I thought about this book a lot. I am in awe of how the author created
such a complete picture of a human being with such spare prose. It’s not
a very long book and yet it felt like I had read it for weeks instead of
a couple days.

Artemisia is an actual historical person, Artemisia Gentileschi, who
painted during the Baroque period of art in Italy. She was the first
woman to be admitted to the Accademia dell’ Arte in Florence, knew and
corresponded with Galileo, had Cosimo De Medici II as her patron and
supported herself and her children with her painting. She was also raped
by her father’s co-worker and tortured in court to verify her accusation.
Apparently, if a woman didn’t recant her story while in extreme pain, she
really was telling the truth.

What Vreeland does is take the bare bones of her story and turn it into a
searching, thoughtful story about the struggle of a woman who must choose
between her personal happiness and her God given gifts. Artemisia is
passionate about painting but she suffers for her passion. The title is
double entendre. I actually looked up the word “passion” to make sure I
wasn’t imagining things. She cannot deny her ability to paint but as a
woman it costs her the men she loves to continue with her art.
Particularly touching was her struggle watching her daughter grow up to
have conventional desires and aims in life, denying her mother’s gifts.

I recommend this book highly. It is packaged like a “chick” book but the
content is so much better than the impression the cover makes. By the
time I was done, I knew Artemisia like a friend.

Usually, I can read a mystery in much less than the week it took me to
complete this one. They’re light and don’t normally require thoughtful
reading to get the plot, etc. But this one was pleasantly different.
Now on paper, the premise does sound fairly sappy. Sometime in antiquity,
ancient people made a powerful chess set that holds the key to some
mysterious formula. The set was owned by Charlemagne and then disappeared
from sight but not from memory. Two narrators tell the story of its
resurfacing and the measures taken to keep it out of the hands of those
wanting to use it for personal advancement. Surrounding the mystique of
the chess set is the number 8, which laid on its side is also the symbol
for infinity.

The first narrator is a nun in the abbey that part of the chess set has
been buried in for 200 years. The French Revolution is on and Marat has
learned of its existence. The abbess shuts the abbey and sends the pieces
individually away with trusted nuns, designating Mireille to be the locus
of the network. She watches the Terror, meets just about everyone
important in the whole mess and her story goes from there. Back in the
future, Catherine Velis is narrating the strange story of her involvement
with the chess set. She is a computer programmer/data analyst who dabbles
in painting and mathematics. On New Years Eve, a fortune teller reads her
hand and gives her a strange prophecy, which she, of course, promptly
forgets. She also has a figure eight described in the fold lines of her
hands. Strange things start happening, she meets a ton of interesting
people and her story goes from there.

Before I read this I really didn’t know more than the basic moves in
chess–nor did I wish to know more. But the book’s descriptions of the
mathematical properties of the game, the mathematics of music and
acoustics, and the use of numbers in mystical beliefs was fascinating.
Whether it’s actually true or not I haven’t a clue, but it made a darn
good story. Even switching back and forth between narrators wasn’t
cumbersome because the mystery was so riveting. I am definitely going to
seek out more of her fiction to see if it holds forth with the same
quality.

This is the sequel to The Duke of Uranium, which I
reviewed a couple of days ago. Jak Jannika travels with his buddies to
the habitat of Greenwood in the Aerie, where his former girlfriend is a
princess. He’s going because she sent him a secret message asking him to
come and “do something for her”, and to fulfill the requirement for his
Junior Project at the Public Service Academy. The action takes him as
far as the mines of Mercury.

The book has much the same strengths and flaws as its predecessor, but
there was more about it to dislike. In particular, parts of it combine
some really ugly sexual domination with a really cynical take on
relationships that I found unpleasant. It wasn’t gratuitous, I’ll give
Barnes that–he was establishing that a particular character is a
sociopathic bitch, and by the time he was done I believed him. But it
was unpleasant, never the less, and I could have done without it.

There are clearly more books to come; I’ll probably buy the next one.
But unless there’s a clear improvement I may not go any farther than that.

This is the third book in the Isles series, and Drake is still going
strong. Garric, Sharina, Cashel, and Ilna, and various friends, continue
trying to save civilization, while the threat this time is the
culmination of a plot a thousand years in the making. I won’t give away
any details, save to say that our heroes aren’t fighting by themselves;
the bad guys have been making free with the mummy of a long dead wizard,
and said long dead wizard isn’t happy about it. The only problem is that
he’s, well, long dead.

This book takes place in the 36th century. Mankind has colonized
the entire solar system; the vast bulk of humanity lives not on Earth,
but in two massive orbital habitats, the Hive and the Aerie, which
occupy the L4 and L5 positions 120 degrees before and after Earth in its
orbit. Our hero, Jak Jannika, is a somewhat shallow, callow, and
feckless youth who has just graduated from the equivalent of high school.
When his girlfriend is kidnapped at a nightclub, he is sent by his Uncle
the social engineer to go rescue her. Which all sounds somewhat romantic,
but it isn’t really.

It’s hard to know what to make of this book. The cover touts it as a
mixture of Robert A. Heinlein and
Harry Harrison, with some justice; in some ways it
also appears to be a spoof of Iain M. Banks‘ “Culture” series.
The science is tolerably hard (or at least pretends to be), while the
tone ranges from deadly seriousness to cartoon lunacy. The two extremes
don’t fit together very well.

But it was not a bad read, and more enjoyable than I feared it might be.

During the course of Drake’s Lord of the Isles we learned of
two wizards each trying to find the throne of Malkar, an artifact that
would either one nearly absolute power–for a while, until it destroyed
them. Garric puts paid to one of them, the Hooded One, in that book; in
this book the chief enemy is the Queen of the Isles, “wife” to the
ineffectual King Valence of Ornifal whom she has nearly supplanted.

The more I ponder this series (and though I’ve only gotten around to
reviewing this book today, I’ve already started the fourth book), the
more impressed I am. The typical fantasy epic–Richard Jordan’s
“Wheel of Time”, say–features some great Evil Overlord which our heroes
must defeat against all odds. No matter how many volumes go into the
series, the quest against the Evil Overlord is the unifying element. And
that means that somehow our heroes must defeat the overlord again and
again and again until we’re almost past caring. That’s the
problem with the typical Big Story–you get the Skylark effect in spades.

The Lord of the Isles series is a Big Story, but it’s anything
but typical. The story isn’t about the defeat of some Evil Overlord;
rather, it’s about a heroic attempt to maintain–and advance!–the
civilization of the Isles in the face of a thousand-year peak in the
tides of evil magic. There’s no one Evil Overlord; instead, there might
be dozens, all competing against our heroes, and against each other. And
on top of that there are the basic human-level politics of the Isles.

Thus, whereas a normal fantasy series must escalate the threat and the
response to it with each book, taking our suspension of disbelief to ever
higher and more tenuous levels, the Lord of the Isles books
each concern yet another problem that our heroes must overcome. The
problem might or might not be more severe than that in the preceding
book; but it’s certainly different.

All in all, I’m finding the whole series most refreshing.

This is a children’s history of the California Gold Rush; it’s published
by Scholastic and is written for kids aged 7 and 8. It’s meant to be
simple enough for the kids to read to themselves. But David saw it at a
book fair at his school, and since we’d recently read a book that takes
place during the Gold Rush (By the Great Horn Spoon), he
grabbed it and I read it aloud to him over four nights (one per chapter).

On the whole, I’m impressed by this little book. Though it’s written for
kids, it isn’t dumbed down; in particular, it speaks in specifics rather
than in vague generalities. The illustrations include many photographs
and engravings from the Gold Rush era, including a couple of fascinating
advertising broadsheets. All in all, it packs quite a bit of information
into 48 pages in large type (there’s even a glossary and an index).

I don’t expect that many of my readers will ever be in a position to buy
this book, let alone read it; but if you need such a thing you could do
much worse.