THE SATURDAY MORNING BOOK REPORT
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.
Petty Pewter Gods by Glen Cook C-
This installment was, I believe, the next book I needed to reread the series in order. I didn't bother to look back on my posts to find out, mostly just going by what I remembered of the covers. Since they are mostly stand alone stories with continuing characters a background timeline, it didn't matter too much. I knew this was likely my most least liked book in the series, and as you can see, it hopefully is. I think I've gotten a bit more critical over the decades, which likely explains just how much I did not like this book, because I certainly liked it more in the past than I did now or I would've had stronger memories of just how much I disliked it. Oh well.
Like most of these stories, the action takes place in the fantasy world, and in the city of TunFaire, where every imaginable fantasy creature, and really anything else as well, exists, including things like dinosaurs, and in this case, gods, of a sort. Though the gods appear to have been refugees from some other dimension. There is a section of the city of TunFaire, the Dream Quarter, with its Street of Dreams along which all the religions of the city have their temples, the more believers they have, the higher up the street their temple is. As they loose followers, the they must move their temple down the hill towards the river. A new religion has arrived with more followers than the two at the lowest end of the street, so one of them must go, and going means the end of its pantheon of gods, or at least they become mortal without followers. To choose which of these two religion loses their temple, the commission of gods have created a quest for a special key, and our hero, Garrett is recruited by both sets of gods, very old school gods and unpleasant gods a that, to find that key.
Now, these books are a tongue in cheek satire of the old school PI school of stories, with the PI being great hunks of men who women are always throwing themselves at, which, I guess, is a trope that hasn't aged well. And in this case, a cynical view of religions in general. The problems in this book, are numerous, even overlooking women and female gods always throwing themselves at Garrett. Mostly it is an account of Garrett being chased and captured by the various factions of gods who then try to compel him to find the key for them. This happens time and again, giving Garrett little agency. This time the banter between him and the Dead Man, is often lame, not very witty at all. The sort of "found family" vibe other stories have by including a wide cast of reoccurring characters is largely missing in this story. And the mystery that Garrett and the Dead Man must solve, such as it is, is very confusing. All in all, a very tedious book, one in which I did a lot of skimming this time around, earning it, at best, its C- grade. I chose it only because it was the next in the series. If I had known just how bad I would find it this time around, I would've skipped it entirely. Oh well.
No comments:
Post a Comment