Month: November 2007

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Wilks, Eileen: (02) Mortal Danger

After reading Eileen Wilks’ Mortal Danger, the sequel to Tempting Danger, I’m doing something unprecedented on this booklog and moving the series out of the category where it’s shelved in bookstores. Yes, if you’re looking for these, you’ll have to go into the romance section, but with this book the series moves firmly into fantasy territory, and continuing to call it a romance would create incorrect reader expectations.

(I realize the covers have, as Chad said, girl cooties all over them. Nevertheless: not a romance novel.)

Thanks to loose ends from the last book, Lily Yu finds herself the victim of a puzzling demonic attack. This kicks off a fantasy/adventure plot which moves along nicely and allows additional worldbuilding, including more about the lupi’s culture and an interestingly different Dis. I don’t think I’ll be putting these on any best-of lists, but they’re competently entertaining and if you’re in the mood for something urban or paranormal, you could do far worse than to give them a try.

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Robb, J.D.: (25) Creation in Death

Creation in Death, the most recent J.D. Robb novel, is a nicely-paced, straight-ahead police procedural. The killer responsible for a series of torture murders nine years ago is back, and Eve Dallas and the rest of the police department race the clock to find him before he finishes killing his victims.

For all that I quibble with aspects of this series, it is hugely readable, and this one is particularly so, with a very effective sense of urgency and tension. I also liked what it does with the character of Ariel, and the nice moment it gives Morris.

Obligatory quibbles: the author forces Eve to silently ignore an obvious follow-up question (I mean so obvious that even I was waiting for it) to drag the story out a little longer. (Possibly also to act stupidly later for extra tension, but I’m not as sure about that.) And I wasn’t quite convinced by one of the personal conflicts that accompanies the main plot.

But, on the whole, I think this is probably one of the better books in the series, and I enjoyed it a lot.

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Dahl, Roald: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

I listed to Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as read by Eric Idle. I don’t think I can say anything new about the book overall: its fantastic inventiveness, its peculiarity, and its cruel streak are all much-remarked. So instead I’ll make a couple of comments about the listening experience.

Idle does a very enjoyable job generally, but I wish the producer had managed his volume better. Generally, when a character whispers on the page, the reader should not whisper, because it’s too hard for a listener to make out the words. (Ditto shouting, though that’s more a matter of sparing the listener’s ears.) Experienced audiobook readers manage the intensity of their reading rather than the volume, which works much better.

The other thing about listening is that it made me wonder where the book was supposed to be set. I’d always assumed it was in Britain, as Dahl was a British writer and it has that indefinably British air. However, though Idle gives Charlie and his family British accents, the money Charlie finds in the street is a dollar bill, and some of the other children have American accents. It’s a bit peculiar, though only distracting in the slower pace of an audiobook.

I don’t remember a thing about the sequel, and look forward to rediscovering it.

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Chase, Loretta: (102) Mr. Impossible

Loretta Chase’s Mr. Impossible was very favorably reviewed back when it came out, so I picked up a copy and left it on the shelf to age. On Halloween, I was cranky about trick-or-treaters interrupting me and agitating the dog, so I picked it up as likely to cheer me up.

Well, this was simply adorable: a fun, sweet, solid romance. I finished it and immediately ordered all of Chase’s other available books from Amazon and Fictionwise (one was only available as an e-book).

Daphne Pembroke is a widow living in Cairo and studying Egyptology. However, thanks to 1820s prejudice against women scholars, she passes her linguistic work off as her brother’s. This backfires when her brother buys her a particularly fine papyrus that is rumored to contain the location of an undiscovered royal tomb. Now he’s been kidnapped and the papyrus stolen by a ruthless, slightly deranged antiquities seeker. When Daphne asks the British counsulate for help, it kills two birds with one stone and has her bail Rupert Carsington out of jail to act as her assistant. (He’s been imprisoned for stopping the pasha’s soldiers from beating a beggar—not the first time he’s been in trouble—and the consulate is finding him expensive.)

Rupert resembles Ivan Vorpatril, without all the trauma. He spends the early part of the book being provokingly stupid, at first because he’s bored in jail and then to distract Daphne from her anxiety. He’s not just comic relief, of course, being perceptive and straightforwardly commonsensical. Perceptive about people, that is: he’s not much for self-analysis, and so doesn’t quite know what to make of the fact that he doesn’t just want to get Daphne naked.

For Daphne’s part, she comes to appreciate Rupert’s support and admiration (once he stops being deliberately provoking, that is). She’s spent years suppressing her passions, and then Rupert comes along and is impressed by her intellect; teaches her to use a pistol; trusts her to rescue herself; and, of course, gets her naked. The book is thus a lovely combination of Daphne learning to fill her own skin and the two of them gradually, convincingly getting to know and rely on each other.

Another thing I liked about this book is that it doesn’t have Daphne discover an unknown tomb or make a breakthrough translation of hieroglyphics or anything like that (which is sadly common in historical stories). The book shows us that Daphne is smart, and doesn’t need to rewrite history to hammer the point home. Similarly, it effectively employs period beliefs such as bodily humors and the formal use of names (and quietly critiques others, like the wholesale looting of Egypt’s antiquities). I’m sure a scholar would find things to criticize about the historical details, but the characters don’t feel like modern people playing dress-up, which is refreshing. (The secondary characters are also fun, including the mongoose.)

I recommend this highly and am looking forward to reading more of Chase’s books.

(The book is part of a series, but stands alone well.)

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Brockmann, Suzanne: (12) All Through the Night

Suzanne Brockmann’s All Through the Night is the sequel to Force of Nature, and a bit of a departure, for three reasons. First, it’s a wedding book, and almost all prior weddings in the series have taken place off stage. Second, the plot contains much less emphasis on suspense. And third, two men are getting married.

In other words, Jules and Robin have moved to Massachusetts for work reasons and, at the start of the book, decide to get married. The run-up to the wedding includes the home renovations from hell, a deceitful newspaper reporter, a nuisance-making ex, and a crazy stalker. The focus of the book is, however, squarely on Jules and Robin’s relationship: the stalker is part of less than half the book, and the secondary romance thread is underwritten to the point of being unconvincing. (For those who’ve read “Winterfair Gifts,” Lois McMaster Bujold’s wedding novella that I appear never to have booklogged, it’s basically the inverse of that.) Fortunately, there’s still plenty of development of Jules and Robin’s relationship to fill the book; though marked as a “holiday novella,” it’s a satisfying read at 300 pages (84,000 words).

Oddly, then, this may not be a bad book to start reading the series, as it’s shorter, more focused, and less dependent on backstory than many in the series. It would also give the new reader an idea whether they don’t mind Brockmann’s political commentary, which is on full display here. (She is donating all income from this book to Mass Equality.) I enjoyed it a lot, for all that the external plots are rather thin, and am happy to leave the series here for a while.

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Christie, Agatha: Sleeping Murder (radio play)

In Agatha Christie’s Sleeping Murder, a woman buys a house and then slowly remembers that she lived there as a child . . . when she may have been the sole witness to an unknown murder.

This is a very linear mystery, with lines of investigation raised and dropped one after another. I saw the end result of every line of thinking shortly before the characters did, including the solution. I don’t object to this, but it was notable.

The other thing of note about this story, at least in the radio adaptation, is that Miss Marple has a distinctly supporting role. The point-of-view characters are the woman and her new husband, who Miss Marple advises and does some secondary information gathering for. While the couple aren’t that exceptional, they are nice as a change of pace.

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Jones, Diana: Dogsbody

I’ve been vaguely meaning to read Diana Wynne Jones’s Dogsbody for some time. Recently I saw a passing mention of it just before I was going to the library and just after I’d finished re-reading A Night in the Lonesome October. Hey, they’re both fantasy novels narrated by dogs, right? (Entities in dog form, at least.)

It turns out that even though A Night in the Lonesome October is about an attempt to open this world to Lovecraft’s Elder Gods, as told by Jack the Ripper’s dog, it is still lighter than Dogsbody.

Some of this darkness is present from the beginning, in which the occupant of the star Sirius is wrongfully convicted of murder and condemmed to live and die in a mortal body, unless he can find a MacGuffin. Not long after his birth, his mother’s owner tries to drown him and his littermates. He’s rescued by a girl named Kathleen and raised by her—as best she can, considering that she is the despised Irish relative-by-marriage of a horrible English woman who makes her do all the housework and starves Sirius.

I know, cheerful, right? But after that, the book focuses on Sirius getting the hang of being a dog (he only dimly remembers his prior existence), so the nastiness is buffered by this and by the prose style:

 . . . it came to him what it was he really wanted to chew. The ideal thing. With a little ticker-tack of claws, he crept to the door and up the stairs. He nosed open the door of the main bedroom without difficulty and, with a little more trouble, succeeded in opening the wardrobe too. Inside were shoes—long large leather shoes, with laces and thick chewable soles. Sirius selected the juiciest and took it under the bed to enjoy in peace.

The thunderous voice found him there and chased him around the house with a walking stick. Duffie spoke long and coldly. Kathleen wept. Robin tried to explain about teething. Basil jeered. And throughout, Tibbles sat thoughtfully on the sideboard, giving the inside of her left front leg little hasty licks, like a cat seized with an idea. Sirius saw her. To show his contempt and to soothe his feelings, he went into the kitchen and ate the cats’ supper. Then he lay down glumly to gnaw the unsatisfactory rubber thing Kathleen had bought him.

(The book is actually in omniscient, and I found its shifts to other characters’ points-of-view rather distracting, since I had been attributing the prose style to Sirius’s nature.)

As Sirius’s new body grows, he remembers more, and the plot starts happening . . . until the ending, which is like getting hit in the face out of nowhere. Some of this reaction is undoubtedly the cognitive dissonance caused by reading this right after A Night in the Lonesome October. Even putting that aside as best I can, though, I don’t feel that I understand the reasons for the ending—not the character motivations, but why the book went in that direction. (The one thematic explanation that comes to mind seems an odd fit for the mythology.) And so I am left baffled and somewhat bruised.

Jones’s books are very hit-or-miss for me in ways that defy categorization, and I think in the end I’m just not the right reader for this book.

I’m putting a spoiler post to discuss the ending over on LiveJournal, because it’s a better audience for it.

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