Author: katenepveu

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Crusie, Jennifer, and Bob Mayer: Don’t Look Down

Don’t Look Down is a collaboration between Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer, with a chick-lit cover and camouflage-patterned boards underneath. Lucy Armstrong has been brought to Georgia at the last minute to finish directing a movie. J.T. Wilder is a Green Beret who’s been hired as a military advisor to one of the movie’s stars. The original crew has left the movie set in droves, strange re-writes are being handed down from on high, a sniper and a one-eyed alligator lurk (separately) in the swamp, the CIA is poking its nose in, and black helicopters make prominent appearances. As do a dysfunctional but loving family unit, pop culture references, bantering, and sex.

To me, this felt more Crusie (though not chick lit, cover aside) than Mayer—well, insofar as I can judge without having read any of Mayer’s solo works. The opening is certainly very Crusie: I don’t know if anyone else has this problem with her longer works, but the way she opens with multiple characters never fails to confuse me. It usually takes me a couple of chapters and a lot of flipping back and forth to figure out who everyone is and what their relationships are to each other. (I started reading Crusie with her category romances, where there are many fewer characters.) While Mayer wrote the male POV sections and Crusie the female, the tone is reasonably consistent and another reason why it doesn’t feel terribly different from Crusie’s other works.

Oddly, even the increased action/suspense content seems more an extension of, rather than a departure from, Crusie’s other works. Lots of her books have had murderers or crazy people or other dark elements—which I often found jarring and poorly-integrated. If you’re going to do that kind of thing, go all the way; and here the darker parts are fully integrated into plot, character, and theme, and so there was no point at which I found myself saying, “there was really no need for a murder (alligator, shooting, explosion) in this book.” Which is a good thing.

This was a fun backyard read up until the very end, which required a re-read, a nap, and then another re-read to make sense to me. Or perhaps I’m still misreading it, because it seems like (spoiler) is getting off awfully damn easy. Perhaps another nap is called for.

Lucy’s soundtrack is provided by Kirsty MacColl. The visual motifs are Wonder Woman (Kingdom Come is referenced, which I haven’t read) and High Noon (which I have seen).

If you like Crusie and aren’t allergic to action scenes, this is worth checking out.

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Davis, Lindsey: (03) Venus in Copper

I think the plot of Lindsey Davis’s Venus in Copper is genuinely tighter than that of Shadows in Bronze; it’s not just that I was sleepy and uncritical today, since usually when I’m sleepy I have less patience for slow books—they don’t do as good a job at keeping me awake. This book picks up immediately after Shadows, but its plot mostly stands alone. Falco is hired by two women; they and their husbands share a household with a third man, who’s just become betrothed to a woman who’s buried three husbands and profited each time she did so. They want him to find out her price for leaving, but her betrothed dies of poison—before the wedding.

Falco sticks with the case even after his clients want him to go away, feeling an obligation. Meanwhile, he’s got a larceny charge hanging over his head, a new apartment to furnish, a great big turbot to cook . . . oh, and there’s Helena Justina, of course.

The plot is not far from being over the top, but at least it’s not insubstantial. I deeply disapprove of what happens with the woman Falco’s hired to investigate, but other than that, I enjoyed it. There’s a lot of Helena Justina—she gets to question a witness for Falco, and is competent as would be expected—and the scene where Falco cooks the turbot is pretty funny.

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Davis, Lindsey: (02) Shadows in Bronze

Lindsey Davis’s Shadows in Bronze is a direct sequel to Silver Pigs. It picks up less than two weeks after the first book closes: Falco is trying to tidy up after the plot against the Emperor Vespasian, but is surprised to find additional loose ends. Vespasian dispatches him to deal with them, and in his travels Falco re-encounters Helena Justina, his love and partner from the first book, from whom he is currently separated by, well, lots of things.

I’d heard Davis’s plots criticized for being obvious, and that’s pretty fair here. What bothered me more was that the plot also felt flimsy; in particular, the section spent chasing down a particular Senator seemed much too long and insubstantial. The character development is as enjoyable as before, but I found myself paying less attention to the other levels of the book. I hope that the next book will hold my attention more thoroughly.

This book, by the way, definitively establishes that the retrospective narration is set at several years’ remove (which seemed quite likely after the first): Falco mentions how Vesuvius’s eruption affected people and places he encountered in A.D. 71. (The author, on her website, states that she hasn’t decided yet how to handle the eruption within the books.)

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Pratchett, Terry: (13) Small Gods (radio play)

Small Gods is one of my favorite books in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. It’s a humanist examination of religion (I don’t think that’s necessarily a contradiction in terms), set in a theocracy where the Great God Om woke up one day to find himself a tortoise with only one believer, an innocent novice named Brutha. (He’d intended to be a bull.) It’s been recorded as an unabridged audiobook, but I didn’t like the way the narrator, Nigel Planer, voiced Brutha; it was a bit too “Duh” for my tastes. I was therefore very pleased to find a recent radio adaptation with an excellent Brutha (voiced by Carl Prekopp).

The radio adaptation is streamlined pretty heavily, removing at least three subplots that I can think of off the top of my head (the History Monks, the lion, and Urn’s last device). I didn’t object to that. However, in spots I did feel that it suffered in comparison to the book, by ever-so-slightly rushing the events that were kept. Probably this wouldn’t bother someone who doesn’t know the book as well as I do, and the excellent voice actors mostly made up for it. I recommend this adaptation, though I recommend the book more.

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[2006] Changed host

If you’re seeing this post, that means that the DNS changes have propogated and you’re now viewing steelypips.org at its new host. Things ought to work exactly the same as at the old host, so if they don’t, drop a comment or an e-mail to let me know what the problem is.

Sorry for all the downtime. There are several backdated entries originally posted on my LiveJournal below this post.

A brief note on the problems and the switch is below the cut.

Continue reading “[2006] Changed host”

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Alexander, Lloyd: Westmark

Lloyd Alexander’s Westmark is the first book in a much-loved trilogy of the same name. I didn’t love this book, and while I’ve been warned that it’s not as good, I suspect that I don’t love it for different reasons that most people.

This is a YA Ruritanian fantasy set in a country where the king is ill with grief over the death of his only child, and his chief minister (a power-hungry manipulative bastard) is plotting to take control of the country in name as well as fact. Theo is an orphan apprenticed to a printer, and the plot happens when the chief minister’s oppressive policies turn him into a fugitive who encounters con artists and would-be revolutionaries.

The way the book handles the political side of the plot is admirable. As Rilina says in a thoughtful and spoilery discussion, “Westmark is distinguished by its refusal to offer anything close to a definitive answer to the questions it raises.” I genuinely could not tell what path the book was going to take or wanted us to approve of. That’s a hard thing to do.

But while I admire this book, I don’t love it. I found the prose a barrier: I was constantly feeling that the sentences were a little short, the rhythms a little choppy, the descriptions and characterizations a little sparse. (Maybe I was off form today, but I completely missed the romance until it was explicitly stated, for instance; I think I mistook the ages of the characters in question.) My overall impression was of an excellently-constructed skeleton, which is nevertheless not entirely satisfying in the absence of muscle and skin. Put another way, I’m not too old for the content of Westmark, but I felt too old for the way it was expressed.

Somewhat like The Ordinary Princess, I suspect I would have loved this if I’d found it when I was young. Everyone says that The Kestrel is excellent, and I own it thanks to a mistaken purchase, so I will read at least that one; perhaps the expected jump in content-quality will pull me past the prose (I’m expecting that the prose stays constant over the series, which may not be correct). At any rate, I would certainly recommend this to kids in late-elementary and middle school.

[Originally posted at my LiveJournal while this booklog was down; there are comments there.]

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Macdonald, James D.: (04) The Apocalypse Door (re-read)

A couple of weeks ago, I needed to fully unwind, sink all the way down into a book and completely lose myself in it. I’d recently had the pleasure of recommending James D. Macdonald’s The Apocalypse Door to someone looking for chaste Catholic priests in action novels, so it was on my mind and just what I was looking for.

I’d talked in my original booklog post about Crossman and Sister Mary Magdalene, but I’d not really mentioned much about the new Knight, Simon B. LaRouche, who is also fun to read about and had a larger part in the book than I’d remembered. And since then, I’ve learned a thematic thing about the backstory thread that I didn’t know enough to spot then; I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler, but I’m going to ROT13 it just to be safe: fgngvbaf bs gur pebff.

Finally, I was surprised to find that some people had different opinions on the substance of the plot; in my opinion, the last three pages make it crystal-clear, but perhaps they tend to get overlooked in the adrenaline rush.

Anyway, still a great book and just what I needed when I was stressed out.

[Originally posted at my LiveJournal while this booklog was down; there are comments there.]

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O’Brian, Patrick: (07) The Surgeon’s Mate (audio)

Rather like the prior book, The Surgeon’s Mate is very closely connected with its predecessor in the Aubrey-Maturin series, in this case The Fortune of War. It opens quite soon after that book, and part of the plot springs from managing the aftermath of their doings in America. In structure, I think of it as something like a criss-crossing two-parter. The book’s first half covers non-naval doings in Canada and Europe, and strands from it cross over into the second half, a mission in the Balitc Sea.

(This is the book where Jack and Stephen see Elsinore and Jack reminisces about being one of the Ophelias. I giggled quite immoderately, in-between reminding myself to look at a map of the Baltic (which I never actually got around to).)

I did not find this book quite as striking as The Fortune of War, but it has its fair share of good moments. I do like the way O’Brian develops consequences in and across books; secondary characters act as it’s in their character to act, even (or especially) if that creates useful plot.

[Originally posted at my LiveJournal while this booklog was down; there are comments there.]

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