Finished Tidhar's Camera Obscura. There's a fine line between 'romp' and 'mess' and Tidhar seems to fall on both sides of it. I like the lit.references and the shoutouts well enough, but the plot supporting them is either not sufficiently thought out or just a bloody mess in ways that annoy. (Ways that annoy: PTB tell protag 'You must find this object! We don't know what it is or what it does or what it looks like, but you must find it AT ONCE or else!!!eleventy-1!' Protag then wanders the streets of Paris in her barouche, stopping here and there to meet people from history and people from literature: shoots someone here, gets shot up there, follows her nose, utters groundless threats-- 'Next time I'll get you!' Now *she* was the hunter!-- whenever bested by villain. Not unlike Toby Daye, who also annoys through sheer inefficiency. Books cannot stand by allusion alone, even steampunk books; or comics, if you're LoEG. Unless they're Silverlock, where the literary references were the whole point of the story.)
Finished Tidhar's Camera Obscura. There's a fine line between 'romp' and 'mess' and Tidhar seems to fall on both sides of it. I like the lit.references and the shoutouts well enough, but the plot supporting them is either not sufficiently thought out or just a bloody mess in ways that annoy. (Ways that annoy: PTB tell protag 'You must find this object! We don't know what it is or what it does or what it looks like, but you must find it AT ONCE or else!!!eleventy-1!' Protag then wanders the streets of Paris in her barouche, stopping here and there to meet people from history and people from literature: shoots someone here, gets shot up there, follows her nose, utters groundless threats-- 'Next time I'll get you!' Now *she* was the hunter!-- whenever bested by villain. Not unlike Toby Daye, who also annoys through sheer inefficiency. Books cannot stand by allusion alone, even steampunk books; or comics, if you're LoEG. Unless they're Silverlock, where the literary references were the whole point of the story.)
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