March book picks

“Glass Houses” by Rachel Caine (paperback)

I don’t really know whether I liked the first book in “The Morganville Vampires” series or not – or should I say how much I liked it. It certainly kept my interest and my adrenaline level up, and maybe that’s the problem: I prefer a healthy balance between bad and good, good and bad, but Claire and her friends didn’t have a moment’s peace. I don’t mind problematic characters and violence in books – heck, one of my all-time favourite series is “All For The Game” by Nora Sakavic – but constant violence aimed at Claire by Monica and her cohorts simply baffled me. I just kept wondering why as it kept escalating, without any reason other than to wish to hurt and even kill Claire. There wasn’t any comprehensible reason to justify such level of viciousness and violence. And then I realised that maybe there doesn’t need to be any normal reason for a deranged person to attack a non-deranged person? After all, isn’t that exactly what happened when my country was attacked by a neighbouring country? They do it because they want to, because they can, and because they know that no one will stop them. I guess I want books that I read to provide some hope when real life doesn’t. Still, I grew quite fond of Claire, Eve, Shane, and Michael, and if I come across any more books in the series, I’ll definitely buy them. I also really liked Amelie, whereas Oliver turned out to be a complete disappointment. By the way, I was shocked to learn that the author of the books had passed. I’m pretty sure that I bought my copy when she was still alive and the knowledge that she is no more hit me hard. She left behind a legacy of more than 50 books and I hope that people will continue to discover and read them.

“The Ice Mage” by Julianne Munich (ebook)

I took up this novel expecting to find a magical adventure yet all I found was growing frustration with the novel’s language, logic, plot, and characters. The language was very wobbly: I had a feeling that the author couldn’t quite decide whether to stick to more old-fashioned language that would suit the selected historical time period or whether to pepper its pages with modern-day expressions and notions – and simply used both, creating a rather uneven effect. I kept wondering if people of that time period would be familiar with such notions as ‘coma’ and ‘closure’. Worse still were the dialogues: awkward, forced, and generally unnatural. The characters sounded like wound-up dolls rather than people. Speaking of the characters, most of the things they did were so idiotic it was painfully obvious that they would achieve the opposite result to what they actually expected to achieve. Was that supposed to be a plot device to help move the story along? A very questionable technique then, as it made the characters look stupid and incapable of anything sensible. Also, if you set your story in a historical time period, your characters cannot have the same attitudes as modern people (e.g.: beauty standards) – unless you’re writing a time-travelling novel, of course. Otherwise you’re just playing dress-up. However, I wanted to commend the author on providing some authenticity in terms of personal hygiene (dressing, undressing, even going to the toilet – it nicely recreated the atmosphere of the time where dialogues failed to convey it), but the relationship between the aristocracy and their employees was completely unrealistic. I have been extensively studying everything connected with the French court during the reign of Louis XIV for a while now and I found the depiction of court-related things in this book utterly unbelievable. I believe that even when writing fantasy we should operate within certain parameters of knowledge and understanding. Also, I’ve noticed that the female characters appeared to be all-knowing in this book, while the male characters were generally slow and clueless. I actually found Marcel and Adelaide quite likeable at first, but after that interminable carriage ride without a single conversation of substance between the two of them, they began to seriously annoy me. They only grew more tiresome once the carriage ride came to an end. All in all, a very silly book with ridiculous characters, and an extremely forced plot.