Market Forces, Richard Morgan

I’m torn between the fact that I like Morgan’s writing — it’s slick, tight, packs a punch — and the fact that his world is just too ridiculously ultra-violent for me, and the characters I like don’t come out well. I liked Chris’ wife Carla, but of course, she loses her husband in the worst of way: he’s not dead, but he’s thrown himself into a life she hates, and refused to accept her help in getting him out of it. And he’s cheated on her, of course: let’s not forget that.

I find the world-building interesting, though in this case not entirely convincing (duels in cars? how does that really come about? it doesn’t sound like something top executives would realistically end up doing), but of course all of it is a way of examining capitalism and the free market, of making brutally clear the way that competition can ruin lives.

If the point then is to take a guy who seems decent at the beginning, like Chris, and watch as that competition warps him, then Morgan does a great job — but it’s hard to enjoy it as a story, particularly given the bodycount. Very much a case of not-really-my-thing, though, and I’m sure that people who’re less squicked out by violence will enjoy this a lot more than me, assuming our tastes are otherwise the same.

White Cat, Holly Black

I started this unsure, thanks to some reviews I read, moved to being quite intrigued, and then stopped on page 125 to inform the internet that I knew the entire plot and I would be very surprised if I was wrong. The disappointing thing is that I was completely right. Everything panned out exactly the way I expected, which was discouraging, and became boring.

At first, I was interested in Cassel, in the way he worked all the angles, his cons. I liked the setup of a mob family with magic: all of that worked fine. What didn’t work fine was the fact that Cassel’s meant to be smart, meant to have his eye on all the angles, and yet he’s so easily manipulated and conned. He doesn’t see the most obvious things.

Like, one example: we’re told about blowback, something that happens to people who use their powers; whatever they’ve done rebounds upon then. So he’s pretty sure his memories are being messed with — sure enough to mutilate himself to try and prevent it — but when someone he knows well has big gaps in their memory and uses a journal to remind themselves of what they’re doing/saying, he doesn’t even think of blowback. He doesn’t seem to think much of it at all, even. And he asks about how this kind of magic works, and someone tells him and then starts to mention his brother and he… cuts her off. It seems a bit like plot-induced stupidity and just completely pushed me out of the story.

So I won’t be finishing this series. It is light fun reading, if you can get past points like that or you don’t see it from the angle I do, but I like some subtlety in the narration (even if I already knew the ending, the example I gave is just too blatantly signalling it for me).