cyphomandra

The heart principle, Helen Hoang
Pandora, Jilly Cooper (re-read)
The edge, Roland Smith
The charm offensive, Alison Cochrun
Total creative control, Joanna Chambers & Sally Malcolm
Lil’ Leo, Hagio Moto
[redacted for Yuletide]

Finished Helen Hoang’s The Heart Principle (mentioned last reading post) and really enjoyed it - it’s not going to be the romance that lingers with me, though, but the story of an adult autistic woman dealing with her delayed diagnosis and her loving but actively unhelpful family. I understand this was very close to Hoang’s own experience.

The Edge, Roland Smith. Peak Marcello is a teenage climbing prodigy who previously failed to reach the summit of Mt Everest in the rather good YA novel Peak that I haven’t got around to reviewing yet. In this he reluctantly agrees to go on a peace climbing expedition in the Hindu Kush that goes badly wrong. What works well in this is his mum, a climber who gave up professional climbing after a bad accident (Peak’s dad, an active professional climber, is divorced from her and largely absent), but who picks it up again to back up Peak on this and turns out to have lots of useful skills, and I really liked the relationship between her and Peak developing. The rest of it is not so successful, the annoying arrogant climber with no real talent seem an unlikely pick for any other reason than to be an antagonist, and the homage at the ending that is supposed to be touching comes across as too much authorial heavy-handedness. I do want to read the next two, though, because the climbing is great and Peak is growing as a character.

Pandora, Jilly Cooper. This is a Jilly Cooper that I’ve only read once before; it came out in 2002, after Score! (1999), which was the first of her books that I thought was really terrible in a way that indicated a basic loss of authorial control, whereas prior to that she’d had characters do terrible things but still manage to make the readers understand why they did it and sympathise. Jump! (2010) had at least one functional plot line and did make me cry at the end, but Wicked! (2006) and the execrable Mount! (2016) do not inspire in me any desire to return to them, whereas I will still cheerfully return to my personal favourites of Polo (1991) and Appassionata (1996) at any opportunity. Pandora is a mixed success and the ending doesn’t really work, and in addition there are no horses.

What there is is a Raphael painting of Pandora, and a repressed gay art dealer who acquires it in dubious circumstances in WWII, and then a multigenerational saga with lots of artistic types and arguments over the painting. Cooper handles her cast well (it is Rutshire-adjacent and Rupert not infrequently inserts himself into the action) and the art side is well done, but the wheels come off a bit in the modern day setting. One thread that really doesn’t work for me is Zachary Ansteig, the tigerish journalist whom, it turns out, is seeking the Pandora painting as reparations for art stolen by the Nazis from his Jewish ancestor, and although he is a romantic lead Cooper unfortunately treats him more as a punchline than as a character (Abby Rosen, the lead in Appasionata is also Jewish; but this is a much more emotionally weighted background for Cooper to deal with and she doesn’t make it work, and her attempts at her usual jabs become far too nasty). When she returns to her strengths, with a high-minded impoverished artist who ends up sleeping on the streets with his loyal dog, she is much more comfortable and effective.

The charm offensive, Alison Cochrun
Total creative control, Joanna Chambers & Sally Malcolm

I read these both together, trading off chapters depending on which one was irking me least, and as might be anticipated wasn’t wild about either of them. Both are m/m romances set in the TV industry; The Charm Offensive has Dev, a not-so-secret romantic working on the latest season of a successful reality TV dating show who starts to fall for the latest bachelor, Charlie, a tech mogul who has reluctantly agreed to appear to salvage his tech career. Total Creative Control has Lewis Hunter, the volatile and demanding creator of hit UK TV show Leeches (about vampires), doing a deal to rework the show to enter the US market - but this could mean losing his slashy second lead and, as a result, losing his own personal assistant, Aaron Page, a devoted fan of the show and fanfic writer who is the only one who can put up with Lewis’ demands and also now deeply involved in writing for it while hopelessly worshipping his boss from afar.

I really disliked the power imbalance in the second one but both characters felt as if they achieved the same level of believability, whereas in the first Dev is compelling but Charlie never makes sense (why is he doing this show???). Both have bits that hit my second-hand embarrassment squick, especially the second where Lewis ends up declaring his undying love for Aaron at a fanfic convention, aargh. TCO has a significantly better backing cast while TCC has just thrown a bunch of cliches at a country house retreat to see what sticks. Neither made me want to read more - I’ve already tried Chambers’ historical novels a few times because I want to like them and failed, while Malcolm favours small town romances with all the tension sucked out of them that are never going to be my thing.

Lil’ Leo (I really wish they'd stuck with the original's レオくん, Leo-kun) is a tabby cat who wants to do more; go to school, act in movies, get a job at a manga studio. Hagio draws him in a liminal space where he can look and act more human or more feline as the situation demands, or as would prove most entertaining. It’s episodic and endearing and quite different from her Heart of Thomas, which was published 30 years earlier and which I’m reading rather slowly because I need to be in the right mode for that degree of emotional fraughtness. The manga studio bits are particularly great.

This is probably the last month or so.

Finished reading:

Tana French, Broken Harbour. A family living on a post-boom half-finished housing estate start to fall apart when the father becomes obsessed with animal noises in the attic; the view point in this, “Scorcher” Kennedy, has bitter family ties to the location (called Broken Harbour in his childhood, it now rejoices in the name of Brianstown). The bit where the lead detective has a family connection that they don’t disclose is growing thin here with repetition here,, as is the moment where the detective tells the reader that this is the moment when they could have stopped everything from falling apart but didn't. Kennedy is less likeable than Rob but more principled in the end, and the relationship with his rookie partner Richie slightly less dysfunctional than Rob and Cassie, and it’s all very readable and has a great sense of place, but I do want something a bit different. I am third out of ten holds for The Likeness and somewhere in the 30s for The Trespasser, and looking forward to both.

Victor LaValle, The Ballad of Black Tom. A black hustler, Charles Thomas Tester, takes a job playing music for a white man who turns out to be summoning the Elder Gods; this is inspired by and criticising Lovecraft, specifically his Horror at Red Hook story and LaValle dedicates the book to him with all his complicated feelings. The scene setting and Tom and his father are all great, and I would have happily read more of it, but the book switches to Malone's (he's the investigating detective who is the protagonist of Lovecraft's piece) pov and although I can see why LaValle did it it lost me as a reader. There are a number of revisionist Lovecraft pieces out or coming out at the moment, and I would particularly recommend Ruthanna Emry's The Litany of Earth.

Jilly Cooper, Jump! I started reading Mount!, which is just out, and realised less than a chapter in that I never finished Jump, which I think ran into earthquakes or something similar, as I stalled less than a hundred pages before the end. It’s still not up there with Appassionata and Polo, but I do admire Cooper having her romantic lead be a grandmother in her late 60s, with a secondary character being a Pakistani stable lad who is suspected of terrorism. I remember the flood as being more significant than it was on this re-read but I think mostly that was because that was where I stalled last time so it felt as if it went on for ever. I do find the way spoiling animals is totally approved of and done by all the best characters while spoiling children is terribly wrong a bit irritating. Some of this is due to having read Jilly Cooper’s The Common Years, a sort of personal diary of nature via dog-walking, in which not one but two of her dogs have to be put down (I think for both killing cats or else a child's small dog is the final offence) despite her doing everything possible to control their terrible behaviour except a) training them or b) having them neutered. I did cry at the end, because there's a bit that reminds me of my favourite moment in Riders and even though I have massive, massive issues with all the human characters involved I still love the horse.

Barbara Hambly, Fever Season. I started reading this and then everyone else in the household got sick (although not with yellow fever or cholera) so it ended up on hold for a bit. I think having not one but two mysteries running during an epidemic is a great idea, but the relentless death scenes as backdrop did make this a rather depressing read. I was also spoiled by history for a fairly key event. The characters are great, though, and even when bleak it’s still fascinating. The next two are available on Overdrive *if* I can actually work out how to use my library's digital subscription (my last attempt got me files readable on a laptop but I couldn't get them onto the ereader).

Matthew Reilly, The Great Zoo of China. A selected group of interested parties are invited to tour a not-yet-open top-secret zoo that turns out to be inhabited by DRAGONS! Much to everyone’s surprise things go horribly wrong. The usual Reilly fast pace and cinematic scenes, with a change to a female protagonist (CJ Cameron, an alligator expert), and there are some nice moments in here but it’s very, very obvious who is going to survive and how. The Four Legendary Kingdoms, the next one in his Indiana Jones-style world-ending conspiracy series, is out next month, and I think he’s probably better in series. I did pick up an ex-library copy of his The Tournament, which is historical and features a young QEI - must give that a go and see what on earth he's done with it.

Jan Mark, Trouble Half-way. Amy is a cautious child who is not wild about her new stepfather; when her mother has to take Amy's toddler sister and look after her suddenly unwell father, Amy ends up having to go on her stepdad's lorry delivery round. You are probably envisioning all sorts of Problem Novel occurrences, but this is Jan Mark and the mid 80s, and so it is a well-drawn believable story in which Amy learns that she can be a little more independent and people are not always threatening just because you don't know them. Mark as an author will always mean The Ennead to me, a stunningly brilliant YA one-volume fantasy that I am enthralled by and argued (in my head) with in equal measure since I first read it as a teenager.

I also skimmed through the Narnia series – the beginning of Prince Caspian, beginning and end of The Dawn Treader, most of The Silver Chair and The Last Battle for writing And All Points North. I am still never going to like The Last Battle, and I can still remember how betrayed and irritated I felt at reading the opening Shift & Puzzle section for the first time as a child. Reread a bit of Mike and Psmith and (mostly) resisted getting sucked into Josephine Tey's Miss Pym Disposes, all conveniently on Project Gutenberg.

In progress:

Jilly Cooper, Mount! Jump! was at least trying to extend the bounds of romantic protagonists. This has Gala, who is employed as a carer for Rupert's increasingly demented father and is a widow from a violence-riven country in Africa whose husband was murdered by possibly state-sanctioned agents of organised crime, and I would like her much more if she were a Sudanese refugee and not a white Zimbabewan who was putting off having children due to a court case over her farm and whose husband ("a true Rhodi") died in a hail of bullets while hugging a baby rhino to save it from poachers. I would also like her more if the description of the revenge attacks on her husband and her farm spent less time going on about how all the dogs were killed and clarified whether the farm workers were also all killed. So far this was mentioned only briefly in the second of three (so far) retellings, and I am unsure if this is the author's or Gala's oversight. It is also heavily about Rupert Campbell-Black, of whom I am not fond, and I am reading it rather grumpily.

Agatha Christie, Death on the Nile. The Peter Ustinov movie of this was one of the first films I remember seeing, but it’s been a long time since I read it. I can remember vividly how the murder was done, which means I know who, but it’s still fun watching it all fall into place.

Tim Powers, Medusa’s Web. I bought this on my last-but-one trip to Kinokuniya in Sydney and found it still in the suitcase on the most recent trip. I am about 60 pages in but was getting wistful fondness for what I consider to be Powers’ best books, so:

Tim Powers, Last Call. I actually borrowed this from the library despite owning it, because my copy is, like most of my other books with authors starting with “N” and after, in one of a large number of inaccurately labelled boxes either in an attic or jammed into a wardrobe somewhere. I can never decide which one of a handful of Powers I like best, but this is up there – it’s so believable and completely bizarre at the same time. I am possibly being unfair to Medusa's Web as I'm not that far in, but it does feel thin by comparison.

Rose Lerner, Sweet Disorder. Widow Phoebe Sparks can, by marrying again, generate a vote in the hotly contested district election and so, despite her lack of keenness, both the Whigs and Tories attempt to provide her with suitable candidates. Nick Dymond, crippled war veteran and brother of the Whig candidate, gets involved a little bit more than he should with Phoebe’s decision. This is holding my attention more than the last Lerner I tried, which I gave up on; it’s enjoyable and there’s enough history there to work for me, even while a fair bit of contemporary creeps in. It hasn’t really got me as involved as I would like, though, and it may be that I’m just not all that into contemporary het romances at the moment, unless they're also re-enacting National Velvet in the background.

Abandoned:

Louise Doughty, Black Water. I liked the idea of a book dealing with the Indonesian genocide, but this wasn’t working for me; as with Apple Tree Yard, there’s an early immediate sexual connection that didn’t feel believable, and flipping through to see if things picked up got me then not one but two past child deaths told in that particular literary styling where you know they’re going to die and it’s just being dragged out in nicely turned prose, so I bailed.

Mark Haddon, The Red House. I could probably have handled all the dialogue being in italics without quote marks if I could have been bothered remembering who any of the characters were.

Up next:

Finishing all this lot and then probably alternating Benjamin January with the My Friends series.