Holly Lisle (1960–2024)

Dear Author,

Women are not things. Blindly possessive obsessive objectification of women isn't romantic. Therefore, the following scenes have caused me to be unable to read any more of your work.

"Hero," meeting Our Heroine for the first time: Oh she smells so good my soul calls out I LURVE her forevah I wonder what her name is?
Heroine: You're sexy and appealing, but your family killed all my family and I have to go find a Magical Artifact to bring them back, kthnxbai.
Heroine rents ship, show more sails off to find artifact.
"Hero": I'm totally gonna follow her, take the Magical Artifact for myself, get rich and famous off it, marry her and live happily ever after.
"Hero" rents ship, follows her.

Three months of sailing follow, in which Heroine tries to hide from "Hero", learns magic, saves the ship at least once and commits to saving the world. Hero is seasick and pends time elaborating on his Perfect Future with Magical Artifact and Heroine who has met him for half an hour one time.

Me: Okay, he's creepy.  I assume he's a villain?

Heroine: I'm stranded on the island and my only way to get me and my friends back is to get a ride on "Hero"'s ship. Unfortunately, "Hero" wants to kill my friends, and I want to bring them with. Well, I'm a trained negotiator, so let's negotiate.
Negotiator person: So you claim you should get to keep the Magical Artifact that might save your family because you sailed all this way and suffered (almost died multiple times) to get it, right?
Heroine: Right.
Negotiator person: Ha ha, gotcha! By that logic, "Hero" sailed all this way and suffered (sea-sickness) to get you. So you can only keep the artifact if "Hero" gets to keep you.
Heroine: Okay, that seems fair.

Me: WHAAAAAAAAAAAAATTTTT????

Negotiator: The two of you have to share a cabin all the way back home. That's three months, folks.
Author: Clearly thinks this is a romance-novel-worthy setup for sexytiems and drama.

Me: Drops book in disgust. show less

I can't say enough good about this book--I've been recommending it to everyone I know.

Midnight Rain is about Phoebe Rain, a tarot card reader for a psychic hotline, who's hiding out from her ex-husband even though he's in a coma. It seems her fears are justified when she gets a threatening phone call on her work line. The caller's voice is that of her ex-husband, and he used her real name, despite the precautions she's taken.

Then she sees the ghost of a little girl, the daughter of the E.R. show more doctor, Alan MacKerrie, next door, who asks Phoebe to go see her daddy.

The threats escalate, and Phoebe begins seeing her ex-husband in her dreams, dreams from which she can't awaken. Meanwhile, she's attracted to Alan, but tries to keep her distance, as she's kept away from people all these years, fearing that someone else will be hurt when her ex-husband finds her again.

I was a little dubious at first, with the ghosts and dream-visitations--I'm not a big fan of supernatural explanations in suspense stories, much preferring a logical explanation. So Midnight Rain had to work against my prejudices, making it all the more remarkable that I liked it so much. The supernatural was handled in a very believable way, and I especially liked Phoebe's matter-of-fact approach to her tarot card reading. Before the threats from her ex-husband, she was a math and science teacher, and that logical intelligence shows through.

The romance between Alan and Phoebe is also very well done--there are no easy answers for either of them, and the emotional obstacles were honest and realistic, as was Alan's grief for his dead daughter.

I suspect that the reason the supernatural elements were handled so well is that Ms. Lisle's other books appear to be fantasy. I'll be checking them out. show less

Originally posted on Tales to Tide You Over

If you read the first Tales from The Longview, you should understand how these novellas work, but that doesn’t really prepare you for the intensity found in The Selling of Suzee Delight. As with the first, though I avoid direct spoilers, it’s hard to talk about this story without implying some of what goes on in it, so proceed with caution.

The first was a very personal story to introduce the world and hint at the ventures of The Longview. Kagen show more has a role to play in the second as well, as do Shay and Melie (all from episode one), but the focus of The Selling of Suzee Delight is so much broader than one person’s hatred of a system that makes commodities of people and crime of justice.

Don’t let that leave you with the feeling there isn’t a personal story, because there are several, but at the same time, in a very real way, Suzee Delight’s story becomes everyone’s story.

That might not sound very likely when Suzee is a trained courtesan and she’s on trial for the brutal murder of five political administrators. Kagen finds the way to make the specifics less important than the generals, not by obscuring them but by giving faces to every aspect of Suzee’s story that describes agency. More than just how her tale connects with the experience of everyone within the Longview universe, I can see parallels to both my experiences and things I have observed.

I know I’m not talking about the story as much as I usually do. I don’t want you to think that’s because the story was weakened by the strong, powerful message it conveys about taking and using your voice no matter how small to make the world into a better place. Every scene ties back to that theme, the pronouncement of agency, of using the agency you have to help those who never had a chance, and by implication, the dangers of sitting back and letting the status quo stand even when it’s twisted and rotten at the root.

That’s a big message to carry in such few words, but Holly Lisle manages through a dark, horrific story that could easily be horror in other hands but ends up being a force for good, an awakening and rejection of the system that made this come to a head. She does this through introducing the key characters then making us understand what drives them and where they will or will not go to make the right thing happen. Sometimes the choices are all bad, sometimes the situation doesn’t work out as hoped for, but each person in this tale takes a risk, takes a chance on no matter how slender a thread of hope, and succeeds beyond imagining in many cases, though often not in the way intended.

My only quibble was the time between pieces of Kagen’s story. It wasn’t that his pieces were placed poorly because they came when they needed to but more that at one point I started wondering how he was getting along because we’d been caught up in other stories for long enough to notice he’d been left behind. Shortly after I reached that point, Kagen returned to the page, though, so it’s a minor quibble all told.

The Selling of Suzee Delight is complex, tangled, and certainly not happy-go-lucky, but if you’re looking for a powerful, thought-provoking read wrapped around flesh and blood characters, The Selling of Suzee Delight is worth the chance. While sometimes a world grows on me so the next one is always my new favorite, in this case, episode 3 will have to do something wildly impressive to oust Suzee. Dark, yes, but also light in a way it can only be because of the darkness. Hope doesn’t rise when people accept life as unchangeable, and this Longview story has hope. show less

This. Was. AWESOME.

There are twists and turns aplenty. Most I didn't see coming. The one or two I spotted, I caught late in the game, and their reveals were still elegant and well written. The characters are, too. This is a book full of interesting, fun people - many of them are likable, though certainly not all (and likable isn't the point) - and more to the point, they're believable (LGBT characters represent! Without it being A Huge Deal!).

I particularly love how all the separate strands show more of story end up twined around each other, supporting and growing each character's individual tale, until the whole package is tied up at the end. It can be a little confusing tracking the scene and character changes at times, but it's a compelling ride and entirely worth it.

I read "Hunting the Corrigan's Blood" (the first book set in Settled Space) several years ago and it was a fun read, but this. This is a whole next level of story. It makes me want to get a copy of "Warpaint" and devour it immediately, and then bounce up and down with impatience until "The Wishbone Conspiracy" comes out, and then bounce until the next book, and.... well. You get the idea.


CONTENT NOTES/POSSIBLE SPOILERS
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There are some very heavy themes in this book. Several characters have pasts politely described as "nightmarish", and there is discussion/description of things that some readers will find upsetting. These include slavery, child abuse, sexual abuse, torture, violent deaths, imprisonment, and possibly a few others. There is rape implied in a couple of characters' pasts but no explicit descriptions. show less