The Last Coyote by Michael Connelly

When I read the back cover blurb on this one, I sort of dreaded it. I should know by now that this series always picks cliched ideas and characters, just so the writer can make them sing in all new ways. I should learn to trust. The Bosch in this story was very different from the ones we've seen to date, and I'm curious to see what he's like in the next one, and the one after that and the one after that. I'm a little bit afraid that Connelly's going to get too invested in Bosch, and start protecting him from the dark. I've seen it happen to too many characters in popular series - they gain popularity by being dark, edgy, a little bit scary, a little bit crazy, and by giving readers the sense that they're on the verge of blowing everything. Then the writers seem to lose their nerve. I have a little bit of hope for this series, based on Connelly's frequent publication of non-Bosch books. I hope that means he's going to successfully avoid that dependence, that need to protect his main guy, his meal ticket. Anyway, I really loved having Bosch stripped bare (metaphorically speaking) in this outing. Bit by bit, he loses his hold on everything connecting him to the world - job, girl, home, history, mission - until he is completely naked and rudderless. He's clearly teetering on the brink, and I can't wait to see what happens next. I'm still a little bit shocked and not sure how I feel about Bosch's candor and emotional vulnerability in this one. I thought it was out of character at first, but then I came to accept it. He's not Jack Reacher, lethal loner - he's just a sad sack lonely cop caught in a fabulous noir wonderland. The more I think about the events of the story, the sadder I get for him. It's *interesting* to see a writer make such bold choices. Series writers: take note. This is how it's done. One troubling thing about this series is that I keep trying to picture Bosch in my head, and I can't do it. I usually read without having a clear mental image of the characters, but for some reason with Bosch I seem to need it. I've been trying to use various celebrities as templates, but nothing has really taken so far. I usually get a John Spencer type of vibe from him (it's the sadness), but Spencer doesn't have the agility and danger. So then I go with Kiefer Sutherland, who can definitely bring the right mixture of menace, vulnerability, and righteousness, but isn't old enough. And when I try to age Kiefer, all I get is Donald and that soooo doesn't work for me. Lately I've been trying out Al Pacino circa "Sea of Love" and "Frankie and Johnny", and that's worked well. It helps that Bosch actually seems to strike the middle ground between the characters Pacino played in those two movies. If anyone out there has a good Bosch template, let me know.

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

My primary feeling on this book is that it is absolutely terrible for the exact opposite reason why Dan Brown's are terrible. This is an excellent story told very very badly, while Mr. Brown tells putrid stories very very well. I'm not sure which offends my sensibilities more. My criticism of The Historian may seem nit-picky, and I understand if others don't suffer from the same distractions as me. But the main problem - perhaps the only problem that is worth a bad review - is how the book is told. There are several different narrators throughout the story: the protagonist in the early 1970s and in the present, her father in the 1950s and in the 1970s, her father's university professor in the 1930s and in the 1950s, her father's professor's lover in the 1930s, and so on. Multiple POVs are not in and of themselves a problem for me. The problem is that these are all told in the "my father sat me down to tell me a story and this is what he said", or "I opened the letter and here's what I found", followed by narration that would never flow from those sources. At one point, a man mortally wounded, in desperate, panicked fear for his life, sits down to type out a missive that runs for about 30 pages of printed book. The first six pages consist of him waking up in a dark place and standing up. This is not what someone does in desperate circumstances. I was irritated by this approach, but I was willing to accept that this is my own quirk as a reader. I had to stop reading Wuthering Heights because it relies too heavily on the same approach, so clearly this is a serious pet peeve of mine. But there was one thing in particular that pushes me over the edge. At one point, nearly 300 pages of text are supposed to take the form of a father's letter to his daughter, written over the course of several weeks in stolen moments late at night. Every line for all of these hundreds of pages is in quotation marks, lest we forget that they're supposed to be coming from a letter, including long sections of flashbacks within flashbacks and more intimate personal stuff than this particular character would share with his daughter. And the best part is, none of it reads like a letter. It reads like the first-person narration of a novel. Anyone who's ever sent or received a letter can tell the difference. Also? All of the writers, speakers, and story-tellers sound exactly alike. There are no obvious differences in humor, education, reticence, talkativeness, writing style, speaking style... they all seem like the same person, advancing the same plot. What's the point of having all these people narrating if there's no difference between them? It would have been so simple to allow all these characters to speak for themselves (rather than all speaking through the daughter), or to rework it another way to avoid this issue entirely. I have to wonder, then, why it wasn't.

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

I absolutely, completely loved this book. This resides alongside Kavalier and Clay as a non-genre book dealing very well with genre topics. In this case, as the title indicates, the topic is time travel. It would probably be a hard sell for any hard-core science fiction fan, as the mechanics and details of the time travel are totally glossed over. And for the purpose of the story, it doesn't really matter much. More than anything, this is a tragic love story of star-crossed lovers forced apart by circumstances beyond their control. It's about separation, longing, missing your other half. It's a theme I'm particularly vulnerable to right now, which may be part of the appeal. Despite the scmaltz-potential inherent in that theme, the lead couple is non-traditional in every way, and the author is not afraid to go dark, both of which I sincerely appreciated. I was a bit concerned when the story veered off into Baby Issues, and the story lost a lot of focus throughout that entire section. There was also waaay too much detail about the woman's (Clare's) activities as an artist. I now know way more about the steps involved in making paper than I ever wanted to (no surprise, the author is a papermaker). But unlike the baby stuff that all could be cut completely and the story wouldn't suffer. The structure takes some getting used to. The story is mostly told chronologically in the middle of their adult lives, but there are exceptions everywhere. It's unbelievably well-constructed in that sense. Vignettes appear in order to illustrate or provide context for whatever else is happening, but it never seems overly expositional. And it's remarkably easy to follow once you get the hang of it. The central issue here is that the characters are in love but out of sync and connected on different levels from one another. Even when they're together in the "present", they're not ever at the same point in their relationship with one another; in their emotional lives, one is always ahead or behind the other. She first meets him when she's six years old and he's in his 30s, and they visit regularly for a dozen years throughout her childhood and adolescence. I can see why some people would find this vaguely creepy, but I think it's handled very well and doesn't trouble me at all. He, on the other hand, meets her for the first time in adulthood, when he's 28 and she's 20. And he's been pretty fucked up his whole life by this whole involuntary time travel thing. He's dark and twisted and not very nice, and not at all like the much-older version of himself that she's known her whole life. The fact that this man, this figure who's been a powerful adult presence her whole life, is suddenly the less mature of the pair is only one of the interesting juxtapositions in the story. I've read some criticism of the male character, Henry, dominating Clare too much, intruding too much on her childhood, poisoning her chances for a normal life. What's interesting to me is not whether or not that's true, but instead how that came to pass. In Henry's timeline, he meets Clare for the first time as an adult, and doesn't start visiting her in childhood until well after making a solid connection with her grown-up self. So who is subverting whose will? In fact, the whole idea of free will versus destiny is a huge issue in the book, which leaves a lot open for pondering. In fact, this same issue leads me back to thinking about the title. I've been pondering for a while: whose story is this exactly? Is it Clare's story, or Henry's? Who is in charge? Whose story is it? I can't tell. The author seems to be telling us it's about Clare, but I'm not so sure whose journey I find more compelling. I'm glad I don't have to choose.