Mad Times

Sequel of sorts to Kushner’s Swordspoint, though Becky read this without having read that and managed just fine. As the book opens, our heroine Katherine is learning that in order to settle a lawsuit that is crippling her family she must go to the city (unnamed as in the other books set there, but fans (and the author) have taken to calling it Riverside) and, train as a sword fighter in the house of her uncle, the Mad Duke Tremontaine. Got that?

Katherine is mostly excited by the prospect of going to the city at first, but as she learns just how serious the Duke is about the sword fighting, things become much more ambiguous for her. She does manage to make a friend as soon as she arrives in the person of Lady Artemisia Fitz-Levi. But they are soon divided and Lady Fitz-Levi has complications of her own to deal with as we see in a parallel narrative thread.

Despite the other story lines, the book is primarily the tale of Katherine’s coming of age. She starts changing on the first page of the book and keeps on refining herself all the way to the end. What makes the book irresistible is that nearly every other character in it is busy going through their own changes at the same time. I can’t recall ever reading a book where so many essentially minor characters were so well drawn and given their own little arcs to follow.

This richness of characterization includes the character of the city itself which Kushner clearly adores. The city and its culture are similar to the typical fantasy setting, but Kusher manages to distinguish it well enough that what would be anachronisticly modern attitudes instead seem perfectly natural. In particular, this society has virtually no stigma on sexual relationships between members of the same gender. And while that is a significant factor in the lives of a number of the characters, I just drew more attention to the fact with that sentence than Kushner does in the whole book.

If I have a gripe with the book at all (and I barely do), it is that Kushner perhaps loves her characters a bit too much and so their trials are resolved, if not painlessly, then with somewhat implausible neatness.

An Argentinian mathematics student goes to Oxford in England on a scholarship. In addition to coping with living in a foreign land, he is soon coping with being closely acquainted with a series of murders.

The murder mystery is fairly pedestrian. What’s fun is the relationship between the student and the logic professor Arthur Seldom. There’s some shared background between the two in the mathematics and Seldom’s facility with Spanish, but through the course of the book they build something deeper and more complex. The book is written as if recounted years later looking back on the events and this nostalgic point of view colors and distances the events of the story. It feels quiet and restrained in a way that even though the book is set in the late 20th century makes it feel almost timeless.

The murders are early on identified as the work of a serial killer and the final resolution is refreshingly free of the cliches of that genre.

This book got featured in a couple of Friday cat pictures here at Mad Times. A friend at work suggested the book based solely on the author’s smart ass sense of humor. But more about that later. The book is not really a self help book. It’s more of a description of what psychologists know about what makes us happy and what keeps us from being happy. There are 388 footnotes in this book and almost all of them refer to a specific experiment conducted to measure some aspect of human happiness. (Lest that scare you off, let me say that I only know this because they’re end notes and so they were all in one place to be added up. I only read the first footnote in the book which helpfully assured me that I wouldn’t be missing much more than references if I didn’t read any of the others.) So the book isn’t an opinion piece, it’s closer to a friendly survey of the literature.

I don’t remember the specific points Gilbert makes in the book. Part of that is because I read it sporadically and failed to take any notes along the way. But I’m afraid I have to lay some of the blame for my lack of retention on the author’s (and editors’) shoulders. Remember the smart ass sense of humor? It really is pretty funny. The problem is that the jokes don’t generally serve the subject matter very well. His examples are colorful, but the glitz overshadows the message. I wish I had taken notes because I think I could benefit from some reflection on his points about the ways in which we fail to accurately predict what actions will make us happy. But to get back there now I’d basically have to reread the book and I can’t quite dredge up that much interest. Maybe my work friend took notes and will share.

Sequel to Briggs’s Moon Called. This one is plotted more like an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but thankfully, the main character, Mercedes “Mercy” Thompson still isn’t like Buffy at all. (not that I don’t like Buffy, but we’ve already got one of those). The story starts off when Stefan, the Tri-Cities’ resident vampire with a sense of humor asks Mercy to accompany him on a visit to another vampire. That vampire has no sense of humor at all.

As with the last book I really enjoyed the relationships in Blood Bound. All the characters interact in ways complicated not only by their own personalities, but also by the social groups they belong to. The werewolf community is especially fascinating with all the shifting levels of dominance and submission. Also fun is the fact that Mercy has men of various races falling at her feet and has so far refused to even think about picking one.

Briggs’s website shows another Mercy book in the pipe with one more under contract plus a couple more books in the same universe planned. Yay!

This seems to be the fifth Retrieval Artist book, but only the second I’ve read. As with the last one, I read this as a nominee for the Endeavour Award (given each year to a book by a northwest author). In this volume, Miles Flint returns to the moon in time to receive a frantic call from his mentor, Paloma, but too late to save her from being brutally murdered. The book is a fairly straightforward murder mystery from that point.

The mystery isn’t very mysterious. I don’t read a lot of mystery novels, but I’m sure there’s a word for books where the solution hinges on information that the reader wasn’t privy to and couldn’t possibly have guessed.

What keeps it interesting is that it leads Miles on a deep exploration of the continuum of ethics in the occupations he and Paloma pursue. Rusch manages to make a number of morally ambiguous characters simultaneously sympathetic and repugnant. It’s really a pretty impressive feat. It will be interesting to see if anyone changes their behavior as a result of the events of this book.

First volume in a new fantasy series from Bujold. The setting is an agrarian society of Farmers who are protected from some scary nasty evil creatures by a parallel society of patrolling gypsy-like Lakewalkers.

We first meet Fawn, a smart if ignorant Farmer girl with an insatiable curiosity who has run away from home we know not why. Next appears Dag, an experienced older Lakewalker who lost his left hand in some long-ago encounter.

Pretty much anything I say from here on is a spoiler, but the plot is so transparent that the book is almost self-spoiling. Yet Bujold is so good at making you fall in love with her characters that having the story be fairly predictable just lets you relax and enjoy their company. In addition to the lovable characters she has also invented a magic system and a setting with enough backstory that I’m looking forward to seeing what she does with them in the next volume.

Published in 2006, this is a sequel to Stevermer’s A College of Magics from way back in 1994. But rather than following Faris Nalaneen or Greenlaw academy after the events of College, Scholar tells a story about a different school of magic, the British Glasscastle University. The stories are linked by the inclusion of Jane Brailsford, Faris’s friend from the first book.

This tale is mostly told through the eyes of Samuel Lambert, an American who has been brought to Glasscastle because of his exceptional facility with firearms. He is fascinated with the college and makes friends with a peculiar faculty member, Nicholas Fell. Jane is at the college on a mission from Faris who became the magical Warden of the North in College, and when her path crosses with Samuel’s, sparks begin to fly.

I really liked the first book, and this volume is a most worthy successor. The Edwardian setting is intriguingly different from the real period. Someone more familiar with history could probably pinpoint where history in this world diverged from that of our own. One would think that the presence of widely accepted functioning magic would cause more widespread divergence than is evident, but that’s not a very sporting criticism. Jane and Samuel are charming and realistic characters and their relationship grows and changes in a most satisfying fashion.

I just hope we don’t have to wait another 12 years for the next book!

There are four books previous to this one in this series. I haven’t read any of them. In light of that I was a little worried when this came up on the list for this year’s Endeavour Award reading. But the book starts off with a 2-1/2 page “what has gone before” summary of the first four books! It’s a little astonishing that that’s possible, but it was enough of a name-packed info dump to demystify enough of the backstory references to make the book feel like a stand-alone.

The book focuses largely on the story of two sons of a king, one, Otter, from an ill-advised youthful liaison with a sorceress, the other, Aewyn, from his queen. A huge portion of what makes the book interesting is that the treatment of this relationship is so completely contrary to the usual cliches of the bastard son. The king openly loves both sons, the two sons are best friends, the queen loves both sons. So nice. Of course there has to be conflict somewhere and it comes from the church (a really unpleasantly puritanical not-Christianity) and from the mother of the illegitimate son. Or does it?

All the action is told from pretty close third person with very little revealed that isn’t clear to the characters themselves, so it’s ambiguous where the creeping menace comes from or if there even is a creeping menace.

The tone of the book is claustrophobic and a little scary. Cherryh accomplishes this primarily through conveying every single thought that goes through her characters’ heads. The problem with the book is that these characters (especially Otter) are obsessive worriers, turning the possibilities and options over in their minds endlessly and repetitively. It reads like realistic internal dialog, but it also reads like redundant page-filling and sloppy writing.

In the end, I enjoyed the book mostly for the characters and the growth they all go through in the course of the story, but I would have appreciated it if Cherryh’s editors had been able to hack out maybe a sixth of the word count.

Miles O’Malley, the protagonist of this book, is thirteen years old. He lives in Olympia, Washington on the shores of Puget Sound. He is completely engrossed in his study of the sea life he finds in the bay outside his front door. Well, not quite completely. He also has a bit of an obsession with Angie Stegner, his one-time baby sitter who has grown up to be a bit of a rebel. And he finds time to be friend and partial caretaker to Florence, an elderly retired psychic with a degenerative disease. Then there’s Phelps, a more typical sex-obsessed teenage boy with a gift for air guitar.

The book has a plot that centers around Miles’s discovery of some remarkable sea life and the consequences of those discoveries. And there’s an earthquake (clearly based on the 2001 Nisqually Earthquake, except that one happened in February and the one in the book is in the summer) and the titular high tide.

But the book is mostly about character. From a distance, the characters are recognizable types, but Lynch has imbued them with enough personality that they don’t feel like types. Miles at times threatens to subside into a miniature version of Cannery Row‘s Doc, but he has a rich enough inner life that it becomes easy to think of him as a real person. But the most interesting character of all is Puget Sound as seen through Miles’s eyes. I kept wanting to write the descriptions off as wild exaggeration, but the very first paragraph of the book is an assurance that this instinct is incorrect. Lynch packs an incredible amount of information about the state and fate of sea life in the Sound into the book without ever making it feel preachy or like a gratuitous info dump. What makes that possible is Miles’s completely believable obsession.

Lovely thought-provoking book.

Ninja commandos! The Blackcollars are an elite military unit formed through a combination of training and the use of a drug which permanently enhances their reaction time. They’re nearly invincible, but they weren’t enough to save humans from losing an interstellar war with the Ryqril, a poorly drawn race of scary aliens with paws and swords.

The book is split evenly into two near novel-length sections. In the first, Caine, a deep cover agent of the human underground resistance goes on a mission to the planet Plinry where rather than the contact he expects to find he runs into a team of Blackcollars and with their help manages to complete his mission. In the second, Caine has been given training by the Blackcollars (but not their magical reaction enhancing drug since the formula for that was lost in the war) and heads back to Earth on his first mission as leader not knowing that his Blackcollar buddies from the first book follow him there as backup.

The book reads like a novelization of a military commando video game. Crazy scheme follows crazy scheme and all depends on the magical powers of the Blackcollar commandos and their shuriken and nunchaku. It’s an okay book if you like this sort of thing. I read it cause it’s eligible for the Endeavour Award.