Congrats to Chris!!!

Chris has won my trivia question about the Way Back machine!!!  The answer, if you are curious, is posted as a comment in the review of The Fifth Quarter.  He's receiving a copy of Rebirth by me.  Congrats again to Chris.

The Shirley Temple Effect

Happy Holidays, everyone.

So, as I look around at pop culture the last few years, I have to ask myself, when did we get so damn popular?

Fantasy used to have its own little hole in the wall cafe where fantasy people met and talked to each other.  You knew better than to mention it among mixed company.  We all had our own set of hand gesture signals to let each other know we were in the club.  Whether you said "fantasy" to the outside world with pride or shame, there was a good chance you would get ridicule.  Now I've already talked about this some with nerd evolution (see post), but I am asking specifically, why fantasy, why now?  Harry Potter is a blow up pop culture life style.  Even straight adult men could be caught reading Twilight.  People love The Lord of the Rings series and yet may not even know who Tolkien is.  Clash of the Titans just got remade, which to me is insanity.  How can you top Ray Harrihausen?  I could keep going with examples from movies to books to video games.  The mass public loves fantasy.  Why?

I'll tell you.  It is the Shirley Temple Effect.  During the Depression and to some extent the following war, the world loved that crazy, overly cute tap dancing mop head.  People actually got off on watching pretty-fied versions of the old South where some loyal slave like Step N Fetchit followed her around her daddy's plantation and pretended like he wasn't getting paid a fraction of her salary just to pretend he could dance medium to well, instead of dance the boards off the floor.  What the hell was that all about?

People had no money.  Their lives sucked.  They didn't want to see violent films or films about how much life sucked.  They were living it.  They wanted escape.  They wanted to watch a five-year-old tap dance.  They wanted to see the Old South with beautiful plantations and mansions and know that all had been better, simpler, and might be that way again.

Well.  They had Shirley Temple.  We have Harry Potter.  Our economy has been in the gutter for over a decade.  We're scared of terrorists.  We are fighting one or two wars at a time for reasons unclear to many of us.  I recently celebrated that my home state's, Michigan's, unemployment rate is under %10.  My home town doesn't even have a bookstore.  You can find parking anywhere downtown.  Sure, we've always been known for our prison, but now we own four hand job massage parlors and drug related crime is on the rise.

Detroit is a wasteland.  Let's not get started on their schools other than to say I worked a whole winter there with a broken classroom radiator because they couldn't afford to fix it.

Don't get me started on Flint.

The world is a mess.  I honestly believe it is getting better over the past few years, slowly, but in the meantime, everyone loves Frodo.  Our world sucketh in so many ways.  So we borrow someone else's world.  We slip into a world of Quidditch, hobbits, moralistic vampires, and flying horses.  Yes, they have nothing to do with reality, no matter what J.K. Rowlings aspires to, and that is why everyone flocks to fantasy.  Forget the mortgage, the school systems, what your health program does or does not pay for, and who is dying where in the greater world for an hour, just a couple of hours of respite when we can worry over such exciting prospects as finding out you are magical, being in a magical place.  Even the scary isn't that scary because the tension isn't happening to us.  Just the characters.

It's rolling up to 1212.  Hurry.  We need Shirley Temple to tap dance through the discovery she's a secret race commonly mistaken for vampires.

Sabriel by Garth Nix

This one is for you, Rick.

Okay, once more, Sherman (and I'm getting depressed no one knows this!  Free book!), to the Way Back Machine.

Sabriel by Garth Nix:

Sabriel In the first scene, we realize Sabriel, an 18-year-old girl school in the country of Ancelstierre, just graduated her rather old fashioned boarding school for young women.  Not old fashioned for Sabriel, however, as Ancelstierre appears to be set in a slightly rearranged version of the twenties or early thirties in geography we don't know.

Oh.  And we know she is a necromancer.

In Ancelstierre, no one much believes in magic, nor does it work much beyond the Wall that shuts the Old Kingdom and its Charter Magic, within the world and order, necromancy, and Free Magic, outside the Charter and corrupting all exist and the people live in a more medieval setting.  Just with no government.

Sabriel was born in the Old Kingdom, but her father brought her here at five.  He is Abhorsen--the necromancer against necromancers.  A Charter mage and necromancer both, it is his job to make sure the Dead pass all nine gates of death, and stay dead.  Which they don't like to do in the Old Kingdom, especially lately.

Only scant pages after Sabriel shows her hidden necromancy, a sending brings Sabriel her father's Charter Magic imbued sword, and his bells--the tools of Abhorsen.  He may only be dead, or trapped in death.

Sabriel walks away from all she has known in thirteen years and goes to the Old Kingdom in search of her father.  Already, those who don't know her call her her father's title, Abhorsen, and that title means her father is assumed dead.

The problem is, she has no idea where he is.  In finding out how, she attracts the attention of a Mordicant, a free magic creature made of peat moss and flames with a Dead's spirit stuffed inside.  She has to make a mad run to find her father's house.  At her father's house, she meets Mogget, a white talking cat, who is most likely far more than just that.  Mogget travels with her in search of her father.  The Dead trail them at all times.  They come to believe a Greater Dead, Kerrigor, a powerful Dead creature who was also a free magic adept tracks them down, as he tries to free himself from Death once more.  All over, they find broken Charter stones--stones that hold the kingdom together with charter magic and keep the Dead down.  The corrupted, broken stones make it all the easier for the Dead to roam.

Along the way to Belisaere, which was the capital until twenty years ago--now overrun with Dead, and where Mogget and Sabriel guess her father's body is--Sabriel gets to discover a little more about Mogget, and discover Touchstone, a fool's name but he will give no other.  Touchstone last lived two hundred years ago.  He says he remembers little, but it is possible he remembers more, and is no more what he says than Mogget.

Eventually the small group makes it to the palace, but all does not go as planned.  The book takes a further magical twist as Sabriel and Touchstone must make it back to where Kerrigor has hidden his ace in the hole--his physical body.

Sabriel is one of those books I could just read over and over.  While it is aimed at a YA audience, it is meant for a mature audience in that Nix does not talk down to his customers and, more than that, perhaps, this book is a fantasy/horror fusion.  It would be hard for it to be much else.  The main character is either walking around in Death or fighting disgusting, scary dead creatures a fair percentage of the book.  Nix creates fear of the creatures, especially the Mordicant, dogging her trail, with an artful suspense.  The where, when you are reading, you keep looking over your shoulder.

Nix's world building is superb.  Ancelstierre feels more based on a version of human history.  However, the Old Kingdom is a complex work of art.  As one of the great puzzles of the book, which you must delight in either discovering or guessing, is how exactly the world works and why exactly everything has been going wrong the past two hundred years and the past twenty esp.  So I'm not going to tell you.  I will tell you that once you have learned all the secrets, the book falls together beautifully.  Rather than ending up with many convolutions in order to keep us guessing, every card that Nix lays eventually lines up into a stunning hand.

Characterwise--I actually rescinded my ban on talking cats because of sardonic, not quite to be trusted, sideways Mogget.

Sabriel was drawn well as a girl who has known more about Death than most of us ever will by the beginning of the book.  However, her father did not prepare her for who she truly was, or what it meant to be an Abhorsen in the Old Kingdom.  She shows bravery that is highlighted and made believable by her moments of terror, of wanting to run away from it all, from feeling she wasn't meant to cope with any of this, for her exhaustion and pain and putting up with wearing dirty, stinking armor.  Because of all these details, we understand her full courage as well as her fragility.

Touchstone is a man of secrets that weigh on him, even after all those dormant years.  However, he has a graceful curve from the servility to he treats Sabriel, the Abhorsen, when they first meet, to his expertise and skills breaking through to show confidence, to his and Sabriel's growing camraderie, to, of course, becoming the love interest.

Believe me.  I didn't just give anything away on that one.  From the moment he appears on the screen, you are nodding your head--okay.  Cue love interest.  Not that that is all the character is for.  Touchstone makes a great companion, someone Sabriel can actually talk to (Mogget can be a pain), someone who works beside her.  Then he gets love-interesty.  And here I feel Nix does fall down on the job.  I know it is YA, but I expect some sort of build in romance.  I expect catching the person out of the corner of the eye.  Wondering about him/her.  Knowing you're smiling too much or that the other person is.  One of my least favorite convenient writing phrases is, "it was if he was seeing her for the first time," or "he had never noticed before how . . . ."  Falling in love is a million microseconds of falling downhill.  You may not know or accept consciously what is going on, but you feel it.  It's cheap to use "He never noticed. . . " right at the end of the book because here is where it is convenient for you to stuff it in.  Also, after deciding he is in love, Touchstone's character does go downhill rather.  He's being soppy, protective, or grimly fighting.

Let's talk about that grimly fighting.  While the first half of the book wasn't hysterical laughter, it had its moments.  Towards the end, it is grim after grim.  It gets a little old.   There isn't even any gallows humor.

So finally, let's talk about the grim after grim effect.  Nix creates a crazy, terrifying, emotionally explosive end.  Only it isn't the end.  The book ends.  And then it goes into a frenzy of action and ends all over again.  And without near the emotional effect, I felt.  I realize what Nix was attempting to do, bringing some of the emotional impact full circle.  However, I felt he did an amazing job of this with the first ending, and that if he needed them (since there are sequels), some of the more important ending elements could be moved in as elements to the same ending.  It would change a little, sure.  But it would, I believe, hold together a little more thoroughly.

Either that--if you all think I am talking out of my ass--he needed to work on the pacing.  I got done with the first ending and I was done.  I was emotionally drained.  To me, the book was finished.  Then I had to keep reading.  I kept reading, but I never got my adreneline rush back.  The book had peaked for me.  I'd blown my wad.  I wasn't getting it back to feel very invested in the rest of the book.

Also, one of the stupidest last paragraphs ever.

Having gone through my nitpicks, though, this is still a book that I return to over and over.  Sabriel is well executed with some of the most vivid world building I've seen.  The characters, if occasionally wooden, are by the whole people I would love to hang out with.

If you are thinking of continuing with the series, my two cents:  Lireal is totally worth buying the book for that first section of creating a world and characters and Disreputable Dog, but skip anything that doesn't have to do with Lireal and consider just putting the book down after Lireal leaves the mountain.  Abhorsen:  I love you, Garth, but I still have to say to your readers, you'd be better off going back and reading Sabriel again.

Okay--I'm still waiting for someone to answer where the Sherman/Way Back Machine references come from.  A copy of Rebirth hangs in the balance.    

Fifth Quarter by Tanya Huff

Once more into the way back machine, Sherman!!  And yes, I'm still offering a free copy of Rebirth for whoever can tell me what I'm referencing.

Fifth Quarter by Tanya Huff

Summary:  I was going to write down the book blurb but it is stupid so you get my version instead.  The first thing you should know is that this is the second in a series.  The end is definitely a set up for No Quarter, but the first book need not be read in order to read this one.  I thought about starting with Sing the Four Quarters, which was a good enough book on the caliber of take it on vacation and read it when the day is rainy.  A good enough book so that I thought, eh.  I'll get the sequel.  The sequel blew the first book out of the water.  Besides the fact that having just read a series religiously, and I don't feel like doing that again, I am focusing on Fifth Quarter and perhaps No Quarter  because especially Fifth Quarter is what makes Tanya Huff so very Tanya Huff.  More importantly, Fifth Quarter is a beautiful fusion fantasy book of fantasy and horror with Huff's trademark complications in romance and attraction.  However, even though I believe you can skip the first book, I'll give a few pointers you learn in the first book.

In Shkoder, Bards hold powerful positions, either stationed or wandering.  They sing the kigh--approximately the souls or the spirits--of the four quarters, or elements.  When doing so they can ask the kigh to perform certain ways--rising up or settling down.  While they live by a strict code, they may also sing to perform tasks like becoming invisible or compelling truth.  Magic, yes.  Good at math, no, as when they discover that humans have kigh--a soul or spirit--that they may be able to learn to sing to--they call this the "fifth quarter."  In Sing the Four Quarters, the fifth quarter is theory, and not much discussed.

Now, Fifth Quarter, as the title suggests, is all about the fifth quarter.  Vree, 21, and Bannon, 20, are sister and brother born and raised in the Havalkeen Imperial Army.  Vree has always cared for Bannon.  When their soldier mother died when she was seven, it was her job to tell Bannon.  As orphans, they had the chance to become assassins--the best of the best.  They become the best of the best assassins, trained as a team.  Two bodies, one single purpose, they work in a complicated couples choreography for each kill.  Once back in the army camp, Vree's life still revolves around Bannon in every possible way.  Including eroticism.  Bannon, however, a charismatic golden boy, lives his life surrounded by people and revolving around himsef.

On a mission only they could pull off, Vree catches up to Bannon to discover someone has stolen Bannon's body, and the only way to save his life is to take his kigh into her body.  Not just a body swapping book, but a body double.  Desperate to get Bannon's body back, they desert--a death sentence for an assassin.  What they find is Gyhard in Bannon, a man whose kigh has been around the block plenty of times in plenty of bodies.  They strike a deal.  Vree, with her assassin abilities, will help Gyhard into an Imperial Prince the assassins have sworn to protect.  Only the siblings plan on forcing Gyhard out before they have to turn to treason and Gyhard plans on having them killed once he can make it so.

Before the trio/duo make it to the prince, the real villain of the piece shows and steals the prince.  Khars is rather sweet, and kind, ancient.  If only in his insanity didn't choose his friends by raising the dead--Singing the Fifth to force a dead body's kigh back inside.  He cares for his rotting, impaired children with gentleness and sorrow.  Then he sees the prince.  By those deep lashed, dark eyes, Khars knows he has finally found what he has been looking for--his heart.  Now Gyhard knew Khars a few bodies back, and is torn up to find him alive and still torturing souls back into bodies.  Gyhard needs to stop Khars.  Vree and Bannon both follow Bannon's body and need to save the prince.

The characters are well drawn.  Bannon and Vree, at the beginning of the book, only have each other--especially Vree.  A study of their relationship if rife with nuance even before he ends up in her head and the distinction between the two begins to shred and blend.  I'm wracking my brain, but I can't remember anyone take on incestuous feelings and reliances between equal siblings in Huff's honest way.  Being Tanya Huff, yeah.  That's sticky sweet hot with a twist up against a wall.

 Gyhard and Vree's growing warmth relies on the fact neither one of them has had someone to be truly open with their entire lives(ssss).  Meeting in raw honesty produces a heady attraction.  I've said that I hate I-hate-you-so-I-love-you-so-I-hate-you relationships, but that isn't the way Vree and Gyhard are relating.  Both of them want something.  The something will cause the other's death.  They are both business people on the concept of death.  As they travel together, get to talk to each other like they haven't to anyone, and slowly merge to a goal, their affection, though awkward, feels natural.

One thing I absolutely love about Huff and it is in this series more than any other:  her honest and absent use of same sex relationships.  There is no stigma attached, and many appear to move back and forth between the sexes based on the individual relationship.  The fact that it is such a NON issue makes it a) not feel like she's cramming an issue down our throats while b) being able to cram an issue down our throats.  And I applaud her on this one.

Her army is also lovely in it's non sexist status.  If she writes "the corporal", don't assume any gender until she writes the pronoun to go with it because that corporal is just as likely to be female as male.

The book could be honestly called a nonlinear.  And we do know how much I love a nonlinear.  She moves into sections of her characters' pasts not in past perfect or swimmy flashbacks and italics, but by ending a scene, and starting the next scene (she has really short scenes) in the past.  The following scene will most likely be in someone's present, but not always.

A book in which two people in one body think to each other, especially as they slowly become more aware of each other's thoughts and dreams and emotions, able to take over movement of the body from each other till their selves shred--it is not an easy thing to do.  She uses *thought* for when they are purposefully thinking to each other.  Italics when Vree is just thinking to herself.  It is quite clean and easy to follow, even as they descend into being each other.

I will complain that I felt her third omniscient view on top of all the thought dancing got awkward.  I'm never a fan of jumping pov mid scene, and she jumped it all over the place.  As much as I was engrossed in the material, I found this distracting and it sometimes pulled me out of the story.  Especially in a story where within one character the pov may be switching, I felt as if I really didn't need any more switching around per scene.

I also accuse her of having a desperate "seems" problem.  She uses the damn dumb word in what feels like every sentence.  I will note I am nitpicking here, however, as I have read other books with as big seems problems and never mentioned it because I had way bigger things to talk about.

I did like the army.  And I never say that.  Armies bore me.  I've never met an assassin that felt remotely realistic.  Until now.  I liked the highlights of how Vree and Bannon worked.  I loved the detail they immediately knew.  I liked the images of the army as a family to Vree and Bannon--all they had ever known.  A great creature that their tiny selves made up a part of.

Now for the horror:  Khars.  He was meant to be a bard.  He was tortured.  His slim hold on reality slipped at some point and now death is his best friend.  His zombies didn't lurch around with their arms out.  Their brains appear intact.  They knew they were dead.  They could speak until their mouths or tongues rotted.  I had to appreciate that.  Not just the walking dead, but the way they slowly rotted around him--the woman holding her desiccated baby.  The leg that snaps when the foot has worn away.  Finally the guts rupture.  This stuff is grotesque but made creepy because Khars truly loves his little family, and he descends the prince to near madness.

The horror and the fantasy blend seamlessly.  They are both born out of the same basic concept which drives the entire book:  the fifth quarter.  The book has an apt name and a guiding concept which both allows her characters to be directed exactly where they need to go without breaking character, and gives the book a cohesive drive.

Book Trailers

How do we feel about book trailers?

Sure, movies have been borrowing from books almost since movies began.  Books borrowing from movies?  Not unless it is a lame novelization.  More specifically:  trailers?  The book world has long relied on good cover art (though publishers have weird ideas on "good" sometimes) and the back of the book blurb.  Maybe some quotes by cool authors who endorse the book.  We relied on the bookstore.  You wandered through the isles.  Maybe pick up a book based on cover or name familiarity here or there.  You read the back blurb.  If it holds any appeal, you flip open to a few random pages not only to get a real sense of this authors' style and whether you mesh with the story, but also:  the smell.  You smell the wood pulpy, acidized and ink smell.

But here's the problem.  You can't smell a book found on an internet site.  Kindles don't smell either.  Bookstores are dying.  Even the really amazing hole in the wall used bookstores where you find things not even in print anymore.  And the whole world smells of dust and books.

So a new industry is born:  book trailers.  The problem is we are still media people.  We aren't book trailer people.  My friend Reeb (yes, he was named that at birth) cuts trailers in L.A.  He went to film school and was always at least a head and probably a whole body above his peers.  But it took him a while to get used to trailers.

Trailers are their own beasts.  Still shots and voice overs don't cut it.  Maybe you are using motion, actors, a film camera and lighting.  That still doesn't mean you know how to make a trailer.  Trailers are dada post modern nuggets.  Watch movie trailers.  It's quick, flashy cuts and random lines that are oh-so-quotable.  Does it really tell you what the movie is about?  No.  It just has to get your interest.  It may be even employing scenes that hit the cutting room floor long before--that you will never see.  Trailer editors watch one movie, over and over and over till they have the damn thing permanently ingrained in their brains.  They look for that one moment they can use to get your attention.  That split second cut you won't even notice go by.  The name of the game is to get your attention, because they have a minute or so on a commercial break to do it if they are lucky.

The book world needs to study this art intensively.  Watch successful trailers from the movie world over and over.  Read the book over and over and over looking for those exact spots and lines to use.  Or deviate completely and have something not happening in the book happen.  It's a joyous, boundless, near nonsensical art and we need to study it to know how to adapt it.  Books force a certain linear sense.  Even the nonlinear novel generally is read by paging forward.  A trailer isn't looking for a linear, nugget of a story.  You are not reinventing your query letter on film.

If we are going to learn this art--because at the moment I think we are mostly sucking--we have to learn movie trailers, and then we have to learn what we can take from them and what we need to adapt.  We definitely need to have some more fun with the damn things.

The one I'm working on will probably be a little longer than a standard movie trailer.  I feel I have the room as I will be working off the net and not being crammed between things on TV or before a movie.  Still, I'm keeping it short.  My next book out is Shining in Darkness--the first high fantasy I'm putting out, though of course people are still sarcastic and petty.  Sprites, the size of humans, each focus one particular facet of the One--everything.  Firelight, the main character, for instance, is a white hot burning fire sprite and is made of flames.  A Prophecy is involved.  Half Gods fight.  Rollicking fun.

However, I have chosen to do the movie trailer with stop motion animation of My Little Pony gore.

There is a reason for the My Little Ponies.  Mysterious to all but a few who know me well.  Someday I may reveal it.  Or maybe you can guess.

The Alleluia Files by Sharon Shinn

That's right, Sherman, once more into the way back machine.  Though not so way back, as this is the final published book in Shinn's original angel trilogy.

This book is where I began.  Not with Archangel, where I should have and is an archived review.  Not with Jovah's Angel, which I never had read until I decided to study this series.  Reading Alleluia Files, I fell in love with Samaria, angels who can be petty and cruel as much as holy and godly, where Jacobites were a cult that believed the god Jovah was a spaceship, and there was no God.

I don't feel bad about that, because in my writer's heart and mind, this is where I believe Shinn began as well.  Books are funny things.  They don't come to writers whole.  For me, a character usually forms in my head, and I wander around with this person in my head as slowly the world coalesces around him or her.  Some writers start with a world or a plot.  Only Shinn could tell you where she began.  Maybe she began with Tamar, a fierce, defiant rebel with a price on her head--willing to die for her cause, but belately noticing the quiet help she has been given all along her journey.  Maybe once Tamar formed, Shinn found Samaria, where angels ruled--ultimately the archangel and the religious guidance of their God, ultimately a very sophisticated spaceship that Tamar and her fellow Jacobites wanted to uncover for the truth.  Was it then that Jared, the lazy, drifting angel came into Tamar's life as her staunch supporter--of her, for her love, not for her mission?  Or did he come before the world--the plot?  It could have been that Lucinda, a naive and sheltered angel, usually underestimated.  Tamar's diametrically opposed twin, down to the fact Lucinda had wings?  Did Lucinda or Tamar open the door to the land of Ysral, where the Edori and engineers had retreated to and the Jacobites sought shelter?  Was Bael, the murderous Archangel in there before all of this, or only when Shinn finally added her villain to this tale? Maybe the stark and brilliant climax bringing her cast together was the first moment in her mind.

We're 100 years away from Alleluia and Jovah's Angel.  We're 250 years away from Gabriel being Archangel.  They are still with us as references to history, bloodlines and of course, Alleluia's famous files that the Jacobites believe will shed the final light on the mechanical nature of God.  Whereas technology was only seen as Godly or the first settlers bequeaths in Archangel, and a slow process of advances and mistakes in Jovah's Angel, Caleb, that engineer above all with a little not so holy help created a school to jump technology into fast forward since we've last seen, though Bael now suppresses it.  The story consists of an delicately interwoven plot of Tamar, Jared, and Lucinda's overlapping voices telling us overlapping events.

Of course Tamar and Jared's Kisses, technological or God created implants, riot with color when they are near, as all true lovers (or genetically matched people) should.  Interestingly, Lucinda and Tamar's worlds also begin to overlap--in dream and in music and sensation when Tamar has her Kiss implanted.  Tamar has lead a bleak and bloody life, held together by absolute belief, and I loved her for it.  I loved her for finally realizing her life hasn't been as independent as she thinks.  Oddly, she does make a good match for the aimless Jared.  His ability to allow a more kind, gentle world, and more--his frustrating and inscrutable to Tamar's angel negative world to a) want to know the truth as well and mostly b) his relentless quest to keep her safe whether she likes it or not--give Tamar a chance to open up all those sides of her life she has never let herself have.  She ridicules him once for having not having a cause he is willing to die for, but she gives him one--her.

At this point I have to stop and say in some ways I believe Jared more than Tamar, though given her life her world view is completely understandable.  I believe an alive proponent, though slightly quieter, is way more useful than a martyr.  To me, even Ghandi and Jesus did their best work when they were alive.  However, I stand by Jared's answer.  There are a number of people in my life I wouldn't think twice about dying for.

Also, I notice Shinn plays a bit of a fast one with traditional female literature by conking Tamar hard on the head so that Jared nursing her through a concussion can help her come around to him.  In feminist lit crit., it has been noted that early female writers had and still have sometimes, a tendency to wound their male lead to put the female character on equal footing.  Think of poor Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre.  Shinn has reversed this.  The only way she could think of for Tamar to learn to quit fighting was to take the ability away from her for a while.  It's a fascinating inverse, and though I want to be snide for her use of this old method, I have to say the Tamar she created may have needed to be conked on the head, however much I wish she and Jared could have opened up to each other some other way.

I haven't spoken yet much about Lucinda, spirited away to an island in the middle of the ocean by her aunt to protect her from Bael.  Her mix of innocence and strong headed intelligence is great fun, and it isn't hard to see how she will fit into the plot--especially when she takes an Edori lover--but for most of the book I became frustrated with her for all I loved her as she interrupted my Tamar and Jared story.  She also, even as she was lovingly crafted, stood out a bit as a plot device.  From the moment she entered, you pretty much knew where she was going.

Again, I love the overlapping style of voices.  That takes a lot of skill and craft to create without it becoming jarring or annoying.  It also gives a chance to see into each characters head and helps us understand why and where and whatfor of their lives.  Occasionally I felt she spent a little too much time overlapping, especially on Tamar and Jared's meetings and odd series of near misses.  She tended to repeat a little too much information at times that we'd already gotten from another pov.  It meant we ended up discovering the same facts and having the same conversations multiple times.  It could get a little trying.  But better too much than too little in this situation.

This book did contain more politics than the other two, and the other two contained politics, so this is just the more so.  Some people love political intrigues and sparring.  It bores me sick.  But that's just me.  I'd rather get back to Lucinda learning her history or Jared and Tamar's evolving bond.

The climax of the book was spectacular.  Tight gut and fingers gripping the book so hard it could have ripped, only to come to a brilliant, cohesive, stunning end.

Unfortunately the book did not end there.  I admit, an epilogue was due.  She needed a celebratory dinner where a few things were explained, the what-do-we-do-nexts somewhat sketched in as she could not resolve all of them.  One final place for some of the characters to come to a reckoning on their relationships, but that all could have taken one, maybe two scenes.  She spent a lot longer on nailing down little logistics when some planning over a bottle of wine and a well-we-have-to-wait-and-see would have worked.

Now on to looking at the arc of the three books.  As I said, I read this one first, and was so thrilled I went back to Archangel.  Not so thrilled.  Nothing wrong with the book per se.  It just left me feeling like, really?  Are we really going to do this each time?  Flawed angel learns valuable life lessons from scrappy, oppressed girl--whose Kisses, by the way, flare like crazy?  The answer is pretty much yes.  Caleb in Jovah's Angel was male, but had his own bitterness about God.  And still taught Alleluia valuable life lessons.  Despite the fact the writing was great and I liked the characters (except in Archangel), I felt a little Hallmark.  Is this all Jovah does?  Find some flawed angel and stick the perfect solution to them?  I thought he worked on genes.

  Which brings me to my other doubt.  That crazy Jovah, apparently on genes alone, can tell a hell of a lot about a person.  Many things which I don't believe it can.  My psych degree leaned my heavily to a nature and nurture combination.  Ones environment can literally rewire the way your brain works.  Genes may supposedly tell far more than we can currently extract from them, but they can not tell how this person's life will unfold.  I'm willing to believe magic or a holy touch can stay apprised of these things, as they are completely uncharted territory that you get to make up in fantasy.  But I don't believe genes map out everything in your life.  I know.  Even the little we know of genes, I have seen people with supposed genetic codes overcome or succumb to them.

I know I've complained about it before but I'll do it again.  I'll buy the angels, being a different kind of being and generally the same sort of growing up have certain similarities, but these other races are driving me nuts.  Luminaux is always beautiful and good, as are the people there.  The whole world changes, remembers itself, forgets itself--Luminaux won't budge.  It's a city but I've never heard of a slum.

My main gripe--what is up with those Jansai and Edori?  The Jansai go from slavers, to owners of disgusting factories that utilize children, back to marauding, murdering mercenaries.  They are also described as the gypsies, so I keep picturing them Middle Eastern or East European.  Anyway, can these people do anything right?  I'll put up with it that they might be bad for a century or so, or that they were unrelentingly bad at the same thing.  But whatever sucks lands on the Jansai heads.  Give me one, just one Jansai who lowers his sword and walks away from killing a Jacobite.  Just one that left the Jansai murdering business because he wanted to play the flute in Lumanazi.

The Edori are just as bad.  The darkest race, the race with different religious beliefs (slightly), the constantly persecuted race--finally you do see a few get angry, but they keep on getting described as the most happy, complacent, laid back big families in the world.  Why don't you stick a watermelon in their mouths and have them tap dance with Shirley Temple and just call the thing done?  Except they were put on reservations, too.  So I suppose small pox blankets are in order.

Plus, I really can't figure it out.  Obviously there are generations between, and generations of Archangels that we do hear about that this isn't true of, but is the mate of the Archangel EVER not Edori?  By this time Edori angels must be wandering around.  Are these angelicas and angelico absolutely so ineffective that they could not get any laws passed to improve the state of their people?  Gabriel and Delilah are lauded as visionary Archangels.  Yes, Gabriel got rid of slavery, but he was going to do that anyway.  He couldn't be strong armed by Rachel to do more?

The world building that I so lauded as fantastic gets a little messy as the series goes on.

At the end of every book, as we get closer to the truth, someone always talks about how they believe in some god, even if they don't know what.  I admire it in that it sets forth a faith that goes beyond everything they have been taught.  In fact, learning lessons in different types of faith of one kind or another really form the theme of the books.  This I greatly admire.  A solid arc of theme.  That is a rare and beautiful thing these days in a book, much less a trilogy.  I do feel as if she didn't quite trust us to get it.  It is hammered home each time when all we needed was a slight push.

Alleluia Files remains my favorite, though I have grown quite fond of Jovah's Angel.  Archangel still leaves me a bit cold, but that is my own private annoyance with the main characters.  Some of Shinn's repeating motifs in the dynamics of relationships I cannot help but feel is carefully crafted.  I admire the symmetry between the novels, even if I occasionally get annoyed by her echos.  She successfully completes not only an arc in each novel, but an arc across the trilogy.

Shinn's work truly belongs in it's own class.  While a steady revelation of science fiction elements occurs, the book is built on a strong foundation of fantasy archetypes and tropes.  She is a fantasy fusion artist.

By the way, anyone who can tell me what Sherman and the way back machine reference, I'll give you a copy of Rebirth, my second book.

"seems" is not all it seems

"She seemed to begin to see as she started to blink."

Okay.  Overkill, but let's once again talk about no-nothing words.  "Seems" may look like a great word on the surface, but basically it can get in the way of that strong, punchy verb you want to highlight in your sentence.  That strong sentence is there.  You are just allowing it to be muffled by phrases like "seems" "begin to" and "start to".

Let's look at "seems" first.  And this goes for all you academics, too.  Any time you touch a finger to a keyboard, you should consider what it seems to be.  Or better, what it is or isn't or shades into gray.

First of all, you are always writing in someone's point of view.  That means that you are working with their impressions.  Whether or not there is a dragon down the street, your character will think, "Ack!  Dragon!"  That is your character's perception.  If your character isn't sure, you can still keep your strong language:  Ack!  Dragon!  She squinted.  Maybe that lumbering shape was just a wagon, and her last encounter had left her paranoid.  You keep your strong sentences, and you learn more about the character, and you still don't know if that's really a freaking dragon down the street.  "Seems" weakens your character's perceptions, and limits, in general, what you do with them.  It also tends to pull the reader out of your character's head.  Your character will have specific reactions.  "Seems" can sound as if the author is being coy--oh is or is not my character perceiving this?  Of course, that wasn't the intent, but it could be the effect, and you never want the author in there.  It's all about the character.  Even in academic writing, you are presenting a certain face to your audience and you want them to stay hooked in to that voice and that knowledge.

Let's go back to that first sentence.  "She blinked crusty eyes.  The waves of gray that had been with her all her life broke into a clean, golden vein of light.  Then tears came to her eyes to blind her even as the gray finally slipped away."  This is assuming blind chick is the pov.  Of the blind chick wasn't the pov:  "The blind beggar winced from my touch.  But then she scrubbed her eyes. Tears coursing down her cheeks, she reached up to the light."

Obviously, I took up more space.  But in writing, God is in the details, not the devil.

So going back to our original statement "She seemed to begin to see as she started to blink." let's talk about "begin to" or "started to".  My main question is, well did the person do it, or not?  "He started to shout"  Well, if he is shouting, then obviously he started at some point.  So why clutter your sentence and bury your active verb "shout".  The writing is strong, but you've unnecessarily cluttered it.

But, you stay, he just started to start when James whacked him on the head with a cudgel, so he didn't really get to shout.  Why let your reader's know this ahead of time.  It's battle!  He's shouting!  Don't give them a preview of the fact he doesn't get to finish.  That just lets your readers grow complacent that you will give them a heads up before Ronald gets hurt.  It may even bore them.  And it slows down that tight, vivid style you have--in battle or out.

Instead, let the reader be as shocked as Ronald is to get cudgeled.  He shouted, but before the rumble could reach his lips, a crack of pain drove him to the earth.  Or, if we are in Jame's point of view.  A sharp shout emerged from Ronald's lips, but with one swift blow, James silenced him.  Same effect.  Ronald barely gets to shout.  But you get that immediacy that he is doing, not trying or starting, or beginning.  The sound hits his lips, and he, and James, and the reader, and maybe even you don't know that the shout is only a beginning, and will be silenced until James brings down that cudgel.

I give one place where all these phrases can be used:  Dialogue.  Why?  In dialogue we really do hedge our bets like this.  Especially if your character either trusts nothing, or isn't very confident, or a number of other reasons you built into a character, your character may use these phrases.  But know why they use them.

Don't let little things like "began to" or "started to" or "tried to" or especially "seems" clutter your writing.  You are couching your writing with little words that make it safer.  You don't need that.  Your words are strong.  You are strong.  Trust your readers to get that powerful writing.  Trust yourself.