Eden

Heat Wave (Richard Castle)

This is a pretty awesome idea, all things considered. Put out the book that the character writes, and do it all in character. Even the marketing, from what I've seen. Right down to the acknowledgements in the back. It's a moneyspinner: even people who don't know the show, Castle, might pick it up, and certainly loads of people that watch the show will pounce on it. And people who read it unknowing might end up sucked into the show.

Also, tons of opportunities to reference it in the show, and to further characterise Richard Castle himself.

The mystery itself is way secondary to all that concerns, reading it as a fan of Castle. It's pretty trashy, an easy read, quick: good to just kick back with, and not think too much about. The story on its own is so-so, I guess: I was there for the Castle references, not for anything unique and scintillating on its own. Pretty much standard fare.

Not sure how I felt about the idea of Castle writing a sex scene about the characters so clearly based on himself and Beckett. I guess I'll have to see how it's played in the show, but I didn't think he'd go that far.

Still, pretty fun, and an awesome idea.

Boneshaker (Cherie Priest)

I'm vacillating between giving Boneshaker three and four stars. It mostly fell down for me for very, very subjective reasons -- liberal use of a trope I'm not fond of -- although there's also a bit of a problem with the pacing. In places it worked very well: beautifully tense and exciting. But after a while, the sneaking and hiding wears on you. It's like watching a movie consisting of nothing but scenes in which the characters crawl through tunnels. No matter how well-shot those scenes are, it gets boring.

The trope that irritated me was the trope of 'they just missed each other'. Briar and Zeke could have met several times before they actually do, and while that might have shortened the book if they hadn't missed each other, I'm not sure that would have been a bad thing. Still, that's one of my pet peeves. It always reminds me of romantic comedies, which invariably make me want to beat my head against whatever's convenient (and I got dragged to a fair number as a teenager).

I also wasn't terribly pleased with Zeke. He ran when he should have stayed still, and stayed still when he should've been running. I know that he wasn't psychic and doesn't know what the reader knows, but even early on, Rudy is obviously not the kind of guy he should be running with. You take what you can get, I guess, but...

I was much more impressed with Briar. An older, working class single mother, kicking so much ass. She doesn't make the same stupid decisions as Zeke, so she's a lot easier to sympathise with. She's not perfect, no, but she does what she thinks is right.

The setting is well done -- quite vivid, and oddly realistic despite the fact that, yeah, it's full of zombies. It's not the most convincing explanation, I guess -- gas that creates the living dead? -- but it's not too necessary, either. The whole thing with Minnericht... I called it, to some extent: I guessed why Briar was so sure about who he was (or, rather, wasn't). I liked it, though.

I enjoyed Boneshaker, yeah, but I'm not in a tearing hurry to read the other two books set in the same world.

Like Twin Stars (N.K. Jemisin, Neil James Hudson, Giselle Renarde)

The rating is mostly for N.K. Jemisin's story, which is the reason I bought this little collection. Jemisin's story evokes a whole world, despite the shortness: a matriarchal society, tribal traditions, the hint of other stories in the background, and the promise of a future for the characters. I found some of the descriptions a little awkward, mostly during the sex scene, in a that-doesn't-sound-right-to-me way, but all of it builds the world of the first person narrator, so it does fit. The story is unquestionably erotic, building tension all the way through, and I think that's made better by the ease with which I connected to the characters.

The other two stories, on the other hand, did this much less for me. There's nothing wrong with the descriptions of sex in the second story, 'Incubus, Succubus', but I didn't really connect with any of it, and it really failed to build a world for me to care about in the way that N.K. Jemisin did.

The third story could be a really intriguing idea: it started strongly, I thought, and I liked the idea. Sebastian was hard to like, though, in the way that he was so very goody-goody. Would anyone really not hesitate or fear for even a second before doing something rash and life-changing? I like to think I would rescue someone who was being subjected to invasive medical testing that goes against their wishes, but I know I would have a moment of hesitation, of sick indecision. Sebastian doesn't seem quite human, in that sense. And the sex wasn't particularly erotic, at least from my point of view: it seemed written almost by rote. Insert tab A into slot B, scream in pleasure, have an orgasm, stick tab B into slot A and repeat.

blueeyedboy (Joanne Harris)

I got impatient to read blueeyedboy. You sort of expect Joanne Harris' work to show up in charity shops in short notice: I've found most of the rest of her work there, in my charity shop binges, after all. But I got tired of waiting, and didn't want to wait until Christmas, so I actually bought it for the Kindle app on my phone. That made it very convenient to read a chapter here and there -- even two chapters while I waited for Delta Maid to get off the stage so Seth Lakeman would come on! -- so that meant I read this quite fast, but in snatches, whenever it was convenient...

The plot is very convoluted. There are so mistaken identities, so many unreliable narrators. The format itself is an unreliable sort of style: it's presented as an online journal-type site, very much like LiveJournal and its offspring, and we all know that people there can fictionalise their lives as much as they want. And you know the narrators are unreliable, and the further on it goes, the more you see that.

I was assured blueeyedboy was a big departure from Joanne Harris' usual. I really don't think so: her writing style bleeds through into the characters, and whenever she writes in first person or third person limited, her style bleeds through. There's something about it -- a hint of flavour, perhaps (appropriate, to be a synaesthete commenting on this book!), something in the phrasing... Anyway, that seemed typically her, and the darkness, the twisted relationships... I can see where in the rest of the work they come from.

blueeyedboy is dark, and not feel-good at all. The theme of food is there, but twisted, where before it's always seemed like a kind of good magic, in Harris' work -- although again, I can see a theme continuing, like the smell of oranges from Five Quarters of the Orange.

Interesting to read, but not so great a departure as I'd been led to believe, although without the comfort I've found in her other books, the way things tend to turn out okay -- changed, yes, but okay, with wounds lanced and poison drained, the danger faced and gone. Not so here. And even that's not new: The Evil Seed ended on a similar note. Not a departure at all, then.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (N.K. Jemisin)

I picked this up due to glowing reviews from various people whose taste I trust. I didn't quite expect it to be as good a match for me as it was, I think -- but I was glued to it. It was the kind of book I would have stayed up late to finish, if I had to. The kind of book I didn't want to put down. It has a lot of the elements I recognise from other fantasy fiction: corrupt politics, struggles between gods, an outsider coming to court for the first time, etc, etc. But it made something different, for me. I felt like I was reading something new.

The book is written in first person. The narrator, Yeine, is the central character. The style of the narration is quite oral, in the sense that the story unfolds as if someone is telling the story aloud, and can't go back and edit themselves, but goes backwards and forwards, pauses to give extra information, etc. I can understand people not liking the style, but it worked for me. Yeine as a character is interesting: there's a streak of ruthlessness in her that somewhat surprised me, because so often the outsider thrown into the middle is utterly unsuited for the game they're playing. Yeine isn't utterly unsuited, though the reason she gets as far as she does is because she doesn't play the game by their rules, and it's not simply that she's nicer than them. She isn't, really. I liked the contrast in her nature: the ruthlessness, and yet the regret, the way she doesn't want to become just another one of the ruling family.

I loved a lot of the other characters as well. I like Sieh and his boyish nature, but the fact that he has to work on it, has to choose it and take himself back to it. I like Nahadoth and his chaos. I found it believable. Despite knowing that for the book to carry on he would have to do the sensible thing, I could believe in his chaotic nature, that he would do something unpredictable, destructive, even detrimental to his own cause. Nahadoth is probably my favourite character, for all the contradictions of him.

The mythology was something I found intensely interesting -- what was, and what was not, new about it. How fresh I found it, despite my general feeling that gods have been Done To Death in fantasy fiction until there is nothing new. This book made me feel like it was something new.

I found it satisfying in itself -- a complete story, with a fitting ending -- but also want more, more by this author, more in this world.

Perhaps a mark of my enthusiasm over it is that I'm probably going to buy copies for a lot of my friends. I can see in some ways why it might leave people cold -- the narration and the relationships between the gods spring to mind -- but it was immensely satisfying for me. I gave it five stars ("it was amazing") on goodreads.