Author: katenepveu

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Resnick, Laura: (01) Disappearing Nightly

On New Year’s Day, Chad and I were in Barnes & Noble looking to spend some gift cards. I was browsing the shelves and spotted a new book by Laura Resnick, Disappearing Nightly. Pretty much all I needed to know was this quote on the back from Jennifer Crusie: “A paranormal screwball comedy adventure. Light, happy, fantastically funny!” Well, that and my prior knowledge of Resnick’s work; I used to read her category romances under a different name, and I recalled that she did comedy well (she’s also written some more recent romances and some Big Fat Fantasies, which I haven’t read yet). I read the first couple of pages, bought it, and stayed up too late to finish it.

This is just fun, pure and simple. The first person narrator, Esther Diamond, is a chorus nymph in the off-Broadway musical Sorceror! and the understudy for the lead female role. The musical is built around a magic act, and one night the Disappearing Lady act works far too well. Esther is warned off taking the missing actress’s place by Max, a member of the Magnum Collegium:

“The Great College?” I guessed. “What was that?”

“It is . . . ” He shrugged. “A varied group of individuals united by a common interest.” . . . 

“But what is it? What is the group’s common interest?”

“We confront Evil.”

“Well,” I said. “Hmm. Uh-huh. I see.” If someone ever tells you he’s a member of a worldwide club whose mission is to confront Evil, I defy you to come up with a pithy reply on the spot.

It turns out that there have been multiple disappearances, all during the vanishing part of magic acts. Max contacts the performers, an affectionately motley bunch, and Esther organizes their attempts at figuring out what’s happening and why. There’s skulking, red herrings, disguises, booby-traps, a cute cop who really don’t want to have to arrest Esther, and, of course, confronting Evil. I should note that the book teeters on the edge of a tone-content mismatch during the confrontation with Evil; on reflection, I think it gets away with it, but I did have to stop and think about it, which is sub-optimal. That’s my only quibble with the book, though.

This is the first book in a series, though it entirely stands on its own, and I definitely will be snapping up the next as soon as it’s out in December.

ObDisclaimer: Yes, this is published by Luna, but it’s not a romance; the relationship with the cute cop is a definite subplot and if you ignore the spine, you’ll never know it was published by *gasp* a subsidary of Harlequin. Girl cooties at a minimum, honest, so don’t let that stop you from reading it.

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Willans, Geoffrey: Down With Skool!

Down With Skool!, written by Geoffrey Willans and illustrated by Ronald Searle, is one of the diaries of Nigel Molesworth, a student at an archetypal 1950s British boarding school. I’d been vaguely aware of the phrase “as any fule kno,” but other than that I knew nothing about these until Down with Skool! appeared in the mail as a gift from my sister-in-law.

This is very, very silly. Molesworth takes his readers on a tour of life in a boarding school: headmasters, masters (teachers), classes, parents, and school food (including a longish fantasy on the revolt of the prunes—”‘Exactly,’ sa the sensitive prune. ‘Why should we revolt them all the time? Why canot they revolt us?'”). To my surprise, Molesworth’s extremely, err, personal spelling and punctuation only tripped me up a few times; I spent most of the time reading giggling quietly to myself.

For some reason, I am particularly fond of the section on math lessons, which includes this bit that nearly had me waking Chad up:

To do geom you hav to make a lot of things equal to each other when you can see perfectly well that they don’t. This agane is due to Pythagoras and it formed much of his conversation at brekfast.

Pythagoras (helping himself to porridge): Hmm. I see the sum of the squares on AB and BC = the square on AC.

Wife: Dear dear.

Pythagoras: I’m not surprised, not surprised at all. I’ve been saying that would come for years.

Wife: Yes dear.

Pythagoras: Now they’ll hav to do something about it. More tea please. There’s another thing — the day is coming when they’re going to have to face the fact that a strate line if infinitely protracted goes on for ever.

Wife: Quite so.

Pythagoras: Now take the angle a, for xsample.

(His wife suddenly looses control and thro the porridge at him. Enter Euclid: another weed and the 2 bores go off together)

(I think I got all the misspellings in.)

The book is also heavily illustrated, with, for instance, “Scenes in the life of Pythagoras”. Though the stalking of the lazy parallelograms amuses me, I like the portraits best; they are wonderfully expressive.

Though I know a teeny bit about boarding-school life from reading other novels, I can’t say I really felt I needed that knowledge; though the context changes, things like Molesworth’s reaction to memorizing poetry are universal:

In other words frankly i just don’t kno it.

Also quite frankly

I COULDN’T CARE LESS

What use will that be to me in the new atomic age?

Occasionally english masters childe me for this point of view o molesworth one [*] you must learn the value of spiritual things until i spray them with 200 rounds from my backterial gun. i then plant the british flag in the masters inkwell and declare a whole holiday for the skool. boo to shakespeare.

[*] His younger brother is Molesworth 2.

I think this is particularly good if you’re in school (I certainly would have been tempted to call various people “utterly wet” and “a weed” if I’d had the phrases), but I enjoyed the heck out of it and, thank goodness, I am no longer a student.

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Kaye, M.M.: Ordinary Princess, The

M.M. Kaye’s The Ordinary Princess would be one of my favorite books if I’d read it when I was, say, ten years old. Reading it for the first time now, I found it charming but unsurprising and pitched a little younger than I prefer.

As is traditional in the country of Phantasmorania, all fairies are invited to the christening of a seventh royal daughter. (The royal family always has daughters. Travelers, we are told, object upon hearing this that the country has a king; the townspeople respond, “Ah yes; but by tradition the heir to the throne is always the youngest son of the eldest princess. It’s very simple.” It’s a quietly tongue-in-cheek book.) Princess Amethyst Alexandra Augusta Ataminta Adelaide Aurealia Anne doesn’t have an evil fairy show up at her christening, but she does have a somewhat cranky water fairy get dehydrated while delayed in traffic.

Old Crustacea put out a long bony finger and touched the seventh princess’s pink cheek. Then she looked at the King and Queen and the resplendent guests and the six little sister princesses, each more beautiful than the last, and finally she looked at the huge pile of glittering presents and the list that the Lord High Chamberlain had made of the gifts bestowed by the other fairies.

“Hmm!” said the Fairy Crustacea. “Wit, Charm, Courage, Health, Wisdom, Grace . . . Good gracious, poor child! Well, thank goodness my magic is stronger than anyone else’s.”

She raised her twisty coral stick and waved it three times over the cradle of the seventh princess. “My child,” said the Fairy Crustacea, “I am going to give you something that will probably bring you more happineess than all these fal-lals and fripperies put together. You shall be Ordinary!”

Amy grows up gawky and somewhat tomboy-ish and not at all beautiful, until her parents quite despair of marrying her off. They finally decide to hire a dragon to lay waste to the countryside, on the theory that when a prince kills it, he’ll have to marry Amy, Ordinaryness and all. Amy gets wind of this, disapproves strongly, and runs off.

After a couple of months of living on nuts and berries in a forest (and taming a squirrel and a crow—fortunately this period is skipped over, because it’s a bit eye-roll inducing), Amy finds that her dress is falling apart, and takes a job as the thirteenth assistant kitchen maid in a neighboring country’s palace to earn the money to replace it. She meets a nice young man who calls himself a man-of-all-work while cleaning up after a banquet, and if you can’t spot where this is going, you’ve never read a fairy tale before.

This was published in 1980, so I can’t really blame it for not surprising me. Since then, things like Patricia C. Wrede’s Enchanted Forest Chronicles or Will Shetterly’s “The Princess Who Kicked Butt” have worked similiar terrority, and I happened to read those first. But this is a nice premise told with a sweet and simple charm, and would probably be great for a ten-year-old new to the genre.

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Christie, Agatha: Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, The (radio play)

Today’s 90-minute Miss Marple mystery, via the BBC, was The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, which is much more like it. There were clues when and where they were supposed to be, interesting and sympathetic characters, and even a bit of things going less-than-smoothly for Miss Marple.

Miss Marple’s friends sell the house of The Body in the Library to a film star named Marina Gregg and her husband. A raving fan girl is poisoned at an open house for the neighborhood, and it appears that Ms. Gregg was the actual target. Miss Marple isn’t there, because she’d been ill and her off-screen nephew Raymond has saddled her with an appalling nurse, but she hears all about it from various people, including another nephew, an Inspector from Scotland Yard. She solves the mystery with a refreshing lack of reminiscences about other people she’s known, among quite a quantity of red herrings.

As I said, this was quite a satisfactory adaptation; the only problem, which is not limited to this production, is that when British actors attempt to do American accents—well, I’ve yet to hear one that doesn’t make my ears itch. I have a great deal more sympathy, these days, for U.K. natives who complain about the accents of American actors.

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Peters, Ellis: (03) Monk’s Hood (radio play)

While I’ve been getting tired of reading Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael novels, when some adaptations showed up on BBC7, I figured I’d give them a try. It’s the repetitiveness of the plots that’s been annoying me, not the characters, and an audio format usually gives me a clearer idea of the characters. (It’s true that it also gives me the time to think about the clues that are given or omitted. However, I have no objections to this adaptation on those grounds.)

I recorded three of them, but listened to Monk’s Hood first, as it came earliest in the chronology. This starred Philip Madoc as Cadfael, who has a nice deep strong voice; the recurring secondary characters of Brother Mark and Hugh Beringar were also voiced well and suitably. My only complaint is that the dialogue was occasionally a touch too fast; there were times when I thought a slight pause between speakers would have suited the content, but the responses came disconcertingly fast. Otherwise, this was an enjoyable listen, and I’ll keep the others for commutes when I can’t deal with anything more demanding.

(Weird note of the day: Something about the Welsh accents in this production (maybe the rhythm?) reminds me of—of all things—Indian accents.)

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Christie, Agatha: Body in the Library, The (radio play)

Another 90-minute BBC radio adaptation of a Miss Marple mystery, this time The Body in the Library. As the title indicates, a young woman’s body is found on the library hearth of an old friend of Miss Marple’s. I wasn’t quite enjoying this one as we went along, because some of the characters exhibit class prejudices that really got up my nose (and I am not nearly as sensitive to this stuff as, say, Chad). The adaptation was also disappointing in that it not just failed to give an important clue, but gave me exactly the opposite impression of the relevant fact. Who’s editing these things?

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Roberts, Nora: Blue Smoke

From the library, a new Nora Roberts hardcover, Blue Smoke. This is a single-couple novel, perhaps indicating that two- or three-couple novels are not going to be a permanent trend in her mainstream novels. It takes its sweet time getting the couple together, mind, letting one-sided “love at first sight” at around page 50, and a number of near-misses, suffice until they meet almost half-way in. The romance feels almost secondary to me, which is just fine, because I read the book as Catrina Hale’s story, how and why she became an arson investigator. Despite its crashingly obvious villain, that story is more interesting than fated love at first etc.

As usual, a good way to pass a lunch and a sleepy evening; I don’t ask it to be more than that and it doesn’t try.

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Pratchett, Terry: (20) Hogfather

Before Thanksgiving, I was feeling stressed and overly-sensitive; thus, when I grabbed books to take with me, Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather was a natural choice. It’s seasonal, being about the Discworld’s equivalent of Christmas, and the better Discworld books are always comfort reads for me.

This was the only book I read over Thanksgiving, so it was a good choice. I really like the principal character of this book, Susan (Death’s adopted grand-daughter), and moments like “Hi! I’m the inner babysitter!” make me want to cheer. I also like the commentary on the Christmas season, belief, and childhood.

On re-reading, I do think the plot has one incident too many; or, rather, while the last bit in the snow serves thematic purposes, it feels tacked-on. Pratchett’s plots have improved vastly over the course of the Discworld books (of which this is the 20th), but I do think they’re his weakest area. It’s a minor point, however, and Hogfather remains great comfort reading.

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O’Brian, Patrick: (03) H.M.S. Surprise (audio)

I’ve heard the third of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels, H.M.S. Surprise, cited as the point where the series really comes together. I don’t know that I can speak to that; it seems smoother to me, in that its land-based plot isn’t just a big lump at the beginning, but on the other hand, we no longer need to be introduced to those land-based characters. However, to the extent that these assessments are based on Stephen’s expanded role in the plot, I think it’s fair: it’s necessary for the overall balance of the series that Stephen be more than just the sidekick along for the ride, which is accomplished nicely here.

I remembered basically nothing of this book but the sloth (which Patrick Tull pronounces “slowth”; is it just the animal that’s pronounced that way, or the sin too?). I don’t know how I could have forgotten various events, but that just goes to show that audio is really the best way for me to first experience these.

A spoiler-filled post follows.

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