The Undead Pool by Kim Harrison

The Undead Pool by Kim Harrison

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I was going to use this space to talk about how much I dislike Marguerite Gavin's reading of the commercial audio of this series, with a sidebar on human-voiced audio as transformative work and how I am still pissed about the whole thing where we're going to block an artificial text-to-speech capability on certain devices because having a computer read a book out loud to a print disabled person is copyright infringement – yep still pissed – because for real, guys, this series is pretty long and there's not much to say at this point, and also Marguerite Gavin delivers 75% of spoken dialogue as if the tag were "she sobbed."

But it turns out I have something else to say, which is OMG!!!11111!!!! <3!! Called it! Like a decade ago! And also those two or three days out of every year I spent shipping this hardcore have all paid off, aw yeah!*

Ahem. Carry on.

*Delivered, I must admit, while dead sober. But if you want to pretend I was drunk for this, I'd actually appreciate it.




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The Spellcoats by Diana Wynne Jones

The Spellcoats by Diana Wynne Jones

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Six hundred years earlier in pre-historic Dalemark, a group of children are outcast because they look like the invaders, and they set off down the river at the call of an evil wizard.

I'm starting to suspect that I don't get this series. It doesn't help that I didn't pay quite enough attention to follow along with who all the gods are in relation to whom, though to be fair, they each seem to have five names minimum and they are all each other's grandfather. I thought vaguely that this book is doing some peripherally interesting stuff with historical narratives in translation, but mostly I kept thinking, wait, she is weaving this entire story into the fabric of a coat? …how does that make sense? because I have no romance in my soul.

But the thing is, I suspect I have been reading this wrong from the beginning. I was reading for the narrative of character the first two books suggested: children growing uncomfortably into and out of power, that sort of thing. But this third book is so clearly concerned elsewhere, so preoccupied with Dalemark the country as a character. I mean, this whole '600 years ago' thing is like the flashback episode during sweeps that explains everyone's origin stories, except in this case 'everyone' is a country. I think Jones was really working at the divided land as the center of this series rather than any of the particular children she writes about. The land, and the politics and ethnic conflict its people and gods reflect back and forth. And I just wasn't paying that kind of attention.




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