February 2010

Unfallen Dead is a good strong installment in the Connor Grey novels by Mark Del Franco, advancing the storyline not only for the world at large, but also for the story arc about what happened to Connor to disable his druid abilities. More specifically, we’ve got ourselves a story where the Convergence, the great merging of the human and Faerie worlds a hundred years or so back, seems to be finally reversing itself. But Connor’s got his own issues; an underQueen of the Seelie Court is bent on interrogating him and Meryl Dian about the events at the tail end of the last story. And furthermore, Connor’s old Guild partner from New York, Dylan macBain, has shown up in town to fill in for Keeva macNeve, suspended from duty because of those same questionable events.

And just to add insult to injury, Dylan’s even got Connor’s old office.

It’s nice to be far enough along in the series arc at this point that we’re past Connor’s initial wave of resentment about his disability, and are moving on to him figuring out what it is and how to conquer it. There are events in the last act of this story that raise all sorts of interesting questions about what exactly happened to Connor, especially given how his nemesis Bergin Vize finally shows up on camera–in a state that Connor does not expect at all. But that’s only part of what he has to deal with from Vize, given that that elf’s bent on taking out the Seelie Court. Meanwhile, another fey is killing people and framing Meryl for the crime, giving Connor yet another challenge to juggle.

Good strong story over all and I’m looking forward to diving right into Book Four, now that it’s out. Four stars.

I swung into Unleashed, Book 3 of John Levitt’s Dog Days series, pretty much on the heels of Book 2. This was a very good way to read it, given that certain events from Book 2 have immediate ramifications for Book 3; in fact, Unleashed opens with Mason and Victor having to hunt down one of those dangling plot ends.

Much of this book’s plot, in fact, is dealing with ramifications of what happened in Book 2. A portal has been opened, you see–and the Ifrit Gone Wrong is not the only thing that’s come through. Something else has shown up in the city, and it’s able to imitate anyone. Even magical practitioners.

This time around as he’s trying to fix what’s gone wrong, we get to see Mason meet a pretty young psychic who is understandably shocked that there are people who can actually work magic in the world. She’s even more shocked when she starts having visions with troubling suggestions indeed for what’s about to happen to Mason, too. We also get a couple of new side characters we haven’t seen before, and you can probably guess from that what sort of role they’ll have in the plot; this was handled well enough, though, that I didn’t mind the obvious pointers in their directions.

What’s got the biggest possible ramifications for further books in this series, though, is the return of a character we’d thought dead as of Book 1. I won’t say who to avoid spoilers, but I’m hoping that what I read as hints that this character has also gone Wrong will bear fruit.

We’ll just have to see, because after two satisfying reads in this series, I’m definitely coming back for more. Four stars.

I was hoping that John Levitt’s Dog Days novels would sharpen up their act with Book 2, and I am pleased to say that I wasn’t disappointed. One of the biggest beefs I had with Book 1–our hero Mason’s friends’ annoying propensity to harp on him about what a slacker he is–was pretty much absent from this book. And there’s nice mileage with Mason making music here, and of course, plenty of cute not-really-a-dog mileage with his Ifrit, Lou.

In this installment the crime that has to be solved is the mysterious draining of life essence out of San Francisco practitioners–one of whom is one of Mason’s old girlfriends, Sarah. Mason and his colleagues Eli and Victor must figure out who’s responsible, and the fact that a known dark practitioner from Portland has recently moved into the city seems like a suspect on a silver platter. This is of course Too Easy. A suitably alert reader won’t have trouble figuring out who the perpetrator actually is, but a good bit of the substance of that revelation comes from Mason’s own reaction to it, so it’s okay.

Some of the side plots were the ones that were more interesting to me, though. Campbell, the healer from Book 1, makes another appearance here–and while I was initially disappointed to see her described as Mason’s ex at this point, things are clearly not really over between them, so I’m pleased on that account. There’s mileage with Victor having a potential steady love interest who actually contributes a bit to the plot, and it’s pretty neat just to see the most competent and badassed of Mason’s colleagues being a gay guy. There are new theories thrown around about where Ifrits come from, and in fact, there are intriguing attempts to make new Ifrits that go horribly, horribly wrong and which have ramifications clear into Book 3.

Good fun overall. Four stars.

It’s safe to say that Apricot Brandy by Lynn Cesar is one of the more unusual urban fantasy novels I’ve ever read, and I’m a little sorry I missed it when it first came out. It’s got its flaws, but I give it quite a bit of credit for what it tried to do. Being an unusual urban fantasy novel these days is very hard to pull off.

First of all, we’ve got the title, which is pretty much the thing that drew me to the novel. The drink for which the title’s named has good plot relevance, and it stands out very nicely against the glut of urban fantasy titles that involve “night” or “blood” or “darkness” or whatever. And thank you, Cover Art, for actually showing us a heroine’s face rather than making her a headless torso! Both of these got my interested enough to look at the actual blurb about a small town being overrun by a rising Mayan god.

Huge, huge points as well for the heroine being a lesbian. Gay men are getting more inroads in fantasy novels to be sure, but lesbian heroines are still pretty thin on the ground and it’s nice to see one have the lead role in an urban fantasy for once. On the other hand, I was really disappointed that her beloved–and I’ll say this only because this happens fairly early on in the story–is killed off, after her one on camera scene shows her acting pretty heavily out of character due to supernatural influence. I was similarly disappointed that the only other person in the cast who has sexual interest in their own gender is one of the bad guys, because this could leave a less discerning reader with the impression that queer people are screwed up.

And, was it really necessary to make the lesbian heroine a victim of sexual child abuse? You could make an argument that it’s plot-relevant, but I wouldn’t necessarily buy it; there’s a lot in the plot about how Karen’s beloved father turns into a monster and how this eventually makes Karen an alcholic in her adulthood. But I’m thinking you could have pulled this off without involving rape.

Similarly, I was disappointed at how the heroine’s interactions with the main male character came perilously close to being romantic. They didn’t actually cross that line; at no point does our heroine show any actual sexual interest to the guy. But he’s definitely got sexual interest in her, and there are moments between them that are definitely intimate even if they’re not romantic. The circumstances that force this closeness on them are pretty brutal, and it’s reasonable for them to form a bond. Yet, again, I could see a less discerning reader leaping to the conclusion that our heroine is romantically interested in the guy.

This sort of unfocused treatment of the main characters has similar echoes out in the plot at large. There’s a lot of POV jumping, and in fact, the heroine actually vanishes out of the action for a big section of the last third of the novel. I must give Cesar credit for her heroine not actually being the main driving force behind fighting the Big Bad of the story, but on the other hand, it was quite disconcerting to have her vanish entirely for a big swath of the narrative. Likewise, Cesar’s prose has moments where it’s surprisingly lyrical and others where it swings right into purple floridity.

All in all though a decent read, even if it never did quite come together fully for me, and even despite its disappointments. There are bits in particular where Cesar describes the townsfolk being subsumed by the plant god that are genuinely creepy and worth reading. Three stars.

My gut reaction to Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, the first Samuel R. Delaney I’ve ever read, was pretty much this: it feels like something I might have read for a college course on influential SF authors, rather than something I’d ordinarily have read for fun. I have a very definite respect for the language, but there are a lot of aspects of the plot that just didn’t work for me.

The core of this story is essentially a romance between Rat Korga, a man who’d submitted to voluntary slavery on his homeworld, and Marq Dyeth, an interstellar diplomat. Korga is the only survivor of a cataclysm that has destroyed his world, and he’s been brought to Marq under mysterious circumstances; Marq’s not really told much more than “this man has been found to be your ideal erotic object, so we thought you might find him interesting, show him around your planet, will you?”

And that’s part of my first problem with the book. A big part of me was put off by the whole concept of these men coming together only because a third party had calculated that they are each other’s “ideal erotic objects”. That’s very cold and very clinical and not at all romantic. On the other hand, there are certain scenes where Marq waxes eloquent on why exactly he finds Korga so very, very attractive–and those are some of the passages that work the very best for me. (On a related note, there’s a huge amount of casual sex all throughout this book, way more than I was expecting; from what I’ve read about Delaney, though, I think that may be typical for his work?)

Secondly, there’s frustratingly little plot here, truth be told. The initial stretch with Korga, setting up his background, was a lot more interesting to me just because of the relative sparsity of Korga’s point of view; by comparison, Marq, who has a propensity to infodump huge reams of text at the reader, was a hard slog to read through. And he’s got the main point of view for the majority of the book. He spends the vast majority of his time hanging out at parties and chatting with other people, and more than once I kept groaning and waiting to see when the plot would kick back in. I can’t say anything about the ending due to spoilers, but I will say that ultimately, I was unsatisfied with it.

On the other hand, all of this is balanced out for me by the sheer mastery of Delaney’s language, infodumps aside. I don’t go up to five stars here because he pulls a couple of language tricks in places that I thought were kind of a cheat. But I found his whole treatment of gender-based language fascinating. This is a future where humanity in general refers to itself collectively as “women” regardless of physical gender, and in which female pronouns are used as well. At first I found this horribly distracting, but then I thought, “well, WHY CAN’T ‘women’ be used as a generic identifier for humans?” Once I had that realization, it was suddenly much easier to accept.

More confusing though were the parts where Delaney suddenly switches back to male pronouns in certain scenes. Only after reading about the book after I’d finished did I realize that apparently this was a marker for when the point of view character, Marq, was finding a male sexually attractive; now that I know that was going on, I appreciate the distinction. I liked as well how he used subscripts on work-related nouns like job, profession, and such, to give a distinction between a person’s primary employment and other jobs they might take on the side.

Overall I’m definitely not sorry I read it, and I appreciated how it made me think about what I’d read in ways a lot of SF/F hasn’t made me do lately. I’m sticking by my initial gut reaction, though, and am not sure I’d ever want to read Delaney for general fun as opposed to “broadening my SF horizons”. Still, though, four stars.