The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl (Bantam Spectra Book) (Paperback)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: genius loci, western door, cloud room, The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl, Tim Pratt, Santa Cruz (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Pratt (Little Gods), praised for his short fiction, stumbles in his first novel. Marzipan "Marzi" McCarty, a 20ish California art school dropout, writes quirky comics. Marzi's also the night manager–barista of Genius Loci, a Santa Cruz coffeehouse decorated by vanished muralist Garamond Ray to hold in elemental Evil. The wild adventures that Marzi concocts for her cowpunk character, Rangergirl, start coming true after her artsy friends become obsessed with freeing weird gods. When the Outlaw, a representative of everyone's worst fears, busts loose from its surreal corral, the Desert Lands, it's up to Marzi, the new artist-guardian, to save the whole shootin' match from disaster. Pratt's simplistic message, glimpsed sporadically behind clouds of neo-hippie jargon, self-consciously naughty language, outdoor sex and nasty violence, is pretentious and even a little naïve—that art can trap our fears and hold them at bay. Like too much marzipan, it all turns cloying mighty fast, pardners. (Dec.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Marzi works at Genius Loci, a coffee shop in Santa Cruz, California, whose claim to fame is the murals in it, painted by Garamond Ray, who disappeared after the 1989 earthquake. Marzi also writes a neo-western comic called The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl, in which the heroine battles otherworldly versions of the villains of westerns. When one of the shop's regulars shows up claiming to worship the god of the earthquake, and moments later a quake rocks the place, and Marzi sees an oddly dressed figure running off--well, then, things are clearly becoming strange. Life begins to imitate art too closely for comfort: a woman made of mud, part of a story in Marzi's comic, is wandering the streets trying to achieve her own mysterious goals, and the villain of the same piece--a primal force from the otherworld behind the locked door in the Desert Room of Genius Loci--turns out to want to destroy California. With Lindsay, a friend from art school, and Jonathan, who lives in Genius Loci's attic apartment while he is studying the murals for his thesis, Marzi travels beyond the possible into a grand and magical western, indeed. Regina Schroeder
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Spectra (November 29, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553383388
• ISBN-13: 978-0553383386
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,091,771 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars I really wanted to like this , December 4, 2005

By	Nathan Blumenfeld "mastadge" (Wilmington, DE United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

I really wanted to love this novel. I like Pratt's short fiction. I love the cover: the image, the title, and the tagline: "If primal evil wants California, it's going to have to go through her first. . . ." It looks like great fun, sort of H.P. Lovecraft by way of Aaron Allston's GALATEA IN 2-D, and has nice cover quote from another couple authors I like. But, while I didn't particularly dislike the book, I didn't find it all that interesting, either. It was rather dull and will, I suspect, be quickly forgotten. The characters were pleasant enough but not particularly captivating or memorable, and the story seemed too thin for its four hundred pages -- it probably would've made a better novella than full-length novel. The villain is disappointingly weak, and inconsistencies abound: in one scene, the villain's incidental touch hurts a character, while later he slaps that character with no ill effect. At one point several police officers are slaughtered, and then for the rest of the novel the police do . . . nothing. They just take it in hand. In one chapter a character interacts with another, and several chapters later seems to have no recollection of it. And too often our heroes get out of their trouble a little *too* easily and conveniently; there's rarely any sense of danger. This book is a reasonably well-written, reasonably amusing read, but it never achieves the energy or excitement that it promises. If you want to like it, you probably will. It's mildly enjoyable, but not particularly recommended.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars not a "must read" but definately worth reading, February 27, 2006

By	gcon (colorado) - See all my reviews

i wouldn't say "go out now and buy this book right now!!!", however, if you are looking for a good sci-fi/fantasy type of book, with a straight up plot that is pretty straight forward, this book is worth your time. the characters are interesting, not stereotypical, and are fleshed out enough so you know them but you are not overburdened with smothering details.

for me, the story moved a bit slow at first, and seemed thin and plodding in spots, but the book reads smoothly enough to where the short comings didn't kill the book completely.

i like the statement it makes (in my opinion, this is how i took it) about art and how artists see the world around them. i like how the author includes the santa cruz earthquake and the way he describes some of the scenes are just perfect.

the writing is good, not pretentious, and pretty smooth. the story is good, basic plot, pretty straight forward. worth it.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fine first novel: an urban fantasy with Old West elements, May 6, 2006

By	Richard R. Horton (Webster Groves, MO United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

About The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl I think I can say: "this is a very promising first novel, and well worth reading, but also quite clearly a first novel." This book is Urban Fantasy, despite not being set in Seattle or Minneapolis or Newford. That said, it has an original flavor: the fantastical elements have an Old West manifestation.

The protagonist is Marzi (short for Marzipan: hippie parents), night manager of a coffee shop in Santa Cruz called Genius Loci. Marzi is an artist, having dropped out of UC Santa Cruz after a nervous breakdown a couple years previously. She draws a fairly successful underground comic called The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl, about a woman who travels to a fantasy Old West and confronts weird villains. Her best friend is Lindsay, a talented bisexual artist still at UCSC. Lindsay keeps trying to set her up with men, but Marzi is skittish just now, after the breakdown. Then a new young man moves in above the coffee shop. Jonathan is studying Garamond Ray, a modestly famous artist who painted the walls of the coffee shop before disappearing during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Lindsay pounces immediately, and perhaps surprisingly has a bit of success pushing Marzi at him.

But at the same time the very strange artist Beej seems to go completely nuts, and starts talking about the Earthquake god. And another couple of artists, Dennis and his ex-girlfriend Jane, act oddly too. In particular Jane seems suddenly to be made of mud, and she seems to want to kill Marzi. All this seems perhaps connected with a locked storeroom, entering which precipitated Marzi's breakdown a couple years previously. That storeroom has an unknown Garamond Ray mural ... which means Jonathan is very interested.

So: Jonathan wants to get into the storeroom. Marzi is afraid, and especially afraid to let anyone else in. Dennis and Jane and Beej are starting to act very strange indeed ... Of course, Marzi will go in, and find a door -- a door that leads inevitably to a version of the Old West that is all too much like her comic. In particular, it holds a chaotic "god" called the Outlaw, who desperately wants to escape back to the real world, and do what he does best: destroy. So when Jonathan lets his curiosity get the best of him (with a little help ...) things go pear-shaped.

And it's up to Marzi to confront her fears, and to learn how to confront the Outlaw in the appropriate manner. Which of course she does, though not without some personal and general cost.

My main problem here was an ending that seemed abrupt and just a bit pat. Yet at the same time several innocent people are killed -- but somehow we are spared emotional involvement with any of the killings -- the characters who die are essentially redshirts, and I felt this a distinct failing. I also felt that the characterization of the villains -- well, Dennis in particular -- was rather lazy. Dennis is a cliche, and not a very interesting cliche.

But as ever when I cite what's wrong with a book I feel I'm overstating things. (Well, not "as ever", but in this case anyway.) The novel is a very engaging read. The good guys, Marzi and Lindsay in particular, are very well portrayed. It's well-written, and the magical elements are well-imagined. It's a good book -- a good first novel, and certainly promising good things to come.