I've been struggling through Anne Rice's latest offering all week. I keep putting it down and reading other things (like Carl Hiaasen's Lucky You, which was a significantly better read, but Hiaasen has yet to disappoint me). I'm not sure what it is about Anne Rice and her desire to be on the cutting edge of coolness, but I really do wish somebody would sit her down and explain what the parts of a computer are called and how to describe them properly in writing. Because at the end of the book, some people need to get vital data from a computer, so they grab the microprocessor. Good Lord, people.
OK, so she's not technical, you say. Willing suspension of disbelief. Well, fine. How about characters who don't seem to be able to stay in character (both from book to book and within the book), conversation that reads like some juvenile message board on MSN, and a plot that goes nowhere, nowhere, nowhere, until the book abruptly ends? That same plot is not so much a plot as a setup for a later book about what was happening with the Taltos from the end of Taltos until Blackwood Farm. I forced myself to finish the book tonight, and I rather wish I hadn't. If I hadn't, I could have lived in the delightful state where I believed this to be a perfectly good book that I had just not had enough time to read yet.
