| Two for Joy by Mary Reed and Eric Mayer |
| (Poisoned Pen Press, $23.95, V) ISBN 1-890208-37-X |
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Something was nagging at me as I plodded through this book, and it finally came to me. I was reminded of playing Barbie with my friends when I was a little girl. In case you haven’t done this yourself, or watched children at play, I’ll summarize for you: you and your two best friends get together in a basement, hunker down and spend three hours setting up the cardboard house, the uncomfortable furniture and the accessories. There is some limited discussion over what all the Barbies will wear. This is to avoid having swimsuits at the obligatory wedding. The Barbies are occasionally hopped into another territory to say a stilted line or two. Then a mother will announce that everything has to be cleaned up because dinner is in fifteen minutes. And in that last fifteen minutes, everything happens. The Barbies zip around as if the world is ending, which it is, for them. Weddings, pool parties, extraterrestrial experiences, you name it, it all happens in that last fifteen minutes. Dialogue is crisp, snappy, characters come to life. Darn! Then it really is time for dinner and you wish you could keep playing because it is just getting good.
Two for Joy is the second in a series about a eunuch named John who holds a high office in the court of Emperor Justinian in 6th century Constantinople. People are bursting into flames and a religious leader is threatening the government. Sounds fascinating, and to a certain extent it is. Mention has been made before of the authors’ extensive research into this era, and the details show in the writing. We really feel surrounded by the homeless people of the time and we come to understand what it is to live in a rabble. The religions of the time are very interesting. As a portal to other reading, this book is a winner. But it moves so slowly that it is work to finish it. The secondary characters are much more interesting than John and his friends, probably because they are regular working people and live in the real world. Isolated by pomp and circumstance, John does no more than get moved from one cardboard room to another, speaking stiltedly. All the main characters talk like Charlton Heston in an old movie, and I accepted this as an attempt to stay in period. However, at the end of the book things really move along, and the dialogue, emotions and action all become so much more lively that it is a shame to have suffered through the previous chapters. I did not read the first book in the series, and I felt I needed to in order to like the main character. This is the real test of any series - can the books stand on their own? In this case, I imagine, but do not know, that the first book was necessary to enjoy the second.
--Diane Gotfryd |
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