Intersection Logs

First volume of a diptych covering the lives and loves of Will Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe/Marley in the waning days of Elizabeth I, in the same universe as Blood and Iron and Whiskey and Water. It starts with the aftermath of Marley's death and goes on from there, with much intrigue both political and amorous, in and out of Faerie and Elizabeth's court.
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Well, that was probably the oddest book I've read this year. It's set in a world where there's an East-West gradient of ability to use magic, and also of the speed at which time passes. In the east there are gods -- whose nature we eventually find out -- and also an increased difficulty to hang on to personal identity, and conversely to the magicless west. Travelers to the East also age more slowly; it's a bit like Vinge's zones on a small, fantasy-world scale. To the mostly peaceful village of Applegarth, about halfway between the extremese, there come two travelers; Hanethe, an ancestor who went east a few generations back and has come home with a vengeful goddess after her, and Jankin, a tourist^H^H^H traveling scholar from the west. Hanethe has a vengeful goddess after her; Jankin has more charm than is good for him. Their arrival causes a series of events that seriously disrupt the cozy, polyamorous domesticity of life at the manor.

The whole thing is told in a peculiar sort of continuous present tense; one of the viewpoint characters has the ability to see people's past and future selves, but the juxtaposition of events from different epochs isn't confined to her narration. It's all done skilfully enough that it isn't hard to follow, which is quite a feat; there are echoes of Le Guin and McKinley in the style and the setting, not in a bad way.

Second in the "Crossroads" trilogy, about a once-protected realm whose supernatural Guardians have gone missing, leaving only the eagle-riding Reeves to try to keep order -- which isn't working too well.
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( In the spirit of warnings )It kept me reading, but I hope the action picks up in the final volume.

Dame Frevisse is sent to London on a secret mission to retrieve a large sum in gold for her newly-widowed cousin the Countess of Suffolk -- not something with which she is very comfortable, but in the end the gold turns out to be the least of her problems. ( Read more... )

Book Two of the Codex Alera series, in which young Tavi, the one man without any control over the elemental spirits known as furies on which his whole Romanesque civilisation is built, is studying at the Academy and acting as a page to his patron the First Lord. When the First Lord collapses on the eve of an important festival, Tavi and some of his friends have to try to keep that secret. Meanwhile, the alien Vord are menacing his native Calderon, and his aunt Isana is in the capital, trying to get help and getting entangled in politics while his uncle Bernard and his beloved Amara fight the Vord hand to mandible. Then there are the Cani -- menacing nine-foot wolf-creatures -- to reckon with, not to mention the young female Marat, Kitai, with whom Tavi shares an unusual bond.

Fast-moving and engaging. I am a little uncomfortable with the way that the availability of magical healing allows gruesome injuries to happen over and over to the same people with no lasting consequences; it has a -- literally -- cheapening effect.

Debut novel from one of the authors behind Shadow Unit., in which a young necromancer is sent with a couple of mercenary bodyguards to foment revolution in a colonial city. I had a bit of trouble keeping all the sides straight at first, but eventually I came to the conclusion that there weren't really any sides, just loose alliances of people with similar agendas, very few of whom are what they first seem. Even the ghosts -- mostly of slaughtered villagers -- have a political angle. The city, its people, its surroundings, and the various kinds of magic, are vividly evoked, and the magic system is different enough to be interesting but familiar enough to feel solid, and not just by-the-numbers. (The necromancy is not, on the whole, the gruesome sort.)

The novel pretty much stands alone, but I believe there's a sequel in the works, and I look forward to it.

Final entry in the series that began with A Princess of Roumania. Can Miranda Popescu make up for her earlier blenders and save Great Roumania as her dead aunt wants? Should she even try, or does the aunt have her own selfish agenda?

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This has definitely been one of the weirder and less conventional fantasy epics I've read in the last few years -- rather bleak in tone, and seriously short on eucatastrophe, but with enough distinctive and interesting -- if not entirely admirable -- characters to keep my interest. Having the world we know turn out to be basically a construct designed for the heroine's protection and education -- though it turns out not to be quite that simple, in the end -- is a risky move, tough on the suspension of disbelief, but the author more or less pulls it off.

This is one of the Inspector Lynley mysteries. The Elena of the title is a Cambridge undergraduate, daughter of a professor with ambitions, who's murdered on her morning run; she was profoundly deaf, but not brought up in Deaf culture. Lynley and Havers are called in to investigate. There's a complicated web of relationships and possible motives to untangle, while Havers is distracted by her mother's slide into dementia and Lynley tries to revive his own relationship with Lady Helen, who's in Cambridge nursing a sister with a bad case of post-natal depression. The damp and cold of Cambridge in winter are vividly evoked, enough to feel chilly when I read it in Tucson in August, and the whole thing is depressing because there's hardly a contented life or a decently-functioning relationship to be seen; the flawed Lynley-Havers dynamic is about as good as it gets. (And I've never been able to understand what it was about Lady Helen, with her indecisiveness and self-doubt, that Lynley found so attractive.)

( Slightly spoilerish comment on the ending. )

Second in the Mistborn series. "Okay, I'm the leader. Now what shall we do?"

The rebellion has succeeded, and the Evil Overlord is dead, but the problems for Vin, the street-urchin turned powerful Allomancer, and her beloved Elend, nobleman turned King and trying to introduce democracy to a city that's lived under the dictatorship of the Evil Overlord for a millennium, are only just beginning, and there are still plenty of unanswered questions about how the world got into this mess in the first place.( Read more... )
I'm still not in love with Sanderson's prose or dialog, but the story moves along smartly, and the characters are engaging enough. I probably won't be getting to the final volume for a month or too, though.

Will this be the last Adam Dalgliesh mystery? It seems as though it may be meant to be, as though the author is bidding a fond and lingering farewell to the characters who have, after all, been around for considerably more years than they seem to have aged by.

There are some other slightly unusual things about the way this novel is written; for one thing, the murder victim (announced as such on the first page, so this really isn't a spoiler) is a POV character right up until the moment of her death -- which happens a long way into the book. ( Read more... )

Something of a "special series finale" rather than standing entirely on its own merits, I think; atmospheric and readable, but not a good place to start.