Sunday, June 5, 2011

Book 8: Hammered

I went back to the pile of almost read books on my nightstand and finished off one more -- Elizabeth Bear's Hammered.  Bear is a very poor choice for reading in dribs and drabs, because she writes for an intelligent reader and doesn't signpost every detail, but Hammered never grabbed my throat and clawed its way out of the nightstand pile.  It's about honor and loyalty and patriotism when your country is going to the dogs (the country in this case being Canada), and the family that you love and the family that tries to kill you.  Even dipping into it in twenty five page chunks was immersive, and I'm glad I finished up the last hundred pages in a gulp.

I hated the French, though.  Since I'm not Canadian, I have no smattering of it so even the catchphrases often missed me completely.  It kept switching me from a reader to an intruder, which pulled me out of the story.  This is clearly a problem with me, not the book, but there it was. (Bear's page talks about it a bit; apparently reading it aloud would have helped but I think I'm just a lousy translator.) I'll still read the next one, since I'm very interested in what happens next to Casey, Razerface (although there's no guarantee we'll find out), Richard, and the Montreal.

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