Soulless: Alexia Tarabotti, #1 -- Gail Carriger

Of course, the minute I post about how I won't be posting much, I start to feel like posting again. 

I had extremely high hopes for Soulless, which isn't a good thing for any book -- in some cases I think it'd be impossible to achieve the level of awesome that my expectations... expect.  (I haven't been writing much lately, so you'll have to bear with me.)  In this case, ultimately, I ended up with mixed-to-negative feelings.  (Does that sound like an emotional weather report?)

I still think the cover is fantastic, though I can't imagine walking (or even standing) like that.  I'd fall over.  Then again, I can fall over standing normally.

Ultimately, I had very mixed feelings.  Now, that can certainly partly be chalked up to my high expectations, but even setting those aside, there were issues.  The book had a fun premise and occasionally made me giggle, but was full of stock characters and mostly unbelievable dialogue.  If the characters had been interesting or the dialogue had been stronger, the been-there-done-that plotting wouldn't have been an issue.  As it was, it, well, was.  I'll elaborate.

The book begins:

Miss Alexia Tarabotti was not enjoying her evening.  Private balls were never more than middling amusements for spinsters, and Miss Tarabotti was not the kind of spinster who could garner even that much pleasure from the event.  To put the pudding in the puff: she had retreated to the library, her favorite sanctuary in any house, only to happen upon an unexpected vampire.

She glared at the vampire.

Fun, right?  I love "to put the pudding in the puff" -- there are lots of little enjoyable lines like that throughout the book that made me smile.  Sometimes they didn't sound remotely right for the period:

The voice was low and tinged with a hint of Scotland.  It would have caused Alexia to shiver and think primal monkey thoughts about moons and running far and fast, if she'd had a soul.  Instead it caused her to sigh in exasperation and sit up.  (page 7)

but as we're dealing with an alternate reality, that didn't bother me so much.

What did bother me were lines like this:

"Starvation would explain why the vampire was desperate enough to try for Miss Tarabotti at a ball, rather than taking to the slums like the smart ones do when they get this bad."  (page 12)

The speaker is talking to his partner, someone who is perfectly aware of how vampires act -- it's the kind of dialogue that is there purely to convey information to the reader, doesn't make sense given the situation or the speakers, and drives me completely bananas.  In this next line, from the same conversation, the speaker provides a definition that his partner, as an employee of the Bureau of Unnatural Registry AND ALSO A WEREWOLF AND THEREFORE PROBABLY UP ON HIS PARANORMAL KNOWLEDGE, wouldn't, I'm assuming, really need:

"We must have a rove on our hands, one completely without ties to the local hive."  (page 12)

Anyway, that sort of dialogue did lessen as the book progressed and as the author had conveyed the information she needed to -- but it made for clumsy-feeling worldbuilding. 

In general, the prose felt a bit like the novelization of a movie or a television show, and, well, I tend to be much more forgiving about that sort of dialogue when it comes to television.  ("We're DEMON HUNTERS, Dean!  Dad raised us like WARRIORS!"  "Oh, really, Sam?  Did he?  I'm so glad that you told me about it -- because seriously, I had COMPLETELY FORGOTTEN."  Thank goodness that they stopped doing that early on.)  Maybe because in a book, it pulls me right out of the story -- doesn't give me the chance to believe in the world and the characters, to forget about the author? 

I think, really (and this is probably a strange thing to say), that the book would almost work better as a television show -- the descriptions of the characters' facial expressions were described so often that I found it grating and very Tell-y rather than Show-y -- if there were actors actors... erm... acting out the described facial expressions and whatnot, it could work.

As I mentioned, the characters are likable but are also very familiar -- Alexia is the Strong Willed Hot Tempered Buxom Heroine (read: Amelia Peabody), Lord Maccon is the Tall Broad Growly Grouchy Hairy Love Interest (read: Radcliffe Emerson), Professor Lyall is the Mild-Mannered, Good Humored Very Intelligent Second in Command, and poor Lord Akeldama (while certainly very likable) can't seem to enter a scene without being described as "mincing".  All of those types can be totally enjoyable, but I didn't feel that any of them ever became more than their own general descriptions.  They just ran around the book like very broadly-sketched... sketches.

Soulless won a 2010 Alex Award and has been extremely popular in the blogosphere, so there are plenty of dissenting views out there.  I'm sure that there will be plenty of older teen readers who'll enjoy it.  (Younger readers -- and some parents -- may experience a bit of an eyepop at the sex.)

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Book source:  Bought my own copy.

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