29 July 2010
Adventures in Urban Fantasy & Paranormal Romance
Categories: read this |
My new gig reviewing science fiction and fantasy for Shelf Awareness continues this month, with a look at Black Swan Rising, the first volume in a new urban fantasy series by “Lee Carroll” (the husband-and-wife team of Lee Slominsky and Carol Goodman). I was fairly impressed; despite some quibbles about the way the authors try to ground their universe in “our” world by implying a magical element to certain historical (and recent) events, I liked much of the framework they set up, it played out in an entertaining fashion, and we’ll see where they take things in the sequel.
(To elaborate, without giving away any key plot elements: Stories which attempt to establish a “magical” cause to real-life historical events, whether they are of a “good” or “evil” nature, sometimes make me feel as if those events are being trivialized or diminished—but it’s not just a fantasy problem, now that I think of it, because I also believe the ending to Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story “Going Ashore” is a weak gimmick, too. So maybe it’s really just about how real-life events are “hijacked” by fiction writers to boost up the drama… which, in the case of Black Swan Rising, wasn’t even necessary.)
Meanwhile, over at Tor.com, I did an interview with my friend Leanna Renee Hieber, the author of The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker and The Darkly Luminous Fight for Persephone Parker, touching upon her love of the Victorian era, how it didn’t take much to finesse paranormal elements into her chosen historical setting, and just how you write a sequel to a romance novel…
13 July 2010
Read This: Marcus of Umbria
Categories: interviews, read this |
I met up with Justine van der Leun at a café just a few hours before she jumped a train to D.C. to do some interviews for her memoir, Marcus of Umbria—the story of how she threw caution to the wind and moved to Italy for a man she’d just met, and ended up falling in love with a dog. She’d been doing a lot of press recently, including some local news spots, although Marcus wasn’t always involved. “She would prefer not to,” van der Leun explained. (Oh, yes, Marcus is a female dog, said discovery not taking place until shortly after the first-impression name had been given.) “She’s very camera-shy, she would much rather stay at home.”
Since van der Leun didn’t just move to Italy for the guy—she also had a ghostwriting gig lined up—she didn’t go with a story in mind, certainly not a memoir. “I wish I had thought of it earlier,” she confessed. “I would have kept better notes and taken better photos.” She had a background as a magazine writer, but “when you write for magazines, you have to write for the voice of the magazine;” finding her own voice was much harder at first—and even before that, there was the proposal to write. “Proposals are an impossible thing to do… You have to be much better at selling… making a clear picture for the editor.”
I don’t know about the proposal, which I haven’t seen, but I’d say she’s done just fine at finding her voice; it’s a wonderful story about impulsively immersing yourself into a totally strange world, finding out that you’re in over your head, and latching on to a source of joy (and frustration) that comes out of nowhere. And whatever she says, the photos are pretty good, too.
6 July 2010
Read This: Medium Raw
Categories: read this |
I’m a big fan of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations, the Travel Channel series where he hops from one nation to the next, checking out local restaurants and regional cuisines. The longer the show’s been on, and the more places he visits, viewers have witnessed a major shift in Bourdain’s personality—or maybe it’s just that we’re seeing a side of him that Kitchen Confidential kept on the back-burner; I guess you’d have to have had spent a lot of time with him to be able to tell… Anyway, sure, he’s always going to be the abrasive, opinionated guy who just comes right out and says what he’s thinking, but in letting us tag along on his global wanderings, he’s revealed a deeply inquisitive aspect—he comes across as genuinely caring about the cultural issues that keep coming up during his travels, and though (as he points out a few times in Medium Raw, he’s no Michael Pollan or Eric Schlosser, his show has done a lot to raise awareness about the alternatives we have when it comes to dealing with our food: not just what we eat, but where it comes from, how it’s made ready to us, and so forth.
Medium Raw is a miscellany, a string of chapters held together largely on the strength of having been written by Anthony Bourdain: There’s some autobiographical confession,s there’s some reportage-based profiles of chefs Bourdain admires, there’s lists of the things he likes. And dislikes: The most passionate chapters are the ones in which he gives full vent with his frustrations about, to pick the three most prominent targets, the flat-out evilness of the American beef industry, the blissed-out hypocrisy of Alice Waters, and the douchebaggery of GQ food critic Alan Richman. (Really; the chapter is even titled “Alan Richman Is a Douchebag,” and even considering the biased perspective, it makes a strong case for its thesis.)
My gut tells me that these rants, as beautiful as they are, might not be the ideal introduction to Bourdain, that Medium Raw is ultimately for the fans who’ve been with him at least since Kitchen Confidential, and maybe even the earlier novels—which, I was delighted to hear when the deal that led to this book being published was announced, he’s going to start writing again. But if you haven’t read any of his earlier work, don’t let my fears stop you from trying Medium Raw. Heck, with a new season of No Reservations having just started last night, you could probably actually bring yourself up to speed pretty quickly…
