Okay, I keep saying I'm going to make a post about why these books are awesome, but I never do, so ... HERE IS THAT POST, DARN IT ALL. XD
Basically right now there are only two series of books that I'm eagerly pre-ordering in hardcover and dropping everything I'm doing to read when they arrive: Dresden Files (which most of you know about) and the Benjamin January books by Barbara Hambly. I started reading them last fall because they sounded intriguing -- they're historical murder mysteries set in New Orleans during the 1830s -- and before I knew it I'd been completely sucked into her sprawling cast of characters and their world.
I'll talk more about the characters under the cut, because there are some scattered spoilers for the first couple of books (it's difficult to talk about who the characters are and why they're awesome without spoiling a few things) but aside from the characters and their AWESOMENESS, here are some of the other things I love about the books:
- They have a
fabulous sense of place. They neither gloss over the ugliness and dirtiness of life in the 19th century, nor fail to celebrate the beauty and wonder. They're rich with historical details and vivid descriptions that leaves me feeling like I'm standing there on New Orleans' muddy, mosquito-infested streets. And I've never been there, never was actually that interested in going there (before reading the books; now I'd love to!), but these books make New Orleans itself as much of a character as the human characters.
- They do a wonderful job of balancing the swashbuckling-adventure side of the plot with the social commentary side of the plot. By narrative necessity, since the main protagonist Ben and his family are black, the books deal heavily with life in antebellum New Orleans among the free black community, including its deep social stratifications of both race and class, and the bitterness of being an exile in your own country, unable to vote or own a weapon or even to enjoy freedom that couldn't be taken from you in a single instant of bad luck or carelessness. And the books do a really good job of keeping this in the forefront of the readers' mind, as it always has to be for the characters. (Not to mention that the author is absolutely
aces at giving her characters agency; Ben is never
ever a victim who can do nothing but wait to be rescued by a white character -- he always,
always saves himself or at least sets the events of his own rescue in motion.)
But the books are
also full of adventure and derring-do -- there are pirates and thieves and bandits, last-minute rescues, hidden treasure, kidnappings, hurricanes, floods, long-lost family, daring plots and so forth. Lots of stuff gets blown up, metaphorically and literally. :D And, as they are technically murder mysteries, each book centers around a murder or three.
( Okay, let's talk about the characters! Mild spoilers for books 1 & 2, nothing major )I wrote a couple of stories for this series for Yuletide:
Rescue is a Ben & Shaw & Dominique story with no specific spoilers (probably takes place in the general timeframe of the first couple of books), and
A Mistress or a Friend is a Hannibal-centric ficlet that's spoilery for one plot thread in book 5.
Here's the series in order on Amazon.com (no spoilers aside from titles). There are 10 books so far, with another forthcoming next year.
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