Read Recently
The Trouble With Islam: a wake-up call for honesty and change by Irshad Manji
Manji is a Canadian Muslim and a lesbian journalist, as well as an Islamic activist. She wants to see Islam reformed to a more liberal faith. This book is her . . . plea? Polemic? Whether she's right in any of her points is not for me to say, but it did make for an interesting read.
Recommended for those who are interested in such things.
Mad Maudlin by Mercedes Lackey and Rosemary Edgehill
Pretty much the only Mercedes Lackey books I read any more are her Urban Fantasy stories. I think she should take a long break from Valdemar, for example, but I've still been enjoying these (mostly). There have been two or three different series going on, with different heroes but the same idea behind each: elves and magic are lurking in the background of our modern world. The elves, lovers of children (perhaps because of their own slow reproduction rate), are drawn to lost, abandoned, and abused children (seems to be a theme in Urban Fantasy). This can produce some powerful stories, but also some powerfully stupid ones (this is the same series that gave us a male banshee, for example).
In this volume, Lackey and Edgehill are exploring the "Bloody Mary/War in Heaven" mythology that Tamson Housers should remember from that article John A sent around a while back (many of us are still working on our own versions of stories based on that). "Yay!" I thought. "A story that won't revolve around elvish villains!" Well, that'll show me.
The story begins with streetkid Magnus overhearing some younger children talking about the Bloody Mary story and one of them claiming to have seen her and therefor being doomed. This explains to Magnus who the chick in blue with the weird eyes he saw on the street the other day was, and he intuits that he himself is therefor doomed. Meanwhile, Bard/Guardian Hosea Songmaker has been working in homeless shelters, entertaining the children, and has been overhearing these secret stories himself. Meanwhile, his mentor and friend Eric Banyon, the erstwhile hero of this series, is about to graduate from Juilliard (hey, I spelled it right without checking!) and is now wondering what he's going to do with his life. Meanwhile, Eric's friend, erstwhile lover, and former enemy Ria Llewellyn is taking a trip to Washington DC to take on the PDI, a government agency that is meant to track down paranormals, such as Elves and Bards (a tool of a dark elf from an earlier book. Said dark elf now disposed of, the agency is left somewhat stranded, which has its leader worried). Meanwhile, New York's paranormal Guardians are worried by a series of apparantly magickal murders. Meanwhile, a cult leader is trying to dupe people in helping him kill, steal the power of, and replace (in that order) one of the Guardians. Streetkid Magnus has a Significant Backstory. So do his friends Ace and Jaycie.
That's a lot of storylines, and it would take a master to fit them all together smoothly. So it won't surprise anyone that they don't, quite. Almost, though--I was pleasantly surprised to find that it worked as well as it did. The "Ria-in-Washington" story doesn't connect up with the others except in that it removes Ria from New York at a time when he could really use her help; otherwise it just follows up on a plotline from a former book in the series and leaves plot hooks set for another book to follow. Similarely, while Ace's backstory links up with Jaycie's at one point in this book, it's not resolved and just leaves more plothooks.
I just remembered that there is one point where the main plot and Ria's plot nearly meet up; something seems to happen to Eric that seems likely to be the PDI attacking him. This tense bit could have tied both plotlines together, but alas, it turns out that someone has done something stupid but well-meaning.
I also--okay, confession time. I've never been to the Appalachians. I suppose that it is possible that, even in the late 20th century, a child from that area of the US could be named "Hosea Songmaker". I hope to god it's not true, though.
Also, for someone who had such troubles with the Guardians-concept in her earlier (and less successful) series of Diana Tregarde Mysteries, Lackey has put more Guardians than you can shake a stick at in this series. I think the evil, faux-Guardian, Would-be Guardian-Killing cult leader is a kind of backwards-cuff at those readers whose attitude to the Guardians in the earlier books drove her away from them, but all things considered, it doesn't quite work for me.
Anyway, if you liked the earlier books in the series you may still like this one, as it's more of the same. If you haven't read them, start with Bedlam's Bard and the Chrome Borne and see if you like those. There's too much backstory to this one to start reading here.