Book update -- Sharon Shinn, Jennifer Crusie, Dan Brown
Mon, Aug. 25th, 2003 09:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oyceterPotential spoilers for Welcome to Temptation, First Lady, Angels and Demons, and Wrapt in Crystal ahead.
Picked up Jennifer Crusie's Welcome to Temptation last week and loved it. Sounds stupid, but I was actually laughing so hard I had to put the book down sometimes. Plus, tiny Buffy reference in there! Pluses include a heroine willing to explore her own sexual kinks, a great hero with a kid who wasn't too sappily cute, and tons of characters who were just weird and odd enough to make me think of them as people, not the overly cute, look how charmingly quirky I am characters that often people romances.
Also got Susan Elizabeth Phillip's First Lady, which I also liked. Unfortunately, I read it after the Crusie, and it suffered in comparison. I like the trend of older heroines in contemporary romances. I like having heroines with a past, who have gone through life and heartbreak and experience, not the virignal, sex-shy heroines in a lot of the historicals whose pasts generally seem to just give them neuroses about having sex. I did think Nealy was a little too cute sometimes, and the Angel of Baby Death bit felt a little forced, as though Phillips had to saddle her heroine with an irrational phobia to be conquered. Lucy and Button were a little too cute and easily handled as well, especially the easy melting away of Lucy's supposedly streetwise and punk exterior.
The boy has been telling me to read Dan Brown's Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code for quite some time now, and I finally picked up the first one. I liked the references to Rome and the puzzles, like the boy thought I would, but several things really really annoyed me. First was the author's rather heavy handed pushing together of the lead male and female characters. Every so often, with no characterization at all, he would narrate, she was very worried about the guy! The guy is now quite attracted to her! And I'm just sitting there, thinking, uh huh. Then there was the stereotype of the Middle Eastern assassin (or Hassassin) and his desire/hate for women, which I felt was rather gratuitous and was put in only so the female character could be kidnapped and almost raped. Yick. Then there were the rather gruesome descriptions of how everyone was killed. This may just be my squeamish point, but I really hate this kind of find the serial killer book. Especially when everyone ends up dead. I was a little more ok with Silence of the Lambs because the author had the killings happen in the past, and in the end the girl was saved. I think I'm a sap at heart. But also, gruesome descriptions really gross me out. I don't like random violence or these books or movies (like Bone Collector) that seem to have fun thinking of the most bizarre and disgusting way to kill people. I also had a problem with the author's eventual depiction of the Church. All along, he seemed to be saying that the Church was not necessarily the enemy of science, that religion and science didn't have to be opposite, and that not everyone who believes is an illogical nutso. But of course then the most sympathetic face of the Church turns out to be a deranged killer with a martyr complex, doing mass destruction because.. God told him too! Then it whiplashes again and portrays him almost as a martyr. Quite frustrating.
So from that book and Sharon Shinn's Wrapt in Crystal, thinking a little more about religion and faith (again). I very much enjoy Shinn's books -- she blends romance, religion/faith, and scifi/fantasy in a very readable mix. And in this book I don't feel like she's bashing me over the head, like she can get sometimes about the Edori and the Edori lifestyle in the Samaria books. Basically Wrapt in Crystal is a detective story, in which a man who has lost his faith is sent to a planet to investigate killings of nuns/ordained women of two sects who worship the same goddess. I thought Shinn did a pretty good job in presenting the two facets of the worship of Ava, the goddess -- the Triumphantes worship in joy and the Fideles in suffering (more secular vs. ascetic I guess). Found some interesting bits on how an austere religion/practice may in some ways be easier than the secular one, ideas of how to give one's life over completely to a higher power, how joy and the like are not always evil or worldly things. Even though I'm not religious, I find books that explore the topic of faith and of higher powers and belief very interesting. So I rather enjoyed this book.
Picked up Jennifer Crusie's Welcome to Temptation last week and loved it. Sounds stupid, but I was actually laughing so hard I had to put the book down sometimes. Plus, tiny Buffy reference in there! Pluses include a heroine willing to explore her own sexual kinks, a great hero with a kid who wasn't too sappily cute, and tons of characters who were just weird and odd enough to make me think of them as people, not the overly cute, look how charmingly quirky I am characters that often people romances.
Also got Susan Elizabeth Phillip's First Lady, which I also liked. Unfortunately, I read it after the Crusie, and it suffered in comparison. I like the trend of older heroines in contemporary romances. I like having heroines with a past, who have gone through life and heartbreak and experience, not the virignal, sex-shy heroines in a lot of the historicals whose pasts generally seem to just give them neuroses about having sex. I did think Nealy was a little too cute sometimes, and the Angel of Baby Death bit felt a little forced, as though Phillips had to saddle her heroine with an irrational phobia to be conquered. Lucy and Button were a little too cute and easily handled as well, especially the easy melting away of Lucy's supposedly streetwise and punk exterior.
The boy has been telling me to read Dan Brown's Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code for quite some time now, and I finally picked up the first one. I liked the references to Rome and the puzzles, like the boy thought I would, but several things really really annoyed me. First was the author's rather heavy handed pushing together of the lead male and female characters. Every so often, with no characterization at all, he would narrate, she was very worried about the guy! The guy is now quite attracted to her! And I'm just sitting there, thinking, uh huh. Then there was the stereotype of the Middle Eastern assassin (or Hassassin) and his desire/hate for women, which I felt was rather gratuitous and was put in only so the female character could be kidnapped and almost raped. Yick. Then there were the rather gruesome descriptions of how everyone was killed. This may just be my squeamish point, but I really hate this kind of find the serial killer book. Especially when everyone ends up dead. I was a little more ok with Silence of the Lambs because the author had the killings happen in the past, and in the end the girl was saved. I think I'm a sap at heart. But also, gruesome descriptions really gross me out. I don't like random violence or these books or movies (like Bone Collector) that seem to have fun thinking of the most bizarre and disgusting way to kill people. I also had a problem with the author's eventual depiction of the Church. All along, he seemed to be saying that the Church was not necessarily the enemy of science, that religion and science didn't have to be opposite, and that not everyone who believes is an illogical nutso. But of course then the most sympathetic face of the Church turns out to be a deranged killer with a martyr complex, doing mass destruction because.. God told him too! Then it whiplashes again and portrays him almost as a martyr. Quite frustrating.
So from that book and Sharon Shinn's Wrapt in Crystal, thinking a little more about religion and faith (again). I very much enjoy Shinn's books -- she blends romance, religion/faith, and scifi/fantasy in a very readable mix. And in this book I don't feel like she's bashing me over the head, like she can get sometimes about the Edori and the Edori lifestyle in the Samaria books. Basically Wrapt in Crystal is a detective story, in which a man who has lost his faith is sent to a planet to investigate killings of nuns/ordained women of two sects who worship the same goddess. I thought Shinn did a pretty good job in presenting the two facets of the worship of Ava, the goddess -- the Triumphantes worship in joy and the Fideles in suffering (more secular vs. ascetic I guess). Found some interesting bits on how an austere religion/practice may in some ways be easier than the secular one, ideas of how to give one's life over completely to a higher power, how joy and the like are not always evil or worldly things. Even though I'm not religious, I find books that explore the topic of faith and of higher powers and belief very interesting. So I rather enjoyed this book.