Radiant (League of Peoples #7)
by James Alan Gardner
4/5 stars
It took me a while to finally get to this book. I read the last of Gardner's Festina Ramos books 9 years ago and just hadn't gotten around to buying this. Since it's been several years since this came out and there's no sequel, I guess we can say that (for now anyway) it's the end of the line. And it was a pretty good end.
Like all of Gardner's books in this series it's told in first person. Except for "Expendable" these have all featured someone other than Admiral Festina Ramos, but she always shows up. "Radiant" is no exception to this. The narrator in question is Youn Suu, who hails from a planet colonized by Burmese people. When something went wrong in her bioengineering, she was left with a deformed left cheek--on her face of course.
This gets her into the Explorer Corps. The Explorers are all disfigured in some way because some scientific studies determined that people feel the loss of an ugly person less acutely than an attractive one. On Youn's first real assignment she goes to a planet that's being attacked by glowing red moss known as the Balrog. There she meets Ramos and gets bitten by the Balrog, so that it begins taking over her body's cells.
From there Youn and Ramos follow a distress call to Muta, where a colony of scientists has disappeared. As they go down to the surface, they're attacked by strange smoke monsters who emit EMP to disable electronics. In the process of determining who these monsters are and what they want, Youn and Ramos make some discoveries about the universe--and themselves.
Unlike when I read "Trapped" last year, which was mostly a spin-off of the same universe, for this one you really need to have read the rest of the series. Given that this is sort of an ending, there are references to stuff that happened in the previous Ramos stories--Expendable, Vigilant, Hunted, and Ascension. Since I hadn't read those in almost a decade I was a bit lost at times in remembering what Gardner was referencing.
The good thing is that if you like light space opera, then you'd find this series enjoyable enough to start at the beginning. Actually I'd like to reread "Expendable" at some point but my copy pretty much disintegrated a while ago.
My real complaint is sometimes there was a little too much conversation. This sounds hypocritical because in my blog I have a few times complained how much I hate writing action scenes. But a little less hypothesizing and a little more finding out what things were would have been nice.
Still, like the rest of the series it's light enough to make it a quick read. Recommended if you like "Star Trek" or similar fare. It's too bad that there don't seem to be more of these forthcoming, but "Radiant" makes for a good ending while leaving things open for the future.
That is all.
Sunday, February 6, 2011
Thursday, February 3, 2011
That Old Cape Magic
That Old Cape Magic
by Richard Russo
(4/5 stars)
There's a bit of jealousy involved when I read something like this. If I queried an agent with a story about a neurotic middle-aged man who's unremarkable in any significant way who has a low-tempered midlife crisis, there's no way I'd ever get it published. But when you've won a Pulitzer Prize you get carte blanche to write books that many others (including yourself) have already done before.
The neurotic man in question is Jack Griffin. Long ago he wrote movies, that was until he married Joy, who gave birth to their daughter Laura. After that Jack moved to Connecticut, where he teaches film classes while Joy works in the admissions office.
The only real problem in Jack's world is his troubled relationship with his parents. His parents were both English professors who had a love of Cape Cod--the Cape referred to in the title. Jack sees his parents, probably rightfully so, as snobs who looked down on everyone including Joy and her family, despite that they never so much as owned a house, preferring to ruin those of their colleagues. Jack has spent a good portion of life trying not to be them, something that weighs heavier on him after his father dies.
During a wedding on the Cape for Laura's best friend, secrets are revealed and Jack and Joy's relationship begins to unravel. His life goes south, his mother dying and her ghost haunting him--usually taunting him while he moves back to LA to try and write movies again. Meanwhile Joy seems to be doing pretty well with a new man in her life.
I didn't hate this book, but I don't think Russo was really saying anything he hadn't said in all of his previous novels. All of his protagonists are haunted by their parents, like all of us to some extent struggle to reconcile that our parents aren't perfect. It was really hard for me to "root for" a guy who has such an obsessive fixation on his parents that he nearly lets it destroy an otherwise happy marriage. Especially because while his parents were jerks they didn't beat him or molest him or anything like that. You can look in the newspaper (or on the Internet) and see parents who are much worthier of obsessing about. It's really amazing Jack hadn't gone into some form of therapy long before this.
Another thing that bugs me is Jack's story "The Summer of the Brownings." He takes the unfinished story out of a drawer and finds some holes not only in the story but possibly his memory and then later finishes the story. But we never really know exactly how he changed it and the story itself never seemed to have much significance. I thought Jack's possibly faulty memory--brought up again when his mother is dying--would have some kind of an impact like in John Irving's "Until I Find You" but it didn't really seem to do anything. It was more of a red herring than anything.
Another minor point is that although Jack is a screenwriter and a teacher of film, he doesn't seem to have much love for movies. We never learn what Jack's favorite movie is or about any scenes or actors who meant anything to him. We get vague details about some projects he worked on, and even those are treated with apathy. Really I don't think the author thought any of that important, that Jack's career was just means to an end. Interestingly Russo has worked on movies like "The Ice Harvest" and he's taught at universities, so it probably seemed easy enough to combine those two into Jack's career. The way it's presented, though, Jack might as well have been a garbage man--not that there's anything wrong with that--because neither movies nor teaching seemed very important to him.
The good thing, though, is that a skilled novelist can manage to beat a dead horse and still make it interesting for the reader. Despite that I've read numerous books and seen numerous films about a guy having a midlife crisis and parental issues, I was never bored with the book. The narrative and dialog are quick and sharp, keeping the story from becoming a limp, inert mess as could have easily happened (and often enough has happened) in the wrong hands.
So even though Jack's story is probably familiar, especially to fans of Russo's other novels, it's still a lot better than a lot of junk put out there.
That is all.
by Richard Russo
(4/5 stars)
There's a bit of jealousy involved when I read something like this. If I queried an agent with a story about a neurotic middle-aged man who's unremarkable in any significant way who has a low-tempered midlife crisis, there's no way I'd ever get it published. But when you've won a Pulitzer Prize you get carte blanche to write books that many others (including yourself) have already done before.
The neurotic man in question is Jack Griffin. Long ago he wrote movies, that was until he married Joy, who gave birth to their daughter Laura. After that Jack moved to Connecticut, where he teaches film classes while Joy works in the admissions office.
The only real problem in Jack's world is his troubled relationship with his parents. His parents were both English professors who had a love of Cape Cod--the Cape referred to in the title. Jack sees his parents, probably rightfully so, as snobs who looked down on everyone including Joy and her family, despite that they never so much as owned a house, preferring to ruin those of their colleagues. Jack has spent a good portion of life trying not to be them, something that weighs heavier on him after his father dies.
During a wedding on the Cape for Laura's best friend, secrets are revealed and Jack and Joy's relationship begins to unravel. His life goes south, his mother dying and her ghost haunting him--usually taunting him while he moves back to LA to try and write movies again. Meanwhile Joy seems to be doing pretty well with a new man in her life.
I didn't hate this book, but I don't think Russo was really saying anything he hadn't said in all of his previous novels. All of his protagonists are haunted by their parents, like all of us to some extent struggle to reconcile that our parents aren't perfect. It was really hard for me to "root for" a guy who has such an obsessive fixation on his parents that he nearly lets it destroy an otherwise happy marriage. Especially because while his parents were jerks they didn't beat him or molest him or anything like that. You can look in the newspaper (or on the Internet) and see parents who are much worthier of obsessing about. It's really amazing Jack hadn't gone into some form of therapy long before this.
Another thing that bugs me is Jack's story "The Summer of the Brownings." He takes the unfinished story out of a drawer and finds some holes not only in the story but possibly his memory and then later finishes the story. But we never really know exactly how he changed it and the story itself never seemed to have much significance. I thought Jack's possibly faulty memory--brought up again when his mother is dying--would have some kind of an impact like in John Irving's "Until I Find You" but it didn't really seem to do anything. It was more of a red herring than anything.
Another minor point is that although Jack is a screenwriter and a teacher of film, he doesn't seem to have much love for movies. We never learn what Jack's favorite movie is or about any scenes or actors who meant anything to him. We get vague details about some projects he worked on, and even those are treated with apathy. Really I don't think the author thought any of that important, that Jack's career was just means to an end. Interestingly Russo has worked on movies like "The Ice Harvest" and he's taught at universities, so it probably seemed easy enough to combine those two into Jack's career. The way it's presented, though, Jack might as well have been a garbage man--not that there's anything wrong with that--because neither movies nor teaching seemed very important to him.
The good thing, though, is that a skilled novelist can manage to beat a dead horse and still make it interesting for the reader. Despite that I've read numerous books and seen numerous films about a guy having a midlife crisis and parental issues, I was never bored with the book. The narrative and dialog are quick and sharp, keeping the story from becoming a limp, inert mess as could have easily happened (and often enough has happened) in the wrong hands.
So even though Jack's story is probably familiar, especially to fans of Russo's other novels, it's still a lot better than a lot of junk put out there.
That is all.
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