Novelist Mary Robinette Kowal launches a huge rock at Washington, D.C., in her
plotty, readable alternate history, The Calculating Stars, and its sequel, The Fated Sky.
Plotty, page-turning pleasure plus instructions on how to make a perfect grilled cheese sandwich and how to stab a man in the heart."
He's never been particularly
plotty, thank goodness, but this story entails reversals and twists that demand structural and subtextual craftiness -- Hitchcockian turns and feints -- that play second fiddle to mood, tone and extravagant expressive pictorialism.
"Sneaky Pete" is, by comparison, a more satisfying but less ambitious show, a delightfully
plotty potboiler.
The critic, however, complains about its reliance on a contrived narrative involving a series of rather
plotty, melodramatic devices (such as suicide, birth of a disabled child, a mysterious bequest, a revelatory letter about a distant past, etc.).
It would brighten up all the dull,
plotty bits no end.
Better than that--they'd had plenty of naughty, tweaky,
plotty, reconciliatory confabulations.
Hope Mills was given a Pushcart Editors' Book Award precisely because it isn't
plotty enough to be commercially viable.
In a word, drama had become plotless because it had turned its back on the
plotty part of plot that had become the basis of drama to the point of (temporary) fatigue.
If that already sounds too
plotty by half, we haven't even gotten to the inevitable return of Zoolander's clown-haired old nemesis, Mugatu (Will Ferrell, energetically nasty as ever), or the "Da Vinci Code"-style legend of a secret bloodline that may hold the key to eternal youth.