Author: katenepveu

Posted on

Sfar, Joann: Rabbi’s Cat 2, The

The Rabbi’s Cat 2 is the unexcitingly-named sequel to Joann Sfar’s charming The Rabbi’s Cat. It collects two volumes originally published separately in France, “Heaven on Earth” and “Africa’s Jerusalem.”

I didn’t like this as well as the first volume, though it still has a great deal of charm and wonderful moments. The first story features Malka of the Lions, which can only be a good thing and which I enjoyed tremendously. But its very end contains what appears to be an explicit political comment on Israel, and then I get all dithery about not knowing enough to evaluate the comment. Your mileage obviously will vary.

The second story is introduced thusly:

For a long time I thought there was no point in doing a graphic novel against racism. That stance seemed so totally redundant that there was no need to flog a dying horse. Times are changing, apparently. Chances are everything’s already been said, but since no one is paying attention you have to start all over again.

Which rather spoke to me.

The story is a road trip through Africa in search of a rumored Jerusalem with an intact Temple. The cat’s master is initially dubious about the idea of black Jews (“look: blacks, they have slavery; Jews, they have pogroms. It’s a lot to bear. Now imagine a people that had both at the same time. It just can’t be.”), but he and a number of companions eventually set out on the quest. I again enjoyed this to the end, though I have difficulty judging its didactic level. As for the end, I read it in a radically different way from a friend, who suggested (spoilers, obviously) that it was a particularly Jewish mode of storytelling. Her reading makes more sense to me, and I suspect that it is more consistent with the author’s intention, but that ambiguity is worth noting.

Recommended if you like the first one, but not quite as strongly.

No Comments

Posted on

Waggoner, Tim: Nekropolis

Angry Robot is a new SF imprint that apparently thinks I have a much wider readership than I actually do, because they put me on their list for e-ARCs. Which is how I read Tim Waggoner’s Nekropolis, forthcoming in paperback in August (UK) or October (US, Canada, Australia) (publisher page). This is an urban fantasy of the private-eye type, which I initially suspected came about when someone said, “Okay, vampires and werewolves and elves and demons and dragons have all been done, so . . . what’s left? Oo! Zombies!” [*]

Nekropolis is a city in a different dimension to which all Earth’s supernatural creatures decamped three hundred years ago, though they still have access to Earth. Which is where Matt Richter came in: he was a cop from Cleveland who chased a serial killer all the way back to Nekropolis and became the rare self-willed zombie in the process. Now he does favors for people in exchange for fees to help keep up his preservative spells, and a beautiful half-vampire damsel in distress named Devona needs his help.

Waggoner is clearly having a lot of fun coming up with ever-more-inventive variants on common urban fantasy/horror elements, sometimes mixing in technology (genetically enhanced shapeshifters, gangs of cyberpunk vampires) and sometimes just turning it up to eleven (bartender named Skully because, of course, he looks like a perfectly normal human except for the skull head; seven-foot silverfish in the Great Library, etc.). There’s some personal development in among the scenery and action, too, which was in keeping with the genre—not surprising, but not offensive either. In other words, I was having a pretty good time . . . and then I got to the mystery’s solution, which has resonances with actual social injustices that I found distracting and annoying. (It’s theoretically possible that these might get explored in a way I find more satisfying in the two sequels, but I didn’t get that sense from the text.) Oh well. It was at least a quick read, so that lessens my aggravation.

At any rate, if this is your kind of thing, you’ll probably recognize it from this description, so keep an eye out.

[*] This is purely a hypothetical and likely wrong, since the book turns out to be an expansion of a 2004 small-press book that was conceived even earlier, i.e., probably before the serious urban fantasy/paranormal boom. But it was what I thought when I read the premise.

2 Comments

Posted on

Monette, Sarah: (04) Corambis

Sarah Monette’s Corambis concludes the Doctrine of Labryinths series. This fourth book features a fairly strong plot-story disjunct. The plot is new to the series, and examines the aftermath of Corambis’s civil war, which ended when the Insurgence’s leaders attempted to invoke a magical engine which killed them all except Kay, the Margrave of Rothmarlin, who is blinded. The story is Felix learning not to be such a terrible person.

This story was very welcome, to say the least—actually it was such a relief that I didn’t re-read the other three volumes looking for overall structure and patterns, because I couldn’t bear going back to Felix in full-out asshole mode. Not only does he get better, but his progress is convincing and emotionally satisfying. Hooray!

Mildmay has much less to do in this book, alas, though I’d suspected as much when considering his arc in The Mirador, and is even absent from a fair chunk of the narrative early on. He’s there, his presence matters to the book, and I’m always glad to see him, but those who strongly prefer him to Felix should adjust their expectations accordingly. Kay, the third point-of-view character, is an interesting person and has a complete arc, but inevitably the weight of the book is tipped away from him and toward Felix, who has three whole books of history with the reader on his side of the scales. Further, Kay’s part of the story is the one most closely linked to the plot, and that is pretty thoroughly subordinated to the story of Felix’s growth.

I have only a couple of small quibbles with the book. There’s one conversation in which our non-omniscient and thus unreliable narrators discuss unreliable narration, which stuck out like a sore thumb to me: the rest of the books aren’t that self-consciously meta. (Speaking of which, it’s not a quibble, but I did note that the book assumes an odd distance from the two really showy episodes via its choice of narrator. I can see some of the effects this produces, but I did find it odd on first reading.) And while I greatly approve of the content of the Conclusion, the form threw me right out of the book—though I seem to be absolutely the only person to feel that way. Otherwise, like its predecessors, Corambis has thorough and complex characterization of its people, their relationships to each other, and the worlds they live in; terrific narrative voices; satisfying arcs of emotional growth; and cool magical bits of the numinous and non-cookbook-y kind. If you’ve been waiting until it was completed to start or continue the series, I think you can go forth and read with confidence.

Monette has also recorded the first two chapters, which you can download via LiveJournal: chapter one, chapter two.

2 Comments

Posted on

Butcher, Jim: (01) Storm Front (audio)

I was casting around for an audiobook to listen to after finishing The Hundred Days, and landed on Jim Butcher’s Storm Front, the first book in the Dresden Files, as read by James Marsters, a.k.a. Spike on Buffy and Angel. I’d read this years ago but never picked up the rest of the series, and this seemed like it might be a good way to resume. I had no awkward associations with Marsters’ voice to overcome since I never watched Buffy or Angel, and he does a nice job overall, though female characters are not his strong point. However, he tends to speak fairly low which easily gets lost in traffic noise, so after not that many chapters I was thinking of dropping it.

Another reason was that Harry’s sexism is much harder to take when I have to listen to it. I’d already had plenty of time to reflect how annoying I found his statement that he liked to treat women as other than “shorter, weaker men with breasts”—hello, way to reveal that your default for humanity is not “person” but “man”! And then I got to his encounter with Bianca, which struck me as a textbook example of fear of female sexuality, and I said, “that’s it, I’m done.”

So I skimmed the rest of it, which was a good decision because I’d forgotten how annoying the “I’m going to keep you in ignorance for your own good, woman” thing had been on the page. If I’d had to listen to it, I would have been spitting fire. But with a little “la la la I can’t hear you,” it was a light entertaining read. I noticed this time that Harry already has a fair bit of backstory, and I understand that his life gets ever more complex as the series goes on, which interests me. I may even pick the series back up sooner than four and a half years, next time. Just not in audio.

4 Comments

Posted on

O’Brian, Patrick: (19) The Hundred Days (audio)

The penultimate book in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series, The Hundred Days, is an unfortunate disappointment. Set during Napoleon’s escape from Elba, its plot is illogical on its face, and its personal-level developments are disturbingly unsatisfactory.

The book opens with news of a major off-screen personal happening, which I disliked strongly both for its form and its content. It then moves into the political/military plot: a Muslim conspiracy is afoot to hire a mercenary army to disrupt the joining of the allies against Napoleon. Jack and Stephen are to prevent the passage of a large sum of gold that will fund the mercenaries. Even without knowing anything detailed about the course of the Napoleonic Wars, however, this adventure ends up not making much sense on its own terms, and feels somewhat repetitive besides. This is only compounded by the extremely rushed feel of the conclusion. In short, I hope this is the low point of the series.

A spoiler post follows.

No Comments

Posted on

Jordan, Robert: (01-03) The Eye of the World, The Great Hunt, The Dragon Reborn

Because of Leigh Butler’s re-read of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series over at Tor.com, I’ve re-read the first three books, The Eye of the World, The Great Hunt, and The Dragon Reborn. Leigh is actually a substantial way into the fourth, The Shadow Rising, but I haven’t caught up with her yet.

I have mixed feelings about the Wheel of Time books. I enjoyed the first several, but the series lost a lot of my good will with the later books, when the odious gender-war aspects got uglier and more prominent and the pace slowed to a crawl. I didn’t read the last two volumes at all.

On this re-read, yes, the books I’ve read so far do have the ability to suck me in and make me read large chunks at a time. But my tolerance for Jordan’s characteristic ways of writing gender relations and politics is even lower than ever—there’s really only so much mental screaming “JUST TALK TO EACH OTHER, ALREADY!” that I can do. So I have to be in just the right mood, as suggested by the fact that The Shadow Rising is generally thought to be, along with The Dragon Reborn, the high point of the series, and I haven’t been able to make myself start it yet.

I imagine I will, eventually, read The Shadow Rising and maybe the next one or two (The Fires of Heaven and Lord of Chaos). After that is when, in my memory, the books really started going downhill, so I may just rely on Leigh’s summaries and only read the cool bits from then on. We’ll see.

And despite all that, yes, I’ll almost certainly read Brandon Sanderson’s conclusion of the series from Jordan’s notes and writings. Sanderson strikes me as a really good choice for the job from a writing perspective and also a class act, and most importantly—it’s how it all comes out, and how can I resist?

5 Comments

Posted on

Arakawa, Hiromu: Fullmetal Alchemist, vols. 1-8

I finally went back to reading Fullmetal Alchemist, by Hiromu Arakawa, when I heard that a new anime was on the way. Enough time had finally passed from my watching the original anime that I could enjoy this on its own merits, which are considerable. (The new anime appears to be much more closely based on the manga, so it was read it now or not for a long time.)

I started by reading the new-to-me volumes that I had on hand, volumes three through eight. I enjoyed these so much I went back to the beginning and re-read all eight straight through. Like the anime, the manga of Fullmetal Alchemist has great characters, fascinating worldbuilding, and gripping angst and action. (I talked about the basic premise in the entry for the first volume.) It eventually develops some pretty significant differences from the anime, but at this point these may also be strengths: certain aspects of the underlying plot seem to remove some logistical questions I had, and the worldbuilding and range of characters are wider and more diverse [*]. I’m not sure how I’ll feel about their relative strengths when it comes to themes and philosophical musings, but the manga certainly has its eye on the questions. Finally, it may just be the difference between screen and page, but the manga doesn’t feel as unsubtle about emotional matters.

[*] There are a couple of isolated instances in which this isn’t a good thing. The series is set in a European-equivalent country, and a handful of characters are obviously meant to have African-equivalent ancestry; they’re not characterized in a stereotypical way, but they do tend to have balloon-like lips, which is unfortunate. And the sole homosexual to date is extremely effeminate and has a thing for underage boys.

Roughly speaking, volumes three and four are the Lab 5 arc, which is where the anime began to diverge—well, rather, there were small hints of divergence from the very beginning, but the different outcomes of this arc start pointing toward the significant changes to come. Volume four is also a convenient point for comparing the overall progression of the two story lines: its end corresponds to episode twenty-five, that is, halfway through the anime, while the manga currently stands at ninety-three chapters, four chapters to a volume.

Volumes five and six take the Elric brothers to Rush Valley and into an extended flashback of their childhood and training. Volumes seven and eight play out the Devil’s Nest arc, and then introduce manga-only characters from the adjacent empire of Xing. The divergences become very apparent and quite fascinating here, and it took a fair effort of will to write these volumes up first instead of diving into the ones that had arrived from Amazon.

Some other comments: the art is generally clear and fairly detailed. Over these volumes, I found myself noticing it more, in a good way, during emotionally-intense sequences. The fight scenes are usually not difficult to follow and not too prolonged, though I tend to skim them anyway—hey, I like stuff with dialogue. And I’m not crazy about the publisher’s decision to overwrite the Japanese sound effects with English translations; I find it distracting when enormous “BOOM”s and such integrated into the artwork, and prefer the original Japanese with translations outside the panels where the meaning isn’t obvious.

A spoiler post follows.

Crossposted to [info]50books_poc (with spoilers in the same post).

No Comments

Posted on

Westlake, Donald E.: (03) Jimmy the Kid

I hadn’t planned to resume the Donald E. Westlake Memorial Dortmunder Re-Read—had in fact picked up Jimmy the Kid and put it back down as not what I was in the mood for—and then I found myself with a sleeping SteelyKid in my arms and nothing else at hand. (She really, really needed the sleep, and was unlikely to keep sleeping if I put her down. Nb.: do not offer me parenting advice.)

This is the very meta one in which Andy Kelp proposes a job using a novel as a blueprint, one written by Richard Stark—Westlake’s pseudonym. (It doesn’t actually have independent existence.) At least in my edition, there’s no indication of the connection, which might make it rather a peculiar experience for someone unfamiliar with Westlake’s career—though whether more or less peculiar, I don’t know. Since, after all, having one set of fictional characters critique the realism of the plans of another set of fictional characters is pretty darn peculiar.

Because this is a Dortmunder novel, things do not go anywhere near according to plan. And the complications are amusing enough, but somehow the book just didn’t click for me. It may have been the circumstances of the re-read, but on the other hand, this is not one of the Dortmunders I re-read usually, so it may be something about the book as well. I just can’t quite put my finger on what.

Ongoing series notes: they’re still not “regulars” at the O.J., but their absurdity levels are approaching baseline. Dortmunder seems angrier at Kelp’s perceived jinxings of plans than I remember him being later. And May and Murch’s Mom again play a more active role than in many later books.

2 Comments