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100 Things #10
Getting back to it ...
100 Things: 100 favorite scenes from anything (books, movies, TV, fanfic, etc)
#10: The finale of Benjamin January book 6 (Wet Grave)
The first half of book 6 is soooo slowwwww, but nevertheless, it's one of my very favorite books in the series because once things start to happen, it's pretty much nonstop awesome straight through to what is probably my favorite ending of any of the books in that series. Swashing! Buckling! H/c! ALLIGATORS!
I have to say that I'd probably love this book just because Ben having to help an injured Shaw is the sort of thing I'd been hoping to happen for the past several books (the reverse happens pretty much once per book; Ben is a worse trouble magnet than Harry Dresden). But then, you also have Rose being awesome, and Dominique and Chloe bonding in a way that hits my "romantic rivals being BFFs instead" happy buttons, and such a huge heap of different kind of trouble piling onto the characters that I think at some point I started giggling hysterically because, seriously, HOW CAN ALL OF THIS HAPPEN AT ONCE.
It's impossible to describe the ending accurately without the setup (i.e. the entire rest of the book), but basically you've got most of the main cast, including Ben's very pregnant sister Dominique, all trapped in a plantation house during a gigantic once-in-a-hundred-years hurricane + flood. While the entire countryside is swept up in a slave revolt*. Also, there are pirates! (Who are mostly good guys. But still. PIRATES.) Not to mention the heavily armed killers besieging the house ...
At one point Ben and a badly injured Shaw get trapped on the floating roof of a shed in the middle of the floodwaters, pursued by men with guns, having just managed to avoid drowning AND getting shot (much), and then Ben discovers that they are sharing the roof with an alligator. That he has to fight hand-to-hand, because the powder in his rifle is wet, and Shaw has passed out from blood loss. On a FLOATING ROOF in the middle of a HURRICANE.
And the lepers haven't even shown up yet.
Oh, by the way, did I mention that one of the people trapped in the house is secretly a murderer?
I have to say that it's kind of amazing she wrote any more books in the series after this one, considering that this book contains basically everything that antebellum Louisiana has to offer (most of it in approximately 3 chapters).
*The slave revolt is the one aspect of the book that I'm really uncomfortable with. It's less squicky than it would otherwise be because the viewpoint character and about half the cast are black, but this is one of the few points where I felt that the series ventured into deeply fraught territory and didn't handle it very well. The rest of the book balances it out for me, but YMMV.
100 Things: 100 favorite scenes from anything (books, movies, TV, fanfic, etc)
#10: The finale of Benjamin January book 6 (Wet Grave)
The first half of book 6 is soooo slowwwww, but nevertheless, it's one of my very favorite books in the series because once things start to happen, it's pretty much nonstop awesome straight through to what is probably my favorite ending of any of the books in that series. Swashing! Buckling! H/c! ALLIGATORS!
I have to say that I'd probably love this book just because Ben having to help an injured Shaw is the sort of thing I'd been hoping to happen for the past several books (the reverse happens pretty much once per book; Ben is a worse trouble magnet than Harry Dresden). But then, you also have Rose being awesome, and Dominique and Chloe bonding in a way that hits my "romantic rivals being BFFs instead" happy buttons, and such a huge heap of different kind of trouble piling onto the characters that I think at some point I started giggling hysterically because, seriously, HOW CAN ALL OF THIS HAPPEN AT ONCE.
It's impossible to describe the ending accurately without the setup (i.e. the entire rest of the book), but basically you've got most of the main cast, including Ben's very pregnant sister Dominique, all trapped in a plantation house during a gigantic once-in-a-hundred-years hurricane + flood. While the entire countryside is swept up in a slave revolt*. Also, there are pirates! (Who are mostly good guys. But still. PIRATES.) Not to mention the heavily armed killers besieging the house ...
At one point Ben and a badly injured Shaw get trapped on the floating roof of a shed in the middle of the floodwaters, pursued by men with guns, having just managed to avoid drowning AND getting shot (much), and then Ben discovers that they are sharing the roof with an alligator. That he has to fight hand-to-hand, because the powder in his rifle is wet, and Shaw has passed out from blood loss. On a FLOATING ROOF in the middle of a HURRICANE.
And the lepers haven't even shown up yet.
Oh, by the way, did I mention that one of the people trapped in the house is secretly a murderer?
I have to say that it's kind of amazing she wrote any more books in the series after this one, considering that this book contains basically everything that antebellum Louisiana has to offer (most of it in approximately 3 chapters).
*The slave revolt is the one aspect of the book that I'm really uncomfortable with. It's less squicky than it would otherwise be because the viewpoint character and about half the cast are black, but this is one of the few points where I felt that the series ventured into deeply fraught territory and didn't handle it very well. The rest of the book balances it out for me, but YMMV.