I’ve posted before about my affection for Elizabeth Lowell’s books, formulaic though they are. Whirlpool is no exception, though it’s an earlier example of a formula she’s used to better effect in more recent books: i.e., an independently operating agency out to recover a Valuable Shiny Thing, a hero who’s a Reluctant Operative of the Agency and who is assigned over his protests to look out for the heroine, and of course a Heroine Who Has the Shiny Thing, and who must be protected from the Bad Guys Who Want the Shiny Thing. In this particular case, the Agency is Risk Limited; the hero, Cruz Rowan; the heroine, Laurel Swann; and the Shiny Thing, a Faberge egg that her father has foisted off on Laurel, an egg with a priceless treasure hidden inside of it. A treasure which, naturally, the Bad Guys are desperate to get hold of.
Here, however, is where the book falls down for me. I had to specifically remind myself of what this book was about, as I remembered very little of it except for the overuse of a particularly annoying trope: i.e., the Bad Guys being signified as the Bad Guys because they’re the ones having lots of kinky sex. This is emphasized almost more than the primary bad guy being obsessed with medical treatments keeping him looking far younger than his actual age, though that was played up a lot too. Overall, though, it was annoying. And there wasn’t much substance in the characterization of the Home Team to balance these problems out.
Lowell’s done better, so if you’d like to see her in better form, there are plenty of other options. For this one, two stars.
I’m a well-documented sucker for books involving the Sidhe, as one would guess given that I’ve actually written one! But that’s also a bane when it comes to writing reviews of similar books, on the grounds that I have to acknowledge a certain “but I would have done it differently” factor. Such is the case for me with Cindy Spencer Pape’s Motor City Fae, the first of her Urban Arcana series.
We fire this one up with a pretty standard urban fantasy/paranormal romance trope: surprise, heroine! You’re not human! You have paranormal blood and abilities, and by extension, this does mean that yes, magic is real, here’s an unbelievably gorgeous paranormal-type love interest for you, and oh hey here’s a threat to your life as well. In this particular case, the heroine is the artist Meagan Kelley and the unbelievably gorgeous love interest is the elf Ric Thornhill. Much is made over how gorgeous these two find each other, and unfortunately, I’m also well-documented as preferring less overt sex in a plot. So that this book was frequently sexually explicit was a strike against it for me. Mind you, I’m not saying the characters didn’t have chemistry or a good relationship; it’s just that it was more explicit than I tend to go for. So if you dive into this one, know that going in. People who like more explicit paranormal romance will probably eat this one up.
That said, though, I did like several other aspects of the book, I’ll grant. There’s some decently suspenseful bits here and some good action scenes, once things actually get rolling past the “how hot do the lead characters find each other?” stage. And I did appreciate the way the author acknowledged that just because the fae are magical does not mean they’re turning up their noses at the use of modern technology.
I’ve already got Book 2, so I will be reading that. But by and large, this one didn’t quite work for me. Two stars.
With all of the fuss I’ve seen made over Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, I feel like I rather missed something–because I outright loathed this book. And it takes a lot to make me loathe a book.
First of all, I kept seeing it get pitched over and over as “Harry Potter for grownups”, which came across to me as completely ignoring the fact that grownups all over the world have been cheerfully reading Harry Potter right alongside the children that are its primary target audience. Part and parcel with this was the corollary that The Magicians is a more grownup, nuanced, mature world, presumably because it’s darker or grittier or something, since the last couple of Harry Potters were of course all sunlight and rainbows and ponies. (Except, oh, wait a minute, no they weren’t.) I take issue in general with the idea that a book “for grownups” by definition has to be darker or grittier. Some grownups like to read stuff that isn’t unremittingly grim, and I happen to be one of them.
Second, if I’m going to have a book try to make a point to me about how very much it’s Not Being Harry Potter, you know what the last thing is that that book ought to be doing in order to keep me engaged as a reader? Reference Harry Potter repeatedly within the actual narrative, to drive home points like how our protagonists can’t just fix their teeth like Hermione Granger to make everything better. This happened at least twice that I can remember off the top of my head, and all it did for me was make the book come across as if it were jumping up and down yelling in my face, “HEY! I’M NOT BEING HARRY POTTER! LOOK HOW MUCH I’M NOT BEING HARRY POTTER! YOU KNOW WHY I’M NOT HARRY POTTER? BECAUSE LOOK HOW THE HARRY POTTER BOOKS ACTUALLY EXIST IN THIS UNIVERSE AND HOW I AM CLEVERLY REFERENCING THEM!”
And yes, the all-caps are pretty much how I felt about it, because it felt like the book was trying to drive that point home with a railroad spike into my skull, and pounding on it with a sledgehammer.
But third and most importantly, the main problem I had with this book was that I wanted to climb into its pages and punch each and every single person in the cast. All of them. I found absolutely no one in this story engaging, and I don’t care how realistic Grossman’s scenario of “in the real world, a school of magic would just generate a bunch of self-absorbed pricks with magical powers” might actually be. You know what you get in this scenario? You get a bunch of self-absorbed pricks, and the fact that they have magical powers does not in any way, shape, or form lessen their massive self-absorbed prickery.
And I don’t want to read about people like that. Especially our so-called hero Quentin, who spent the entire book being an emo little whiner and who showed no redeeming characteristics whatsoever. If he’d gained even a shred of nobility by the end, I might have thought differently about this book, but no.
To be fair, the first chunk of the story when our protagonists were going through all of their classes–despite the heavyhanded LOOK HOW MUCH I’M NOT BEING HARRY POTTER! screaming the book kept doing–was interesting. But once they graduated and we got into the sequence full of nothing but relationship angst, my urge to punch the lot of them rose dramatically. And by the time we got the big reveal of Fillory’s reality (which I can safely mention since that’s not a spoiler), I was so thoroughly disenchanted with these people that all that kept me reading to the end was a wisp of an acknowledgement that the author did have a compelling enough command of the language to keep my attention.
It’s just that no matter how well Grossman wrote, he was writing about thoroughly reprehensible characters in a setting that was unremittingly bleak. And I don’t need that in my life. The real world is bleak enough without subjecting myself to it in my reading. One star.
With the notable huge, huge exception of Cherie Priest, steampunk is not my thing. This is not to say I dislike it–it’s just that as sub-genres of SF/F go, I don’t favor this one in particular over any other, and won’t go out of my way to read something just because it’s got the steampunk label slapped on it. If on the other hand the story sounds like it’ll engage me anyway, then if it happens to be set in a steampunk-flavored world, awesome!
Which is about what happened when I decided to read M.K. Hobson’s The Native Star. Magic is much more the emphasis here than steampunk gadgetry per se, but Hobson has both of them in this book and combines them to charming effect. Charming, too, were both of the main characters. Our heroine Emily Edwards starts off strong but clearly flawed, making a seriously ill-advised attempt to use her magic to land herself a husband in the name of taking care of her aging father, and getting herself thrown out of town in the process. Squared off against her is our hero Dreadnought Stanton, whose name is as overblown as his initial personality. Yet, as he and Emily must flee across the country with evil warlocks in pursuit, the two of them have crackling good chemistry, and I was happy to cheer them all the way.
I didn’t quite buy the villains a hundred percent; there were parts of the story where they were coming across as Evil Because They’re Supposed To Be Evil For the Sake of the Plot. But that said, the ending had some genuine weight and cost to our protagonists, which I appreciated as well. I’ll be continuing on with Book Two. Four stars.
I’ve just written in my review of Clementine that given how much I loved Boneshaker, the first book in that series, it’d be extremely difficult for any followup book in the series to measure up. Happily, Dreadnought, Book 3 of Cherie Priest’s Clockwork Century series, has done just that.
As with Clementine, this is a sequel to Boneshaker mostly in the sense that it’s set in the same universe. But unlike with Clementine, Dreadnought has a character in it directly related to one of the Boneshaker cast–in this case, the nurse Mercy Lynch, who is the daughter of Jeremiah Swakhammer. Mercy learns of the death of her husband in battle and of her estranged father’s being gravely injured and ill in a one-two punch at the beginning of the book. And, with great reluctance, she sets off across the country to fulfill her father’s wish to see her.
And make no mistake, this is a rollicking adventure of the first order, especially once Mercy makes it to the titular train, the Dreadnought, which will be her mode of transport for most of her journey. It’s on the Dreadnought that she’s embroiled in intrigue between the Union, the Confederacy, and the independent republic of Texas–this last embodied by the Texian Ranger Horatio Korman, with whom she joins forces when it becomes increasingly clear that the mysterious cargo in the train’s final car may be putting all their lives at stake.
If you’ve read Boneshaker, it won’t be any stretch at all to imagine what’s in that car.
The trip builds excellently, up until the reveal of what exactly happened to a missing regiment, and how that regiment eventually reaches the train. Great, great fun all around. Five stars.
Cherie Priest’s Clockwork Century series is rather refreshing in that the various books, thus far, don’t follow the exact same set of characters. They’re all set in the same universe, but the characters featured in each book are only tangentially related to each other. And things are slightly complicated by how the books in the series are not all exclusively with the same publisher. The main books in the series are via Tor, but Subterranean Press has the actual Book 2: Clementine.
Now, this one didn’t grab me nearly as hard as Boneshaker, but that isn’t really this book’s fault; I loved Boneshaker so much that any other book in the series was naturally going to have to work extremely hard to measure up. And this is not to say that Clementine isn’t good, because it is. There’s some steampunky airship-and-battle-automaton goodness here, as well as the appeal of both of our lead characters, Maria Isabella Boyd and Captain Croggon Beauregard Hainey, being people of color. But man, I missed the zombie action, as well as the bigger scope of Boneshaker (and, since I’ve since read it as well, Dreadnought).
Still, if you’re a fan of the series, this one is worth finding. The hardcover edition is hard to find at this point, and expensive as well–but the book’s also available electronically for very reasonable prices. So if you’re electronically inclined in your reading, be sure to grab this one. Three stars.
I’m a sucker for zombie novels, as y’all know. I’ll take them in all stripes: hardcore creep factor like Sarah Langan, spectacular worldbuilding like Mira Grant, or over the top steampunky goodness like Cherie Priest. I’ll also happily read any zombie novel that aims for funny and/or lighthearted, and I was pleased to see that Jesse Petersen’s Married With Zombies filled that bill nicely.
Our protagonists, Sarah and David, are in the middle of couples counseling when the zombie apocalypse hits–as they discover when they show up for a therapy appointment to find their therapist eating a previous client. Oops. From there, they quickly discover that a zombie outbreak has completely overrun Seattle, and that they are going to have to figure out fast how to not only survive the situation, but put aside their own marital issues while they’re doing it. This is an excellent setup, and it didn’t hurt either that the action started in Seattle, since I’m always a sucker for books set here. (Especially ones involving zombies.) We soon go into a general road trip, though, as Sarah is desperate to find out what happened to her family, and she and David meet the obligatory other parties along the way, all of whom are also struggling to deal with the outbreak–some effectively, some with outright fail, some with genuinely creepy fanaticism.
The book hits all the high points you want in a good ol’ fashioned zombie adventure, though I could have liked a bit more character development for our protagonists–I never got any real feel for why they were having issues to begin with. But then, given that this is pretty much a romantic comedy with zombies, you don’t really need much more than what you get, and I certainly liked this well enough that I’ll be reading more in the series. Three stars.
Oh my giddy aunt, this one was fun! I’m already on record as a documented fan of the Walker Papers, so it’s easy for me to say that this one was my favorite one yet–but it’s the absolute truth. This far into the series, all the characters are well and thoroughly established, and Murphy has the rhythm of the series moving nicely. We’ve got a purely prosaic challenge to Joanne for once as she has to face the first time she has to shoot someone on the job, and how this affects her not only as a shaman, but also simply as a cop. It’s excellent character development for her. And we’ve got transformative magic on the loose, magic capable of turning Jo herself into coyote form.
Most importantly for my purposes, though, we finally get some payoff on the excellent slow build of the relationship between Joanne and Morrison. Next to that, everything else in the book is kind of extra. I can’t say more than that without going into spoiler territory, so I shall content myself with noting that the ending of this one had me simultaneously going YAY! and AUGH! And I cannot wait to devour book 7.
So yeah, this is almost more fangirling than actual review, but hey, like I said–I’m a fan. And I loved this one. Keep ’em coming, Kit! Five stars.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again–if you like old-school romantic suspense, then Mary Stewart is the author for you. And out of all her various novels I’ve read, Nine Coaches Waiting stands out as one of the most solid. I’ve often found Stewart’s work to be almost more about the scenery than about the actual plot, but not so here. Her prose is as lush in this work as it is in any other, and happily, there’s an excellent little plot to give it heft.
Linda Martin is a young Englishwoman taking on the position of governess to a nine-year-old French count. As with any good Gothic suspense novel, this means we’ve got the obligatory remote setting along with the governess in question, as well as the obligatory cast of potential threats to our heroine’s life as well as that of her young charge. We have the young count’s charismatic uncle, confined to a wheelchair. We have the uncle’s son Raoul, who serves the role of the obligatory love interest. And, we have the obligatory mysterious attacks on the young Count Philippe–and ultimately, how Linda must choose to handle them.
You might think this is a historical novel with Linda being a governess. Don’t. The name “Linda” is certainly a giveaway that this novel is set in a timeframe contemporary to the author’s own lifetime, as is the presence of cars and other modern-at-the-time technology. But that said, it’s historical in the sense of being over 50 years ago; the book was, after all, first published in 1958. This might make it feel dated to some readers, yet, what with the classic Gothic elements in the plot, I found it all strangely and pleasantly timeless.
As with most other Stewart novels, the pacing here is not terribly intense, but that’s quite alright. I found the increasing urgency about the life of young Philippe fraught with tension, eventually overshadowing Linda’s initial concern about hiding her own childhood in France. Philippe’s uncle Leon is compelling, all the more so for the force of his personality being constrained by his physical limitations. My only real beef with the book at all is that I found the chemistry between Linda and Raoul almost perfunctory, as well as the brief appearance of another male character who, in a more modern novel, might have served as a rival love interest. Yet, even that was ultimately fine and contributed to the novel’s overall timeless feel.
All in all, check this out if you get a chance. It’s a nice switch from a lot of more modern novels, indeed. Four stars.
I really wanted to like Julie Moffett’s No One Lives Twice–after all, a comedic action-adventure story starring a girl who’s a computer geek should have been tailor-made for me, right? Certainly the premise is promising enough: Lexi Carmichael is a computer expert working for the NSA, leading a predictably boring life, until the disappearance of her best friend.
Speaking as a woman employed in the computer industry, though, I fear I found Lexi’s ability with a keyboard distressingly lacking. Much is made of how this girl is supposed to be a hacker, yet she spends an awful lot of time getting the men in the cast to do actual computer work for her. And off the top of my head, the one bit I can remember where Lexi herself is at a keyboard on camera involves her specifically screwing something up. None of this did much to impress me with Lexi’s computer ability.
Likewise, Lexi shows distressingly little agency in finding out what’s going on herself, as opposed to relying upon the various men in the cast. There’s much mileage spent on the obligatory selection of sexy men and the question of which one of them Lexi’s most attracted to–which is all very well and good–but I would have respected this book more if it’d spent less time trying to convince me the boys were sexy and more time showing me that Lexi was, in fact, a hacker.
Mind you, the book’s not wretched by any means. Moffett’s got some genuinely lighthearted moments in here, and to be fair, the book does pick up a bit towards the end. I fear I’m not its target audience, though. Two stars.
