Farm Stories

I'm reading this book that my father recommended--The Dirty Life, by Kristin Kimball--and I'm really enjoying it.  It's about--

Wait, hold up.  My father? Recommended?  Tom, you mean.  Tommy Smith.  This guy.  Recommended a book?  That he read, himself?

Yeah, yeah.  It takes a while to let that sink in.  Pa doesn't have time to read, so he doesn't do much of it.  But the farm in the book is just a few miles from my uncle Bouncer's house, so the book came into his path.  And of course, it's right up his alley--it's about starting a farm.

I sit in a strange place when it comes to books about how awesome it is to get back to the Earth.  Whenever someone asked it I was going to go into farming, my father would say, "I've worked very hard all my life so my kids wouldn't have to go into agriculture." Farming is really, really, really hard work, and there's no money in it.  It is not for the faint of heart; it may be rewarding but it's only very occasionally fun, and you won't have any health insurance.  It kind of reminds me of parenting like that--there are plenty of great moments, but as many or more horrible moments, and a pervasive exhaustion that makes it really hard to parse why you're doing this--but you'd never give it up.

Very few memoirs about farming let onto that.  Yeah, they'll talk about the dirt and the work, the hours and the weather.  But a writer who's got a book in them about farming is generally not motivated to really communicate how all those things pile on themselves to the point of oppression, or how much of a factor luck is--how too much or too little rain at just the wrong time can cost you half a year's income. 

The other side of this book is the love story, if you will--how the author met her husband and left her life as a writer in NYC to move with him to upstate New York and milk cows.  Whirlwind doesn't even begin to describe it, and I frequently found myself thinking "the man is CRAZY, you should RUN!"  My favorite example: while they were looking for land to start their farm, they had rented a house.  Mark "mistrusts" modern plumbing, so he build a compost toilet in the living room of their rental.   This is beyond endearingly quirky--this is someone who's going to end up living in a shed keeping his toenails.  (He actually does save his used dental floss, just in case he needs it for something.)

But the really crazy, creepy part is how many of his wacky quirks, again, REMIND ME OF MY DAD.  He doesn't like driving anywhere, and is mistrustful when she decides to leave the property, too.  (Not mistrustful that she's doing anything he wouldn't want her to.  Just uncomfortable when she's not home.)  He wants to do things his way, even when it's not entirely sensible, and they have a lot of arguments about things.  He sounds exhausting, really, and I'm rather startled at how much of his crackpot scheming he manages to pull off.

Because I think that's the thing, in the end.  My horror at getting up at 3:30 AM to do 3 hours of chores BEFORE you start your full day of work (chores means feeding, milking, and cleaning up after the animals) is almost dwarfed by the thrill I feel at the idea of this self-sufficient food empire they've created, and at the notion of fresh dairy, and at the fact that they've made a success of it, with supporting members and volunteer workers.  And I can't pretend I don't envy that sense of place and focus. 

I think what this book really feeds into is the same thing I love about nun books--it's about putting aside the easy parts of life to shape yourself around something that really matters to you.  It's about doing something hard and transformative and permanent.  It's about living a life that is not only shaped by your values, but is defined by and entwined with and in every way formed around those values.  I could never do that, but I'm always in awe of the people who can.

Quick Hits

How many times can I come here and rant about Stephen King?  Actually, this one is kind of a new rant: Mile 81 is way less troubling than a lot of his other recent stuff.  It's a Kindle Single, meaning a short story/novella, so that helps--too long is not the problem.  And, even better, it's pretty tight, not getting too distracted by some of the things that lead to his digressions.

No, my only complaint here is that dude, I know you have a very rosy picture of what a rough and tumble punk you were at age ten, but that is a LOT of swear words that this kid is spouting.  Not just out loud, but in his thoughts, which I think is even less likely.  I mean yeah, a ten year old says swears to impress his older brother, but he doesn't think the f-word in every sentence.  And I highly doubt that a six year old girl thinks of her brother as an asshole quite as frequently as your character does.  I realize that kids are not the pristine innocents we want them to be, but you might have tipped over into the opposite end of  believability.

Let me talk a little about Safekeeping, a new novel by Newbery-winning writer Karen Hesse.  I've never read anything of hers before; I got this advance reader's copy based mostly on the blurb, which is about how the main character, a teenager named Radley, is away from home when the American People's Party takes over the country and the arrests begin.  She makes it back into the US, but now she needs to find her way home to Vermont; and from there, to somewhere even safer when things go downhill.

I wanted to like this book--it's got a good premise--dystopian road trip!--and, based on the blurb, promised to be immediate and intimate.  I was pretty sad to find it disappointing.  There are a lot of ways a book like this can go that would satisfy me--either deep into the day to day details of how the characters keep themselves alive and safe, or on a nerve-wracking series of close calls and scrapes, or into a broader view of the world through the eyes of people they meet and news that trickles through.  This book took none of these paths. 

It seemed like almost every opportunity for tension is wasted.  Radley considers herself to be in danger, but it's always completely unspecified, both why she would be targeted and what the dangers would be.  There are almost no details about how she lives--dumpsters, gardens, hunger, how she spends her days, all are touched on vaguely, broadly.  This is not a book where you worry about food, like Life As We Knew It.  And it's not really political--she gets almost no news, and everything is very vague.  It's really sort of a poem on nature, and discomfort, and sort of the Zen of living in the moment and wanting what you have, and learning to value things you never did before, some of which are now lost to you. 

Emphasis on poem.  There's almost nothing concrete here to hang your hat on.  Radley is pretty passive, and not much happens to her either.  There just wasn't a lot of there there in this book.  I can imagine appreciating it on the level it works on, but it's a little too YA even for that.  Sorry to call this one a no.

I Think the Birds Are a Motif

I got this book, Mockingbird, by Chuck Wendig, from Netgalley, because the blurb (short and sweet) sounded really interesting--a girl who can see how people die foresees a big tragedy.  It was succinct and punchy, and when I started the book, it had a gritty, acidic wit, and I got into it.

As I was reading, I was composing this review, which included some concerns about how there seemed to be a backstory subplot going on that was really informing the relationships among the characters but that seemed pretty unclear to me.  Were we going to flash back to how these characters met?  What's the story behind the little pieces of info that we get here and there about their histories?

I was almost done with the book before I found out that it was the sequel to the book Blackbirds.  When I realized that, I was 1) embarrassed, but 2) mightily impressed, because as a second book, it works really, really well.  From the beginning, I understood the characters, I got a clear idea of how they felt about each other, and I understood what I needed to dive right into the story.  And let's let this stand as a recommendation for the book: after getting it free to review, I then paid money for the first one in the series, and will probably do so if another comes out later.

So, the book.  If Miriam touches someone, she can see how they'll die.  She gets lots of details--sometimes sights and sounds and smells, but also dates and information (what kind of cancer, where it's metastasized, how long it's been happening).  The kicker is, there's not much she can do.  Explaining it, trying to stop it--nothing helps.  In extreme moments (as in the first scene of the book, so I'm not giving anything away), serious, profound, violent action on her part can change things, but the different outcome is generally just as ugly.

Unsurprisingly, this has made Miriam a kind of prickly person. She's also broke and in need of money, so a friend sets her up with a gig--a woman who's sure she's dying, though the doctors say no.  Miriam goes to the boarding school where the woman works and easily tells the woman her outcome.  But it's when she accidentally makes contact with one of the students and sees her horrible, violent death that things really take off.

This book is all about voice.  Miriam is angry, sour, intelligent, and likes to hear herself talk.  She takes care of herself, often by beating the crap out of people, and I kind of loved that about her--a woman of action.  She drinks and smokes too much, doesn't eat enough, and is really on the edge of not holding it together, but she's fast and she's trying.  She kind of reminds me of Lisbeth from The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, only more likeable (in her prickly way) and sympathetic and well-written. 

It's not a book for everyone.  It's angry and ugly and violent and there's a lot of cursing.  You feel right with the characters when they're hungry and hung over and limping and stuck out in cold rain and angry and scared.  But that's also what's so great about it.  This is a book where, if you read the first five pages and think, yeah, this could be good, then you will absolutely love it.  I kind of did.

A More Diverse Universe

Aarti posted this today, and I was really excited to see it, not only because I will take any excuse to read any fantasy novel that pretty much anyone throws my way, but because I've been really interested in reading more fantasy by non-white writers lately.  I signed up right away, and I'm really excited to browse all the links she gives to reading lists.

I've been thinking about this for a while, mostly since I discovered Octavia Butler and started reading a little about how important a figure she was as a black woman writing fantasy.  N.K. Jemisin has talked about people of color being under represented in fantasy.  And then there were the cover whitewashing scandals.  And I remember Ursula LeGuin's comments when they made a TV movie version of Earthsea that they made all the characters white, which is kind of horrifying, and then I remembered this blog post that I can't find anymore about an avid fantasy reader of Southeast Asian extraction thinking s/he could write a book, but not even knowing where to start, because the culture s/he was imagining was missing all the tropes you expect in a fantasy novel (what do your characters do if they live in a world with no inns?).

So, bloggers unite, and let's get this moving.  Seriously, fantasy is too Eurocentric and needs shaking up.  Let's take a look at early contenders for my review.

Who Fears Death, by Nnedi Okorafor.  Already in my pile (physically)--does it even count if I already wanted to read it?  Also, so popular everyone's reading it.  Let's get outside the box, am I right?  I don't know a huge amount about this book--African dystopia, angel of death, quest for an absent parent.  Supposed to be phenomenal.

Redemption In Indigo, by Karen Lord.  Another African story, this one sounds a little more lighthearted and domestic; a storyteller with an annoying husband crosses some feisty spirits and chaos ensues.  I could be way off, though.

The Killing Moon, by N.K. Jemisin.  Again, can this possibly count since I've been meaning to read it for ages, and can you believe I haven't gotten to it YET?  It's obnoxious to say I don't even care what it's about, but it's kind of true, mostly because her stories are so complicated that trying to describe them almost works against you.  And that's misleading, because all those places they take you?  So, so great.

My Soul to Keep, by Tananarive Due.  Horror!  It's still speculative, it still counts, and I've been on a kind of weird thriller kick lately. Strange deaths in her circle of friends lead Jessica to a horrifying discovery about her husband.  I know very little more, but its Goodreads rating is 4.22 stars, which is kind of awesome.

Huntress, Malinda Lo.  This is more YA, set in a fantasy version of China, where two girls go on a quest to restore the balance of magic in the world.  This draws me because I'm a big fan of worldbuilding, and I'm really in the market for a non-standard fantasy world.  I was quite excited about The Silver Phoenix when it came out, but the writing style was so very, very not mine, I couldn't get very far.  Maybe this will be what I wanted from that!

So, that's the early shortlist.  Head over to Aarti's blog to find a bunch of possible reading lists, and check back here for updates on my book choice and the blog tour in general. 

Vampires, But Just Emotional Ones

Okay, I am definitely not a fan of dysfunctional family dramas, or of stories that are about the bonds between family members who don't really like each other very much.  Just not my thing, possibly because my own family is both so awesome and so crazy.  You know the old saying about happy families all being the same?  Not really, no.

So I was a bit doubtful about The Family Fang when I picked it up.  I think the only reason I got it was because it was time to cancel my Audible subscription, and I had a bunch of credits to use up.  The reader sounded great in the sample, so I figured what the heck?

I just went to look up the author's name, and was surprised to see it's Kevin Wilson.  I actually had thought it would be a woman.  I hope Kevin Wilson isn't out there feeling hurt, because I consider this to be an enormous compliment.  First, his female characters are very well-written, and second, he does such a great job writing about delicately balanced relationships, about internal turmoil, about uncertainty and insecurity, without getting too caught up in the minute examination of these feelings in details.  This book has more emotional authenticity with less pretension than I generally expect to see from a male author. 

I'm just coming to the end of the book now, and I don't think I can organize all these thoughts.  Caleb and Camille Fang are performance artists, thriving on creating chaos in real world situations.  Their children, Annie and Buster, have been part of their pieces since they were born.  Now grown, Buster is a writer and Annie an actress, and they're not close to their parents at all.  But they're not very good at maintaining their lives, and through a series of happenstances, they both end up back home at the same time, reconnecting with each other, their parents, and a lot of baggage.

This sounds more abstract than it is.  Annie makes a series of decisions that really seem to make sense at the time, but that look like a nervous breakdown from the outside.  Buster is semi-employed and completely broke when an accident puts him in the hospital.  Interspersed with their lives, we get glimpses of Fang art (the children, pre-teens, sing on a streetcorner for change to take their cat to the vet, and their parents, pretending to be bystanders, heckle them; Buster is put in a wig and entered into a Little Miss Something pageant).

So, I'm not sure I can pick apart all the great stuff going on here, so instead, I'll give you a little reader's guide.  And this could actually be useful, because it would be a really excellent book club pick--it's readable, substantial, and there's a lot to talk about.

1) What is art?  Caleb Fang says that representational art is dead on the page, and it isn't art at all.  He's quite vehement about it.  Is painting art?  Is the process of painting art, at least, if not the end result? Basically, can you imagine what it would be like to have a long conversation with Caleb Fang about Picasso?

2) Where, exactly, did things start falling apart for Annie?  I have my theory (hint: it's not on set, but that relationship that she didn't keep under control), but I think there are solid arguments to be made all around.

3) The end: too pat?  Too easy?  I like closure, but there's such a thing as too satisfying (e.g., the third slice of tirimisu).  This is a real question, though, because I think you could go either way.

4) Did you ever really think about how much kids are totally at the mercy of their parents, not just on a moment to moment basis, but in terms of who they'll become?  It's a big subject, but I think a lot about how the kind of person you want your kid to be intersects with the kind of person who will result from your behavior as a parent.  It's a weird Venn diagram, that one.

5) Did you see Torchwood: Children of Earth?  Warning: spoiler.  At the end Captain Jack basically has to decide between killing one child--his grandson, whom he loves--or letting 10% of the world's children suffer in torment for hundreds of years.  An impossible choice, right?  What do you think Caleb and Camille would do in this situation?  (Hint: the answer is probably "eat a live goldfish.") 

I do kind of wish I'd been able to bring this to a book club meeting.  I think the discussion of the nature and importance of art alone could be really, really great.

Babes and Bosoms

I read The Wet Nurse's Tale, by Erica Eisdorfer, because Aarti has Sarah Rose on her list of "Heroines Who Don't Annoy Me," along with Anne Shirley, Elizabeth Bennet, Sarah Tolerance, and Scout.  Anne, Elizabeth, and Scout recommended the list to me, and Miss Tolerance had me convinced.  Sarah Rose does not disappoint.


Sarah's mother was a wet nurse, but Sarah's first job is as a maid at the local estate.  She's an ample woman and no prettier than she ought to be, so she has an easier time of it than her pretty sister, who catches the unasked for eye of the master of the house.  The first half or so of the book is the general unfolding of Sarah's life--how she finds herself working as a wet nurse after (naturally) having a child of her own, the families she works for and her relationship with her own family. 

In the second half of the book, the story gets more urgent, as Sara's son is taken from her abruptly and she has to use her wits to get him back.  One of the things to love about The Wet Nurse's Tale is the hard-to-manage balance here between the realism of historical fiction--Sarah can't read, she's relatively uneducated, and this is perfectly well represented.  But she's smart and a very quick thinker, and the balance between those is managed very well.  She's desperately in love with her baby, but also very practical about caring for him.

If you want to look at the bigger theme of this book, it's about sexual politics at this time in history (mid- to late-1800s, I'd guess?).  There are so many male-female relationships here, and none represent any kind of modern "true love" sense.  There are power relationships (employer and employee, husband and wife), and relationships of affection (lovers of various kinds of affection, brothers and sisters), and types of acquaintance, sexual liasons, father-daughter interactions.  Sarah is quit savvy to how the world works in the sphere she resides in, and she makes a lot of pragmatic choices that seem not cold, but rather the opposite--full of human warmth and good common sense.

I read this in a very meandering way over the course of a few weeks; I think the first half of the book really works that way, since it covers years of Sarah's life and many separate episodes.  By the end of the book, however, we've become focused on one adventure, and I read that all up in a day or two.  Both halves were excellent reads, in their own way, and I definitely recommend them.  It, I mean.

Oh, Book Club

As far as I know, only two members of my book club read this blog.  To them I apologize, because they've already heard most of this.  But my god, that book was annoying.

Here is the Goodreads description of Mark Haddon's The Red House:

The set-up of Mark Haddon's brilliant new novel is simple: Richard, a wealthy doctor, invites his estranged sister Angela and her family to join his for a week at a vacation home in the English countryside. Richard has just re-married and inherited a willful stepdaughter in the process; Angela has a feckless husband and three children who sometimes seem alien to her. The stage is set for seven days of resentment and guilt, a staple of family gatherings the world over.

But because of Haddon's extraordinary narrative technique, the stories of these eight people are anything but simple. Told through the alternating viewpoints of each character, The Red House becomes a symphony of long-held grudges, fading dreams and rising hopes, tightly-guarded secrets and illicit desires, all adding up to a portrait of contemporary family life that is bittersweet, comic, and deeply felt. As we come to know each character they become profoundly real to us. We understand them, even as we come to realize they will never fully understand each other, which is the tragicomedy of every family.

This cannot be called a lie.  In fact, it's quite accurate, except in the parts where they describe how I'm likely to react to the book.  I don't find it bittersweet, comic, or deeply felt.  I don't understand them, or find them profoundly real.  And I foolishly spent the whole book hoping that something might come together, that someone might have some personal insight, that something might come of this murk.  Sorry, nope.

There are some interesting things going on from a writing standpoint--he's doing a sort of Virginia Woolf thing where you change perspective in the middle of a scene or even a paragraph.  This worked better than you might expect, although it seemed kind of heavy-handed.  There are no quotation marks; dialogue is in italics, which I think gives the whole book a very internal, dreamy feeling.

And there are a few interesting things happening--Angela and Richard's mother has died, and as they reconnect on this vacation, they realize that their memories of their family are quite different.  Angela is suffering from the memory of a stillbirth she had eighteen years ago.  Her husband Dominic is emotionally absent; their daughter Daisy has joined a church; Richard's stepdaughter Melissa is a traditional mean girl.  The families go on hikes and cook with vacation house pots and pans and flip wander around the countryside.  Really, it's like going on vacation with someone else's dysfunctional family--which, let me tell you, don't.

I think one big struggle for me is that the book is so English.  So much of it is minor observational description--which, in my opinion, is a wonderful tool, but without insight or aim, it's void of meaning.  But because of this structure, the sheer number of references I didn't get--smells I don't know, TV theme songs I've never heard of blaring in the background, slang terms that I can't figure out, and does everyone in England know the names of all the trees?--prevented the word picture he was trying to paint from coming into focus.

Anyway, it was a great book club, even if I didn't like the book very much.  And I'm pushing for Age of Miracles for next month. Which reminds me: scheduling email should go out tomorrow.  Gotta do that!

Good Guy's War

I feel like all the reviews I write for the next month or so will all  have to start with "this has been on my list forever; I can't believe I never read it before!"  But that's good, because it means I'm digging into the really fun meat of my list, and so far it's paying off.

I just finished Old Man's War, by John Scalzi, which of course has been highly recommended for ages.  I've never read John Scalzi before, if you can even believe that.  But this book pressed all my favorite buttons--there's a certain kind of fantasy or science fiction book that mostly consists of kick-ass world building and day-to-day details in an interesting universe.  That's exactly what this book did, and it did it really well.

John Perry is 75 when he enlists in the army of the galactic colonies.  No one quite knows what use the army has for the elderly, but lots of people sign up, since it seems to promise some kind of rejuvenation.  And it does--soldiers are remade in young bodies and sent to fight for the colonies.  The galaxy, it turns out, contains way more intelligent species than fit on the habitable planets, and it's a nonstop struggle to survive as a species.

So this summary doesn't give anything away, but it also kind of misses the point.  The novel is about how things unfold, and it's about life in the army, killing under orders, being part of a team, losing people you love, the meaning of the soul.  It's really a very solid war book, with a lot of really great observations about war.

That in itself is interesting to me.  In my world, the good guys are against war, always.  Avoiding war is supposed to be the aim; a book about war, especially from the point of view of a foot soldier, is going to be about how to bring the war to an end, or a realization that your own side is just as evil as everyone else.  The hero is the one who wants to negotiate, who won't fight.  That notion is written off pretty quickly in Old Man's War.  There are people who think that way, but it quickly becomes clear that the way the galaxy works is kill or be killed, and the very alienness of the aliens makes negotiation only a distant possibility.  You don't even really hold it against the politicians that there's nothing to be done about it; plenty of races eat people.

Watching all these different battles, with different enemies, Scalzi presents you with all these different sides of this kind of struggle--religious fanaticism, hopeless battles (from both points of view), arms races.  There are observations about the advantages of having people with a lifetime of experience in battle--their sense of perspective, their understanding of the gray areas between right and wrong, their enthusiasm for their new young bodies.  The solution to the "youth is wasted on the young" problem is quite charming, and the enjoyment that these "old farts" get out of being young and healthy and genetically enhanced is pretty fun to romp through.

I wish I had more deliberate, well-argued points to make about the book.  But really, it had me thinking about what a privilege it is for me to live in a world where things aren't a zero sum game.  I can give to charity and want everyone to have plenty because, at my exact place in the world, there is enough to go around.  It really is a problem of distribution.  Not every place in history, not every hypothetical situation is like that.  Sometimes there's no best option, just the least awful.

You'd think a book that had me thinking these thoughts would be the opposite of fun, but this was a total romp.  I'm headed right out for the next one.

Linkage

I was just reading this article at Publisher's Weekly, a list of the 10 best, most difficult books in English.  And you know, while I don't really walk away wanting to read any of them, per se, I did really enjoy reading about them. 

A suggestion on what to do with James Joyce: 

Try reading 25 pages a day, out loud, in your best bad Irish accent. (Seriously - some of what seems like idiolectic obscurity is just a question of how you pronounce your vowels.) You'll be maddened, you'll be moved, and you'll be done in about four weeks. 

And on Edmund Spencer's The Faerie Queen:

The Faerie Queene is allegory to the power of allegory. Or it is allegory drunk out of its mind on sugary wine, dressed up in layers of costumery, made to run singing through the garden of Eden at four o' clock in the morning before falling down in a heap at sunrise to make silver love to itself.

But then, I love reading about reading.  As they say, your mileage may vary.

Angels in Samaria

I may have mentioned my love of Sharon Shinn around here before--I really love Sharon Shinn.  I don't love every one of her books, but I love the way she writes, the way she builds worlds and builds stories around mundanities and details, characters and very small moments. 

I have particularly loved the Samaria series, and right now I'm in the middle of the latest one, Angel-Seeker. This is Shinn's own favorite in the series, and I've heard from others that it's the best.  I think I agree--although the first book, Archangel, had the advantage of the novelty of all that wonderful worldbuilding, this one is definitely the most thoughtful, particularly about love and the place of romance in society.  By this point in the series, Shinn's done a lot of exploration about the place of religion in society and how it shapes individuals, and about what it means to know that god is not omnipotent.

But make no mistake, this is a romance series, straight up, and the fact that this book is so thoughtful about relationships is really satisfying.  Elizabeth is on her own in the world and a bit resentful of it; she moves to Cedar Hills to attempt to win an angel lover, in the hopes of bearing a child who will guarantee her place in the hold.  Rebekah is a good Jansai daughter, veiled and chaste, until she meets the angel Obadiah, in need of nursing back to health.  In traditional romance plot, they fall in love and challenge each other's worlds.

Okay, now here I have to talk about the problematic part.  As usual, I'm writing this review from 2/3 of the way into the book, so I can't tell for sure how problematic this is going to be; it could be that the stuff I'm seeing is deconstructing all the things it has me worried about.  But this is the first book in the series where we get inside Jansai society, and boy howdy, this is one big can of worms.

Jansai, as readers of the series will remember, are a nomadic, mercenary/mercantile race who have dark skin, keep their women veiled, and will do anything for a buck.  In pretty much every book so far, the Jansai are the bad guys.  They enslaved the Edori (who are invariably generous, open-hearted, and friendly); the allied with the rich (greedy) Mandaavi merchants to make business deals that crush the competition.  They conduct raids; they cheat.  And, as we learn in this book, they stone their women if they transgress.

Okay, so first, there's something problematic about any story in which there is a race that is all composed of Bad Guys (or Good Guys, or any one kind of person).  Yes, there are cultural mores in any situation, but the broader the strokes painting these, the more troubling this kind of thing is.  And at the beginning of this book, I was actually getting pretty disgusted by how the angels (tall, gorgeous, musical, goodgoodgood) all described the Jansai--greasy, greedy, disgusting--and their city, Breven--dirty, smelly, unpleasant.  On his visits, Obadiah does not meet a single Jansai whom he trusts, enjoys, or even just is not grossed out by.

Then, of course, he meets Rebekah, and that's totally different.  And through her we get glimpses of the rebellions of women, both small and large.  In fact, the women we meet through Rebekah have a relatively reassuring range of personalities, of feelings and opinions outside of (or rather, ranging wide within) the constraints of being veiled.  I guess what I'm saying is that you see that some of these women have real interior lives, and you see how they spend their time.

The men, however--with the notable exception of a couple of helpful younger brothers--are, to a man, hostile, aggressive, distrusting, and icky.  Not just to women, but to "civilized" people who come among them.  I think that, unless Obadiah finds a couple of Jansai men he can talk to, and unless some man stands up for the young women who (I know) are going to find themselves in trouble by the end of the book, I'm going to have to flat out say that this great book that I'm really enjoying so much is kind of pretty darned racist.

I hope that happens.  In fact, I have some confidence in Sharon Shinn, that she's painting these unattractive pictures near the beginning so that we can follow Obadiah as he learns more about the Jansai as a people (not just as eager slave-drivers).  I think it's likely, and I'm really interested to find out.

Let me say, too, that this kind of indictment is particularly tricky, because unlike some depictions of other societies, you don't just want your heroes to realize that the Jansai are great just the way they are.  Because they stone their women.  They keep them locked up.  I mean, it's not all noble savage, or separate but equal, or something like that.  They're a messed up society.  But she'll need to give me more than "but Rebekah is so great!" for me to think that this one-dimensional portrayal isn't seriously problematic.  She doesn't even give the Jansai any of the traditional virtues that the Arabs they're based on have going for them--a long history of civilization and scholarship and master craftsmanship.  Mandaavi are civilization; Luminaux is craftsmanship.  Jansai are savages.  I hope Obadiah and I learn otherwise.

Thriller

Everyone's talking about Gillian Flynn's new book, Gone Girl.  So very many people are talking about it, in fact, that I couldn't wait for the million years it was going to take me to get it from the library--I had to go out and get one of Flynn's earlier books, Dark Places, to see what all the fuss was about.

Have you ever tried to explain the plot of a thriller, or a mystery, or even an episode of House?  Yes, take an episode of House. So the blonde guy got a haircut and House is trying to figure out why, but then there's this fifteen year old who's bleeding from her fingernails and they think it's cancer, but it turns out it's NOT cancer, and then the other guy got a haircut too so maybe it's a conspiracy?  Yeah, it doesn't translate in a plot summary.

I'd say the same thing about Dark Places.  I can give you a brief description: Libby Day's mother and two sisters were killed in horrifying violence 25 years ago.  Libby, 7, hid in her mother's closet and testified against her teenaged brother Ben, who is now in prison for life.  Now, Libby is a mess and popular opinion is Ben was innocent.  For various not-particularly-virtuous reasons of her own, Libby begins investigating what really happened that night.  We also see flashbacks of the day leading up to the crime, and we learn more and more about what was going on in the life of Ben and their mother Patty. 

So, that's the summary.  You can pile things on, though--no money, small town gossip, creepy ex-husband, Satanic cults, serial killer aficianados.  When you make a list like that, it starts to sound silly, right?

But this book is absolutely masterful.  First, it's structured in the most gradual, creepy, foreboding way.  You start out with basic information, and more trickles in.  Each successive chapter adds a layer to what's going on.  Hints pay off, characters appear, there are reveals and surprises, and it all makes sense as you're cruising through.

And I don't mean to make it sound like it's a slow book.  That's the great part; each revelation is important, exciting, a moment.  We learn what Libby knows, and Libby learns more and more, and we learn things she doesn't know. 

There are two other things that really impressed me about this book, but they're really connected by the notion of really good writing.  One is that it's smart, witty.  Libby is snarky and bleak, but she's funny--not laugh out loud funny, but just intelligent and angry.  She has no investment in what people think of her, and no filter on her thoughts.  She's profoundly depressed, and doesn't seem to have a lot of control over her life, which makes her a keen observer of her own problems.

The other aspect of this is how perfectly things are portrayed.  The claustrophobia of a small town; the blank fatigue of someone who's depressed and hopeless; the impossibility of being a farmer with four children and no money, none, not at all.  There are amazing portrayals of depression here, without being boring (which is HARD).  There are some really clear, brilliant insights into how children can be manipulated unintentionally, and how the things that you're responsible for as a child affect you for the rest of your life.

One element of a book that was so tight and affecting is that it's sad and grim and harsh, and that feeling is pervasive.  Emotionally, it was a little hard to read--besides the violence, which wasn't that explicit, though the results are described in various places--the entire tone of the book is tense and unhappy, and, as with everything else, it's very successful at communicating that.

I really can't wait to get my hands on Gone Girl.  I think I'll probably be reading a lot of the most highly recommended thrillers soon. 

Trilogy Blues

I know so many people who just won't read a book when it comes out if it claims to be a first book in a series.  Intellectually, I understand that, but it hasn't bothered for me in a while. Books come out so quickly these days!  I mean, if you waited 10 years for the next Clan of the Cave Bear book, you're not afraid of the eight months it takes to get the next popular YA title of the moment.  Amateurs.

But I've just finished No Safety In Numbers, by Dayna Lorentz.  There's no warning on the cover, no "Book One of the Hydrogen Prophecies" or "First Book in the Magnesium Cycle."  No, you start reading, and you think it's just your average YA about a bioweapon bomb planted in a suburban shopping center, a quarantine, and four kids facing the dangers and pressures that come with the situation.

And then you start to get it into it.  I mean, it's really a trapped-in-a-mall story--no one knows what's going on, or for how long they'll be there.  The teenagers are making trouble, the pharmacy is running out of toothbrushes, and Ryan has a crush on Shay, while Lexi's mother is being a pain.  Maybe you're a little skeptical that people are still selling food instead of giving it away before it goes bad, or wondering how much contact lens solution a group of this size is likely to need.

But in general, you're rolling along, feeling the mall-claustrophobia (which seriously, I have.  Malls used to make me hyperventilate when I was in high school), getting a little bored with everyone, and a little paranoid as you realize that we're worried about contagion but not taking the proper precautions, and that there's really no one from stopping the jock-bullies from being buttheads.  Things are building to a head--Marco also likes Shay; Lexi needs to step up and take care of people; Mike might be a jerk but he takes care of his own.

And then BANG!  The absolute climax of the book, seven days into this nightmare with five pages left and you're like what?  How can this end?  And it DOESN'T!  We're still in the mall.  Tune in next--what, year?--to find out what happens.  The presumed sequel doesn't even have an Amazon listing yet.  "End of Book One" my Aunt Fanny.  That's not book one, it's PART one of ONE BOOK.  This is not an ending to a book, it's an ending to an episode of a TV show.  Blargh!

At least be gracious enough to get an Amazon listing.  I want to know the title.  Because I really, really want to read it.

Sigh.

Book Party

As a former video producer, all I can think about is how much work this must  have been.



But as a reader, I am completely smitten with this video and want to go to the book party.

(This is from the website of a bookstore called Type Books, found via Hark, A Vagrant!)

Caroline B. Cooney: Enigma

I can't figure out if this book is a joke, or a first draft, or a sign of some sort of mental breakdown.  Caroline B. Cooney is a bit of an icon, for kids who read a certain type of book during a certain decade (say, 1987 to 1997).  I've loved her, too--from the super creepy Fog right up until my recent Janie Johnson reads.  But Diamonds in the Shadow, so far, just defies description in its levels of badditude.

Okay, so premise: midwestern Ohio family sponsors a family of African refugees and gets in for more than they bargained for.  It's unclear so far what that "more" consists of, but there's some messed up stuff going on.

First, the 12 year old, super-annoying and perky caricature of a younger sister is named Mopsy.  I mean, she's already a really silly character, and you name her Mopsy?  Seriously?

Secondly, while it's pretty clear she must have done some research about African civil war, there's a weird, thriller aspect to the story that doesn't quite sit right.  It doesn't fit together--I can't really explain it.

And then you have my pet peeve--the book's complete inability to adhere to a single point of view.  It's told in the third person, and I can handle it when there's a section from Jared's point of view, and then a different section from Mopsy's.  But when you jump quickly from the refugee orientation specialist to the refugee--no section break, no nothing-- but only really hint at what the refugee's thinking, it just gets confusing and frustrating.  Purposeful obfuscation.  Blargh.

If it wasn't so short, I'd give it up, but right now it's almost an adventure in badness.  Onward!

Update: No, I give up.  It's just so bad.  The traits of the African family read like a list of Traits You Might Find in African Genocide Refugees.  Not that these are not valid traits, but seriously, each family member represents a different psychological problem, and there is a LOT of telling, not showing.  Onward, indeed.

Janie Johnson

After finishing the somewhat iconic Face On the Milk Carton, I'm just wrapping up the sequel (there are actually THREE sequels!), Caroline B. Cooney's Whatever Happened to Janie?  It feels really silly to give it a deep and thoughtful analysis, since it's a late-'80s after school special of a book, but there are some really interesting aspects of it.

I often have trouble with old YA books, wondering if they feel dated to me because 1990 was such a different time, or because 14 was such a different age.  This is a good example of that feeling, for a lot of reasons.  One very basic one--Janie spends a little while being shocked that people go on talk shows and discuss their most personal feelings, say things that will break their loved ones' hearts.  Everyone in this book is keeping silent--no one is saying what they feel, putting it out there for others to react to, even though everyone's feelings are obvious.  Is that how people used to be in the '90s?  Or is that something a modern 14 year old might still wonder?

Really, most of the mysteries of this book are about people not discussing their feelings.  Sure, I don't expect the teenaged characters to have much understanding or appropriate expectations of what happens when a teenager is reunited with a birth family that she never knew existed.  But the adults seem bewildered, too.  Was there every any adult who thought that taking a previously happy teenager out of her home and delivering her to a different family--however entitled that original family is--and insisting she cut off all contact with everyone--friends, boyfriend, parents--is going to make everything go much more smoothly?  Or is this a sketchily thought out plot point? 

What this book has me thinking about a lot is actually adoption.  There are a lot of issues of identity here that are the same as the ones present in thinking about adoption--what makes someone a parent?  What feelings are "supposed" to be there for a biological family you've never met?  What do you owe someone who's been through a lot emotionally on your behalf, without your input?  What does it matter who your genes come from, and what does it mean to be part of a family? 

And this book seems to get all those answers wrong.  I mean, in the end it comes around to them, but nobody in this book seems to feel on any level that the bonds of parent and child have anything to do with a lifetime spent parenting the child.  Not that the suffering of Janie's birth family should be dismissed, or their needs tossed aside, but that they don't trump everything. 

Even the end, where (spoiler!) Janie decides to go back to her "real," raised-her family doesn't feel quite right, because when she chooses this, there's no sense of the importance of this new tie, no sense that the new bonds might matter, too.  It's tough because the situation is so traumatic, I can imagine it playing out this way in real life--just get me home, forget you people.  But when Janie gets letters from her new family and sees them in her own behavior...well, it just made me wonder why so much of the book is spent negotiating the practicalities, but none on emotional compromise.

Anyway, this is way more thought than the book really entailed.  As I said, an after school special.  If you ever get a chance to see the made for TV movie starring Life Goes On's Kellie Martin, do.  If you like made for TV movies, you'll get the full book experience.

Two Castles

Yesterday I finished A Tale of Two Castles, by Gail Carson Levine, and I suppose that since I've almost forgotten about it I shouldn't be too worried about getting it into the blog, but I am.  Partly because my reaction to Levine's books is all over the map, and partly because my reaction to this book is all over the map.

For the record, I really like much of Levine's work.  Loved Ella Enchanted; really liked Fairest; thought Ever was romantic and soppy except for the interesting take on gods; couldn't get into Two Princesses of Bamarre at all.  The intended audience for her books ranges from middle grade to YA, so I'm sure that's part of the equation.

The interesting thing about this book is how many different reactions I had at the same time.  At its core, the story is a mystery; one of the things I noticed most is that there's a LOT of detail piled into the storytelling.  This serves a lot of purposes: it sets the narrator, Elodie, up as someone who is observant and intelligent, which is a big plot point and an important part of why we like her.  It serves as some rich world-building.  But, most interestingly, it prevents you from knowing which details are the ones that will be relevant to the mystery.  If there are two horsemen riding past, a man with a basket of kittens, and a woman offering a bite of sausage to her father, which of these details might be relevant in who stole the ogre's dog? 

On one hand, the world she build was great, with lots of fun details and richly imagined layers of culture.  Actors are called mansioners, because their traveling caravans are like mansions with many rooms, and each color represents the tone of a scene (tragic scenes are set in the black mansion; love scenes in the green).  Cats are considered good luck, so everyone has a few.  A dragon's gender is no one's business but ITs own.

Elodie's family sends her to the city of Two Castles to apprentice, since they're too poor to pay for a place.  Her plan is to run away and become a mansioner.  Neither plan works out, and she finds herself in the employ of the city's only dragon.  The dragon sells roasted skewers and advice, and Elodie's first job is to help the local ogre, Count Jonty Um, solve the petty thefts and poaching that have been going on at his estate.

Now, here's where we get into the trouble.  This story was SO confusing.  The mystery was hard to solve, because it was hard to figure out.  There are so many strands of problems (thefts, dognapping, poaching, and others that come up later in the story), and how they tie together is unclear.  There are almost no clues left for the reader (as far as I can tell), and honestly, even now I couldn't trace a timeline of who was doing what and why.  All that rich and glorious detail made it even trickier to follow, and slowed down the pace of the story more than I wanted it to be.

Which is a shame, because I loved Elodie, and Meenore the dragon, and Count Jonty Um.  One of the big themes of the book is that you never know who is or isn't what they appear to be, so even the bad guys have good layers (though the good guys don't have a lot of bad ones).  And the mystery of who can be trusted--which is as important to the story as the mystery of who was committing the crimes--is also sprung on you.

I think my mixed reaction is based around the idea that I like the message of the book--in real life, the truth doesn't broadcast itself with sly looks and foreshadowing; the important details aren't the only ones that jump out at you.  But it made for a book that is paced and structured in an unfamiliar and, in the end, kind of uncomfortable way.  Reading this book was a lot of fun, but I didn't really follow it very well.  And when the reading level is 7 or so, that's kind of startling.

Brief Reviews

Finished three books in quick succession.  I already blogged about some of them, but some final thoughts.

Almost a Scandal, by Elizabeth Essex.  How I love Harlequin Historicals.  There's such comfort in their familiar rhythms, even when they don't make perfect sense.  This book, for example, didn't have a misunderstanding keeping the hero and heroine apart, but rather a practical situation.  So the resolution was almost unnecessary--they were in perfect agreement by the end.

But the best part is that my calculations were proven true.   A HH novel is between 280 and 320 pages long.  Let's say 300 for mathematical purposes.  On my Kindle, that means that each percent that I tick off is three pages.  So if I'm right, they'll have sex at 180 pages = 60%.  I think 59% is well within the margin of error.

As I said before, this is a great book for someone who wants to read about the British navy but with some romance and a chipper girl as your heroine.  There's a lot of naval lore here.  It's like Bloody Jack only a bit less convoluted.  Good stuff.

I'm a Stranger Here Myself, by Bill Bryson.  Dude is an old crank.  It made me so sad to dislike Bill Bryson so much, when I've loved him so much in his other books.  Admittedly, only one was a memoir (A Walk In the Woods), and the others all research-based (At Home, A Short History of Nearly Everything, The Mother Tongue).  And in Walk, he does get awfully opinionated in a cranky old man kind of way (why is the Adirondack Trail so woodsy?  In England they'd have charming farms and cottages with privet hedges.  All this nature is so dense and thick--where's the fun in that?).  But anyway--I'm reserving judgement on him in general till I've read the  next one I picked--In a Sunburned Country.  I am neither defensive nor knowledgeable about Australia, so I think this will be a good test.

Finally, The Face On the Milk Carton, by Caroline B. Cooney. That cover makes it look creepier than it is--this is the story of a girl who sees her own childhood portrait on a milk carton, and the fallout from that.  I saw the movie--After School Special?  Made for Lifetime?--ages ago, and I really liked it. 

Turns out this book is only the first half of what the movie covered, which made me a little impatient with it.  This book is entirely about Janie Johnson's internal struggle with the question of what this Missing Persons photo means.  Are her parents not really her parents?  Are they kidnappers?  Who can she trust?  What will happen if she tells?  There's a lot of good, complicated family stuff here, though it feels a bit dated--Janie's parents are so great and perfect, they're all so close, and there's an underlying assumption that it's all either-or.  Her parents are the wonderful people she assumes, OR they're monsters who are terrifying and evil.  OR maybe they're crazy and have amnesia about what they did?  Black and white--is that because she's in high school, or because the book is from 20 years ago, when "suburban" meant "safe" instead of "soul deadening?"

Anyway, it's all worth going through, but I was much more interested in the complexity of what happens after this all comes out, and that's really where the book ends. It reminded me of The President's Daughter series in that way, actually.  I liked the ones about PTSD and the character dealing with her life being turned upside down more than the one where she's actually kidnapped.  But I'm definitely going to read the next one, Whatever Happened to Janie?, which promises to be exactly what I'm looking for to follow this up.  Too bad the library doesn't have it for the Kindle.

So, now we're up to date.  Hopefully I won't fall off the map again.  Toodles!

Quickies

Not a lot of time today, after a busy weekend.  A couple of one-line observations, though.

First, Bill Bryson is cranky.  This is probably a risk of compiling a weekly column into a book, but I'm a Stranger Here Myself is just a series of one moaning rant after another about how lazy, impractical, bureaucratic, dangerous, and selfish America is on various levels--sometimes as a society, using statistics, and sometimes as individuals, using examples.  It's funny, because the book was written in the late '90s and can often go for long periods without seeming dated, and then I'm hit by something really surprising and I remember, oh, yeah, he's talking about when I was in college.  America's attitude toward the environment was more cavalier, England's airport security was comparatively much weaker, and people faxed letters to their far-off friends.

Second: Stephen King really believes that ugly people are ugly.  Which is to say, people who are mean, frightening, shrill, or horrible in Stephen King books are almost always sweaty, distended, bug-eyed, crooked, and poorly dressed.  Good, kind people, on the other hand, are at worst plain, and mostly attractive and pleasing to the eye, if not downright good-looking.  This kind of goes along with some of his other problems--I've always noticed that his women have intuition coming out of their metaphorical ears, and someone (Nnedi Okorafor, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Who Fears Death, which has just gone on my to-read) pointed out in a blog post I just read that he also falls prey to the Magical Negro problem.

Another interesting factoid I learned from Okorafor's blog is that H.P. Lovecraft was a HORRIBLE HORRIBLE HORRIBLE racist.  I've only read a couple of his stories, so I didn't realize.  This is why I don't like finding out about authors/actors/creatives whose work I admire.  Learning about their personalities and personal lifes is almost always a bad thing (cf. Marion Zimmer Bradley, Orson Scott Card).

(As an aside, I've been very interested in reading and thinking about the idea of how to be a fan of things that are problematic--how to recognize racism and sexism in books and movies that you really like.  It can be easy to get defensive about stuff you love and try to pretend the problems don't exist, but that's so much worse than facing up to it.  I have friends I love who do things I don't like.  I'd like to do a whole post about it, but I think it'll probably just be passing along good links.)

I suppose this post is now a bit of a ramble, but I was away all weekend and didn't have any time to post or much time to read.  I'll keep you as posted as I can, and know I love you all, Dear Readers, and have missed you!

Scandal On the High Seas!

As I may have mentioned before, I'm not much for romance novels.  I've read a few, and there are even a few that I love and reread.  But invariably, those are the ones that have something going on besides the romance, whether it's grand adventure or a detailed look at ranching in the 1880s.

What I am into, though, is swashbuckling.  And girls who dress up as boys and run away to (fill in the blank).  So I picked up Elizabeth Essex's Almost a Scandal on a whim, with trepidation in my heart.

But oh, it's so worth it! Ignore the cover--I'm halfway through and Sally hasn't worn a dress yet.  You see, when her brother, Richard, ran away to become a parson instead of following family tradition into the Royal Navy, she simply had to preserve the family's honor by showing up in his place.  Luckily, at 18, she can pass for a 16-year-old boy.  She's soon faced with an overbearing midshipman and a suspicious commanding officer, but she was raised by the navy, so she's ready for anything.

Now, the big risk with any girl-disguised-as-boy romance novel is the fact that the hero naturally doesn't know she's a girl.  So the requisite barely-repressed longing becomes confusing, especially for romance.  It's not that the authors aren't open-minded, but romance novels cross a lot of political divides, and when I see that particular dilemma coming, I'm never sure if the author or the characters are going to be able to handle that confusion of throbbing organs without some horrible pangs of homophobia. 

Bless Elizabeth Essex (if that is your real name--who believes that?), she sidestepped the question entirely.  Mr. Colyear recognizes the little sister of his old friends very early on in the story, leaving him free to be maddened and bewitched, and to feel electricity shoot through his body and all sorts of other feelings that permeate every fiber of his being. 

Because that's what feelings do in romance novels, and yeah, it's a romance novel.  But really, those parts are just punctuating things.  Again, halfway through, this is really a story of Sally doing her thing, and Col admiring her and not being sure what to do about her.  Yeah, there's the occasional bout of thinking about each other too much, and the occasional unfeminist desire to teach her a lesson (spanking or kissing, not sure).  But mostly they respect and like each other and are trying to manage the situation--with the added difficulty of his being the commanding officer of a great sailor who's also kind of stubborn. 

Of course, since this is a Harlequin Historical, they won't have sex until page 180, and they won't end up together until at least 275.  I did a careful study during my misspent high school years.

So yeah, this book is, thus far, pretty awesome as romance novels go.  Really, if they were all like this, I'd read them all the time.  "Headstrong" is too often a word for flaky in these books, but not this one.  This book reminds me very much of Bloody Jack--the first one, before Jacky's life started getting more and more hypermanic--and of the Temeraire series, in its fun, detail-filled picture of the Napoleonic war.  In short, I'm seriously loving it.

Here's where I disclose that I got a free copy for review.  And I'm so glad I did, because I can tell you I never would have paid money for a romance novel, but knowing what I know now, I really might for this one.  And I think I might give another Elizabeth Essex book a shot.  It depends on how the rest of the book pans out--if she maintains a strong, smart, competent female character who doesn't fall apart just when the man needs to pick her up, nor do stupid things that prove that the guy's the only logical one in the story, then yeah, I'm all over the Essex oeuvre. 

Fire-n-Thorns

Since I was raving so enthusiastically about The Girl of Fire and Thorns in my last post, I feel like I need to come back and wrap up my opinion, which changed over the course of the book.

I gave this 4 stars on Goodreads, really more of a 3.5 book.  Honestly, though, the first part of the book was almost a 5, while by the end it had dwindled down to a 3.  There are a lot of elements to my reaction, and a lot to pick apart, I think.

First, what I loved about it was what caught me at the beginning.  I think a lot of it had to do with how unusual it felt.  First, the Hispanic influences of the language and names, which is not the same-old.  The fact that the characters seemed to be Latino/a was also a big plus.  It just gave a slightly different flavor to another fantasy story. 

I also really liked the angle that a lot of things came in at.  I liked that Elisa and Alodia are princesses--Elisa finds it oppressive, Alodia empowering.  For both of them, being a princess has nothing to do with dressing up in fancy dresses or having parties--either good or bad.  So many books either push back against "girl things" or embrace them, but they really don't show up much at all here.  Elisa is bookish; Alodia is social--both are smart. I liked that the arranged husband is neither treated entirely as a sex object nor is he a terrible curse.  So many things like this felt more real and complicated than they are in many fantasy stories.  I think this is what set my expectations so high.

There were so many little worldbuilding things that I loved at the beginning.  The religion aspect was cool--Elisa bears the godstone, which warms when she prays.  God is a big part of Elisa's life, but it's not clear how literally we're supposed to take him--is God going to be a deus ex machina in this story?  Are we going to find out God's big secret?  Are the priests good or evil.  All of these, and none--in real life, the answer to "what's up with this religion thing?" doesn't jump out at you, and it doesn't here, either.

So the beginning, essentially, had a ton to love about it.  But about one-third of the way in, there's a big shift, and the story changes abruptly.  It's not entirely unexpected--quite the opposite, in fact.  From an unexpected, interesting, unpredictable place, the book takes a shift into standard YA territory--there is a quest, and a finding of the self, and friendships, and an enemy that is OMGSOEVIL!  Elisa shifts into this new zone well before I did--from the minute she left the palace, she didn't act like I expected; she acted like someone who knew what was coming in the story and was behaving the way the story wanted her to.

I was really bothered by how "other" the enemy seemed.  They're barely human, pure evil, out to Take Over The World for no particular reason.  They're physically disgusting, cruel, and manipulative.  It's not like I haven't seen this problem in other books--a bad guy with so little subtlety that there's almost no point.  It's just that I have seen it so often, and I hoped for so much more here.

I don't want to give away the story, but suffice to say that all sorts of things that you might expect happen--romance, betrayal, escape, etc.  It's all quite dashing and kept me reading, and was well-written.  But nothing in the last 2/3 of the book lived up to the glorious promise of that first 1/3.

Now, let me get to the thing that so many people have been bothered by: Elisa's body.  She starts out fat--"piggy," "disgusting," frequently eating herself sick.  This is the angry, weak, lonely Elisa who's never good enough.  I kind of liked this, actually--a fat heroine.  Yeah, the fact that she's not just fat but gross about it--frequent scenes of her eating herself sick use phrases like "cramming food into my face"--is kind of bothersome, but this, of course, is the flawed character we start out with.  The direct association of fat and grossness is the before picture. 

And I'll say, I thought her internal life was really neatly drawn.  Her sense of failure and hopelessness and shame is all tangled up in hope and wishing and pride in her other accomplishments and frustration, both at herself for not being less gross and the rest of the world for not realizing that she's not as gross as she seems. 

But again, the rest of the book let me down.  As Elisa gains strength, she stops stuffing her face.  As she gets more confident and accomplished, she sometimes forgets to eat.  As she undergoes physical trials, she finds her clothes don't really fit anymore.  And finally she emerges--strong, proud, confident, and thin.  So the fat was never separated out from the gross.  The appetite and enjoyment of food is never distinguished from gorging herself sick.  Thin is beautiful is healthy is successful wins the day.

Really, it's not a bad book.  It's a run-of-the-mill YA fantasy adventure story.  But it promised to be so much more at the beginning--in spite of the 4 stars, I'm left feeling pretty let down in a lot of ways.  But I'll read the next one; I'd like to see if Carson brings other bright spots to the rest of the series, the way she promised to in this book.

New PLR

The Kindle has changed my relationship with the Personal Library Renaissance.  Which is hard, because it's not like I don't have a huge shelf of books upstairs that I haven't read yet and want to read.  Plus all those library books I still have out.

But right now, the backlog of books in my Kindle that I've acquired and want to read is the one that's teasing me most.  People are always asking why I get books before I'm ready to read them, and I don't really know how to answer that, except to ask how you manage to know you want to read something but not acquire it right away.  Don't you worry that it will vanish from the library/bookstores/internet and you'll never get a chance to read it?  Or (less insanely) that you'll forget how interested you were and miss an opportunity that, right now, you're SO EXCITED about?

Anyway, the hurdle is always jumping in, starting a book and getting swept away.  Let's see what's in the line up for now.

I've started The Girl of Fire and Thorns, by Rea Carson.  I bought this months ago after loving the sample, and I don't have any special explanation about why I hadn't gotten around to it yet, but now I have and I'm really, really loving it.  Actually, about 1/3 of the way in it's just taken a turn for the slightly less interesting--it was all court intrigue and mysterious omens before, and now it's--well, I'm not going to give it away, but it's just a different direction, and I'm not far enough into the new section to be excited about this twist.

But I LOVE the story.  I like that the main character has some real, significant weaknesses--she's childish and selfish and overeats--but you're still really rooting for her--she's smart and wants to be better.  I love the Hispanic feel to the worldbuilding--all the names and words from the "old language" are Spanish-sounding, and the landscape, between deserts and jungles, has a Central American feel.  It's that perfect thing to find in a new author--a familiar structure--girl needs to grow up and save the world--with a new flavor.

The next few I have lined up are also all YA fantasy adventures that I'm excited to read.  Can you believe I haven't read Maggie Stiefvater's The Scorpio Races yet?  I bought it months ago!  I don't even know much about it, but I've heard it's amazing.  I've also got the last of Sharon Shinn's Samaria books, Angel-Seeker, and Mercedes Lackey's The Gates of Sleep, which is one of the only books from her Elemental Masters series that struck my fancy.  Oh, plus Black Powder War, by Naomi Novik, because how is it that I'm so many books behind in Temeraire?

These are all just on deck, though.  I'm still reading (and loving) Bab: A Sub Deb, which you kind of have to read in chunks or you just want to smack her, or her mother, or her maid.  And I'm trying to pick my way through some of the library books I have out.  I'm thinking I'll take on a Heavy, Important, Grown-Up book, just to counterbalance all the fun I'm having right now.  Does that seem self-punishing?  I can't decide how much non-YA, non-fantasy I need in my reading diet to cleanse the palate and keep my brain limber.  But I've got about two novels written from the point of view of Mary Magdalene out of the library right now, so maybe I'll start there.