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Antidotes to a bad Sue
14 November 2005 09:38 amAfter surgically dissecting one book, I feel I should say something good about a book. I'd laud All the Fishes Come Home to Roost by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rachelmanija, but it's getting enough notice around here it doesn't need my hosannas -- aside from noting that all the praises are deserved and none of the snarks are. So a book I've not seen mentioned: Enchanted, Inc. by Shanna Swendson.
It's packaged as chick-lit with fantasy elements, but it's more like a fantasy with chick-lit elements. Yes, the protagonist is a young woman narrating her vicissitudes in the work and dating worlds of New York City, but it's blended into a delightful froth of urban fantasy about an ancient magic spell consortium trying to update itself as a modern corporation. Should appeal to fans of Undead and Unwed and Kitty and the Midnight Hour, even without the former's shoe fetish or the latter's talk radio snark -- instead it has an intelligent young woman trying to make her way in Manhattan. And lying underneath it all is a fannish sensibility deploying guarded pop sci-fi references to good effect for anyone in the genre. Best scene: a Girls Night Out with fairies where they end up kissing frogs in Central Park.
It's nice to have a bright heroine who's often but not always right -- and earns her mistakes. And her promotions. My strongest caveat is that it's the first of a series, which means nothing gets tied off love-interest-wise.
It turns out, although I hadn't read any of Swendson's previous novels (she's published five category Romances), I've been a fan of hers for a decade: she wrote the Stealth Geek FAQ when she was a student.
---L.
rachelmanija, but it's getting enough notice around here it doesn't need my hosannas -- aside from noting that all the praises are deserved and none of the snarks are. So a book I've not seen mentioned: Enchanted, Inc. by Shanna Swendson.It's packaged as chick-lit with fantasy elements, but it's more like a fantasy with chick-lit elements. Yes, the protagonist is a young woman narrating her vicissitudes in the work and dating worlds of New York City, but it's blended into a delightful froth of urban fantasy about an ancient magic spell consortium trying to update itself as a modern corporation. Should appeal to fans of Undead and Unwed and Kitty and the Midnight Hour, even without the former's shoe fetish or the latter's talk radio snark -- instead it has an intelligent young woman trying to make her way in Manhattan. And lying underneath it all is a fannish sensibility deploying guarded pop sci-fi references to good effect for anyone in the genre. Best scene: a Girls Night Out with fairies where they end up kissing frogs in Central Park.
It's nice to have a bright heroine who's often but not always right -- and earns her mistakes. And her promotions. My strongest caveat is that it's the first of a series, which means nothing gets tied off love-interest-wise.
It turns out, although I hadn't read any of Swendson's previous novels (she's published five category Romances), I've been a fan of hers for a decade: she wrote the Stealth Geek FAQ when she was a student.
---L.