Christine Amsden

Earlier this week I finished watching all three seasons of Roswell, the TV series. Then I bought them so I could watch them again.

This is a great series. In terms of my list of favorite scifi/fantasy shows of all time, I am currently giving it second place, just under Babylon 5.

At its heart, Roswell is a love story that takes place between a bright and attractive girl named Liz Parker and an alien named Max Evans. In the first episode, Liz gets shot and would have died if Max had not risked his cover to save her. (He had been secretly in love with her for some time and could not bear to let her die.)

A secondary love interest springs up after a few episodes between Liz’s best friend, Maria, and Max’s best friend and fellow alien, Michael. For my part, I enjoyed this secondary romance at least as much, if not more, than the one between Liz and Max. Michael has had a hard life in the foster care system, raised by a drunk who doesn’t care about him. Maria has the unenviable task of showing him how to love and be loved.

The first season is a quest for answers — who are the aliens (Max, Michael, and Isobel) and why are they there? None of them have any idea at first. The pace is brisk (starting with the sixth episode…episodes 2-5 appealed to me more after I finished watching the show than they did the first time I saw them) and each new revelation brings with it new questions.

Most of their questions are answered at the end of season one and season two comes with a new quest (which I will not describe for the sake of spoiling the first season for those of you who have not seen it). The fifth episode of season two, “The End of the World,” creates terrific tension between Max and Liz that almost hurt to watch.

Season three is pretty different from the first two and I have a sense that the writers of the show weren’t entirely sure where to go. I admit that as much as I enjoyed the show, I noticed some missed potential. The answers to their first season quest opened up lots of potential for many seasons of action and danger that were never fully realized. Also, season three was cut short and the last few episodes have a rushed feel to them. Some of the subplots could have been dealt with at a more leisurely and complete pace.

Nevertheless, I did enjoy the season three episodes and am happy to assure you that the show does come to a conclusion, even if it leaves room for sequels.

I would recommend this show to anyone who enjoys science fiction or romance. It also has a certain appeal to high school audiences, as it takes place in high school. (Although some of the topics in the show are of an adult nature.)

P.S. This is one of the reasons I love Netflix — I can watch these older shows from start to finish with no commercials and no waits.

My first shipment of books came in the mail on Monday and they look nice. The cover art looks pretty much like the cover art on my web page right now, but the title banner is a little different.

It feels nice to actually hold my book in my hands. Right now, it doesn’t seem entirely real. I look at the book, a real book, and have to tell myself, “You wrote this.”

The next step in this novel journey is to send the book out for review, which is how I’m spending all my free time this week. With any luck, I’ll get a couple of nice ones to put on the back of the book before the first official print run. (The copies I have right now are proofs and advanced review copies.)

I decided to read the Roswell High series after I started to watch and fall in love with the TV series based on those books. (I’ll have more to say about the TV series later.) If you’ve watched the show, then I can tell you that while the book and the show start out almost exactly the same way, they soon take very, very different paths.

The show is better. But the books are good, if you’re willing to overlook a few glaring plausibility problems. Bear in mind that they are geared towards senior high school readers.

The premise is that the Roswell crash back in 1947 really happened and that six aliens escaped the crash and blended in with human society — one adult and five maturing embryos in pods. The pod children hatch in the 1980’s and look to be about 6 years old. Two are adopted into a loving home and one is shuffled around the foster care system. (The other two don’t come into the story in the first book.)

They don’t know anything about who they are or why they’re there, but they have special powers that they try to keep under wraps for fear of getting caught. They don’t tell anyone, not even their parents.

Then one day, a human girl named Liz is shot in the stomach and one of the aliens, present at the time, makes the life-changing decision to save her life. He had been secretly in love with her for years, so he could not let her die.

What follows is part love story, part adventure, and part mystery as the aliens and their new human friends uncover the truth about who they are and where they came from. There are ten books in all, each one following directly on the heels of the previous book. They are quick reads — I finished the series in less than a week.

I thought I’d take a break from Harry Potter posts to let you know I have been reading other things. :=)

One of the things I’ve been reading this summer is a series called The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher. It’s kind of a cross between CSI and Harry Potter. :=)

All right, all right, I’ve got a one track mind. I do enjoy fantasy, though, and this series is, so far, very entertaining. It stars a professional wizard for hire, Harry Dresden, whose biggest client is the Special Investigations Department at the Chicago PD. They try to solve all the weird cases, and Harry tries to help them whenever demons, wer-wolves, vampires, or other supernatural beings might be involved.

The books are action-packed page turners. It was easy to see why the Scifi channel chose to make this into a TV series. it has a lot of television potential. Of course, it’s also no surprise that the Scifi channel canceled the show after one season. They wouldn’t know a good show if it jumped up and bit them on the…er…nose. Too bad USA wasn’t the one to discover this series.

Anyway, the books have their problems. Jim Butcher has a tendency to over describe things and even to describe the same thing multiple times. Especially as you get into the sequels, there is some skimming potential as he redescribes his car, his office, his apartment, and Murphy, the detective in Special Investigations he works with. He also likes to pause, from time to time, in the middle of an exciting action sequence to recap us on the danger.

But if you can handle a couple of quirks in his writing choices, the stories are very good. If you can get the one season’s worth of shows on the Scfi channel, it’s worth watching, too.

If you have not read the seventh and final volume in the Harry Potter series, please do not read any further. I will reveal crucial plot points and the ending of this novel. You have been warned!

Well, I promised it over a week ago but here it is today: my thoughts on the last book in the series.

Basically, I loved it. My husband read the novel out loud to me and we finished by dinnertime Sunday. This action-packed final volume kept us turning pages late into the night.

The single best thing about the story — the humanizing of Dumbledore. Wow. I knew she was working on that in books 5 and 6 but she really drove it home in the last book, even though he was dead. I always felt that one of the series’ themes is that people are neither black nor white. We all have our strengths and our weaknesses, even our iconic heroes. Very well done!

I loved every action sequence, especially the last battle. I loved the emotional journey we took with Harry throughout the book as he was, once again, torn apart from the wizarding world….this time more completely than ever before. I never guessed that Voldemort would succeed in capturing the ministry but it was exactly what the book needed to up the stakes. Then, with our hero on the run, we could fully appreciate the wonder as he returned to Hogwarts — a fugitive, yes, but also the symbol of hope for all those who hated Voldemort.

I loved Harry’s journey from his aunt and uncle’s house. I was touched by Dudley’s change of heart and hope that he becomes an even better person later in life, though that was outside the scope of this story.

I cried when Hedwig died, and especially when Harry blew up the side car with Hedwig’s body inside.

The ministry falling got a gasp from me. It really set the tone of the book.

The escapade at the ministry was pure Harry Potter — from saving Mad Eye’s magical eye to saving a corridor full of supposed Mud Bloods. If we didn’t remember, he’s still our hero!

The camping sequence drove home what a difficult task this was all going to be. Harry lost his home and had to subsist off of what they could scrounge from the forest floor. Some people have claimed that this section was slow but I disagree. It was only slow by comparison to the action-packed chapter surrounding it. The stakes in the camping scenes were just as high as any of the others — but they were emotional rather than adrenaline-filled life and death. Having always been drawn to characters and character stories (especially in my own writing) I found myself getting into the boredom, the hunger, the desperation, and the loneliness. My heart even leaped when they ran into Ted Tonks and Dean Thomas — their first link to the bigger world in ages.

I flew threw Christmas, poor Lovegood’s predicament, and an escape from the Malfoys to the second death that really affected me — Dobby. The innocent are the ones who often suffer the most. Poor Dobby.

Then there’s escape from Gringott’s on the back of a dragon followed immediately by our last visit to Hogwarts. I continued to cheer as familiar face after familiar face came to fight alongside Harry. This wasn’t just his fight anymore — the entire wizarding world was ready to stand up and say “We’ve had enough!”

Then, of course, there is Harry’s march to his death. I have rarely read anything as powerful. Even though I believed, even then, that Rowling had a way out planned for Harry, the scene was no less powerful. Harry believed he was going to his death, and that’s what mattered.

After Harry’s escape from death, we had a few tense moments as Narcissa chose to help Harry, and then it was one long cheer! Neville — Pow! Molly — Splat! And then Harry takes off his cloak and the dance to Voldemort’s death begins.

The Epilogue is my biggest complaint about the book. I know Rowling has answered a lot of questions in follow-up interviews after the fact, but the book itself is still incomplete without a few additional details. The Epilogue could have been summed up with the words, “And they all lived happily ever after.” Well, I sort of suspected that was the case but it really trivializes the impact that the events in such an emotionally powerful book had on the character’s lives long term. In one interview, Rowling suggested that she was trying to be poetic, but I’m afraid that, however good the books are, they are not written by a poet or even a good wordsmith. The writing is just good enough that it doesn’t get in the way of the story, to be perfectly honest. Meanwhile, I wanted a real conclusion.

My other nitpick about the book is that many of the deaths had little impact on me. The one that I most wanted to feel was Fred’s. I mean, he was the comic relief, Ron’s brother, half of a set of twins that were as good as one character throughout. Yet his death, with earned barely more than a paragraph, never managed to hit that emotional chord.

Similarly, Lupin and Tonks should have made me feel worse but their death felt like an add-on. We never even saw it firsthand. In fact, in an interview, Rowling says that they were not slated to die in the outline. Well, they don’t feel dead to me now.

The last thing I want to talk about is Snape, and he is one of the reasons it took me so long to post this review. I needed some time tot think about him and now that I’m down to the end of this post I think I would like to dedicate a separate post to his character.