Witches Incorporated.
Feb. 18th, 2010 06:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
serynWitches Incorporated is the sequel to The Accidental Sorcerer by K.E. Mills, which is a pseudonym for Karen Miller.
The books try too hard to be funny at the expense of the characters we have gotten to know. So a lot of the book before it gets into the plot is just painful to read through. It's my least favorite kind of humor, the bullying kind. It is saying, "I'm the author and I can tease you and hurt you and you have to put up with it because I won't let you leave my book."
In both books, things improve dramatically after the author gets her sadism out of the way and starts the story.
The books are set in a world where magic has sort of superceded what would otherwise be Victoriana steampunk. That bothers me a lot. The author has gone through a lot of effort to create an entire world and couldn't help but bring in the shitty parts of her inspirational basis instead of the wonderous ones. That means zero rights for women including social ostracism for the wearing of trousers. Š Oh yes, let us please recreate that. We missed it so much now that we cannot possibly have a fantasy world without sexism.¡ š
The story itself is quite nice, it's well plotted and there aren't a lot of tells (either in the sense of foreshadowing or where the author is too lazy to write the scene and just sums up with narration). The characters are interesting. They're so interesting I feel sorry for them having to star in this author's books.
The other minor quibble I have is that the characters have paired off quite obviously but no one will say anything. It's stupid. It's hard to understand why people who are so obviously smitten would not do anything about it. The text indicates that both couples are aware of their partners' mutual interest, and yet, nothing happens. It's irritating.
At the end I enjoyed the book heartily. I have been extremely negative here and I think that really underappreciates the book, but honestly the supposedly humorous setup to the story is terrible. The rest of it is just fine and it probably even tips the scales to making this a worthy book--- especially if you're an Austen fan or like steampunk or historicals. But the humor in this is not witty, it's just cruelty and it took me 7 months to get past the first few pages.
But I'm buying the third book without qualms.
The books try too hard to be funny at the expense of the characters we have gotten to know. So a lot of the book before it gets into the plot is just painful to read through. It's my least favorite kind of humor, the bullying kind. It is saying, "I'm the author and I can tease you and hurt you and you have to put up with it because I won't let you leave my book."
In both books, things improve dramatically after the author gets her sadism out of the way and starts the story.
The books are set in a world where magic has sort of superceded what would otherwise be Victoriana steampunk. That bothers me a lot. The author has gone through a lot of effort to create an entire world and couldn't help but bring in the shitty parts of her inspirational basis instead of the wonderous ones. That means zero rights for women including social ostracism for the wearing of trousers. Š Oh yes, let us please recreate that. We missed it so much now that we cannot possibly have a fantasy world without sexism.¡ š
The story itself is quite nice, it's well plotted and there aren't a lot of tells (either in the sense of foreshadowing or where the author is too lazy to write the scene and just sums up with narration). The characters are interesting. They're so interesting I feel sorry for them having to star in this author's books.
The other minor quibble I have is that the characters have paired off quite obviously but no one will say anything. It's stupid. It's hard to understand why people who are so obviously smitten would not do anything about it. The text indicates that both couples are aware of their partners' mutual interest, and yet, nothing happens. It's irritating.
At the end I enjoyed the book heartily. I have been extremely negative here and I think that really underappreciates the book, but honestly the supposedly humorous setup to the story is terrible. The rest of it is just fine and it probably even tips the scales to making this a worthy book--- especially if you're an Austen fan or like steampunk or historicals. But the humor in this is not witty, it's just cruelty and it took me 7 months to get past the first few pages.
But I'm buying the third book without qualms.
