Heart of Stone by C.E. Murphy

Heart of Stone by C.E. Murphy

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


DNF around 60% through. A largely unobjectionable if boring urban fantasy about the lawyer who encounters the supernatural while out jogging at night. But you know how we all have these specific things that a book has to get right? Like, the author can invent a magical creature out of nowhere, no problem, but she better get the details of how the heroine bakes biscuits exactly correct?

Well, it turns out one of mine is poverty legal services. Who knew! And this book gets that so completely and offensively wrong. I mean, the heroine doesn't have a caseload of 80 open matters, she has one "big" case (which is exactly the sort of case that never lands on the desk of someone like her since private defenders would have been lining up to try it for free for the publicity). And that one case -- yeeeeeah. It's really telling what an author chooses to do when she wants to amp up someone's heroism. And what this author chose to do was erase an ethically complex, grinding, in-the-trenches-of-the-race-war reality with something apparently way more palatable, which is to say ethically unchallenging and full of righteousness about racism without ever engaging with the realities of the heroine's mixed race status. The actual heroism of defending drug dealers and pimps and rapists because everyone, absolutely everyone, deserves someone standing up for them and ensuring the state proves its case beyond a reasonable doubt because that's what motherfucking justice is -- yeah, that's too icky and complicated.




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Deadline by Mira Grant

Deadline by Mira Grant

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


DNF at 70%, though I went and spoiled myself when I realized just how little I care. And nope. Don't care.

It's interesting how polarizing Mira Grant/Seanan Mcguire is. The people who love her looooove her, and the people who don't are utterly baffled at all the fuss over such terribly written tripe. I've been on both sides of this: I have friends who speak in trembling, delighted voices of the Toby Day books, whereas I thought they were so poorly written as to irritate my brain like nails on a chalkboard. Then again, I genuinely enjoyed Feed, even though it had all the same leaden character work and thudding prose. So I wondered . . . which was the fluke?

Yeah. It was the book I liked. This one, without the political foreground designed to appeal to me, and without the emotional climax? *whistles between teeth*. All you've got left is writing that I find irritating to a really extraordinary degree. I mean, I read original M/M! I know from bad writing, and have excellent mental muscles for tuning it out! But there is just something to her writing that is unignorably bad, and reading it makes my brainstem hurt.

Maybe it's the endless, endless repetition of detail. I would put down solid money that, at some point, someone really impressed Grant with this idea that to build convincing characters, what you do is choose some distinguishing characteristic and emphasize it. So she was like, I know! I'll make these people drink Coke! That's character-building!

And I wander off with a terrible headache, muttering about how brand association isn't the same thing as characterization, and also oh my God please please stop with the Coke we know stop stop stop.

Or maybe it's how her world building is not done through variation and elaboration, but repetition. Characters in this book take repeated blood tests to assess zombie infection status. Every step of this process is described in such precise and identical detail, over and over and over again, that at one point I started reciting the paragraph along with my audiobook narrator, and I had most of the words right. That's not world building, kids. That's bad writing.

These are just guesses. Neither of those things alone could account for my near allergic reaction to her prose. It's just. Nails on a chalkboard. In my soul.

I dunno, maybe she'll happen to drop another book right on my buttons some day. She seems to publish something every ten minutes, so it's possible. I just don't see why I should bother irritating myself trying to find it.




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Taste by Mickie B. Ashling

Taste by Mickie B. Ashling

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


DNF halfway through. Why yes, I'm cleaning out my unfinished books, how can you tell?

M/M that I started out quite liking. Contemporary romance/drama set around a huge Chicago food festival. But then we got to the kink.

Look, here's the thing. A lot of M/M subscribes to the notion that what you are is how you fuck. You know, the smaller dude always enjoys being overpowered, that sort of thing.

Which is screwed up and uninteresting in equal degrees. But the thing is, you can't separate sex from character. And you definitely can't separate something as specific and personal as kink from character. I mean, you don't have to explain it, you don't have to draw nice straight lines from someone's specific trauma to why he likes asphyxiation. Really, it's better when you don't.

But kink doesn't happen in a vacuum. It's an expression of some really intense and fundamental emotions – desire sure, but also antipathy, pain, joy, you name it. The kinky person doesn't have to know why, but there is a why, and the shape of that why – often done in the negative spaces by the writers who are really good at this – is what makes the kink vital and interesting. Also hot. This stuff gets installed in us in, like, the root directories. It's so deep in the operating system that looking at it is also looking at how we function. Or don't.

Which is what makes it interesting. And thus why this book, which wandered along doing food festival/family things for a while, and then basically out-of-the-blue was all, hey, these dudes like to wear women's panties! was so, so boring. I don't care. This is the sort of writing about sex that is all bodies and no brains. Sex acts aren't by themselves hot. Personal, contextual sex acts can be blazing.

And thus endeth Light on kink. For today.




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Grimspace by Ann Aguirre

Grimspace by Ann Aguirre

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


DNF. Hard-bitten lady space navigator is broken out of prison for blah blah revolution adventures.

#Thatthingwhere a bunch of people are excited about a new science fiction series written by and featuring a woman, and you try it because you try that sort of thing, and then . . . no.

It takes chops to pull off first person present tense for an entire novel. I mean, you've got the uphill battle of convincing me that the book isn't actually stitched together emo wailings of a sixteen-year-old Tumblr user who writes in first person present the same way my teenaged generation put safety pins in our jeans – it's edgy, yoe. Spoiler: these ain't those chops.




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The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Post food apocalypse scifi with tremendously original and genuinely frightening world building.

DNF, and right on the verge of finishing, too. I've just swapped audiobook players, meaning I lost my place in everything on the SD card, and yeah, okay, three years later it's probably time to admit I'm never going to finish this. I wouldn't bother saying anything about it because I don't remember much aside from repeatedly thinking how great his short stories are and how badly constructed the novel was, and how he should go back to shorts.

Except that I apparently left myself a note attached to the file, and that note says:

Robot rape for emotional effect/robot rape complicit in sexualized violence?

And you guys. I got nothing. Three years ago me, I'm glad you had apparently deep thoughts about robot rape?




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