Watched a few episodes of the Dresden Files TV show online… decent by themselves, but when you know the books, they just fall very short. Too much of a crime show, not enough magic. It was probably budgeting issues at the ground level. It’s such a shame, because Paul Blackthorne really fits as Harry Dresden. And the ‘cover art’ with him holding up that little ball of bluish-white flame is gorgeous.
Owlsight; OwlflightMercedes Lackey &Larry Dixon This is not really a new book, but the last time I read it was when I was in 9th grade. My general impression of it hasn’t changed, however — I still have no patience for the way the characters stand around gabbing endlessly to themselves, mental soliloquies like woah. At one point Darian says to Tyrsell, a dyheli who can actually hear this mental roundabout, "I’ll stop woolgathering." It’s about a book and a half and a hundred thousand words too late. If it was an infodump, that would be one thing, because at […]
The Cracked ThroneJoshua Palmatier I liked Cracked a lot better than Skewed. The style flows a bit more smoothly, you get some fascinating new insights into the way the Sight and the Throne work, and Varis seems much less of a wet rag. I like the personalities of the original group who created the throne, how they’re saner than the other voices, and present as a guide to Varis — it’s a believable way to teach her certain things that she needs to know but would take far too much time to discover herself. That’s always a problem when you […]
I’m breaking from the review-only format to include news from the specfic market/community because I couldn’t read about this and not pass it on, especially since there seems to be an effort to suppress it. From a rejection letter sent out by an editor of Helix: I’m impressed by your knowledge of the Q’uran and Islamic traditions. (Having spent a couple of years in the Middle East, I know something about these things.) You did a good job of exploring the worm-brained mentality of those people – at the end we still don’t really understand it, but then no one […]
The VirtuSarah Monette Labyrinthine. Sorry, I just had to. As a single word to describe this book, it’s irresistible and perhaps inevitable. And not in terms of the obscure thaumaturgical theory and the calendar system, although that’s intricate in itself, but in terms of Felix and Mildmay, and this endless, twisted, complex little dance they do. They’re hopelessly interlocked to each other by love and blood and history, and to link it to the baseline metaphor, it’s like they’re both running around the same labyrinth trying to get out but neither of them willing to go through the heart. Backing […]
The Skewed ThroneJoshua Palmatier I don’t know if this was intentional or not (I suspect it wasn’t, but I’m always ready to give the benefit of the doubt), but much of this book sounded as if it was written by a fourteen-year-old, not just narrated. It’s just little things that sort of stick out, like, "Eyes hardening, I turned back to the mouth of the narrow." I mean, you just don’t say things like ‘eyes hardening’ when you’re talking about yourself in first person. It’s the show-not-tell thing, most basic rule in the book. Same thing comes up in multiple […]