Melinda Snodgrass

Fast and frivolous.

Good parts:
1. Fast
2. Frivolous
3. Linnet, the heroine, does not miraculously develop kung fu skills
4. She does use amazing legal skills
4. Former female adversary now a bestie
5. Lots of detail on Hollywood movie sets
6. Kick-ass horse
7. Decent writing, with details that make it feel real

Bad parts:
1. Numerous men she meets are convinced she is 'cute' and want to date her
2. Former love interest treats her in a cold and heartless way, clearly under a spell but causing Linnet self-doubt
3. Leading male in this book obviously has a crush on Linnet, of which she is completely unaware
4. Which means future love triangle
5. Former female adversary now a bestie
6. Lots of detail on a Hollywood with imaginary movie stars
7. Moralizing about how we all need to treat beings as individuals, and not just react against a particular race/species
8. End-of-book scene where important identity questions are promised to be answered "when you are back at home in New York."

Personal peeves:
1. Being an over-twenty-year-old lawyer at a prestigious firm, living on her own, and living away from her dad since she was eight but still calling her him 'Daddy' when he visits
2. Repetitive dialogue about counting calories/being forced to eat salad/drink plain coffee and then eating french fries, binging on sushi and eating steak-n-crab at dinner. "I grabbed a cup of coffee, and took a blue M&M, and wandered back toward the set." Seriously. A M&M? Who does that? I hate heroines in UF with food issues. Harry Dresden doesn't have food issues. Felix Castor doesn't have food issues. Cal Leandros thinks the less healthy, the better (he's the Dean of the brotherly duo). Neither does any other male detective. So why must the females? I don't mind if it's about healthy, but it always seems to be about weight. Females and female writers--let's stop hating ourselves, hey?

Okay, now that I parse it out, it's not that great. Still, Bornikova is a decent writer whose talent is wasted on a storyline that barely reaches above the low bar of standard UF (young single woman working to establish her identity and relationships in the new order). Notable for some nice touches of humor.

Two and a half stars. Yes. It rated above Cold Days. So sue me.

Cross posted at http://clsiewert.wordpress.com/2013/09/04/box-office-poison-by-phillipa-bornikov...
With links!… (more)

I'll go with my initial thoughts:

Strangely, it doesn't suck.

If it sounds like I'm damning with faint praise, I don't mean to disparage; it's that in a genre packed with poorly-written tropes, I've become used to disappointment.

The basic story surrounds a twenty-something woman, fresh out of law school; vampires, Alfar (fae) and werewolves out of the closet; questions of identity, dating, rolling briefcases and shopping; and yet I didn't roll my eyes once. If you've followed any of my reviews, you know what an unusual reaction that is. But Bornikova (apparently, a.k.a. Snodgrass, which surely must also be an a.k.a.) takes familiar chick-lit and urban-fantasy elements and writes them well, with a side helping of grrl-power that involves a combination of determination, intellect, justice, solidarity, blind luck and not one single roundhouse kick.

Those familiar elements? They're there, and they didn't bother me at all:
Yep, those were daddy issues, but done in a really unusual way, so I didn't really care. There was an ex-fiance. Didn't care. A gay best friend who was in theater. Didn't care--he was actually in a very loving relationship, not just there for comic relief. There's an obligatory dig about Jersey: "'I've still got to do some work before I get to bed, and I have to go to New Jersey tomorrow.' 'Okay, that's just horrible,' said Gregory. 'You should get a lot of sleep before you face that.'" Didn't really care.

Yep, that was a hint about the next book. And I didn't care. Bornikova seems to be alluding that there is something special about the Brooklyn riding stables, which will no doubt come up in the next book. Don't care. There also seems to be strong hints that Linnet might have spechul snowflake powers. Don't care about that, either. Bornikova can portent her way across my reading any time. There's even some sex, and if I cringed, it was because I empathized with the heroine and her position all too well--or did back when I was twenty-three--not because it was hawt. And damn if she didn't rip that little bit out of trope-land with a display of independence. Sure, perhaps there was even a little too much female bonding at the office, but I wanted to believe in it, so I didn't care then, either. Ladies lunch? Awesome.

Sprinkled through are small bits of humor, not enough to really detract from the emotional tone, but more like the variety of coping skills, or of every-day life getting a chance to be normal:

"I took after Dad, who lied and said he was five foot eight. I put him closer to five-six on a tall day. I also lied, saying I was five foot two."

"The dog rose ponderously to her feet, waddled over to me, and pressed her body against my legs. It seemed like the dog was trying to comfort me. I patted her and felt like a shit. It was one thing to fool a human, but taking advantage of a dog..."

And, as a bonus for the 16-year-old girl in all of us, there are horses. Not magical ones, just unusual ones, and an amazing rider. For once, I didn't mind the accompanying geek-speak that comes with an author's passion (just spare me the guns, please, [a:Larry Correia|1136158|Larry Correia|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1323587082p2/1136158.jpg]). I'm definitely looking forward to comments from my horsey-friends at just how accurate (and dreamy) those scenes were.

Kudos, Bornikova, for making me not care, all while keeping me up past bedtime. I'm even going to read the next one.

Highly recommended for fans of [a:Carrie Vaughn|8988|Carrie Vaughn|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1231952277p2/8988.jpg] (the Kitty Norville series), [a:Chloe Neill|1857564|Chloe Neill|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1370898783p2/1857564.jpg] (Chicagoland Vampires) and [b:Bridget Jones's Diary|227443|Bridget Jones's Diary (Bridget Jones, #1)|Helen Fielding|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1292060045s/227443.jpg|3185154].

Three and a half stars.

Cross posted at http://clsiewert.wordpress.com/2013/09/06/this-case-is-gonna-kill-me-by-phillipa...… (more)

I read the first 17 Wild Cards, but I logged that last one eighteen years ago, so I've missed a bunch in the meantime. Unfortunately, the characters in this graphic novel are from books 21-23 and 31, and the author assumes I've been keeping up, leaving me a bit lost in the finer points of this police procedural graphic novel.

Wild Cards is set in a world shaped by a cataclysmic event in the 1940s that released a virus over New York City that gruesomely kills most of the people it infects, but leaves a small number with body-deforming mutations, gives a smaller number powers that amount to useless parlor tricks, and grants the smallest number full-blown super powers. Those with the worse luck live in a slum neighborhood of New York City called Jokertown.

The lead character is Francis "Frank" Black, a legacy police detective with daddy issues who was never infected by the virus. Assigned to Jokertown, he wants to find who removed the skeleton from the pile of skin and muscle that's been found in an alley. But when that case starts to reveal secrets the powers that be would prefer uncovered, he finds himself offered with a distracting high profile operation against Russian mobsters. The various plots get all muddled and I lost interest long before a cheesy showdown tried to tie it all together.

The story is narrated by a character whose identity is not immediately revealed, though it is pretty easy to guess very early on. But the story makes no attempt to justify why or how this character could be the narrator, so the identity reveal feels like only half of a payoff, with a second shoe left undropped.

The other side characters are barely introduced, lowering the stakes considerably when bad things happen to some of them. One character has a ridiculous Barbie doll figure that is unexplained in the book, but some research revealed she is a Joker whose body has the characteristics of a greyhound dog. The artists failed to show the exaggerated canine teeth her prose appearances describe.

The art, by the way, is going for an Alex Ross painted realism that does look pretty good most of the time, but it has a stiffness that fails to convey action sequences well.… (more)