false 23 10 9 true 5772184 read 0 true 2593969 currently-reading 1 true 2593968 to-read http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/66438017 to: Sisters of the Raven (Aspect Fantasy) by Barbara Hambly
I loved Barbara Hambly's vampire books -- they remain possibly the best I've read -- so I picked this up at the used bookstore because the premise sounded interesting: Middle-Easternish society that doesn't think much of women, in which male-controlled magic is dying out while magical powers appear among the women.

I'm not sure why it was so boring, but I found myself unable to care about any of the characters except Oryn, the king. Sad commentary for a book that's supposed to be all about the women. I couldn't even summon up outrage for the way this desert society treated its women. In contrast to Those Who Hunt The Night, my previous Hambly experience, this novel was unable to evoke a sense of place or atmosphere.

It's hard to point at what was wrong with it, which makes me feel somewhat incompetent -- I'm an editor -- but the whole thing was just profoundly lackluster. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/64692927 to: The Shadow Queen (The Black Jewels, #7) by Anne Bishop
What a guilty pleasure.

There's something a little bit trashy about Anne Bishop's books, but as some reviewer somewhere said, the pages are sprinkled with the literary equivalent of crack. I can't help myself.

Yes, the characterization is often possessed of all the subtlety of a brick to the face. Yes, all the bad guys are into kinky pedophiliac sex. Yes, all the good guys are fond of bitchy women. Yes, all the good girls are bitchy.

But...but...but...

The characterization is filled with wry, affectionate touches. There's the occasional stroke of truly clever verbal humor. And above all, it's a fascinating take on gender relations that is idealized and exaggerated, but still insightful.

Getting to The Shadow Queen specifically, this is an installment in Bishop's world that will appeal only to fans of the series, I think. It's a slow, gentle story about seeing past surfaces and winning trust. Fans will relish spending more time in Bishop's sensuous and fascinating universe, but there is a faint sense that Bishop didn't try quite as hard with this one as she has with others. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/28847404 Jessica's review of Working for the Devil (Dante Valentine, #1)
by Lilith Saintcrow

Thanks! It's nice to know people read them. :-)

]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/28846914 Jessica's review of Betrayed (House of Night, #2)
by P.C. Cast

*wry* Golly gee whiz, I guess I've been told. And sweetie, I'm not a guy.

]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/44778626 to: She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders (Paperback) by Jennifer Finney Boylan
One of the blurbs in the front of this book describes it as "surprisingly buoyant." I can't think of a better description. Jennifer Boylan describes her transition from male-to-female with grace and humor, and her lightness of spirit makes this memoir go down more easily than one would expect, but at times there's something disturbing about the way she seems able to only hint at her pain, and how fully her determination to become a woman eclipses the legitimate pain and worry of her wife (how her children felt is never really explored). Her best friend writes her letters in which he touches on this, and is courageously if painfully honest about his own discomfort with the transition, and Jenny reacts indignantly, saying his letters are "pretty horrible." As a reader sympathizing with his wife, I couldn't help but bristle for her. On the other hand, it's a fascinating look at the differences between the genders from someone who is in the strongest possible position to translate between them. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/29712397 to: Midworld (Mass Market Paperback) by Alan Dean Foster
Purple prose describes an overly green world, where the distinction between plant and animal life is never entirely clear. This wasn't a terrible book -- the ecosystem created is fascinating, if implausible -- but the flat characters and stilted narration and dialogue sometimes make it hard to appreciate its finer qualities. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/28847404 to: Working for the Devil (Dante Valentine, #1) by Lilith Saintcrow
Just as every cop is a criminal
And all the sinners saints
As heads is tails
Just call me Lucifer
cause I'm in need of some restraint

I blame Buffy for the rash of ass-kicking, smart-talking, bitchy female vampire slayers and the legions of sidekicks who inexplicably give them unconditional love.

I don't mean to imply that loving Buffy herself was inexplicable. Buffy was something special. Even when she was bitchy, she was prone to saying things like, "I'm cookie dough. I'm not done baking." Even as she was touted as "the blonde who strikes back" in gender studies courses and pop culture crit, she was busily disarming our heroic archetypes with plain, good-old goofiness. And girliness.

Her imitators, as often as not, miss the point. Once, in a discussion about why there's so much bad writing in high fantasy, a friend of mine said:

John Clute, the one unquestionably brilliant critic in sf/f (when you can understand what the hell he is saying) has all kinds of interesting things to say about the difference between Tolkien and his imitators—being able to distinguish between Tolkien and Brooks is the minimum standard for any critical apparatus applied to the genre, in his opinion. One of the observations he makes is about the role of time and change. Tolkien’s world is, among many other things, an attempt to come to grips with the industrial revolution, and everything in Middle Earth is constantly twisting in the corrosive stream of time. The imitators tend to fetishize the tokens of the bucolic world—sword, cloak, stew—and the actions play out in a bubble world immune to THAT kind of change—real change. In a sense, Middle Earth is saved neither for Frodo nor for us.

I think there's something similar -- if not as widespread or profound -- going on with Buffy in the sort of fetishization of the female vampire slayer, the victim who strikes back, that misses the point of who Buffy was and what she represented.

But for better or for worse, an army of pseudo-Buffys, from Anita Blake to Cassandra Palmer to Rachel Morgan to (the colorfully named Lilith Saintcrow's) Dante Valentine have descended upon us. They all have handsome men of the demon/vampire/werewolf persuasion pining after them, and often it's pretty difficult to pinpoint why.

WORKING FOR THE DEVIL isn't really a paranormal romance (the romance part is extremely subtle and not the focus of the book), but I read it anyway because I thought it might have useful elements of the sort we're looking for. Dante Valentine is a necromantic bounty hunter, who gets hired by Lucifer himself to hunt down a rogue demon who's escaped from Hell. He assigns his eldest son, Japhrimel, to protect her.

That's really all you need to know about the plot. Battles, confusion, chase scenes, and the requisite ass-kicking all ensue.

Saintcrow alternately scored and lost points with me for her setting: an Earth that simultaneously pings the futuristic and alternate-history tropes. Sometimes it works quite well, and sometimes she seems to have changed details or place names simply for the sake of changing them. But her settings have distinctive feels, and I'm a sucker for a good sense of place. Hell, in Saintcrow's imagination, is probably the most distinctive and fascinating fictional land I've been to yet: alien, excruciating, and as incomprehensible as you'd expect it to be. But the author seems to understand the difference between mysterious and merely confusing, and stays safely on the right side of that line.

The best part of the story, for me, was the delicately drawn relationship between Dante and her reluctant demon guardian. Dante dislikes him, but comes to rely upon and trust him gradually, and the narration manages to clue the reader in on their growing attraction before Dante realizes it herself without making her seem stupid.

Dante herself is a bit hard to take at times (and gets worse in the following books). She's harsh toward friends and enemies alike, abuses her sidekicks, dishes it out but can't take it, and her witty observations usually seem forced.

But the books move along at a terrific clip and the supporting characters are interesting enough to make up for the fact that the heroine's a harridan. Would I have found it as engaging if I hadn't been stuck at SeaTac waiting for a flight to Milwaukee that had been delayed for five hours? Hard to say, but it was fun in the same way your average action flick is fun, and at the time that was good enough for me. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/28846914 to: Betrayed (House of Night, #2) by P.C. Cast
Good Lord, was this terrible.

It had a great concept: a vampire finishing school. Say it to yourself a few times. Vampire. Finishing. School. I envisioned a dark mirror of Hogwarts, something that would feed my irrational* obsession with boarding schools while twisting it down new, hopefully black-humor-laden pathways.

This was not the book I got, but I'm flexible. What I got was a flat, contrived exercise in demonstrating the problems of YA writing, fantasy writing, and romance writing.

Zoey never misses a chance to remind you that she is The Most Powerful Fledgling Ever. She would rather explain to you, in laborious detail, what every event means, instead of letting you judge for yourself from the consequences of each plot turn. She will describe every other character's personality for you, because apparently you're too dumb to draw your own conclusions from their dialogue and behavior (or, rather, the authors are too lazy to give them dialogue and behavior that would limn their natures organically). She rings false as a teenager, and more frustratingly, as a person that anyone would like.

There's no magic in Betrayed. You might read it to get your vampire fix (although, truthfully, it doesn't even do that well), but it's not going to give you a reason to keep reading. It seems to assume that teenagers aren't familiar with good writing, so there's no reason to try very hard for them. I disagree. Try Stephanie Meyer. At least you get the impression that she respects you. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/28846726 to: The Silent Strength of Stones (A Chapel Hollow Novel) by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
The front of this book is chock full of glowing blurbs from reliable sources, but I feel like I'm missing something.

The writing is decent, but the main character's reaction to the magic around him is implausible (oh, this is a family full of sorcerers? Ho hum), and all the magic users are pretty morally repulsive. (The main character's friends are into magically "owning" people -- essentially psychic rape -- while the relatives they've been sent to live with, ostensibly to straighten them out, injure, curse or nearly kill anyone who interferes with them, seemingly without remorse.

The magic-users flaunt their jargon and powers around normal people, and the normal people don't seem all that shocked.

It's not terrible; it's just terribly uneven. ]]>