Category Archives: Lilypad-Library

Books, blurbs, and bullrushes

No wonder I’m struggling with The Wheel of Time books

The PolyBlog
May 12 2025

If you know, you know.

The Wheel of Time series, by Robert Jordan, is 14 really long books about a group of people in a fantasy land with magic, demons, witches, creatures, and humans. It is all about a war between good and evil, where the forces of light and the forces of dark are in constant battle. The Wheel of Time turns and is seen as controlling fate. They’re fantastic stories, and relatively infamous in the industry and genre.

My son Jacob loves them and is on his fourth or fifth reading, plus we watch the TV series.

Me? I read book 1, and it took a LONG time to finish. I really enjoyed it, but I also like variety so hadn’t tried book 2 yet. But when Jacob and I were watching the TV series, I turned into THAT guy. I kept having to pause and ask Jacob, “Okay, wait, which side is this group aligned with?” or “Who does that one work for?”. I was even struggling with the main six to eight characters from the first book that I had already read.

I started on book 2 this past week and I cannot keep a bunch of the characters straight. It should be EASIER since the TV series has faces and names to boot that I should be able to remember more easily than just reading the books alone. Right? RIGHT?????

Anyway, I’m struggling to keep certain characters straight. Tonight, I decided to cheat. I thought, “Okay, let’s treat this like a play…let’s look online for a list of the characters!”.

Holy fudge.

Book 1? The one I already read? It apparently had references to 259 characters. Sure, many of them were throwaway references to past Lords or Kings or Queens, names from history, but over 250 of them? Holy fudge, indeed.

Book 2 that I’m reading now? 255 characters. Sigh.

Let’s look ahead, shall we? 238, 437, 403, 602 (hah! the book is called the Lord of Chaos!), 466, 460, 444, 522, 685, 454, 715, and 466.

I really must be getting old. I have never quit a book because I couldn’t keep track of the characters, but this one is sorely testing me. I love the stories, but heck, I made it through watching most of GoT and never struggled with all the names. I haven’t gone back to the books yet, but I will at some point. Fire and Ice was nothing compared to this.

Would it be too much to ask for them to give me a little org chart?

A Purple Place for Dying by John D. MacDonald (1964) – BR00270 (R2025) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸⚪

The PolyBlog
May 8 2025

Plot or Premise

McGee is running low on cash and is looking for some work. A friend of a friend asks him to come out to Nevada to discuss a possible salvage job, but it’s looking like a bust for good old Trav. She’s been robbed of her father’s estate by her husband, and she needs lawyers and accountants, not Travis. Which he is in the process of telling her when a large rifle bullet takes her life.

What I Liked

The explosive opening leaves McGee somewhat ticked off, as you can imagine, and he immediately reports the murder. Except when the Sheriff comes to check, the body and all evidence are gone. Someone has made it look like the wife ran off with a lover, even if McGee swears he saw her die. It’s an interesting plot after that, as the only person who would seem to want her dead doesn’t seem like the person who killed her. And there doesn’t seem to be any other rationale for the death. It’s well into the third act before the likely killer becomes more obvious. There are a lot of red herrings, too, with crooked business dealings, rival businessmen, and the IRS sniffing around.

What I Didn’t Like

The pseudo-runaway wife was having an affair with a young professor, who had an unhealthy relationship with his sister, both depending on each other too much. But the sister is written as a terrible cliché from start to finish. To be honest, the story would work a lot better without her involvement, and it would have left more room for McGee to play Sherlock.

The Bottom Line

Great story, lousy secondary character

Nightmare in Pink by John D. MacDonald (1964) – BR00269 (R2025) – 🐸🐸🐸⚪⚪

The PolyBlog
May 8 2025

Plot or Premise

An Army buddy of McGee’s asks for help looking into the death of his sister’s fiancé, Howard Plummer. While Plummer looks to have been the victim of a simple mugging, the sister isn’t so sure that her pure, sweet Howard wasn’t somehow into something shady involving extra cash. McGee wants to help the buddy, but he also wants to know about piles of cash.

What I Liked and Didn’t Like

There are really four parts to the story, and I confess I don’t like them equally. The first part is the fiancé, the sister and the Army buddy. They may be the clients and written sympathetically, but they’re not particularly interesting.

The second segment is the crooks who have their hooks into a wealthy man who lives a bit of an isolated life from his ex-wife and two kids. While there’s a femme fatale running around, there’s not enough substance to her to make her truly menacing or truly attractive.

The third segment involves some badly written noir involving an involuntary stay at a psych hospital, overuse of some bad drugs, and the fear of lobotomies mixed with brainwashing. It’s just all way over the top.

However, there is some fifth business in the mix. One of the tertiary characters that McGee goes to talk to is an aging well-to-do woman who McGee knows from back in the day, and they work well together. She is the most interesting person in the story, albeit a bit shallowly developed. I’d love to see a story just about her life, to be honest.

The mystery is decent, the plot / grift has some spark for the time, but the roller-coaster reads as way too farfetched even for the period. A little too pulpy, even for McGee stories.

The Bottom Line

Too much psychobabble, not enough mystery

The Deep Blue Good-by by John D. MacDonald (1964) – BR00268 (R2025) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸🐸

The PolyBlog
May 6 2025

Plot or Premise

A dancer, Chookie McCall, has a friend, Cathy, whose father might have had some buried World War II loot. A guy named Junior Allen seems to have found it and run off with it, and she has no way to get it back. So, Chookie introduces Cathy to her friend Travis to see if he can help.

What I Liked

The classic series of 21 books starts with this one, with all of the main elements of the series apparent in the first two chapters.

Travis McGee is taking his retirement in fits and starts, not waiting until he’s 60 to take it all at once. He lives aboard a houseboat he won in a card game, and specializes in difficult salvage, retrieving things other people have stolen or conned away from rightful owners who have no legal way to get it back. His usual fee for a successful recovery? 50% of anything recovered.

Junior Allen is a piece of work and delights in destroying women. In addition to stealing from Cathy and her family, he also moved into a house of a rich widow named Lois, and raped, abused and gaslit her into a puddle of a human. Travis manages to help her heal and get back on her feet while he goes after Junior. Some teens get involved as further victims, but in the end, Travis is mostly the smarter man.

What I Didn’t Like

Travis’ relations with women are always half-positive/half-negative. He always treats them relatively with respect, far ahead of his time, but his solution to most of their healing is hanging around his houseboat, enjoying the sun, until they have enough self-respect again to want to bed the knight who saved them. This story is a bit raw in places, more so than some of his later books. But it’s still an amazing story.

The Bottom Line

The legend begins with a busted flush

Verity by Colleen Hoover (2018) – BR00267 (R2025) – 🐸🐸🐸⚪⚪

The PolyBlog
April 29 2025

Plot or Premise

A struggling writer gets hired under somewhat odd circumstances to finish a popular series by another author who has become incapacitated. She moves into the house with the author, her husband, and child, and starts to develop feelings for the husband.

What I Liked and Didn’t Like

I confess upfront that I am not a giant fan of Colleen Hoover nor romance thrillers, but the premise of an author taking over a popular series was too intriguing to resist. I tend to skip the genre as I find too often that the “thriller” part strays too close to domestic violence porn even if you know the woman will win in the end.

I wasn’t wrong about the intrigue of Lowen Ashleigh taking over a writing series from Verity Crawford. When she’s in the writer’s realm, struggling with figuring out how to advance the series and tell a “Verity-style” story, the pages sing. It’s great. When she finds what appears to be a cross between an unpublished biography and a personal journal of Verity’s, Lowen’s story starts to morph into multiple strands of wanting to fill in for Verity, the person, not just the author.

I’m not big on romance unless it’s more two people working on something in a will they or won’t they style of romantic tension, while this one is more isolation together. And while I see Lowen’s morphing into caring about Jeremy (she’s reading about him in the journal), Jeremy spends very little time with Lowen, far too little to be falling deeply in love with her. Pretty unrealistic, in my view. However, their scenes together are not terrible. I quite enjoyed their interplay at times. If it ran for another 2 books, I might see it.

However, I didn’t like three aspects of the story. There is a very traumatic event right at the start that is total coincidence. I kept waiting for it to somehow tie together, but of course, it doesn’t. Secondly, there is a plot device used throughout 80% of the novel, and it is incredibly unrealistic, so the big twist at the end isn’t much of a twist. You’ve seen it coming from the beginning. Lastly, there is an extra twist and explanation at the end, all of which brings most of what happened in the book back to a situation of relatively simple misunderstanding. It felt more like a sitcom than a strong novel, where two characters have a miscommunication, never discuss it, and both go off in weird directions, only to lead to tragedy, almost Shakespearean in terms of misconnects for bad plotting.

Disclosure

I received a free copy of this book through an Amazon promotion. I am not personally friends with the author, nor have I ever interacted with them.

The Bottom Line

Too many shaky plot devices, but a good story for the writer’s part