"Perfect Circle" by Sean Stewart (2004). I love everything this guy has written. This is the story of William "Dead" Kennedy, a down-on-his-luck guy living in Texas. He is 32 and just got fired from his umpteenth job working as a store clerk. He has been divorced for 12 years but is still in love with his ex-wife, who remarried shortly after the divorce. He has a 12 year old daughter with his ex, and he is alternate weekend dad. William is part of a large extended family of lower middle class blue collar working stiffs. Every year they get together and have a picnic. Among the members of his extended family, besides being known as a nice loser, William is also known as the guy who sees dead people. Yep, like the movie "The Sixth Sense". He is sort of like a grown up Haley Joel Osment from the South, with the part of Bruce Willis being played by William's dead preacher uncle and his dead cousin who he used to have a crush on, who was shot to death by her boyfriend when she was a teenager.

The plot in "The Perfect Circle" revolves around William's very spotty relationship with his daughter, something I can relate to a fair amount, and on what follows when one of his cousins calls asks him to help get rid of the ghost of girl that has been haunting him. It's a pretty damned good book, like I've come to expect from Stewart. It is narrated first person by William, and is very insightful. William is very much less than perfect, but he is also easy to learn to care for.

My only quibble with the book comes when William has a sort of nervous breakdown. William's life is seriously falling apart even at the start of the book, but at a later point things truly start to disintergrate. The problem is that William's inner voice never changes to reflect the emotional trauma he is experiencing. Yes, he is a sort of no-nonsense type person, but when a person is having a breakdown of the sort William has, there ought to be more of change in his thinking than the author shows. The extent of the breakdown came as a surprise to me because of the consistency of that voice, and as a result I didn't quite buy into it.

It is otherwise a really good book. One of those pick up and read and devour in one fell swoop type of books. I do not understand why this wasn't available at the local Barnes and Noble or Borders.

"Orphans of Chaos" (2005) marks the beginning of the third series by John C. Wright, following on his "Golden Age" trilogy, and his "Everness" duology (is that a word?). Like both of those series, this is a dense work that can be a complicated to follow. Wright is pretty amazing for a relatively new author though, and this is a pretty damned good book. It follows the adventures of five teenaged? orphans who are being raised in an exclusive school in the English countryside. They are receiving an excellent education and live in a fairly comfortable setting, but somehow these orphans understand that they are as much prisoners as they are students. We rapidly come to learn that each of them has special and unique powers that are kept under control with medication, and that portions of their memories are periodically wiped clean. Their teachers and keepers are masked as ordinary people, but have special powers themselves and are members of factions with competing interests.

I found myself liking these orphans and sympathizing with their desire to escape from the school, but there is enough moral ambiguity in the situation to make certain of their caretakers seem sympathetic at times. The head school master for example, might have been made into a crotchety old scary man by another author, but here has a certain heroic quality about him that mixes with the sense of fear that the orphans associate with him.

The first person from whom the book is viewed is female, and when a male author writes from the perspective of a female, or a female writes from the perspective of a male, it influences my perception of that character at times. So for example, when I learned that Robin Hobb was a female about half way through her "Assassin's Apprentice" series, it changed the way I view some of her characters.

I wonder then reading a passage like the one that follows, does it ring true for a woman if they know that a man wrote it? Does it ring true at all?

I remember the day Quartinus, who turned into Colin Iblis mac Fir-Bolg, proved he could master me. There was some quarrel over who was to pluck apples from the tree, and I threw one at his head hard enough to raise a bruise. He grinned, as he did when he was angry, and chased me down. You see, I laughed because the last time we had raced, I had beaten him. Now he tackled me, rolled me onto the ground, and took my hair in one hand to yank my head back -- something he would never have done to a boy. Still, I grinned, because the last time we fought, I had toppled him downhill.

And so I struck and I wrestled and I pushed and I kicked, but my blows seemed, by some magic, to have been robbed of their force. Just one year before, he had been a child, and I could bully him. Where had my strength gone?

He pinned my wrists to the ground, and knelt on my legs to prevent me from kicking. Suddenly, the game turned into something serious, mysterious, and somehow horrible. I writhed and struggled in his grasp, and I somehow knew, knew beyond doubt, that I would never be stronger than a man again. Not ever.

Colin smiled and ordered me to apologize, and he bent his head forward to stare into my eyes. I wonder if he was trying to awe me with his frowning gaze, to hypnotize me with his luminous blue eyes.

If so, he succeeded beyond his dreams. This boy, whom I had never really liked, now seemed inexpressibly powerful to me: manly, potent, confident. I will not tell you all my wild thoughts at that moment. But I wanted him to kiss me. Worse yet, I wanted not to want it, and to have him steal a kiss from me nonetheless.

I did not apologize, but snapped defiantly at him, "Do your worst!" And I tossed my head and yanked at my wrists in his grip. My fists seemed so little compared to his, and his grip seemed as strong as manacles. I felt entirely powerless, but the sensation seemed oddly intoxicating, rather than dreadful.

He did not do his worst. Instead, baffled, he stood up suddenly, releasing me and seemed suddenly a boy again, a child I could defeat.

I remember we raced back towards the house, apples in our hands. We had just enough that we could throw one or two at each other, trying to bruise shins and legs.

And I won that race, that time, but he grinned and tried to make me believe he had allowed me to win.

Strangely enough, I knew he thought he was lying. And he I knew he had not been

A few things to add. First, this is not the prelude to some further romantic interlude with Colin. There are three other spots in the book that have sexual overtones, none of them involve Colin, and none of them go any further than this one. There is also something in the book that does offer a partial explanation for the main character's submissive behavior and makes it something which might not be under this character's control. Finally, the main character has the potential to be the most powerful in the series, and the term "female" may not be completely applicable to her.