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My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I heard about Silver Phoenix as yet another example of a trend that bothers the hell out of me: putting white faces on the covers of books that are not about white people. Thus, I wanted to give this book a bit of support. But, given that Cindy Pon was an unfamiliar author, I opted to check the book out of the library first and see whether this was a story I’d want to own.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t. I’m writing this review several months after I actually read the book, and at this point, I have to admit that I have very little recollection of what it was about–this being a measure of how little it stayed with me. So I had to refresh my memory by reading other people’s reviews of the story, which got me three overall problems I have with the book.

One, I never found any of the characters particularly well-drawn. I often have this problem reading YA, but Silver Phoenix is worse than other YA I’ve written, since the characters were ephemeral enough that I didn’t retain them at all within months of readin the book.

Two, I specifically didn’t care for the heroine’s love interest, and how he was so dismissive of her after one scene where she is almost raped. (Which some might call a spoiler, but which I’m noting here as a potential trigger warning for those who might find that scene an issue.)

And three, the heroine Ai Ling is sadly pretty much a non-entity. I’m calling her out separately from the rest of the cast because, as the ostensible protagonist of the novel, she should have stood out for me far better than she actually did. Yet the book doesn’t give her nearly as much agency as it does her love interest, Chen Yong–and much of what I do remember about the book involves Ai Ling pining after Chen Yong. Which I can do without. One star.

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Nora Roberts, my main go-to author for formulaic but nonetheless entertaining romance and romantic suspense, holds that position for a few strong reasons. And among the strongest is that every so often, she does actually try to break out of formula. With Midnight Bayou, she delivers a rare oddity in my reading experience: a romance novel from the point of view of the male lead rather than the female.

Our hero, Declan Fitzgerald, has moved down to Louisiana to renovate an old house–and this being Louisiana, the house is of course full of secrets and ghosts with a bloody history, one that smacks Declan hard as he starts having disturbing dreams, hallucinations, and bouts of sleepwalking. There is of course his love interest, Lena, the beautiful owner of a local bar. As is generally the case with Ms. Roberts, the chemistry between these two is strong. And as is also generally the case with Ms. Roberts, we have the obligatory set of side characters with whom our hero has generally amusing interactions, especially the heroine’s grandmother, Miss Odette.

The book falls over for me in two ways, though. The first of these is that while I do appreciate her trying a story with the male lead as the primary POV character, it didn’t quite ring true enough for me to work. I usually find Roberts’ portrayal of male characters to be more “what the typical romance reader idealizes as a male character” rather than truly well-rounded characters, and that’s still the case here. Don’t get me wrong, Declan does have some great lines, especially in several scenes with his best friend Remy. But he still frequently comes across to me as acting in given ways because That’s How Boys Are Supposed To Act.

The second way the book falls down for me is the same way other Roberts paranormals have done for me so far: good buildup, but with a fizzle at the end where I was expecting way more of a punch than I actually got. It doesn’t help, either, that a certain plot thread with Declan (about which I cannot go into details, for fear of spoilers) doesn’t play at all well in the last couple of chapters.

So yeah. Not awful, but still not one of Roberts’ better works. I’d recommend this one only if you’re a completist, or if you’d like some very light reading. Two stars.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My first book of 2012 is a good strong start: Mary Robinette Kowal’s Shades of Milk and Honey, which I’ve been meaning to read for some time.

Much has been made over this novel being the “fantasy novel Jane Austen would have written”, and to an extent, I do agree with that. I could certainly see Austen, had she thought to use magic in the stories she wrote, using it the way Kowal does–as a womanly art, employed to enhance the illusion of beauty on a painting, in a room, in an entire house, or even upon a person. Yet at the same time, a comparison to Austen is inevitably going to be a burden against which many books, worthy in their own right, are going to struggle. For my money, Kowal’s prose didn’t quite resonate the same way Austen’s did. Yet this is not to say it’s bad, for it is most assuredly not. I very much enjoyed the read.

I’ve seen Shades of Milk and Honey called out for not having enough of substance going on, that it focuses upon the relationships between the characters and lacks Austen’s social commentary. For me, this charge is unfair; I certainly noted multiple points throughout the book that read as social commentary, such as our heroine’s disdain for the notion of using her talents at glamour to make her nose smaller. Moreover, while most of these characters did not come across to me with the same force as oh, say, the cast of Pride and Prejudice–though yet again, many otherwise worthy novels would suffer in comparison to that particular book–I am honorbound to point out that that very novel focuses quite a bit on the relationships between the characters. And the ultimate main plot does, indeed, come out of that. So too is the case with Shades of Milk and Honey. The eventual unmasking of a callous rogue in the cast livens up the end of the book considerably.

All in all my only lament about this novel is that the relationship between our heroine Jane and her eventual love lacks a certain force, at least at first. So to some readers, it may come across as completely out of the blue. Still, I did quite like this and am looking forward to the next one in the series. Three stars.

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

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.

My rating: 2 of 5 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.

My rating: 1 of 5 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.