Archives - June 2009 archives -- index by author -- index by category -- favorite books -- links

Search Now:

12 June 2009

• Tamora Pierce, Terrier, Bloodhound: I read Terrier when it came out yonks ago (2006, I think) and liked it quite a lot, though I appear not to have booklogged it for some reason. Beka Cooper is a trainee Dog (called a "Puppy") in the Lord Provost's Guard, having clearly been destined for the job since she tracked down her mother's abuser at the age of eight. She is assigned to the Lower City, where crime is rampant, with two of the best Dogs as her trainers: easygoing Matthias Tunstall and tough Clary Goodwin.
  
  Beka's smart, observant, and determined to see justice done, but she does have one big problem: she's shy, and it's terribly difficult for her to talk to people she doesn't know. I find Beka especially appealing because of her shyness, actually. Pierce's heroines are all tough and smart and determined, but I like best those who have significant obstacles to overcome, like Beka and her shyness or Keladry (of the Protector of the Small series) and her struggle to become a knight in spite of a gender barrier. Beka and Keladry share something else as well: their love for animals. Beka has an oddly intelligent, purple-eyed cat named Pounce, who's more than a cat, and in the second book, she gets a hound as well.
  
  The books are essentially fantasy-world police procedurals, written in the form of Beka's journal. In Terrier, she seeks to solve two crimes: to locate and stop a serial blackmailer, kidnapper, and child-murderer, and to figure out the origins of the beautiful and valuable opals that are turning up and who is killing the crews that produce them. Bloodhound has a less complex plot: there's a counterfeiting ring about, and Beka and Goodwin travel to a neighboring city to track them down.
  
  The crime-filled Lower City is an interesting change from the other Tortall books, which are generally focused much more on the court. It also gives Pierce a chance to explore the moral complexities inherent in Beka's chosen job. The Dogs take bribes, sometimes; every criminal isn't arrested; there are more criminals than Dogs, and the Dogs have to make choices about whom to pursue. The Dogs use torture on prisoners, even though it's acknowledged several times that the information they get that way isn't necessarily good (although I don't recall anyone simply objecting to it on the grounds that torture is wrong no matter what, and I wonder if Pierce will explore that at some point). Beka forms friendships with some of the people who work for the Rogue, the leader of the city's lawbreakers, and I bet that this potential problem will be an even larger part of the third book.
  
  I think the first book (which I've now read twice) is better: the two plot threads support the length better, whereas the one plot thread in the second doesn't feel like enough to fill the pages, and it drags. I liked it anyway, and I think once the third book is out that Beka's series is likely to become one of my favorite Tortall-universe series (along with Protector of the Small).
  
  
• Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games: Katniss Everdeen lives in a future dystopia, the nation of Panem, in what used to be North America. The country is divided into districts, and Katniss's district is one of the poorest, where most people are on the edge of starvation and she hunts and gathers to keep herself and her mother and younger sister fed. Each year, every district must send one boy and one girl to the Hunger Games, a brutal battle to the death which is televised nationally and serves as a way for the capital to keep its districts, once rebellious, in line. Katniss becomes the girl tribute from her district, along with Peeta Mellark, the baker's son, who once did a good deed for Katniss. In the Hunger Games, though, it's a fight for survival, and Katniss must decide where her loyalties lie.
  
  Collins doesn't pull her punches with Katniss's character. She's tough and smart and pretty darn ruthless: not feisty, not spunky, just ruthless. I liked how Collins avoided what could easily have been the stock romantic plot, too, of true love conquering all, and concentrated on how vastly different Katniss's and Peeta's worldviews and mindsets are. I would have liked to get to know the other tributes a little more, but Katniss was so immediately engaging (and it's in first person anyway) that I was carried along by her, and by the breakneck pace of the plot. I'm very glad I knew this was the first of a series, or I would have had issues with the ending, which does wrap up the main plot, but doesn't address Katniss's inevitable struggle with the totalitarian government. As it is, there's certainly enough closure to satisfy, and I'm eager for the next book.
  
  
• Marie Brennan, In Ashes Lie: In this sequel to Midnight Never Come, Brennan moves forward from the end of the Elizabethan era to the middle of the seventeenth century. As the book begins, the Great Fire of London is just starting, and humans and fae alike are battling its flames. But it isn't just the fire that threatens: Brennan flashes back to earlier in the century, when King Charles I fought with politics and soldiers against the Roundheads, and Queen Lune of the fae Onyx Court struggles for her throne as well.
  
  In Ashes Lie has all the excellent historical detail and folklore of Midnight Never Come, and similarly good portraits of its historical characters and its fictional ones. I missed some of the emotional immediacy provided by the romance in Midnight Never Come, but the romance isn't just forgotten here; Lune still remembers and grieves for her human lover, who isn't simply forgotten as the immortal court lives past him. The flashback structure is well handled, and the plot is especially dexterously woven into the threads of history. I think I liked In Ashes Lie even more than Midnight Never Come, and I definitely look forward to the next book, which Brennan calls "an Enlightenment faerie alchemical fantasy".

• George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman and the Tiger, Flashman on the March: the last two books in the series, which I've enjoyed much more than I thought I would after reading the first one. Some are better than others (Royal Flash, Flashman and the Great Game), some aren't quite as good (Flashman on the March), but overall, they're a wickedly funny, historically deft, wonderfully characterized lot.
• Robert Jordan, Lord of Chaos (reread): ...and it's all downhill from here, so far; I think this book is where he really lost control of his plot threads. Also, it has the worst cover in the whole series, and that's saying something.
• Ross King, Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling: a well-structured and narrated history of the creation of the Sistine Chapel's famous frescoes; King places Michelangelo and Julius II in the context of their times, and his commentary on the paintings themselves is very interesting.

19 June 2009

• Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game: In 1920s Barcelona, David Martín is struggling to get by as a writer and longing to be noticed by the lovely Cristina, daughter of his mentor's chauffeur. When David discovers that his true métier is for Gothic, sensational stories, he comes to the attention of the mysterious publisher Andreas Corelli, who offers him a fortune to write a shocking book which will be the keystone to a new religion. His involvement with Corelli, however, does not lead David to fame and fortune, but deeper and deeper into a maze of fantastical, dangerous events.
  
  I loved Zafón's previous book, The Shadow of the Wind, to which this is a prequel of sorts, but alas, I was disappointed in The Angel's Game. I still love Zafón's very vivid, visual, almost Hitchcockian style -- I noticed myself visualizing scenes in detail more than I usually do -- and the use of books as keys to the story, and I appreciated the subtle links with The Shadow of the Wind. However, I did not love the characters; I found David selfish and Cristina nearly a non-entity. I don't require that a novel's characters be perfectly admirable, or they would be boring, but I do want them to have more depth and at least some likeability. (I did really like David's devoted friend Isabella, and had more of the book been about her, I would have liked it more.) The plot veers wildly about and finally devolves into an ending which simply baffled me. In the end, though the lush writing and tense action kept me reading to the end, I found The Angel's Game more style than substance.
  
  
• Susan Sellers, Vanessa and Virginia: Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell were sisters, conspirators, and rivals: one was an outspoken writer, married but childless, while the other was a painter who kept her emotions to herself but was a devoted mother and (sometimes hopeless) lover. Sellers tells their story from Vanessa's point of view, in a series of letters addressed to Virginia after her river suicide in 1941. She describes events from their childhoods and on throughout their lives, touching only lightly on each event as Vanessa remembers it.
  
  Readers who are unfamiliar with the Bloomsbury group are likely to be confused by Sellers' references to people and events with no context or explanations; for example, on one page, Vanessa and Virginia learn of Lytton Strachey's death and wonder how Dora Carrington (a painter who lived with him and adored him) will handle it, but it's never referred to again, even though not every reader is going to know what happened. (Carrington committed suicide soon afterward.) For those who do know Bloomsbury, it's easy to fill in the blanks, but I can only imagine the frustration of someone who doesn't.
  
  Unfortunately, I also found Vanessa and Virginia unsatisfying from the perspective of someone who does know a lot about their lives and their circle. When I read historical fiction dealing with historical people, I want it to show me something that I couldn't have gotten from reading biography or history; I want to gain a deeper understanding of those lives through the imaginative portrayal of them. Although Sellers does delineate the close relationship between the sisters well, I didn't gain any more understanding than I already had through reading non-fiction books about them (especially Jane Dunn's Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell: A Very Close Conspiracy, which Sellers credits as a source). In the end, her novel is too impressionistic, too evanescent to satisfy me; it's ambitious and beautifully written, but it's more a watercolor sketch than a full portrait.
  
  
• Jane Dunn, Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell: A Very Close Conspiracy: I read this years ago and decided to reread it after reading Sellers' Vanessa and Virginia, which clearly relies heavily on it (as Sellers says in her acknowledgements). Dunn doesn't take a straight chronological approach; she examines the sisters' lives and relationship thematically, showing how they were both rivals and conspirators and how their lives revolved around each other's in so many ways. It's an excellent book, and I think I got even more out of it this time after having read more about Woolf (and now I long to read Frances Spalding's biography of Bell) to give me more background.
  
  
• Brian Biegel, Miracle Ball: My Hunt for the Shot Heard 'Round the World: Possibly the most famous play in baseball history is Bobby Thomson's bottom-of-the-ninth home run off Ralph Branca in the 1951 playoff game between the Giants and Dodgers, which sent the Giants to the World Series and the Dodgers home to Brooklyn. Nowadays, the fan who caught such a ball would either treasure it forever or sell it, but back then, baseball memorabilia wasn't big business. For years, the whereabouts of that ball has been a mystery: who caught it, and what did they do with it? When Brian Biegel's father Jack found a baseball at a thrift store which he thought might be the famous home run ball, Biegel began a quest to find out whether his father's ball was really the one. Along the way, he learned to deal with the potentially devastating depression he'd been saddled with since a series of personal setbacks.
  
  The writing is nothing outstanding, workmanlike and readable, but the book is cleverly structured. As the mystery unfolds and Biegel meets more people who might have a clue for him, there are short flashbacks to the moment of the home run, showing what each person involved was (or might have been) doing. In fact, since Biegel is primarily a documentarian and did make a documentary about that, I wondered if the choice of structure was influenced by his film background. I thought his fight with depression could have been a larger part of the book, but as it was, the course of the ball investigation was so absorbing that I was happily carried along by that. Full of baseball history, legends, and lore, Miracle Ball is a great book for baseball fans.
  
  
• Ruth Reichl, Not Becoming My Mother: And Other Things She Taught Me Along the Way: Reichl takes an interesting but ultimately slight look back at her mother's life upon reading her letters and journals after her death, discovering the sacrifices her mother made in order to give Reichl a better life than hers. I think that a fuller biography, along the lines of Margaret Forster's Hidden Lives, which is about her grandmother and mother, would have been much more satisfying; as it was, it felt like an essay which went on too long and didn't come to any interestingly new conclusions.
  
  (Also, there's an amusing mistake on the book jacket, which claims that while running a bookshop, Reichl's mother corresponded with authors such as Christopher Marlowe. It's clearly a misprint for Christopher Morley, but I had an entertaining mental picture of her holding a séance to communicate with Kit in the afterlife.)

• Georgette Heyer, A Civil Contract, The Convenient Marriage (both rereads): The Convenient Marriage is pleasantly entertaining, but I probably shouldn't have read it after A Civil Contract, which is so much better that it casts lighter Heyers into the shade.
• Anthony Trollope, Nina Balatka, Linda Tressel: a pair of short novels which Trollope published anonymously as an experiment. Both are set outside England (in Prague and Nuremberg respectively), and both deal with the experiences of a young woman fighting religious rigidity in order to marry the man of her choice.
• Derek Zumsteg, The Cheater's Guide to Baseball: a lively, funny look at cheating in baseball, from the early years of rough plays (which begot many of baseball's essential rules) and gambling to today's steroids scandals.

25 June 2009

• Nnedi Okorafor, Zahrah the Windseeker: Zahrah Tsami, a girl of the Ooni Kingdom, is unusual: she was born dada, with long green vines growing in her hair, the outward sign of mysterious powers nobody seems able or willing to explain to her. She wants to be normal, but her hair makes her different and feared, except by her best friend, Dari. Eventually, Zahrah's powers begin to materialize, and Dari encourages her to test them out. When he gets into terrible trouble as a result, only Zahrah can save him, by entering the most dangerous part of their world and facing all of her fears.
  
  I liked the worldbuilding a lot (plant computers! plant buildings!), and shy but brave Zahrah is a good heroine. I thought the plot was a little episodic, especially in the second half, and never very tense: everything is just a little too easy for Zahrah to achieve. I think it's simply that the book is aimed at a slightly younger audience than I was expecting; I wanted Zahrah's quest to be more complex and difficult, and it turned out to be fairly straightforward. The energy and creativity of the story were more than enough to keep me reading, though, and to take me right on to The Shadow Speaker. (And bonus points for a good Douglas Adams reference!)
  
  
• Nnedi Okorafor, The Shadow Speaker: It is 2070, and life on Earth has been completely changed after a disastrous nuclear fallout earlier in the century: now in addition to technology, there is magic, and there are magical gateways to another world, Ginen (the world of Zahrah the Windseeker). Certain people have become metahuman, with strange abilities like rainmaking, or speaking to shadows, as Ejii Ugabe is able to do. When Ejii was eight, she witnessed the execution (or perhaps murder) of her power-seeking father by Jaa the Red Queen of Niger. Now that she is fourteen, she must follow Jaa to the other world of Ginen, as they strive to convince the otherworlders not to make war on Earth.
  
  I liked this a lot more than Zahrah the Windseeker; this is not to say that I didn't like Zahrah, because I did, but The Shadow Speaker is much more complex and interesting. Ejii faces a much larger threat, and her journey feels more dangerous and tense. I appreciated the focus on Africa, on languages and cultures, and the contrast between our present and this future Earth, where Africa and Australia play a much more central part and America and Europe are barely mentioned, as well as the contrast between Earth and Ginen. It's a fascinating universe, and I hope Okorafor will return to it in future books.
  
  
• Sarah Dessen, Along for the Ride: Auden is a studious overachiever; her parents are divorced, and she lives with her professor mother, being the good girl in order to please her mother. The summer before college, she decides on the spur of the moment to visit her father, his new wife, and their newborn baby, in the little beach town of Colby. There she meets new friends, especially mysterious longer Eli, and learns to break out of her groove and enjoy herself.
  
  Oh, dear, this felt rather formulaic, particularly when I type out the description. I enjoyed the baby and post-partum depression bits with Auden's stepmother the most, because they seemed the most emotional and freshest; the romance and new friends seemed rather well-worn. I mean, I wouldn't say that I didn't enjoy reading Along for the Ride, because I did; I just wonder if it's time for Dessen to break out of her own groove a little.
  
  
• Dave Duncan, The Cursed: Many have died from the star sickness; those who survive become Cursed, the holders of mysterious, double-edged powers conferred by the stars, or fates. It is unwise to have contact with the Cursed and illegal to shelter them, yet after the death of her husband and children from the sickness, innkeeper Gwin Nien Solith does just that, taking in a girl cursed with the power to heal or kill. When farmer Bulion Tharn and some of his family come to Gwin's inn, a quest begins which will change the destinies of Gwin, Bulion, and their whole world.
  
  I had a hard time getting into this, but I'm glad I kept on. The worldbuilding is excellent; the curses and their ramifications and implications are very well worked out. Duncan's characters are vivid and their dialogue witty and fun to read. There are many hints of prophecy and destiny, but he manages the plot adroitly so that there are still surprises along the way. I hadn't read anything by Duncan in years (after reading the Man of His Word series a long time ago); I may seek out more of his books now.

• Richmal Crompton, Family Roundabout (Persephone): I found this a very enjoyable multi-generational (but not overly long) family story, centering on two matrons with very different personalities and mothering styles and how their children and grandchildren turn out.
• Alice Steinbach, Educating Alice: Adventures of a Curious Woman: I think the reason I like her travel writing is that I feel as though she'd be a good traveling companion, adventurous and open-minded. Here she visits eight different places to take lessons and courses, and although I don't think I'd want to replicate exactly her choices (though Florentine history in Florence does appeal, as does the Jane Austen course), it's a lovely thing to think about doing.
• Sarah Waters, Tipping the Velvet (reread): Yep, I still love it. I can't wait to get The Little Stranger (which I had somehow forgotten was out already).

30 June 2009

• Kate Atkinson, Case Histories: A little girl disappears from her garden. A young woman is murdered at her father's law office. A teen mother kills her husband. All of these cases are long cold...until years later, when private detective Jackson Brodie gets involved in them.
  
  I didn't find the various plot threads all that difficult to figure out, but I liked the characters and Atkinson's witty style so much that I didn't mind. How the characters interact with each other and how they deal with the unfolding of the mysteries is just as important as the actual mysteries. I did, however, think that one plot thread in particular didn't get quite enough screen time or resolution, and I wonder if perhaps it was one thread too many.
  
  
• Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: Gladwell examines how human beings process information to make decisions and how split-second decisions (made in a "blink", by a process he calls "thin-slicing") differ from decisions made at more length. It's certainly on the anecdotal and episodic side, feeling rather like a set of magazine articles pulled together, but it's generally an interesting read nonetheless.
  
  Gladwell looks at both the good and bad sides of thin-slicing: on one hand, an art forgery is correctly detected by experts making quick judgments, but on the other, cops in the Bronx make a tragically wrong snap judgment based on race and kill an innocent victim. In fact, I thought the parts about race and unconscious prejudice were the best in the book, and I liked Gladwell's conclusion: that it's our responsibility not only to acknowledge making these judgments, but also to act to fix the inequities caused by them.
  
  
• Delia Sherman, The Magic Mirror of the Mermaid Queen: Sherman returns to her delightful alternate New York City in her second book about Neef, the official changeling of New York Between's Central Park. After surviving her first quest (in Changeling), Neef figures that going to school won't be too difficult, but Miss Van Loon's School for Mortal Changelings turns out to be tougher than she thought. The snobbish East Side girls look down on Neef and her friends, and there are way too many rules to follow. As if that weren't enough, the magic mirror of the Mermaid Queen of New York Harbor is lost, and Neef has to go on another quest to find it, with a little help from her friends, and maybe from her enemies.
  
  I thought this was just as delightful as the first book. I love the playful setting, the wealth of faerie lore and references to other books, and the tough, clever, impulsive Neef.
  
  
• Jo Beverley, Forbidden: Serena Riverton escaped her cruel husband when he died, but although she never wants to marry again, now her shiftless brothers want to sell her to the highest bidder. Francis, Lord Middlethorpe is on the verge of proposing to Lady Anne Peckworth, a perfectly suitable match. When he and Serena meet in a thunderstorm, both their plans go tempestuously awry.
  
  I really liked the reversal of the usual experienced hero vs. inexperienced heroine trope and how Francis and Serena work out their very different expectations and life experiences to become a couple. The plot was a little shaky, especially the subplot having to do with Francis's mother's romantic entanglement, but I liked the characters enough that I didn't mind the plot issues. This was the first of Beverley's books that I've read, and I've already picked up a couple more.
  
  
• Sherry Thomas, Not Quite a Husband: Pursuing her life calling as a doctor in India in the late nineteenth century, Bryony Asquith believes she has left behind her failed marriage and her ex-husband, Leo Marsden. When Leo shows up unexpectedly to bring an appeal from her sister to return to England and their ailing father, Bryony feels compelled to go with Leo. Their journey home is much more dangerous than they thought it would be, though: in addition to confronting a revolt, they must confront the deep emotions which led to the break-up of their marriage.
  
  I really loved Leo and Bryony (especially Bryony) and their justifiably messed-up relationship, and as in previous books, Thomas handles the flashback structure very well. There were a lot of things I didn't like, though, and they almost overcame what I did. There's a particular element to their past sexual relationship I found troubling, and I couldn't tell if Thomas meant it to be problematic or not, because Bryony and Leo never really address it. Also, I was very disappointed that the book is set almost entirely in India, yet there are no Indian characters (save for a couple of soldiers). Also also, the romance is resolved about three-quarters of the way through, yet the book keeps going; the last part in England just seemed completely unnecessary to me.
  
  Thomas' characters always seem to pull me through her weak plotting, but I do hope the next book is better in that department (which I think is what I said about her first two books, unfortunately).

• Jane Dunn, Elizabeth and Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens: Like Dunn's book about Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, this is not a full-on biography, but rather a study of how the two queens interacted and influenced each other's lives and reigns. It's skillfully written and organized; I enjoyed it a great deal and think it sheds useful light on both women.

Total books read this month: 31
Total books read this year: 201

Last updated 19 November 2009. All text and photographs © George Mitchell and Margaret Johnston, unless otherwise noted Comments, questions, suggestions to margaret@lonelymountain.net.