First post in what may or may not become an occasional series, with the books I’ve read in the last week (or just over – I read a couple while recovering from last weekend).
The Hero Strikes Back
– Moira J Moore
Second in the series, and not particularly challenging fantasy, but acceptably put together and a pleasant way to spend a couple of hours. Looking forward to seeing how this author and series develop (and if my links ever come back from whence they’ve gone, there’s a link to her LJ in there too).
The King’s Own: A Borderlands Novel
Lorna Freeman.
Got a few pages into this and quickly realised it was a sequel which was annoying, but it was good enough fun that I kept reading anyway, and will go back and read the first one when I discover whether Jonathan’s already got it 😉 Definite echoes of Mercedes Lackey and her Valdemar novels with strong fantasy, multiple different magical races (who in this case all appear to speak human and wander around upright even when they are big cats) and convoluted political shenanigans, but I like Valdemar and didn’t have any problems with this. A good yarn, and I’m looking forward to the previous book and finding out whether there are any more.
[eta found this on penguin’s site and a number of disgruntled fans on various forums. No one seems to know what is going on, and apparently the author no longer contributes to forums, though no one has linked that with the book disappearing except to be annoyed that they aren’t getting answers. Very odd.]
Angel
Colleen McCullough.
This one was a charity shop find some time ago, and I’ve been waiting for the right moment to read it. I enjoy Colleen McCullough – I know it probably doesn’t fit with most of the SF that I read as a first preference, but I think she crafts her characters well, and fits a good story around them. This one is set in Australia some years back (or may have been written in Australia some years back I suppose) and is quite disturbing in terms of its references to women’s lives – ppl automatically leaving their job when they were married, women earning less than men, the idea that the pill was controlled by men rather than by women as unmarried women weren’t supposed to be able to get it. All of those are just set up in passing though, background to the story of a young woman moving out of home into a communal house and experiencing her first affair as she begins to find out who she is. Some of the writing style in terms of speech patterns grated a little – the book is written in diary form – but overall I enjoyed it. Not sure that I’ll ever get round to reading it again though – not as strong as some of her other books.
Leave a Reply