Laura Anne Gilman
Staying Dead (2005)
A Retrievers Novel
I found this book disappointing.
I've come to expect a lot from books published by Luna, so it's almost a shock for me to read one of their books that I don't absolutely love. And the thing is I really should have loved this book. Like all Luna books, it has a strong female hero, and I enjoy supernatural fantasy, and the writing seemed strong. Yet as I read the book I felt like it somehow wasn't quite meeting my expectations. Despite the fact that there is very little I can point to and say, "THAT bothered me."
The one thing that did bother me was the font. I strongly dislike sans-serif fonts on paper (they're great on the screen, but on paper I can't stand them). But although it was distracting, it was hardly enough of a reason for the general feeling if disappointment and discontent.
The only other thing that I would take issue with is the fact that I never developed a sense of what Wren could and couldn't do with her Talent. She's wasn't all powerful and able to everything, but I was never sure what her limits were, and what she could do. There was lots of talk about current and electricity, but it never really made a lot of sense to me how that would let you translocate something. So I would have liked the rules--or at least ideas--of magic to have been fleshed out a little more.
Otherwise, I'm hard pressed to say what was wrong. I found the Wren and Sergei interesting characters. Nothing struck me as untoward about the writing--I was never pulled out of the story by some detail or quirk. The story itself was interesting, and there were several different threads to the story happening at once, which I liked, since that's how life generally works.
Yet with all those good points I put the book down with a feeling of disappointment. And because I felt the same way about the Laura Anne Gilman Retrievers short story I read last year, I probably won't read any more Retrievers books, unless I come across them used. So whileI wasn't that excited about this story, that may well be chalked up to personal taste.
Rating: 5/10
Staying Dead (2005)
Anthologies: Running with the Pack (2010) edited by Ekaterina Sedia
