Bonus/Interim bookpost, mostly October
Oct. 14th, 2007 10:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellarienBarbara Hambly, Patriot Hearts
Historical novel of the women who loved the first four US presidents -- though in the case of Sally Hemmings "love" is a bit of an oversimplification. As you might expect, the structure is complicated; it's mostly in flashbacks, embedded in an imagining of Dolley Madison getting ready to evacuate the White House in the War of 1812. I wasn't weaned on US history, of course, but I've read enough of it over recent years to recognize most of the people and events. Jefferson comes across as typical Hambly geek-hero, rather to my amusement, though she doesn't flinch from his contradictions. There are a couple of fictional elements used to tie the story together, but otherwise it's straight historical fiction, vividly evocative of dangerous and exciting times.
Michael Flynn, Eifelheim
Stranded aliens in a remote village in fourteenth-century Germany, with a present-day (or maybe near-future) thread of a historian and a theoretical physicist finding out about them. The 21st-century part is not very satisfying; the two are supposedly a couple, but one gets the impression they only stay together because they're both too wrapped up in their work to realize it isn't working, and the choice of narrator is odd, both distancing and unconvincing. The fourteenth-century parts are much more engaging, though the priest seemed rather more open-minded than I would have expected for the time; there are some wonderful cross-purposes conversations when the priest is talking theology and the aliens are talking quantum mechanics. It's all very bleak and tragic, of course; I'm not sure whether we're supposed to believe that the alien ship got away safely, but I suspect not, and of course it ends with the arrival of the Black Death. In contrast, the modern parts seem naively hopeful.
Robin McKinley, Dragonhaven
A rather different take on the boy-raises-dragon theme, in which the dragons are marsupials and the newborns are tiny and completely helpless (and stinky) for quite some time. I enjoyed it and didn't mind the heavily filtered first-person viewpoint, though it bugged me a bit that the last segment, when the narrator is supposedly in his mid-twenties, had almost exactly the same slangy teenage voice as the rest of it. The dragons are vivid and particular, the people less so, but that makes sense when the narrator is so utterly wrapped up in himself and his baby dragon.
Emma Bull, Territory
Doc Holliday and the Earps in a vividly-realized Tombstone, mining-camp turned bustling city almost overnight, with sorcery. It's the world of the Western movie and it isn't (not least because of the attention paid to the female point of view), and it's just next door -- I live on the other side of the Rincons, after all -- and I read it in a day and took a couple of days longer to shake off the feel of it. I look forward to the other half of the story with interest.
Historical novel of the women who loved the first four US presidents -- though in the case of Sally Hemmings "love" is a bit of an oversimplification. As you might expect, the structure is complicated; it's mostly in flashbacks, embedded in an imagining of Dolley Madison getting ready to evacuate the White House in the War of 1812. I wasn't weaned on US history, of course, but I've read enough of it over recent years to recognize most of the people and events. Jefferson comes across as typical Hambly geek-hero, rather to my amusement, though she doesn't flinch from his contradictions. There are a couple of fictional elements used to tie the story together, but otherwise it's straight historical fiction, vividly evocative of dangerous and exciting times.
Michael Flynn, Eifelheim
Stranded aliens in a remote village in fourteenth-century Germany, with a present-day (or maybe near-future) thread of a historian and a theoretical physicist finding out about them. The 21st-century part is not very satisfying; the two are supposedly a couple, but one gets the impression they only stay together because they're both too wrapped up in their work to realize it isn't working, and the choice of narrator is odd, both distancing and unconvincing. The fourteenth-century parts are much more engaging, though the priest seemed rather more open-minded than I would have expected for the time; there are some wonderful cross-purposes conversations when the priest is talking theology and the aliens are talking quantum mechanics. It's all very bleak and tragic, of course; I'm not sure whether we're supposed to believe that the alien ship got away safely, but I suspect not, and of course it ends with the arrival of the Black Death. In contrast, the modern parts seem naively hopeful.
Robin McKinley, Dragonhaven
A rather different take on the boy-raises-dragon theme, in which the dragons are marsupials and the newborns are tiny and completely helpless (and stinky) for quite some time. I enjoyed it and didn't mind the heavily filtered first-person viewpoint, though it bugged me a bit that the last segment, when the narrator is supposedly in his mid-twenties, had almost exactly the same slangy teenage voice as the rest of it. The dragons are vivid and particular, the people less so, but that makes sense when the narrator is so utterly wrapped up in himself and his baby dragon.
Emma Bull, Territory
Doc Holliday and the Earps in a vividly-realized Tombstone, mining-camp turned bustling city almost overnight, with sorcery. It's the world of the Western movie and it isn't (not least because of the attention paid to the female point of view), and it's just next door -- I live on the other side of the Rincons, after all -- and I read it in a day and took a couple of days longer to shake off the feel of it. I look forward to the other half of the story with interest.
