Sam Downing

Gone Girl is one of those everyone-is-talking-about-this-so-I-guess-I’ll-check-it-out-too books. Happily, it’s not one of those crazy-popular books you read with one hand turning the pages and the other batting away the unholy stench of shit reeking from the pages. This is a bestselling thriller that is actually pretty thrilling! Which doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its problems.

Spoilers (of the utterly-plot-ruining-so-watch-out variety) follow.

This much you know from the blurb on the back of the book: Golden boy Nick Dunne meets golden girl Amy Elliott. They hit it off. They wed. Then everyone goes sour: Nick loses his sweet job as an entertainment writer for an Entertainment Weekly-type magazine*, Amy’s trust fund is wiped out by her flaky parents’ financial mismanagement, the two move back to Nick’s decaying-middle-American-shithole hometown, their marriage starts to break down. On their fifth wedding anniversary, Amy disappears from their home. The crime scene suggests a violent struggle. The police immediately suspect Nick – the husband is always guilty, right? – except we know he didn’t do it. So what has happened to Amy?

(*Author Gillian Flynn was also formerly an entertainment writer for Entertainment Weekly. Which is probably just a crazy coincidence.)

Last chance to back out if you don’t want any spoilers. And this really is one of those stories you should experience spoiler free.

Halfway through her novel, Flynn completely upends it. Amy hasn’t been killed by some violent, mysterious man. She’s staged her disappearance as an Old Testament God-level revenge against Nick for cheating on her with a younger women. On the one hand, it’s fiendishly clever: Gone Girl immediately becomes something much more compelling, much fresher than the “missing woman” story we’ve been led to believe it is.

On the other hand… something about the twist flattens the story into two dimensions, and it’s less compelling. Suddenly, Nick’s increasingly misogynist feelings towards Amy (and our increasingly complicated feelings towards him) are brushed aside – hey, the reason he hates his wife is because she really is an actual literal psychopath. Hey, of course Nick is the good guy again, because even though he cheated on Amy, she really is lying, manipulative, hate-filled* and through-and-through horrible. Which is kind of a shame, because in its first half the book frequently cuts to the heart of what it is to be in a relationship with devastating clarity, the kind of clarity usually reserved for those times when you wake up at 3 a.m. and remember your death is coldly inevitable, only to turn Nick and Amy’s marriage into more conventional cat-and-mouse spy-versus-spy stuff.

(*Seriously, there is a lot of woman-on-woman use of the C-word in here.)

That said, Flynn mostly succeeds in keeping the momentum up in the second half of the book, as Nick starts plotting to get Amy back and Amy starts plotting to outmanoeuvre Nick’s plots and Nick starts plotting to outmanoeuvre Amy’s plots to outmanoeuvre Nick’s plots… and so on and so on. It whips up and up and around itself until it all finally collapses in the last few ludicrous pages, as the plot fizzles out with a whimper – Amy (who’s also an actual literal murderer by this point in addition to being an actual literal psychopath) manipulates Nick into taking her back and falls pregnant with his artificially inseminated kid, and Nick accepts because he relishes her mindgames and wants to protect his unborn kid… or something.

I bet most people will finish Gone Girl with a “Seriously – WTF was that dumb ending” expression. But it’s a pretty entertaining ride getting to said dumb ending. Any writer who can get you to keep turning the page even as your scoffing eyebrow creeps ever higher up your forehead has pulled off a pretty good trick.

(Spoilers follow.)

Oh boy this is a stupid book.

I honestly don’t mean “stupid” as an entirely bad thing – I like plenty of things which are “stupid”, and there’s nothing guilty or ironic about my affection for them.  I mean “stupid” as in, Clockwork Princess is unashamedly romantic and melodramatic and hand-wringing and bosom-heaving. And if that’s what you’re reading this series for: fine. You’ll love this final instalment. Everyone’s paired off neatly, more or less, and everyone gets a tidy ending. Hurray.

I guess I’m more about plot than romance, though, and the plot is disappointing. For starters, it’s thin, so thin the novel’s sharp-clavicled cover model would look at it and be like “Seriously, eat a sandwich, plot”. But it seems weightier than it is because half of every page is devoted to characters ruminating on the exact same problems they were ruminating on a chapter ago. (“I love Tessa but Jem loves Tessa, woe!” “I love Sophie but Sophie is a mere servant girl, woe!” “Gideon tricked me into wasting scones, woe!”) There are whole pointless chapters you can just glance over without losing the thread of the story – which is a hallmark of Clare’s work, and not a great one.

It’s the resolution to the plot that’s most disappointing. (Book, I am disappoint.) Clockwork Angel and Clockwork Prince told us that Tessa, our immortal heroine, has mysterious powers unknown even to her, which make her vitally important to the cunning plans of Mortmain, our villain. Well, Mortmain seems to do a pretty good job building an unstoppable army of robots without relying on Tessa, and even after finishing this book I’m still not clear on exactly why he needed her so badly. (Something to do with using Tessa’s shapeshifting ability to make her transform herself into Mortmain’s dead father, so Mortmain can access dear old dad’s memories and make his automatons even more powerful. Or something. Like, is that all.)

And the ending just feels so… easy. Tessa is torn between her love for two best friends, Will (who’s beautiful and arrogant and less of a dick than he seems) and Jem (who’s beautiful and kind and suffering from a fatal illness that will kill him any day now). She ends up with Will, but not because she has to make any sort of sacrifice or choice: Jem – impossibly, implausibly nice Jem- goes and joins an order of immortal monks (… kind of), despite saying early on that he’d never do that, freeing her up to marry Will. Easy. But then, after a century or so, when Will’s long dead, Jem leaves the order and hooks up with Tessa anyway. Even easier! So she ends up with both of them. The cake is both had and eaten.

And Mortmain is defeated pretty easily, because Mortmain is a dull villain who’s evil mostly just because he’s evil (another Clare hallmark), much as Clare tries to flesh him out with a backstory. He exists because someone needs to be working to destroy Tessa and Jem and Will and the rest of their demon-fighting Shadowhunter friends, right?

I kind of feel bad coming down harshly on Clockwork Princess. It is what it is. It’s not terrible. (And it’s a lot better and more inventive than the increasingly over-the-top Mortal Instruments series, which this Infernal Devices series precedes). Other people will read this book for much different reasons than I did. And those people will probably like it a lot better.

Previously: Clockwork Angel, Cassandra Clare; Clockwork Prince, Cassandra Clare

I read The Ruby in the Smoke at Christmas – and immediately regretted not having the rest of the Sally Lockhart Mysteries at hand. (Apparently they’re only available as ebooks in Spanish, and no habla espanol or whatever)  They’re those kinds of books: Once you’re in the universe, you want to stay in it.

The second instalment in the series, The Shadow in the North, picks up Sally’s story several years after the end of Ruby. She’s a successful financial consultant with a taste for mystery, which flares up  when a client of hers loses all of her money to a ruined company whose misfortunes seem to have been predicted by a spiritualist. Dun dun!

Pullman built a sinister, grubby Victorian London in Ruby, and it’s an even darker place in Shadow. There are deaths – of major characters, who you’d expect to survive in any other series because most writers wouldn’t have to balls to kill off them off. The only “safe” character is Sally, and even she’s only safe from death. She’s a plucky, smart, ballsy, admirable heroine, so the risk of her falling victim to some worse-than-death fate that would crush her spirit is a big one.

The third book, The Tiger in the Well, is about such a fate. While the first two books are about Sally rising above the sexist goons of the time, in Tiger those goons are actively seeking to crush her. A powerful and mysterious force conspires to take from Sally everything that she’s built up – her business, her home, her family – but not by killing her. Her shadowy enemy is taking away everything by twisting the law, which didn’t give much of  shit about women back then, especially unmarried ones with children.

There’s an explicit theme of men hoarding power over women and using it to oppress them. “The real Big Bad is institutionalised sexism,” etc etc” Of course not all the penis-havers are nefarious tosspots. The male heroes – Jim, Sally’s closest friend; Fred, her on-off paramour; Daniel, a political journalist she encounters – revel in her strength and the opportunity to share power with her. Shadow and especially Tiger are explicitly feminist books. Their plots are deliberately pulpy, riffing on penny dreadfuls, but the themes of social justice – not just for women, but for immigrants, Jews, the poor – lend their storylines a real heft.

The Tin Princess departs from the first three books (if the differently arranged title didn’t clue you in). For starters, Sally hardly features at all. The focus is on Jim; Adelaide, a street urchin last seen in Ruby; and Becky, who’s recruited as Adelaide’s maid after she suddenly marries the prince of the tiny European kingdom Razkavia and becomes its princess.

The trio sets out for Razkavia, wedged between Germany and what would become the Czech Republic. Political intrigue follows. Scandal follows. Regicide follows. Razkavia is just an important a character as London was in the first three books, and it’s beautifully realised: Pullman’s descriptions of it are so vivid, his history of it so rich, that a couple times I almost looked up “Razkavia” on Wikipedia to double-check it never actually existed. Too bad, then, that this is one of those books let down by its ending: The story is exciting and thrilling until the last couple of chapters, where it all kind of just peters out.

Previously: The Ruby in the Smoke, Philip Pullman

iPhones screens are fine for reading Agatha Christies and Dan Browns and Stieg Larssons – page turners. They’re no good very bad for reading anything that demands actual attention. Anything that has long, dialogue-free paragraphs. Anything that has lots of charts and tables and diagrams. A book like, say, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel.

I tried reading this for the first time a couple of years ago, when I was travelling around Europe and reading books on my iPhone while stuck at airports and in trains and on tour groups. I got maybe a quarter of the way through before discovering that, no matter how high you jack up the font size or the line spacing, some books just aren’t made for reading on a 2.5 by 4.5-inch* screen.

(* I know those aren’t the exact technical specification dimensions of an iPhone screen. I don’t care.)

I vowed at the time I’d get back this (Pulitzer Prize-winning!) book. And you know when you want to look back and congratulate your past self for making a sensible decision? Like, “Nice work going to bed at a reasonable hour last night, past self, so I’m not inhumanly exhausted today!” “Nice work not binging on pizza and chocolate biscuits, past self, because I am looking super skinny right now!” This is also one of those times. Guns, Germs and Steel is one of the most ambitious, convincing and accessible non-fiction books I ever read. Nice work buying it to read later, past self!

Diamond’s work focuses on resolving a simple question: Why do some humans from some parts of the world have so much more than other humans from other parts of the world? To put it less politely: Why did mostly white societies end up conquering non-white societies, and not the other way around? Diamond removes the racial element from the answer. White people dominated other races because they developed “guns, germs and steel”, and they developed those things because of (spoiler alert!) lucky geographical accidents – not because some races or societies are inherently more sophisticated. The course of human history boils down to chance. No shit, right?

I know academic-types who’ve read Guns, Germs and Steel, and enjoyed it, but objected to the flaws in the reasoning. You don’t have to be a genius to see Diamond’s thesis is packed with generalisations, and glosses over the exceptions. That’s kind of unavoidable when you’re a 500-page book examining tens of thousands of years of history. Read something else if you want careful detail and not broad brush strokes. If you’re a regular person seeking an entry point into anthropology, linguistics, biology, and a bunch of other scientific disciplines – read this book.

I read Life of Pi years ago and I thought it was a pretty stunning book (at least once you get past the turgid first 100 or so pages – seriously ugh so boring). The film adaptation, released in Australia on New Year’s Day, is also pretty stunning. But it’s frustrating for the exact same reasons the book was frustrating.

Spoilers ahead.

Life of Pi is, no shit, the story of the life of Pi (played as a teen by Suraj Sharma and as an adult by Irrfan Khan), who survives several hundred days floating on a lifeboat after the freighter he was catching sinks en route from India to Canada. That’s already pretty incredible, but the real hook of Pi’s tale is that he says it will make you believe in God, because he offers two different “interpretations” about what happened on the lifeboat.

In one, Pi was stranded with four zoo animals his father was transporting to Canada, including a fearsome tiger named Richard Parker; in the other, Pi was stranded with four of the freighter’s human passengers, including a brutish cook who murdered Pi’s mother in front of him, and who in turn was murdered by Pi in revenge.

Those who listen to Pi’s story all believe he was stranded with the tiger – because it’s better to believe a bold, fantastic, impossible story than to acknowledge the mundane (at best) or horrific (at worst) truth. It’s better to put faith in God, or gods, than to confront nihilistic reality.

Well – no, it isn’t. A story that’s warm, cuddly B.S. is still B.S. It’s nice to believe that a jolly bearded man who rides a sleigh pulled by reindeer brings you your Christmas parents, and they’re not just purchased by your consumer-driven parents, but you wouldn’t expect anyone but a child to swallow such a concept.

Look: Life of Pi‘s vision of God – this benign lodestar of kindness and love, free of dogma and hatred – is lovely. If I were into religion or spirituality, I’d be into that (probably because it’s so harmless. Anyone could accept Pi’s God without really having to put in any effort). But it’s rooted in the assumption that without faith you can’t have wonder, that nothing is wonderful unless it can be explained by the guiding hand of God. Which… no. Emphatic no. If Pi survived purely by chance, or by his own skill, by something that can’t be dismissed as merely “some deity did it” – that is wonderful.

The frustration is the good kind of frustration. I like that Life of Pi is thoughtful about its depiction of faith, that it offers something to chew on, that it makes Pi an unreliable narrator (in addition to claiming that he drifted into a floating carnivorous island populated by meerkats, he claims that as a schoolboy he memorised Pi, the mathematical symbol, to about a billion places – which both cast him as a fanciful liar). But it offers a choice between two different versions of reality, one with God and one without, and I’m not convinced by the one it chooses.

So before I saw Quartet I kind of had this idea it’d be The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel 2: Marigold Returns - a pleasant but blandly conventional, mostly forgettable comedy starring Maggie Smith that you won’t really enjoy unless you’ve drawn up a will and started paying attention to funeral insurance commercials on afternoon TV.

But: My impression of Quartet was wrong! It is not bland. It is lovely. Like Marigold was ho-hum maybe because it was a film about old people whose problems didn’t really extend beyond being old (same goes for gay films that navel-gaze at Homosexual Themes, as if they’re all that preoccupy homosexuals). Whereas Quartet is a film about old people – cute, charming old people – whose problems are timeless.

It’s set in a retirement home (which, OK, not so timeless), but not one that’s all grim loneliness and dusty blankets and fogies staking themselves good spots at the staring window. Beecham House is the most awesome retirement home ever! It’s a posh English mansion and the residents are jolly good former musician sorts and the staff are tasty young bits of crumpet. You want to be in this retirement home when you’re decrepit.

The residents include Reg, Wilf and Cissy (Tom Courtenay, Billy Connolly and Pauline Collins), retired members of an operatic quartet renowned for their rendition of a Verdi classic. Smith is Jean, the fourth member of their quartet, who moves into Beecham House. Hey, say Wilf and Cissy, how about the quartet reunites to perform that song everyone likes? Except Jean refuses to perform because she’s afraid of embarrassing herself because she’s old, and Reg refuses to perform with Jean because they used to be married and she cheated on him. Will they put aside their arguments and put on a show that will raise enough money to save the cash-strapped Beecham House?

Yes. Of course they do. Obviously.

Quartet is not trying knock you down with any weighty themes, or seed an aggressive fear of ageing in your heart. (If you want an aggressive fear of ageing seeded in your heart, watch Amour. Oof.) It just wants to let you know: Hey, isn’t an appreciation of art a nice thing to have, at any age? And isn’t it kind of nice to grow old if you’re surrounded by loved ones and doing the things you love?

The “Growing old does not mean abandoning your passions” theme is doubled up by Dustin Hoffman, who directed Quartet. It’s the first feature he’s directed and he’s 75! Plus many supporting roles are played by actual former musicians who are now very elderly. So watching this film makes me feel like becoming ancient might not be so bad, as long as I end up in a luxurious retirement mansion surrounded by brilliant peers where no one ever seems to wet themselves by accident (fingers crossed).

Also: Michael Gambon is in this too, basically playing the fruity old queer version of Dumbledore. Like in half his scenes I swear he’s just recycling his old Dumbledore costumes. It’s pretty fantastic. Also: yes I’m aware that Dumbledore is technically the fruity old queer version of Dumbledore. Shut up then look at this adorable picture:

Aww. And now watch these wise words about Maggie Smith:

What a captivating, enthralling, terrific book!  The Ruby in the Smoke is the kind of adventure I’d tentatively describe as “ripping”. (But not if it makes me sound like a dick?) As I read this I crossly thought: “Why wasn’t a book like this around when I was a child?! What a rip!” Later on I discovered it was published in 1986, when I was a (very small, still-several-years-from-learning-to-read) child: “… oh.” At least I got to enjoy it as a manchild an adult.

Here are some things that make Ruby a great book. One: Its heroine, Sally Lockhart, who is clever and resourceful but not easily reducible to adjectives like “plucky” or “feisty”. Two: Its dirty and sinister Victorian London-setting, which is crawling with crims (…? Is that era-appropriate slang? Is “crims” the sort of thing a late-1800s London resident would say?) and opium dealers and other grubby reprobates. Three: Its complicated and cunningly told mystery, which scuttles from the eponymous stolen gem to Indian mutinies to Sally’s dead father to frightening crime matriarch Mrs Holland.

And: It is written by Philip Pullman, who wrote the His Dark Materials trilogy. And basically everyone who’s read those books thinks they’re awesome. (Well unless they’re Catholics or religious-types or whatever I guess.) He cleverly keeps readers guessing about whether the puzzle will have a supernatural resolution or not. Finding out is a lot of fun.

One strike against the series: It isn’t available as e-books. (Well – they’re available as e-books in Spanish. And my Spanish is, how you say, muy inelegante.) Isn’t that annoying.

Afterwards I watched the BBC adaptation which stars Billie Piper as Sally (and Matt Smith as her friend and ally Jim. It was his first TV role! And it’s kind of weird seeing him in this because Jim is only about 13 in the books and Smith was like in his early twenties when this thing was filmed). It’s pretty good! And well cheap on iTunes.

I like how so many reviews of The Hobbit include a synopsis of The Hobbit - like, der, it’s about a hobbit. And as if is there is anyone who doesn’t know already it’s about a stumpy fellow named Bilbo Baggins who goes on a quest blah blah magic ring yada yada dwarves and elves flim flam dragon.

The true reason it’s unnecessary to summarise the plot of this film is: there isn’t one. Sure, there’s lots of events. Lots of action. Lots of exposition. But no plot. This stems from splitting up J.R.R. Tolkein‘s slender children’s book in three greedy Hollywood-machine money-over-art films, which means a straightforward storyline about going there and back again doesn’t even get there.

Despite this you will go see The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, because you liked The Lord of the Rings. And you will think The Hobbit is… fine. It’s not like this is some impossible-to-endure colossal failure of cinema that will skim off the top of your soul and feed it to wargs or direwolves or whatever. There is plenty of stuff to like. Martin Freeman is charming as Bilbo. I could watch Ian McKellen act out scenes from Gandalf Sits Quietly For Three Hours Without Speaking Or Moving (spoiler alert: this is the plot of the third instalment). Cate Blanchett, why are you so beautiful. The dwarves are well cast – some of them are even nice to look at. (Attractive dwarves! Can you imagine!)

It’s just that The Hobbit is as cynically padded as you think it’s going to be. This is evident from the very first scenes, where Ian Holm reprises his role as Old Bilbo to explain to us that he’s writing down his adventure for his nephew Frodo, and then Frodo actually wanders onscreen all like “Whatcha doin’ there, Uncle Bilbo? It’s me, Elijah Wood, from those LOTR movies! Here I am for a bit!”, and then Bilbo explains that he’s writing down his adventure for Frodo to Frodo, and then they talk about Bilbo’s upcoming 111th birthday party (HEY THAT’S FROM FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING GET IT), and Old Bilbo fusses around some more why is any of this stuff in the movie can the unexpected journey please begin.

The entire movie is like this. (The dwarf musical numbers you might have read about in other reviews aren’t as mortifyingly long as I was dreading, but there are two of them, both within about the first 45 minutes, so.) Like remember, back when Peter Jackson and co. weren’t just pumping out movies just to make money, how they wisely cut that awful Tom Bombadil shit out of FOTR? The Hobbit is like they kept that shit in – then shovelled in some more. Saruman (Christopher Lee) and Galadriel (Blanchett) pop up in Unexpected Journey because, hey, why not? (I get why they added Galadriel, actually. Without her the film would be 100 percent sausage-fest.) Some wizard chum of Gandalf’s called Radagast (Sylvester McCoy) zooms around on his bad-CGI sled pulled by bad-CGI rabbits to warn everyone about Sauron’s comeback. I half-expected Aragorn to saunter onscreen and make some “Darth Vader built C3PO”-type meta-reference – everything else is crammed in there.

All this bloat really steals away any urgency from the story. The dwarves want to reclaim their home mountain cave from some dragon who’s taken it over*, but so what? In two-and-a-half hours they hardly get anywhere on completing their quest. I can’t imagine taking a kid to see this, unless kids’ attention spans are suddenly magically enormously long.

(*Remember how the dwarves were the least glamorous characters in the first LOTR trilogy? Like everyone wanted to be Legolas and no one wanted to be Gimli? Well, The Hobbit is focused almost entirely on Gimlis – 13 of them, few of whom I felt I got much of a sense of – so if you don’t like dwarves, it’s T.S. for you.)

Serious question: I’m pretty sure I’ve heard Jackson say he’s doing an extended DVD cut of this movie. How. This is already an extended cut. Watching an extended-extended cut honestly sounds like a tedious chore – I’d rather they release a contracted DVD cut with all the filler chopped out (it would run for five minutes). I have no idea how he’s going to spin two more movies out of what little plot remains, even with all the Middle-earth backstory tacked on, but I have a feeling it’s going to feel ”thin. Sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.”

In addition to splitting The Hobbit up into three movies, Jackson filmed it at 48-frames-per-second. As far as I know it’s the first feature that’s been filmed this way. Boy I hope it doesn’t catch on. The very best you can say about the effect of the increased frame rate is that you get used to it, eventually. At first it’s super jarring – because it just doesn’t look like a film. It looks like a video game cutscene, or a cheaply done reenactment from a dodgy pay TV crime doco, or a showroom-floor television with those dreadful motion enhancement settings jacked up to max.

Probably future generations of cinemagoers will look back and laugh at how us primitive 2012 audiences recoiled from The Hobbit‘s boosted frame rate, like we look back and laugh at those bozos who leapt out of the way of projections of trains rushing right at them. Well: cram it, future generations. 24fps looks better. 24fps looks like a movie. 48fps looks… plastic and artificial. The computer effects look like computer effects. The stunning New Zealand landscapes* look like IMAX tourism commercials, and not in a good way. The actors clash with the beautifully painted vistas behind them. You should actually go see The Hobbit at 48fps, just to witness its effect yourself.

(*Hilarious joke: How can you tell The Hobbit is filmed in New Zealand? Because New Zealand will tell you. Again and again.)

The first LOTR films worked so magnificently because it’s so easy to get lost in them and forget you’re watching a movie. The Hobbit never stops reminding you it’s a movie, that it’s padded and bloated and strange-looking, that its Middle-earth is built with green screens and computers. It’s not the epic disaster some critics are making it out to be. There are some good, solid, enjoyable scenes – especially Bilbo’s confrontation with Andy Serkis‘s Gollum (which, of course, goes on twice as long as it needs to). But there’s just not a lot of magic here.

I was near the end City of Lost Souls while I waiting for a coffee at my local place and one of the waitresses asked me what I was reading. I told her it was trashy teen fantasy. “Oh,” she said, “like Twilight?” “Well… kind of,” I replied, “but it has a better plot.” But then I thought about it and added: “It’s still the kind of thing I should be ashamed of reading, though.”

Which sums up how I feel about all the books in Cassandra Clare’s series The Mortal Instruments. I’m not embarrassed about reading young adult books in general, because then I’d be embarrassed about half the stuff I read. But something about this series… It is not great. It is kind of embarrassing. Yet I keep reading it.

(FYI: there are spoilers ahead for the end of this book.)

Anyway, you’ve read the rest of this series so you know the formula for City of Lost Souls: a team of angsty teenagers, all either Shadowhunters (humans descended from angels, empowered with strength and stamina they use to fight demons, etc etc), vampires or werewolves, over-analyse their romantic feelings for each other while battling some rising evil.

And oh man do the characters in this book looooove to overanalyse their romantic feelings for each other. I don’t mind talky books, but some of the chapters here are less plot drivers and more recaps of the characters’ previous conversations about their problems. Our heroine Clary our endlessly wonders whether she still can still love her perfect boyfriend Jace even though he’s possessed by her evil brother Sebastian (… yeah). Simon, Clary’s best friend, endlessly thinks about how loyal he is to her. Isobelle, Jace’s adopted sister, endlessly frets about her blossoming feels for Simon, while her brother, Alec, endlessly frets 0ver his boyfriend Magnus (an immortal warlock whose magic power is apparently tolerating all these moody adolescents).

All that repetition (Clary and Sebastian’s resemblance to their parents is mentioned every other page – I’m barely exaggerating for comic effect about this) (Oh! And in case you forgot what everyone is wearing at any particular moment, that’s also repeated on actually every page) sticks in the plot’s wheels. There’s no suspense. And too much of the story’s thrust relies on someone doing something stupid or unlikely (“Let’s rush recklessly into danger! Let’s summon a demon! Let’s summon an angel which apparently isn’t difficult!”). That’s a big problem, coupled with the book’s general sense of “middle instalment in a trilogy” syndrome: you know Sebastian’s devious plot will be foiled, paving the way for the really devious plot to unfold in the final act, and you know complications will arise just as everyone comes thisclose to finding true love.

Clare, when she’s not detailing what everyone is wearing at any given moment, can be a beautifully descriptive writer. And she is obviously deeply, admirably invested in the world she’s writing here. But that investment just doesn’t leap off the page. I guess the prime exhibit of this flatness is Clary. We’re told a bunch of stuff about her without really feeling it: she’s an artist (she doesn’t make any art), she’s interested in anime (she never watches any), she’s a Strong Female Character battling her inner darkness (not really).

Ditto her brother Sebastian. He comes so close to being a complicated villain (like maybe he really does believe he’s the hero forced to do bad things for some greater good), till it’s ultimately revealed that, nope, he’s just as two-dimensionally evil-because-he-likes-being-evil as you suspected the whole time. Probably his sadism is meant to make him wildly sinister, but it ends up having the opposite effect. He’s boring: whatever he’s got cooked up for the next book, City of Heavenly Fire, will just wind up being the most predictably evil thing. Snooze.

And yet I will totally still read that instalment too. I suck.

Previously: Book review: City of Fallen Angels, Cassandra Clare

Buried in the acknowledgements in the back of Black Heart is what might be the key to Holly Black‘s success. She writes (slight paraphrasing): “I have to thank my husband, who once again let me read the whole book to him out loud.”

That’s right: having a husband is the key to a woman’s success. Just kidding! I mean the bit about reading the whole book out loud. That’s kind of neat, right? The only people who read whole books out loud are the people who get paid to narrate audiobooks. But I think it explains why The Curse Workers trilogy, which concludes with Black Heart (at least I assume it’s a trilogy – trilogies are how YA series are mostly pitched and sold. So maybe there’ll be a fourth book. I have no idea), has such a distinctive, polished, convincing voice. Because Black read the whole book aloud, to someone else. It really pays off.

So. In this series magic is real, and most people with magic powers are criminals – mobsters, con men, killers. Cassel Sharpe is the youngest member of a family of “worker” lowlifes (worker is Black’s term for anyone magic) who’s been roped into using his rare magic ability, the power to transform anything into basically anything else, for the FBI. And of course it turns out the feds are as ruthless and untrustworthy as the worker mafia Cassel is also tied up with. “Between a rock and a hard place” comes somewhere close to describing this kid’s dilemma.

Cassel, bless his melodramatic moody teenage heart, is dealing with some heavy stuff. But The Curse Workers books are not hard hitters. That is not meant as a bad thing! This series is a noir thriller dressed up as young-adult fantasy: it’s sexy. It’s gritty. It’s readable. Please, television executives who are totally likely to pay attention to all the things I say: make a TV series about these books. It’d be Veronica Mars with magic. And I have to wrap this up now because I’m having heart palpitations at how awesome that would be.

Previously: White Cat, Holly Black/Red Glove, Holly Black