bookpost, part two: series books. [west of the moon, 1/7/17]
By "series books" I don't necessarily mean books that are part of a series, but instead books where I read the whole series and I feel like talking about them as a whole. ("Series" means more like "trilogy" in most of these cases, or at most a four-part series. I've done a ton of reading while convalescing but it's not like I was racing through the Wheel of Time from my hospital bed or something.)
Off the Grid series by Alyssa Cole (Radio Silence, Mixed Signals, Signal Boost). These are nominally romance novels--Alyssa Cole is primarily a romance author, and honestly given how well romance sells, if you can market yourself as romance you should do it--but they're also pretty smart science fiction. The first book opens with two college-student best friends, Arden and John, hiking through upstate New York to get to John's family's house, because the global electrical grid has completely shut down and no one knows what's going on, what caused it, how to fix it. Because they're romance novels, romances happen. Arden falls in love with John's older brother Gabriel, John falls in love with a hot physics grad student named Mikhail who randomly turns up in their vegetable garden (seriously), and John's younger sister Maggie gets involved with a former soldier in the third book. But the SF plot, the consequences of a world that's lost electricity and the reasons for the grid failures and the attempts to put it all back together, those aren't just backdrop, those are a real (and interesting) part of the plot. I thought these were great, and I'm really excited to read other books by Alyssa Cole. (Bonus, she seems to specialize in romances with diverse characters. The main characters in this series are mostly Korean, Black, and Latino. And there's a really good thread running through all three of them about the Korean-American family pushing back against model minority stereotypes. Which is the kind of thing you don't see every day, in mainstream romance novels.)
Contemplative Aside on the Conventions of Romance Novels. As society is changing and the industry is loosening up a little and authors are making more use of independent press and/or self-publishing, there's a wider range in the pairings of romance novels. One thing I've definitely been noticing is the romance series where one installment centers on a same-sex couple. I am totally on board with this, but I'm also curious about the fact that it's always (in my experience) two men. Romance is a genre that's predominantly written and read by women, but with very few exceptions, its ventures into same-sex partnerships are always male couples. (I feel like I remember seeing academic scholarship on the way that fanfic, another genre predominantly written and read by women, also traditionally leaned heavily on relationships between two men, e.g. most famously Spock/Kirk but clearly not limited there. So I'm not seeing anything really new, or trying to reinvent the analytical wheel. I'm just saying I find it interesting.)
The She-King series, Libbie Hawker. I picked this up as an e-book box set, on sale. Ever since I read the Falco books by Lindsay Davis, I've been hoping to find an author who could give Egypt the same type of treatment that Davis gives Rome. These books are not the books I was looking for. (I'm not sure the books I'm looking for are out there. Historical fiction about Egypt is basically its own sub-genre, but everyone seems really into the mystical aspects of things. What I love about the Falco books is the vision of an everyday Rome, but people who write about Egypt seem less interested in the everyday than in the divine.) Anyway, enough about what these aren't. What they are is the story of Hatshepsut, famous for being a female pharaoh, a story that mixes religion and court politics and Egyptian culture. I'm not sure what to say about these. I mean, I read them all, and I didn't dislike them, and if you're into ancient Egypt then sure why not. The whole business (from character to plot to writing style) was a little too stiff for my tastes, in the end.
And if anyone's come across something that looks like Falco, but Egyptian, please do let me know.
True North series by Sarina Bowen (Bittersweet, Steadfast, Keepsake). Romance novels, set in semi-rural Vermont, focusing on a farming family that's also the center of the local community. Sarina Bowen's wheelhouse seems to be stories about young people with profoundly messed-up pasts who are struggling to do better, and there's plenty of that in these books. (She also nails that dynamic in her earlier Ivy Years series, which I highly recommend.) Weird but true fact about my romance novel reading: I actually find the sex scenes not that interesting and tend to skim them. I'm in this genre for the emotional development and the witty banter. All three books in this series (and she's strongly hinted that more books are coming, but maybe not for a year or so) are all about emotional development. I liked all the characters, I liked that their issues were real issues with real consequences, I liked the sense of community. I'm not going to try and convince anyone to start reading romance novels if you're not interested in doing so, but if you're interested, you'll probably like these.
The Midnight, Texas series by Charlaine Harris (Midnight Crossroad, Day Shift, Night Shift). Charlaine Harris, who probably never has to work again after the success of the Sookie Stackhouse books, is having some fun. These are some crazy weird books, and if I'm understanding correctly, I think they're also an attempt to tie together all of the different weird supernatural universes she's created in various series. So it's a collision of mis-matched supernatural characters in one tiny crossroads town in Texas. (A town so tiny and so weird that the characters themselves occasionally wonder out loud how a town with so few residents and so few businesses manages to stay afloat economically.) She does a great job of keeping everything slightly off-balance while not tilting too far into messy and incomprehensible. (The end of the trilogy veered very close to nutter territory but I thought it worked out okay.) Quirky as all get-out, not a lot of tidy tying up of loose ends, etc.
The Blades of the Rose series by Zoe Archer. I am sure that these books have individual titles, but I'm going to be honest here, I picked up the e-book complete-series bundle for very cheap, and I read them all while I was in the cardiac ICU, and I don't know that I could even tell you with any certainty how many books are in this series, much less what they're called. I bought the series bundle because I think that some authors I like and respect have said good things about Zoe Archer, and (again just being honest here) it was a lot of pages for not a lot of money and I knew I was going to need the book equivalent of watching dumb television from my hospital bed. (For the record, I am completely aware of how snotty I sound right now.) This series is not really my normal thing. It's historical romance, in some vaguely Victorian British-Empire setting, and it's a tiny bit steampunk, both of which I'm fine with, but it's also supernatural fantasy epic etc, which is really not my thing. The heroes of the series are members of a secret society called the Blades of the Rose, who carry wee magical compasses and travel the world trying to protect native magical artifacts from the predations of a different secret society, the Heirs of Albion, who are trying to control all of the native magical artifacts in the world in order to secure British dominance over lesser peoples. I can see how she's trying to do a sympathetic critique of colonialism, and I appreciate very much that she gives prominent roles to both women and people of color (in one book, a First Nations hero, and in another a black Englishman), but the Heirs are like cartoon villains and most of the "native" people they interact with feel a little too noble-savage. (Also I'm too much of a science person, still, to be comfortable with the essentially arbitrary nature of most fantasy-book magic systems. This is my problem, other readers have different tastes, etc.)
It's strange how it's easier to find a lot to say about books I liked less. Books that I love, I just end up gushing "yes this! It's awesome!" There's a lot more word-count in critique, apparently.
--Susan