The Black Unicorn by Tanith Lee

BLACK UNICORN (Ibooks Fantasy Classics)

3/5. Young adult fantasy back from when the genre as we understand it today didn't exist.

Read for the obvious reason. This made me think about Diana Wynne Jones, and Narnia, and, weirdly, Fullmetal Alchemist. It's not exactly like any of those, that's just the context in which I was reading it. The DWJ because this is quite a young book, but the writing has that flickering, fast-moving quality where it can deliver an improbable plot twist or a painfully precise observation in less than five words and keep right on going like nothing just happened. Narnia because of a fuckin' weird direction this book goes in the last quarter that makes no damn sense to me at all. And Fullmetal Alchemist because children in deserts building life out of dead things, and monsters and doorways.

I should have read this in the nineties. Tanith Lee would have been one of the seminal authors of my childhood, and that would not have been a bad thing. It's too late now, though.

Dangerous Ground by Josh Lanyon

Dangerous Ground

3/5. Collection of novellas about partners in a made up government security service who do a lot of running and shooting punctuated by sleeping together. And good grief, he really really likes his law-enforcement/military guys, doesn't he?

There's nothing wrong with this – Lanyon can write, which distinguishes him from a lot of people in this genre – but there's also nothing right, specifically for me. My favorite thing about Lanyon is that he likes established relationship as much as I do, because he understands that the hard part doesn't end when you get together, it's just starting. So his established relationship stories are full of negotiation and work, and I love that.

But the particular work here is the work of a couple where one of them is way more into it than the other is – or at least that's the way they both perceive it, at various points – and it's just . . . not what I came for. Not what I come to this genre for, specifically. Other people may really enjoy this, because it is a grown up, thoughtful examination of that dynamic. I just don't like that dynamic. Probably because the worst relationship of my life, in retrospect, was the one where I was the one way less into it, and argh, nope, that is not the fun relaxing brain candy place.