July 2016 – Page 2 – meghan rose allen

A silly, but engaging spy romp in 1970’s Prague. With magic added, literally. Most of the spies here are also magicians, fighting another, older war between Fire and Ice underneath their capitalist/communist one. Of course, most of the tension comes from the fact that Fire and Ice don’t match up with East and West. So we have *gasp* CIA and MI6 agents having to consort with KGB in the magic war, while trying to hide their liaisons from their respective economic ideological sides.

So yeah, pretty silly.

Originally published as a serial, it’s an interesting idea: basically high-end television, but in reading form (if you were to read it as a serial, as opposed to me who got a copy from Netgalley and read it all at once). As such, there are times where it feels more like teleplay than fiction, but not often. The main issue is that it’s just so much. I guess I’ve never really binge-watched television. Binge-reading The Witch Who Came in From the Cold was a bit of a task, especially, in doing so, it tends to magnify some of the plotting issues. Each chapter is a different day, and while they are chronological, the jumps aren’t smooth and, while the story sets them at days, the character and plot development that happens off-page often makes it seem like the jumps are weeks long. What happens in these gaps often seems more interesting than the mundaneness of espionage (like what exactly is Gabe doing to himself with the mercury?) Having, it seems, every character leading a double-life as spy/magician starts to feel very, very unlikely. The magical villains are all fairly predictable villains of the Snidely-Whiplash-twirling-mustaches-variety; for a story that goes out of its way to humanize both capitalists pigs and commies, there is no attempt to humanize the “bad” side of magical war.

But it’s a romp. A big, blockbuster series/summer movie sort of romp. Try not to take it too seriously and maybe it won’t matter. It killed a few days of reading time.

The Witch Who Came in From the Cold by Lindsay Smith, Max Gladstone, Ian Tregillis, Cassandra Rose Clarke, and Michael Swanwick went on sale June 1, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I read:

Thoughts:

Dreamsongs by George R. R. Martin: I didn’t like it at first, but it grew on me, before beginning to rub me the wrong way again. There were a few tortuously mediocre stories to drag down the ones that were so much better. Overall, the earlier stories especially, they were all built up with no real ending, just us being treated again and again to a hit-my-word-count-wrap-it-up sort of ending; I get it, many stories in outer space, easy out is Let’s leave the planet, but what’s the point of building up a world to just toss it aside. Perhaps all you GoT fans should take his inability to write a satisfying ending as a warning.

Also, while not as bad as Haruki Murakami, he writes too much talk about breasts. I don’t care about breasts. Let it go breast-loving-writers-of-the-world, let it go.

You Can’t Bury Them All by Patrick Woodcock: Reviewed earlier this month.

Girl At War by Sara Nović: I wish there’d been an ending, instead of nothing, instead of just staring up at the stars. This was not a good month for books with good endings.

The Little Black Fish by Bizhan Khodabandeh: Reviewed earlier this month.

The Thickety: The Well of Witches by J.A. White: How did I not know this was a tetrology? I’m getting to the end of the this third book and thinking to myself Wow, he has a lot to wrap up here and then the book ends and Tesfa is like “What? Is that it?” so we had to go online to find out there is going to be a forth book. Phew.

You by Caroline Kepnes: So if the purpose of a book is to make sure that the reader is hooked until the end, I guess You satisfied that criterion. But there’s something pornographic about how the book revels in the narrator’s violence. It made me queasy (not the violence, the almost celebration of it). I don’t know if Kepnes was doing it on purpose or it was unintentional.

There’s a sequel I’ll likely forego. I’m not that interested in POVs from the inside of psychopaths’ heads right now. Since they have no empathy, it always ends up being sort of dull in the end anyway.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck: Not being American, I never read this in school. Not a big fan of the opened ending.

Shielding the Flame by Hanna Krall: I think I may be reading too many books about the Holocaust.

The Russian and Ukrainian Notebooks by Igort: Reviewed earlier this month.

The Retribution of Mara Dyer by Michelle Hodkin: Why do books not have endings? Why why why why why? There’s a difference between an ending which opens up a world and one that is just annoying. Am I the only writer/reader who is currently enamored with closure or something?

Secondhand Memories by Takatsu: Reviewed earlier this month.

The Witch Who Came in From the Cold by Lindsay Smith, Max Gladstone, Ian Tregillis, Cassandra Rose Clarke, and Michael Swanwick: Review forthcoming, probably by the end of the weekend.

Favourite book:

My queasiness continues. What does it say about me that my “favourite” book of the month was about the Holocaust? Maybe I’m a sociopath and don’t know it yet.

Most promising book on my wishlist:

Not out for awhile yet. Maybe Netgalley will give me a free copy, since they seem to give me lots of famous authors when I ask for them.

I watched:

I complain about violence and then watch Luther, so I guess I’m pretty inconsistent, aren’t I.

I wrote:

Faeries. My goal for end of summer completion seems more and more unlikely with each day. I’m pretty sure no sentence that was in the first draft is still intact at this point. It would probably be easier just to scrap it and rewrite the whole thing from scratch.

meghan rose allen

Month: July 2016

Review of The Witch Who Came in From the Cold by Lindsay Smith, Max Gladstone, Ian Tregillis, Cassandra Rose Clarke, Michael Swanwick

June 2016