I Hunt Killers

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I Hunt Killers
Barry Lyga

Publisher’s Blurb:

What if the world’s worst serial killer…was your dad?

Jasper (Jazz) Dent is a likable teenager. A charmer, one might say.

But he’s also the son of the world’s most infamous serial killer, and for Dear Old Dad, Take Your Son to Work Day was year-round. Jazz has witnessed crime scenes the way cops wish they could–from the criminal’s point of view.

And now bodies are piling up in Lobo’s Nod.

In an effort to clear his name, Jazz joins the police in a hunt for a new serial killer. But Jazz has a secret–could he be more like his father than anyone knows?

Let’s start with the only two words that can really sum up this book:  holy shit.  I hadn’t ever thought about serial killer’s children, I think because I had some senseless hope that the universe would somehow deny something that innocent and impressionable to someone that horrifyingly evil.   Now that I have thought about it, all I can think is “holy shit” over and over again.  We’ll start with the fact that Jazz is remarkably well adjusted for someone who grew up listening to murders for bedtime stories.  The other side of that coin is that he’s also understandably conflicted.

In terms of characterization, I have no complaints with Lyga.  Jazz spends a fair bit of his time waffling over whether he’s good or if he’s really evil and just exceptionally skilled at faking good.  Here’s the thing though:  I never once got fed up with it because of course the kid’s going to have some burly inner demons given his upbringing.  I mean, even if it were just limited to the dreams, he would still have been monumentally screwed up. What tempers Jazz’s uncertainty a bit is that this is really just the (reasonably) exaggerated internally conflict between light and dark that everyone goes through.  Admittedly some to a greater extent than others, but everyone’s questioned themselves at some point.  By adding that small sense of familiarity, it adds an element of realism to the story.  No one wants to believe that serial killers exist, but an internal struggle is pretty easy to understand.

Okay this is the last thing I have to say about Jazz, but it’s something that was done so artfully that it surprised me.  What surprised me so much was the fact that I ended up sympathizing with Jazz so thoroughly.  I actually got a little defensive on his behalf, particularly when he was approached by families of his father’s victims who asked him why he didn’t do something.  Why didn’t he stop his dad?  Normally, that’s a perfectly valid question, but when it’s the killer’s son, it bothered me of a very basic level.  When you’re growing up, your parents are gods and what they do, who they are is perfectly normal.  Asking a seventeen year old why he didn’t do something to stop his dad pissed me off because his dad has been in prison for four years, so really they’re asking why a fourteen year old couldn’t have risen above a decade and a half of brainwashing to put a stop to it.  I can’t even begin to imagine what it’s like to lose a loved one knowing that they experienced so much pain and terror before they finally passed on.  My heart goes out to anyone who’s had to go through that.  But this is what Lyga did artfully.  He made me resent the victim’s families a little, which is an entirely new experience for me.  Normally, I’m pretty universally on their side.  It takes some good writing to get someone to abandon their pre-conceived inclinations.

In the end, this book is compelling, though even that doesn’t quite do it justice.  It’s fascinating layered over enthralling.  You’re probably thinking that this book is filled with only darkness from this review, but Jazz’s best friend and girlfriend provide a fair bit of relief from the murder and dismemberment.

4.5 ink bottles
Character Investibility:  5 Buffys
Character Believability:  5 Doctors
Pacing/Urgency/Tension:  4.5 Dresdens
Worldbuilding:  4.5 Snyders
Language:  4.5 Feegles
Mystery:  4.5 Sherlocks

Book Links:  Goodreads, Publisher

The Archived

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The Archived
Victoria Schwab

Goodreads Blurb:

Imagine a place where the dead rest on shelves like books.

Each body has a story to tell, a life seen in pictures that only Librarians can read. The dead are called Histories, and the vast realm in which they rest is the Archive.

Da first brought Mackenzie Bishop here four years ago, when she was twelve years old, frightened but determined to prove herself. Now Da is dead, and Mac has grown into what he once was, a ruthless Keeper, tasked with stopping often-violent Histories from waking up and getting out. Because of her job, she lies to the people she loves, and she knows fear for what it is: a useful tool for staying alive.

Being a Keeper isn’t just dangerous—it’s a constant reminder of those Mac has lost. Da’s death was hard enough, but now her little brother is gone too. Mac starts to wonder about the boundary between living and dying, sleeping and waking. In the Archive, the dead must never be disturbed. And yet, someone is deliberately altering Histories, erasing essential chapters. Unless Mac can piece together what remains, the Archive itself might crumble and fall.

In this haunting, richly imagined novel, Victoria Schwab reveals the thin lines between past and present, love and pain, trust and deceit, unbearable loss and hard-won redemption.

It’s rare that as a writer, I’m left breathlessly wordless, but I’ve been waiting to write this review for a few days now because I couldn’t quite figure out how to describe how much I loved it.  Here’s what I’ve come up with:  after reading this book, I will forever be classifying Schwab with Neil Gaiman in my mind.  They both manage to create these dark, haunting worlds that somehow manage to capture hope and love in ways that are truer that one can usually see in real life.  They embrace the creepiness of a dark hallway and the echoes of humming and yet the way each of the characters clings to the importance of life, it adds that tiny flicker of light that makes the story enthralling.  In some ways this book reminds me a little of The Graveyard Book, in that she took this place that can be really quite scary and made it into a place where people live at least part of their lives.

Now, to the reason for why exactly this book is so thoroughly compelling:  Schwab has this uncanny ability to write protagonist who are heart-wrenchingly endearing.  She writes them so well that it won’t matter if you can relate to them on a meta level, whether you’ve lost a sibling, because you’ll be able to feel what they’re feeling.  It’s not hard to imagine the compulsion to keep things that were important to the brother you lost.  I’d prefer not to because it’s far too painful to imagine my life without my goof of a brother in it, but Schwab made it so that I didn’t have to.  She wrote it so that the pain was there on the page so that I didn’t have to look inside myself to figure out what the character was experiencing.  Oddly, the icing on the cake, the one thing that made wish she was real, was the fact that she can read the history of any place, so she, of course, would read the history of her room.  That one moment of curiosity made her into a real human being for me.   If you could see all the people who had lived where you live, wouldn’t you?  I know I would.

Chiaroscuro by Caravaggio. From here.

Schwab, of course, wrote this book in the same way as The Near Witch, by which I mean that it’s vibrant and evocative.  She really does use words as if they’re paint.  I compared The Near Witch to a Caravaggio painting, but after reading The Archived, I realize that this is the book that more aptly resembles the master.  You see, Caravaggio was the first to use chiaroscuro, which is the use of light and dark to create high contrasts.  In The Archived, Schwab does this to sublime effect.  Whether it’s in the Narrows, where the only light comes from the cracks around the doors or when her mom’s cleaning the floor and you get the contrast of the brilliantly clean and sparkling inlaid rose against the dust clogged marble surrounding it, Schwab has no problem using contrast to bring an her work to life.  These images all stand out in my mind still, a week later because they’re so incredibly easy to see.  Schwab creates this vibrant tapestry on which her characters play and it feels more like watching a movie than it does reading a book because I’m not reading everything and imagining it.  No, I’m watching it happen and it’s amazing.

This book will be coming out on January 22, 2013 and you really should pick it up.  It’s entirely worth it.

4.5 ink bottles.
Character Believability:  5 Buffys
Character Investibility:  5 Doctors
Pacing/Urgency/Tension:  4.5 Dresdens
Worldbilding: 5 Snyders
Language: 5 Feegles
Mystery:  4 Sherlocks

Book Links:  Goodreads

Redshirts

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Redshirts
John Scalzi

Publisher’s Blurb:

Ensign Andrew Dahl has just been assigned to the Universal Union Capital Ship Intrepid, flagship of the Universal Union since the year 2456. It’s a prestige posting, and Andrew is thrilled all the more to be assigned to the ship’s Xenobiology laboratory.

Life couldn’t be better…until Andrew begins to pick up on the fact that (1) every Away Mission involves some kind of lethal confrontation with alien forces, (2) the ship’s captain, its chief science officer, and the handsome Lieutenant Kerensky always survive these confrontations, and (3) at least one low-ranked crew member is, sadly, always killed.

Not surprisingly, a great deal of energy below decks is expended on avoiding, at all costs, being assigned to an Away Mission. Then Andrew stumbles on information that completely transforms his and his colleagues’ understanding of what the starship Intrepid really is…and offers them a crazy, high-risk chance to save their own lives.

I’ve read quite a few reviews for this book, most of them written with more eloquence that I can summon that give you a better feel for the piece (here for one).  I had written out whole review for this piece, but I don’t think it truly does it justice, so today (for once), I’m going to keep it short.  This book, like so many of Scalzi’s books, hit a soft spot for me.  Let me tell you why.

You see, when I was little my dad used to let me watch Star Trek: The Next Generation with him.  I’ve come to cherish the simplicity of that time.  I don’t recall ever feeling frightened of what I was watching.  It was more a sense of profound awe that these people could forge their way through space and leave it a better place for them having been there and that I got to experience their stories curled up next to my dad on a well worn velvet couch.  It’s defined my life in ways that I don’t think I’ve come close to realizing.

The reason I bring this up here is because every time I pick up a Scalzi book, Redshirts in particular, I feel like I get to worm my way back into that space, sitting next to my dad, watching people fly through the stars.  There’s this odd sense of familiarity. (I feel compelled to specify that I find the universe to be familiar, not the author.  I’m not a stalker.)  I think that what Scalzi has done is tapped into a very realistic view of what the future would look like.  It feels like it’s my universe, just really far in the future.  It’s not that he’s showing me the future with Captain Picard forging his way through the galaxy.  It’s that he’s showing me the real people who report to the Captain and how their lives had meaning beyond the ten second cameo necessary to communicate the damage to levels 7-11.  He’s giving me the story of the people I would be sitting with at the mess hall and he makes it heart-wrenching and compelling.  He takes ordinary people and elevates them without taking away their mundane worries and cares.

In the end, of course this story will entertain you.  There will be some smiling and some shaking of the head in happy understanding, but really Scalzi speaks to the eight year old in you who read comic books or played D&D or watched Star Trek and it will be glorious.

Enjoy.

4.5 ink bottles.
Character Investibility:  4 Buffys
Character Believability:  4.5 Doctors
Pacing/Tension/Urgency: 4.5 Dresdens
Worldbuilding:  4.5 Snyders
Language:  4.5 Feegles
Mystery:  5 Sherlocks

Book Links:  Goodreads, Publisher

I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

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I Am Half-Sick of Shadows (Flavia de Luce #4)
Alan Bradley

Publisher’s Blurb:

It’s Christmastime, and the precocious Flavia de Luce—an eleven-year-old sleuth with a passion for chemistry and a penchant for crime-solving—is tucked away in her laboratory, whipping up a concoction to ensnare Saint Nick. But she is soon distracted when a film crew arrives at Buckshaw, the de Luces’ decaying English estate, to shoot a movie starring the famed Phyllis Wyvern. Amid a raging blizzard, the entire village of Bishop’s Lacey gathers at Buckshaw to watch Wyvern perform, yet nobody is prepared for the evening’s shocking conclusion: a body found, past midnight, strangled to death with a length of film. But who among the assembled guests would stage such a chilling scene? As the storm worsens and the list of suspects grows, Flavia must use every ounce of sly wit at her disposal to ferret out a killer hidden in plain sight.

After the last book, I was actually a little reticent to pick this one up, which wasn’t something I ever expected to happen.  I’m very happy to report that my concerns were entirely unfounded.  This book returns to the well constructed yarns that Bradley is so well known for.  It feels like it picks up where The Weeds that Strings the Hangman’s Bag left off.  In fact, I would have considered the series complete with just Books 1, 2 and 4.  However, before I devolve into another tangent about how much of an outlier Book 3 is, the point of this little exercise is to discuss this book.  I don’t know why I didn’t guess it, but an actress with a similar interest in crime and grisly murders is exactly what Flavia needed, a sort of mother figure without the inconvenience of evil step mothering.  She seemed a perfect fit for Flavia.  Finally an adult who could commiserate with her and help her solve crimes.  However, I would have liked for Wyvern’s cruelty to Bun to be explained in some way instead of simply throwing it in there to add another suspect to the list.

In fact, when it came to the suspects in this particular book they were oddly scarce and Bradley was completely aware of that.  I’m not sure what it says about me that I prefer a book wherein there can at least be someone for me to suspect, even if the rug is ripped out from under me later on, but in this book, I found myself not even bothering to guess.  Though that could have something to do with the fact that there were so many people in the book that it was actually a little difficult to keep them all straight.  You had your main characters and even your minor characters that you recognize from the other books, but in this one, Bradley threw in an entire film crew and then literally half the village.  The village I knew, but I actually found it difficult to keep the film crew straight.  When the final reveal came, I was a little surprised at who is was and actually found it a little difficult to swallow.

However, aside from that one moment of doubt, the rest of the story is downright delightful. Flavia’s scheme to catch Father Christmas (and I do mean catch) reminded me of all the Christmas mornings when I still believed that a man of magic had delivered presents over night.  Bradley’s blizzards actually made me want to be in them because they are the kind of blizzards you survive by hunkering down under a mountain of blankets and reading books until the wind stops blowing.  I cheered when Flavia finally called her sisters on their malodorous malarkey and asked them why they hated her so much.  Bradley’s true genius lies in his ability to capture a capricious eleven year old and make me love her.  I actually mentally reprimanded her sisters when they were awful to her because I knew no one else would and it takes truly good writing to get a reader to parent imaginary characters.  I found his revelation about Aunt Felicity to be marvelous.  It took a fussy old woman and made her into a the kind of strong woman the era is known for and he did it over the course of a single conversation that she spends half of complaining about her old age.

In the end, this book is lovely and delightful in all the best ways.  Flavia is still the chemistry loving child that we have all grown to love.  I only wish that she were real and not just a character because the world could use someone like Flavia de Luce.

4.5 ink bottles.
Character Believability: 4 Buffys
Character Investibility:  4 Doctors
Pacing/Tension/Urgency: 4.5 Dresdens
Worldbuilding:  5 Snyders
Language: 5 Feegles
Mystery:  4 Sherlocks

Book Links:  Goodreads, Publisher

Book Trailer:

The Drowned Cities

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The Drowned Cities (Ship Breaker, Book 2)
Paolo Bacigalupi

Publisher’s Blurb:

Soldier boys emerged from the darkness. Guns gleamed dully. Bullet bandoliers and scars draped their bare chests. Ugly brands scored their faces. She knew why these soldier boys had come. She knew what they sought, and she knew, too, that if they found it, her best friend would surely die.

In a dark future America where violence, terror, and grief touch everyone, young refugees Mahlia and Mouse have managed to leave behind the war-torn lands of the Drowned Cities by escaping into the jungle outskirts. But when they discover a wounded half-man–a bioengineered war beast named Tool–who is being hunted by a vengeful band of soldiers, their fragile existence quickly collapses. One is taken prisoner by merciless soldier boys, and the other is faced with an impossible decision: Risk everything to save a friend, or flee to a place where freedom might finally be possible.

I would like to preface this with the fact that I haven’t read the first book in this series yet (though that fact will be changing in the very near future).  Having said that, this is one of those rare books wherein it’s completely unnecessary to have read the first book in the series. Normally when I discover that I accidentally picked up the second book of a series, I give it about ten pages and then put it down in frustration because I’m clearly missing something huge that’s happened that’s super critical to this plot.  In this book, there’s every indication that huge things have happened, what with the whole war-torn jungle that used to be America, but it doesn’t constantly remind you that you missed Book 1.  I’m actually really looking forward to reading Book 1 now given the deft hand that was evident in this one.

Now, to the story:  it’s amazing.  It combines the horror and pain of Vietnam with Iraq and adds in a sprinkling of Afghanistan, but in a future where science has created a perfect killing machine.  The irony is that even though it’s in the future, it feels like it’s set in the Dark Ages, that period after the fall of Rome when the whole of the world was plunged into chaos and plague.  The sheer brutality of the book was both visceral and compelling.  The truly terrifying part is that about half way through the book, I realized that this is totally plausible.  First one politician accuses the other of treason, and then the other fires back.  It’s easy to see the snowball effect there.  The brilliance of Bacigalupi’s writing is that he gave me that whole history, the accusations followed by the division, followed by the taking up of arms, and then chaos, he gave me all of that over the span of maybe two sentences.  He made me see my world implode with twenty five words (give or take).

And within that world he gives you these characters of unflagging bravery and courage, even when they’re claiming to be cowards.  They live in a world where nothing is sure, but each other and themselves and he makes events turn around them and yet they still put one foot in front of the other.   It’s delightful to read.  When one thinks of the children of war, I usually look on with sympathy at the little ones who have been orphaned and are helpless in the face of wonton destruction.  Bacigalupi’s children of war are so much more than that.  Sure, they’ve been orphaned, but they aren’t helpless.  Mahlia listened to her peacekeeper father’s lessons on The Art of War and little Mouse knows where to forage for food in the jungle surrounding the Drowned Cities.  However, Bacigalupi used the brutality of the book to put his characters in danger over and over again and it made the book enthralling because he had gone to the trouble to make me care for them first.  Even Tool was never the animal that he could have been seen to be.  He was a warrior, albeit a wounded one.

I could gush about this book for ages, but there’s no need for that.  Pick up the book.  I really can’t recommend it enough.  It’s a gut wrenching tale that will grab hold of your brain stem and won’t let go.

4.5 ink bottles
Character Believability: 4.5 Buffys
Character Investibility:  4.5 Doctors
Pacing/Tension/Urgency: 5 Dresdens
Worldbuilding: 4.5 Snyders
Language: 5 Feegles
Mystery:  4 Sherlocks

Book Links:  Goodreads, Publisher

Book Trailer:

The Weed that Strings the Hangman’s Bag

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I must have lost my mind last week.  I read these books in order, but for some reason went ahead and posted the third book before the second.  I don’t even know.  Oh well.  Without further ado, the second book in the Flavia de Luce series:

The Weed that Strings the Hangman’s Bag (Flavia de Luce #2)
Alan Bradley

Publisher’s Blurb:

Flavia de Luce, a dangerously smart eleven-year-old with a passion for chemistry and a genius for solving murders, thinks that her days of crime-solving in the bucolic English hamlet of Bishop’s Lacey are over—until beloved puppeteer Rupert Porson has his own strings sizzled in an unfortunate rendezvous with electricity. But who’d do such a thing, and why? Does the madwoman who lives in Gibbet Wood know more than she’s letting on? What about Porson’s charming but erratic assistant? All clues point toward a suspicious death years earlier and a case the local constables can’t solve—without Flavia’s help. But in getting so close to who’s secretly pulling the strings of this dance of death, has our precocious heroine finally gotten in way over her head?

I wasn’t sure how Bradley would continue on with Flavia’s story, since the murder in The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie was so tidily tied up, but he did it and he did it magnificently.  I was more than a little surprised when he didn’t immediately open with a dead body, but instead allowed me to get to know the victim for a little while.  That being said, I loved that I was allowed that space of time to come to my own conclusions about Rupert Porson and the people who surrounded him.  Sure he was kind of horrible in that he clearly beat his travelling companion/mother to his unborn child, but Bradley also gave you glimpses of why Nialla would have been attracted to him in the first place, his showmanship.  Having all of this context on the victim made the murder all the more intriguing.  It’s brilliantly done.

Flavia is still completely adorable.  Her love of chemistry continues unabated and I still maintain that it’s chemistry presented in the most fascinating way possible.  Her fascination with poisons is both understandable and completely endearing.  That being said, the fact that she can manufacture them is minorly concerning, especially knowing that she’s faced with two older sisters who frequently tell her that she was adopted and that her dead mother tried to give her back, but they wouldn’t take her back.  However, although Flavia periodically falls into mildly morose moods, she still remains the same plucky young woman that we left at the end of Sweetness.  When she covers for the fact that she was examining a dead body by slowly rising from a crouch, loudly proclaiming “Amen”, elaborately crossing herself, and then dabbing at her eyes, I laughed out loud.  She might be sneaky and underhanded, but she’s delightfully sneaky and underhanded in all of the ways that an eleven year old investigating murder should be.  I particularly enjoyed the effect she has on the detectives at the end of the novel.  I can completely understand it since I was wearing the same look on my face as I was reading it.

I really can’t recommend this book enough.  It’s brilliantly written.  For a mystery that takes place in the quiet stuffiness of the British countryside, Bradley writes them with a unique balance of humor and urgency.  They are exceedingly entertaining.

4.5 ink bottles.
Character Believability:  5 Buffys
Character Investibility:  5 Doctors
Pacing/Tension/Urgency:  4.5 Dresdens
Worldbuilding:  4.5 Snyders
Language:  5 Feegles
Mystery:  4 Sherlocks

Book Links:  Goodreads, Publisher

The Enchantress

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The Enchantress (The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel, Book 6)
Michael Scott

Publisher’s Blurb:

The two that are one must become the one that is all. One to save the world, one to destroy it.

San Francisco:

Nicholas and Perenelle Flamel have one day left to live, and one job left to do. They must defend San Francisco. The monsters gathered on Alcatraz Island have been released and are heading toward the city. If they are not stopped, they will destroy everyone and everything in their path.

But even with the help of two of the greatest warriors from history and myth, will the Sorceress and the legendary Alchemyst be able to defend the city? Or is it the beginning of the end of the human race?

Danu Talis:

Sophie and Josh Newman traveled ten thousand years into the past to Danu Talis when they followed Dr. John Dee and Virginia Dare. And it’s on this legendary island that the battle for the world begins and ends.

Scathach, Prometheus, Palamedes, Shakespeare, Saint-Germain, and Joan of Arc are also on the island. And no one is sure what—or who—the twins will be fighting for.

Today the battle for Danu Talis will be won or lost.

But will the twins of legend stand together?

Or will they stand apart—

one to save the world and one to destroy it?

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this story, given the number of parallel plotlines that we left off with in Book 5.  And while I can’t say that my socks were completely knocked off, I will unreservedly say that this is my favorite book of the entire series, hands down.  Josh isn’t whiny at all, you guys.  In fact, he’s kind of awesome, but that’s not what makes this the best book.  No, in this story, Scott uses the parallel plotlines to build tension.  Everyone in one place is about to die? Yeah, let’s jump over here to this other place where other important things are happening.  And something important is happening everywhere.  Every page of this book feels like a dead sprint.  The characters are constantly moving with every ounce of their strength and being and it makes for such a compelling tale.

However, it’s not all hair-raising action.  Scott wove in humor here and there and it ratcheted to book up from really good to great.  The redshirts reference had me grinning from ear to ear and the fifteen year old in me laughed out loud at the thought of hearing the Imperial March when parents walk into the room.  Also, you don’t often get Sci Fi references in Fantasy, but after this, I want it to happen more often because it works.  Boy howdy, does it work.

The time travel dimension to the story had a part of my brain working overtime.  I realized at one point the number of decisions Scott would have had to have made in writing this book given the complexity of having people from the present going in the past, interacting with people they had known and loved in the future.  You see, even that sentence is muddled.  I would give you an example, but I don’t want to spoil anything.  Rest assured, where my writing is failing, Scott’s came through with flying colors.  There was never a doubt of who was where and with whom.  It’s astoundingly clear and without the use of any qualifiers.

The one thing I take issue with is when an Elder says that humans are essentially good.  While I’ve always hoped for that to be true, I know it isn’t universally true.  Stalin was not essentially good.  There’s no doubt in my mind that he thought what he was doing was for the greater good, but the truth is that you cannot be “essentially good” and be responsible for the brutal deaths of millions of innocent people.  It’s a nice sentiment, to imagine that we as a race are essentially good and I still like to think that the majority of human beings are, but the reality is that there are outliers.  It’s just too big of a generalization.  It exceeds the truth.

In the end, however, this story is a fast paced roller coaster ride of action, magic, and monsters.  I highly recommend it.

4.5 ink bottles.
Character Believability:  4.5 Buffys
Character Investibilty: 4.5 Doctors
Pacing/Tension/Urgency: 4.5 Dresdens
Worldbuilding: 4 Snyders
Language: 4.5 Feegles
Mystery: 5 Sherlocks

Book Links:  Goodreads, Publisher

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

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The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce Book 1)
Alan Bradley

Publisher’s blurb:

It is the summer of 1950–and at the once-grand mansion of Buckshaw, young Flavia de Luce, an aspiring chemist with a passion for poison, is intrigued by a series of inexplicable events: A dead bird is found on the doorstep, a postage stamp bizarrely pinned to its beak. Then, hours later, Flavia finds a man lying in the cucumber patch and watches him as he takes his dying breath.

For Flavia, who is both appalled and delighted, life begins in earnest when murder comes to Buckshaw. “I wish I could say I was afraid, but I wasn’t. Quite the contrary. This was by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life.”

Adorable.  I know that Flavia, would cringe at my use of the word to describe her, but it’s the perfect one to use.  She is adorable.  The stereotype of the plucky Brit has always struck me as endearing and Flavia is the concept of plucky embodied.  Everything about her made me want to smack her dad in the head and tell him what an amazing kid he has.  Item the First, she’s a massive chemistry nerd.  She uses archaic names of chemical compounds to calm her nerves (“Butter of Antimony…Flowers of Arsenic”).  I’m not going to lie, if I’d been able to learn about chemistry the way Flavia does, I would have a whole different viewpoint of the topic. Item the Second, she uses “scissors” as a curse word.  Any eleven year old in the world who uses the word scissors as a curse word gets an automatic amazing award.  Item the Third, she named her articulated skeleton Yorrick.  Do you see what I’m getting at now?  I wasn’t this cool when I was eleven, but retroactively I totally wish I had been.  If the Doctor were to ever show up in Flavia’s life, I wouldn’t be surprised at all.

As to the story, it’s surprisingly compelling.  It falls along the lines of a typical Agatha Christie novel (and not just because of the time period in which it’s set).  There’s a minimal amount of gore.  The plot centers almost entirely upon intrigue and Flavia’s progress in wading through it, with a small subplot regarding a fantastic prank she played on her sister.  (Seriously, if I had been half as clever as Flavia, I would have gotten away with so much more stuff.)  Like a cozy mystery, the cast of characters that revolve around Flavia are both eclectic and marvelous.  Throw in the fact that you’re in Britain in 1950 and the fact that the oddball histories of the characters are all marred by WWII, and you find there’s an odd sort of realism to the story. The tension and urgency of the story are wrought almost entirely by Flavia’s persistence.  Her tenacity is downright charming and it certainly goes far to keeping the story moving along at a reasonable clip.

In the end, this story is a perfectly lovely tale of murder and the plucky eleven year old who sets out to solve it.  I can’t tell you how thankful I am that this whole series is out so that I can pick up the next one tomorrow.

4.5 ink bottles.
Character Believability: 5 Buffys
Character Investibility:  5 Doctors
Pace/Urgency/Tension:  4.5 Dresdens
Worldbuilding: 4 Snyders
Language:  4.5 Feegles
Mystery:  4.5 Sherlocks

Book Links: Goodreads, Publisher

Book Trailer:

11/22/63

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11/22/63
Stephen King

I’ll admit that I didn’t devour this book, but at a little under 850 pages, it’s kind of impossible to.  What I will admit to is enjoying the living hell out of it.  This is one of those books that meanders a bit and that you want to do so.  I picked up the book intending to immerse myself in the early sixties, to learn more about the assassination through the fictional story.  Although I absolutely succeeded in that, what actually happened was that the part of the story that I found to be most compelling was the main character’s time in Jodie, TX.  Reading about the simplicity of life in that time period was endearing on so many levels.  I found Sadie and her no-nonsense practicality to be charming and wonderful and the changes she wrought in the main character made me smile every time.  I was a little bummed out when he had to go spend time researching Oswald.  There were times when I wanted to say, “psh, who really cares about him anyway,” only to remember that he was the reason I had picked up the book in the first place.  It’s a testament to King’s genius that the parts of the book I found to be the most compelling were the parts that had absolutely nothing to do with the assassination, the interstitial areas that some authors leave by the wayside.

Publisher’s Blurb:

ON NOVEMBER 22, 1963, THREE SHOTS RANG OUT IN DALLAS, PRESIDENT KENNEDY DIED, AND THE WORLD CHANGED. WHAT IF YOU COULD CHANGE IT BACK?

In this brilliantly conceived tour de force, Stephen King—who has absorbed the social, political, and popular culture of his generation more imaginatively and thoroughly than any other writer—takes readers on an incredible journey into the past and the possibility of altering it.

It begins with Jake Epping, a thirty-five-year-old English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching GED classes. He asks his students to write about an event that changed their lives, and one essay blows him away—a gruesome, harrowing story about the night more than fifty years ago when Harry Dunning’s father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a sledgehammer. Reading the essay is a watershed moment for Jake, his life—like Harry’s, like America’s in 1963—turning on a dime. Not much later his friend Al, who owns the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to the past, a particular day in 1958. And Al enlists Jake to take over the mission that has become his obsession—to prevent the Kennedy assassination.

So begins Jake’s new life as George Amberson, in a different world of Ike and JFK and Elvis, of big American cars and sock hops and cigarette smoke everywhere. From the dank little city of Derry, Maine (where there’s Dunning business to conduct), to the warmhearted small town of Jodie, Texas, where Jake falls dangerously in love, every turn is leading eventually, of course, to a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and to Dallas, where the past becomes heart-stoppingly suspenseful, and where history might not be history anymore. Time-travel has never been so believable. Or so terrifying.

You don’t actually expect to be disappointed when you reach the end of such an opus, but I’d be lying if I told you anything else.  I wasn’t disappointed in the story.  No, I was disappointed that there weren’t any more pages to read.  I actually read the afterword because I couldn’t quite bring myself to put the book down just yet.  If that doesn’t tell you how much I enjoyed the book, nothing really will.

One of the main things that truly astonished me about this book is Kings capacity to hold multiple linear strands of story in congruous lines.  His attention to detail is mind boggling.  I can’t remember what I had for dinner last night, but he can remember the exact make and caliber of a particular gun four hundred pages later.   It’s this detail that makes this story so rich, a thread of meaning throughout the story, an echo that pricks at your mind, adding depth where none had been previously.  In many ways this book shatters standard perceptions of space and time and I love it for that.

It seems ironic that I have so few words to describe how much I enjoyed this story, so I’ll leave you with this:  although this story is long and intricately woven, it is compelling and enchanting.  It’s truly remarkable.  Sure there are a few areas where the pace lags a bit, but they’re important down the line.  At this point, I think we can safely assume that King doesn’t do anything accidentally.

4.5 ink bottles.
Character Believability:  4.5 Buffys
Character Investibility:  4.5 Doctors
Pacing/Urgency/Tension: 4 Dresdens
Worldbuilding: 5 Snyders
Language: 5 Feegles
Mystery: 4.5 Sherlocks

Book Links:  Goodreads, Publisher

Book Introduction by Stephen King:

Sea Glass

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Sea Glass
Maria V. Snyder

This is Snyder’s darkest book yet.  The distrust and betrayal sown throughout it makes for a bleak tale, but it doesn’t make for a boring one.  I read this story in record time.  Every time I sat down with the book, I’d look up and another hundred pages would be gone. Once again, Snyder makes Opal so very relatable and human by plaguing her with self-doubt and a certain amount of self-pity and let’s be honest, who hasn’t felt those two emotions at some point in their life?  The men of the story are just as compelling, but it’s Opal who will make you turn the pages.  The story itself is a fast paced, gut clenching tale of action and adventure and I loved every minute of it.

Publisher’s blurb:

Student glass magician Opal Cowan’s newfound ability to steal a magician’s powers makes her too powerful. Ordered to house arrest by the Council, Opal dares defy them, traveling to the Moon Clan’s lands in search of Ulrick, the man she thinks she loves. Thinks because she is sure another man—now her prisoner—has switched souls with Ulrick.

In hostile territory, without proof or allies, Opal isn’t sure whom to trust. She can’t forget Kade, the handsome Stormdancer who doesn’t want to let her get close. And now everyone is after Opal’s special powers for their own deadly gain….

It’s so very easy to empathize with Opal because while you will doubt pretty much everyone else in the book, you will never doubt Opal.  In that regard there is no ambiguity to the story.  Snyder could have written a tale wherein you would doubt the narrator, but she didn’t and that’s wonderful.  Because, you see, if you doubted Opal and her belief that Devlin and Ulrick have been switched then the air of ambiguity would murder the pace of the plot and no one wants that.  By making Opal sure of at least one thing, she makes it so fantastically easy for the reader to invest in Opal.  She made it so that I could wish for the rest of the world to see what Opal sees and that’s part of what makes the pages blur by so quickly.

It’s kind of amazing the number of modern cultural issues Snyder hits on in this story.  There’s the underlying story of whether a human who has perpetrated horrifying atrocities can be rehabilitated in the story of Devlin.  There’s a little bit of xenophobia in the insistence of one of the stormdancers that Kade should be with another stormdancer and not a magician.  There’s the fairly strong commentary of a government’s willingness to delude itself.  Here’s the thing, this book doesn’t feel like a messaged book.  It doesn’t hit you over the head with these issues.  They’re woven in effortlessly and are only noticed if you sit down and think about them for a little while.

The story is fast paced and never lets up.  Just as soon as Opal gets a chance to rest, something happens that propels her forward into the next step and I can’t lie, I love Snyder’s pace.  She subtly builds in character development, but never at the expense of slowing down the story.  It just keeps chugging along.

4.5 ink bottles.
Character Believability: 5 Buffys
Character Investibility:  4.5 Doctors
Pace/Urgency/Tension:  4.5 Dresdens
Worldbuilding: 5 Snyders
Language:  5 Feegles
Mystery:  5 Sherlocks

Book Links:  Goodreads, Publisher