peekle book blog

Death evicts Marla from Felport, and she schemes to return.

These books just keep getting better and better. I was really nervous at what looked like the first example of extreme power creep, and then it was rescinded — and because of that rollback, I was worried about a lack of consequences for Marla’s choices. I shouldn’t have worried on either count.

I really want to simply buy the next book on Kindle and start it. I just might.

UPDATE: I just did. And looking at the first page of Spell Games reminds me: there oughtta be a law against ending a book like that.

A long, slow slide to an inevitable sad ending. I have real mixed feelings about the whole trilogy; I’m not sure the character arc was compelling, and it was hard to maintain any sort of serious sympathy for Henry, who, at the end of things, was just content to let his life slide away from him over and over again. (Late entry; actually finished last week.)

The second Marla Mason book. The first book took Marla away from her home base, and I wished that there was more about Felport in it. Well, there’s lots more in this book, and an intriguing plot besides. Not as wildly imaginative as the first, but more even, and it presents Marla as a much more sympathetic character. Looking forward to the next.

Read via Amazon’s Kindle software for iPod, which I found a little more frustrating than Stanza; it’s harder to see where you are in a book, for instance. The thing is, books are less expensive for the Kindle than from either of the stores available through Stanza, enough so to make the savings significant. I’m almost tempted to just go paper for the rest of them…

Pretty entertaining, though it remains a bit hard to root for Henry, who makes one bad decision after another. I’m going to read the third one as well, though I’ll probably let it wait for a while so I won’t get tired of Huston’s quirky prose.

The first in a series, all three of which were available for free download from Random House. A guy named Henry gets in a lot of trouble, all because he agrees to look after a neighbor’s cat. Exciting and noirish, if a bit frustrating; by the end, Henry’s made so many bad decisions and done so many bad things it’s hard to root for him. I’m probably going to go ahead and read the others, but maybe not right away.

First the book, and then the experience of reading it.

Blood Engines is YAUF (Yet Another Urban Fantasy). It does a lot of things right to avoid my usual complaints: the protagonist, Marla, is already pretty powerful — as is only appropriate for the magical boss of a fair-sized midwest city — so there’s no power creep. (If I’ve misunderstood where Felport is, it’s because the book doesn’t spend much time on that subject.) Although she spends most of the book in danger, little of it is physical danger and there’s no exhaustive cataloging of just how hurt she, or anyone, is. There’s a lot of fascinating detail around how magic works, and the one magical cliche is made up for by tons of originality.

I feel a little like I did after reading Kelley Armstrong’s Bitten, though; it was really hard to get to like the protagonist of both books. Unlike, say, Harry Dresden, Marla is not someone I’d like to know. I’d warmed up to her more than Elena from Bitten by the time it was all over, and the two great sidekick characters really helped.

Blood Engines was the first book I read on my iPod Touch, downloaded free from Random House via Stanza. Reading books on the iPod works; the anti-aliased fonts and bright, clear screen make it a much better experience than it was on my old Palm IIIc. I enjoyed the book and the reading of it well enough to purchase an electronic copy of the second from Amazon. We’ll see how that goes with two kinds of readability (have to use the iPod Kindle application, have to see how I feel about Marla in a second story).

(Thanks for the recommendation, JMcDS.)

Another smart, sweetly fun book in the long-running series. A break of four years and the recent HBO series made me very ready to start these up again, and I’m glad I did. I bought the three that I hadn’t read, but I’m going to read other things in-between to make sure I don’t burn out again.

So frustrating. The last book was hard to read, but ended on a high note; things were really shaken up and it looked like everything was going to be different.

This book starts out just a few hours after the last one ended, but then loops back and recaps those hours in endless detail, with the same old character introductions (do we really need these in book, what, five?) and tedious discussion and exposition. The book moves at the pace of mud until the final confrontation, which is excellent, exciting and rushed.

Condense the whole shebang to be the first 25% of a tightly-plotted and fast-paced book, and we’d have a hell of a story on our hands. (Some new jokes would help, too.) As it is, though… sigh.