At Cahuenga Pass, in a stagecoach inn on the road to Los Angeles, Mendoza meets her new cyborg colleagues in this third novel of the Company. In the vein of Grand Hotel, we get to know the lives and stories, both sad and funny, of these operatives from the twenty-fourth century. As bullets fly overhead, we learn that Mendoza is being haunted, in her dreams, by the man she loved and lost three centuries ago and whose ghost is unexpectedly reincarnated by the arrival of a very large, very suave, and very handsome British spy, Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax. We watch the immortals' reactions as they screen, for relaxation, D. W. Griffith's Intolerance; we root for Oscar, an anthropologist in the guise of a traveling salesman, as he tries repeatedly to sell the Criterion Patented Brassbound Pie Safe.
The front-flap summary of Mendoza in Hollywood promises that Mendoza runs into a man who seems to be identical to Nicholas, her doomed lover from [b:In the Garden of Iden|270490|In the Garden of Iden (The Company, #1)|Kage Baker|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173300942s/270490.jpg|227134]. However, this doesn't really happen until the last quarter of the book, at which point the action really takes off and almost seems like a different book. I feel like it suffers the same flaws that [b:Sky Coyote|270492|Sky Coyote (The Company, #2)|Kage Baker|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173300943s/270492.jpg|262224] did: there are tantalizing hints about The Company's secret truths, but they're not given much attention amid all of the slow, day-to-day events of the cyborgs who collect birds and plants and local stories. And just like Sky Coyote's questionable 20 page description of a play, Mendoza in Hollywood spends 20 pages explicitly describing DW Griffith's silent movie Intolerance.
I still had fun, mind you, and I'm still checking the clock to see if I can make it to the library tonight to pick up the next book in the series, but so far only the first book in the series has felt like a perfect book.
Reading updates
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Started reading
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10 March, 2010:
Finished reading
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10 March, 2010:
Reviewed