again, another book much better than i expected. in fact, a lot of the elements in this reminded me of both pat rothfuss's "name of the wind" and the catherynne valente series, and somehow it still remained separate enough to retain originality.
initially, i found the character ash hard to follow, if only because he seems to feel sorry for himself, or that he acts more like a devoted puppy than a person. when he found the nerve to stand up for himself though, i guess it sort of made up for everything else. his powers are eerily similar to those of the well of secrets, and i wonder how that's going to come into play. maybe bramble will find romance with ash.
saker's pov was also very hard to follow, only because.. well, he's the bad guy, it seems. his reason for doing what he does seems justifiable, but only just. he is a character more similar to doronit in formula, i think. and it's weird to see saker excuse away anything that doesn't serve what he wants, ie. when the gods were silent to him calling for them. mentally unstable villain?
anyway, the whole travelers thing reminded me a lot of how gypsies are often portrayed, like how they're somehow more magically apt than other people, or how they're seen as cheats and, i guess, criminals in general? i really liked the idea of the gods' will, and how you know when you're meant to be a certain way or not. i wonder if leof might be a recurring character in the later volumes. and how come the roan was supposed to live and bramble supposed to die? how does this work if the roan lives only to die a couple of years later? the roan's purpose in living mainly went toward serving bramble, but if bramble was supposed to die, then what was the roan's purpose of living to begin with?
well, i'll know by the next volume, i guess. november just can't come fast enough.
another mediocre chick flick. i actually wanted to see this since i was just fresh off enchanted, and since james marsden carried the appeal of that for me, i figure he'd do the same here. but umm.. no.
first off: katherine heigl's character is creepy, and a bit annoying. i could understand her plight most of the time, but i really can't stand all the cheesy "and then i knew that was the moment when.." i personally like her as an actress, actually, but i found that the script was completely lacking. her supposed "arguments" with marsden were fake and just a ploy on the writer's part to get the actors' faces as close to each other as possible, especially that stupid scene with her trying on the dresses and posing for him. no chemistry, or terrible writing? i suspect, actually, a little bit of both, which is a disaster.
in fact, the dialogue was very much shallow--it doesn't explore deeper meanings behind anything, like any good flick should. i understand that it's a chick flick, but i've seen ones way better. this is trying to copy the formula of a successful chick flick, but it doesn't provide characters that people can relate to, or even care for. marsden's character works mostly toward an objective, and i never really see the attraction or the affection building, it just randomly happens and *SPOILER* bam, they get married. WHAT?
or maybe i missed something and i really shouldn't be whining. or maybe i was just expecting too much, again. i hear from people who've seen "made of honor" with patrick dempsey that that is just like this. shame that both male leads in enchanted go on to make only mediocre chick flicks, but i guess it's not the actors' faults, since the writing was this crappy to begin with. so i guess my bottom line is that the plot was poorly planned, there was no direction at all, and the dialogue was juvenile and predictable. there was no fresh twist, it doesn't even try. utter disappointment.
i really wanted to like this, since the premise sounded so interesting. unfortunately, i couldn't even get into it enough to let my inner fangirl do the rest, since the actors were so marvelously bad. and hey, if the plot was actually any good, it might even actually rate okay on my list. this is, however, not the case.
i remember sitting to near the end of the movie, there was maybe like 15 min left on the disc, and i just suddenly realized that nothing really happened throughout the entire hour or so i sat there, which is pretty sad. i can tell they spent a rather lavish budget on this thing since the effects were pretty darn cool. i just couldn't get over the fact that nothing at all happens. just when i think they are going to introduce a subplot or a central storyline to it, they completely brush that aside for a little more special effects. and they barely gave any background to any of the other characters, and barely even gave much of the history behind what's going on, and why. all i know as the viewer was that there was something going on. and they run back and forth. the end.
well, that was exciting.
*rolls eyes*
the beginning of the movie, about their adolescence, was the best part. anything after that was a downward spiral. i have yet to find someone who can disagree with my opinion on this.
ehh, this is pretty much what i expected. well, maybe i expected the main chick to be less annoying, but i enjoyed it for what it is nonetheless. it was simply very typical disney, so thank god i didn't actually pay to see this in the theaters.
- scene in ballroom - how come only they get a spotlight? that's hardly fair, is it? and the other couples have different steps, less flashy ones. it was very obviously choreographed, and they had her spinning too much, i thought. i was getting dizzy just watching her. plus, everyone else was wearing historical costumes of some kind, and only she was wearing the regular modern nightgown. i guess they figure she'd been wearing the other stuff long enough?
- i didn't find patrick dempsey all that appealing as a love interest. in fact, there was nearly no chemistry between the ditz and dempsey. although i suspect that's more the fault of the lines they have to work with than their actual performances.
- james marsden was awesome as the prince. it was so obvious he had fun in the role, and i actually found myself getting sad that he wouldn't end up with the girl. i think most of the movie is made thanks to his performance, or his character, anyway. i like an innocent pompous bastard every now and then :)
so i mean, overall, it wasn't awesome, but it was a good enjoyable 2 hours. last thought: i wonder what sex in andalasia would be like? how do you make sex fairy tale-like? HMM.
i'm really trying to think of a good way to open this entry, but at the current moment, can't. i think reading this book has befuddled my brains a little bit. anita blake blows out brains literally and figuratively, heh.
so. umm. i can't decide how this weighs against her last book into this series, since i barely remember it, and i can't decide whether there was anything to like in this book either, although there was certainly less to hate. a lot of the times, she would end the chapter by saying something as conclusive as "and then they have sex," but just when i start the next chapter and expect the aftermath or something, she would go into heavy detailing of the sex. not that i don't appreciate sex, but sex can both be done tastefully, and painfully. she took the painful route, or as she put it in her personal interviews, that she doesn't shy away from what bothers other people's comfort levels. if anything, i think someone needs to make her understand this: it's not my comfort level or my sensitivity that is bothered. it's that i really do get bored during the sex scenes, and that her sex scenes have just really begun to feel like reality tv. and god, i HATE reality tv. it's like watching some of your favorite characters go "you bitch, you slept with her again!" that.. NOT my cup of tea.
i suspect i've just described most of her fans' love/hate relationships with this series in general. i hope i've described it well enough to do it some justice, instead of being found by her one day and have her declare me a prude. because trust me, i've had sex that was way more inventive than what she describes. granted, not the 5 orgasms in a row that she describes, but i'm to this day having trouble believing someone can have that many orgasms within a couple of minutes. i would be more inclined to believe that it's not really an orgasm, just the loss of bladder control in the middle of the act.
okay, that probably went too far.
but anyway. the sex-so-boring-it-makes-my-eyes-cross is really the only problem i've ever had with AB as of late. that, and that there really weren't any mysteries going around anymore. take this latest installation, for example; there was no buildup, there was no climax. it attempted at both, but achieved neither, in my eyes. this series, for me at least, has definitely lost its grittier bit, from earlier on in the series. i like it when a character gets out of a hopeless situation by sheer will, by strength of character. i don't like it that a character gets out of a situation by having a magic wand, so to speak. if i wanted that, i'd watch disney. or watch some truly bad anime, or play a game with a hero with a serious superiority complex. but when i used to read anita blake, it made me understand her, feel sorry for her. now, it feels like an overdramatized episode of the o.c. what the hell happened?
now understandably, richard's insanity problem has been solved by the end of this. i think even LKH was getting tired of having to write his character's antics out, and jesus, good riddance. other instances that bothered me from time to time, or maybe bothered is too heavy a word, more like, distracted from the overall reading--she uses the same similes over and over again. i'm not sure if she realizes she's already written the phrase out before, but by god, if i read the phrase "the smile that gets his customers to part with their money" again, i am going to vomit. i thought LKH was supposed to be the queen of imagination here? what happened there?
i realize life must've been hard on her for her to write consistently. but i also sorely miss the AB of old. not the character, i'm fine with her character as is. but the seriously wondering what the hell will happen on the next page kinda thing, where a book just grips you and won't let go. i no longer fear for any of the characters, knowing that they are all probably immortal, with superpowers and no kryptonite in sight. that is grossly exaggerated and maybe i'm being unfair, but that's the gist of it. i mean really, i don't see any of them dying anytime soon, and she herself has said so. when kim harrison killed off a major character, it shocked many people into responding negatively, but the truth is that it makes all the characters that remain all that much more fragile, it brings into full relief the briefness of life itself. it's therefore sad to say that although LKH will never make me grieve for a character as much, i will also never feel for any of her characters as much. emotion works both ways.
i feel this rantfest is probably accumulated from a long time of reading her AB books and not being pleased with what i read. this, i will be glad to say, is neither amazing or awful, but as a result it's mediocre. i don't know if that's better or worse. next year at this time, when the next book is out and i'm settling down for another read, i probably won't remember the contents of this book much, much as how i can't for the life of me remember much of what happened in "the harlequin." i think it's sad that my once-favorite series is, in my eyes, dying. i keep crossing my fingers and hoping, though.
AFTERTHOUGHTS: i thought this was supposed to be a novella on the side, like one was written for micah? did she then not have enough time to write her full one either, or did i get something wrong? something else that somewhat bugs me, but not enough for me to have remembered in time to put in the full entry: if anita doesn't feel guilty for having so many men, then why does she keep trying to justify it throughout the book? this is another one of those things that she mentions repeatedly, to the point of where i'd just roll my eyes.
took me a hell of a lot of time to finish this. about 3-4 days, actually, but admittedly i wasn't reading all that consistently. anyway, midway through this one i was curious about what other people had to say about it, so i looked it up on amazon and read a lot of reviews. turns out people didn't like this one so much.
but maybe that effectively lowered my standards enough that i actually thought this was pretty well written. it was original, at least. i did get really annoyed with lena's mind diaries from time to time, but i suspect that was the effect he wanted to have on his readers. i mean, the point of it was that lena was an annoying bitch, right? some of the scientific concepts are a little hard to understand, and some are very vague altogether because maybe the author himself doesn't know what he means. the beacons, for example--the "science" is entirely glossed over. but, regardless of that, a lot of the characters are endearing enough to make up for anything else that might seem implausible.
the alien species introduced were really interesting. the bugs were properly horrifying, and the flame beasts are kind of awe-inspiring, and makes you really understand how small humans are in the larger context of things. the sparklers weren't really elaborated on, and i suspect that will change in the future, but what i understand as it is is that flame beasts are the prevailing sentient living form. and the "living" part might be questionable. does that mean that flame beasts prevail over bugs and the like too? or are they alpha and omega, one made from pure energy and the other.. the opposite? the speculation is driving me crazy. maybe it's that this is my first official venture into scifi lit, barring some crappier ones i read earlier that make absolutely no sense (diana palmer's "the morcai battalion"). i don't know why some amazon reviewers gave it 1 or 2 stars, because it was certainly an interesting and entertaining read. i guess ultimately, it really does depend on initial expectation.
so anyway. his next novel is called kelos, but about sea-dwelling humanoid creatures called the dolphs. what will it be like now that the beacons are down? i'm fairly certain there will be a more in-depth description of these sparklers too, and maybe introductions of new alien life forms? the way i see it, now that lena and flanagan are travelling into uncharted territory, they will certainly discover new wonders. i wonder if characters from this book will be making brief appearances too.
oh, some additional details i just put together: if the flame beasts are sentient and everywhere at once, then what is their historic event of consuming their only sun really about? and i trust we won't be seeing the last of the bugs either. i can't say i'll eagerly await the next one, but this first novel has certainly piqued my curiosity.
EDIT: something else. if no one knows the composition of the bugs, then how can anyone possibly make a robotic replica? and if the bugs were only kept confined by the multiple layers of beacons, and now the beacons have been blown up all over the universe.. they're not confined anymore, are they? and what about all those people who "guard" the bugs? it seems like somewhere along the way someone forgot about the area of debatable space..
actually, not quite sure what to say about this, because despite entertaining me decently for the past couple of hours, i still find plenty of fault with it. which is to be the norm, i guess, but.. i almost feel bad when i'm criticizing so many books in a row. after all, what i just read was someone's sweat and tears, and possibly some blood thrown in there. that said, i'll be gentle. or i can try.
the, uhh, cover girl. she looks like a cartoon mouse. no offense if that's a real person, i'm sure she's really cute in person. she just doesn't sound anything like the hot chick described in the book? she's also drawn as a little bit pudgy in here, and with a giant forehead--not sure if my standards are too high or something. in which case it would be strictly me with the problem.
the most distracting thing throughout reading this, i felt, was that every other line felt like the closing of a summary. i'm not sure how to completely explain it, but it was like there was a sense of finality in every other line, and in which case there really wasn't much flow. i mean here i am, as a reader, just trying to get through one paragraph, and her as a writer and being continuously deceptive in her writing style, in that i keep expecting the paragraph to end since there's that air of finality in every sentence, and it's just not ending. there were also several times where plot points were obscenely obvious--it just made me wanna bang a platter on someone's head repeatedly for supposedly not being able to see it coming. there were also times where i was completely fooled, but that counts one against many.
okay, i'll leave that alone for now.
but another big thing also involves plotting, or her writing of it, at least--why were so many points repeated in dialogue? it's like one her characters will suddenly exclaim, oh my god, this happened! and i'm staring at the page and going, yeah, she already told you that 5 pages ago. get with it. and characters aren't even aware they're repeating something they've already said--which means probably that the author had no idea what she's already mentioned and what she hasn't. so like diana palmer in her amateurish scifi shot, she'll just repeat it until she's absolutely certain it almost becomes the catchphrase of the chapter. it gets tiring pretty fast.
a giant gaping plot hole too--all the people investigating the disappearances were supposed to be competent? they're supposed to be experienced, right? they're enforcers, as in, crime-fighters, that type of thing? SO. why the hell did NO ONE put two and two together and see the pattern among the people who were kidnapped? that's the first thing any investigator would do. what, did they really think it was completely random and just sit by and twiddle their thumbs? it strikes me as not even close to what might have happened, that no one would even bother to wonder if there might even be a pattern. so, essentially, i want to give this a 3 for entertainment level; however, i'm gonna stick by a 2.5 for that point alone. in trying to make her dumb heroine look smart she just made everyone else look even dumber. shame.
guess i failed in trying not to sound harsh after all.
so, what's up with comic book artists all writing books nowadays? it strikes me as peculiar that they would write books that i find much more readable than the average book written by some guy who's actually a writer by profession. maybe all comic book artists should start writing, at this rate?
anyway. some of stuff written about in here are actually pretty sick. i had trouble picturing some of them, in fact, and besides that some of it made for pretty hilarious scenes, there were some which made me seriously wonder if this book isn't the ultimate penicillin to all america's sicknesses? even the guy who wants the damn book is pretty sick himself, so i wonder what he's really going for if he's one of the guys. the short chapters definitely made for much easier reading, and i found myself speeding through it in no time, with barely any time for break necessary. the plot isn't at all cohesive, though, but what really wins this book for me is the entertainment value. ask me about this book in a couple of months and i'll probably barely even remember it, but it's a good sit down just to be entertained kind of thing.
i'm not sure i really felt the message, though i understood what he was going for. of course, this trix wasn't my favorite person in the world, so it's quite hard sympathizing with her. and like i said before, there really isn't any plot. the whole story is really just them flying from one place to another to witness some very freaky people. which makes me feel almost like i haven't read anything at all, which may be why it isn't all that memorable, but the hilarity was worth it. maybe he'll write more in the future, or maybe i can look forward to some more comic book artists turning to writing?
oh, and why have amazon replaced the cover of the book with someone's picture of it? did someone make a mistake somewhere?
kind of a finally getting around to thing for this book, which isn't entirely unexpected from me, since my interest in this series has seriously waned over the last several books. i'm not sure what it was, but it was just missing that extra something that i found so compelling about the series from the start. i think it was something between the appearance of alcide and quinn, and it was just one too many for me. by which i don't mean men--i meant unbelievable occurences within the plot. by the time the last book rolled around, i felt that if she'd written that a species of martians were part of the supernaturals, it wouldn't be that much more far-fetched than what she was writing. maybe it was something to do with having ridden a coffin down a pyramid like a sled. a giant pyramid which is probably 10+ floors, to boot. i'm aware i'm sounding a bit melodramatic, but i feel i deserved it.
anyway.
to sum this book up, sookie wraps things up with quinn. there's a significant amount of eric, bill, and sam in here. i found sam relatively appealing compared to his actions in the past several books. eric is still lead man for me though, of course. bill.. makes up for his mistakes somewhat, though i'm still unwilling to look past it, as a reader. plus, the name bill never struck me as anything near vampire-like, it sort of doesn't have that sense of coolness to it. :D in any case, i also feel like it was because i felt that the last book was such a letdown that i could fully enjoy this one that much more, and the only complaints i had toward this book was that she spends more than half the time going back to recap what's already happened in previous books. in not very disguised ways either, which can get tiring sometimes. i understand that after a year, people will need some recapping, but even when i couldn't remember the events from previous books i wish she could mask her attempt a bit better. not that i have any right at all to criticize a seasoned writer, but i'm just saying. as a reader, it felt somewhat tedious to read through.
certain things seemed relatively amusing, though her usage of language seemed really high school to me at certain points. and the forced southern thing kind of grated on my nerves after a while. how many times was carrie underwood mentioned in there? i had to reread the word "hootchie" to make sure i wasn't imagining things. are you eff-ing serious? i haven't used that specific term for the female sexual body part since, i don't know, 6th or 7th grade. it's like saying cooties. you just don't use it.
the ending was also relatively abrupt, but i liked the bittersweet touch to it. when everyone keeps thinking sookie has a drop dead figure, i have trouble imagining it when she states that she's normally a size 10. umm, around here that's usually a bit thick, but maybe i'm not operating on normal standards or something? i don't know. average is usually like size 6 or something, no? i mean i'm personally a size 4, and i've gained significant weight lately, and am getting almost disproportionate in the thickness of my thighs. i know marilyn monroe was a size 14 and all that, but the perfect woman back then wasn't exactly, uhh, fit. size 10 really isn't ideal in my standards. maybe i'm screwed up somehow. or maybe the south likes their women big-boned? you know, bigger boobs and all that. and the bigger ass.
sigh. at least there's closure on several fronts there. makes me sort of wonder what the next book will be about. or maybe she'll start completely concentrating on her harper connelly series? dunno. and actually, i'm still quite passive about this book. wanted to give it 4 stars, but again, the recapping. god. talk about distracting. 3 1/2 stars.
hmm. very funny thing here, because while most of the other reviews i read seem to be favorable, i really didn't like it much. and i can tick off all the reasons why too. this is something the quality of what i would've written were i still in 8th grade. which is not to say that her writing in itself is bad (though i wouldn't know for sure, would i? these things go through hordes of editors) but.. god DAMN. this woman can't plot for shit. perhaps i've been spoiling myself with good books too much lately. again.
point: when she learned she was supposedly "dead," why didn't she just return? it would've proved the bad guy (name of vesputo. suspiciously close to rasputin?) was lying the whole time, and made it that much easier for everyone else. second extremely obvious plot hole: why the hell would this vesputo try to execute landen before finding out what he did with the sword? i thought the whole point was the sword? why would you execute a prisoner without torturing him for information that is ESSENTIAL to your plot first?
and those are only the gaping most obvious ones. there are numerous others that i noticed, but didn't bother to remember. i'm sorry but, even my worst fanfiction had more strategic plots than this. the author obviously wanted her characters to jump certain hoops to arrive at certain plot points so much that she's willing to make all her characters the dumbest i've ever read, unfortunately. at times it even seems like she parodies them herself, and i found myself giggling much of the time when she wrote some dialogue with some "OH MY GOD! HE'S DEAD!!" or some such overly dramatic crap in there. i wonder if i may be being so harsh only because i am strictly not a young adult and as such shouldn't be reading young adult fiction. but i suspect that even in young adult lit, there is the good and the bad. whereas most people gravitate toward being favorable in their opinions of this book, i can't help but disagree. the only reason i ended up giving this 2 stars is because of the good pace it had going, though even that was relatively brought low in the end, with the overly anticlimactic death of vesputa. oh, and the character dahmis stood out fairly well. no jealousy on his part at the end though? the queen just randomly goes "OH MY GOD SHE'S ALIVE!" without any hesitation whatsoever after 3 years? i feel that mrs. hanley has got to stop taking inspiration from disney movies.
just noticed something too. the magical artifacts in this book are apparently a sword and a ball. i'm sorry, but the suggested sexual innuendo, however unintended, has me in fits of giggles right now. people reading this review who actually like the book will want to seek me out and murder me.
