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(Post title taken from actual grading story I was told by a professor who shall not be named.) Grading today; confronted with an exam bearing a note that the examinee had not noticed Part 3 until the end of the (8-hour) exam, and thus had not provided an answer, ensuring a pretty bad grade given that the question was worth 35% of the grade. I feel horrible for the student, but mainly I think because my embarrassment squick’s been triggered. Here is what I did beforehand: I announced there’d be three sections in class, each with a different format: short answer, essay, fact pattern. I posted the exam instructions on the course site before the exam; the instructions specify that there are three parts and set forth the percentages. On the exam itself, those instructions are repeated. On each question, the points available are marked at the beginning. The exam has “page X of Y” on each page. The third part took up several pages—it even had pictures, for pete’s sake! It’s an exam disaster, to be sure, and I do feel sorry for the kid. But sorry with a lot of argh attached.
Cindy Pon, Silver Phoenix: YA fantasy in which Ai Ling, the heroine, leaves home to find her missing father and escape a lecherous suitor and finds amazing powers and a cute boy along the way. They meet an awful lot of mythical Chinese creatures and tour mythical landscapes (the setting is Xia, the first Chinese dynasty) and eat an awful lot of food, all described with enjoyment. Ai Ling is plucky and practical and by necessity concerned with the rules governing women’s behavior; the cute boy enlightens on the issue pretty fast, as is standard for the genre. I liked it, but as with my attempt to read LJ Smith, reading it made me realize that I’m not really the target audience; YA is often more about nostalgia for me than anything else. Longer, better reviews from rachelmanija and oyceter.
Karen Harbaugh, The Vampire Viscount and The Devil’s Bargain: Supernatural regency romance! In the former, a vampire must seduce a virgin to love him or go mad; in the second, Lucifer and an angel wager on whether Lucifer can make a man choose evil, and the price of saving his sister is the ruination of another innocent young girl. Regency isn’t generally my favorite, but it does provide the opportunity for finding total, all-consuming passion in the mere touch of fingers, and I enjoyed my brief excursion. It helped that Harbaugh’s heroes had reasonably good reasons for not disclosing the secrets they were keeping from their heroines, and that the heroines were strong of character and willing to take action to save their men. I am now unused to the rapid switching of limited third POV back and forth between hero and heroine during a single scene that comes with a certain type of romance. I have absorbed the lesson that this kind of switching is inelegant, but then again the books I read don’t generally have a 222-page maximum, and I did notice the technique’s efficiency: it’s useful if you need to be very clear about what both of them are thinking.
Patricia Briggs, Bone Crossed: Still wish Briggs hadn’t left her classic fantasy novels for Laurell Hamilton territory, but I’m growing fond of Mercy Thompson, the shapeshifter hanging around a werewolf pack and, in this book, variously: recovering from a brutal attack; taking her relationship with the Alpha of the pack to the next level; helping a little boy who sees ghosts; and dealing with various powerful vampires who want to kill, fuck, or otherwise use her, sometimes nicely but mostly not. Plenty of room left to explore Mercy’s shapeshifter powers, and their relationship to other supernatural creatures, in subsequent books.
Patricia Briggs, Alpha and Omega (novelette) and Cry Wolf: Anna is an Omega, a nondominant wolf who is also not a submissive. Unfortunately, she was also turned into a werewolf against her will and brutally abused by her dysfunctional pack. Charles, the enforcer for the ruler of the North American werewolves, is sent to sort out what’s going on with the pack, and quickly falls for Anna. But murderous machinations and Anna’s past trauma stand in their way. It’s reasonably well done, and wolfy healing sex is at least better explained than standard healing sex (also, the fact that the characters’ wolves decide that they should mate does not in fact fix everything for Anna, not even after she decides to sleep with Charles). But this extension of the Mercy Thompson universe really confirmed for me that, though I like Briggs, I’m not that interested in werewolves and pack dynamics.
Cindy Pon, Silver Phoenix: YA fantasy in which Ai Ling, the heroine, leaves home to find her missing father and escape a lecherous suitor and finds amazing powers and a cute boy along the way. They meet an awful lot of mythical Chinese creatures and tour mythical landscapes (the setting is Xia, the first Chinese dynasty) and eat an awful lot of food, all described with enjoyment. Ai Ling is plucky and practical and by necessity concerned with the rules governing women’s behavior; the cute boy enlightens on the issue pretty fast, as is standard for the genre. I liked it, but as with my attempt to read LJ Smith, reading it made me realize that I’m not really the target audience; YA is often more about nostalgia for me than anything else. Longer, better reviews from rachelmanija and oyceter.
Karen Harbaugh, The Vampire Viscount and The Devil’s Bargain: Supernatural regency romance! In the former, a vampire must seduce a virgin to love him or go mad; in the second, Lucifer and an angel wager on whether Lucifer can make a man choose evil, and the price of saving his sister is the ruination of another innocent young girl. Regency isn’t generally my favorite, but it does provide the opportunity for finding total, all-consuming passion in the mere touch of fingers, and I enjoyed my brief excursion. It helped that Harbaugh’s heroes had reasonably good reasons for not disclosing the secrets they were keeping from their heroines, and that the heroines were strong of character and willing to take action to save their men. I am now unused to the rapid switching of limited third POV back and forth between hero and heroine during a single scene that comes with a certain type of romance. I have absorbed the lesson that this kind of switching is inelegant, but then again the books I read don’t generally have a 222-page maximum, and I did notice the technique’s efficiency: it’s useful if you need to be very clear about what both of them are thinking.
Patricia Briggs, Bone Crossed: Still wish Briggs hadn’t left her classic fantasy novels for Laurell Hamilton territory, but I’m growing fond of Mercy Thompson, the shapeshifter hanging around a werewolf pack and, in this book, variously: recovering from a brutal attack; taking her relationship with the Alpha of the pack to the next level; helping a little boy who sees ghosts; and dealing with various powerful vampires who want to kill, fuck, or otherwise use her, sometimes nicely but mostly not. Plenty of room left to explore Mercy’s shapeshifter powers, and their relationship to other supernatural creatures, in subsequent books.
Patricia Briggs, Alpha and Omega (novelette) and Cry Wolf: Anna is an Omega, a nondominant wolf who is also not a submissive. Unfortunately, she was also turned into a werewolf against her will and brutally abused by her dysfunctional pack. Charles, the enforcer for the ruler of the North American werewolves, is sent to sort out what’s going on with the pack, and quickly falls for Anna. But murderous machinations and Anna’s past trauma stand in their way. It’s reasonably well done, and wolfy healing sex is at least better explained than standard healing sex (also, the fact that the characters’ wolves decide that they should mate does not in fact fix everything for Anna, not even after she decides to sleep with Charles). But this extension of the Mercy Thompson universe really confirmed for me that, though I like Briggs, I’m not that interested in werewolves and pack dynamics.
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That kind of POV switching makes me put a book down *immediately*. Especially in a romance situation, where it takes out any of the mystery or tension--"what does he think of me?" has no impact when the reader knows *exactly* what he thinks of her.
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