March 2009 Archives

So I bought this for two reasons... one, to prove that it actually exists (guess what, it does!); two, to see if some pretty awesome ideas were matched by pretty awesome execution (for the most part, yes).

Case in point: Caged alien demonlord. Buffy, "The Body." "The Blazing-Eyed Demonwolf d-does not cry, mortal swine! He does not... hkk Ah huh huh... sniff sob" ... Okay, so transcribing dialogue from a comic is iffy at best, but I did what I could. Point stands. Caged alien demonlord. I really think that speaks for itself.

There's also something endearingly pathetic about a superheroine meeting her only two friends on the job, as it were. On opposing sides. ...Actually I think "endearingly pathetic" sums up a lot of her character.

So yeah. It's a good quick read, if you're into endearingly pathetic superheroine protagonists.

Okay. Good character work, both in drawing compelling characters and in having them develop as the novel goes on, though that said hardly any of them are likeable; in one case, however, the character does some things which are truly horrible and it's rather impressive how a character can be so very evil with no clear motive because I hope his motive isn't what he claims it is because if it is I will be so terribly disappointed. ...If I ever read the next books.
It has both a prelude and a prologue, which is a little bit silly. I approve of the presence of the prelude, but it should be the prologue, and the existing prologue should not be.

Passage of time was a little confusing. Between the prelude and the prologue there's a little passage that says pretty definitively that the age "came to an abrupt and terrible end" in one specific year--the same year in which the novel is set, and as the age has not yet ended (I assume that's for later books) it must still be the same year, but... there are an awful lot of times the narration jumps ahead by a few weeks. Or a month. Or two. How long are these years anyway?

Greg Keyes made up a bunch of languages, or at least pretended to; however much detail went into them, they all look suspiciously like existing languages. It's kind of like they too come from Proto-Indo-European. One example, something called a sedos, plural, sedoi. Hello, second-declension Greek nouns. Or the language obviously modeled after Italian. Or the language that, if you read it out loud, sounds an awful lot like a corrupted English. To be honest it all left me a little confused--was this supposed to be some variant, or perhaps future, of our world? (Random other example: "Genia" meaning "Born" ... it's almost like he took words that meant what he wanted them to mean and just modified them a tiny bit.)

I probably won't continue the series. As I said above, I don't particularly like any of the characters, and while I was interested enough to keep reading through this book, the interest is not strong enough to have me continue. Especially not when the last chapter is so annoyingly conventional.

So when I bought this, I thought it was a new novel by Patricia C. Wrede, who I know from two things: the Enchanted Forest Chronicles, which are really quite good, and the junior novelization of The Phantom Menace, which... isn't. (She doesn't really get Star Wars.) So imagine my surprise when I looked at the copyright page and saw that while this edition is from last year, it was originally published back in 1984. So not so much with the new, then.

There's a lot to like in this book. Amberglas is immediately endearing, in a way that doesn't quite go with "endearing" but--her excellence as a character is immediately apparent. Of course, it's mostly from her interesting conversational style, which I must admit Wrede struggles with maintaining at times. There are two other characters with very distinctive ways of talking... one I think she also had a little trouble with, and the third I wasn't terribly fond of so I tended to skim over her dialogue's flairs.

It's also very apparent that a reread would treat the book nicely; a lot falls into place throughout the plot in a way that makes earlier things make sense, in a way that makes a reread fun with the seeing clues with hindsight et cetera. The plot also knows exactly what it wants to do, and doesn't spend a whole lot of time doing anything else--even when it looks like it is.

Another thing Wrede is good at--chapter breaks. The chapters alternate between two viewpoint characters, and once the plot gets moving pretty much every singe chapter ends at a moment of some suspense--usually in the middle of a conversation, actually, which is kind of funny when I think about it. There were times when a chapter ended and I wanted to hurry past the next one to get back to the first viewpoint, but when that chapter ended I wanted to hurry past the next one to get back to the second viewpoint, until I remembered where the first chapter had left off and wanted to resolve that again--all in all a pretty effective way to keep someone reading, at least if they have the patience and good humor to not be bothered by such transparent tension-creation.

...There's a remarkable lack of negativity here. It's not that the book was amazing and perfect; as I was reading I could tell it was an early effort from her. It's all very quick, and some things feel rushed, and some things aren't explained as well as they should be. Still, if you happen to come across it and feel like a fast light fantasy read, go for it.