Currently Reading - 25 Feb 2016
Feb. 25th, 2016 03:43 amIn Progress
Superhighway: Seapower in the 21st Century, (Rear Admiral) Chris Parry
Not a book I went out looking for, but it's very cheap on Amazon and the sample was interesting. It'll probably take me a while to get through this, not because it isn't interesting, but Grand Strategy isn't an area I read for lightweight entertainment!. I'm only a few chapters in and it's more setting the scene at the minute. And it's doing that by using the internet as an analogy for the sea, which I find particularly interesting. Also interesting are the historical snippets - such as Intenational Maritime Law and the whole principle of the ocean as freely accessible outside of coastal waters - all springing from the Dutch needing to justify three VOC (Dutch East Indies Company) ships essentially pirating a Portuguese galleon off Singapore.
Books Read
Guard Wolf, Lauren Esker
Marketed as Paranormal Romance, ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rachelmanija suggested this was close enough to urban fantasy I'd probably enjoy it, and she was right. Technically this is book 2 in the author's Shifter Agents series, book 1 is Handcuffed to the Bear, whose title gives entirely the wrong, or maybe right, impression. The books are set up as thrillers rather than pure romances, featuring the agents of the Seattle office of the Shifter Crimes Bureau, one of the shadowier arms of the DHS, and it looks like the author's intention is to marry them all off. Having read Guard Wolf, I'd say what makes these paranormal romance rather than urban fantasy is about one page of sex scene, so it's fairly easy to read them as urban fantasy instead of as romances (and if you consider Laurell K Hamilton gets away with 60 page sex scenes in the Anita Blake books...).
The agents of the Shifter Crimes Bureau are charged with dealing with crime among the shifter community and with anything too weird for the other agencies, and are themselves shapeshifters. Senior field agent in the Seattle Field Office is Hollen Avery, who is a wolf shifter. Rachel nailed his character when she called him the series woobie, though IMO he comes perilously close to achieving chew-toyhood, Hollen used to be military, but got fairly thoroughly stomped on in Afghanistan, which has left him with a dud leg. His mobility sounds a lot like mine was before I switched to wheels and I recognised an awful lot of the physical description, which is a roundabout way of saying the author did her research and got it right. Hollen's also a survivor of childhood abuse, so when an abandoned set of wolf-shifter puppies (they're pretty much stuck as puppies, not babies, which causes all kinds of complications) brings him into contact with social worker Nicole Yates, she immediately recognises what kind of a background she's dealing with.
Nicole is another shifter, the reason she can be trusted to handle the puppies' case, but in her case she's an Australian immigrant and a koala shifter (the drop bear jokes are probably inevitable, but the author then carries them through into a Crowning Moment of Awesome for Nicole at the climax of the book). Adding depth to Nicole's backstory is that she's someone with chronic depression, including having faced a complete breakdown while at uni, one of the reasons she ended up in the States living in her scientist sister's spare room - not my area of disability, but I can't see anything to fault the handling.
And science turns out to be the plot driver, there's a full blown evil scientist with a hidden lab doing illegal research on wolf shifters, and they want their puppies back. The only problem with that being that Nicole can't easily get hold of a foster parent for four infant wolf-shifters, so Hollen finds himself volunteered, and standing between the kids and a scientist absolutely convinced the end will justify the means (and it's not as if they're human, is it). Having an evil scientist as antagonist could easily have descended into cliche, but her backstory is very well put together and she doesn't come across as outrageously over the top, just utterly uncaring, which is even more disturbing.
The only part of the story that didn't work for me was a sub-plot/running joke involving one of the SCB interns being a klutz of epic proportions, but that's probably because that sort of humour doesn't appeal to me, being a klutz of epic proportions.
I thoroughly enjoyed this, and I will definitely go back to read Handcuffed to the Bear (even if my cheeks positively glow with embarrassment every time I even look at the tifle).
The Invisible Library, Genevieve Coglan
The Masked City, Genevieve Coglan
I read these two back to back on Sunday, which is as good an advert as you can get (though the first volume has actually been sitting in my TBR pile since last summer). Irene, the protagonist, is a Junior Librarian with the Invisible Library, which exists outside of the multitude of alternate Earths, and which is dedicated to preserving the written word, in all its variations. (It's also big enough that an unlucky gate back to it can leave you several years of shelving away from your office) And if Library acquisitions means cat-burglaring someone's private collection to obtain a copy, then that's perfectly fine, that's why Librarians go through a training programme that lies somewhere between Bond and Hogwarts.
The narrative throws us right in at the deep end as Irene's planned snatch of a book goes slightly off track and she's forced to improvise, quite literally on the run. This serves to set up both the acquisitive nature of the Library, and the librarians' special talents, most importantly The Language, which is essentially a vocabulary based magic system, and also to establish that across the ebb and flow of parallel worlds there are varying balances between order and chaos, and an ongoing struggle to shift those balances. An orderly world is more mechanistic. but as the balance shifts towards chaos, magic becomes a possibility. The Library is somewhat inclined towards Order, but not actively engaged in the struggle, which sees the Dragons as agents of Crder, and countered by the Fae as agents of Chaos.
Junior Librarians exist as tools for their Senior Librarian mentors, and no sooner has Irene rannounced she's back than she is rushed out again on a classified mission with a minimum of briefing. Just to complicate things even further, this time she won't be working along, she suddenly finds herself with a trainee to wrangle. Kai, whose description labels him as impossibly beautiful, and who quickly establishes himself as bored, but likely competent - the Library 'acquired' him from a life of petty-crime when he asked too many questions and found himself given an offer he couldn't refuse. And then there's Bradamant, once Irene's mentor, now her rival, and Bradamant wants the mission for herself/
The mission is to head off to the London of a world which manifests as Victorian steampunk with added magic, and acquire a unique copy of Grimm's fairytales which has suddenly appeared with the death of a collector and the sale of his collection. Stepping through into the office of the Librarian-in-Residence, where else but in the British Library, Irene and Kai find that things have already gone pear-shaped. The book's new owner, a prominent vampire, has been staked and beheaded, and the book is missing, with a prominent female cat-burglar implicated. They rapidly find themselves caught up in a struggle between factions they haven't been adequately briefed on (Liechenstein as a major power due to it's mastery of airship technology, and not entirely coincidentally run by the Fae, secret societies, and so on). And all that before they can really start trying to find the book.
Fortunately they quickly pick up - or is that are picked up by? - a trusty native guide, Peregrine Vale, Earl of Leeds, this world's Sherlock Holmes analogue (and yes, Irene is named for <i>that woman</i>, Librarians choose their professional name, and Irene is a fan of the Great Detective). With a murder and a theft to investigate, not to mention Lord Silver, the interfering Liechtensteinian ambassador, Vale quickly proves not just useful, but probably vital, but neither Vale, nor Irene and Kai, are quite sure if they can trust each other, or merely have temporarily parallel aims. Worse, Irene isn't even sure she can trust Kai, whose background history doesn't entirely stand up to scrutiny.
And then the stakes are raised with a warning that Alberich, the Library's boogeyman, is at large, which is a problem as Librarians who cross paths with Alberich tend to come back to the Library in very small boxes. Alberich is the Library's nightmare scenario, a Librarian who went all the way over to chaos, and who seems to have a grudge to bear.
The book is non-stop, there are enough secret societies and rampaging mechanical centipedes for it to sound like a pulp, but it's far too intelligently written for that and it ultimately achieves exactly what it set out to achieve, a world in which Irene can take on everything even the Library's very own nightmare can throw at her, and still emerge at the other end with mission accomplished and book in hand.
( The Masked City is impossible to review without a very large spoiler for the Invisible Library, so that's hidden behind a cut. )
