The Saturday Morning Post (No. 167)

 

This first entry is something like five weeks out of order. I inadvertently duplicated a Saturday Morning Post number for this post, and since I alternate paintings, I couldn't just change the post number without messing up this pattern. So I bumped it down the road to next open odd numbered review. This one.

This happens to be another booktuber recommendation, a science fiction novel in this case, which, as you likely know, is a genre that I usually give a miss to these days. But since she thought it was one of the best books she read this year, and even an all time top five book for her, I decided to give it a try, given that it was readily available as an ebook from the library, and was co-written by someone famous. What the heck?

This week's second book is also out of reading order, but it had its own solo review, so I lumped that in this issue to get my two books per week. But what do you care about my paper work? I will just say that this won't be the last book by this author you'll be seeing in the coming weeks. A bit of foreshadowing...

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below. 

Windhaven by George R R Martin and Lisa Tuttle  DNF 21%

Maris is a young girl, a flyer, who as the cover illustration suggests, soars between the islands of her world on its stormy winds using a set of folding wings. She is very good at it. A natural. However, according to the tradition of the flyers, she must give up her wings to the son of her foster father when he reaches the age of 13. Taught by her foster father, she's been flying for some years and was really good at it. But now, as I said, she must give up flying, and she doesn't want to do so, especially since her foster brother is so bad enough at flying, that it will likely kill him, and well, he doesn't even want to be a flyer. He wants to be a singer, a troubadour. It doesn't seem fair that she has to give up the wings to someone who will only get killed using them, and who doesn't want them anyway. Still, it's tradition... and so she must. 

But, it really isn't fair! So instead, she steals the wings, and flies off to an island to get one of her flyer friends to call a conference of all flyers in order to plead her case, i.e. that the tradition must change; wings should be earned by skill not just automatically passed on to the first born, too many of which, she argues, haven't the talent, and only get themselves killed. This conference and all the speeches on this subject take up 17 pages of the story. It was at this point where I gave up on the story. 17 pages of speeches...jezz.

The thing is, I didn't care for Maris. While she accuses the other flyers of being arrogant and privileged snobs, she comes across as every bit as arrogant as all the rest of them. Her attitude is that because she's so good at flying she's entitled to be able to fly, tradition be damned. And so she wants to change the system to work in her favor. She seem blind to the fact that she's as arrogant and as self centered as those who want to uphold tradition. I found I could not root for her after stealing the wings.

The world building is sparse, at least in the first 21% of the story, and the premise; the seas being too dangerous to build ships, so that these flyers are the messengers between the islands is a stretch. If they can't easily reach the other islands, what's the point of carrying messages between them? And then there is the premise that a 13 year old boy or girl would have the muscles needed to control a twenty foot span of wings attached to them on a harness. But, what the heck, I'd be willing to go with the flow, if I had been able to connect to the main character. No doubt there is much more and bigger stakes ahead, but whatever charm this booktuber found in this story I missed entirely.

Bath Tangle by Georgette Heyer  C

This is a pretty straight romance novel, and as such I haven't much to say about it. The story opens with the death of Serena's father, the Earl of Spenborough who leaves a young wife and no sons, so that the title goes to Serena's cousin. Serena further discovers that her father has named her former fiancé as the trustee of her portion of the his private estate, much to her dismay. Women can't be trusted with money.

This former fiancé is a very rude and domineering man, with a temper as well. When they were engaged, they argued all the time, which is why she had called it off. Now he holds her purse string, and like it or not, she must deal with him.

Serena and her step-mother retire to the dowager house, but soon find it very boring, so they rent a house in Bath. Here Serena meets the true love of her youth, and he promptly asks her to be his wife. She accepts - though with her being in morning for her father, this is just a private understanding.

However, the problem with this proposed marriage is that Serena, raised almost like a son, used to managing a great house, and so is rather free speaking and dominating, for a woman, with a temper to boot, which her fiancé comes to realize might not make for the ideal wife of his dreams. Plus her wealth far exceeds that of her current fiancé, which makes him uneasy as well. Still, a promise is a promise. He'll make it work...

There are also other romances tangled up in this story, hence the title, to fill out the story.

A pretty predictable outing this time around for Heyer, without much of her characteristic lively dialog, along with a sappy ending filled with sappy, heartfelt speeches. Okay for what it was, but not high on my list of Heyer books.