Flight into Fantasy

Tad Williams says on his website that he doesn’t like writing middle books. But he does a wonderful job with this one, letting us get to know the characters and the settings.

Unfortunately, not a lot happens to advance the actual, y’know, plot. Basically, our merry band of adventurers, (who I have been trying to equate to various members of Lord of the Rings since there are a few paralels) continue going through the Otherland network that they learned about in the first place. They visit a weird upside-down creepy version of Oz, a cartoon kitchen (which was my favorite part of the book because Williams and I apparently share a sense of humor), Renaissance Venice, and H. G. Wells’s London after Martian attack. The group gets separated, and only sort of reunites a little near the end.

I’m hoping that some of the relevant plot threads start to come together in the third book… Because while this one was entertaining, the lack of significant plot development until the end drove me crazy.

However, to end on a positive note, you remember those slashy subtexts I mentioned in my review of the last book? They’re still there. And Williams also increases my respect for him because he’s very queer-positive, portraying both a gay man and a lesbian cop in what I think is a very sympathetic manner.

All in all, a very good read, and I can’t wait to dive into book 3.

Rating: 96/100

I love Dave Barry. I read his column regularly, I appreciate his sense of humor, and I look forward every time I go to the bookstore because inevitably there’s some new book by him I can pick up to read.

This book is a collection of Barry’s most recent columns. It starts out with a few political pieces, then moves to some random columns on a variety of topics, such as North Dakota, Windows XP, the Loan Ranger, etc. He closes the collection with a couple of essays regarding September 11.

As column collections go, the humor is there, and I did laugh in parts. But there wasn’t really anything new here. Barry’s humor is, for me, just a little bit predictable because he makes the same kinds of jokes about the same kinds of things. But still, I enjoyed this book. Probably not enough to keep from selling it back to the local used book store once my mom finishes reading it, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

It’s horrible, but I have a bad habbit of trying to glance ahead in stuff I’m reading in search of spoilers. This is hard as most of the books I read are on tape. And now that I remember that Tad Williams writes handy synopses of previous books in the beginning of other books in the series, the urge to sneak a peek at the synopsis of the second book found in the beginning of the third is fairly irresistible.

There are just certain characters I don’t want to see killed… And I haven’t been involved in a book where that kind of thing is likely in a long time.

Tad Williams has made me a squeeing fangirl in this first volume of the Otherlands series. So much so that I’m considering searching through fanfic sites looking to see if there are any, say, Orlando/Frederics shippers out there or if it’s just me. He’s woven a wonderfully complex and epic struggle that is really hard to just summarize suscinctly, especially just the first book.

Basically, you’ve got a group called the Grail Brotherhood, who’ve designed and built a place called Otherland, which has been spiriting away Earth’s children through the Internet. Among the kids taken is Stephen, brother of Renie, the main character. With the help of Xabbu, an African bushman she’s tutoring in virtual ingeneering, Renie sets out to discover what was done to Stephen.\

Meanwhile, Orlando Gardener, a terminally ill young man, lives live vicariously through his character, Thargor, scourge of the Middle Country, a barbarian who reminds me of so many munchkin gamers’ characters I’ve known in RL. Thargor is killed during an adventure when Orlando catches a glimpse of a mysterious golden city, and then, with the reluctant help of his best friend, Frederics (who also intrigues me quite a bit) he sets out looking for the city.

Then there’s the frighteningly psychotic Dread whose amusements involve killing random women, and Christabel, a little girl on a military base, and Mr. Sellers, and so many others. All of them are depicted realistically through the author’s wonderful narrative voice.

I should also give a shout-out to the NLS narrator, Eric Sandvold, who reads the series. The man’s a brilliant voice actor, and he brings Williams’s prose to life wonderfully.

My quibbles with the book were few. First of all, I kind of think he could have cut out a little bit and made the ending flow together a little more without sacrificing a whole lot. And the books are all loooong, and definitely not light reads which are slow to get moving.

Other than that, though, I’m looking forward to continuing to be absorbed in these books.

Rating: 97/100

To be fair, there were some concepts in the book I found intriguing–what it
would be like to be an azi–or a cloned person, shaped by taped lessons
learned while the person is sleeping. But aside from that, the book really
didn’t do anything for me. I can’t even really summarize the plot because I
couldn’t figure out who was doing what where or why. There were a couple of
characters I sort of cared about, but not really enough to keep reading.

So, yeah, unless you like your science really hard and your intrigue thick
and complicated, feel free to skip this one.

Tad Williams is probably going to take a permanent place on my favorite authors list. I’m totally immersed in Otherland right at the moment. Like, I would write fanfic about it kind of immersed.

And since I have all the books, I can be so immersed for days to come, and that makes me happy.

So given the predilictions of those of you on my friendslist, most of whom seem to be avid SF or fantasy readers…

Have any of you read C. J. Cherryh’s Cyteen? What about C. S. Friedman’s Cold Fire trilogy or Tad Williams’s Otherlands books?

I know I’m going to like the Tad Williams books. And an old friend kept insisting I needed to read Cherryh. (Actually, I agreed with him because I started to read Downbelow Station years ago, and I think I just never finished it because of a lack of time. But I’ve never heard of C. S. Friedman.

Thoughts? Opinions?

OK, Judith McNaught’;s Perfect is the last for a while in my romance novel binge. Next be prepared for a lot of series reading, and a bunch of SF and adventure stuff thrown in.

That said, I’m rather ashamed to admit, as a cynical, hardened and sort of worldly person, that I actually shed tears over this book. Tears! I’m tough and hardened that way, and I never never cry over literature or movies (except for this instance and the time I watched Prancer as a kid and bawled my eyes out at the end of that movie.

Anyway, the plot: Julie Mathison is a young, sweet, irritatingly wholesome Texas schoolteacher. Zachary Benedict is a famous movie star who gets convicted, wrongly, of killing his life. After suffering through prison, Zach escapes and ends up bringing Julie along as his hostage to his hideout in Colorado where, you guessed it, they fall in love.

The good: McNaught might strike some readers as excessively wordy, but I found that her wordiness made for a better book as she draws her characters carefully and thoroughly and makes them real. Julie and Zach are a wonderfully realized couple, and the other small-town colorful characters and glamorous Hollywood types with which she casts the book are also vividly portrayed. She also knows how to wring forth all the emotion from the book. And one of Julie’s goals, that of promoting women’s literacy, is very admirable and I respect her for it.
Some reviewers I read on Amazon.com thought that McNaught dropping famous names around was excessive, but I thought it made the Hollywood lifestyle in which Zach lives seem more real, even if the celebrities listed are kind of dated.

The Not So Good: If you look at them too closely, Julie and Zach are a well-realized and vividly colorful female fantasy and a Mary Sue. And there are a few little moments here and there, mainly involving a subplot featuring Julie’s brother, whose ex-wife is trying to get back together with him, where McNaught says a few things about how women should be expected to be good wives that made me grit my teeth. There are also a ton of romance cliches, where Julie’s attempts to be independent and escape from Zach in Colorado struck me as stupid and I knew they’d fail because Zach thwarts them… And I was right.

Overall, though, I was very satisfied with this book. Definitely recommended.

Rating: 90/100

So I departed from my romance kick for another visit to Charles de Lint’s Newford with this rivveting book. Unlike Spirits in the Wires The Onion Girl lived up to its expectations for me.

Artist Jilly Coppercorn is hit by a car and left partially paralyzed. The only escape she has is through the Dreamlands, where she can do all the things she did normally. Meanwhile, her sister, grown bitter and hard from a bad childhood and adult life, seeks revenge on Jilly for abandoning her to the whims of her psychotic, molesting older brother.

This story spoke to me on many different levels. Jilly’s always been a favorite character in the Newford books, and it was nice to let her have some of the spotlight. It was also nice to see the way her accident effected the lives of her friends, particularly poet Wendy and fellow artist and dreamer Sophie. As a character study of both Jilly and her sister, this book succeeds quite well.

I only had one minor quibble with the book.

I thought that hooking Jilly up with Daniel, her nurse in the hospital, was a cheesy horrible plot contrivance, since CDL never really fleshed Daniel out very much. I mean, I get that it’s more fun to have the running thread of Jilly and her best friend Geordie having this continuous unrequited love going on, but Daniel was barely in the book at all. The least CDL could have done was make him someone *important* to the story.

So, aside from that, this was a wonderful read, and I was sad to see it end.

Rating: 99/100

Duchess in Love by Eloisa James was an interesting story. It was lighter than the last couple of books I’ve read, and there were a lot of cute elements, but it didn’t grab me quite as much as I hoped it would.

The story tells of a wayward duke, Cam, who returns to England from Greece where he fled after a forced impromptu marriage between himself and his wife, Gina. Gina wants the marriage enulled because she wants to marry Sebastian, Marquess Bonnington. But in the meantime, Cam and Gina find themselves falling in love with each other.

This story is set in Regency England, at a house party. We meet a colorful cast of secondary characters, and there are lots of subplots thrown around, mostly involving Gina’s wayward and married friends.

Overall, this book was a pleasant read, but I never connected with any of the characters. There were some hysterically funny moments, but the story dragged a little bit and lacked a lot of the depth I’d have liked.

Rating: 85/100.

Candle in the Window by Christina Dodd was not one of the books I
enjoyed reading. It was boring in a lot of places, offensive at others, or
just meh at the rest.

In medieval England, young blind Lady Sora is living the life of a poor Mary
Sue character at the mercy of her mean stepfather. She gets rescued by
another lord, who wishes Sora to help his son, William, the greatest knight
in all England, recover from his blindness. Sora agrees. William doesn’t
like her at first, and she more or less uses her tongue to make him see that
he’s being hard to deal with.

Of course, William regains his sight completely after less than a third of
the book, and the rest of the novel sort of ambles along pointlessly for too
long. Dodd constructs a plot involving a psychotic nobleman obscessed with
William, and there’s some stupid issues William and Sora have to work out,
but all told I couldn’t be bothered.

Being blind myself, I can say that the portrayal of the blind characters in
this book really really sucks. Most of us, for example, don’t really feel
the need to feel people’s faces to determine what they look like. And poor,
sweet, perfect, angelic Sora has it way too easy. I don’t buy that the
greatest knight in all England would in those days find love with a blind
woman, whether she’d helped him gain confidence or not. It’s not realistic,
but then nothing in this book was.

Oh, and speaking of realism, this book is set around 1160, and it refers to
people speaking the “barbaric English tongue”. And yet, all the serfs speak
in cockney accents. The French *had* Cockney accents? I don’t buy it either.

So, yeah. Pass this one up. The only vaguely appealing thing the book had
going for it were some truly deliciously hot sex scenes. But that isn’t
exactly the stuff of a great novel.

Rating: 70/100 because the sex scenes counted for a lot and the psycho
villain plot did snare me despite my better judgment.