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Mid-April book: Shearin
Apr. 16th, 2011 08:18 amPossible spoilers: you've been warned.
Work has been busier than usual, so I finished just one book in the last week or so. It's also because I had to force myself to keep reading the book. The book was Con & Conjure by Lisa Shearin, #5 in the Raine Benares series. The series is interesting, and I have some interest in the characters. I am starting to be more interested in the secondary characters than Raine Benares.
Raine Benares is a seeker or finder. She lives is a world filled with elves, goblins, humans, and a lot of other critters and magical creatures. She's an elf, from a family of pirates, but generally lives a life on the up-and-up. In the first book, she ends up bound to the Saghred (not by choice), an incredibly powerful, sentient (I think) rock which eats souls for power and tries to corrupt whoever it's bound to--so that person will feed more souls to it. Over the next books, we meet various relatives, friends, ex-boyfriends, new boyfriends, and a whole lot of enemies.
Since being bound to the Saghred, her power levels are up quite a bit. I've complained to my friends that she was powered-up too much, too soon.* I thought she might be powered down at the end of this book, but no, of course not. It would have been much more interesting going into the next book, she had to do it under power limitations.
The entire series is a headlong dash from disaster to disaster, and it's not unusual to have a very bad situation made doubly or trebly bad by introducing in a new monster. That's! So! Powerful! ZOMG! How are they going to kill it!! Often it's also semi-mythical. I mean, of course, they're going to kill it, it's not the end of the book yet, and super-powerful guardian (paladin, basically) Mychael is right there, and often super-powerful dark mage Tamrach is also there. *mighty sigh* Or some other powerful character.
I was intrigued by Raine's cousin, Mago, arriving to help set up con that would strip her worst enemies of cash and get them into trouble with their backers. I love the show Burn Notice which regularly runs cons on the bad guys, so I was really looking forward to seeing this play out. If I understood correctly, it didn't get run, although they did get a lot of incriminating papers and testimony from one of the bad guys.
Another problem I have with this series is that it always feels a little anachronistic. I think Raine is supposed to come across like a P.I. Falco (an ancient Roman 'informer'/detective written by Lyndsey Davis) has the same feel, but I trust that author's scholarship more. Because I hit one on the first page, I kept looking for anachronisms and if I thought I found one, deciding whether I could explain it away. One I explained away was Raine saying, "Let's get this show on the road." Definitely modern English, but there could certainly be traveling shows in Raine's quasi-medieval world. Pass. So what was the anachronism that got me on the first page? Raine refers to "green" money. Not only is it unlikely that they're using paper-based money, although they probably have some sort of bank notes/i.o.u./drafts, monochromatic paper money that uses green ink is strictly an American convention.
So I've probably written more about this book than the 3 books I posted about last week, and that I like a whole lot more. I want to like this series more and I still think it has a lot of potential. I was on the fence about getting this installment, and I'll be on the fence about the next one too.
* In many series, the main character keeps gaining powers. Laurell Hamilton's Anita Blake is a good example. In other words, what does it take to be able to fight Superman?
Work has been busier than usual, so I finished just one book in the last week or so. It's also because I had to force myself to keep reading the book. The book was Con & Conjure by Lisa Shearin, #5 in the Raine Benares series. The series is interesting, and I have some interest in the characters. I am starting to be more interested in the secondary characters than Raine Benares.
Raine Benares is a seeker or finder. She lives is a world filled with elves, goblins, humans, and a lot of other critters and magical creatures. She's an elf, from a family of pirates, but generally lives a life on the up-and-up. In the first book, she ends up bound to the Saghred (not by choice), an incredibly powerful, sentient (I think) rock which eats souls for power and tries to corrupt whoever it's bound to--so that person will feed more souls to it. Over the next books, we meet various relatives, friends, ex-boyfriends, new boyfriends, and a whole lot of enemies.
Since being bound to the Saghred, her power levels are up quite a bit. I've complained to my friends that she was powered-up too much, too soon.* I thought she might be powered down at the end of this book, but no, of course not. It would have been much more interesting going into the next book, she had to do it under power limitations.
The entire series is a headlong dash from disaster to disaster, and it's not unusual to have a very bad situation made doubly or trebly bad by introducing in a new monster. That's! So! Powerful! ZOMG! How are they going to kill it!! Often it's also semi-mythical. I mean, of course, they're going to kill it, it's not the end of the book yet, and super-powerful guardian (paladin, basically) Mychael is right there, and often super-powerful dark mage Tamrach is also there. *mighty sigh* Or some other powerful character.
I was intrigued by Raine's cousin, Mago, arriving to help set up con that would strip her worst enemies of cash and get them into trouble with their backers. I love the show Burn Notice which regularly runs cons on the bad guys, so I was really looking forward to seeing this play out. If I understood correctly, it didn't get run, although they did get a lot of incriminating papers and testimony from one of the bad guys.
Another problem I have with this series is that it always feels a little anachronistic. I think Raine is supposed to come across like a P.I. Falco (an ancient Roman 'informer'/detective written by Lyndsey Davis) has the same feel, but I trust that author's scholarship more. Because I hit one on the first page, I kept looking for anachronisms and if I thought I found one, deciding whether I could explain it away. One I explained away was Raine saying, "Let's get this show on the road." Definitely modern English, but there could certainly be traveling shows in Raine's quasi-medieval world. Pass. So what was the anachronism that got me on the first page? Raine refers to "green" money. Not only is it unlikely that they're using paper-based money, although they probably have some sort of bank notes/i.o.u./drafts, monochromatic paper money that uses green ink is strictly an American convention.
So I've probably written more about this book than the 3 books I posted about last week, and that I like a whole lot more. I want to like this series more and I still think it has a lot of potential. I was on the fence about getting this installment, and I'll be on the fence about the next one too.
* In many series, the main character keeps gaining powers. Laurell Hamilton's Anita Blake is a good example. In other words, what does it take to be able to fight Superman?
