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.

A smorgasbord of books

Vampire | Thriller | Spy | Legal | Science fiction

Twilight | Area 7 | Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves | Private Wars | The Hearing | Illegal Action | Brood of Bones | I am FanFare | Post-Human

Stephanie Meyer | Matthew Reilly | Greg Rucka | John D Lescroart | Stella Rimington | AE Marling | Milo James Fowler | David Simpson

I'm embarrassed to admit that I'm so far behind in my notes on books I've read that I'm in danger of forgetting which ones I've read, so for now I'm just listing them out, and will give longer reviews later. In no particular order:

Twilight by Stephanie Meyer. I've finally worked out (to my satisfaction, your mileage may vary) why this series became so wildly popular, and why some people hate it so very bitterly. Promise, I'll write more on this some day.

Area 7 and Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves by Matthew Reilly. I think I've written in more detail about Ice Station, the first book in the series, some time earlier, so not rehashing that. Area 7 is the second book, and Thieves is the fifth, so I haven't read the ones in between. Aussie writer M Reilly writes about an American soldier, Shane Schofield aka Scarecrow, who can give Rajnikanth pause, and run rings around Chuck Norris. His books are the equivalent of very fast-paced Hollywood action movies, complete with helpful italics and utterly improbable scenes in quick succession. Suspend disbelief, pack a tub of popcorn, and read breathlessly. It doesn't make sense, you have things like negative and positive magnets, and rusted aluminium tanks, but who cares? Some day M Reilly will grow up and become all thoughtful and plausible and then we'll all stop reading.

Private Wars by Greg Rucka. This features Tara Chace, Minder 1 in MI6. OK, here you thought the agents with licence to kill had 00 prefixes, and there are at least 7 of them. Wrong, there are three only. Tara Chace leaves MI6 to have a baby (clearly, I need to stop entering a series in the middle), and then is brought back in by her boss. Nothing is as it seems. Uzbekistan is being run by a dictator, and his ruthless daughter and her besotted chief of the secret police are bent on getting her the post next. Her brother is the hitch, being a sort of heir apparent, apparent only to the US Ambassador, who asks the Brits for help. Tara is sent in to get him out. Mayhem follows. Forget James Bond. Cut to the Chace.

The Hearing by John D Lescroart. Lawyer Dismas Hardy (what kind of name that is becomes clear in this book) is begged by a friend to get her brother to hospital. He's a junkie, and the prime suspect in the murder of Elaine Wager (spoiler warning!) who is the chief detective, Abe Glitsky's unacknowledged daughter and a rising legal star. Abe has hinted to his staff to hang the mugger out to dry, hence the call. Dismas slowly becomes embroiled in the case, though Abe is his best friend, he admired Elaine, and hates his new client. Vintage Lescroart. But read the series in order, okay.

Illegal Action by Stella Rimington. This is what comes of writing without googling first. I have moaned in an earlier post that S Rimington wrote a wonderful first novel and would probably not write any more about Liz Carlyle. Serves me right (but, hey, I'm delighted). She's written five more. This is the third in the series (and I haven't read the second). Liz gets to protect a Russian emigre from an assassination attempt. Yup, the Russkies are as evil as ever. Or are they? I liked the first book more, but this one was good too. 

Dang, I've forgotten the next book. Never mind, carrying on...

Brood of Bones by AE Marling. Amazon sent me a hint that this one was a free download for a time. Unfortunately, that means I cannot go out there and give it a five-star rating. Our heroine is the Elder Enchantress, and has won 27 gowns in academia, showing her prowess. For some reason, in a land of banyan trees and protectors named Gautam, she wears all of them at the same time, making movement tiring and complex. Which is the least of her problems, since she keeps falling asleep all the time. In this world, magic is done only when asleep, so her magic is fine, if only she can keep awake long enough to find out what the problem is she needs to fix. The great city of Morimound, from where she hails, has suddenly been afflicted with mysterious pregnancies. Every woman 12 or older is pregnant. Is it godly or an evil magic? Whom can she trust? Our heroine turns out not to be snobbish, incompetent, sociopathic or stupid, but a shy nerdy young woman you begin to love more and more as the book moves on through horrors and petty people to a rivetting end. Read this book! I look forward to more.

I am FanFare by Milo James Fowler. This is a short novel about a different kind of nerd. This one spends his life (if you call that a life!) on a social network. Curious about the ads it shows, he finds a horrible truth, with grievous consequences. Funny and a bit poignant.

Post-Human by David Simpson. What I liked best about this book is the seamless way the post-human technology is introduced to us with the minimum of exposition. In the post-human society, nanobots or nans support humankind with everything from permanent online connectivity, to morning wake-up calls, trauma repair, IQ upgrades and work commutes to Venus. When James Keats, whose IQ of 200 is still above the international average, is working on terraforming Venus, his team suffers a problem and finds themselves offline. Navigating back to Earth by memory, they find every connected human on Earth dead. Now, all their hopes lie with the Purists. Somehow, they have to save the world. Very enjoyable (I'm on the sequel now).