After another unsuccessful investigation into Philosopher's Stone rumors, Edward and Alphonse Elric wait for a train. Strangely, when one finally arrives, it's hours late. They're also surprised to see Roy Mustang and Jean Havoc among the passengers, dressed in civilian clothes. They soon learn that there has been a lot of recent terrorist activity on the train tracks. The terrorists announce their bombing target 20-30 minutes in advance, enough time for civilians to get to safety but too little time for the military to do anything to stop them. It's terrorism without terror - civilians are more inconvenienced than anything, and they've directed their annoyance towards the ineffectual military.

Although he hasn't been able to find any proof yet, Roy suspects that the bombings are somehow connected to a string of kidnappings. The kidnappers abduct a child from a family with a connection to the military, demand and receive a ransom, and let the child go free, completely unharmed. As Ed and Al continue their own work, they accidentally stumble across something that may be key to both of Roy's investigations.

This is the second Fullmetal Alchemist novel I've read, and the first that I don't think was turned into a filler episode in the original anime, so the story was entirely new to me. It was decent - not something I'll necessarily want to reread, but it felt like something that could happen in the Fullmetal Alchemist universe, was a relatively quick and light read, and the characters mostly acted and spoke like themselves.

Ancy, the child Ed and Al encountered, was like literally every child they've ever met in the series, sweet and cute. There was a funny running joke involving Ed calling Roy "Dad" that, for a very brief moment, dipped into "Roy as Ed's father figure" territory. Havoc drove a car badly, multiple times. Ed went up against a couple dozen terrorists and managed to hold his own with alchemy and an entire building (although he forgot that some parts of buildings are load-bearing and really shouldn't be messed with). There were no alchemists in the terrorist group, but there was a guy named Gael who was ridiculously strong and fast.

It wasn't the most exciting story, overall, but it had some good stuff in it, especially in the second half. Roy and Ed had some great scenes together. The one thing that was a little off was the bit where a woman called Ed a "wee bonnie squire" to Al's "knight in shining armor" (78) and Ed didn't even twitch.

This is the last of the Fullmetal Alchemist novels that I have on hand, but I'd still like to read the rest.

Extras:

A few black and white illustrations throughout, an afterword by Makoto Inoue, and an afterword/illustrated interpretation of the "you have a son?" scene by Hiromu Arakawa. Also, one full-color illustration.

 

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

Captured by Fairies: Folk Tales of Kidna... [As always, when this is on the Currently Reading shelf I'm not done and will continue adding bits to this review. Also I may start off saying something about a book and then change my mind before I get to the end - and then I'll edit this. So until I remove this blurb take none of this as final!]Contents:The Recovered Bride (Ireland)- Captured wife to husband: "The fairies got power over me because I was only thinking of you and did not prepare myself as I ought for the sacrament. I made a bad confession and now I am suffering for it."- No info on what she was up to during the time with the fairies, she just shows up in a procession of well-dressed people on horseback. Which honestly doesn't seem very terrifying.Taken by the Good People (Ireland)- Mother taken at birth of her child, though everyone thinks that she's died (Wait, did they not bury a body?! Fairies can leave body doubles?)- Mother was not only taken but married again.- Another "find us, we'll all be at point X, on horseback" plan- Captured wife to husband, about man who's her new husband: "You will know my man, for he is the only one of them that has a red head."- fairy or good people aren't mentioned - the kidnappers referred to as men - which is frankly what the warring tribes of this country were doing a lot of (raiding, stealing, etc.)Twenty Years with the Good People (Ireland)- Husband is snagged by...someone when on a journey to get leather for shoemaking - only his cart and ass return home.- Captured husband, now returned, tells them: "...I can't tell you for some time where I was since I left you. But some time I might have the power, but not now."- Story teller: "...he never tould her or any one where he was, but of course everybody knew that 'twas wood [with] the good people."Jamie Freel and the Young Lady: A Donegal Tale (Ireland)- Here the good people are actually in the story a bit more: "...he had neighbours, of whose opinion he was ignorant, neighbours who lived pretty close to him, whom he had never seen, who are, indeed, rarely seen by mortals, except on May eves and Halloweens." and "Numbers of little people, the largest about the size of a child of five years old, were dancing to the music of flutes and fiddles, while others drank and feasted."- Jamie Freel is invited to dance and feast with them, and then they take him along on a trip to "steal a young lady"- when you hang out with fairies your horse can be made to fly- The capture: "He saw the young lady lifted and carried away, while the stick which was dropped in her place on the bed took her exact form."- Hero Overhears Fairy Plans (for beings that are supposed to be uber powerful, fairies are apparently bad at realizing humans are listening to them)- When the captured girl is finally returned to her parents they don't believe it's her until Jamie tells her story. Oddly no one thinks about digging up the body (the stick!) they buried, thinking it was her.Ethna the Bride (Ireland)- Finally, some detail on the why's of capture: "The fairies, as we know, are greatly attracted by the beauty of mortal women, and Finvarra the king employs his numerous sprites to find out and carry off when possible the prettiest girls and brides in the country. These are spirited away by enchantment to his fairy palace at Knockma in Tuam, where they remain under a fairy spell, forgetting all about the earthly life and soothed to passive enjoyment, as in a sweet dream, by the soft low melody of the fairy music, which has the power to lull the hearer into a trance of ecstasy."- Ethna is stolen and her husband goes to Finvarra for help, thinking Finvarra is a friend - and of course it's Finvarra that's had Ethna kidnapped- Hero Overhears Fairy PlansNed the Jockey (Wales)- Ned wanders into a group of fairies who send him off in a guest of wind (or possibly he'd been drinking and this was a great way of explaining how he ended up in someone else's garden)The Old Man and The Fairies (Wales)- The old man is carried off while sleeping: "...when he awoke he found himself in a great palace of gold, full of fairies dancing and singing. And they took him and showed him everything, the splendid gold room and gardens, and they kept dancing round him until he fell asleep."- The fairies apparently enjoy toting sleeping humans around - they put him back in the spot they'd found him, filling his bag full of gold. Gold turns into shells after he tells his wife where he'd been.A Visit to Fairyland (Wales)- Man is entranced by a group of fairies dancing and playing music, and somehow seven years pass- Rip Van Winkle effect: his parents are dead, his sweetheart has married another, and he dies of a broken heartFour Years in Faery (Isle of Man)- Two sentences of note: "Like the Welsh fairies, the Manx ones take men away with them and detain them for years." and "The other world, however, in which he was for the four years was not far away, as he could see what his brothers and the rest of the family were doing every day, although they could not see him."The Lost Wife of Ballaleece (Isle of Man)- A man's wife disappears: "Some persons said that she was dead and others that she was taken by the Little People." - which makes you wonder if people often vanished without a trace like this.- Man married again but his first wife appears to him at night (it always seems to be at night): "...I was taken away by the Little People, and I live with them near to you."- Once again it's the Rescue from a Group on Horseback Scenario!- Second wife sabotages the rescue, and first wife is never seen again. Of course if he had rescued her he'd have suddenly found himself married to two women.On Fairies (England)The Lost ChildThe Fairies' HillThe Stolen LadyTouching the ElementsThe Aged BrideA Smith Rescues a Captured Woman from a TrollThe Sea NymphOf course this makes me want to write a list (everyone loves lists, right?) - How Not To Be Kidnapped by Fairies1) Try not to live in Ireland. This sort of thing seems to happen a lot there. ...Also Wales. ...And actually, to be safe, avoid the British Isles altogether.2) Pay attention in church/confession - do not daydream about your fiance.3) If pregnant be sure to have some folk ready to guard you when you give birth, at which point you can be snatched away and somehow everyone will believe you're dead.4) Don't go on a journey alone. (However if you do, and are delayed for any amount of time, you can always hint that you were with the Good People, and this might be a believable excuse. To some.)5) Never go to sleep. If you must, be sure you're guarded. Don't worry, no one will think you're at all paranoid.6) Don't be too good looking. If you are, try not to flaunt it. Tip: Hide indoors a lot.7) If you see a group of fairies or hear their music, do NOT go over and listen or talk to them.

Captured by Fairies: Folk Tales of Kidna... Looking at Ms. McLaughlin titles it seems as if she is channeling Andrew Lang in part. The collection is short but quite good. Several of the stories are of fairy brides. McLaughlin also keeps the favor of the telling, so the Irish tales sound different than the Scottish. Highly enjoyable by both adults and children. The only thing I would add would be a source listing. I'm happy there is an inheritor of Lang and another good collector like the Heidi over at Surlalune. Will be reading the others by this author.

The first thing that attracted me to this book was the cover – the model in the foreground looks so fantastic I barely even noticed that there was someone in the background. Which was maybe a good thing, because that guy looks nothing like how I imagined Connor would look.

The description reminded me a little of works like Jordan Castillo Price's Among the Living (cop/detective/whatever with special powers partnered with cop/detective/whatever who's an ordinary human being). It also made me think that the child kidnapping case might take the entire length of the book to solve. It doesn't, not exactly. Unfortunately, I think my own description probably perpetuates that expectation, so now I'm going to give a few more details while still, hopefully, avoiding big spoilers.

The way this book was plotted felt...weird...to me. It starts with SCI training, which would have been more interesting, I think, if more details had been given. Then Connor and Devlin are sent off to investigate the child killing/kidnapping case. The passage of time was a little hard for me to follow, and there's one bit where I could have sworn they had decided to call it a day and suddenly they're off interviewing people (page 57 on my Nook). The sexual tension between them mounts but is handled badly by both of them: Connor refuses to admit his interest in Devlin, and Devlin, frustrated, purposefully hurts and upsets Connor. Before they have a chance to work things out, the case is solved, although the man responsible escapes. That happens at approximately the book's halfway point.

Devlin and Connor are ordered to take a 3-week-long vacation to recuperate. Devlin visits his family on their farm, which is like a self-contained little town, and Connor ends up joining them after he gets into a fight with his very controlling father. Connor and Devlin's problems are resolved almost right away, and suddenly everything is nice and easy between them, aside from the whole “what will we do about this relationship once we have to go back to work?” aspect. They continue their relationship in secret after their vacation ends, and Devlin helps Connor practice standing up to his father. Just when Connor is about to put all that practice to the test, the child kidnapping case comes back to haunt them both.

The change in moods felt so abrupt that it was a little like the story was stitched together. The stuff in the first half, with the child kidnapping case, was tenser. I enjoyed the signs that Connor and Devlin were interested in each other and wondered how their relationship would begin, what with them being on a case (because at that time I didn't realize that the case would be over when the book was only half finished). I did not like how things devolved between them. While Connor's lack of willingness to admit his feelings frustrated me, I understood it. I hated how Devlin acted towards Connor, and I wasn't a fan of Devlin's decision to go off and sleep with another guy rather than try to fix things between himself and Connor.

The next part, at the farm, might as well have been rainbows and kittens by comparison (and there really were kittens, by the way). I was looking forward to the sexual tension between Connor and Devlin as Devlin tried to make up for the way he acted and regain Connor trust...except then they had sex right away (or would “participated in sexual acts” be more accurate?). It was enough to give me mental whiplash. While I thought the details about the farm and how things worked there were incredibly interesting and provided lots of opportunities to show Devlin and Connor growing closer, I  would have preferred  it if these parts had been the author's way of working up to them having sex.

The rest of the book could easily have been about nothing more than Connor working on his relationships with all the people in his life. Thank goodness I remembered that the guy who kidnapped and killed the kids hadn't been caught yet, or his reappearance in the story would have come as a much bigger shock. As it was, I sort of expected something to happen. I was not so pleased about the aftermath – there didn't seem to be any logical reason for Connor to push Devlin away. They needed to establish better boundaries, since I think Devlin's use of the glasses crossed the line a few times (there were special glasses that allowed him to tap into Connor's enhanced senses, seeing what he saw, which he sometimes used for personal reasons, just to see where Connor was). My impression of Connor was that he needed to learn to open up to people more, so it made no sense for him to say that it would be better for him to get away from Devlin for a while. It felt cliched and inappropriate for the story and characters.

Now for the world-building, which, during the first half of the book, seemed a little weak and composed mostly of random little details. People had “readers” (similar to smartphones?), the price of a cup of coffee was outrageous, cyborgs like Connor existed, etc. It seemed like gay marriages and being gay were widely accepted things, except at one point Devlin had a thought about a friend of Connor's casually outing him (page 50 on my Nook), which seemed like an odd thing to think if being gay was considered no big deal. I thought the world-building became much richer and better integrated into the story during the part at the farm. Actually, so many aspects of the part at the farm seemed better that I almost wished the bulk of the book could have taken place there.

Overall, Somatesthesia was okay, but a little disappointing. I can't help but think that the romance would have worked better if Connor and Devlin's profession had been different and allowed for more quieter character-focused moments.

 

(Original review, with read-alikes, posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)