Ordinary Day

Solstice Wood is Patricia McKillip's first contemporary fantasy. I can't call it urban, since the setting is decidedly rural and since the pacing and flavor of it is not at all like most current urban fantasy novels. It's subtler and quieter, with some quite lyrical magic in its words, enough to remind any avid fantasy reader that oh yes this is why we read this stuff: because the world of the fay, the world of Other, is full of magic. McKillip does an excellent job keeping that magic flowing through her prose; a lot of her sentences in this book are a distinct pleasure to read.

On the other hand, the book did have some issues for me. There are five POV characters, and every single chapter is written in first person, which made it difficult for me to really feel like I knew any of the characters in any depth. It also meant that the overall plot took a while to get started, since different heads had to be hopped into in different chapters, and different points of view presented about what was going on. And while I found the comparative lack of fast-paced action no problem--the pace was rather refreshingly gentle, in fact--the moral-heavy resolution at the end felt a bit obvious and forced. Three stars.

After the densely packed prose of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, it was rather a relief to tear through Empire of Ivory, the fourth installment of naominovik's Temeraire series--which roared along at quite a satisfying pace and as always, latched onto my attention and refused to let it go until I was done.

This time around we have Captain Laurence and Temeraire up against the challenge of a plague that threatens to kill off the entire dragon population of Britain. The search for a cure builds nicely upon earlier details from Books Two and Three, following up on not only Temeraire's own earlier illness, but also his efforts to enlighten his fellow dragons to the virtues of liberty and self-determination, Laurence's ongoing relationship with Jane Roland and the status of her daughter Emily, and the bringing of the twenty feral dragons from Book Three to England. Iskierka, now grown, is absolutely delightful ("you didn't say it had to be a French ship", hee hee). The plot's taking the reader to Africa gives us another opportunity to see the parallels between human slavery and dragon servitude; the further developing of the characters of Jane and Catherine Harcourt gives us more opportunity to see how women officers in the aerial corps still have quite the ongoing battle of their own to win in British society.

And oh my, the ending. I won't say anything about it except this: AUGH! And that Ms. Novik now has me on tenterhooks awaiting Book Five! Four stars.

I got this book as a freebie hardback at a Norwescon a few years ago, and have finally gotten around to reading it in a burst of wanting to get all the larger books on my To Read shelf off the queue. Having finished it up last night, I'm now not entirely sure whether I chose wisely. Asher writes well, I'll give him that; the story's certainly action-packed, and the pacing is excellent. I was compelled to read the whole thing all the way through last night rather than waiting for this morning's bus commute to finish it off, and this wasn't even entirely motivated by just not wanting to carry a hardback around two days in a row.

Ultimately, though, I came out of the book a little disappointed. One issue I've got with it is that it tries too hard to set up the protagonist, Ian Cormac, up as James-Bond-esque. There are excerpts from in-character works quoted at the beginning of every chapter, and a couple of these talk about Cormac on the assumption that this legendary figure must surely be fictional--and draw a parallel between him and Bond, too. While there are definitely a lot of similarities between Cormac and Bond, I'd already seen the connection made in review blurbs. Having the book do it too made me pretty much gave me a reaction of "I GET IT ALREADY!"

Next, as things are getting underway, a big deal is made to Cormac about how he needs to be booted off his connection to "the grid" on the grounds that it's begun to dehumanize him and deaden his ability to think on his own. My first issue with this is mostly just wry amusement: "why, we're not trying to make a statement here about THE INTERNET or anything, are we?" My second issue with it, though, is larger: I didn't quite feel like there was a payoff on this plot device. Cormac has very little trouble dealing with not being on the grid. His only difficulties, really, are occasionally twitching when he can't look something up immediately rather than just having to ask somebody about it, and one or two instances where another character loftily points out to him that he has forgotten how to ask questions on his own.

And it doesn't work for me. I kept looking for something to happen to really drive home for Cormac that "this is what I've been missing"--not only improvements in his ability to think for himself, but something that really drove home for him what it means to be human. He reaches no such epiphany. And while I saw the potential for seeing a cool parallel drawn between him and the primary bad guy--who was in fact gridlinked in a way, and growing progressively more inhuman through the story--there wasn't a payoff there, either. So for me as a reader, I didn't quite see the point of making that a significant enough plot point that it was worthy of being in the title.

All this said, I did enjoy reading the book. There's a lot of action, and although the ending is a little shaky (there's a twist I didn't expect and I'm not entirely sure whether I missed some sort of discovery on Cormac's part that explained what was up with that), there are intriguing questions about what exactly happened with the alien characters and how that'll be built on as the series progresses. I'll have to think about whether to read the next one. For this one, two and a half stars.

As I've posted before on this journal, the American film The Ring is perhaps the creepiest horror movie it has ever been my pleasure to watch. The only problem is, having seen it, I lose a critical element of surprise and suspense going into the reading of Ring, the novel on which that movie is based. I have a genuinely difficult time trying to decide whether those who are unfamiliar with the story should watch the movie or go straight to the book. Koji Suzuki's writing is definitely worth exploring, though. The man knows his creepiness, and it was quite fun going into the novel and seeing the solid bedrock of the plot in place even though the outer layers were of course vastly different from the film.

The differences between the book and the movie were the primary fun I had reading this, so I'll touch on those briefly: it's set in Japan, of course. The protagonist is a male reporter rather than a female one, with a spouse and a child, so there's no romantic subplot. There's a sidekick character who's the most interesting member of the cast, due to his blatant amorality and the question of whether he actually ever committed the heinous acts he claims to have done--a question for which the protagonist has no answer. Most notably, the circumstances surrounding the character who's the driving force of the plot--in this version, Sadako--are quite different from what is seen in the American movie.

I'm told that there are some lesser differences between the novel and the Japanese film Ring, though I haven't seen that yet, so I can't judge how it stacks up against the book. Till then, I can definitely recommend this as a fun read, whether or not you've seen either version of the movie. Four stars.

How much of your humanity can you retain if you replace huge swaths of your biological body with machinery? How about your brain? It's certainly a well-visited question all over SF, as is the related question of the rights one should give a truly sentient artificial intelligence. When you're telling a love story in SF trappings, you're inevitably also going to get this corollary: can I fall in love with a guy who's technically more machine than man?

In Catherine Asaro's hands, with Sunrise Alley, the question becomes whether our heroine du jour, Sam Bryton, can love Turner Pascal, the resurrected artificial intelligence version of a dead man. I admit, I'm a sucker for this scenario--I've toyed with it in my own fanfic. And I've read and enjoyed prior Asaro works The Veiled Web and The Phoenix Code.

But this time around it didn't quite gel for me, and three reasons come immediately to mind. One, her explanations for why her cybernetic hero could modify himself to look more machine-like but could not reverse the process made no logical sense to me whatsoever. Two, the surprise plot thread that came in at the end felt entirely unnecessary and ill-explained. Three, she had too much "As you know, Bob" going on with the made-up vocabulary terms she was using for her setting--such as throwing out the word 'holicon' as a term to describe a holographic icon and defining the term immediately in the prose for the benefit of the reader. Jarring, unfortunately, when you're in the point of view of someone who should already damn well know what that word means, and it was especially jarring after having seen Charles Stross do it so much better over in Glasshouse.

All that said, it was still a fun enough fluffy read, even with the obvious hints dropped to set up the sequel. Two stars.

The Empire of Glass, by Andy Lane, is another of the free ebooks of classic Doctor Who novels available for downloading on the Doctor Who site. This one's First Doctor, with Steven and Vicki as his Companions, and turned out to be a lighter read than I was expecting for a First Doctor story--perhaps because of having my expectations set by The Eleventh Tiger. Yet, it stands up pretty well overall, and upholds what I'm coming to expect as a common trait of a Doctor Who novel: throwing you several seemingly disparate plot elements in one big initial burst, and then spending the rest of the novel tying it all together.

This one's got a whole bunch of seemingly very disparate elements, as well as a plethora of historical personages: the mystery of the vanishing Roanoke colonists in the New World, William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and the political situation going on in 16th-century Venice. The presence of Shakespeare in particular was kind of amusing and weird, given that ol' Will shows up in a Tenth Doctor episode--and this novel references an encounter he had with the Fourth Doctor as well. It does make me begin to wonder how many times the Doctor has shown up to hassle any given historical personage, and when any of them start to keep track. ;)

Companion-wise, I think I like Ian and Barbara and Susan better for First Doctor stories so far; Vicki still remains mostly a non-entity to me, and at least in the first part of this book, so does Stephen. He gets a little more interesting as he develops a strong bond with Christopher Marlowe towards the end, as well as a change in his relationship with the Doctor... but I suspect I'd need to see more of his episodes before I'd really have a feel for him. (I did, however, grin as Marlowe shamelessly hit on Steven right and left. Hee.) As for the Doctor himself, he's pretty typically portrayed in this story. But there's one interesting bit where he opens up to Vicki a bit about missing Susan, which really does rather resonate with that Seventh Doctor episode I'd read earlier this year, when he was still missing Susan.

I didn't particularly get much out of the farcical subplot involving Cardinal Bellarmine (yet another historical personage in the story, apparently) being mistaken for the Doctor. But I did like the major other mover and shaker in the plot being another Time Lord, a character the author borrowed from another Doctor Who writer; it was neat to see a plot involving another Time Lord who wasn't actually a villain. All in all, three stars.

One of the biggest things I wanted to do during our Japan trip was get hold of some works by Japanese authors, translated into English. I really wanted to find something by Sakyo Komatsu, since he was after all the author GoH at Worldcon, but unfortunately it seems not many of his books have been translated. Instead, I wound up picking up several mystery/suspense type novels, and the first of these was The Togakushi Legend Murders.

The back cover of this thing says that "This novel will mesmerize mystery buffs as well as those interested in the culture and folklore of Japan." This was in fact the selling point of the book for me, since I wanted to get a feel for what Japanese authors do with supernatural things in their work. Turns out that this particular novel utilizes the legend of the Demoness Maple quite well for its plot, and while there isn't anything actually supernatural going on, the old legends of Maple are fascinating in their own right. So are the backstories Uchida sets up for all his characters, all centered upon a specific tragic event during World War II, and all the glimpses of daily Japanese life that took on added weight after two weeks' stay in the country.

There is a certain formal stiltedness to the language, but I don't know if that's due to the flavor of the original writing or to the influence of the translator. Either way, it oddly worked to set the flavor of the story, especially when dealing with the older events that form the core of the entire plot. And while the ending wasn't exactly surprising, watching everything fall into place was nevertheless quite satisfying. Three and a half stars.

The idea is raised in Gina Farago's Ivy Cole and the Moon tha a girl born south of the Mason-Dixon line is always a part of the South. My parts of Kentucky are more Midwest than Southern--yet they're close enough that I suspect something of that very idea may draw me to novels set there. Especially fantasy novels, or in this particular case, horror.

Ivy Cole and the Moon is not a particularly fast-paced work. But then, it doesn't need to be; instead, like a summer night in the South, it is heavy and redolent with atmosphere. It slowly builds until, as if with the inevitable Midwest or Southern thunderstorm, the tension blows over at last. Farago knows the pace she needs to set and sets it well, handing out careful pieces of her werewolf heroine's backstory while she hunts another of her kind--who, unlike her, is taking innocent prey. While her style occasionally struck me as a little too cumbersome, there was also a refreshing lack of dialect tricks in her rendering of her Southern accents; where many authors might have taken shortcuts, dropping g's and writing out pronuncuations phonetically, her dialogue was wonderfully clear. There's not quite enough suspense here to make the plot truly surprising... but then, thunderstorms in the South rarely are. And sometimes, a good storm is refreshing indeed. I'll give this one three stars.

I'm tellin' ya, urban fantasies set in Seattle must be in these days or something. I've got mizkit's Walker Papers, of course, but now there's also Yasmine Galenorn's Sisters of the Moon series, not to mention Kat Richardson's Greywalker (which I've just started) and Richelle Mead's Succubus Blues (which is on my queue). It's enough to make a Seattle-based aspiring author with an urban fantasy (set in Seattle, of course) she's trying to sell want to weep. ;) Or at the very least, rewrite the damn thing to set it in Vancouver.

But in the meantime, I've read Witchling--book one of a trilogy featuring three half-fey sisters, and which comes across a lot as Charmed meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Mind you, I haven't actually seen Charmed, but I know enough to get the gist and that seems to be a pretty good way to peg this book. Unfortunately, for me at least, the mix wasn't quite workable. At times the story seemed to want to go the cutesy/charming direction: for example, the three sisters, as a result of their mixed heritage, aren't quite as secure in their abilities as they'd like. At other times, we got the gritty/dark direction: for example, in one sex scene with the protagonist and her Svartan (read: Drow-type dark elf) lover, the language and word choices are earthy and blunt, which didn't mesh well for me as a reader with the lighter tone of the sisters' erratic powers.

This particular book focuses on Camille, the witch sister of the trio, and she is the other major issue I have with the book. I freely admit that as a not-particularly-femmy girl utterly uninterested in makeup and corsets and bustiers, I had a hard time sympathizing with Camille enthusing over her sexy clothing and how makeup in the human world was infinitely superior to makeup in Otherworld; I kept finding myself impatient for her to get on with it and get back to tracking down the demons she and her sisters were supposed to be hunting. Ditto with her flirting or outright getting it on with not one, not two, but three different males of different species: Svartan, kitsune, and dragon-transformed-into-human-shape. I got very little sense of any of the males as individual characters. Mostly, it seemed like they were there to provide a) guard duty, b) fighting ability, and c) flirtation aimed at Camille, and this too mostly lost me as a reader.

And yet, I did read all the way through to the end. Galenorn is a local author, and when she threw in details of local color, I appreciated that they felt right. Once Camille actually let fly with some magic, that was admittedly neat; a scene where she accidentally calls up a harpy is suitably fraught with tension, and a visit to an ancient entity called Grandmother Coyote is nicely creepy as well. What we see of the other sisters--Delilah, the one with the computer talent, certainly seemed more interesting to geek-me, and newly-converted vampire Menolly hints at unexplored depths. I'll have to think about whether following up with the other sisters interests me overall enough to continue with the series; meanwhile, let's give this installment two and a half stars.

Just to give you an idea of how behind I am on getting my To Read shelf cleared out, Jane Yolen's The One-Armed Queen--the followup to Sister Light, Sister Dark and White Jenna--has been on the queue for NINE YEARS. The thing came out in 1998. It has taken me until now to actually read it.

Was it worth my wait? Eh, it was a decent enough novel. It didn't particularly blow me away, and the interspersing of snippets of myth, legend, song, and "historical" research through the story sometimes struck me as annoyingly distracting and sometimes as a rather cool meta-level interpretation of the story... which, I suppose, is a sign of it not quite working for me. The same for the title character, Scillia, adopted daughter of the Jenna who was the heroine of the previous two books. She starts the story off as an angsty child who mostly annoys the tar out of me, and finishes as more of a catalyst for others to act rather than someone really driving the action herself. While I can see why this was in character and appropriate for her, it was still unsatisfying for me as a reader.

So. All in all, kind of ambivalent about this one. Yolen's way with a word is solid, and I do like the songs that were leavened all over the novel, but ultimately I could have taken or left this one. Two and a half stars.