reviews

Sherlock Revisited

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So I’ve been on this total Sherlock Holmes and Great Britain kick lately. I’m a total Anglophile, though not so bad that I stayed up for the royal wedding a few months ago. 🙂 At any rate, I got started on this by watching BBC’s new Sherlock series. If you haven’t watched it, Netflix it. Now. I’ll wait.

Done? Fantastic! And so is that show. So sad I don’t get BBC America, but I digress. I’m here to pick up an anthology called The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. This was a collection of short stories featuring the worlds greatest detective as written by fantasy authors. There are well known authors such as Steven King and Neil Gaiman, as well as a bunch of folks I hadn’t heard of.

Arthur Conan Doyle was a spiritualist and as such, he worked some of his beliefs into his Holmes stories, such as The Hound of the Baskervilles, which featured the mystery of a demonic hound. Holmes himself wasn’t a spiritualist and indeed proved the hound to be nothing more than a violently trained dog covered in a phosphoric substance. Inevitably in the Holmes stories, there is always a reasonable and logical explanation.

This anthology was based on the premise: What if there wasn’t a logical explanation? What if some of the things Holmes investigated turned out to be truly inexplicable? Or what if the world Holmes lived in featured the supernatural in every day life. This was a chance to go to town with Holmes.

The book started out promisingly enough with a short by Stephen King. Normally I’m not a Stephen King fan. An ex-boyfriend of mine gave me a collection of King’s short stories, telling me that they were creepy and horrifying. I used them to get to sleep at night. It wasn’t that I didn’t get what King was going for. I did. I just found his writing a bit too trite and predictable for me. I’m the type of person who figured out that Bruce Willis was ghost half way through The Sixth Sense, so the short Trucks didn’t do it for me.

At any rate, Stephen King wrote a refreshingly subtle and original Holmes short. It wasn’t too different than something that Doyle would write I feel (and yes, I have read the original Holmes. All of them. I love them) but with just a little bit of a spiritual twist.  I was a feeling better about having spent 15 bucks on the book.

The next story (or perhaps the third, can’t remember the order at the moment) featured a mirror universe. Being a Trek fan, I know that alternate or mirror universes are often used in sci-fi/fantasy stories. I like them because you can see the what if but you can get the original that you love back.  Haven’t you ever wondered with an evil Holmes or a good Moriarty would be like? Well, read the book! 😀

I was a little disappointed however by some of the later stories. Some of them didn’t really seem to have anything to do with science fiction or fantasy at all. That’s not to say that they weren’t entertaining or well written, but I was expecting a bit more fantasy in a book I found in the fantasy section of the book store.

All in all it was worth the read. The writing was very well done (B/B+). However, I have to give it an overall rating of C+ simply because there could have been much more fantasy involved in some of these stories. And man, they should have let Jim Butcher have a crack at one of those stories!

The stories of October Daye

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I just found a wonderful new series.  Seanan McGuire takes you into the world of half-faerie/half-human PI October ‘Toby’ Daye.  When I first came across the book, I was a little leery about the oddly named title character. After reading the book and understanding that she isn’t human and wasn’t raised as a human, it makes more sense. The books all take place in modern San Francisco and around the central character of Toby Daye.

Toby is a changeling (part Fae, part human) and doesn’t really belong to either world.  Changelings are generally treated as second class citizens among the Fae and all Fae hide themselves from humans in this series.  Toby is a Knight of a local Fae duchy, of which there are many. There are also many different kinds of Fae.

The first book, Rosemary and Rue, starts out intriguingly enough with PI Daye trailing a couple of people suspected of kidnapping the wife and daughter of her liege, Duke Sylvester of Shadowed Hills.  Only she isn’t as careful or as concealed as she think because they turn her into a fish.  Yes, a fish.  For fourteen years.  The book is a little vague as to how she becomes un-fished but apparently the spell just ends after fourteen years.

Toby, of course, finds it very hard to reintegrate into modern society.  Technology is much farther along than she remembered. Her lover and daughter thought she had run out on them and want nothing to do with them.  Having failed at her initial task fourteen years ago, she wants to distance herself from her court out of a feeling of shame, even though the wife and daughter were returned. All she wants to do is get a steady job and hide from the world.

Life with the Fae is never, ever simple and she’s called back in to the world, literally.  She receives a phone message from an old friend/enemy, a pure blood faerie by the name of Evening Winterrose.  Evening gets murdered but before she goes, she places a curse on Toby. The only way to lift the curse is to find Evening’s killers.

With the threat of death over her head, she has no choice but to get back into the investigation game and back into court life.  I won’t go into too much detail, but with the fact that there’s a fourth book on the way (can’t wait!), you can safely assume that Toby survives.

The characters are well written and the story was compelling enough that I zipped right through the second and third books (Local Habitation and An Artificial Night). McGuire brings the world to life. Magic, though present, isn’t the be all end all answer in the novels.  Toby Daye has definite limits to her abilities.  If she uses too much magic, she gets magic burn (a nasty migraine). She almost dies in all three of the books and only survives through the help of friends.

I highly recommend these books.  They are amazingly well written and entertaining.  McGuire does a wonderful job in bringing the Fae world to life. I rate all three books as solid A reads and I cannot wait for the next one to come out. I received a number of books for Christmas and I haven’t read any except Rosemary and Rue because I’ve been too obsessed with these novels. 😀

Hello world!

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Recently I’ve become hooked on reading urban fantasy novels and anthologies.  My problem is that I stumbled into this fascinating genre via Jim Butcher’s awesome Dresden Files series and I had never even heard the term “urban fantasy” before.  I tried Googling for urban fantasy recommendations and didn’t find a whole lot out there.   So I figured that I would create my own blog for reviewing the books that I’ve read and asking people if they had any suggestions for similar books.

Like I said, I’ve been real into urban fantasy lately, but I also like some mystery, some action/adventure and even some history books.  So I’ll have a little bit of everything on my site eventually.

Just a bit of miscellany before I get started:

  • I am not looking for any reviews, recommendations or raves about the Twilight Series by Stephanie Meyer. I realize that I may piss off a horde of teenage fan girls out there, but I personally found the series dull. I’m sorry but vampires do not sparkle.
  • I do like Harry Potter. I adore Harry Potter.  I’m obsessed with Harry Potter. I’m sure I’ll get around to writing a review for those books eventually but since they are so popular, I’m sure I don’t need to recommend them to many people out there at this point.
  • I do not own any of the titles, characters, author’s names etc I may mention here. I’m not making any money off of this (though I would love to if I could).
  • I don’t care if you don’t agree with what I say, that’s your prerogative, however, please try to be civil in your posts and I’ll try and be civil in my responses.
  • I have read a lot of books and I would like to review most, if not all, of them eventually.  This means I may have to re-read them, so if new posts take a while, that’s why.

And now…to the show!