Curate's eggs
Sep. 23rd, 2007 10:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraBlaze of Glory, Michael Pryor. Aubrey Fitzwilliam is the son of an ex-prime minister, brilliant at magic, an excellent actor, attractive, intelligent, good at sports (in the first XI with a distinctive late cut) and a practised code-breaker. In his spare time, he disguises himself as Tommy Sparks, a petty thief with an irritating mockney accent, and wanders the city’s less attractive areas, picking up gossip and funding medical clinics on the side while winning the undying loyalty of the poor. In the first chapter of this book Aubrey tries a dangerous new spell in an attempt to harness the power of death magic, and kills himself.
I do admit that anything with magic as a science in this sort of semi-1900 setting is going to be a hard sell while I still have most of Full Metal Alchemist in my head, but Aubrey really is one of the most insufferable leads I’ve spent time with for quite a while. In addition, he has a faithful sidekick, George, who exists to do the heavy lifting and point out how clever Aubrey is, and he also picks up one of those feisty head-tossing love interests who hang out in this sort of book holding on to useful chunks of plot and being conveniently related to various key characters (she’s called Caroline. She knows martial arts and can fly ornithopters). It’s a shame, because the skeleton of this has some good ideas, but it’s one of those books where nothing ever is allowed to inconvenience the hero – being partially dead, for example, is one of those things that shows up every so often, when it’s convenient for Aubrey to have a couple of paragraphs of magical struggling and angsting, but goes away again when it might actually stop him doing something. The limitations of the magic system are unclear and there’s never any real tension in the action. Also, while I’m on a roll, the paper is appallingly low quality and appears to be visibly ageing everytime I look at it.
On the good side, I got this free (a giveaway with my copy of HP & the Deathly Hallows). And I'm in the middle of at least two other very good books that have nothing to do with this one.
Playscript - haven't seen it, either on stage or in the movie (which I think is Emma Thompson). Excellent start, and I can see where it would work very well on stage, but it does lean rather heavily on stereotype for all the health professionals (the sympathetic but dim female nurse as well as the distant uncaring male doctors), and I’m never entirely comfortable with the “strong intelligent woman learns she can be broken too” theme – but having the reconciliation and acknowledgement of human weakness be with her former lecturer/mentor (also female) is really nice, particularly when she starts analysing Margaret Wise Brown picture books. In minor nit-pickingness, Edson makes up the names of chemotherapy drugs by combining bits of existing ones, which bothers me because parts of drug names imply certain properties. “Vin-“ as a prefix indicates a drug derived from a vinca alkaloid (e.g. vincristine and vinblastine), which is a mitotic inhibitor, while “-platin” as a suffix indicates a platinum derivative (e.g. cisplatin and carboplatin), which works differently – it’s an alkylating agent – and so giving someone “vinplatin”, which happens here, makes no sense at all. Connie Willis does this a lot in Passage, where it bothers me more, but in a play that gets annoyed about mis-cited commas you’d think they’d just use the real names.
WebMage, Kelly McCullough. Ravirn, computer hacker and child of the Fates, is framed for an attempt to mess with the nature of destiny itself, and must try and stay alive, avoid pursuit and work out a way to defeat the real power behind this attack. He’s assisted by Melchior, his familiar and laptop, who is actually pretty nifty, and Cerice, his forty-seventh cousin, who is stunningly beautiful and madly convenient in terms of forwarding the plot, saving Ravirn, patching him up and providing an excuse for rather purple sex scenes (bursts of lilac, summer lightning and white waterfalls, which made me feel rather like I was looking at a budget fireworks assortment).
WebMage, Kelly McCullough. I also like the fact that all the powers in this are female – the Fates, the Furies, the Mother of them all (Necessity). It does feel like all the characters just popped into existence at the beginning of the novel (there’s a painful bit where Ravirn and Cerice discuss how surprising it is that they hadn’t gotten together before, as they both wanted to) and I never really got the hang of how the “child of the fates” thing works, especially as we almost never see anyone who isn’t, and there are scenes where I can see the author yanking strings desperately in an attempt to get my emotional response (Melchior’s apparent demise, for example), but even if it didn’t work they’re the right sort of attempts. I’d pick up something else by the author.
The Diamond Girls, Jacqueline Wilson. Four girls (all with different fathers) and their imminently about-to-deliver mother move from their fairly shoddy estate to what turns out to be an equally appalling council house in the middle of nowhere. I always enjoy the construction of Wilson’s books, and I think it takes an amazing amount of panache to write something involving characters at whom the Daily Telegraph would point fingers and put them through things like teenage pregnancy, gang encounters and domestic violence, and yet have the overall mood be positive. This one didn’t really grab me, tho’, and it’s more a case of admiring from a distance.
Unpublished novel for critique – not an indepth one, but an “advise re marketing pre-rewrite” one, difficult in that it can go at least two ways and one of them is a genre (erotica) I don’t really have much idea about at all as a commercial market. Have also notified author that one of the two main characters is missing an arc.
I do admit that anything with magic as a science in this sort of semi-1900 setting is going to be a hard sell while I still have most of Full Metal Alchemist in my head, but Aubrey really is one of the most insufferable leads I’ve spent time with for quite a while. In addition, he has a faithful sidekick, George, who exists to do the heavy lifting and point out how clever Aubrey is, and he also picks up one of those feisty head-tossing love interests who hang out in this sort of book holding on to useful chunks of plot and being conveniently related to various key characters (she’s called Caroline. She knows martial arts and can fly ornithopters). It’s a shame, because the skeleton of this has some good ideas, but it’s one of those books where nothing ever is allowed to inconvenience the hero – being partially dead, for example, is one of those things that shows up every so often, when it’s convenient for Aubrey to have a couple of paragraphs of magical struggling and angsting, but goes away again when it might actually stop him doing something. The limitations of the magic system are unclear and there’s never any real tension in the action. Also, while I’m on a roll, the paper is appallingly low quality and appears to be visibly ageing everytime I look at it.
On the good side, I got this free (a giveaway with my copy of HP & the Deathly Hallows). And I'm in the middle of at least two other very good books that have nothing to do with this one.
Playscript - haven't seen it, either on stage or in the movie (which I think is Emma Thompson). Excellent start, and I can see where it would work very well on stage, but it does lean rather heavily on stereotype for all the health professionals (the sympathetic but dim female nurse as well as the distant uncaring male doctors), and I’m never entirely comfortable with the “strong intelligent woman learns she can be broken too” theme – but having the reconciliation and acknowledgement of human weakness be with her former lecturer/mentor (also female) is really nice, particularly when she starts analysing Margaret Wise Brown picture books. In minor nit-pickingness, Edson makes up the names of chemotherapy drugs by combining bits of existing ones, which bothers me because parts of drug names imply certain properties. “Vin-“ as a prefix indicates a drug derived from a vinca alkaloid (e.g. vincristine and vinblastine), which is a mitotic inhibitor, while “-platin” as a suffix indicates a platinum derivative (e.g. cisplatin and carboplatin), which works differently – it’s an alkylating agent – and so giving someone “vinplatin”, which happens here, makes no sense at all. Connie Willis does this a lot in Passage, where it bothers me more, but in a play that gets annoyed about mis-cited commas you’d think they’d just use the real names.
WebMage, Kelly McCullough. Ravirn, computer hacker and child of the Fates, is framed for an attempt to mess with the nature of destiny itself, and must try and stay alive, avoid pursuit and work out a way to defeat the real power behind this attack. He’s assisted by Melchior, his familiar and laptop, who is actually pretty nifty, and Cerice, his forty-seventh cousin, who is stunningly beautiful and madly convenient in terms of forwarding the plot, saving Ravirn, patching him up and providing an excuse for rather purple sex scenes (bursts of lilac, summer lightning and white waterfalls, which made me feel rather like I was looking at a budget fireworks assortment).
WebMage, Kelly McCullough. I also like the fact that all the powers in this are female – the Fates, the Furies, the Mother of them all (Necessity). It does feel like all the characters just popped into existence at the beginning of the novel (there’s a painful bit where Ravirn and Cerice discuss how surprising it is that they hadn’t gotten together before, as they both wanted to) and I never really got the hang of how the “child of the fates” thing works, especially as we almost never see anyone who isn’t, and there are scenes where I can see the author yanking strings desperately in an attempt to get my emotional response (Melchior’s apparent demise, for example), but even if it didn’t work they’re the right sort of attempts. I’d pick up something else by the author.
The Diamond Girls, Jacqueline Wilson. Four girls (all with different fathers) and their imminently about-to-deliver mother move from their fairly shoddy estate to what turns out to be an equally appalling council house in the middle of nowhere. I always enjoy the construction of Wilson’s books, and I think it takes an amazing amount of panache to write something involving characters at whom the Daily Telegraph would point fingers and put them through things like teenage pregnancy, gang encounters and domestic violence, and yet have the overall mood be positive. This one didn’t really grab me, tho’, and it’s more a case of admiring from a distance.
Unpublished novel for critique – not an indepth one, but an “advise re marketing pre-rewrite” one, difficult in that it can go at least two ways and one of them is a genre (erotica) I don’t really have much idea about at all as a commercial market. Have also notified author that one of the two main characters is missing an arc.
