315. & 316. The Fire Rose & Murder in the Collective
The Fire Rose by Mercedes Lackey - this book travelled with me on my recent holiday, as I was well aware that I hadn't read much (anything?) by this prolific author and really didn't know quite where to start...
The basic premise of The Fire Rose, as with all the books in this particular series, seems to be the rewriting of fairy tales within a particular universe where magic is possible because of the mastery of certain elements. Following the death of her father, academic Rosalind Hawkins is left penniless and wondering what she can do to make a living when a mysterious job offer pretty much lands in her lap.
Since she has no other real option, Rosalind travels to the home of her new employer where she discovers that her job is to read out loud to him from a variety of books in various languages in which she is proficient. Circumstances naturally mean that she eventually learns her employer's secret and is pulled into the middle of things, as heroines in fairy tales usually are.
It's an enjoyable enough book, though Rosalind herself gets a bit wearing at times and the eventual end of the whole thing is pretty much clear from partway through. Still, I enjoyed it enough to want to read more books in this series, so I'll be picking up The Serpent's Shadow next, which is technically book 1.
Murder in the Collective by Barbara Wilson - given that I read crime books on a regular basis, sometimes names of authors seem familiar even though I can't remember what else I've read by them and Barbara Wilson was one of those...
In Murder in the Collective, the reader is taken back to 1970's America, where two collectives in roughly the same type of work are considering a merger - one is a leftwing printshop which spends much of its time printing posters and flyers for various campaigning groups, the other is a radical lesbian typesetting group whose work would seem to fit well with the first. Not everyone in either collective is particularly happy about the proposals and then one of the members turns up dead.
Alongside the murder plot is also the considerations of our narrator, who is trying to decide just what her sexuality is and figures it out within the life of the novel, though matters don't always run that smoothly. It's very much a book of its time, in many ways, but an enjoyable enough read despite that.
The basic premise of The Fire Rose, as with all the books in this particular series, seems to be the rewriting of fairy tales within a particular universe where magic is possible because of the mastery of certain elements. Following the death of her father, academic Rosalind Hawkins is left penniless and wondering what she can do to make a living when a mysterious job offer pretty much lands in her lap.
Since she has no other real option, Rosalind travels to the home of her new employer where she discovers that her job is to read out loud to him from a variety of books in various languages in which she is proficient. Circumstances naturally mean that she eventually learns her employer's secret and is pulled into the middle of things, as heroines in fairy tales usually are.
It's an enjoyable enough book, though Rosalind herself gets a bit wearing at times and the eventual end of the whole thing is pretty much clear from partway through. Still, I enjoyed it enough to want to read more books in this series, so I'll be picking up The Serpent's Shadow next, which is technically book 1.
In Murder in the Collective, the reader is taken back to 1970's America, where two collectives in roughly the same type of work are considering a merger - one is a leftwing printshop which spends much of its time printing posters and flyers for various campaigning groups, the other is a radical lesbian typesetting group whose work would seem to fit well with the first. Not everyone in either collective is particularly happy about the proposals and then one of the members turns up dead.
Alongside the murder plot is also the considerations of our narrator, who is trying to decide just what her sexuality is and figures it out within the life of the novel, though matters don't always run that smoothly. It's very much a book of its time, in many ways, but an enjoyable enough read despite that.
