Why, that would be shiny new cover art to admire and preen over. So exciting! And an interesting thing about Amber Quill, I think, is that the acquisitions editor is also the cover artist — which means he’s actually read the book. He certainly did a great job capturing Luke’s sullen aggressiveness and Conall’s sardonic humor.

Also, “A Novel” has been cracking me up all day long.

I love it! June 27th cannot come soon enough.

In Mary’s world, there are simple truths.

The Sisterhood always knows best.

The Guardians will protect and serve.

The Unconsecrated will never relent.

And you must always mind the fence that surrounds the village. The fence that protects the village from the Forest of Hands and Teeth.

But slowly, Mary’s truths are failing her. She’s learning things she never wanted to know about the Sisterhood and its secrets, and the Guardians and their power. And, when the fence is breached and her world is thrown into chaos, about the Unconsecrated and their relentlessness.

Now she must choose between her village and her future, between the one she loves and the one who loves her. And she must face the truth about the Forest of Hands and
Teeth. Could there be life outside a world surrounded by so much death?

I’ve been having a really hard time figuring out what to say about this book. There’s been an awful lot of excitement going on about it (including my own), and I hesitate to say it, but…it didn’t really work for me.

The trouble is that I really enjoyed Ryan’s writing. I’ve seen it described as “lyrical”, and I certainly can’t argue with that. I found the plot fairly gripping, especially once they left the village and broke out on their own.

The characters — and Mary in particular — are where it failed me, though. And…I’m going to have to back up here and admit that it was pretty obvious from about the halfway point that this book wasn’t going to do it for me, and I spent a lot of time when I wasn’t reading trying to figure out why, and what I was going to say about it. And I decided that the problem was that I was the wrong audience for this book — that it was a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story, and as a reader I didn’t have the patience for it. I kept wanting Mary to roll up her sleeves, take up the lemons that had been given to her, and make the best darn lemonade in her power. I kept waiting for her to grow up and start dealing with things like an adult, and I didn’t want to wait until the events of the story shaped her into that adult. I figured I could chalk it up to “the wrong book for me, and the wrong reader for the book”.

But…I finished the book, and realized that I was wrong. It’s not a coming-of-age story. Mary doesn’t grow up. She’s no wiser or smarter or more reasoned than she was at the start of the book. She makes the same selfish, foolhardy, impassioned, irrational decisions all the way through the book, and for the most part she never really has to sit down and face the fact that that’s a really stupid thing to do in the best of times, and even more so in the kind of dire, fight-for-survival, life-or-death situations that she finds herself in.

And, the more I think about it, the more I remember other coming-of-age stories that I did enjoy. A Companion To Wolves comes first to my mind as a story about a boy growing into a man that never once left me sitting there grinding my teeth wishing the main character would stop acting so darned childish. But also Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Dart, which tops the list of my favorite books of all time. Phedre spends a lot of time in that book being thoughtlessly privileged and capricious and self-absorbed, but it never irked me the way that this did.

I also hard time connecting emotionally with Mary, for a number of reasons. Mary does a lot of navel-gazing during the book, and that sort of constant introspection made me impatient to get on with the action. And a large part of her thoughts throughout the book revolve around her feelings for a certain boy. Now, I absolutely love a good love story, and it doesn’t take a lot to make me throw myself behind the main romance in a book and cheer for it for all I’m worth. But it does take more than telling the main character telling me she loves somebody, and then never showing me why. There’s no substance to it, it’s not built on anything more than Mary’s say-so, and in the beginning I was content to take it at face value and wait for all to be revealed in the course of the novel, but that never really happened. And I had a very hard time getting behind Mary’s feelings for this boy when they caused her to do things like stop and contemplate the color of his eyes while their house and only shelter is being invaded by the Unconsecrated.

Which, I suppose, is all a long-winded way of saying that I enjoyed the writing and the story, but the character whose eyes we saw it all through ruined it for me.

Rae Seddon, nicknamed Sunshine, lives a quiet life working at her stepfather’s bakery. One night, she goes out to the lake for some peace and quiet. Big mistake. She is set upon by vampires, who take her to an old mansion. They chain her to the wall and leave her with another vampire, who is also chained. But the vampire, Constantine, doesn’t try to eat her. Instead, he implores her to tell him stories to keep them both sane. Realizing she will have to save herself, Sunshine calls on the long-forgotten powers her grandmother began to cultivate in her when she was a child. She transforms her pocketknife into a key and unchains herself–and Constantine. Surprised, he agrees to flee with her when she offers to protect him from the sun with magic. They escape back to town, but Constantine knows his enemies won’t be far behind, which means that he and Sunshine will have to face them together.

I have been a fan of Robin McKinley’s for a long time. Beauty was the first book I ever checked out from my high school library and I absolutely loved it, I read Chalice just a few months ago and loved it, too. There have been a few exceptions — I still haven’t managed to finish Deerskin, for example — but for the most part I love them, and love them well enough that pretty much any McKinley book is an instant-purchase. So when I found out that she’d ventured out from YA and written an adult novel — and one about vampires, no less — Well. Be still my heart.

Sunshine lived up to most of my expectations. The first section of the book (it’s broken up into four “parts”, and I was sucked into this book so strongly that I was nearly three-quarters of the way through it before I realized that it didn’t have any chapters) is absolutely fabulous. I’ve neglected sleep, work, and even sustenance over my addiction to this book. Sunshine’s voice is very different from what I’m used to from McKinley, but absolutely delightful. I loved seeing baking through her eyes, and much like Chalice made me really wish that I liked honey more than I do, Sunshine made me really wish that I could manage to bake a loaf of bread that didn’t turn into a sour brick. And Constantine — I don’t have words for how much I loved Constantine. You could chain me up in a crumbling ballroom with him any day.

I did have a few nits — Sunshine has a tendency to tell us about the way her world works, and I felt this bogged the story down, especially the latter half. I would have much preferred to be shown these things, and spared the infodump. There are also some well-meaning types in the book who keep asking Sunshine to put put her life on hold, and herself in danger, in order to help them out with their fight against the Others that threaten humanity, and I kept wanting Sunshine to put her foot down and tell them to stop ordering her around and assuming that when they said “Jump,” she’d answer, “How high?” That said, though, while Sunshine’s reactions may not have always been what I wanted her to do, I did think that they were incredibly realistic for the situations she found herself in, much more so than many vampire books I’ve read. Goodness knows, I probably would have been just as scared out of my wits and overwhelmed as she was. Likely more so.

Also, from a purely selfish-reader perspective, I wanted much more of Con than I actually got. But in all fairness, McKinley could’ve had Con jumping in on every page and it probably still wouldn’t have been enough for me.

Despite my few minor complaints, I did really enjoy this book. It’s definitely a keeper, and I’m sure it will be one of the books that I routinely pull off my shelves to reread favorite passages.

In a world where malices—remnants of ancient magic—can erupt with life-destroying power, only soldier-sorcerer Lakewalkers have mastered the ability to kill them. But Lakewalkers keep their uncanny secrets—and themselves—from the farmers they protect, so when patroller Dag Redwing Hickory rescued farmer girl Fawn Bluefield, neither expected to fall in love, join their lives in marriage, or defy both their kin to seek new solutions to the perilous split between their peoples.

As Dag’s maker abilities have grown, so has his concern about who—or what—he is becoming. At the end of a great river journey, Dag is offered an apprenticeship to a master groundsetter in a southern Lakewalker camp. But as his understanding of his powers deepens, so does his frustration with the camp’s rigid mores with respect to farmers. At last, he and Fawn decide to travel a very different road—and find that along it, their disparate but hopeful company increases.

Fawn and Dag see that their world is changing, and the traditional Lakewalker practices cannot hold every malice at bay forever. Yet for all the customs that the couple has challenged thus far, they will soon be confronted by a crisis exceeding their worst imaginings, one that threatens their Lakewalker and farmer followers alike. Now the pair must answer in earnest the question they’ve grappled with since they killed their first malice together: When the old traditions fail disastrously, can their untried new ways stand against their world’s deadliest foe?

Horizon is the fourth book in Lois McMaster Bujold’s The Sharing Knife series, and picks up pretty much immediately where Passage left off, with protagonists Fawn and Dag and their small group of farmer and Lakewalker friends about to embark on the long (and long-awaited) trek back home. I really enjoyed the supporting characters that we got to know in Passage, so I was pleased to see that they all had significant roles to play in this book too, as well as some new faces.

In fact, I was very impressed with Bujold’s ability to handle this cast of characters. When Dag and Fawn’s party swelled to twenty-five people, most of them new and unfamiliar, I was skeptical that she’d be able to pull it off without it feeling crowded, jumbled, or confused, or without some members of the throng being neglected on-page. But my worries never came to fruition — the characters were all distinct individuals, and I never got confused between them or felt like they were there to serve a purpose and then cast aside to be forgotten.

This book (and, indeed, the whole series) is rife with cultural conflict and bitterness between her farmer and Lakewalker characters, but Bujold never resorts villainizing one side, or even one character. Farmers and Lakewalkers alike do foolish or cowardly or noble or terrible things, and many of their actions are born out of the best of intentions, or in service of their own laudable and understandable intentions. I was really impressed with how deftly she handled these interactions and subtleties.

The Sharing Knife series was my first introduction to Lois McMaster Bujold’s work. I’ve enjoyed every one of these books, and Horizon was no exception. The plot starts at a slow-but-enjoyable simmer, carried along by the reader’s vested interest in the characters and conflicts. But when the action comes, it does so swiftly and mercilessly, and left me frantic to know how it would all work out. I will definitely be looking for more of Bujold’s books, and keeping my fingers crossed that this is not, as it seems to be, the end of Fawn and Dag’s story.

And I think this holds true for more than just sex scenes. I’m currently reading Deerskin, by Robin McKinley, and I was absolutely engrossed at the beginning. I loved the way she was able to make the narration sound lke a fairy tale. In the opening chapters, we learn about the main character, the princess Lissar, her beloved sighthound, Ash, and her somewhat-unusual life in the palace. I loved seeing how Lissar came into her own as she grew to adolescence, how she shrugged off what ws expected of her and followed her passion. I was very thoroughly engrossed, and very much enjoying the woman I was reading about, and looking forward to reading more.

And then Lissar suffered a terrible trauma, ran off to the mountains, and forgot pretty much everything. She doesn’t remember who she is, where she came from, or why she left. She doesn’t even remember what farmland is until she happens to see some. A goddess heals her wounds, and in doing so drastically changes her appearance so she will not be recognized. She also gives her magical abilities.

If this were the opening of the book, I think it might be another matter, but as it stands, this is just about at the halfway point. All those promises the book made to me when I started are thrown out the window, and I feel like I’m reading about another woman entirely. I’m a little miffed about it. It is not what I was led to expect.

The part tht breaks my heart is tht it’s an incredibly well-written book. But it’s not the book I thought I was reding, and I’m having a little trouble moving past that and enjoying it for what it is.

I’m not sure what’s to be done about it. I’m not sure what can be done. Should authors stop throwing plot twists and surprises into their books? How boring that would be! Should readers suck it up and deal with it? I’m not sure that’s the right answer, either. There’s something to be said for the fact that I’m sitting here thinking, “This is not the book I signed on for,” and feeling slightly betrayed, and I don’t think that’s a thought any of us want to be going through our readers heads about our books. This isn’t the book that’s had this effect on me, either. I’ve read other books that have caused a similar reaction, that turned away from the course I thought we had set, and left me impatient, irritated, or frustrated.

I don’t know that there’s an easy solution for this, from either a reader’s or a writer’s perspective. But I’ll be keeping it in mind, especially as I look at my own work.

And I’m going to keep going with Deerskin. Because it is a very well-written book, even if it’s not the one I thought I was reading.

I’m grieving.

I don’t get this way over books very often. I get emotional, certainly. I laugh, I love, I hate, I rage. But I don’t cry, almost never. The last time I remember crying over a book was when I read Where the Red Fern Grows in elementary school, and my mom came home and found me lying on the carpet, bawling. I might have cried over Bridge to Terabithia, too, but I’m not certain.

I don’t cry over books, but I very nearly cried over New Amsterdam.

In any case, this revelation got me thinking about the five stages of grief, and by golly, I’ve gone through every one of them but the last.

Denial — Oh my, yes. Lots of denial. I have been trying really hard to just pretend that the last ten pages don’t exist.

Anger — See my previous post. *grin*

Bargaining — I’ve been doing lots of this, too. From “Maybe if I talk to her, maybe if I just tell her how upset I am, she’ll understand. Maybe once she knows what she’s done, she’ll just say she’s sorry for it, that she wishes she could go back and change it, and then it will all be okay” to “Well fine. I am just going to create my own not-Jack character and stick him in my own book, and I will love him and treat him right and it won’t matter that Ms. Bear was such a meanie.”

Depression — Yep, that too, and it’s a large part of the reason that I’ve been trying to keep my mind off of it. Because inevitably, I come back to it and I think about it and I just get so sad. It makes me just want to curl up in bed and mope for days.

Acceptance — This one…this one I haven’t gotten to yet. I do hope I will. I hope I can get this damn book out of my brain and move on.

The thing I keep coming back to, the thing that keeps making me want to scream and cry and wail, is that it’s just so senseless. It seems almost random. I keep thinking, “It’s not like there was nothing they could have done to save him. It’s not like it had to happen.”

A comment on the Q&A post that Bear put up today helped me get a little bit of insight, a little bit of understanding. It helped me take one small step toward acceptance. She said, “You made me care, and then you made it hurt, and that’s the endless Sebastien theme.” And, you know, it is. And I can kind of get that. Putting us in Sebastien’s shoes, giving us a small taste of his eleven-hundred-plus years of loving and losing over and over and over and over again.

But…

That’s the thing. I keep thinking maybe I can understand, maybe that, I can accept. And I keep thinking it, and then thinking, “But…“

But it didn’t make sense. But it’s so pointless. But it could have been done so many other ways, so many better ways. But there wasn’t a set-up for his death, it just happened, out of the blue. But we weren’t given a chance to prepare.

And then I sigh and think that Bear’s response to all of these protests would probably be, “Yeah, well. That’s life.”

And yeah, it is. People die for pointless, senseless reasons all the time. People go through life blithely taking for granted that everyone they love will still be there the next day. And then something happens, they turn around, they wake up, and suddenly one of those loved ones is gone, just like that. Out of the blue, no set-up, no chance to prepare for it. That’s life.

But…

But New Amsterdam isn’t life. It doesn’t even pretend to be — it’s alternate history. It’s not life. It’s a story.

And that’s what I keep sticking on. I don’t remember who said it, but it makes me think of the quote, “The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense.” And that, I think, is where Bear failed with New Amsterdam. Taken as a whole, it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t work.

(You should, of course, read this with a great big “IMO” tacked on to the end of everything I’m saying here. From the comments on Bear’s blog, I gather it worked just fine for a number of people. But it didn’t work for me, and I know I’m not the only one.)

It puts me in mind of another quote. I don’t know who this one came from either, and it should probably be considered more paraphrasis than direct quotation, but the gist of it is, “If someone gets shot by a gun in Act 3, then the audience had better see the gun lying in the drawer of the desk in Act 1.” And that’s why New Amsterdam’s ending didn’t work for me. We saw no gun. I knew from the beginning that something bad was going to happen, because Terra wailed when she finished the book, and I figured that could only mean that either something happened to Jack, or something happened to split Jack and Sebastien up. And even with those strong suspicions, even watching for it and waiting for it, a page before it actually happened, I still wasn’t sure. I still thought maybe, maybe I was wrong. Maybe I’d misinterpreted what Terra had been wailing about.

When a reader knows what’s coming and is searching desperately for any hint of its existence and it still takes her by surprise, you’re being too damn subtle.

From what I’ve read in Bear’s posts and comments, it seems like she’s trying for an Important Life Lesson sort of theme, in this ending¹. It seems like she’s trying for something literary. And that, too, makes me think about that second quote. Because I didn’t think I was getting Literature when I picked this book up. I had no clue. For 95% of the book, it reads like any other commercial fantasy novel². You can’t pull out a gun in Act 3 that wasn’t there in Act 1 and expect the audience to accept it, and you can’t tack a Tragic Ending onto a fantasy novel and expect to turn it into Literature.

That said, she did nearly bring me to tears, and three days later, I still can’t stop talking about her book. And that, at least, is impressive.

But it still doesn’t mean the ending works.

Rocks fall. People die. Life goes on.

Or: After bliss? The laundry.

²I don’t mean to suggest that it’s average. It is, as I said earlier, quite good. What I mean is that that seems to be the genre niche it fits itself into.

I’ve been musing over what to say about this for about a day and a half, and at some point the title came to me, “The Good, the Bad, and the Angry”. And as tongue-in-cheek as it may be, it’s appropriate.

First, the good. Because, make no mistake, New Amsterdam is very, very good. I read about it a few weeks ago, and was intrigued by the premise. It sounded really interesting, but I had a rather ambivalent experience with Blood & Iron, so I hesitated and — as is my wont — ultimately talked myself out of it.

Then I discovered that “Lucifugous”, the first story in the book, is available online at Subterranean Press. I read it, fell in love, and immediately ordered New Amsterdam. (And waited on pins-and-needles until it arrived.) And the rest was just as good as the first. I love the worldbuilding, the alternate history and what she did with the vampires. And I love — love — Sebastien and Jack. Words cannot express my love, and I can’t count the number of times I squeed to Terra over some bit of cuteness or another. My God, I love them.

Even Abby Irene (though I’ll admit I often found myself yearning for more Sebastien and Jack during her stories) was great fun to read.

So, yes. Overall? Very, very good.

Now, for the bad, and the angry…

(Here there be spoilers. You’ve been warned.)

The thing is, I loved the book… until the last ten pages. And then Jack died, and it crashed and burned.

See, I understand the need to murder your darlings, when the plot requires it. When there’s a point. But if there’s a point to Jack’s death, I just don’t see it.

He didn’t die to save someone else’s life, he didn’t die to uphold an ideal, he didn’t sacrifice himself because it was the only way to kill the beast and save Paris (although after all their talk about how stepping into the power field would kill you, I half expected that he would die because something would go wrong with their trap and the only way to kill the beast would be to go into the field with it, and Jack would end up taking the initiative and doing it). If he’d been turned by Sebastien, even, it would have worked, and it would have been a nice throwback to the conversation in “Limerent” between Sebastien and Abby Irene, over whether Sebastien would turn Jack if he needed to, and whether Jack would thank him for it.

If Jack had died for one of those reasons, I’d have been really sad. As it is, I’m sad, but I’m also really really angry. What was the point?

It’s just so senseless. And without a point, a reason for it, it just seems like melodrama, like a contrivance. The only point I can see is to make the last story have a more dramatic climax than the rest. Murdering your darling because the story requires it is one thing, and slaughtering them needlessly is entirely another. And it’s a really piss-poor reason to kill a character, IMO.