Thief's Magic, Trudi Canavan

So far Sunday is going quite well, if sleepily. I ended up staying up until almost midnight last night to read, and by the end of the book that did not seem like a good time investment. And then I couldn't get to sleep and kept waking up. So, much grump.

Thief's Magic started unpromising and continued worse. ( Read more... )

On both gender and race the book shows a breathtaking failure of imagination.

It seems to find caricatures of historically existing systems of oppression an interesting place to tour.

And by the end of the very thick book the protagonists have done bugger all about any of it. The two of them arguably escape, but that's it. They barely even question the systems, they certainly do nothing to change them, they mostly want to climb back in in their old roles.


It says book 1 on the cover, so probably the whole thing is just setup and a tour of the worlds and magic rules this time, but come on, it's a huge great book, something ought to happen.



It's very much not what I look for in a story.

And it's going back to the library, since thankfully I remember disliking this author on roughly these grounds before.




... my continued quest for books to read while waiting for the good authors to write is not going very well.

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This morning I realised that there's probably someone somewhere discovering Highlander on the digital channel reruns right now, the way I watched Blakes 7 start to finish on digital tv the first time.

And with a similar time gap since production.





time just keeps happening, don't it?

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My ear is grumbly grump painful, like it can't decide to not pain or to pain (and yaay for mostly not pain, don't get me wrong, I like absence of pain plenty)
I have written the last time I took a painkiller on my arm. That should work for now.



I've been reading a book and, as with much urban fantasy, the author has clearly watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer, cause they've strip mined it for names.

Unfortunately I suspect it's also the closest they've been to England, and they have an English main character. And very probably no Brit picker.

It's kind of hilarious.

I realise other countries don't pick up on subtleties of class or region, and I haven't a hope of reading their local accents for such things, but it's still pretty funny to read.

I think he's supposed to sound like Spike. Which is a problem from the start, because Spike is a multi layered fake, a US actor with US writers trying to imitate a British accent/dialect with occasional input from a Brit, and in canon a man who hasn't been back to the mother country for several generations and is trying to fake his class background. If that's what you're working from, and all you've really grasped about it is occasional verbal ticks like 'mate' and 'love', well, that's... not quite the thing.

Especially when you then have the American protagonist keep commenting on how educated it makes him sound. Because that's... not quite the signifiers over here.

But sometimes the character verges on camp, and this mixes rather poorly with his darkly tortured ex soldier persona. Or rather, it would be an interesting character choice, if I thought it was vaguely on purpose, giving me mental images kind of like Captain Jack Harkness with even more Barrowman. As it is that's clearly not what they're aiming for, so it's as if Angel is every now and then sounding more like Lorne, and yet everyone responds by saying how classy and intelligent it seems.



No I'm not quoting quotes, it's not as bad as I'm making it sound, it was just once it struck me funny I read it with an accent, sort of thing.



Rather more of a problem is the way either the author is falling very short on the show not tell or the protagonist is making a lot of assumptions about tall dark and laconic's character based solely on his accent. It's epic :eyeroll: but they just did a whole Destined For Each Other thing. ... which, pretty much, is why I'm on the computer now, the whole sex scene I'm not sure if it needed tagging for dubcon due to magic, and since it was about a paragraph long and specified he's really not into foreplay it, er, had no actual appeal. So I'm just :eyeroll: at the book right now.

Plus the author seems to think that wanting to shake someone is a manifestation of really really caring about them, an indeed the only one Tortured Warrior Guy has had so far.

Also it probably doesn't help that, despite this being the first in the library system, the lightness of incluing and list of other books in the front suggest this is something like book 7 in the same 'verse. It makes sense, it's just not optimal reading order.



Honestly, I want to read a book about a healer who finds Tortured Warrior Guy and trains him as her assistant and can't be having with him until he stops all the grabbing and so forth. You know, one that values the healing arts, instead of just using them as background indicator of She Really Cares and then keeps going to the shooty stuff.

Eh, I haven't finished this one, you never know...



ETA: As it turns out, it does build up to Tortured Warrior Guy learning to not kill, while the healer actually heals people, and gets him to help. I am positively surprised, since I've read a lot of these and that's actually unusual. But it turns out all the Tortured Warrior Guys start out as the enemy and get converted and that's why they're so Tortured. I actually like this setup.

Unfortunately it also builds up to him picking her up, throwing her over his shoulder, and tossing her down on the bed, then telling her he'll never leave her even if she orders him to. Which is less cool. I mean, actively a problem, promising to stalk someone for their own protection forever.

Plus I really wish more fiction agreed with me that dried blood is not sexy. Unsanitary.