Random Thoughts

As with a couple of other books I’ve bought lately, I started reading this book and then started wondering more why on Earth I’d bought it. But this time around I remembered! I read Robin Hobb’s review and though that this sounded like a diverting read. Even though she says “I consider Cherie Priest a friend of years. I don’t think that influences my review.”

But oh my god it’s so awful. On a sentence by sentence basis, it’s just the absolute worst. Even so, I hoped it would pick up, and I soldiered on for 25 pages, but the action is perhaps even more annoying than the prose, and I know how unlikely that sounds.

So I gave up.

The Drowning House (2024) by Cherie Priest (buy new, buy used, 3.43 on Goodreads)

I almost forgot that I finished this book on the plane the other day. I’ve been reading it on and off for a few months in the in-between times, and the reason it took so long is because it’s pretty bad! It’s pretty bad!

M. C. Beaton is, of course, dead now, so this R. W. Green person is continuing her two enormously successful book series. I mean, successful commercially. I don’t think this series was very good even when Beaton was alive, but it had its charms. Green tries to emulate Beaton’s pell-mell ADHD writing style, but he’s just not that good at it. Instead he resorts to dropping in Wikipedia excerpts whenever he has to describe something in Scotland, and he tries to make more “respectable” plots than Beaton ever bothered to. So here we have spies and drug gangs and American agents and eh.

It’s really bad, and I’m never reading one of these zombie series again.

Death of a Spy (2024) by M. C. Beaton and R. W. Green (buy new, 3.81 on Goodreads)

This is the final ebook I read on the recent trip I took — a romance trilogy of sorts.

This has the most preposterous plot of them all, and the heroine in this one references a Regency novel with a similar central conceit — but I didn’t check whether that was something Beaton made up or not.

While reading this one, I started thinking about what the charm of these books really are. I mean, they’re not well-structured, and they’re repetetive. Sure, Beaton writes well on a sentence by sentence basis — she has a nice flow — but nothing else really convinces.

I think the charm is that reading these books is the closest you can get to observing somebody daydreaming. You know when you (especially as a teenager) would construct a fantasy world, and then you’d have something fun happen, and then something dramatic, and then something fun again — but you’re not making an effort at a consistent story or anything. You’re just daydreaming.

That’s what these books feel like. Just an inventive mind spinning idly until you have about as many pages as you need to call it a novel.

When it works, it’s very charming. When it doesn’t, it’s excruciating. This one works.

Those Endearing Young Charms (1986) by M. C. Beaton (buy used, 3.58 on Goodreads)

Like the previous post, I’m still on a train, reading.

This isn’t as good as the previous book, though — Beaton has more pages to fill, and fill it she does with a series of murder attempts that don’t go anywhere. But it has a more memorable heroine than usual — very hands on, for a change. It’s a diverting book.

To Dream Of Love (1986) by M. C. Beaton (buy used, 3.79 on Goodreads)

I’ve been on a trip that involved planes and trains and not automobiles, and I read some old romances. These are very brisk reads (to put it mildly), so they’re well suited for that kind of thing.

Beaton’s thing is to put some young people in some kind of absurd situation or other, and then they eventually realise that they love one another, and then everything ends happily. The end. And this is more absurd than most, and it’s very diverting indeed. And it’s so short that Beaton doesn’t have time to do what she usually does when she has too many pages, namely have some evil person(s) try to kill the heroine — again and again and again. This time around I think there’s only a couple attempts at her life?

I’d say that this is one of her best, but I wouldn’t actually recommend it. It’s not, like, you know — good. But for what it is, it’s a good one.

The French Affair (1984) by M. C. Beaton (buy used, 3.56 on Goodreads)