Hours of my life I will never get back...

At least it wasn't as bad as the movie/trainwreck Snow White and the Huntsman (I almost just typed "Snotwhite" - wouldn't have been totally wrong)?

So, after an aborted attempt at reading The Apothecary's House by Adrian Mathews on Saturday night, I finally finished all 534 grueling pages of it over Sunday-Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday nights. I think. Now I don't remember when I started it. But I DO remember that every night I'd get into bed and be like "okay, back to the grindstone" and not "yay, back to the wonderful, entrancing story and the finely-limned characters who populate the vivid world in which it's set!" Needless to say, I was not impressed.

Basically, the story is about a young(ish) woman (maybe?) in the Netherlands who works for a group that evaluates claims to artwork stolen by Nazis, and how she gets deeply involved with one painting (and one of its claimees). Then there's also this whole thing where someone's out to get her, and presumably the painting, because of it's freaking mysterious alchemical significance. It's not that any one strand of the story was so terrible or unrealistic, but all together they were way to much. Pick one, Mathews.

The characters were a problem, as well. The two primary supporting characters are probably the best. You get a good sense of who they are, and the author balances their humorous value with more serious sides. The main character, though, is kind of an idiot. While she admits to being something of a b*tch at the end of the book, my issue with her was not that, but that she was totally self-absorbed and really dumb. She wrote people off that she shouldn't have (like the awesome guy she eventually realizes the worth of about 300 pages after you know he's going to be the best thing that ever happened to her), alienated some friends and used others, and constantly got herself into bad situations that she should have seen coming, in most cases, and could have avoided, in virtually all.

I've read other books set in the Netherlands, but it's still unfamiliar enough terrain to me that I think I could have really enjoyed the setting, and the location is very important to the story, but Amsterdam doesn't really come to life here. Also, maybe this is a Dutch thing, or maybe it's some American pc/squeamishness on my part, but I was really, really uncomfortable with the way race was handled/written in the book. At first I thought maybe it was a translation issue, when the main character's friend kept being referred to as "the black girl" over and over again. She has a name, you can use it. Nobody else is referred to as "the white girl/man/etc." But then Mathews started referring repeatedly to another character as "the black." Oh my God. Just call him the Negro and have done with it.

Honestly, even beyond it just making me kind of uncomfortable, it's lazy writing. If the only way you can identify a character is by his or her race, then maybe you need to work a little harder at making him or her memorable. Or even mildly interesting. OR USE HIS OR HER NAME. At one point, when discussing the effect the man had had on another (white) man, Mathews say "the black had stifled him [guy #2]." CAMERON. CAMERON had stifled him. Or "He had stifled X."

Dumb. So glad I'm done with this book. I don't remember ever hearing/thinking about this book, so I'm wondering if I just grabbed it off the shelf at the library because the spine looked cool / the title sounded promising. If that's the case...FAIL.

Orgies

Of reading, obviously.

I plowed through a ton of books this week/end, at least that's what it feels like.

Started Justice Sotomayor's memoir, but I was taking cold medicine for most of the last week, so I didn't want to really get into it, excited as I was to get my hands on it. So more on that later, when I really read it.

What I DID read, and is perfect for when you're not feeling great and spending a lot of time curled up in bed, was the latest Agent Pendergast book, Two Graves. It's pretty much what you'd expect - actually, it's exactly what you'd expect - but that's just fine - it's what I wanted. I will say, I give Preston & Child credit for not recapping the first two books in the trilogy (to say nothing of the entire Pendergast series), and basically just jumping into this particular story. It was schlocky, belief-stretching fun, although way over the top, of course. But who doesn't love when a Nazi hive gets blown up?

After Two Graves I continued on in the same vein with The Third Gate, by half of the same duo, in this case Lincoln Child. It was...fine? It's set at an Egyptian archaeological dig site, so maybe I was extra harsh, given my childhood love for the subject, but I felt like there were a lot of flaws. like the Preston & Child books, a LOT was crammed in - lots of different plot strands, random comments about cars and guns and machines that are maybe boy-brain-action-porn, but weren't doing it for me, and waaaay too much description of the man-made physical setting. Now, about that last maybe part of that is how I read. I generally don't "see" what's being described in my mind's eye, at least not always at the level of detail given, so when you go on and on about how the joists of a particular platform are connected, I get bored. But I think most people would have in this case.

The biggest problem was the huge twist at the end, or at least what I suppose was meant to be a huge twist, was super obvious and I saw it coming right away. Then again, I saw it coming because of clues in the text, so maybe we were supposed to get it, and then saying "you idiots! Don't you see?" to the characters would have ramped up the tension. But instead I just said "you idiots" and then was mildly annoyed when the revelation hit them, because I had been waiting for so long.

The end of the book, too, just seemed very abrupt and unsatisfying. Well, not unsatisfying, because I didn't want anything more, but not satisfying either.

Finished that yesterday, Saturday late afternoon, then started a book called The Apothecary's House (Adrian Mathews) - fine, about art stolen by the Nazis, but it was sloooooow going, so I gave it up, since I started it around 11 p.m. (stayed in last night, long story), and wanted something fast and easy.

So then I flew through another book with NO twist (although, again, when it's that obvious, is it even meant to be a twist?) and a really abrupt and in this case very unsatisfying ending, The Poison Diaries by Maryrose Wood (and inspired by, or something, the work of the Duchess of Northumberland). It's a slim YA book about a girl in eighteenth century England whose father is an herbalist who keeps a locked garden of poisonous plants and about a mysterious young man (heh, I feel cheesy just writing that, but there's no other way) - who's also hot, obviously - who comes to live with them. The main character, even the two main characters, are appealing, and there's so much room in the plot to really explore, but virtually nothing happens and what does happen is incredibly obvious.

And, maybe this is a YA thing, but much like when I watch The Vampire Diaries or Pretty Little Liars on TV, I just want to scream/scold "you stupid adolescent idiot - just TALK to him/her/them and you'll get this all figured out a million times sooner than if you run around trying to do everything on your own and secretly." I guess wisdom comes with age.

Then the end is just like "okay, and now we're done. The end." Dunno. Found myself wishing a better author had taken the same story and made an adult novel out of it.

So then it was 1:30 a.m. (I read it in under 90 minutes), and I had napped from 5:30-7 p.m., so I was awake, so I sped through Lauren Willig's The Mischief of the Mistletoe, which is just such a sweet, adorable little thing (well, almost 400 pages, so maybe not that little...but they are small pages), and then I was happy again, so I went to bed. 

N.B. - looked up The Poison Diaries to the author, and it looks like it's the first in a series. So that may account for the abrupt ending.