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wilderthan) wrote2011-03-14 04:06 pm
wilderthan) wrote2011-03-14 04:06 pm
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Reviews - Connie Willis, Rohase Piercy, Kathe Koja, Justine Larbalestier, Mary Stewart
A big catch-up post of reviews, including reviews of a book or two from series I'm not planning to finish in the near future (Connie Willis' books and Mary Stewart's).
Fire Watch (Connie Willis)
I just read the title story, not the whole collection. I've been meaning to read Connie Willis' stuff for a long time, since several friends in one of my groups are very enthusiastic about her work. Fire Watch was easy and fun to read -- available online, here, by the way. You get thrown in at the deep end a bit at the beginning: it helped me to know that it was a story about a history student going back in time as part of their studies. But it was very readable, and reasonably easy to catch on to once I'd read a couple of 'entries'.
Emotionally, I didn't engage with it until the end, until the narrator saves Langby -- and suddenly I cared, quite a lot, and was hurt that Langby gets everything wrong...
I liked the glimpses of the 'modern' (for the narrator) world. Looking forward to hopefully seeing more of it? We'll see.
Doomsday Book (Connie Willis)
It took me quite a while to read Doomsday Book. I was intrigued to find it was about Kivrin, who was mentioned in Fire Watch, but it took so, so long to get off the ground. I figured most things out ages before any of the characters did. Following sick protagonists really is no fun at all, and it's frustrating for the same conversations to be repeated over and over again -- "Where is Basingame?" (who never appears), "Did you get the fix?", "I must speak to Gawyn"... The parts in which Kivrin's recordings were recounted were also annoying, given that they simply repeated the action, without giving much more information.
The last thirty percent of the book, though, is pretty good. I'm not sure I'm glad I persevered, because I was seriously being bored to death, but once Kivrin's story really got into its swing -- and I don't think that happened until nearly the end -- the sense of tension and horror was catching me by the heart, and the exchanges between Father Roche and Kivrin at the end of the book made me want to cry. Some of Kivrin's part had real power -- her outburst on the corder, for example, when she swears that she won't let the others die.
One thing that amused/bothered me in equal measure was the inclusion of a character called Gawyn, with a horse called Gringolet, who bragged and was in love, "courtly love", with his lord's wife. Pity that I can't think of a story where Gawain actually commits adultery, and that Lancelot or Tristan would have been a far more appropriate reference.
I'm going to try reading more of Connie Willis' books -- To Say Nothing of the Dog looks to be next -- but I'm not going to stick with them all the way through if they have the same pitfalls as this book.
[I did start To Say Nothing of the Dog, but got nowhere with it.]
My Dearest Holmes (Rohase Piercy)
My Dearest Holmes contains two stories, with the conceit that they're both stories Watson set aside as being impossible to publish given the social circumstances of his day, and that he left them to be published years after his death, when it couldn't possibly affect him or his associates. The first deals with Watson's apparently unrequited love for Holmes, and provides background to his swift marriage to Mary, an arrangement of mutual benefit that allows both Watson and Mary to disguise their true preferences. The second deals with Sherlock's 'death', in the case involving Moriarty, and Watson's grief afterwards, and the true circumstances of their eventual reunion.
I had a lump in my throat for most of the book. It's well-written, in the style of the original Sherlock Holmes stories, and yet filled with feeling -- the focus is not on the mysteries, but on the characters and their feelings. It is very, very moving, even heartbreaking in the latter half, and fits in well to what I know of the canon, too. I enjoyed it very much.
Under the Poppy (Kathe Koja)
Full disclosure: I only read just over half of Under the Poppy. What I did read was interesting, but I couldn't get into it -- I was reading to finish it, not to enjoy it, which is the point at which I'm trying to teach myself to stop reading (unless I need to read it for some academic purpose). Supposedly, according to reviews, the second half is great, but I am really not in the mood right now. I'm not going to donate my copy or give it away -- for one thing, it was a gift from my girlfriend -- but I'm not going to finish it for now, either. Maybe when I have more time and energy to devote to it.
What I did read of it was rich, detailed, slipping in and out of the minds of various characters. It's atmospheric, wonderfully so -- but to me it felt all atmosphere and no substance, and very little truly happening. I wanted to love Istvan and Rupert, but felt shut out by them -- I identified perhaps the most with Decca, in that respect! -- and didn't feel caught up in their world, at all. And it's not as though Decca is easy to love. The easiest ways in seem to be Lucy and Jonathan, but there isn't much of the latter...
The narration doesn't help: it isn't easy to read, the style, not quite conventional. It takes a while to pick up the signifiers, what is flashback and what is real, and sometimes what exactly is being said, and by whom. Parts of it are third person (omniscient?) and parts are first person, which gives it all sorts of different flavours, but... still. I don't feel closer to any one character, through that.
And, in the end, very little happens in that first half.
I am willing to give this book more of a chance -- I know there's something in here that will catch my full attention, I'm sure there must be -- but not when I'm so busy.
The Perilous Gard (Elizabeth Marie Pope)
I'm sure someone said to me that they found it hard to read The Perilous Gard, but I didn't find it so -- I really enjoyed it, and found it quite easy to get into. I half-expected to be following Alicia from the start, but that wouldn't have been half so interesting: Katherine felt much more real, right from the start, and I'm glad the story followed her. It was also pretty interesting that it was set in a historical context, instead of being relatively lightly rooted in time: Queen Mary is on the throne, followed in the course of the story by Queen Elizabeth, and both of those characters are present in the narrative, at least at the beginning and end. It has a feeling of fantasy and reality twined together.
I got to love Katherine and Christopher Heron quite quickly. The kind of relationship they have is just wonderful, to me -- the back and forth banter, the saying the wrong thing and it being alright... I don't know if I can explain exactly what I liked about it. I liked that she had these ideas about Arthurian knights and so on, and yet at the same time they kept each other on track by talking about the proper placement of a dairy, and how they'd manure the land.
I liked the details of the faery land, and how strong Katherine had to be, and yet how at the same time she wasn't perfect -- she felt the horror of it, she wasn't so special that she couldn't feel it at all.
The story is obviously based on/linked to the story of Tam Lin, without being a straight retelling, given that Katherine finds out what to do from listening to the ballad of Tam Lin, and given that she doesn't have to take the ballad literally. It's a semi-historical, realistic-feeling version. I definitely liked that about it.
Magic or Madness (Justine Larbalestier)
I loved Justine Larbalestier's Liar, and I think in a way it spoiled me for this book, which is equally readable but a bit less intricate, and requiring less thought. The basic idea is encapsulated in the title, which makes it very annoying that the main character, Reason, spends at least half the book not getting it -- it doesn't come as a big revelation to the reader, if they can put one and one together to make two.
My other problem with it was how prevalent the slang was. It's like Justine Larbalestier did some basic research on what teens are saying in Australia and NYC lately, and then crammed all of it in, in every other sentence. That'll quickly make it feel dated, and it feels so contrived. The fact that she needs a little glossary in the back to make things clear is kind of annoying.
The characters themselves haven't gone anywhere much, but I have hope for them. I'm most interested in Esmeralda, really: I found the portrayal of her for the most part one-dimensional, except for at the end where she shone. I like the moral ambiguity, and I hope it's expanded upon. That could make it very interesting. I'm not so drawn by Jay-Tee, Reason and Tom.
Magic or Madness is a pretty quick, fun read, but I don't like it nearly as much as I liked Liar. If I were to recommend Larbalestier's work to someone for the first time, I'd suggest they read Magic or Madness first, and figured out if they were interested in reading the rest, before going onto Liar, simply because Liar raised my expectations very high, and consequently reduced my enjoyment of this book.
Magic Lessons (Justine Larbalestier)
I really think that reading Liar first spoiled me for Justine Larbalestier's earlier books. They just don't have the same complexity. I don't think it helps, reading the second book in a series, that I didn't really get into the first book, very much. It's easy to read and pretty fun, but I didn't engage with the characters, and this second book felt even lighter on character development.
The whole Reason and Danny thing... while feeling quite realistic in one way, also seemed to be going way, way too fast, and to be a bit creepy. And it didn't develop their characters -- for me, anyway -- beyond a sort of sketchy outline.
Basically, like the first book, it's fun but somehow unsatisfying, and the problems with slang and so on remain. I am a bit more enthused about reading the third book than I was about reading the second, but I'm not desperately anxious to grab it off my shelf and start right away, either.
Magic's Child (Justine Larbalestier)
I don't know if I've been expecting more out of this series than I should've. But Liar had everything I wanted, and I was using that to judge Larbalestier's work as a whole... It was just my thing, I guess, and this trilogy wasn't, at least not to anything like the same degree. It was fun to read, and the moral ambiguity and the unreliability of nearly everyone does make it more complex than I'd really considered. We're told what people think magic is: we never get an objective answer. We never really know who has done right.
I still feel like this whole trilogy went by too fast, without getting its hooks into me. I didn't get engaged with Reason's transformation -- it didn't have the sense of drama, of desperation, of things coming unravelled, that I think it was meant to. And the end of this book just ravelled up everything so neatly, all in one, with so few jagged edges. Everything's okay. Of course Reason isn't upset that Danny doesn't really want her. Of course everyone gets healed. Of course there's one dad here at the end who isn't a total deadbeat...
Liar left me with a sense of unease, which I liked. There's a bit of that here, but I just didn't feel as jerked about and emotionally engaged, I guess. I'd definitely read this trilogy first, before Liar, if I wanted to get into Larbalestier's work.
The Crystal Cave (Mary Stewart)
It's hard to put my finger on what bothered me about The Crystal Cave. On the surface, it's something I should love: other people whose taste I trust loved it, and tore through it; it deals with Merlin, whose life I'm interested in; it's set in Wales; I enjoy elaborations on less explored facets of the legends... But somehow, it just took me far too long to get through it, and I happily abandoned it for whatever else looked interesting, given half a chance.
Merlin's voice never quite felt real to me, for a start. I know that it's a retrospective voice, but it's so very measured, and few parts felt truly passionate. The one image that's likely to stick in my head is actually the image of Merlin travelling back to England with the king-stone stolen from Ireland, while Ambrosius lies in bed dying. The relationship between those two, I enjoyed. Mary Stewart's Ambrosius was quite similar to Rosemary Sutcliff's Ambrosius, though, which didn't do this book any favours, since I got to the part with Ambrosius after having read Sutcliff's Sword at Sunset.
The whole thing about Merlin needing to remain a virgin bothered me a little. I dislike the 'women are eviiil and will steal your poweeer' trope, even if it is balanced a little by the strong and clear-headed figures of Niniane and Ygraine -- although I would have loved to see more of those two women as women, and not just the concern about who they were sleeping with. And there were several throwaway comments about women that made me disinclined to like Merlin, e.g. "Duchess and slut alike, they need not even study to deceive."
I was also fond of a couple of minor characters, who died, which doesn't help with my disinclination to read the rest of the series. Maybe someday, not now.
Fire Watch (Connie Willis)
I just read the title story, not the whole collection. I've been meaning to read Connie Willis' stuff for a long time, since several friends in one of my groups are very enthusiastic about her work. Fire Watch was easy and fun to read -- available online, here, by the way. You get thrown in at the deep end a bit at the beginning: it helped me to know that it was a story about a history student going back in time as part of their studies. But it was very readable, and reasonably easy to catch on to once I'd read a couple of 'entries'.
Emotionally, I didn't engage with it until the end, until the narrator saves Langby -- and suddenly I cared, quite a lot, and was hurt that Langby gets everything wrong...
I liked the glimpses of the 'modern' (for the narrator) world. Looking forward to hopefully seeing more of it? We'll see.
Doomsday Book (Connie Willis)
It took me quite a while to read Doomsday Book. I was intrigued to find it was about Kivrin, who was mentioned in Fire Watch, but it took so, so long to get off the ground. I figured most things out ages before any of the characters did. Following sick protagonists really is no fun at all, and it's frustrating for the same conversations to be repeated over and over again -- "Where is Basingame?" (who never appears), "Did you get the fix?", "I must speak to Gawyn"... The parts in which Kivrin's recordings were recounted were also annoying, given that they simply repeated the action, without giving much more information.
The last thirty percent of the book, though, is pretty good. I'm not sure I'm glad I persevered, because I was seriously being bored to death, but once Kivrin's story really got into its swing -- and I don't think that happened until nearly the end -- the sense of tension and horror was catching me by the heart, and the exchanges between Father Roche and Kivrin at the end of the book made me want to cry. Some of Kivrin's part had real power -- her outburst on the corder, for example, when she swears that she won't let the others die.
One thing that amused/bothered me in equal measure was the inclusion of a character called Gawyn, with a horse called Gringolet, who bragged and was in love, "courtly love", with his lord's wife. Pity that I can't think of a story where Gawain actually commits adultery, and that Lancelot or Tristan would have been a far more appropriate reference.
I'm going to try reading more of Connie Willis' books -- To Say Nothing of the Dog looks to be next -- but I'm not going to stick with them all the way through if they have the same pitfalls as this book.
[I did start To Say Nothing of the Dog, but got nowhere with it.]
My Dearest Holmes (Rohase Piercy)
My Dearest Holmes contains two stories, with the conceit that they're both stories Watson set aside as being impossible to publish given the social circumstances of his day, and that he left them to be published years after his death, when it couldn't possibly affect him or his associates. The first deals with Watson's apparently unrequited love for Holmes, and provides background to his swift marriage to Mary, an arrangement of mutual benefit that allows both Watson and Mary to disguise their true preferences. The second deals with Sherlock's 'death', in the case involving Moriarty, and Watson's grief afterwards, and the true circumstances of their eventual reunion.
I had a lump in my throat for most of the book. It's well-written, in the style of the original Sherlock Holmes stories, and yet filled with feeling -- the focus is not on the mysteries, but on the characters and their feelings. It is very, very moving, even heartbreaking in the latter half, and fits in well to what I know of the canon, too. I enjoyed it very much.
Under the Poppy (Kathe Koja)
Full disclosure: I only read just over half of Under the Poppy. What I did read was interesting, but I couldn't get into it -- I was reading to finish it, not to enjoy it, which is the point at which I'm trying to teach myself to stop reading (unless I need to read it for some academic purpose). Supposedly, according to reviews, the second half is great, but I am really not in the mood right now. I'm not going to donate my copy or give it away -- for one thing, it was a gift from my girlfriend -- but I'm not going to finish it for now, either. Maybe when I have more time and energy to devote to it.
What I did read of it was rich, detailed, slipping in and out of the minds of various characters. It's atmospheric, wonderfully so -- but to me it felt all atmosphere and no substance, and very little truly happening. I wanted to love Istvan and Rupert, but felt shut out by them -- I identified perhaps the most with Decca, in that respect! -- and didn't feel caught up in their world, at all. And it's not as though Decca is easy to love. The easiest ways in seem to be Lucy and Jonathan, but there isn't much of the latter...
The narration doesn't help: it isn't easy to read, the style, not quite conventional. It takes a while to pick up the signifiers, what is flashback and what is real, and sometimes what exactly is being said, and by whom. Parts of it are third person (omniscient?) and parts are first person, which gives it all sorts of different flavours, but... still. I don't feel closer to any one character, through that.
And, in the end, very little happens in that first half.
I am willing to give this book more of a chance -- I know there's something in here that will catch my full attention, I'm sure there must be -- but not when I'm so busy.
The Perilous Gard (Elizabeth Marie Pope)
I'm sure someone said to me that they found it hard to read The Perilous Gard, but I didn't find it so -- I really enjoyed it, and found it quite easy to get into. I half-expected to be following Alicia from the start, but that wouldn't have been half so interesting: Katherine felt much more real, right from the start, and I'm glad the story followed her. It was also pretty interesting that it was set in a historical context, instead of being relatively lightly rooted in time: Queen Mary is on the throne, followed in the course of the story by Queen Elizabeth, and both of those characters are present in the narrative, at least at the beginning and end. It has a feeling of fantasy and reality twined together.
I got to love Katherine and Christopher Heron quite quickly. The kind of relationship they have is just wonderful, to me -- the back and forth banter, the saying the wrong thing and it being alright... I don't know if I can explain exactly what I liked about it. I liked that she had these ideas about Arthurian knights and so on, and yet at the same time they kept each other on track by talking about the proper placement of a dairy, and how they'd manure the land.
I liked the details of the faery land, and how strong Katherine had to be, and yet how at the same time she wasn't perfect -- she felt the horror of it, she wasn't so special that she couldn't feel it at all.
The story is obviously based on/linked to the story of Tam Lin, without being a straight retelling, given that Katherine finds out what to do from listening to the ballad of Tam Lin, and given that she doesn't have to take the ballad literally. It's a semi-historical, realistic-feeling version. I definitely liked that about it.
Magic or Madness (Justine Larbalestier)
I loved Justine Larbalestier's Liar, and I think in a way it spoiled me for this book, which is equally readable but a bit less intricate, and requiring less thought. The basic idea is encapsulated in the title, which makes it very annoying that the main character, Reason, spends at least half the book not getting it -- it doesn't come as a big revelation to the reader, if they can put one and one together to make two.
My other problem with it was how prevalent the slang was. It's like Justine Larbalestier did some basic research on what teens are saying in Australia and NYC lately, and then crammed all of it in, in every other sentence. That'll quickly make it feel dated, and it feels so contrived. The fact that she needs a little glossary in the back to make things clear is kind of annoying.
The characters themselves haven't gone anywhere much, but I have hope for them. I'm most interested in Esmeralda, really: I found the portrayal of her for the most part one-dimensional, except for at the end where she shone. I like the moral ambiguity, and I hope it's expanded upon. That could make it very interesting. I'm not so drawn by Jay-Tee, Reason and Tom.
Magic or Madness is a pretty quick, fun read, but I don't like it nearly as much as I liked Liar. If I were to recommend Larbalestier's work to someone for the first time, I'd suggest they read Magic or Madness first, and figured out if they were interested in reading the rest, before going onto Liar, simply because Liar raised my expectations very high, and consequently reduced my enjoyment of this book.
Magic Lessons (Justine Larbalestier)
I really think that reading Liar first spoiled me for Justine Larbalestier's earlier books. They just don't have the same complexity. I don't think it helps, reading the second book in a series, that I didn't really get into the first book, very much. It's easy to read and pretty fun, but I didn't engage with the characters, and this second book felt even lighter on character development.
The whole Reason and Danny thing... while feeling quite realistic in one way, also seemed to be going way, way too fast, and to be a bit creepy. And it didn't develop their characters -- for me, anyway -- beyond a sort of sketchy outline.
Basically, like the first book, it's fun but somehow unsatisfying, and the problems with slang and so on remain. I am a bit more enthused about reading the third book than I was about reading the second, but I'm not desperately anxious to grab it off my shelf and start right away, either.
Magic's Child (Justine Larbalestier)
I don't know if I've been expecting more out of this series than I should've. But Liar had everything I wanted, and I was using that to judge Larbalestier's work as a whole... It was just my thing, I guess, and this trilogy wasn't, at least not to anything like the same degree. It was fun to read, and the moral ambiguity and the unreliability of nearly everyone does make it more complex than I'd really considered. We're told what people think magic is: we never get an objective answer. We never really know who has done right.
I still feel like this whole trilogy went by too fast, without getting its hooks into me. I didn't get engaged with Reason's transformation -- it didn't have the sense of drama, of desperation, of things coming unravelled, that I think it was meant to. And the end of this book just ravelled up everything so neatly, all in one, with so few jagged edges. Everything's okay. Of course Reason isn't upset that Danny doesn't really want her. Of course everyone gets healed. Of course there's one dad here at the end who isn't a total deadbeat...
Liar left me with a sense of unease, which I liked. There's a bit of that here, but I just didn't feel as jerked about and emotionally engaged, I guess. I'd definitely read this trilogy first, before Liar, if I wanted to get into Larbalestier's work.
The Crystal Cave (Mary Stewart)
It's hard to put my finger on what bothered me about The Crystal Cave. On the surface, it's something I should love: other people whose taste I trust loved it, and tore through it; it deals with Merlin, whose life I'm interested in; it's set in Wales; I enjoy elaborations on less explored facets of the legends... But somehow, it just took me far too long to get through it, and I happily abandoned it for whatever else looked interesting, given half a chance.
Merlin's voice never quite felt real to me, for a start. I know that it's a retrospective voice, but it's so very measured, and few parts felt truly passionate. The one image that's likely to stick in my head is actually the image of Merlin travelling back to England with the king-stone stolen from Ireland, while Ambrosius lies in bed dying. The relationship between those two, I enjoyed. Mary Stewart's Ambrosius was quite similar to Rosemary Sutcliff's Ambrosius, though, which didn't do this book any favours, since I got to the part with Ambrosius after having read Sutcliff's Sword at Sunset.
The whole thing about Merlin needing to remain a virgin bothered me a little. I dislike the 'women are eviiil and will steal your poweeer' trope, even if it is balanced a little by the strong and clear-headed figures of Niniane and Ygraine -- although I would have loved to see more of those two women as women, and not just the concern about who they were sleeping with. And there were several throwaway comments about women that made me disinclined to like Merlin, e.g. "Duchess and slut alike, they need not even study to deceive."
I was also fond of a couple of minor characters, who died, which doesn't help with my disinclination to read the rest of the series. Maybe someday, not now.
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Sometimes I want to reread books I loved as a kid, but then I am afraid to replace the fuzzy memories with more critical adult reading....
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I know that feeling very well. I've had to reread some stuff from when I was younger in a very critical light, for Children's Lit, and it's a bit horrifying.
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