cyphomandra (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cyphomandra) wrote2006-09-03 07:36 pm
cyphomandra) wrote2006-09-03 07:36 pm
Entry tags:
Catching up
I am, ultimately, intending to use this as my book log, but I'm currently miles behind and also part way through far too many books. Anyway, I finished two today to start with, even if one is really the sort of book I like to pretend I don't read anymore...
Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory, Not even good pulp, but I'd read the first two - also borrowed from the library - and figured I might as well finish them off. I'd guess that James Mallory does the battle sequences, as I don't remember Lackey being big on these in her solo books. They always make me feel like I'm playing Warcraft, only I prefer my Elven archers to be silent and deadly rather than perpetually brewing tea and interior decorating, as they are here. Lackey isn't as bad as Melanie Rawn, but I do wonder who does all the maintenance in these worlds, and why there are never any class revolutions
Anyway. All the good people eventually work together, magic escalates appropriately so there's always a Bigger Spell when needed, characters do that annoyingly smug brand of self-analysis that I associate with Lackey (it's like Heinlein, only his characters tend to smugly analyse everyone else) and, ultimately, one of the important characters does actually die to save everyone. Only then she gets reborn as a violet-eyed elf baby with an Elven Bethrothal Necklace Birthmark, so her true elven love can hold her tiny baby finger and talk fondly about how he might not be able to wait eighteen years for her. Eewww. I presume this is meant to be touching and life-affirming, but I was just rather creeped out. And yes, I did read the whole book, so there must have been things I liked about it, or else I'm just a masochist in denial; I can usually remember who all the characters are (one of my stalled books is a fantasy where I can't remember anyone! I keep having to look at the blurb just to get the three major characters sorted, and all these people keep dying and I have to flip back frantically to work out how I'm supposed to feel about it) and there's a certain comfortable predictability to it. And it's not as if the things she does with characters are wrong - establish sympathy, show agency, complicate etc - but it's interesting to see how the way she does it really doesn't work for me, and think about how I'd try to do it. I would not, for example, make all my bad guys gratuitous sexual deviants - which makes me realise that the pro-gay, pro-polyamory style of some of her other books is missing in this trilogy, and instead celibacy is massively important and there's a lot of heavy handed single entendre involving unicorns. Hmm.
I had mentally tagged Isabelle Holland as an Australian author, which I think reflects some confusion over Mel Gibson doing The Man Without a Face as a movie. Instead, wikipaedia informs me that she was born in Britain before moving to the US in 1940 (it says "after the war", but that must have been a particularly short version of the war or else the date is wrong), and also depresses me by letting me know she died four years ago. Cecily appears to have been her first novel, and as first novels go it's good but slight; unpopular (fat, not quite quite) girl at UK boarding school interacts with young confident teacher who's never had to think about whether the system that judges both of them is wrong. There's a bit too much all-knowingness on the parts of the head mistress and the jaunty American fiancee, but it's solid and interesting. Sadly I am pessimistic and think that Marie Dobsons a la Antonia Forest ("people you can't like") are possibly more realistic than Cecilys, who are more the victim of bad timing and end up ultimately redeemable, but I liked it.
The wikipaedia entry links to the one for Man Without a Face, which I did rather like as a film and still liked after subsequently reading the book, although I was rather annoyed at how much they'd toned down the issue of sexuality (specificially, homosexuality) and personal responsibility for this. I've read a handful of her others - Dinah and the Green Fat Kingdom, Perdita - and liked them; might look for some more, later.
Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory, Not even good pulp, but I'd read the first two - also borrowed from the library - and figured I might as well finish them off. I'd guess that James Mallory does the battle sequences, as I don't remember Lackey being big on these in her solo books. They always make me feel like I'm playing Warcraft, only I prefer my Elven archers to be silent and deadly rather than perpetually brewing tea and interior decorating, as they are here. Lackey isn't as bad as Melanie Rawn, but I do wonder who does all the maintenance in these worlds, and why there are never any class revolutions
Anyway. All the good people eventually work together, magic escalates appropriately so there's always a Bigger Spell when needed, characters do that annoyingly smug brand of self-analysis that I associate with Lackey (it's like Heinlein, only his characters tend to smugly analyse everyone else) and, ultimately, one of the important characters does actually die to save everyone. Only then she gets reborn as a violet-eyed elf baby with an Elven Bethrothal Necklace Birthmark, so her true elven love can hold her tiny baby finger and talk fondly about how he might not be able to wait eighteen years for her. Eewww. I presume this is meant to be touching and life-affirming, but I was just rather creeped out. And yes, I did read the whole book, so there must have been things I liked about it, or else I'm just a masochist in denial; I can usually remember who all the characters are (one of my stalled books is a fantasy where I can't remember anyone! I keep having to look at the blurb just to get the three major characters sorted, and all these people keep dying and I have to flip back frantically to work out how I'm supposed to feel about it) and there's a certain comfortable predictability to it. And it's not as if the things she does with characters are wrong - establish sympathy, show agency, complicate etc - but it's interesting to see how the way she does it really doesn't work for me, and think about how I'd try to do it. I would not, for example, make all my bad guys gratuitous sexual deviants - which makes me realise that the pro-gay, pro-polyamory style of some of her other books is missing in this trilogy, and instead celibacy is massively important and there's a lot of heavy handed single entendre involving unicorns. Hmm.
I had mentally tagged Isabelle Holland as an Australian author, which I think reflects some confusion over Mel Gibson doing The Man Without a Face as a movie. Instead, wikipaedia informs me that she was born in Britain before moving to the US in 1940 (it says "after the war", but that must have been a particularly short version of the war or else the date is wrong), and also depresses me by letting me know she died four years ago. Cecily appears to have been her first novel, and as first novels go it's good but slight; unpopular (fat, not quite quite) girl at UK boarding school interacts with young confident teacher who's never had to think about whether the system that judges both of them is wrong. There's a bit too much all-knowingness on the parts of the head mistress and the jaunty American fiancee, but it's solid and interesting. Sadly I am pessimistic and think that Marie Dobsons a la Antonia Forest ("people you can't like") are possibly more realistic than Cecilys, who are more the victim of bad timing and end up ultimately redeemable, but I liked it.
The wikipaedia entry links to the one for Man Without a Face, which I did rather like as a film and still liked after subsequently reading the book, although I was rather annoyed at how much they'd toned down the issue of sexuality (specificially, homosexuality) and personal responsibility for this. I've read a handful of her others - Dinah and the Green Fat Kingdom, Perdita - and liked them; might look for some more, later.