On the Edge by Ilona Andrews
Ace, 2009
Category: Fantasy
UNFINISHED

This is the second time I’ve started and failed to finish reading this book.  The first time, I was in the wrong mood. This time, I realized that the reason I was in the wrong mood was because the book had generated it. It’s not a bad book (not great either, but not bad) but a complete mismatch for me as a reader, so I’m officially giving up. I was going to explain in more detail why it’s such a mismatch, but since I think my reaction wouldn’t be helpful to those who are a good match for it, that would just have been mean.  I don’t mind ranting about something that is genuinely flawed, but if it’s just not my thing? Not fair.

The Edge of the title is a place between two realities that coexist in our world. The Broken is what Edgers call the "real" world–magic doesn’t exist here, and people without magic can’t even perceive the boundary between it and the Edge.  The Weird is a place of true magic, akin to Faerie. The Edge is something inbetween, where the inhabitants have some magic, but not enough to let them live in the Weird and too much for the Broken. Edgers who spend too much time in either find themselves unable to return to the Edge.

Rose Drayton scrapes out a meager existence in the Edge, trying to raise her two young brothers after her parents abandoned them. Declan is a smokin’-hot blueblood from the Weird who is searching for something and incidentally has decided he’s going to claim Rose as his own. Despite initial clashes (really? I personally love it when a stranger tells me I’m going to beg him to bed me someday) they end up working together to fight an evil from the Weird that if left unchallenged will destroy Rose, her family, and ultimately everyone she cares about.

Ilona Andrews (actually a husband and wife team, but I’ll stick with the fiction) has a good track record for coming up with interesting fantasy ideas about the intersection between mundanity and magic. She is not so good with exposition. Granted, exposition is the giant bugaboo of speculative fiction, because you can’t depend on the reader’s having a familiarity with the subject, but Andrews doesn’t quite know how to handle it beyond just getting it out of the way. In On the Edge, there’s a very awkward early scene of exposition through dialogue between people who already know the facts and are really having the conversation for the sake of the reader. Fledgling writers: Don’t do this. It draws more attention to your exposition, not less. Andrews’ books get better once the exposition is established and she can just move on with the story.  My recommendation to readers who are put off by the awkwardness is to just go with it. You may ultimately not like her books, but it should be because of the story.

Like I said, not a bad book, but not my thing.  If you’re interested in urban fantasy, it’s probably worth a try.

Kitty and the Dead Man’s Hand  by Carrie Vaughn
Grand Central Publishing, 2009
Category:  Books bought new but never actually read
Time owned before reading:  2 years 7 days

My only excuse is that Carrie Vaughn pumps out these books way too fast for me to keep up.  Honestly.  Despite being fast reads (2 hrs for this one, roughly) they’re easy for me to forget about–enjoyable, not stupid, but not the kind of literary crack someone like Jim Butcher produces on almost as rapid a schedule.  I like them when I’m reading them, feel fond enough to recommend them to others, and then forget that a new one will be out in a few months.

The Kitty Norville series is urban fantasy, which is more complicated than just vampires and werewolves, but you still understand what I’m talking about when I describe it as vampires and werewolves.  The titular character is a late-night radio talk show host who was turned into a werewolf (har har, a wolf named Kitty) and now tries to live a normal life (good luck with that).  Her show is sort of Art Bell meets a toned-down Dr. Laura–Kitty discusses all sorts of paranormal subjects and gives advice to her audience, many of whom are supernatural creatures themselves.  So far, in the course of the series, Kitty has overcome her low-rank status at the bottom of her Pack, been exposed as a werewolf on national television, become the alpha female of her old Pack in Denver, made friends with a bounty hunter who normally kills her kind, fallen in love, and helped a sorta-nice vampire take over the Mastery of the vampires in Denver.  Not in that order.

In the fifth book, Kitty and her mate Ben are getting married.  Wolves already mate for life, so human marriage isn’t a huge deal, but Kitty’s mom wants to see her settled.  (Kitty’s mom is a funny mix of suburban housewife and Woman of Steel.)  After looking at all the planning necessary for My Big Fat Werewolf Wedding, they decide to elope to Las Vegas.  Kitty’s boss cons her into doing a live show from there as well, and the new vampire Master of Denver wants her to carry greetings to Dom, the Master of Las Vegas.  Because everyone wants to work during their wedding trip.

It turns out that Kitty’s boss has booked them into a hotel that just happens to be hosting a gun show, which drives Kitty nuts because she has a pathological fear and hatred of guns.  This would be a nice character trait if it weren’t so unclear whether Kitty is speaking for herself or for the author; the characterization of every attendee as a potential homicidal maniac is really stupid.  Unfortunately, it’s also a draw for bounty hunters, who are a genuine threat because they usually pack silver bullets.  Then Ben discovers that his werewolf senses make him a genius at poker.  Also, there’s an animal act full of lycanthropes–the feline type–that may not be what it seems, and a mysterious stage magician whose magic may be more real than sleight of hand.  All in all, there’s plenty for Kitty to deal with, enough that she keeps forgetting why she came in the first place.

Carrie Vaughn is not a great writer, stylistically speaking.  More accurately, I get the sense that she believes her readers are not as clever as they could be, because she tends to hammer home her revelations like she’s not sure people will have picked up on all the ramifications.  As a selling point, it’s probably a good one–better than writing that’s so abstruse that no one understands what’s going on.  To me, it means I won’t love her books the way I might otherwise, but can’t really criticize her choice of style.  The books are a lot lighter on the sex than a lot of urban fantasy these days, which I admire–there’s plenty of hot men and women, and a lot of sexual attraction expressed in detail, but very little graphic sex.  I also like the development of a married couple as protagonists (though with another four books ahead of this one, there’s still room for it to fall apart).  In this book, Vaughn introduces a plot complication that should take the series from episodic fiction to a larger story arc, which is promising.

All in all, a very enjoyable entry in an enjoyable series.  If you’re looking for an intro to urban fantasy (and you know you are! this is a good place to start.  The first volume is Kitty and the Midnight Hour.

Changes
by Jim Butcher
2010, 438 pages
Read April 7, 2010

Ten years ago Jim Butcher published his first book, Storm Front, featuring a wisecracking wizard named Harry Dresden.  He had a good idea and some native talent with dialogue and fast-moving action.  Since that time, he’s published eighteen—EIGHTEEN!—full-length novels and a handful of short fiction.  With the publication of Changes, the twelfth novel in the Harry Dresden series, Butcher has achieved a level of success that no one anticipated a decade ago.  True to its name, Changes marks not only dramatic alterations to the series, but a subtle transformation in Butcher’s writing abilities and style.

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I love watching a writer grow over time.  It’s one thing to come bursting out of the gate like a Harper Lee or a Robin McKinley, or grabbing the world and shaking it hard like Douglas Coupland or Cormac McCarthy.  Brilliant first novels are a revelation.  It’s a different kind of joy when you see potential in a novelist and are able to watch that writer grow from the beginning into something phenomenal.  I picked up Storm Front on a friend’s recommendation, back when that and Fool Moon were the only ones Butcher had written and urban fantasy as we know it today was still in, if not its infancy, at least a rocky adolescence.  What appealed to me was Butcher’s concept of the supernatural and his manipulation of it. Vampires, for example.  Vampire legends and contemporary stories portray them as beautiful or repugnant, blood-drinkers or sexual predators, terrifying or captivating.  Rather than choose between these possibilities, Butcher took all of them and created three types of vampire, each with its own needs and weaknesses, but coexisting in our world (not comfortably, of course).

The series has a very workaday premise:  Harry Dresden is a wizard, on the outs with the rest of the wizards due to his having been tarred with accusations of black magic.  To make a living, he does the obvious:  He advertises his services in the Yellow Pages.  Most people think the ad is a joke, but those who are desperate come to him.  In short, he’s a private investigator for all things magical.  He also consults with the Chicago P.D. when weird stuff happens; Lieutenant Murphy of Special Investigations doesn’t really trust him, but she’s seen enough creepiness not to reject help when it’s offered.

This alone is a good way to keep a series going.  Heaven knows there are enough detective series that work on this premise, and do so very well.  So Butcher keeps it going along these lines for maybe four or five books.

And then he takes it off the rails.

There is a great deal more material implicit in this series than just a detective with a magic staff and a talking skull (Bob, and he’s not really a talking skull, but it sounds cooler that way).  The early evidence of Butcher’s fascination with making multiple mythologies work together should have been a clue.  Dresden is part of a world in which phenomenal forces are at war with each other, and the good guys aren’t as good as we might hope—which is to say, they are not evil, but their priorities are seriously screwed up.  As someone on the outside, Dresden is the one wizard with enough power for the others to take seriously and, it seems, the only wizard who cares about humanity enough to challenge the status quo.

Over the last few books, the story has moved well away from the private investigator idea, as Dresden grows in power and begins to gain responsibility within official wizarding circles. Gradually the individual plots began to take second place to the overarching story, which is about the wizards and their White Council and their war with the Red Court of vampires—as well as the pressing issue of traitors within their group.  I joked with Greystoke after reading the last book that Harry was wasting his money paying rent on that office, because neither of us could remember the last time he’d had a client.

Each successive book has shown Butcher maturing as a writer, both in style and in plotting ability.  There’s been less dependence on conventional story types, more use of original plotting, and extraordinary character growth.  One of the things that I disliked (and by “disliked,” you should probably read “ranted about it to anyone who would listen, not to mention people who didn’t care”) in the early novels was Dresden’s martyr complex over things that either weren’t his fault or that he shouldn’t be culpable for.  In fact, I’d say that Butcher’s only real weakness is a persistent inability to distinguish between guilt and culpability. (That, and he had a priest retell the parable of the talents wrong.  How hard is it to look that up, I ask?)  Far too often, other characters would lay out blame on Dresden that he didn’t deserve—and the subtext indicated that we were supposed to take those accusations as fact.  Over time, those relationships changed and deepened—people stopped dishing out the guilt, and Dresden learned to stop being overprotective.  Twelve books gives you a lot of room to explore relationships between people, and Butcher has taken every inch of it.

With Changes, however, the difference is style is suddenly noticeable, and not in a bad way.  Word choices are different, descriptions fall together more succinctly…it is impossible for me to explain it, because so much of it is indescribable.  More important, however, is the fact that Jim Butcher means this book to mark a tremendous change both for Harry Dresden and for the series as a whole.  One problem writers of suddenly popular and therefore long-running series have is that some of the things they set up in early novels no longer work as the series develops.  In moving away from the initial premise, Butcher is left with all the trappings of that world.  In Changes, almost everything in Dresden’s life is torn down, one piece at a time.  And it all makes sense.  Different reasons, different enemies, all take a turn with the sledgehammer for a crack at Dresden.  Remarkably, there’s no sense of wrongness about any of it; this is not random destruction, but the clearing of space for new growth.  For everything physical that Dresden loses, he gains at least three pieces of knowledge or spiritual growth; our understanding of the Faerie courts increases, and there’s the introduction of another powerful player whose existence is hinted at earlier in the series. (Two words: Monoc Enterprises.  Hahahaha, I was right about Miss Gard’s boss.) His relationship with Murphy continues to grow, his interactions with his apprentice Molly show how much they’ve both changed because of her apprenticeship, and his half-brother Thomas the vampire is still up and fighting.

I can’t go into a lot of detail because at least one person reading this hasn’t read the book yet and hates spoilers.  But I find that I really don’t want to talk about the details of the plot.  As enjoyable as they were, they’re almost irrelevant to the larger picture of where this series is going.  This book hinges on Dresden’s ability to make hard choices—in fact, to make the wrong choices for a greater good.  The ending, which looks like a cliffhanger, is actually very satisfying; it also represents the “wrong” action that leads to something infinitely better.

Finally, I am, as always, deeply impressed by Jim Butcher’s depiction of religious faith. From Michael Carpenter, man of God and former wielder of His sword, to Sanya, atheist in God’s service; from Murphy, temporary wielder of the Sword of Faith, to Dresden himself, all-around agnostic, Butcher shows us many faces of what it means to have faith in God (or in anything) and does so with respect.  There is a moment in Changes where Murphy uses the sword, or is used by it, in a way that makes you hear the hundreds of thousands of souls who had worshipped a false god crying out for justice, and see that their true God did not abandon them.  Urban fantasy often has to focus so hard on the diabolical supernatural that the other side is forgotten.  Kudos to Butcher for figuring out how to do it well.

After twelve novels, a writer could be forgiven for losing his or her edge.  I do not believe Jim Butcher will take that route.  Here’s to another brilliant twelve (or more) Dresden novels to come.