Thanks/reviews
Icon courtesy of tzikeh.
boniblithe, thank you so much! She sent an adorable blue hat and blue and white striped blanket, handmade and amazingly cute. Someday soon we will maybe have furniture to put them in/on.
Jennifer Crusie, Fast Women: As most of you probably know by now, I rarely read fiction outside sf/fantasy and usually grump about it if I do. Nonetheless, on the advice of several people whose opinions I respect, I gave this contemporary romance a try, and was pleasantly surprised. It didn’t hurt that there was a bit of a murder mystery, but mostly the writing was clean and snappy and the characters were complex people. I particularly appreciated that the protagonist specifically insisted that her first marriage, which lasted over two decades and produced a child, was not invalidated and not a mistake (at the beginning anyway) just because she fell in love again. The noirish male lead was also snarky enough to make me forgive the boss-falls-for-secretary trope - Crusie made a point of showing the problems with that paradigm as well as the potential sexual power, but what sealed the deal for me was when the protagonist asked her boss, “What happened to ‘don’t fuck the help’?” and he responded, “You’re not that much help.” I also enjoyed a metaphor about china collections, which I first thought was overplayed and then at one crucial point - it had to do with egg cups with feet - blew me away with its gentle relevance.
Amanda Quick, Late for the Wedding: A somewhat less successful venture into romance reading for me, this novel was nontraditional in that it featured protagonists who began the book already lovers, working as detectives at the fringes of Regency society to solve a series of murders. The characters’ attitudes seemed a bit too consistently modern, especially the women, and the mystery failed to engage me, though there’s nothing I have any impulse to mock. I will confess to some surprise at how steamy mainstream romance has gotten, though I should know better given what I’ve seen from Robin McKinley and Robert Sawyer of late, never mind Laurell Hamilton. (This tagging stuff is fun and moderately useful!)
Peter David, One Knight Only: This is a sequel to Knight Life, in which King Arthur was revived and became the mayor of New York City. He’s now the President. I was deeply disappointed by the book, in significant part because it contained a September 11-analogue without doing much with it except using it as a way for Arthur to receive national prominence. Compared to Gibson’s Ex Machina, which also uses September 11 as a turning point in the hero’s political career but also makes it a devastating day for him and the city, with continuing resonance, David’s version seemed cheap. Also, the conflict between Arthur-as-King and Arthur-as-President was clumsily handled, though it improved significantly over the course of the book as various people actually debated whether kingly acts and attitudes had any role in a republic. The President isn’t the king; he doesn’t get out in front of the troops; he doesn’t take terrorists on in single combat; and it’s stupid to pretend that the qualities that made a good preindustrial king have much to do with the qualities that make a good president. The gestures towards this conclusion at the end, however, did not redeem the book for me.
Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child, Brimstone: An FBI agent and a burnt-out cop investigate several grisly murders that seem as if they might be the work of the Devil. Not my type of thing, if only because the authors couldn’t convince me that the FBI agent was as impeccably, and classically, educated as he was supposed to be when he came out with “between you and I.” I can construct a scenario in which a character uses language not natural to him to create a rapport with another character, but I don’t believe this was an example of that technique. Otherwise, there was a big coincidence at the heart of the mystery and a moderate case of evil overlord expositionitis, though to be fair there was an attempted explanation for why the bad guy didn’t just kill the cops when he should have.
boniblithe, thank you so much! She sent an adorable blue hat and blue and white striped blanket, handmade and amazingly cute. Someday soon we will maybe have furniture to put them in/on.
Jennifer Crusie, Fast Women: As most of you probably know by now, I rarely read fiction outside sf/fantasy and usually grump about it if I do. Nonetheless, on the advice of several people whose opinions I respect, I gave this contemporary romance a try, and was pleasantly surprised. It didn’t hurt that there was a bit of a murder mystery, but mostly the writing was clean and snappy and the characters were complex people. I particularly appreciated that the protagonist specifically insisted that her first marriage, which lasted over two decades and produced a child, was not invalidated and not a mistake (at the beginning anyway) just because she fell in love again. The noirish male lead was also snarky enough to make me forgive the boss-falls-for-secretary trope - Crusie made a point of showing the problems with that paradigm as well as the potential sexual power, but what sealed the deal for me was when the protagonist asked her boss, “What happened to ‘don’t fuck the help’?” and he responded, “You’re not that much help.” I also enjoyed a metaphor about china collections, which I first thought was overplayed and then at one crucial point - it had to do with egg cups with feet - blew me away with its gentle relevance.
Amanda Quick, Late for the Wedding: A somewhat less successful venture into romance reading for me, this novel was nontraditional in that it featured protagonists who began the book already lovers, working as detectives at the fringes of Regency society to solve a series of murders. The characters’ attitudes seemed a bit too consistently modern, especially the women, and the mystery failed to engage me, though there’s nothing I have any impulse to mock. I will confess to some surprise at how steamy mainstream romance has gotten, though I should know better given what I’ve seen from Robin McKinley and Robert Sawyer of late, never mind Laurell Hamilton. (This tagging stuff is fun and moderately useful!)
Peter David, One Knight Only: This is a sequel to Knight Life, in which King Arthur was revived and became the mayor of New York City. He’s now the President. I was deeply disappointed by the book, in significant part because it contained a September 11-analogue without doing much with it except using it as a way for Arthur to receive national prominence. Compared to Gibson’s Ex Machina, which also uses September 11 as a turning point in the hero’s political career but also makes it a devastating day for him and the city, with continuing resonance, David’s version seemed cheap. Also, the conflict between Arthur-as-King and Arthur-as-President was clumsily handled, though it improved significantly over the course of the book as various people actually debated whether kingly acts and attitudes had any role in a republic. The President isn’t the king; he doesn’t get out in front of the troops; he doesn’t take terrorists on in single combat; and it’s stupid to pretend that the qualities that made a good preindustrial king have much to do with the qualities that make a good president. The gestures towards this conclusion at the end, however, did not redeem the book for me.
Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child, Brimstone: An FBI agent and a burnt-out cop investigate several grisly murders that seem as if they might be the work of the Devil. Not my type of thing, if only because the authors couldn’t convince me that the FBI agent was as impeccably, and classically, educated as he was supposed to be when he came out with “between you and I.” I can construct a scenario in which a character uses language not natural to him to create a rapport with another character, but I don’t believe this was an example of that technique. Otherwise, there was a big coincidence at the heart of the mystery and a moderate case of evil overlord expositionitis, though to be fair there was an attempted explanation for why the bad guy didn’t just kill the cops when he should have.