Books read lately
Dec. 30th, 2004 05:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annathepiperSpoilers abound in this post, so if you haven't read any of these books, don't peek behind the cuts!
Death is Forever by Elizabeth Lowell is apparently a rewrite of a much earlier book she wrote under the name of Ann Maxwell: The Diamond Tiger. The old version of this book was written as a romance; this one was written as romantic suspense.
As Elizabeth Lowell books go, I didn't like this one quite as much as I've liked the Donovan books or Moving Target, but I will say that it's got a lot of nifty Australian outback atmosphere, lots of nifty "inexperienced heroine learning how to hold her own with the help of the hero, and in fact doing a good job of it" mileage (Erin was a very good heroine), and a reasonably suspenseful plot. The only bits I didn't care for may be holdovers from the romance-novel version of the book--the inevitable scene where Erin finds Cole, the hero, seemingly in the arms of another woman (his former love interest) and has the expected stereotypical jealous snit fit. And the big final confrontation scene, while getting points for pulling out a plot complication set up way back in the preliminary chapters of the book, nevertheless kind of annoyed me in terms of the whole reaction Erin has. An incriminating conversation the hero has with one of the minor characters is taped--and of course the rival woman whips this tape out at the crucial moment to prove to Erin that Cole is an opportunistic asshole. Which he is, of course, not, but does Erin believe in him after slogging through miles and miles of treacherous terrain with him and having him save her life on multiple occasions? No. She stomps off, leaving him (with a nasty concussion, I might add) on his own to deal with the Other Woman in whatever way he sees fit.
And it requires Erin's daddy to hand her the requisite clue that Cole really does love her: he risked himself carrying pounds and pounds of her undeveloped film out of the wilderness, not mentioning this to her once and not protesting in the slightest about the weight he was carrying. That, I kind of liked. But it nevertheless felt forced to me, as if Ms. Lowell was thinking "Oh shit, I'm already over the number of pages I wanted, how can I wrap this up in a single scene? I know! Let's have Daddy reveal the Redeeming Secret to Erin!" Sigh. It goes right back to "show, don't tell". Too much tell in that final scene, even if all is set right in the end and Erin and Cole get their Happy Ever After.
I am vaguely tempted to hunt down a copy of the older version and compare them, just to see what she changed, but that would probably mean actually having to BUY a copy of the older book and I'm not sure I want to bother. ;)
I have hugely mixed reactions to Every Secret Thing by Laura Lippman. This was an impulse buy that I picked up in the grocery store a couple of weeks ago, based on the spooky, moody feeling evoked by the cover art and blurb. And by and large, the writing did live up to the promise of the cover. Ms. Lippman is very good at interweaving the lives of a bunch of people who were irrevocably altered by the killing of a baby seven years prior to the main story, and she does it all in a subtle, slowly mounting kind of fashion that I like in a suspense novel. Nothing too overt, but the tension insidiously builds until you're just sort of gaping at the pages going "Holy crap..."
Now, that said, the book also annoyed the hell out of me on other levels. For one thing, the author has this habit of referring to a single member of a police force as "a police". The first time I encountered this I thought it was some sort of weird typo, but different characters used the phrase, and it showed up in the narrative as well. Once I realized it was not in fact a typo, it started getting on my nerves. I have never, ever heard this way of referring to a police offer before; I even looked up the word "police" on dictionary.com just to make sure that there wasn't some sort of obscure definition that allowed this usage. Nothing. So I don't know if this is some sort of weird regional dialect thing (the book is set in Baltimore), an affectation on the part of the author, the author genuinely not understanding that a single member of a police force is not "a police", or if it's some sort of weird copyediting mistake. Regardless, it was jarring enough that every time I saw it, it knocked me out of the story for a few seconds.
The bigger annoyance about the book, though (and I don't mind giving this away as a spoiler just because I don't recommend reading this book in general), is what Ms. Lippman did with the situation she created. #1, she had two young girls kill a baby. That's disturbing enough. #2, there is this huge feeling throughout much of the early part of the book that the girls might not actually have done it, and that something else more sinister was going on. I spent much of the early chapters waiting to see some sort of actual villain figure emerge, someone who might have abused or intimidated the girls or framed them for the murder of the child. That didn't happen; the girls did in fact do it. So while I am kind of pleased on one level that the book was unpredictable in that respect, it wasn't really satisfying. #3, she goes out of her way to set up how the one girl, Ronnie, is supposed to be the 'bad girl', and the other girl, Alice, is supposed to be the 'good one'. This gets flipped around in the last third of the book as things start coming out to reveal that Alice actually goaded Ronnie into the murder... and again, while I give the author points for the unpredictability, I really didn't like what #4, this ultimately said about Alice as well as her mother.
My biggest beef with the character of Alice is simply that the author had her get fat while she was in juvenile detention. Part of me can kind of buy this happening to a child if she gets sent off to juvenile prison--a combination of crappy food, inadequate exercise, and emotional trauma can wreak hell on a young metabolism. And we are shown that Alice is very clearly emotionally fucked up. And yet, something about the way that the narrative continually points out her weight to the reader, with this, that, and the other character seeing her as an "obese almost-woman", leaves this aftertaste of "well, she weighs nearly two hundred pounds, of course she must be emotionally fucked up". I really hate that. I hated the use of an overweight girl as a villain in a Tami Hoag book and I hate it here, too.
Also, I didn't like that her mother, who through most of the book seems fairly okay, is ultimately painted as a self-serving, thoughtless bitch because she a) never got married and therefore didn't give her child the Benefits of a Father, b) she engaged in premarital sex, and c) she smoked marijuana. Now, the character does some distinctly bad things; I had a big alarm bell go off in my brain when the narrative revealed that she had lied to Alice about her father. (I.e., she told Alice that her father had died just before she was born, where what really happened was that her mother had a fling with a cute but dumb meter reader. I mean, for fuck's sake, you had an affair, you got pregnant as a result, and instead of learning from that and teaching your kid about what not to do, you lie about it and make up a bullshit story about her father? NOT GOOD, MOM.) But as with the portrayal of Alice, I got this aftertaste of "oh, she's a freewheeling liberal, so of course her kid must be fucked up". Because of course <sarcasm>being a single mother means you take drugs and don't treat your kid right</sarcasm>. Grr.
Ultimately, there isn't even a happy ending. Alice is revealed as being behind the current rash of toddler disappearances, and even though her attempt to pin the blame on Ronnie fails, Ronnie still takes a fall. Ronnie, whose family life is by my standards way more fucked up than Alice's (her family is poor, her father is a truck driver who has to steal extra food and soda off deliveries he makes, her brother tried to sexually abuse her when she was nine), spends most of the book trying to rebuild what's left of her life; she gets a job, she makes friends with her manager, she struggles to hang onto the counseling she got while she was in juvenile prison. And yet, after one confrontation with Alice, she goes home and commits suicide. Alice gets away with not only destroying her but also pinning the blame for the kidnapping she commits on the father of the child she bore in juvie prison--an illegal alien in Baltimore who conveniently never even appears on camera. She switches her story from "I loved this man and we were going to get our baby back and go away together" to "he brutally raped me". And she never seems to actually get punished for pulling this crap.
So on the whole, not recommended.
Boy, The Three Musketeers is a thick, dense book. 530-some-odd pages, in small type, so closely packed together that it took me forever to slog through them--and it didn't help that many pages were printed weirdly, so that the ends of lines ran right down into the spine and made me have to work to figure out what was there. (This, I might add, was annoying. I wonder if I just chose poorly when I bought my copy, and whether another printing of the book might have gotten me a more readable one.)
But as of yesterday, at least, I finally finished it off. And I will say that the latter half of the book perked up significantly. The action and intrigue racheted up, some of the exploits of the musketeers went past the level of farce and actually turned into exploits (I liked the bet to spend an hour eating breakfast in an enemy garrison and what they did to fight off the enemy forces who tried to confront them), and once Lady de Winter started being an active force in the plot, I was actually impressed by the evil things she pulled off. (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
aerialscribe, you were absolutely right in how she's deliciously evil. Especially after she's captured and confined by Lord de Winter and starts messing with the mind of the impressionable Puritan Felton.)
I still didn't come to like d'Artagnan, Aramis, or Porthos very much, but Athos? All about the intense, broody hero once his history got revealed. The king, still an asshole. Buckingham? Not terribly impressed by him. The queen? She's all right.
And Richelieu actually started to impress me at the end--coming through as an archetypal figure of the "honorable villain" mold. I liked that he came to respect d'Artagnan and the others, and that he even tried to convince d'Artagnan to join his service, and that he even gave d'Artagnan a lieutenant's commission in the musketeers (though that kind of confused me, as I wasn't quite sure how he had the authority to make offers in the musketeers).
Final verdict: hard to get through, but I'm glad I did.
Death is Forever by Elizabeth Lowell is apparently a rewrite of a much earlier book she wrote under the name of Ann Maxwell: The Diamond Tiger. The old version of this book was written as a romance; this one was written as romantic suspense.
As Elizabeth Lowell books go, I didn't like this one quite as much as I've liked the Donovan books or Moving Target, but I will say that it's got a lot of nifty Australian outback atmosphere, lots of nifty "inexperienced heroine learning how to hold her own with the help of the hero, and in fact doing a good job of it" mileage (Erin was a very good heroine), and a reasonably suspenseful plot. The only bits I didn't care for may be holdovers from the romance-novel version of the book--the inevitable scene where Erin finds Cole, the hero, seemingly in the arms of another woman (his former love interest) and has the expected stereotypical jealous snit fit. And the big final confrontation scene, while getting points for pulling out a plot complication set up way back in the preliminary chapters of the book, nevertheless kind of annoyed me in terms of the whole reaction Erin has. An incriminating conversation the hero has with one of the minor characters is taped--and of course the rival woman whips this tape out at the crucial moment to prove to Erin that Cole is an opportunistic asshole. Which he is, of course, not, but does Erin believe in him after slogging through miles and miles of treacherous terrain with him and having him save her life on multiple occasions? No. She stomps off, leaving him (with a nasty concussion, I might add) on his own to deal with the Other Woman in whatever way he sees fit.
And it requires Erin's daddy to hand her the requisite clue that Cole really does love her: he risked himself carrying pounds and pounds of her undeveloped film out of the wilderness, not mentioning this to her once and not protesting in the slightest about the weight he was carrying. That, I kind of liked. But it nevertheless felt forced to me, as if Ms. Lowell was thinking "Oh shit, I'm already over the number of pages I wanted, how can I wrap this up in a single scene? I know! Let's have Daddy reveal the Redeeming Secret to Erin!" Sigh. It goes right back to "show, don't tell". Too much tell in that final scene, even if all is set right in the end and Erin and Cole get their Happy Ever After.
I am vaguely tempted to hunt down a copy of the older version and compare them, just to see what she changed, but that would probably mean actually having to BUY a copy of the older book and I'm not sure I want to bother. ;)
I have hugely mixed reactions to Every Secret Thing by Laura Lippman. This was an impulse buy that I picked up in the grocery store a couple of weeks ago, based on the spooky, moody feeling evoked by the cover art and blurb. And by and large, the writing did live up to the promise of the cover. Ms. Lippman is very good at interweaving the lives of a bunch of people who were irrevocably altered by the killing of a baby seven years prior to the main story, and she does it all in a subtle, slowly mounting kind of fashion that I like in a suspense novel. Nothing too overt, but the tension insidiously builds until you're just sort of gaping at the pages going "Holy crap..."
Now, that said, the book also annoyed the hell out of me on other levels. For one thing, the author has this habit of referring to a single member of a police force as "a police". The first time I encountered this I thought it was some sort of weird typo, but different characters used the phrase, and it showed up in the narrative as well. Once I realized it was not in fact a typo, it started getting on my nerves. I have never, ever heard this way of referring to a police offer before; I even looked up the word "police" on dictionary.com just to make sure that there wasn't some sort of obscure definition that allowed this usage. Nothing. So I don't know if this is some sort of weird regional dialect thing (the book is set in Baltimore), an affectation on the part of the author, the author genuinely not understanding that a single member of a police force is not "a police", or if it's some sort of weird copyediting mistake. Regardless, it was jarring enough that every time I saw it, it knocked me out of the story for a few seconds.
The bigger annoyance about the book, though (and I don't mind giving this away as a spoiler just because I don't recommend reading this book in general), is what Ms. Lippman did with the situation she created. #1, she had two young girls kill a baby. That's disturbing enough. #2, there is this huge feeling throughout much of the early part of the book that the girls might not actually have done it, and that something else more sinister was going on. I spent much of the early chapters waiting to see some sort of actual villain figure emerge, someone who might have abused or intimidated the girls or framed them for the murder of the child. That didn't happen; the girls did in fact do it. So while I am kind of pleased on one level that the book was unpredictable in that respect, it wasn't really satisfying. #3, she goes out of her way to set up how the one girl, Ronnie, is supposed to be the 'bad girl', and the other girl, Alice, is supposed to be the 'good one'. This gets flipped around in the last third of the book as things start coming out to reveal that Alice actually goaded Ronnie into the murder... and again, while I give the author points for the unpredictability, I really didn't like what #4, this ultimately said about Alice as well as her mother.
My biggest beef with the character of Alice is simply that the author had her get fat while she was in juvenile detention. Part of me can kind of buy this happening to a child if she gets sent off to juvenile prison--a combination of crappy food, inadequate exercise, and emotional trauma can wreak hell on a young metabolism. And we are shown that Alice is very clearly emotionally fucked up. And yet, something about the way that the narrative continually points out her weight to the reader, with this, that, and the other character seeing her as an "obese almost-woman", leaves this aftertaste of "well, she weighs nearly two hundred pounds, of course she must be emotionally fucked up". I really hate that. I hated the use of an overweight girl as a villain in a Tami Hoag book and I hate it here, too.
Also, I didn't like that her mother, who through most of the book seems fairly okay, is ultimately painted as a self-serving, thoughtless bitch because she a) never got married and therefore didn't give her child the Benefits of a Father, b) she engaged in premarital sex, and c) she smoked marijuana. Now, the character does some distinctly bad things; I had a big alarm bell go off in my brain when the narrative revealed that she had lied to Alice about her father. (I.e., she told Alice that her father had died just before she was born, where what really happened was that her mother had a fling with a cute but dumb meter reader. I mean, for fuck's sake, you had an affair, you got pregnant as a result, and instead of learning from that and teaching your kid about what not to do, you lie about it and make up a bullshit story about her father? NOT GOOD, MOM.) But as with the portrayal of Alice, I got this aftertaste of "oh, she's a freewheeling liberal, so of course her kid must be fucked up". Because of course <sarcasm>being a single mother means you take drugs and don't treat your kid right</sarcasm>. Grr.
Ultimately, there isn't even a happy ending. Alice is revealed as being behind the current rash of toddler disappearances, and even though her attempt to pin the blame on Ronnie fails, Ronnie still takes a fall. Ronnie, whose family life is by my standards way more fucked up than Alice's (her family is poor, her father is a truck driver who has to steal extra food and soda off deliveries he makes, her brother tried to sexually abuse her when she was nine), spends most of the book trying to rebuild what's left of her life; she gets a job, she makes friends with her manager, she struggles to hang onto the counseling she got while she was in juvenile prison. And yet, after one confrontation with Alice, she goes home and commits suicide. Alice gets away with not only destroying her but also pinning the blame for the kidnapping she commits on the father of the child she bore in juvie prison--an illegal alien in Baltimore who conveniently never even appears on camera. She switches her story from "I loved this man and we were going to get our baby back and go away together" to "he brutally raped me". And she never seems to actually get punished for pulling this crap.
So on the whole, not recommended.
Boy, The Three Musketeers is a thick, dense book. 530-some-odd pages, in small type, so closely packed together that it took me forever to slog through them--and it didn't help that many pages were printed weirdly, so that the ends of lines ran right down into the spine and made me have to work to figure out what was there. (This, I might add, was annoying. I wonder if I just chose poorly when I bought my copy, and whether another printing of the book might have gotten me a more readable one.)
But as of yesterday, at least, I finally finished it off. And I will say that the latter half of the book perked up significantly. The action and intrigue racheted up, some of the exploits of the musketeers went past the level of farce and actually turned into exploits (I liked the bet to spend an hour eating breakfast in an enemy garrison and what they did to fight off the enemy forces who tried to confront them), and once Lady de Winter started being an active force in the plot, I was actually impressed by the evil things she pulled off. (
aerialscribe, you were absolutely right in how she's deliciously evil. Especially after she's captured and confined by Lord de Winter and starts messing with the mind of the impressionable Puritan Felton.)I still didn't come to like d'Artagnan, Aramis, or Porthos very much, but Athos? All about the intense, broody hero once his history got revealed. The king, still an asshole. Buckingham? Not terribly impressed by him. The queen? She's all right.
And Richelieu actually started to impress me at the end--coming through as an archetypal figure of the "honorable villain" mold. I liked that he came to respect d'Artagnan and the others, and that he even tried to convince d'Artagnan to join his service, and that he even gave d'Artagnan a lieutenant's commission in the musketeers (though that kind of confused me, as I wasn't quite sure how he had the authority to make offers in the musketeers).
Final verdict: hard to get through, but I'm glad I did.
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