Monarchy, Idealism, and Psychic Horses

Once again--it seems to happen so often--the two books I'm reading dovetail strangely.  This time, it's causing me some challenges keeping the tone of the two books sorted out.


You've got two pseudo-medieval, very much YA fantasy novels.  Mercedes Lackey's Redoubt is the newest Valdemar novel (if I say psychic horses, I hope that gives you a really good shorthand for this series of books in general).  Princess Academy: Palace of Stone is also a sequel, this one by Shannon Hale.  Both of them are about lowborn folks who end up living and being educated at the palace, getting involved in politics and, to a lesser extent, the personal lives of the royals.

Mags, the hero of Redoubt, is the apprentice spymaster to the King of Valdemar.  By day he's a Herald (which means he has a psychic horse sidekick) and by night he roams the city meeting with sketchy folks and getting the scoop on the underworld happenings.  The Heralds of Valdemar are the arms on the law--they are honest, upright, and true, and they speak for the king and dispense his justice in the same way the Superman speaks for Truth, Justice, and the American Way.  Government is all about doing good.

When Miri, the heroine of Palace of Stone, comes out of the highlands of her childhood to spend a year studying (so she can start the first ever school in her hometown, as well as hang out with her friend the Princess), she's entering the world of politics for the first time.  Turns out everyone kind of hates the king, who's been demanding tributes and stomping on the poor.  Or at least, so say the new friends Miri meets at the university and the salons she attends.  Down with monarchy!  The king is a leech upon the people!

Switching back and forth between these books is a head trip.  When I read about Miri's friends discussing the end of monarchy, I keep waiting for Mags to come bursting in with a bunch of Heralds.  The rebel leaders will be revealed to be conniving and tricking the good honest folk into believing that the king is doing less than his best, which is a LIE, of course!  It makes my head swim.

Another layer of this is knowing the Shannon Hale is Mormon.  I don't know enough about her to have any idea how conservative or liberal she is, but this really affects my expectations for where this book is going to go.  Are the rebels going to turn out to be on the side of the good and the downtrodden--as they appear to be right now to the very naive Miri?  Are they going to be duplicitous, a power-grab disguised as freedom-fighting?  Or just misguided communists? 

In my mind, this depends on Hale's politics, which I don't know anything about.  It's frustrating to feel like I'm looking to the real world to guess what's going to happen in a book.  Here's an essay on Hale's website where she talks about creating the religious homemaker character of Becky in the book The Actor and the Housewife (which I disliked for being Hugh Grant fanfic). 

So, how do I feel about the monarchy?  I like idealism, but Lackey gets treacly.  I like freedom, but Hale gets heavy-handed.  Let's see if I get confused or if things just shake out nice and balanced.

On Her Majesty's Supernatural Secret Service

That's actually the subtitle of the book.  The Rook, by Daniel O'Malley, has been keeping me company while I waited for my new Kindle, and believe  it or not I haven't read an electronic word in the two days since Grimm came in the mail.  I'm having too much fun here.

It took me a little while to get the hang of it, I'll admit.  The complicated plot isn't hard to follow, but I had a lot of trouble catching my stride with the tone.  There's real danger, there's wry humor, and there are funny names.  I kept trying to figure out if we were talking Terry Pratchett, Tom Clancy, or Monty Python.  I eventually got the hang of it, but it's only today that I found the analogy I was looking for--it's James Bond.  If James Bond was fighting supernatural manifestations instead of all diamond thieves and international masterminds, this would be the book.  It's over the top and melodramatic, with plenty of humor thrown in.  The plot works straight, but the reason you love it are the fun bits.

The reason I didn't go straight to Bond is because the main character is a paper pusher.  There's a lot of wonderful dry humor about administration, red tape, and standard operating procedure.  And, as I said, there's a lot going on--Myfanwy Thomas has lost her memory.  She wakes up one day and finds herself an elite executive at a national agency that handles supernatural threats in Great Britain.  She has no idea who she is or what is going on--her only clues are the notes she left herself, knowing the memory loss was coming, warning her of a traitor in her agency.

There's the whole traitor plot, which is actually quite the nail-biter. A lot of the fun, though, comes from just trying to navigate day to day operations at an office where you've never been, but everyone knows you.  And of course, there are the standard threats to the nation from sentient purple fungi and ancient Belgian brotherhoods.  Plus, while all this is going on, you get the letters from the old Myfanwy, telling about her life and how she ended up where she is.

It's complicated enough, but it's not as complicated as you might fear.  There are good guys and bad guys, and even before we know exactly who's who, we have a good instinct for where folks are going to fall.  I'm not done or anything, but it doesn't seem to be a story with a big twist at the end.  Myfanwy's just so down to earth, I'm having fun with her.

This is not a compelling review.  Somehow I'm not feeling very articulate today.  Still and all, I'm having a blast with this book--highly recommended.

La Grande Sophy Remembered

Readers, I would like to say a sad goodbye to my Kindle.  Her name was La Grande Sophy, and she had been with me for nearly a year and a half.  Well, she was replaced once by an identical copy of her.  That was a seamless transition, and we pretend it never happened.  She was a milky alabaster in color, with a keyboard and 3G. 

I named her partly for Georgette Heyer's heroine, The Grand Sophy, but Frencher, because it was important that its name alphabetically came before Mike's Illustrated Primer.  If you have two Kindles on the same account, the one that comes alphabetically first will be the default in the One-Click Buying drop-down menu, and I am the impulse shopper in this relationship.  So La Grande Sophy she was, and she held my to-read pile with quiet dignity for a long time. 

She was lost due to a foolish attempt on my part to cram her into my bike basket along with my laptop.  I didn't think I was squishing her, but the next time I pulled her out, the screen was a mess, and she never came back.  She was in her slipcover, too--supposed to be safe!  May she rest in peace.

She has been replaced, after much deliberation and some expense, by Grimm, a slim, dark, handsome cousin of hers.  He's mysterious, but is a teasing way.  I suspect he might be some sort of vampire, but the good kind.  He lacks Sophy's bright, tranquil alertness, but he makes up for it with the kind of illusion of casualness hiding careful attention that James Bond brings to his work.  I think we'll get on well together.

Thank you for everything, Sophy.  I'll miss you.

Twin-Off: The -Offs Trilogy, Final Showdown

Really, it's not so much a comparison as a complementary situation.  I'm deep into two books that are incredibly different and perfectly suited to balance each other out, and both feature a pair of male-female twins as their main characters.

Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl is about Nick, whose wife, Amy, disappears on the morning of their anniversary, leaving signs of a struggle in their living room.  His sister, Go (short for Margo, which nickname I seriously love), is one of the few functional relationships in his life.  We watch the investigation unfold from Nick's point of view with a sour, hungover stomachache just from hanging out with him, and see Amy as a brittle, aggressive person.  Then we watch their relationship unfold from the beginning through her journal entries and start to wonder if Nick is really the guy he thinks of himself as or the guy he knows the world sees.  It's dark and makes you feel kind of hopeless about people.

Patricia Wrede's The Far West is the third book in the Frontier Magic series, and it's so exactly what I wanted it to be. We pick up where we left Eff--working at the college menagerie, living with her parents, everything going along.  Her twin brother, Lan, is still living at home, and appears to be going through some real self-examination after the incident in the last book, but that's not what this story is about.  The reason for reading Eff's story is that it's the story of a place and a time, and I wish I could find a book that did with real history what this does with alternate history.  Her friends visit and pass through, she and the professors at the university try to figure out what's up with the medusa lizard they're studying, and Western expansion unfolds around them. 

The Far West is a slow, easy novel that gets you caught up in the day to day.  Gone Girl is a mover, grim and kind of icky, but fascinating.  It's so perfect that whenever I need a break from one, the other is waiting right there for me.  If you'll excuse me, I have some books to read.

Trapped-In-A-Mall-Off

I did a thing the other day that I try very hard not to do--I revisited a score I gave a few months ago and dropped a four star book to a three star.  This was based partly on reevaluation--I really don't remember liking the book for four stars.  But it was also because, in a head to head of YA novels about a bunch of teenagers trapped in a mall, No Safety In Numbers fell a distant second to Monument 14.

One big ticket item in any book where the kids have to sort things out is where the heck the adults are and what they're doing.  Safety had adults in it, and while many of them were wandering around passively, some of them were taking action.  Just because we're following the kids doesn't mean the adults disappear.  But there's definitely a sheep-like element to the behavior of most (though not all) of the adults that the kids are all too vital and probing to fall prey to.  They're not sheep!  They're individuals!

Monument, however, had the kids trapped without adults.  The adults are on the outside, doing their best to survive the earthquakes and chemical weapons.  When we do meet adults, they're commanding and firm, and there are complexities to their presence--they're just as much characters as the kids are.

And really, it's about the characters.  Both books have some parallel characters--the popular jock who's not as much of a jerk as tradition holds, and the popular jock who is.  The self-sufficient loner who knows how to make his way in the world.  Hot popular girl.  But Safety's characters are somehow still thumbnail sketches--the non-jerk jock has to be a stealth non-jerk, because Jocks Are Jerks is written in stone somewhere.  Not because jocks are people who are sometimes not jerks, or because often someone gets to be popular by being really, really likeable.  Monument's Jake is a real person, a hand-shaking, back-slapping, let's-all-chill type of guy.  Yeah, he's got problems and plenty of flaws, but being a flat out jerk is not one of them.



What about Jerky Jock?  There's Safety, with a dude who elbows random strangers out of the way and runs someone down with his car, or there's Monument, with a dude who teases mercilessly, occasionally threatens, and steps up at least partway--you know, like a real human being--when the situation calls for.

So yeah, there's no way I could give Monument a lower score than Safety.  It was tighter, made more sense, and had a lot more of the good, meaty how-to details I love.  Plus, while the ending was not very resolved, at least it was an ending.  Definitely the winner of this kids-in-a-mall-off.

Run-Off

This month, book club was a close tie between The Language of Flowers and The Age of Miracles.  The club went with Vanessa Diffenbaugh's Flowers, but I read both, just out of curiosity, and I think they're a great study in contrasts, especially about what makes a "literary novel." 

I've already mentioned that I didn't like Miracles. It was less an awful book than a waste of time and a good premise.  Almost nothing happens.  Occasionally the narrator will let you know about interesting things that are happening, inasmuch as the world is coming to an end.  But it doesn't affect the day to day life of anyone you know; your main character just has a standard twelve year old's coming of age story--and a particularly boring one, as I'm pretty sure Julia doesn't actually take a single action in the whole story.  She just rambles around and watches people live their lives.

I really did like The Language of Flowers.  Although it was also a coming of age story, the main character--tentatively and with great emotional barriers--does actually do things.  She reaches out and shies away and hurts people and is hurt by them, and then makes up with them and tries again.  It's really a book about getting it wrong and trying again.

What I think is interesting in looking at the two books next to each other is about my overall discussion of literary fiction.  I think these two books aim very solidly for the same high-middle-brow range of literature--the land of book clubs and reviews in popular mainstream magazines.  And they both have, I think, the same quality of a "hook."  Miracles has the end of the world; Flowers has a character who has been chewed up and spit out by the foster system, who got kicked out of the best home she'd been in by committing some unnamed horrifying act--she's messed up and misanthropic, and she likes flowers and pretty much nothing else.  For want of a better descriptor, the bare bones outline is a bit lurid, which, as we all know, sells.

So what does Flowers succeed at where Miracles fails?  It's all in the details. Even at the moments when Victoria is at her most passive--and her passive aggressive moments are remarkable--she's filled with emotion.  She freezes it out, she goes into shock, she suppresses rage--it might look like nothing is going on, but a lot is going on.  Julia, not so much.  She's an empty vessel, a wide-eyed lens to look at the world around her.

The other characters in the books have room to wiggle, too.  Let's look at Mother Ruby, who is kind of a third tier character in this book--neither the protagonist nor one of the main players, but a big role anyway.  Mother Ruby is solid and knowledgeable, and yet she screws up.  She is needed and just what Victoria needs at the moment she appears, but she's not all-knowing.  Then you look at Hannah, Julia's best friend at the beginning of Miracles, and you realize that she's just an object to act on Julia.  What's important is not who Hannah is; it's what she does to Julia.  But since Julia doesn't seem to react, then that "what she does" means nothing.

My review of The Language of Flowers is "great read," though I would caution you that if your book club is composed of 70% social workers and child psychologists, they're going to explain how attachment disorders work and how in real life, Victoria would never, ever heal.  But the real point I wanted to make here is that, when I talk about not liking literary fiction, I know I'm probably misusing the term.  What I dislike is a book in which NOTHING HAPPENS.  It doesn't have to be space opera, soap opera, or even musical theater.  Emotionally, though, I need real motion, agitation, and a breath of life.

Brokeback Tankers

Do you think  my titular puns are getting worse?  I think they might be.

Paolo Bacigalupi's Ship Breaker won a bunch of awards last year, so I always figured I'd read it.  Took me a while to get around to it, probably because I was a little put off by the first few pages of Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl, which is overwhelmingly world-building and kind of hard to follow, I thought.  So I put this book off.

This book, though, is really great.  The blurb is pretty straightforward--it sounds like setup, but it's really the meat of the story--Nailer lives in the poor community centered around tearing apart derelict oil tankers for scrap.  In a post-petrolium world, this is dangerous business, and everyone is hanging on by their fingernails.  When a hurricane rips through their beach community, it leaves behind a prize--a wrecked sailing ship, and a survivor who could be worth a fortune, or who could get him killed.

All this is on the inside cover, so you kind of expect it to happen in the first ten pages.  But really, that's about a third of the book, and everything else that happens stems from that, so it's not like any of it is a surprise.  There was a little stretch in the middle where I was adrift, because I wasn't sure what direction the story was going to go in, but that was pretty brief--the story is about Nailer, and wherever he is, you're happy to be. 

Usually your protagonist in a book like this is a little smarter or kinder or better than everyone around him--because in a rough world, most people are keeping their heads down and doing whatever ugly things they need to do to survive.  You don't want your protagonist doing these things, so you're with the special guy who rises to the top.  And that's not untrue here, but it's not nearly as clunky as you expect, either.  Nailer isn't the only one who does generous things, and he doesn't always do them, either.  He believes the code that the people around him live by--the book just happens to catch him on a day when he rises above it, and everything spills from this. 

I need to write my reviews while I'm still reading the book, or right after.  I finished this at least a week ago, and it's hard to blather on as I usually do.  But I really, really liked this book, and I definitely want to read the next one--which follows a character who's a genetically modified half-man, which is one of the more interesting world-building details.  We'll see if I can ramble more eloquently on that one when the time comes.

Booktober!

Yet another thrilling book month!  Although, to be honest, a lot of the books I'm excited about are not new releases.  Still--let's do a quick run-down of October's exciting (to me) new releases.  Most of them came out last week, but I haven't read them yet, so I don't have to writhe in anxious anticipation.

The Far West, by Patricia C. Wrede.  You remember The Thirteenth Child and Across the Great Barrier, of course, because I loved them so much.  I think this is the last one in the series, and I can't wait--one of the best things about this series is the real danger and excitement of discovery, and I really hope Eff spends most of this book out West.  Oddly, the book was out in print about three months ago, but not as an ebook till now.  I actually bought this the day it came out; I was that excited.

I think I have loyalty issues surrounding Redoubt: Book 4 of the Collegium Chronicles, by Mercedes Lackey.  I mean, you can't say these books are good--as I keep saying, I aged out of Valdemar ages ago, and I'm starting to suspect the author did, too.  I read the first sentence of the sample and I cringe a little.  But I know--I know--that when I dig in and start reading it, the super-organization and competence of everyone in these books is just going to knock me backwards.  And of course, Mags is going to think everyone hates him and turn his back on them at some point.  But on the way, we'll learn about the super-organized dining hall system at the Collegium, or the forensic investigation units in the City Guard.  I love it when a fantasy author gets fed up with the medieval world they've modeled their own world on for not being innovative.

The Twelve, by Justin Cronin, is the sequel to his first book, The Passage.  I started out loving that book and ended up really liking it.  It read like early Stephen King--perhaps a bit ambitions, especially toward the end when our characters start traveling, but a great balance of forward motion and character development, with effectively scary bad guys.  I have some strong suspicions about what's going to happen in this next book, at least in broad strokes.  My only fear is that it's going to be hugely long, and I'll need to invest myself when it's time to dive in.  I have a hard time with commitment.

Son, by Lois Lowry--after all this time, another book in The Giver series!  I have to admit, I didn't love Messenger all that much--I can't really remember the details, but I remember not really getting the details even just after I finished it, and not really finding the ending very satisfying.  But Lois Lowry is so awesome, and the various worlds/societies in this series are so interesting and different, I can't wait to see what else she does with it.
  
Beautiful Music for Ugly Children, by Kirstin Cronn-Mills, first hit my radar because of Netgalley, where I get my publisher's galleys.  This is proof that they're doing a solid thing for the publishers, because I got excited about this title.  I wasn't given a copy for review, though--don't blame them; I suspect this publisher sticks with outlets that really follow their demographic--which means I'm now going to have to buy the book.  And I will, if the sample's any good--I'm really interested in transgender issues, and the description makes this sound like a sad, hopeful novel.

Whenever I do one of these, it seems to be mostly sequels.  I guess it's partly because everyone's writing sequels these days, and partly because I mostly get excited about a book because I've read the author before.  Still, I am just drowning in exciting new books by authors I haven't read--many of which, I'm ashamed to say, have been on my to-read list forever.  Still, I soldier on.  Really, it's quite remarkably.  I understand now why you admire me so much.

Steering Friends Wrong

A couple of months ago I thrust the book Twilight Eyes at Brenda, urging her to read it.  It's a book I've read four or five times, but not in at least 15 years.  Dean Koontz is one of those authors I used to read all the time but haven't in ages.  I know that his new books started to turn me off, but I did keep returning to old favorites for a long time, so I imagined that he had changed, not me.

Brenda was less than impressed--which is fine; visceral reactions are personal, especially for things we first experienced in ninth grade--and I got it into my head to pick the book up again myself.  And when the library had the ebook--well, why the heck not?

Wow, Bren, I'm so terribly sorry I subjected you to that.  The book is exactly as I remembered it, and/but there's so much wrong with it!  From the purple prose with multi-page descriptions of the charm and magic of the circus midway (many, many such descriptions), to the seventeen year old narrator's preternatural level-headedness and convenient psychic flashes, to the fact that the first half of the book unfolds in less than a week, including his seduction and wooing of an ice-princess-type woman who magically falls into bed and love with him, and did I mention the long, lavish descriptions of EVERYTHING?  Pages and pages and PAGES of tension building around every little thing.  Maybe I'm a jaded inhabitant of the new millennium when I'm saying you could use a little more action here, dude.

I don't skim, but here I am, skimming. And you know, with the skimming, things are good.  It's the book I remember--the action that does unfold is good, exciting, tense.  It's kind of a worldbuilding novel--it's about the unfolding of all this information about the secret predators that live among us.  And the story it's telling is good--it's just about twice as long as it needs to be to get there. 

I know this reaction is me changing, since the book remains the same.  I do wish I could figure out if it's impatience born of our quick-cut culture, or if it was always this slow, but the building tension really worked for me as a teenager because I had never been that scared before.  Like, NEVER.

Since it's October, I was thinking of rereading 'Salem's Lot, which is (I think) my favorite Stephen King book.  But now I'm worried it won't hold up.  Then again, I didn't even read King for the first time till my mid-20s.  What do you think--will it work out?

Follow Up and Winding Down

Okay, this has been the most insane work week(s, really, three of them) I've ever experienced, but Claudia's back, thank God in sweet heaven, and so I can breathe again and maybe even read a book and MAYBE even blog.

Right now I'm wrapping up the last book I reviewed, My Soul to Keep, and as I get closer to the end, the true shape of the book emerges, about which I have some interesting observations.  Well, I find them interesting--as the tag line says, you're free to find them interesting or not.

I don't want to spoil the book, but I can say without ruining anything that your point of view in this book shifts back and forth between Jessica, intrepid reporter who notices weird things and then eventually realizes that her husband is immortal, and David, aka Dawit, said immortal husband. 

It's in third person, so it's not like there are multiple narrators, which is a relief.  I definitely think both POVs are necessary to make the story work; strictly from Jessica's viewpoint, you would have absolutely no clue what's going on for way too much of the story.  In the end, this is the story of a messed up relationship, and it's important that we be able, along with Jessica, to see David as really wonderful, not someone sketchy who's hiding something.  But to keep the plot moving, we need to know what David knows.  Also, it's a pet peeve of mine when characters in novels like this spin wild theories out of the little data they have and then happen to be right.  (Stephen King, I'm looking at you!  "I bet the operate on a sense of smell."  What evidence? "Well, it only makes sense." How do you figure? "Let's risk our lives to find out!")

Anyway, I do think the book lags a bit in the middle.  It would have more tension if I was denied some information, which I'm not--I know what Jessica thinks and guesses and suspects and knows, and what David needs and wants and plans.  There needed to be some information kept hidden from me, because the tension of "when and how will Jess find out?" was not quite enough there toward the end.

But what compensates for this is the really amazing picture of David.  He's incredibly self centered; being immortal has completely messed with his perspective (of course).  But he loves his family, in ways even he can't understand.  He's got all this loyalty and he doesn't know what to do with it.  It's like there's this messed up immortal, and you can't be sure how much of it is because he's a messed up person and how much is immortality messing with you.

And can we stop for a second and talk about how rotten immortality would be?  I mean, long life would be great and all--a few hundred or even thousand years of bopping around.  I'm not talking about Hob from Sandman type of immortality, or even Highlander just-don't-cut-off-my-head stuff.  I'm talking true, Captain Jack Harkness cannot be killed indestructibility.  I mean, if absolutely nothing else, I don't want to be around when the sun explodes in 10 billion years.  How is that anything but sad and painful?  I was surprised, when I brought this up to Mike, that his instantaneous reaction was anything but, "Immortality?  Ugh, no!"  I'm sorry, but there are scenarios in which death is an important back door that needs to be open, thank you very much.

Wow, that sounds grim and creepy.  But then, it's October!  It's thematic!  Coming up: goblins and purple prose.

Undying, Not Undead

Once again, my Diverse Universe book reflects another ongoing theme in my reading.  This time, it's October (or it's going to be) and I'm reading thrillers and chillers. Besides discovering Gillian Flynn and rereading some of my favorite Dean Koontzes (Twilight Eyes), I picked up My Soul to Keep, by Tananarive Due.

Let's start with her name, because it's lovely and fun to say.  I found this book on one of the lists Aarti posted at the beginning of the blog tour.  It's kind of a thriller--it's actually got a Dean Koontz vibe, in that normal people are living normal lives until something abnormal starts happening.

Jessica is an up and coming young reporter at a newspaper in Miami.  She's got a great, loving husband that her friends call Mr. Perfect, a beautiful five year old daughter named Kira, and a good shot at the Pulitzer for her investigative work on elder abuse in nursing homes, as well as a book deal in the works.  Everything's coming up roses.

What she doesn't know is that her husband's past is about to catch up with their perfect life--and it's a long past.  David has a secret from his wife--and everyone.  Five hundred years ago in Africa, he underwent a secret ritual to become part of a brotherhood of immortals.  David can't die. Membership in this brotherhood comes with a lot of rules, though, especially around secrecy, and his brothers are coming to make sure he obeys the rules.

Now, the thriller is really good--you get the story from Jess's side of the weird things that are going on, stuff she notices about her husband, mysterious happenings.  And you get David's point of view--memories of other lives he's lived, previous loves, and how immortality has affected  his personality.

And that, I think, is the absolute coolest part of this book.  We spend a lot of time with David.  There's almost nothing factual that we don't know--details, sure, but there's no big mystery.  We know where the immortality came from, how he feels about it, and how the brotherhood works.  What's fascinating to read about, though, is his personality.

There are so many layers to it.  First, he's Jessica's perfect husband, who makes breakfast for their daughter every morning and cried when the dog died.  He really is the Mr. Perfect that her friends describe.  But the more you get inside his head, the more you--not start to wonder, but start to see how different facets of a personality work.  How love for one person can make someone change the way they act, and you wonder how much is because she inspires him and how much is because he wants to please her.  You see how an immortal might see a mortal life as meaningless, and how moving through life in a world full of people who are dying could chafe.  You wonder whether callousness is natural, or fiendish.  You wonder what he was like before he was like this.

And the thing is, I don't know the answer.  There are so many aspects of this character that are straight out of the abuser's handbook, and in a lot of ways (a LOT), David is pretty explicitly a bad guy.  But he truly loves Jessica and Kira, and that makes you wonder what exactly love means from someone who is, on a very fundamental level, a bad person.  It's not like it redeems him, and it's not even like his past explains his evil.  It's more like his evil resides right up against his love, and that he doesn't really seem to know the difference.  And Jessica lives with him and doesn't see so many things about his personality when he's not trying to hide them; he's doing what comes naturally, which is pretty kind and loving where she's concerned.  This is the absolute creepiest part of the book, and I'm finding it really creepy.

Really fun book--definitely more of a thriller than a fantasy novel, but if a working mother, a mystery, and a bunch of African immortals sounds good to you, then you should definitely give it a shot.  I know I'll read the next one (next one--yay!), My Soul to Take.

Amazon Made Me Do It

This review is posted as part of the A More Diverse Universe Reading Tour.

At just about the time I was looking into more speculative fiction by authors of color, Amazon slapped up a big ol' ad for Angelfall, by Susan Ee.  And while I have avoided a lot of the YA fantasy trends (vampires, werewolves, and, yes, angels) for quite a while, I was very much in the mood to say "yes."  So I said it, and clicked it, and Amazon sold me a book.

Well played, Amazon.

This fits right in with the rest of my summer reading--it's fast, action packed, and fantastical.  It starts out with a pretty standard YA end of the world feel, and the YA feeling is enhanced because all the characters speak in a very modern way.  You don't know where the angels come from, but they talk like they're from California or Kansas--the here and now.  There's no high drama in the language.

What you get is nonstop action.  Good action, too.  This is a world that has been ravaged by angels who have rained destruction down on the major cities.  What people remain hide in fear of roving bands of angels, and of the gangs that have filled in the gaps left in the absence of civilization.  Penryn is a resourceful young woman who takes care of her mentally ill mother and her wheelchair-bound sister.  When they are caught in an angel-on-angel battle, Penryn's sister is taken, and Penryn reluctantly teams up with a wounded angel to save her.

Now, there are a decent number of plot points here that don't bear close scrutiny.  A few well-chosen conversations would make things a lot clearer, for the reader and the characters.  There are some things that are treated as fact that seem wildly unlikely, even within the confines of the story (why didn't they just kill that person? given what we know about angels, is it likely that they'd be able to do XYZ?).  But the book this reminded me of most was Maria V. Snyder's Poison Study.  Not that the stories are anything alike, but that they rocket along so fast and so thrillingly that if there are holes and weaknesses, I hardly notice them, and less do I care.  

Reading the book for A More Diverse Universe, I was probably more conscious than I would otherwise have been of Penryn's ethnicity, which is not identified in the story at all.  Aside from having long, dark hair and being relatively small, there are no physical descriptions of her, or of most of the main characters.  I pictured her as Asian as I'm reading the book, but there's very little in the text to support that (her childhood nickname is Ryn-Ryn). 

I don't think it makes sense to lay any particular expectations on the author just because I'm going into this with an awareness of her ethnicity.  This isn't a book about a Chinese character, though she might be Chinese-American.  What matters in this story is that Penryn is tough, strong, trained in martial arts, and devoted to her sister. 

Speaking of her martial arts experience, though, I'm reminded of something somewhat problematic about the book.  Penryn's mother is schizophrenic.  This is a pretty big plot point--she's off her medication (end of the world, you know), and so is intermittently violent.  On one hand, there are some really touching passages about the complexities of having a mother so ill--not knowing who you're going to find when you come home, having to be the grown-up in the relationship, loving her and fearing her and being angry at her all at the same time.

But on the other hand, the book really emphasizes how violent--horrifyingly violent, really--her mom is.  There's a line: "We now play a permanent game of I-am-crazier-and-scarier-than-you.  And in that game, my mother is our secret weapon."  I don't know a lot about schizophrenia, but the intense emphasis on the really unpleasant violence her mother is capable of is not doing any favors for the image of mental illness.  Not a lot of schizophrenics are violent, especially not like Penryn's mom.

The violence is another aspect of this to note--it starts out as an actiony book, but by the end, there's some really, really horrifying stuff.  Like violent, gross, intensely horrifying moments.  I don't want to spoil it, but I am hard to shock, and I was pretty shocked.  It almost came out of the blue--I think I'm reading a book with one level of awful, and then a whole other level shows up.  It's like you're reading a book about Nazis and then toward the end Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft pop up, and the ending gets all woah.

Still, the upshot is that I'm really having fun reading this book.  It's nice to start out this blog tour with something fast-paced and fitting with my light reading mood.  Oh, and I should warn you: it's a trilogy.  I know, I know.  Sorry about that.

Diverse Universe!

It's here!  Aarti has announced the lineup, and you'll see my first post tomorrow.  I cannot WAIT to read a bunch of these posts and am a little intimidated by what my to-read list is going to look like after I get through all this cool stuff. 

Of course, it happens to come during a week of complete madness, so I'll be lucky if I'm not reading all these blog posts next week when the work rush is over.  But I'm reading fun books for this, and I'm looking forward to reading a bunch more when it's done.  Very exciting!

Not Urgent

It's late and I was supposed to go to bed ages ago and work is CRAZY, but I wanted to share that I might not finish the book Insurgent, by Veronica Roth, which is a sequel to Divergent, which was slight but at least compelling in an action packed kind of way.

So at the beginning of this book, Tris and Four and their little band of misfits has just escaped the battle in the city toward the Amity compound.  While I remember the overarching story of the previous book, I remember almost none of the secondary characters or the complicated plot, so right off, I have very little idea what's going on.  How did Tobias's father end up with them?  And that violent jerk Peter?  But okay, whatever, let's follow along and see what happens.

But without the sort of shallow, straightforward training montage of the first book, this one just can't hold me.  Because none of this stuff makes any sense!  Only very rare, unusual people have this special brain chemistry that causes them to have more than one character trait.  No one can imagine a world in which people have multiple character traits.  This is extremely weak.  Those nasty Slytherins--I knew they were up to something!

And plot-wise, lots of very intelligent adults with lots on the line say, "Yeah, it's true that they broke into our homes and tried to kill lots of us, but you're just a kid, so whatever you advocate, no matter how sensible, we'll do the opposite."  Tris is angry that strangers are keeping secrets from her, when she's full of secrets herself.  It's just one dumb move on top of another, by everyone.  It's all angsty and mournful, and that would be fine if I could follow what the hell is going on, but they're all just fighting and breaking into each other's compounds and shooting each other with simulation serum, and it's boring boring boring.

This book and Crossed belong in the exact same category: the first book takes a not-quite-convincing future dystopia and tells a very simple, relatively enjoyable personal story.  In the second book, things get political and complicated and hard to follow and just ridiculous, and the plot holes pop up, and now I'm feeling very meh.  I don't think I'm going to finish.

Two notes before I go.  One: I maintain my firm conviction that the third book will be called Emergent, and I expect someone to congratulate me if I'm right.  Two: Brenda, my image is left-aligned.  Is it totally blowing your mind?

Sucker For a Parody

A) Any book themed parody song
B) ALMOST (key word) any parody of That Song
C) This one specifically because of kind of awesomeness.

Thanks, Sarah and Molly, for the link!

Define Miracle

I decided to read the book club runner up before the actual selection, so I'm most of the way through The Age of Miracles, by Karen Thompson Walker.  I was pretty excited about it, mostly because of some positive reviews by some of the folks I get my book recs from.  The premise is quite promising, too--it's a coming of age story set during a time when the Earth, for no discernible reason has begun to slow in its rotation. 

Each day is longer than the one before it, the light lasting longer, the night stretching on.  The story begins on the first day when the phenomenon is announced (most people haven't noticed in their day to day life; sunrise is barely an hour off of where it should be).  There are changes that are chronicled--gravity is stronger, and the birds suffer.  Crops struggle.  Something called slowing sickness affects certain people.  There is social and political tension about whether the world should function on clock time or daylight time.

But really, this is all background.  I wouldn't say that the amount of detail is dissatisfying, but the fact is that, even when the world doesn't just keep on spinning, the world just keeps on spinning.  Kids go to school, marriages contain tension, middle school friendships come and go. 

In fact, this entire review so far is misleading, because really that's what this book is about.  It's not about the world changing at all; it's about a girl going through a tough transition in middle school.   She struggles to fit in.  There's a strain on her parents' marriage, and though Julia (that's the narrator, 11-year-old Julia) pinpoints the slowing as the beginning of it, it's pretty clear that it was coming anyway. 

So really, what I see here is a coming of age novel--fairly straightforward, middle-of-the-road, slightly boring "literary fiction" (if by that you mean closely observed details of a mostly unremarkable life)--with an extended metaphor that serves as a setting and framework.  It's not bad--not at all--but I almost feel like I was sold a bill of goods, because there's just not much new here--not much insight into human nature, either through observations of the slowing or of Julia's adolescence.  I'll admit that I'm less surprised that Julia's troubled adolescence is kind of boring than I am that this account of the basics of physics being upended is kind of dull.

Again, it's not a bad book.  I think my favorite thing about it is the little hints the narrator gives to the future as she tells the story.  In some places they're short term (the car was silver, though the police report would describe it as light blue), whereas in some places they're tantalizingly long term (that was the last time we ever tasted pineapple). 

I don't expect to get a satisfying glimpse of the world post-slowing, though, because that's not what this is about.  It's not a speculative book.  In fact, the world pictured here is probably most remarkable in its mundanity in the face of 60 hour days.

Romance Titles: This Never Gets Old

Every time the library gets a new batch of ebooks, I start to giggle.  Okay, this one is a quiz.   Which one am I making up? (I swear to God, two out of each three are real.)

1) Book titles: who did what?
   A. Led Astray by a Rake
   B. Taken by the Devil
   C. Twice Tempted by a Rogue

2) Series titles: there's more than one of them?
   A. The Wicked Temptress Trilogy
   B. The Wanton Dairymaid Trilogy
   C. The Stud Club Trilogy

3) Place names: I want to go to there.
   A. Kiss River
   B. Gossamer Ridge
   C. Satin Hollow

4) Sounds like/might be an '80s power ballad.
   A. Take Me There
   B. All I Need
   C. Against All Odds

5) Title and summary, all in one.
   A. Stranded with Her Ex
   B. Love and Danger in a Highland Castle
   C. Rancher's Twins: Mom Needed

I hope you don't get tired of this game, because I never, ever, ever will.  I'd offer a prize if you guessed right, but I don't trust you not to use Amazon.  Also, it's entirely likely that my made-up ones really exist.  And now I'm really tempted to start reading Lady Drusilla's Road to Ruin.

(PS. I hope no one things I'm mocking the books.  It's the titles that are so much fun!)

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.