Crusie, Jennifer, and Bob Mayer: Wild Ride

Wild Ride is the most recent book from Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer and a departure from their prior collaborations in two ways. First, it’s a fantasy: five Etruscan demons are imprisoned in an amusement park, and they’re getting loose. (Crusie has written at least one other collaborative fantasy before, The Unfortunate Miss Fortunes; Dogs and Goddesses probably is too, but I haven’t read that.) Second, it’s not structured around a romance arc.

The fantasy plot of the book is fine; even using the amusement park as a prison ends up making enough sense that it didn’t bother me. But the characterizations feel unusually flat, which is odd, because it’s not as though Agnes and the Hitman didn’t have just as much plot, and those characters felt very vivid and rounded to me. Also, one of the arcs uses an annoying cliche to speed things along. The net result was that I finished it this morning, thought about it a bit, and realized I had no urge to go back and re-read even the best plot bits. Back to the library it goes tomorrow.

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Resnick, Laura: (02) Doppelgangster

Hey—remember four years ago, when I said that Laura Rensick’s Disappearing Nightly was a lot of fun?

Well, the next book in the series, Doppelgangster, has finally been published. (It was a temporary victim of its original publisher’s convulsions.) As the title suggests, this expands and significantly modifies the short story of the same name in the anthology Murder by Magic. And like both the prior works, it’s light and fun and an enjoyably non-angsty urban fantasy. Bonus: the next one will be out in August.

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Gabaldon, Diana: (107) An Echo in the Bone

An Echo in the Bone is the seventh and most recent in Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series. At this point all I can usefully say is that we’re finally into the thick of the American Revolution; I find Gabaldon’s war plots less interesting than the rest of her books; and every single damn plot thread in the book ends on a cliffhanger—including at least one for which the cliffhanger is completely and utterly unnecessary.

Oh, and the continuity error from last time is explained, and it might almost be theoretically possible that the series is coming to a close. (Though the author says on her website (5 February 2010) that she doesn’t know if the next book is the last.)

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Klasky, Mindy: How Not to Make a Wish

I think I must’ve heard about Mindy Klasky’s How Not to Make a Wish from a Big Idea post at Whatever. It sounded like light fun, so I put it on my list of things to look for and eventually read it.

It does have very nice theater stuff that is amusing and feels quite real. And if only it hadn’t involved completely removing genies from their cultural context, I might have liked the concept of them as civil servants who are pressured to grant wishes in a timely fashion. But it uses Western standards of feminine beauty in a way I strongly object to, and its plot rests on a glaring inconsistency and a random, nonsensical revelation. It might have been a fast read, but I still regret the time I spent on it.

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