k – Page 13 – Triple Take

Booked to Die (John Dunning)

The Plot
Cliff Janeway is a Denver detective with a weakness for book collecting. He likes to read, too, though that’s not a given. The year is 1986 and eBay and the internet have not yet transformed the antiquarian book market into something completely unrecognizable from its previous incarnation. A book scout — a person who makes the rounds of yard sales and thrift stores in search of underpriced used books — is murdered, and Janeway finds himself oddly determined to find out who was responsible. The path he takes to the answer puts his career and even his life in danger.

My Thoughts
This was not a mystery series I had ever heard of until it was suggested for one of our reviews. I suspect it was the alleged subject matter — the book trade — which was the attraction. And I freely admit, had I found this on my own, I might well have been tempted to pick it up.

And it succeeded in one goal at least: I was able to finish the book. In spite of my near obsessive need to finish things like books, there have been quite a few mysteries that I’ve picked up off the shelf at the library due to an interesting cover blurb which later proved to be entirely unreadable for a variety of reasons. (Off the top of my head, the recent failures include The Rabbit Factory, Southern Fatality and Consigned to Death.)

The story centers around one Cliff Janeway, who seems to be writing or telling this tale from some unspecified point in the future. At the time described at the beginning of the story, he is a police detective who has been having some problems with a wealthy scumbag to whom no charges will stick. He’s also involved with another police officer, Carol, supposedly to the point of considering marriage with her. But it’s telling that the author lavishes far more time and effort in detailing Janeway’s feelings and emotions toward the scumbag than his relationship with his girlfriend. She remains a non-entity and pretty soon they randomly break up and she disappears from the narrative altogether. Janeway, in fact, is really a loner in spite of a superficial effort (purposely superficial? It’s unclear) made to give him connections and friends and other contacts. And honestly, loners can be hard to make interesting.

The mystery itself doesn’t really ramp up until the second half of the book. The first half, though the mystery is presented on the very first pages and there is some desultory detective work put in, is totally there to explain how Janeway came to leave the police force and enter the book trade. I would have liked to have seen this fact a bit more well camoflaged, because as it stands, there’s a very clear break in the middle of the book where this tale ends and then suddenly the real detective work begins.

I also found some of the writing and characterization to be sloppy. In the middle of the book especially, Janeway starts to make sweeping statements about the passage of time which makes it seem as if years have passed. But then when we move in to the second half of the book, it’s clear that this is taking place just a few months after the first section. So where did those statements come from? Is he narrating this from a time far in the future? This could be made more clear. As it was I spent several minutes flipping back and forth trying to figure out how it could work that there wouldn’t be a contradiction.

And then the characterization. Janeway was all right; by the end of the book I did feel like he was starting to take shape, if a still nebulous one. But the secondary characters were very vague, and many of them (like his police detective partner) never made it past cardboard cutout. I also felt cheated — one expects to lose secondary characters in a mystery, that’s a danger of the role, but if you spend the first half of the book tearing apart the character’s life, you tend to expect that when he finally begins to rebuild it that you’re going to start meeting the characters who will people the series from here on out. This is obviously not the case here, as by the end of the book there’s perhaps only two people other than Janeway who seem likely to return in any future stories.

The mystery itself was pretty weak. The author dropped enough hints about who the culprit was that he might has well have erected a sign. That he managed to spin it out over half the book was impressive; it just wasn’t complicated enough to go on longer than that, so it’s a good thing there was all that other stuff to occupy the other half.

In Short
This was an okay, but not stellar mystery book. It was made more interesting to me by its description of the used book trade of two decades ago. The author could have done more to tie the two halves of the book together, and there were some sloppy phrases that made the timeline of events confusing to me. The secondary characters were also pretty weakly drawn in several cases, with little to make them memorable in any way. I probably won’t be continuing with this series, though I may check out the jacket summaries just in case.

The Happiest Days of Our Lives (Wil Wheaton)

The Plot
A loosely related collection of essays by blogger Wil Wheaton. The theme here seems to be memories.
My Thoughts
I’ve been a reader of Wheaton’s blog for years, and I read his first two books when they first came out. I anticipate that I’ll continue to read after this one, even though I […]

The Plot
A loosely related collection of essays by blogger Wil Wheaton. The theme here seems to be memories.

My Thoughts
I’ve been a reader of Wheaton’s blog for years, and I read his first two books when they first came out. I anticipate that I’ll continue to read after this one, even though I found it a bit more disjointed than his previous efforts. Perhaps it suffered in comparison to Just a Geek, which I had reread most recently, and which was really a _book_ rather than a collection.

The essays in this entry into the Wil Wheaton oeuvre are of varying lengths. Some are just a handful of short paragraphs and others continue for pages — either greatly expanded from their origins as blog entries or a combination of many posts, because blog entries are rarely so epic.

The writing flows, at its best when he doesn’t try too hard to be literary and just lets the story have its own voice. It’s probably no coincidence, but I found that the writing was at its best in the entries where he’d clearly felt the most emotion while the event itself was happening. “The Butterfly Tree” and “Let Go – a requiem for Felix the Bear” really stood out for me. The former especially — I felt so badly for little Wil, and it was so easy to see myself at the same age feeling the same way in a similar situation. The deep embarrassment compounded by the unfairness of it all and his parents’ reaction: it’s the sort of thing that sticks forever in your mind.

Aside from the disjointedness of the content, which I’ve already mentioned, the only other thing that started to bother me was the continual injection of song lyrics and music into the text. However, this is not really a failure of the author — clearly song lyrics and bands are important to him. Unfortunately I just find them annoying. About the only thing that turns me off more than random quoted song lyrics in a blog entry is a long rambling discussion of the dream you had last night.

In Short
I wouldn’t call this Wheaton’s strongest book, but it holds up well enough next to his others. An expanded/revised/superspecial version of this is supposed to be out from Subterranean press some time soon (I believe he’s sent off the final copy to them now). I’d be interested to know what he felt like adding and/or changing now that the book has had a while to settle in his mind. Bear in mind that the title is sort of ironic, as quite a few of these memories have the potential to leave you in tears.

Flora Segunda (Ysbeau Wilce)

The Plot
Flora Fyrdraaca is about to turn fourteen, about to be sent to the army’s training camp, and about to find herself stuck in a profession she doesn’t want. What she does want is to become a Ranger like her hero, Nini Mo, but she has no real idea how she ought to go […]

The Plot
Flora Fyrdraaca is about to turn fourteen, about to be sent to the army’s training camp, and about to find herself stuck in a profession she doesn’t want. What she does want is to become a Ranger like her hero, Nini Mo, but she has no real idea how she ought to go about fulfilling this ambition. While attempting to procrastinate dealing with this increasingly pressing problem, she finds herself embroiled in one accidental near disaster after another.

My Thoughts
After I read this book, I went looking online to see what I could find out about the series — more background, future books and so forth. I soon found the author’s blog in which she noted her strong preference for reviews without spoilers. So that is what I shall provide here, more or less.

Stuff I Liked
The first thing that strikes one about the book is the writing style. I’ve been trying to come up with a way of describing it that would make sense to anyone but myself, but I’m not sure my impressions are easily conveyed. The style is what I would describe as ‘cute’, young fannish female bloggerese. (And let me clarify that these are college or post-college young fannish females, as contrasted with middle aged fannish females and female children. It was not chatspeak.) Since that is a writing style which I like and to which I occasionally aspire, I liked it very much. (Except when I didn’t, see below.)

Also very positive was the author’s excellent job at creating a character who actually thinks, behaves and reacts in a fashion entirely appropriate for her age. This is not as easy or as obvious as it sounds, as it’s remarkable the number of amateur and even professional authors who find themselves in desperate trouble as soon as they write a character younger than seventeen or eighteen.

The setting was also very intriguing to me. The city in which Flora resides seems as if it may be loosely based on San Francisco, with the wider world outside consisting of the rest of California and Mexico at the very least. As someone who hasn’t lived any further west than Minneapolis and has spent probably a grand total of about 3 weeks on the west coast, my innate knowledge of the history of the area is sorely lacking, so some of what has been pulled in for the world building may be lost on me. I can tell you why the Pilgrims at Plymouth did not get on with the Puritans in Boston but I could not tell you what the Spanish were doing in Mexico and California and when they actually left and what lasting influence they had on current Hispanic and Mexican culture. Which is my roundabout way of saying that quite a lot of stuff in Flora’s world (like the catorcena) seemed like it might be of Hispanic or Mexican origin but I am not qualified to make definitive statements on the matter. But I liked it anyway because these are not influences I often see in fantasy novels.

Stuff I Didn’t Like
As noted before, the first thing that strikes one about the book is the writing style. And though I liked it overall and became very used to it over the course of the whole story, there was a point toward the beginning where I was starting to find it overbearingly cutesy. While I can understand the reasoning behind using similar-sounding but not quite the same words to help with your world building, “sandwie” crossed the line. I didn’t realize there was a line until it was crossed, but as soon as I saw that I knew we’d gone beyond it.

I also felt very much the lack of a pronunciation guide to the names. Almost all of them were vowel soup with random squiggly accent marks to boot and I would have appreciated some guidance there. Left to my own devices I will often grow used to thinking of it being pronounced in an incorrect fashion and thus be jarred later to hear it another way.

What?
While the book had a conclusion, of sorts, there were a lot of questions which were either not answered or even raised during the course of it. Some of them are perhaps not the sort of questions Flora would have asked, but as a reader, I certainly did.

1. Where did Flora come from? Her dad did not seem to be in any particular position to be performing his husbandly duties and one can only assume he was worse years ago.
2. What happened to the Rangers?
3. What happened to Nini Mo?
4. What happened to the first Flora?
5. What happened to Poppy? Perhaps this is meant to have been answered but I cannot help but feel the explanation was inadequate.

I assume (and now know) that some of these questions will be answered elsewhere, and I can be satisfied with that. But I didn’t go into the read with the expectation or realization that this was a series effort, so to have so much left in the air at the end was a little jarring.

In Short
As I started the book, I wasn’t sure how the language and the setting would pan out. Would they grow to grate on me, or would I grow to like them? It turned out to be the latter, as I became absorbed in the story and came to like Flora and even Udo, who is not the sort of character I usually like. (It goes without saying that I also liked Hotspur, because he is exactly the sort of character I usually like.) This is again a fantasy-adventure book with a strong female protaganist which I haven’t seen getting enough publicity. It already has one sequel (which I began reading directly, then stopped because I realized it was going to answer some of the questions I had left after reading the first Flora, and I should write this review before I got the answers) and it seems more are probably on the way. More people should read it. Make sure your libraries are purchasing it.

The Sharing Knife: Horizon (Lois McMaster Bujold)

The Plot
After seeing the ocean, Dag and Fawn head for their next destination, a Lakewalker camp rumored to house a Healer who might be able to answer some of Dag’s concerns and questions. Arkady Waterbirch, the Healer, turns out to have quite a lot of answers, and much of Dag’s worry is relieved. […]

The Plot
After seeing the ocean, Dag and Fawn head for their next destination, a Lakewalker camp rumored to house a Healer who might be able to answer some of Dag’s concerns and questions. Arkady Waterbirch, the Healer, turns out to have quite a lot of answers, and much of Dag’s worry is relieved. After some trouble with the southern Lakewalker camp, which, though not quite as cut off as the northern camps, is still not very accepting of change and new ideas, the group (Fawn, Dag, Barr and Arkady) join a farmer wagon train heading north. Along the way Dag continues his ‘apprenticeship’ with Arkady and finally makes some real headway on solving the problem of farmer/Lakewalker relations: he invents a shield that can prevent farmers from being mind-controlled by malices. This is tested during an unexpected malice attack where the farmers save the day.

My Thoughts
After the nice interlude on the river, we’re thrown back into the thick of things back on land. Dag’s anxiety over what happened with Crane has grown to a fever pitch, and he feels as if he may be losing control of himself. It’s just so easy to abuse power, especially when it seems to be for the right reasons. Fawn is worried too, and has been canvassing the local poplulation for the name of the best Lakewalker healer around, someone with enough talent they might be able to help guide Dag.

The group is consistently given the name Arkady Waterbirch, and they travel to the camp where he lives. This provides our first introduction to the Southern Lakewalker clans. The South, as we’re told, has been pretty much cleared of malices, and both the farmers and the Lakewalkers have ceased to view them as an immediate threat. The Lakewalkers especially are finding it difficult to maintain the Spartan lifestyle adopted by the northerners: they have started building houses and permanent buildings and mixing far more freely with the farmers in the area. This slow erosion of their supposedly superior culture is a source of great anxiety to the Lakewalkers themselves, and it seems like most of their reactions are informed by their guilt at succombing to farmer ways (and that, deep down, they probably don’t really want to go back.)

Our band of travellers lodge with Arkady while Dag begins learning to control his new abilities. I was pleased that we didn’t have to deal with Dag’s angsting for very long: he calmed down directly he saw Arkady had the same ability to project ground as he did. We then get a glimpse of what might have been back at Hickory Lake camp, had Hoharie agreed to Dag’s suggestion that Fawn be allowed to be his Healing assistant. Though Dag naively assumes the other Lakewalkers are getting used to Fawn and becoming more accepting of her, it’s pretty clear to the reader (and later made starkly clear to Dag) that the Lakewalkers are only humoring the whim of a skilled Healer they hope to retain. They tolerate her, it’s true, but it’s not enough on her own merit that they would ever consider associating with her without him. And so, in case the reader didn’t agree with his decision to light out on his own, we are shown that it never could have worked out any other way.

The group is soon on the move again, heading north with Arkady in tow, after a disagreement with the camp leaders generates an ultimatum and a bluff which Dag calls. And while the necessity of heading north again is clear (without malices, the need for immediate farmer/Lakewalker cooperation is less pressing and seems to be evolving naturally at its own pace), this second half of the book was much weaker than the first. Dag, Arkady, Barr and Fawn join a farmer wagon train heading north, and we’re suddenly introduced to a whole pile of new characters who are not really very distinctive and who, for me, blend together in a confusing mass. The proliferation of characters only increases when we rejoin the other half of the previous travelling group, Fawn’s brother Whit, his new wife Berry and their assorted entourage. Then still more people arrive: a small band sent out from the southern camp to try and entice Dag’s party back, an ignorant farmer family stuck on the road, and Dag’s niece Sumac and another patroller she was with.

The small army travelling along makes it hard to maintain focus. There is a reason to limit a quest group to under ten people: it’s too hard to remember and keep track of where everyone is. I have read books in the past where characters will disappear for chapters at a time (often missing conversations and actions they should certainly have been involved with) only to suddenly pop up again when the author remembers they were there. Bujold does an admirable job of not forgetting characters, but the effort of keeping track of so many different people and made this whole section less effective than the rest. It felt shallow. There was too much going on, and in a series which has made a point of being introspective and “small” in its focus, I felt like suddenly we were doing something else altogether.

The crazy amount of new characters aside, it’s in this part of the book that Dag finally makes progress at solving the problem he has pinpointed as the largest obstacle to farmer/Lakewalker cooperation: the farmers’ vulnerability to Beguilement by both Lakewalkers and Malices. He had made a small attempt at a shield earlier, but it’s only after his work with Arkady that he is competant to actually create one and make it stick. This is a good and reasonable solution to what was a seemingly intractable problem set up in the prior books, and I was pleased at the resolution.

And now a few random observations:
1. The real villain of this book was the Lakewalker Neeta rather than the malices, and I was once again very very glad not to have the plot become embroiled by some sort of stupid jealousy/misunderstanding business where someone sees something that was really innocent and overreacts. I cannot really recall any instances of this in any of the books in this series, and for that I am grateful.

2. That said, we came precipitously near to a cringe-worthy turn of events toward the end of the book where Dag is restrained by the farmers because they think he’s lost it. It was similar in feel to the scene in Legacy which I also disliked, and that is why I preferred Beguilement and Passage which had none such.

3. And finally, I end with a question: Throughout the series we’ve seen that farmers are generally named after real things: plants, animals and the like. Lakewalker given names are more fanciful and seem to have no particular origin in the real world. So what in the hell is going on with Sumac?

In Short
This was a good conclusion for the series, leaving open the possibility of further adventures but tying up all of the main plotlines in a satisfying way. After the very strong third book, I found some parts of this book a bit of a let down, but it was never bad and there was much to like.

The Sharing Knife: Passage (Lois McMaster Bujold)

The Plot
Having given up their attempt at living among the Lakewalkers, Dag and Fawn are at loose ends. Dag decides to fulfill an earlier promise he made to Fawn and show her the ocean. Accordingly, the pair set off. Along the way, they’re joined by new companions, including Fawn’s brother Whit, a young man accidentally […]

The Plot
Having given up their attempt at living among the Lakewalkers, Dag and Fawn are at loose ends. Dag decides to fulfill an earlier promise he made to Fawn and show her the ocean. Accordingly, the pair set off. Along the way, they’re joined by new companions, including Fawn’s brother Whit, a young man accidentally beguiled by Dag, the riverboat captain Berry, and some young Lakewalkers who have decided to run away from home. Dag’s powers continue to increase, and he begins to grow more and more worried over what he might be turning into.

My Thoughts
The first two books were written together as one book and then backedited to split them into two. I believe that is not the case with books 3 and 4, though they were also intended to be two halves of the same story (and together to form a second half of the story started by books 1 and 2). Bujold had given them the working titles of Wide Green World 1 and 2, but for publication they were changed to Sharing Knife 3 and 4, which I think was a wise decision.

We pick up in Passage very shortly after Fawn and Dag have cut ties with Hickory Lake camp. They have headed for the farm belonging to Fawn’s family, and stop there for a little while to figure out just what they’re going to do. Upon arrival they discover that Fawn’s twin brothers, the ones who had caused the most trouble back in book 1, have departed to the frontier to look for land. Fawn’s remaining family (her parents, aunt, two brothers and sister-in-law) are much more accepting of Dag and don’t question too deeply why the pair are out on the road again.

Eventually, Fawn and Dag move on from the farm, feeling refreshed and with at least some goal in mind: to go visit the ocean. They have also picked up Fawn’s brother Whit as a travelling companion for at least part of the way. That it turns out to be more than just part of the way should surprise no one, least of all them, and on the whole they don’t seem particularly shocked. They both acknowledge that there was little to hold Whit back at the farm, since he was not due to inherit and there was no other obvious outlet for his creativity.

Dag, freed from the oversight of Lakewalker superiors, begins experimenting a good deal more with his ground-based powers. He first has a sort of idea that he will heal the rift between farmers and Lakewalkers by allowing farmers to share in some of the medical techniques used by the camps. It doesn’t take him long to realize that this idea requires a good deal more thought than he gave it before starting. We discover that “beguilement”, the title of the first book, is an actual real state which can be caused accidentally (or on purpose). To me, at least, this was not clear before, because Dag’s original explanation was filtered through Fawn’s perception and seemed to be that farmers got obsessed with Lakewalkers because they were so good in bed. It turns out to actually be a bit more serious than this, a real problem needing a solution.

The solution presents itself partway through the book, as Dag comes to understand what it is that causes the beguilement and figures out how to remove it. This is fortunate, because the ‘big bad’ of the book turns out to be not a Malice, but a renegade Lakewalker who has been beguiling people left and right to make a troop of bandits.

This Lakewalker, Crane, is someone who was mentioned in passing before — a Lakewalker who got involved with a farmer woman and ended up thrown out of camp as a result of his support of her. I’m not sure if we’re meant to feel sympathy for him or not; in spite of his involvement with the farmer woman, he doesn’t seem to have much respect for them as a people. This may be born from his anguish at her death and his alienation from society as a whole, but it’s not clear. In any case, he is definitely full of contempt for others by the time we meet him here.

The encounter with Crane is a double-edged sword for Dag. Throughout the whole book Dag has been experimenting more willingly and aggressively with his groundwork: healing people, trying to figure out beguilement, trying to figure out how to replenish his reserves more quickly. But he’s also growing more and more tense as the techniques he seems to be discovering strike him as very similar to the methods Malices use to enslave and destroy others. Dag lashes out at Crane when Fawn is threatened and uses his abilities to paralyse him from the neck down. He fears very much that he has gone too far and is turning into a monster. But to the good, he manages to use Crane’s death to acquire a new Sharing Knife, something he has been feeling a lack of for the whole course of the book. And in so acquiring, he is able to use the activity as a teaching exercise for the large group of Farmers who assisted in breaking up the bandit group.

One negative aspect to the focus on Dag’s exploration of groundwork was that I felt Fawn was relegated here to a less prominent role. She was still around, being supportive and clever, but on the whole I felt the spotlight was mostly shining on Dag. On the other hand there were only a few points in the book where they were divided up, and then only for a few hours at a time. The Malices didn’t make any appearances on camera at all, which made for a nice change.

Aside from the main thread of plot, we have several subplots introduced here, along with some new characters. Berry Clearcreek is the captain of the boat in which our protagonists head down the river. She’s a young woman about Fawn’s age, and relieves her of the responsibility of being the only girl in the party. Berry is on a mission to try and find out what happened to her father, brother and fiance, who never returned from their trip downriver the year prior. Unfortunately for her, it turns out that her relatives are dead and her fiance has joined Crane’s bandits.

The group is also joined by Remo and Barr, two young Lakewalker patrollers who have gotten in big trouble with their families and their camp. Both exemplify the problem Dag is attempting to solve: they are arrogant and look down on farmers as inferiors. Over time, they begin to realize farmers aren’t as stupid as they thought. The question of what they plan to do next is still unresolved at the end of this book.

In Short
This one was by far my favorite of the whole series. Not only did Fawn and Dag manage to spend almost the entire book together, but what battle scene there was was quite brief and didn’t involve a malice at all. As an added bonus, we got another interesting female character, and some friends for Fawn. Dag’s angsting about his powers was a little tiresome, but his concerns were legitimate enough, and didn’t get in the way of the story (ie, he didn’t go making some dumbass speeches about not using his powers and then being forced to go back on his word only after tragedy had ensued.) We started to get a few inklings of how the central background plot point might eventually be resolved, but at the end of this book it still seems an enormous and unwieldy task for our small band of heroes.