Where Warlock Holmes Gets a Backstory

The Hell-Hound of the Baskervilles by G.S. Denning
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is pretty good. I didn't really enjoy the first book in the series as much as I hoped to, and almost didn't read this one. Looking back, I see I gave the first book 4 stars, and I'm a little surprised; I remember it more in the 3 range. I graded easier back then, I guess. But this one is better, more fun beginning to end, more like what I hoped the series would be, and I might get on with the next book a little quicker. (5 years between books 1 and 2.)

It's an odd mashup--Sherlock Holmes with comic fantasy. I'm down for it, actually, and I have a pretty wide range of things I'll accept and try to enjoy, but the first one didn't work for me through most of it. It made suspension of disbelief really hard, in the same way that you see The Flintstones and think that's not possible; a dinosaur would never do that. (Maybe that's just me.) It strayed too far from fantasy and broad comedy into just spoof, the kind of book where the author and the reader shake hands and say, "Isn't this completely ridiculous?" That stretches my interest too thin, right to the breaking point.

This book, based on the Hound of the Baskervilles, dances close to that point early on, but then settles in for something I like better--a weird, fantasy version of Sherlock. It is pretty silly in parts (a race on tricycles, for example, that is almost more than I can bear) but keeps close enough to fantasy conventions pretty much everywhere else that I don't have to toss it in frustration. In fact, I enjoyed it quite a bit.

This book is intentionally a spoof, I suppose, and I understand that now, though it is farther along the spectrum than I thought before buying the first two books. It's kinda like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which also blends fantasy and elements of the ridiculous with a strait-laced property. That book took itself more seriously than this one, though, or so it seemed to me, and I liked it better for that.

I wander. In sum, this is not precisely my thing, especially in parts, but I liked reading it, and I feel like it's a better example of--[waves hands]--whatever it is than the first book in the series. YMMV.

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Where Mack Bolan Takes It Easy

Blood Of The Earth by Don Pendleton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Published in 1999, this is the first of the "newer" Mack Bolan books I have read. I tried and honestly enjoyed a handful of the OG Mack Bolan books from 1972 and 1973 (books 11-15), so I crossed my fingers and jumped ahead to #246, hoping and expecting opposite things. It defied my expectations, though, and I think this book is even better that the old ones. To keep the series going, Mack Bolan had to broaden out from attacking the Mafia, and now he works for the government, taking on bad guys around the world. In this one, he's on a Pacific island where oil is discovered, protecting US interests from deadly guys working for shady Japanese and French investors.

There are a bunch of these books, literally hundreds, across a range of related series, and as a result they are more or less like episodes in a long-running tv show, or maybe more like comic books, coming out 1 or 2 times a month. You don't expect it to be cinematic, and it's not. Nor do you expect it to sound like literary fiction, and it doesn't. But it is well plotted and conceived, following the norms and expectations of the genre, reading something like an unknown but pretty decent action movie buried deep in Netflix. And it is well written, with great pacing and strong action scenes, as it is penned by someone who makes their living doing this, someone who knows how to make installment #246 in a long-running series somehow interesting and exciting and worth coming back to over a series of days. I give the author a lot of credit. I'd be psyched to have his career.

This keeps my experiment with pulp fiction going, and I've got a few more coming in the mail that I'm super curious about. So we'll see. I'll keep everyone up to date.

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Where She Makes a Good Case

The Truths We Hold: An American Journey by Kamala Harris
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I'm rating this as a book. From that perspective, it's about a 3, IMO. Moderately entertaining. Competently written.

As an introduction to the person, as a textbook on the subject "Kamala Harris," I'd give this a higher score, a 4 or 5. Good information here, well presented. I found out things I didn't know, which was actually a disappointment. I wish her recent campaign had shown how she cared about some of the things she clearly really does care about. It feels like the message was narrowed down for party reasons, because I think the version of Kamala found in this book is better than the version presented on TV. (I thought she was okay there, but she's more focused here, more detailed, more personally invested. The version of her in the book might have done better in the election than the DNC-moderated version did.)

I'm not a consultant. I wasn't asked.

In a way, this is really more of a long speech than a book. It's breezy and anecdotal and focused on issues more than on biographical details, constantly making points to build an argument. That's a good idea in a book meant to introduce yourself to voters, but it's still kinda weird in a book. The whole time I was reading it, I imagined her speaking from a lectern, reading this aloud. As a speech, though, it's pretty good.

In sum: I like the person, I rather like the speech, but I only kinda like the book.

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Where Tress Surprises Everyone

Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a cute book. I liked it, and I think people from a lot of different fandoms would enjoy this.

It didn't quite match my expectations, tbh. I thought the story would be classical and traditional, the ocean-going variant of a Greek pastoral romance, or maybe sparkling and magical like a fairytale, but it aligns more closely with traditional folktales or tall tales, and a bit like a mock epic. The tone I expected was something more wistful, sweet, maybe melancholic, but it turns out to be chatty, a little lighthearted and silly, yet somehow still earnest and kindhearted.

Tress is a likable character, like a 30s or 40s Hollywood leading lady who's kind and polite but still has moxie, the country girl who doesn't give up. She fights to save her prince, but she doesn't really want to put anyone else out. Very cute.

Many of the characters are Wizard of Oz strange--a talking rat; an immortal but slightly sociopathic doctor who would like any body parts you would be willing to spare; a nonsense-talking sailor who's really a powerful sorcerer under a curse; and many others--and all that's entertaining on its own, but the strange characters also allow the MC to show her range and her tolerance for the who are different from her. Ultimately, it's her ability to see the humanity in weirdos that helps her survive and succeed in this story. They are also the friends she makes along the way...

I always rather like Brandon Sanderson books, and this is my current favorite. I never quite love them the way many readers do, and I wouldn't say I love this one. But I'm pretty confident that lots of readers who have set their hearts against ever reading his stuff for one reason or another would actually be charmed by this book. He probably should have written it under a pseudonym.

Recommended.

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Where Olive Climbs in the Paintings

The Shadows by Jacqueline West
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

[Yes, I'm an old dude. Yes, I occasionally enjoy MG books. I also used to teach English and ESL and had lots of these books in my classroom and I still have lots of opinions about them.]

There are some fun things in this book, and I bet there are young readers who would like it. But I feel like it misses the mark.

It's a bit slow. Not deadly slow, but not awesome. The MC is likable enough, and I can get behind her, but she doesn't achieve much, and I wish she had. She mostly blunders around, seeing weird and sketchy things without knowing what to make of it, letting bad things escape. (The reader is also mostly confused. What's going on?) She does a few brave things--that's where the "pretty good" grade of 3/5 comes from--but the first 80% of the plot is so disjointed that it's frustrating.

Why don't the cats give a proper warning? Why a vague, ultimately useless one? Most of the conflict comes from her inadvertent mistakes that they could have prevented.

Her search for explanations and answers is so random and unproductive. I would rather if the author had her searching for old stories in the paper, reading private journals, winnowing it out from the paintings, or finding some other kind of evidence explaining the mystery and the dangers in the old house, something that allowed her to be more active, more intelligent. It also would have been better (IMO) if the crisis was brought on by something outside her, like maybe her parents or something happening in town, instead of it all being kinda her fault.

The final showdown, written out in words (which I'm not gonna do), is not impressive. Too easy. Very anticlimactic. It's told in a dramatic way, but it's not that great.

Maybe kids would read this with a "what happens next?" attitude, and maybe they'd like it okay, but the MC's role in the story is not very satisfying, outside a few moments here and there, and I don't know if many young readers would want to come back to this world. Maybe they would. And maybe she's a more successful hero in the next book. I hope so.

Modestly recommended. If they do like it, there are several sequels.

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Where I Cringed a Bit

A Feast of Freedom by Leonard Wibberley
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This was odd.

Look, if this is supposed to be satire, it misses the mark, IMO. I expect it to be satirizing real things in the real world, the genuine state of affairs, the actual state of institutions or the actions of governments, mocking the way things are. But I don't see that. What's the point in satirizing a cartoonish version of institutions? An acerbic critique of government overreach in The Jetsons or a brutal takedown of law enforcement blunders on The Andy Griffith Show (to use 1960s references for a 1964 book) are equally pointless and unsatisfying.

The US foreign policy failures of the 50s and 60s and the various government dysfunctions are ripe targets. British, too. Maybe the author was too polite to go after genuine weaknesses and real disasters?

(You have to get pretty meta to find a way to claim that this story lands a solid punch on anything or mocks any real-world thing that needs to be mocked. At best, you can say that the story demonstrates that the native people would have been better off if they had never been colonized, that there's no good way forward once that has taken place. I'll give it that one, with reservations. I'm not sure that was his meaning or if it was just mine. Beyond that, making something out of the general incompetence of Western governments is a little funny, I suppose, but that's a pretty blunt attack.)

And if it's lampoon he was going for, well... that's easier. It should be funny. I didn't think it was funny. A few humorous lines at best. And I like the author; I was expecting it to be funny.

I really enjoyed the Mouse That Roared books. That series seemed clever and fun and on-target. This story of Pacific islanders that believe they were better off as British colonies and are forgiven for killing and eating an American vice president just wanders around any point. It's absurd, yes. It's weird. But if it makes someone laugh, I'd like to have them explain to me why. (I wouldn't, really.)

Maybe the difference in the tone of those books compared to this is in the balance of power. The Duchy of Grand Fenwick in the Mouse books is put in a position of strength, quite surprisingly, even though it's a tiny country. The powerful countries are humbled. That's the central conceit of those stories, and I thought it worked. The tiny country here, on the other hand, is at the mercy of superpowers and is left in the position of begging favors and hoping to be forgiven. It feels crummy, making the natives read like children that need a daddy, and if the author isn't actually punching down it sure feels like it sometimes.

Anyway, it's short. That's good.

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Not Sure Frederick Is all that Great

Berlin and Sans-Souci; or Frederick the Great and his friends by Luise Mühlbach
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was my first look into Muhlbach, and I enjoyed it. I didn't really know what to expect, and was pleased that I thought it mostly worked.

This is primarily the story of Frederick the Great, though most of the time is spent on people in his orbit. We get the story of some of those who served him in government, his sisters (especially Amelia) and their loves, a beautiful dancer the king fell in love with, and the brilliant people he surrounded himself with, particularly Voltaire.

Amelia's story is the most similar to traditional historical romance. She falls in love with a brilliant soldier, a young man named von Trenck, who is a favorite of Frederick's and is being promoted rapidly, but he is still much too far beneath her socially to even allow rumors of their connection to exist. Their visits and letters are discovered and he is jailed, ostensibly for treason against the state. Amelia fights for him; the king demands she forget him entirely; Trenck escapes, but never reconnects with her; years pass; and Amelia intentionally destroys her voice and her beauty when her brother insists she marry the king of Denmark. It's tragic, and it also shows the absurd social stratification that existed in European states at that time, a theme repeated in other subplots.

Another subplot includes a student at university who excels in studies but then falls in love with the theater and a particular actor. It's not until the day of graduation that we learn that the student is a woman in disguise. The very conservative professors allow her to graduate--she was a favorite--and also loosen their restrictions on the theater.

Voltaire is a dick in this novel, and he really wears out his welcome. I wonder how accurate this portrayal is. But Frederick loved him--up until he didn't. The king himself isn't much better, and is often worse. So inflexible and demanding. He would let on that he was just one of the guys at times, but then he'd get furious if he didn't get the respect he felt like he deserved. He basically kidnaps a beautiful dancer and makes her perform in Berlin, preventing her from making any decisions about her future. And the way he treats his sister was so unfair, forcing her to pretend to be happy at all times even when she is inconsolable with disappointment. It seems like the kindness of a loving brother might have succeeded where the demands of a tyrant failed.

One thing I appreciated about the character Frederick, and possibly about the real person, was his progressive view of religion. He was pretty much an atheist, more interested in philosophy and the beauties of nature than a supernatural creator that he couldn't believe in. He sounds in many places a lot more like people today than his own contemporaries. He didn't really care what religion his people or officers or officials were, which I found surprising and positive.

There are differences worth looking at, perhaps at another time, but this novel compares very well with Scott, Ainsworth, Dumas, and others from the period. It's just very interesting to have a story from the German perspective, taking place in Berlin instead of Paris or London or Edinburgh. I enjoyed it and I'm looking forward to more by this author. I have 8 or 9 other titles, so we'll see if this is representative of her writing.

It'll be interesting either way.

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