Hold my Mule, Whilst I Rant

Folks I’ve read some books in my time. I’ve read some good books. I’ve read some bad books. I’ve read some books that made absolutely no impression on me at all. But yesterday was a first for me.

Yesterday I read a book that wasn’t there.

Okay, well technically I didn’t read it. Or maybe I unread it. Anyway, this book that I unread wasn’t called The Witch and it wasn’t written by Lev Grossman.

I know that by this point you’re looking at me like I’ve gone off the deep end, so let me explain.

A while back I read a book by Lev Grossman called The Magicians. Overall I thought it was a good book. It deconstructed ideas found in the Narnia books as well as breaking down the notion of a magical school popularized by Harry Potter. More importantly it played with the idea of magical power leading to emotional stagnation through boredom.

But. It ended on a decidedly downer note, with the protagonist slowly dragging himself out of depression and finally agreeing to go back to the magical land of Fillory with his friends.

Probably the best scene in the whole book was somewhere in the middle when the protagonist meets up with one of his former friends who didn’t pass the exams to enter into magic school. Her memory of the exam was supposed to be suppressed, but she’s started to remember and is trying to learn the craft magic on her own.

The scene is effective because of her desperation. She is a woman driven mad by something she has seen but that no one else believes. And when she finally faces off with the one person who can validate her experience he shrugs her off and walks away.

At that point the story completely forgets she exists until the very end where some of the protagonists friends pop up and happen to mention, “Oh yeah, we met your old friend, and now she’s a hedge witch. Wanna go back to Fillory and be a king?”

And that’s it. The book ends there. And the sequel, The Magician King opens with the characters from the first book already on the throne in Fillory bored out of their minds again.

*takes deep breath*

DOES. NOT. HAPPEN!

The trials of a young woman trying to learn to be a witch on her own in a world that doesn’t believe in magic? The things she learns that go outside the borders of what would have been taught in a formal schooling setting? The main characters’ path to the throne? You think you can just kill it with a summary? You can’t just summarize all that stuff!

Well, obviously you can. But there’s a whole book in there.

Let me reiterate. An entire book’s worth of material is just skimmed over so that Mr. Grossman can get his characters onto the thrones in Fillory.

I understand that you can’t go into detail about every single character’s backstory. But the witch character had pathos. Her frustration and building insanity from trying to learn magic the hard way spoke to me. And Mr. Grossman thinks he can get away with telling me, “Oh yeah, she’s developed a lot as a character now, moving on with the real story” and get away with it.

But he can’t. This is one of the worst examples of telling over showing I have ever seen. And it infuriates me all the more because I can see all that that story could have been. I can see the interactions between the characters and their trouble accepting a woman who has no formal training. I can see the protagonist from the first book slowly overcoming his inner darkness. I can see all of it.

But the book isn’t there. The Witch doesn’t exist. Instead we jump straight into The Magician King and it looks like its going to cover the same “power leads to ennui” message that the first book dealt with already.

If it wasn’t a library book I would have thrown it across the room. Since I can’t do that I’m doing this instead.

Pardon my ranting, but I really had to get this out.

Maybe you’ve had a similar experience. Maybe you’ve read a book that made you want to pull your hair and and fashion it into a rope that you could then hang yourself with.

Commiserate in the comments ya’ll. I’m all ears.

Bizzaro Book Review: Scoop by Kit Frazier

We’re in dangerous waters with today’s review folks. I’ve left the safe harbour of nerdy dude fiction and ventured out over the deep and shark infested seas of…Chick Lit.

Why am I reviewing this book again? Two reasons:

1. I’m a sucker for obscure authors with a great voice.

2. I’m an even bigger sucker for ebooks with a 99 cent price point.

So, without further ado lets get on with the show.

Scoop is a book about a reporter named Cauley McKinnon who has made some…less than stellar choices in her love life which in a roundabout way has led to her working at the obituary desk of the smallest of Austin’s newspapers. And that would be Austin as in Austin, TX, a town so clearly realized in this novel that it comes to feel like a character in and of itself. In this and other things Scoop is a clear example of the old mantra, Write what you know. It was clear to me when reading the author was drawing many of the details of her fictional surroundings from real life, and that realism of setting made the story all the more believable.

The author’s writing style is both clear and compelling, which was really one of the first things that made me want to buy the book. The second reason is that from the first page the characters seem to leap off the page and into your mind.

The books characters are both its greatest strength and greatest weakness. On the one hand the main cast is strong and well developed, filled with well rounded villains and subtle flawed heroes. On the down side the supporting cast of characters, mainly represented by Cauley’s friends and family, are also fully developed. You may be wondering why I’ve put this down as a negative. The essential problem is that while this cast of miscellaneous characters are both colorful and interesting, they do almost nothing to move the plot forward. Occasionally they provide support to our heroine in her times of trouble (and Cauley McKinnon has loads of trouble on her plate) but they do very little to push the story forward which by the end of the book leaves the lot of them looking decidedly superfluous.

As to the story itself it was compelling enough as both a mystery and a romance, keeping me turning the pages till the very end. Unfortunately once I got to the end I found the resolution to both threads to be slightly underwhelming. On the one hand Cauley solves the mystery and ostensibly finds the right man for her but her happy ending feels somehow shallow and tacked on.

And of course since this book is partially a romance its time for my to insert my obligatory rant about such things here. Cauley McKinnon suffers from what I will call Bella Swan syndrome. Bella Swan syndrome is when a female character downplays her own attractiveness and then every single unattached guy she meets wants to jump her bones. And I know I’ve complained about the double standard before but I’m gonna hit it again here:

Ladies, don’t tell me you want me to love you for who you are and not what you look like and then write stories in which your heroine has guys drooling all over her because of what she looks like. Your desire to be desired is practically omnipresent in the books you write for other gals.

If you really meant what you said you would write characters that are truly unattractive, that don’t get noticed by guys, that have to prove their inner beauty over time to win the heart of the man they love. Or better yet, write a guy character who isn’t superficially handsome. If what’s the inside is so much more important than what is on the outside then why aren’t there ever any nerdy, balding, overweight male love interests in your books? (wrote the nerdy, balding, overweight male)

Okay I think that’s all the soapboxing you can handle.

In the summation Scoop is fun book with great writing and believable characters. The plot tapers off a little toward the end, but on the plus side this book has a sequel so hopefully the intrepid Cauley McKinnon will get a more satisfactory resolution in that one.

I already mentioned the 99 cent price point and Scoop is more than worth that. If you like romantic mysteries or mysterious romances this book has got you covered. You can get it for your eReader type devices here.