Slo-Mo Bounce
A few weeks ago, seeing that I had a Borders 40% off coupon about to expire and the remainder of a gift card, I wandered through on my lunch break. Their pickings are getting slimmer than slim, but I was attracted to the cover of Jay Lake's Green-girl with a knife hanging out of a tree. Intriguing.
I'd heard some good things about his writing, so with a net outlay of $5 it was mine.
Lake's writing style is descriptive without being wordy and I didn't have any problems with word flow. The plot gets pretty slow after we make the first transition and I put it down for about a week at around page 50 when the "beating the waif" theme began in earnest. I mean, if we've got a story ostensibly set in the past, we're going to see kids get walloped. But when the MC dwells on it -- "I had not taken a beating in almost two weeks. It seemed improbable that I would finish the day without a score of blows due me." -- then I start to get annoyed.
I guess this is part of the difficulty of following the disadvantaged child character as she grows, but only getting into the late teen years. You never have a mature character to deal with.
Never have I seen a character puke so much. The first WTF puke moment was when it marked the beginning of her menses. Whenever she's upset, she pukes.
She keeps getting mistaken for a boy after puberty, though she's very beautiful as a woman.
Then there was the S&M . . .
But one of the more problematic parts for me was the fighting. Like movie choreography, you can tell someone has little working knowledge of practical fighting when they use high spinning kicks in fights. Sorry, they're flashy and cool, but just plain bad news. They're slow, they make the attacker vulnerable, they're easy to dodge, and one (even an inexperienced older woman in the dark) can see them coming a mile away. Then there was the line dropped in like a promotional blurb from a strip-mall master: "'We do not train so much to forms. When one fights in a form, one expects one's opponent to do so.'" Maybe if you're going like a robot through forms that have been completely severed from the roots. Since this statement comes from a character who is supposed to be street-savvy and highly skilled as a fighter, this suggests to me an author's shallow understanding of the value and meaning of training via kata.
That's where I turned off the book almost completely and began to skim. The only reason I kept going on at all was because I was curious about what else there was to annoy me, and I wondered how it would wrap up.
The final confrontation was confusing. At least one character was briefly described multiple times in ways that indicated he should be dead, but he was apparently not. The MC herself led other people to their deaths in the battle (she seemed to get other people in trouble a lot), but she herself was minimally involved in the literal deus ex machina.
If you like petulant princess stories, I'd say you might enjoy this. I should have bought an IT book or something.
I'd heard some good things about his writing, so with a net outlay of $5 it was mine.
Lake's writing style is descriptive without being wordy and I didn't have any problems with word flow. The plot gets pretty slow after we make the first transition and I put it down for about a week at around page 50 when the "beating the waif" theme began in earnest. I mean, if we've got a story ostensibly set in the past, we're going to see kids get walloped. But when the MC dwells on it -- "I had not taken a beating in almost two weeks. It seemed improbable that I would finish the day without a score of blows due me." -- then I start to get annoyed.
I guess this is part of the difficulty of following the disadvantaged child character as she grows, but only getting into the late teen years. You never have a mature character to deal with.
Never have I seen a character puke so much. The first WTF puke moment was when it marked the beginning of her menses. Whenever she's upset, she pukes.
She keeps getting mistaken for a boy after puberty, though she's very beautiful as a woman.
Then there was the S&M . . .
But one of the more problematic parts for me was the fighting. Like movie choreography, you can tell someone has little working knowledge of practical fighting when they use high spinning kicks in fights. Sorry, they're flashy and cool, but just plain bad news. They're slow, they make the attacker vulnerable, they're easy to dodge, and one (even an inexperienced older woman in the dark) can see them coming a mile away. Then there was the line dropped in like a promotional blurb from a strip-mall master: "'We do not train so much to forms. When one fights in a form, one expects one's opponent to do so.'" Maybe if you're going like a robot through forms that have been completely severed from the roots. Since this statement comes from a character who is supposed to be street-savvy and highly skilled as a fighter, this suggests to me an author's shallow understanding of the value and meaning of training via kata.
That's where I turned off the book almost completely and began to skim. The only reason I kept going on at all was because I was curious about what else there was to annoy me, and I wondered how it would wrap up.
The final confrontation was confusing. At least one character was briefly described multiple times in ways that indicated he should be dead, but he was apparently not. The MC herself led other people to their deaths in the battle (she seemed to get other people in trouble a lot), but she herself was minimally involved in the literal deus ex machina.
If you like petulant princess stories, I'd say you might enjoy this. I should have bought an IT book or something.