To add to what Slam said above, Confessor, Brackett also ventured into more 'hard' SF - I read one of those efforts and posted about it in this very thread last year. Basically, the point is that she was a pretty solid writer across the board and you probably can't go wrong picking up anything she wrote.

p.s. *stated sheepishly* fixed the link, or rather, put the damn thing in, my earlier post...

Yarrow
Charles de Lint

This was almost a really good book. I think if you cut out the first half, which simply gives us a detailed look at what life was like in Ottawa in the mid-80s, and cut to the chase, you'd have a pretty decent novella. If this was 3x longer, and Otherland was fleshed out... the bad guy given some sort of motivation beyond 'hungry' and those people described in the first of the book made a bit more important, it'd probably be a good epic fantasy.

As it is, it fails on both counts. The 1st half of the book is largely irrelevant, other than to name drop the books, bands, and TV shows the author likes. The main character, Cat, is massively unlikable and emo-y. The two main support characters, Peter and Ben, are impossibly nice to her.. I guess it could be a commentary on the power of fandom to overlook a person's flaws, but I think it was just lazy writing.

Once the story actually starts, it's a page turner for sure, but doesn't really get into any of the interesting things that are just vaguely hinted at. If those were fleshed out? You might have something. But instead we get one of those books with a thoroughly unsatisfying conclusion that leaves the readers to write most of the details themselves.

I don't think I'd read anything else by him, though I'd definitely seen his name a number of times. If you're a fan of the genre of books that revolve around a book store, you might like it.. this could almost fit into that retroactively.

He has one long running series that has alot of the same themes as Yarrow (so it seems from the reviews and such), so perhaps it works better there.

Kind of got stuck on the Wheel of Time stuff and hadn't read much prose recently, but switched gears, and read this...



Baltimore: The Steadfast Tin Solder and the Vampire by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden with spot illustrations by Mignola. The structure is similar to The Decameron in that three strangers gather in a pub and share tales, which gives us their backstory and their relationship with a fourth figure, Lord Baltimore, whom we also learn of through their tales of their association with him, all occurring in a time of plague. However, we also learn the nature of the plague is not disease, but of vampires, and it culminates with the appearance of that fourth figure in a confrontation with the architect of the plague.

I generally enjoy Mignola's storytelling, and have read a bunch of Golden's stuff both in comics and in prose, both in partnership with Mignola and Sniegowski and on his own, and this was no exception. It's a bit of a slow burn at first, as the stories told have to establish a foundation for everything else to be built upon, but it works and draws the reader in. I am not exactly sure of the relationship between this novel and the Baltimore series of graphic novels, as I haven't read those yet, but I have tham and will likely dive in soon. I know the novel preceded them, and I think they are an expansion and continuation of the story, but I am not sure. We'll find out.

-M

The Pleasure Palace
Joan Lee, 1987


So, the only reason I picked this book up is because it was written by Stan Lee's wife. And - it's not bad, but nothing spectacular, either. First I should say that title is a bit misleading. The 'Pleasure Palace' is the name of a luxury ship that's supposed to be a private club for the world's wealthiest people, a joint business venture of one of the book's main characters, Nick Tyson, and a Middle Eastern oil sheikh. Based on that brief description, as well as the cover blurb and photo (that's from the UK edition, by the way), you'd think it's all about the debauched orgies of the obscenely wealthy on a floating Xanadu.
In fact, though, very little of story takes place on the titular seafaring vessel - basically the prologue, which briefly introduces most of the main cast, and the last few chapters in the last thirty or so pages. The rest is a rather lengthy flashback as to how it all came about, delving deeply into the back stories of main characters, mainly young and beautiful people who are already wealthy or soon become wealthy, like the already-mentioned Nick, a twenty-something entrepreneur and son of a super-successful Louisiana businessman, his possessive mother Cynthia, Jan Julliard, an aspiring model who falls madly in love with Nick (and vice versa), Cat Bracken, an up and coming singer and actress who has a very troubled past, Mark Squire, a rags-to-riches hair-dresser and then hair-care products entrepreneur, and a number of others. Their lives become intertwined and things come to a head at the launch party for the Pleasure Palace.
As I indicated above, this is a competently written book, but not really the type of stuff I normally like reading. It's kind of like one of those night-time soaps, like Dallas or Dynasty, in prose form, albeit with more racy and very (very) descriptive sex scenes - Mrs. Lee definitely had a raunchy streak. One the most interesting parts to me was that one of the characters is a transgender woman, which I found surprisingly ahead-of-its-time in the way it was handled.