Entry tags:

reviews, writing

Face Down Below the Banqueting House by Kathy Lynn Emerson
Mystery set in Elizabethan times. The author's done lots of research and it shows, though most of the time not too clunkily and much of it was fascinating. One of a series though (as with most mysteries I think?) stands alone perfectly well. Obligatory living-in-sin affair on the part of Our Heroine (a widow); at least the consequences aren't completely glossed over, but. I'm just bored of the trope, I guess.

The story was quite readable and satisfying for the light kind of read it was, anyway.

Cart & Cwidder by Diana Wynne Jones
Part of the Dalemark quartet, of which book 4 reminded me distressingly of things I was doing less well in Chalice of Truth. I, um. I absolutely adore some of DWJ's stuff (Homeward Bounders, Fire and Hemlock, the first Chrestomanci books); and then there's other of her stuff that I... don't understand how she can write both the stuff I adore and also this. There's the weird thing she does with POV, for instance: like an amalgam of tight-third and omniscient. And then there's the thing where the magical boy hero always has a distant mother and a duplicitous father-figure (I don't think it's ever his actual father - in most of the Chrestomanci books it's an uncle). It got predictable quite a while ago now, y'know?

And I kind of wonder if she knew. And if I've got things like that. I already know that there's a certain character-type I always kill, but is there anything else I've missed?

I'm at chapter 5 now; I'll probably skim the rest to see if anything new happens.