Less promising
Mar. 5th, 2007 08:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraAfter extracting Dolly and the Cookie Bird from the morass of my room and finishing it, I then managed to leave Dolly and the Starry Bird perched on the toilet roll holder in a convention centre (I was sorting through my bag and failed to reincorporate everything). Fortunately, it was still there when I realised and went back for it. Mainly, I'm glad that I got to find out what happened without having to track down another copy, but I also tend to treat my current book as a combination wallet/entertainment item, and in this case it had my bus pass, twenty dollars and a list of transport times acting as bookmarks, all of which I'm relieved to still have.
I'll get back to the Dolly books, but in the meantime:
A good example of why I don’t read much current fantasy. Priestess of the White. There’s very little to this, despite its near-700 pages; a world that never feels real or moves beyond the obvious clichés (whores, cute telepathic animals, a bright kid who gets bullied by the other boys but wins the affections of the school cheerleader equivalent etc etc), on-the-nose dialogue, characters that don’t live on past their paragraphs. I read the first one of The Black Magician series and had similar problems (not least of it being the complete lack of weather), and I don’t think I’ll be picking up anything else of hers. Given her sales figures, I doubt this will upset her.
A bomb goes off in Manchester, killing a Muslim girl; her friend, who survives, is photographed helping the white English boy also caught in the blast. Mixing It. The media spin this as a Romeo and Juliet story, which earns both of them death threats and hostility from within and without their communities; despite this, they form an alliance that extends out to the wider world. Meanwhile, nameless figures plot another bombing…
It’s not a bad book, but it has the feeling of being written to order. The characters never really step off the page; the identity of one of the nameless terrorists is obvious from a structural point of view without making much sense in terms of what we learn about the character. I did like that the relationship between the two leads isn’t romantic, although it hovers on the edge.
I'll get back to the Dolly books, but in the meantime:
A good example of why I don’t read much current fantasy. Priestess of the White. There’s very little to this, despite its near-700 pages; a world that never feels real or moves beyond the obvious clichés (whores, cute telepathic animals, a bright kid who gets bullied by the other boys but wins the affections of the school cheerleader equivalent etc etc), on-the-nose dialogue, characters that don’t live on past their paragraphs. I read the first one of The Black Magician series and had similar problems (not least of it being the complete lack of weather), and I don’t think I’ll be picking up anything else of hers. Given her sales figures, I doubt this will upset her.
A bomb goes off in Manchester, killing a Muslim girl; her friend, who survives, is photographed helping the white English boy also caught in the blast. Mixing It. The media spin this as a Romeo and Juliet story, which earns both of them death threats and hostility from within and without their communities; despite this, they form an alliance that extends out to the wider world. Meanwhile, nameless figures plot another bombing…
It’s not a bad book, but it has the feeling of being written to order. The characters never really step off the page; the identity of one of the nameless terrorists is obvious from a structural point of view without making much sense in terms of what we learn about the character. I did like that the relationship between the two leads isn’t romantic, although it hovers on the edge.
