Author: katenepveu

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Pratchett, Terry: (14) Lords and Ladies

I spent a lot of time over the weekend wandering around trying to figure out what I was in the mood for. Watching The Last Seduction wasn’t it; though it’s pretty amazing to watch Linda Fiorentino’s character and how her brain works, she’s so thoroughly amoral that it’s hard to feel good about it, at least in the mood I was in Saturday. (It did net me an amusing half-an-hour where I contemplated how I would handle the trial that’s pending at the end of the movie; there’s definitely a possibility or two there, though I’d still do my best to avoid going to trial.) Re-reading The Lady’s Not For Burning wasn’t it; I got through the first act and realized that I hadn’t been paying attention for the last ten pages. Watching The Hunt for Red October was almost it, but I didn’t see the whole thing.

After eventually determining that I was looking for was the equivalent of “things go fast and blow up,” I ended up with Terry Pratchett’s Lords and Ladies—in which some things do go fast, and I suppose some thing probably blows up, but which is not the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of “things go fast and blow up.” However, I was after something fast-paced, vigorous, lively, and with some righteous butt-kicking. (The “righteous” bit being where The Last Seduction falls short.) All of the Discworld books are lively and fast-paced, and Lords and Ladies has some of the most enjoyable showdowns of the series. Of the books focusing on the Lancre witches, I still have a soft spot for Witches Abroad, but I think this one is the high point to date. (I re-read Carpe Jugulum a while ago and now think that it’s a little too similar to Lords and Ladies after all.)

I think I once had, or read, an edition with the following quote on the back, which makes for much better cover copy than that on the US HarperPrism trade paperback edition we currently have on hand:

Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.
Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
Elves are terrific. They beget terror.

Granny facing down the Queen of the Elves: great stuff and particularly recommended.

(The next Discworld book, The Night Watch, should be out in a few weeks, and I’m quite looking forward to it.)

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Peters, Ellis: (12) The Raven in the Foregate

Time to take a break from Ellis Peters’ Cadfael novels, after the twelfth, The Raven in the Foregate. Some of the characters are starting to sound all too familiar: “Oh look, another Young Person In Disguise.” And I know I wanted to see Cadfael wrong at some point, but I meant wrong about who he decides to trust; in this one he’s just slow to notice crucial details, for no reason than to draw the plot out, as far as I can tell.

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Duane, Diane: (106) A Wizard Alone

A Wizard Alone is the latest book in Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series, and a welcome return to form after the disappointing The Wizard’s Dilemma. That book suffered from the “A Plot, B Plot” problem; what’s more, both of the plots seem, to my memory now, to not cohere very well even to themselves. The author has stated that it was the beginning of a larger plot arc, which is quite evident in A Wizard Alone. This doesn’t retroactively make The Wizard’s Dilemma a better book, unfortunately, but at least it wasn’t in vain.

[ As an aside, I wonder if the series was originally meant to be a trilogy? The first three are much more of a set, to my mind; the stakes and questions steadily ramp up throughout, and the end of High Wizardry, the third and my favorite, really feels like it could be an end to the series. The fourth book, A Wizard Abroad, seems quite slight in comparison, more an Ireland book than a Wizardry book, and then we have this new story arc starting up after it.

*pauses to mourn her copy of High Wizardry, temporarily buried in a box somewhere inaccessible* ]

In this book, there is no “A Plot, B Plot” problem, though Kit and Nita start out trying to address different situations. These initial problems turn out to be related, and with the effects of last book quite clear, we get a really interesting exploration of the question, why would a person with autism be offered wizardry?—particularly since wizardry is inherently outward-directed: the fight against entropy, on behalf of the universe and everything in it. What problem is there, that this person is the answer to?

Some of the threads begun in the last book aren’t yet complete, but this book ends in a much more satisfactory place than the last. There’s one piece of the worldbuilding that I have a problem with, specifically that Order of Being we learn about; I couldn’t help but say to myself, “Surely the One could have come up with a less perilous arrangement . . . ” Beyond that, though, I quite enjoyed this book; it’s not the best book of the series, but it’s a solid entry all the same.

[ Oh yes: the offer on the house was accepted, so barring disaster, we’re buying a house . . . ]

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McKinley, Robin: Knot in the Grain and Other Stories, A

I picked up A Knot in the Grain and Other Stories, by Robin McKinley, Thursday night because I still was experiencing leftover hyperactivity from the trial at the start of the week. Fairy tales seemed like a good way to calm down enough to go to sleep. (The hyper feeling is gone, by the way; I walked around Friday like a zombie, and was hardly better Saturday, despite having done basically nothing all day. Well, besides making an offer on a house.)

There are five stories in this collection; the first two are explicitly set in Damar, since Luthe appears, and the last is set our world or something like it. “The Healer” is the first story, about a woman who has never been able to speak and a man who has lost his magecraft. It’s an odd story because the text leaves it ambiguous as to whether it’s meant to have a happy ending. The second, “The Stagman,” is a look at the subtle damage a wicked uncle can inflict on a princess and at what Luthe can and can’t do.

“Touk’s House” is the third; it starts out as Rapunzel, and comes full circle by the end, but all the same I think it would be inaccurate to call it a Rapunzel story. Which is a good trick, and I enjoyed it. I also liked “Buttercups” for the imagery and the characters; it, oddly, has moral to spare—perhaps making up for “The Healer”?

I was quite close to really liking the title story. It has dead-on descriptions of not knowing anyone and feeling socially awkward. At one point, the protagonist thinks how weeding the garden “didn’t go in a letter very well. It was what kept Annabelle going, but it wasn’t anything she could talk about. This seemed to be part of not having anyone to talk to. It was very confusing.” I knew the feeling; when I was studying for the bar, I usually wouldn’t have an actual conversation until dinnertime, and by then I would have literally lost nouns in all that silence. (“You know, the, the thing.”) However, the event that kicks off the plot is the proposed construction of a highway through the small upstate New York town where the protagonist has moved. The characters all oppose it, and I’m quite sure the reader is supposed to agree. However, Chad’s family is from a small upstate town that had a highway put through it, and they tell me how much a difference the highway has made to the local economy. So when the developers appears at the town meeting and are described as knowing “how to talk about ‘helping the economic profile of this rather depressed area.’ They made the highway sound like a slight inconvenience for a good cause—what were a few meadows and trees one way or another?”, I’m nodding along with the developers, because there is a lot of rural poverty in upstate New York. In other words, I am pretty thoroughly not the audience McKinley was intending for this story. Other people would probably like it just fine, though.

Overall I like this collection better than The Door in the Hedge, because the stories are considerably more concrete. Worth reading.

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Peters, Ellis: (11) An Excellent Mystery

An Excellent Mystery is the eleventh of Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael novels and the first in the series that I’ve read for a while. It’s also the first one that I can’t say I actually like. Of course, saying why would require explaining the whole story; if you’ve read it, you’ll understand what I mean when I say that the plot turns on a mindset that I find just weird, somewhat uncomfortably so.

(Oh, and the title is actually not generic.)

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Roberts, Nora: Three Fates

While I was at the library over the weekend, I was primarily looking for brain candy: I was scheduled to go to a trial in Utica, an hour and a half away, for a couple of days, and I knew that I’d need something fluffy to read at night to decompress. (Just to watch and help my boss; I’m not admitted to the bar yet, so I don’t get to talk.) Nora Roberts’ Three Fates is about as fluffy as you can get and was perfect for the job.

I actually ended up reading it all last night, which turned out well because the trial ended today, a day earlier than expected. [We won. Decisively, in so far as one can win a trial decisively: the jury was out for only 45 minutes, which suggests that they hardly needed to deliberate, and the judge basically told the plaintiff not to bother with post-trial motions, since he didn’t have a leg to stand on. Which he didn’t. (Appeals are different from post-trial motions, and wouldn’t go to this judge.)] I hadn’t planned to read the whole thing in one night, but it’s such brain candy that it reads really quickly, and I wanted to be sure I was well and truly tired before I tried sleeping alone, in a strange bed, with a pillow made of spun rock, and with our case on for the next day.

The plot of this is almost beside the point (in a week I won’t remember anyone’s names, just wait). Basically, there were three statutes of the Fates (Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, those Fates). One of them was thought to have been lost when the Lusitania sank, but it was actually stolen just before the sinking by a petty thief, who reformed after his near-death experience but passed the statute down as a family heirloom. Then one of the heirs gets an inkling that this might actually be worth something, brings it to the villain for an appraisal, has it stolen by the villain, and then sets out with his two siblings to get it back, and track down the other two for good measure. And everyone falls in love, and the villain is eeeeevil, and eventually everything works out okay. The End.

This one does include nice caper bits, which I always enjoy even if I doubt Roberts’ research. I don’t believe in fate; I rather think it’s impossible for a materialist to believe in fate, actually. (Materialist as in physical matter is all that exists, not as in money money money.) However, this is one of the advantages of plowing through brain candy: potentially-annoying bits just fly right by and barely register.

I’m still a little hyper from the trial, even after driving back from Utica, so I think I shall stop babbling and go read some Brother Cadfael to calm down now. Yay, being home . . .

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McKinley, Robin: Stone Fey, The

I was browsing around the library yesterday, and found myself in the YA section. I picked up Robin McKinley’s The Stone Fey out of curiosity, saw that it was a Damar story from the inside cover, and decided to check it out.

Actually I read the whole thing while waiting for Chad to come pick me up; it’s a children’s book illustrated by John Clapp. I don’t quite know why it was published in this format, since it doesn’t really strike me as a children’s story; at the least, it would fit perfectly well in any adult collection. Despite the title, the story is very tightly focused on the viewpoint character, Maddy, a shepherd in the Hills of Damar who meets a stone fey one night. (I mentioned McKinley’s tendency to treat names as almost incidental in my comments about The Door in the Hedge, and it’s the same here; we don’t learn Maddy’s name until page 22 of a 52 page story.)

Because it’s such a short story, there’s not much to say about the plot, which besides will probably be predictable to most people familiar with fairy tales. Like all of McKinley’s work, it’s very atmospheric, but I can’t help but feel something’s missing from it. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I think it’s too tightly focused on Maddy. At any rate, an interesting little book, but not fully satisfying.

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Elrod, P.N.: (02) Lifeblood

I started P.N. Elrod’s Lifeblood on Monday on the grounds that it was really short, and finished it Friday night in my post-NITA-collapse. [*] This is the sequel to Bloodlist and the second in the Vampire Files series.

Fellow readers, I ask you: does Jack get the crap beat out of him in every book in this series? I know this is a noir-homage kind of series, but if it’s a homage to that kind of story, then I’d like to know so I can avoid them unless I’m in the mood for something fairly dark.

Other than that, it was a perfectly good short read. By rights it should have been even shorter than it is, since as far as I can tell, the first two chapters don’t actually have anything to do with the plot (in which vampire hunters come after Jack, and Jack’s past comes back to haunt him). I am interested whether the author has a grand theory of the workings of vampires; some of the characters have been discussing how, for instance, a creature with no heartbeat can live on blood, and if eventually they’re going to come up with a theory, that might be fun to read about.

[*] NITA is the National Institute for Trial Advocacy; I went to a four-day training of theirs (sort of; it was run in-house but with their materials and one of their people leading the training) on, well, trial advocacy this week. It was very intense, a hell of a lot of work, and really draining. I do feel I learnt a lot, though I can’t say I cared for the way the program was set up. Don’t let TV and movies fool you—doing this kind of stuff the right way is damn hard and requires overcoming a lot of instincts you don’t even realize you have.

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Smith, Sherwood, and Dave Trowbridge: (05) The Thrones of Kronos

Last Friday night, when I finished reading The Thrones of Kronos, the last book of Sherwood Smith and Dave Trowbridge’s Exordium series, I had the following thoughts more-or-less in this order:

  • Arrgh!
  • You looked up “exordium,” you should have expected this.
  • Well, that was . . . strange.
  • Maybe reading a big complicated book in tiny chunks during lunch, and then in the same room as Chad watching Pleasantville, wasn’t such a good idea—you know you don’t block out distractions very well.
  • Clearly I need to read this again. In large distraction-free chunks this time.
  • Hell, it’s going to be forever until I can manage that.

So I finished my re-read yesterday night, and anyone who cares will be pleased to know that it was much less strange when read under proper conditions. However, people who like their fiction to conclude with all the ends tied neatly in a bow should probably avoid this; put another way, if you didn’t like Tigana‘s ending, you’ll hate this one. (The authors did warn us, though: the definition of “exordium” is “a beginning or introductory part.”) I have a reasonable tolerance for this sort of thing, so I’m basically resigned to the unresolved parts of this series; there’s just one thing that, in my opinion, fits better with the main plot than as a life-goes-on. On the other hand, I’m probably biased because I just really want to know . . .

Beyond the ending proper, this volume was an almost entirely satisfying conclusion to the series. I’m not entirely sure what one particular plot thread ended up contributing, but beyond that, I really enjoyed it. I wish I had time to re-read it all from the start, but I’ve started an actual job (gasp! shock!) and the next couple of weeks in particular are not going to lend themselves to reading long complicated works.

I’ve been trying to think of other things to say here about Thrones and failing miserably, because they’d be incomprehensible without spoilers. Also, I’m coming down with a cold and have to Entertain shortly, so I’m a bit distracted. I plan, sometime, to write up a general review for sf.written and to append spoiler comments to that; I’ll post the link here in a comment when I get around to it (conducting spoiler conversations is rather awkward in this format).

But, in short: yay, space opera. Go agitate for Baen or someone to reprint these.

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Smith, Sherwood, and Dave Trowbridge: (04) The Rifter’s Covenant

Yesterday, I finished book four of Sherwood Smith and Dave Trowbridge’s Exordium series, The Rifter’s Covenant. It doesn’t end on as a wham-bang note as the previous one, but I’m even more eager to find out what happens in the next and final volume: not only do I want to see if Our Heroes make it out of their tense situations reasonably intact and heart-whole, but it will be interesting to see how some of the plot threads and characters we’ve been following will come into play.

Oh, and my Guy Kay in spaaace comment wasn’t so far-fetched after all: the series’ original editor apparently compared these to Dorothy Dunnett, who was a big influence on Kay. (I should start a sf.written thread on “Lymond homages in sf,” really.) Unfortunately, beyond that, I can’t think of much else to say today; been rather ill all weekend and my brain is fried. (Boy, I really hope I feel better by tomorrow, or I will have the world’s worst first day at work . . . )

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