Powers 2 and The Vellum reviews

[alobear]

The Vellum by Hal Duncan is really hard going.  If the person who lent it to me managed to get through to the end (which I'm assuming they must have done), they did better than me - I've had to admit defeat on page 138.  The narrative is so fragmented, the plot so nebulous, and the characters so mutable that I'm really having difficulty gleaning any coherence out of it at all.  And, while some of the concepts are really interesting, they are rendered so impenetrable by the style that I've lost all motivation to find out what's going on.  It was the paragraph where Metatron is having trouble reading something on his palmtop, and describes it as having been torn into so many pieces and put together in so muddled an order as to be incomprehensible, that finally sounded the death knell for my efforts.  If the author is trying to be funny by being self-referential, I'm really not laughing.  This book is too clever for my poor brain, I'm afraid - I tried, I failed, I moved on to a comic book!

The second volume of Powers - Roleplay - is not as good as the first, and actually felt disappointingly short and lightweight after the outstanding start with Retro Girl.  It was still good, and I still like the characters and am looking forward to spending more time with them in the (thankfully) longer next couple of volumes, but Roleplay was comparatively weak.