![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
larryhammerIt's Reading Wednesday -- and I have an actual book finished:
The Mystic Marriage by Heather Rose Jones, the Ruritanian fantasy romance sequel to Daughter of Mystery -- or rather, it tries to be two different types of sequels at the same time, a Romance one, which relates the romance of two minor characters from the previous book in the series, and a Fantasy one, in which new characters are added while continuing to follow the previous protagonists. If the book had committed to either mode, either by using a brisker fantasy pacing or by more strongly foregrounding the new romantic pair, it would be slightly more successful, I think. It doesn't help that, apparently in the interest of compression, a couple key scenes are omitted and recounted in retrospect.
The Ruritanian part of the genre is entirely successful though -- right down to the right sort of geographical fuzziness: Alpannia seems to hover, Schödinger-like, between "above Tyrol" and "above Savoy," bordering Switzerland and Italy, but sometimes near Austria and sometimes near France.
In progress: Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks, the second-to-last Culture novel -- this is, if anything, more engaging than The Hydrogen Sonata despite its structural complexity and taking several chapters before explaining anything.
DNF: Bath Tangle by Georgette Heyer -- lost interest and came due.
---L.
Subject quote from "King Volmer and Elsie," Christian Winter tr. John Greenleaf Whittier.
The Mystic Marriage by Heather Rose Jones, the Ruritanian fantasy romance sequel to Daughter of Mystery -- or rather, it tries to be two different types of sequels at the same time, a Romance one, which relates the romance of two minor characters from the previous book in the series, and a Fantasy one, in which new characters are added while continuing to follow the previous protagonists. If the book had committed to either mode, either by using a brisker fantasy pacing or by more strongly foregrounding the new romantic pair, it would be slightly more successful, I think. It doesn't help that, apparently in the interest of compression, a couple key scenes are omitted and recounted in retrospect.
The Ruritanian part of the genre is entirely successful though -- right down to the right sort of geographical fuzziness: Alpannia seems to hover, Schödinger-like, between "above Tyrol" and "above Savoy," bordering Switzerland and Italy, but sometimes near Austria and sometimes near France.
In progress: Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks, the second-to-last Culture novel -- this is, if anything, more engaging than The Hydrogen Sonata despite its structural complexity and taking several chapters before explaining anything.
DNF: Bath Tangle by Georgette Heyer -- lost interest and came due.
---L.
Subject quote from "King Volmer and Elsie," Christian Winter tr. John Greenleaf Whittier.