|
|
Because otherwise these books are never going to get reviewed!
 Ten Things I Love About You, Julia Quinn
Annabel Winslow is looking for a rich husband to rescue her family from the poorhouse. And she’s found a potential suitor, an aged, lecherous earl, of whom she isn’t at all fond, but she figures she has to resign herself to her fate – even if he does nearly assault her. Then she meets the earl’s nephew, Sebastian, and everything changes. They may be falling in love, but will Sebastian have the funds to save her siblings?
Much the same as the last book in this series, What Happens in London, this book is very sweet and very funny. It’s easy to become fond of both characters and believe in their romance, even if everything is far too rosy for real life. The series lacks the real fantastic romantic potential of the Bridgerton series, but still all of them provide a nice, quick diversion from every day life.
 Lead Me On, Victoria Dahl
Jane Morgan has worked very hard to get her position as an administrative assistant to an architect. She rescued herself from years of bad behavior as a teenager in order to turn herself into a real adult – even if that means she’s neglected her family. But she can’t seem to kick her attraction to big, tattooed, rough men, no matter how many businessmen she dates. When Billy Chase steps into her office, she simply can’t resist him – but can she fit him into her new life?
I think I may be the only romance reader in the world who had some issues with this book – I just found that it wasn’t really to my taste. Dahl’s writing is funny and smooth, so no problems there, but I couldn’t connect with her characters and the book was a little too raunchy for my tastes. Jane spends most of the novel as a complete snob, and it bothered me that she judged people so heavily on their appearances when she knew perfectly well that people could be more than that. I should have been delighted that her prejudices got absolutely torn apart and she had to face reality, but I was already too annoyed with her to bother!
My negative reaction to this book won’t really stop me from reading more Victoria Dahl, though – the concept of the book was very good and I liked the writing a lot. I think I’ll try another one of her books and see if the characters annoy me less!
 Stealing Water, Tim Ecott
Tim’s parents give up their home in Ireland to move to South Africa, a land where Tim’s father believes he has a respectable job waiting, and where Tim’s mother believes she will finally be free of the boggy Irish weather. But things don’t turn out as they expect and the family become virtual vagabonds, struggling to get by.
This was okay, but I think is one instance where I enjoyed the idea of the book more than the book itself. The family’s South African life is so full of crazy, illegal antics that, even though they were often necessary to survive, it made me uncomfortable. There were aspects I enjoyed, though; my favorite bit was when Tim worked in a Johannesburg hotel, at a total contrast to his home life, and became acquainted with guests solely based on their voices. It was clever and funny. I also enjoyed glimpses of period department stores and cities.
I also struggled because I couldn’t really understand the way his parents worked; I would basically never do what they all did, much less not return immediately, or as soon as I could, once I realized things were going haywire. I felt for Tim quite often but it was hard to relate to everything that happened.
 Visions of Heat, Nalini Singh
Faith is an F-Psy, meaning she can predict the future. She’s one of the best, which also means that she is bound to go mad eventually, but she’s making her family rich in the meantime. Outside her home lurks Vaughn, a changeling jaguar who longs to know more about the girl he senses behind the walls of the compound. When Faith comes out, she and Vaughn collide, opening her to emotions and physical sensations she’d never dreamed of. When the Psy world no longer begins to make sense, Faith wonders if she and Vaughn can make a life for themselves without it.
I definitely enjoyed this, and the world-building that went on, but I didn’t really find it to be anything particularly out of the ordinary. As usual I find Nalini Singh’s love scenes a little too racy and a little too frequent for my personal taste. I’ve read that she tones down the heat in the next volume, though, as well as lays on the plot, and I’m really interested to see what happens to Judd, so I think I’ll keep on reading.
I am an Amazon Associate. I did not receive any of these books for review.
 Mattie dreams of being a writer, filling notebooks when she can get them and choosing words of the day to expand her vocabulary, but since her mother died and her brother left she’s been more like a housekeeper to her father and three younger sisters. She longs to move to New York and make a go of her talents at Barnard College, so she starts slowly saving for the day when she can escape her rural life. She takes a job at the Glanmore, a fancy hotel for tourists, to get enough money to go, but her attention is distracted when she discovers an unsettling truth about a capsized boat and a death that once looked innocent.
Told back and forth over two different time periods in Mattie’s life, Mattie’s story quickly gains suspense while retaining its literary bent. I loved the fact that each chapter has a word before it and the author works the word into the story over the course of the chapter. Mattie herself loves reading and adores writing, and she’s supported in that by her school teacher, who firmly believes that she can make something more of herself than becoming a simple farm wife. Mattie is torn between her ambitions and the attention paid to her by a handsome local, which adds another dimension to the story as she struggles with immediate infatuation and long-term dreams and desires.
I also just loved the setting. In rural New England, life is not easy, and Mattie’s father and uncle experience all the risks of a country life. Mattie herself endures the hardships of it, with backbreaking work constantly and reluctant days missed off school – which she adores – to help out around the farm. But there’s also a beauty to it which shone through in Donnelly’s writing, really rounding out the book. I got such a feel for the time period that I immediately wondered why more books aren’t set in early twentieth century New England; it’s in such stark contrast to the rest of the nation.
Finally, there was the suspense of the murder, and the slow reveal of precisely what happened and why. We begin to understand why Mattie holds the secret, what she fears, and this laces the entire book together as it heads toward its conclusion, both towards her decision for her future and the final discovery of why a girl drowned in the lake. It was surprisingly gripping at times and I got through it very quickly. Mattie’s character, despite her fervent desire for independence, was completely believable and I appreciated both her literary mind and her romantic impulses. She felt like a real teenager and I was anxious for her to make what I considered the right choice.
A Northern Light is a beautiful and enthralling book, with a main character to root for, a fantastic setting, and a curious and heartbreaking mystery. This is the kind of book teens should be reading, and I would have loved it even more had I been one.
I am an Amazon Associate. I purchased this book.
 Tragedy strikes one summer day in Maine. What is meant to be a happy day for two families instead turns into a day of mourning and despair, with consequences set to echo across their entire lives. The Copaken family, despite living in New York City most of the year, consider themselves native Maine residents, while the Tetherlys, significantly poorer, do in fact live there all year. Due to two deaths, the families find themselves linked closer than ever as they all struggle to deal with their own grief and suffering.
A few people have expressed some distaste for the way this book’s prologue was written, but I found that I quite liked it. It’s written from the perspective of an outsider looking in with plenty of detail about the day. No one is named; it could be just any wedding, which is exactly what I liked about it. I thought it perfectly captured a typical wedding day, with the perfect photos and elaborate ceremony neatly masking the real conflicts between people and the difficulties of human relationships. Everyone feels something about a wedding and it’s not always pure joy.
Of course, the book drastically changes once the accident happens, and instead of joy, both families are left with incredible sorrow. The book is really about how individual people deal with it, how it can pull people together and push them apart, sometimes both at once. It’s poignant because the Tetherlys and the Copakens have always had something of a relationship, if only because Jane Tetherly cleans the Copakens’ house year-round. Later on, of course, the two women are meant to be united by the relationship between their children, but are left in a curious midway point. They have things in common, but they’re also complete opposites, incapable of truly understanding anything about one another except the shared pain of mothers who have lost their children much too early.
I liked how many of the characters strove to achieve things for the people that they’d lost, learning eventually that they should really be following their own lives rather than the blueprint they had planned. They have to think more deeply about their assumptions when faced with the fragility of human existence; their desperation to maintain that existence is heartbreaking.
Overall I found there was a lot to admire in Red Hook Road. The relationships are pitch perfect to the real experience of grieving families. Each character is carefully delineated and even when I didn’t like them or agree with them, I could understand how they worked. Since the book is set over the course of four summers, it’s easy to see the way that time changes perception and does manage to place scars over fresh wounds. I was glad that I could follow the families through their lives and closed the book satisfied with the way it wrapped up. Red Hook Road is a wonderful choice for those who enjoy literary fiction, realistic depictions of grief, and family relationships.
I am an Amazon Associate. I received this book for free for review.
 This review contains spoilers for the entire Chaos Walking series. Don’t read this, read them!
War makes monsters of men, and Todd and Viola are discovering just how true that saying is. Separated once again, Todd has remained with the mayor to keep him calm while Viola has gone with the Answer and her new shipmates to broker a compromise. Into the mix we’re thrown a third character with his own perspective on events, set to radically change both the way Todd and Viola think about their new world and their strategy for the forthcoming war.
Everything about this book is basically awesome. Patrick Ness has taken on enormous issues in this series and executed them perfectly, without a hitch, sending out clear anti-war themes but at the same time showing just how humans are so susceptible to dictatorships and strong personalities.
First of all, what struck me as so eerily true to life is the way that Mayor Prentiss can simply take charge, how he can twist reality to suit himself without ever suffering any flack for it. It reminded me most of the way that the media can twist things as they wish, but most people don’t bother to research (or watch more than one TV channel) so they’ll never know the truth of the way the world works. Even Todd and Viola know vastly more than they’re told, but they still find it easier to settle into the same grooves they’ve known their whole lives. Todd himself finds it easiest to dehumanize the Spackle because they aren’t exactly the same as him even though they are thinking, speaking beings like he is, just because he’s committed atrocities against them and needs a reason to do so. The introduction of the third character throws a wrench into those plans, both for readers and for Todd.
Throughout the book my heart ached most for Todd and I simultaneously feared for him. He gets far too close to the Mayor and is convinced he’s acting for good, but I knew he couldn’t be, that the mayor was a force for dissent and fear. But as we learn by the end, even that’s not entirely true. The worst character in the series is himself multi-faceted with surprising reasons for how he works, which don’t excuse him but help us understand him. Each and every character with page time in this book is a complex human being with believable motives and actions. It’s a genuine work of art.
The entire book is sobering in its depiction of war, especially as Todd is growing up in the midst of it. It’s evident from both his actions and even from the text itself as the spelling mistakes and grammatical errors slow down drastically in this third installment. He’s becoming a man, but how I feared he wasn’t going to live to get all the way there. The constant battles and struggles speedily mature him, so much so that it was easy to forget his true age. Not all that much time has passed since he first discovered Viola, that pocket of silence amidst the Noise. And I keep talking about Todd, but it was Viola who became my favorite character, for her strength and reason and love.
I wish I was talented enough to articulate clearly the many ways Monsters of Men – and the rest of the series – made me think and feel. I borrowed this book from the library but I know it’s one that I’ll need to own and reread in its entirety. It’s incredibly powerful in so many ways and I truly think is literature at its finest; it’s a series with a lot to say about the world, not only Todd’s but our own, and with a fantastic story to go along with it. What more could any reader ask for?
I am an Amazon Associate. I borrowed this book from my local library.
 This review contains spoilers. Read the books first!
Todd and Fiona have arrived in Haven only to discover that it’s not a haven at all. It’s New Prentisstown and Mayor Prentiss has now declared himself the president of the entire planet. Fiona is seriously wounded and whisked from Todd’s view to heal, used as a threat to get Todd to cooperate. Todd himself is locked up with the old mayor of Haven, forced to spend time with Mayor Prentiss’s son Davy and commit ever more horrible acts against the Spackle during the day. When rebellion begins, Todd and Fiona begin to wonder who the Answer are and what is going to happen to New Prentisstown.
This is going to be a short review because I read this and Monsters of Men right after each other. I have quite a lot to say about the third book, but this one has somewhat blended in with it, so my observations are less clearcut. Still, I thought they each deserved their own post.
While I wasn’t so crazy about The Knife of Never Letting Go, I thought it was worth reading the rest of the series to see what happened with Todd and Fiona. This book was the perfect follow up for me because it took a step back, slowed everything down, and really fleshed out the world and the story. I’m not a huge fan of breakneck, breathless books, and so this was a breath of fresh air as Todd and Fiona stay in one place for the most part. They learn more about what happened in the past and they start to take strides towards changing the future. Their bond still remains very strong even though they’re apart for most of the book.
I can easily say the high point of this book for me was Todd’s relationship with Mayor and Davy Prentiss. I loved how the relationships gradually changed and were fleshed out as well as how genuinely true to life they were. Davy strives for his father’s approval but has never had Mayor Prentiss’s extreme, if cruel, strength of character, so he’s always going to be a failure. Todd does have that strength, and as a result Davy is almost naturally drawn towards him even if they’re enemies at first. It’s a fascinating dynamic and all of their emotions rang beautifully true for me.
By the time I finished The Ask and the Answer, I’d become a loyal fan of the series and could not wait to start Monsters of Men. I’m surprised by how much the book turned my feelings around, but I’m very glad, because Patrick Ness is a masterful writer and plotter.
I am an Amazon Associate. I purchased this book.
 This review will contain spoilers for the entire series. If you haven’t read these books yet, skip this post and read them!
I am not even going to attempt to summarize this, but I thought instead I’d just post a collection of thoughts now that I’ve finally managed to finish the book myself, before I go out and read all the other reviews that might influence my own opinion.
First of all, I had a harder time connecting with this book than with either of the first two. I found it difficult to recognize these characters after the horrors they’d endured, and Collins just kept piling on the pain. The entire world has become unrecognizable due to the rebellion, so I found that there were few points for me to hang onto as references; all I had was Katniss and even she is often drugged, suffering, and considered mentally unstable by everyone else. Every time something happens to her, on come the drugs and the seclusion and I got very tired of it. All of the other characters either die or become distant versions of themselves, so affected by the turmoil of war that they are fundamentally changed.
And I think that’s what I didn’t like about the book in the end, that it was basically war. The Hunger Games certainly weren’t easy to take in either of the first two books, but there was a definitive goal, things I knew had to happen to get to the end. I knew which characters were in danger. This is just the horrors of war, over and over, and even though the Capitol is designed like a Hunger Games arena, I just found it that much more difficult to deal with. I think it may have made it worse, reading all three in a row, because there’s just so much violence and pain and suffering. By this point, I couldn’t take it. She doesn’t soften anything at all.
I also really didn’t like how the deaths were almost glanced over. Here I’ve gone and become attached to all of these characters and they just die over and over and there was no break in the book to mourn them. I had this problem with another dystopia, The Knife of Never Letting Go, and it bothered me just as much here.
That’s not to say I didn’t like the book, although it’s harder to say I like such a very dark book. I thought most of what happened in it had to happen for the ending to come out the way it did. We all could easily see the rebellion coming, that Katniss was the focal point of it, and that people were going to die to make it all come out okay for the rest of them. The plot had a few surprises in store. It was still just as absorbing a book as the rest of them, but I am not sure it lived up to my expectations. About the only thing that completely satisfied me was the ending, which was just how I wanted it to be, and Katniss even shared my reasoning for her eventual choice. I was worried that she wasn’t going to choose at all, based on some blog titles I’d seen around and the way the book seemed to be going. I do kind of think the epilogue was unnecessary, but not entirely unwelcome.
I’m glad that, in the end, the book left me satisfied, but since I did a reread of the first two before launching into this one, I genuinely don’t think it’s as good. I didn’t like it as much, it didn’t absorb me to the same extent. I may change my mind if I do a reread of the whole series in a year or two, when my internal hype has died down, and I’ll see if the conclusion sticks as well as the first two did.
What did you think of Mockingjay?
 Jack and Sadie Rosenblum move to England just before the start of World War II, their little girl in tow and big dreams in their heads. In Jack’s head, at least, as he longs to be a proper Englishman. On arrival in England, Jack receives a checklist of ways to become English. Jack fails to recognize the nuances of the said list and instead decides to conform to everything as though it were a requirement, marking him out as a foreigner just when he wants to fit in. Meanwhile, his wife Sadie wants to cherish her roots, and daughter Rose becomes a genuine native. When Jack reaches the final item on his list – joining a golf course – he struggles to find membership as a German Jew, and embarks on a quest to build his own golf course in a small rural town.
This book was completely charming in just about every way. Natasha Solomons writes in a wonderful, easy to read prose style but conveys the very true difficulties of adapting into a new society. Perhaps it’s unlikely that a man would conform to a list in order to fit in, but Jack uses the pamphlet as guidelines and doesn’t ever get close enough to English people in order to learn otherwise. They shut him out and treat him as a bit of a dummy, but again, he can’t pick up on those nuances – and when he does, they hurt so much that he simply ignores them. It’s enough to break your heart.
I loved the relationships in this novel, particularly when Jack and Sadie move out of London and try to fit in a country town. They’re still outsiders, true, but it’s a little bit different when you’re the only outsiders and don’t have your own community to rely on. The reactions of the townspeople to them are vastly interesting, as are those with their London friends who occasionally come for a visit. This part of the book seemed remarkably true to life for me; obviously, no one discriminates against me quite so much, but I have seen nationalities band together and form friendships based on nothing but their similar backgrounds; if you’re the only foreigner, attitudes and behaviors change.
Finally, I loved the culinary threads woven throughout the novel. It’s so true that food is a clear link to heritage; smells and flavors remind us of certain times in our lives as nothing else does. I wanted to try everything that Sadie made for myself; it’s so evocatively described that I could almost but not quite taste it. The food also made clear how Sadie felt in ways that the prose by itself couldn’t quite express, adding another layer on to the cultural isolation of the family and her character in particular.
Truly, Mr. Rosenblum’s List was a delightful book. It warred with my emotions and is surprisingly sad in parts, but it’s a remarkable depiction of the immigrant experience and manages to be a fantastic story besides.
This book is known as Mr. Rosenblum Dreams in English in the US. I’m an Amazon Associate and I purchased this book.
 Mina Murray thinks she’s a lucky woman. She has a fiance who some may have considered out of her reach, a pair of best friends, and enjoys her time teaching before she’s married. But she has dreams about a man she can’t identify, dreams that go beyond what a proper lady should be capable of imagining, and her friend Lucy appears to be in serious trouble with the men who wish to court her. Worst of all, Mina’s fiance goes on a trip to Romania and doesn’t write her, finally emerging seriously ill on the border, making Mina question the future she’s planned for herself and long for the man of her dreams to appear in the flesh.
I’m not sure if this is another case of me being far too fond of the original, but I just didn’t seem to love this one as much as everyone else did. It was definitely engaging and drew me in, but it kept reminding me of the original Dracula and making me long to read that one instead of continuing to read this story that turned it all upside down. I appear to have a soft spot for certain favorite books and I don’t always like other authors popping in and changing things. I have enjoyed Essex’s other books, but this one just didn’t have the same effect on me.
Setting my partiality aside, I did like how Essex turned the sexual stereotypes in Dracula on their head. Instead of women sitting in the background, having brains like men and not brains in their own right, Mina takes the forefront here, and has perfectly normal feelings and desires that all women share. Instead of being ashamed of her sexuality, Mina learns to appreciate it and to acknowledge her feelings. The scenes in the asylum are just heartbreaking; perfectly ordinary women are consigned to terrible lives simply because men decided they were too lustful, something that sadly did happen at the time.
I’ve seen a few complaints floating around about the novel’s sexuality; this isn’t really something I had a problem with. The thing about vampires is that they have always been sexual – seriously, think about it – we’re just a little more comfortable about admitting it these days. Saying that, I would definitely not recommend this book if you don’t want any of that in your books, because it is fairly frequent and a major part of the story.
Unfortunately, all the book really inspired me to do was start reading Dracula again. Dracula in Love may work better for you if you’re not so attached to the original (seriously, a friend and I nicknamed ourselves Mina and Lucy in high school), but I would still recommend Stealing Athena and Leonardo’s Swans first.
I am an Amazon Associate. I received this book for free from the publisher for review.
 Andie Miller is finally over her ex-husband, North Archer. She’s getting married to someone else, and heads to his office to symbolically return ten years’ worth of alimony checks. As it turns out, though, North still needs her help; he has two young wards in a supposedly haunted house. Three nannies have fled from the kids, and North is pretty desperate. So he offers Andie a ridiculous amount of money to take care of them for just a month, convinced that she’s the one – not ready to let her go. She can’t turn that down, not just to take care of two kids, but it turns out that the house truly is haunted – and the ghosts don’t want to let the kids go.
Jennifer Crusie is the only contemporary romance author I like and she’s proved herself yet again here. This isn’t a romance, because the romance isn’t driving the plot, but it is one fantastic book no matter what genre you put it in. I picked this book up and I did not put it back down. I ignored basically everything else going on and absolutely inhaled this book because I just completely loved it. I loved it so much that I’m not sure I can even articulate why but I will completely agree with Crusie’s editor – your weekend might be shot because of this book, but you won’t be sorry.
First of all, the plot. Most of the book takes place in the haunted house with the kids and their skeezy housekeeper. I knew there were ghosts involved, but for a while there is some suspense around who they are, why the kids won’t leave the house, and what everyone’s so nervous about. Andie not only has to win the kids’ affection and, you know, educate them, but has to contend with ghosts who will not let the kids leave. The pace quickly ratchets up and is part of the reason I sped through the book. I had to know what happened and I couldn’t let the story go long enough to set the book down. And, to my surprise, it was genuinely creepy. There was a definite gothic feel to the book. I was afraid for Andie, Alice, and Carter, and I wasn’t sure how it would all end.
The relationships in this book are most definitely its strongest point. There’s so much growing and changing that it’s almost incredible, between Andie and the kids, Andie and the ghosts, Andie and North, even between all the eventual houseguests, who all have their own distinctive and wonderful personalities. They feel like real people and they react like real people and I was desperate for most of them to be okay and happy. I could believe in everything happening here, and at times their interactions just brought tears to my eyes. It was that good.
And, of course, the romance is just spectacular. Crusie’s words are magic. Andie and North have a history that’s slowly revealed and better yet, they’ve made mistakes. They’ve changed. They’re adults now in ways they weren’t really before, but they can still feel the romance of their youth and bring it back. I loved how their memories intertwined with what was happening now to create a completely new relationship based on the foundations of the old.
Honestly, Maybe This Time was just great. I think it could appeal to many people outside of Crusie’s normal audience, who are bored by a normal romance but would definitely enjoy the suspense and quirky characters of this one. It was absolutely perfect for me and I suspect I will go on recommending it to everyone I see for a long, long time.
I am an Amazon Associate. I received this book for free from the Amazon Vine program.
 After twenty years in England, Bill Bryson and his family moved back to his native United States, for reasons he can’t quite fathom. To his surprise, his country has changed a lot since he last lived there. Even though he isn’t particularly inclined to write a newspaper column about it, his friend asks him to, and his essays are published weekly. This book is a collection of some of these essays, on topics ranging from the tax system to sports to garbage disposals.
I’m on a bit of a Bill Bryson spree these days, so I picked this book up without really thinking about it. I found its quality to be more variable than the first two books of his I read, but overall it was still very enjoyable. Bryson’s humor is excellent and he makes even the most mundane exchanges into passages that have me giggling away, to the extent that my husband asks what’s so funny and is, I suspect, now eager to get his hands on one of Bryson’s books.
The funniest passages were easily the ones that I have had experience with. This book is now quite dated; it was published in 1998 and so all of the essays are from before that time. As a result, things in America aren’t the same as they were, but I can remember a lot of this from my childhood. The catalogues, for example; it did feel at times like we got a catalogue for everything under the sun without ever actually asking for them. Plenty of trees were wasted for this purpose, but some of the products in catalogues were delightful and exciting, even if I can’t actually remember ever ordering anything out of them.
Some of the sections didn’t work quite so well; these are generally the few that don’t consist of actual anecdotes but are just him trying to demonstrate the absurdity of things like tax forms. There are also some outdated ones which no longer strike the right note, like his comments on computers. Overall, though, these are only a few pages long so they don’t detract too much from the overall humor of the book.
It’s also best to approach this knowing that mostly he makes fun of Americans and American things, but as he seems to do this with everything, it didn’t bother me. It just amused me because most of it was true and his style of writing makes it clear that nothing is really an insult at all. It’s just, for the most part, a very amusing book about American culture.
Notes from a Big Country is not quite a travelogue, but it’s an entertaining look at America through a former expat’s eyes. Despite the few off notes, if you like Bill Bryson’s books, you’ll enjoy this one too.
I am an Amazon Associate. I borrowed this book from my local library.
|
|
Stephanie
bermudaonion (Kathy)
blodeuedd
heidenkind
Julie P.
Recent Comments