October
27,
2002
In Elizabeth Moon's Divided Allegiance
, her trilogy takes a
decided turn for the worse. The first Paksenarrion book was bog-standard
medieval military fantasy made interesting mostly because its protagonist
was a member of a mercenary company rather than an adventurer; the second
begins with Paksenarrion leaving her mercenary company behind and setting
off for a solo D&D-style adventure.
Quickly, she meets up with a level six chaotic neutral half-elf mage, and
the two of them explore the ruins of an ancient elven city, now possessed
by a powerful evil. The passages and corridors in the ruins, of course,
are full of orcs, and there's nice loot (including a magic sword that
glows blue, and special elf-crafted chain mail) once they defeat the
powerful bad guy at the end.
After this, she heads off to a small village, where the town council asks
her if she can investigate a band of bandits that attacked a caravan.
With the company of a mysterious thief and a few low-level fighters, she
traces the bandits back to an abandoned keep peppered with all sorts of
traps, grunts (not orcs, but they may as well have been), and ultimately a
powerful evil cleric. I think I remember that quest in (the computer
game) Baldur's Gate.
This book had the Baen logo on the spine, but if you swap a few proper
nouns around, it could just as easily have had a TSR logo. If it had,
it'd be a superb TSR novel -- I've read a lot of those in my day, due to a
youthful conviction that if a series of books sold a lot of copies, it had
to have something good about it, so I know whereof I speak. Most
D&D books are abysmally bad, so that when one comes along that's even
reasonably well-crafted, it seems astonishingly good in comparison:
consider the success that R.A. Salvatore has enjoyed in that realm, and
how much less success he's had writing more mainstream fantasy. Moon is
better than Salvatore, which puts her about ten miles above the rest of
the TSR stable.
Still, this isn't a D&D book, so I'd have hoped for something a little bit
more. I'm still very much in the mood for generic fantasy, but this is
starting to stretch even my tolerance of genre conventionality -- I don't
think I've read a real novel where the phrase "you can almost hear the
dice rolling" was more applicable. This is a disappointing follow-up to a
relatively promising start; the end of it does skew things in a new
direction, though, so I'm curious to see how the third volume will go.
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October
22,
2002
I always feel like I'm cheating when I review the individual books
of an omnibus separately. My mind has a deep conviction that if a
work is bound in one cover, it's one book, and to treat it as multiple
books isn't quite kosher. But then, why should I let the vagaries of
the publishing industry affect how a book is defined? Would someone
who read The Dying Earth in 1953 have considered it merely the
first fourth of an eventual omnibus? They would not.
The thing is, though, someone who read Elizabeth Moon's
Sheepfarmer's Daughter
very well might have thought of it as
the first third of The Deed of Paksenarrion, so it's a bit of a
different case. But if I can't quite justify reviewing this separately
from the completed trilogy on principled grounds, I can easily do so on
pragmatic ones: I don't want to leave my poor booklog unattended for as
long as it'll take me to get through the whole thing.
So, then. After finishing up all that Vance, I was in the mood for
something familiar, down-to-earth, and comfortable; this hit the spot
nicely.
The story begins with Paksenarrion, the titular sheepfarmer's daughter,
running away from home so that she can join a mercenary company rather
than get married, so right away we know we're in the familiar Plucky
Female Heroine Who Doesn't Wear Dresses And Ride Sidesaddle zone. She
meets up with the company, goes through the requisite training scenes
where she realizes that she's still got a lot to learn, but she's got
pluck, determination, and fortitude. Once that's done, the company leaves
the hardy north to fight in the decadent warring kingdoms of the south,
where the primary action of the book takes place.
Will Paksenarrion become a hero? Will a corrupt bad guy receive his just
desserts? I don't want to give anything away, so I'll just give a little
hint: Yes.
Despite my somewhat sarcastic rendition of the plot, this is actually a
very enjoyable book. It's not at all free from cliche, but that was the
whole point of picking it up in the first place. It's my firm belief that
there's nothing inherently bad about using familiar tropes, and that what
ultimately matters is how well and interestingly they're handled. Moon
handles them reasonably well, and adds the mercenary company twist to
things, which makes the book feel different from a standard quest novel.
My main complaint with this book, actually, is that it was very leisurely
and unhurriedly paced; a lot of unimportant details take up a lot of time,
making the book longer than the strict requirements of plot would dictate.
But I have a Theory about that, too, which I will expound when I write up
the third book.
Yes, that's right: I'm ending this review with a teaser for a future
review. That's the kind of untrammelled recklessness you can only get
here at Weasel Words. Well, or on your local news. ("Is your book
killing you? Tune in at 11 to find out.")
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October
14,
2002
If you'd told me a year and a half ago that I'd be reading Bridget A.
Barnes and Steven M. York's Common Sense Parenting of Toddlers and
Preschoolers
, I'd have given you one hell of a weird look. Which
probably goes to show something, but dang if I can think of what.
So the thing about parenting is, it seems like the sort of thing that an
intelligent person should know how to do instinctively. I mean, it's just
some obvious interpersonal stuff combined with simple psychological
conditioning. Except damn if it doesn't turn out to be more confounding
than that -- dealing with pre-rational children is fundamentally different
from dealing with semi-rational adults, and the complexity and immediacy
of actual situations confound obvious solutions. So, like any good
computer person, when the interface is unclear, I turned to the manual.
The most popular kid-manuals are probably the What to Expect...
books, and they're damn fine books, indeed -- but they only go up to three
years old, so the particular child with which I'm concerned is out of spec
for those books; hence, this one.
It's a good book. Unlike the What to Expect... books, it focuses
only on parenting and disciplining topics, and doesn't address
developmental, medical, or other topics at all. It's written clearly,
concretely and simply, and outlines a straightforward path of action that
seems sensible, at least. Whether or not its recommendations
actually work in practice is something I won't know for a while yet, but
the book is convincing enough that I'll give 'em a shot.
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October
9,
2002
I really shouldn't have read Jack Vance's Rhialto the
Marvellous
right now. As soon as I started reading it, I realized
that I was in the mood for something else; but I also wanted to just
finish the big ol' omnibus so I could put it back on my shelf without a
bookmark in it, so I decided to just push on through.
At least this time I had an excuse. I have a habit of finding an author,
and reading a whole bunch of their stuff in one sitting, until I'm finally
so turned off the author that I don't know if I'll read anything of theirs
again. I did it with Bill Bryson, I did it with Christopher Moore, and
only the immanent quality of Wodehouse and Vance prevent me from having
burnt out on them.
So, at any rate, I can't really tell how good this book was. It's my
sense that it's somewhat less enjoyable than the other three Dying Earth
books, but that's not a judgment I place a lot of trust in. Like the
other books, this one comprises a few shorter stories; in this case, each
of them feature the wizard Rhialto the Marvellous.
Rhialto is a different sort of protagonist than Cugel the Clever. Where
Cugel was largely incompetent and blundered his way through his
adventures, Rhialto is a respectable wizard whose appellation isn't
especially ironic. It's my suspicion that this saps the narrative a bit,
but I can't say that with any certainty.
Well, I'm glad that's done with now. It's always a nice feeling to be
able to put a huge brick of a book back on your shelf. Now, I just need
to figure out what I'm going to read next; I think some generic fantasy
sounds very appealing about now.
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