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 Martin is a thief, but he isn’t an ordinary thief. He meticulously studies his victims – who he calls clients – before he steals from them, to ensure that they don’t have any danger factors and that he won’t get caught by a dog or a child home sick from school. He starts to feel that he knows his clients based on the items he takes from them – from one, he’ll steal some laundry detergent and a packet of nearly expired tomatoes, while from another he’ll nab toothpaste or a box of pasta. His big operations take months of planning and he does his best to take things that his clients won’t miss for long periods of time. But when he gets trapped in one of his clients’ homes and starts to believe he can help them, Martin finds that his life of crime may turn into an attempt to be a guardian angel for his clients.
This was a startlingly original and often delightful read. Who could imagine that a thief could be so lovable? It helps that he hardly ever steals anything actually worth money, and when he does he takes extra effort to ensure its owners will never miss it. Instead, he seems to consider his clients as friends. He’s a peculiar character to start; he’s obsessed with mapping out houses and following his routines. He thinks he’s gone on dates with a woman at the local diner when she’s just being friendly, and has a single friend to his name. He works at a coffee shop and tells the people that he knows that he writes technical manuals rather than divulging his real career. He seems as though he might have happily gone along continuing to steal from his clients for years, until he realizes that maybe he can use his intimate knowledge of them for good rather than for his own personal gain.
In some respects, I think making it so easy to relate to him trivializes the fact that he is actually stealing, but this is a minor note and is completely contradicted by the good he actually ends up doing. Since we spend over 100 pages following him on his travels, we get a really good idea of what he actually steals and how he goes about doing it. Still, somehow, we appreciate and start to like him even as he describes his meticulous process of removing fingerprints and approaching houses from a variety of methods. It’s after we’ve known him that the book takes off – things start to go wrong and Martin has to cope with not only dangers but unfamiliar environments he isn’t prepared for. I didn’t feel anxious for his clients as he investigated, I felt anxious for him.
Something Missing completely delivers on its unusual premise with a fantastic main character as well as an intense and addicting storyline. This sweet read is highly recommended.
I am an Amazon Associate. I received this book for free for review from the publisher.
 Life in the military is difficult, not only for the men who go off to war, but for the women and children they are forced to leave behind. This new collection of stories from Siobhan Fallon explores the lives of the men and women who are forced to endure the separation, from both perspectives. We see men who dream of nothing but home, only to find themselves strangely out of place away from the war. We meet women who are bereft without their men, but when the men return are unsure how to fit them back into their strict lives. And we witness the spouses who can’t take the separation, who cheat, from both sides of the equation.
Every tiny bit of praise you’ve heard for You Know When the Men Are Gone is true. This is an incredible collection of stories, and I say that as someone who doesn’t normally like short stories, whose loved ones are all civilians, and who is hesitant about reading books about modern day women’s emotions. Each story in this book is wonderful on its own and as part of this collection. They are all very loosely connected, some having more links than others, but with several universal themes coming through.
Many of those themes are explored through the two different perspectives. We witness just how difficult it is for women when their husbands are gone. They bond together with other mothers, have children early to have something left of their husbands, and end up coping with absolutely everything in the men’s absence. Meanwhile, the men are dreaming of home, even as they’re adjusting to Iraq. Each story in some way deals with a soldier’s return or lack of return.
Infidelity is a big concern for both the soldiers and the women who are waiting for them. After all, a year’s deployment is a very long time, and all of them can get desperate. One husband returns, convinced his wife is cheating, and hides in his own basement to catch her in the act. A wife suspects her husband of cheating, but decides to forgive him and save the love that she still has for him and, she hopes, him for her.
Each story in this collection affected me in some way, tugging on my heartstrings relentlessly. Several had me in tears, which doesn’t happen very often for me and books. I can’t imagine how difficult these lives are, but I truly feel that Fallon gave me a glimpse into the tough struggles that military families go through each and every day. There is definitely a reason this collection has earned so much buzz, and it’s so well deserved. I’m glad to add my voice to the many others who have fallen in love with this book – Fallon is unquestionably an author to watch and You Know When the Men Are Gone is an amazing read.
I am an Amazon Associate. I received this book for free for review from the publisher.
 Lady Julia Yardley would do almost anything to divorce her husband. She stops short of killing him, but only because jail would be yet another prison. Justice for an early twentieth century lady with an abusive husband is difficult to find, however, so in the end Julia realizes she has only one way out: adultery. She arranges a seduction of a friend, Aidan Carr, the duke of Trathen, so that her atrocious husband will catch her in the act, and she is granted the divorce she so craves, causing a ridiculous but necessary amount of scandal in the process. But what she doesn’t account for is the fact that Aidan will continue to be drawn to her and, as her feelings thaw from a destructive decades-long marriage, that she will be tempted by his advances.
Reading this in close succession with Wedding of the Season was, I think, a great idea. Both Julia and Aidan are introduced in that book, and therein they absolutely can’t stand each other. Julia is constantly needling upright, proper Aidan, who was engaged to her cousin Beatrix (the heroine of that book). There was clearly something there, but I was genuinely shocked when I realized that these two were actually the stars of this particular book. I shouldn’t have been, though; everyone knows that strong antagonism can be much more than it appears on the surface, and here it’s jealousy and longing in their most potent forms. Scandal of the Year fleshes out the back story of these two characters, so we learn just why Julia is out to irritate Aidan and, simultaneously, why he is the one she chooses to seduce when her situation gets desperate.
I loved the way this series revolves around scandal. None of these events would be anything close to scandalous in our society, unless a celebrity was the one committing them; a woman like Julia would have divorced her husband and had legal protection, no less. But for Victorians, desperate times call for desperate measures, and Julia suffers in a way she never would have done in our world. This isn’t just virgins hopping into bed with dukes without a thought for the consequences, as happens in so very many romances; Julia does think about and suffer the consequences of her decisions. She’s cut in society, she only gets invited to balls by her friends (some of whom abandon her), and she is a proper divorcee. Her previous scandalous behavior is quickly hushed up and she’s speedily married off to prevent gossip. Julia knows that, were she to have children, they will suffer even more. Aidan’s association with her damages his prospects and means his search to find a suitable heiress is vastly more difficult. It doesn’t stop them falling in love with one another, but they are firmly planted within the society of their time.
The romance itself was at times frustrating; I felt Julia clung too closely to her stubbornness, but this was ingrained in her character from the beginning. I could understand why it was happening, but rather strangely I was always on Aidan’s side. I’ve been wondering if that is simply due to my own fortunate experience in the romantic department, and I’ll be very interested to read other reviews and see how other women viewed these two characters.
Scandal of the Year is another wonderful romance from Laura Lee Guhrke; I am definitely eager to read more of her work after these two books and I’m glad to have discovered another good romance author (especially when a few of my favorites seem to have gone downhill these days). I would definitely recommend it to other romance readers.
I am an Amazon Associate. I received this book for free for review from Netgalley.
 When Eddie’s father killed himself, her life fell apart. She can’t figure out how he could have left her, left her mother, when they all seemed so happy. Now her mother can’t get out of her bathrobe, her mother’s best friend Beth is constantly in the house and invading Eddie’s life, and there are ever-growing boundaries between her and her own best friend Milo. When Eddie meets her father’s last student, Culler Evans, she begins to hope that he can finally answer the question “why?”, even at the expense of everyone and everything she thinks she knows.
I don’t think I can do this book justice in a review. It was such an all-consuming experience, a complete cascade of grief, hope, and love, that I genuinely don’t think I can express the effect this book had on me. Needless to say, I was totally wrapped up in Eddie’s experiences. At times, I wished she could have been more forthcoming – that all of the people in the novel could say what they really wanted to – but conversations in real life are difficult, too, and I didn’t think the author could have done a better job portraying real people suffering.
When Culler comes into the picture, I could completely understand Eddie’s desire to know, to understand. A death, especially a suicide, makes us question what happened, and in our grief, it can be so easy to get lost in that question. I was worried for her, dealing with an older boy who could hurt her so easily, and at that moment I realized just how wrapped up I was in this book. I didn’t want to put it down for anything, I just wanted to see what happened and whether Eddie managed to find the meaning she so craved.
Amidst all of this are the usual teenage dramas – because at the heart of it these characters are distinctly teenage even when their lives are turned upside down. Eddie still wants to be with her friend, Milo, even though he won’t tell her essential facts about the night her father died. His ex-girlfriend still manages to get in the way of their friendship. And she still sometimes goes out to parties, where occasionally she feels a spark of normality. She’s changed but she’s still recognizably a teenage girl, which gives us hope that she will find answers and return to enjoying her life eventually.
Fall for Anything was simply an incredible book. Beautifully written, with realistic characters and an absolutely gut-wrenching storyline, don’t miss this if you enjoy contemporary YA. And let me tell you, I have Some Girls Are on my shelf and I cannot wait to get to it now.
I am an Amazon Associate. Many thanks to the author and publisher for sending me this review copy!
 Margaret of Anjou has no idea what’s in store for her when she travels as a seasick French fifteen-year-old to marry the English king Henry VI. Not fluent in English and, due to her nationality, viewed as an enemy by many English people, Margaret doesn’t have the easiest time of it, particularly when her marriage fails to bring peace between England and France and takes years to produce an heir to the throne. Amidst suspicions over his illegitimacy, challenges to her husband’s throne, and eventual war between her suspects, Margaret struggles to retain the birthrights of herself, her husband, and her son.
Susan Higginbotham is a historical fiction writer who never fails to deliver the books that I personally want to read. Well-written, historically accurate, and meticulously detailed, she is an expert at transporting me back in history while never really throwing me out of the story with something I obviously know to be wrong. Even when she does change something to suit her purposes, I know that it will be logical and fully explained at the end, as everything is here. With this latest book, I got all of this and wasn’t disappointed at all. If anyone can make me enjoy a book set during a period about which I know entirely too much, Higginbotham is unquestionably that author.
And I did enjoy The Queen of Last Hopes. At its heart it is a good depiction of Margaret’s life and a more careful examination of the motivations that this so often vilified woman had for the actions she took over the course of her life. She’s not dismissed as a villain, for once, but instead rehabilitated. Unfortunately, though, I think in this case Higginbotham went a little further towards good than I really would have preferred. I would agree that she was made to seem excessively cruel because she was a woman, a crime perpetuated over the centuries, simply because she took a role most people would rather envision a man having. But that doesn’t mean she had to be so very good; I think creating an affair for her went some way towards mitigating this, but not entirely.
Still, I related to Margaret, and for the first time I felt I could understand what the real woman must have gone through as everyone turned against her and everything she cared about was at risk. I’d find it difficult not to. The book is told through differing viewpoints and I found hers to be by far the most appealing, even though she was on the sidelines of almost all the events. Those other characters give us the perspective on her that we need to remain balanced throughout the course of the novel; they save the book from excessive telling by giving us a way to see the events through those characters’ eyes.
Overall, The Queen of Last Hopes was an engaging historical novel for me that suited my expectations perfectly. I would have preferred a more balanced version of Margaret, but I could still relate to her and was still wrapped up in her story. Though not my favorite of Higginbotham’s books, this is still a good move towards looking more realistically at Margaret of Anjou.
I am an Amazon Associate. I received this book for free from the publisher for review.
 On one cold winter in Wisconsin, 1907, Ralph Truitt awaits his mail-order bride at the train station. All he has are a photo, of a plain innocent-looking woman, and letters from her. The woman who steps off the train is too beautiful, instantly causing Ralph to be suspicious, but he’s been unloved for far too long, and in any case has a mission for his new wife. He wants Catherine Land to persuade his son, Antonio, to return to him, for a final chance at forgiveness. But he has no idea how complex the ties are truly between him and his new wife, nor the conspiracies which soon crop up amongst these three very different people.
This book, while bleak, is surprisingly addictive. Goolrick’s tone throughout is contemplative, which perfectly fits the winter atmosphere and the secret, devious plots that the characters harbor and then keep from each other. It’s well-paced, with everything revealed at just the right moment, enough to keep me stuck to the page while I waited for the next revelation, the next step in the plan. I couldn’t say I liked any of the characters, but I did appreciate the story itself very much.
One important warning; if you’re a bit squeamish about sex, this is not the book for you. The characters are very explicit in their thoughts and actions and much of their relationships are actually based on sex. I’d argue that it’s got more in there than many romance novels I’ve read, and certainly more than the ones I prefer. The whole book is charged through with it. It’s a dark gothic romance without any little details actually left out, and in my opinion it’s best approached that way. But the beauty of the story is truly that both characters learn that sex and desire aren’t love, that marriage isn’t easy, and without so much emphasis on the physical side of things, I’m not sure it would have the same impact.
To make it all that much better, Catherine, despite being a prostitute and very uneducated, adores books and knowledge, and her time spent in the library is some of the happiest of her life. Though I never really cared all that much about the characters, this one little thing did help quite a bit towards making me like her. It’s just one of those little signs that she hasn’t let the circumstances of her life destroy her spirit, and as a result I kept hoping for a good chance for her and a bit of redemption by the end.
A Reliable Wife was an intoxicating read; suspenseful plot, moving emotions, and fantastic setting. It may be a little bit too racy for some, and I never quite fell in love with the characters, so I can’t recommend it whole-heartedly, but it was nevertheless for me an excellent book.
I am an Amazon Associate. I purchased this book.
 Miles has lived a fairly lonely life throughout school when he decides to go to the same boarding school his dad went to, Culver Creek, to finish out his high school years. Rather than spending all of his time researching the last words of dead people, Miles wants to live, to experience his “Great Perhaps”. And on arrival, he almost immediately starts to, as his roommate instantly befriends him and introduces him to a friend, Alaska Young. Miles has never met a girl like Alaska – a clever, funny, beautiful girl, always living on the edge and taking risks. Starting out on a countdown to a mysterious event, Looking For Alaska is suspenseful, heart-breaking, and completely real.
John Green is famous around the blogosphere for writing real teenagers with real emotions, and I found nothing less than that in this book. At the very beginning, I found myself immediately drawn in; we start off at Miles’s going-away party, which no one but his parents and two awkward acquaintances attend. How could I not relate to a geeky boy that loves history and struggles to make friends? He’s pragmatic, clever, and funny, and when he met people at his new school right away, I was already his enthusiastic cheerleader.
The story only got better. I’m a big fan of boarding school and even house party stories. When you get lots of characters living together at once, fireworks happen, and they quite literally do so here. There are so many interesting dynamics going on, from pranks to friendships to the traditional high school hierarchy. Each character was quirky and distinct in some way, so I never lost Miles’s friends amongst the crowds. Miles is speedily renamed “Pudgy”, which quite effectively marks his separation as a kid with only adults for friends and a kid who is ready to be a teenager.
And now we get to the point where we talk about spoilers, albeit vaguely, so look away if you haven’t read this book. This is one that I believe is given away on the American cover, but not on my British one. I have one notable incident later in the book that struck me as incredibly true to life and, I think, illustrates very well why John Green is so beloved for writing real teenagers. After a death occurs, a peripheral character comes to Miles, convinced that she’s had “a sign” from said person. Miles doesn’t want to hear it. This character had never related to the one who died in real life, and while he was really suffering, he just wasn’t interested. Instead, he’s annoyed.
This is something which has always bothered me about other people’s reactions to my brother’s death. People who wouldn’t have given him the time of day in real life were torn up about his death, and it’s always bugged me that it wasn’t him they were upset about, it was the confrontation of their own mortality. I always felt that they should have shown something when he was alive. And here John Green has illustrated precisely this. The other characters don’t care about the person who died. They’ve just realized that they themselves will die, and are reaching out for signs that it’s not so bad. What a uniquely teenage experience this is, that realization of death, and what a magnificent job Green did depicting it.
Anyway, to sum up, Looking For Alaska was a fantastic contemporary YA read, a true look at what it feels like to be a teenager, with a suspenseful, emotional plot. Highly recommended, and I’m looking forward to reading more.
I am an Amazon Associate. I purchased this book.
This is the sixth and final book in the current Vampire Academy series, and this review WILL contain spoilers for the first five. If you’re new to the series, read my review of Vampire Academy.
The stakes have never been higher for Rose and her friends. Rose is in prison, accused of murdered Queen Tatiana, and with the evidence against her, will almost undoubtedly be convicted and sentenced to death. The court itself is in turmoil over Tatiana’s death, still over Dimitri’s restoration to Moroi from Strigoi, and over turning dhampirs into guardian at just sixteen, instead of eighteen. A new monarch must be chosen for the Moroi world and the choices aren’t stellar. Rose must escape and find the real murderer before it’s too late.
While I enjoyed this final installment in the series, I have to say that it wasn’t as satisfying as I’d expected it to be. In large part, I suspect this is because the Vampire Academy universe will be continued in the future. Rose’s story is wrapped up, but the author has a lot of loose threads to tie together at the end. I wasn’t particularly pleased with how things went with Lissa and Jill, for example, and especially not with what happened with Adrian. We’re just left with a lot of questions and not as many answers as I’d have expected. What did happen was mostly what I expected to happen, regardless of what I actually wanted. Suffice it to say that this was enjoyable, but not my favorite of the lot. Okay, I’ll be including spoilers now, as I just can’t hold back!
What’s worse is that I wasn’t entirely sure I liked Rose at the end of the book. At one point, Adrian tells her that she’s hurt a lot of feelings and used a lot of people to get to the end, and I had to agree with him. She does use people, she gets them into trouble, and she has the ability to ruin lives. I actually would have been happier had the ending gone a different way – I hated how she treated Adrian, who I thought was actually a much better match for her in Dimitri. Sure, I was caught in that romance at the beginning, but that just wasn’t a sensible choice. I didn’t feel that he was the one for her. I wanted to believe that she was getting past it and that she’d find a new future with Adrian, but she didn’t.
After all her talk of best friendship, I thought she ended up using Lissa the most. By making her friend queen – she didn’t make it happen entirely but she certainly got into the idea and made it so it COULD happen – she took away Lissa’s young adulthood and freedom, something she’d obviously longer for in previous books. Maybe Lissa was the best choice, but primarily the goal was to delay the Moroi election, and to buy Rose time. It was selfish, although in some respects she made up for it in the end.
This was a good series, even if it didn’t end precisely how I wanted with Last Sacrifice. Recommended for fans of YA fantasy and vampires.
I am an Amazon Associate. I purchased this book.
 Jane Eyre has been one of my favorite books for more than ten years. I read it regularly as a teen, before I went to college. When I had to choose a book to read aloud from in my public speaking class, Jane Eyre was it, and nothing else quite matched it (until, of course, I read The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, and I’ve never been able to choose between them since!).
But when I went to college, many of my reading habits lapsed. I had friends constantly around and, while I still read, for about three years I read considerably less than I do now and than I did in high school. Rereading was the first to go, and I hadn’t read Jane Eyre in about six years. I knew I wanted to read it again, but it was hard to persuade myself to do so, with other review books stacking up and, finally, feeling financially comfortable enough to buy new books and support the publishing industry on a regular basis. Rereading still falls by the wayside.
Luckily, I received just the impetus I needed to read Jane Eyre again in the form of a lovely publicist, who let me know about a new series of pocket classic editions from White’s Books. All of them have new, lovely art and introductions commissioned just for them. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to receive a gorgeous new edition of this book, especially when it’s so lovely. And the edition is nice; the front and back of the book have appropriate, evocative art and the book fit right in my hands for easy reading. There’s even a little ribbon to mark my page. The font did happen to be a bit small, but I expected that out of something called a “pocket” edition. The publisher also sells more expensive, normal size versions; here’s their website for more. Here are a few of the book covers for this edition:
Anyway, as the book itself went, I loved it just as much this time. Mostly, I adore Jane herself; she’s such a passionate person even when she’s determined to hide it in herself. She doesn’t let people push her around and sticks by her morals even when she would rather do otherwise, to the point of turning aside from her own love. She lives on her own terms even as she relies on others for employment, as a woman in her position at the time had to do, and she actively seeks people who appreciate her for who she is, the people who don’t dismiss her for being a governess, teacher, poor relation, or younger student.
I’d forgotten so much of the Gothic atmosphere as well, with creepy, dark Thornfield, Jane’s many dreams, and how much the book has to say about religion – what is true faith and what is twisting Christianity to suit one’s own goals. I’m not surprised, but reading it now after four years of English literature classes and lots of classics read on my own, it really sticks out as a Victorian novel. The new introduction by Jacqueline Wilson was also a pleasure to read and picked out many points about the book’s treatment of Jane that I wouldn’t have considered on my own – just right for someone who’d read the book multiple times before.
Have you read Jane Eyre? What did you think of it? I know not everyone agrees with me and I’d love to hear your thoughts.
I received this edition free from a publicist.
 When you move to a new place in adulthood, making new friends isn’t easy. I’ve moved three times since graduating college and, everywhere I go, it seems difficult to meet people with whom I have a common interest. It certainly isn’t as easy as it was when I was in school. Blogger Rachel Bertsche at MWF Seeking BFF has precisely this problem. Having moved only a few years after college to be with her now-husband, she’s found herself without a best friend locally. Though very successful in her professional life, she’s spent two and a half years best-friend-less and thus decided that the time has come to step it up a notch and find one. She’s spent the past year blogging about her efforts to find someone and she’s writing a book about her search, which will be published in early 2012. When Jen at Booklicity contacted me and asked if I’d feature Rachel, of course I said yes.
One of the posts which struck a particular chord with me was Rachel’s discussion of how a husband isn’t quite enough in the friend department. This is something that’s also been true for me; I love my husband, but having him as my sole in-person anchor just doesn’t provide the same emotional satisfaction. He doesn’t always want to converse about people’s reactions in death, he’s not interested in what I’m wearing and whether it goes, and really sometimes he’d rather just go off and play a video game (or head out to snooker with one of his own friends). It’s so nice to find someone who feels similarly, and this is only one of the reasons I’ve become a reader of Rachel’s blog.
I also really enjoyed this post, wherein Rachel writes about how we think others won’t want us as friends. I think after school, we expect friendships will just pop up naturally, but in reality they just don’t always. People often love being your friend as much as you love being theirs – which is why, as she writes, going for it is actually a great move. This is something I’ve heard from others as well, but shyness is always a barrier. It’s a fantastic reminder that it it’s sometimes worth going out there and just meeting people. If you hit it off at work or in a book club, it’s worth trying to be friends outside too.
One of Rachel’s most recent posts, A Case of Friends That Could Be, hit a particularly relevant note for me, too. I have made friends towards the tail ends of time in particular places – in high school, in college, even in grad school – where I felt that those friendships could have definitely been more. I had plenty of close friends in college, so I didn’t think I needed more, but now I do often regret not chatting to those people more, not making an effort to be real friends while we had the chance. I did with one and it turned out to be a great friendship. Of course, I now don’t have the opportunity to see them and follow up like Rachel does – but should that come my way in the future, I am determined to do so.
In addition to these reflections on friendship issues that will resonate with all women – whether or not our best friend lives next door – Rachel is a fantastic writer, also loves to read, and has plenty to say about pop culture. I definitely recommend checking out her blog. I suspect you’ll become a subscriber just like I did.
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