Monday, December 22, 2008

Blessed Solstice to You and Yours

I love Georges de La Tour's use of light; he's one of my favorite painters. And yet, I'd never seen this picture, which seems appropriate for today.



The Young Singer by Georges de La Tour



PS Hopefully I will post soon and explain how writing roughly 30,000 words of fiction in the last two weeks has kept me from posting reviews for the five books in my "already read" stack.

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Book Twenty-three -- Empress (Godspeaker, Book One) by Karen Miller


Empress (Godspeaker, Book One)
by Karen Miller
fantasy
717 pages

Have you ever read a book only to find that you don't like the majority of the characters, you find the writing to be mediocre at best, you think the world-building only succeeds some of the time and yet...you find yourself wanting to read the next page (and the next book in the series) because you really have to know what happens next? Or maybe it's just me?

Empress is the story of Hekat, a girl born into horrible, back-breaking poverty in a part of the world that sees women as useful only for bearing sons. At 12, as soon as she has her first period, her father sells her to slavers. One of the slavers thinks she's something special and treats her better than the rest of his stock and certainly better than she was treated at home.

She learns a great deal from the slavers as they traveling from The Savage North (no really, that's what it's called, right there on the map) to their home city of Et-Raklion, way down in the south. We learn along with her and here's where the shaky world-building comes in. We do learn that it's only in the north that women are totally disenfranchised and that, further south, they can serve as warriors and priests (godspeakers) of the nameless, monolithic God, and yet we see them still being treated poorly elsewhere. While yes, that happens even in our own society, the way it's handled here feels like Miller didn't really think everything through.

We also learn that this is an almost insanely religious society; the godspeakers are everywhere, sacrificing live animals at the drop of a hat, doing magic, enforcing curfews, advising the warlords who are the head of the secular side of the government and generally interfering with people's lives. Although the whole setting has Middle Eastern overtones, the one good thing I can say is that this doesn't really read like a fantasy version of Islam.

Once Hekat and the slavers reach Et-Raklion and she learns that, while she's "beautiful and precious" (a phrase she and other people use about her all the goddamn time), she's still a slave and not as important to the slavers as she thought. She runs away and that's essentially where her story really begins.

There's nothing really new about her journey (it's a pretty typical "rise to the top while not caring about who you step on to get there" trope) and the fact is, she's a rather unpleasant character--manipulative, lacking in any real empathy, and incredibly selfish. It makes sense given her background, but it also makes it kind of hard to care about what happens to her. The people around her, with the exception of Vortka, a young man taken from the same slave train as Hekat and made a godspeaker, are mostly annoying as well. The high godspeaker of Et-Raklion, Nagarak, is scheming and ambitions; the warlord, Raklion, is a good soldier, but easily manipulated, and so on.

On top of it all, if it weren't for the adult nature of the sex scenes and the sacrificial scenes (seriously, avoid this book like the plague if you hate animal death or ifscorpions freak you out), I'd think it was a YA novel. Miller's writing is incredibly simplistic and repetitive; off the top of my head, I could easily name twenty fan fiction writers in my current fandom who are much much better writers.

And yet, as I said up there at the beginning of the review, I blew through this book and will undoubtedly be grabbing the next one. I don't know what it is, but sometimes a story will manage to break through all of the obstacles the author throws in its way and demand that you finish it. So I ask again: that ever happen to any of you?

Or is it just me?

Meme!

This one was going around LJ the other day (although you were writing a poem and not a song) and now I see that both Figgy and Marra have done it, and because I am about the stealing of good ideas, and also about procrastination, I'm going to do it again here.

First phrase from iTunes songs on shuffle 1-20; 21 - song title, 22 - band name.

Turn Your Ugly Face
by I Had a Dream

I was born by an old streetlight
She knows the voices in her mind
Have I got everything? Am I ready to go?

My lover's charms
I know you just want to kill me
You belong to the gang

Field of light
Something isn't right
Knew you were born under a waxing moon

Well turn up the bottle, pour down the wine
Oh, life is bigger
When I offer you survival

The leaves tell
Be ready to fly
Alcoholic kind of mood

Oh let the sun beat down upon my face, stars to fill my dream
Must it take a life for hateful eyes
The canyon air is like a breath of fresh LA

Bye bye love
There's no time for us


Okay then, that's surreal. Although the last two lines dovetailed nicely.


1. Street Smart, Book Stupid by Sara Slean
2. After All (DJ Moon) by Delerium
3. Traveling Again (Traveling I) by Dar Williams
4. My Lover's Box by Garbage
5. I Need to Say Goodbye by VAST
6. O Valencia by The Decemberists
7. Happy by Mazzy Star
8. Something Isn't Right by Aimee Mann
9. Majesty by Claire Voyant
10. It Ain't the Wine by Kate Wolf
11. Losing My Religion by REM
12 Bling (Confessions of a King) by The Killers
13 From Heaven to Dust by Azam Ali
14. Journey by Hungry Lucy
15. Nancy Boy by Placebo
16. Kashmir by Led Zeppelin
17. Drunken Lullabies by Flogging Molly
18. Dogs of LA by Liz Phair
19. Bye Bye Love by Simon and Garfunkel
20. Who Wants to Live Forever by Queen
21. Getting Scared by Imogen Heap
22. Fallen by Beauty's Confusion