annathepiper | Aug. 29th, 2010

Aug. 29th, 2010

Nora Roberts really does love her some “girl who’s been away for ages goes back to family home in a small town, and OHNOEZ THERE’S A MURDER” plots, and Carnal Innocence is yet another one of those type of books. Fortunately, this is a plot formula that Ms. Roberts does well. So even though there’s nothing terribly out of the ordinary in this novel, it’s a fun read nonetheless.

This time around we’ve got a world-famous violinist, Caroline Waverly, returning to the small Southern town of Innocence to recuperate from a grueling performance schedule, romantic betrayal from her conductor and lover, and her domineering mother. But there are murders going on in Innocence; young women are being lured out at night. And one of the initial prime suspects is Tucker Longstreet, one of the sons of a local old and wealthy family, with a reputation for being quite the lady-killer. The question is, of course, does this mean literally?

This being a Nora Roberts novel, the answer to that question is a no-brainer. Roberts takes her usual circuitous (but not too circuitous) route towards identifying the real killer, and along the way sets up some quite nice chemistry between the prim Caroline and the lazily charming Tucker. I quite liked both characters, not only because of my partiality to lead characters who are musicians, but also because Tucker invariably reminded me of Sawyer from Lost. He has the same kind of rogueish Southern charm, and that’s a quality that Roberts writes with engaging skill.

Since the setting is Southern, there are racial tensions here as well as religious ones. Both of these are played a little heavy-handedly at times in the plot, but on the other hand, I still found them realistically done. The inevitable awful family secrets among the Longstreets, coming to light, set the book up for a resolution that did actually surprise me a bit, too. Three stars.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies was one of those books I’d been hearing about for ages, and I’ll cheerily admit that glancing at the blurbs on it and the other books in the series in a bookstore did pique my interest. I did not, however, get a chance to read this one until it was handed out briefly for free in PDF form as part of a promotion for Westerfeld’s book Leviathan.

Survey says: less complex than I would have liked, which so far I find is the risk I run when I delve into YA. On the surface, there’s decent worldbuilding here in a sort of Logan’s Run-like, futuristic setting where every member of society is given an operation at age 16 to turn them into a “pretty”. Tally, about to turn 16, is ardently looking forward to her turn, since the transition means she’ll have no responsibilities for a while and will get to indulge in non-stop parties and fun.

This being a dystopian setting, though, she naturally finds out that not everybody is as enthused about becoming pretty as they should be. When her best friend escapes the city in search of a hidden enclave of people led by a couple of doctors who have discovered disturbing truths about the operation, Tally is forced to go after her and infiltrate the enclave as a spy.

All of which is a tasty little core of a story, to be sure. That said, I frequently found the worldbuilding thinner than I would have liked even as I appreciated the base concepts. Same deal with the characterizations of most of the cast. Tally read for me as too simplistic, and I couldn’t really nail down whether this was because it was a YA novel and therefore less complex than I prefer, or simply because Tally as a teenaged girl was being portrayed believably as a teenaged girl. Her primary motivation is at first of course to be a pretty–which seems reasonable for all the young people in her society, since that’s what they have drummed into their heads. But even afterward, as she starts cluing in to what’s going on, she is wishy-washy about committing to changing things, and half the time only seems interested in doing so because she’s attracted to the son of the doctors who run their little colony.

Overall though I did like the read, and I’ll probably be buying this sooner or later to get a proper copy, as well as continuing the series to see what happens next. There is a cliffhanger, and it got me well enough that yeah, I’m in for more. Three stars.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

Is that too much to ask? Grf.

Case in point: my computer surgery from yesterday. Winnowill’s hard drive had started making disturbing, unusually loud noises when spinning up out of hibernation. This concerned me, especially given that everybody I mentioned this to said “yep, time to get a new hard drive”.

So yesterday I went out and got one, along with a new 2G RAM chip so that I could bring Sweet Winnie’s total memory up to a shiny 4G. The new hard drive was a very shiny 320G, twice the capacity of the old one.

Brought these things home, and went to work on doing the restore from my last Time Machine backup. Taking apart the machine and putting in the new RAM and drive was the easy part. As per solarbird‘s instructions this was also supposed to be pretty easy–mostly. Dara brought me the external backup drive and plugged that in, and I booted up from our Snow Leopard install disk. Went into Disk Utilty to format the new drive, and then clicked in to the proper command to restore from a Time Machine backup.

It went swimmingly, up until the part where I rebooted and didn’t get any further than a blue screen and a little spinning progress wheel that came and went every few seconds. To wit, um.

Tried a second pass through the entire procedure, with the same results.

Turned out I had to totally re-install Snow Leopard on the drive. Which fortunately didn’t overwrite any of my old data, but it did mean I had to re-download all of the software updates that Apple has dropped since Snow Leopard came out. Which was vexing. (And which, tangentially, led me to repro a bug in one of our games that I’ll have to be chatting with folks about at work tomorrow.)

Now the computer seems happy enough. Which is of course a perfect time for WordPress plugins to start going blooey on me. YAY! And by yay, I mean, AUGH!

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

I’ve been in another prolonged writing funk, which has been frustrating–so tonight I tried another round of throwing tiny bits of words at stuff. Got up to just over 200 by throwing small words at four different things, so I’ll take that!

So we’ve got 51 words into Chapter 4 of Shadow of the Rook, which is currently in the middle of an Enverly scene–his first since the events at the end of Lament of the Dove. Let’s just say Father Enverly has had his first actual religious experience, shall we?

Mirror’s Gate is still in Chapter 2, with Yevanya going to have a friendly little chat with her dead husband’s former teacher and colleague, which should set her up nicely to learn some disturbing things about what’s going on in the city of Istra. 57 words to that, and I gotta say, I rather like this fragment:

Genrek was a great hulk of a man, towering over her by many inches, and yet she had never found him anything but amiable in his gruff fashion. She always supposed it was not because he found her fragile and dainty; next to Genrek many things were, such as carriages, hills, and the smaller varieties of bear.

Over in Bone Walker, I’m still in Chapter 11, with Kendis and Christopher about to get hugely distracted from the question of whether Christopher can, in fact, cross Lake Washington. ‘Cause something is about to give them a disturbing little phone call. 52 words there.

And last but not least, in the still untitled Warder-universe story of Elizabeth and Ross, Elizabeth is realizing that she has no business snarking on a man who’s just told her his dead sister was the magical defender of the city. Not when she is, herself, a psychic. 67 words here.

So yeah. 227 words total. Not much overall, but something!

Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.