A good second volume. I am enormously happy that the ineffective interior dialog that repeatedly broke me out of the first volume is gone; there's some italicized Thought, but it's more to explain the character's reasoning and less twee.
At one point the heroine thinks "Gah", which isn't unreasonable as an expression of startlement, but I did snag on it because it seems to me to be a SF-ism, for no particular reason. "Pure quill" seems to be that now, though it wasn't originally. At some point in-group language isn't a condensation of agreed ideas, it's a shortcut around ideas. This is too large a concern to hang on "Gah", of course.
I wonder if three-volume-ism is related to the triple-decker or the roman fleuve, the pleasures of big nineteenth-century novels, or is it only a parallel quirk in the economics of publishing. How did ninteenth-c. readers think of the volume break? Album sides on LPs, query.
ISBN: 0380977893
So wrote clew in SF&F. | TrackBack