Magic or Madness by Justine Larbalestier

Magic or Madness by Justine Larbalestier

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Disappointing. Larbalestier's Liar -- when it impressed and when it didn't -- that book was interesting. It was thinking and messing with the boundaries of young adult fiction and just doing stuff.

This book is none of the above. It's just a couple hundred pages in which stuff happens. And I was frankly confused, because this is a universe where people -- women, mostly -- have a choice between the assumption of power and death on one hand, or eventual mental illness (unspecified) on the other. Magic or madness, right. And I kept twitching, because that's difficult ground right there, a lot of things can go really, really wrong, and I kept waiting for it to happen. And it kept not happening. Not because Larbalestier was doing a really good job with it, but because she wasn't doing anything with it. Like, at all. Stuff just happened to a bunch of young people, and then it was over.

Does the rest of the trilogy deliver . . . anything?




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Pale Demon by Kim Harrison

Pale Demon by Kim Harrison

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Ah, fuck, I don't know, I read this a month ago and five thousand miles away. When people ask me for urban fantasy series recs, I often don't give them this one, and when I do it's with a lot of caveats -- "she would be a much better writer if she wasn't pumping out two books a year" "there are a handful of sex scenes that are just embarrassing when you remember someone wrote them to be sexy" etc. I swore off this series, actually, on a surfeit of stupid. But swearing off a series means you have to totally unplug, abandon the early investment in the lives of made up people, back before it all went weird and sort of deflated. And so I unplugged, I stopped caring. And because I stopped caring, I could pick up the new book for airplane reading and go "huh, yeah, there it is" over it. Whereas if I still cared, I wouldn't come anywhere near this book. Shrug.



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