Hey folks, for those of you who haven’t seen this news elsewhere, Vera Nazarian, who runs Norilana Books, has lost her home to foreclosure and is having to move across the country. To try to offset the cost of this, she’s having a huge Foreclosure/Moving Sale of Norilana titles. Details can be found here.
Buy something if you can, and if nothing else, pass the word on! Because foreclosure sucks.
This one clearing the slate before Norwescon, since I’m fairly sure I’m coming back with more books from that! And without further ado, from B&N:
spazzkatMeanwhile, over in Carina Press land:
89 for the year, now. We’ll see how many print books I pick up at the con!
You, yes YOU, must hie yourselves with all speed up to teefury.com ASAP and see the “River Tam and the Fireflies” shirt they have on sale today. It is ADORABLE! ADORABLE, I TELL YOU! And it’s on sale for the next twelve hours or so. 😀
In print:
Electronically:
76 for the year, now.
Currently reading Side Jobs by jimbutcher
Queued up right after that is going to be a library checkout of The Last Hot Time by John M. Ford, since Jo Walton keeps writing tor.com reviews for interesting-sounding books that are damned hard to find and buy. So library checkout it is!
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Pop quiz! Which of these is a quote from Mojo Jojo of the Powerpuff Girls, and which is a quote from Justin Cronin’s The Passage?
“ONE EGG LEFT?! For a nutritious breakfast, TWO eggs is the minimum requirement! And I have but ONE, which is ONE shy of TWO! And it is TWO that I need! Curses! I must immediately purchase some eggs, for I need to have breakfast, and without the eggs I cannot have the breakfast that I so require!”
“She moved to where the bodies lay, the men and also their horses who were dead with no blood in them as was the case with all things that had died in this manner.”
Now, to be fair, it was only the one section of the book where Mr. Cronin was writing in this particularly long-winded style. And I’m pretty sure that he didn’t mean for that part of the book to be read in Mojo Jojo voice. That it did in fact pop right into my brain, though, made it significantly more difficult to take that bit seriously.
And really, that’s the first problem I have with this entire book: its length and verbosity. As someone who’s been working hard the last couple of years to learn how to write more concisely in an effort to sell my initial novels, I cannot help but react badly to an 800+ page doorstop of a novel. Especially when this leads into the second problem I have with the book: that so much has been made of how Amazing and Awesome Mr. Cronin’s effort to write a genre novel is, when he’s not doing a single thing in this story that I haven’t seen done just as well and more concisely by SF/F genre authors. Yet, since he’s the big-name literary author, he gets plaudits that the vast majority of SF/F authors will never be lucky enough to achieve.
Secret government experiment, prompted by Mysterious Investigations into the jungle? Check. The experiment going horribly, horribly wrong? Check. A rampaging virus that turns a lot of the population into vampire-like creatures? Check. Survivors that must eventually band together decades later to find the ultimate way to get rid of all the vampires? Check. Mysterious Young Girl who may be the KEY TO ALL SALVATION? Check, check, and check. Seen it, lots and lots and LOTS of times.
All that said? If you can slog through 800+ pages, and you can deal with the hard time jump between the first part of the story and the rest of it, the book’s actually not half bad. Mr. Cronin uses some tropes that did make me roll my eyes quite a few times (and which will doubtless do the same for anyone who’s read more than one SF/F or horror novel, or who’s seen more than one SF/F or horror movie), and the very end of the book in particular provoked an “oh for fuck’s sake” out of me. It did, however, keep me interested enough to make it all the way to the end, even though it was verbose and cliche-ridden.
And in the end, if a book does that and I’m even mildly entertained, I am willing to say that it did its job. I’m still trying to decide if I want to actually buy a copy to keep in my personal collection, but I was quite fine with checking this out from the library. I’d recommend the same for anyone who might be on the fence about whether to buy this one. Three stars.
Those of you who follow my personal blog know that my partner solarbird
One of the things I’m thinking of doing with mine is seeing if I can write effectively on it. So if you’re a writer and an iPad owner (first OR second generation model), I’m very interested in hearing about whether you find them effective writing devices! If so, what apps do you use? I’ve kind of liked Documents To Go on my iPhone and I plan to see how well I can use it on the iPad, but I’m open to other suggestions as well!
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
It’s taken me a while to figure out exactly how to review this book. The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker has a lot in it I like quite a bit, but on the other hand, it’s also got some elements that drive me absolutely crazy. The core concept is certainly Relevant to My Interests: an urban fantasy scenario, only set in a period time frame, and written in a style heavily influenced by old-school Gothic romances. We’ve got a secret society of men and women whose function is to protect London from ghosts and other supernatural creatures, and who discover that the strange young albino woman who shows up at their academy may be their prophesied seventh member, vital to their defense against an ultimate forthcoming evil.
All well and good. And certainly I must say that Ms. Hieber at many points in this book turns a lovely phrase indeed, very nicely evoking the Gothic style.
The problem for me is, there are also many points where she goes a bit far for my tastes in evoking that style. Our young heroine, Miss Percy Parker, spends just about all of her on-camera time dewily mooning over her handsome professor, the leader of the aforementioned secret society, Alexi Rychman. This frustrates me for several reasons. One, Percy is apparently brilliant in all of her classes except his, yet we never see her actually being particularly brilliant. Two, despite the fact that she’s handed an opportunity to have private tutoring sessions with her professor, she spends way, WAY more time swooning over him than she does actually trying to apply herself to learning anything from him, which would have made me respect her as a character quite a bit more. And three, there was just way too much emphasis, seemingly every third or fourth paragraph in these scenes, about Alexi’s “rich voice” and “noble brow”. All of this is rather appropriate for a traditional Gothic heroine, don’t get me wrong–but in a modern work, I find myself hoping for more, a better balance between the Gothic story tropes and a modern reader’s sensibilities.
My other main point of frustration has to do with the big climax of the story, about which I can say little, since I don’t want to spoil it. I will however freely disclaim that this book ties into certain aspects of Greek mythology about which I have very, very strong opinions–and in fact about which I’ve written a story of my own, so I can’t really address the ending of the story and what’s revealed there in a suitably unbiased manner.
I will say though that if Gothic romance is your thing, you’ll probably eat this book right up. And again, Ms. Hieber’s command of her prose is often very lovely, if you don’t mind your prose in shades of purple. Three stars.