Review: The Arranger

I received a review copy of The Arranger by L. J. Sellers and the bottom line here is that I think the book is almost awesome. I am not a regular reader of thrillers and maybe my expectations weren't in line with genre norms so consider the source.

The story is set in a near future US where the federal government has been radically downsized, unemployment is high, health insurance is rare and a lot of government services, including basic EMT and police services have been cut to the bone. There are elements of dystopian near future sci-fi and while these set a tone and provide some character motivation I think this clearly belongs in the suspense/thriller category.

The heroine is a 42-year old woman named Lara Evans who used to be a police detective but now works as a freelance EMT. She's called to the scene of a shooting where the victim is a high profile government employee who is anxious to avoid a scandal. As it happens, he's in charge of a major national competition that our heroine is going to be involved in and pressures her with his potential to influence the outcome.

Well next thing you know, her roommate at the competition is dead on the floor and our heroine is the only suspect because she's the obvious suspect and the cops don't have the time or resources to do much digging. There's a nice setup there. It works. It feels realistic enough that if we couldn't really imagine it happening in this world it wouldn't take too much of a twist to make it actually possible and from there it's a fairly fast paced action adventure.

I think there are two pretty important weaknesses with the story. The first is characterization and the second is the finish.

The characterization suffered from a lot of telling rather than showing. For example, in the first few pages we have this paragraph:

Lara loved these moments--rushing to a scene, not knowing what chaos she would encounter. In some ways, it was better than being a police officer because she kept on the move and did a lot less paperwork. She missed the authority of the badge though. She'd liked having people pay attention and feel nervous when she approached. It beat the hell out of her current personal life: a forty-two-year-old woman with no partner, no children, no power.

We learn a lot about her in that paragraph but we don't feel any of it. I don't feel like I know her any better because I'm told she doesn't like paperwork. Nobody likes paperwork. If I saw her joking with a former colleague about how he was going to go back and write up a report on someone who got shot while she went out and saved the life of someone who got shot we'd get the same information and I would feel more like I knew the character as a person.

The other issue I had was with the end. The last 2600 words of the story start with our heroine in the last leg of the competition. She then leaves the competition, barges into the house of the director of the competition to find him dead. In doing so she finds the real reason he didn't want an investigation, gets in a confrontation with the villain, gets rescued (sort of) by the cops and ordered back to the competition which she finishes well behind the other competitors, wins anyway, enjoys a night of celebratory sex with her new fling, forgives herself a little for something that wasn't really her fault, gets the run down on why the bad guy was a bad guy and makes plans to meet the new fling when he comes out to her neck of the woods.

It was a bit much. In particular, I thought the end of the competition was a bit contrived. The character pretty clearly felt that doing the right thing meant giving up on the competition to chase the bad guy. I think it would have been better for the character and the story for it to end like that. She doesn't get the redemption she was looking for from winning because she was off being the hero. It works for the character and it doesn't stretch the plot and since you go into the thing (at least, I did) assuming she eventually wins the competition you get to throw the readers a bit of a curve.

I feel like I am concentrating a bit too much on the negative here which I don't mean to do. It was entertaining. I read it in one day which I wouldn't have done if it didn't pull me in and carry me along. It was a pretty good story with a couple problems that kept it from being completely freakin' awesome.

Plot Doesn't Matter

I found this article on spoilers through the Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast which you'll like if you think people who babble on about crystals and bigfoot are batshit crazy.

But I digress...

The article is about a study done by a bunch of folks at the University of California, San Diego which finds that people enjoy a story more if they have had it spoiled. They presented previously written stories by famous writers in three ways, 1) as they were originally writted, 2) with a prefatory paragraph that spoiled it or, 3) with the spoiler paragraph included in the text of the story.

They found that people who got spoiled ahead of time enjoyed the stories more than people who were unspoiled and those who got their spoilers in the text of the story.

I find that intriguing.

The study didn't ask why this is true so there's no data on that but the authors of the study have a couple suggestions. One, that plot just doesn't matter that much. I stole that for the title of this post but I don't really believe it. I'm about as character driven as anyone but you still need to have a plot. There needs to be some there there. I don't care how much you love Kvothe or Elijah Bailey, you don't want to follow them around while they pick up their dry cleaning and shop for groceries. The second suggestion was that it is simply easier for your brain to process information if it knows where to put it. I think that sounds perfectly reasonable but I am not sure why something that is easier to process is more enjoyable.

Whatever the merits of those suggestions, I think most of the reason people enjoy something more if spoiled like this is that they like being in on the secret. It's cool to know something other people don't. I remember at one point when I was a kid a neighbor told me about this thing his teacher gave him about the Body Rituals of the Nacirema and it was just nifty enough for it to stick in my mind so a couple years later when I had that teacher and he pulled out the same thing I knew where it was headed and had a little grin on my face the whole time.

So while the authors of the study say they don't have any secrets for writers I think they actually do and it's about building a community. I've read a bunch of writers blogs lately and one of the things that always comes up about marketing is building a community. Build a relationship with a fan base and you're in great shape. One of the things that builds community is stuff like sample chapters and the like.

You know, giving people stuff ahead of time to make them feel special.

I don't necessarily know shit. I haven't written anything unless you count about a third of the backstory for a guy who I think might be the main character of some serial storytelling action and I sure as shit don't have anything to sell that the moment. So take what I say with a pillar of salt.

Stuck to the ass of a toad

Don’t let the character be a dingleberry stuck to the ass of a toad as he floats downriver on a bumpy log.

25 Things You Should Know About Character

Review: Kinshield Legacy by KC May

Bottom Line:

It's a fun read.

A Little Deeper:

This tale relies more on good characters than a fully developed world. I don't doubt that there is a fully developed world behind the scenes but we don't actually see much of it. We see what is necessary for the story and not much else. That left me wanted more but not in a way that distracted from the story and that's the way it should be.

The characters are the strength here. The villain is an unrepentant power hungry captain of evil and while I generally prefer a little humanity in my villains this worked in context.

The two heroes more than worked. They were excellent.

Details:

Gavin Kinshield is descended from Ronor Kinshield who pledged to save the king and failed. Gavin has lived up to that legacy by failing to come through on many of his responsibilities, from fixing a door to preventing his family from being brutally murdered in front of his face. Worse, we ultimately find out that the murder was retaliation for Gavin's failure to complete a task he'd promised to complete. Yeah, he feels guilty a lot and that's part of what makes him work. He's a bit of a lout--crude, crass, and possessing less than delicate table manners. But at the heart of him, he's a decent guy. I don't think it is so much that he's a whore-with-a-heart-of-gold so much as it is that he's just a guy. He has strengths and weaknesses just like all of us. He downplays his strengths because his weaknesses (in his eyes at least) led to him seeing his wife cut open but he has them and they come to the fore when he's placed in a situation that requires them.

Daia Saberheart was born a noble's daughter--worse, his heir--and was promised to another noble's son. We don't get her entire backstory but we are told that she hated the fact that her life was being determined for her without her say. She kissed that life goodbye and burned a few bridges in the process not because it was a bad life but because she wanted her own life.

The question of whether one's life is to be determined for them or by them is a bit of a theme in the novel. While Daia Saberheart has her life laid out for her in a fashion that is rather typical for daughters of royalty and Gavin Kinshield has his seemingly dictated by an ancestor two centuries in the past it's all a question of who owns a life. Saberheart takes ownership of her life and the question of the novel is whether Kinshield will do the same.

It's a fun story with fun people and you'll probably enjoy it.

Edit--Just a follow up, as I read the sequel and it was also quite a fun read.

Review: Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb

Four Stars

Bottom Line:

If you like fantasy you'll probably like this. It's an easy world to get lost in.

A Little Deeper:

I think some people will feel that this story starts off slowly and builds slowly then sprints to the end over the last 10-15% of the book and I think those people will be the ones for whom the plot is everything. If you're like me and care about characters more than the plot I don't think you'll have that problem. I cared about what Fitz was doing so it didn't really matter if he was mucking stables or walking on the beach with his kinda maybe might be girlfriend even though neither of those particularly advanced the plot much.

If you're plot centric and aren't hooked by the first chapter or two then give it a pass because the first two thirds or so of the book is more of the same.

Details:

The premise is a little cliched. Fitz is the bastard son of the heir apparent and his life sucks, lol boo hoo. But he'd be an interesting guy if he weren't the bastard son of a lord and his bastardy just serves to put him where the action is and prejudice people for and against him...so it works.

The magic here is interesting. I wouldn't say there is a lot of magic involved but that's somewhat disingenuous. Our Hero has a certain innate magical talent of communicating with animals not just in the sense of making them understand his speech or understanding theirs but as a sort of mind link between him and them. It comes so naturally to him as a child that he doesn't even understand that he's doing anything.

And then what serves as a father figure forbids him from doing it at all.

And later he tries to learn a type of magic that may or may not be different and he struggles. At one point he uses his connection to animals to help with that struggle but it doesn't really end well. We are later told that his teacher is somewhat less than sophisticated in his teaching methods and that Our Hero has more skill than the teacher was able to nurture. And yet, at the end of the story we're not entirely clear how much skill in magic he actually has.

As with many stories with child protagonists, this is in large part a story about a kid finding out who he is and where he fits (ha, I slay me) in the world. As such it is a little disappointing that he spend so much time simply going where he's told and doing what he is told without taking much if any control over what he is to become. That changes in the Big Climactic Thing At The End which bodes well for the next volume in the trilogy.

Review: The Hunger Games

This is an awesome story.

In one sense, the science fiction elements are pretty limited. There weren't spaceships, faster than light travel, teleporters, ray guns or sharks with frikkin' laser beams. There were some genetically modified creatures, a Star Trek style food replicator and that's about it.

But it was set in a post apocalyptic US where the political situation is radically different. There's a Capital that is very much in charge and there are twelve Districts that are geographically and politically isolated.

And part of the way the Capitol shows its power is by having a Shirley Jackson style lottery where two "winners" from each of the twelve districts are dropped into an arena where they fight to the death. Why? Because that's the way the bastards in the Capitol want it.

Come to think of it, it's a pretty absurd premise, really, but it never feels absurd because the characterization and the storytelling are absolutely first rate.

Read it. You won't be sorry.

I Got A Kindle

So this is supposed to be a writing blog now, which means that for the nonce it is a reading blog since I don't have anything really worth talking about from a writing perspective.

So I just got a Kindle.

And I completely fell in love with it immediately.

This only makes sense with a little back story. I was a bit of a nerdy kid. I wasn't as nerdy as some but nerdier than most. Given a choice between going out and playing kickball and staying in and reading the Belgariad for the fifth time there's a good chance the books would win.

It's not like I didn't have friends but the characters in books became friends too. So reading the Belgariad for the fifth time was much like going to spend a weekend in Vegas with your old college buddies except that I was twelve.

And I don't mean to single out the Belgariad. The same was true with Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, The Hardy Boys, R Daneel Olivaw, and pretty much every denizen of Xanth. At one point I measured things on my bookshelf and I had over three feet of Piers Anthony books.

All I ever wanted for Christmas was bookstore gift cards.

And then I lost it.

I don't really know when it happened. I went off to college at 18 and wasn't ready. I ended up coming home getting a job and eventually getting my degree (BA History) at night. That didn't leave much time to read. It was somewhere in there between graduating high school and years later getting a college degree that reading ceased to be one of the pillars of my recreation time.

And then I got my kindle and it all came back. I spent an entire day reading Hunger Games. I just hunkered down, immersed myself in someone else's world and only pulled myself out when I had to pee.

It was awesome.

And I immediately went looking for old friends. Since then I have been buried in the extra long version of The Stand which is not really something you can read in one sitting. I feel like I have met up with long lost friends and reconnected with a part of my past. There's a certain degree of rancid history (you might know it better as nostalgia) there and it's just phenomenal.

Anyway, about the device. It does what it does really well. It's not a tablet and if you expect it to be you will be disappointed. You read shit on it and it helps you do that. It doesn't get between you and the world the way hardcover books sometimes do.

The screen is very readable. I read for a whole day with no problems at all.

I got the wifi version with the ads and I'm pretty glad I did. I can get books from my couch. I can't really imagine a situation where I'm going to have a need to purchase a book while away from my house that can't wait until I get to a wifi hot spot. Maybe it exists but really, I'm not sure it does.

And the ads are not remotely intrusive. When the machine is off, you have an ad. It's like a book cover. When you're looking at your bookshelf of ungodly amounts of reading material there's a little ad down the bottom. When you're actually reading....zippo. It's awesome and good and lovely.