Non-Recommendations

Since I have this giant list of books over there without commentary, I thought I'd point out the books I do not recommend from that list. Most are entertaining, a few are very good. But these aren't worth it:

Never After by Laurell K. Hamilton, Yasmine Galenorn, Marjorie M. Liu, & Sharon Shinn

I was so disappointed by this book. It's four novellas by fantasy writers. I know about Hamilton, and I've read Galenorn (hated her tea and ghosts mystery series, enjoy her urban fantasy series). I assume the others also write fantasy with lots o' sex. I might look them up after this, but I don't know. You would think that with a tittle like Never After and the cover proclaiming that these are tales of "matrimony refused" that all the pretty little princesses wouldn't end up married happily ever after at the end. You would be wrong. These stories do not fracture the "faerie tale wedding" trope as the back matter suggests. The pretty and accomplished princesses just don't marry who their fathers want them to marry--often marrying below their station, and oh, royal patriarchy is bad. I feel completely ripped off and there's this "great read guaranteed" offer where you can get a full refund if the book is crap, only that ended in January. Liu's story "The Tangleroot Palace" does do an interesting thing with the Sleeping Beauty story, but that's it. These are proper romances, which was not what I was expecting or wanted.

Hell and Earth by Elizabeth Bear

This is the fourth book in a series, but the series is really two pairs. The first two focus on Faerie and contemporary society, the second two on the great writers of Renaissance England and their invention of Faerie. The third book (Ink & Steel) was quite wonderful, full of interesting ideas about the relationship between literature and society and a very touching romance between Shakespeare and Kit Marlowe. Hell and Earth was boring and too long. There wasn't enough story to carry the weight of the pages. So I do recommend this one if you've read the others, but only to resolve plots. It's not really something I suggest as a stand-alone.

Finished Off by Rebecca Kent

Like many mystery series, very formulaic but without the quirkiness that makes a series stand out. It takes place at a finishing school around 1900 and has some really interesting suffragette stuff as background, but it's one of those mysteries where the heroine is so stupid she misses really obvious things and you just yell at her to pay attention. Of course he's the bad guy! I read two in this series before deciding to give up. The thing about writing a mystery is that it's okay for the reader to figure out the crime before your detective if the reveal is clever and part of the joy is in reading how the detective figured it out or how the crime was committed. It's not okay if whodunit is the point.

A Tisket, a Tasket, a Fancy Stolen Casket by Fran Rizer

See above. Stupid heroine. Of course he's the bad guy! This heroine is the cosmetologist at a funeral home in South Carolina.

The End of the Alphabet by CS Richardson

This one I think I would like better if I were older. I might be able to relate more to the end-of-life/aging/dying plot. That said, I was bored and didn't care about the characters. And Richardson did that stupid thing where the last line is the first line. I know it closes a nice little circle, but it's stupid. Susan Kandel does this in Dial H for Hitchcock too, but it was funny so I could write it off. But this is not how you write about writers writing their life. If you want a good meta-fictional piece with a great story, read Atonement by Ian McEwan. It rocks.