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I’m slowly catching up with SPN; this weekend I saw Jus in Bellum and Ghostfacers. I have nothing substantive to say, but: Dean got shot in the shoulder? It wasn’t bothering him by the time he ran out to the car—seriously, he can’t be human. Lex Luthor has an excuse; so does Sam—I can think of a number of reasons Sam could recover extra quick from gunshot wounds. But unless Lilith needed Dean to stay alive until the full year had passed, just: no. See also: Dean moving heavy bookcase, called out on his strength by the narrator/audience-surrogate, in the very next episode. I guess it was just a flesh wound. Through his shoulder.
Jonathan Kellerman, Obsession: A former patient comes back into Alex Delaware’s life, drawing him into a baroque mystery with several bloody deaths. Lather, rinse, repeat. I don’t know if Kellerman’s caricatures of nasty people—especially women, especially bad mothers—have just gotten worse with time or if I’m more sensitive now, but I believe that I am done with Kellerman, even when I’m out of books in an airport, which was the impetus for this one.
Donna Andrews, We’ll Always Have Parrots: A Meg Lanslow Mystery: Meg’s a blacksmith who sells handmade weapons, and her boyfriend is a college professor who also acts on a cult cable fantasy show. She goes to a con to sell her work and hang out with her boyfriend, and ends up investigating when the show’s star is murdered. Unfortunately, the bulk of the light humor, such as it is, comes from caricatures of fangirls—slavering harpies who wish Meg didn’t exist. There are slurs and the usual legal misunderstandings about fanfic (no, really, you won’t lose your copyright or your trademark, if any, by not suppressing fanfic—no, really), though that was in character for the nonlawyers involved in producing the show; there was also what I thought was a spectacular error about general copyright law that turned out not to be as much of a plot-killer as I initially supposed. Fans are even slurred as uncharitable compared to other groups; an animal display that matches the theme of the show and that is supposed to raise money to sustain a wildlife sanctuary only draws a few coins and dollar bills, and the handler says that this is unusual. (Don’t get me started on the academic caricature here—ok, fine, I’ll just say that it’s not actually a devastating criticism to say, when someone talks about the presence of Jungian archetypes in a work of fiction, that the writer of that work has never read Jung. There are plenty of academics who are silly, and more who are wrong, though they’re better than the folks who aren’t even wrong. But the academic wasn’t making fun of Meg, and I wished she’d returned the favor.)
In general, even without the Bad Fan stuff I get enough of elsewhere, Meg got on my nerves: she told the police how to detect; she told the show’s writer (singular? Really? Who said, with no question from the narrative, that he could write the season’s scripts in a week?) how to fix the plot problem that had him stumped; she told the animal handler how to do his job—and not only was she right, they all recognized it and thanked her. Moreover, the female lead of the show couldn’t just be a bitch; she had to be fat and ugly underneath her heavy makeup. I’m not saying the book would have been better if the victim had been prettier, but, seriously: has Andrews seen the female leads of genre cable shows? It smacks of overkill, as if Andrews isn’t confident where our sympathies will lie even though she controls the POV. As it is, I’m pretty sure where things stand: Andrews doesn’t respect me, and I don’t respect her.
Suzanne Brockmann, Hot Target: Gay-friendly het romance! Jane is a hot (in all senses of the word) Hollywood producer, under threat because she’s producing a movie about the tragic true gay love story of two WWII heroes. Cosmo Richter’s on leave from the Navy SEALs, working for his friend’s bodyguard agency. They fight crime. Because of the imperatives of the genre, I think, I didn’t react very strongly to the main romance, though they did have some awesome, non-vicious but non-trivial fights. The emotional core of the book, though, was the difficult and tentative romance between FBI agent Jules and Jane’s ladykiller brother (and movie star) Robin. Jules and Robin’s interactions are complicated by the presence of Jules’ ex-lover, an actor who starts out as a caricature (he done Jules wrong!) and gets to be human, but not reinterpreted as an angel, by the end. Robin’s fears and doubts—along with his functional alcoholism—make the story feel like there’s really something at risk.
Jonathan Kellerman, Obsession: A former patient comes back into Alex Delaware’s life, drawing him into a baroque mystery with several bloody deaths. Lather, rinse, repeat. I don’t know if Kellerman’s caricatures of nasty people—especially women, especially bad mothers—have just gotten worse with time or if I’m more sensitive now, but I believe that I am done with Kellerman, even when I’m out of books in an airport, which was the impetus for this one.
Donna Andrews, We’ll Always Have Parrots: A Meg Lanslow Mystery: Meg’s a blacksmith who sells handmade weapons, and her boyfriend is a college professor who also acts on a cult cable fantasy show. She goes to a con to sell her work and hang out with her boyfriend, and ends up investigating when the show’s star is murdered. Unfortunately, the bulk of the light humor, such as it is, comes from caricatures of fangirls—slavering harpies who wish Meg didn’t exist. There are slurs and the usual legal misunderstandings about fanfic (no, really, you won’t lose your copyright or your trademark, if any, by not suppressing fanfic—no, really), though that was in character for the nonlawyers involved in producing the show; there was also what I thought was a spectacular error about general copyright law that turned out not to be as much of a plot-killer as I initially supposed. Fans are even slurred as uncharitable compared to other groups; an animal display that matches the theme of the show and that is supposed to raise money to sustain a wildlife sanctuary only draws a few coins and dollar bills, and the handler says that this is unusual. (Don’t get me started on the academic caricature here—ok, fine, I’ll just say that it’s not actually a devastating criticism to say, when someone talks about the presence of Jungian archetypes in a work of fiction, that the writer of that work has never read Jung. There are plenty of academics who are silly, and more who are wrong, though they’re better than the folks who aren’t even wrong. But the academic wasn’t making fun of Meg, and I wished she’d returned the favor.)
In general, even without the Bad Fan stuff I get enough of elsewhere, Meg got on my nerves: she told the police how to detect; she told the show’s writer (singular? Really? Who said, with no question from the narrative, that he could write the season’s scripts in a week?) how to fix the plot problem that had him stumped; she told the animal handler how to do his job—and not only was she right, they all recognized it and thanked her. Moreover, the female lead of the show couldn’t just be a bitch; she had to be fat and ugly underneath her heavy makeup. I’m not saying the book would have been better if the victim had been prettier, but, seriously: has Andrews seen the female leads of genre cable shows? It smacks of overkill, as if Andrews isn’t confident where our sympathies will lie even though she controls the POV. As it is, I’m pretty sure where things stand: Andrews doesn’t respect me, and I don’t respect her.
Suzanne Brockmann, Hot Target: Gay-friendly het romance! Jane is a hot (in all senses of the word) Hollywood producer, under threat because she’s producing a movie about the tragic true gay love story of two WWII heroes. Cosmo Richter’s on leave from the Navy SEALs, working for his friend’s bodyguard agency. They fight crime. Because of the imperatives of the genre, I think, I didn’t react very strongly to the main romance, though they did have some awesome, non-vicious but non-trivial fights. The emotional core of the book, though, was the difficult and tentative romance between FBI agent Jules and Jane’s ladykiller brother (and movie star) Robin. Jules and Robin’s interactions are complicated by the presence of Jules’ ex-lover, an actor who starts out as a caricature (he done Jules wrong!) and gets to be human, but not reinterpreted as an angel, by the end. Robin’s fears and doubts—along with his functional alcoholism—make the story feel like there’s really something at risk.
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