Silent City, Alex Segura

I was hopeful about this one when the publicist contacted me via my blog to offer me a copy. Chris F. Holm and Adam Christopher blurbed it, and I’ve certainly enjoyed their books. Plus there was a reference to similarities between the main character and Matt Fraction’s Clint Barton, which… hmm, I don’t really see.

Anyway, the problem with this is for me, it felt like a pretty standard detective story in style, tone, plot, characters… There’s nothing surprising about an alcoholic PI, though Pete Fernandez is a bit more the worse for wear than most. One aspect I did like was some of the relationships in the story, like Pete’s with his ex-girlfriend. That felt a bit more nuanced than typical for these stories.

It’s a quick read, and if you have a particular affection for the genre or the city-scape of Miami, then it might be worth checking out, but if your tastes in crime fiction are more for the excellent outliers and stuff that breaks the mould, then I probably wouldn’t go for this one.

Alcestis, Katharine Beutner

I’m torn on this one. It was spellbinding, but in a soft, dusty way — Alcestis as a character is too obedient for most of her life to have any colour to her. The bit in the Underworld is still quite colourless, quite literally, except for Persephone. I was actually more interested in the relationship between Hades and Persephone than that between Persephone and Alcestis. I wanted to understand them, what made them tick, what made them volatile.

I understand that there’s actually a degree of historical accuracy here to way a real Alcestis would’ve lived, just with the gods treated as a rational part of everyday life as well, but she seems so meek and resigned — until she’s in the Underworld. I can appreciate the liberation of a female character from a stifling traditional role that must have been so flattering to the men in that male dominated world, and it makes sense it could happen in the Underworld, where the rules of life don’t apply.

I guess in summary, I just didn’t fall for it. There were some lovely sections, gorgeous imagery, and there was some interesting interplay between characters, but all in all it didn’t work for me.

Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

I had trouble with Invisible Cities. It’s beautiful, light, a dream of a soap bubble of a book, insubstantial and for me, really difficult. I can appreciate the writing, the dreamy nature of the book, but I can’t love it. It just didn’t quite work for me. Maybe written by Catherynne M. Valente it would have worked for me — her use of language has weight, somehow — but in this translation at least, no, Calvino didn’t work very well for me. It’s gorgeous, but I quickly got impatient with it.

It’s still a worthwhile read, I think, but don’t look for a story here: that’s not the kind of book this is. It’s more like a dreamscape.