I also love Annalise Powliss. The Harry Connolly books are another series on my list of 'aargh publishers dropping things', though rosefox said over on my DW that there's a self-published prequel I haven't got yet.
I see what you're saying about Marla and treating people as objects, but assure you that it's a problem unique to the first book. There are series-structural reasons that Pratt set the first one Not In Marla's Home City, but it really puts the reader at a disadvantage as far as seeing the bits of her personality that are likely to make most people like her. Because most of those parts of her kick in at Felport city limits, and so one only gets told about them in the first book, and they're harder to register as real when it's tell-not-show. Fortunately as soon as she gets home one realizes that she was, in the entire first book, in extreme-danger out-of-my-element hardass mode. Tell-not-show is Pratt's major writing problem, I think, but he gets a lot better at not doing that as he goes along.
Now me, there's a certain kind of nasty I am actively fond of, so I wouldn't have had a problem if she'd continued being the way she is in the first book for the entire series, but then it would have been one of those reviews where I sit there going '... so I think maybe people who aren't me are going to find these books disturbing and maybe I should have a content warning?' And it isn't one of those reviews. If that makes any sense.
I think I would probably dislike Marla if she were male, because male characters of that sort usually have horrendous Machismo Issues.
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I also love Annalise Powliss. The Harry Connolly books are another series on my list of 'aargh publishers dropping things', though
I see what you're saying about Marla and treating people as objects, but assure you that it's a problem unique to the first book. There are series-structural reasons that Pratt set the first one Not In Marla's Home City, but it really puts the reader at a disadvantage as far as seeing the bits of her personality that are likely to make most people like her. Because most of those parts of her kick in at Felport city limits, and so one only gets told about them in the first book, and they're harder to register as real when it's tell-not-show. Fortunately as soon as she gets home one realizes that she was, in the entire first book, in extreme-danger out-of-my-element hardass mode. Tell-not-show is Pratt's major writing problem, I think, but he gets a lot better at not doing that as he goes along.
Now me, there's a certain kind of nasty I am actively fond of, so I wouldn't have had a problem if she'd continued being the way she is in the first book for the entire series, but then it would have been one of those reviews where I sit there going '... so I think maybe people who aren't me are going to find these books disturbing and maybe I should have a content warning?' And it isn't one of those reviews. If that makes any sense.
I think I would probably dislike Marla if she were male, because male characters of that sort usually have horrendous Machismo Issues.