Subject: FINDER by Emma Bull

From: [email-masked] (Christina Schulman)
Date: Tue, 05 Apr 1994 22:59:43 GMT

_Finder_, Emma Bull's latest novel, is set in the shared world of
the Borderlands, a city where Faerie and the "real" World overlap with
decidedly sordid but entertaining results.  Like Steven Gould's _Jumper_
and Crawford Killian's _Lifter_ (see a trend here?), _Finder_ is about
a young man with a nifty but inexplicable power.  Orient, a human
runaway, finds missing things.

   When a local drug dealer is murdered, the police hire Orient to help
them track down the murderer, who is presumably also the source of a new
drug that transforms humans into twisted parodies of Elves.  Apparently
the police usually don't care about recreational drug use, but the
humans who take this new drug invariably sicken and die. With the
help of his Elven partner Tick-Tick and the tough-but-predictably-
sensitive cop Sunny Rico, Orient wanders around the seedier bits of
Bordertown, searching for the drug manufacturers while trying to avoid
being blown to pieces.

    _Finder_ is really just a whodunnit with fantasy trappings, but
Orient's finding ability is quite an entertaining plot device.  The
narration is clever, the dialogue is witty, and even minor characters
have a sense of depth and history.  (Of course, this is a shared world,
and I haven't read any of the previous Borderlands stories, so many of
these minor characters have probably been extensively developed
elsewhere.)  I found Sunny Rico to be rather predictable and unoriginal,
but Tick-Tick is one of the most charming fictional characters I've run
across in a long time.  The first half of this book is fast and amusing.

    There's a back-cover blurb from Pamela Dean that warns you that this
book "will sneak up on you and break your heart."  She ain't kidding.
The second half of _Finder_ is still clever, but I give it 3 Kivrins
on a 4 Kivrin scale for depressing endings.  The gloom isn't gratuitous,
and it isn't there to build character through angst, but you won't leave
this book with a warm fuzzy feeling.

	Read it anyway, especially if you liked Emma Bull's previous novels.
It's more coherent than _War for the Oaks_, and less grim than _Bone
Dance_.  There's a luscious breakfast recipe.  (Do you have to be an
accomplished cook to join the PJF?)  It even has a lovely cover.

            "Of course," she went on, with a not-exactly-focussed-on
        -anything smile, "a journey of a thousand steps begins with
        a single mile, unless they're really small steps."

%A   Bull, Emma
%T   Finder
%I   Tor
%C   New York
%D   February 1994
%G   ISBN 0-312-85418-8
%P   317 pp.
%S   A novel of the Borderlands
%O   hardback, US $21.95

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Christina Schulman                        [email-masked]
Pittsburgh NMR Institute                 [email-masked]