Enormous Volumes of Fantasy

I have somehow missed Robin Hobb till now.  I'd never heard of her till pretty recently, and then suddenly she's everywhere.  So I got Assassin's Apprentice from the library.  Luckily, it's on the Kindle, so I couldn't tell how long it was, because I'm pretty sure it was enormously long.  It might have intimidated me in hardback, but I read it.  And it was awesome.

I'm always surprised by how many of these are out there--enormous fantasy novels.  I suppose you might call them epic, but it doesn't span generations, characters, high passion.  It's the story of one boy who finds himself a member of the royal household.  As the bastard son of the heir to the kingdom, he's hated, yet bound to the family.  The king puts him in training as a spy and assassin.

A bunch of stuff happens--enemies attacking the coast, the king's youngest son jockeying for power--but most of the book is about Fitz growing up, learning about royal life, and trying to do his part to hold the kingdom together.  He makes the occasional friend, but mostly he's a solitary kid with a gift for communicating with animals.

Does this sound like not much?  Most of my favorite books do.  I thought this book would be boring when I started it, but that was out the window pretty quickly.  Mostly, though, it's the story of a boy growing up kind of lonely and becoming extremely competent at things like intrigue and poisons.  Did I ever mention how much I love books about people just being competent at things?

Can't wait to read the next one.  And there are heaps more Robin Hobb books out there!  Lord, I'm never going to finish reading.  Well, back to it, I guess.

Pants Afire

I had no idea what to expect from Liar, by Justine Larbalestier.  Actually, that's not exactly true.  I had expectations, but they were unfounded, because for some reason I thought the author of this book was Laurie Halse Anderson.

I'd read one book each from Anderson and Larbalestier.  Anderson writes about high school students with complicated, challenging emotional struggles; I read Wintergirls, about anorexia.  Larbalestier wrote the Magic Lessons series that I recently started reading.  Based on the cover blurb about a high school student whose life is full of lies, and my vague memories of reading about Anderson's Speak, I rolled this book into Anderson's work.

It's not.  And I tell this whole convoluted story right off the bat because I don't want to spoil the book, so I'm going to tell you very little of what happens.  But I will say that, as unreliable narrators go, Micah is a doozie.  She's smart, winning, and tortured.  She's a teenaged New Yorker who admits to being a liar, and is something of an exile in high school.  When a classmate is found dead, her lies begin to peel away.

Now, the thing about this book is that you don't know what kind of book you're reading.  There are hints, mysteries, layers, and each one that's revealed is complicated by the question of whether it's true.  Are the hints misleading you, or are there outright lies?  And every layer that's revealed introduces a new set of questions, right up to the end. 

So at the beginning, I thought I was reading an Anderson book, about teens with emotional problems.  But as things built up, I realized I was reading a Larbalestier book, about a girl with much bigger problems than that. 

I hate to be cryptic, but untangling Micah's lies is the main point of reading the book.  She's an amazing character--blunt, brutal, needy, angry, practical, strange, envious.  Her relationships with her parents and her classmates, her perceptions of the world she lives in--she's an alienated teenager, and more.  I wouldn't like her in person, but she might be one of the best protagonists I've read about in a long time.

Fascinating, I think, is the word for this book.  And for Micah.  She's a page-turner.

Lesson Learned

When I resolve to review every book I read, I also need to resolve to post occasionally when I haven't finished anything. 

I just finished Liar, though, and I'm about to finish Assassin's Apprentice, so look for some posts very soon!

Memento

Amnesia: long the staple of daytime soap operas and wacky sitcom hijinks.  And, apparently, current novels.  To-read example: What Alice Forgot, about a woman who wakes up with no memory of her last ten years and finds that her suburban mom life looks lonely and miserable when you jump right into it.  That's up next.

But from the just-read pile, we have the psychological thriller Before I Go To Sleep, by S.J. Watson.  This book is a great example of why I like to write reviews while I'm in the middle of a book--I felt a lot more passionately about it while I was reading it.  It's also a good example of why I shouldn't do that--my opinion of the end of the book was very different from how I felt about the middle.

Christine wakes up confused in a bed she doesn't know, next to a man she doesn't recognize.  Every morning.  She doesn't recognize the face in the mirror, either.  Christine has amnesia--she can retain memories for a day, but when she falls asleep every night, it all slips away.  She's been this way for years; she was in a hospital for a long time, but now her husband, Ben, cares for her at home.

As the day goes on, she learns more; she's seeing a therapist, keeping a journal that Ben doesn't know about.  She finds clues about her life, makes guesses, has doubts.  Watson does an excellent job with the unreliable narrator.  Christine catches her husband in lies, some larger and some smaller.  But are they lies of convenience, or something more sinister?  Why is she keeping her journal from him?  And her memory isn't perfect--things slip.  Her theories and reactions range from reasonable to inappropriate, and she's not always sure what's going on.  And every day, she has to learn all this again by reading her journal.

The tension between the facts and Christine's emotions, the mysteries and the lies, all of this is very well executed, and I was never sure who to trust or how clearly Christine was thinking. I can't say that I didn't guess the ending, but that's mostly because, at one point or another, every possible ending occurred to me.

Now, I'm not going to spoil anything, but I'll admit that the ending really didn't live up to the rest of the book for me.  The resolution to the story was a little Hollywood, a little pat, but it was also pretty clunky in its execution.  The same events could have been written in a less melodramatic way--less of a Dramatic Confrontation, fewer characters making illogical choices, less conveniently wrapped up in a tidy little package, and heaven help us, building up more gradually.  The last 25 pages or so of the book were a fast-moving "and then this happened and then that happened and then there was a big confrontation and then it was all over the end" chunk of brick.

It's a shame, because the psychological tension, the confusion, and the doubts that I had in the narrator made for a really enthralling read up until that point.  I still suggest reading it--as I said, the ending wasn't unsatisfying--but my positive review does come with a caveat.  Enter at your own risk.

Laundering

Al Capone Does My Shirts, by Gennifer Choldenko, has been on my radar for a very long time.  Mrs. N at Between These Pages reviewed it and liked it. Though I had heard the title before, that was when I realized that it was about autism, specifically a boy living with his autistic sister in the '30s on--you guessed it--Alcatraz.

Moose is a great kid, likeable, good with his sister, but no more patient than he should be.  All the characters are exactly as flawed as they should be.  Natalie changes over time, but she is never magically cured.  Moose's mother is a fierce advocate for her daughter, but her strength is brittle bravado.  His father sees things clearly, but tries not to push anything out of the balance.

This is definitely a kids' book, but it was thoughtful and complex enough to keep me really interested.  There was just enough tension from the troublemaking neighbor, just enough anxiety about what was going to happen, and just enough historical flavor from the cons on the Rock.  I don't have a million things to say about this book, but I really enjoyed it, and I really can't wait to read the sequel, Al Capone Shines My Shoes.

Un-Comical

Craig Thompson's Habibi is an excellent example of why the name "comic books" is kind of useless as a descriptor.  There's pretty much no level on which the word "comic" applies here.  I suppose that's why we have the term graphic novel, though sometimes that seems inadequate, too.

This was one of those books that is hard to give stars to, or even to say whether I enjoyed it.  I can list off its qualities, though--the art is incredible, simple and expressive.  The long passages about Islamic numerology are beautifully rendered but somewhat confusing.  It shouldn't have surprised me that this was a fairly explicit sexual coming of age story (given that the author's previous book was Blankets), but the sexuality, the explicitness, and the complexity of some of the relationships was actually pretty shocking.

The time period and the historical context are a little confusing--the desert, sultan's palace, and city all feel like timeless places, so the occasional glimpse of a motorcycle or pickup truck are jarring.  It spans many years, too--Zam is three at the beginning of the story and about 19 at the end.  Dodola is a little girl when she's sold in marriage, and not yet a teenager when her husband is killed and she's sold into slavery.  She takes Zam under her wing and becomes his mother, his older sister, and his protector. 

They are each other's only family and whole world, and as they grown up in close quarters and all alone, sex takes on a strange aspect of their relationship.  So many harsh elements of sexuality are touched on here--rape, concubinage, prostitution, castration--and those studies are probably what I find most successful about the book. 

Considering the heavy influence of Islamic mysticism in the story, I was a little disappointed that there wasn't more explicit discussion of sex in Islam.  All of those elements were symbols, metaphors, and analogies, which I'm not usually very good at.  I think I could have used a study guide for those parts; I'm not even sure what the stories meant to the characters, except to the extent that storytelling itself was an escape, a power, and a connection between the characters.

This was a beautiful book in a lot of ways.  It was also shocking, harsh, confusing, and challenging.  A real work of art, I think.

Super-Sequel

Again with a non-disappointing second book!  The Thirteenth Child was the first in Patricia C. Wrede's new Frontier Magic trilogy, which takes place in the 19th century as the United States of Columbia expands past the Great Barrier River and into the frontier.  The river and the spells that guard it protect the eastern united States from the wildlife—both natural and magical—that populate the west, but pioneers are finding ways to survive in such a dangerous land.

Across the Great Barrier follows the same heroine from the first book, Eff Rothmer, as she begins to find her place in the world.  The first book followed her growing up in a western college town, learning that being the thirteenth child didn't mean she was cursed, and figuring out how to listen to herself in a world where she's overshadowed by her large family and accomplished twin brother.  In this book, we get a new set of challenges as Eff learns more about her own brand of magic and gets more opportunities to spend time on the frontier.

A lot of the charm of these books is in their portrayal of this alternate frontier.  Something I noticed this time, though, is that the success of world building here isn't just centered around the magical alternate reality that the author created.  Rather, the historical sense of expansion, the newness, eagerness, and change that infect everyone around Eff are really the most fun part of the book.  The tightly woven alternate reality is a bonus on top of this.

These are not books in which major things happen.  Minor incidents are related not only because they are important in the greater story, but because they build a picture of Eff's life.  The realism of this approach and the opportunity to follow Eff through her days—whether hunting magical animals beyond the Great Barrier or sharpening her skills on basic housekeeping spells—are really what made me love this book. 

And I do love it.  It reads very much like an extension of the first one, almost seamlessly.  But it's got its own arc, its own flavor.  Eff isn't afraid anymore—the first book was about her fear, but this book is about her discovery of herself, and learning.  Watching Eff—and the people around her—change through time is another thing that Wrede does a lot better than other authors.  I really can't wait to read more.

Also, I'd really like to see an ice dragon someday. 

From a distance, of course. 

The Kindle Problem

I can't imagine there are many people out there who aren't finding that their e-reader is increasing the amount they spend on books.  A lot of people defray the cost by choosing some of their books from the many free options available.  I just can't do that--my to-read list is already more than 500 books long (that's the A-list, mind you; I also have a B-list of over 400 books).  I'm trying NOT to find more books to read.

So I've had a two-pronged approach of a) mining the library's ebooks for all they're worth, and b) sticking with about half paper books.  So I'm still using the library extensively, which is pretty great.  Sure, my book buying has increased, but I actually feel pretty good about the idea of spending some of my disposable income sending money at some of the authors I like, especially the ones who aren't rich and famous yet.


But then I run up against a conundrum like Tomorrow Girls. I've heard great things, and it's a kids' series, so the books are a little cheaper.  I figured what the heck and bought the first one, Behind the Gates.  It turned out to be a lot of fun--in a future America (points!) where resources are scarce and the nation is at war, Louisa's parents are lucky to have enough money to send her and her best friend Maddie to boarding school (points!), where they'll be safe. 

Louisa's having a great time learning outdoor skills, making friends, and impressing her teachers.  But the school doesn't quite make sense--if there's no reception, why were their cellphones taken away?  Why do they need to learn survival skills?  There are plenty of interesting secrets to uncover.

I really enjoyed this--a fun, quick middle grade read that moved quickly and kept me guessing without being confusing.  For a middle grade book, it was really impressively accessible as an adult.  I want to read the next one--in fact, there are already four of them, and I'm not sure how many there will be total.

And herein lies my problem.  I bought the first book for $8.  While I really love this book, I'm not sure if I want to run out and spend almost $24 on the next three.  But--BIZARRELY--the BPL doesn't have any copies of these.  I might be able to find them through the Minuteman network, but even they only have a few copies and it's not clear if they have the second one. 

I guess $24 ($32 total) isn't that much in the greater scheme of things.  I've got some gift certificates to spend and things.  Still, though, I have a terrible time with things like this.  The Kindle puts this conundrum--is this worth my money?--in front of me significantly more often than the library ever did.  Surprise!

The Gods Must Be Crazy

Remember how I was talking about sequels, and second book syndrome?  Baby, I've found the cure.  The Broken Kingdoms is an awesome book that just got better and better as I went along, until, two chapters from the end, I bought the third book because I didn't want to wait five more minutes to read more.  N.K. Jemisin is a great author, and I can't wait to see what she does next.

Not perfect, but I can't even generate a whole paragraph on that subject.  Basically, I wasn't sure where the book was going for the first 60 pages or so.  I enjoyed meeting the characters and the worldbuilding, but I couldn't figure out which details were going to be relevant to the bigger story, or which direction it was going to go in.

But when it started rolling, nothing held it back.  Oree is a blind artist who lives in the city of Shadow, under the World Tree and the hovering palace-city of Sky, where the powerful Arameri live.  This is a city where godlings live beside mortals and magic is mostly illegal and not uncommon.  Oree finds a silent vagrant in her trashbin and takes him into her home, and the story begins.  Godlings are being murdered, the balance of power in the world is shifting, and Oree finds herself at the center of the struggle. 

It's so much harder to enumerate what you like about a book than what goes wrong.  The naturalism of complicated emotions, bad luck, and bad decisions is handled effortlessly, which is often something I find awkward in books.  The worldbuilding is elegant and seamless, which is astounding with a mythology like this--the implications of the interactions of gods, mortals, and godlings are consistent and believable, but not invasive.

I wish I was a better reviewer, because I loved this book and I think you should read it.  I suppose that's the best I can do.  I'm so excited for the next one!

Life Is a Dryer Full of Socks

This'll be quick, because the book was quick.  The Everafter, by Amy Huntley,  is not a book I'd call light, fun, or fluffy, but that's mostly because it's about death.  And it's not silly, or at all cheesy.


But it's a puff piece on death. This book isn't about mining any of the darkness.  The main character died at 17, but it's not even about being cut down so young, the way Before I Fall was.  It's kind of a meditation on loss, I guess?  Or really, on lost opportunities.  But in a sweet way, not a painful one. 

Maddy finds herself formless and alone, floating in a void with almost no memories.  She shares the void with random objects--a shoe, a rubber band, a set of keys, a cell phone.  These things are everything she's ever lost, and when she touches something, she is taken back to the moment when it was lost.  As she lives more moments in her life, she regains more and more memories, and begins to circle in on the question of how she died.

The question of who killed her is treated nicely--it's not the point of the book, but curiosity keeps you interested in the story.  The real point of the book, though, is about the things that slip away.  It seems kind of odd to have a book for teens that is about memory and wistful regret, but it's balanced with how self-doubt in one moment becomes regret in another.  Maddy can change her past, but the memories that she overwrites slip away, and she can never really compare now with then.

I've read a lot of young adult books for many years, but lately I've started to notice that some things have started to get on my nerves--earth-shattering teen romances, entire books whose tension revolves around people not saying what they think.  But this book puts a lot of "stereotypically" teen moments--tongue-tied by your crush, panicking over lost homework--in just the right perspective, simultaneously the biggest problem ever and just a mote of dust drifting away.

This is a short book, dreamy, easy to read.  I don't know if I'll be thinking about it next week, but it was well worth the few hours I spent with it.

The Society Strikes Back

Ah, second book syndrome. Has any trilogy escaped it? You start with a standalone story of fighting for survival against all odds. At the end, success--with a strong hint that there are bigger battles to be fought.

Then we get the sophomore slump, where little battles are fought and the Really Big Battle is set up for us.  Things don't really let loose till the final book, where there are showdowns and world changes and a neat little wrap up.


I'm really looking forward to that third book in Ally Condie's Matched series.  The second, Crossed, was good, kept me reading, no problems, but the Society wasn't really in it at all, except as whispers in the background.  And come on, this is all about Man--well, Teenaged Girl--vs. Society.

The story, in general, is that Cassia sets out to find Ky, who's been basically deported to the Outer Provinces.  We also get alternating chapters from Ky's point of view, where the role of the "colonists" in the Outer Provinces is one giant step below cannon fodder.  Ky and Cassia both end up on the run through nature (there are canyons--I'm thinking American Southwest), looking for each other, afraid of the Society, trying to learn more about the folks who live outside it--the Rising, the Farmers.

We learn a bit more about Ky's history.  We learn a LOT about how True Love makes you pine for your beloved, and how being with them makes everything feel right, and how remembering hard things makes you feel, and hoping makes you feel, and wondering makes you feel, and thinking makes you feel.  There's a lot of feeling, is what I'm saying.

What there's very little of is any real driver.  The characters keep running because they're so afraid of being caught, but as far as I can tell pretty much nobody is looking for them.  There are occasional dead bodies to imply that the ante is being upped, but I don't quite get where they came from.  Ky's fears, while probably normal, seem kind of lame to me.  Cassia's attempts to stop thinking like a Citizen are worth something, but there just aren't that many of them.

What the book did is set a lot of expectations for the next one.  The whole book was about getting elements into place--the movements and characters and expectations.  The stage is now set for the third book to be action packed, either with explosions and running or with delicate political maneuvering.  I'll take either one, because I just spent a lot more time than I needed to on the setup.

I also have some predictions about the Enemy that I won't make explicitly, but that I want credit for calling as early as the first book, thank you.

Basically, while I don't regret reading it, most of what I have to say about this book is that there's no there there.  It's an opening act.  I'm waiting for the headliner.

Snazzy

Like the new design?  I hadn't realized Blogger had so many new layouts and features.  I feel very modern and jazz hands.


I accidentally started reading Neal Stephenson's Reamde (which I think is pronounced Read Me, but I always read as Reamed, but isn't he clever, it could also be read as Remade).  I got it and set it aside for when I had time, but I glanced at the first few pages.  Which was a really interesting account of a guy at his family reunion in Iowa, only he's sort of--well, not the black sheep, but he has a Wikipedia entry and people are glancing at him sideways.  And so I read a little more to find out what was going on....

And now I'm into it.  And it's really just so engaging as a story of how to set up a good MMORPG, with some other pretty interesting anecdotes thrown in.  It's not like it's driving along like a rollercoaster, but it's a string of really engaging scenes and anecdotes and I'm going to read the whole thing.

Except that I have no clear idea what it's about yet.  The blurb implies that there will be chasing and thriller elements, but I have no clear ideas yet.  I'm 5% of the way in, but this is a Neal Stephenson book, so that's about 50 pages out of presumably a thousand or so.

Thank heaven it's really, really good.  And that I have Tomorrow Girls--which is dystopian AND girls boarding school all in one--to balance it out.

Growing Up '80s

I was drawn to Silver Sparrow, by Tayari Jones, by the first line: "My father, James Witherspoon, is a bigamist."  Well, now, there's something you don't see every day--I was hooked.

It goes on to describe his meeting with the narrator's mother, ten years into his first marriage.  Good choice; at this point, how this bigamy came to pass is what's keeping me interested.  How do Gwen and James meet, fall in love, and end up married?  By the time this background story is told, the narrator's voice has you, and you're on board for the rest.

Dana Yarboro (she doesn't have his name) knows she's the secret daughter.  She sees her father once a week, shares her  mother's obsession with his other family, and has to give up opportunities again and again to protect his secret.  Her uncle Raleigh is the only person in her father's life who knows his secret, and he's at least half in love with Gwen himself.  Dana's loneliness bearing this long secret, her relationship with her mother, who walks the line between doing her best and obsessed, and her attempts to figure out where she fits in the world when she's not even sure where she fits in her family comprise the structure of the story, although a lot of it is just about growing up Black in lower-middle class Atlanta in the early '80s. 

(I have to say here, I loved the early '80s stuff.  It's a period that you don't see in fiction much without a lot of ironic layers and distant social observation.  If only as the story of a Black teenager in Atlanta, this was really good.  It felt very personal and familiar--there was no feeling of distance from the time, either intentionally or unintentionally by the author.)

But then--oh, then--halfway through the book, the point of view shifts, and we learn of another mother's courtship with James Witherspoon, and another daughter's life with her mother, her father, her friends and neighbors, her place in the world.  Chaurisse is the legitimate daughter, the acknowledged on, the one whose perfect life Dana is protecting.  It's not all that perfect--her parents were married very young due to a pregnancy that ended with stillbirth.  Chaurisse is not beautiful or brilliant, doesn't have close friends, but has a happy, solid family life.  She doesn't know or even suspect her father's secret.

I won't spoil the events in the book, but for the most part, the events aren't what matters.  This book is all about relationships, and about trying to figure out what to do with the cards you're dealt, how to navigate a world you can't control, and how to make the best of a tough situation.  In that respect--in portraying these two young women and their strengths and vulnerabilities, and above all confusion--Silver Sparrow really shines.

In fact, I think the book's biggest flaw is that it is a bit too casual with the plot.  The ending is rushed, and a lot of emotional fallout is left of the page, which is kind of unsatisfying.  Because the decisions of adults--especially men--are almost always enigmatic, a lot of situations the girls face feel just a little sudden and contrived.  It's not entirely a failure, but it pulled me out of the story more than I would have liked.

I think my favorite element of the story, though, is the way we get to see each character through two sets of eyes.  Dana's mother--glamorous, self-sufficient, desperate--and Chaurisse's--comfortable, maternal, emotional--are both observed by each daughter, through the lenses of love, fear, innocence, and too much knowledge.  Whether the chain of events fits together at every link, Silver Sparrow is a perceptive character study that kept me reading.

A New Task

Not a resolution, or anything, but let's see what happens when I try to blog every book I finish, instead of just the highlights.

First up, Dash & Lily's Book of Dares.  Another outing from Rachel Cohen and David Levithan of Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist fame.  I liked that book a lot, but I think I like this one even more.  But they're hard to compare, because while there are some major similarities (alternating point-of-view chapters, a scavenger hunt-like journey through New York City), the characters and mood are so very different.

Nick & Norah was one long, intense, pounding night in the city.  That was the glory of it, and it worked really well.  Dash and Lily spend a week roaming around, never meeting, trying to figure themselves out through the lens of the mysterious pen pals they are to each other.  Nick was the sweet, sincere boy with a guitar of so many girls' dreams, Norah the smart, determined young woman that most girls become four years later after college.  But Dash is a snarly, ironic, bookish hipster, while Lily is a too-sincere, family-centered free spirit.

When you meet Dash and Lily, you despair of them ever liking each other--it's not that Lily isn't smart enough for Dash, or that he's not warm enough for her.  It's that they each embody not just the opposite of the other, but the fundamental elements that the other is missing, and maybe most afraid of.  And maybe you start out thinking Dash is a snob and Lily a freak, but you live inside their head and come to love them--and the things they love--and you just want to meet them and read about them and see them both happy.

I really enjoyed this book.  It didn't zip by as fast as Nick & Norah, but that's okay.  It didn't need the driving pulse or urgency.  It had its own introverted, tentative charm that drew me in and made me--ME, mind you, who is in many ways the opposite of a New Yorker--want to see the Big Apple at Christmas.  I think that alone says all you need to know.

My People

I have been looking around the internets for book blogs that I could love.  I have a few favorites from people I already know well--Between These Pages for kids' books, Unshelved Book Club for comic reviews--but I've been looking for more and more. I found a lot that I didn't--romance blogs with great writing but that I'll never read the books, and a lot of blogs that do all the same theme days: Tuesday, a random line from a random page; Friday, a title from your to-read pile.  Not bad, but just not for me.

But I've finally lucked into a couple of great reads.  Fun, thoughtful writing, books right up my alley (fantasy, historical fiction), and reviews, reviews, reviews.  I'm constantly being reminded that reviews are what people want to read from book bloggers, including me.  I will endeavor to provide, gentle readers.

In the meantime, check out my two new imaginary sisters, Books I Done Read and Aarti Chapati's BookLust.  Not to be confused with Nancy Pearl's Book Lust, which I would love if she ever updated.

An Accounting

As 2011 draws to a close, let's summarize what we've experienced together over the past twelve months.

According to Goodreads, I've read 106 books.  It will be 107 by tomorrow, since I'm only four pages from the end of The Weathermonger.  This count isn't a perfect representation of the picture, though, since it includes five novellas, thirteen graphic novels, and at least one audiobook performance that only sort of counts as a book.  Still, it's a good way to grasp how things have been going.

I can't tell you what the best book I read this year was, but I can give you a sampling of the five-star ratings I've given.  My star ratings (like everyone else's, I suppose) mostly reflect my reaction in the moment, and looking back on them, I'm sometimes surprised--something I only moderately enjoyed stayed with me, or something I loveloveloved loses its luster.  But sometimes, great books are just great books.  So:
 
Gunnerkrigg Court, Tom Siddell.  I read some good comics this year, but this one just makes me so happy.  It's an ongoing webcomic (the image links to Amazon, but he link goes to his site), and I read it through in about three days.  Halfway through, I sent the author a donation through PayPal; when I got to the end I sent him another.  There are robots, animate shadows, a mysterious boarding school, an ominous forest, teenaged relationship stress, and Coyote the trickster.  Also laser cows.  Read this, please.

Troubled Waters, Sharon Shinn.  Reviewed here.  I love Sharon Shinn.  I don't love every one of her books uncritically, but I think that makes me love her more--I know it's not just that I'm bewitched or she has a gimmick; it's that she writes such good books.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, N.K. Jemisin.  Reviewed here.  I'm also reading the sequel right now.  This is one of those books that kind of blew me away with the world building--including things that I'd never seen done so well, like gods as characters--and some outings into very tricky literary ground, like irregular timelines and characters without enough information.  In my memory, it's just a really good fantasy book, but looking back to when I finished it, it really blew the doors of your average good fantasy book, and was totally worth it for that.

The Warrior's Apprentice (The Vorkosigan Saga), Lois McMaster Bujold.  I'm finally reading the Miles books.  They're just as much fun as I was promised.  I read two quickly, and now I'm dawdling so I don't finish too fast.  I can't say much about how great these are that hasn't been said a million times--the Amazon reviews alone are so glowing as to be bottomless.

Some nonfiction....

Bossypants, Tina Fey.  Reviewed here.  This is definitely one of those that I look back on with a little less enthusiasm than I had when I starred it.  But belly laughs will do that to you.  Her reading was a performance--I highly recommend the audiobook.  I laughed so hard, and I loved that she actually had a lot to say about the challenges of being a woman in an odd, male-centric field like comedy.

Nothing to Envy, Barbara Demick.  Reviewed here.  Even more timely now that Kim Jong Il is dead and North Korea's about to go just a little wonkier.  Amazingly well-painted portrait of life in the modern world but cut off from it.

Letting Go of God, Julia Sweeney.  Spiritual journeys--complicated ones by intellectuals, especially--are one of my favorite types of stories.  This is actually an audiobook/performance, so I'm not sure it counts as a book, but I'd like to recommend it here anyway, because I really liked the way all Sweeney's considerations orbited around trying to reconcile her experiences as a believer with the mythology she had grown up with.  Moving, and thoughtful, and funny.

And a couple of novels...

Marcelo in the Real World, Francisco X. Stork. Reviewed here.  I found the ending a little problematic, but it was such a thorough, touching, and sensitive portrayal of Asperger's, I was really moved.

Rules for Virgins, Amy Tan.  This one is a novella, and absolutely lovely.  It's an instructive monologue from an experienced geisha to her student.  The subtleties of relationships--power, sex, culture--and the delicate pressures everyone is exerting are intricate and fascinating.  And the hints of character that are revealed through the lessons are equally compelling.  I wish it had been longer.

Overall, I'd say it was a pretty good year.  I found a lot of great new authors and had a lot of fun in a lot of great fantasy worlds.  There are all kinds of things that I imagine myself reading in the new year--more literary fiction, more classics--but I'm having so much fun the way I'm going, I'm not setting any goals.  We'll trust where the wind takes me.

Welcome 2012!

Sequeltown III: The Revenge

Don't think I was done.  I'm hardly reading anything these days that doesn't come from a proven author with a proven set of characters, world, and pre-approved plotlines.  Keeps things streamlined.


I liked-but-didn't-love Ally Condie's Matched, but was interested enough to keep rolling with the next one, Crossed.  It's coming at the Perfect Society Dystopia from the other side; while the first book took place in the happy, locked-down part of the world, this one takes place on the fringes, on the run.  In spite of that, it has a very similar feel to the first book, and I have a very similar reaction to it.

I think this series may have suffered from overhype.  That's a real risk, especially when you're an adult reading YA.  Because the main audience for these books is young, you have a fresh set of folks reading their first dystopian fiction and being blown away by it.  Books are wildly popular because most readers are coming at everything with fresh eyes.  Even reviewers in this genre are often librarians, teachers, and people who service young adults and who (appropriately) look at the work through that audience's eyes.

Crossed shares some of what I'd consider the weaknesses of Matched, especially the reliance on true, deep, enormous teen love as the main driving force, and the seamless monolith of the Society's machinations.  The former is usually my biggest pet peeve, but is almost tolerable here; I can really get behind the romance being mostly a way for the characters to pursue something (freedom) that they wouldn't know how to reach for or even really define on its own.  So I'll give it a pass.

But the absolute tight control that the Society has--every piece of information monitored, every piece of paper accounted for, every ounce of food measured and accounted for--seems entirely impossible to me.  I think that's a very adult perspective on my part; over the years I've become aware of how almost everything that looks structurally flawless is fraying just out of frame.  Still, I'm finding it to be a weakness, if only because I never know what to expect from the Society--the omnipotence they seem to have in the story, or a more realistic veneer of omnipotence.

As flaws go, these are in no way deal-breakers, though.  I like how little information everyone has, how hard Cassia finds her decisions (though her unflinching willingness to rush toward death is kind of startling), how conflicted Ky is.  I really like the secondary characters, who really feel like full characters we've just met, with back stories and blind spots and everything.  There are types here, but they're all their own.



My other current situation is The Broken Kingdoms, sequel to N.K. Jemisen's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.  I only just started it, so it almost doesn't count for a blog post, but I really liked the first one, and I'm pretty excited about it.  The world-building was incredible; the incredibly complex problem of gods living side by side with people was deftly handled.  I've barely begun this one, but as a follow-up--with new characters and set a while later--it's already very promising.

I think that's it from Sequeltown for now.  But hey, maybe I'll come out with another trilogy 25 years from now.  They'll probably be pretty mediocre, though.  This is probably my masterpiece.

Someone Else's Blog

Kristen Cashore (of the inimitable Graceling and Fire, and the forthcoming (squee!) Bitterblue), posted a link to this from Tui Sutherland, whose blog I hadn't read before.  That post has some fabulous stuff in it, both as Christmas gift ideas and just good reads, and I may or may not have run out and made myself an impulse buy based on it. 

I know Tui through a friend and she's very cool--I can't believe I hadn't found her blog before.  She's the author of a bunch of books for young readers and young adults, which you should check out!

Anyway, I know it's last minute, but a good book is a great gift.  Merry Christmas!

Slasher Fic

In the afterword to the ebook Trapped, by Jack Kilborn, the author explains why the ebook contains two versions of the novel.  He wrote one and his editors asked for some revisions, because it was too violent.  He wrote the second, but refused to make further revisions, so it sat unpublished till it came out in this form.  He requests that reviewers please rate the version they prefer, rather than averaging the two for a rating and thereby "punishing" him for including two versions.

Jack, honey, I'll be happy to.

This is a slasher movie of a novel, all gore and guts and cannibals and torture.  It's not just that it's violent--I've read some violent stuff.  It's that it's so purposefully violent.  It feels very much like the only thought that went into this story was "how can I be gorier; what would be the most horrifying thing that could happen to this person?"

It's pretty poorly written, although I don't entirely hold that against the author; there's a strong sense that this is a first draft (second, actually; I'm reading the LESS violent revision).  There are typos, a lot of exposition is thrust into the middle of the action in a clunky way, a lot of the character histories read like the author hadn't really figured out which details were important and which weren't.  All these I can let slide, mostly because I wasn't expecting much when I picked this up.

But there are some serious, major plot holes in the surprise twist that I really don't think, at this point, are going to be sewn up.  Things like: nobody noticed those campers never came back?  Really?  No insurance because you missed a Medicare payment?  Is that how it works?

I'm skimming almost all the back story, and almost all the tension-mounting moments in the dark woods, and almost all the really violent scenes--well, the whole book really.  There are some good moments about planning and logistics, but oh my word, the do-gooder's heroic thoughts and the inner city slang of the troubled youths being chased through the woods--it's a parody of itself.  It's the novelization of Really Freaking Scary Movie, with Gore. 

It's almost high art.

Sequeltown, The Sequel

The Thirteenth Child was a pleasure, and I'm hoping Across the Great Barrier is just as good.  As a sequel, that's always tough, but the style of storytelling here really lends itself to continuing in the same vein as the first book.  This isn't a story of glorious highs and terrifying lows--it's about living on the American frontier, coming of age as a girl who's always been outshone by her twin, and trying to find what you want when it's always been easy just to slip by.

And also magic.  Wildlife, really.  Magic is everywhere, always used.  On the frontier, magic runs wild and the magical animals make homesteading incredibly dangerous.  And our heroine, Eff, wants to be a naturalist and to study these animals.

I don't know what's going to happen in the story, but explaining what happened in the first book wouldn't tell you much.  Eff grows up, her brother goes to school, they visit the Rationalist settlement, she learns Aphrikan magic.  I'm a sucker for a book about the patterns of life in a well-built fantasy world, and that's what I'm hoping to find in Patricia Wrede's sequel.  I think I've got a good chance.


Unfortunately, I recently threw in the towel on another sequel that I've been struggling with for a while.  The Parable of the Talents, which is Octavia Butler's follow-up to The Parable of the Sower, started out with the spark of hope that concluded the first book and slowly, painfully scattered dirt on it till it was snuffed out.  Sower was grim enough that I would not have expected to be overcome by the grimness of the sequel, but darn if I wasn't.

I'll admit that I actually really want to know how it ends.  I wish I'd been able to stick it out to find out.  But as the precarious little world that the characters have built is dented and shredded, as the outside world gets worse, as the story is framed with comments many years later that describe the emotional fallout of what we're about to read, it just wore away at me until I never wanted to pick it up.

The more I think about it, the more the visceral discomfort was an intellectual strength.  When everything falls apart, that's when anyone's faith is tested, and more so those whose faith states that God is change.  The introduction by Lauren's grown daughter opens a wider window on the harsher aspects of the protagonist's character--her ambition, her cold practicality.  The most useful traits are not always the most endearing ones.

But in the end, I couldn't read it.  It just made me tired, and sad.  That feels more like a weakness in myself than in the book itself, though.

But oh, baby, I'm not done with sequels yet!  While I've got some one-off irons in the fire, I feel like there's a wonderful bounty of great series that I'm swimming in right now.  Huzzah!

RIP Anne McCaffrey

Anne McCaffrey of The Dragonriders of Pern fame passed away almost a month ago. I was very sorry to hear it, although I'm not very familiar with her work.  I will always remember the Pern books as the first stories I read that started out medieval/fantasy style and turned out to be post-industrial space colonies (see Dragonflight and Dragonsdawn--the only two Pern books I've read).

(Spoiler Alert)




But I read these books long ago, and I have a question for McCaffrey fans.  I loved Dragonsdawn, but my memory of Dragonflight involves a flaw that really bugged me.  Dragonriders have lived on Pern for thousands of years at this point, presumably.  And they travel to distant places by visualizing them and going "between."  But somehow no one has ever accidentally traveled through time until Lessa did?  And she did it by picturing her target place as she remembered it?  No one else ever did that before?  Then what were they picturing?

Can someone who's read this book more recently, and/or who loves it and knows it well, tell me whether this is as far fetched as it seems to me?  Am I remembering it wrong?  Is it addressed in the story?  Am I the only one who noticed this?  I'd appreciate it, because I'm very tempted to read some of these books, but just the memory of that is bugging the heck out of me.

Thank you for your time and attention.

Sequeltown, Part the First

During my long break, I waded hip-deep into a bunch of YA fantasy (surprise!), and I've been devouring series in one big gulp.  It's kind of fabulous, actually.  A quick, fun read, and I walk to the library while I'm finishing the last 10 pages so I can check out the next on.  Or, heck, the next two, why wait?

Tamora Pierce is an incredibly popular classic, but it took me a while to understand her.  I think this is because she straddles the line between YA and middle-grade--she's NOT a YA writer who ended up in that section because of marketing.  Her books have younger characters, simpler moral dilemmas, and straightforward writing.  Ages ago when I read the first Circle of Magic book, I considered that a weakness. I've gotten much more comfortable with the genre since then, so I thought I'd try another one.


Alanna: The First Adventure is the beginning of the Song of the Lioness series.  It falls clearly into that same category--the main character ages from 10 to about 14 in the book, and the target audience is right in the lower range of those ages. Because I understood that, I could deal with the simplicity, and of course you know how excited I get with books about learning how to do stuff.  Knighthood, jousting, girls disguised as boys, magic lessons, court politics.  Simple fun, small stories, a kid growing up.

I barely finished the book before I went back for In the Hand of the Goddess and The Woman Who Rides Like a Man (which, good God, don't even look at that awful cover.  Alanna is not sassy.  Alanna is a knight.).  They took about three days to read total, and now I've started Lioness Rampant, which is the final one in the series.  She's an adult and traveling around and having adventures.  Starting with the second book, Alanna has had sexual relationships (no direct sex scenes), which has thrown off my understanding of the age bracket thing, but basically, I am having a blast reading these books in the same way that I enjoy watching a lot of simple, fast-paced TV shows: stuff is happening to these characters I know and like, and I'd like to see how it turns out.

If I was 14, I'd probably feel impassioned about these books, but for right now, what I'm feeling is a Pez-level pleasure.  And baby, I'll take it.


The Changes series by Peter Dickinson is extremely different in tone.  For lack of a better word, it's very British.  There is something charmingly, weirdly British in a book about people who do a lot of walking that is described in great detail, but somehow that doesn't work against these.  The first book, The Devil's Children, I think I found on a "help me find the name of this book I remember from childhood" website; it was the answer to someone else's question.  (I know; I need to stop reading those).

One day, England suddenly changes.  There's a brief prologue that hints someone in a mine opened up something, but essentially everyone woke up one day hating, loathing, fearing all machines.  Cars ran off the road as the drivers tried to jump away from screaming engines, people smashed the electronics in their houses.  People wandered the streets, sanitation ended, there was death and mass exodus.  People are affected differently--children feel it less acutely than adults; white people more strongly than other races.

The Devil's Children is the story of a girl who is left alone and falls in with a group of Sikhs.  They keep her around as a canary in the coal mine--to test whether things that they want to do are likely to get them lynched--and they end up forming a community that lives somewhat peacefully near a feudal-style village.  That's almost all there is to the story--it's about looking for a good spot to live, learning about Sikh culture, what mass fear looks like.  A small, everyday story.

The second book, Heartsease, is set in a different part of England, five years later.  A "witch" (someone who uses technology) is stoned in a small town, and is rescued by some children who aren't as frightened as they should be.
They keep him hidden for months, then smuggle him away to a boat and upriver to the sea.  That is all that happens in this book--all the tension is around getting caught, misleading the lynch-mob adults of the town, wandering around at night, and trying to get up the canal.  And along the way, teeny-tiny little clues about why The Changes happened are dropped. 

I'm DYING to know what's up with The Changes.  The third book is sitting here beside me.  I'll let you know how it goes.

I Read That

Isn't it funny that it hardly occurs to me to review books I recently finished with, as opposed to those I'm in the middle of?  Why would I talk about those?  They're yesterday's news.



Literally yesterday.  I'm not always a mystery reader, but the Mistress of the Art of Death series by Ariana Franklin has a firm grip on my love of historical fiction. I had Grave Goods
on my desk/table/floor next to the table for over a month before I picked it up from the long list.

But oh, it did not disappoint. In fact, I think I'd forgotten how much I love this series.  Tightly plotted, full of historical detail, and just the right amount of color and flavor.  I hate a mystery where you know who did it by the Law of Economy of Characters, but I also hate a mystery that rambles around and mostly isn't about the mystery.  That's never a problem here--place and time, political intrigue and love and fire and superstition are wrapped up tightly and hurl you through the story.

I think it helps that I love Bones, since it's basically Bones in the Middle Ages, like some time travel episode of a sitcom. Adelia is a doctor, trained in Italy where social mores are liberal enough to allow a woman that profession.  She's scientific, literal, and not very socially adept; her expertise is the dead.  In the first book she comes to England to assist Henry II with an investigation.  In this book, she's trying to establish whether a disinterred body is that of the legendary Arthur, whose proven death might help quell a Welsh rebellion.

But there's so much more to the story.  The innkeepers, the abbot, the huntsmen, the bard, the knight, the friend, and of course the Bishop of St. Albans (wink wink).  All the subplots come together neatly (but not too neatly), and there is just the right amount of peril, confusion, and diversion.  And there is comeuppance, though not all exactly what one might wish for.

As I said, I'm not a mystery person.  But I've already reserved the most recent book in the series, A Murderous Procession, from the library.

Unexpected Hiatus

Not only was I gone for a month, but I left a Christopher Pike retrospective posted.  Did you ever notice that when a blogger disappears for a long stretch, the last post they leave up is usually pretty lame?  Yeah, that's me.

There wasn't any special reason I didn't write all month.  Not that I wasn't busy, but I also didn't have a lot to say about anything I was reading.  I grabbed and quit a lot of books, finished a bunch, and read a good amount of fluff. 

But instead of going back to fill in last month's reading, which thought I'm finding rather depressing, I'm going to plunge forward with some current reviews, because there's some great stuff piling up here. 


Like True Grit, by Charles Portis.  I haven't seen the John Wayne movie, but I saw the more recent one, which was really fascinating.  The dialogue was very stylized, but the story was a great Western and the characters were such fun--strange, hard Mattie and aloof, competent Rooster.  I was curious about the book.

It was just fun.  Narrated by Mattie, the nitty gritty, practical details of getting business done as a 14-year-old girl on her own in a Western town were a romp.  The dialogue was still distracting--no contractions, everyone speaking in a stilted, structured way.  But inside the story, it's very clear that Mattie is telling the story, and Mattie is relating everything in her own voice. 

And her voice really makes the book.  I didn't understand two words of her digressions into politics or the divisions within the Presybterian church, but they were incredibly charming and passionate.  She's a strange, passionate, practical girl, and it was satisfying to watch her follow her quest.  Short, sharp, fun read.