Books in mid December

[ladyofastolat]

Nearing the end of 2016. This whole "write a review of every book I read in 2016" thing fell apart rather in the summer, although I think I managed to track down all the titles retrospectively and write at least a few lines about them. I do quite like having the record to look back on, so might continue this in 2017, although I'll probably write less about each book. Or try to. I'm not good at being succinct.

Anyway...



I started reading a random Regency romance which I came across when doing stock work in a library. I can’t remember its title now, but I chuckled at the quote on the front, which said something like, "full of dashing cads in breeches! Bravo!" However, I only lasted for a few chapters. By its cover design, it was clearly going for a Georgette Heyer feel, but it read more like a Mills & Boon romance, and didn't feel remotely true to the period.

Staying on a Regency theme...

Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal

Regency romance with magic. In this AU, "glamour" is the manipulation of the ether to produce illusions and other effects. While some men do it professionally, it’s mostly seen as one of those accomplishments that well-brought-up ladies should have, like piano playing – a way to delight your dinner party guests and prettify a ballroom. Jane, the heroine, is a highly skilled glamourist, but she is plain and is unmarried at 28. She has feelings for a handsome neighbour, but so does her younger sister, who is far more beautiful, so Jane is resigning herself to life as an old maid. Then a variety of newcomers arrive in the neighhourhood: the neighbour's young sister, a dashing young naval officer, and a grumpy and very talented professional glamourist...

I enjoyed this, and found it very readable. In terms of action, nothing really happens. People talk. Newcomers arrive and relationships get stirred up a bit. The blurb mentions "danger," but that only means the danger of scandal and social disgrace. The author is very obviously going for the Jane Austen vibe, and does so fairly well, although some of the attitudes didn’t quite ring true to me – for example, the casualness by which someone talks about having killed someone in a past duel. But the author invites people to email her with any anachronisms they have spotted, so is clearly trying hard, unlike the author of the dashing cads in breeches.

(Although, technically, are they anachronisms at all, given that this is an AU? Not that it feels like an AU. The existence of glamour doesn’t appear to have affected the world in any way at all, except in interior design and dinner party entertainment.)

Glamour in Glass by Mary Robinette Kowal

Sequel to the above. Jane is now married (and, yes, this is a spoiler, but hardly a surprise) and happily practising glamour with her new husband. In this book, they travel to Belgium to consult with a glamourist there and to have a belated honeymoon. Because Napoleon is safely exiled to Elba, and what danger can there be in Belgium in the summer of 1815?

For some reason, I found my interest in the series seriously waning as the book progressed. Book one was pretty much people sitting around and talking in manor houses in Dorset, while this one included kidnappings, daring rescues, spying and all sorts of things. But I found the book in which "nothing happened" far more interesting than this one. I really don’t know why.

There are two more books in the series, and I’ve still got them out of the library and might return to the series in a few weeks for more, but I may well not. I didn’t dislike book 2, I just found myself getting bored with it.

Arcadia by Ian Pears

Oxford, 1960. Henry Lytton, an academic and occasional intelligence agent who used to hang out with Tolkien and Lewis, has spent years working on a novel set in an imaginary world, but of the actual plot, all he has is fragments, since his interest lies mostly in the world-building. We kick off with a scene set in this world, featuring a boy called Jay who sees an apparition of a girl, then move to Lytton in the pub, who has just read this scene aloud. Then we meet 15 year old Rosie, who feeds Lytton's cat. Searching for the cat in his basement, she finds a garden pergola, walks through it... and meets Jay. Several centuries from now, in a future ruled by a totalitarian "scientific government", a mathematician has created something that she claims is a true time machine, although scientific orthodoxy rules that it can only travel to the past of a parallel world. In order to keep her invention from falling into unfriendly hands, she disappears through it...

Um, to be honest, there’s no way I can describe this, so I'll stop trying. There are multiple narratives here, centred around three main settings: the nightmare future, Oxford in 1960 and the invented world which may or may not have become real. By the medium of the "time machine," people you meet in one narrative have a habit of suddenly popping up in a different setting. There’s loads of timey-wimey stuff going on here and it's really hard to describe. It's like a tangled ball of string where everything connects, but it's initially very hard to see how. To make things even more complicated, a note at the end invites you to download an app which, it appears, allows you read the chapters in a completely different order. I didn’t.

I... liked it, I think. I have a feeling that it's not as clever as it thinks it is, and I defintely think it could be shorter, but I liked it. I think.

Now reading the Greatcoats series by Sebastian de Castell – swashbuckling fantasy full of duels and camaraderie in black leather. I've just started book 2 and am enjoying the series a lot. More later. Probably next year.

Comments

[lycoris.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed Shades of Milk and Honey but never managed to find the sequel - I'm not sure that I want to either, I know a few people who didn't like the second one as much. I'll be interested to hear what you think of the rest though if you read them ...