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It's a flawed story--see the other LT reviews--but this is one of my favorite books. You just cannot miss Kage Baker's love of Los Angeles and LA's history as she tells this rather disorderly tale; it almost makes me wish I knew the places the's describing. ( )

Still my fave character - I will continue.... ( )

I found this third novel in Kage Baker’s Company series less intriguing than the others. There is no real coherent plot or central conflict. Mendoza is just hanging around Los Angeles in the mid nineteenth century. About two thirds into the book, she meets the clone of her lover from the sixteenth century and immediately jumps into bed with him. His new incarnation is as a British spy working to secure California for the empire and Mendoza allows him to manipulate her into helping him - actually encourages him to manipulate her into helping him. As an emotionally unstable and impulsive teenager, this kind of behavior was believable in the first Company novel, “In the Garden of Iden,” but it just did not ring true for me for a three-hundred year old cyborg. You can safely skip this novel and continue on with “The Graveyard Game." ( )

I was afraid that, due to the title, this was going to talk overmuch about movies (books that get all meta- about film and media really annoy me - it's a personal thing). But the 'Hollywood' in this case is a good deal before the time of the silver screen - the botanist Mendoza has been assigned to this stretch of country in 1862, studying the native flora and saving anything that might be valuable to her bosses in the future. Still traumatized by the martyrdom of her human lover Nicholas, she is at first bemused and then, willy-nilly, head over heels when she meets a British spy who looks exactly like her lost love.

Full of quirky, unique characters and humor and well as poignancy.
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