Daniel Shellenbarger > Recent Status Updates

I was just saying in my review of The Pilot last month how much I disliked antagonists who seem to know everything and whose plans go perfectly. Well, that's pretty much what the first 2/3rds of this book is. Sure, a few little things go wrong and they build up, but this book has the curious quality of entertaining me while also making me incredibly angry.

third (or fourth? can't remember) time reading this and starting this series, I made it to book 4 once, and I really do want to finish it (by which I mean books 1-8, book 9 was an abortive attempt to start a sequel series apparently best forgotten, so I'll just ignore that), maybe this is the time.

Fullmetal Alchemist really doesn't hold back, in the second volume we have the horrors of human transmutation, the murder of innocents, a serial killer, recollections of alchemists as human weapons employed to carry out a genocidal ethnic cleansing campaign, so thank goodness we also have Colonel Maes Hughes, he's so funny, nothing bad will ever happen to him (forbode...)

oh my goodness, I can't believe they left the story of Gussie Fink-Nottle and the Mephistopheles costume and the cabbie out of the BBC version. I near died laughing.

"What do you make of it, Jeeves?"
"I think Mrs. Travers wishes you to come at once, sir."
"You gather that too, do you?"
"Yes, Sir."
"I put the same construction to the thing. But why, Jeeves? Dash it all, she just had nearly two months of me."
"Yes, sir."
"And many people consider the medium dose for an adult two days."

now that we're into the story, it's got far less fan-service-y, hooray

Frank Churchill poisoned Mrs. Churchill, open and shut case: the timing fits, he had the motivation, I'm sure a sneaky clever young fellow like him could come up with the means, and given Mrs. Churchill's history of medical complaints, I'm sure there were plenty of medicines he could've tampered with... and he got away with it. No one even suspected. He murdered his aunt to be with the woman he loved.

Oh my gosh, sound the trumpets, we actually have a plot!

Two things I've figured out about this book that I find strange: First, Emma, the protagonist, is the least dramatically-involved character in it as most of the plot happens to other people. Second, the book is far more interested in its characters than it is in telling a story. The characters are very memorable and I've chuckled to myself imagining how I'd cast them, but the story is BLAH, almost nothing happens.

Also, I insist that Miss Bates have someone who follows behind her with a good-size padded stick and gives her a bit of a whack every few sentences to force her to take a breath and start a new paragraph.

Anyone else want to raze and burn Maple Grove to the ground and salt the earth underneath it in hopes that Mrs. Elton will never mention it again? Oh, better idea, invite the Royal Society of Effete British Snobs to Maple Grove and have them just absolutely excoriate the place, make it a public byword so anyone who so much as mentions it becomes a social pariah. THAT might work.

Ha, good progress, and I met a character (Mrs. Elton) I disliked more than the heroine, so that always helps. it's like Austen realized the best way to make Emma likeable was to introduce a character like Emma but without any of her positive points and who takes her foibles to more of an extreme. Still, the story could DEFINITELY do with a locked room murder mystery.