Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
jarjar26: Quarriors!Ma créature favorite / Ma favorite creature…
I found this at a toy shop in our local mall. I still think…
I found this at a toy shop in our local mall. I still think these were the coolest looking toy guns ever made.
#photos
herochan: Batman Created by Mauricio Herrera Tumblr |…
Wake (Dream Catcher, #1)
author: Lisa McMann
name: Paul
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2008
rating: 2
read at: 2012/03/12
date added: 2012/03/12
shelves: novel, young-adult
review:
For book recommendations, I tend to specifically look for them, finding several friends, podcasts, websites and a few other places (The Daily Show provides quite a few of my nonfiction recs) to provide a steady stream of possible nexts. Not that I need more stuff to put on my insurmountable to-read pile, but I like to have options. Which is why it’s funny to me that sometimes I’ll grab a book and start reading based on no recommendation at all, and I’m not sure what it is that makes me do this. Maybe it’s striking cover art, or an interesting synopsis on the inside flap or back cover, perhaps simply a title. In the case of Wake by Lisa McMann, there was a display copy of the third book in the series that Wake begins (Gone) which somehow caught my eye in a bookstore and made me seek out the initial volume.
Which is all to say that I came at this with zero preconceptions, having never heard of the book or the author before they caught my eye. And from that perspective, I can say that Wake was incapable of disappointing me, but I did find myself eventually disappointed. The disappointment comes from the way the book’s central premise, that a teenager named Janie gets pulled against her will into the dreams of others who are sleeping around her, is full of potential. And even, to a certain extent, that potential is realized. What was ultimately disappointing is that the quality of the writing is mediocre to bad, such that I found myself reaching for a nonexistent red pen as I tore through the brief, wide-spaced, two hundred page novel.
McMann does a couple of things very well: She writes with evocative urgency, especially in her dream descriptions, and she has a very strong sense of pacing such that the prose presses onward (it took me about three hours to read the whole thing and I’m not a particularly fast reader), yet when it is narratively important to convey the stretch of time, she usually does so without bogging down the book in unnecessary detail. But what McMann struggles with is tone. For example, for a young adult book she peppers the prose with blue language which is not necessarily out of context for a book about high school kids. Yet despite her willingness to drop vulgarity, when it comes to the hormonally-soaked activities of these largely parentless kids, she pulls way back into incongruous kissing and hand-holding rather than allow, even at a narrative distance, sex to occur. The characters talk about it a lot, but it never seems to actually happen, which makes the air of authenticity slip. Even Christopher Pike back in the 80s wasn’t timid about having his characters “go all the way” and he mostly kept the foul language out of the dialogue. Somehow that felt less phony than this does.
Also McMann’s sentence structure is weak. This is the kind of technical criticism I usually refrain from making but I swear a good thirty percent of the sentences in Wake are fragments, and unnecessary ones at that. She also struggles with analogies and her characterizations are woefully predictable, where they exist at all. Moreover, in spite of her command of pace and description, she lacks either the ability or the will to truly surprise the reader. It’s not that events are telegraphed in advance so much as every revelation falls back to the most predictable possibility. Perhaps McMann doesn’t think her audience is sophisticated enough for the truly unexpected, but I’ve read plenty of young adult novels that don’t follow every well-worn path and are far more popular (insofar as they reached my distant ears where Wake only came to me by some bookseller’s stacking whim), for whatever that’s worth.
In the end I’m sort of ambivalent about Wake. It was a light, fun read while it lasted and I really liked the central concept, but considering that Wake ends on a high note and lacks any real egregious loose ends, I’m not sure I’m all that inclined to pick up the sequels and I think that says something pretty significant about the overall strength of a first-in-a-trilogy novel.
A is for Alibi (Kinsey Millhone, #1)
author: Sue Grafton
name: Paul
average rating: 3.58
book published: 1982
rating: 3
read at: 2012/03/11
date added: 2012/03/11
shelves: mystery, novel
review:
Some people are just genre fiction devotees, sticking to their romance novels or science fiction paperbacks or westerns more or less exclusively. I’m not one of those people, which means that I try to sample a bit from wherever sounds interesting. But I have unique relationships with a number of specific genres, such as my wary approach to epic fantasy or my conceptual preference (that doesn’t quite hold up in practice) to science fiction or my exhaustion with horror novels from a binge in my early teens. When it comes to mysteries, though, I find myself returning to the well with a pretty regular frequency which makes my relationship to mystery novels pretty consistent. The funny thing, though, is that I rarely ever love the mysteries I read.
As I read Sue Grafton‘s ‘A’ Is For Alibi, I realized that part of the problem is that I’m never sure what exactly I’m looking for in a mystery story. It occurred to me for the first time when reading Kinsey Millhone’s inaugural adventure that perhaps the problem I have with rarely being really enthusiastic about mystery novels is that I’m bringing impossible expectations to the table. Take Grafton’s book: To a certain extent, I felt unimpressed because I kind of figured out the killer about halfway through, round about the time Millhone was scratching her head and saying she was getting frustrated at not making much progress. And as the evidenced tightened around my prime suspect, I felt a surge of triumph for being so much smarter than Grafton’s heroine.
What I realized is that I approach mysteries as a sort of an intellectual challenge, as if each book were egging me into a contest to see whether I could figure out the culprit before the character could. The theory I’m starting to work from now is that such is not the point at all. Which might explain why, unless a book really surprises me without cheating (that is to say, reveals the culprit in a way which no reader could possibly have solved either because there was no link between the perpetrator and the narrative until the unveiling or because the perp is not introduced until they are shown as the villain), I always feel somewhat let down by a mystery.
The cementing point in ‘A’ Is For Alibi came when I realized that Grafton had masterfully orchestrated a book that met my exacting standards in that a certain component of the truth of Millhone’s case was a surprise to me, but I still had that smugness because the central mystery of who Kinsey Millhone killed (that’s not a spoiler; the information is given in the book’s second sentence) figured out relatively early on. So on finishing the book I realized I had to admit that it was a very good mystery; that even if I was able to deduce some of the facts ahead of time, it wasn’t so transparent as to be dull and predictable. In fact, that word “predictable” I think is the cornerstone of how I erroneously have been approaching most mystery novels up to this point. I think what I need to start doing to really enjoy them more is stop being so hung up on whether or not I can guess what’s going to happen next and enjoy the ride. After all, to a certain extent all novels are mysteries and I don’t necessarily discount a book just because I can predict it’s climax or resolution if it comes from another shelf in the bookstore.
So taking a more non-mystery analytical approach to Grafton’s introductory Millhone novel, I can say that overall I really enjoyed this book. It’s a taut, well-crafted novel that manages to squeeze an impressive amount of tone and atmosphere out of little over 200 pages and the central mystery is engaging and exciting. I read the book very quickly because I was truly absorbed in it (although circumstances kept me from really knocking it down in a sitting or two which is probably what I would have preferred) and that speaks to Grafton’s circumstantially appropriate style. What I mean by that is that she is able to adjust the pace of the prose to match the intensity of the situation, playing with description the way a director might play with different lighting effects or camera angles to evoke specific moods for various scenes. There are a lot of characters in a small space in this book, but Grafton does an admirable job of keeping them all straight in the reader’s head without too many obvious author-y tricks.
There are a few niggling complaints here and there. Millhone herself takes a while to get a voice, coming across as a sort of generic PI heroine for the first third to half the book, though she does develop more of an identifiable personality toward the end. Unlike obvious comparison point Stephanie Plum from Janet Evanvich’s numbers series, Millhone doesn’t make much of an initial splash. Also, the ending sequence is sort of awkward and abrupt, leaving the whole novel with a particularly unsatisfying conclusion that is only lessened somewhat by the knowledge that there are (at this point) plenty of sequels to develop the character further. And in an admittedly petty but sincere gripe, the paperback edition I read contains a mystifying and aggravating number of typos, mistakes and misprints which started to distract me badly during one of the books very few low points, narrative-wise.
If I were judging ‘A’ Is For Alibi on my usual scale for mysteries, I’d probably be waffling between two and three stars for having some potential as a series starter and being capable and well-paced. But I feel compelled to act on my newfound insight and realize that I liked the book a little bit more than just that, making me wonder if this is maybe even a four-star book. For a series book I usually find that my assessment hinges on how urgently I find myself wanting to dive into the follow-up, though. And while I definitely will be putting ‘B’ Is For Burglar up on my to-read list as soon as this review is posted, I don’t think it will be my very next book which means I can live with a break from Kinsey Millhone for a bit and that probably means I didn’t love the book. Don’t let the middling three-star review fool you, though, I really enjoyed Grafton’s novel and I’m happy it taught me something about mystery novels, something that will hopefully make future mysteries all the more enjoyable.
