The Storm

Image via Goodreads

The Storm
Clive Cussler with Graham Brown

Publisher’s Blurb:

In the middle of the Indian Ocean, a NUMA research vessel is taking water samples at sunset, when a crew member spots a sheen of black oil ahead of them. But it is not oil. Like a horde of army ants, a swarm of black particles suddenly attacks the ship, killing everyone aboard, while the ship itself goes up in flames.

A few hours later, Kurt Austin and Joe Zavala are on their way to the Indian Ocean. What they will find there on the smoldering hulk of the ship will eventually lead them to the discovery of the most audacious scheme they have ever known: a plan to permanently alter the weather on a global scale. It will kill millions . . . and it has already begun.

I’ll openly admit that it’s been a long time since I’ve read a Cussler novel and in that regard, I enjoyed this one, although to a lesser extent that I was expecting.  I remember opening a Cussler book and losing track of all time and space until I turned the final page, but that didn’t quite happen this time around and I don’t necessarily think that it’s due to the intervening years.  Initially I thought it was due to the co-authorship of the novel, but after a little bit of research, I don’t believe that to be the case.  Through my research (Megalith, Kill Zone), I learned that this story is primarily written by Brown, in which case, I’m impressed by Brown’s ability to hold true to Cussler’s style.  Knowing that the story isn’t necessarily written by Cussler makes it make a lot more sense, in that there are one or two stylistic departures that one wouldn’t normally expect from him.  I will say this: I do intend to hunt down more of Brown’s work because now I’m curious.

This is the first Kurt Austin novel I’ve read, so please forgive my ignorance of what he and Joe are normally like.  I did very much enjoy the byplay between the two, but I found myself stopping just shy of suspending all disbelief, which has never before happened during a Cussler book.  When Joe confused being on a boat with vertigo, I was baffled. Wouldn’t a person who’s spent a large portion of their life on a boat immediately recognize the motion of one, even in pitch black darkness?  Although this happened rarely throughout the book, it had the rather unfortunate effect of pulling me out of it.

The action is superbly well wrought, making the pages fly by at an incredible speed.  And even though it felt like the reveal on the Big Bad came early, it only meant that it was the action driving the story, not necessarily the mystery.  The characters were well done, though admittedly some more so than others.  I found the Trouts to be delightful and I devoured Joe’s portions of the story.

This is one instance wherein the bad guy is done very well. He has this undercurrent of immaturity that made him both compelling and truly horrifying. It felt a lot like watching a bully tease the little kid in school.  You cringe and wonder why on earth that kind of person would be given that kind of power.  One of the awesome things Cussler and Brown did in this book is the back story they provided for Jinn.  They give you the exact moment when the innocent child takes that first step down the path of evil mastermind.  It might not qualify as good parenting, but it certainly hits the mark for quality exposition.

In the end, it boils down to this:  this book is a fast paced tale of death and a few people’s quest to save the world before it gets eaten alive.  You won’t just read it. You’ll consume it.

4 ink bottles.
Character Believability: 4 Buffys
Character Investibility: 4 Doctors
Pacing/Tension/Urgency: 4.5 Dresdens
Worldbuilding: 4 Snyders
Language: 4 Feegles
Mystery: 2.5 Sherlocks

Book Links:  Goodreads, Publsiher

A Red Herring without Mustard

Image via Goodreads

A Red Herring without Mustard (Flavia de Luce #3)
Alan Bradley

Publisher’s Blurb:

In the hamlet of Bishop’s Lacey, the insidiously clever and unflappable eleven-year-old sleuth Flavia de Luce had asked a Gypsy woman to tell her fortune—never expecting to later stumble across the poor soul, bludgeoned almost to death in the wee hours in her own caravan. Was this an act of retribution by those convinced that the soothsayer abducted a local child years ago? Certainly Flavia understands the bliss of settling scores; revenge is a delightful pastime when one has two odious older sisters. But how could this crime be connected to the missing baby? As the red herrings pile up, Flavia must sort through clues fishy and foul to untangle dark deeds and dangerous secrets.

This book, out of all the books in the series, really highlights the dark undertones of Flavia’s world.  In the end, I felt sorry for her.  The aunt in me wants her to have a more wholesome environment in which to live.  A place where she wouldn’t have to live in anticipation of being kidnapped, bound, and left in the cellars by her sisters.  In fact, it struck me as particularly hateful and mean spirited that this treatment came at the hands of a sister who at the age of 17 I would have thought too old for those kind of antics.  Increasingly, I really want to know what happened, aside from their mother’s death, that would have caused this absurd level of animosity.  Several times while reading this book, I stopped and wondered at Flavia’s fierce determination in the face of her sisters’ consistent efforts to disenfranchise her.  Her father’s distant mild approval of her actions seems a pittance compared to the systematic warfare of her sisters.

As to the story of this book, it’s not quite a straightforward as Book 1 and 2 of the series.  It reads more like a Dan Brown novel than Alan Bradley with shapes rising out of the amorphous fog at surprising and unexpected times and not universally to the plot’s benefit.  In mystery, one expects a certain amount of smoke and mirrors, but in this book, it really felt like it was nothing but smoke and mirrors right up until Flavia’s famous exposition at the end and even then, not all of my questions were answered.  Flavia’s actions seem more helter skelter in this book.  She rarely had a reason to go places, she just set out as if it was a high adventure and she was Alice in Wonderland.  I found her willingness to sneak Porcelain into her bedroom to be a bit strange and even further I found the family’s reaction to Porcelain’s dinner clothes to be somewhat false.  The appearance of the murdered body was quite bizarre to me in that it came out of nowhere and played second fiddle to the rest of the plot for the entire story. You’d really think discovering a body hanging from a sculpture in your backyard would leave an indelible impression on a person, but Flavia keeps on forgetting about him.  Even for an eleven year old sleuth who’s used to finding dead bodies around her house, you’d think she’d spend at least a significant portion of her time thinking about him.  It’s baffling.

However, all of that aside, this is still a Flavia de Luce story and she still shines in all of her adorableness.  From her verbal conversations with her bicycle to the fact that she has dry cleaning solution in her personal chemistry lab, she’s still the same precocious eleven year old that we’d left off with in The Weed that Strings the Hangman’s Bag.  She still roams about, unchecked, and wiggles information out of people that the police would never have a chance at procuring.  It cracked me up when Inspector Hewitt politely asks her father to keep her at home since she keeps showing up at crime scenes and discovering important pieces of evidence that they missed.  You know he’s doing it for her protection, which is incredibly endearing, but the way she acts subsequently is nothing short of delightful.  Bradley’s portrayal of the 1950’s English countryside is both bucolic and exciting.  It’s simultaneously idealized and realistic.  You have the simplicity of village life juxtaposed with the complexity of estate law and it’s done marvelously.  Bradley has created the perfect world for Flavia to exist in and I can’t wait to read the next book.

4 ink bottles.
Character Believability:  4 Buffys
Character Investibility: 4 Doctors
Pacing/Urgency/Tension: 3.5 Dresdens
Worldbuilding: 5 Snyders
Language: 5 Feegles
Mystery: 3.5 Sherlocks

Book Links:  Goodreads, Publisher

Hyperion

Image via Goodreads

Hyperion
Dan Simmons

It’s really hard to write this review without including my knee jerk reaction to the ending. Leaving that aside, however, I actually enjoyed this book once I realized what was going on (i.e., the fact that it’s a series of stories within a story).  Oddly, the least interesting part of the tale is the group of people moving closer and closer to their apparently eminent demise via impaling.  (Also oddly, that last sentence isn’t a spoiler.)  The parts of the book that held me enraptured were the pilgrims’ tales.  It will vary which of the stories appeals to you, but I can tell you this, even the story that I hated the most (that’d be the poet’s tale) still moved along at a healthy clip and kept me turning the pages.  The scholar’s tale, however, went so much farther that simply keeping the pages turning for me.  It ripped my heart out and ran over it.  It was powerfully written and did what every writer aims to achieve, it elicited one hell of an emotional response from me.

Goodread’s Blurb (from the paperback edition):

On the world called Hyperion, beyond the law of the Hegemony of Man, there waits the creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all. On the eve of Armageddon, with the entire galaxy at war, seven pilgrims set forth on a final voyage to Hyperion seeking the answers to the unsolved riddles of their lives. Each carries a desperate hope—and a terrible secret. And one may hold the fate of humanity in his hands.

As you guys know, I’m quite the sucker for a story that moves, but every once and a while, it’s kind of nice to sit down with a book that meanders a bit.  I’m not talking about meandering lost in the wilderness with no sense of plot.  No.  I’m talking about a story that meanders in such a way as when the threads start to come together in the tapestry, you’re momentarily blinded by the image that suddenly coalesces.  The one thing I can say about this story, unreservedly, is that it is richly told.  However, it’s not so rich that you can only consume small bits of it in one setting.  There were times when I was fully expecting to just read for a little bit and then set it aside, but then two hours would have passed and I’d still be glued to the book.  For a story that’s structurally based on The Canterbury Tales, it manages to be modern, futuristic, and fantastical.  And yes, I would say that it remains modern even though it was originally published 22 years ago.  The technology in the story stands the test of time, at least to my knowledge (which is pretty rudimentary when it comes to tactical nuclear weapons).  Although it falls primarily under Sci Fi, the fantasy elements to the story are impossible to ignore and actually added yet another layer of vibrancy to the story that would have been otherwise lacking .

However, there is one piece that I’m somewhat skeptical of and that’s the seemingly pervasive influence of John Keats through the millennia.  How many books last through a century?  Shall we say maybe 300?  We’re talking books that people can still reference and quote in current popular culture with no problems, the Shakespeares of the world.  In a world that’s thousands of years in the future, I found the idea that an 19^th century poet would be not just pervasive, but seemingly important to the very fabric of humanity’s existence to be a little hard to swallow.  Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy Keats as much as the next girl, but we exist in a society that features people who are proud they don’t read.  There are I Hate Books groups on Facebook and they have thousands of members (a little under 9000, just checked).  It’s hard to believe that should humanity one day be forced into the stars that the names they would chose to take with them would be centered on a poets. Granted it’s certainly something I would hope for, but that doesn’t make it any more likely.

You’re probably asking yourself why I’m posting about a 22 year old story that isn’t pervasively popular.  I starting listening to the Sword and Laser podcast after Veronica Belmont was on the Nerdist podcast and you guys, I freaking love it.  It’s not often that we, as readers, are allowed a sense of community.  Reading is inherently an individual activity and I’ve never been involved in a reading group before.  That being said, it’s been nothing short of delightful for me to read the discussions of Hyperion on Goodreads (there’s a Sword and Laser group there) as I’ve read the book.  They’re pretty good about spoiler warnings, so it’s possible to read discussions that are pertinent to where you are in the book in real time. You can even contribute to them.  It’s refreshing to be able to interact with a bunch of other people who are reading the same thing as you without having the time commitment of a true book club wherein you have to go somewhere and bake something in advance.  Sword and Laser also has a show on Geek and Sundry’s YouTube channel and I highly suggest it.  They have a dragon.

Now, back to the book.  It’s a subtlety woven tale of death, treachery, and fatefully converging lives.  If you have a little bit of spare time, it’s certainly worth it.  If you want to give up at the poet’s tale, try to get through the scholar’s tale.  If you hate it at that point, then I can’t help you.

4 ink bottles.
Character Believability: 4 Buffys
Character Investibility: 3.5 Doctors
Pacing/Tension/Urgency: 4 Dresdens
Worldbuilding: 5 Snyders
Language:  4.5 Feegles
Mystery:  4 Sherlocks

Book Link:  Goodreads

Aunt Dimity and the Village Witch

Image via Goodreads

Aunt Dimity and the Village Witch
Nancy Atherton

The one word that comes to mind every time I think of this book is lovely.  Atherton builds a small village in the English countryside that is populated by exactly the kind of people one would expect to find there.  It seems to have missed the last century, in that people are more worried about their neighbor’s welfare than they are about what dress Kate Middleton worn to the gala last night.  You won’t find constant twitter updates here or anybody talking about the most recent podcast.  Ordinarily, when I sit down and pick up a book, I curl up in bed with a cup of earl grey or a Stella Artois and the world outside my window disappears.  Reading this book went beyond that.  It was bizarrely cathartic to me that this place could exist in this time.  It’s comforting to know that there’s a place where cell phones and husband grubbing spinsters exist simultaneously. It results in this delightfully light romp through the English countryside.

Publisher’s Blurb:

When Amelia Thistle moves to Finch, her new neighbors welcome her with open arms-and inquiring minds. Among them is Lori Shepherd, who isn’t fooled by Amelia’s unassuming persona. Amelia is, in fact, a world-famous artist with a rabid and eager-to-stalk fan base.

In order to keep peace in Finch, Lori must help Amelia conceal her identity. Amelia, meanwhile, sets about working on the riddle that brought her to town in the first place. A fragment of a family diary hints that one of Amelia’s ancestors might have been Mistress Meg, the Mad Witch of Finch. Following the clue, Lori hunts through Finch’s darkest and most secret corners, all the while dodging nosy neighbors and Amelia’s frantic fans. With Aunt Dimity’s otherworldly help, Lori inches closer to the true story of Mistress Meg-and Amelia.

In truth, I found this book to be refreshing.  It’s not every day when you get to read a mystery that doesn’t center on a murder or a terrorist plot of some kind or another.  The search for a hidden 17^th century memoir that’s been hidden piecemeal throughout a sleepy village is nothing short of delightful.  At no point is the situation life or death for our characters and though that can pump up the suspense, it’s wonderful to read a book that kept my eyes glued to the page without resorting to it.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m a sucker for a good murder mystery or a action adventure that’s all action (see my review of Soft Target), but some days I want the mystery without the gore and this book 100% delivers on that.  It’s multi-faceted and complex without being ham-handed or overbearing.

There are two aspects, however, in which this story truly shines:  characterization and setting. We’ll start with the people.  Atherton created an entire village of fully fleshed out human beings with hopes and dreams, adorable idiosyncrasies and flaws.  For a while I thought that a few of the characters were going to be left on the shelf as dusty stereotypes, but rest assured, she didn’t leave them there.  These secondary characters were dusted off and allowed to adapt and grow.  Since part of the premise of the book is the intrinsic value of village life, it was necessary to create a cast of believable and fully realized people to populate it.  I’ll admit that there were times when I doubted that this could possibly be happening on the same planet that I live on, but the level to which I wanted it to be true more than compensated.

As to the setting, it’s surprising the economy of words with which Atherton brings the village to life.  The tearoom and village green are left with only their names as their descriptors, allowing my mind to populate them with dainty china and verdant grass.  Atherton does describe the locations of the clues more thoroughly, which is as it should be since they will have to be searched for the aforementioned clue, but when she does I was more than a little surprised to find that it matched (at least externally) what I had in my mind already.  Granted the names of the cottages were pretty damn expressive, in and of themselves, and once again I found it difficult to believe that there’s a house on the planet that’s commonly referred to as Pussywillows, but oh how I want it to be true.

This is the first book I’ve read in this series and I fully intend to go back and read the rest, but there’s a key piece to this story/series that I haven’t covered yet:  Aunt Dimity.  It’s not explained how the effect is achieved in the story, but the main character, Lori, has a journal which she can speak to and her deceased aunt will write her response.  It sounds weird when I describe it like that, I know, but oddly, within the confines of the book it works.  You look forward tp Lori sitting down to talk to Aunt Dimity in front of the fire because Aunt Dimity is something of a spit fire.  She reminds me quite a lot of Granny Weatherwax from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld.  She’s exceedingly intelligent, pragmatic and always talks with a certain dry wit that I just adore.  We should all be so lucky to have a leather bound Aunt Dimity in our life.

In the end, this book is a light read, but it’s delightful nonetheless.  If you have a free afternoon, this is one hell of a way to spend it.

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

Book Links:  Goodreads, Publisher

The Light Fantastic

Image via Goodreads

The Light Fantastic
Terry Pratchett

I’m not going to lie, every time I picked up this book, I heard Sam Rockwell saying “let’s trip the light fantastic” from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Totally unrelated to the actual book, but it couldn’t be helped.  Aside from that, I enjoyed this story more than I did the first book of Discworld (The Color of Magic).  I was oddly thrilled to discover that Rincewind and Twoflower were still our leading characters and, I have to say, the addition of Cohen the Barbarian and Bethan was both welcome and highly entertaining. A hero with no teeth that pronounces every “s” as a “sh” had me laughing out loud (particularly when he’s talking about sitting by the fire).  It’s very rare to find such a combination of humor and fantasy, but Pratchett always combines the two into the perfect recipe.

Publisher’s Blurb:

Terry Pratchett’s profoundly irreverent, bestselling novels have garnered him a revered position in the halls of parody next to the likes of Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams, and Carl Hiaasen.

In The Light Fantastic, only one individual can save the world from a disastrous collision. Unfortunately, the hero happens to be the singularly inept wizard Rincewind, who was last seen falling off the edge of the world.

It kind of stuns me the way Pratchett can talk about huge big ticket items while keeping his books light and clever.  In this book, he covers religious intolerance in a big way without bogging down the story.  I mean, they basically have a witch hunt on the Disc (though in this case, they’re hunting for wizards) and Pratchett does a marvelous job of subtly weaving in the impulsions that can drive a group of people to clamor for death without clouting me over the head with it.  I don’t know if he actually had Group Think or mob behavior on the mind, but he built it in and highlighted it in stark relief.

Aside from the heavy stuff, which actually manages to feel light when you’re reading it, Pratchett once again did a delightful job of crafting an entertaining tale.  I love that the one person who can save the world is the most inept one on it.  I love that he resolutely refuses to believe that the trees are talking to him because if they are then he’s finally gone around the bend.  Pratchett paints his world in every sense available.  From the scent of Ankh-Morpork to the syrupy golden light of the Disc’s sun, Pratchett creates a vividly realized world and he populates it with things made of magic and imagination and everything that’s good in fantasy.  With every turned page, I smiled at some other tiny fact Pratchett included.   More people could take a page out of his book.

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

Book Links:  Goodreads, Publisher

The Color of Magic

Image via Goodreads

I will be re-reading Pratchett’s Discworld series from start to stop in between new releases for a while.  Consider yourselves warned.

The Color of Magic (Discworld #1)
Terry Pratchett

I shouldn’t be surprised that this isn’t my favorite Discworld book thus far.  It’s easy to see the seeds of everything that makes a Pratchett book truly great in this book, and I mean great as in the greats of the ancient world.  You have a footnote, a lead character who is brave in spite of themselves, imps that made me smile everything they appeared, and a box made of sapient wood that follows its owner regardless of where they go.  Here’s the thing, even though this isn’t my favorite Pratchett book, it’s still flipping incredible.  I love the way he portrays heroes as dumb oafs who walk around flipping open altars because hero logic dictates that there’s gold beneath every altar.  The lead character, Rincewind, is delightfully bumbly and consistently brave in spite of his bone deep cowardice.  The story’s pace rarely flagged and when it did, it didn’t for long.  Not my favorite, sure, but still good.

Publisher’s Blurb:

Terry Pratchett’s profoundly irreverent, bestselling novels have garnered him a revered position in the halls of parody next to the likes of Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams, and Carl Hiaasen.

The Color of Magic is Terry Pratchett’s maiden voyage through the now-legendary land of Discworld. This is where it all begins — with the tourist Twoflower and his wizard guide, Rincewind.

With regards to the folklore contained in this story, I’m completely in love with the idea that Discworld is a giant sea turtle, slowly swimming through the universe, and that on his back Discworld is held up by four enormous elephants.  As a version of the Iroquois creation myth, it added a bizarre sense of familiarity to a tale of magic and gods, though on some strange level this seems more realistically modern to me.  Sure the Iroquois would have set the giant turtle in the ocean because that was the size of their world.  They didn’t know at the time that they were sitting on a lump of rock that’s hurtling through space at a little under 70,000 mph (only accounting for orbital movement, if you throw in the movement of the solar system, it’s 446,400 mph [numbers from here]).  Pratchett’s expansion of the myth to include the fact that we know we’re hurtling through space brings the myth into the age of space shuttles, which is kind of awesome.  He includes the theory of the multiverse (a personal favorite) making it actually possible that in some version of the universe there could be a flat world suspended above four elephants balanced upon a giant sea turtle IN REAL LIFE.  (I really didn’t start that paragraph expecting to end in a line about the multiverse, I promise.)

Though the story didn’t suck me in on page one, it still did a marvelous job of keeping my eyes glued to the page.  Sure, it was a little easier to put down than usual, but that’s not really saying much since that only meant that I was able to put it down if there was something pressing I needed to do.  It’s a little astonishing to me that this was Pratchett’s first book.  You can totally see how the magnificence that is the rest of the Discworld series is seeded in this book and he does it in a way that appears to be completely effortless.  Pratchett’s imagination must truly be a place of wonder and I’m grateful that he let us in to share it with him.

4 ink bottles.
Character Believability: 4.5 Buffys
Character Investibility:  4 Doctors
Pace/Urgency/Tension:  3.5 Dresdens
Worldbuilding: 5 Snyders
Language:  5 Feegles
Mystery:  4 Sherlocks

Book Links:  Goodreads, Publisher

fated

Image via Goodreads

fated  (Alex Verus #1)
Benedict Jacka

It’s not possible to read this book without relating it to the Dresden Files, for two reasons.  The first is the blurb on the cover from Jim Butcher stating that “Harry Dresden would like Alex Verus tremendously—and be a little nervous around him.  I just added Benedict Jacka to my must-read list.”  The second reason is the direct reference to Dresden as a guy Alex heard of who advertised under Wizard in the yellow pages within the novel itself.  At first, there were a bunch of parallels between the two stories/characters:  two men, neither in the favor of their ruling bodies, both of whom survived horrifying apprenticeships and still bear the resulting scars.  However, although similar, there are stark differences between the two.  While Harry can control the elements, Alex can only see the future.  While Harry was his uncle’s apprentice, Alex was a slave to a Dark mage. The main reason it brought Dresden to mind so strongly is because there was a Dresden shaped hole in my reading that I hadn’t noticed until I read the first sentence of this book.  I’m not going to lie, Alex fits into that hole perfectly.  He’ll never replace Dresden, because let’s be honest, who really could, but there’s room in my reading life for the both of them.

Publisher’s Blurb:

Alex Verus is part of a world hidden in plain sight, running a magic shop in London. And while Alex’s own powers aren’t as showy as some mages, he does have the advantage of foreseeing the possible future–allowing him to pull off operations that have a million-to-one-chance of success.

But when Alex is approached by multiple factions to crack open a relic from a long-ago mage war, he knows that whatever’s inside must be beyond powerful. And thanks to his abilities, Alex can predict that by taking the job, his odds of survival are about to go from slim to none…

Image via Goodreads

Now, as to the story, it’s pretty damn good.  Jacka’s characterization is strong and although there’s a short period wherein the pacing flags for the vast majority of the tale the pacing combines with the tension to glue your eyes to the page.  I read this book in a single afternoon.  I simply couldn’t put it down.   Now, here’s where Jacka shines, his worldbuilding. It’s superbly done.  Between the blue green flickering light of his barriers and his fog marbles, he genuinely created a world that’s surprisingly easy to see and completely riveting.  The final bit of action is made all the more fascinating by its inter-dimensional traits.

With regards to the protagonist, Alex Verus, I’m fascinated by the man and his gift.  I’d never really thought out the implications of having the ability to see the future, but after reading this book,oh my god do I want it.  He might have to rely on his wits during a physical fight, but with his ability he has both wits and knowledge galore.  On a different level, I’m wholly glad that this is fiction because I don’t want to have to worry about someone out there who has a few hours on their hands who happens to run into my thread of the future and decides to ferret out all of my embarrassing secrets.  I’m naturally clumsy.  While I’m sure it would be an entertaining few hours, I’d really rather live in a world where someone isn’t sitting on a park bench laughing themself hoarse while I fall down stairs over and over again.  However, if I did live in that world, I can completely see how beneficial it would be to have this particular skill.  Although, Alex is more than just his gift, he’s pragmatic and heroic.  His need to protect those around him is incredibly endearing and serves to make the story more compelling.  Not to mention Jacka’s artful way to introducing us to the growing cast of those who surround Alex.

In the end, this is a well crafted, highly entertaining piece of urban fantasy.  It’s a world that exists within our own, only it makes for a much better read than my daily life.

4 ink bottles
Character Believability:  4 Buffys
Character Investibility:  4.5 Doctors
Pacing/Tension/Urgency:  4 Dresdens
Worldbuilding:  4 Snyders
Language:  4 Feegles
Mystery:  3.5 Sherlocks

Book Links:  Goodreads, Publisher

The second book in this series is slated to release on May 29^th.  Get a move on reading this one, because you’re going to want to be up and running before the next one comes out.

If Walls Could Talk

Image via Goodreads

If Walls Could Talk:  An Intimate History of the Home
Lucy Worsley

I’m not as likely to pick up a nonfiction book as I am a good sci fi epic or a sweeping fantasy, but I do have a weakness for oddball histories.  This particular book falls perfectly into that category.  Part of the reason I tend to avoid nonfiction is that I don’t have the time (or sometimes the ability to stay awake) to slog through page after page of dryly laid out facts.  Worsley sidesteps this problem marvelously.  Instead of narrowing down her focus and analyzing one thing in detail, she takes a wide variety of home themed topics and covers them lightly.  Now, when I say lightly, I really want to emphasize that that’s what makes this book so successful.  Worsley does a remarkable job of never taking the topics too seriously, but instead treats them with the light humor that they all deserve.  How can one discuss using hay as toilet paper and not chuckle a bit (there’s also some cringing, but only because hay is pokey and toilet paper should never be pokey).   I was a little surprised at the number of things I learned from this book, particularly in areas in which I already considered myself informed.  Although the book primarily covers the history of the British home, there are glimpses into American and even German homes scattered throughout.  All in all, this book is written with a light hearted, wry humor that makes the information that much more interesting.

Publisher’s Blurb:

Why did the flushing toilet take two centuries to catch on? Why did Samuel Pepys never give his mistresses an orgasm? Why did medieval people sleep sitting up? When were the two “dirty centuries”? Why did gas lighting cause Victorian ladies to faint? Why, for centuries, did people fear fruit? All these questions will be answered in this juicy, smelly, and truly intimate history of home life. Lucy Worsley takes us through the bedroom, bathroom, living room, and kitchen, covering the architectural history of each room, but concentrating on what people actually did in bed, in the bath, at the table, and at the stove. From sauce-stirring to breast-feeding, teeth-cleaning to masturbation, getting dressed to getting married, this book will make you see your home with new eyes.

I know you won’t be able to believe it, but I only have one complaint about this book.  There are times when the author put herself into historical situations, such as printing wallpaper, and in the book there are usually only one or two sentences about her experiences, usually just to verify that the historical records are accurate. Now, I’m sure she did that because brevity is generally something to be sought after in these situations, but every single time one of these instances popped up, I found myself wanted to know more.  I wanted to know why it took years to become proficient at printing wallpaper.  Was it because the machine was large and unwieldy or because the ink was difficult to apply to the paper in just the right way? It didn’t have to be a long explanation, but I felt like I needed for one to have been there.  It’s pretty cool that Worsley found all of these places that would literally put her into history.  I would have very much liked to have read just a little more about these experiences.

Outside of that single complaint, however, I really enjoyed this book.  I found the information to be fascinating.  The topics covered where both informative and entertaining, which is a very hard balance to achieve in this kind of nonfiction.  Due to the pacing of the book, there really isn’t a dull moment. If you’re curious about how home life has evolved over the last millennia, I highly recommend this book in particular.

4 ink bottles.
Character Believability: Not Applicable
Character Investibility:  Not Applicable
Pace/Urgency/Tension:  4 Dresdens
Worldbuilding: Not Applicable
Language:  4 Feegles
Mystery:  Not Applicable

Book Links:  Goodreads, Publisher

Ripper

Image via Goodreads

Ripper
Stefan Petrucha

For a book about an orphan, I’m still a little floored at how it managed to encompass everything that fascinates me about this period.  There’s a kind of steampunk flair to the Pinkerton agency that had my imagination running overtime, but it wasn’t just the gleaming steel of the pneumatic subway that had my eyes glued to the page.  Petrucha’s world encapsulates two things that I’ve long been fascinated by:  the Pinkertons and Jack the Ripper.  Although I knew they existed in the same time, I had never before tied them together into the same place and the result is a highly suspenseful piece of mystery, filled with death, hope, admiration, and stick-to-itiveness.  I kind of love that Petrucha places it in the grit and realism of New York City just before the turn of the century, but more than that, I love that he centers it in the world of youth fiction.  By placing his central character in a very unique situation, he gives him an interesting place to stand in the story.  For a good deal of the story, it feels as if he’s running over slick mud, that his feet will fall out from under him at any moment, which in no small part adds to the tension of the story. The one thing that adds the most urgency to the story, however, is his youth.  Of course the killer will strike again tonight, everything is of immediate importance to a 14 year old. The alarming thing is how often his instincts are correct.

Publisher’s Blurb:

You thought you knew him. You were dead wrong.

Carver Young dreams of becoming a detective, despite growing up in an orphanage with only crime novels to encourage him. But when he is adopted by Detective Hawking of the world famous Pinkerton Agency, Carver is given not only the chance to find his biological father, he finds himself smack in the middle of a real life investigation: tracking down a vicious serial killer who has thrown New York City into utter panic. When the case begins to unfold, however, it’s worse than he could have ever imagined, and his loyalty to Mr. Hawking and the Pinkertons comes into question. As the body count rises and the investigation becomes dire, Carver must decide where his true loyalty lies. Full of whip-smart dialogue, kid-friendly gadgets, and featuring a then New York City Police Commissioner Teddy Roosevelt, Ripper challenges everything you thought you knew about the world’s most famous serial killer.

I have a larger point to make, but upon reading that blurb, can I just say:  kid-friendly gadgets?  How is a gun with a timer kid-friendly?  The thought of a fourteen year old in a room with loaded guns that are all set on a timer does not speak of safety to me.  It speaks of unfortunate accident.  There are some sweet gadgets in the story, don’t get me wrong, but I wouldn’t hand any of them to a kid until they could vote, maybe even a little after. Whew.  Moving on…

I’ve always been fascinated by people who are so thoroughly evil that you want to disavow them from the human race.  I completely understand the impulse.  I don’t want to claim Jack the Ripper or Hitler as having any similarities to me, even on a level as basic as species. What they did was so horrible that you want to run away, screaming, while pointing a finger and condemning them to the worst parts of Hades, but the truth is that they were human beings who were capable of truly catastrophic evil.  To deny their humanity is to fail to understand how humans can become these monsters.  Petrucha does a remarkable job of weaving this idea into the story.  It’s rare to have an evil character in a book who is anything beyond one dimensional, but through Young’s persistent research, the character of Jack the Ripper is honed into a three dimensional being.  Still not a three dimensional being I’d like to meet, but oddly slightly less scary that the real life Ripper, since some of the veil is cut away.

As to the rest of the world Petrucha creates, I have to say that Teddy Roosevelt was one of my favorite characters, which is the least surprising sentence I’ve ever written.  I’ve always loved the boisterous hulking man and to hear him railing about corruption in the police force made me wish he could have been the commissioner in Gotham City.  They wouldn’t have needed Batman.  But that’s not my main point here.  My main point is that the world that Petrucha built was evocative.  The soot combined with the snow to make a New York City that was real in my imagination, but it went further to give the story a darker edge.  It seems to me that Petrucha went through this period and picked out all of the very best things to include in this story.  To think that there might have been an underground lair for a secret arm of the Pinkerton agency made me nerd out to no end.   Throw Teddy Roosevelt into the mix and a plucky fourteen year old who never gives up and you have a story that will set fire to your imagination.

In the end, this story if filled with suspense and action, but made more real by the heart of Carver Young.  Good luck putting it down.

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

Book Links:  Goodreads, Publisher

Book Trailer:

http://ahref=

Born Wicked

Image via Goodreads

Born Wicked (The Cahill Witch Chronicles:  Book 1)
Jessica Spotswood

This book is surprising in all the best ways.  I would not have thought it possible to pack so much action into a story of an older sister trying to protect her younger sisters without any abusive parents.  In fact, if anything, with one parent dead and the other travelling for business for 95% of the book, it’s kind of hard to get further away from abusive parents. No, Spotwood’s genius lies in the world of fear and paranoia she creates for Cate.  An oldest daughter left to care for her two sisters makes for an interesting story.  Throw in the fact that all three of them are witches living in a time when witchcraft is used as an excuse to keep women in line and you have a story that’s enthralling.

Publisher’s Blurb:

Blessed with a gift…cursed with a secret.

Everybody knows Cate Cahill and her sisters are eccentric. Too pretty, too reclusive, and far too educated for their own good. But the truth is even worse: they’re witches. And if their secret is discovered by the priests of the Brotherhood, it would mean an asylum, a prison ship – or an early grave.

Before her mother died, Cate promised to protect her sisters. But with only six months left to choose between marriage and the Sisterhood, she might not be able to keep her word . . . especially after she finds her mother’s diary, uncovering a secret that could spell her family’s destruction. Desperate to find alternatives to their fate, Cate starts scouring banned books and questioning rebellious new friends, all while juggling tea parties, shocking marriage proposals, and a forbidden romance with the completely unsuitable Finn Belastra.

If what her mother wrote is true, the Cahill girls aren’t safe. Not from the Brotherhood, the Sisterhood – not even from each other.

Primarily this story made me extraordinarily grateful that I was born in this place in this time.  For most of the history of our world women weren’t entitled to their opinions.  Hell, there are whole parts of the globe where the notion that women should be seen and not heard in not only accepted, but lauded.  The scariest part of this book, for me, is that they had advanced as a society past women’s rights and gay rights, but then somehow all of that was abolished and everyone’s rights were revoked.  The very basis of rights is that they are inalienable and therefore un-revoke-able, but in Spotwood’s world they did it with terrifying results.  The amount of stress Cate faces in this book is haunting in large part because of her revoked rights.  She gets angry about it and generally looks at it as the hypocritical bullshit that it is which serves to strengthen her character and make her into a Real Human Being.

As to the story, it’s gut wrenching.  There’s so much mystery and intrigue swirling throughout, but it never gets bogged down.  It feels like a dead sprint to the end because I needed to know.  Spotswood paints a vivid setting that lends the story further realism, but it’s her characters that really make the story.  I fell in love with them immediately, investing in their safety and well being whole heartedly.

I was surprised with how much I loved this story.  It’s spellbinding and lyrical, but urgent and tense at the same time.  I’m already looking forward to book 2.

4 ink bottles.

Book Links:  Goodreads, Publisher

Book Trailer:

http://ahref=