Cirque des Geeks

I never thought I'd hear myself say this, but internet: I need your help finding stories with accurate depictions of male characters.

(This comes from discussing Looking For Alaska and being told that maybe I don't like the protagonist because he's a very well-written teenage boy, and from trying to discuss The Dresden Files and being told "It sounds like you just don't books with accurate male characters in them." Once is a co-incidence, twice is carelessness.)

In the spirit of not becoming what I hate - someone who dismisses or dislikes books based entirely on the gender of the main character without thinking through why: does anyone have any stories with accurate/realistic protrayals of male characters? I suspect that I need to read things to judge how accurate this suggestion is. :\

Don't worry - soon, we will return to your regularly scheduled flailing and ladies!

Pisces Rising by Peter Cave and Margaret Wredden // Fontana Books, 1979 // Bought at a carboot sale // Read and reviewed February 2013

Fathoms deep they lay in wait, these sea creatures man had exploited for so long. Soon their concerted might would be ranged against mankind – the slashing, tearing jaws of the great sharks, the numbing shocks of the stingrays, the fury of the killer whales and the guile of the dolphins. Man would be taught a lesson, slowly and agonisingly, and he would have only himself to blame...

I read this pretty much entirely because cheap-and-rubbish-70s-scifi with bonus dolphins on the cover (Seriously, it has 85p printed on the cover as the recommended retail price - this thing is pretty much a historical artifact!)! And the best part is that it is exactly as good as it looks.

This book contains, in no particular order:

• A fairly illogical story with the silliest, most anticlimatic ending. The blurb in my copy makes it sound like a story of Evil Corporations vs Noble Idealistic Scientist... Which is dropped fairly quickly. Along with pretty much everything else in the initial set up beyond ANGRY FISH.


• Terrible stereotypes (the American scientist is heroic, any of the non-white characters are racial stereotypes are introduced to die and/or suffer, and of the female characters are ineffective peace keepers, mothers, secretaries, or Plot Point Children, the military people are pointlessly stupid, violent and cruel.


• Some ridiculous names in this - seriously, there's names that sound like something from an aquarium ("Bluey the Blue-Ring Octopus"... Why are these the default names? Why the Shakespearean names... Why many of the names? I have no idea what the logic is behind them.).


• Every problem in this book (every single one!) being caused by stupid military people (I include the fish/underwater mammals in this) or scientists doing something really stupid, pointless, and damaging to everyone. It is really annoying to see someone do something so blatantly ridiculous, so reading this book is sometimes really frustrating.


• Lectures (whole pages!) on how Man (and it is always Man, never humanity - yeah, this book contains some really blatant background sexism.) is destroying the enviroment in general and fish/the ocean in specific. It's... Very pointed. Very preachy.


• Decent world-building and underwater mythology. It's kinda interesting, but not great enough to justify... Well, the rest of the book.


• Basic errors that even a layperson (i.e. me) can pick up - I'm gifting my copy to a friend who scuba-dives and is interested in this sort of thing to see if he picks up more than me, but there seems to be things like basic misgendering, inaccuracies in actions and statements... It doesn't make sense, some of the things they get wrong.


• Some deaths and attacks that are genuinely atmospheric, horrifying, and inventive! Some of the effects a sudden lack of fish would have on the world are really well-thought through and interesting, with the obvious flaw of some of them are absolute nonsense.


• FISH TELEPATHY. When telepathic fish is not the strangest thing in your novel, you should probably... Take a look at that.

BASICALLY, this is one sexy love-interest away from being the literary version of a made-for-TV "Syfy" original, so if you like those it may be worth trying to grab a copy. It is exactly of the quality and enjoyment level of one of those and the very least; pretty bad, but a decently entertaining read!

"Week in..." is a regular post to let me discuss what I've been reading, watching or playing lately in fewer words than a full review. It's primarily here to be useful and let me talk about things that either I'm not planning to review, or won't be getting around to for a while.

Books

( No-Time Party Cakes // Looking For Alaska // To Write Like a Woman // The Scorpio Races )

Games
( Mass Effect 3 )

Web Original
( The Lizzie Bennet Diaries )

So that's what I've been up to this week - how about everyone else?

Wither by Lauren DeStefano // Harper Collins, 2011 // Borrowed from the library // Read December 2011, reviewed January 2012 // Trigger warning: (skip) Forced marriage, underage sex and pregnancy.

By age sixteen, Rhine Ellery has four years left to live. She can thank modern science for this genetic time bomb. A botched effort to create a perfect race has left all males with a lifespan of 25 years, and females with a lifespan of 20 years. Geneticists are seeking a miracle antidote to restore the human race, desperate orphans crowd the population, crime and poverty have skyrocketed, and young girls are being kidnapped and sold as polygamous brides to bear more children. When Rhine is kidnapped and sold as a bride, she vows to do all she can to escape. Her husband, Linden, is hopelessly in love with her, and Rhine can’t bring herself to hate him as much as she’d like to. He opens her to a magical world of wealth and illusion she never thought existed, and it almost makes it possible to ignore the clock ticking away her short life. But Rhine quickly learns that not everything in her new husband’s strange world is what it seems. Her father-in-law, an eccentric doctor bent on finding the antidote, is hoarding corpses in the basement. Her fellow sister wives are to be trusted one day and feared the next, and Rhine is desperate to communicate to her twin brother that she is safe and alive. Will Rhine be able to escape--before her time runs out?

Together with one of Linden's servants, Gabriel, Rhine attempts to escape just before her seventeenth birthday. But in a world that continues to spiral into anarchy, is there any hope for freedom?

I really didn't mean to read this one - I didn't know anything about it, but I'm generally wary of YA books with girls in floaty dresses on the cover. But then the sequel was stalking me around Waterstones (Every time I went in, I had a moment of "Ooh, that book looks interesting", picked it up, and only then remembered that I'd done this before.) so I decided to exorcise it by reading the first one in the series.

... It worked!

(As an aside, I really liked the cover for this, and the way it throws subtlety to the wind to highlight all of the symbolism. It's nice, I like the design, and it is a floaty-dress cover where the floaty dress is actually appropriate!)

( 'I wait.' (Cut for length of review and vague, unmarked spoilers. )

In conclusion... I really enjoyed this book, much more than I expected to, but I'd be hard-pressed to tell you why. It's was fun, in a depressing sort of way, despite its flaws, and I guess that's enough!

If you like this you might like:

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood or The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers if you like dystopian/post-apocalyptic futures where baby-production is the major societal concern and role for women, and the reactions people have to this.

In Time if you like the aspect of "genetic manipulation means we're all going to die really young!"

¹: I appreciate that it's not anyone's responsibility to educate anyone else, but I'm still not sure why Jenna and Rhine didn't explain about the truth - ANY of the truth - to Linden when they had the chance. I do wonder how the story would've gone if they had.

The Ninth Circle by Alex Bell // Gollancz, 2009 // Borrowed from the library // Read November-December 2011, reviewed December 2012

A man comes to on the floor of a shabby apartment in the middle of Budapest. His head is glued to the floorboards with his own blood. There's a fortune in cash on the kitchen table. And he has no idea where, or who, he is. He can do extraordinary things—speak any number of languages fluently, go three days without food or sleep, and fight with extraordinary prowess. But without a name, without a past, he's isolated from the rest of the world; a stranger to everyone, including himself—until a chance encounter with a young scholar leads to his first friendship, and his first hint that someone out there knows more about him than he does. Someone is sending him clues about his past. Photographs hidden in books and crates of wine. Cryptic clues pointing towards a murdered woman. And clear warnings against Stephomi, his only friend. But that's not all; Gabriel Antaeus is seeing strange, impossible things: a burning man is stalking his dreams and haunting his mirrors, his dreams are filled with violence from the past, and his pregnant young neighbor is surrounded by an extraordinary golden aura. Something dark and violent in Gabriel's past is trying to resurface. And as he pieces the clues together, everything points towards an astounding war between angels and demons—a battle not just for the future of the world, but for the minds and souls of everyone in it.

Oh, I was not keen on this one. The blurb made it sound really interesting, at least the first half - mysterious people plus angels plus demons sounds like the sort of thing I would gobble down in a heartbeat! And yet this... This felt like a slog. I kept picking it up resentfully, muttering about how I didn't want to read it, I'm not enjoying it - the only reason I did finish it was because it had been on my to-read list for years.

(I am still really disappointed that the story isn't as good as the blurb. So disappointed.)

Part of my problem was that I couldn't really stand the narrator. While paranoid/unstable narrators can be interesting in their own right, and I have no objections to characters taking time for very justified freak-outs, but Gabriel was just... I couldn't like him. Part of it was that he was extremely self-righteous - nothing is his fault, and everything he says or does is right (if he's wrong, then he'll either find another justification or be dramatic about it.). The rest of it is that he almost comes across as an unreliable narrator - I'm willing to believe that what Gabriel reports is factually right, but not the conclusions he draws - and that's not actually a trope I like. On top of that, his relationship with Casey comes across as really creepy, even in his own narration.

The rest of my dislike for this book comes from the fact that it is so hamhanded. It is trying to make about good and evil not being so different, but it feels like the book is trying to beat me over the head with it. (See also: Devils are charming and friendly! Angels will terrorise and intimidate you! ... My notes for this do have "CHAOTIC GOOD DROW ARE A THING!" written on them in big letters, I'm sorry.) Worse than that, Gabriel and his mysteries actually bored me. There were Dramatic Reveals all over the last third of the book and I just didn't care.

I was much more interested in Casey and her story, and that didn't get enough screentime. For something as important as Casey's pregnancy, I really felt like there should have been more time spent with her. Her story was actually more interesting than Gabriel's turned out to be - a teenager alone in a foreign country, trying to look after herself and her brother while dealing with her mysterious pregnancy - and quite frankly, I would probably read a book about her. I guess what I want is for Casey to be focused on as a person, rather than as an object in a cosmic struggle or of Gabriel's obsession, with a satisfactory conclusion to her story!

I have to admit though, the writing does have its good points, despite some serious plot holes. It managed to portray Gabriel as an unsettling, genuinely creepy guy even as he's trying to convince himself that he's acting rationally/justified in acting irrationally. The way it handles the final chapter while staying in the limits of the diary format it uses actually worked really well, in my opinion! Just a bit too-little-too-late.

The back labels this as a "Theological thriller", which makes me laugh. There's a lot of debate about "Could you kill baby Hitler?" and the like, and so much discussion of theology, but... I would have said it was more moral than theological, despite the presence of angels and demons, if that makes sense? Certainly I wouldn't have said that it was a thriller, theological or otherwise. (Suspicion: they made up this genre so that they wouldn't get lumped in with the fantasy novels, even though that's really the best fit for it.)

Suffice to say, I didn't enjoy this book. It did have some good moments, but the amount of work it took to get to them didn't make it worth it for me.