Author: katenepveu

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Wrede, Patricia C., and Caroline Stevermer: (02) The Grand Tour

The Grand Tour, by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer, is the sequel to Sorcery and Cecelia—a welcome and unexpected treat indeed, since that was out of print so long. As I said in the booklog entry for Sorcery and Cecelia, my one-word reaction to that is “charming”; I’m afraid that my one-word reaction to this one is, well, “squee!”

I’m such a fangirl.

In The Grand Tour, our two couples are taking their honeymoon trip together, allowing many opportunities for them to be all cute and smit and stuff. Necessarily, this requires modifications to the epistolary format, since Kate and Cecelia can hardly write each other letters when traveling together. Instead, we read Kate’s diary and Cecelia’s after-the-fact deposition (a written narrative, not a transcribed question-and-answer session). This removes a small quantity of the fun of the prior book, because there isn’t the same interplay between Kate and Cecelia. However, it’s interesting to get more insight into Kate; for instance, I was initially surprised by her raptures over opera, since she didn’t show that much interest in music in her letters—ah, but then she mentions that Cecy isn’t interested in music, so of course she would play that down in her letters to avoid boring Cecy.

I recall finding the plot unsurprising, but I think the jacket copy or perhaps the summary on the copyright page (yes, I always read the copyright page, don’t you?) gave a lot of hints. And, you know, plot is nice, but I loved Sorcery and Cecelia for the characters and the wit and the sparkling Fantasy-of-Manners-ness, and The Grand Tour has all of these in abundance.

(And one of the authors says that it looks like there will be a third. Squee!)

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Smith, Sherwood: Crown Duel

Too bleh to read, so will write about reading instead. This may be slightly scattered, but the more time passes, the worse it’s going to get, because we’re going way into the backlog now, all the way back to August.

Sherwood Smith’s Crown Duel was originally published as Crown Duel and Court Duel. This fantasy novel opens with two teens of an impoverished noble family promising their father on his deathbed that they’ll kick the bad king off the throne, to which their mother had a good claim. From there, it both does and doesn’t go where you might expect; I didn’t find many surprises as the various characters came on screen, but it doesn’t take the most obvious route, either.

My primary reaction to this book was to the first-person narrator, Mel. I like and understand her, I do. Honest. But I still found myself wanting to kick her not infrequently. (She gets better, which is the point.) I have a feeling that if I’d found these earlier, I would have identified with her ferocious awkwardness a lot more, which is possibly the most significant way it’s within the YA genre.

This is a lot smoother than the Wren books. The story is definitely structured in two halves which are fairly different in content, but I was expecting that from the prior publication history. I only experienced a couple of very minor glitches, which might well be idiosyncratic reactions: for some reason, I thought the retrospective narration was further removed than it turned out to be; and I had trouble getting the characters’ names to stay in my head. Other than these small things, I quite enjoyed the story.

I understand that Crown Duel takes place in the same world as a much larger story (including the forthcoming Inda, a summer hardcover from DAW), the hints about which are very tantalizing. This book is quite self-contained, however, so you needn’t be nervous about jumping into an unfinished tale.

Crown Duel is often mentioned in discussions of Fantasy of Manners, because the second half of the story concerns Mel coming to court for the first time. I’m personally not sure where I’d classify it, considering that Mel ends up rejecting the existing system of manners, but it certainly would be of interest to people who like FoM for the cultural anthropology, as it were. (People who like FoM for the wit and tone might find Mel too passionate a narrator to really scratch that part of the itch.) I would also recommend it for people looking for stories about Girls Who Kick Butt.

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Heyer, Georgette: Unknown Ajax, The

I suppose I might also have been thinking of The Unknown Ajax when thinking about Heyer’s tendency to focus on family dynamics [with regard to Venetia]. It’s one of my favorite Heyers and has been reprinted (along with A Civil Contract, currently awaiting a re-read). The Unknown Ajax is definitely a family story rather than a romance, though it does contain a romance. The family in question is turned upside-down when the aging patriarch summons the new heir, previously unacknowledged because his father had the gall to marry a weaver’s daughter. A former Army officer, Hugo amuses himself by playing dumb (and hamming up a thick dialect, which is unfortunate) while learning the many ways in which the Darracotts of Darracott Place are dysfunctional. This leads to possibly the best, or at least most gripping, of Heyer’s plots; the last few chapters are excitingly tense in a way that few of her other endings are. Hugo is probably too perfect, but I just don’t care; The Unknown Ajax is great fun and wonderful comfort reading.

(Oh, and Lady Aurelia has to be one of the models for Alys Vorpatril.)

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Heyer, Georgette: Venetia

Georgette Heyer’s Venetia is frequently described as one of the few good Regencies of the rake/innocent variety. I very much enjoyed it, but found that it had less plot than I expected. As I recall, it had some family problems that reminded me of The Grand Sophy, but unlike that book, they aren’t all neatly tied up by the end. This isn’t particularly a flaw, it was just slightly surprising on the first read. Venetia does not appear to be one of the ones recently reprinted, alas.

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Claire, Cassandra: “The Girl’s Guide To Defeating the Dark Lord”

I bought Turn the Other Chick, edited by Esther Friesner, because it contained Cassandra Claire’s “The Girl’s Guide To Defeating the Dark Lord” and I believe in buying books by people I know (even when the entire story is available online). The story has a good pace and a nice blend of lightness and pragmatism in its tone; I enjoyed it. I can’t say anything about the rest of the anthology, because I didn’t read any of the other stories.

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Dare, Justine: High Stakes

Back when I was a voracious romance reader, I used to read a lot of Justine Davis’s category novels. She’s now writing romantic thrillers under the name Justine Dare, so I picked up High Stakes used out of curiosity. This was a competent and unmemorable thriller about a former runaway who is on the run again after a murder, and the owner of a small hotel/casino who helps her despite her initial reluctance. It was a perfectly decent lunch book, and it went to the paperback exchange as soon as I was done, because I feel absolutely no need to ever re-read it.

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Peters, Elizabeth: (01-04) Crocodile on the Sandbank; The Curse of the Pharoahs; The Mummy Case; Lion in the Valley (audio)

More audiobooks, this time the first four Amelia Peabody novels, written by Elizabeth Peters and read by Barbara Rosenblat.

First, let me say that Rosenblat is a superb narrator, with amazing flexibility and precision (though maybe a hair too much drama). These have also been recorded by Susan O’Malley, but I read one review that said she doesn’t use a British accent for Amelia, which is just wrong. If you’re going to listen to these on audiobook, I highly recommend the Rosenblat recordings.

The first Amelia Peabody novel is Crocodile on the Sandbank, which I found charming. Like the rest of the ones I’ve experienced to date, it’s in first-person retrospective, framed as journals written after events have concluded. (I understand that some of the more recent ones depart from this format.) I knew I would like Amelia when, after rescuing a young woman in 1884 Rome and hearing how she was seduced and betrayed, the first thing she asked was what sex was like. (At the time, Amelia was a spinster who neither expected nor desired marriage.) Amelia and Evelyn, the young woman, go off to Egypt and end up on an archaeological dig, where they find adventure, love, and in Amelia’s case, a lasting passion for “Egyptology.”

The plot of this book is so slight as to be transparent, and I found the ending a touch unjust. But I enjoyed the characters and the Egyptology enough to get the second one right away.

When The Curse of the Pharoahs opens, Amelia and her husband Emerson are in England going slowly mad. Emerson refuses to be parted from their son Ramses (a nickname) to go dig in Egypt, but doesn’t think Ramses’s health is strong enough to take him with them. Emerson is teaching, and Amelia is helping with his academic work, but they are really very bored. And their son is an absolute terror. Enter a distressed widow, begging Emerson to take over the dig that her possibly-murdered husband ran; of course they take it (leaving Ramses with his aunt and uncle). I enjoyed this section for its non-typical, and very in-character, portrait of Amelia as a mother, but a little of Ramses goes a long way. I was glad to get away from him too, and I don’t even live with him.

The actual plot moves a little slowly, particularly at the beginning, but has a colorful cast of characters and some more good Egyptology (including the strong suggestion that they were this close to discovering King Tut’s tomb thirty years early). And I enjoyed seeing Amelia forced to acknowledge an error, even a relatively minor one—Amelia is very prone to declaring how sensible and perceptive and stout-hearted she is, and it gave me hope that the author saw her more clearly than that.

In the third book, The Mummy Case, I continued to get progressively more irritated at Amelia’s pronouncements about herself, as well as her tendency to not so much jump to conclusions as to fling herself at them headlong. I was also irritated that the vital clue to the mystery is a piece of Egyptology that I didn’t already know and wasn’t told by the book. Finally, Ramses went on the dig with them, and long-winded speeches in piping child voices are much easier to take in text than aloud. I was strongly considering taking a break from these at this point, but I saw that the fourth appeared to be closely linked, and then the fifth was back in Britain. I decided to stick it out for one more.

This was a mistake. I stopped listening to Lion in the Valley less than halfway through because Amelia was driving me nuts. For one thing, she was being more bossy than usual toward the young people she accumulates each book. For anther, a master criminal (Sethos) first appeared in the third book, and Amelia’s continuing obsession with this individual rather grates. When I found myself greeting her orations regarding “that genius of crime” or “the subtle machinations of that great criminal brain” with “oh be quiet!”, I decided that for the sake of my blood pressure it was time to stop listening and just skim the text to see what happened.

It’s a good thing I did. The ending is on crack. I was almost literally reading with my head averted because it was so very embarrassing.

Can anyone tell me which of the remaining books contain the Sethos plot, so I can avoid them? I would like to see if Ramses becomes human, and if they ever get any really good archaeological discoveries, but I just cannot deal with Sethos, even skimmed at speed.

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Adams, Douglas: Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency; The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (audio)

I’d read Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul before, but remembered nothing useful about them. I listened to them as audiobooks read by the author, as with the Hitchhiker’s books, and Adams again did an excellent job (with one small exception).

Dirk Gently’s was a lot better than I’d remembered (the sum total of which was Coleridge and weirdness). The ending requires a fairly unjustified deductive leap, but the characters were much more emotionally engaging—I remember listening to the death and after-death of one of the characters, and thinking that Adams had really surpassed himself with the sequence. Except for that unjustified deductive leap, the book also struck me as a lot more carefully constructed than the Hitchhiker’s Guide books. It does something neat with the worldbuilding, which is carried through well and cleverly even though I was distracted and didn’t notice it at first. I think that as a novel, it’s probably Adams’ best.

Despite the title of Dirk Gently’s, I thought Dirk was a supporting character and was unsure he could carry an entire novel by himself. Fortunately, in Long Dark Teatime, he’s balanced with a sensible co-protagonist, Kate (who doesn’t sound American in the least in Adams’s reading). The characters and book were ultimately less engaging to me, however, because it’s much pettier than the first. This is the point, mind you (consider the title), but it’s still not to my taste. It also struck me as less tightly-constructed, though I’m afraid that with this backlog I can’t recall the specific loose ends.

I certainly recommend reading or listening to Dirk Gently’s, though, and I’m pleased to have rediscovered it.

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Spencer, Wen: (04) Dog Warrior

Wen Spencer’s Dog Warrior is another series book with structural problems. It is the fourth Ukiah Oregon book (I logged the first three together). My immediate reaction on finishing it was that it’s a pity that Spencer couldn’t take the route that Mary Gentle’s Ash did in the U.K., and publish the series as a single book (Ash was broken into four for U.S. publication. I appear to have read it pre-booklog, so I’ll just say I didn’t like it and leave it at that). The weight of exposition to be got through, after three books’ worth of both action and history, is really crushing and does serious damage to the book’s pace.

On reflection, though, even the Ash route wouldn’t necessarily fix Dog Warrior, because though you could get rid of a lot of backstory put in for the reader’s benefit, this story switches viewpoint character. That’s right, after three books’ worth of Ukiah figuring out who and what he is and what happened to make him that way, we get someone else who needs to learn all this stuff from scratch!

The new character, Atticus, is Ukiah’s new-found brother (sort of), and so it does make sense for us to be in his point of view as he figures out what he thinks of Ukiah and all the odd baggage that comes with him. But the tension, pace, and exposition suffers so much thereby, that I really have to wonder if staying out of Atticus’ head might have been a better course—let us infer his mental journey from Ukiah’s keen observation of his actions. (And give us a straight-up “what has come before” prologue too; at some point you just stop being able to smoothly inclue everything important.)

Because of all this backstory to wade through, the actual plot seems almost an afterthought. More, it’s another stopgap action in an ongoing war, and I’m left wondering if the larger conflict ever will, or indeed can, be resolved. I found the first three fun and fast reads, and it’s too bad that this, the last for the foreseeable future, didn’t satisfy.

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Pierce, Tamora: (114) Trickster’s Queen

Tamora Pierce’s Trickster’s Queen is the sequel to Trickster’s Choice. Pierce is always entertaining, and I really appreciate that she continues to try different things—here, she has her protagonist up to her neck in running a revolutionary conspiracy. I have to say, though, that I respect the idea of both of these books more than their execution. I reacted to at least two major plot turns not with feelings, but with, “Oh, so that’s how that obstacle is overcome; convenient.” Things were just a little too easy for our protagonists, undercutting the credibility of the gritty revolutionary plot. (This is related to my feeling that Pierce doesn’t convey grief in a way that grips me.) I doubt these will end up in heavy rotation as comfort re-reads, the way that Pierce’s Circle-verse books and prior Tortall books (minus the Alanna series) have.

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