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beccaelizabethYesterday I read 'Shadows Return', the new Nightrunner book by Lynn Flewelling.
I was really figuring to like this. I love the first three books. I love the Bone Doll trilogy. I read the author's LJ and they seem like a nice person. So I figured I'd like the book.
... I was left with a feeling a bit like I ordered spaghetti and got soup. Sure, it's got stuff in it, but somehow it feels un meal like.
The story kicked off with plots and politics and resolved none of it. It lacked a mystery, because the reader already knew who did what and then just watched others discover it, sometimes getting the same revelation once per character, on screen, like half a dozen times. Which doesn't exactly pull you along into the world. It turned into a hurt/comfort epic that never really went all the way on the hurt and was extremely minimal on the comfort. It's a Seregil&Alec story where they're separated almost all the time. And I can't figure out who changes. If the protagonist is the one that changes, I can't figure out who that is. So I end up at the end of the book wondering vaguely what it was for.
It was probably to invent the silver baby of magical healing powers.
It makes flowers. That heal people.
... the cute, it burns.
Okay, yeah, it also drinks blood, which is less cute, but if it cures people by dropping blood into water and making a flower then why does the flower or water stage be needed? Just have little vampire baby of super healing, be less cute.
I'm not a fan of cute.
So, anyway, if the healing-vampire-baby is the point, lets look at attitudes to babies all the way through. Start of book: Alec loves kids but doesn't want to shag womens to make them. End of book: Alec loves kids, including silver creepy vampire baby, and didn't have to shag womens to make them. Also it has magic super healing. Possibly because no women were involved in the making?
Where have all the women gone? I remember Klia and Beka and a bunch of other strong women in previous books. In this one? There's the slave so resigned to her station she can't think of escaping, the slave who wants to escape so bad she kills herself, and... mentions of why all the other women aren't going to be involved in this adventure. Um, scuse, unintended subtext FTL??
Then there's the eunuch thing. There's an evil eunuch, but he was evil before he got gelded. Threat of gelding is introduced early and waved around a lot. And then it doesn't happen. This is what I mean by the Hurt in the h/c never really going there. Sure, they get whipped on the feet and that's nasty. But they're going to invent a super magic healing silver vampire flower baby by the end of the book. Couldn't the middle of the book involve having some bits get cut off, maybe a bit of despair, overcoming the odds with the new impairments, loving each other despite lack of tackle, then when the silver baby cures all having a new start in life? And then instead of 'cowardly evil eunuch runs away, and therefore doesn't get killed, oh wait there's no moral to that lesson' you would have 'cowardly evil eunuch abandons those who tried to help him and therefore never learns his problems can be magic flowered away'. But hey, whatever.
Maybe it's meant to be about the evils of slavery. I was thinking it could be about why the evil empire is evil, but we start out thinking its evil and we end up thinking its evil and also we only ever see two cells and a garden of it. Oh, and a lot of empty countryside. We get no feeling for the politics or power structures or spy stuff. But we do see slaves. We see a spectrum of responses to slavery, from not being able to imagine other lives, to fighting back until they despair and kill themselves, to collaborating and getting their own slaves to oppress in turn. There's a couple of freed slaves later on but they're suspicious and don't like the good guys and only help them as swaps for the healing. There's no slaves getting themselves out of oppression and going home. Just slaves who are so ashamed to have been slaves they say to tell home they're dead. WTF? Oh, and some slaves being bought back by their original clan. We don't see them get home. We don't see how they reintegrate. None of them volunteer to go back to lead our heroes to anywhere. They're just numbers mentioned, pawns in the background.
So we have noble Skalans who escape with outside help and... everybody else who don't. Slavery so evil it breaks people. Okays, that's a story.
It doesn't break the heroes though. They go through the same stuff and come out all noble and heroic and still saving people. I find it rather irritating. Because, and I may have mentioned this before, the woman who does most of the work in getting Seregil free then ups and kills herself. I couldn't even figure out why, except fear. Her nerve breaks at the last minute? I think I'd have liked the book a whole lot more if she was a PC instead of an NPC resource supplier who kills herself.
There's two womens in the whole main block of the story and one of them kills herself. Not cool.
So the other thing about being a slave is the sexual access and the being made to breed. Seregil and Alec both get raped... in their sleep. While dreaming of each other. And once again the 'hurt' component does double back flips to not go there. They get drugged, pass out, have sex dreams, wake up feeling defiled. Which, yeah, is nasty, but... okay, look, if the threat throughout is (a) gelding (b) rape and (c) being used for breeding, then if the heroes avoid all of the above, shouldn't it be through some kind of heroic effort? As is it looks weirdly like the bad guys are all talk. But only about our two.
But wait, Alec is used for breeding. The baby with no mother. Two of them, really. And here we have the central described at great length thing. Bad guy puts him in a cage and bleeds him for days, after pouring potions in and making him not be human any more. Vampire baby results. Alec decides to love it anyway. Which could be a story... if there was ever any doubt Alec would love a baby. Only the evil people think it is a thing and call it it (even though there's no genitals there so what's the right word?) Alec hears them hurting and has to get them out of slavery.
It's like there's a story there, but...
Okay, you can't say it doesn't cost anything. But none of the cost is a choice. He doesn't have to overcome deep seated loathing and ookiness when he looks at the kid, he gets a feeling of connection. Where's the cost? All the pain in the making of the kid cost him a lot, but that weren't his choice. An interesting story would be if it *was* his choice, if it was a kind of seduction and sacrifice story, where he finds out making this kid is a possibility and the kid will have magic healing powers and decides, possibly because his friends are ill and possibly just for the general war effort or the general good, that he will go find the people who can do this and submit to whatever he'll have to go through to do it. He'd be making choices and sacrificing stuff and it would cost him a lot. As is, he's a slave getting tortured. And that's pretty much the whole book. Honestly, I got bored. It's like they made an entire episode out of the parts where our noble heroes are stuck in a cell. Those aren't the interesting parts. Mystery and politics and spy stuff, those are interesting.
Seregil and Alec rescue themselves. Okay, cool. But they do so simultaneously because Alec starts to rescue himself and then dithers and goes back in his cell. Er, what? Daring escapes interrupted by bad guy = tension. Dithery escapes interrupted by bad guy = facepalm. I'm just saying.
And then Micum and Thero get sent to rescue them, but their role is *entirely* finding things out that the reader already knows. Seriously, you could remove their plot thread completely and not one word of new information would be lost. You know how boring that makes them? Yes, that boring. And then they turn up after the big fight and are there to be the escape boat... but they wait around in the middle of nowhere until the second set of hunters catch up to them just so the vampire baby can do his party trick, that we the readers have already seen, that Seregil has already seen, but that Thero and Micum now need to see. Why? I mean, yeah, there's an in-story why of Alec and Seregil being weak and feeble, but right after the attack they can go on a horse and leave, so why not right before? And outside of the story... Why? I can't see a reason at all.
And that's the comfort section. Not Alec and Seregil looking after each other. Magic vampire baby looking after them. Which not really what I'm there for.
okay, so once I get started on being picky, I can go on a bit more than I meant. I quite liked the book while I was reading it, mostly. I just... found it really thin. Who got changed? What happened? Why did some of these people need to be in the book? Was it secretly a h/c short story that grew? Where's all the women? And politics? And mystery? And why do we need telling everything twice?
But hey, I'm buying the next one. Guess it didn't suck.
... come to think, quite a lot of it is about sucking. Heh.
So now I feel guilty posting this when the author's on my f-list. Er, sorry?
Anyone who has different opinion feel free to tell me I'm reading it wrong.
I was really figuring to like this. I love the first three books. I love the Bone Doll trilogy. I read the author's LJ and they seem like a nice person. So I figured I'd like the book.
... I was left with a feeling a bit like I ordered spaghetti and got soup. Sure, it's got stuff in it, but somehow it feels un meal like.
The story kicked off with plots and politics and resolved none of it. It lacked a mystery, because the reader already knew who did what and then just watched others discover it, sometimes getting the same revelation once per character, on screen, like half a dozen times. Which doesn't exactly pull you along into the world. It turned into a hurt/comfort epic that never really went all the way on the hurt and was extremely minimal on the comfort. It's a Seregil&Alec story where they're separated almost all the time. And I can't figure out who changes. If the protagonist is the one that changes, I can't figure out who that is. So I end up at the end of the book wondering vaguely what it was for.
It was probably to invent the silver baby of magical healing powers.
It makes flowers. That heal people.
... the cute, it burns.
Okay, yeah, it also drinks blood, which is less cute, but if it cures people by dropping blood into water and making a flower then why does the flower or water stage be needed? Just have little vampire baby of super healing, be less cute.
I'm not a fan of cute.
So, anyway, if the healing-vampire-baby is the point, lets look at attitudes to babies all the way through. Start of book: Alec loves kids but doesn't want to shag womens to make them. End of book: Alec loves kids, including silver creepy vampire baby, and didn't have to shag womens to make them. Also it has magic super healing. Possibly because no women were involved in the making?
Where have all the women gone? I remember Klia and Beka and a bunch of other strong women in previous books. In this one? There's the slave so resigned to her station she can't think of escaping, the slave who wants to escape so bad she kills herself, and... mentions of why all the other women aren't going to be involved in this adventure. Um, scuse, unintended subtext FTL??
Then there's the eunuch thing. There's an evil eunuch, but he was evil before he got gelded. Threat of gelding is introduced early and waved around a lot. And then it doesn't happen. This is what I mean by the Hurt in the h/c never really going there. Sure, they get whipped on the feet and that's nasty. But they're going to invent a super magic healing silver vampire flower baby by the end of the book. Couldn't the middle of the book involve having some bits get cut off, maybe a bit of despair, overcoming the odds with the new impairments, loving each other despite lack of tackle, then when the silver baby cures all having a new start in life? And then instead of 'cowardly evil eunuch runs away, and therefore doesn't get killed, oh wait there's no moral to that lesson' you would have 'cowardly evil eunuch abandons those who tried to help him and therefore never learns his problems can be magic flowered away'. But hey, whatever.
Maybe it's meant to be about the evils of slavery. I was thinking it could be about why the evil empire is evil, but we start out thinking its evil and we end up thinking its evil and also we only ever see two cells and a garden of it. Oh, and a lot of empty countryside. We get no feeling for the politics or power structures or spy stuff. But we do see slaves. We see a spectrum of responses to slavery, from not being able to imagine other lives, to fighting back until they despair and kill themselves, to collaborating and getting their own slaves to oppress in turn. There's a couple of freed slaves later on but they're suspicious and don't like the good guys and only help them as swaps for the healing. There's no slaves getting themselves out of oppression and going home. Just slaves who are so ashamed to have been slaves they say to tell home they're dead. WTF? Oh, and some slaves being bought back by their original clan. We don't see them get home. We don't see how they reintegrate. None of them volunteer to go back to lead our heroes to anywhere. They're just numbers mentioned, pawns in the background.
So we have noble Skalans who escape with outside help and... everybody else who don't. Slavery so evil it breaks people. Okays, that's a story.
It doesn't break the heroes though. They go through the same stuff and come out all noble and heroic and still saving people. I find it rather irritating. Because, and I may have mentioned this before, the woman who does most of the work in getting Seregil free then ups and kills herself. I couldn't even figure out why, except fear. Her nerve breaks at the last minute? I think I'd have liked the book a whole lot more if she was a PC instead of an NPC resource supplier who kills herself.
There's two womens in the whole main block of the story and one of them kills herself. Not cool.
So the other thing about being a slave is the sexual access and the being made to breed. Seregil and Alec both get raped... in their sleep. While dreaming of each other. And once again the 'hurt' component does double back flips to not go there. They get drugged, pass out, have sex dreams, wake up feeling defiled. Which, yeah, is nasty, but... okay, look, if the threat throughout is (a) gelding (b) rape and (c) being used for breeding, then if the heroes avoid all of the above, shouldn't it be through some kind of heroic effort? As is it looks weirdly like the bad guys are all talk. But only about our two.
But wait, Alec is used for breeding. The baby with no mother. Two of them, really. And here we have the central described at great length thing. Bad guy puts him in a cage and bleeds him for days, after pouring potions in and making him not be human any more. Vampire baby results. Alec decides to love it anyway. Which could be a story... if there was ever any doubt Alec would love a baby. Only the evil people think it is a thing and call it it (even though there's no genitals there so what's the right word?) Alec hears them hurting and has to get them out of slavery.
It's like there's a story there, but...
Okay, you can't say it doesn't cost anything. But none of the cost is a choice. He doesn't have to overcome deep seated loathing and ookiness when he looks at the kid, he gets a feeling of connection. Where's the cost? All the pain in the making of the kid cost him a lot, but that weren't his choice. An interesting story would be if it *was* his choice, if it was a kind of seduction and sacrifice story, where he finds out making this kid is a possibility and the kid will have magic healing powers and decides, possibly because his friends are ill and possibly just for the general war effort or the general good, that he will go find the people who can do this and submit to whatever he'll have to go through to do it. He'd be making choices and sacrificing stuff and it would cost him a lot. As is, he's a slave getting tortured. And that's pretty much the whole book. Honestly, I got bored. It's like they made an entire episode out of the parts where our noble heroes are stuck in a cell. Those aren't the interesting parts. Mystery and politics and spy stuff, those are interesting.
Seregil and Alec rescue themselves. Okay, cool. But they do so simultaneously because Alec starts to rescue himself and then dithers and goes back in his cell. Er, what? Daring escapes interrupted by bad guy = tension. Dithery escapes interrupted by bad guy = facepalm. I'm just saying.
And then Micum and Thero get sent to rescue them, but their role is *entirely* finding things out that the reader already knows. Seriously, you could remove their plot thread completely and not one word of new information would be lost. You know how boring that makes them? Yes, that boring. And then they turn up after the big fight and are there to be the escape boat... but they wait around in the middle of nowhere until the second set of hunters catch up to them just so the vampire baby can do his party trick, that we the readers have already seen, that Seregil has already seen, but that Thero and Micum now need to see. Why? I mean, yeah, there's an in-story why of Alec and Seregil being weak and feeble, but right after the attack they can go on a horse and leave, so why not right before? And outside of the story... Why? I can't see a reason at all.
And that's the comfort section. Not Alec and Seregil looking after each other. Magic vampire baby looking after them. Which not really what I'm there for.
okay, so once I get started on being picky, I can go on a bit more than I meant. I quite liked the book while I was reading it, mostly. I just... found it really thin. Who got changed? What happened? Why did some of these people need to be in the book? Was it secretly a h/c short story that grew? Where's all the women? And politics? And mystery? And why do we need telling everything twice?
But hey, I'm buying the next one. Guess it didn't suck.
... come to think, quite a lot of it is about sucking. Heh.
So now I feel guilty posting this when the author's on my f-list. Er, sorry?
Anyone who has different opinion feel free to tell me I'm reading it wrong.
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Date: 2008-09-01 02:20 pm (UTC)