Where They Should Just Wake Up

Slightly Married by Mary Balogh
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Pretty good. I still like the book and the author, but this is my least favorite of her novels so far. 3 stars.

I liked Aidan and Eve--by the very end. But it took me a long time to warm up to them (and them to each other). They were admirable all the way through. Honorable. Good people, trying to do the right thing. But I didn't care much about them. Both of them were so cold to each other, outwardly, anyway, and formal, and uncommunicative. It wore me out. In the other books I've read by Mary Balogh, I liked and enjoyed and rooted for the main characters almost from the beginning, and that didn't happen here. (Could have been me, obviously.)

Aidan promises a dying soldier to protect his sister, Eve. He brings her the news of his death and discovers by a quirk of their family's will that she will lose everything if she isn't married by a certain date--in about a week. Because Eve makes a home for servants who have been cast off by the world and a pair of orphaned children that she is more or less parent to, it is not just for herself but for their sakes she wants to keep her home and property. So... Aidan marries her, promising to leave her alone as soon as the wedding is over. Problem solved!

Complications arise, obviously. Everyone learns about the marriage, and they have to follow through on more than just saying "I do." They hang out, and she meets his family and wins them over. But both of them think, until almost the end, that the other one wants to be left alone to go back to their regular, single life once everything is done. He thinks she does; she thinks he does. Even though they have been growing closer during all this time together, learning to admire and care for one another, they keep that feeling hidden. Really hidden. Smashed down deep. A smidge of communication could have fixed this much sooner.

It ends well, and I almost gave it a 4, but 3 is right--it was good, good enough to read and recommend to people who like this type of story.

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Where Joliffe Goes to Rouen

A Play of Treachery by Margaret Frazer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A good book. It has some quirks, maybe flaws, but I still enjoyed reading it.

This series has been very entertaining, but this book took a turn, and it almost didn't work for me. Joliffe has been with his traveling troupe of actors in the first four, solving mysteries while they're putting on plays in rich houses or village greens. Here, he gets hired to go to France (to Rouen, in the part England still governed back then) to serve in a rich household and learn how to be a spy, basically. It's a good idea, opening up cool possibilities for the series, but it takes a lot of time.

It makes this a sort of hybrid book--training for a job first and solving a mystery second. In fact, probably 2/3 or 3/4 of the book is about Joliffe learning how to be a spy while pretending to be a kind of losery drunk guy who's about to get fired. He trains in spycraft and weapons in the night while working as a scribe and watching everybody during the day. All this is fine--but it's meant to be a mystery series and the first part isn't all that fun. It isn't until quite near the end that we get a mystery, which is where it gets good. (I was gonna give it a 3 until that point.) There's a murder and an attempted murder, and at last Joliffe is doing his thing, bringing his skills to bear.

I guess the author wanted to give Joliffe more scope for those skills, and I agree with the idea. I expect the next novel jumps into the action quicker.

It's still a brisk read, even the early parts, and by the end it's quite fun. Recommended--in order.

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Where Mack Bolan Surprises the Bad Guys

Mountain Rampage by Don Pendleton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I thought this was a better-than-average example of the genre.

The early Mack Bolan books are all about him taking on mafia families in various cities, getting revenge for his loved ones. Somewhere along the line, he pivoted to terrorists and the like. I haven't read enough or researched it to know when that happened, but this one (#54) is an example of the latter. The formula still works, IMO, and the book is an entertaining read.

The whole idea for the series is that there are criminals and evildoers who are so brutal, so dangerous and evil, that we can have no sympathy for them at all, so we can root for Bolan doing whatever he has to do to stop them. He's Rambo, John Wick, Doc Savage, and Ethan Hunt all wrapped into one. Here, his target is a bunch of eastern European (communist) terrorists who are preparing to poison whole cities, and they have been testing their chemicals on kidnapped people. He has to go into their Rocky Mountain compound all alone and stop them.

It's very satisfying in a kinda gladiatorial way when he kills the people we've seen commit horrendous crimes and then rescues some survivors. It's all very unlikely--one against 50--but the author actually does a reasonable job of imagining how it could be possible, provided the man is athletic, quick, and a very good shot. Resourceful, too. He cheats, though; he doesn't let them know he's coming.

These books are not for everybody, but I've liked them so far, and this one was one of the more satisfying ones of the books I've sampled. I'm a little surprised how much fun I find them, actually. It helps that they're move like novellas than novels. It's as if someone took a 100,000 page novel and removed everything but the action.

Nope. Not as if. That's exactly it. :)

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Another Graustark Adventure

Beverly of Graustark by George Barr McCutcheon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Not really a 4--but more fun than most 3's. 3.5, IMO.

I rather like this book and this series, despite a number of criticisms any reader could easily make. It's not very serious, mostly silly melodrama, and reads a little cartoony. It's coming from outdated turn-of-the-century (120+ years ago, I mean) sensibilities--putting me in mind of early Hollywood. In fact, the whole time I was reading this, I kept imagining it as a very old epic filmed on a soundstage with cheesy costumes, stilted dialogue, and lame sets. That's not a criticism, though, but rather my opinion about the best way to approach this book. You have to let it be a bit over-the-top.

Like the Zenda books, this series is about a fictional small country in Eastern Europe. In the previous book, an American man married the princess of the country, and in this one, a Southern woman, a friend of the princess, visits Graustark and falls in love with a man from neighboring Dawbergen. He isn't what he seems--then he is--then he isn't. You don't know until the last couple pages who he actually is. But Beverly and Baldos fall in love while he is hiding from partisans trying to overthrow the rightful prince of his country. I don't think I could put up with Beverly in real life. Her game playing--pretending not to care about Baldos, then showing him a little attention, followed again by studied neglect--was annoying, but treated like just what women do.

Overall, it's a light adventure, or maybe a cozy romance, with pretty low stakes and a happy ending. It's pretty fun, and though it suffers from many of the outdated attitudes of the time, it's entertaining and silly, and readers might be able to overlook its flaws just enough to be amused by its melodrama.

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Where I Didn't Get It

Li Shangyin by Li Shangyin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It was okay.

I generally really enjoy Chinese poetry, especially Tang-era poetry. I was psyched to get this book. But it's very hard to connect with.

A lot of Tang poetry is straightforward, at least on the surface, with concrete imagery and plain language, dealing with being separated from home, or enjoying wine and books, or working in one's garden, or visiting a neighbor, or saying goodbye at the river's edge. Generally comprehensible. And sometimes, often even, the poetry is filled with allusions that are completely unknown in the West, but are explained in extensive notes. (Red Pine does a really good job of this.) Both are absent here. Nothing is simple or readily comprehensible to a Western reader, and the many, many allusions are either left unexplained (most of the book) or are partly dealt with in endnotes (a few). So I struggled to understand or enjoy these poems.

I might succeed with a different collection and different translation and notes.

Like, look at these four lines (from a couplet in the original) and see if you get the author's intention:

Seablue, moonbeam,
Pearls hold tears.
Indigo fields, sun-warmth,
Jade begets smoke.

The book includes other translations of a few poems including this one, and one of those has two pages of notes for this 8-line poem. After working through that, I mostly understand it and can appreciate it some. Without it, I've got nothing but vibes, and I'm way off the mark on most of it.

My polite take on this book of poetry is that it is very challenging. I'm gonna look for a translation with more helps.

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Where the Bad Guys Take Your Breath Away. Literally.

Merchants of Disaster by Kenneth Robeson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

As always with Doc Savage, the book was okay. Three stars.

For personal and biographical reasons, I have more affection for the series and the characters than the novels really warrant. The cool covers help, too. In truth, there's a little fun to be had reading these books--the "advanced" science from the 30's is kinda fun, and we usually have exotic settings (though not in this one), and there's an advantage to knowing the characters before you open the book. (Star Trek novels, for example, have the same advantage.) But you can tell these books are quickly written and barely edited. In a way, that's part of the charm. This is pulp fiction; that's how they're supposed to sound.

This particular novel has no supernatural trappings, no supposed werewolf or ghost or goblins. In fact none (almost none? not sure) of the books really do--they just tease something supernatural that ends up being explained another way, like Scooby Doo. But even that is skipped here. From the start, it's clear there's some sort of weapon being used by bad guys, and it's clear they're gonna sell it to other bad actors. That plot is not too different from many movies and tv shows out right now--just a straightforward action story with criminal arms dealers. It works fine, tbh.

They're short, moderately entertaining novels, and they give me a jolt of nostalgia when I read them, so even if I almost never give them a 4 (and never a 5) I keep picking one up from time to time. And I've got a couple more on the shelves, so eventually I'll get to those as well.

Just recommended for people who already read old pulp fiction. But anybody might try one, once.

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Where Alchemist Gangs Turn Everything into Trouble

Red City by Marie Lu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a birthday present, so I was already predisposed to liking the book. And I was glad to find it was a good read. :)

Sam and Ari are shy kids who become best friends in school without ever revealing anything personal about their lives and where they come from. Both are gifted in different ways and recruited by alchemist syndicates. There they are trained under pretty harsh conditions to be able to use alchemy to transform things into different states. There are many magic-type things they both learn to do, all in the service of the nefarious businesses their syndicates are involved in. But neither tells the other that they're in rival gangs.

The story tells about their childhood and their progress in alchemy and the business of organized crime, showing how they become useful and important in their separate organizations. This includes both of them being coached and pressured into committing some pretty horrible acts. It's all aimed at other gang members, rivals, career criminals, people we aren't supposed to care about all that much, but it's not awesome, and as a reader you start to wonder of either one is redeemable--because they're both still likable, in a way, and I was rooting for them. (Is this another Breaking Bad situation where the author is seeing how much we'll put up with and still root for the character? I'm not sure. Are we meant to pardon them their crimes because they've clearly been both coerced and groomed from an early age? Maybe.)

All through, you're hoping Sam and Ari get to break free of their rival gangs, and the ending has a sort of answer to that, though I'm sure the sequels will have a lot more to say about it.

It's a very compelling alternate world that Marie Lu has created. The rules governing the magic system (though it's something like a science in the book) make sense, and the societal impact adds up, too. Well thought out. I think there's a lot more to explore in future novels, maybe among the regular, non-alchemist population, and I hope we see more of that in whatever sequels she may write. I want to see more from the main characters, too, obviously, so I hope those are in the works.

Four stars. Recommended.

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