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

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

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:

Hyperion

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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

The Book of Blood and Shadow

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The Book of Blood and Shadow
Robin Wasserman

Publisher’s Blurb:

It was like a nightmare, but there was no waking up.  When the night began, Nora had two best friends and an embarrassingly storybook one true love.  When it ended, she had nothing but blood on her hands and an echoing scream that stopped only when the tranquilizers pierced her veins and left her in the merciful dark.

But the next morning, it was all still true: Chris was dead.  His girlfriend Adriane, Nora’s best friend, was catatonic. And Max, Nora’s sweet, smart, soft-spoken Prince Charming, was gone. He was also—according to the police, according to her parents, according to everyone—a murderer.

Desperate to prove his innocence, Nora follows the trail of blood, no matter where it leads. It ultimately brings her to the ancient streets of Prague, where she is drawn into a dark web of secret societies and shadowy conspirators, all driven by a mad desire to possess something that might not even exist. For buried in a centuries-old manuscript is the secret to ultimate knowledge and communion with the divine; it is said that he who controls the Lumen Dei controls the world. Unbeknownst to her, Nora now holds the crucial key to unlocking its secrets. Her night of blood is just one piece in a puzzle that spans continents and centuries. Solving it may be the only way she can save her own life.

This book should have been right down my alley.  I should have sat down and opened the first page and then turned the last as if it had been 150 pages instead of the full 432.  That’s not what happened.  All of the buzz I’d heard about this book gave me such high hopes that I was expecting to simply open the page and be whisked away into a world of murder and history.  What actually happened was that although I still picked up the book at every available opportunity, it had more to do with what I had in my reading stack and less to do with this book.  I found it difficult to really invest in the characters, which in turn threw the plot into question.  About 90% of the way through the book I realized that the main character, Nora, was so emotionless and bland that I found it incredibly hard to believe that she was truly stuck in this terror ridden adventure.  The element of suspense was nullified by her inability to connect with her surroundings and the people with her.  The author tried to drudge up robed figures lurking in shadows, but all I ever saw were shadows.

Aside from the bland characterization, the rest of the story feels a little ham-handed, whether it be the slow beginning or the chaotic toiling of the Prague half.  While I understand why it can be necessary to build a beginning in this way, the tag line on the back of the book taunted me every time I closed the book until I got to Chris’s murder.  “One girl. One night. Centuries of secrets.”  I understand that the author had nothing at all to do with the tag line (galling though it was), the slow build up, however, is another issue.  When Things started happening it actually took me by surprise even after the murder.  And once they were in Prague, it felt like Wasserman spent more time telling me what Nora was thinking and feeling rather than simply showing me and letting me come to a conclusion.  This aspect, in particular, comes off as ham-handed.

However, there are redeeming bits to the story.  Elizabeth Weston’s letters are fascinating to say the least.  The section of the story that centered on her plotline, I found to be the most enticing.  Wasserman does a wonderful job of bringing 17^th century Prague to life.  She fills it with the swirling mists of alchemy and the sometimes morbid curios of the wealthy to create a richly woven tapestry on which her character can act.  Of all of the characters, Elizabeth is the most believably human.   She seems whole in a way that all of the others lack, which is weird since she had been dead for four hundred years.

In the end, this story is certainly action packed.  Flipping between a lamp-lit Prague and one that echoes with car horns, you’ll find a struggle to survive that transcends time.

2.5 ink bottles
Character Believability:  2 Buffys
Character Investibility: 2 Doctors
Pacing/Tension/Urgency: 2 Dresdens
Worldbuilding:  3.5 Snyders
Language: 3.5 Feegles
Mystery:  3.5 Sherlocks

Book Links:  Goodreads, Publisher

Aunt Dimity and the Village Witch

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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 Ash Born Boy

Holy Announcement, Batman!

As you all know, The Near Witch was one of my favorite books of last year.  You can find the review here.  If you haven’t read it yet, the paperback comes out today.  You’ll want to go get that now… I’ll wait.  *stares at watch for thirty seconds* Everyone back?  Awesome, because to celebrate the release of the paperback of The Near Witch, “The Ash-Born Boy” is finally up at Disney*Hyperion.

What is “The Ash-Born Boy”, you ask? It’s a free story that Victoria wrote as a thank you to her readers and to answer one question:  ”Who was Cole before he came to Near?”  You can find it here and you’ll want to go read it.  It’s written in the same evocative prose as The Near Witch and it gives you back story on Cole.  You know, the back story that you wanted the whole time you were reading The Near Witch, but instead you sat on your hands and watched all the things unfold.  Yeah, that back story.

Here’s the awesome thing, even if you haven’t read The Near Witch you can still read The Ash-Born Boy.  There aren’t any spoilers.  If anything it’ll just make Cole’s character in The Near Witch that much more compelling.  If you want to wait to read The Near Witch first, however, the story will stay up at Disney*Hyperion’s website, and if it ever comes down, Victoria will carve out a space for it on her own site. It will always be available somewhere, and it will always be free.

You guys, I’ve read the story and I love it.  It’s not every day that an author gives readers a gift, particularly not one this richly woven.  I can’t recommend the story enough.  It will make you smile and will tug on your heart-stings.  Victoria uses the same chiaroscuro brush strokes to bring her characters to life and the action is stomach clenching.  As far as the usual platypus rating for this book, it’s 5 ink bottles easily.

Help Victoria celebrate today and go get the paperback of The Near Witch because it has more goodies in it.  You’ll find the first chapter of Victoria’s next book, The Archived, in the back.  I can’t tell you how excited I am for this book.  I’ve had it on my Goodreads to-read shelf since I finished The Near Witch and  I. Can’t. Wait.

Because Mondays Always Need a Good Bedtime Story…

You guessed it, it’s time for another David Tennant bedtime story.  It’s that kind of Monday.  It just needs a little bit of Doctor Who.  Enjoy.

The Color of Magic

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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

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