Mendoza in Hollywood

These Company books are addictive reading. Our broken-hearted, misanthropic, immortal heroine finds herself collecting samples for preservation in Hollywood long before it becomes Hollywood. The Civil War is raging and in California people live in shacks and shoot at strangers just to say hello. With other Company operatives, Mendoza lives in a stagecoach waystation and passes the time with work and thinking about what this place is going to be like in a few decades' time. They even have a film festival, screening Von Stroheim's original nine hour cut of Greed and DW Griffith's Intolerance. Mendoza dreams nightly of her dead mortal lover, Nicholas and contemplates her lot and her future and the pain of being alive.
Okay, that might make show more it sound a bit of a drag, but Baker excels at character and setting, as well as well as the brain-tickling high concept of the time-traveling Company and its immortal operatives, so she creates a vivid and often very funny picture of life lived at the primitive edge of the American West by a bunch of highly educated people who know what HAS happened and what is going to happen, but who don't necessarily know how to deal with it. The older ones are a bit mad, and the younger ones have harsh lessons to learn about love and loss.
Excellent, fun read; historical science fiction with a strong romantic streak, reminiscent in terms of style of Lois McMaster Bujold and Connie Willis. show less

Mendoza in Hollywood - Kage Baker (9/10)
And the good just keeps on going. I find it fascinating that Baker has set up this series with Mendoza as the pivot of the books and yet she isn't always the main character in a novel. She is in this one however, as we see her dealing with humanity again after centuries of blessed peace and solitude in the wilderness. Her life goes to hell in a handbasket from here as things get more complicated, more fascinating and more conspiracies rear their heads. Baker has a way of writing that makes all these things flow instead of backing up in one's brain and I'm left with a feeling of great satisfaction (and anticipation for the next volume) at the end of each book.

Each book in this series managed to utterly surprise me! In this one we join Mendoza in California - in Hollywood, years before the famous film town. We're treated to the daily lives of a ill-matched gang of immortals killing time and saving history. The slow days and little details of their lives were so engrossing, that I was sorry when the plot kicked up a million notched and the book finished in a flurry of action. I love Mendoza. I found some of the human politics a little tedious, as I did with some of the religious argument in the first book, but I happily skimmed. I'd give this to followers of the series - it's not a good place to start the story.

It's a flawed story--see the other LT reviews--but this is one of my favorite books. You just cannot miss Kage Baker's love of Los Angeles and LA's history as she tells this rather disorderly tale; it almost makes me wish I knew the places she's describing.

I was afraid that, due to the title, this was going to talk overmuch about movies (books that get all meta- about film and media really annoy me - it's a personal thing). But the 'Hollywood' in this case is a good deal before the time of the silver screen - the botanist Mendoza has been assigned to this stretch of country in 1862, studying the native flora and saving anything that might be valuable to her bosses in the future. Still traumatized by the martyrdom of her human lover Nicholas, she is at first bemused and then, willy-nilly, head over heels when she meets a British spy who looks exactly like her lost love.

Full of quirky, unique characters and humor and well as poignancy.

What misshapen but readable books Kage Baker wrote. She puts just enough plot in Mendoza in Hollywood to keep you reading and make sure the book has an ending, but she really wants to talk about movies and historical forces, so please sit down and wait while she does. If there's one part that fits the science fictional conceit, it's that immortals have all the time in the world, so what's the hurry getting to the end of the story? The closest analog in classic SF I can think of is Fred Pohl.

Ah, Baker, you trickster. You just sold me "Garden of Iden" all over again. Boooo. Also, as a sulky, cranky, impudent wenches myself, you think I would love to read a book with such a main character. Well, no. 1) I do not suffer from Mary Sue syndrome. 2) Cranky wenches are not that charming. 3) Romance? Argh, lame. Booooooooooo.

Recommendation: Only read out of devotion to Baker and the Company Series.