Book log archives - February 2009

Archives - February 2009

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Tobias S. Buckell, Crystal Rain: When the ferocious Azteca threaten to overwhelm the world of Nanagada, John deBrun holds the key to its salvation. The problem is that he's been an amnesiac for twenty-seven years, since he washed up on the shores of his adopted country. Now he must race to recover the ancient device which could save his people before the Azteca and their gods destroy everything he's learned to hold dear.

Easily the best thing about Crystal Rain is its excellent, unusual worldbuilding, based on Caribbean culture. Even though he's clearly got a huge amount of background worked out, Buckell is really good about not infodumping, just adding in details as he goes along to create a more and more complex picture of the world he's created. One small issue: I did wish he'd explained where the Azteca civilization comes from, as I don't see how a dead culture could have been imported to the world the same way the Caribbean culture was. I hope he'll explain this more in future books.

I have to admit I was never all that invested in the characters, and I really, really wished there were more female characters. I felt that the prose was a little clunky in spots, but the dialogue was great, with the easy rhythm of the Caribbean-inspired speech and the more formal language used by a few characters. But even with a few nitpicks, the plot moves along at such a pace that I was pulled along with it, and the worldbuilding made me very much want to read more by Buckell. I guess I'd better get my hands on the next book, Ragamuffin, soon!
Paul Douglass, Lady Caroline Lamb: A Biography: After reading Glenarvon, I really had to read a biography of Lady Caroline Lamb; this is the most recent one. Douglass is very sympathetic to Lamb while managing to remain fairly balanced in his presentation of her, and he doesn't allow Byron to take over, which would be all too easy, I think. He's good about quoting primary sources often (and now I really want to read the letters of Lady Harriet Cavendish, Caroline's cousin, which are alluringly witty and spiteful), and he gives a lot of very interesting space to Caroline's literary aspirations (I had no idea she'd written any novels besides Glenarvon).

However, I thought Douglass skimmed over things a little too often. He doesn't really address Caroline's problems with drugs and alcohol, and her final descent into illness and death is far too abrupt. It felt as though perhaps he was trying a little too hard to present her in a good light, and thus didn't address her very real problems as well as he might. Still, it's a readable, workmanlike biography and did shed a lot of light on her life and character, so it was worth reading.
Ysabeau S. Wilce, Flora Segunda: As the book opens, Flora Fyrdraaca is supposed to be writing a speech for her fourteenth birthday party, wherein she will celebrate her wonderful family, house, and future. The problem is, she doesn't think any of them are all that wonderful. Her house used to be a Great House, until her mother banished the magickal Butler; now it has eleven thousand rooms and only one bathroom. There are only four Fyrdraacas left: Flora herself, her crazy father, her military mother, who's never home, and her sister Idden, also in the military. The military is a family tradition, but Flora would rather be a cunning, magick-using Ranger. When she discovers the exiled Butler, though, she gets a lot more magick and excitement than she bargained for.

I loved this so much that I can't really point to what I loved easily. It's set in Califa, a sort of alternate California, and the worldbuilding is wonderful; it's very refreshing to have something other than medieval or Renaissance Europe, and it's full of marvelous little details which make it feel very complex and real. Flora is a lovely narrator: clever and adventurous and adolescently impulsive. And the writing is just great, witty and full of inventive words without being twee. I do hope the sequel is as good.
Lesley Livingston, Wondrous Strange: I was hooked by this YA urban faerie fantasy early on, partly because I just needed a fluffy read then, and partly because I hoped for an interesting mix of faerie and backstage drama, since the protagonist is an actress in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Alas, my interest wore thin by the end of the book. Livingston does provide a reasonably interesting version of faerie, with four seasonal courts intriguing against each other, but the backstage drama turned to be not a big part of the plot, and the faerie happenings weren't quite enough to hold my attention throughout. (Possibly I'm simply burned out on this subgenre.) Also, the protagonist turns out to be just too wonderful to feel real: she's beautiful, a wonderful actress, and hey, also possessed of unexpected faerie powers! Though there's a fair amount of plot closure, the ending is clearly leading into a sequel, which I may or may not read.
Virginia Hamilton, Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush: When Teresa first notices the handsome stranger out on the street, she falls hard for him. Several weeks later, he appears in her apartment, and it's only then that she knows that he's a ghost, Brother Rush. He takes Tree and her mentally challenged brother Dab on journeys into the past, and slowly Tree realizes in these glimpses of the past, Brother Rush may be telling her something about her own present.

Hamilton's writing is wonderfully lucid and descriptive, showing Tree's thoughts in a language and idiom that perfectly express her character. Here's a passage I especially liked, from Tree's first meeting with Brother Rush in her apartment:

"The sweatshirt she had on couldn't keep her warm. Yet she was aware of the moment when the cold turned into something she could live with. Fear was sealed inside her, like a tatter of paper from her ream. And if you opened the tatter, it would read: This is all the scared I can get.

The categorizing part of my brain wants to say that this is fantasy, because it's a ghost story. I suppose technically it is, but it's so rooted in reality that the supernatural doesn't feel especially fantastic. It's simply a book about people, about Tree's relationships with her brother and her mother, who has to work so hard to keep the family going that she's rarely there, leaving Tree to take care of herself and Dab. It's a bittersweet book, full of loss and sadness, yet also full of love and hope.
Patricia Gaffney, To Love and to Cherish: Christy Morrell is the vicar of Wyckerley (the small town which is also the setting of To Have and to Hold). When his childhood friend Geoffrey Verlaine returns to Wyckerly upon the death of his father, Christy's faith is sorely tested by Geoffrey's caprices and by his own strong attraction to Geoffrey's wife, Anne. Unfortunately, Anne's past life has made her an atheist, and even when it seems that they can be together, their different beliefs may keep them apart.

It's really refreshing to read a romance in which the hero isn't a rake, reformed or otherwise, and I quite liked reserved, wry Anne, whom we get to know better through diary entries interspersed with the main third-person narrative. Though there are some dramatics around Geoffrey, this story is much less fraught and angsty than To Have and to Hold and takes advantage of a lovely village setting which gives it a more pastoral, low-key charm. I can't say I was quite convinced by the resolution, but I was so entranced by the characters that it didn't really matter.
Mary Shelley, The Last Man: In the 21st century, the British monarchy has given up the throne, and the country is a republic. When Lionel Verney comes to be involved with the ruling elite, he is first swept up in romantic and political intrigues and finally swept out of England altogether when an apocalyptic kills nearly everyone. Eventually, everyone but Lionel does die, and he writes his memoirs, in the form of The Last Man. (I would apologize for the spoiler in that last sentence, but even the title of the book makes it clear what's going to happen and Shelley makes frequent references to it.)

I found the first half somewhat slow going, as I could not find myself much interested in the various romances. There's some interest in the characters as portraits of Shelley herself (represented by aspects of several characters), Percy Bysshe (as the beautifully noble Adrian, son of the former king), and Lord Byron (as the dashing, charismatic Lord Raymond). However, as soon as the plague hits, Shelley hits her stride, and the rest of the book is very compelling. The world she's created in the beginning of the novel, which seems headed toward an earthly paradise, simply disintegrates, and nothing Lionel or anyone else can do can save it. Art crumbles, science is helpless, and even imagination fails.

I think Frankenstein is the better-constructed book, but The Last Man is worth reading. I totally bounced off Valperga a few months ago, so now I'm wondering which of Shelley's other books I should try to find (Perkin Warbeck tempts for its subject matter, but the only edition in print is kind of expensive).
Elizabeth Moon, the Vatta's War series: I thought these were good, solid space opera. They're not as complex as Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga or Smith and Trowbridge's Exordium books, but they have good worldbuilding (I especially liked the inclusion of religions), excellent main characters, with lots of strong women (of course, this being Moon), and good pacing. I also liked the slightly different focus: though of course there are military engagements and political maneuvering, commerce plays a larger role here than in most space opera I've read, which was an interesting slant.
Alexandre Dumas, The Last Cavalier, Being the Adventures of Count Saint-Hermine in the age of Napoleon: This is Dumas' last novel -- well, most of it. Dumas scholar Claude Schopp discovered references to it and then tracked the installments down in the Bibliothèque Nationale; then he found some manuscript pages, never published, opening a new episode of the serial.

I loved the beginning, because I am a fool for Napoleonic fiction, and Dumas' portraits of Napoleon and Josephine are wonderful. But then, the last half of the book is all over the place, and I really had to talk myself into finishing it: first the hero goes to sea as a corsair, then he's in India (where a woman dies for love of him, argh!), then he's back at sea at Trafalgar (and is the unidentified Frenchman who kills Nelson), then he's back in France for about three seconds before heading off to Italy to catch bandits. I suppose Dumas might have pulled this together a little if he'd lived long enough to finish it and edit it for book form, but it's really kind of a mess. I think if he'd just stuck with Napoleon, I'd have ended up liking it a lot; as it is, not so much.
Sherri L. Smith, Flygirl: Ida Mae Jones wants to fly, the way her daddy taught her to. In 1940s Louisiana, though, a black girl has no chance to fly; Ida can't even get a license. When her little brother brings home an article about the Women's Airforce Service Pilots, formed by Jacqueline Cochran to ferry planes and free up male pilots to fight in the war, Ida thinks this might be her chance to help in the war and help bring her brother home from the front. But the WASP don't take black women, so to get in, Ida has to pass for white.

Smith's exploration of Ida's choice is nuanced and complex; there's lots of family history involved with her choice. Ida chooses to pass so that she can pursue her dream and help her country, but she finds that it's not as simple as it might appear. She is constantly afraid she'll reveal herself to her new friends and instructors, and she even has to deny her own family. Ida is a great character, smart, brave, and full of determination in the face of adversity, even when she's full of doubts. Smith does an excellent job weaving her characters into their historical background, from Ida's family life in Louisiana to her WASP training and career. Smith intriguingly leaves a little bit of the plot open-ended, but she provides enough closure for a very satisfying ending to a very good book.
Jessica Day George, Princess of the Midnight Ball: As in Sun and Moon, Ice and Snow, George starts with a familiar fairy tale; this time, it's "The Twelve Dancing Princesses". Rose is the eldest princess, cursed along with her eleven sisters (all named after flowers) to dance every night at the ball of the King Under Stone. Galen is an soldier returned from war, now an undergardener with some unusual skills. Now they must work together to free Rose and her sisters from the dreadful bargain made long ago between the King Under Stone and the queen, who died years ago.

As in most fairy tale retellings, the author has to add complexity in order to make a short tale into a longer book, and George does a good job with this. She adds political intrigue around the proposed betrothals of the princesses, so that their kingdom is threatened not only by the King Under Stone but by enemy countries above ground. It's tough to make the twelve princesses distinguishable from each other, but she manages at least to give each one or two unique characteristics, and some are more complex than that, notably Rose. And I really loved Galen -- he knits! And it's an important plot point! More than that, he and Rose develop a nice relationship and make it believable that they would end up together at the end, beyond the simple "and the soldier chooses the eldest daughter" solution at the end of the fairy tale. I don't think George is on a level with Robin McKinley or even Shannon Hale as far as fairy tale retellings go, but she has a nice, light touch which I enjoy.
George Eliot, Silas Marner (reread): In Dickens' hands, Silas Marner would have been what many people condemn it as: a soppy, sentimental Victorian story of a man redeemed by love. (I'm not necessarily slamming Dickens here; I appreciate him, but I love Eliot much more.) In Eliot's hands, it's beautifully warm and human, without being mawkishly sentimental.
Justina Chen Headley, North of Beautiful: Terra Cooper is mostly beautiful...except for the huge red birthmark across one cheek. She and her family have been obsessed with it all her life: her mother urges her to try new treatments, her father simply denigrates her, and although Terra uses thick makeup to cover it up, she can't mask her need to be free of it and of her stifling life. When she meets Jacob, a Goth guy from Seattle, he begins to help her win free of the façade she hides behind.

I thought this was pretty good, but I liked Girl Overboard more, possibly because I found it more focused. The map metaphor Headley uses for Terra's life (her controlling, horrible father is a cartographer) is badly overstrained and unsubtle, and the book starts quite slowly, getting bogged down in Terra's various interactions with her father, her mother, both her brothers, her best friend, and her boyfriend. Cutting the best friend and the second brother might have helped here, because I didn't think Headley really gave them enough screen time to develop Terra's relationships with them enough.

However, once Jacob showed up, I was a lot happier, though really, I found him (the adopted Asian son of a white couple) more interesting than Terra and would have been even happier to read more about him. I liked the unexpected direction Headley went with the second half, and I loved both Terra's developing friendship (and more) with Jacob and her deepening relationship with her mother. I think the book would have been even stronger if it had focused more on these two relationships, and Terra's difficult ones with her father and older brother.
Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America: Takaki brings together a multitude of voices to tell the rich, complex story of the non-Anglo peoples of the United States: African Americans, Asian Americans, Indians, Jews, Latinos, and more. He begins with the colonization of North America by the Europeans and "the racialization of savagery", whereby the Europeans came to believe that the Indians were different from and inferior to them, and that this difference was based on race and skin color. Then he goes on to examine the experiences of other peoples, taking a roughly chronological approach and devoting each chapter to a specific group and their experiences in a particular period. Takaki lets his subjects speak for themselves constantly; the text is full of quotations from songs, poems, prose, and interviews. Like Lies My Teacher Told Me, this is one of those books which opens your eyes to the history you're not necessarily taught in schools and to many overlooked aspects of the rich cultural and ethnic heritage of the United States.
Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, eds., Fast Ships, Black Sails: I resisted buying this for a long time, because I am really not a short story person and thus don't usually get along well with anthologies, but eventually I broke down and bought it. It turned out to be rather a mixed bag: some really good stuff, especially near the beginning and the end, but some I was less enthralled by (and a couple I frankly skipped, after reading a page or two and not being hooked).

I really liked Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette's "Boojum", about a living spaceship and one of her crew; Naomi Novik's (non-Temeraire-related) "Araminta, or, The Wreck of the Amphidrake" and its heroine who starts out as a lady and ends up as a pirate (but in an unexpected way); and Rachel Swirsky's "The Adventures of Captain Black Heart Wentworth", a tale of piratical rats (and one cat). I liked the conceit behind Howard Waldrop's "Avast, Abaft!", which begins with Captain Rackstraw of the Pinafore chasing the famous Pirates of Penzance, but ended up finding it disappointingly short and slight.


Last updated 18 May 2009. All text and photographs © George Mitchell and Margaret Johnston, unless otherwise noted Comments, questions, suggestions to margaret@lonelymountain.net.