{"id":320,"date":"2007-09-17T06:23:24","date_gmt":"2007-09-17T06:23:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/?p=320"},"modified":"2012-02-27T14:22:40","modified_gmt":"2012-02-27T14:22:40","slug":"in-the-company-of-ogres","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/?p=320","title":{"rendered":"In the Company of Ogres"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><em>In the Company of Ogres <\/em>by A. Lee Martinez<\/h3>\n<p>Eight of us of us gathered at the North Village  library for this meeting. Our topic was <em>In  the Company of Ogres<\/em>,  the second novel by new Texas writer A. Lee Martinez.  The story is a  humorous military fantasy about a problem group of supernatural soldiers   (amazons, trolls, ogres, etc.) commanded by a former bookkeeper named  Ned, who  keeps dying and getting resurrected. None of us had read any  of Martinez\u2019s  prior work. Seven of us started and finished the book.  Our eighth member said  it looked like a \u201csilly book\u201d so she did not  even try to read it.<\/p>\n<p>We liked many things about this book. Several  of us  commented that it was fun and stupid. The blind oracle who sees and  hears  the future was a clever idea. One<!--more--> person found the names of the  characters to  be particularly amusing. We thought the eventual  explanation for Ned\u2019s  never-ending resurrections was clever and  original. Martinez writes female  characters and their interactions  well. We appreciated the scene where two  women get in a big fight and  then wash dishes together afterward. The amazon  getting romantic advice  and makeup tips from other women was priceless.<\/p>\n<p>There were some problems. A couple of us found  the prose  was rough in places and needed better editing. One person got tired  of  Ned dying so much.<\/p>\n<p>Overall we enjoyed this book. Several of us  compared it  favorably to early works of Terry Pratchett, Christopher Moore, and   John Moore. We think A. Lee Martinez is an entertaining writer with a  lot of  talent, and many of us plan to read more of his books in the  future.<\/p>\n<p>After the meeting, a few of us had a nice  dinner at Houston\u2019s.<\/p>\n<p><em>&#8212; A. T. Campbell, III<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the Company of Ogres by A. Lee Martinez Eight of us of us gathered at the North Village library for this meeting. Our topic was In the Company of Ogres, the second novel by new Texas writer A. Lee Martinez. The story is a humorous military fantasy about a problem group of supernatural soldiers [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=320"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":582,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320\/revisions\/582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}