Category: Book Log

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.

I only realized partway into Nina Kiriki Hoffman’s Fall of Light that this was actually a sequel to a previous book: A Fistful of Sky. I elected to keep reading anyway, but I can’t help but wonder if I’d read the other book first, whether this one would have made more sense.

This one’s premise was promising, I thought: Opal LaZelle is a makeup artist working on a movie set, and she’s got a thing for the man who’s playing the monster of the movie. Only something awakens to possess him when Opal goes a little overboard on mixing her magical talent in with her gift for makeup artistry–and she discovers that the location where they’re shooting is no coincidence. Makeup artist is certainly something I hadn’t seen done before in a fantasy novel, and I wanted to give this one points alone for an unusual profession for the heroine.

Unfortunately I found the read disappointing, I fear. It was admittedly a bit of a relief to have most of the cast react surprisingly well to discovering that Opal is magically gifted–but on the other hand, all of them, including Opal herself, seem surprisingly casual about the fact that something else has invaded the consciousness of Corvus Weather. Also, there are several interesting concepts the plot toys with–is the invader of Corvus truly evil? Are Opal’s past flirtations with darker magics going to unleash part of her that should never have been given form? But these concepts seem thrown forward for the reader’s consideration, and none of them get any real resolution at all.

Which isn’t surprising, given that the book overall doesn’t get any real resolution, either. Without going into spoiler territory, I’ll say right out that the ending is a cliffhanger, and I’ll have to hope that Ms. Hoffman plans a followup, if nothing else just to give these characters some closure. If one isn’t coming, I have to take this book as a standalone experience, and ultimately as such, it doesn’t satisfy. Two stars.

One of the nice things about reading a lot of ebooks as of late is the sheer number of older classic works available in public domain electronic copies. Among these is the Feedbooks ebook edition of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson, and I decided it was high time I read it.

We all of course know the basics of the story, but what I didn’t know was that the original story is not from Jekyll’s point of view at all, but rather from that of a third party. The lawyer Mr. Utterson is an old friend of the doctor’s, and is the keeper of his will as well–but he’s recently been given a newer version that names a Mr. Hyde as the beneficiary of all of Dr. Jekyll’s worldly goods should the doctor ever die or mysteriously disappear. This, coupled with a disturbing report from another friend that Hyde has been seen in the street causing cruel hurt to a child, alarms Utterson deeply and puts him on to finding out exactly what has befallen the doctor.

What follows is mostly not surprising, aside from a few particular plot details that I won’t mention in case someone else like me who hasn’t read it yet wants to take a peek. Like many works of its era, though, a lot of the storytelling is done via the device of letters rather than shown directly on screen. For me this dampened the impact somewhat of the events described–though on the other hand, Jekyll’s explanation in his final letter of the moral experiment that led him to create his infamous potion in the first place was interesting reading.

Overall this was a much shorter story than I’d expected, though, and very quickly and easily breezed through. Three stars.

ReVamped, J.F. Lewis’ second book in the Void City series, picks up pretty much right where Book 1 left off: with Eric, his vampire protagonist, getting blown up. Which, you have to admit, is a pretty tough state to come back from–but Eric isn’t just any vampire. He’s an Emperor-class vampire, with enough power and enough followers to pull off even coming back from the dead. Thus, we’ve got the stage set for Book 2.

Eric is understandably less than thrilled at having been made to explode, but that’s only the beginning of the curveballs his resurrected existence throws him. His newly vamped girlfriend, Tabitha, has dumped him in favor of a far more powerful and physically repellent vampire. His almost-a-thrall–who just happens to be Tabitha’s apparently resurrected sister Rachel–is exerting magic upon him for unknown reasons. A local demon wants him to acquire the Stone of Aeternum, conveniently enough from the very same powerful vampire to which Tabitha has given her attentions. And on top of it all, Eric’s discovered he’s suddenly got an undead car.

There are certainly plot twists galore in this installment, and things advance intriguingly not only on the Eric/Tabitha front, but also in explaining what’s going on with Rachel and quite a bit about Eric’s own background. But ReVamped didn’t have quite the same punch for me as Staked did; there were parts that matched that book, but overall it didn’t flow quite as smoothly, perhaps because Eric seemed to spend a lot more time in reaction mode rather than being proactive. Nonetheless, I’m up for Book 3! For this one, three stars.

Unsolicited, the first of Julie Kaewart’s Alex Plumtree series, is a book I’ve actually had for some time and which I had the yen to re-read. Specifically, in print form–since the hero, Alex, is the young owner of a publishing company in London, and it therefore seemed wrong to re-purchase this particular volume in ebook form.

You’d think the British publishing business would be a sedate and staid affair, but as this is after all a mystery novel, you’d be wrong! It seems that Plumtree Press has scored big with its first fiction release, a novel written by an anonymous author known only as “Arthur”. Now Arthur is penning his sequel. But! He’s gone missing, and with him, the last five chapters of the novel. As Alex does his best to track down his reclusive writer and secure the missing chapters–or risk his publishing company going under–he soon discovers that there’s a lot more involved with this manuscript than just fiction. Arthur, whoever he may be, has taken actual World War II events pertaining to the kidnapping of British children and worked them into his book. Moreover, he’s about to reveal the perpetrator.

This is Kaewert’s first novel, and it shows a bit; she overuses the “if I had only known such-and-so was about to happen!” device, pretty much as code for “and something suspenseful is going to happen in the next chapter!” Plus, the book’s got issues with being dated even though it’s set in the 90’s, not that long ago. Arthur is described as being fond of communicating exclusively by fax, and in a scene where Alex’s office computer is trashed, he tells the reader in an aside that it’s a good thing that the culprit only broke the monitor instead of the hard drive where the actual data is stored–in what read to me clearly as a passage intended for readers who weren’t likely to be at all familiar with computers.

But all this said, Alex is a charmingly self-deprecating hero, and it’s refreshing to see a hero with severely bad eyesight, enough that he’s pretty much legally blind if he loses his glasses. Moreover, his devotion to Sarah, the banker who works with him on Plumtree Press’s finances and for whom he carries quite the torch, is quite sweet. So all in all, a nice read. Three stars.

At this stage of the In Death series, twenty-seven books in, one of these is as good as another as far as quality goes. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the Eve/Roarke books are formulaic, but there’s something to be said for Nora Roberts being able to maintain a readable formula for nearly thirty novels.

This time around Eve’s investigating the murder of a priest who was poisoned right in the middle of conducting a funeral service–a deeply perplexing murder, because who would off a priest? But the matter gets more complex as she soon uncovers that the priest was not who he appeared to be, and that he was in fact apparently in hiding.

On the personal front it’s the turn of stylish ME Morris to start developing a relationship, and it’s amusing to see Eve and Peabody issuing tart commentary on the detective who’s snared his interest. Aside from that, though, no huge developments in the statuses of any of the main characters’ lives take place, so the fun here is pretty much all with the investigation. Still, though, it’s an enjoyable read. Three stars.

If you love you some zombies, especially in a story with a hefty helping of lulz and satire, you can’t do much better than Breathers: A Zombie’s Lament. I had great fun with this one, the story of a man who has come back to life as a zombie following the car accident that killed both him and his wife. He’s now living a miserable existence in his parents’ basement, barely surviving on the consumption of formaldehyde and his attendance at the meetings of an undead support group. But he’s growing more and more drawn to fellow zombie Rita, and more and more interested in standing up for zombie civil rights. All of which comes to a head when his support group meets Ray, who shares with them his jars of “venison”–after which they find that the death wounds they sustained are healing, that their hearts are beginning to beat again, and that…

Well. You can probably figure out what the “venison” actually is. Muahaha.

General points for not only achieving a story with zombie protagonists, but doing it in such a way as to make you totally want to root for them munching on as many of the nearest brains as possible. Mark Henry has pulled this off equally well in his Amanda Feral books, so it’s fun to see it here, too. Four stars.

Oh my, I’m really of two minds about this book. Going into it, even aware that I’d seen some poor reviews of it before, I was hopeful about the prospect of a plot that asserted that the Scarlet Pimpernel had been real and had in fact set off a trend of flower-themed spies during his era–and that the heroine of the meta-story, graduate student Eloise, was researching the identity of the mysterious Pink Carnation. It sounded like fun and I decided to give it a shot anyway, even knowing going in about poor reviews.

And now that I’ve read the first book I won’t exactly say that the poor reviews are justified–that wouldn’t be fair. But I will say that the book wasn’t nearly as strong as I would have liked. The meta-story involving Eloise wasn’t nearly as the story she was researching; aside from a few cliched conflict scenes she has with her future love interest, she honestly doesn’t do much, and it’s kind of surprising that the author bothered to put a framing story around the more entertaining actual story at all.

As for the main story, this is where the interest is, yes. Although here, as well, there wasn’t as much strength as I’d have liked. I have three major issues with it. One, both our hero and heroine make critical errors of judgment that should have gotten them killed. Our heroine doing so is more forgiveable, as she is a young and inexperienced girl full of her own ambition, and not nearly as trained at being a spy as she thinks she is. Our hero, on the other hand, is supposedly an experienced spy and has no excuse. Two, there’s a near-sex scene about three quarters of the way through that I found jarringly out of place with the overall flavor of the novel, not to mention the time period it was set in. And three, the final confrontation scene with the bad guy was unfortunately farcical, to the degree that the bad guy was only caught because he literally tripped over a convenient dropped object rather than any real skill on the part of our heroes.

Despite these flaws, I actually enjoyed the read. The chemistry between heroine Amy and hero Richard was fun (even given the jarringly out of place scene previously mentioned). And even though both of them were being stupid in places, there were other scenes where they achieved a rhythm that actually did hearken back to the actual Pimpernel and Zorro novels. Amy has some nifty supporting characters backing her up in the persons of her cousin Jane and their chaperone Miss Gwen, the latter of whom is a force of nature.

All in all, flawed but fun, and if you go in, go in expecting lightweight fluff. Three stars.