Thursday...

We don't have freezing rain, like yesterday. Instead we have snow.

Wotta revoltin development.

OC Transpo...

The city has cut $19.5 million from the city transit bus budget.

They say we should notice 'no difference' from previous service.

How does that work?

Havemercy by Jaida Jones and Danielle Bennett...

Finished Havemercy by Jaida Jones and Danielle Bennett, a pair of fan writers who went professional.

On the Amazon site, Publisher's Weekly said: "Jones and Bennett vividly convey the testosterone-saturated world of fantasy fighter pilots in this fast-paced debut." Really? Did they read the same book I did? Not to say I didn't (more or less) enjoy it, but... testosterone? I thought three of the four male protagonists acted and thought like thirteen-year-old girls.

Publisher's Weekly's next sententence calls the enemy, the Ke-Han, "stereotypically Asian" - I'm not sure why. Because Asians practise magic? Because their name sounds Klingon? Basically we get nothing much of Ke-Han except glimpses of their magic. They're the enemy. They don't even have a stately pleasure-dome, the dome belongs to the Basquiat - the magicians on the heroes' side.

Basically we have four narrators in two storylines, and the storlyines weave together towards the end. Most of the action is introspection. Most of the introspection is worry, especially about relationships. Lots and lots of hurt/comfort between Royston and Hal, and attack/hurt between Rook and Thom.

One story is narrated by Royston and Hal, alternately. Royston is a warrior-magician, disgraced for having seduced a foreign Prince who visited the city on a diplomatic mission. The leader of the city-state, the Ezar, exiles him to his brother's country home. In the country, Royston befriends and comes to love Hal, the youthful tutor of his nephews.

The other story is narrated by Thom and Rook. Rook is an Airman, one of fourteen elite warriors who ride mechanical/magical dragons into battle. The dragons are way cool. Rook's powerful dragon Havemercy has the best personality in the book. Rook himself is a foul-mouthed bully who (like Royston) is in trouble for a sexual misdemeanour: he molested, or seduced, or flirted with, or raped, a foreign diplomat's wife. (The actual situation was never fully clear to me.) The Esar sends a student named Thom to teach manners and diplomacy to the Airmen. Nobody, least of all Thom, thinks he can succeed.

Eventually the war catches up with all of them, with crises on all sides.

My problem? Hal blushes just about every time anyone speaks to him. Thom weeps at the drop of a hat. Both believe themselves to be unworthy failures all the time. They are studies in chronic anxiety and low self-esteem. I thought at first Hal was about fourteen; turns out he's a shy twenty. Thom is a little older.

I never did figure out Royston's attitude to his romance with Hal, though he thinks about it incessantly, and we follow every twist and turn of thought. Occasionally they kiss (in a chaste manner) and I thought they'd get on with falling in love; but no, each continues to angst over the unspoken relationship and I was most puzzled as to why. Because Royston can't have an affair with his nephew's young tutor in his brother's home? That argument works for part of the book, but once they go to the city together, what's to prevent them from getting together? Chapter after chapter Royston tries to hide his feelings, refusing to allow the adoring Hal to get close to him, but he never gives a reason for it. Because the Prince had broken his heart, and he was afraid of a new relationship? Because of differences in age or status? Because it's a homophobic society? Because magicians are sworn to celibacy? None of the above. I was baffled.

The question of sex never comes up. Some romance novels have lots of unresolved sexual tension. Here we have unresolved emotional tension. No sex. Some cuddling, much hair-touching and hand-holding, hesitant sighs and glances, and those few awkward and gentle kisses. And there's no indication of why no sex. No indication of desire for sex, either, though I suppose I could or should take it as implied. But when we're so closely in their thoughts for chapter after chapter... why so little lust?

The relationship between Rook and Thom had lots more potential to be explosively sexy, or so I thought until more than halfway through the book. And then - I'll put a cut because it's a big spoiler - ( and then... )

And I found myself cringing at what I couldn't help seeing as sexism. I don't mind when slash fiction excludes female characters; I really don't. But I did mind that the women we met in passing were mostly unnamed whores or unnamed groupies. And of the exceptions... there's the little girl who cries all the time, and her middle-aged mother, who is unreasonable, unlikeable, and given to fainting whenever she doesn't get her way. Much later in the the book there are two female magicians, intriguing but barely mentioned in passing.

And then... the novel's really interesting character, Havemercy herself, was characterized as female, albeit neither human nor (strictly speaking) alive.

So I found myself wishing I was reading a similar story with different characters. Heroes who didn't blush and cry so much, who weren't passive victims of circumstances. Rook was at least aggressively active, though difficult to like. We kept being told how clever Thom is, but he seemed to me almost as useless as he thought he was, and considerably more dim.

Even with all these complaints, I didn't want to stop reading. I liked the setting of the City, even though I wished we saw more of it than the inside of three or four buildings; I liked the moral ambiguity of the Ezar, the way the magic wasn't quite like any magic I've read about before. I particularly loved the great clanky metal dragons and the men who fought with them. Action adventure with the Airmen? Sgt. Rook and His Howlin' Commandos? That, I could get behind.

I wanted more about the dragons, and less of Thom's fears. Or Hal's.

The best scene is the one in which Rook takes Thom flying, in battle, on Havemercy. That was terrific. That felt real. That was living up to the book's potential.