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book reviews
Some recent reads:
'Black Hearts in Battersea' by Joan Aiken 4/5
This is a cheerful romp of a book!
Set in the fictitious reign of James III, it has pretty much everything a young reader could wish for (my 11 year old granddaughter loved it!): adventure, kidnapping, hot air balloons, shipwreck, an eccentric Duke, an attempt to murder the king, lots of fun characters and the lost heir to a Dukedom.
Fast paced and laced with humorous situations.
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We have a deal going on. I read a book my granddaughter recommends and she reads one I rec. So I've just finished Black Hearts in Battersea, and she enjoyed Heinlen's 'Rolling Stones'.
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Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel 2/5
I really wanted to like this, as I enjoyed the TV series.
Unfortunately, I dislike most books written in the first person, and most books written in the present tense - this book is both.
I couldn't get though many pages before giving up.
Hopefully, most other readers won't find this an issue, but for me personally, I can only give it two stars.
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Bookshops and Bonedust - Travis Baldree 3/5
This one disappointed me.
Surely a writer as popular as Travis Baldree can get decent beta-readers/editors who actually have some decent general knowledge?
Fantasy requires 'suspension of disbelief'. I can believe in a lesbian, dwarf baker falling for an orc twice her size. I can happily buy an evil necromancer, an ailing bookshop, etc.
But I cannot buy a character being stabbed twice rapidly in her leg by a pike. I'm a re-enactor. A pike is an 18ft long weapon, cumbersome, and used as part of a pike block.
If you want to stab someone close up, use a spear!
Happened again right at the end. A warrior sat rosining his bowstring.
Even my 11-year-old granddaughter spotted what was wrong with that...
You rosin a violin bow. (It makes the horsehair sticker so it has more friction with the violin strings)
Rosining an archer's bowstring (which is definitely not made of horsehair) is complete nonsense.
Without those gaffes, I'd probably have given it a rating of 4, although there was a geological error as well...
It may sound nit-picky, but if I'm absorbed in a story, something that is clearly wrong jerks me out of my belief in that story.
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Wind erosion would have rapidly turned it into low ground...
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I've been thrown out of my emersion in fantasy books when:
- the protagonist joins the King's army and whinges that practising all the marching in formation and formation drills are "pointless". Er, no, it's vital.
- People travel ridiculous distances with their horse at full gallop all the way, like 100 miles in a few hours. They don't swap mounts, and the horse is not dead on its feet by the end of the journey.
- A predator runs underneath an elephant and bites it in the testicles. (Okay so this is specialist zoologist knowledge - elephants keep their testicles where humans keep their kidneys).
A friend once read something where a thief made a getaway by jumping into an ox cart and galloping off too fast for pursuers to catch him!
That line in Doctor Who when the Doctor says the Romans didn't have a word for volcano before Vesuvius destroyed Pompeii. Er, what did they call Etna and Stromboli then? 'Those weird mountains that do that thing we don't have a word for yet'?
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Cavalrymen needed multiple mounts and so did cowboys...
And horses need a lot of time to feed, as well.
Ox cart! That's hilarious.
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I remember stopping reading a fantasy in disgust when a traveller stumbled across an abandoned fireplace and lit the ashes. Honestly it's the things you don't know you don't know that trips an author up. And as you say that's why having someone else read it before you put it out really helps.
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I remember one writer who had tulips, daffodils and crocuses all blooming at the same time. They don't - unless you've done some careful planting in pots and started them indoors, etc.
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It's funny, I think that's a common misconception - that they're all 'spring' flowers and therefore they all come out at once. The writer was urban, maybe? Or just not very interested in plants.
I remember even Terry Pratchett having his characters panic because their sailing ship had set off without an anchor, so how were they going to get the ship to stop when they reached port? (Not realizing that you can back sails to stop. And if you're at a port you can either be tied up or be passed an anchor by someone at the other side.)
But that among other things made me realize that the famous Sir Pterry didn't know what he didn't know about ships.
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You don't ever *anchor* in a port anyway -- you have mooring lines for that.
You only need to anchor when you are trying to stop out in the middle of open water with nothing to tie up to (and you slow/stop *before* you anchor, because it doesn't have that much holding power, and if it does manage to stop the forward progress then it will probably severely strain/yank off whatever bits of the vessel it is attached to, due to deceleration!)
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I think it was Vimes who was panicking - he's usually something of a figure of authority about which things work and which don't.
And usually if a character is very wrong, Pterry lets you know about it. On this occasion he didn't. No other character contradicted him, and there wasn't any authorial voice to do it, so I naturally assumed that the author didn't know either.
It stuck out to me because I had never previously known it to happen. I've always felt very safe in his authorial hands :)
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I can see how you'd interpret those in combination as "We can't make a landing without using the anchor to brake the ship", but I'd automatically interpreted them as the captain suggesting the usual procedure of slowing down, turning into the wind a little way offshore and stopping *in order to* lower the boat or drop the anchor (except, oops, we can't do either), and Vimes insisting that they just sail flat-out straight for the edge until the last minute before expecting to 'brake' to a dead halt -- at which point, with a following wind, it is far too late to do anything about it.
I couldn't say definitely one way or the other how Pratchett had intended it...
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Oh, well done for laying your fingers on it so quickly. It doesn't sound so bad now I re-read it. It may well have been Vimes' ignorance, which makes sense for a man who hates to leave the city.
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Vimes is definitely depicted as completely ignorant about ships, for comic effect (hence the reference to how he "strode up to the sharp end"); exactly how much the *author* knows that he doesn't know is an open question...
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I saw your rec for Blackhearts on Battersea on my post--thanks!--I've requested the first book in the series from the library.
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