Books:
Magic Burns (Kate Daniels #2) by Ilona Andrews
Well I found this second book in an urban fantasy series - a genre I don't normally love - to be as entertaining as the first and I'm knocking wood that the whole series ends up being as good. There are two components that put this book above others of its ilk. First, to a large extent the top-level plot is standalone combined with, second, ongoing and building underlying character and world stuff. It's like, well pick your TV/Streaming series that you loved that did that; for me it's The Good Wife where there were multi-season plots, a few recurring characters, and largely new cases each episode. This series so far is the same in that regard. Our hero is a super tough mercenary with a past that's still only been hinted at in modern-day Atlanta but really not urban fantasy in a traditional sense. The overarching idea - not a spoiler btw - is that something's happening where the world is flip-flopping between tech being dominant and magic being dominant with one negating the other. When tech is dominant, it's our normal world; when magic's up, it's, well, some familiar stuff (vampires, werewolves) plus some more obscure stuff drawn from myths. So what this book has is a brooding lonerish lead with all kinds of spoilerable things going on that she needs to hide but with her only real skill being that of a for-hire magic-PI (kind of) and thus stuck in situations where she's both highly invested on a human level - this book centers around a young girl needing protection - while also needing to pull her punches due to the still-unrevealed backstory. This is combined with a set of other characters and constructs and rules around how all the magic stuff is supposed to work plus what looks like the start of a combative romance tossed in for good measure. But what really makes these books work for me, aside from everything I just mentioned, is the nonstop action. Basically they're just fun. There's enough downtime for character and world building but then it's back into the thick of an investigation that's ultimately going to lead to some kind of chase/battle/whatever and it makes it all pretty addictive. The basic plot of this one involves the aforementioned young girl who's tangentially wrapped up in a much more massive plot issue that leads to the big ending of this book (being vague to avoid spoilering). You know, I think because I don't love urban fantasy and the covers of these books make them look like romances, I avoided them but, having read two, I gotta say: if the genre's not a total turnoff and you can ignore the covers, there's a really entertaining and well-done series here which I plan to inhale and you may want to as well.
Slippery Adventures (Will Darling Adventures #1) by KJ Charles
This was an okay 1920s adventure/mystery about a WWI vet who inherits a bookstore only to discover himself in danger with a bunch of people who are chasing him to get something hidden somewhere in the store. The style of the book is pretty breezy and I'd say in keeping with my (admittedly vague) sense of these types of books. The plot and overall tone has a kind of Peaky Blinders vibe in that there’s no real good guy/bad guy but rather people ill-intentioned towards our lead (that would be the eponymous Will Darling) and his efforts to escape them. And that's my first issue with this book. Will was really there more or less to be the recipient of mystery and violence but didn't seem to have any skills himself beyond some occasional knife-pointing and the like. I mean he's facing two gangs, one criminal and one government, and doesn't really do all that much beyond getting swept up in and complaining about it and get swept up in it all. This made the story pretty turgid because there's a lot of action happening around and to the main character but no real action generated by the main character. I mean it's a mystery as in he initially doesn't know what anyone's after or why, but his unraveling of that mystery comes to, more or less, waiting around long enough for other people to explain it to him as opposed to taking action to unravel it himself. It makes the read overall pretty flat because he's basically Nell tied to the train tracks the whole time and I mean don't you want to read about an active hero rather than a passive victim? So that's my main issue, it's a writing issue, and it's something that makes me not want to continue this series because I'm not interested in seeing that character do nothing in subsequent books like he did in this one. My second issue is a personal taste thing and not some flaw or anything with the writing which is that there are a TON of sex scenes, long long long sex scenes, and I just find sex scenes to be crazy dull. That may not be you in which case enjoy. But it's me, though honestly it was the first issue, the character one, that kills this book for me because if that problem weren't there I'd have just skipped the sex scenes and enjoyed the book. That wasn't the case and bummer cause I liked the writing overall, but I just can't read an adventure series with a cipher as the lead.
TV/Streaming:
The Crown (Season 3):
Well this show continues to astound, primarily in terms of it story-to-runtime ratio which, in this season, continues its trend of under 1 story beat per hour of programming. To give you my mathematical proof of the absolutely amazing utter lack of anything whatsoever happening at any point in this show, Exhibit A (wait - did this just become a legal proof?) is an entire episode devoted to people, by which I mean people who do absolutely nothing but sit around in their rich prison wearing rich people clothes and being waited on but doing, as noted, nothing, watching television. Maybe that episode was like a meta thing, where I'm having the exact same experience as the characters, i.e. watching them on my screen watching something on their screen. Very very powerful. But for real: what do you think of an hour of viewing in which the characters do nothing more than gather around a TV to watch the moon landing? The writer(s) tried to infuse it with meaning as the main rich dude in some earlier era/season was, for one hot second if that, a fighter pilot of sorts and felt his horrific rich life (as opposed to his total idiocy for being the wealthiest person on the planet yet deciding not to do whatever the fuck he wants to with all that money) had constrained his dreams. So we're watching someone, for an hour, watch something... yearningly. I mean is it just me? Look I get it, this story is hewing to truth or somesuch but guess what, writer? It's your job to make that truth interesting! I'm aware, by which I mean Netflix's unaudited marketing would have us all believe, that lots of other people have a totally different reaction to this show. And, yes, if you're a British royals fan then I'm sure this series is a whole other experience. But if you're just, you know, watching something then… um... As I mentioned my prior reviews (here and here), my primary amazement with this series is how little it makes of not much, like it's incapable of infusing anything with even the barest hint of character but instead substitutes the same quote unquote character beat over and over and over and over and over with every single person in the show and calls it a day. That beat - "I have something on the inside but I can't let it out due to duty" - is insanely passive and interior. When literally anything a character wants or aspires to is instantly squashed by both his/her/their (I know there's a royal "we" but are there any royal theys?) family members or staff, what are you watching!??! 200 million hours of the plot of Waiting for Godot but without any of the humor or ironic (or not) existentialist commentary. In many ways, I wish they had done this series as a brutal examination of existentialism, of how waiting around for your capital-L Life to happen but never allowing it to happen is, for better or worse, your life. Like show me how people, due solely to statements around needing to conform and not stick out, instead delude themselves that their busywork of doing nothing is doing something with glimpses of their emptiness and a sense that, well, that's life. To pick Beckett again, he had an entire play which was one long monologue performed entirely with the character's head coming out of a pile of garbage and that static nature, where she was stuck but talking talking talking nonstop, was also somehow a life but not a life (go watch the play not series Happy Days (maybe the series too who knows?) if you haven't already and you'll see what I mean). But there's nothing writerly beneath this show at all, no artistic need to talk about people spending their entire lives spawning in a rich prison or whatever. Like no idea, just docudrama but without the drama part and, come to think of it, without the docu part either because it's hard to imagine any documentarian worth their salt just dropping these factual bits which all end in "and then nothing happened and life went on" in a row and proudly releasing their final product. So this show is actually nothing. Are people watching it for this same reason I am, i.e. to rip it apart, or am I all alone? Well onto season 4 at some point.
Movies:
Emily the Criminal - I swear I'm not damning with faint praise, but this was a not-bad crime drama about a woman, trapped by societal circumstances, who turns to crime as her only realistic option to survive. Her basic backstory, which you know instantly so not a spoiler, is that she did time for felony assault and a DUI when she was younger and is now trapped with that being permanently part of her resume and thus, despite having skills as an artist and a strong willingness to do hard work, really can't get anything other than low-paying unskilled jobs where she's powerless against bad bosses and really has no hope of getting anywhere else in her life. This social trap where, essentially, you're never really released from prison and no amount of paying your societal debt will ever undo your younger self's mistake, infuses the whole movie without actually taking over the movie and that's a compliment. I mean it's there and it's why the character does what she does, like you can see she just wants to have some kind of life and pay her bills and has no interest in being a criminal or doing anything of that kind but actually has no choice in the end despite every effort to make other choices. Beyond that, it was a relatively interesting crime movie but more about someone being drawn into crime - credit card fraud specifically - and then being forced, without spoilering, to escalate in some ways. This is what made the movie interesting on a basic movie-watching level to me. First, it was kind of cool to see the inner workings of credit card fraud and how that happens and second, Emily, our lead, really isn't some hardened criminal but rather just someone whose determination to get out of her hole overcomes, to a certain extent, her fear. This became interesting as the movie progressed and she inevitably got pulled deeper in with the lead criminal guy because, well, it's probably how crime happens. I'm not going to spoiler where it winds up, but she makes plot choices driven by character and circumstance, like she's not a criminal at heart but then again she grew up in a tough neighborhood and did prison time and is determined to have something better for herself, as in a good job not a life of crime, and is forced to find a sort of inner steel in order to get what she needs. I know I'm being vague but in the end this does have a crime/thriller plot to it and I don't want to spoiler anything. I enjoyed it and, while I wouldn't say the social stuff is anything I didn't know already, I also hadn't seen it played out like this in a movie before. Like yeah we've seen movies with desperate people driven to crime, but this was more of a not-desperate person who, by the trap we put ex-cons in, became more and more desperate and hopeless and was then compelled to grab at the only shot for a future she really had. It clocks in at around 90 minutes and I'd say it has enough interest in terms of theme and enough plot to drive it all forward that it’s probably worth a watch if this sounds up your alley.