Latest reads
Feb. 21st, 2006 02:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annathepiperFirst, some picoreviews!
Moon Called, by Patricia Briggs--unusual urban fantasy with werewolves, unusual not in the treatment of the weres but rather in the directions the plot takes the reader. Some bits that felt shaky, but otherwise a decent read, and I'll probably be picking up the inevitable sequel.
Survivor in Death, by J.D. Robbs--yet another in the long-running In Death series, but if you've made it this far in, you'll find a few nice surprising touches in the ongoing adventures of Eve, Roarke, and all their supporting cast. Nothing to hugely break the formula that has made this series such a success, but the little surprises were nice.
Spoilers behind the cuts!
Patricia Briggs' Moon Called was an odd read for me, especially reading it right on the heels of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rachelcaine's Ill Wind. In some ways I found it to be evidence that as with many fiction genres, urban fantasy really is rather formulaic... and in others, I found it a fairly interesting little book, not because it did anything hugely new or unusual with urban fantasy tropes, but more because of certain plot choices that caught me off guard and made me genuinely unable to predict how the book would go.
The first of these was the introduction to the heroine of a young man on the run, the evident victim of a plot to make people into weres against their will. He's been made a brand new werewolf and has no idea how to control his beast, and now he's also wanted for the murder of his girlfriend (which naturally he did not commit). In many books I would expect this story to wind up being all about the effort to set this kid's life right, let him learn how to control his new furry self that pops up every month, etc., etc.
What does Briggs do, fairly early on into the book? She KILLS OFF THE KID. That by itself was enough to make me go "whoa". Then later on, we discover that the character being set up as the evident near-at-hand bad guy (as opposed to the mastermind that's off in Chicago) is actually not the bad guy at all... and a scene where I was convinced that our heroine Mercy was going to get her ass kicked actually turned into a parlay as she learns the truth from this guy and his cronies. By that point, I was well and thoroughly into the land of "okay, I have no clue where this is going at this point, cool". And I appreciated that. This kind of thing is something I've seen in Briggs' earlier fantasy novels, and it's put to good effect here.
On the other hand, there are bits of the overall setup that I don't quite care for. When I learned in the first chapter that the heroine was a mechanic, hard on the heels of reading a different book with a heroine who was into fast cars (Ill Wind), and still not terribly long after reading yet another book with a heroine who's a mechanic (Urban Shaman), I couldn't suppress a reaction of wondering when the hell "chicks who like cars" became the hot thing in urban fantasy. ;) Now I know the genre isn't suddenly swimming in such characters, but having read three urban fantasies fairly close together where this was a common trait of all the heroines was still a bit much for me, and kept me from quite getting into the heroine's head as much as I might otherwise have done.
Nor am I entirely sure that the notion of Mercy as a "walker" (a shifter who, unlike a werewolf, can turn instantaneously and without pain into her beast, in this case, a coyote) entirely worked for me. I appreciate the usage of a Native American concept here, but on the other hand, giving Mercy the backstory of being raised by a werewolf pack sometimes struck me as a too-convenient way of getting her werewolf connections without going to the trouble of making her a werewolf. Though I do have to giggle at the thought that this does give the whole idea of "raised by wolves" an entirely new spin. ;)
And I'm similarly ambivalent about the obligatory triangle set up between Mercy, Samuel, and Adam. Adam is pretty much your garden-variety alpha werewolf, though it was kind of cool to see him have a teenage (human) daughter. Samuel as a character had more potential interest, since he not only has a lot of backstory with Mercy, he's also got the unusual conflict of being a werewolf who's also a doctor. Both men like Mercy, but I didn't quite like the way that this was dealt with towards the end of the story--i.e., Adam taking Mercy out to dinner, then bringing her home only to discover that Samuel is suddenly her roommate, and he's also being snarky about Adam's presence on the porch. That put a bit of a forced ending on that whole plotline, and didn't quite feel smooth enough to set up further romantic tensions between these three for me later.
Yet Briggs' prose is tight, and she does have a deft hand in sketching out her world without hitting you over the head with certain concepts. I like how she chose to handle the supernaturals in her world coming out to humanity at large, and I liked that the big meeting with the local vampires didn't degenerate into a big blood-and-sex-fest--this is what I get for being put off by one too many Anita Blakes, I think.
So, all in all, a slightly shaky but otherwise fun start to a new series. And as mentioned, I will probably be buying the obligatory sequel!
I will be the first person to admit that J.D. Robb's <Foo> in Death books are pretty formulaic. Tough cop chick kicks ass solving a case, angsts about her tortured childhood on the side, and has frequent hot sex with her devilishly sexy husband who seems to own seven-eighths of the planet. That said, it's a good formula, and by and large ol' J.D./Nora does a decent job keeping at it. And when she can actually surprise me twenty books into the series, I have to give her credit for that.
Survivor in Death is all about a family murdered in their beds in a military-style precise assassination, and Eve and Peabody and Roarke working on figuring out why in the world a family with no apparent trouble should be so slaughtered. But this time around there's an added wrinkle--one of the children actually survives, because she's having a friend sleeping over and the friend is the child murdered in her bed, because little Nixie got up in the middle of the night to get herself a drink in the kitchen. And conveniently avoided being found by the killers.
It's not surprising that the kid winds up in Eve's custody, since Eve is the one who finds her and Nixie latches onto her like a remora, and with her own traumatic memories of going through the system Eve isn't about to surrender the poor thing to the same fate. Nor is it surprising that both Eve and Roarke find a lot of sympathy for what Nixie is going through and even are tempted to adopt her as their own, when they find out that Nixie's only remaining relatives are either totally unsuitable or totally unwilling to take her... and that the parents of the girl who was murdered in Nixie's stead can't stand to take her because of the reminder of their own loss.
The part that surprised me is that Eve and Roarke didn't actually adopt her. I was totally expecting it, given the ongoing mileage with Eve struggling to figure out how to deal with a scary creature like a nine-year-old girl and starting to like her despite herself, and given how Roarke tries to help by hunting down the one relation Nixie has to see if he can convince her to take Nixie on. That Eve and Roarke give it hard consideration and angst at one another about it--and then do not actually do it, but rather arrange to turn her over to trusted friends who have already adopted a boy and are hopeful to add a girl to their family--really kind of pleased me. It made Eve and Roarke stronger characters for me in a way, since it shows me that here are two people who both really want children and yet are very conscious of the fact that neither of them are prepared to deal with one, especially one that's already nine years old. It's a mature decision, and I approve of it--because no matter how much they liked Nixie, it would have been the wrong thing to do to try to keep her if they weren't really ready to be parents.
So yeah, kudos to that.
Aside from that, there wasn't too much terribly new or surprising to the formula. Plenty of little touches I liked, like Roarke being so wrapped up in his hacking work that he starts swearing in Gaelic, and Eve and Summerset actually being vaguely nice to one another for once, and Eve actually screwing up on the job and getting into a bit of trouble over it. But these were all variations on familiar and comfortable territory.
I'd still like to see something really new and unusual happen to this cast--something that oh, say, I dunno, puts Roarke in extreme danger. The man's richer than Croesus, we got that part already, it'd be nice to see him rattled on his lofty perch every so often. And it'd be nice to see some resolution come to Eve for all of the angst in her past. Which I'm hoping will come with Memory in Death.
I'll keep reading until then, at the very least! Like I said... formulaic... but it's a good, fun formula, and as long as it entertains, that's all I ask. ^_^
Moon Called, by Patricia Briggs--unusual urban fantasy with werewolves, unusual not in the treatment of the weres but rather in the directions the plot takes the reader. Some bits that felt shaky, but otherwise a decent read, and I'll probably be picking up the inevitable sequel.
Survivor in Death, by J.D. Robbs--yet another in the long-running In Death series, but if you've made it this far in, you'll find a few nice surprising touches in the ongoing adventures of Eve, Roarke, and all their supporting cast. Nothing to hugely break the formula that has made this series such a success, but the little surprises were nice.
Spoilers behind the cuts!
Patricia Briggs' Moon Called was an odd read for me, especially reading it right on the heels of
rachelcaine's Ill Wind. In some ways I found it to be evidence that as with many fiction genres, urban fantasy really is rather formulaic... and in others, I found it a fairly interesting little book, not because it did anything hugely new or unusual with urban fantasy tropes, but more because of certain plot choices that caught me off guard and made me genuinely unable to predict how the book would go.The first of these was the introduction to the heroine of a young man on the run, the evident victim of a plot to make people into weres against their will. He's been made a brand new werewolf and has no idea how to control his beast, and now he's also wanted for the murder of his girlfriend (which naturally he did not commit). In many books I would expect this story to wind up being all about the effort to set this kid's life right, let him learn how to control his new furry self that pops up every month, etc., etc.
What does Briggs do, fairly early on into the book? She KILLS OFF THE KID. That by itself was enough to make me go "whoa". Then later on, we discover that the character being set up as the evident near-at-hand bad guy (as opposed to the mastermind that's off in Chicago) is actually not the bad guy at all... and a scene where I was convinced that our heroine Mercy was going to get her ass kicked actually turned into a parlay as she learns the truth from this guy and his cronies. By that point, I was well and thoroughly into the land of "okay, I have no clue where this is going at this point, cool". And I appreciated that. This kind of thing is something I've seen in Briggs' earlier fantasy novels, and it's put to good effect here.
On the other hand, there are bits of the overall setup that I don't quite care for. When I learned in the first chapter that the heroine was a mechanic, hard on the heels of reading a different book with a heroine who was into fast cars (Ill Wind), and still not terribly long after reading yet another book with a heroine who's a mechanic (Urban Shaman), I couldn't suppress a reaction of wondering when the hell "chicks who like cars" became the hot thing in urban fantasy. ;) Now I know the genre isn't suddenly swimming in such characters, but having read three urban fantasies fairly close together where this was a common trait of all the heroines was still a bit much for me, and kept me from quite getting into the heroine's head as much as I might otherwise have done.
Nor am I entirely sure that the notion of Mercy as a "walker" (a shifter who, unlike a werewolf, can turn instantaneously and without pain into her beast, in this case, a coyote) entirely worked for me. I appreciate the usage of a Native American concept here, but on the other hand, giving Mercy the backstory of being raised by a werewolf pack sometimes struck me as a too-convenient way of getting her werewolf connections without going to the trouble of making her a werewolf. Though I do have to giggle at the thought that this does give the whole idea of "raised by wolves" an entirely new spin. ;)
And I'm similarly ambivalent about the obligatory triangle set up between Mercy, Samuel, and Adam. Adam is pretty much your garden-variety alpha werewolf, though it was kind of cool to see him have a teenage (human) daughter. Samuel as a character had more potential interest, since he not only has a lot of backstory with Mercy, he's also got the unusual conflict of being a werewolf who's also a doctor. Both men like Mercy, but I didn't quite like the way that this was dealt with towards the end of the story--i.e., Adam taking Mercy out to dinner, then bringing her home only to discover that Samuel is suddenly her roommate, and he's also being snarky about Adam's presence on the porch. That put a bit of a forced ending on that whole plotline, and didn't quite feel smooth enough to set up further romantic tensions between these three for me later.
Yet Briggs' prose is tight, and she does have a deft hand in sketching out her world without hitting you over the head with certain concepts. I like how she chose to handle the supernaturals in her world coming out to humanity at large, and I liked that the big meeting with the local vampires didn't degenerate into a big blood-and-sex-fest--this is what I get for being put off by one too many Anita Blakes, I think.
So, all in all, a slightly shaky but otherwise fun start to a new series. And as mentioned, I will probably be buying the obligatory sequel!
I will be the first person to admit that J.D. Robb's <Foo> in Death books are pretty formulaic. Tough cop chick kicks ass solving a case, angsts about her tortured childhood on the side, and has frequent hot sex with her devilishly sexy husband who seems to own seven-eighths of the planet. That said, it's a good formula, and by and large ol' J.D./Nora does a decent job keeping at it. And when she can actually surprise me twenty books into the series, I have to give her credit for that.
Survivor in Death is all about a family murdered in their beds in a military-style precise assassination, and Eve and Peabody and Roarke working on figuring out why in the world a family with no apparent trouble should be so slaughtered. But this time around there's an added wrinkle--one of the children actually survives, because she's having a friend sleeping over and the friend is the child murdered in her bed, because little Nixie got up in the middle of the night to get herself a drink in the kitchen. And conveniently avoided being found by the killers.
It's not surprising that the kid winds up in Eve's custody, since Eve is the one who finds her and Nixie latches onto her like a remora, and with her own traumatic memories of going through the system Eve isn't about to surrender the poor thing to the same fate. Nor is it surprising that both Eve and Roarke find a lot of sympathy for what Nixie is going through and even are tempted to adopt her as their own, when they find out that Nixie's only remaining relatives are either totally unsuitable or totally unwilling to take her... and that the parents of the girl who was murdered in Nixie's stead can't stand to take her because of the reminder of their own loss.
The part that surprised me is that Eve and Roarke didn't actually adopt her. I was totally expecting it, given the ongoing mileage with Eve struggling to figure out how to deal with a scary creature like a nine-year-old girl and starting to like her despite herself, and given how Roarke tries to help by hunting down the one relation Nixie has to see if he can convince her to take Nixie on. That Eve and Roarke give it hard consideration and angst at one another about it--and then do not actually do it, but rather arrange to turn her over to trusted friends who have already adopted a boy and are hopeful to add a girl to their family--really kind of pleased me. It made Eve and Roarke stronger characters for me in a way, since it shows me that here are two people who both really want children and yet are very conscious of the fact that neither of them are prepared to deal with one, especially one that's already nine years old. It's a mature decision, and I approve of it--because no matter how much they liked Nixie, it would have been the wrong thing to do to try to keep her if they weren't really ready to be parents.
So yeah, kudos to that.
Aside from that, there wasn't too much terribly new or surprising to the formula. Plenty of little touches I liked, like Roarke being so wrapped up in his hacking work that he starts swearing in Gaelic, and Eve and Summerset actually being vaguely nice to one another for once, and Eve actually screwing up on the job and getting into a bit of trouble over it. But these were all variations on familiar and comfortable territory.
I'd still like to see something really new and unusual happen to this cast--something that oh, say, I dunno, puts Roarke in extreme danger. The man's richer than Croesus, we got that part already, it'd be nice to see him rattled on his lofty perch every so often. And it'd be nice to see some resolution come to Eve for all of the angst in her past. Which I'm hoping will come with Memory in Death.
I'll keep reading until then, at the very least! Like I said... formulaic... but it's a good, fun formula, and as long as it entertains, that's all I ask. ^_^
no subject
Date: 2006-02-21 11:26 pm (UTC)Also, even in her sixties, Eve has still not yet found out who's been stealing her office stash of candy!
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Date: 2006-02-22 03:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-22 03:39 am (UTC)