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Apr. 11th, 2006 05:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annathepiperThief of Lives is the second in the series about the vampire hunters Magiere and Leesil, by Barb and J.C. Hendee. In this one, we see that the duo has tried to settle down in the village they saved in the first book--only to discover that the phony reputation they've built up is coming back to bite them in both their asses as they're summoned to deal with a very real undead problem in the king's own city.
There were only a small number of things I disliked about the book, so I'll get those out of the way first.
First up, language. There were just enough references in the book to the languages being spoken by the characters to remind you that you're not actually dealing with English speakers, and that part was cool--but the words that were being bandied about, especially the term for the royal guards, were utterly unpronounceable. They also had a plethora of umlauts and accent marks, enough that it looked like they basically got flung over the words like too much salt. I don't have anything against diacritics on invented words--gods know I'm throwing grave accents around on my Elvish words in Lament of the Dove--but I'm kind of thinking that like unto commas, they should be used lightly. And they weren't used lightly here. Pretty much every single occurrence of words like this that I saw in the narrative had at least one diacritic on it, if not more. And that it was only occasionally done made it actually more annoying to me--because none of the characters had huge, unpronounceable names, which made me wonder why such words were used for other things. It was just enough to jolt the flow of otherwise enjoyable reading to me.
Second up, in the big climactic sequence towards the end, the Hendees split up their protagonists--which required a lot of jumping back and forth as different things happened to different characters. This threw the pacing off for my tastes, and a few times I kept wanting them to just get on with it.
Third, I was vaguely put out that the plot sets up Magiere and Leesil as being summoned to the king's city to deal with this whole undead threat, and then the city council (predictably) turns out to be ineffectual when Magiere starts actually, like, y'know, doing what they summoned her to do in the first place. They raise a lot of protests about how "oh, no, this killer couldn't possibly be hiding among the nobility", and all that attitude from them mostly just made them tiresome.
Now to the stuff I liked. The story is overall interesting, with some good muscle to its prose, and I like both Leesil and Magiere as characters. Even when my better judgement makes me want to whine about liking a character who's a half-vampire. ;)
And there's an overall good thread advancing the relationship between our lead characters, too. A few bits of it annoyed me--the tension between them occasionally made me want to smack them both for being idiots at each other--but by and large I liked it, since it seemed to proceed naturally out of where they were in the first book. Leesil especially is a character with intriguing flaws to round him out, and seeing him try to wrestle against these as he tried to keep Magiere's regard was good, taut reading.
The excursion into more of Leesil's backstory was entertaining too, and I liked that the Hendees' elves are very light on the detail at this point. We're getting just enough to know that they're there, they're reclusive to the point of paranoia, and some Very Interesting Things happened with Leesil's mother, who may in fact be alive. Intriguing stuff there and definitely enough on its own to get me to get the third book.
Not sure yet what I'm thinking of Welstiel, who mostly seemed to be wandering around the plot for the sake of dropping hints about what's to come--but I'm definitely curious about what's going on with him too.
So yeah, good read overall. The next one won't be high on my priority queue since I have other things I am more actively interested in, but it will be joining my To Read shelf soon!
Carrie Bebris' Suspense and Sensibility was described on Amazon.com as "Jane Austen meets the X-Files", and its predecessor, Pride and Prescience, as "reasonably well executed fanfic". These descriptions pretty much fit in with my impression of Suspense and Sensibility.
Now, let me get this much straight--Bebris does not have Jane Austen's sparkle in her prose. Few people do, though Stephanie Barron does come close in her mysteries that feature Jane as their heroine. By and large I found the plot fairly thin, and the juxtaposition of a Jane-Austen-esque setting and the paranormal element, especially this whole idea of Elizabeth Darcy being set up as someone who's sensitive to the supernatural, will probably grate if you try to take this book too seriously. So might the admittedly deus ex machina ending. It felt really, really weird to be reading a story featuring Elizabeth and Darcy that also had paranormal elements in it; I felt like I kept jumping back and forth between Book A and Book B.
It took a bit to get its feet under it; the entire beginning where Elizabeth's little sister Kitty is having her courtship with her handsome and kind young betrothed is pokey and stilted. Bebris does not have Austen's gift for making scenes involving the gentry at their gatherings entertaining, I fear. Then again--she also seems to know this, and in the one extended scene of such a gathering that we get, she throws in the complication of the hosts' young child making a huge scene, which gives all the characters a reason to be fairly awkward as they pretend to ignore what's going on. And I do have to give her points for avoiding having Elizabeth's parents on camera at all--because without Austen's deftness, those characters would very quickly stop being amusing and quickly become godawful-annoying.
Once the real story kicks in, though--once Kitty's husband-to-be starts exhibiting very strange shifts in his behavior--things get more interesting. There's less substance than I would like even at that point, for we never really see most of the strange things that Harry Dashwood is up to; we get a lot of "tell" and not too much "show". And a good bit of the "tell" is via Darcy dropping ominous hints that are never really elaborated upon, on the grounds that to do so would be offensive to a lady's ears. Very appropriate for the period, but vexing to me as a reader. :)
The aforementioned deus ex machina ending partly bugged me and partly didn't. The bugging comes less out of it being a deus ex machina in general and more out of my having not really clued in immediately what was going on--I had to go back and re-read what I'd just read, since I was going, "Wait, what just happened there?" Once I did realize what had happened, it did strike me as sort of sweetly poetic... though again, with less substance than I might have otherwise liked.
But with all of this in mind, actually, yeah, I did enjoy the book. I did read it with my "this is reasonably well executed fanfic" glasses on the whole time, and with that to remind me not to raise my expectations too high, it was overall a perfectly decent fluff read.
There were only a small number of things I disliked about the book, so I'll get those out of the way first.
First up, language. There were just enough references in the book to the languages being spoken by the characters to remind you that you're not actually dealing with English speakers, and that part was cool--but the words that were being bandied about, especially the term for the royal guards, were utterly unpronounceable. They also had a plethora of umlauts and accent marks, enough that it looked like they basically got flung over the words like too much salt. I don't have anything against diacritics on invented words--gods know I'm throwing grave accents around on my Elvish words in Lament of the Dove--but I'm kind of thinking that like unto commas, they should be used lightly. And they weren't used lightly here. Pretty much every single occurrence of words like this that I saw in the narrative had at least one diacritic on it, if not more. And that it was only occasionally done made it actually more annoying to me--because none of the characters had huge, unpronounceable names, which made me wonder why such words were used for other things. It was just enough to jolt the flow of otherwise enjoyable reading to me.
Second up, in the big climactic sequence towards the end, the Hendees split up their protagonists--which required a lot of jumping back and forth as different things happened to different characters. This threw the pacing off for my tastes, and a few times I kept wanting them to just get on with it.
Third, I was vaguely put out that the plot sets up Magiere and Leesil as being summoned to the king's city to deal with this whole undead threat, and then the city council (predictably) turns out to be ineffectual when Magiere starts actually, like, y'know, doing what they summoned her to do in the first place. They raise a lot of protests about how "oh, no, this killer couldn't possibly be hiding among the nobility", and all that attitude from them mostly just made them tiresome.
Now to the stuff I liked. The story is overall interesting, with some good muscle to its prose, and I like both Leesil and Magiere as characters. Even when my better judgement makes me want to whine about liking a character who's a half-vampire. ;)
And there's an overall good thread advancing the relationship between our lead characters, too. A few bits of it annoyed me--the tension between them occasionally made me want to smack them both for being idiots at each other--but by and large I liked it, since it seemed to proceed naturally out of where they were in the first book. Leesil especially is a character with intriguing flaws to round him out, and seeing him try to wrestle against these as he tried to keep Magiere's regard was good, taut reading.
The excursion into more of Leesil's backstory was entertaining too, and I liked that the Hendees' elves are very light on the detail at this point. We're getting just enough to know that they're there, they're reclusive to the point of paranoia, and some Very Interesting Things happened with Leesil's mother, who may in fact be alive. Intriguing stuff there and definitely enough on its own to get me to get the third book.
Not sure yet what I'm thinking of Welstiel, who mostly seemed to be wandering around the plot for the sake of dropping hints about what's to come--but I'm definitely curious about what's going on with him too.
So yeah, good read overall. The next one won't be high on my priority queue since I have other things I am more actively interested in, but it will be joining my To Read shelf soon!
Carrie Bebris' Suspense and Sensibility was described on Amazon.com as "Jane Austen meets the X-Files", and its predecessor, Pride and Prescience, as "reasonably well executed fanfic". These descriptions pretty much fit in with my impression of Suspense and Sensibility.
Now, let me get this much straight--Bebris does not have Jane Austen's sparkle in her prose. Few people do, though Stephanie Barron does come close in her mysteries that feature Jane as their heroine. By and large I found the plot fairly thin, and the juxtaposition of a Jane-Austen-esque setting and the paranormal element, especially this whole idea of Elizabeth Darcy being set up as someone who's sensitive to the supernatural, will probably grate if you try to take this book too seriously. So might the admittedly deus ex machina ending. It felt really, really weird to be reading a story featuring Elizabeth and Darcy that also had paranormal elements in it; I felt like I kept jumping back and forth between Book A and Book B.
It took a bit to get its feet under it; the entire beginning where Elizabeth's little sister Kitty is having her courtship with her handsome and kind young betrothed is pokey and stilted. Bebris does not have Austen's gift for making scenes involving the gentry at their gatherings entertaining, I fear. Then again--she also seems to know this, and in the one extended scene of such a gathering that we get, she throws in the complication of the hosts' young child making a huge scene, which gives all the characters a reason to be fairly awkward as they pretend to ignore what's going on. And I do have to give her points for avoiding having Elizabeth's parents on camera at all--because without Austen's deftness, those characters would very quickly stop being amusing and quickly become godawful-annoying.
Once the real story kicks in, though--once Kitty's husband-to-be starts exhibiting very strange shifts in his behavior--things get more interesting. There's less substance than I would like even at that point, for we never really see most of the strange things that Harry Dashwood is up to; we get a lot of "tell" and not too much "show". And a good bit of the "tell" is via Darcy dropping ominous hints that are never really elaborated upon, on the grounds that to do so would be offensive to a lady's ears. Very appropriate for the period, but vexing to me as a reader. :)
The aforementioned deus ex machina ending partly bugged me and partly didn't. The bugging comes less out of it being a deus ex machina in general and more out of my having not really clued in immediately what was going on--I had to go back and re-read what I'd just read, since I was going, "Wait, what just happened there?" Once I did realize what had happened, it did strike me as sort of sweetly poetic... though again, with less substance than I might have otherwise liked.
But with all of this in mind, actually, yeah, I did enjoy the book. I did read it with my "this is reasonably well executed fanfic" glasses on the whole time, and with that to remind me not to raise my expectations too high, it was overall a perfectly decent fluff read.