Lady Eve's Last Con

Lady Eve's Last Con

By Rebecca Fraimow

Ruth Johnson and her sister Jules have been small-time hustlers on the interstellar cruise lines for years. But then Jules fell in love with one of their targets, Esteban Mendez-Yuki, sole heir to the family insurance fortune. Esteban seemed to love her too, until she told him who she really was, at which point he fled without a word.

Now Ruth is set on disguised as provincial debutante Evelyn Ojukwu and set for the swanky satellite New Monte, she’s going to make Esteban fall in love with her, then break his heart and take half his fortune. At least, that's the plan. But Ruth hadn't accounted for his younger sister, Sol, a brilliant mind in a dashing suit... and much harder to fool.

Sol is hot on Ruth's tail, and as the two women learn each other’s tricks, Ruth must decide between going after the money and going after her heart.

Well, I had high hopes for this one: a madcap story in space about a con artist looking for revenge? Sign me up! But as other reviews state, the problem is that for a screwball comedy to work, you've got to be rushed along at a pace too fast to look around you. The minute the train slows down you're dead in the water, so to speak. And if you couldn't tell already, this story got slooooooow.

It's probably about a hundred pages longer than it needs to be. Every time we get some action, we spend another ten pages of Ruthi's internal monologue about the setting, or going over details about the back and forth machinations with Sol, or the local gang,  that just bog things down. 

I'm not dinging Fraimow (much) - this kind of storytelling is hard. But you've got to be much more streamlined about it than she is here. Connie Willis is the epitome of space screwball comedy and even she gets it wrong sometimes (let's not speak of her most recent effort, The Road to Roswell). But there needs to be a zingy tension that pulls the reader through it all, and instead, I found myself putting this down multiple times, having to force myself to finish it. 

It doesn't help that we spend more time with just Sol and Ruthi than we do in groups, and that they show their hands to each other in the first third of the book. Part of what's needed is more undercurrents, like conversations where Sol and Ruthi are trying to catch each other out but can't reveal their own cards in front of other people. Instead, after a big confrontation on the beach satellite, we... um, wander around the lower decks talking about frozen ducks and Sol's poor half-siblings, on a weird pseudo date.  

I think part of the problem is that it feels like Fraimow is setting this up for more installments. The classic version requires all storylines to be wrapped up tightly, preferably with all couples reunited, all bad guys punished, and all ventures successful. We don't get that. Instead Jules is in limbo, four months pregnant and refusing to marry Esteban. We don't see the result of the ruse on Alfonso at all and presumably the gang will be after them again in subsequent books. And there's no real resolution about the frickin kosher ducks, which is the whole device on which the plot spins: what the golden girl did to get herself in so deep with the mob that she's tempted to wipe her memory and it's wrapped up off-screen.

So instead of that feeling you get when you press the button on a tape measure and it all comes whizzing back into your hand and closing with a satisfying catch, it's like we threw a yoyo out and now it's just on the ground flaccid and we gotta spool it back up ourselves.

There's a lot of promise here, a lot of good things, like the characters and the setting, and the pitter patter and well, everything else is fine. It's just the pace, the tempo, but for something like this, that's everything.

 

 03: A Book About Space Tourism

Ten Second Reviews

Anya's Ghost, by Vera Brosgol

Anya could use a friend, but she wasn't expecting to find one at the bottom of the old well she fell into.  Emily has been there for 90 years - she's ready to get back out into the world, and her gratitude towards Anya knows no bounds.  Until Anya begins to realize that Emily may have been in the well for a reason - and Emily doesn't want to go back.  This one, like Be Prepared, takes inspiration from the author's life (although I assume all of the ghost stuff is made up).  Anya is a scholarship teenager at an expensive prep school, trying to navigate relationships, and Emily seems like the answer to a prayer, helping Anya with tests, tracking down the cute boy's class schedule - at first.  But when Anya doesn't like Emily's methods and tries to distance herself from her, Emily threatens even more destruction  - this time on Anya's family.  I don't know if it's the inclusion of ghosts, but this one felt slimmer than Be Prepared, more like a short story than a novel.  It also seemed like it ended really abruptly.  It seemed like the last scene (when Anya and her class are outdoors) was supposed to be connected somehow to Emily, but I couldn't figure out why (are they just out beautifying things? Did Anya tell people where to find Emily's bones? What is it?) and it seems like everything just wraps up really tidily.  While still entertaining, definitely not my pick for Brosgol's finest.

Trading in Danger, by Elizabeth Moon

Kylara Vatta, daughter of one of the great trade and shipping families, has been sent home from the military academy in disgrace.  Her father arranges a new job for her - taking an old ship off for scrap - which should give her some time and space from her embarrassment, and set her up in the family business.  But it's not long before Ky starts to take matters into her own hands, and accidentally winds up in the middle of a planetary war, where she'll have to use all her military training to survive mercenaries, mutinies, and pirates.

One of the Publisher's Weekly reviews for a book in this series says that Moon is great at action and space battles, but it's "too bad she so frequently drowns them in mundane details that provide realism at the expense of entertainment." I could not have said it better.  I like slow sci-fi books that talk about commerce and boring things (how else could I have made it through the Ancillary  series?) but already in Trading in Danger, it feels like we spent a hundred and fifty pages ramping up to action, and then forty pages on the aftermath - planning funerals, reading mail, arranging a new name record for the ship (I am not making any of that up).  I didn't mind it at the beginning, but it definitely feels like the end is unbearably slow paced, like when people (mostly my family, although I'm sure other people felt the same way) complained that The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King movie had like, ten endings that went on for an hour.  It's a weird pacing problem.  The other problem that Publisher's Weekly had, which I definitely agree with, was that things are set up, and then there's no payoff: like this polo match which is alluded to multiple times like it has meaning, and then is just skipped, or the whole ship model kit that Ky receives from one of her old military instructors which has a secret code in it that she just ignores, but then also happens to have the one part she needs later to re-assemble the ship's beacon. That pissed me off.  Come on!  You can't just be like, here's a mysterious package which has a mysterious part, which turns out to be the one part you need, but we're never going to even talk to the sender or mention him again, or even have consequences of using what is clearly a military beacon on this junk ship.

I'm just not quite convinced enough to keep going.  Based on the reviews, although the rest of the series has more action, they're all plagued with similar issues. 

Comic Bonanza

Here's a round-up of a couple of kid-friendly(ish) comic books I've been reading:

Courtney Crumrin, Vol. 1: Courtney Crumrin & The Night Things

By Ted Naifeh

Courtney's parents have dragged her out to a high-to-do suburb to live with her creepy Great Uncle Aloysius in his spooky old house. She's not only the new kid in school, but she also discovers strange things lurking under her bed.

This one is why I'm calling these "kid-friendly (ish)" emphasis on the "ish".  Courtney is a somewhat darker take on the beginning witchcraft dabbler tale, both figuratively and literally.  I mean, everything is kid-appropriate, but at one point a changeling takes away a baby that Courtney is watching, and although she tries to get it back (being captured and sold herself) her uncle basically tells her in the end, "Forget about trying to get the baby back, these things happen, his parents won't even notice." And they don't!  That was a more chilling story than I expected it to be.  Anyway, these are set up as four short stories, all in black and white.  I would have loved to have them in color, but I suppose it sets the mood.  Courtney herself is an entertaining little curmudgeon.  The last story finds her losing energy, only to realize she's been replaced by a doppelganger who is living her life (and doing much better at it apparently).  In the final confrontation, you think that Courtney will let the doppelganger just take over since everyone seems to prefer it to her, but she comes out swinging hard with a "fuck everyone else, I'm a difficult and unpleasant person, and that's exactly how I want to be!" that completely saps the doppelganger.  Good on you, Courtney.  I would never want to meet you in real life, but bless your confidence. 

Goldie Vance Vol. 1

By Hope Larson and Brittney Williams

Sixteen-year-old Marigold “Goldie” Vance lives at a Florida resort with her dad, who manages the place. Her mom, who divorced her dad years ago, works as a live mermaid at a club downtown. Goldie has an insatiable curiosity, which explains her dream to one day become the hotel’s in-house detective. When Charles, the current detective, encounters a case he can’t crack, he agrees to mentor Goldie in exchange for her help solving the mystery.

This one is a lot of fun to read, colorful, bouncy, basically Nancy Drew in 60s Florida, if Nancy weren't so lily white.   Whereas Courtney was a loner and preferred it that way, Goldie has a colorful cast of supporting characters, including friends, enemies, potential ladyfriends, adults who seem to exist mainly for spoiling fun, and also: aliens!  Yes, I was really getting into the story when it took an abrupt right turn into Martian colony weirdness.  This was set up so the mini-stories merged into a longer connected story, so we'll have to see if all of the mysteries end like that.  It was a little off-putting, but I (a) enjoyed the rest of it enough to keep reading and (b) can kind of see where they're going with the 60s cold war and space-focus (one of Goldie's friends wants to be an astronaut) so I will allow it for now.

The Lost Path

By Amélie Fléchais

Three young boys set off from Camp Happiness, map in hand, determined to be the first to find the treasure before anyone else. But the shortcut they take leads to something far more spectacular and sinister! All manner of magical beasties live in these woods, and the kids find themselves caught between warring Forest Spirits. Will the three boys find their way out of trouble? Get your map and ready, set, go!

This was something I picked up and bought during my sojourn on Free Comic Book Day solely because of how beautiful it was, and that definitely panned out.  It is gorgeous, done in multiple color and drawing styles.  I would have liked something 100% in color, just because the coloring that was there was so beautiful, but, I acknowledge that (like Courtney) the black and white was an appropriate style choice for those sections - when the three boys are simply wandering in the woods.   I agree with a lot of other reviewers that felt the story-line was lacking in comparison to the illustration.  The story is good, but it felt oddly incomplete and only half explained.  We wind up in the middle of fighting forest spirits, but it was hard to tell who was on what side and why.  A crown/hat becomes a Chekov's Gun that never goes off, and when I got done, I went to look if this was intended to be a stand-alone story or not.  So far it is, which is a let-down.  Overall, a beautiful, but otherwise somewhat empty, little book. 

Red Mars

Red Mars

by Kim Stanley Robinson

For centuries, the barren, desolate landscape of the red planet has beckoned to humankind. Now a group of one hundred colonists begins a mission whose ultimate goal is to transform Mars into a more Earthlike planet. They will place giant satellite mirrors in Martian orbit to reflect light to the surface. Black dust sprinkled on the polar caps will capture warmth and melt the ice. And massive tunnels drilled into the mantle will create stupendous vents of hot gases. But despite these ambitious goals, there are some who would fight to the death to prevent Mars from ever being changed.

I will be honest: the reason I had it on my list as a book to finish in 2018 is because I started it last year, got about a third of the way through and just gave up and did not want to finish. It was not good! I was initially misled, which didn't help, into thinking that it would be about the murder that takes place in the prologue, like a Martian dinner mystery, which it definitely WAS NOT.

Also, the other thing I struggled with in the first section was the significant Ayn Rand overtones for the "first hundred" where everyone is this super smart person who insists that they're the right person to make decisions for everybody else.  I mean, they vet all these people and on a mission that is like a knife's edge of failure, and before you even get to mars you already want to start a revolution, disengage entirely from the Earth people supporting you, completely rehaul the design of your living accommodations and just make this shit up as you go?? It seemed not only very short sighted, but also extraordinarily presumptuous for any one of them to assume that their ideas were any good in relation to the actual reality of being on Mars. How was a team of scientists and governments on Earth working cooperatively going to be any worse for the planet than some random Mensa type who summarily decides what should be done before even getting there?

There were, in fact, far too few mechanical difficulties - it was actually distracting how easy it was for them to set up a colony: oh we have everlasting power, and machines that don't break down, and even though the whole planet is freezing and icy and uninhabitable, no one ever dies from it, or has an accident, or is so tired they fall asleep at the wheel and make a crater. It's just like, oh, we built a house! Oh, we set up windmills! Oh, we separated into like, fifteen small encampments, and none of them gets mysteriously wiped off the map.  There are a lot of comparisons in the book to the discovery of America (which makes sense) but also there are a lot of colonies in America that just died out for totally unknown reasons.  I mean if we want to use that analogy we should be discovering dead Martian colonists for the next thousand years and frankly in the course of this book there are no major disasters except essentially the man-made ones with the immigration nonsense. Even the months-long dust storm is just an inconvenience, ho hum, we have literally no visibility for months, but it never craps up our balloon, and we're still able to lock on to a homing beacon.  Even the people who go mad actually turn out just to be very foresighted about the upcoming arguments over Martian development. COME ON.

And also where are they getting all of this food from? Food doesn't become a scarce resource until like 80% of the way through the book but how are they getting all of this freaking food for the first fifteen years? Are they growing it? Are they having it shipped from Earth? It is completely unclear to me and also unclear how the colony on the south polar cap manages to survive for 20 years. 

So that was my initial beef, and although I did end up getting more into it by the end (it helped that there was more focus on the socio-political side of things, and geared up into action finally) there were just a lot of issues I had with the book.

 

At one point there's a whole bunch of psychological mumbo-jumbo about opposites and contraries and the psychologist who later goes mad goes into like a whole side issue about marriage being allowed, female adultery being not allowed, male adultery being neither forbidden or not allowed and incest being forbidden and I'm not entirely sure what the whole point of this process is. It's so bizarre and frankly unnecessary to the book and he does it trying to figure out people's personalities too (stabile, labile, extrovert, introvert). I think the author flips too much between science and entertainment and leaning too heavily or one of the other at different times.

One of the other problems is that none of the characters are very likeable. We start off with Frank who indirectly leads to John's murder -

 

SIDEBAR: It is never adequately explained why Frank would manipulate people to the extent that they're ready to murder John. We're never presented with Frank's point of view during John's life except that brief excerpt in the prologue.  I mean, but even in John's section of the book, we're givin some indication that he's not being told stuff, but because he doesn't even notice he's not being told stuff, we don't even know what we're missing!  By the end of the book Frank's doing just about the same things politically that John was trying to do and trying to create a separate Mars, and it was never clear to me that they had different goals/objectives in the first place, aside from all that unnecessary nonsense about both wanting to date Maya. Don't even get me started on that. END SIDEBAR

 

- John whose first man shtick begins the longer "civilization/detective" portion, Maya, who flips back and forth between the two of them and is incredibly unlikable as a result, Arkady, who incites revolution at the very beginning and yet doesn't really seem to fill up to that, Nadia, who does robots, Ann, who's another whiny bitch in a book that doesn't need more whiny bitches, Simon, who's a wet rag, Sax, who is monotonic the entire time, and Hiroko, who leaves before we ever get a chance to know her and frankly doesn't deserve all of the accolades the other first hundred seem to give her because Frank's right which is that she just left like, 10% of the way into this rather than deal with other people. And the fact that she has been bearing children spliced with all of the other people's donor material is briefly mentioned but then entirely dropped and frankly it's a disgusting invasion of privacy. Hiroko is no one's hero. 

All of these people are obnoxious, Masters of the universe type personalities and I think the book would have been more enjoyable if at least one of the perspectives was from a "normal," i.e., one of these immigrants whose entry we so decry later on. And THAT whole thing didn't make sense to me - even a million people is hardly a drop in a bucket to countries that are apparently so overcrowded Earth is in a constant state of war.  Russia's population right now is 144 million, and the US is 325 million.  There would have to be HUNDREDS of millions of people exported before anyone on Earth would even notice they were gone.  And in the meantime, again, who the fuck is paying for all this? I mean, I appreciated the concept that Mars would basically become a plutocracy, and it has a charming resemblance to the current economic shithole we're pouring ourselves into, but it felt more like the whole thing happened for plot reasons, and not organically through the story. Kinda like the deus ex machina that saves Ann's son, since I know he narrates the second book in the series.

And my last beef (which I know is a surprise since it seems like they are neverending) but how are you going to have a freaking map in the front and not put half of these locations and place names on it?? I was flipping around all over the place especially in the beginning trying to figure out where any of these things were and they are not on the stupid map. Why even have a map at all? In the final portion when they're trying to make their way down to the the South polar cap and they're trying to avoid a giant basin full of ice water I have no idea where this basin ends and begins the map is very unclear about the outlines of it. You and your "map" can go to hell.

09: A book you meant to read in 2018