Letters to Zell: 47North, July 2015, 326 pages. Letters to Zell is an epistolary novel, consisting of letters written to Rapunzel ("Zell") from her good friends CeCi (don't call her Cinderella!), Bianca (Snow White), and Rory (Sleeping Beauty). It seems Zell has abandoned their home in Grimmland to go manage a unicorn preserve. CeCi takes this gracefully, while Bianca begins her first letter, "Z, you silly bitch." The ladies are getting bored and so decide to travel Outside (i.e., to our world) to take a cooking class. Snow White ignores that she is officially "discouraged" from going, because her wedding has not yet happened, and therefore she has "unfinished Pages."
Originator: . Pyr, January 2015, 397 pages, cover art by Stephan Martiniere. Originator is the sixth volume in the Cassandra Kresnov series of science fiction adventures by Australian Joel Shepherd. This book begins with Sandy (Cassandra) at a school play starring one of her three children. Her enjoyment is interrupted by the announcement that the moon of Cresta has been destroyed by forces unknown. Sandy immediately moves her Spec Ops forces into action, beginning with trying to capture "Subject A," a mysterious figure they have been trailing. It turns out that Subject A is also under surveillance by FedInt and a League infiltration team, while meeting with an alien Talee. (Don't wait for me to explain who these various groups are, because I don't know.) Sandy has her cruiser shot out of the sky, but she survives to find a murdered Subject A. She meets up with her other people in time for a firefight over Subject A's companion.
The Battle: We have a chick-lit fantasy against an action-packed science fiction adventure. Letters to Zell faces an uphill battle, because I'm a huge science fiction fan, not much of a chick-lit reader. But upsets do happen . . .
The opening 25 pages of Letters to Zell are a lot of fun to read. Each of Rapunzel's three correspondents has a distinctive voice. They all have more attitude than one might expect from their Disney incarnations, but in different ways. I particularly like Snow White, who apparently came away from her years with the dwarves with a bit of a potty-mouth. Here Sleeping Beauty describes meeting up for their first visit to Outside:
Thinking our outing was to be an informal affair, I was enjoying five extra minutes of sleep when CeCi turned up attired as though we were attending a party, blond hair coiffed and complexion perfect, as if she'd been up for hours. As for Bianca, she managed to secure some sort of Outside clothing from Rumple's tailoring shop. We spent the entirety of the walk from my castle to Solace's Clock Shop arguing whether her arms were inserted through the correct openings. I maintain to this minute that she put the outfit on wrong, because it didn't cover very much of her. Bianca informed us she'd been reading something called Cosmo, and that we could kindly go fuck ourselves.We're not far into the story after 25 pages, but I'm enjoying the set-up enough that I'd be happy to keep reading.
Meanwhile, 25 pages into Originator, things are happening at a break-neck pace. Already a planetoid has been destroyed, our protagonist has survived having her aircraft shot down, visited a murder scene, and burst into a firefight that erupted in the middle of a wedding on another world. This should be a page-turner, but I confess so far I feel quite distant from all the action.
Part of the problem is this is the sixth book in a dense series, and I have no concept yet of who most of the major players are or what they want. I don't even know what planet Sandy is on. Even if I had read the previous books, however, I'm not sure I would have followed why Sandy believes "Subject A" has anything to do with the destruction of Cresta. I think this is an example of a narrative that is too fast-paced, giving the reader no time to understand the significance of all the action.
Another issue for me is that Shepherd's writing style does not do much to convey the immediacy of the situation. Here, for example, Sandy leaps from one cruiser to another in mid-air:
She stopped tracking the situation long enough to pop the door as Vanessa steered her cruiser underneath and to one side Wind blew in, not much, she was nearly hovering . . . she leaned to recover her bigger weapon from under the rear seat, locked the cruiser's course on auto, then stepped out. She fell five meters onto Vanessa's rooftop, then swung over the edge through the window Vanessa had opened for her.Oddly enough, this will be the first of two times this chapter Sandy leaps from a moving aircraft. The second time: "The door cracked, and again Sandy stepped out." This matter-of-fact statement does not really give me an adrenaline rush, nor am I impressed with such bland descriptions as "her bigger weapon." I think it's all meant to suggest that Kresnov is such a badass that dropping from a moving aircraft is a walk in the park for her. But perhaps she is too much of a badass? Too many descriptions like this make the whole story start to feel like a walk in the park, no matter how many deaths and explosions have occurred. Which doesn't much compel me to keep reading.
THE WINNER: Letters to Zell by Camille Griep
Letters to Zell advances to the second round to face either Towers Fall by Karina Sumner-Smith or The Just City by Jo Walton.
To see the whole bracket, click here.
No comments:
Post a Comment