Books 16-18: Changeless, Living with Ghosts, Meeting the Other Crowd

[corrielle]

First, a brief summary of my life: Teaching two summer school classes is sucking out my soul; Comic-Con is NEXT WEEK, and I'm not ready; the end Robin Hood Season 3 is STILL made of aweseome crack and pain; and it really is NOT fun when my house air conditioner gives out at the first sign of real heat because whoever lived here before us put in fuses with two different wattages. (AC is fixed now... still not ready for con or over my rewatch of CRACKY RH S3.)

16. Changeless by Gail Carriger


Changeless is the sequel to Soulless, which I talked about here.  This novel finds a strange plague of... normalcy coming over the vampires and werewolves of London, which is only slightly more troubling to Alexia than the army regiment attached to her husband's werewolf pack that returns from abroad and camps out on her (admittedly rather extensive) front lawn.  Her confrontation with the utterly boorish Major Channing had me grinning, and let me know right from the start that marriage had not dulled Alexia's wits one bit.

Things pick up from there, and we get to learn all sorts of interesting things about how this world works.  I won't give away what exactly is causing the problem with vampires and werewolves being unable to change, but Alexia has to investigate, of course, and she ends up following Conall to Scotland, where he's visiting the pack he used to be Alpha of, but isn't any more... (Highly irregular, by the way, and in this book we get to find out what happened there...) We find the cause of the... problem, Lord Akeldama once again proves that he's so much more than a prissy vampire with exquisite fashion sense, and Alexia meets a lovely Frenchwoman who likes to dress in men's clothes and... prefers women. Alexia's slow realization of the fact that her new acquaintance is a lesbian is... quite hilarious.

And Madame Lefoux turns out to be a really lovely person who's there for Alexia when she needs someone after the shocker at the end of the book... looks like her being a preternatural does more than just make Conall unable to change while he's in contact with her... looks like it makes him human again, or at least human enough to father a child, something werewolves are not supposed to be able do to, so of course, Alexia is going to have a terrible time convincing him that she hasn't been unfaithful.  For all of the hilarity that these books inspire, they have also managed to make me care very deeply for the characters, because when Alexia and her husband had their big falling out at the end (and by falling out, I mean Conall yelling and not listening to reason and doubting her when she has been nothing but devoted to him...) I was so upset. I ship them like nobody's business, and the next book needs to be out now so that I can see how Ms. Carriger is going to FIX THIS. (And she had better... *twirls parasol* *dangerous look*)


17. Living With Ghosts by Kari Sperring


I will fully admit that I bought this book because of its cover. I believe it was last summer when I bought it, and I was in a phase where any book with a pale, lanky, dark-haired, black-clad character on the front would immediately command my attention. I wonder why. Guy-obsession aside, the summary on the back sounded interesting enough, if a little scattered.  My corollary to "don't judge a book by its cover" is "don't judge a book by its cover copy."  It's all too easy to have a good book with a badly written summary.  However, sometimes... when the back cover sounds a bit fragmented and lacking in cohesion... there's a good reason.

First of all, let me start out with the things I did like.  Some of the worldbuilding was interesting.  For instance, one of the countries in the story is made up of clans that don't marry outside of themselves because they're trying to preserve the ability to shapeshift into different clan totem animals, and marrying outside of the blood produces children who don't have that ability and are considered outcasts and halfbreeds.  Such potential there. I also liked the way that she played with the very old "sacred contract between the monarch and the land" idea, and the idea that the main city is safe from ghosts and other supernatural happenings because of the mixture of salt and fresh water... I thought that tapped into old folklore about salt and running water being anethema to all sorts of creatures in a neat way.  

However, that being said... I have some problems.  This is partly me talking about the book, and partly me talking about what I like in my genre fantasy in general.

First of all, much of the magic seems... very thrown together.  We've got one person who can shapeshift because his clan blood is pure, another one or two who use "foreign" (to the country where the main action takes place, at least...) magic and have the ability to see ghosts and seduce people, and I can see the beginnings of a use of scent in interesting ways, and there is one particular ghost who really wants to come back from the dead and eventually does, kind of... but it never quite gets explained, and most of the ritual seems to be thrown together candles and a small bit of bloodletting with no real explanation of what exactly the magic is supposed to be capable of.  (There's a book the characters keep alluding to, but we don't know much about that either, or where it came from or what exactly it contains.) I think that's one of the things I've come to expect from my fantasy novels.  I want to know how the "magic" (or the Force, or the One Power, or the Will and the Word... whatever you want to call it) works.  I want to know what can be done with it, what can't be done with it, and what the consequences of using and misusing it are.  I don't feel like I ever got that here.  I understand that you have to show characters doing their special stuff for the first time in a cool, mysterious way at least once, but it seemed to me that every time someone did something I was raising an eyebrow and saying to myself, "So... that's possible too, now?  Who knew?"  And there were so many different... systems, for lack of a better word.... so many different people having wildly disparate experiences with "magic," that it was hard for me to piece together what exactly I was supposed to be taking from all of it.  I'm not asking for rigidity and rule-following here... I'm asking to know, as a reader, what the heck is going on and what the stakes are.

Second, I felt like the first two thirds of the book were a whole lot of people running around and visiting each other and talking about things that were going to happen. Things start to get more interesting when Valdin's ghost comes back fully corporeal, but the author is so fond of pretty sounding metaphors that I was left wondering what exactly had occurred and what the implications were.  That's another thing that really got me.  I'm not usually bothered much by flowery, descriptive writing.  It's one of the reasons I read fantasy in the first place. So when I of all people am saying, "Stop it with the use of the 'swan' related metaphors already and tell me what the heck just actually happened," you know it's serious.  Back to my original point, though... I think that if we had gotten to the point of Valdin being real and the plague hitting the city a third of the way through instead of two thirds... that would have given the characters more time to show themselves in situations that matter rather than situations that... don't. 

That "getting to know the characters" thing, too... it was hard for me to get to know any of these people.  I knew about them... Yvellianne is a workaholic who's grinding herself to the bone helping her cousin run the country, Thierry is her husband who's kind of a useless fop in some ways, but really has a good heart and loves his wife, Gracielis is a drop dead gorgeous male courtesan who sees ghosts and was supposed to be an assassin-priest-in-a-death-cult until he couldn't complete the final test, Iareth is one of those clan half-bloods who has a whole lot of honor and always does her duty, and Valdin is a ghost of a man who was rich, hot-tempered, and generally arrogant (and in love with Iareth until she left him over that whole duty thing...) See? See how these people sound maybe a bit interesting and like you'd like to get to know how these basic templates get fleshed out?  Well... they don't.  Not really. I can't really... think of anything beyond what I've just told you about any of these people that makes them more than... their roles. And I'm really trying. And... even though some big stuff happens, I don't really see any of them changing much over the course of the story, and those that do don't get to stay alive long enough to deal with that change. Case in point: Iareth decides that she's served her kin long enough and is going to stay with back-from-the-dead Valdin this time, and boom. She's dead.  Yvellianne figures out that maybe her husband is more than just comforting but incompetent, but before they have a chance to resolve anything, she's dead and all noble sacrifice-y, and Gracielis finally gets all of the powers he lacked because he didn't go through the final test, helps save the city and actually does something rather than being timid and afraid, and then at the end, he leaves because for some vague reason his kind of magic was illegal in the city, even though that never seemed to matter to all of the other people who were practicing it the whole book, AND he pretty much just helped the city not completely get swallowed up by the river, and EVERYONE KNOWS IT.  But he leaves, and Thierry becomes... responsible, or something... and Gracielis never tells him that he loves him (this too isn't fleshed out so well, but I'll take what I can get in the character development area).  Granted, "I love you" is a weird thing to tell someone who's just lost his wife, but... given the circumstances, it wouldn't have been that weird, and in a society that seems to view both same-sex attachments and bisexuality as perfectly normal, it would have been nice to see that fluidity of sexual desire in action by having a major character have a wife and then a long-term male lover... but I think I ask too much.

So, what did I learn from this?  Well... First, I'm pickier than I thought I was. Second, I think it's probably a bad idea for me to read first-novel high-fantasy while I'm doing my Wheel of Time re-read. I don't mean to compare stand-alone novels to the sprawling behemoth with amazing world-building that is WoT... I just can't help myself.


18. Meeting the Other Crowd by Eddie Lenihan and Carolyn Eve Green


The full title of this book is Meeting the Other Crowd: The Fairy Stories of Hidden Ireland.  I have been on an Irish and Celitic mythology kick lately, and this collection seemed to offer something different.  Instead of "older" stories revised and retold, the stories in this book were, if I remembered correctly, collected over the last three decades from storytellers, skeptics, and true believers in the Good People all over  counties in southern Ireland.  Some of the stories took place far in the past, in the lifetime of an elderly storyteller's grandparent or great-grandparent, but the telling was much more recent, and some of the stories are about how cars and modern roads and other trappings of "modern life" still exist side by side with their Otherworldly Neighbors.

The variety and the unity of these stories were both fascinating.  I had already read that "real" Irish fairies aren't cute little pixies with wings and sparkles, and I knew about banshees and the belief in changelings.  However, I didn't realize how many stories there were that suggested that fairies need a living, breathing human for a great many things... celebrations, funerals, sports matches... in all of these, the person taken for a time has to be polite, act like a proper guest or referee (but not eat or drink anything...) and they'll usually get returned safe and sound, if a little dazed.  And for those people who do the fairies special favors, like lending a horse for a while or helping one in need, there is usually some sort of favor done for them in turn. 

Others who offend them aren't so lucky.  The best way to respect the Good People, it seems, is to leave land that is recognized as theirs alone.  Fairy forts and fairy bushes are not to be trifled with in these stories. The two stories that stayed with me most on this topic are the one about the house built on a path between two forts that had constant knocking on the door and things being turned over as They passed through, and the very last story in the book about the weaver who planted his crop in a fort, grew enormous potatoes that bled when he tried to harvest them, and then wasted away in a really gruesome, decidedly strange manner.  And of course... everyone in the village knew that it was because he'd offended the fairies... challenged them, even. But then... even though the man was a stranger to them, they paid for him to be buried, because to be buried at a the work house where he died would have meant he was less than nothing.  I love little moments of humanity and people being good to each other in all of the strangeness that run throughout these stories.

There was so much interesting stuff in here... little tidbits about religion and culture that I'd never run across before, like all of the Biddy Early stories (had to look her up... she's fascinating) and the idea that priests were supposed to be able to see and deal with the problems people were having with fairies... which they do with varying degrees of success.

Anyway... really lovely book, with the stories told as much in the voice of the speaker as possible, which made it fun to read.  I could imagine myself in some pub in Ireland listening to older folks tell about that time when their grandfather saw something strange in the Fairy Fort just off the road...