I recently reviewed Kenna White's lesbian romance Braggin Rights and, hoping for something a little better, I also picked up Romancing the Zone. For me, this novel already had a huge advantage over Braggin Rights before I ever started reading, since it's about women's basketball instead of horses.
Sheridan Ross is a rising star of women's college basketball coaching. She's recently been made head coach of the Chilton College team, but her sights are set much higher and her professional zeal is all-consuming. Liz Elliott is a local restaurant owner and former basketball star who dropped out of Chilton to raise her daughter Becca, who plays for Coach Ross's Lady Stingers. When Becca has to miss the season after seriously injuring her leg and considers dropping out of school altogether, she and Liz make a bargain that has Liz back on campus--completing her degree and her last year of playing eligibility. Coach Ross isn't too enthusiastic about having a forty-year-old point guard added to her squad, especially one that she finds physically attractive. Nevertheless, she and Liz take baby steps toward a romantic understanding. But when Liz's creepy ex-girlfriend from college reappears on the scene and Sheridan interviews for a job in the midwest, their tenuous relationship is in danger of falling apart.
Grade: B-
I enjoyed a lot of things about this book, including the small-town New England setting, the basketball scenes, and the slow development of the relationship between Sheridan and Liz. Unlike series romances, there is a lot more room in a lesbian romance for older protagonists, or women with older kids, and so forth, and Romancing the Zone takes full advantage of that. I wasn't quite sure what to think of the stalker/girlfriend from the past angle, which provided the dramatic tension for the second part of the book. On one hand, it's good to have a portrayal of same-sex domestic abuse, because it absolutely does exist, and Sara is really creepy. On the other, the Sara's existence and the circumstances of Becca's conception provided the "deep dark secret" variety of character motivation (largely hidden from the reader for most of the narrative, apart from dire hints) that I dislike in mainstream romance novels. Because of this, the conclusion to that plotline ended up seeming melodramatic rather than dramatic, and made the resolution of the romantic plot (will Sheridan leave for greener coaching pastures, or stay for love?) rather anticlimactic.
Random Thoughts:
I do love a title with a pun in it, as all readers of the Marc of the Beast blog will be aware. In addition, the cover art is really cute! However, I am completely thrown out of the narrative when I encounter typos, and this book had a distressing number. A few typos are understandable, but there is a line, and it was crossed in Romancing the Zone. I meant to remember the page numbers for some examples, but of course I failed to do so. These things balanced each other out.
This book actually contains scenes in Springfield and Northampton, MA, both of which are very familiar places to me. White's Northampton was pretty much unrecognizable, in a humorous way, although the descriptions of a snowstorm in which no one could drive anywhere until the streets were cleared was depressingly close to real life.
Book Review Index
Dead Mother:Yes
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Book Reviews: Pretties [2005] and Specials [2006]
While I was finishing up my Leviathan review I remembered once again that I've actually read the rest of Scott Westerfeld's Uglies series, but never gotten around to reviewing it. I hate leaving things like that unfinished, but bear in mind that it has been a few months and some of the insightful commentary I had planned probably ended up as a throwaway joke on Twitter instead.
When Pretties begins, Tally Youngblood has made the voluntary transformation from rebellious ugly to carefree pretty, theoretically so she could be a test case for the cure to the brain-altering lesions. However, Tally's prettification means that she doesn't really remember much about her love interest David or the Smoke; she's more concerned about going to all the bubbliest parties with her BFF Shay and their new, pretty friends, including the aloof Zane. However, when a face from the past leads Tally and Zane to the cure (which they divide and each take half of, in a completely ill-advised move), it's all they can do to stay bubbly and try to get themselves and the rest of the Crims out of the city and the sinister grip of Special Circumstances. When they get separated, Tally learns that the world beyond her city is even bigger than she had previously imagined.
There's a lot to say about Pretties, mostly because it's jam-packed with action. Westerfeld explores some hefty themes using Tally, Zane, and Shay, including environmentalism, self-injury, resistance to authority, and of course beauty standards and body modification. A few of the things I thought didn't work as well in Pretties were the dream sequences featuring the princess in the tower and the introduction of the "primitive" humans. Although the discovery of this Special Circumstances control group was illuminating, in that the belief that humans are violent as part of their "true nature" provides an important motivating factor that gives some plausibility to Special Circumstances' heretofore seemingly pointless evil, it seemed like a throwaway obstacle between Tally and the New Smoke. Coming as it does almost three-quarters of the way into the book, I feel like I really would have benefited from the opportunity to sit with the ideas a little bit longer. This feeling strengthened for me when I read Specials, where Andrew and the rest of his people are only marginally involved in the action. For example, they are very useful as a group that provides contrast; the fact that the primitives are much more gender-biased than Tally's society makes the reader realize again that there may be advantages to the way the city is organized and run. Tally's home isn't just a black and white place of oppression, despite the way that its citizens are stripped of their free will by the operation. Anyway, it was obviously a thought-provoking read for me.
Grade: B-
Specials picks up after Tally has been caught yet again by Special Circumstances and been surgically transformed into one of the Cutters, a self-injuring clique created by Shay in Pretties to ameliorate the effects of the operation that was later co-opted and special-ized by Dr. Cable. Led by Shay, the Cutters are a wilder band of specials who work to hunt down members of the New Smoke; however, when they come up against a newly militant David and his crew and one of their own is captured, things start to spin of control. Tally enjoys the fantastic powers that come along with her newly special body, but realizes that something isn't quite right as she arranges to get a sick Zane back out of the city in order to convince Dr. Cable that he should be made special as well. However, her plans are swept up in a much larger intrigue as the interplay between Shay, Zane, the New Smoke, Dr. Cable, and the "cured" city of Diego inevitably leads to one of the most frightening Rusty pastimes: war.
Grade: B
Westerfeld did a great job in Specials of expanding the universe he'd created in the first two books. I'm not sure what I expected going in, but it definitely wasn't the introduction of a new city and an inter-city war. It is similar to Uglies and Pretties in that, once again, Tally ends up outside the city, pursuing someone else's agenda, but this time she finally discovers her own agency. Tally has always seemed like a passive character to whom things are done, which makes her rather unlikeable and "why me?" at times, but that changed somewhat by the end of the series. The idea of Tally as a kind of maverick ranger, reminding the newly cured cities not to devour the wilderness as thoughtlessly as the Rusties did, is appealing.
Random Thoughts:
I don't know, am I the only one whose favorite character ended up being Dr. Cable? She was really mean and, I guess, probably evil, but also pretty funny ("Didn't I tell you to lie still? Or must you always destroy everything?") Maybe it was just that, by the end, I wasn't really that invested in Tally or David or Shay. Yeah, I could have done with a whole lot more Dr. Cable. I'm about five steps away from writing "an embittered and friendless Dr. Cable works to unseat the city's new government using only her brilliant, evil mind" fanfic.
Westerfeld has a talent for building slang vocabulary, such as "pretty-making" or "bubbly," and making it stick. I can still hear Carine Montbertrand's voice drawling in my head without too much work, particularly Shay's voice saying "Tally-wa," and I think this was definitely a case where I wouldn't have finished the series if it hadn't been available on audio, or if the narrator had been switched in midstream (which is why I haven't gone any farther than Airborn in Oppel's series, for example). So, kudos to Montbertrand for doing such a great job and making Westerfeld's world come alive for the listener.
Book Review Index
Dead Mother: No
When Pretties begins, Tally Youngblood has made the voluntary transformation from rebellious ugly to carefree pretty, theoretically so she could be a test case for the cure to the brain-altering lesions. However, Tally's prettification means that she doesn't really remember much about her love interest David or the Smoke; she's more concerned about going to all the bubbliest parties with her BFF Shay and their new, pretty friends, including the aloof Zane. However, when a face from the past leads Tally and Zane to the cure (which they divide and each take half of, in a completely ill-advised move), it's all they can do to stay bubbly and try to get themselves and the rest of the Crims out of the city and the sinister grip of Special Circumstances. When they get separated, Tally learns that the world beyond her city is even bigger than she had previously imagined.
There's a lot to say about Pretties, mostly because it's jam-packed with action. Westerfeld explores some hefty themes using Tally, Zane, and Shay, including environmentalism, self-injury, resistance to authority, and of course beauty standards and body modification. A few of the things I thought didn't work as well in Pretties were the dream sequences featuring the princess in the tower and the introduction of the "primitive" humans. Although the discovery of this Special Circumstances control group was illuminating, in that the belief that humans are violent as part of their "true nature" provides an important motivating factor that gives some plausibility to Special Circumstances' heretofore seemingly pointless evil, it seemed like a throwaway obstacle between Tally and the New Smoke. Coming as it does almost three-quarters of the way into the book, I feel like I really would have benefited from the opportunity to sit with the ideas a little bit longer. This feeling strengthened for me when I read Specials, where Andrew and the rest of his people are only marginally involved in the action. For example, they are very useful as a group that provides contrast; the fact that the primitives are much more gender-biased than Tally's society makes the reader realize again that there may be advantages to the way the city is organized and run. Tally's home isn't just a black and white place of oppression, despite the way that its citizens are stripped of their free will by the operation. Anyway, it was obviously a thought-provoking read for me.
Grade: B-
Specials picks up after Tally has been caught yet again by Special Circumstances and been surgically transformed into one of the Cutters, a self-injuring clique created by Shay in Pretties to ameliorate the effects of the operation that was later co-opted and special-ized by Dr. Cable. Led by Shay, the Cutters are a wilder band of specials who work to hunt down members of the New Smoke; however, when they come up against a newly militant David and his crew and one of their own is captured, things start to spin of control. Tally enjoys the fantastic powers that come along with her newly special body, but realizes that something isn't quite right as she arranges to get a sick Zane back out of the city in order to convince Dr. Cable that he should be made special as well. However, her plans are swept up in a much larger intrigue as the interplay between Shay, Zane, the New Smoke, Dr. Cable, and the "cured" city of Diego inevitably leads to one of the most frightening Rusty pastimes: war.
Grade: B
Westerfeld did a great job in Specials of expanding the universe he'd created in the first two books. I'm not sure what I expected going in, but it definitely wasn't the introduction of a new city and an inter-city war. It is similar to Uglies and Pretties in that, once again, Tally ends up outside the city, pursuing someone else's agenda, but this time she finally discovers her own agency. Tally has always seemed like a passive character to whom things are done, which makes her rather unlikeable and "why me?" at times, but that changed somewhat by the end of the series. The idea of Tally as a kind of maverick ranger, reminding the newly cured cities not to devour the wilderness as thoughtlessly as the Rusties did, is appealing.
Random Thoughts:
I don't know, am I the only one whose favorite character ended up being Dr. Cable? She was really mean and, I guess, probably evil, but also pretty funny ("Didn't I tell you to lie still? Or must you always destroy everything?") Maybe it was just that, by the end, I wasn't really that invested in Tally or David or Shay. Yeah, I could have done with a whole lot more Dr. Cable. I'm about five steps away from writing "an embittered and friendless Dr. Cable works to unseat the city's new government using only her brilliant, evil mind" fanfic.
Westerfeld has a talent for building slang vocabulary, such as "pretty-making" or "bubbly," and making it stick. I can still hear Carine Montbertrand's voice drawling in my head without too much work, particularly Shay's voice saying "Tally-wa," and I think this was definitely a case where I wouldn't have finished the series if it hadn't been available on audio, or if the narrator had been switched in midstream (which is why I haven't gone any farther than Airborn in Oppel's series, for example). So, kudos to Montbertrand for doing such a great job and making Westerfeld's world come alive for the listener.
Book Review Index
Dead Mother: No
Friday, February 4, 2011
Book Review: Leviathan [2009]
The Library of Congress subject headings for Scott Westerfeld's alternate history novel Leviathan (first in a trilogy) are: 1. Science fiction. 2. Imaginary creatures--Fiction. 3. Princes--Fiction. 4. War--Fiction. 5. Genetic engineering--Fiction.These descriptors indicate, more than the general heading of "steampunk" that I think the book is labeled with, how focused the worldmaking actually is on genetically engineered living creatures. For example, the hydrogen-filled airship Leviathan itself is a genetically modified whale populated with symbiotic creatures, all coexisting in a delicate balance. The purpose of this geeky librarian subject heading exercise is to illustrate that Leviathan really wasn't what I expected (an airship adventure along the lines of Airborn, I guess), it was OMG ALAN CUMMING!
Ahem. What was I saying?
Leviathan is set in an alternate 1914, where world powers--the western Darwinists, who have discovered how to create living amalgams, including war machines, and the eastern Clankers, who prize strictly machine-based technology--are on the brink of war. As in our time, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand is the crucial event that sparks international conflict, only in this case his death also has enormous repercussions for the Austro-Hungarian succession, in the form of his (secretly legitimized by the Pope) son Alek. There are a lot of people who apparently want to see Alek dead as a result, and his father's trusted retainers abscond with him in the night in a Stormwalker fighting machine. After dodging various forms of death, Alek and his crew intersect unexpectedly with a British airship, the Leviathan, on its way to Constantinople on a secret mission. The Leviathan is home to Deryn Sharp, a Scottish girl whose intense desire to join the British Air Service led her to adopt "Dylan," a brash male persona. When Alek rescues Deryn in the aftermath of a German attack, their fates become inextricably linked with the Leviathan and its mysterious cargo as they travel toward the Ottoman Empire.
Although it's not that clear from my synopsis, Alek and Deryn have alternating viewpoints throughout the book. Both are interesting, flawed characters who experience some growth throughout the course of the novel, although they have many miles to go. It almost doesn't matter, because everything is brilliantly, perfectly narrated by Alan Cumming, who should be a professional actor or something! He is THAT GOOD. It also helps to have the Scottish accents read by someone who is actually Scottish, for once.
Grade: A- (for the audio version with ALAN CUMMING, probably a B otherwise)
Random Thoughts:
I would definitely recommend this book to Airborn fans, as well as to Naomi Novik fans for the alternate history of Europe/warfare angle. I really appreciated that Westerfeld included a section in the back about what was really true in the book, because otherwise I would have headed straight to the internet/Encyclopedia to try to figure it out.
Despite losing the ALAN CUMMING factor, if you are forced to read the book on paper, it does have a ton of lovely illustrations. As usual, I recommend experiencing it both ways, if not at the exact same time.
The back of the book says that "Deryn is a girl disguised as a guy in the British Air Service. She must fight for her cause--and protect her secret--at all costs." Really, jacket copy writers, that's the best you could come up with?
When I was searching for Deryn's last name, I ran across Leviathan fanfic. Quite a bit, actually. At least it was only rated K through Teen.
Book Review Index
Dead Mother: Yes
Ahem. What was I saying?
Leviathan is set in an alternate 1914, where world powers--the western Darwinists, who have discovered how to create living amalgams, including war machines, and the eastern Clankers, who prize strictly machine-based technology--are on the brink of war. As in our time, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand is the crucial event that sparks international conflict, only in this case his death also has enormous repercussions for the Austro-Hungarian succession, in the form of his (secretly legitimized by the Pope) son Alek. There are a lot of people who apparently want to see Alek dead as a result, and his father's trusted retainers abscond with him in the night in a Stormwalker fighting machine. After dodging various forms of death, Alek and his crew intersect unexpectedly with a British airship, the Leviathan, on its way to Constantinople on a secret mission. The Leviathan is home to Deryn Sharp, a Scottish girl whose intense desire to join the British Air Service led her to adopt "Dylan," a brash male persona. When Alek rescues Deryn in the aftermath of a German attack, their fates become inextricably linked with the Leviathan and its mysterious cargo as they travel toward the Ottoman Empire.
Although it's not that clear from my synopsis, Alek and Deryn have alternating viewpoints throughout the book. Both are interesting, flawed characters who experience some growth throughout the course of the novel, although they have many miles to go. It almost doesn't matter, because everything is brilliantly, perfectly narrated by Alan Cumming, who should be a professional actor or something! He is THAT GOOD. It also helps to have the Scottish accents read by someone who is actually Scottish, for once.
Grade: A- (for the audio version with ALAN CUMMING, probably a B otherwise)
Random Thoughts:
I would definitely recommend this book to Airborn fans, as well as to Naomi Novik fans for the alternate history of Europe/warfare angle. I really appreciated that Westerfeld included a section in the back about what was really true in the book, because otherwise I would have headed straight to the internet/Encyclopedia to try to figure it out.
Despite losing the ALAN CUMMING factor, if you are forced to read the book on paper, it does have a ton of lovely illustrations. As usual, I recommend experiencing it both ways, if not at the exact same time.
The back of the book says that "Deryn is a girl disguised as a guy in the British Air Service. She must fight for her cause--and protect her secret--at all costs." Really, jacket copy writers, that's the best you could come up with?
When I was searching for Deryn's last name, I ran across Leviathan fanfic. Quite a bit, actually. At least it was only rated K through Teen.
Book Review Index
Dead Mother: Yes
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