Cranky Hamster
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- Joined
- May 1, 2008
- Messages
- 558
Meanwhile, I've been reading Kelley Armstrong's Bitten. I'm 150 pages in, and so far it hasn't risen above "okay." I'll probably finish it (maybe), but I can't really recommend it. The kick-butt heroine subsection of urban fantasy is pretty crowded these days, and there are lots of better books out there.
For me to love a book in this sub-subgenre, it needs to do two things well: a) humor*; b) action/intensity (often but not always the same thing; basically I just need a compelling plot wherein Stuff Happens to interesting characters, and I am made to care about an outcome that is somehow uncertain). Books that do both things well get my rabid loyalty. Books that do one thing well, or both things okay, will at least keep me buying and reading even if I don't love them.
Bitten is pretty "meh" on both counts. There is no funny. The narrator, Elena, is a tough-cookies walking-wounded "survivor of abuse" cliche. She's better-written than most, and is thoroughly emotionally developed, but in 150 pages she still hasn't taken one step beyond being that cliche. Also, she's the only character who's remotely believable at this point; nobody else has been developed in any meaningful way. You can sum them up as "Patient Boyfriend," "Sexy Genius Bad Boy," etc. 150 pages to get one good character is not promising.
There is also no action. In 150 pages a grand total of nothing has happened. Furthermore, there's no suspense or promise that anything is going to happen in the foreseeable future. There's a lot of emotional angsting and "woe is me, will I ever find my place in the world" navel-gazing, but this is not a plot.
Finally, the worldbuilding does not work for me. Example: in this universe, there are 35 known werewolves on Earth. ON EARTH. Werewolves are only male, and most of them are hereditary (male werewolf + female human = werewolf offspring (sometimes) if it's a boy, or human offspring if it's a girl). The werewolf fathers take away their werewolf sons to be raised as lycanthropes, and apparently the human mothers don't know or care about this, which makes no sense to me. Surely these women would be asking some questions about where their sons have gone (even assuming they don't ask questions about the fathers, which is easier for me to accept since I guess you could have an entire species propagated by one-night stands). It is totally unexplained how the moms don't know about this, yet that is given as a fact.
So to the extent that the Bitten universe veers away from the real world, it does so in ways that break my suspension of disbelief, which is not cool. If there were a lot of other things going on, I might be inclined to overlook that, but unfortunately there is no plot to distract me from the myriad ways in which the worldbuilding doesn't work. There is also no hint that something will come along later to explain the issues that don't make sense now. Accordingly, I am not a fan. The writing's fine, and the book is by no means aggressively terrible, but it really doesn't have anything to hold my attention.
(* -- Weirdly or not, I don't really care about humor in my high fantasy or SF. It's nice but by no means essential. I think it's just harder to do that well in those subgenres, and attempts to shoehorn it in there often bomb out, whereas it's a pretty natural fit for the snarky first-person narration commonly found in kick-butt urban fantasy.)
For me to love a book in this sub-subgenre, it needs to do two things well: a) humor*; b) action/intensity (often but not always the same thing; basically I just need a compelling plot wherein Stuff Happens to interesting characters, and I am made to care about an outcome that is somehow uncertain). Books that do both things well get my rabid loyalty. Books that do one thing well, or both things okay, will at least keep me buying and reading even if I don't love them.
Bitten is pretty "meh" on both counts. There is no funny. The narrator, Elena, is a tough-cookies walking-wounded "survivor of abuse" cliche. She's better-written than most, and is thoroughly emotionally developed, but in 150 pages she still hasn't taken one step beyond being that cliche. Also, she's the only character who's remotely believable at this point; nobody else has been developed in any meaningful way. You can sum them up as "Patient Boyfriend," "Sexy Genius Bad Boy," etc. 150 pages to get one good character is not promising.
There is also no action. In 150 pages a grand total of nothing has happened. Furthermore, there's no suspense or promise that anything is going to happen in the foreseeable future. There's a lot of emotional angsting and "woe is me, will I ever find my place in the world" navel-gazing, but this is not a plot.
Finally, the worldbuilding does not work for me. Example: in this universe, there are 35 known werewolves on Earth. ON EARTH. Werewolves are only male, and most of them are hereditary (male werewolf + female human = werewolf offspring (sometimes) if it's a boy, or human offspring if it's a girl). The werewolf fathers take away their werewolf sons to be raised as lycanthropes, and apparently the human mothers don't know or care about this, which makes no sense to me. Surely these women would be asking some questions about where their sons have gone (even assuming they don't ask questions about the fathers, which is easier for me to accept since I guess you could have an entire species propagated by one-night stands). It is totally unexplained how the moms don't know about this, yet that is given as a fact.
So to the extent that the Bitten universe veers away from the real world, it does so in ways that break my suspension of disbelief, which is not cool. If there were a lot of other things going on, I might be inclined to overlook that, but unfortunately there is no plot to distract me from the myriad ways in which the worldbuilding doesn't work. There is also no hint that something will come along later to explain the issues that don't make sense now. Accordingly, I am not a fan. The writing's fine, and the book is by no means aggressively terrible, but it really doesn't have anything to hold my attention.
(* -- Weirdly or not, I don't really care about humor in my high fantasy or SF. It's nice but by no means essential. I think it's just harder to do that well in those subgenres, and attempts to shoehorn it in there often bomb out, whereas it's a pretty natural fit for the snarky first-person narration commonly found in kick-butt urban fantasy.)
I guess this fact alone contributes to the strange feeling I get when I read. It almost feels like watching an old classic movie. Not necessarily in black-and-white but like a good vintage wine... 
