Category Archives: Lilypad-Library

Books, blurbs, and bullrushes

Betrayed by P.C. Cast (2007) – BR00233 (R2023) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸⚪

The PolyBlog
October 20 2023

Plot or Premise

Within the school, Zoey has ascended to lead the Dark Daughters in place of Aphrodite, but outside the school, humans are going missing and then turning up dead.

What I Liked

In the first book, the newness of the premise was enough to overcome fairly cliché writing. None of the characters had much depth to them, they were either good or bad, and the teen angst was overwhelming at times with little nuance. In this one, Zoey’s struggling with balancing her new responsibilities, some weird stuff she keeps seeing, romantic entanglements with multiple males (three at last count) and a changing power dynamic between her, Aphrodite and Neferet. As Nyx has told her, not all darkness is bad and not all lightness is good, and the changes for Aphrodite and Neferet are great.

What I Didn’t Like

The stuff with Loren, a poet and professor, seems completely out of left field, and while future books explain it, it really seems odd here. The giant plot twist isn’t hard to see coming, but what it means and the level of complication keeps it fresh. However, the ending relationship with Neferet changes too dramatically.

The Bottom Line

Not all lightness is good

Marked by P.C. Cast (2007) – BR00232 (R2023) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸⚪

The PolyBlog
October 20 2023

Plot or Premise

A young girl’s body starts the change to become a vampire, so she has to go to a vampire finishing school, leaving behind her friends and family.

What I Liked

This school is not Hogwart’s for vampires. First of all, the characters are mid-teens, dealing with romantic angst, sexual desires, and confusion about relationships and their future. In the first big scene with vampires, the main character, Zoey Redbird, accidentally sees two young vamps having oral sex in the darkened corridors at the school. I suppose there’s a joke in there about magic wands, but mostly, the scene sets the age and content of the series squarely in the more mature part of the YA world. Zoey quickly demonstrates that she has special powers for a young vampire, and ends up antagonizing the cool clique while befriending the nerd herd. The newness of all of it overcomes some of the teenage angsty parts.

What I Didn’t Like

The teenage angst. The first book isn’t completely horrible; it’s the age the books are meant for, but at some point, even her friends were ready to move on to more important topics than her budding interest in boys.

The Bottom Line

Interesting premise, not bad for a start

The Anderson Tapes by Lawrence Sanders (1970) – BR00231 (R2023) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸🐸

The PolyBlog
September 27 2023

Plot or Premise

A robbery crew is planning to rip off an entire small apartment building of tenants in one night.

What I Liked

I had read a lot of Sanders’ novels before I got to this one, out of order. While it is the first of the Edward X. Delaney series, he is a relatively small part of the book near the end. Instead, it reads like the same structure of the movie, the Usual Suspects (which drew inspiration from the book). There are scenes in the present day, after the day of the robbery, with people being interviewed about what happened. But in addition to their witness statements, there are also numerous electronic surveillance tapes of the various criminals being surveilled by a bunch of different police groups, none of which are talking to each other.

What I Didn’t Like

I was on the fence for the rating between four stars or five. While the book is awesome, there is a niggling detail in the plot that bothers me. The “premise” of all the surveillance is that all of these crooks were being surveilled by separate law enforcement units (different precincts, different federal agencies, and so on), and so none of them had the “big picture” to prevent it. Which is fine, it’s a tale as old as time as they say, and a popular theme for crime sprees like serial killers. No one was looking at the cases as connected. Which is fine as a premise, except in each of the fictional tapes referred to as the premise for the book, it is very clear not only that a crime is about to happen, but in many of them, the actual day of the crime, at least one of the major players, and in some cases, the address of the building. Yet NONE of the law enforcement agencies portrayed as running the wiretaps bother to warn the precinct where it will happen, or when, or how? It’s not very realistic in plotting, as the tapes are made several months in advance, according to the text. If it was all in the week ahead, potentially the transcripts weren’t ready or nobody had listened to the tapes yet, sure. But months ahead, someone would have warned someone so the cops could be ready. In the end, I decided it wasn’t a big enough plot device to knock it down a full star.

The Bottom Line

The first book of a master storyteller

Agency by William Gibson (2021) – BR00230 (R2023) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸⚪

The PolyBlog
September 26 2023

Plot or Premise

People from the future are reaching back again into a version of their past.

What I Liked

When I read Peripheral, I had no idea it was part of a trilogy or that there were other books in the series. I just knew that I enjoyed Gibson’s writing and looked for other recent books by him. I found Agency, and initially thought it was a similar theme to the previous book, not that it was actually in the same universe. A young woman is hiding from the paparazzi because of a relationship she once had with a very famous guy and takes on a computer-related job to pay the bills. She is to interact with a virtual assistant / pseudo game-AI and see how lifelike it can appear, and whether it displays signs of self-agency. The company intends to monitor all of her interactions with the program, use it to improve it, etc. Except the program doesn’t like that, and becomes more self-aware. Everyone involved realizes the program is more than they thought, and the woman is now in danger from the people who hired her who want to shut everything down, others who want to access the program, etc. It’s a race to the end where no one but the program knows the finish line.

What I Didn’t Like

There is a nebulous connection between this reality and the previous book, but it seems to be further back in time. Yet some of the other characters from the slightly later past end up getting involved too, without much explanation if they are crossing old timelines or not. Plus, while the series is called Jackpot, you never find out really what the Jackpot is or why it’s named that…at some point in the future, a series of lines of societal degradation finally reach a tipping point, much of the world’s population gets eliminated, and you end up with a huge divide between the rich and poor — all after the “Jackpot”. Maybe it will be explained in Book 3, not yet announced. The socio-economic manipulations are not quite as prevalent, but some societal stuff happens in the background, far enough back that you are now in the recent timelines of our own society, yet way beyond what we can do even now.

The Bottom Line

More like books set in the same universe than a trilogy


Peripheral by William Gibson (2014) – BR00229 (R2023) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸⚪

The PolyBlog
September 25 2023

Plot or Premise

A girl in the early 21st century fills in for her brother on a contract to play a virtual reality video game set in the future. Except it turns out that it isn’t a video game, she really is in the future interacting with the people who hired them.

What I Liked

There is a really good hook to the opening sessions, including a murder to potentially solve, connections to clandestine operations, etc. And some really rich “time travel” logistics of how the future connects to a version of their past reality that is not REALLY their past, but a divergent path of their old reality. I liked how it moved towards some broader socio-economic changes for a while, and then it started to seem almost unreal at the end (a little too much political change).

What I Didn’t Like

I watched Episode 1 of the TV series based on the book before I started reading it, and it’s what inspired me to read it, in fact. But I would have been beyond confused if I hadn’t seen the episode. As the “future employers” want to take their time explaining to the girl and her brother what exactly is going on, that they really are communicating across time, they also don’t explain it very quickly to the reader either. The technospeak was off the charts and even with the orientation from the TV episode, I felt like it was almost a third of the way into the book before I was “caught up” and understood most of what was going on. Some pieces were not explained very well, including the relationship between several shadow contractors in the future, or how some people from the future are actually originally alive in the hub’s present. However, what isn’t really clear is how some of the antagonists are involved to oppose them.

The Bottom Line

When the past is not your past but you want to ensure a good future anyway