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cornerofmadness 's review for:
An Easy Death
by Charlaine Harris
More like a 3.5 read for me and the beginning was entirely the reason for that. Harris is in that rarified stratum where her name seems to mean editors do less editing because I can't think of any other reason why no one questions FIFTY pages of introduction. The actual story doesn't start until 55 pages in. And what's worse, the intro nearly drove me off.
This is a dystopic alternative history that I can't even figure out the time period. I'm assuming the 1940s but you can't quite tell because we keep getting referred back to 1918 and the Russian revolution and the 1918 flu. But then we have FDR being assassinated and America literally falling to pieces (I was amused Canada snatched up some of us). The northeast reestablished itself as a British colony (seems somehow unlikely) Russia has the west coast (where their exiled Tsar rules and is a major plot point), the south is its own country and Mexico got Texas partially back and the rest is Texohoma (Where our heroine lives) and the Native Americans got back some of their lands (another thing that seemed unlikely if this IS 1940, they were pretty damned and sadly broken by then)
Our protagonist is a Gunnie, a Western styled gunslinger (seriously, are there no rules because she shoots people dead every five minutes) named Lisbeth Rose. And it opens with her and her lover's crew escorting a family into another (and better) territory than Texohoma. So yeah honestly fifty pages on these characters who won't play a role other than in Gunnie Rose's memories seems a lot, especially when it has an on page rape of one of the family memories (allowing Rose to blast the crap out of the rapists mid-rape), the murder of a child, and a pack of wild dogs savaging another child (and then the brutal killing of said dogs). Yeah it establishes how awful this world is but it is so long that I just couldn't care by the end of it. It's like I get it. This place is bad. Can we move on, maybe without rape scenes and brutalizing children? And that's me saying this. I have a taste for dark fic.
So once Rose is back from this mission she finds two Grigoris, Russian witches, at her home wanting to hire her. Without spoiling things, let's leave it as a) Rose is keeping a major secret that impacts this mission and b) she hates the Grigori. If she helps them, it may save the Tsar's life (He is a hemophiliac) It might keep what's left of America from getting worse. But more important to her, it pays well.
Rose reluctantly accompanies them and there is death at every turn. Once Gunnie Rose takes the mission, the story really takes off. The characters are great and I enjoyed it. I would have enjoyed it a lot more if it had started at page 55.
This is a dystopic alternative history that I can't even figure out the time period. I'm assuming the 1940s but you can't quite tell because we keep getting referred back to 1918 and the Russian revolution and the 1918 flu. But then we have FDR being assassinated and America literally falling to pieces (I was amused Canada snatched up some of us). The northeast reestablished itself as a British colony (seems somehow unlikely) Russia has the west coast (where their exiled Tsar rules and is a major plot point), the south is its own country and Mexico got Texas partially back and the rest is Texohoma (Where our heroine lives) and the Native Americans got back some of their lands (another thing that seemed unlikely if this IS 1940, they were pretty damned and sadly broken by then)
Our protagonist is a Gunnie, a Western styled gunslinger (seriously, are there no rules because she shoots people dead every five minutes) named Lisbeth Rose. And it opens with her and her lover's crew escorting a family into another (and better) territory than Texohoma. So yeah honestly fifty pages on these characters who won't play a role other than in Gunnie Rose's memories seems a lot, especially when it has an on page rape of one of the family memories (allowing Rose to blast the crap out of the rapists mid-rape), the murder of a child, and a pack of wild dogs savaging another child (and then the brutal killing of said dogs). Yeah it establishes how awful this world is but it is so long that I just couldn't care by the end of it. It's like I get it. This place is bad. Can we move on, maybe without rape scenes and brutalizing children? And that's me saying this. I have a taste for dark fic.
So once Rose is back from this mission she finds two Grigoris, Russian witches, at her home wanting to hire her. Without spoiling things, let's leave it as a) Rose is keeping a major secret that impacts this mission and b) she hates the Grigori. If she helps them, it may save the Tsar's life (He is a hemophiliac) It might keep what's left of America from getting worse. But more important to her, it pays well.
Rose reluctantly accompanies them and there is death at every turn. Once Gunnie Rose takes the mission, the story really takes off. The characters are great and I enjoyed it. I would have enjoyed it a lot more if it had started at page 55.