New series for Jacqueline Carey

Carey is starting a new series she's calling the Agent of Hel series. She's already working on the second novel, Autumn Bones, before the first, Dark Currents, has even been released! Keep a look out if you enjoy her writing. As it's an urban fantasy series, it will be interesting to see if it's more like her Santa Olivia books or her Terre d'Ange books.

Henry James: The Bostonians

• ISBN-13: 9781593082970
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Publication date: 5/1/2005
• Pages: 480

Nearly a century before the birth of the contemporary feminist movement, Henry James dealt with its nineteenth-century forerunner in The Bostonians. Mixing acute social observation and psychological analysis with mordant humor, James hangs his story on a unique instance of the traditional romantic triangle. At its apex stands the vibrantly beautiful Verena Tarrant, an intense public speaker who arouses the passions of two very different people. Olive Chancellor, a Boston-bred suffragette, dreams of turning Verena into a fiery campaigner for women’s rights. Basil Ransom, a Mississippi-bred lawyer, dreams of turning her into his wife. As these two struggle for possession of Verena’s soul—and body—their confusions, crises, and conflicts begin almost preternaturally to prefigure today’s sexual politics. In fact, James’s complex portrait of Olive and her ideals, savagely satirical yet sympathetic and so controversial when it first appeared, continues to evoke both anger and admiration. But he treats Verena and Basil with equal complexity, climaxed by the novel’s quietly haunting final sentence.

 I've only ever read one other thing by Henry James, Dubliners, and he's just apparently not a very happy guy. This story was no different. I wasn't anticipating a whole lot of happy, happy, joy, joy, but I was not expecting the level of pissed off I was going to experience by the end of the book.
 The story centered on the feminist Olive Chancellor, who was a satire in and of herself. I'm not sure where James stood on the issue of women's rights, but by what I read I could see him going either way. The character was a passionate, highly intelligent woman, but her downfall was the fact that she spent too much time thinking about the wrongs done to women and fighting the good fight that she often was made to look a fool. Her caricature was almost mocking the women's movement. Then there was Verena who was flighty but good-hearted and was led around by the nose by Olive. She gave herself fully when it was asked of her, but she turned out to be completely useless and not really dedicated, although you couldn't really blame her since she was just sucked into Olive's orbit. Finally, there was Olive's cousin, Basil Ransom. A Mississippian in the years immediately following the Civil War, he's poor and of course, has the gentleman complex. Which is code for saying he acts like an ass for the entire book. He basically decides he's going to seduce Verena away from her activities as a feminist activist because he believes all women are basically useless except in their capacity for loving. Gross. And he somehow convinces Verena and destroys Olive in the process.
 Henry James is always really good at creating ambiguous characters. You hate them for a lot of reasons, but you can also see the reasoning behind a lot of their actions, so you can't entirely justify how much you want to punch them in the face. Verena is so sweet, and you know at the beginning that she doesn't really give a flying rat's ass about the movement and only proclaims she does because Olive makes her believe she does. Basil comes along and we see how irresolute and flaky she is. You want to be sympathetic to Olive, but she's just so damn dramatic about everything you can't stand her. Basil...there were times when I didn't think he was too bad, merely jaded with the world, and especially when he was essentially hunted down by Adeline, but he just trampled all over Olive's and Verena's lives because he could. He was disrespectful and willfully harmful. Plus, everyone knows he's going to treat Verena like crap, even though he's convinced her that her voice and talents are only for him, that she's not meant for public speaking because he doesn't want her "sullied" by it, and that she's going to be happy being dirt poor and basically sitting at home waiting for him.
 As you can see, there wasn't a single character that I liked unreservedly. James isn't a bad writer, he just loves making your emotions fluctuate. I would say this was a great book if I could extract my extreme irritation from the moment Basil hunted Verena down in Cambridge until the end of the book from the equation, but I can't. This book made me actually want to reach in and slap the characters around.
 Which is what it was supposed to do. So for quality of writing:
 Overall: B-
 James can at times be wordy and repetitious, but he's fabulous at characterization, no matter how those characterizations make you feel. The story moves along fairly easily despite his long paragraphs and the development makes sense. I just can't get over the distaste the whole subject left in my mouth which is why my score is lower than it probably should be.

David McCullough: The Great Bridge

• Paperback: 562 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; First Edition edition (January 12, 1983)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067145711X

This monumental book is the enthralling story of one of the greatest events in our nation's history, during the Age of Optimism - a period when Americans were convinced in their hearts that all things were possible. 
In the years around 1870, when the project was first undertaken, the concept of building an unprecedented bridge to span the East River between the great cities of Manhattan and Brooklyn required a vision and determination comparable to that which went into the building of the great cathedrals. Throughout the fourteen years of its construction, the odds against the successful completion of the bridge seemed staggering. Bodies were crushed and broken, lives lost, political empires fell, and surges of public emotion constantly threatened the project. But this is not merely the saga of an engineering miracle; it is a sweeping narrative of the social climate of the time and of the heroes and rascals who had a hand in either constructing or exploiting the surpassing enterprise.

 I have been ranting about The Great Bridge pretty much since I finished it yesterday. I absolutely adored this book. There were some dry bits, certainly, but overall I think it was brilliant.
 The story is about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, both the people involved and the surrounding political climate and its effects on the bridge. I was most amazed by chief engineer Washington Roebling. First off, this guy was a genius. He had almost total recall and at times appeared that he wasn't focusing much on what he was seeing or being told, but could later write it all down in all its details. He was not one to be swayed by the politics of the day and he fought physical illness to complete the bridge in fourteen years, not a moment of which was he able to relax or leave behind the pressures of having a gigantic public work resting almost solely on his shoulders. The admiration I have for this man is boundless. His wife was a force to be reckoned with too, and I can only really say that it's a rare American who has the courage and moral backbone that these people had.
 But he is only one part of the story McCullough weaves. While there are the noble men, like the Roeblings, there are the devious men like Tweed and Kingsley, and the men who were just out for themselves like Slocum and Hewitt. Several times the political maneuverings of the Directors and Trustees placed in charge of bringing the bridge to fruition with a minimum of cost and effort were the ones who almost destroyed it. Aside from the personalities of the people involved and the amazing fact that the bridge got built at all, the bridge itself was a feat of engineering that still stands with little maintenance. The amount of deaths over fourteen years were very few, especially for the times, and most of the deaths were the result of the idiocy of the men involved, not the machinery or the engineering. What was more impressive was the fact that everything went smoothly and almost entirely to plan. Incredible.
 McCullough tells the story in a coherent manner that doesn't leave the reader confused or fumbling for answers. While at times the technical side of bridge got to be a little much for someone who isn't an engineer or initiated into the mathematics of physics, those parts were fairly brief and bearable. I don't know why McCullough had to give those details, other than as an exhibition of his knowledge or to impress with the sheer mass of the components of the bridge. But if you like math, then...power to you.
Overall: A+
 I obviously loved this book and I would recommend everyone read it, even if history isn't your thing. If nothing else, it's a glimpse of New York and Brooklyn in the late 1800's.

Diana Gabladon: Outlander

• Publisher: Delta (August 10, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385319959

The year is 1945. Claire Randall, a former combat nurse, is back from the war and reunited with her husband on a second honeymoon - when she innocently touches a boulder in one of the ancient stone circles that dot the British Isles. Suddenly she is a Sassenach - an "outlander" - in a Scotland torn by war and raiding border clans in the year of Our Lord...1743.
Hurled back in time by forces she cannot understand, Claire is catapulted into the intrigues of lairds and spies that may threaten her life...and shatter her heart. For here James Fraser, a gallant young Scots warrior, shows her a love so absolute that Claire becomes a woman torn between fidelity and desire...and between two vastly different men in two irreconcilable lives. 

 I have a soft spot for Celtic things, so when I discovered this series in a bookstore a while back, I was intrigued of course. At the time six or seven had been written (which is to say that she has only written one since and it is not yet published). I've had the first sitting on my bookshelf for a time waiting to be read, but have only just gotten around to reading it this week, and I must say I greatly enjoyed the read. I do, however, have some criticisms.
It is quite obvious that Gabaldon was a first time author when she wrote Outlander. There are times when she makes leaps without explaining where they're going - a character will suddenly speak without the reader ever knowing when they appeared, but Claire is not surprised at their sudden appearance, so the author clearly intended that Claire saw when they arrived but did not find it pertinent to tell the reader. She is also occasionally heavy-handed with her suspense. For example, she tells us that she has finished a certain sentence to another character and proceeds to quote that sentence, but is suddenly cut off. We only receive the rest of the sentence chapters later. Her thoughts make jumps that she doesn't put on paper, though again, not through intent. She is not a bad writer, simply a noob, if one might put it indelicately. I hope her writing will improve with practice.
 Her characters were well-fleshed out for all that. I could really relate to Claire and Jamie was not at all what I was expecting, but lovable all the same. If you're expecting a bodice-ripping sort of Highlander, you're going to be sorely disappointed, but what you get is, in my opinion, much better. He actually has a personality that isn't pissed off all the time or overbearing with his woman (well, not for the most part). The supporting characters are entertaining, at times despicable, and most of the time somewhat likeable even when they're being devious.
 This is not a book for the faint of heart, furthermore. There are some pretty graphic scenes that I am frankly not entirely sure had to be there. A lot of things that I did not expect to find in either a plain fiction book about the Scottish Highlands or a romance-fiction. I will say again that I am not certain what those events added to the plot other than make it traumatizing. Unless it has some greater importance in later books, I think it was unnecessary overall. If you read it and don't know what I'm talking about, that's probably because you can't read. I won't spoil it for those of you who can.
 Overall: A-
 The book was well-put together for the most part, although there was frequent meandering, a lot of filler scenes that did nothing to further the plot but added somewhat to characterization, and the end could have been cut shorter by a lot. For a freshman effort, it was actually impressively coherent for all that, and her characterizations really were stellar.