anna genoese

It is officially fall: I have had several pumpkin spice lattes, got a mani-pedi using Essie's Wicked instead of a bright orange or pink, and slept last night with the windows open and was cold. Yay fall! Yay! Soon it will be baked potato weather, too, and time for baked apples and roasted squash and roasted vegetables and after-supper mugs of hot tea and sweaters. I am pretty excited to pull out my favorite sweater.

Now: books! A while back, I had the pleasure of copyediting a book that I enjoyed reading. Sometimes the books I copyedit (for private clients or for publishers) are not quite to my personal taste. Hey, what are you going to do? Not everyone likes everything. But, luckily for me, when I copyedit for Baen, I pretty much always am working on books I enjoy!

Often I buy the books I enjoyed working on. The one I'm staring at right now, realizing I never talked about it, is Grand Central Arena by Ryk E. Spoor. It's standalone SF, about the test flight of a faster than light drive that fails, and transports the crew on the ship to a place they learn is called "the Arena," and there's no way to get home (or get out of the Arena) without either declaring allegiance to one of the alien groups also there, or beating the crap out of a bunch of aliens so they can be declared their own faction and have autonomy.

I can't say this is a perfect book by any stretch of the imagination (find me a perfect book, though, seriously), but I really enjoyed it -- the descriptions of space, a lot of the dialogue, the action sequences! What I really liked was more of a background point -- the exploration of the Arena itself, and the way that even though it's the setting, it's also a character, and never explained so much as to take away its mysteriousness.

I've never read anything else by this guy, but I have his first novel, which I downloaded for free from the Baen website, tucked away for after I finish the bulk of the work I have to do on the sequel to Salt and Silver - slash - when I go on vacation at the end of September.

I've also got my copy of Birthmarked by Caragh M. O'Brien, which looks good!

I did open up Heist Society by Ally Carter. It looks like it's cute, but I expect a lot more from a book about thieves -- I was disappointed almost immediately by the lack of details about the thieving and cons. One of the highlights of books and movies (and TV shows!) about thieving and cons are the asides to the consumer with notes about the way things are "really" done -- think of the voice over about how to be a spy on Burn Notice, or the way they structure Leverage. It's a little harder to pull off in a book -- but Elizabeth Scott did it really well in Stealing Heaven. Too bad for Ally Carter that she is no Elizabeth Scott. I'm going to press on, though, because it's a cute premise and maybe it will get better.

Although... I'm definitely giving up on The Body Finder by Kimberly Derting. I haven't even gotten to the plot yet, but I can't suspend my disbelief long enough to get there. Kimberly Derting just did not convince me that the teenage heroine really has no idea what it could possibly feel like to have a crush on someone else. Even if the heroine really never had a crush on anyone before this point, has she never read a book or seen a movie or watched a television show? Okay, maybe she's never read a romance novel or a YA romance (really?) and maybe she never read the Harry Potter books (??!!!), or watched a Disney movie (possibly more believable, if her parents have Taken A Stand), or... yeah, I can't even keep going. It's just way too unbelievable. I could buy that she's never experienced the feelings for herself before, but to not even realize that she has a crush, that the tingling, stomach butterflies, new attraction, etc., logically add up to having a crush?

Even then, I guess I could believe it, if the author did it well and convincingly. But this isn't convincing. And if the author can't even pull off this, one of the first scenes in the book, how is she going to pull off the rest of the (cool-sounding!) story?

I'm just going to set it aside and maybe one day, if I'm feeling more forgiving, I'll give it another shot. Maybe it gets better? I want to believe that, but I don't have the free time to spend indulging books that still haven't grabbed me by page thirty, or whatever. Especially when instead of reading it, I could be reading really good books, or knitting Olatz with the repurposed purple yarn anatsuno gave me! My digital camera is down for the count right now, but as soon as I get a new one, I will be taking a huge number of pictures and posting them.