Fiction Reviews - Books in the Glass World

I like Dick Francis's books a lot, I think I have read every one, starting rather early and going back to the beginning and continuing on, reading the yearly new one. I even sent him a glass gift once and suggested glassblowing as a topic. I don't know if my input was a factor, but the 2000 book lives in the world of small studio glassblowing in England and by the end, exploding annealed glass and molten glass on a punty have been used as weapons. [Got a letter from Mr. Francis responding to one of mine about this book. He says that since he is 80 and his wife died last fall, Shattered is going to be his last book. [But he came out with another, Under Orders, praising his son for encouragement.]]

The portrayal of glass working and of the studio is very good as far as it goes and there are very few errors in what is portrayed (e.g. Lehr is used like a brand name "in the Lehr annealing oven") If I found anything missing it was the physical feel of the dance of making the glass and the working of the team. Francis is usually very good about physical details and he does well with the heat and the color and the discovery that something when seen after making is more than was thought while making.

There is a pattern to Francis's books. Almost all involve some incident of considerable personal violence, but only one or two. There is always a commitment on the part of the narrator to carry on something risky for personal reasons. The narrator/protagonist is always male. He is a nice male. He admits fear. He uses an attack or threat to his person to reveal things about the attacker. Almost all the books have a relationship with a female that is mildly offbeat - in this book it is with a female cop who rides a motorcycle off-duty. People get killed, but almost by accident - usually.

If you like mysteries and a good read that takes you through the story non-stop, I think you will like this one. Probably in your local library, he is popular enough that the books are hard to find for the first few months after they come out.

Sharp Edges by Jayne Ann Krentz, 1998
Review originally published in Hot Glass Bits and reposted by request on Author site.

Do Glass, Crime, and Sex mix?

I regularly go to the library looking for books for my wife to read, especially looking for authors with several books, so she can have several in a row (without further searching) to read on her Reading Machine. While doing this I came across Sharp Edges, which I got for her after glancing at the fly and then read myself. It is set (sort of) in the world of glass in the Northwest. It is sort of a mix of the Harlequin Romances where the maiden goes into the dangerous castle (I am told, catch me reading one), a tough guy detective mystery and an old fashioned screwball Clark Gable romance with R to X rated sex. Of course all the sexual images are related to the "molten fire" of glass.

Eugenia* Swift is the high style curator of the Leabrook Glass Museum, an up and coming small museum in the Seattle area which has expanded on her skills with glass and donors. Recently Adam Daventry has died, leaving his fantastic glass collection to the museum and she has to go out to Glass House on Frog Cove Island. She has her own agenda, wanting to investigate the death of her friend Nel, Daventry's last lover, the day after his death. She is saddled by her boss with Cyrus Chandler Colfax a reasonably good private investigator who has his own agenda tied to a very old cage cup.

I found the book fun to read. There are almost no references to the actual Seattle glass scene, but the Glass House has a number of pieces that are clearly Chihuly, particularly the chandelier in the entry. The glass stuff is good. The reaction of a couple of artists to broken glass pieces seems overwrought considering how many pieces become "floor models" in an average week.

Krentz is obviously a popular writer, several copies of the book were in each branch I looked for it.

*Eugenia is also my wife's name.

This short story came up as a topic because of its title on CraftWeb Glass and since an internet search revealed that it had been published in the Magazine, which I have on my shelves, I spent some time straightening up the "collection" to find the issue. Shepard is a widely published author, still published this year per the web site, and regularly winning awards.

This a fantasy set in an isolated portion of the real world of Florida at the end of the 80's. It is about a pair of cynical, bitter people, aged 50 and 24. The older man is a glassblower, supposedly famous, working alone from a furnace. The dragon is an accidental creation that comes to life, affects the couple and flies off, leaving them in their downbeat situation. If it had been written in the 70's, the fantasy would have led to an upbeat ending, even if both recognized it was part of a fantasy, but the 80's did not allow that - one of the reasons I stopped reading SF in that time frame (punk SF being the other.) The story reads like a student cynicism exercise and I think I wrote one of these 30 years ago. We learn nothing about emotions, experience, people or glassblowing by reading it.

Glassblowing appears incidentally in Dragons of Pern and a previous book. In the previous book a father incites his sons and others and conspires to destroy a computer, Avias, that is providing information for development which the man thinks violates the "right" old way of doing things. In Dragons of Pern, one son whose hearing was damaged during an attack on Avias escapes from prison and tries to re-establish the Abominators who will destroy the innovations. Ironic comment is made that the new glassblower, Morrellton, makes better glass that does not break under assault. 2006-11-06