -- I think that's the entirety of his character. They have all the chemistry of two action figures being smashed together with a "Now kiss", nothing about their relationship felt at all realistic, and the book certainly wasn't worth reading for the porn (of which there is actually very little, as many readers on Goodreads complained).
Apparently this was expanded from a short story, and I wonder if I might not have liked the short form more. This certainly felt too padded to me, and not with anything worthwhile. But mostly it just means I will plan to stay away from this author, because I don't think she's a good match for me, simply.
4. K.D. Edwards, The Hanged Man (The Tarot Sequence, book 2) -- going back to read over egelantier's writeup, I see that I had this book on hold in December 2019, and it got to actually be my turn in mid-March, BUT THEN Covid happened and the libraries shut down for like six months, and then I had to figure out curbside pickup (because this is a book the library only got in hard copy), and anyway, I'm finally done reading it. It was a lot of fun!
I don't have a ton of distinct things to say about it, because what I like most about this series is the bond between Rune and Brand, and the kind of insane worldbuilding, and both of those things just continued to be my favorite things in this book as in the first. Rune hassling Brand about the swear jar when they're hanging out with kids, his inability to tie a tie, and teasing him about the phone autocorrecting all his fucks, the way the two of them are each other's Most Important Person clearly throughout, all that was very satisfying. SPOILERS I even enjoyed the sort-of fight they have when they have to visit the brothel, and Addam having to be the one to separate them and explain things to them (which was a scene very reminiscent of Vlad telling Morrolan and Aliera why they're always bickering in Issola). Speaking of Addam, I still don't find him to be all that interesting as a character, or his relationship with Rune (though I'm all for Rune having an understanding and caring boyfriend with a lot of resources and ready cash, because it makes things go smoothly and also Rune deserves to be happy), but the fact that he understands and values the Rune & Brand bond and gets along well with Brand makes it easy for me to not mind him. Although the whole thing about his supposedly-Russian accent and it being sexy continues to be completely ridiculous and makes me roll my eyes every time. Anyway, back to Rune and Brand -- I was very glad that Rune came clean with Brand about all his secrets (or at least all the secrets we as readers are privy to), and and his willingness to move to the US and be a barista if Brand wanted to get to know his birth family was adorable.
I was afraid, at the end of the first book, that Lord Tower was being set up to be revealed as a Big Bad, and while I still definitely don't trust him fully (nor should anyone), he came across more along the lines of a ruthless protector who definitely has his own secrets, and not someone who was cynically manipulating Rune / going to betray him in this one, which I really appreciated. I also liked Tower making a point, to Rune, that there are things he is unprepared to barge into on his own, not because he's not as good or as strong or as clever as the older Arcana, but just because there are things he doesn't know, things no-one has told him because until now they've not been allowed to tell him -- I think that was a really nice distinction, which I think does usually get ignored in Chosen One sort of narratives, and also was just good for Rune to hear. Tower using semicolons in his texts was a delightful detail to learn. Oh, and Mayan and Brand both "accidentally" bringing along some plastique and watching the two of them operate together was also neat.
Of the new characters introduced in this book, I enjoyed Corinne, the aging Companion who lost her scion, and the dynamic she had with Brand -- it's nice to have a sort of mentor figure around for him, but also to have the clash between their different priorities, since Corinne is motivated by protecting the children and Brand's key priority is always Rune. When she had her heart attack, I was convinced she was going to die so that Rune would have a reason to be fully responsible for the kids, so I was very happy about the solution that was not that. I really liked Anna, the very serious 13-year-old, and her disdain at Rune and Brand's lack of babysitting skills, and am intrigued by her heavy-hitter powers. I find the other kids -- Max and Quinn included -- too cutesy to feel invested in them, but her I like. Really like, actually -- at this point she's my third favorite character after Brand and Lord Tower, which I definitely had not expected.
I was not expecting Rune to ascend to the Sun Throne in book 2, but that was a cool scene and I enjoyed meeting the other Arcana and watching Rune play on a larger board (it felt reminiscent of something like the Harry Dresden books in the early teens, which is why I was pretty surprised at how early in the sequence it happened). Individually, only Lady Death seems interesting so far, and I liked her sort of siblingy relationship evolving with Rune, but it was neat to learn that Lady Moon married her Companion. The Hanged Man was suitably monstrous, if not particularly interesting as a character (as opposed to a threat). Oh, and speaking of Rune coming into his own, all of the scenes where he was behaving like an Arcana (OK, which is a lot like behaving like an asshole), like the one at the Green Docks, were pretty satisfying to watch.
I found the action climax to be a big weakness of book 1 (it felt like an interminable video game and I ended up being kind of meh on a book I had started out loving), and that was fortunately not the case here. I still feel like plot is not a strong point of these books -- there is a lot of cheating with ghost scenes and seers to set up stuff -- but also plot is not what I read them for, so it's OK. There were several tense sequences that kept me wanting to read faster, some cool twists, and I liked that there was some time at the end for a proper denouement (with arthritic dinosaur acquisition, LOL). I was not expecting Addam to end up with a permanent injury, given the level of what Atlanteans can heal, but it was actually set up quite neatly with the healing spell.
One thing that's becoming clear to me with this book which I had not expected based on book 1 is that this really seems to be a found family story rather than an action story or romance or anything like that. Well, found family and Rune's healing and coming into his own, but I did expect that latter part. But apparently Rune's household is going to expand, like, geometric sequence style, as he picks up wards and heirs and various random kids that are his responsibility now. Oh, and a dinosaur XD I mean, that's not what I thought I was getting into, but I like found family stories, and I am amused by the idea of Rune and Brand (and Addam, OK) needing to parent a bunch of teenagers and now also younger children. I'm looking forward to how they end up managing this whole lot in the next book (unless the older kids will all be away at school at that point).
Quotes:
Tower (to Brand): May I expect better of you as well? We are in a serious moment, Brandon.
Brand: Of course it's serious. You're not in pajamas, and you put on some fucking shoes.
Rune: "Oh gods," I whispered, and smothered my face in my hands. "I need a drink too. Brand? Please?"
Tower: It's all right, Rune. It couldn't have been easy for Brand. Mayan doesn't like to wait outside either. But, Brand, perhaps I should point out that the threat has not ended, which means I require you to do your fucking job.
5. K.D. Edwards, The Sunken Mall (The Tarot Sequence, book 1.5) -- this was a freebie novella Edwards put out, and it was a lot of fun. There was some very flimsy plot about buying presents for Max, and some actually interesting worldbuilding with elementals (although that's totally not what I'm reading the books for). What I'm absolutely here for, though, is Brand and Rune's entire household giving him shit about day-to-day things, and this novella was basically 80% that, so I enjoyed it at least as much as the full-fledged novels. My favorite moments: spoilers, such as they are Rune's entire household spying on him via Brand-installed cam as he is getting ready for his date and dropping by "for no reason" to silently critique his wardrobe choices, Brand teaching Max street fighting techniques under fancy names like "The Beholder's Red Curtain" and "Finding the Flower's Seed" (gouging out eyes and kneeing in the nuts respectively), Rune and Brand bickering about hypothetical doggy bags from the fancy restaurant ("He's buying my love, not yours."), Rune pretending to Addam that he went for a run and finished his shopping ("It's as if you think Brandon and I don't talk"), Rune explaining a pre-cellphone world to the kiddies ("There was actually a time when I could have walked to the corner cafe by myself without Brand having a way to immediately tell me what a dumbass I was. Then pagers came along, which is sort of a way for Brand to let you know that you needed to get to a landline and call him because he wanted to tell you what a dumbass you were."), Rune earworming Brand in retaliation, Rune and Brand bickering over who fucked up ("Oh," I whispered. "Oh, you set it off. You broke the ward." "Are you going to let this go? Is this going to become a thing? "I will write it on your birthday cake."; "I winked! I winked before I did it!" "You twitched." "I looked at you with great deliberation and twitched?"), and Brand admiring a store's layout ("You can't walk in without being in swinging distance of a salesperson. Whoever created this fucking studied Sun Tzu."). I also really enjoyed the flashback to infant Rune and Brand agreeing Barney was terrible and Brand trying to scare him away from the TV set, Brand's approach to ensuring Rune's date is secure, Addam taking lessons in being a regular person by attempting to buy a bucket of chicken, and Brand throwing away Rune's favorite snacks in retaliation. And yes, that's basically the whole thing XD
On a more serious note, the psychological/emotional version of the los desmembrados, which makes Quinn talk (and later itself talks) in the voices of the last things said by people before they die, was really nicely chilling and well done. And like I said, the spirit society was neat, and I especially liked the idea that them forming this kind of a society was the result of their prior service to the Emperor: "We were also unified in our grief. That unity we'd felt in his service led to a sense of belonging. We had learned what it meant to be a group, and we feared losing it."
I do get the sense that I enjoy Ciaran less than I'm meant to -- like, I certainly don't dislike him, but I find him less entertaining (except in small doses) than a lot of readers seem to? So he was kind of wasted on me as an addition to the cast, but overall it was still a very fun ride.
Random note: The department store which had "started its life in Pripyat, the twon closest to the Chernobyl catastrophe" which is described as "Some of the original Soviet signage was still framed in the windows, including advertisements for Chanel No 5 and vegetable juices." My brain ran aground on the concept of Chanel No. 5 being available for sale in a store in Pripyat, before catching up to the fact that advertisements just weren't a thing in the USSR, period.
Quote:
"Paying attention to prophecy was like tossing real diamonds in the air mixed with shards of broken glass. The grab was rearely worth the injury."
I haven't been able to find a pub date for book 3 (The Hourglass Throne), although there are mentions of it coming out this year. But he wrote a bunch of holiday stories which I'm hoping he will collect in a single thing I can download and read.
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And the Friday Five book meme that was going around:
1) Have you read more books, or fewer books, this past year than usual?
Way fewer. And it looks like this trend is going to continue, although I am reading more now than a year ago. Really, it's just harder to find time to read without my commute, which used to be basically ~10-15 hrs of mostly-reading time a week. I've been trying to read before bed instead, but the result tends to be that I fall asleep...
2) What book are you reading now (or what book did you read most recently)?
I'm actively reading The Unspoken Name by A.K.Larkwood, which has kind of taken my focus away from the two things I was reading before that, which are Master of One by Jaida Jones and Dani Bennett and A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking by T.Kingfisher. I'm also less actively reading Gideon the Ninth and my first Elric novella.
3) What is the best book you read in the past few years?
The last book that seriously hijacked my brain was Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning, but that's been a few years ago now. Looks like the books I called out for the "best book you read" yearly memes in the last couple of years have been Silver in the Wood and Among Others.
4) Do you read more than one book at a time, or just one?
As you can see from my answer to the second question, I usually read more than one, though I might be reading in nested fashion -- i.e. there's probably one book that I'm reading most actively, and several that I can choose between to go back to and finish after I'm done with that one. But sometimes I also just alternate between books, e.g. a hard copy book I'll read at home and a Kindle book I'll read on my commute when I have a commute.
5) How big is your to-be-read pile (or list)?
I'm not doing TBR piles right now, because they usually come from the library, and the library is not really functional right now.
Non-meme-ly, I seem to be actually reading again? Like, it's definitely still not the pace of pre-Covid reading, for the reasons mentioned above, but I'm enjoying books and looking forward to books, and the thought of talking about books? At the moment it's The Unspoken Name, which I picked up as the Tor.com e-book freebie of the month, and was fully expecting to belong to the class of modern fantasy books that I think of as "bisexual mermaids are valid", which tend to really not work for me, but it's actually not at all that vibe and I'm really enjoying it so far (25% in) -- the characters are great, the worldbuilding feels like a fully-baked fantasy world, the writing is really lovely, and it's funny and thoughtful and just... good. I'm honestly impressed this is a first novel, just from what I've read so far. And I have two books on hold at the library, that I'm keeping an eye on: The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry by C.M.Waggoner (loose sequel to one of the most fun books I read last year) and A Desolation Called Peace (sequel to A Memory Called Empire which was one of the biggest disappointments of my 2019 reading, BUT which I found to be very interesting scab-picking, and so I'm curious to check out the sequel to see how it takes me, with suitably adjusted expectations). Perhaps the Stars got pushed to later in the year (from June 1 to September, I guess?), but there's also that to look forward to. So, like, I'm feeling optimistic about reading? Like, as an activity, not just specific individual books, though I can't really explain the difference. But it's nice, and I hope it lasts.
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In non-book media/fandom consumption, though:
I looked through AO3's options for She-Ra fanfiction and found them rather baffling, but it turns out that this fandom does songs, and some of them are pretty cool. My favorite that I've come across has been this one: Ghost
Also, some time ago Screen Junkies/Fandom Entertainment (the guys behind Honest Trailers) did a documentary on Galaxy Quest, called Never Surrender. I'd been meaning to watch it for a while, and then lost track, but some time last week YouTube's algorithm tossed a version of it in my path (it's copyrighted material, so it shouldn't be on YouTube, but apparently it was, for half a year, though now it's been taken down, because probably the same algorithm that made it show up for me also made the creators aware it was there. Anyway, once I was aware of it, it turned out that it is now included with Amazon Prime (Never Surrender), so I could've watched it anyway. I love Galaxy Quest a lot, despite not being a Star Trek fan and actually being fairly anti-Trek at the time I first watched GQ, but I knew pretty much nothing about its history and the people behind it, so this documentary was full of interesting information, cool tidbits, and lovely interviews with fans, actors, and other people behind the movie, so this was a very enjoyable 90 minutes.