RogueBelle

Review: Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett

Title: Night Watch
Author: Terry Pratchett
Year of Publication: 2002
Length: 408 pages
Genre: urban fantasy
New or Re-Read? New!
Rating: 4.25 stars

This is the first City Watch book that I’ve really, genuinely liked. I’ve read others – Guards! Guards!, Jingo, and The Fifth Elephant(though none terribly recently) — and while they’re all good, because Pratchett is good, none of them quite ever grabbed me the way the Witches series did.

I decided to pick this one up after someone tipped me off to the fact that it was Pratchett doing Les Miserables – and, at a wide stroke, this is true. I was expecting a far stricter parody than I ended up getting, though, and I think I’m okay with that. Really what Pratchett does is invert the structure, giving us the story of a good copper with quite a lot to lose. Night Watch is not as broadly comic as many of Pratchett’s novels, particularly those involving the Watch, and there are few moments in it which are truly just gut-wrenchingly awful. Pratchett throws some punches here that he often pulls elsewhere, particularly with regards to mortality. His political satire is as good as ever, with some particularly incisive observations regarding the nature of mob mentality, of anything done for the good of “The People,” and, as Ankh-Morpork so often allows him to demonstrate, of the lifesblood of cities in general.

[…]

Overall, I think what I can say the most about Night Watch is that it surprised me. It was not the book I was expecting to read, but I’m exceedingly glad that I read it.

Someday I really must read all of the Discworld novels in order.

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The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden (and) In the Cities of Coin and Spice, by Catherynne M Valente

Valente has given us a new Scheherazade, a girl with stories etched indelibly on her eyelids. Taken for a demon by the Sultan and his kin, the girl is abandoned in the garden and grows up half-wild and definitely a little eldritch. She reads the stories off of reflections, one eye at a time, and for years has nothing but them and the garden itself for company — until the day a little princeling encounters her and is brave enough to speak to her. Their unlikely friendship grows and coils around the stories she tells him.

I sort of don’t even know where to begin. I could never recap everything that happens in the girl’s tales. It’s the story of how the stars fell from the heavens, and some got murdered, and one gets revenge. It’s the story of a girl who was a goose. It’s the story of a fox-woman who captains a ship of monsters. It’s the story of a three-breasted saint. It’s the story of how cities can die and mutate into something else. It’s the story of a wizard’s evil deeds. It’s the story of a phoenix and his feathers.

I’ve described Valente before as steeped in mythos, and it shows here more clearly than in anything else of hers I’ve read. None of these stories are retellings of things you know; do not look here for Snow White or Aladdin or Rama. But the flavours are there. Indian and Arabian, Japanese and Russian, Finnish and German, African and Greek — layers on layers of cultural seasoning, mingling freely with each other. There is a familiarity even as everything is new and wonderful; these stories would fit in perfectly well among their elder siblings that have been told and retold for centuries. And like the folktales of old, they don’t pull their punches. These are stories with blood and bone at their core, and I adore them for it.

… 

I love these books and can’t recommend them highly enough. I don’t know if I’d consider them the best starting place for Valente, even though they were the first books of hers I read — the Fairyland novels might be an introduction with lower time and brainpower investment. But these, I think, really show her at her best.

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Fables #2: Animal Farm, by Bill Willingham

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Rules to Catch a Devilish Duke, by Suzanne Enoch

Well, this is one of the best historical romances I’ve read in a long time. I really mean that. I tore through this in about 24 hours because I just couldn’t stand to be parted from it.

Sophia is exactly the sort of heroine I have been yearning for: cheerfully independent, even in the face of difficulties; not a virgin and not ashamed about it; knows what she wants sexually and isn’t afraid of her passions; good-natured and forgiving but not a pushover; decisive and undeterred from pursuing what she wants out of life. Of course, the reason she can get away with being all of these things is because she lives a life outside the bounds of the good ton. Sophia White is the illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Hennessey, sired on his wife’s maid. Raised in obscurity, Sophia eventually finds a comfortable place at the Tantalus Club (a gentlemen’s club owned by a woman and staffed entirely by ladies, if you haven’t read the earlier books in the series or my reviews of them) — and she appears in both of the previous books in the series as a supporting character. This was going along well for her until her father randomly chose to care about her existence again — not to acknowledge her, but to threaten her. Tired of being ribbed by his peers about his by-blow’s occupation, he’s arranged for her to marry an alarmingly pious vicar in Cornwall; if Sophia doesn’t agree, he will use his power to destroy the Tantalus Club and everyone Sophia cares about.

Adam Baswich, Duke of Greaves, unwittingly provides Sophia with an opportunity for one last hurrah before her sentencing. He invites her to a Christmas house party at his estate in Yorkshire, ostensibly to keep Camille and Keating (see Taming an Impossible Rogue) company. But as Sophia is traveling to the estate, the bridge over the river collapses, dunking her in it. Adam rescues her, but that leaves them as the only people on the correct side of the river until the bridge is repaired, except for Adam’s unbelievably snotty elder sister. … So Adam has to settle for Sophia’s company. And what company it turns out to be.

The most excellent thing about this book is that Adam and Sophia are so beautifully well-suited for each other. Their interactions while they’re alone at his estate are just gorgeous — warm and funny, passionate and teasing, thoughtful and challenging — everything that a marriage should be. But they can’t see it, bless ‘em. They do build a real friendship, which is so important and honestly pretty rare in romance novels. … The sex scenes throughout this book are magnificent, not least because we don’t have to deal with any of that “teach the virgin to accept pleasure” nonsense. Nope, Sophia knows what she wants and grabs at it, quite literally in a few cases. It’s so refreshing.

… I knock half a point off because the end is a little unsatisfying — it all crashes together very quickly, with literally no denouement whatsoever. … And I also dock for an unflattering portrayal of Cornwall, which really is a lovely region with gorgeous landscapes and the nicest people I’ve ever met anywhere in the world. On the whole, though, Rules to Catch a Devilish Duke is a lot of fun, and I highly recommend it.

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Taming an Impossible Rogue, by Suzanne Enoch

Rating: 2.5 stars

I still enjoyed dipping into the world of the Tantalus Club, but this one just didn’t do it for me. I found the heroine lackluster and the hero hard to like, and that impeded my enjoyment.

The basic outline of the story isn’t bad: Camille Pryce ran away from her wedding a year ago on the sudden realisation that she did not want to spend her life with the groom. Not hard to believe, considering that the marriage was arranged when she was three days old, and yet the groom, the Marquis of Fenton, never saw fit to so much as introduce himself to her at any point in the past twenty-one years. Turned away by both friends and relatives, Camille eventually ended up at the Tantalus Club, a scandalous gentlemen’s club owned by a woman and exclusively staffed by women (see Scandalous Brides #1, A Beginner’s Guide to Rakes). It takes Fenton a year to decide he would still like to marry Camille after all … but he can’t get into the Tantalus Club to see her, as Camille has had him barred. Fenton decides to send his cousin, Keating Blackwood, … who is charming and therefore that will lure Camille out or… something?

… It doesn’t help matters that Keating, apart from being a notorious rake, is also a sot and a murderer. Yes, you read that right. Six years ago, he had an affair with a married woman, her husband found out, pursued him back to his house, and Keating shot him in self-defence — but definitely killed him, and has been skulking outside of polite society ever since, apparently at the bottom of a vodka bottle. It’s hugely unattractive. … Now, don’t let anyone think I’m saying that alcoholics can’t change or aren’t deserving of love — but none of that is ever addressed, except that he just magically stops drinking once he starts falling in love with Camille. The entire problem — and at the beginning of the book, it’s a huge problem — is glossed over.

… The “twist” ending is something I saw coming two hundred pages away, and the climax is a hastily thrown together jumble. Overall, Taming is skippable.

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A Beginner’s Guide to Rakes, by Suzanne Enoch

A Beginner’s Guide to Rakes is the first book in Suzanne Enoch’s latest series, Scandalous Brides. Though, having glanced at the back covers of the other two, I suspect it would be better named the Tantalus Club series, since that seems to be the common thread yoking them all together. What is the Tantalus Club? Precisely the question that Diane Benchley wants you asking. The lovely widow has just returned from abroad, where her bankrupt husband died, leaving her with a mountain of debts to settle. She managed to do it by selling off almost all of his unentailed property except one location, a home in London. That, she gets into her own hands with a bit of clever forgery — illegal, but deserved, she feels, since her husband ignored her and then left her with nothing. She intends to transform the house into an upscale gaming hall, staffed entirely by women — but she needs some cash to get the enterprise started. So she approaches one of the wealthiest men she knows — Oliver Warren, Marquis of Haybury, who also happens to be her ex-lover. She and Oliver met in Vienna just after her husband’s death. They entered into a torrid affair, but after two weeks, he fled back to England, leaving her heartbroken. Why go to him? Because she has a sworn statement from another man labeling him as a cheat, an accusation which could ruin him. Oliver agrees to loan Diane the money — but with some hesitations and stipulations. … 

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Review: The Bride and the Beast, by Teresa Medeiros

I know I liked this book once.

It was the first Medeiros I ever picked up, and I certainly liked it well enough to become a regular reader of her novels. But this really may just be one of those places where age and awareness have ruined something for me. … What’s really spoiled it for me now is the entire attitude of the heroine. She’s just so Special Snowflake because she reads and has held onto her virginity, and the amount of slut-shaming she heaps upon every other woman in the village, including her sisters, is actually just disgusting. It’s no wonder, really, that they were willing to feed her to the dragon, since she so clearly goes through life actively disdaining everyone around her. Apparently we’re meant to forgive her for this since she feels insecure about her weight and because she likes reading. I can tell, through the way she narrates her feelings about those traits, that she’s clearly meant to be a Reader Avatar, which is perhaps why this book appealed to me when I was a self-absorbed teenager who was convinced the entire world was out to get her because I was so ~tragically misunderstood~. Reading it again as a well-adjusted adult, though, the heroine just comes off as snotty and self-righteous.

Add to that the fact that Medeiros throws every Scottish stereotype in existence at this book, including thorough abuse of accented spelling, and it’s just gotten to be a rather painful read. These are all things I either didn’t notice or that didn’t bother me when I was younger. I hadn’t returned to this book in several years, and I don’t believe I’ll be returning to it in the future.

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The Sister Queens, by Sophie Perinot

The Sister Queens tells the story of Marguerite and Eleanor de Provence, the eldest two sisters in a noble family destined to shape the political (and genetic) future of Europe. Marguerite marries King Louis IX of France, a quiet and introspective young man whose outlook on life is shaped by an overbearing and pious mother. Eleanor marries Henry III of England, a good man but an inefficient king who spends most of his reign struggling to control his barons and to regain some of the territory (and respect) lost by his father, the notorious King John. Though their younger sisters Sanchia and Beatrice would also be queens in time, Marguerite and Eleanor had snagged the great prizes — but neither is entirely fulfilled. Marguerite’s marriage starts well, but Louis grows ever more pious over time, to the point where it seems to begin to fracture his sanity. As his devotion to God increases, his attention to his wife wanes. Eleanor, meanwhile, has in Henry an attentive and faithful husband and an exemplary father, but she finds that his political acumen leaves much to be desired.

[…] Honestly, I give this book almost-four stars a lot on credit, because of my interest in the time period. Thematically, I quite enjoyed it, and I got quite wrapped up in Marguerite’s and Jean’s story in particular. Technically, though, it left a lot to be desired for me. It’s told in first person present tense, swapping between Eleanor and Marguerite each chapter. I increasingly dislike first-person narratives. I think too many authors are using it as a cop-out, and Perinot doesn’t do a great job of differentiating the sisters’ voices. Their experiences are disparate, but their speech and thought patterns are not. I also found the use of the present tense quite jarring — it’s always something that throws me, but it seems all the more out of place in a historical novel.

The book is also very episodic, particularly at the beginning — several chapters have to awkwardly work in reminders of how many years have passed since the last time we were with the narrator. There often isn’t a strong sense of connection between one vignette and the next. This also leads Perinot to glance over a lot of historical details — we spend a lot more time hearing about Marguerite’s and Eleanor’s pregnancies and their thoughts about their marriages than we do about, say, life on Crusade, the rebellion of Simon de Montfort, the tension between Queen Eleanor and the citizens of London. And perhaps that’s just the sort of book it is, but I would have appreciated more history to balance out the domestic feelings — particularly since these women were such powerful political figures in addition to being wives and mothers. Perinot seems less concerned with the former roles than the latter, which was a bit of a disappointment to me, particularly since it obscured exactly the historical depth I was hoping to get from this novel on an era I wanted to know more about.

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Review: Deathless, by Catherynne M Valente

Deathless is a blending of several myths out of Russian/Slavic mythology, regarding Koschei the Immortal and Marya Morevna, woven together with the history of Russia in the first half of the twentieth century, from the Revolution through the rise of the Cold War. The ancient themes play out against the increasingly grey background of Russia’s national fate, sprinkled now with details like rifle-demons and house-imps who learn the communist virtues of sharing their abodes collectively. Koschei, Tsar of Life, engages in his eternal battle with his brother Viy, the Tsar of Death — but the world, unarguably, is changing, and the war that was never going well is even less optimistic in these times. The central story of Deathless is that of Marya Morevna, a heroine too aware of her role. … Marya finds herself seduced by Koschei, spirited away to his country, which is both of our world and beyond it, in the way of fairy tales. Though he cherishes and spoils her, and though she makes friends in this land and takes to its customs, she must still pass trials before she can become his bride in truth. 

[…] From another angle, Deathless is as fine a representation of a Dominant/submissive relationship as I’ve yet seen in literature. I wanted to find a quote to exemplify this, but it’s difficult, because so much of it is written in subtleties. … It is, as all good love stories ought to be and as more D/s stories need to be, about the figures involved finding their matches in each other. It is about power, but more about negotiating that power, taking it and trading it and yielding it, not just becoming locked into a prescribed fixed pattern — and in that way, the relationship is a microcosm of the storytelling itself, exploring the places where the patterns are useful and where they can and should be coaxed, cajoled, or kicked into a new form. In the end, the question that Baba Yaga poses is the important one: Who is to rule?

[…] I highly recommend this book to any fans of folklore and fairy tales, particularly if you’re someone who enjoys modern, magical-realism twists on them, or else the grittier, less forgiving, less redemptive versions of the stories. This is, like The Orphan’s Tales, a book I almost want to start all over again immediately after finishing it. Valente’s writing voice is exquisite — dark and lyrical, utterly poetic yet entirely unflinching from the harsh and the ugly, with a cadence familiar yet enchantingly new. Marya’s twisted, torquing path is one I’m eager to tread again.

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Review: Beauty and the Werewolf, by Mercedes Lackey

This book suffers from its predictability. And that’s a shame, because there was a lot of potential here, and I did enjoy this book — but very much in a fluffy, easy-to-digest sort of way. This book is the latest in Lackey’s Five Hundred Kingdoms series, which I generally enjoy but which are far from the best fairy tale adaptations out there. She’s starting turning them into mash-ups more than just retellings, and this one smushes Beauty and the Beast and Little Red Riding Hood (as though the cover didn’t give those things away). …

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