FantasyFans : Where are you in Fantasyland? August, 2013

I'm currently in Lakeside with Shadow as I continue through American Gods by Neil Gaiman. Then I'll be heading into The Long Prince Quartet by Daniel Abraham in Shadow and Betrayal which is an omnibus edition of the first two books in the series. And then I'll be heading down to Panama in Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton.

I've just been selected to receive Baseball's Creation Myth by Brian Martin as part of LibraryThing Early Reviewers. I'll be reading this book as soon as I finish the current book I'll be reading when I receive it.

Ha. I'm in Hollywood, reading a biography of Elizabeth Taylor.

This is probably the third or fourth biography of an actor that I've tried to read over the years. I keep thinking they ought to be interesting glimpses of influences that have shaped the culture, but they're mostly boring. Loaded with fantasy, though.

I've finally got round to reading The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho - I'd say fantasy-tinged / fairy story rather than fantasy, but it currently puts me in an oasis watching hawks fly.

I have to admit, it's more fun in person than through this narrative.

Finished two books; am starting two more.

I didn't love Magic Lost, Trouble Found enough to move forward in the series, the perpetually sarcastic tone of the narrative voice and the Smurfette Principle/Highlander Syndrome being enough to put me off. But the book did have its virtues, which make me glad I finished it. Despite the snarky narrative voice, I did like the protagonist, and I appreciated that romance/sexual attraction did not prove too great a distraction from her mission.

The Golem and the Jinni, however, stands out as one of the best books I've read over the past two years. The prose is gorgeous, the characters intriguing. It's Helene Wecker's first novel. First novels should not be this good. The author needs to have somewhere to grow. How is she going to top this one?

Now I'm beginning Soulless, and at only twenty-five pages in I already like it better than Magic Lost, Trouble Found. I am also starting Stained Glass Monsters on my Kindle.

<4 I'll have to add The Golem and the Jinni to my To Read List. I didn't find Souless recommendation worthy, but I think that was at least partly because I was expecting a different sort of book when I picked it up. It had more romance than I prefer in a book.

I've recently finished Shadow and Bone, a YA book I picked up at the local library. It was far better than the books I normally pick up without any before hand knowledge. I can't believe I've never heard of it before. The world was based on imperial Russia and was a pleasant departure from the typical medieval Western European fantasy world. The characterization was also well done, and there were some surprising character twists. I love when I peg a character for one type and he or she turns out to be another.

Well and truly in Westeros now. I've borrowed the whole series.

I'm traveling across a glacier on a sledge in The Left Hand of Darkness, and am keeping on with various parties traveling toward Caemlyn in The Eye of the World. Preparing to start Mind of My Mind before too long, I think, but I might take a break and read something lighter first.

I recently finished my first Octavia Butler novel, Wild Seed, and a few quick reads, Nnedi Okorafor's Zahrah the Windseeker, which was new to me, and Rachel Caine's Ill Wind and Melisa Michaels' Skirmish, both re-reads. I also finished Winter Well, an anthology I received for Early Reviewers containing four novellas with older female protagonists.

Wild Seed was an engrossing but uncomfortable read. Butler doesn't shy away from racism, sexism, slavery, or abusive relationships, and she doesn't portray them in simplified or cartoon versions or revel in the gritty grimness- this is about two immortals getting on with their lives, presented as three slices of their lives over about two hundred years, from their first meeting onward. A lot happens offscreen in those times, but we see the effects played out on-screen. This is one that has a lot of potential for discussion, I think, in what the author intends and what the meaning is of what is shown. I'll limit myself to only two comments for now, both of which I suppose I'll have to see how they play out in further books, SPOILER of course. One, are the talents supposed to have a physical basis, and if so, could Anyanwu give herself the gifts of Isaac or any of the others? It was pointed out that she could take others' forms, but I was unsure how the talents really worked- they were presented as hereditary, so I assume there is a biological component, but Anyanwu never tried to figure them out the way she did disease and injury or sought cures for those talented who were tormented by their talent, which seemed out of character. Two, more plot-wise, I was uncomfortable with the ending-it seemed as if Anyanwu did overall bring Doro back to some human emotions, when I had read most of the book before that as showing the futility of her trying to "fix" him, a common fallacy seen in abusive relationships. Am I reading that wrong, or did others feel the same?

I'd bought Okorafor's Who Fears Death as a local Borders was clearing things out, having heard good things about her, but I just couldn't get into it at the time. I enjoyed Zahrah the Windseeker quite a bit, though- it is for a younger audience, it's tagged "young adult" a lot on LT but the narrative voice, the plotline, and the age of the characters hit me more as an older children's book instead. The various life in Forbidden Greeny Jungle and the setting with its computers grown from CPU seeds and skyscraper plants is wonderful- it reminded me of the films of Studio Ghibli more than anything else, I would love to see this as an animated film. Despite a couple of nitpicks (after the snake incident, I would have expected at least some mention of watching out for snakes during the journey into the jungle; the ending that brought in nature being superior to technology when the rest of the novel had seemed to escape that binary with nature being technology, and a passing mention of, paraphrasing, "I was shy, quiet, and introverted, thanks to adventure I've been cured"), I will definitely keep an eye out for more of Okorafor's work, I've read that The Shadow Speaker and Akata Witch have ties to this setting, though they are both set (at least mostly) on Earth.

Ill Wind is as action-driven a read as I remember, and it remains free of most of the tropes that I dislike in urban fantasy (less graphic violence, a plot that isn't "a monster is killing/kidnapping/controlling one or more young, beautiful women," and a love interest that doesn't seem borderline abusive due to controlling tendencies excused as "alpha male" behavior- he tries to coerce her to kill him and save herself once, she calls him on it, and the protagonist is also already competent with her powers-this isn't an initiation into the secret world story. I checked this out from the library intending to read through the whole set now it's complete- I'd read the first five or maybe six books before- but after finishing this one, though I enjoyed it, I haven't felt the need to go directly on to the next that I felt on my first read. Maybe later this year.

Skirmish was a re-read of a book I read a couple of years ago that went right on my favorites list. It pretty much ticks all of my boxes for lighter, adventure science fiction, and shows up. The main character, Melacha, is the best pilot, and everybody knows it-there are other female pilots, there is absolutely no questioning that women can be pilots or gendered slurs or proving to herself or a word about being "one of the guys" or contempt for women who aren't tough pilots (there are women everywhere, right alongside men in political and company and space police roles, presented without comment or physical description- it just doesn't matter), there is no impostor syndrome or doubt that she could be a pilot because she is a woman, there is no romance subplot, and when she gets into a fistfight and punches a man, he doesn't tell her she's cute when she's angry or laugh it off because of a grossly exaggerated strength difference between men and women to the extent that men are invincible against them, instead he gets injured. It's unbelievably refreshing. I highly recommend the whole series, and wish there had been more.

I picked up The Eye of the World from where I left off at my reading attempt a little while ago, just outside Shadar Logoth; I'm about halfway through now. This is a book with sexism problems, as seen in the series backstory of "men are from Mars, women are from Venus, attempt to make things equal and you will cause all men to turn insane and also probably release the ultimate evil and destroy the world," and they run throughout, but as far as I can look past it I am enjoying the nostalgia (I still like Moiraine, but Perrin, my favorite of the three male leads before, is getting on my nerves with his grumbling about Egwene). At this point, I plan to finish this volume and may read a little further into the series for the parts about Aes Sedai and the female characters learning magic that I enjoyed- I think I made it to volume four or five before I started skimming and gave up before.

The Left Hand of Darkness... There's a Michael Moorcock quote on the cover that reads "As profuse and original in invention as The Lord of the Rings," and I think that's the best comparison for me at this point- I am feeling the sense of immersion and depth in this world that many other people seem to feel when they read The Lord of the Rings, which I personally could never get into. There are parallels as well in the content- as Lord of the Rings is in the shadow of World War II, when I look at this book I imagine I see the influence of the Cold War in the paranoia and nationalism and warmongering and the world on the brink of discovering what war means; as Lord of the Rings has Christian underpinnings, so this book seems to have Taoist underpinnings. The book has one of the things that appeals to me most about speculative fiction, an attempt to explore different social organization on a society-wide scale, and here in two cultures, Karhide and Orgoreyn, that illuminate each other- I am captivated, especially by the sections written from the Gethenian Estraven's point of view.

However, the handling of gender is dated at best. I certainly wouldn't recommend the book on that count- the society with no gender differentiation is undermined by the use of the male pronouns for everyone; the focus of political elite, separatist monks, and laborers, all roles (especially note the gendered title of "king") typically gendered masculine, without any look at home life or children or anything typically feminine (excepting Ai's "landlady," a term presented quoted in the book as well- Le Guin chose to use the term "parent of the flesh" rather than "mother" even); and Ai's general misogyny and detestation of anything feminine. All of this combines to make me feel more like the book is speculating about a society without women and femininity rather than without gender, and the cynical part of me wonders if that's not part of the reason that this book seems to often be the only science fiction novel written by a woman on lists of genre great classics.

So yeah, mixed feelings.

Winter Well was a bit of an uneven collection for me. I really liked Anna Caro's story about a human architect living on an alien world with her alien wife as the country she lives in becomes embroiled in war with its neighbor and she finds herself having psychic visions of the "enemy" country, but had problems and dissatisfactions with the others that I detailed in my review.

> 5 I've heard good things about the writing of Shadow and Bone, but > evidently the Russian content is really inaccurate. I've heard good things accuracy-wise about the works of Ekaterina Sedia (I have my eye on Heart of Iron), Catherynne Valente's Deathless, and Kim Wilkins' The Veil of Gold if the Russian setting/mythology interests you, but I don't know if they have the other qualities you liked in Bardugo's work.

Edit to fix broken link.

I finished Broken Homes by Ben Aaronovitch, fourth book in the Peter Grant series. The book was very good and the series has become one of my favorite on-going series.

> #7, sandstone78

I think the key word here is based on Imperial Russia. It's a secondary world so it just has a Russian flavor. If it had actually been set in real Russia, the inaccuracies would have been a bigger deal, but it's not so it's doesn't. At least not for me.

>8 beniowa: Hmm. I think we differ here. For me, secondary worlds are something of a gray area- I guess I feel that it comes down to how much the author "files off the serial numbers" of their source material. If the influence from a certain culture is strong enough that it becomes a marketable point for the work, I expect a certain level of research to be done out of respect for the culture the author is profiting from.

Personally, I wouldn't expect much rigor in place names or exact geography, but if there are, say, references to Russian food and drink, I would have expected the author to either ensure the descriptions were accurate or just invent something, or in the case of say Jay Kristoff's Stormdancer, I have no problem with obviously invented steampunk and dystopia elements, but since it is billed by the author and the publisher specifically as Japanese steampunk I would expect name honorifics to be used as suffixes on the name rather than the grammatical equivalent of "my Lord" in English as Kristoff did, among other inaccuracies.

For me it is a question of purposeful changes vs changes made out of ignorance or carelessness.

If I take Japan as my inspiration, and one of the things I decide to adopt is the system of honorifics (ie. -san, -sama, -kun, -chan (and dozens of others)) I am adopting specific words from a specific culture. If I vary how they are used, even if I call my country something other than 'Japan', the variation needs to be due to deliberate decisions, not because I don't know enough about the system of honorifics.

It would be better to adopt only the idea of a system of honorifics, make up my own words and rules and use them, rather than use the existing words and get it badly wrong. Or, if for some reason I needed them to be different, to address the reason and cause for the differences in the text - to demonstrate a purposeful change which adds something to the world.

Started another new book: Steven Brust's The Phoenix Guards. It's taking me time to get used to the pseudo-Dumas style, but I'm looking forward to seeing where this book goes, and I really like Tazendra.

I'm pleased that all the books currently in my rotation -- The Phoenix Guards, Stained Glass Monsters, The Color of Distance, and Soulless -- are all so different in style and feel. Soulless, I'm afraid, isn't wearing as well as I would like. I love petticoats and crinolines, to be sure, and the heroine herself is smart and witty, but the title of the series, "The Parasol Protectorate," led me to expect a secret society of women fighting the undead with their feminine paraphernalia (how fun would that be?), and instead I get yet another round of Highlander Syndrome. All women other than Alexia fall into two categories: Evil and Stupid. On the Evil side, we have the Westminster Hive Queen; the evil vampire society is of course a matriarchy, while among the more sympathetic werewolves there are no females at all apparently. On the Stupid side, it turns out that Alexia's so-called "best friend" is just as lame-brained as her two ditzy half-sisters. A review on Goodreads put it this way: the author "sh-ts on other female characters to make Alexia appear 'more special.'" This is a tired technique and, I think, evidence of weak writing.

Thankfully, I have The Color of Distance and Stained Glass Monsters to enjoy -- and I am enjoying them much more. The latter, in particular, has the kind of heroine that I, during my teenage years, would have wanted to grow up to be. Even The Phoenix Guards may yet offer an alternative to Highlander Syndrome.

>8 beniowa: I'm eagerly awaiting Broken Homes in the U.S.

I've finally mustered up the courage to delve into the world of Malazan Book of the Fallen. Right now I'm in the middle of Gardens of the Moon and incredibly thankful for the chapter by chapter reread blog on tor.com with detailed notes to help me keep track of everything.

Because Republic of Thieves is finally coming out in October, I've also started The Lies of Locke Lamora once again and plan to reread it (along with Red Seas Under Red Skies) at a slower pace than I did the first time I read them.

After a couple of disappointing reads (Tome of the Undergates, Magic Lost, Trouble Found, Phoenix) these two are a lot more enjoyable!

Because Republic of Thieves is finally coming out in October,

I'll believe it when I see it. Really hope so though.

I'm in Middle Earth again, this time rereading The Silmarillion (for the first time in 30 years; I find that, now solidly in my mid-50's, I'm doing nearly as much revisiting of books as reading new ones).

I imagine these myths & histories as something Bilbo translated from the Elvish during his old age in Rivendell. They are beautiful, engaging, and almost unrelentingly tragic. In thinking of their elegiac tone, I remembered in Tolkien's preface to LotR where he writes (responding to critics who looked for direct correlations between his life and fiction) "One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression..." and "By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead."

7> I don't really care about the accuracy. It wasn't any sort of alternative history and the landmasses weren't even the same. Under those circumstances I think the author is free to do whatever she likes. Yes, accuracy is nice, but I'm not really bothered by the lack of it unless I'm passionate about the subject in question.

I'm about 250 pages into Bitten and am wondering if it is worth continuing. I hate the main love interest - he's the alpha male type and is completely horrible to the main character. I feel like I could like her, and I did at first, but she keeps making stupid decision after stupid decision regarding the love interest. She keeps whining about how horrible he is, but her actions say she thinks otherwise. The plot's okay and has had an interesting take, but it keeps getting interrupted by romance sequences. I've also noticed that besides the lead, there aren't any other female characters besides some extremely minor ones in the opening chapters. It's Highlander Symptom to a T. Does this book get any better, or should I cut it loose now?

16: In my opinion, Clay, the love interest, never really gets any better. Elena does prove to be very strong in the end, but I never understood what she saw in Clay, or saw anything solid on which a true love might be built.

From what I can tell, this is a problem with urban fantasy in general: the genre may have plenty to say about sex and sexual desire, but has little if anything (of any value, at any rate) to say about love. Couples fall in lust more often than in love, and in more than one series, the heroine's bedroom seems to have a revolving door. I don't find that all that enticing, let alone emotionally moving. Also, aside from the solid War for the Oaks and some of Charles de Lint's work, Highlander Syndrome seems to be a common feature in the genre, despite the prevalence of female protagonists.

If I could find an urban fantasy novel/ series that was actually romantic, and that featured a strong heroine who actually had some good relationships with other women, it might soften me a little toward the genre.

Sherwood Smith recently recommended Sorcerer's Luck by Katharine Kerr as an urban fantasy which takes many of the problematic tropes of Urban Fantasy and then starts twisting them sideways and examining them (sounds a bit like heroine starts out wimpish and meets a jerk, but then we don't follow the standard progression?).

None of the reviews I've seen mention any other women, though, so it might still have Highlander Syndrome.

17> I actually have read an urban fantasy series like that. The Kate Daniels series tends to equally divide the characters between male and female, and Kate has relationships with various other woman - her best friend, her 'niece', and a were-hyena matriarch to name some. I didn't particularly like the love interest at first, but over the three and a half books until they got together, I warmed to him, mainly because I thought Kate would be happier and better off with him.

If Elena proves strong in the end, I guess I'll keep reading. But it sounds like I'll just have to skim the parts with Clay.

> #9

I agree that if it's marketed as such and such culture there should be a good level research done, though I don't remember Shadow and Bone being marketed as Russian fantasy or Russian-like fantasy. I could be wrong though. Even so, the author often has little to do with the PR of a book unless they market it that way themselves aka Stormdancer. Stormdancer is definitely a good example of your point.

> #12

I was too impatient to wait for February so I ordered from amazon.co.uk. Import tax wasn't too bad, but I probably did end up paying a little more for it.

20> For me the biggest thing that said 'Russian' was the cover art. Definitely a PR decision.

I've just started re-reading A Madness of Angels. It's about three and a half years since I read it for my book club, and I need to read it again before going on to the next 3 books in the series, which are all lined up on my Kindle, ready to go.

>16 pwaites:

I don't like Bitten, but I like the Women of the Otherworld series as a whole. In Stolen the author introduces a bunch of other supernatural races (because she didn't want to be stuck writing just werewolves for the length of the series), including a lot more women who go on to become narrators of their own books. Some of the narrators are usually featured in each other's books, and there is definitely the indication that a lot of the women are friends and in touch between adventures, some more than others, because really not everybody is going to be friends with everybody. I never did get to like Elena as much as the other narrators, although she doesn't bother me as much in later books as in Bitten. I even like Clay more through his own eyes (some of the men narrate short stories or novellas) than through Elena's, because when he's narrating I can enjoy being in the head of this strange person. Dime Store Magic is the first in the series with a different narrator. Paige is younger than Elena in her first and dealing with some tough stuff for her age, and sometimes she makes some decisions somebody with more experience might not, but her heart is decidedly in the right place and her relationship doesn't make me want to push a list of warning signs of an abuser in her face.

After spending the weekend searching for the Dragon haven, I'm now in Copper Downs with Green.

23> I've finished Bitten. While I don't think I will ever reread it, I might go on to read some other books in the series. Elena did come through at the end without relying on anyone else to solve the problem for her. I still hate Clay, and I don't think that's going to change. However, Bitten was her first book, so I think some allowances can be made. I think the other books might very well be better, especially if they're not about werewolves; there might be less of the whole alpha male and instinct drivel.

Of the few werewolf books I've read, all of them gave me the impression that the authors did absolutely no research into wolf behavior. Points that I'd like to see more accurately represented: 1) Wolf packs have both an alpha male AND an alpha female. 2) Wolf packs are generally families. The alphas are the parents, the other wolves are usually children or siblings. 3) In terms of inter-pack interaction, females are more aggressive. 4) Wolves are neither monsters or wonderful, noble, peaceable creatures.

>25 pwaites:

My habit is to read the werewolf books from the library just to make sure I don't miss any major developments in the world, and buy most of the others. The ones that feature the witches most prominently are my favorites. I've come to the conclusion that I prefer urban fantasy in which the main characters are spellcasters of some variety because as a rule, spellcasters have to study to do what they do, and therefore tend to be kindred-nerd-spirits, whereas the werewolves and vampires generally come by their superhuman powers without any particular work besides making the transformation if they weren't born that way.

I'm reading Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore.

Out of fickleness more than anything else, I set aside The Eye of the World and picked up HeartMate, determined to get through it this time and remove it from my TBR pile after several false starts.

However, I soon remembered why I put it down- the male lead is a jeweler and smith, and in the first chapter he is in his shop, and his special-bond-destined-one-and-only love interest walks in. We switch to her point of view, and she refuses the jewelry he offers her and tries to leave the shop, whereupon he remotely locks the doors. She initially feels alarm and starts inching towards the fire alarm, but then their eyes meet, his "essential male vitality envelops her," and... well, "and it wasn't menacing, but sheltering." Er.

This is my biggest problem with destined love psychic bonds, "somehow he/she knew" characterization overriding logical character reactions... Well, that and the uncomfortably common metaphysical reason for the destined special love psychic bonds existing being make optimal babies- in this case, the setting is a colony world where "Families (have) to be vigilant in keeping their numbers up and watching for sterility or genetic paths that led to extinction," and HeartMate unions "invariably (have) more children and a stronger line than other, more prosaic unions"- not only sort of framing true love as a great method of eugenics, but also implying that love that does not result in children is not worthy of destined special perfect love psychic bonds.

(HeartMate's phrasing here at least keeps the origins of the bond vague enough that I can read it as "people who are especially compatible and devoted to each other are more likely to form stable families," unlike at least one other series where it's explicitly stated that the destined lovers are chosen for genetic compatibility by computer and they all turn out to also have extraordinarily complementary personalities and find true love.)

I cringed at the scene where a fat woman buys something from T'Ash's shop though. "A heavy woman puffed to the counter," called for him in "an obnoxious voice" (interrupting his conversation with another member of the planet's prestigious FirstFamilies); her mouth "open(ed) and clos(ed) like a fish" at his presence when he came over, he couldn't touch the charm she's buying or her money so he teleports them where they need to go instead because "he didn't like her negative energy," and his telepathic familiar cat calls her "nasty thing" when she leaves, to his agreement. Ugh.

I pushed on, and am enjoying the book well enough so far as I can ignore the romance tropes like "fat people are obnoxious and repulsive" and "he's not controlling, he's protective" and "maleness" everywhere in descriptions (I'm sure somebody has written a romance drinking game- "one drink for every occurrence of the word 'maleness'"); I enjoy psychic-power-heavy societies, and I enjoy descriptions of characters doing things they are competent at, so the jewelrymaking and forging is interesting.

I'm getting close to the end of The Left Hand of Darkness, and have acquired Patricia McKillip's Alphabet of Thorn, which looks quite promising. I also noticed that C.J. Cherryh has another Foreigner short story, this one about Bren's first day of work, up at Closed Circle, so I will likely download that shortly...

>10 AndreaKHost:,20,21 I have done a bit more research into Bardugo, since most of what I had known about her work was from critical reviews like the one I linked to. I found an interview linked from her site where she states that Shadow and Bone's setting is Russian-inspired and not meant to be accurate. I can empathize with finding a culture really interesting and being inspired by it, that's cool.

However, I think there is an "uncanny valley" effect between authenticity and serial-numbers-filed-off inspiration, and works that use techniques like Bardugo's where she mixes actual Russian words used as in Russian with Russian words deliberately used differently and non-Russian words altered to fit in with the sound of the previous that fall squarely into that uncanny valley, using too much of the real inspiration to be comfortably divorced from it but far enough from real-world usage to be jarring to people familiar with Russian language and culture.

I don't think this is limited to linguistics, or culture, though because of which cultures are valued and which are not in modern society this is one of the most difficult areas to get right- to give another example of something less fraught from an area closer to my own experience, a short story I read recently featured two computer hackers as protagonists. I could tell the author had some knowledge about computer security from some of the details, but in the hundred-years-from-now setting present-day computer security problems were juxtaposed with invented systems that read closer to Hollywood conceptions of hackers' nigh-omnipotent secret access to networks- the elements were not consistent with each other, and as a result I had a hard time buying into the story as either realistic or science fictional.

>16 pwaites:,23,25,26 re Bitten, I'd picked it up without reading the back and read the first few pages about Elena and her architect boyfriend. This sounds like something I would like, I thought, a werewolf living among humans, working as a journalist, trying to navigate not really knowing how to be human.

Then I read the back where it seems to end up that werewolves can't live human lives after all, werewolves and humans being fundamentally different and everybody should stay with their own kind, and that she is the only female werewolf, so "her kind" by definition includes no other women, and was like... oh. Then I read the reviews mentioning Clay's behavior, and was even more... oh. Just in case, I picked up another book in the series, where not only is the heroine pregnant (which might kill her), she also accidentally time-travels Jack the Ripper and his zombie thugs(?) from Victorian England to the modern world, and that just made me go "What??" (I assume it makes more sense if one has read the intervening books.)

In the end, I decided it probably was not the series for me, but it sounds like Dime Store Magic might be worth giving a try should I come upon it at the library.

>25 pwaites: I acquired J. Damask's Wolf at the Door because it looked like the story I was hoping for from the first chapter of Bitten, but reading the first chapter, the author seems to have done her research about wolves- at the beginning, the heroine and her husband are getting ready to replace her aging parents as the alphas of their pack (the parents are retiring). I also enjoyed Amelia Atwater-Rhodes' take on shapeshifters in her Kiesha'ra series (wolves don't show up until the later books), where they are led by a single alpha, but this and other things are recognized as a human invention, culture rather than nature, and abusive behavior by an alpha is decidedly shown as dysfunctional and bad rather than excused as "but uncontrollable animal instincts!"

I'm heading back to the Malazan Empire with Toll the Hounds. It looks like I'll be on the Genabackis continent this time. With so many story threads going on, even with 1200+ pages I have no idea how Erikson is going to tie it all together. This should be interesting.

I am in Chicago alot lately hanging out with Harry Dresden. i have have books 7 and 8 on standby to finish. I have been to the City of Sky and finished the first two books of the inheretance trilogy. now I am working on horns by Joe Hill but after that I will be moving on. I have too many ooks to read and not enough time.

27> I'm not sure you have the right tag for Wolf at the Door. The book you've linked to seems to be a romance and doesn't have the have the story line you've described.

>30 pwaites: Fixed, thanks

31> Thanks. That looks more promising. I've added it to my To Read list.

I'm now just a quarter through HeartMate, and I keep wanting to enjoy it for the lighter tone the author takes and the setting, but I keep coming to uncomfortable realizations about the psychic bond trope it's using (which is not an uncommon one in SFF romance).

The whole set up, not uncommon in SFF romance with this sort of psychic bond, basically comes down to (trigger warning for pretty much the rest of this post) "She said no to me, despite the special bond I know we have? The special bond makes her want me, when I look at her I can tell she's attracted to me! She just doesn't understand me, I know that underneath that no she really means yes, and I won't leave her alone until she realizes that I'm not like those guys who would use a seduction spell on her, I need her to understand that and accept me!"

Even worse, the HeartMate bond takes away her ability to feel fear and anger towards him ("the most she could summon was irritation at his harassment, and she wondered why," "fear should have swamped her, but like anger, it found no place in her heart"), which... yeah. I guess a seduction spell, presumably the equivalent of date-rape in this universe, is ethically different from a magical bond he knows about, doesn't tell her about, and exploits to incite lust in her and make her unable to feel anger or fear so he can achieve a relationship with her? Maybe even though the heroine doesn't make a consensual, informed decision to participate in either, it's supposed to be ethically better because the result is marriage rather than "meaningless sex" as the book has it?

Plot-wise, the psychic bond trope seems to be used like the arranged-marriage-turns-into-true-love plotline to bring two seemingly incompatible people together, but the shortcuts it takes from the arranged marriage are morally dubious at best- often only one of the two (almost always the man, but Anthora in the Liaden novel I Dare is one female example) even knows about the bond, for example, and "because destiny" is used as a substitute for consent in pursuing the one who doesn't know about it even when they say no.

Arranged marriages at least require the knowledge of those involved, and a romantic happy ending turns on characters getting to know each other and working through their problems, with in most settings at least some opportunity for getting out of the marriage through divorce or simply running away- in the stories I have seen, there is no opting out of the magical destiny romance bond, it is right and the character is wrong, no matter how the love interest treats the character.

Now, I don't think at all that Robin Owens, Lee and Miller, or any of the other authors that deploy magical destiny love bonds set out to reinforce "no means yes" in the real world with it, but is a trope with unfortunate implications, and I really, really wish it would stop showing up unquestioned.

>32 pwaites: I hope you like it!

Finished Stained Glass Monsters this evening. A highly enjoyable read, and, from a feminist standpoint, one of the most satisfying books I've read all year. Rennyn is my kind of heroine, determined and competent and very, very powerful; I find it refreshing to read about a heroine fighting to uphold her ethical/moral code while dealing with the possibility of being TOO powerful. The romance plot was important but did not swallow the story. And this book offers the very reverse of Highlander Syndrome, with women everywhere, in a variety of roles, and almost no gender-related angst.

My one disappointment: that Sukata Illuma -- my favorite character next to Rennyn -- didn't have more of an opportunity to shine. But hey, maybe that's what the next volume in the series is for. I will be waiting eagerly for it, and in the meantime I will explore some of Ms. Host's other works.

I've been in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, among the mysteriously insular, musical Tufa people in The Hum and the Shiver. Intrigued enough that I may read the sequel.

Still plowing through my Bus/Train book Clockwork Prince .
I don't like it. I bought the 1st one in the series Clockwork Angel 'cos I wanted some light Victorian
Urban Fantasy Steam Punkish yarn. It was so so. This is one is just a typical love story with weak Victorian atmosphere, unrealistic language and unfortunatly I also bought the 3rd. (and thank God last) one in the series. I doubt I will read Cassandra Clare again.

ETA. Angle, Angel not much difference, except to touchstones :-)

36> I liked her Clockwork Angel series; I found the characters compelling and the story interesting. I didn't really care that she didn't use language specific to the Victorian era - I didn't notice any glaring instances of modern slang, and Victorian era language might be a hard sell for the YA market.

I was in alternate Victorian London in Soulless.

Light fare, not unpleasant, actually more pleasant than I'd probably find many books wandering so far into romance territory, but I don't think I'll be pursuing the series very actively.

Some fairly irritating repetitions, unwarranted when word-for-word or nearly so in a book this short. Yeah, I got it that Miss X is a "spinster long on the shelf", that Mr Y is "an alpha male", find ways to illustrate that in different interesting ways, or just get on with the world building and plot, please -.-

Also, Highlander syndrome. I usually don't mind it that much when the / one of the protagonist(s) is "special"... as long as that specialness isn't conveyed by dint of making everyone else needlessly stupid/annoying/etc... alas that's the case here.

38: That's the very thing that's driving me up the wall and back about that book. No other female character can be allowed to equal, let alone surpass, the paragon that is Alexia. Therefore, the female humans (mother, half-sisters, so-called "best friend") must be abysmally stupid, and the female Others must be 1) rare, and 2) evil.

I'm further into The Phoenix Guards now, and I'm seeing much the same thing. Tazendra is such an entertaining character that I'm enjoying the book in spite of it (more, at any rate, than I'm enjoying Soulless). But even though female characters are plentiful, so far Tazendra herself is the only one who isn't despicable. The female characters in authority (the Warlord, the old crone who is the King's adviser, the female Guard Captain who is rival to our heroes' superior) are particularly reprehensible. I know Brust has written halfway sympathetic female authority figures elsewhere in his series, so I know this isn't his regular thing -- but it's still a bit annoying.

I must confess I liked Souless much more than I did Clockwork Prince - see #36 above.

Sure it has it's weaknesses. But I almost felt I was in Victorian England. Almost. Does anyone have any better suggestions?

G.

40: The world-building and the character descriptions are definitely among the story's strengths, and Alternate History is a genre I like. I know I've been giving the book a lot of grief for its Highlander Syndrome and its treatment of the female Other, but I would give the book a "like" (three stars) if I had to rate it today. I will read the sequels eventually -- they were gifts from a friend -- but not right away.

I would like to ask any and all who might have read further in this series: does the portrayal of non-Alexia females EVER get any better?

Freedom and Necessity is an interesting piece of pseudo-Victoriana. I've also heard good things about To Say Nothing of the Dog, though I haven't read it yet.

As for Clare's Immortal Devices, I'll admit it interests me more than The Mortal Instruments, as I will almost always gravitate toward a period setting rather than a contemporary one. I got the first volume, Clockwork Angel, on sale at Books-a-Million. But I will hold off a while before I buy the sequels.

9> I've just read Stormdancer. I see your point. I didn't know enough about Japan to catch most of it, but I saw some things. For instance, the pandas. In a Japaneses based setting. Besides the use of Wikipedia as a reference source and the slow start, I thought the book was actually quite good. The characters were interesting, and Yukiko was a strong heroine. I particularly love her relationship with the griffin Buruu. It was also nice that it didn't end in a cliff hanger or have any other sort of "this is the first book in the series endings."

I've just left Green in Copper Downs, a very interesting fantasy land. I didn't always think that Green made good choices, but they were not totally illogical given her background, and they served to get her into the right place at the right time. Plus we have an interesting female Other character, the Dancing Mistress, and some assassin-warrior-priestesses. I think I liked this book more than most of those who've reviewed it, although it is not flawless by any means.

Now I'm travelling in Amerike with Cat in Cold fire.

Started Amelia Atwater-Rhodes' Hawksong. I can sorta kinda tell that the author was a teenager when she wrote this, but it's still a fascinating look into a wainscot world and promises to be a breezy, enjoyable read.

I finished HeartMate at last. I did find the worldbuilding more thought out than other futuristic genre romances I've read, it maintained cohesion throughout and the details of how magic/psychic powers/Flair was integrated with daily life were really what kept me reading through the end, but like an unfortunate majority of the genre romance novels I pick up, the romantic arc and some of the character background just didn't work for me.

SPOILERS and grousing in the next couple of paragraphs.

The male lead, T'Ash, changed strategies and backed off his controlling behavior with the female lead, Danith, sort of, but it felt like just that- changing strategies because what he was doing wasn't effective, rather than any real realization that what he had done (rage-teleporting Danith's concerned friend across the city, forbidding Danith to see her friends, and so on) was not okay. I really didn't understand why Danith started sleeping with him most of the way through the novel, when nothing seemed to change in her feelings toward him- I felt her development was somewhat weak throughout the novel overall, actually, the supposed love triangle other interest, "normal guy" Claif, never really felt like a possibility- he got one or two scenes, maybe? Less than T'Ash's friend Holm, who as I suspected is the protagonist of one of the sequels.

I never really understood why Rue and Flametree killed T'Ash's family beyond one sentence mentioned in passing as their being "rival houses" or somesuch, and it was unclear to me why none of the other noble families seemed to even care- if the society has a police force concerned with stolen jewelry (that plot thread just kind of fizzled out, I hope somebody told Winterberry they got it back), surely murder of an entire family would have been a big deal, especially in a setting where birth rates are low and preserving family lines for diversity is a thing? Why wouldn't T'Ash have gone to the police instead of living in the slums and later evidently killing all(?) of the Rues and Flametrees on a "vengeance stalk"- we know that there is an orphanage system from Danith's background, but wouldn't his family also likely have had alliances of their own with other families that would have taken him in? Maybe nobody liked them, and that's why evidently nobody noticed when four out of five of them were murdered, or thought that foul play might have been a thing when they all died in a fire, and they were known to have a rival house called Flametree whose magic power is starting fires? Maybe it was an act of vengeance exempt from the law- nobody seems to mind from a legal standpoint that T'Ash killed all those people, or that there's an entire family, the Hollys, that comes into their powers by killing people in duels. I don't know.

Anyways, the ending was bemusing as well. Their final obstacle to getting together is that each has to get over some emotional baggage- T'Ash has to let Danith see that his childhood was terrible so she can fix the "kernel of darkness" inside him, and Danith has to get over wanting to find out who she could be on her own before getting into a relationship. One of these things is not like the others. The resolution on Danith's side is that she has a one-paragraph training montage, T'Ash notes that she's come into her own the next time he sees her, and Danith now believes that she is strong enough to stand up for herself in their relationship. Okay, even though it was glossed over at least it was addressed that she's not going to tolerate his controlling tendencies, okay... but then T'Ash's last word on the matter at the end of the book is "I know how to control this wild woman of mine," and they both declare their love for each other. Er...

(Also, was the paragraph reminiscence where we find out the headmistress of Danith's orphanage was a pedophile and that's sort of conflated with lesbianism really, really necessary? "The love that Maiden Brigit of the Saille Home for Orphans had for Danith. Not a wholesome love, not a love of a mother/sister for a daughter/sister. Danith whimpered, then caught herself. Maiden Brigit had restrained that wrong sort of love, had controlled her sexual impulses, had never hurt any of the children." Just... no. It was an unpleasant surprise, especially given that another reader here had said good things about Owens' treatment of same-sex relationships in her more recent Summoning series.)

END SPOILERS.

The whole thing ended up leaving a bad taste in my mouth. I keep wanting to like SFF genre romance- on the surface, it seems to offer many of the things I look for in lighter reads, with a character-driven story and a guarantee that things are going to work out, but in practice, all of the books I pick up are fraught with relationship dynamics that come across as dysfunctional to me and unpleasant gender essentialism that I can never get into the story.

I may still try Owens' Summoning series in the future, as I think I have one or two of the books around, but I'm uncertain what to do with the couple of other Celta books I picked up. I noticed the next one focuses around a man who doesn't have psychic powers and therefore can't psychic love bond, and according to reviews this doesn't get magically (pun?) fixed, so I may continue on since I liked the setting... but it will be a little while. Those who have read further in the Celta series, do the relationship dynamics still largely follow the "controlling guy and uncertain woman come to terms" pattern or is there variety?

Anyways, after I finished that I read The Swan Maiden, which as I hoped was short and sweet and just what I needed to get over brooding about the irritating tropes in HeartMate. I'm now considering the embarrassment of riches in my TBR pile, and deciding where to go- I read the prologue for Into the Dark Lands last night, and it seems like a very promising entry into the "dramatized created mythology" subgenre (population including Louise Cooper's Time Master books and N.K. Jemisin's Inheritance Trilogy), but I'm not sure I want another romance-centered story right now, so I may or may not continue.

>42 pwaites: That's the thing- I find that this kind of lack of research or appropriative "I will use these things from an exotic setting to make my story interesting" is a content flaw, to a degree independent from other more mechanical parts of writerly craft that make a story enjoyable like plotting, characterization, and the like. It would be so much easier if people who do problematic things in their work were also poor writers and people with agreeable views were always great writers, but those things are not strongly correlated.

As for me, when I encountered the book in the store, the premise sounded interesting (steampunk dystopia, okay, heroine making a bond with an animal, cool), but the names threw me off before I even read about the lack of research elsewhere. "Buruu" is a loan word from English, a rendering of "blue" in the Japanese phonetic writing system, rather than an actual Japanese name, and "Shima," the name Kristoff chose for his country, is just a word for "island" or "islands." The whole blurb just had a vibe of "I named things by looking up translations of common words in the dictionary rather than using or basing things off actual personal and place names" that put me off.

This kind of misuse of language would grate on me through the whole book, and it would take a really strong connection with something else in the story to keep me going.

>44 kceccato: I'm curious to know what you think of Hawksong. I really enjoyed the series when I read it earlier this year, much more than I expected to. I was a little disappointed to read that the sort-of sequel trilogy starting next May ties the shapeshifters in with her whole modern-day vampire mythos, but I will probably still give it a try.

45: I just finished it. Wow, that was fast.

What I liked:
It was fun to read about a fantasy society in which none of the characters are pure human. Everyone's an Other, which means within this society there are Others who are MORE Other. I know many readers would decry the absence of a human protagonist: "Whom do I have to identify with?" But as anyone who has read any of my posts already knows, I relish the opportunity to walk in the shoes and see through the eyes of a female Other.

Also, this book had a kind of reverse Highlander Syndrome -- lots of women, in lots of roles, some sympathetic and even heroic, others driven by desperation to terrible acts, but none purely evil. That's right, not even the bad guys (and gals) are purely evil, which I believe is part of Atwater-Rhodes' point.

I also appreciated that the romance was allowed to develop slowly; here we don't get the "insta-love" that passes for a romance in too many YA novels.

What I didn't like:
It really boils down to one thing -- the heroine, Danica. She was at her most impressive at the very beginning of the story, with an act of kindness that transcended hatred. After that, however, she was a little too bland and passive for my liking. The most courageous thing she does in the whole of the story is actually someone else's idea. In the last half, she sinks into the damsel-in-distress role and never quite rises out of it. I found myself wishing that Irene, a far more courageous figure, could have been the heroine instead. (That's part of what I mean by "reverse Highlander Syndrome" -- a situation in which the supporting females, even with their limited page space, are more impressive than the female protagonist.)

I also didn't like it that Danica, while ostensibly a Queen, never seems to wield any real authority. Her love interest, Zane (a more interesting character, IMO), does speak and act with authority, but Danica seems less like a ruler than like a glorified Princess, sheltered, protected. Again, a supporting character -- the queen of the tiger clan -- is much more impressive.

I suspect I found myself more intrigued by Zane than by Danica because she is the first person narrator; she's the character we look THROUGH, while Zane is the character we look AT. Endowing a first-person narrator with vitality and personality is not as easy as it might seem. Only very talented writers can pull it off, Mark Twain and Harper Lee being the gold standards of course. When less talented writers attempt it, we get... Bella Swan. Most of the vivid first-person narrators in the fantasy genre right now seem to be male. The closest I've seen to a vibrant female first-person narrator so far this year has been the title heroine of Seraphina.

I'm back in The Final Empire in The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson.

I read C.J. Cherryh's latest Foreigner short, Invitations, which covers Bren's first day on the job. It was cute, but there wasn't much there beyond that, unfortunately- it didn't shed new light on things the way the other short, Deliberations, did by giving us Ilisidi and Tabini's view of things.

The description of Tabini's facial expressions in their first meeting was a little jarring- it's been ages since I've read the first book, but I seem to remember Bren not being able to face-read anyone around him, yet in this story set several years before that if I have my timeline right, he's picking up on Tabini's subtle amusement and changes of expression without a problem.

It brought a review I read of the latest book, Protector, commenting on how the depiction of atevi emotional display has really shifted from the beginning of the series- I chalked that up to Bren learning over time, but this story has me wondering now if it isn't a shift in Cherryh's writing style after all.

I am once again looking forward to the next installment, however- April of next year seems so far away!

>46 kceccato: I would agree with that. If you decide to continue with the series, I think you will find the next book, Snakecharm, will be a little bit of a frustrating read. It was definitely the weakest of the series for me, and one of the biggest disappointments was that I expected to see more of Danica in authority, but she is pretty much sidelined for a large part of the book in order for Zane to have enough to do to justify his being the POV character. Thankfully, the rest of the female-heavy cast is still there to carry things along with some additions, and I think Snakecharm is also the shortest book of the series.

I think you're on to something with first-person narrators being a window rather than a person, though, and I definitely have seen what I think of as the "boyfriend effect" where the female character is really just a vessel for directing the reader what to think about the male love interest- it doesn't have to be a love interest, or a female character for a male one, but that's where I most commonly see it- maybe a more neutral term for it would be the Gatsby effect, where Nick is just a vessel for relaying the character study of Gatsby.

Anyways, I didn't really feel like that was going on in Hawksong so much, though- it came across more to me as Atwater-Rhodes worldbuilding through contrast, so that the snake culture which is unfamiliar to Danica is explicitly described, and the avian culture which would be familiar to her is less so. I would have liked more scenes at the avian court, which also would have given Danica more chances to use her power, though if I remember I think part of the reason we didn't see her doing that more was a worldbuilding decision where the avians rule more by consensus/council overseen by a Tuuli Thea that has veto power and the final say and the serpents' are more direct authoritative orders from the Naga.

Back to first-person narrators, though, I think that characters who are unusually snarky or unusually introspective are the most natural fits for first-person, probably because both sarcastic commentary about the world and overthinking the world lend themselves to worldbuilding through the character's descriptions. Characters who don't really have either of these traits are a harder sell, I think, and both Danica and Zane sort of fall into that category.

For female first-person narrators, my favorites are the protagonist in Tanith Lee's Biting the Sun duology, Melacha in Melisa Michaels' Skyrider series, and Theodora in Doris Egan's Gate of Ivory (and presumably sequels, which I haven't read). First-person done right can really be something- I would say these three characters are probably among my favorites in the genre. I'm also fond of Jamil/Alasil in Laurie J. Marks' The Watcher's Mask, Lixia in Eleanor Arnason's A Woman of the Iron People, and Rihanna in Cheryl J. Franklin's Fire Get, and I like Joanne in Rachel Caine's Weather Warden series well enough too, but she doesn't leave as strong of an impression.

I finally finished Soulless. Here is my Goodreads review:

I resisted this book for quite a while. Does the fantasy genre really need yet another human gal/ shapeshifter guy romance? Is not the ground already thick with ultra-hunky Alpha male werewolves? Moreover, I found myself irritated by the treatment of all the female characters besides the Impressive Alexia. The human females were all dimwits, whether mean (mother, half-sisters) or good-natured (Ivy). As for nonhuman females, well, this book follows the Buffy-the-Vampire-Slayer prescription: male supernaturals are sympathetic "misunderstood monsters," worth loving and worth fighting for, but female supernaturals are evil-evil-evil! Since I'm especially interested in seeing female Others presented sympathetically, this did not sit well with me. I kept reading, delighting in the immersion in steampunk Victoriana and appreciating the plentiful witticisms. But I chafed.

(Note to my LT friends: I could not accept Alexia as Other. She is not Other, but rather, a human with a certain superpower. Awesome in her own right, true, but not an Other.)

Then I got to the last hundred pages.

All right, Ms. Carriger, finally I get it.
Finally I see Alexia come into her strength. Finally I'm shown, not merely told, that she is an impressive heroine.
Finally I really feel the chemistry between her and her hunky werewolf beau.
Finally I find myself anxious to see what she'll do next.

The last hundred pages saved the book for me. Now I can look back on the whole thing and say, with conviction, that was an enjoyable read.

But I hope the portrayal of other female characters improves in subsequent books.

@kceccato, as I recall, the portrayal of other women does improve somewhat. Even Ivy is shown to be a better/stronger person, and probably more perceptive, than she originally seems. And of course there is the inestimable Madame LeFoux, heh. And there is a female werewolf who's pretty cool as I recall...sorry, it's been a while since I read them.

I'm about halfway through City of Ashes, and I don't think I'm going to get any farther. I either dislike all the characters or don't really care about them (with the exception of Magnus, who is pretty much the only character I like). Not much has happened plot wise, and the main character is still attracted to Jace who is supposedly her "brother" (I'm 100% certain that this will turn out to have been a ruse caused by the books villain). And then, the other member of the love triangle, who I didn't actually hate (the same cannot be said for Jace), just got turned into a vampire. I mean, obviously, the YA genre just NEEDS more vampire love interests.

I continued with the series because I enjoyed her Clockwork Angel series, but I don't think I will be reading any more books by Cassandra Clare.

I'm still in London with "A Madness of Angels". I'm currently in the underground tunnels of the former Kingsway Telephone Exchanger, waiting with my allies for a magical battle to begin.

I'm in Winding Circle in Emelan, having just survived a crisis in Sandry's Book and now dealing with the aftermath in Tris's Book. Some of the flaws in the books are more apparent than when I first read these books around 6th grade, but I still really enjoy the setting and characters; I've re-read the first quartet, but not the second, and couldn't get into The Will of the Empress at all when I tried to read it after release, but I thought I'd give the series another read-through now that Battle Magic is finally coming out next month to fill in the gaps.

>51 pwaites: Obviously! I wonder if the other part of the love triangle gets turned into a werewolf?

54> He's already supernatural warrior with father issues and a bad attitude. I don't think he could get any worse.

I started an ARC of Grim Company yesterday but it failed the fifty page test. I gave it to a coworker who likes Joe Abercrombie more than I do since I saw a lot of people comparing it to his work online.

#55 by @Unreachableshelf> I received that ARC as well. Not nearly as good as Joe Abercrombie.

>56 majkia:

Well, Joe Abercrombie didn't do it for me either, so I was watching one thing I didn't care about enough to finish be compared to another thing I didn't care about enough to finish.

Started two new books last week: Robert J. Sawyer's W.W.W.: Watch, and Jana Oliver's Sojourn. It's too early for me to tell how I will feel about either, but I'm always cautiously optimistic.

I'm still in Emelan; I've finished Tris's Book and am just starting Daja's Book, with Briar's Book lined up after that, after which I may take a break from this setting. The Cloud Roads, Cold Magic and Jaran (with the whole series now conveniently available in ebook so I don't have to worry about difficulty finding the latter books!), Into the Dark Lands, The Crystal Variation, and Mind of My Mind are all clamoring for attention, and I keep seeing Jacqueline Koyanagi's Ascension and M.C.A Hogarth's work mentioned around as well, both of which I want to try (I have my eye on her short story collections Clays Beneath the Skies and novel The Aphorisms of Kherishdar).

The Circle of Magic quartet by and large fits into the comfort read niche for me- part of it is the nostalgia factor, for sure, but I like the craft-and-nature-based magic, and I enjoy the large cast of likeable characters that get along and work together, the minimum of angst, and the refreshing complete absence of romance subplots (at least in the first quartet). I suspect that's why I couldn't get into The Will of the Empress when I picked it up wanting the same type of comfort read I associate with the early books in the series- it's fairly well the opposite of them on all three counts. I suspect I may fare better taking it in context with the darker, murder-mystery-focused Circle Opens quartet and war story Battle Magic before it. It's difficult when a series changes tone as it progresses.

I also still have a couple of chapters The Left Hand of Darkness to finish up, hoping to do so over my upcoming long US Labor Day weekend when I have time and space to dedicate to it- this isn't one I want to rush through.

>54 pwaites: And he's the lesser of two evils? Goodness.

>59 sandstone78:: I too really like Pierce's Winding Circle books, and the first series in particular. Watching the friendships grow and powers develop over the books is very satisfying to me. And I like their relationships with their mentors too, in a genre where plucky kids usually go it alone.

I've just left the Cold fire of Expedition with Cat and Bee. I adored Cold magic, the first in this trilogy, but Cold fire sagged badly in the middle section. The beginning and ending were very strong, and hopefully things will move a bit faster in the third book.

After my disenchantment with my recent Fantasy reading, I am please I found Land of Hope and Glory. Evidently his 1st novel but it does have a sequel.

An unusual inversion of the "British Raj" alternative history, and an interesting magic system.

No spoilers (I haven't finished it yet) and will be getting the sequel.

I sometimes wish I rated...

Dealing with forest fires in Daja's Book- somebody's been magically preventing them for decades, and as we've learned in previous books in the series, messing with nature for human convenience never ends well.

One thing I've noticed in my reread is that the original US editions of the books clearly showed the diverse skin tones of the cast, but in the whole series US re-release (evidently prepared for The Will of the Empress, which has a similar cover), all of the characters are presented in silhouette- except Tris and Sandry, who are both white. Melting Stones, released after The Will of the Empress, does accurately depict Evvy, but that's one book out of nine- and soon to be ten; the new release, Battle Magic, has an abstract cover with a sword and a vine that doesn't really go with either cover style. (I do prefer it to the silhouette-looking cover style, though- even aside from not showing the characters clearly, I don't think they fit the tone of the series either, certainly not the lighter first quartet.)

>60 Sakerfalcon: Yes, adults being present and neither antagonistic nor useless nor killed off for the sake of the kids' character development is a welcome thing indeed. It's also just been undeniably pleasant to read a story where magic has uses other than maiming and killing and the like that get the focus in the story for the most part.

I'm glad to hear positive things about Elliott's Spiritwalker trilogy, I think I may head to Cold Magic next. (Though I must admit, I am tempted to take up Cold Magic and sequels next partially for the chance to read two books with the name "Cold Fire" (Elliot's Cold Fire and Pierce's Winding Circle Cold Fire) in the same year... I also have both Moira Katson's Shadowborn and Alison Sinclair's Shadowborn in my TBR, though the latter is the third book of a trilogy.)

One of the things I'm appreciating most about W.W.W.: Watch so far is that Robert J. Sawyer presents us with a teenage female protagonist with an intact family. Not only that, but she actually gets along fairly well with both her father and her mother, and they are real characters rather than window dressing. Caitlin Decter is a smart, likable character, and I have to give Sawyer additional bonus points for NOT saddling her with a romance plot.

Now, Sojourn -- the Good:
An interesting juxtaposition between a future and a past that are corrupt in their different ways, and the portrayal of the dangers that come about when time travel becomes a tourist industry.

The Bad:
It looks we're headed straight for yet another love triangle involving an ordinary girl (albeit one from the future) and two supernatural guys. Yawn.

>62 sandstone78:: I noticed that one of the recent covers for Shatterglass shows Tris from behind with STRAIGHT BLOND hair. Grrrrr ..... talk about not reading the book!

I've finished my re-read of A Madness of Angels and will read the next in the series, The Midnight Mayor next month. I'm not going to update the review I wrote last time, but may add something about one thing that irritated me this time round, which is how the Whites and other magical groups use Matthew Swift as a convenient scape-goat for whatever goes wrong.

He has been dead for the past two years, wasn't around as the Tower grew in strength and picked off its enemies one by one, and it wasn't his idea to form an alliance to bring down the Tower. Sinclair had that well in hand already, and invited the anti-magic Order to join the alliance, and it was the head of the Whites who decided to force Guy Lee's hand and get him to attack sooner rather than later. But it's stil apparently all Matthew's fault that people got killed and that the Order have more information than before about the magical groups they are intent on destroying!

Still in Daja's Book. It's a bit odd that there only seem to be two languages in the entire world, Traders and everyone else, despite the fact that many characters come from different countries- in fact, this seems to extend to culture in general as well, there are Traders' morality and cultural norms, and then there's everyone else, despite many characters being pointed out as coming from different countries. Hmm.

>64 Sakerfalcon: I checked, and was not surprised to see it's from the same series of covers as all of the silhouettes. I also can't explain why she is making jazz hands at a washbasin. Bemusing.

>65 isabelx: Things like that annoy me as well, when it seems like people's attitudes in-story are bent away from logical conclusions in ways that seem designed purely to ensure suffering for the protagonist. The more a story appears to be plotted along the lines "what's the worst thing that can happen now?", the less engaged I typically am with a story, similar to way the technique of "anyone can die, I mean anyone, and many of them will!" tends to make me less willing to invest in any of the characters.

I have finished The Color of Distance. I will be looking for more of Thomson's work. Not everyone on Goodreads agrees, but I found her writing style quite lyrical and lovely, and her outlook refreshingly optimistic. Being an alien/human first contact story with a strong pro-environmentalist message, this book took some of the bad taste of the similarly themed The Word for World Is Forest out of my mouth. I've posted my thoughts more fully over in my reading blog on The Green Dragon. (I hope that's okay -- I don't know if there are any rules about mentioning other threads on other groups -- don't want to get in trouble.)

Like all good books, this one leaves me with a pleasant afterglow. I will miss Juna, Anito, Moki, and the others I've spent quality time with.

I'm Cainsville, IL in Omens. Haven't quite worked out what I think of it yet.

I've just read and loved The Lies of Locke Lamora. I can't believe that I hadn't heard of it before!

I loved The Lies of Locke Lamora as well. The third of the series is about to be released. Waiting with baited breath for it.