Finished Mira Grant's Parasite...
...and I have thoughts. And I promised 
aerye I would write these thoughts down.
Okay, so. I enjoyed the book. I enjoy everything Seanan McGuire writes, though I'm starting to see a lot of repetition of tropes and character types in her work. This is not a deal breaker! But, well, Tansy was so much like the Fox that I started to actively look for ways in which they were not identical characters. And Sal was so not-badass that I almost wanted to make a list of all the ways she is explicitly not!Georgia. The way she completely broke down every time something remotely scary or tension-filled was kind of extreme. And the big bad guys are large medical institutions and sterilized white surfaces are scary. It's okay; Stephen King had certain similarities running through all of his work, as well. (Maine, Maine, oh, and more Maine.) Oh, and the physical and behavioral similarities between the sleepwalkers and Newsflesh's zombies were almost comical at times, but it was never lampshaded, which I think could have helped my skepticism a lot.
I mean, Sal's characterization made sense! I really like the idea of this sort-of unreliable narrator, who is unreliable not because she lies, but because she is so very new to cultural norms that you can't really trust her impression of things. That fascinates me. But it kind of brings me to my biggest problem with the book, which is that the big reveal at the end...that Sal's been a worm all along! was so very much not a surprise to me, that I was a bit annoyed. I mean, I figured it out right there in the first scene, and it was telegraphed all over the place. And I can understand structuring the story so that we know but Sal doesn't...until she does. It's just that the book seemed to expect it to surprise the readers at well, the way it's presented as such a dramatic cliffhanger at the end. I'm used to dramatic cliffhangers at the end of Mira Grant books. The one at the end of Deadline was fantastic, and completely unexpected. So I guess when I got to this one, and it seemed to want to evoke the same response, I was just like, "Well, duh." and then got annoyed.
The thing is, the end of Feed felt a little like this to me, in that I thought the explanation of Tate as the big bad was kind of one-dimensional and disappointing. This ends up being subverted in Deadline, and actually made a bit of a plot point. So I suspect that something similar may happen with the big reveal of Sal's wormish nature. And I really did enjoy the book and am looking forward a great deal to the next installment. It just feels very much unfinished at the moment. And I can never get enough of Seanan's work. :)
Some thoughts outside the cut for those who haven't read it yet: I'd say it's a bit more scary and gory than Newsflesh was, if that is a dealbreaker for you. I know zombies are an automatic dealbreaker for some people, but Newsflesh wasn't really graphic about the zombies the way that this one is about the Parasites.
Also posted at http://kouredios.dreamwidth.org/254844.html ; feel free to comment there if you so choose: add comment/
comments.
aerye I would write these thoughts down.
Okay, so. I enjoyed the book. I enjoy everything Seanan McGuire writes, though I'm starting to see a lot of repetition of tropes and character types in her work. This is not a deal breaker! But, well, Tansy was so much like the Fox that I started to actively look for ways in which they were not identical characters. And Sal was so not-badass that I almost wanted to make a list of all the ways she is explicitly not!Georgia. The way she completely broke down every time something remotely scary or tension-filled was kind of extreme. And the big bad guys are large medical institutions and sterilized white surfaces are scary. It's okay; Stephen King had certain similarities running through all of his work, as well. (Maine, Maine, oh, and more Maine.) Oh, and the physical and behavioral similarities between the sleepwalkers and Newsflesh's zombies were almost comical at times, but it was never lampshaded, which I think could have helped my skepticism a lot.
I mean, Sal's characterization made sense! I really like the idea of this sort-of unreliable narrator, who is unreliable not because she lies, but because she is so very new to cultural norms that you can't really trust her impression of things. That fascinates me. But it kind of brings me to my biggest problem with the book, which is that the big reveal at the end...that Sal's been a worm all along! was so very much not a surprise to me, that I was a bit annoyed. I mean, I figured it out right there in the first scene, and it was telegraphed all over the place. And I can understand structuring the story so that we know but Sal doesn't...until she does. It's just that the book seemed to expect it to surprise the readers at well, the way it's presented as such a dramatic cliffhanger at the end. I'm used to dramatic cliffhangers at the end of Mira Grant books. The one at the end of Deadline was fantastic, and completely unexpected. So I guess when I got to this one, and it seemed to want to evoke the same response, I was just like, "Well, duh." and then got annoyed.
The thing is, the end of Feed felt a little like this to me, in that I thought the explanation of Tate as the big bad was kind of one-dimensional and disappointing. This ends up being subverted in Deadline, and actually made a bit of a plot point. So I suspect that something similar may happen with the big reveal of Sal's wormish nature. And I really did enjoy the book and am looking forward a great deal to the next installment. It just feels very much unfinished at the moment. And I can never get enough of Seanan's work. :)
Some thoughts outside the cut for those who haven't read it yet: I'd say it's a bit more scary and gory than Newsflesh was, if that is a dealbreaker for you. I know zombies are an automatic dealbreaker for some people, but Newsflesh wasn't really graphic about the zombies the way that this one is about the Parasites.
Also posted at http://kouredios.dreamwidth.org/254844.html ; feel free to comment there if you so choose: add comment/
comments.