Amused in Review

Newage MarySue, pitting the life-affirming chocolatier/witch vs. the rigidly repressed Puritanical Catholic priest for the affections (or is it the soul) of a small French village. The POV alternates between the chocolatier, Vianne Rocher, and the priest, Francis Reynaud, but only serves to demonstrate that Joanne Harris really can't imagine what a Catholic priest might be thinking. Mildly entertaining, with at least a couple of vivid characters (including Rocher herself) and some nice descriptions of chocolate, but I can't help thinking it would be stronger if you only read every other chapter.

Somewhere between comic fantasy and coming-of-age story, Ithanalin's Restoration is the oddly prosaic story of an apprentice wizard in a Sword & Sorcery sort of world (the same world as the author's previous Master of the Five Magics and Night of Madness) where wizardry works pretty much like in D&D: there are distinct named spells for every effect ("The Spell of Lesser Invaded Dreams", "So-and-So's Levitation"), spells consume exotic ingredients which the wizard has to prep in advance and carry around, interrupted spells can have odd side-effects, etc. Ithanalin's apprentice Kalisha has to restore her master to his original form after a spell that went awry scatters pieces of his soul into the furnishings of the room and the animated furniture all runs away. The rest of the story deals with her trying to find, and capture all the furniture so that she can cast the complicated spell to reverse the effect. Time limit: 12 hours. No actually, there doesn't seem to be much of a time limit, or indeed much tension at all in the story. She encounters some obstacles, and learns to overcome her impulsiveness, but until the very end the story is oddly light on narrative drive. Action-adventure this ain't. The characters are, by and large, likable, and there's something to be said for steering clear of the High Fantasy cliches, but there's something oddly unsatisfying about wondering not what will happen next but whether anything of note will happen. It wasn't exactly boring, but I did have the sense of waiting for the shoe to drop almost to the very end of the book. When it finally did, I was left thinking, "well, if that had happened in chapter five, and built from there, this would have been a lot more exciting book."

Wildly inventive and often somewhat whimsical adventure tale about a police detective named Thursday Next (her father is a rogue timetraveller) in a Britain where the Crimean War never ended, genetic engineering is a hobby kind of like model rocketry is in our world, vampires and werewolves exist, and literature is popular enough that streetcorners sport vending machines that serve up passages from Shakespeare and the police force has a special branch, section 27, to deal with crimes involving literature (forgery mostly). Thursday Next is one such detective, before she gets drawn into an attempt to capture Acheron Hades, the third most evil man in the world. Hades, who cannot be photographed, and who can hear his name if it is spoken within a thousand yards, escapes and kidnaps Thursday's brilliant, eccentric Uncle Mycroft. Mycroft, you see, has invented a device that lets you enter into a work of literature; Acheron's plan: hold Jane Eyre hostage.
A neat premise, and the kind of inventive profligacy that I really admire in speculative fiction, plus an engaging heroine, and a real love of books. All in all, a winner.

Somewhat tongue-in-cheek fantasy, veering between "low" fantasy picaresque (the protagonist is an assassin who just can't seem to retire peacefully) and high (the stakes are the fate of the world, and the humans and other races are pawns of the gods). Quite fun for what it is, and unexpectedly moving in parts, with a surprisingly humanistic and satisfying ending. Much less ambitious than Baker's "Dr. Zeus" series (Garden of Iden, Sky Coyote, Mendoza in Hollywood), but still quite inventive, and distinctly reminiscent of Jack Vance with a touch of Roger Zelazny.

A fun book on food, eating, and cooking, collecting essays by Vogue food critic (who also writes for Slate, or so his bio says) Jeffery Steingarten. Comes across as a more erudite (if somewhat less funny) version of my favorite food author, Calvin Trillin. Unlike Trillin, though, Steingarten is willing to go beyond appreciating food to cooking food, and includes recipes. Not a good book to read on an empty stomach with nothing in the freezer or pantry.

Amusing, somewhat kinky power fantasy by the author of the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series. It's almost as if Laurell K Hamilton, having grown tired of the accusations of Mary-Sue-ism directed at the Anita Blake books decided "I'll show them a Mary Sue!" This time the powerful, beautiful, hard-as-nails protagonist is a fairy princess, making her way as a private eye in LA. In the first book, A Kiss of Shadows, Princess Meredith was made co-heir to the Queen of Air and Darkness's throne--if the current heir didn't have her assassinated first. In the current book, she's back in LA, with her harem of gorgeous Unseelie boy-toy bodyguards (to become Queen, she will first have to prove her fertility, you see), just in time to become involved with not one, but two newly awoken ancient evils stalking the land. As usual, it's the character interaction, and the eroticism, that's the driving force, not the mystery per se.

More of the same: kinky elf sex, elven magic, elven court politics. A potboiler, not that there's anything wrong with that.