Azure Jane Lunatic (Azz) 🌺 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
azurelunatic) wrote2014-03-16 07:00 pm
azurelunatic) wrote2014-03-16 07:00 pm
Half-Off Ragnarok, and full-price snakes
Yet another Seanan book launch party!
I arrived comfortably early (having decided that BART was the way to go, then scheduling my nap early) and soon found myself settled in with book, bagel, and hot chocolate. I had been planning on one of their nice meat and cheese plates, but in the interim the cafe has been overhauling their menu, so that didn't exist anymore.
Yay book! Half-Off Ragnarok is a nice sturdy addition to the saga of the Healy-Price family. Alex is Verity's brother, and I was happy to be introduced to him and let him show me around the various perils of life as a cryptobiologist (and also cryptozoologist) who enjoys his job. There are snakes. If snakes are not your thing, proceed with caution. If snakes are so very much the opposite from your thing that you have leaped on top of your chair at the very mention, this book is not for you. You will possibly miss the mice, but there. are. snakes.
While manymanymany urban fantasy book covers have an Unnecessary Cheesecake problem, or a Gratuitous Beefcake problem, the InCryptid covers continue to mostly accurately depict characters and situations within the book. Alex and Shelby (a zoologist from Australia with a few secrets of her own) do sneak through the darkness of the West Columbus Zoo reptile house with guns, and Shelby does wander around in khaki shorts, and that shirt does go with khaki shorts. I do have questions about the anatomical likelihood of that particular cleavage, because it looks like she's wearing the tightest sports bra possible which is squishing them together like that. Also her hair is described as "wavy", while the hair on the cover looks pretty straight if fluffy. Those are pretty small quibbles all told; I'd say that this cover is genre-compliant while not misrepresenting the book inside it. (In the Q&A, Seanan mentioned that Verity's next books took place during a dance competition. She asked us if we've ever seen dance competition costumes. It seems that like skating costumes, they make concessions to actual modesty via flesh-tone panels. Unlike skating costumes, they don't have to pretend that the visible parts of the costume are enough to keep you from immediately sticking to the ice if you fell down on it. Those covers are going to be something.)
This book might be a decent entry point to the series if someone picked it up without realizing there are books that came before it. Stuff which is introduced in more detail in previous books (like the mice) is dropped gently with enough context that a savvy genre reader is likely to be able to get a good idea of what's going on. Events that would be spoilers for the previous books are referred to, both without pussyfooting and without the heavy implication that this particular thing is something that you, the reader, should already have known. There are also enough things that are mentioned in passing that if I were a new reader playing spot-the-hook-to-the-previous-book, I might pick up on things which are hooks for future books in the series instead.
As I previously mentioned, snakes. There are snakes all up in this. There are people who are snakes. There are snakes who are people. There are people who have snakes for hair. There are people who can turn into snakes, at least partially. There are snake-chickens. There are larger things who are not chicken-sized but who are definitely still snakes. Nobody's eyes flash gold, though. There is that. Instead, can we offer you a discount on being turned into stone? Painfully?
When you have snakes, and good guys, and bad guys, many authors would make the choice to say that the snakes and people who like snakes are bad guys. Not so here. Alex specifically calls out JKR for Slytherin House. Some of the snakes are good guys. Some of the snakes are bad guys. Some of the snakes are on their own side, because fuck you. Some of the young snakes are engaged to adorable little girls (who are also snakes) and that's awesome.
But it's not all snakes! We get mice! We get frickens! We get church griffins. We get various members of the Healy-Price family.
We do get one guy who is unclear on the concept of how adult consensual relationships tend to work. This situation is resolved without sexual assault; general physical assault has already happened by this point. Also various violence and death: sentient-sentient, animal-sentient, sentient-animal, and animal-animal; there is death and blood and arson and a whole lot of weapons. There is what I would describe, without specific spoilers, as "body horror". There is an autopsy. There is a telepath recovering from the aftermath of horrific mental injury. In happier content that people often still want to know about, Alex is a lot less chatty about his sex life than Very is, but Shelby does mention that they have one, even if you wouldn't know it from how fast the fade-to-black feels. Workplace policy on "fraternization" exists and is discussed in passing. There's also a typo-level factual error about geese, which only bothered me because Alex is the kind of person who would know these things, and my mother's a birder so I know these things; the proper venue for me to go on for more than one sentence about a typo is through the publisher, so I have an email draft in progress about that.
I was delighted by getting to see more than one Healy-Price at a time. It is fantastic to see them published and engaging in mayhem. I felt like Verity's books were about responsibility and duty. This book of Alex's is about family. You stick by your family. Except at the point you have to make some really hard decisions, because something has gone terribly wrong. It's also framed and delicately interwoven with the larger plot arc question of the frickens (half frog, half chicken, all abomination of nature, at least as the Covenant understands it): what happens when Mainstream Science! eventually and inevitably discovers something that sets it on edge? When does a cryptobiologist have to accept that as the inevitable? What does that mean for the rest of the cryptids? The answer to that one is not in this book, though I have faith we'll run into further exploration later on in the series.
I'm tempted to say that the cast may be majority-female, despite a male protagonist, which means that it's probably about 50/50. There is Alex of course; then there's his family: Grandma, Grandpa, Cousin Sarah. We hear from father, sister, and brother-in-law-equivalent over the phone. At the zoo, there is Lloyd, Dee, Shelby, Chandi and her fiancé Shami. We also call on Chandi's family, and visit Dee's entire community. The only person I am tempted to call "the girl" is in fact eight years old; the fact that she's not a mammal is beside the point. Alex keeps upgrading his relationship status with Shelby when asked about it; he notices at least the first time. I predict that there's going to be some words about it in the next book when Shelby notices more than she already has.
Some of Seanan's books leave me feeling profoundly affected and like I need to get as many of my friends as possible to get this into their brains ASAP. This was not one of those, but if you like mystery-y urban fantasy with snakes in, I think you should read this, because it's good.
The party was fairly standard for a Seanan event, which is to say always great fun: door prizes, music, cupcakes, signing, Q&A. I spent most of the music reading: not that it wasn't good, but the book was better and also new. Paul Kwinn had a song about how Seanan might solve problems. It was the best. The Bohnhoffs played The Actor, which was new to me (despite having been released in 1999), and hilarious. Logistically, combining the line for the signing and the cupcakes was an excellent decision, since both require queueing. If you are planning on going to these events and have dietary restrictions, contact Seanan through the contact form on her website and let her know, some time in advance. That will let her let Cups & Cakes know what to make. I got the lemon this time. It was delicious.
I need to remember to collect my random questions about the books for the Q&A sessions, because sometimes there aren't quite enough questions to go around. Seanan can and will entertain the audience in other ways if there are insufficient questions. This time she threatened to unleash The Chaos upon us. We learned that no battle plan (outline, first draft) survives first contact with the enemy. I asked a follow-up: did that mean that Toby was "the enemy"? In point of fact, Seanan explained, everyone except for Cagney and Lacey (Toby's ancient Siamese, if you please) was "the enemy". And there are characters everywhere who were never meant to be there: Quentin was originally there to appear and then die, and Danny was a publisher's addition because there was no way that amount of blood would have flown at all well with a human cabbie.
Seanan's hair was in excellent form. Apparently the version that we had seen at FOGcon was in fact in the faded state. It looked like a candy corn rainbow there. Here, it proceeded from blonde to yellow through screaming orange and vivid pink down to a really assertive purple at the ends. Seanan's hairdresser is also her sister, and I fully intend to arrange an appointment at some time when I am both awake and have the budget for turning my hair the color blue that it was always intended to be.
I had passed the calendar appointment along to Purple when I realized it was happening, but he had other plans for this weekend (plus it is up in the city, and that's a ways). Tif showed, and we caught up a little. Burger Joint across the street had a sufficient non-gluten offering that we wound up eating there and catching up a bit. We are due an Epic Shopping Escapade soon.
Unfortunately for me, I had just hit the high point of the book when my train arrived at Daly City. So I had to decide whether I was going to read in the car, or drive home and then read in bed. Bed won out. By that time, the amazing crowd I'd seen earlier on the Millbrae/SFO platform had dispersed. I'd seriously thought there was some sort of protest or riot brewing, but then I saw all the green and realized that it was some sort of horrifying Saint Patrick's Day/spring break sort of thing, and it was just that many chuppers all together and chupping. Alcohol may have been involved. I drove home, put my hair up, got a snack, finished reading, and went to bed without bothering to actually brush and rebraid my hair. Consequently I have been painstakingly detangling all my hair while writing this up. All of the elastics have been removed, and it is time for the ylang ylang oil. But I had a great time. Whee!
I arrived comfortably early (having decided that BART was the way to go, then scheduling my nap early) and soon found myself settled in with book, bagel, and hot chocolate. I had been planning on one of their nice meat and cheese plates, but in the interim the cafe has been overhauling their menu, so that didn't exist anymore.
Yay book! Half-Off Ragnarok is a nice sturdy addition to the saga of the Healy-Price family. Alex is Verity's brother, and I was happy to be introduced to him and let him show me around the various perils of life as a cryptobiologist (and also cryptozoologist) who enjoys his job. There are snakes. If snakes are not your thing, proceed with caution. If snakes are so very much the opposite from your thing that you have leaped on top of your chair at the very mention, this book is not for you. You will possibly miss the mice, but there. are. snakes.
While manymanymany urban fantasy book covers have an Unnecessary Cheesecake problem, or a Gratuitous Beefcake problem, the InCryptid covers continue to mostly accurately depict characters and situations within the book. Alex and Shelby (a zoologist from Australia with a few secrets of her own) do sneak through the darkness of the West Columbus Zoo reptile house with guns, and Shelby does wander around in khaki shorts, and that shirt does go with khaki shorts. I do have questions about the anatomical likelihood of that particular cleavage, because it looks like she's wearing the tightest sports bra possible which is squishing them together like that. Also her hair is described as "wavy", while the hair on the cover looks pretty straight if fluffy. Those are pretty small quibbles all told; I'd say that this cover is genre-compliant while not misrepresenting the book inside it. (In the Q&A, Seanan mentioned that Verity's next books took place during a dance competition. She asked us if we've ever seen dance competition costumes. It seems that like skating costumes, they make concessions to actual modesty via flesh-tone panels. Unlike skating costumes, they don't have to pretend that the visible parts of the costume are enough to keep you from immediately sticking to the ice if you fell down on it. Those covers are going to be something.)
This book might be a decent entry point to the series if someone picked it up without realizing there are books that came before it. Stuff which is introduced in more detail in previous books (like the mice) is dropped gently with enough context that a savvy genre reader is likely to be able to get a good idea of what's going on. Events that would be spoilers for the previous books are referred to, both without pussyfooting and without the heavy implication that this particular thing is something that you, the reader, should already have known. There are also enough things that are mentioned in passing that if I were a new reader playing spot-the-hook-to-the-previous-book, I might pick up on things which are hooks for future books in the series instead.
As I previously mentioned, snakes. There are snakes all up in this. There are people who are snakes. There are snakes who are people. There are people who have snakes for hair. There are people who can turn into snakes, at least partially. There are snake-chickens. There are larger things who are not chicken-sized but who are definitely still snakes. Nobody's eyes flash gold, though. There is that. Instead, can we offer you a discount on being turned into stone? Painfully?
When you have snakes, and good guys, and bad guys, many authors would make the choice to say that the snakes and people who like snakes are bad guys. Not so here. Alex specifically calls out JKR for Slytherin House. Some of the snakes are good guys. Some of the snakes are bad guys. Some of the snakes are on their own side, because fuck you. Some of the young snakes are engaged to adorable little girls (who are also snakes) and that's awesome.
But it's not all snakes! We get mice! We get frickens! We get church griffins. We get various members of the Healy-Price family.
We do get one guy who is unclear on the concept of how adult consensual relationships tend to work. This situation is resolved without sexual assault; general physical assault has already happened by this point. Also various violence and death: sentient-sentient, animal-sentient, sentient-animal, and animal-animal; there is death and blood and arson and a whole lot of weapons. There is what I would describe, without specific spoilers, as "body horror". There is an autopsy. There is a telepath recovering from the aftermath of horrific mental injury. In happier content that people often still want to know about, Alex is a lot less chatty about his sex life than Very is, but Shelby does mention that they have one, even if you wouldn't know it from how fast the fade-to-black feels. Workplace policy on "fraternization" exists and is discussed in passing. There's also a typo-level factual error about geese, which only bothered me because Alex is the kind of person who would know these things, and my mother's a birder so I know these things; the proper venue for me to go on for more than one sentence about a typo is through the publisher, so I have an email draft in progress about that.
I was delighted by getting to see more than one Healy-Price at a time. It is fantastic to see them published and engaging in mayhem. I felt like Verity's books were about responsibility and duty. This book of Alex's is about family. You stick by your family. Except at the point you have to make some really hard decisions, because something has gone terribly wrong. It's also framed and delicately interwoven with the larger plot arc question of the frickens (half frog, half chicken, all abomination of nature, at least as the Covenant understands it): what happens when Mainstream Science! eventually and inevitably discovers something that sets it on edge? When does a cryptobiologist have to accept that as the inevitable? What does that mean for the rest of the cryptids? The answer to that one is not in this book, though I have faith we'll run into further exploration later on in the series.
I'm tempted to say that the cast may be majority-female, despite a male protagonist, which means that it's probably about 50/50. There is Alex of course; then there's his family: Grandma, Grandpa, Cousin Sarah. We hear from father, sister, and brother-in-law-equivalent over the phone. At the zoo, there is Lloyd, Dee, Shelby, Chandi and her fiancé Shami. We also call on Chandi's family, and visit Dee's entire community. The only person I am tempted to call "the girl" is in fact eight years old; the fact that she's not a mammal is beside the point. Alex keeps upgrading his relationship status with Shelby when asked about it; he notices at least the first time. I predict that there's going to be some words about it in the next book when Shelby notices more than she already has.
Some of Seanan's books leave me feeling profoundly affected and like I need to get as many of my friends as possible to get this into their brains ASAP. This was not one of those, but if you like mystery-y urban fantasy with snakes in, I think you should read this, because it's good.
The party was fairly standard for a Seanan event, which is to say always great fun: door prizes, music, cupcakes, signing, Q&A. I spent most of the music reading: not that it wasn't good, but the book was better and also new. Paul Kwinn had a song about how Seanan might solve problems. It was the best. The Bohnhoffs played The Actor, which was new to me (despite having been released in 1999), and hilarious. Logistically, combining the line for the signing and the cupcakes was an excellent decision, since both require queueing. If you are planning on going to these events and have dietary restrictions, contact Seanan through the contact form on her website and let her know, some time in advance. That will let her let Cups & Cakes know what to make. I got the lemon this time. It was delicious.
I need to remember to collect my random questions about the books for the Q&A sessions, because sometimes there aren't quite enough questions to go around. Seanan can and will entertain the audience in other ways if there are insufficient questions. This time she threatened to unleash The Chaos upon us. We learned that no battle plan (outline, first draft) survives first contact with the enemy. I asked a follow-up: did that mean that Toby was "the enemy"? In point of fact, Seanan explained, everyone except for Cagney and Lacey (Toby's ancient Siamese, if you please) was "the enemy". And there are characters everywhere who were never meant to be there: Quentin was originally there to appear and then die, and Danny was a publisher's addition because there was no way that amount of blood would have flown at all well with a human cabbie.
Seanan's hair was in excellent form. Apparently the version that we had seen at FOGcon was in fact in the faded state. It looked like a candy corn rainbow there. Here, it proceeded from blonde to yellow through screaming orange and vivid pink down to a really assertive purple at the ends. Seanan's hairdresser is also her sister, and I fully intend to arrange an appointment at some time when I am both awake and have the budget for turning my hair the color blue that it was always intended to be.
I had passed the calendar appointment along to Purple when I realized it was happening, but he had other plans for this weekend (plus it is up in the city, and that's a ways). Tif showed, and we caught up a little. Burger Joint across the street had a sufficient non-gluten offering that we wound up eating there and catching up a bit. We are due an Epic Shopping Escapade soon.
Unfortunately for me, I had just hit the high point of the book when my train arrived at Daly City. So I had to decide whether I was going to read in the car, or drive home and then read in bed. Bed won out. By that time, the amazing crowd I'd seen earlier on the Millbrae/SFO platform had dispersed. I'd seriously thought there was some sort of protest or riot brewing, but then I saw all the green and realized that it was some sort of horrifying Saint Patrick's Day/spring break sort of thing, and it was just that many chuppers all together and chupping. Alcohol may have been involved. I drove home, put my hair up, got a snack, finished reading, and went to bed without bothering to actually brush and rebraid my hair. Consequently I have been painstakingly detangling all my hair while writing this up. All of the elastics have been removed, and it is time for the ylang ylang oil. But I had a great time. Whee!
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And yes, the perpetually-upgrading-relationship-status amused the hell out of me.
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All of the upgrades made sense! First the police and then the "yo, why does she get to tag along" at the enclave! But there's going to be hell to pay when she notices. :D
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I also really like that the narrative always remembers that Sarah and Angela are literally the only two cuckoos in the world who aren't looking for a chance to play with their food, and I love the wide range of reactions people have to them across the books!
(Which leads to reminding me that at the time I did think that Shelby's resistance to the idea of "just shut up and do what I say so my eyes don't turn to stone" was a bit unrealistic given the Next Big Twist, but on a reread I found that she wasn't reacting as much like a mundane as Alex thought she was. But the layers of "who knows what" and "unreliable narratorhood" there were a bit much for me.)
I was also glad to see a bit of Verity! (And Dominic. I wonder how long he'll put up with being their go-to guy for Covenant info.)
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YOU'RE GOING TO LIKE IT.
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