Bookish

( Meme questions from tarzanic )

I don't believe I mentioned all the fun I had last week in the bargain aisle at McKay's. And at Barnes & Noble. And Borders. (Hey, apartment offices close at 5. What else are you going to do in strange city?)

I came back with quite the haul. The last time I was at McKay's, I bought a book from the fantasy section titled Resenting the Hero, by Moira J. Moore. I figured from the cover and blurb that it would be sort of a comedy, but it...well, it kind of was, in places, but overall was more of a drama. The premise is that there is this world out there that was colonized long ago by humans who have forgotten all their technology, because it doesn't work on this world. Further, there are massively destructive weather events on this world, and that would spell doom except for the fact that there are these people, called Sources, born with the ability to "channel" the destructive forces into...well, I don't know where, but basically they're a human lighnting rod. Only they die if they do it without the help of a Shield, which is also a person born with a (different) natural talent. A particular Source and Shield bond with each other at around age twenty, after spending their lives to date in school, and they must work together forever more, and when one dies, so does the other. The Source and Shield the book follows are Shintaro Karish and Lee Mallorough, respectively.

(Those of you who know my preferences may be able to predict some of the rest of the plot now.)

Anyway. The plot started out interesting, with a serious questioning of what is implied to be a corrupt institution which the two characters have to work for as part and parcel of being a Source and a Shield. Then the interesting character who was leading the questioning turned into a bog-standard moustache-twirling villain, and it kind of went downhill from there. However, I liked the sarcastic voice of the narrator, Lee, and, yes, I enjoyed her prickly, UST-filled relationship with Taro.

So I ended up with the next two books in the series, and they are much better-plotted. And there's timely and believable progress on the UST-to-RST front, which is always nice. I hear there are more books coming out at some point, and I imagine they will wind up in my possession at some point. It's nothing that'll set the world on fire, but they're fun books with great main characters.

On this latest trip, I also bought a children's book called Behind the Attic Wall, which turned out to be about a girl who finds a room in her new house where people with a connection to the property who die have, apparently, been turned into china dolls that move and speak. Most of the way through, I was wondering how on earth this Stephen King-like madness could in any way be categorized as for the grade school set. Gah.

And now I'm about to start on Jane Yolen's Briar Rose, which I read at some point in middle school but remember very little about. On my last trip to McKay's I bought Patricia C. Wrede's Snow White and Rose Red, whcih I'd also read long ago, and while it was good this time, I remembered it as better. Alas.

Now I'm wondering which of that multi-author fairy tales series I haven't collected yet...I have Pamela Dean's Tam Lin as well. Hmmm. Must investigate.