Beth's Reviews > Borderline

I read Borderline for the "Dozen Roses" challenge on SFFBC. (it was one of the books I submitted for it, actually)

Up-and-coming film school student (and first-person narrator) Millie was doing well at UCLA and had even directed a film project, when a suicide attempt horribly injured her and put her into a mental hospital. While at the hospital, she's approached by a supervisor of the Arcadia Project, an intermediary between the human world and that of the Seelie court. Despite Millie's being enmeshed in investigating various disappearances and kidnappings as a probationary member of the Project, the film world won't leave her behind.

The best thing bar none about this book is our main character, Millie. Along with having to deal with physical disabilities, such as a pair of prosthetic partial legs, she has to deal with borderline personality disorder wedging itself between her and other people, and between her and herself. She frequently has to manage emotional and physical outbursts, not always successfully. And when she does act out, true contrition is much further out of reach than recriminating the person that she's wronged is.

At times Millie is hard to like, especially in the several scenes where she acts out. She is especially harsh on her partner, Teo, but just about everybody in Project Residence Four has a moment where Millie goes after their psychological soft spots with brutal abandon.

The fae aspect of the story is pretty lightly sketched in, and in many cases doesn't distinguish itself from other stories that are based on that mythology. We've got the Seelie and Unseelie courts, and magic that has largely to do with manipulation of the senses, and changelings, and fairy portals, and all that. What was more distinctive to me was the idea of Echoes: an artist on Earth having a kind of soul mate or Muse in the fae world who magically enhances their art. An aging Hollywood director and his Echo are the center of the mystery plot in this volume, and Millie's Project partner Teo has an obsession with finding his Echo that sometimes leads him astray. A nice detail is that the various (view spoiler)[metal pieces in Millie's body make her immune to much of the fae's magic, or even nullify it (hide spoiler)]--a passive ability (in game terms) that helps her out, but doesn't make her an overpowered heroine.

I've been living not-too-far from Los Angeles for a while, and there are quite a few familiar places in the book like Union Station and (more broadly) Santa Barbara. There are also small details that are all too familiar, like those big rectangular patches of beige paint where the city came through and painted over graffiti on the side of a business, or sitting in traffic on PCH when all you wanted was to see some nice scenery. I liked the hints about the filmmaker's life, and visits to film sets that we see now and then, also.

The whole thing came together for me with its great sense of humor. I mean, as always, humor is subjective, and a recommendation for you could well be a caveat for me, and vice versa. I can easily see some readers being put off when Millie interjects humor into situations where it's not that appropriate. It's quite possible that she keeps the more inappropriate quips to herself, though that wasn't something I was specifically keeping track of as I read.

Borderline's usually brisk pace fumbled here and there, notably in scenes where it was a little too obvious that a scene was there only to get us from point A to point B. The big battle at the end slogged a bit, too, though that could just be me not being a fan of physical violence as a default story climax. There were a few too many characters and not all of them were characterized early enough or deeply enough for me to care much when the bodies started falling. I never quite "got" (view spoiler)[Caryl or Teo (hide spoiler)]. I think I could see the intention with these characters, but they never got their hooks into me like Millie did.

Still, on the whole this was great! It was quick-moving, and emotional at points. At the beginning, I thought I wouldn't like Millie at all, or had a pitying outlook on her, but as I got to know and understand her, that distant attitude gradually melted away and by the end I was rooting for her (while also not forgetting that she did some unforgivable things). I also appreciated that the ending was equivocal in places, that there weren't a bunch of reversals of some of the events to happily-ever-after it up.

Three and a half stars, rounded up. I'm not a huge fan of UF, but I'll be reading the rest of these.