Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 418

So that’s what hydroplaning feels like. Plus, marshmallows.

It turns out my tires were bald, bald, bald. Who knew? I commented to my Dad that it felt like I kept starting to hydroplane coming back from the Springfield show the other week. I couldn’t go above sixty (the speed limit was seventy) and it wasn’t even raining that hard. How could I have let my tires get that bald and not notice? Well, I never said I knew anything about cars or tires. And after all, it didn’t rain at all this summer, so not a problem until recently. But it’s a good thing at least my Dad can recognize an obviously bald tire when he sees one.

Do you know how long it can take to get your tires changed? Especially if the tire place doesn’t seem to really get the concept of an “appointment”?

So, see, it’s NOT MY FAULT that I haven’t even STARTED the revision that I planned to have FINISHED by December 15th. Dog shows! Tires and other random annoyances! And now, the year’s round of Christmas parties! I’m not so much of a hermit that I just skip all the parties. No, indeed.

Well, the show season is now over for me, and alas, Kenya did not pick up her other major. Next year for sure! And for the Cavalier party this past Sunday, I took this beautiful platter of intense chocolate cookies surrounded by swooshes of coconut marshmallows and these pretty pink marshmallows I made with rose water and minced dried cranberries. I will take a similar assortment to the Master Gardener party tonight. And I will turn on my laptop tomorrow FOR SURE.

I posted this marshmallow recipe last year, but it’s so amazingly good that I’m going to post it again. If you have kids, this recipe would be SO NEAT to do with kids. Marshmallows just seem SO artificial when you turn them out of the pan!

Coconut marshmallows (or rose and cranberry marshmallows) (or chocolate marshmallows):

3 env. unflavored gelatin

1 C cold water, divided

2 C sugar

1 C corn syrup

1/8 tsp salt

1 tsp coconut flavoring

1/2 tsp vanilla

Ground toasted coconut

Line a 13 x 9 pan with foil and spray the foil with cooking spray.

Sprinkle the gelatin over 1/2 C water in a LARGE bowl and whisk quickly to break up the gelatin. Set that aside.

Combine the other 1/2 C water, sugar, corn syrup and salt in a pan. Bring to a boil over med-high heat, stirring only until the mixture comes to a boil. Bring to 240 degrees (use a candy thermometer, for heaven’s sake! They’re wonderful to have even if you don’t use them all that often.)

Once the syrup has reached 240 degrees, gradually pour the hot syrup mixture into the bowl with the gelatin, while the mixer is running. Then continue beating on high for 10 minutes or so, until the mixture is white, thick, and trying hard to climb up the beaters so it can engulf the mixer. Beat in the coconut and vanilla flavorings.

Or, for rose and cranberry marshmallows, beat in a bit of red food coloring, plus 1 C of minced cranberries and 1 1/2 tsp rosewater.

Pour and spread into prepared pan. The mixture will be VERY STICKY, so don’t bother trying to get ever bit of it out of the bowl. The kids can clean some of it out for you and then you can run hot water in the bowl to dissolve the rest.

Anyway, let the marshmallows sit, uncovered, in the pan, for six hours or overnight. Although I’ve rushed it with no ill effects, so I think four hours is enough, probably.

Lift the marshmallows out of the pan with the foil, lay it upside down on a cutting board, peel off the foil, and cut it into squares with a pizza cutter sprayed with cooking spray. Roll each square as you cut it in the coconut.

Or, if you made the rose/cranberry marshmallows, mix cornstarch and powdered sugar and toss the cut marshmallows in that.

Store at room temp in an airtight containger. Stores just fine for weeks, but they’re not likely to last that long.

I’ve also done this to make chocolate marshmallows: add 2/3 C cocoa powder to the gelatin before you beat in the syrup, then roll the finished marshmallows in a mixture of 1/3 cornstarch and 2/3 cocoa powder. Also very good!

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Published on December 03, 2012 13:20

Secondary characters are important

Which is obvious, I suppose. It’s a thought that was sparked by this post, on supporting casts, by Jennifer at WriterJenn.

Jennifer says, among other things:

“Subplots and side characters can be fascinating. Usually I enjoy the time I spend with the supporting cast. So I’ve been trying to figure out why I didn’t like it in this case. For one thing, it seemed to come at the expense of the main story line. There were important questions dangling, and instead of pursuing them, the author would pull back and spend all kinds of time in the side characters’ backstories. In addition, the side characters’ stories didn’t really enhance the main theme…”

The emphasis is mine.

I love great supporting characters. Like, Debbie and her family in STILL LIFE — remember I mentioned them specifically? And why did these secondary characters work so well? Well, because

a) We see all secondary characters from Melanie’s pov, so obviously this is going to keep the story feeling cohesive — one plus of a first-person pov.

b) The stuff that happens at that dinner party is crucial to plot and theme development.

c) And yes, the characters themselves are engaging — can’t forget about that.

One plus of writing a short book is that you are forced to keep your plot tight and your story elements restricted — you can’t go everywhere in your world and do everything. And however many secondary characters you have, they have to support the main character and everything they do has to support the plot. My strong guess is that the book that didn’t work for Jennifer was a longer book, and not YA (she doesn’t give the title).

Here are the books I’ve read this month:

The Hollow City — Dan Wells

Shape of Desire and Still Life with Shapeshifter – Sharon Shinn

Fool’s Run — McKillip

Paladin — Cherryh

The Girl Who Chased the Moon — Sarah Addison Allen

The Raksura trilogy — Martha Wells

And some of these books provide an interesting contrast when it comes to the number and use of secondary characters.

The Hollow City . . . doesn’t really have any secondary characters. Not really. Not exactly. I mean, very minor secondary characters, yes, plus the bad guy, plus the protagonist, plus his delusions. It’s a very weird book, as you may gather. I mean, at the end the protagonist kind of defeats the bad guy and you stand up and cheer: Yay? Because is that a happy ending or not? If you read this, let me know what you think. I’m not sure what I think.

And in Paladin? There almost aren’t any secondary characters in that one, either. It’s Shoka and Taizu and that’s it. Oh, I take it back, there’s also the horse, Jiro. He’s as close as it comes to a secondary character for that whole book. I think this tight focus on the two main characters is what gives the story such intensity.

And then in Shape of Desire and Still Life we get excellent secondary characters, and there’s no doubt which ones are the protagonists and which ones are secondary, because both books are in first-person-present. In these books, the secondary characters are perceived solely through the eyes of the protagonist and they’re there to drive the main plotline, which is (usually) the only plotline. Of course this sucks us into the protagonist’s life and makes us identify with her, which is probably why so much YA is written in the first person.

Which is different from Fool’s Run, say, because there are a heap o’ characters in that one, but it would be hard to pick out one main character. And in The Girl Who Chased the Moon, though it’s so different, in this one way it’s quite similar to Fool’s Run. In both books, there are several pov characters and a whole cast of very important secondary characters. And that gives a whole different feel to the book, naturally, since you aren’t allowed to focus tightly on just one character. It makes you first sympathize with one and then a different character, and then a third; and it gives you a nudge away from the characters and encourages a broader attention on the world the author’s built.

Or so it seems to me. Thoughts?

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Published on November 30, 2012 13:14

Recent reading: Still Life With Shapeshifter.

Plus, a minor (well, probably no more than medium-intense) rant about photographers who don’t know their subject. Which, I know! Is not the author’s fault. You don’t have to tell ME that, right? Nevertheless.

I like the cover design. I really love the scrollwork down the sides, which you can’t really see in the picture — you have to tilt the book back and forth to see it. It’s really lovely. But the dog! It’s just painful. Look:

Sorry, but I know too much about correct dog structure and about what REAL Siberian huskies look like. This dog has got quite a German shepherd head. Either it’s a very poor example of a Sibe or else it’s a white German shepherd or shepherd mix.

Worse, it’s standing in such a way that its structure looks all wrong. Probably it’s not as poorly put together as it looks, but its stance makes it look as though it is wheelbacked, over at the knee, too straight in the front pastern, and poorly angulated in the rear.

This dog looks like it would have a tough time with endurance and be prone to injuries to the front pastern and knee, especially moving over rough country. If it really is wheelbacked, it will also be prone to injuries of the spine. If it’s hunched up because it wants to stand with its hind legs this far forward, then it probably has a problem with slipping hocks, slipping patellas, or hip dysplasia — some joint issue that is making it try to carry its weight in its back. If it does that for long, again, it’s going to be liable to spine injuries. Moving this dog’s hind legs back by eight inches before snapping the picture would have enormously improved its appearance.

For comparison, here is a much nicer Siberian, posed in a good show stack:

Just in case you happen to want to take a great picture of a dog, let me just add here that the way to pose a dog so that it looks great even in a natural setting, is to make sure its rear legs are set well back and its topline is straight. You may want to set its front feet up on a rock or log to exaggerate the smooth slope of the topline. You may want to get the dog to point its nose down slightly so that its neck is arched. I’ve certainly got my girls to pose standing that way, just so they look as fabulous as possible.

This photo here is a cheat in some ways, because the snow conceals so much of Pippa’s legs. But her stance is clearly four-square and balanced, and her topline is gorgeous. Take a look:

Pippa always takes great pictures because her structure is excellent. The dog on the cover of Still Life — well, who knows? Maybe it was just caught at a really unfortunate instant. What a shame the publisher’s photographer didn’t ask a dog show photographer for advice!

So, okay, onward (at last!) to the actual book!

First, is that a great title or what? Seriously. I LOVE that title! I know I always seem to focus on titles, but seriously, titles are hard and this is one on my favorite titles EVER. Clever AND evocative.

Now, how about the book itself?

I figured, since I started by providing Goodreads reviews for the first book, I’d do that again for this one. Here’s the second review in the lineup. It is a four-star review.

Posted by Lisa on Nov 13

“I was one of the people who really, really disliked the first book in Shinn’s shape-shifting series. I feel that Shinn’s particular brand of romance doesn’t work in a modern/real-world setting the way it does in fantasy or science fiction; reading about women or men who will die if they can’t be together makes me roll my eyes. So I went into this book expecting little to nothing, after the dissatisfying tale of Maria and Dante and a relationship I thought bordered on the emotionally abusive.

I’m delighted to say how wrong I was.

The story of Melanie and Ann, sisters who are equally devoted to each other, was wonderful. Yes, there was romance that went a bit too far for my liking, and a plot point (leftover from the first novel) that made me shake my head and wonder if Shinn had forgotten where she’d taken us the first time around. But the book was touching, and I adored the protagonists. And in this book, I feel like she’s branching out and finally touching the wider world of shifters. The first book didn’t feel like a set-up to a series, but this one does. I almost wish this one had come first.”

I think this review is really accurate. It’s perfectly true that borderline-obsessive devotion is a whole lot less disturbing between sisters than between lovers. Particularly when the older sister has taken a maternal role toward her much younger shapeshifter sister. We expect a mother or older sister to pull out all the stops when defending a child / younger sister, right? I actually like both Melanie and Brody quite a bit.

I do disagree about one thing, though: I definitely didn’t think there was “too much romance” in this book, as the reviewer above said. In fact, I especially loved the fact that Melanie wouldn’t admit to herself that she was actually dating Brody. And if anything, there was too little shown of the romance between William and Ann — but then, Ann was not the point-of-view character.

And I’m not sure what this reviewer had in mind as a possible forgotten plot point. Having thought about it . . . still not sure. I can’t think of anything that struck me that way.

The interaction between all the characters was good, and in particular I loved some of the secondary characters, especially Debbie and her family. My favorite scene was probably the dinner party at Debbie’s house. The discussion about superpowers? That was so funny! (The superpowers are things like “being able to find keys” and “knowing who the phone is going to be for”, and the idea is not just funny, but also completely crucial to the plot.)

I really enjoyed Ann (the shapeshifting sister). I totally believed in her — in how she acted. I could see why Melanie couldn’t accept the risks her sister was taking, but I thought Ann’s decisions were right for her. And Melanie’s were right for her. I love irreconcilable dilemmas, which is exactly what we had here.

In fact, I really appreciated this unique take on shapeshifters, in which being a shifter is actually a pretty terrible thing in lots of ways. It doesn’t give you superstrength and supersenses and supersexiness and a hot temper and a special pack to belong to — it isolates you and messes up your ability to have a normal life and has serious, sometimes very serious, effects on your health. Though in STILL LIFE we start to see a larger shapeshifter community, which I think could be developed into something that would act as a real support system for shapeshifters. Which they could certainly use!

Yet for all that, I honestly preferred the first book. This was a real surprise to me, but it’s true. I preferred Maria to Melanie — or more accurately, I preferred reading about Maria to reading about Melanie. Maybe this was because Maria started off in such a questionable place psychologically and then wound up in such an improved place, so there was a lot of development over the course of the book. Or maybe it was because I liked the more intense, faster-paced plot of the first book. Or maybe it was because . . .

Okay, the subplot in STILL LIFE? The one where Janet is the pov protagonist, in a plotline only tangentially related to Melanie’s plotline? Janet goes into science, see, and studies shifters scientifically. And that is a problem for me.

See, it’s not just that I know a good bit more than average about canine structure and function; I also know quite a bit about genetics. For me — and I know this won’t be a problem for most readers — reading about the “science” in this story was as painful as looking at the dog on the cover. As a public service, let me suggest that the following terms should never be used by anybody who doesn’t know anything about genetics:

“Dominant”. The word already has a specific meaning in genetics, and this wasn’t it. This makes the third completely different wrong way that I’ve seen this word used in the context of genetics — people also often use it to mean “common in the population” and dog breeders use it to mean “homozygous”, and everyone should cut that out and look up the actual real meaning. Or just not use the word.

“Gene”. Genes absolutely do not and cannot work in any way similar to that depicted in the story. Please don’t use a pseudogenetic explanation for anything magical. It’s painful to those of us who do know how genes work.

On the other hand, it is perfectly fine to say that someone has discovered a previously unknown magical factor in a blood sample. It’s fine to say that this magical factor can get transferred to normal blood via a transfusion, and then proliferate through the normal blood so that the shapeshifter character of the blood overwhelms the normal character of the normal blood. That wouldn’t throw me out of the story.

But, with the appalling state of science education in this country, I doubt very many people are going to have trouble with the (pretty tiny) amount of fake science in this story.

Okay! “Science” aside, I do plan to get the third book, whenever it comes out. I am longing to know how things are going to work out for Dante and Maria and their extended family, which now in a certain sense even includes Melanie. And! I STILL think Caroline has evil mind control powers. I hope we eventually find out what is going on between her and Grant!

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Published on November 29, 2012 13:11

Oh, and one more link for today!

Because I just happened to follow this link from Twitter to this article, and DO I EVER AGREE WITH THIS OR WHAT.

This article, by Nicole Lisa at Reading, Writing and the ‘Rhythmatic of Life, is about how passive women can be on television and in movies — how they just cower in corners while the serial killer breaks down the door to get at them.

This is so true! And it drives me NUTS. About the worst offender I EVER saw was the movie “Scream”. Over and over, someone knocked the killer down — and then ran away. I kept yelling, “He’s DOWN! What do you think that chair right there is FOR? Hit him with it, you doofus!” It would have been a much shorter movie, or at least a very different movie, if anybody had had the guts and basic common sense to bash the killer’s head in when he was sprawled at their feet. I actually think male characters also showed this run-away-screaming reaction, not just the female characters, but I’m certainly not going to suffer through the movie again just to check. I do think there’s this weird omnipresent assumption these days that it’s just wrong to defend yourself against violent attack, and WHERE DID THAT RIDICULOUS IDEA EVEN COME FROM?

I would like to try a five year experiment: for five years, have every woman attacked on tv and in a movie fight back! Have them beat the tar out of their attackers at least a third of the time! And see what happens in the real world. Wouldn’t that be interesting?

Incidentally, in Nicola Griffith’s wonderful, intense book ALWAYS, there’s a woman’s self-defense class integrated into the main plotline. I really need to read that book again! Because it’s a great antidote to this awful passivity of women victims on the big screen and on tv.

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Published on November 27, 2012 13:13

A few interesting links –

Ever heard of book reviews in video format?

This whole concept was new to me. I was just doing an (ahem) vanity search, and came across this YouTube review of THE FLOATING ISLANDS.

I wonder if there are many *readers* who find a video book review more interesting or compelling than a written review? Anyway, since the reviewer loved ISLANDS, naturally I approve of the review! Has anybody else ever listened to a YouTube book review, or even known that there were such things?

Elevator pitches: Or how to talk about your book really really briefly. I can’t even describe how horribly difficult I find this. There is totally a market for anybody really gifted at coming up with catchy titles and one-sentence summaries and such.

This post is actually about the paragraph-long summary, but that’s not a huge improvement. Susan Morris says: “Your story is complicated! It has layers! It is inexpressible in a measly paragraph. (Hence: book.)” And, well, yeah. Exactly.

I like the way Morris breaks elevator pitches down into types:

a) The x-meets-y summary. It’s like Highlander meets Black Swan . . . in space!

b) The Sound-Bite Summary, where in 100 words or less you provide “one sentence of premise, one or two sentences of complicating factors, and, if you’re talking to an editor or agent, one sentence about the resolution (you may want to skip that part if talking to a reader!).”

c) The accurate descriptive tag. “It’s a YA paranormal western novel with steampunk elements.”

And I think Morris’ last suggestion is really funny:

“Seriously? Sometimes? The easiest way to get a good pitch is to hand it to a trusted friend and see what they say it’s about. I mean think about it: you’ve been in the trenches of your book for so long, you hardly know what it’s about any more! You’re too close. Like how picking out gifts for someone close to us is somehow always infinitely harder than picking out a gift for someone about whom we know two things: they like bears and tea (shiny new bear tea cup, here we come!). So give it to a friend who doesn’t know your book—and then ask them to read it and tell you what it’s about. You may just be surprised at the eloquence of the answer.”

I get that! I never know what my big themes are until someone points them out to me. Then I’m all like, “Yep, I did that on purpose!”

And last!

Here’s an interesting and (for me) unanswerable survey from Nathan Bransford. I have no idea when I will finally get an e-reader. Maybe when Martha Wells’ Raksura novellas come out only in e-form next year? And even when I have an e-reader, I have no idea when or if I’ll eventually switch to buying mostly e-books.

It’s interesting to see the changing responses to this question, though. Nathan’s been doing this survey since 2007. In e-reader terms, that’s practically forever.

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Published on November 27, 2012 10:31

Recent Reading: Sarah Addison Allen

Just read The Girl Who Chased the Moon. Lovely! I immediately ordered the other two by Allen, Garden Spells and, um . . . oh, right: The Sugar Queen.

I trust Amazon Prime won’t let me down. I still haven’t gotten Still Life With Shapeshifters, you know, the sequel to Shape of Desire. I hate waiting! Especially when I totally expected the book to arrive last week! Sometimes life demonstrates that really, I am not always a patient person.

Anyway — I don’t suppose I loved The Girl Who Chased the Moon quite as much as The Peach Keeper. But since the latter was one of my favorite books for the whole year, well, it was a high bar.

I love the wallpaper that changes depending on your mood. I love the Giant of Mullaby. I love the idea of baking cakes as a wistful summons to those you’ve loved and lost. I really admire Win’s strength of will and I love Julia’s kindness and the way everybody in Julia’s restaurant supports her against her evil stepmother.

Most of all I love the epilogue-like last chapter. Without that, the book would have felt terribly incomplete, no matter how many people got their lives in order during the course of events.

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Published on November 26, 2012 11:14

Recent Reading: The Raksura trilogy

So! Just finished the third one last night. It was wonderful! But (ahem) I don’t want to get ahead of myself, so let me start at the beginning:

THE CLOUD ROADS

THE SERPENT SEA

THE SIREN DEPTHS

Aren’t those great titles? I find titles hard, so I admire good ones. Aren’t the covers beautiful? Martha Wells told me the artist won a prize for the first cover; I think he deserved to. Being asked to do a cover featuring nonhuman protagonists is surely a challenge, and these covers are lush, beautiful, and quite true to the stories. Even the kind of flying ship featured in the backgrounds for the first and third books are perfectly correct (though the details are probably invisible in the tiny pictures I have here). There really are these two different kinds of flying ships in the books and they really are shown on the covers exactly as they are described in the books. And if you look closely you can see the island below the flying Raksura in the second book? you might be able to see that it’s shaped like the Loch Ness Monster – and that’s exactly how it should be shaped. The artist for these books did a great job. I’m going to keep one of these turned face-out on my shelves so I can enjoy the cover.

The world:

I kept catching myself thinking: How DID she come up with THIS idea? Which is funny, since after all people ask me that fairly frequently. But still. This is a beautiful and highly baroque world, where people build cities in, let us say, somewhat odd places. Usually really spectacular odd places. If somebody carved an immense statue into a mountain a thousand years ago, you can bet that somebody else has carved a city into that statue now. And there are at least . . . um . . . three stranger places that that in which we find cities, but I don’t want to give those away, so if you want to enjoy them, you’ll have to read the books.

The description all through is so beautiful. For example, here’s that city built into the statue (from the third book): “As they came closer, [Moon] realized that the lines of the plateau weren’t entirely natural. A great figure had been carved out of the side, into the shape of the body of a groundling seated on a throne. The statue was huge, taking up half the side of the plateau. The proportions were distorted, making the body wider than it was tall, and a large section of the head was missing, but it was still an impressive sight. And so was the city built into it. The statue’s chest and stomach, and the cliff face to either side, had been carved out with balconies, windows, stairways, open galleries. The rock had been shaped into columns, pediments, as if these were the façade of buildings standing along a street instead of hanging out over empty air. The plateau’s broad slopes were riddled with steep gorges, with the gleaming silver bands of streams winding along the bottoms, lined by lush foliage. The streams fed into a large lake covering the statue’s feet. Along its banks, regular rows of greenery and trees revealed planting beds and orchards. . . .”

I’m a sucker for setting, and I love how we get to explore so many wonderful parts of this world, but characterization is even more important. Luckily, I loved the characters. They’re not human – Wells does a great job making them not human – but they’re enough like humans that it’s definitely not a strain to sympathize with them. In fact, they’re quite compelling. Moon is a wonderful protagonist – lost from his people in early childhood, he knows nothing about them when he meets them in the first book. That lets the reader see his people, the Raksura, through his eyes – we meet the Raksura for the first time just as Moon does, and they’re just about as strange to him as they are to us, which I think was really important in drawing the reader into the story. And of course it gives Moon a backstory anybody can sympathize with, a problem anybody can understand, and very believable psychological issues that definitely complicate his life. I mean, he may believe intellectually that Jade isn’t going to abandon him, but he can’t help but feel that she might.

We do meet a LOT of characters, and of course we can’t be given a character sketch of any of them in two words because they’re not human, their society isn’t human, their roles in their society aren’t human – that puts quite a burden on the author, doesn’t it, getting the reader to fall into a story where everything is unfamiliar? Wells does this very skillfully, but I think it’s why many of the minor secondary characters are hard to keep track of. There’s a character list in the back of each book, which I didn’t realize at first. I mostly didn’t need it, though, as it was easy enough to keep the important secondary characters straight. Besides, the third book really deepens the characterization for Moon and the other important secondary characters. And it does this because –

Okay, the plot! I will do this without spoilers, so don’t worry if you haven’t read these books yet.

Book 1 is obviously Moon’s discovery of and by his people and his struggle to fit in (and to believe he might fit in). We also get a very cleanly defined Good vs Evil struggle, because the bad guys who attack Indigo Cloud Court after Moon finds them? Called the Fell? They are very evil. Very creepy. You would not want to encounter one in a dark alley, or anywhere else. So the first book has a very straightforward plot. I don’t know that I would say it’s exactly predictable, though, because the world, the Raksura, and the Fell are all too unfamiliar for many of the details about how things work out to be very predictable.

Book 2 is pretty much a Further Adventures Of Moon type of story – the Indigo Cloud Court moves back west to reclaim ancestral territory, there are problems, which require a quest to recover an object, which becomes complicated. For me, though I enjoyed it, this was decidedly the weakest of the books because the Quest To Recover The Object is so disconnected from the overall plot of the trilogy – the overall storyline involving the struggle between Indigo Cloud Court (and all Raksura) against the Fell. On the other hand, we get to see some pretty spectacular scenery during Book 2. And we do meet other courts of Raksura, which leads in a fairly convoluted way to –

Book 3, where Moon is rediscovered and reclaimed by his birth court. Wow, that is intense. I mean, wow. Here Moon is, having basically succeeded in making a place for himself in Indigo Cloud, and with Jade, and now he’s required to return to his birth court? Where he finds relatives, naturally, as well as his mother, about whom, well, words fail me. I wound up just loving her, but, well, wow. Plus, as you can imagine, the whole situation is extremely fraught, especially for Moon himself, with his abandonment issues. Plus, we’re back to the conflict with the Fell, in a situation that gets rather, um, complex.

I really loved Book 3, which wound up as my favorite book of the trilogy. In fact, I read it too fast and am now going to take some time to re-read some of my favorite parts. This trilogy is DEFINITELY a keeper; I will LOVE re-reading the whole thing in a few years. In the meantime, I’ll be pushing it on everybody who loves great writing, ornate worlds and wonderfully-drawn nonhuman characters. And I am also looking up Martha Wells’ backlist, right now.

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Published on November 21, 2012 09:48

Recent Reading: Shape of Desire

Okay! SHAPE OF DESIRE. Anybody out there who’s read it and didn’t tell me anything about it? Thanks! I really wanted to come to it without a lot of preconceptions. Anybody out there who wants to do the same, look away now, because I’m going to totally provide (variable) responses to this book, below.

Now, this is the Sharon Shinn novel that Publisher’s Weekly loved but to which responses by readers have been highly mixed. Let’s start with the Pub Weekly review, which is here.

Here’s what the Pub Weekly reviewer said about SHAPE OF DISIRE:

“Loving a shape-shifter requires a life full of lies in this touching domestic fantasy . . . Maria has known, and kept, her lover’s secret since they were in college together. Dante is only human a few days a month, and he cannot control when he shifts or what he shifts into. Maria has lied about him to her family and friends for almost half of her life. But when Maria suspects that a shape-shifter is behind recent murders in local parks, she begins to fear that, whether or not Dante is innocent, their lives will irrevocably change. The tale of their relationship meanders like a stream, with strong characterizations and poetic prose polishing the story until it shines. Shinn’s frequent comparisons of humans and animals are subtle, quietly building the question of whether the true monsters are those who change shape or humans with the capacity to hurt those they love.”

I would say that’s a very accurate summary. And please note that Pub Weekly picked this one as a top book for 2012, too.

The book’s average rating on Goodreads is 3.05, with 125 reviews. Here are a couple of interesting responses from random reviewers on Goodreads:

The Good — Louise Marley rated it 5 of 5 stars:

“This is a fabulous novel, dark and erotic and unerring in its character portrayals. Shinn has chosen the shape-shifter device to tell a story of passionate love under difficult circumstances, and something I love about the way she’s handled it reminds me of THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE–no rationalization or apology, just accepting it for what it is. And it works! I’ve read almost all of Sharon Shinn’s lengthy bibliography, and I think this is her strongest work yet. It’s always satisfying to see an artist get better and better with time, so this book is a special pleasure. Highly recommended.”

That was the first 5-star rating I came to. I can see where this reviewer is coming from, and btw, by ‘erotic’, she means Maria and Dante have sex all the time, on stage, as it were, which is a first for a Sharon Shinn novel, so fair warning, right? Compared to the highly explicit, lengthy sex scenes you see all the time in modern paranormals, though, it’s pretty tame.

The bad — Evangelie rated it 2 of 5 stars

“This book was sadly,disappointing. Did Sharon Shinn really write this??? The author of The Twelve Houses created this boring and unimaginative story? I am a big fan of her writing but this book fell flat. I was constantly waiting for something to happen. After reading this book all I learned was that

1. Maria LOVES Dante

2. Dante and his family are shape shifters

the end.

Also, this might have been just me, but until it was mentioned Marie was in her 30′s, I had thought she was a teen, maybe a college student…overall, very disappointing. I hope any other books Sharon Shinn plans to write are like the ones she used to write.”

This was the first two-star review I came to. I think it’s a lot less accurate. Actually, I think this reviewer expected and wanted an adventure story — which the Twelve Houses series provided — and this one is a relationship story. Nobody saves the world in this book; the most they’re aiming for is to save each other.

I do think the reviewer was right to feel cheated on a YA front. This one was marketed as YA, I suspect; the cover certainly implies YA; and it’s not. Just not. At all. In fact, if I had a teenage daughter who wanted to read this, I wouldn’t object, but I’d want to talk about it afterward.

Now, back to those mixed responses. Reviewers love the ordinariness of Maria’s life. Or they hate the triviality of Maria’s life. They love Maria’s obsession with Dante. Or else they totally hate Maria’s obsession with Dante. I’m sure you can imagine how it goes — the characters are well drawn. No, they’re totally flat and one-dimensional.

Okay, I’m not claiming to have a corner on The Truth about this book, but here goes:

My God, is that relationship between Maria and Dante disturbing, or what? In no way is it healthy for any adult human being to be so totally obsessed with her lover. When he’s with her — bliss! When he walks away — the abyss! Emotionally, Maria is a lot like a dog suffering separation anxiety. That’s bad in a dog, and REALLY AWFUL in a person.

But . . . you know what? If I’d stopped reading two chapters in, it would have been a mistake. Because at the ending, we find Maria and Dante still together, but in a MUCH, MUCH healthier relationship.

The whole book is about relationships — healthy relationships, sick relationships. And trust, and the nature of love. This is quite obvious, because one of the other pivotal relationships in the story is between an abused woman and her abusive husband. So I think we can be sure that Maria’s obsession with Dante is not supposed to look normal, either.

We get to see Maria’s interaction with her family and friends — nothing amiss there, if you don’t count Maria concealing this huge secret from them all for years and years . So I think we’re supposed to understand that Maria is capable of healthy relationships. Plus, she’s surprisingly easy to root for — I say ‘surprisingly’ because I would not normally find a woman who obsesses over her lover and just dies emotionally when he leaves her to be very sympathetic. But Maria’s got a really interesting, unique take on the world. Here’s one of my favorite passages:

“If I can hide the fact that half of my waking thoughts are consumed by my passion for a mythological creature, if I never mention his name at all to people who think they know me very well, how big could their own lies be? Are they serial killers, members of the Witness Protection Program? Have they been transgendered, bitten by vampires, kidnapped by aliens? . . . No possibility seems too outlandish. And I would not blame any of them for refusing to spill their secrets.”

Maria really *is* a hopeless romantic who wants everything to work out for everyone — I definitely like that about her, even if her obsession with Dante is disturbing. Which it IS. Until, as I said, the end of the story leaves her — leaves them all — in a better place.

I will be getting the sequel. In fact, I’ve just ordered it, so I expect I will be getting it Wednesday.

I do rather look forward to seeing if anybody else Maria knows actually turns out to have a really outlandish secret. My best guess now is: Caroline? I think she is doing evil mind-control of some kind. That’s just a guess!

Anybody else read this yet? Or planning to?

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Published on November 19, 2012 13:12

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