Lucky Luke takes on Ma Dalton, and does not lose.

Graphic Novel | Morris and Goscinny |  Ma Dalton

Lucky Luke, our hero, who can shoot faster than his own shadow, takes on Ma Dalton and the Dalton brothers (a set of clones in different sizes, with the shortest of them being the smartest, and the tallest, the stupidest, but all of them equally funny). The Dalton brothers are in jail, which they break out of, going home to ma. Lucky Luke is sent after them, with the help of the wonder dog, Rin Tin Can (I know, right?). The wonder is if he is ever awake.

The book is a riot of laughs. Like when the brothers read a letter together, and conclude that one of the letters is a 'g'. Later, you find out what the letter is when the tallest Dalton rushes to his mother, calling, 'It's me, Ma, your gagy!' I laughed out loud. The horse gets his laughs, too. The whole thing is as convoluted as a prime time sitcom, and twice as funny.

I guess there were cigarettes in the Wild West. Lucky Luke has plenty of them. Today, the story would have had a statutory warning that tobacco is dangerous, or maybe Lucky Luke would not have been a smoker at all. Only smokin' fast with his gun.

Her dresses are worth more than her strength

Fantasy | Elizabeth Haydon | Destiny 

As someone mentioned online, no wonder people prefer writing fantasy to hard science fiction. A few horses, some random magic, a demon to vanquish, and dresses like a millionaire's wedding confection. That's all you need to generate terrific sales. No wondering if the planet you posit would develop with the atmosphere you need for the critters you invented for the story to move. Ha.

The first thing I noticed about the book was the contorted pose of the heroine on the cover. Bent head, bust stuck out, butt stuck out, and no feet. She is also holding—delicately--a long and heavy sword, at one end, cantilevered out ridiculously. Try standing like that in real life, and you may find the ground is closer than you thought, as well as a lot harder and sooner than you expected, and the sword, while dropping, would take off a knuckle or two. The only people who can hold huge swords in two fingers are the video game characters in Final Fantasy. Oh, wait, this is a fantasy, too.

This book is part of a series, the last in the row. Rhapsody, a Namer, has tied up with Achmed, an assassin who is now a king, and the Sergeant (who gets only a few bit parts in this book). She is also in love with Ashe, or is his name Gwydion? The evil F'dor is finally bested by our heroes in this book. Assorted magic weilders suddenly and for no good reason decide they want Rhapsody as their Queen, so she gets a lot of gowns that take several pages to describe. Characters with exotic and relentless power succumb to her charm, or her Naming, or something else. Anyway, the reader who identifies with Rhapsody will be much reassured to be told, several times in the book, that she is way powerful, and the most beautiful woman in the world. Powerful men love her to bits.

Damn. That's all I remember. There were some nice fantasy scenes in between, but this is what sticks. Why do I read these books? Because they don't mind if I switch off my brain before I start? Not good enough reason, my dear...

Living in olden times

Historical detective | Michael Jecks | The Sticklepath Strangler 

Many books that purport to be placed in the past get the past all wrong. If you were a king, you would be relatively well off, albeit without a decent doctor or dentist, but for the majority of people, life was nasty, brutish and short. Ordinary people had little or no rights. As Lois McMaster Bujold's Capt Cordelia Naismith once drily remarked, democrats have no problem with an aristocracy as long as they get to be the aristocrats. Aren't most of us fantasy readers expected to identify with benevolent kings rather than the downtrodden serfs? Yeah, you read my previous review, right? It would indeed be difficult in the extreme for us to identify with the serfs of bygone ages, so Michael Jecks wisely gives us the viewpoint of Baldwin Furnshill (Sir, no less) so that we aren't faced with the viewpoints of the ordinary villagers of Sticklepath (steep path) -- which would drive us quickly insane.

Did you know that villages were fined if a murder occurred in them? Heavily? Now that's a motive for not reporting it, if there ever was one. However, a blabbermouth traveller happens to be around when some young girls discover an old body in a wall, and the King's men, Sir Baldwin and his friend the bailiff Simon, turn up to investigate.

The mystery is an old-fashioned detective story (ha! In more ways than one) in which you get clues, and you have to deduce the facts logically from what people state. No forensics, no photographs, not even written records. More than one murder is unearthed (cough, cough, no pun intended, I'm sure), and more than one murderer is unmasked, with more than one motive for murder. To Jecks' credit, he manages to explain the surreal motives of people in ye olde times understandable, with good doses of prior exposition neatly woven into the story so that you get your aha moment from the mystery's solution(s).

It's easy to understand the jaquerie after reading a book like this and finding out what a horrible life most people had before the industrial revolution and modern medicine. I'm grateful to live now, and not a few centuries ago, and especially not in rural England.

Recommended for a good mystery as well as insight into ye olde times.

With the Goddess on my side, I conquer all

Fantasy | PC Cast | Elphame's Choice

This is part of the Goddess of Partholon series, which, per the publisher's blurb, is exceedingly popular. I found it difficult to imagine that the heroine and hero would actually face any difficulty in waltzing their way to a happy ending. After all, the Goddess is on the heroine's side, all the way from ensuring that she is born in satyr form to a human mother and centaur father, and is announced as the incarnation of the Goddess herself, right in chapter one.

On the other hand, I've never quite understood why such a stated-as-benevolent goddess would require such bloodthirsty sacrifices for good ends to result. It's not as if there are any real choices along the way, title notwithstanding.

Neither have I got my head around a rose-tinted view of a society in which there are tenth sons, who stand to inherit nothing, so they are super thrilled to have Elphame rebuild the ruined castle, rumoured (correctly, as it turns out) to be haunted. By benevolent ghosts.

Who show us what horrid creatures the ancient winged enemy were. But their descendants, equally winged, are human and stubbornly and relentlessly resist the call of their demon blood for several decades. Benevolently.

Aargh. Anyway, the second half of the book is somewhat better than the first, and the brother-sister dialogues are quite snappy and have a true sibling feel. Loving and benevolent though they are....

But I'm getting less tolerant of books with prophecies. Sigh. The older I get, the fussier I get.

Nope, not checking out more PC Cast books myself, but if you liked Twilight, this may well be up your alley, 170 year old hero, teen heroine, and all.

Werewolf jokes

Fantasy (Werewolf and Sorceress) | MaryJanice Davidson | Derik's Bane

Derik is a werewolf. Based on a prophecy that the reincarnation of Morgan le Fay is shortly going to be involved in the end of the world, he sets off to California to put paid to her. But the ditzy Dr Sara Dunn is too lucky to be true.

Lots of side-splitting dialogue and sitcom, with lots of romantic tropes mixed in. (A few very steamy scenes, so not really suitable for under-18s).

Sample this:

'You have to save the world.'Derik fought to keep his jaw from dropping. 'Me?''Yes, brain-drain, you. In fact, could you get started on that right away?'Moira clapped her hands. 'A quest! Just what you needed, oh, it's perfect, perfect!''A quest? Do I look like a Hobbit to you? I have to save the world? From what?'Antonia smirked. 'From who, actually.''From whom, actually,' Moira corrected.

It's totally funny. I laughed out loud so many times, the next person took the book away from me and started reading it himself--laughing from page to page while at it. Ha.

The end is a bit of an over-neat wrap-up, but you will forgive it for being a bit of a let's-finish-this-before-the-interval speed-solution since it could have well been dragged out beyond 198 pages, and become a drag itself. As it is, frothy and light, silly and funny.

Recommended for the laughs, and I for one am going to keep an eye out for more MJ Davidson books.

It's been a long time

It's been a long time since I last posted, but I haven't stopped reading!

Nope, I've just been postponing writing about what I've been reading. So I guess I'm a reader at heart, and not a writer. Ooh, who would have guessed? :D

So, here are the books I've read in the past couple of months, in no particular order. I'm dead sure there was one more, but try as I might, I can't remember its name or author. Sigh.

Saving Faith by David Baldacci
Derik's Bane by MaryJanice Davidson
Vanished by Joseph Finder (ha, now that's an ironic title if there ever was one, given the author's name!)
The Sticklepath Strangler by Michael Jecks
All the Colours of Darkness by Peter Robinson
Unfit to Practice by Perri O'Shaughnessy
XO by Jeffery Deaver
Elphame's Choice by PC Cast
Destiny by Elizabeth Haydon
Dark Visions (a short story collection of Horror stories)
Ma Dalton by Morris and Goscinny (a graphic novel aka comic)

So, I'll get my nose to the grindstone and tell you about these in a bit. If you have preferences as to the order I go through these, don't feel shy, let me know.