Fiction
Gillian Flynn, Dark Places: Twenty-five years ago, Libby Day’s two older sisters and her mother were brutally slaughtered in what looked like a Satanic killing. She testified against her teenage brother, Ben, who went to prison. Grown, she’s depressed, out of money and lacking any skills, so when some murder enthusiasts promise to pay her for revisiting the past, she goes along with it. But the past bites back; her brother’s secrets, her terrible father’s, and her mother’s all intersect in tragic/horrifying ways. Flynn’s trademark is nasty people in juicy situations that also manage to force your reluctant sympathy for how terrible the circumstances are, but I wasn’t feeling the sympathy here, so it was basically just nastiness. There’s a fine line between gothic and ridiculous, which I felt was crossed. Maybe it was the Satanism.
Ilona Andrews, Steel’s Edge: Magical healers who use their powers to harm lose their minds and can become deadly plaguebringers, so when Charlotte-the most powerful healer of her generation-feels herself about to give in to temptation, she heads to the Edge, where her magic will be blunted and she can live in peace. Then she saves a hot guy, wounded near to death, who turns out to be hunting slavers-and those slavers quickly give her a reason to seek revenge as well. Passion, violence, sex, and palace intrigue follow. I didn’t like this one quite as much as Andrews’ other books. Though people weren’t making head-bangingly stupid decisions, everything just fell out a little too neatly. The bad guys made just the right/wrong moves, and the heroes’ powers were just exactly at the right level. Usually that doesn’t bother me, and I’m probably making it sound like I disliked it, which I didn’t.
Meljean Brook, Heart of Steel: The further adventures of some characters from The Iron Duke: Yasmeen, the genetically modified airship captain, meets up with the adventurer Archimedes Fox, whom she earlier kicked off her ship into zombie-infested waters because he pulled a gun on her. (As a woman in a sexist society she couldn’t afford the challenge to her authority, but also she just couldn’t abide the insult to her competence.) Did I mention that the airship used to be his abusive father’s, before she killed the father? Archimedes survived and thrived, and there are no hard feelings-well, not that kind. Steampunk romance with light political intrigue. A little too heavy on the romance and mooning over the hardness of Yasmeen’s heart and how Archimedes will suffer for his love, but on the other hand neither of them play head games about love and one of the things he adores about her is that she’s got her own agenda and won’t let him get in the way. I’d be tempted to read anything set in the same world (the Horde and its nanomachines conquered Europe centuries ago, but empires fall; mechanically altered former slaves are making their own ways in the world while the Continent is still mostly zombified), but hope for more worldbuilding in the next outing.
Elizabeth Wein, Code Name Verity: Ok, outside my wheelhouse, but several rave reviews convinced me to try this story of two Scottish women-a pilot and a radio operator-in WWII. The story begins as one of the women writes her “confession” after being captured in occupied France and tortured by the Nazis, but in the midst of giving up what she knows about British war arrangements she’s actually telling the story of their friendship. Other women-including the German who assists in the narrator’s torture and a French prisoner who didn’t break and despises the narrator-are also memorable; the men are there, and they are powerful, but this isn’t their story. There are twists, which I didn’t find particularly surprising, but they were well-done and, yes, I cried at the end. Wein’s afterword notes that women did have these jobs, though she made up this particular story.
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Ilona Andrews, Steel’s Edge: Magical healers who use their powers to harm lose their minds and can become deadly plaguebringers, so when Charlotte-the most powerful healer of her generation-feels herself about to give in to temptation, she heads to the Edge, where her magic will be blunted and she can live in peace. Then she saves a hot guy, wounded near to death, who turns out to be hunting slavers-and those slavers quickly give her a reason to seek revenge as well. Passion, violence, sex, and palace intrigue follow. I didn’t like this one quite as much as Andrews’ other books. Though people weren’t making head-bangingly stupid decisions, everything just fell out a little too neatly. The bad guys made just the right/wrong moves, and the heroes’ powers were just exactly at the right level. Usually that doesn’t bother me, and I’m probably making it sound like I disliked it, which I didn’t.
Meljean Brook, Heart of Steel: The further adventures of some characters from The Iron Duke: Yasmeen, the genetically modified airship captain, meets up with the adventurer Archimedes Fox, whom she earlier kicked off her ship into zombie-infested waters because he pulled a gun on her. (As a woman in a sexist society she couldn’t afford the challenge to her authority, but also she just couldn’t abide the insult to her competence.) Did I mention that the airship used to be his abusive father’s, before she killed the father? Archimedes survived and thrived, and there are no hard feelings-well, not that kind. Steampunk romance with light political intrigue. A little too heavy on the romance and mooning over the hardness of Yasmeen’s heart and how Archimedes will suffer for his love, but on the other hand neither of them play head games about love and one of the things he adores about her is that she’s got her own agenda and won’t let him get in the way. I’d be tempted to read anything set in the same world (the Horde and its nanomachines conquered Europe centuries ago, but empires fall; mechanically altered former slaves are making their own ways in the world while the Continent is still mostly zombified), but hope for more worldbuilding in the next outing.
Elizabeth Wein, Code Name Verity: Ok, outside my wheelhouse, but several rave reviews convinced me to try this story of two Scottish women-a pilot and a radio operator-in WWII. The story begins as one of the women writes her “confession” after being captured in occupied France and tortured by the Nazis, but in the midst of giving up what she knows about British war arrangements she’s actually telling the story of their friendship. Other women-including the German who assists in the narrator’s torture and a French prisoner who didn’t break and despises the narrator-are also memorable; the men are there, and they are powerful, but this isn’t their story. There are twists, which I didn’t find particularly surprising, but they were well-done and, yes, I cried at the end. Wein’s afterword notes that women did have these jobs, though she made up this particular story.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.