BATTLE OF THE LINGUIST MAGES by Scotto Moore has an IT nerd recruited out of the online gaming world where she’s “Queen of Sparkle Dungeon” to work on a tech company’s project mastering the superhypnotic “power morpheme” magic. The narrator’s voice wore out its welcome fast and while I enjoyed the gaming references at first, they got tedious quickly. I put this down unfinished.
I did the same to NATURE’S MUTINY: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present by Philipp Blom. I’m intrigued by the Little Ice Age but began to question Blom’s expertise when he asserted nature overturning Europe’s social order was unprecedented (the Black Death would like a word). About a third of the way into the book, he wanders off-topic, giving us a whole chapter on Montaigne simply because he was alive in that era. Thumbs down.
Even though it didn’t blow me away, Beth Morrey’s CLOVER HENDRY’S DAY OFF beat out the other books simply by being not terrible. The eponymous middle-aged mother and TV producer rebels against all the annoyances in her life by blowing off work, confronting jerks in her life, calling her overbearing mother out, settling some scores and gazing into her navel for insight. While I like the plot and some of the scenes, this is another voice that relies heavily on voice, and Clover’s didn’t win me over (but I didn’t hate it like the Sparkle Dungeon woman). Also the opening chapters set up Clover’s husband as a selfish jerk, then that possibility gets dropped — though it may be I lost something when I started to skim the book rather than read closely.
#SFWApro.
