Flight into Fantasy

Conor’s Way by Laura Lee Guhrke is a wonderful read. It’s a romance novel, but it is also the story of a man coming to terms with his own past and learning to look beyond it.

After refusing to go down deliberately in a fight, prizefighter Conor Brannigan is beaten severely and left in the middle of the road, where stubborn, proud Olivia Maitland rescues him and takes him in, nursing him back to health. During that time, Conor finds his soul being healed by Olivia and her three adopted daughters, and Conor learns, too, of Olivia’s own pain.

This book really worked for me. The characters don’t get into stupid fights. They talk to each other, and their misunderstandings are genuine.

The author also draws her other characters well, and makes the small Louisiana town where the story is set come alive for me.

1. Being absorbed in a good book.

2. Tortured heroes who have a lot of angst and yet do not whine to excess
about same.

3. Hanging out with friends.

So far, the visit with my dad has been pretty cool and mellow. It’s funny
how, as a child, I hated and feared the man. Now, in the absence of all
those emotions, we’re getting along really well. And I talked to a good
family friend tonight. Tomorrow I’ll spend the day with her while Dad and
her husband go do manly things which I kind of glazed over when they
explained them.

Along with fantasy and science fiction, my genres of choice, I love a good romance. Mostly because I’m a great big saphead at heart.

Laura Kinsale’s The Dream Hunter is a fairly good romance. Not the best I’ve ever read, but certainly not the worst.

Arden Mansfield, Viscount Winter is a shy, tormented solitary man who goes on worldwide expeditions searching for… something. He finds it briefly in Zenia, a young woman who he mistakes as a Bedouin boy in the Arabian desert. Zenia makes him promise to send her to England, and after Arden is shot, she uses his passport to get herself there. Arden turns out not to be dead, and he comes back and has to get to know her again, as well as the child they conceived after a passionate night of lovemaking.

Kinsale’s prose is quite solid. It feels authentic to me, and I think she’s researched her setting quite well. Arden is also a wonderfully compelling character. He’s my kind of guy, sarcastic and brooding, but with a shy, vulnerable side.

Zenia, however, stuck in my craw. I found her pretty unlikable from the first. I knew she was going to end up with Arden, but the ending felt rushed, and I felt sorry for the poor man. Zenia in the desert is a whiny wallflower with no spine. In England she’s a cold fishwife and a whining shrew. I thought Arden could have done better.

Overall, I’d give this book 84/100, because the prose and the narrative really did mostly cover the fact that I didn’t like Zenia.

I just finished Spirits in the Wires by Charles de Lint. De Lint is one of my favorite authors. He has a way of making his characters and their stories come to life, of drawing the reader into the worlds he creates.

That’s why, when this utterly failed to happen in this book for me, I was disappointed. Oh, I liked a lot of the characters, and they were drawn passably well. But none of them clicked.

Spirits in the Wires is set in de Lint’s city of Newford. If you want an introduction to Newford and its denizens, this book is not the one you want to read. In fact, one of its flaws was that de Lint was overly fond of referencing his other characters in this book when they had no relevance whatsoever to the story at hand. Yes, it’s nice to occasionally have references to events outside of what’s important to the story, but not to the extent De Lint did it in SITW.

The premise of the story was interesting, though. Writer Christie Riddell is dating a woman, Saskia, who was born in a website. We meet Saskia talking to Christie’s shadow, Christiana, who is all of the bits of Christie’s personality he didn’t want and cast off when he was seven years old. A virus takes down a popular website, the Wordwood, and people start disappearing from in front of their computers, including Saskia. Thus it’s up to Christie and several of his friends (a good fourth of whom really could have had a lot less screen time without taking anything away at all) to go rescue them, which involves traveling through the mysterious Borderlands and into the Internet.

Fascinating premise, as I said, but the execusion leaves a lot to be desired, and de Lint can do a lot better. Someplace to be Flying is a much better introduction to Newford and its characters than this book.

Rating: 72/100

Incidentally, I got my copy of the book from here in case anyone likes the idea of finding cheap unabridged audiobooks on the Internet.

So I finally got around to starting to read this book in earnest after I bought it in MP3 CD format from here.

Here are some random thoughts.

I don’t know. I’m not really digging this book the way I’ve liked some of de Lint’s other offerings. The exploits of Hank and Lily and the junkyard peeps in Someplace to be Flying got me hooked from the start. Similarly, I fell in love with Janey and Sarah in The Little Country and Moonheart respectively. But even though SITW features my favorite characters, the Riddell boys, I’m just… meh.

However, Jackson Hart, the techie guy, uses Eudora as a mail client. That means he rox0rz!

Also, Chuck, darling, sweetie pie, the self-referential stuff has got to go. It’s cute if you’re an old fan of the Newford stories. But your new fans are going to sit there and go, “OK, so why did we need the random sentence about Joe Crazy Dog if we’re not going to meet him?” or “Right, so who the fuck is Daniel and why does it matter to me that this jilly person is with him instead of Geordie?” (Although, that being said, if Geordie Riddell were to exist in real life, I would not kick him out for eating crackers in bed. Ahem. Right. Topic.

My goal is to finish this book by the time I leave for my friend’s baby shower this weekend. So probably more notes as I go.