booklog

[firecat]

(Links are to the Goodreads site.)

Stay by Nicola Griffith

Third in a series of books featuring Aud Torvingen, who started out seeming like a sort of lesbian James Bond, but is evolving more complexity by this book. This is a well-crafted novel with two intertwined plots -- a "stay up too late to finish it" sort of novel.

The Shadow of the Wind Bestseller's Choice Audio by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

The story was engaging -- several stories within a story, in a sort of historical Gothic romance genre. Several of the male characters are well drawn.

I was disappointed by the treatment of female characters. The women in the novel are, with one partial exception, mythical beings rather than real people, who exist solely to elicit strong emotions in the male characters.

The narrator did a good job, although he fell into certain modern American speech patterns more often than I would have preferred, given that it is a historical novel set in Barcelona.

Piano music appears behind key scenes. The music itself is lovely (and apparently composed by the author). But I find it unpleasant to try to listen to music and words at the same time, so I really didn't like the musical additions and wished they'd been left out of the audiobook.