Foundation and Love's Last Shift reviews
Apr. 16th, 2009 10:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearNo, not *that* Foundation - Asimov really isn't my thing. This Foundation is the first in a new Valdemar series from Mercedes Lackey, which I was pretty excited about when I heard of it. Sadly, the reality was rather disappointing.
The first two thirds of the book was justa re-hash of the same story she's told a million times before - child grows up in miserable surroundings, magic horse comes to mark child out as special, child is whisked to the capital to learn to be a servant of the monarch, child spends a couple of years in a university environment with magic horse and lots of other youngsters. So far, so unoriginal.
Then, once the storyline specific to this series finally got going, it really wasn't very interesting, or in fact very coherent. Lackey apparently didn't have enough plot to make one decent story, so she kept jumping around between minor, pointless snippets - dissension amongst the Heralds as to the way the Trainees are taught (Oh no! Changing from one-on-one mentoring to group classes has potentially catastrophic consequences! Er, what?); random foreign visitors to the court are not very nice and start acting strangely (cue main character being trained as a spy for very little apparent reason - wouldn't there be plenty of other, more appropriate people to do this job?); there's a big storm that threatens the city (which basically involved child and magic horse hauling logs for firewood for a few hours, and then people getting briefly lost in the snow); and so on...
The other thing that really annoyed me was a lack of internal consistency, or any kind of sense of historical progression from one set of books to another. One of the characters, who has been in several other series, really shouldn't have been in this one - he doesn't turn up until several hundred years later! And there seemed to be a woeful lack of knowledge of events that happened in books set only 50 years before this one - evidently sticking a new storyline in the middle of the timeline wasn't such a good plan.
I actually don't think I'll buy the next one in the series - which certainly hasn't happened with Valdemar books before. Sigh.
Last night, though, Dave and I ventured to a tiny theatre in Kennington to see the Restoration comedy Love's Last Shift, and it was excellent. Restoration is one of the few types of comedy I find consistently entertaining, and this play did not disappoint. There were only 23 of us in the audience (and the theatre would only have held 30 in total), which made it a rather more intimate experience than usual. The performances were brilliant, the staging was well done, and the costumes were lovely - I particularly liked the way the three central couples wore complimentary colours, with the women's dresses having accents the same colour as the men's jackets, and the men sporting either wastcoats or trousers the same colour as the women's skirts. As is to be expected from Restoration comedy, the dialogue was fast-paced, wordy, witty and clever, there was some ridiculous scrambling about of servants under furniture, the heroes managed to marry the right girls mainly by trickery, and there was a fop in a silly wig and face paint to laugh at. A good time was had by all!
The first two thirds of the book was justa re-hash of the same story she's told a million times before - child grows up in miserable surroundings, magic horse comes to mark child out as special, child is whisked to the capital to learn to be a servant of the monarch, child spends a couple of years in a university environment with magic horse and lots of other youngsters. So far, so unoriginal.
Then, once the storyline specific to this series finally got going, it really wasn't very interesting, or in fact very coherent. Lackey apparently didn't have enough plot to make one decent story, so she kept jumping around between minor, pointless snippets - dissension amongst the Heralds as to the way the Trainees are taught (Oh no! Changing from one-on-one mentoring to group classes has potentially catastrophic consequences! Er, what?); random foreign visitors to the court are not very nice and start acting strangely (cue main character being trained as a spy for very little apparent reason - wouldn't there be plenty of other, more appropriate people to do this job?); there's a big storm that threatens the city (which basically involved child and magic horse hauling logs for firewood for a few hours, and then people getting briefly lost in the snow); and so on...
The other thing that really annoyed me was a lack of internal consistency, or any kind of sense of historical progression from one set of books to another. One of the characters, who has been in several other series, really shouldn't have been in this one - he doesn't turn up until several hundred years later! And there seemed to be a woeful lack of knowledge of events that happened in books set only 50 years before this one - evidently sticking a new storyline in the middle of the timeline wasn't such a good plan.
I actually don't think I'll buy the next one in the series - which certainly hasn't happened with Valdemar books before. Sigh.
Last night, though, Dave and I ventured to a tiny theatre in Kennington to see the Restoration comedy Love's Last Shift, and it was excellent. Restoration is one of the few types of comedy I find consistently entertaining, and this play did not disappoint. There were only 23 of us in the audience (and the theatre would only have held 30 in total), which made it a rather more intimate experience than usual. The performances were brilliant, the staging was well done, and the costumes were lovely - I particularly liked the way the three central couples wore complimentary colours, with the women's dresses having accents the same colour as the men's jackets, and the men sporting either wastcoats or trousers the same colour as the women's skirts. As is to be expected from Restoration comedy, the dialogue was fast-paced, wordy, witty and clever, there was some ridiculous scrambling about of servants under furniture, the heroes managed to marry the right girls mainly by trickery, and there was a fop in a silly wig and face paint to laugh at. A good time was had by all!
