Ever After by Kim Harrison

Ever After by Kim Harrison

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This might not be drunk reviewing, but it sure ain't sober reviewing either.

So it turns out this series only has two? Something like that – two books left. Which blows my mind, since I have been reading this off and on since 2005, and thinking back, it's like my relationship with this series encapsulates my relationship with new millennium paranormal fantasy. I was charmed by it; I was frustrated that it wasn't higher quality; I felt strangely guilty for liking it in all its embarrassments and silliness; I felt angry for feeling guilty for liking this explicitly women's literature; I constructed elaborate Doylist feminist theories; I nominated it for Yuletide; I was bored by it; I made scouring, screaming fun of it (extra! Vaginal! Muscles! Ahahaha); I came to associate it with a certain friend, and that tasted a little bitter; I gave up on it; I came back to it carelessly, because giving up meant I could thoughtlessly enjoy; I read it in sickness for comfort, in pain for help, in travel for distraction; I stopped tracking its publication dates and plot convolutions, and merely let the next book fall from the sky into my lap when it would; I began to care again, or to notice caring, like getting back with an ex and finding that all the cynicism has been pounded out of you in their absence; I knew what was going to happen 300 pages before it did, but still waited for it and, in the moment, exhaled softly; I let myself have whatever emotional reactions would come, unjudgingly, because they would come anyway; I heard it is coming to an end and thought, no, but I'm not done with you.



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The Nine Tailors by Dorothy Sayers

The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


The last Wimsey. Last that I hadn't read, I mean. I couldn't remember whether this one or Five Red Herrings was the truly bad one; I meant to save the worst for last, but guessed wrong, so ended up surprised by the quality of this chilly, densely-peopled, eerie book. She writes beautifully of the fens, the tiny villages, the convolutions of life around the church, the rising water, the ringing ringing ringing of the bells. I stopped reading this as a murder mystery very early and recalibrated my attention to a novel of place. That turned out to be just right, because it's a good novel of place, though I think many people will like it more than I did. And also it set me up perfectly to be genuinely chilled by the ultimate solution, even if I had guessed three-quarters of it all correctly. Ooof.

I am not, I must say, sorry to see the back of Peter's 'oh woe is me, I wish I had never carelessly wandered into this murder mystery because I'm endlessly nosy and then discovered later that real people really got hurt, oh waily waily.' I understand this is supposed to be a function of his PTSD, and this book does weave together the strands of his war recollections with the present abdication of responsibility. In fact, I think it does so notably better than Busman's Honeymoon does (Busman's Honeymoon being the obvious thematic and structural companion to this book, at least to my eye). I just don't have to like it, and for complicated reasons I deeply do not.




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