Princess Academy

Princess Academy by Shannon Hale

After reading the previous Hale book, I wanted to see if her other work was as promising. Another book from the children’s section, Princess Academy was just as nicely written and just as nicely edited. It is a previous work, and I think Shannon Hale’s writing has improved with experience. I might have thought I just preferred the other story, but if you had asked me to choose by summary, Princess Academy would have been my first read.

Princess Academy is about a world where the Prince is told by the royal diviners where his bride will hail from. So all the eligible girls are sent to an ad hoc princess academy. [Speaking of ad hoc... I mean that in the "assembled for a specific purpose" sense, not the "thrown together haphazardly without care" sense... this is an important distinction that Cory Doctorow neglected to mention throughout his entire work, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which depended upon that definition. Without understanding that there is a completely contrary definition to the common usage, most of the Doctorow book made no sense. He kept saying that his bizarre "whuffie" system made perfect sense because it was designed by an ad hoc committee--- which I understood to mean, "thrown together by unskilled people who don't know what they're doing" instead of "designed by forethinking people with the best economic and sociological minds in the world who built it and then went back to their day jobs."]

The village divined is a stone quarry village that’s only nominally part of the same kingdom so the herald and the academy staff look down on the villagers.

There is some time spent about how the girls get along together. There is some time spent talking about village life— and explaining the details to lowlander girl who moved there earlier— this includes a bizarre form of magic that doesn’t seem especially important. All of this was interesting, but it was not very cohesive. It all works together, but it seems rather accidental instead of being especially chosen as a means to convey the underlying story.

We do not really get to know the characters we meet. They are superimposed caricatures, then suddenly there is a paradigm shift from the main character’s point-of-view and everyone is someone completely different. It was less interesting than if there had been a steady build-up to that. I didn’t like one of the crux points in the story where the main character brings home drastic changes, the story presents them all as universally positive, but I am not convinced that much change without examination is not going to have long-term repercussions. For example, the main character wants to start a school and have everyone learn to read and figure, but the main method of communication in the quarry is this magic that is heart-felt and unlearned. I didn’t see that as fitting well together because it’s possible that all the formal learning will undermine the magical knowledge. The main character is 15 years old, it really seems like her whole village shouldn’t just let her take over. Other people have experience and knowledge and it really seems unlikely that they’d have an open leadership role just going begging for her to fill like that.

It was a good story. It was well told. But I think there were some rough edges as to internal motivations that we just didn’t see.

recommended.

Book of a Thousand Days

Shannon Hale: Book of a Thousand Days

I ended up reading a book, nearly random selection, from the children’s new book section of the library.  It was Shannon Hale’s Book of a Thousand Days. I thoroughly enjoyed it. There is a lot of personal and external conflict and these things were kept well in balance. Normally a book will use internal conflict to showcase a character’s development or to drive the external conflict, and there was some of that. But what I really enjoyed was how the seeming “progress” the character makes toward her personal development ends up being an external conflict. This is a very character-driven book, despite the big war plot.

It’s meant to be a story for children, and I have to say that I’m starting to envy children for getting the better quality books. All the fantasy and magic based books for adults have been subsumed by the “OMG *squee!* vampires!” books or the ones where the vampires are evil and everything is grim and scary. Plus someone actually edited this book. There weren’t any typos or mis-used words. Someone went through this and scrubbed it clean. I can’t remember the last time I read an adult book with that level of quality effort.

The story is about a nomad girl who moves to the big city and takes a job as a maid and her first job involves going to be imprisoned with her lady in a tower. Eventually they break out. The story ends happily. But I was really surprised by how well I liked the nomad girl, how she uses her magic, her unfailing belief that there is a way, and her devotion to her faith. The author did a really stunning job of creating a world and a worldview that were both alien and realistic. I was amazed.

Highly Recommended.

Acheron

Acheron by Sherrilyn Kenyon is the nth book in her Dark Hunter series. Ash has always been the leader of the Dark Hunters, who are vampire-like, but kill other vampires who are evil because they’re Apollo’s offspring instead of Artemis’s. Or something. It’s always been kind of vague and ridiculous to me and I ignored that part to concentrate on the individual Dark Hunter’s past/background.

This series, despite the vampire angle, is mostly romance-based. The point of the stories is to match the Dark Hunter up with his One True Mate who then has to kill him to redeem his soul. In later books, we see that the Dark Hunters’ souls are not freely given by Artemis, Asheron pays for them with his body and flesh and blood.

Acheron’s story is a tome. The hardcover version outweighs the most recent Erikson hardcover.  But it has thick paper and pleasantly sized type. 65% or so of the book is very ancient times, like 11,000 years ago. We see Ash as a child. We see him eternally living in the absolute worst torturous environment possible, with hope lasting just long enough to make the fall past rock-bottom even harsher. A lot of it was nauseating to read. If this was fanfiction, it would have carried a plastering of warning labels rivalling Indy cars. I loathe that published fiction has zero respect for readers and does not even bother to mention this level of violence and graphic torture. Normally I would not read anything with this much blood and gore and unfounded hatred because it makes me less of a person to immerse myself in other people’s pain like a sadistic voyeur.

What absolutely ruined the book for me was the modern story.

We see Ash going to an archaeology lecture and heckling the speaker. We see the speaker asking a colleague for help, the colleague is a Dark Hunter from a previous book (of course beholden to Ash) who says he can’t help her, but knows someone who can. The woman speaker throws a hammer at Ash and stomps off. (He deserved it, admittedly, but only if you hadn’t just read the previous half of the book.)

Ash decides she’s the woman for him and instantly falls in love with her, so despite ELEVEN THOUSAND YEARS OF EXPERIENCE, he trusts her and opens his heart to her. She falls for him because he’s freaking gorgeous (and this is actually described much better than the Kitty Does DC author’s “Brazilian”) and he can teach her to speak Atlantean (the language of Atlantis.)

It’s bizarre and completely unrealistic. There’s no reason these people should fall in love. And if there is, then Ash should have been able to fall in love before, because this woman is nothing special. Ash is thrilled that she seems to accept him, but lots of women accept men with shadowed pasts and don’t hold it against them. Ash is thrilled that she seems to have honor and loyalty and he’s never see that in another woman. I don’t know where he’s been looking, but I know a LOT of smart women who don’t lie and don’t cheat and who generously aid their friends even when it’s hard. The book is set in New Orleans, which is part of the South, where they claim to have Southern Hospitality and women are all kind and Christian, but most of them in my experience are vicious snakes in the grass out for any and all advantages they don’t deserve, as long as they can pull a kind face on it and say “Bless your heart!” afterward. So maybe Ash really does think all women around him are worthless whores, but I did not see ANYTHING special about this woman. There was no real rationale given either.

I had to read hundreds of pages of filth and torture scenes where a young boy is chained up and raped repeatedly and starved and beaten and raped and castrated and thrown out of his family home just for having been abused— and I get, Ash meets his perfect woman who is the only woman he’s ever met who doesn’t think badly of him for having been tortured. ? What? Really? That’s it?

No quibble with the very thin love story, not really. All the Dark Hunter books have been like that, where the big strong man just knows when he’s met the right woman.  Then they go through some conflict and plot and drama and in the end there’s a happy ending. I was really expecting that. This was absolutely not a happy book even though there is lip service to that. We spent pages and pages watching Acheron be raped and bled almost to death and gutted and having his eyes gouged out… but the only sex scene in the modern half of the book was less than 2 pages, most of which described the woman as wearing sexy lingerie instead of a pleasant instance between them.

I am angry that there was 10 times as much effort to convey the pain and fear and gut-wrenching aspects of Ash’s early life and no effort what-so-ever to convey why he would fall in love with this particular woman. She didn’t seem special. That would have been fine if it had stood alone. With all the gore though, I feel like I am OWED hundreds of pages of “this is what it’s like to be in love with the right woman and be immortal.”

I would like the other 400 pages of happy ending. Or for someone to have warned me to start 2/3 of the way in the book. Even just typing this out, my stomach is trying to escape through the back of my neck and my skin is crawling fit to move to Canada without me.

There is no question that this was supposed to be a “romance” story, that’s who the whole series has been marketed toward. But at the same time, there is no question where this book belongs. It was full-on horror in my opinion.

-1089123 in meeting my expectations.

Heartily non-recommended due to causing of repeated vomiting.

If you’re one of those sadistic people who likes scary stories and violence and characters hurting beyond the point of human frailty, well, this book is definitely for you. It was well researched and catchy enough that I read it all. But it still gives me nightmares.

0/10 because it made me want to throw up just thinking about it to write about it here. ANGRY ANGRY ANGRY at the author for the zero warning.

Wolf’s Blood

I finished the last book in Jane Lindskold’s wolf girl series. This is definitely an epic fantasy series and I enjoyed all the books. The final book in the series was a fairly satisfying conclusion to the series overall.

My favorite is still the first book, because of the potential. But the plot arc in the final book was better than any of the others. The series suffers a lot from its epic scale and fantasy tropes being super-imposed. The first book reminded me of that first Jacqueline Carey book, where the first part was really interesting when we met the characters, but then there was this random half a book crammed in the middle where they go off to have a war. I didn’t bother reading any of the other Carey books because I hated her main character.

Lindskold’s main character is my favorite character in the series; clearly the books should have been centered around her. That is a tremendous accomplishment in and of itself. Usually I feel like a series should be orbiting someone else. Harry Potter was the loser doofus in that whole series and he’s pretty much the same guy at the end. He goes through 7 books to be mostly unchanged. There’s an authorial rule of thumb that says the story belongs to the character who changes the most. So Rowling really fell down on that aspect. Then there is Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake Vampire Hunter series. (She really limited herself with that name, eh? Kind of like Sabrina the Teenage Witch when Sabrina was 24.) I loathe Anita. I think honestly if the series was set around anyone else I would like it better. Anita doesn’t really change either, she’s come up in the world through no efforts of her own (just coattail politics) but she’s still got the same hangups and quirks she started with, so I don’t know why the books are about her.

Lindskold’s Firekeeper is an honorable woman who makes her way in 5 different human societies after having been raised by wolves. She’s strong, but she got that way from chasing down food to eat, not because of some otherworldly gift. She gets along with people even when she doesn’t understand them because she is able to see how her life-rules can be applied and adapted for the situation. Other people see her as taking the hard way to live by her own rules even when no one would know if she cheated, so she gets respect for her honor and for her hard-won abilities. Throughout the series, Firekeeper gets stronger, but she’s grown from being 8 or 10 years old to being 22, so we would expect some physical improvements.

I really enjoyed reading her story. The half a book of random war stuff that kept appearing in each book was extremely annoying, but many fantasy novelists cannot let go of that “one big crisis” plot arc. I think all the books are worth reading, but the series did add weight to that argument that plot really sucks if you’re a character in a book. And the concluding volume resolved most of the outstanding issues with characters without making the final chapter feel like a clip show.

Breakfast At Tiffany’s — Truman Capote

Breakfast At Tiffany’s
a book by Truman Capote
Wiki | Amazon
Overall Rating: 6/10
Meets Expectations: +2 and -2
Apparent Rating: 6/10

Many times in the course of my life, glaring omissions in my knowledge of the world appear, realizing recently that there was a book (novella) version of the famous movie Breakfast At Tiffany’s was one of those things. I have had the movie in my Netflix queue for ages, but just about anything sounds better and it doesn’t move up. Truman Capote arises on Jeopardy! fairly frequently. He’s supposed to be really famous for being a great writer too. My knowledge of Truman Capote was, “Isn’t he some dead writer dude?” So I was completely shocked that he’d written something I’d heard of.

Now, let us get into the book itself. I was very very interested by the beginning, where the narrator of the book sounds a lot like I imagine Capote himself would have sounded. It was that kind of book, where enough facts coincide and it looks like the author’s fantasy life spilled onto a public page. But the narrator starts out saying that it never occurred to him to tell the story of this everyday experience/life he had even though it’s clearly what he really knows. Modern advice-for-writers pounds that idea so heavily that creativity can have its edge blunted. Some other modern advice is to “show, not tell”, but this is very terse narration with bits of really dramatic scenes. Pretty much all the advice I have ever seen for authors is tossed out the window with Breakfast At Tiffany’s. And yet, the writing in this is stunning. I found myself wanting to go back and read portions again.

The quality of writing and the degree of control in this book and by this author is enormous. The flashbacks aren’t tightly reined, but I followed along without error. The characters live in my imagination despite my not knowing anyone like any of those people. The world described is something I can see in my mind’s eye. You see? It’s brilliant. Hands down, utterly brilliant.

And it’s all fucking wasted on the most loser story in the history of the planet.

Flighty useless woman lives in New York City, has a flighty useless life, gets lots of men panting after her, continues being flighty and useless, book ends.

In a recent post about Arabian Nights, I said, “To my mind, there should be a penalty for doing a mediocre job with a great idea, thus wasting the idea.” I wish we could have combined some of the really amazing story ideas out there with the writing efforts of Truman Capote.

I will be pulling the movie from my queue. I can’t imagine a way that the movie would be anything less than disappointing since the only thing I liked from the book was Capote’s work.

I read one of the following short stories and again found the writing very elegant (sparse alternating with glorious detail to keep the reader’s attention focused) but again the story was so horrible (not gory or sad necessarily, or even badly written, just why would you ever want to read that?) that I felt physically ill.

Truman Capote was really extraordinarily talented and wasted it writing depressing stories wrapped in frivolity about nothing. If he could have taken that ability to capture the essence of a scene and used it to document history, I think generations of schoolchildren would stop thinking history was for the dead. If Capote could have actually used his imagination and gone for the kinds of world-building we see in Tolkien, Peter Jackson would have been too busy to do Lord of the Rings.

So the writing in Breakfast At Tiffany’s is about as close to godlike as I have seen, but the story was flat-out nauseatingly bad.

Agnes And The Hitman — Crusie and Mayer (fiction)

Agnes And The Hitman
a romantic fiction book by Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer
Authors’ site | Amazon
Overall Rating: 6/10
Meets Expectations: +2
Apparent Rating: 8/10

Agnes And the Hitman took a long time to review since I thoroughly enjoyed it. Immediately upon finishing it, I mentioned it as a “you should buy this” book to a specific friend. (This is NOT a general endorsement, the friend has really enjoyed similar books previously.) Yet, I don’t see a lot of objective difference between this book and the previous Crusie+Mayer collaboration that I panned (before this blog.)

In the previous book, Don’t Look Down, (they’re not a series at all) we had a film director who was dealing with a mystery and violence on the job while trying to help her sister and niece. I didn’t like it. In Agnes, we have a woman who cooks a lot and has bought her dream home from childhood. In both books the hero is a guy who knows his way around violence, but is a good guy, rock solid, hero-with-issues kind of man. In both books, the hero falls for the heroine for no Earthly reason (Agnes was a little better in that regard; there was some hand waving toward that explanation, though it didn’t jive for me.)

One of the few things that bothered me about Agnes was that she didn’t appear to have much of a career. She writes a newspaper column. I don’t know much about syndication, but it doesn’t seem likely columns pay more than comic strips and Scott Adams who draws Dilbert worked his day job for years after getting major syndication. So it would not likely pay well enough to sustain a mortgage of $3000/month, even split with someone else (which had been the plan). Agnes also writes cookbooks. Even bestselling cookbooks are still non-fiction and sales of 10,000 copies is a large run. There just doesn’t seem to be a way for Agnes to afford even half of what she was expecting to pay on the house plus her handyman plus the repairs for the upcoming wedding that was the central focus of the story.

Agnes herself was quite interesting. She has real anger issues. Not like she shouts at people, like she kills a man in the first chapter and is worried that she’ll be in bigger trouble because she’s walloped men with frying pans before and been arrested for it. It makes Agnes’s interest in the hero much more explanatory, he’s actually strong enough to calm her down and deal with it. All the other men in Agnes’s life quail in the face of her anger.

I did not like the setting for the book. It’s in that part of the South where women are universally evil bitches sent by the devil to plague man- and womankind. If someone lies to you and cheats you and is a general scumwad, you tell everyone you know so no one ever talks to them again. You post about it on your blog. You call your lawyer. You don’t smile pretty and be a doormat. Being nice to people who are devoutly evil is wrong, but Southern women make a career out of it. It disgusts me. It appalls me.

I really liked the hero in this book. I liked how he stepped in and helped her in practical ways. I liked how Agnes feeds people and they become her family. I liked how family-like it really was. I even liked the kid they adopted. The flamingos were hilarious. There was a lot of humor in the book without the humor interfering with the story. None of us would like to star in a comedy, but all of us have humorous things which happen around us. This was that kind of funny.

I enjoyed the story, but the plot was ridiculously complicated for the book and the level of writing. The mystery plot and hidden characters and bizarre soap opera plot twists were authorial masturbation at its finest. One of the things I complained about in the previous collaboration between these authors is that they don’t appear to match up in terms of audience level. Romance readers tend to be lowest-common denominator— to unfairly stereotype: (but the genre sells with the kind of books that indicate it) romance readers want small words and easy answers to easily resolved (or imaginary) conflict. Suspense (+mystery or +adventure) books have more of the underlying motivations and the details. I have read books where the mystery was good and the “hook-up” was good, but those are not very common. Usually a book goes to one side or the other. This book had the plot of a suspense novel and the writing and attention to detail of a romance. So there is definitely a disconnect and the end of the book was extremely confusing and had several “Wait. What?” moments.

I think the writing could have been better. I liked the story and the characters better than I feel like the book deserved, but it was a book I really enjoyed reading. I might read it again before it goes back to the library. But if I had paid $17 for it, I would be mad.

From Dead To Worse — Charlaine Harris (paranormal fantasy)

From Dead To Worse
a paranormal fantasy book by Charlaine Harris
Author’s site | Amazon
Overall Rating: 6/10
Meets Expectations: +1
Apparent Rating: 7/10

This is the eighth book in the Southern Vampire series. They have been variable. Generally if the book is set anywhere aside from Bon Temps, Louisiana, it was mediocre. Although I find the mechanics of vampire travel very interesting, Sookie herself is so discombobulated whenever she’s out of the boonies that all of her internal monologues are about crap I couldn’t care less about. When Sookie is at home, most of what happens that I find eye-blinkingly Southern is glossed over and disregarded as normal. It makes the books less alien that way because we’re all pretending fictional rural Louisiana shares a common culture with anywhere else in America.

Sookie started out her adventures in paranormal life (her interactions with vampires and were creatures and other weirdnesses) largely due to her own weirdness of being a telepath in a small town. She was more than a little insane from not being able to block that out, but in the first book, she meets a vampire and his mind is silent. There’s a lot of lust, rather graphic, and we see a gory mystery solved. It was satisfying but a bit formulaic until I realized that the first vampire was a very low-level peon vampire. That made it different from Laurell K. Hamilton’s books where her central character only meets the kings and gods of the paranormal enclaves.

I really enjoyed the first book in the series. I enjoyed some of the stories in the other books too. But this was the first book that came close to approaching my enjoyment from the first book. Most of the reason for this is that Sookie didn’t spend a lot of time interacting with neighbors and humans or working. Sookie didn’t spend a lot of time with the were creatures— who really are less vivid than Ms. Harris’s vampires. Sookie’s boyfriend issues took a back seat, which is a relief because she hasn’t really seemed attached to any of them since that first vampire who dumped her viciously and violently for his old girlfriend. It’s hard to think of a book as a romantic adventure when it seems like meaningless sex.

This eighth book brought back a lot of favorite characters and used residual Katrina mess to kill off some really lame characters. If someone had gone through and done an audience screening, I don’t think they could have done a better job gleaning the wheat.

The whole Southern vibe this series has rubs me the wrong way a lot of the time. In this book, Sookie comes to a dead stop when a man says he wants to check her house over for intruders and she insists she’s fine, so he says he wants a Coke and her upbringing won’t let her not jump on that immediately. I would be all like “There’s the ‘fridge, yo.” Well, not really, because I’m an educated woman who doesn’t mock the uneducated urban culture. In a previous book Alcide shows up first thing in the morning and is offered coffee, he says he wants breakfast. When he’s offered eggs, he asks for sausage too. What I didn’t understand is why did Sookie date him then? A man who acts like that isn’t looking for a partner in life, he’s looking for a slave he can have sex with. But Sookie doesn’t think anything of it. Sookie goes to a high school football game in one book, she dresses up for this with hair ribbons that match the team colors…. first no one goes to high school ball games unless they know one of the players— if unchilded adults went to high school football games here someone would think they’re likely pedophiles. Second, how old is she that she wants matching hair ribbons? There’s a lot of just plain weird stuff that the author describes Sookie as doing or thinking or accepting as normal that is completely anathema to me.

I would really like to see stories written in this universe that aren’t set in hell and starring someone who acts as blonde as she looks. The vampire mythology, the magic system in use, the were creatures, the intra- and inter-relationships of the paranormal groups are all very interesting, but the whole thing really suffers from being set in a part of the country where they still burn crosses on people’s lawns.

What I like about the characters who are my favorites is that they’re from a city in Louisiana and they cynically market their own vampirism to tourists. They come across as normal kinds of people. I’d like to read books which just have those kinds of characters and leave the bumpkins alone.

If you are considering other books by this author, be warned that the Grave series contains graphic consenting incest in its third book. The author has some very Southern ideas about what family means and I brought that squick with me to her other series.

None of this explains why I liked it, and I did. I like vampire stories. I like stories where the heroine doesn’t start out at the top because the author is lazy. But mostly I like non-horror vampire stories.

Cruel Zinc Melodies — Glen Cook (fantasy)

Cruel Zinc Melodies
a fantasy book by Glen Cook
Amazon
Overall Rating: 5/10
Meets Expectations: +1
Apparent Rating: 4/10

There are a number of books in Glen Cook’s Garrett PI series. They are all adjectival metallic nouns. Cold Copper Tears, Cruel Zinc Melodies, Silver something. Whatever. Generally these foci are forced into the story and we’re made to put up with it. I can see it being a useful method for writing a series because the author can use it to hold things together. I really hate it when the technique is obvious though.

The main character used to be downtrodden and put upon and can’t seem to get past that. It’s really irritating to have someone who knows the chief of law enforcement, the heir to the throne, the best telepathic monster, a team of fairies, the head of the were rats, the biggest heads of the criminal underworld, the driving forces behind the biggest manufacturing enterprises, someone in every branch of the military, the best accountants, the royal tailor, the best security people… if there is someone at the top of any heap, Garrett knows him. And the guy cannot stop whining. He also can’t stop referring to himself in the third person–romance manner. (In romances, there’s this stylized referenced manner, people aren’t referred to by name but by descriptor. The red-headed lady. And because that can’t be constantly repeated like a pronoun, there are endless variants… Titian-maned, crimson locks, ginger girl, whatever. It’s always clear the writer bit off too much thesaurus and is burping it back.) Garrett refers to himself as “Mother Garrett’s Blue Eyed Boy” Or Mama G’s or Ma Garrett’s or whatever variant. I wanted to get in Mr Cook’s face and say “emulating pulp romances is a step down! Stop it.”

These are all irritations. But it’s been years since the previous book. And I spent the whole book trying to remember what was so interesting about these books. I liked it. But I have no idea why. If you are not a desperate fan, don’t bother.

The plot was really strange because about halfway through the narrator (who is Garrett having hindsight) said they should have been able to solve the mystery since they had all the information. Only the way the ending went, they didn’t. I think. I was amazed Garrett could follow along with the plot. He doesn’t seem that bright.

In summary, drunken asshole makes good, can’t seem to appreciate that, and story magically works out while idiot tells us we’re the stupid ones.

Heroes Adrift — Moira J. Moore (fantasy)

Heroes Adrift
a fantasy book by Moira J. Moore
Author’s Site | Amazon
Overall Rating: 8/10
Meets Expectations: +0
Apparent Rating: 8/10

Books seem to be much more about personal preference, I have higher expectations from the authors than I have been trained to expect from popular films. Heroes Adrift is the third in the series, and I liked it better than the second one. I liked it a little better than the first one just because it’s here now.

One of the things I really like is how bumbling the main characters are. Unlike a lot of fantasy series, especially the paranormal/urban kinds, the main characters do not get new god-like skills in every volume. They struggle through new situations and they learn from those things. But it’s not that they can solve the problem on their own, it’s more that they’ve learned who to contact in law enforcement when they have an important clue. Sure they have a few extra quirks so we know why the books are about them instead of other people they meet, but they don’t seem like things other people couldn’t have because the gods have a limited number of blessings to hand out.

What interested me about the books is the way the characters are paired up permanently but it’s not about sex, it’s about magic. I really liked that after a long batch of romances. That means there absolutely has to be a story and the plot and characters cannot just be glossed over. What was unfortunate here was that they decided to have a sexual relationship during this third book and it didn’t work for me. Not that they’re having a relationship at all, despite the conflict, but because it’s not written into the pages. It wasn’t hot, it didn’t seem sexy, and it really didn’t seem like they liked it all that much.

Some of the problems were in how there is a lot of detail about the world, but not enough of it was reiterated here. A lot of it was, parts where they summed up the plots, but not the parts where it’s explained how the main character doesn’t need to worry about contraception even though women around her do. So there were a lot of details that just didn’t track for me. I remember that being an issue with the previous books. So I have it in my head that the author isn’t very good at world building.

I liked the magic system in these books. Because it was clear why this magic was essential and important, but the effects were limited and far-reaching. I liked the economics described in the series and how they were differentiated when the main characters went away to another country.

There is a lot to like in this series, and not much to dislike seriously. Sure I think they could be better books, but this is not the heyday of fantasy fiction publishing when there are a thousand new titles per year. There really isn’t a lot out there that’s better than these are.

Kitty Takes a Holiday — Carrie Vaughn (fantasy)

Kitty Takes a Holiday
a fantasy book by Carrie Vaughn
Wiki | Publisher’s Site | Amazon
Overall Rating: 6/10
Meets Expectations: +1
Apparent Rating: 7/10

I loathed the second book in this series, Kitty Does DC Goes To Washington, with the author’s description of a gorgeous man as merely “Brazilian” as if all Brazilian men are the kinds who are featured on pin-up calendars of soccer players… as if “Brazilian” isn’t a type of pubic wax job. So I figured the guy was old, wrinkly, and midget-size…. I’m thinking Tattoo from Fantasy Island twenty-five years later and the author was thinking “dark-haired Fabio”. We were told that Kitty has self-respect, but she takes her Brazilian to bed right away because she can’t resist him since he’s a lycanthrope too— but he’s a were-jaguar and you wouldn’t think wolves and jaguars would mate in the wild, right? So why was her attraction uncontrollable? I really lost all respect for the author. I swore off any other books she might write. I didn’t even consider buying the third book.

The library had the book. It taunted me.

So I took it home and read it. Kitty only f**ks one guy in this book and it costs her a long-time friend. But mostly what made this so much better than the previous book is that it actually is all about her when she thinks it is. And even when the problems are about her, she’s thinking about someone besides herself. So when the author tells us that Kitty is a great person who cares about her friends and her fans, it’s somewhat believable, for once. When we’re told that Kitty has suffered, we’re actually shown some of her suffering, for once. We don’t see Kitty get viciously raped then get up and walk away but get told that she’s broken up about it.

Maybe I liked this book because it was largely about how vicious and horribly intolerant Christians are while claiming they’re nice people (they accidentally summoned a demon while trying to force a well-mannered lycanthrope from her home). That usually improves my opinion of a book.

Overall, it was a pleasant read. If the first two books had started like this one, I might not have such a horrible impression. I still doubt I will ever buy any more of Ms. Vaughn’s books since we don’t share a common vocabulary (“Brazilian!” “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”) And we don’t seem to share an understanding of what normal people consider normal behavior. So when Kitty behaves bizarrely or immorally, I’m expecting an explanation in the text from the author and it’s never there. I guess maybe the author is much younger than I am and thinks women act like they act on the television– like sluts and whores— so no explanation is needed because it’s not werewolf behavior, it’s ordinary.

I liked it surprisingly well. I think other people would consider it an average book for the genre.