Amy, I admit that while I really enjoy Stabenow's storytelling and characters, her tendency to change povs in the middle of a paragraph never ceases to annoy me. I've become kind of a hardass on pov.

On edit: not, of course, that you are to be blamed for her failings...

t grins and shrugs

It's so long ago that I can't say for sure, but if she did that in the manuscript I had, I would have queried it. Big no-no in my eyes.

And while I did like it and read one other, I didn't keep up. Too many books, too little time (too much good porn fic to read on the intarwebs...)

She's done it for her entire career, so I suspect a query wouldn't have made much difference.

And the newer stuff? Occasionally kinda porny.

It was a link about BtVS from Dana Stabenow's web site that led me to Buffy threads on WorldCrossing. I lurked there once in a while, then followed the crowd to here, where I lurked some more.

I liked Stabenow's "Star Svensdotter" series a lot. My copies didn't survive my move from Colorado in 1997, and I haven't been able to find them to replace them, but if you ever come across any of the three, I recommend them.

The Kate Shugak series was pretty good. Interesting stories, interesting characters, some humor, and as Consuela said, a great sense of place. She lost me after about the seventh book. Kate had become unlikeable, and too many people were being too stupid, it broke my willing suspension of disbelief.

The first couple of Liam Campbell books were merely okay. I kept nit-picking the flying scenes, and I lost interest in continuing.

I didn't like Blindfold Game at all. Her blog entries from her time spent on board a Coast Guard cutter doing research for the book were much more interesting.

No, Susan said that the one she voted for was historical, with the 2 basically naked people. Because y'know, people throughout history have been naked....

I could've lived with the naked. But no one was naked with those hairstyles 200 years ago!

I kept nit-picking the flying scenes, and I lost interest in continuing.

Really? There was one scene in one of them that I thought was just fabulous, where Liam is the spotter while his ex flies the plane looking for a school of fish, and there's dozens of boats down below and a whole bunch of other planes above that they're trying not to hit. It was just exciting as hell, and very well-described in a way so you could really imagine it. I like that kind of writing.

It was a fabulous scene, and what she described is similar in many ways to what it's like to be in a gaggle of sailplanes sharing a thermal. There were too many "Yes...but no...." moments.

I'm overly critical of descriptions of flying. I recognize it, but I can't stop doing it. It's stuff I'd like to think I know, even though I know my information is almost 15 years out of date.

But on just about anything but feminism she was reactionary even for her time.

Surely you're not faulting her for not being perfectly untimely and reactionary?

One way or another it's hard to tell how many people would translate into our oh-so-enlightened times. Some people would still sit squat upon their prejudices and hold them tight to their breasts, and others would let them fall away since they'd not been held with rigourous examination.

Surely you're not faulting her for not being perfectly untimely and reactionary.

I don't know about faulting her. She was reactionary on many issues, by the standards of her time. Not just by today's standards but by her own times standards. If she was a reactionary in the 20s by the standards of the 20s, then a best guess is that she would be a reactionary today by the standards of today.

Feminism was an exception. She was a feminist in her own time by her own times standards, albeit at the conservative end of the feminist spectrum of her time - thus I'm guessing today that she'd be a feminist by the standards of today, albeit a conservative feminist by today's standards. You can never know something like this for sure - but it seems plausible to translate where she was compared to others in her time to where she'd be today compared to others today.

(Sneaking in just to tell Typo Boy how much I love the tagline)

/alas, back to work