HSU IT Department

Snagged from igrockspock. Looks like a good time to catch up on my book reviews.

Immediately upon finishing Windeye, I added three or four more of this author's books to my to-read list. That should tell you something.

A collection of did-that-happen-or-didn't-it? and what-just-happened? stories, the tales in this book range from the odd and eerie to the downright horrifying. The author's command of language and range of styles are remarkable, from fairy tale to classic monster/demon to magical realism to the completely surreal, and there's a nice sprinkling of unreliable narrators which are always fun.

In the title story we're not sure whether or not the narrator had a sister, and in a later one a man may or may not have a brother; there's a classically sinister monster tale and a very peculiar piece about what I thought was a spacesuit, but on googling it found out it's actually an old diving suit ("The Sladen Suit", whose nickname apparently was "Clammy Death"!!). There's an fairy tale about a young man whose inheritance of a fabulous horse turns out to be not quite what he expects, and a short-short about bees. All are very different in tone, style, setting, and narrative voice, but all are equally high quality. I highly recommend it.

I'm not sure what to say about The Children's Hospital. It's...extremely odd, a combination of surrealism, post-apocalypse, religious rapture, and a really really long, boring boat ride. It was published by McSweeney's, which should tell you something right there. There are so many things about this book that should have turned me off: it's overloaded with medical jargon, the main character is annoyingly passive and her fear that anyone she loves will die is completely irrational, every single thing about the apocalypse is completely opaque, most of the characters are one-dimensional and wholly unlikable, and weirdest of all everyone in the floating hospital seems to just Keep Calm and Carry One despite the seven miles of water and the loss of the ENTIRE PLANET...

And yet, and yet....

I was sucked in. I felt Jemma's brother's pain, even though I didn't comprehend it. I cared about these people, even while I didn't like them very much and was not infrequently irritated by them. And I cried at the end, surprising even myself. (N.B. According to the Washington Post, the author is a pediatrician studying at Harvard Divinity School. That explains a lot.)

Ah, The Necromancer's House. Been waiting for this for MONTHS. I got hold of an advance reading copy of this, so was lucky enough to read it before it was officially released. Well, actually Mr Psmith got the ARC and I had to wait until he was done with it before I could get my greedy little hands on it. Longest two weeks of my life.

Given that the author's previous two books were "period pieces" -- although from wildly different periods -- I wasn't sure what to expect with this one, a very contemporary story complete with classic cars, AA, chat rooms, and the interwebz. Happily, I was not disappointed. The main character, Andrew, is a complicated man with a strong sense of integrity but, one quickly suspects, certain secrets in his past that are coming back to haunt him. This turns out to be true, but in more ways than are at first obvious.

I do love non-obvious.

There was quite a bit of non-obvious in this book which meant that I was frequently surprised -- and for somebody who reads as much as I do, that's not easy to do. The surprises were not so much in the broad arc of the story, which is a classic (and I mean that in a good way) tale of redemption, as in the details and the execution, and in what one might call the inflections of the ending, the way it’s shaped and carried out.

Two things I particularly liked about the book's treatment of magic. First, magic isn't free. One doesn't simply shout some garbled Latin and wave a wand -- this magic takes some serious effort, both mental and physical, to learn, to control, to use (safely), in some cases simply to understand. And there's no question that magic is potentially very dangerous stuff in this world; it can blow up in your face if you're not careful. Second, the story didn't get bogged down in the mechanics of the magic -- recipes, spells, how you do it, how it works. There's just the right amount of detail, and nicely modernized (Andrew’s particular skill is with cars and film footage, for example, while chicagohoney85’s are with computers), that the flavor permeates the story without overwhelming it.

Which is good because, despite the fact that magic is wound thoroughly about this tale, in the end it’s all about the people. And I like these people, Andrew and Anneke (and Chancho and Michael and even chicagohoney85), enough that I want to know more about all of them. (Here’s where I admit that I’m hoping for a sequel, or maybe Michael’s backstory...shhhhh...) They aren’t perfect, but like most of us they’re good people doing their best to muddle through, and deal with their past mistakes in a stand-up way without compromising what they believe.

Oh, and he made my cry over Salvador. Thanks, buddy.

Buehlman’s novels have all been billed as horror, but clearly they aren’t horror for horror’s sake. It’s not about a high body count or creative methods of killing people off (although he’s good at that, and Between Two Fires had a lot of them!). It's about applying horror to characters -- putting them in horrifying situations -- to see how they respond, the way an engineer applies heat or pressure to a substance to see if it will break. "Test to destruction" is how you learn what something is really made of, and this seems to be a recurrent theme, first with Frank Nichols in Those Across the River, then Thomas in Between Two Fires, and now Andrew and Anneke.

I'm looking forward to his next test.

Alas, everything about Regina's Song annoyed me, and I do mean everything. The dialog is flat and artificial, crammed with cliches and bad/outdated slang, despite the fact that the narrator is supposed to be a PhD in English [1]. The characters are one-dimensional and uninteresting, and the male characters consistently demonstrate a condescending 1950s-era attitude towards women (and others) [2]. The plot is full of holes and irrelevancies [3], and a fairly appalling lack of any sort of moral or ethical sense is exhibited across the board [4]. Examples hidden to prevent spoilerage. Although really I'm sure it wouldn't matter to anyone.

[1] "It's not as if we're going to rat him off...He knows that he can trust us to keep our mouths shut. I'm not all that interested in cop-shop secrets when you get right down to it. But we need to know what Burpee's up to. Bob's cut him off at the pass on this case and Burpee's probably eating his own liver by now. Let's face it guys, Bob stuck his neck way out with that protective custody scam, and Burpee's most likely trying to blindside my big brother. If we want to keep Bob on our side, we're going to have to help cover his buns."

That's eight, count 'em, EIGHT, in one speech. And that's fairly typical. If I never read the phrase "hit the bricks" again it will be too soon.

[2] male characters (the good guys, whom we are supposed to like) call female characters "babe" and "sweet-cakes" and "Mama Trish" to their faces. And the girls don't object. Also the girls aren't allowed in on the investigation and do all the cooking while the menfolk do the home and auto repair and come up with good ideas and hunt down killers. Oh, and the one Japanese character is referred to as "an oriental gentleman." Please.

[3] the license plate, the curare, the dogs/wolves (wtf?), a vast plethora of legal irregularities, and the presentation of DNA as a Big New Technology -- in 2002. Srsly? Also, there is no villain. Or mystery. Or song, which made even the title of the book annoying.

[4] The fact that the residents of the boarding house collude to protect a psychotic killer is a little unnerving, but when a priest hears about a murder and actually cheers the killer, you know something is seriously amiss.

Most vexing of all is that all of this derailed an excellent premise that had a lot of potential. The first few pages, with the backstory between the narrator and the twins, is pretty gripping. But it deteriorates pretty fast from then on.

I also read The Fox Woman by Kij Johnson, which was excellent but I haven't written a review for it yet, so maybe next week. And yay, I will at last be able to use my "fox sex" tag again!! (It's the little things that can make your day...)

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh.

Another reinvention of a fairy tale, Robin McKinley's Spindle's End takes a new approach to "Sleeping Beauty." Rosie, the princess-in-hiding, is definitely a new spin on the main character -- totally uninterested in clothes, dancing, or any other highbrow stuff, it turns out her true calling is as a "horse-leech," a job made much easier by the fact that she can talk to animals. The talking-to-animals was a nice addition to the story, and I loved McKinley's characterization of the "voices" of the different species: cats are elliptical and always talk in riddles, bugs speak in a kind of clicking code, foxes "generally wanted to talk about butterflies and grasses and weather for a long time while they sized you up," dogs bolster their conversation with lots of physical action, etc. Especially wrenching: Lord Prendergast's best stallion (used as a showpiece and stud, and never allowed to run or get dirty) and the huge white bird that lives in the rooftree of Woldwood, when they speak to her of their yearning to be free of the constraints they live with day in and day out.

Her writing style is unusual. I was struggling with it a bit at the beginning, I kept having to go back and reread paragraphs because I was getting lost in the sentence structure. She favors long sentences with lots of clauses and parenthetical digressions. Then, at some point about halfway through when I was playing online, I ran across this piece from Ursula K. LeGuin, where she draws an analogy between story and movement. There's the running kind of story, where you put one foot down after the next because you can't stop because you're leaning forward, rushing ahead -- page-turners. Then there's the walking story, where "you fall into the flow of the gait and cover ground while seeing everything around you, scenery you may never have seen before; and the walk may end up somewhere you've never been." And finally the dancing story, where you're led on for the simple joy of movement and things might seem pointless but beautiful, "and yet if the dance is true to itself, all the movements are connected and every one follows from the last, not predictably, but inevitably." And there was my problem: I was reading Spindle's End as though it were a running book and clearly it was a walking book. Or she's a walking writer.

Unfortunately the book was marred by a couple of places where there was no good reason for something to happen other than that the plot required it. For example, ( Spoilers! ).

I also took issue with the nature of the ending -- I don't object to happy endings, but the way they achieved it dissatisfied me, and the more I think about it the more dissatisfied I am. ( More spoilers ).

The idea of baby-magic (very young children unable to control their powers, therefore a bit of a trial to live with) was clever and cute, like a nicer version of the theory of poltergeists being generated by the pangs of adolescence. I also enjoyed the whole magic-thick-as-chalk-dust ambiance of the place, so that mugs spontaneously turn into frogs and people spend a lot of time asking things to stay what they are (laptop, stay laptop...). The story never explains why the country's that way, though, when none of its neighbors are. There was also no explanation of the roots of Pernicia's vengeful nature -- is she just a Bad Hat, or was there some conflict behind it? A simple insult like not being invited to a christening might suffice for a Disney villain but in a full-length book I expect a little more meat to a rage and fury that's been festering for centuries.

I'd like to try more of McKinley's books to get a better sense of her as writer; one of my colleagues at work has The Blue Sword and one of our interns was a big fan of Sunshine, so maybe I'll give them a try.