Bribery

“Before he lost his sight, the maester had loved books as much as Samwell Tarley did. He understood the way that you could sometimes fall right into them, as if each page was a hole into the other.” Truth.

5.14 A Feast for Crows

I came to the A Song of Fire and Ice series late.  I discovered it through a New Yorker article about how impatient George RR Martin’s fans are becoming for him to finish the series, and many fretting over the fact that he may die before he manages it.  I was amazed by the article and asked my brother who is a huge Fantasy fan if he had read the books.  He hadn’t… three weeks later he had and he was hooked.  So I decided to delve in. 

I have made no secret of the fact that I have grown tired of the new trilogy/series fad.  Mostly because I think it leads to over written ideas that really don’t need to be dragged out, and after finishing book four of the series I have hit true fatigue.  As I read, my attention wandered away from the story more often than not and I kept thinking that while I understand that Martin has created a world and characters that he loves, and I can understand why he wants to see where they may go and what they may do, that in the end I bet it was a pretty simple story he intended to tell.  I imagine that when he wrote that first book he knew how it all would end, but then got lost in all the planning and imagining and thus we end up with (supposedly) seven books that will, once complete, still bookend that same simple story line.  Is that a bad thing?  No necessarily.  He is a great writer and people love the books so have at it.  I just hope it finishes up at some point for those fans.

By the way, I had to bribe myself to finish this book with promising myself the purchase of the only book I have been really, really excited about in a long while. Very excited.

Summer Reading

“What a thing to go through life without books.”  Truth

What is it about summer?  You think there is nothing to do but be hot and thus lounge by the pool and read, right?  That is what I thought I was in store for this summer, but no… I had to move, and visit family, and socialize.  Not much reading going on, and so I have managed to finish a whooping six books this summer.  Of course, it doesn’t help that the last two were kind of stinkers and so I was left wanting to do anything other than reading.

21.13 Etiquette & Espionage

Great Cover! Great Title! Great Blurb!  Not such a great book. 

This YA should have sucked me in and lasted about two days - a perfect summer read – instead it became a total chore for two weeks.  It reminded me of summer reading for school, at times honestly doing nothing was more entertaining than reading some of that dredge.  The main character is interesting and the school seems wonderful but I felt like I should have cared much more about it all by the end of book one.  We will just have to see how the series progresses.

20.13 Ratlines

This was a dude book disguised as historical fiction.  There was far too little history, and far too many fisticuffs and too much torture and killing.  Blah.  Not good.

As I said, it was a sad summer reading season, but right now I am going to pick up a book based on the Luther series, and on September 3^rd BBC will start showing Series Three.  So summer be damned! Bring on fall, Luther, and, let’s not forget, Alice.  Yippee!!!

On The Fence

“It was time to let go.” Truth.

18.13 Shadow and Bone

So I loved parts of this as I read but after sitting with it a few days there are more and more things I didn’t like – and I hate (as usual) that it is another unfinished trilogy and so lost all of its steam at the end.

Characters –

The Good:

I love that Alina feels a sureness in her power – not like it is natural or outside of herself, but a thing she feels right about.  

It isn’t really clear who is good or bad, and it totally works.

The Bad:

Everyone is far too concerned about how they look.  This is a fantasy for goodness sake, can’t we leave the reality out?  Essentially she gets plastic surgery and this is skeevy for me.

I wanted to know more about the royal family. *To be fair, this may come later.

World Building –

The Good:

Original.

I like that it is allowed to unfold naturally instead of being explained ad nauseam to the reader.

Not a lot of back story.

The Bad:

Not a lot of back story. *Yes, this is both good and bad. 

There are a lot of different places mentioned but I don’t know why I should care about any of them.

I need a bit more about how the Grisha rankings work.

The Plot –

The Good:

The endless travel scenes plugged right along and I didn’t have to hear about every berry they tried to eat or fire they started.

The Shadow Fold seems like a genuinely scary thing and the bad guy is pretty bad and yet a bit logical.  Intriguing.

The Bad:

I read it two days ago and haven’t thought about it since, or thought of picking up the second book.

I finished reading the book and the story isn’t over.  I am honestly so tired of this.

Overall, I will be back, but I may wait until it has all been published.  Curses to the trilogies and my OCD to finish things I have started.  *See, I always bitch about it but also end up buying all the books – damn you capitalism.

War – Huh - Good God Y’all

“Nothing made you feel so useless as another person’s grief.” Truth.

9.13 Days of Blood and Starlight

This is the second in the Daughter of Smoke and Bone Trilogy and it shows that war truly is good for absolutely noting.  It also shows that the second book in a trilogy can be totally engaging and advance a plot in a totally meaningful way.

In the first book the war between the Chimera and the Seraphim is set up.  We see the history and build up and understand that it will be an all or nothing war – one side will cease to exist.  In Days, we see it actually happen.  And we see it keep happening because the killing never stops, even if you destroy one side another side appears.  This is a harsh book and I kind of loved it for that.  It doesn’t gloss over the hard stuff, or the grey area.  There are characters that we care for on both sides; we are shown that each side is justified and awful at the same time. 

Karou is still torn between sides no longer because of love but because of her constant questioning about what it right, and, because she is from the human world, she knows how much worse it could be.  They could have guns.  And as this story ends and we wait for the next to be written, both warring leaders now know what Karou knows and they are heading for the human world where we make gods of some and monsters of others, and arm them both in unimaginable ways.

I hate guns.  So much.

Strike Two

“Nothing went exactly right. And yet it was perfect.” Truth.

7.13 Tempest

I hate when I read two stinkers in a row, it puts me off for a bit.  Plus, when both have been recommended by friends I have to also worry about gracefully navigating our next meeting.  If only I could go back in time and make a different choice…

Speaking of, Tempest is a YA about a boy who can jump back in time and while there the things he does do not change the present.  Then one day odd men show up and shot his girlfriend.  From there he goes back in time to change her future and figures out a big subplot about his abilities and where he comes from.  It is actually a pretty good and original premise, but so much time is devoted to explaining how the time shifts work (and I won’t claim that this is done very well either) that you never come to care about the characters doing it.  There are some interesting parts sprinkled through but I never felt like anyone truly cared about anyone else and there were so many lies being told I wasn’t sure what to believe in the end.

Of course, it will eventually be part of a trilogy and so it leaves off without a satisfying end.  I am pretty sure I won’t be reading on and rather sure it won’t effect my future in any way.

A Bitter Pill

“Bacon improved things dramatically.” Truth.

3.13 Bitterblue

This is the follow up to Graceling, taking place eight years later and following the search for truth of the new queen we met as a girl in Graceling.  I honestly was looking forward to it, and while I liked being back in the world, nothing much happened.

At 500-some pages, there is just far too much bloat going on.  New characters are introduced who are all too similar to one another and many unnecessary, story lines that start out interesting but don’t have any structure or follow through, and a mystery that is intriguing until it is wrapped up nicely with very actually little resolved.  In the end, it didn’t even feel like a completed story, just one long tale that meandered nowhere. (But I did love that Bitterblue said, “Balls,” a lot.  It is a favorite of mine.)

This is a big issue for me with the new YA landscape.  Once publishers figured out that kids would take on a long book, scarf it down, and still want more, everyone started to write every little thing they thought of and not edit it well.  And yes, readers love a long book to escape into, but it needs to be worth it in the end.  Not every book needs to be over 500 pages and part of a trilogy.  Sometimes a story is short and tight, sometimes questions are left unanswered, and sometimes it is worth the extra pages, but not always and certainly not as often as the current YA publishers seem to think.

A True Hero's Quest

“Well, actually, I love books because books are my best friends.” Truth.

61.12 Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore

I loved this book.  Yes, it is a little sugary sweet, and yes, it is a whole lot nerdy (and there may be a royalty check for Google in the mail), but it is also full of wonderful people and places.  It is about the love of books, and words, and print.  It is about learning, and creating, and evolving.  It is a quest story with a hero who isn’t looking for the answer but for the solution, and he is looking not for himself but for his friends, and when he finds it it is poignant and simple and timely.  He counts on his friends, and they pay him back in kind, and we see that sometimes life and immortality are the same.  I will forever be hopeful that upon entering a bookstore, the man behind the counter might just ask, “What do you seek in these shelves?”

On a side note, I used the above picture instead of just the sole cover because this is the picture I used on my Twitter feed for the #Dailybookpic of weekend reading.  I was finishing the book on the left to start the book on the right.  And imagine my delight when just a few pages into Penumbra, Sloan wrote this:

“My Kindle is a hand-me-down from my dad, one of the original models, a slanted, asymmetrical plate with a tiny grey screen and a bed of angled keys.  It looks like a prop from 2001: A Space Odyssey. There are new Kindles with bigger screens and subtler industrial designs, but this one is like Penumbra’s postcards: so uncool it’s cool again.”

Now, my original Kindle is not a hand-me-down from my father, but his first Kindle was an original hand-me-down from my brother so that isn’t far off, and if there is anything I am a pro at it is being so uncool that I am sure that someday I just might be cool again.

Not Such a Great Discovery

“Happiness is always louder than sadness.” Truth.

48.12 A Discovery of Witches

This book lost me early on, very early on.

There was the witch who really didn’t want to be a witch but would use magic when she couldn’t be bothered to find a step stool, or turn off the water. There were the many descriptions of the clothes she wore to work versus to exercise versus to sleep versus to whatever, who cares. There was the vampire who practiced yoga - Screeech! What the !?! - Yep, that is where it lost me. The big, bad, dangerous vampire who maybe isn’t so big and bad because he can perform a perfect shavasana. He is a vampire from cripes sake isn’t that the very definition of shavasana??? Jebus, I can’t.

Anyway... The entire book is over bloated with silly details. Do I need to know that you are making two pieces of toast despite the fact the toaster has six slots?  Nope. Do I need to know how different characters carve their jack-o-lanterns? Nope.  The book certainly does not need to be 600 pages. The core story shouldn’t have been more than 300, plus it doesn’t even finish. As I got closer and closer to the last page, with little to none of the plot resolved, I started to get a funny feeling...  Another f-ing trilogy. I have to admit that the set up of the second book seems interesting but it also seems like it will be a story within a story and not get us any closer to a resolution.  It clocks in at about 600 pages as well, so let me guess, there will be movies? Probably six because all the books are so long.  Right, because everything now a days needs to become the next million-dollar machine. Ugh. Stop it.

There were things here I really liked. I loved the idea of looking at the DNA of vampires and witches and trying to find where they began, and I am always down with a hunt for a mysterious antique book, but too little of that was lost in all the toast eating and wine and tea drinking. Not to mention the romance that wasn't really a romance. I hear a lot of people bemoaning the future of publishing in the e-book era, but what of publishing in the absent editor era?

Game Over

“As terrifying and painful as reality can be, it’s also the only place where you can find true happiness. Because reality is real.” Truth.

45.12 Ready Player One

This was a fun read, and one that I was absolutely in the mood for.  It is also something that one must be in the mood for.  In the not so far future, life on earth is barely livable so most people live in the virtual OASIS.  Its creator has died, with no heir for his billions.  He sets up a hunt within the game:

Three hidden keys open three secret gates

Wherein the errant will be tested for worthy traits

And those with the skill to survive these traits

Will reach The End where the prize awaits.

So begins the quest of our hero, heroes, actually.  If they find the prize they win the dough.  And herein lies the biggest problem with the book: Key One – fun introduction. Key Two – lots of the same… oh god there is another key to go. Key Three – good twists granted, but get on with it!  All the issues of most trilogies found in one book.

I loved that in the beginning, without any fun money to spend, Wade had to depend on his own intellect to educate himself.  He found free information and studied it.  He took classes in school that would help him with the game. I LOVED that.  I loved that the game was set up for anyone to win, rich or poor, old or young, male or female (or even human since your avatar can be anything).  Sadly, that quickly was squashed by the more you have the better you are idea, and I was sad.

What the book is known for are the 80’s references, all the 80’s references.  Many of them are fun but as the story goes on they are no longer a part of the functioning plot.  The movies, music, and video/computer games of the 80’s are such fond memories for me, but after a while it got a bit silly and a lot of the middle could have been edited down.

The Battle of Midway

“Any act can be a prayer, if done as well as we are able.” Truth.

36.12 A Storm of Swords

I really loved Game of Thrones. I knew going in that there would be a lot of backstory and character introductions and I thought it was done really well.  I really cared about that core group of characters: Tyrion, the Starks, Jon Snow and the small group of The Watch, Cersi and the Kingslayer, the Hound, (Sorry, but Dany annoys me).  I couldn’t wait to see what happened to them next, and herein lies my problem.  The next two books have given me a bit of detail on their stories, and the fact that they are still around leads me to believe that they are in it for the long haul, but they are still the only characters I care about.  Both Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords and full of new characters pledging loyalty, gaining lands, acting both chivalrous and treacherous, experiencing battles, deaths, marriages.  And I care not a lick about any of them.  As my eyes read the works my brain literally says, “Blah, blah, blah.” When I come to a heading chapter and see the name of a character I don’t care about I force myself through just to see who is next.  

These are big books and they take time to read, and while I love those original characters I am wondering if I am just wasting my time wading through all this other nonsense when I could be reading a new book and discovering new character to love instead.  I don’t want to give up on Game of Thrones but there is very little holding me to the story at this point that I can’t really imagine four more books, especially when two of them haven’t been written.

***Confession time!***

I wrote the first half of this post after reading the first half of the book.  I really considered putting it aside and giving up.  I was so tired of people moving from place to place and looking for food and shelter; but man, once people get where they are going – watch out!  There is nothing off limits in this series.  No character is safe, no one to really be counted on to act as they have before, and my mouth was left hanging open more than once.  But it was all saved up for the last 1/4 of the book and that makes me wonder what all of that other running around is really about.  Is it even important?  Is it time to give up on the reading and just watch the TV show - I can't even believe I just said that! I wish more than anything that the series was already complete so at least I would know there is a resolution waiting, but it isn’t.  

Clearly I  am losing some of my fortitude to continue with the series but I imagine that I will, because when the going gets good it is soooo good.  I just wish it would get going a lot faster and more often.

Out of The Blue

“I tell myself it doesn’t matter. I don’t need to look like one of them.  I don’t need to belong.” I wish this were my Truth.

30.12 The Scorpio Races

A friend lent me this a few months ago, along with a stack of probably ten other books, so I was feeling the need to get some of those back to her and decided to pull one that I had no expectations for.  I had never heard of this book, or read the author’s other YA series, but I have certainly seen them around.

Quite honestly, I hated the first half.  The action built very slowly and it was easy to see where it was going.  It is a rewriting of a myth so I guess that is to be expected, but since I didn’t know this I found myself bored.  The setting was a bit disorienting because the myth develops slowly, and there are no geographical or time cues given making it hard to imagine where or when all of this is taking place.  We also have alternating points of view that are totally the same voice.  The title chapter indicates whose voice we are reading, and frankly without that we would have no idea.  So I started to kind of push my way though just to get it over with and suddenly I found myself very deeply entrenched in the story of this girl trying to help her family just by being her.  No magical creature or unaccounted for help, just her and the support of people who love her.  SO GREAT!  I read the last 300 pages in a day, and by the end was sobbing with both happiness and heartbreak.

This is a rough book though.  It is violent and sad.  The bad guys are bad; the good guys are good but rarely rewarded.  It is about people who love horses and you know how that goes.  We readers often end up loving animals much more than the humans and their pain feels much more intense. This is not a happily ever after story in the conventional sense, but I did find it hopeful.  It is a YA book, but I would say you would have to put it in the hands of a pretty mature reader who would stick to it thorough the slow going plot development and be able to handle the harsh realities as the story unfolds.  But in the end it was a pretty successful read for me, and I never thought that would happen.

Once Upon a Time...

Robin McKinley wrote an amazing book!

18.12 Deerskin

This is the first book I have read by McKinley, recommended and lent by a wonderful friend, but I see that she has made a bit of a career out of rewriting fairy tales while highlighting strong female heroines.  Hallelujah!  

The fact is that I love fairy tales, mostly because I glean a sense of comfort while reading them, but also because I dreamed of castles and princes as a girl.  I know the basic plot structure and so I know what I am in for.  In recent years, there has been a push towards retelling everything, and it makes me wonder where our creativity has gone, but I didn’t feel this way about Deerskin.  It felt like a whole new story.  To be fair, I am not very familiar with the story it is based on, Donkey skin by Charles Perrault, but something about it still felt new.  It is dark in many ways, as we all know most fairy tales were until Disney got their hands on them, but it is also very hopeful.   There are supernatural elements but they felt based in reality, as if they could have been hallucinations just as easily as fantasy.  It all felt very real yet very much remained a story and I think that is why it was so successful for me.  I will certainly be going back to discover more of her books.  

Coming away, I feel like Deerskin was everything I need a book to be: well-written, pure escapism, and the satisfaction of a story well told, with a message worth telling.

Must Have Map

16.12 – A Clash of Kings

 

When setting out on my Game of Thrones journey, my brother mentioned (repeatedly!) that I needed to find a good map. Clearly that message was meant for the second book.

It is a lot of riding here to there and troops amassing. So and so holds this or that, he is now dead, and now a different so and so is in charge.  Everyone lying to everyone, no one trusting anyone.  I skipped over half the names because they would be killed a chapter later, and there are far more places talked about than noted on the maps.  But the map did help me kind of keep track of where the main families were, but I do admit to a lot of eye blurring as I carried on.

The use of character names as chapter headings, and then as points of view, is critical.  It was the only thing that brought a sense of familiarity from the first book.  By now, I know these characters well enough that when I see their name I am able to adjust my concentration level because I know what will follow – with Tyrion it is plotting and humor, with Jon it is traveling and deep though, with Catelyn it is hearing about a bunch of people in a bunch of places and sadness.  But mostly it is just a sense of continuity and also being in the action.  You don’t see everything in this story and a lot of really important plot developments take place off stage.  I think Martin handles this really well and stays true to the time he is writing about.  No cell phones or email here; just a bunch of crows flying around carrying letters.  Safe to say some miscommunication occurs. 

I loved the first book, but found the second a bit more tedious. Sadly, knowing I have three more to read, and Martin two more to write, my sense of excitement dwindles a bit just faced with the glut of it all.  Only a bit though.

Curses!

11.12 The Magician King

I am a bit OCD about things in my life, particularly my reading life.  I buy books at an alarming rate.  In fact, there is simply no way I will read all the books I have in my lifetime, but I get some sense of relief from just owning a book I want to read.  I also NEVER give up on a book. I read to the end every time. Admittedly, I do know of one that I haven’t finished, but I also know exactly where it is and where I left off, so I am destined to pick it up again simply so I don’t have to think about not thinking about it any more.  I have a system of stacks that is silly, and many lists to make it all seemingly more manageable.  If I start a series I finish a series, even if I didn’t really like the first, and I have to read any book I borrow from the library cover to cover and within the check out time.  I never renew, it just seems so rude to the others waiting.

So it is because of my reading OCD that I subjected myself to The Magician King, both second in a series, AND a library loaner. I didn’t love The Magicians but one thing that was left hanging, and that I wanted to know, was what happened to Julia.  She is there for just moments on the book but it is clear that something was happening to her that we weren’t privy to, and we get her story here.  It is all sorts of fucked up.  I think my friend Carol said it best, “He doesn’t really like women.”   In The Magicians, Alice was such an underdeveloped character that it was annoying, and all the other females were just sexual conquests and bitchy, but Julia was out there and undiscovered.  Turns out she is just another sexual conquest in the most horrible of ways and she loses her soul, literally.  So, I got the story of Julia like I wanted but it just wasn’t a story that I wanted to read.  Oddly, in this book, Grossman introduces Poppy, another possibly interesting female character, but again does nothing with her.  Let me guess – book three?

The main plot of this book follows our cast of characters as they try to rescue the magical land of Fillory, and thus, magic itself.  And this was a big issue for me. The characters love Fillory because they read about it in a series of books as kids.  It was their escape and sanctuary from the real world and while us readers are familiar with that experience we aren’t given any insight into what makes Fillory so special to the characters and so it remains un-special to us. So this book’s plot is all about saving Fillory but I don't care about Fillory, and I still don’t care about the whinny characters. Plus, like in the first book, every plot development is just hinted at instead of really being hashed out. Big things are supposedly happening but it feels to the reader like nothing happens at all.

So please, for my OCD sake, don’t write a third book that I will force myself to be subjected to.

Deja Vu

After reading Game of Thrones, I wanted to read something more modern and was excited to find that I had a Kindle library book waiting for me, The Magician King. I thought it would fit the bill perfectly since its predecessor was very modern. 

The opening paragraph is about kings and queens riding on horseback.  FML. I am suddenly wondering what their sigil is... Actually, I wonder what mine is???

House Beasley

House Hoff

I believe I traded up on the intimidation factor, non?   Swans are mean.

Winter is Coming

10.12 Game of Thrones                                   

This book came to my radar when I read an article about the uproar of the series fans over the long wait between books four and five in the series.  Apparently they are worried that Martin is getting on in years and may kick it before he is able to finish telling his story - Aren’t people lovely?  Since it is fantasy I asked my brother if he had read them, he said that he had never even heard of them.  I dropped it.  A few weeks later Peter called in a frenzy – "These are AMAZING!!!"  I think he was already on the third book and he didn’t stop until he read them all.  That was last summer, and he has been on me to read them ever since.

I kept putting it off because it just so doesn’t seem like my thing.  I am not big on fantasy, I need to start another series like I need a hole in my head, and it just seemed like a bunch of dudes and their horses and their swords and… ugh.

I was enthralled early on.  This is not really fantasy at all, it is more like alternate history and for some reason I really liked reading about all these different ruling families and how some had become more powerful while others had been destroyed.  I liked that the point of view changed just because it kept things feeling fresh, and I liked that the bad guys are far more interesting than the good. Plus, I have to give any story whose twists make me gasp aloud its due. 

I wasn’t meant to like this book, but I did, and I find it hard to explain why except that sometimes timing is everything.  This past week was one that I needed an escape from and Game of Thrones fit the bill perfectly.  I didn’t want to deal with anything that felt familiar to my own life.  I wanted to get away.  I did, and I found myself wanting to stay in the book as much as possible.  It isn’t a great book, it doesn’t ask a lot of you as a reader, but it is certainly a yarn and I know exactly where to go the next time I need another escape – I can’t imagine it will be very long.

Umm...

I just sent this text to my brother:

"BTW, I am pretty smitten with Game of Thrones even though they threw that kid out the window!"

What is this book doing to me?  Not to mention what the other four will do...

Realistic Magic

7.12 The Magicians

Side note: I love a book that uses as its title a title of a book that plays a part in its plot, even more when it is a surprise.  It is one of those little secret things that make my toes curl and make me so happy that I am a reader.  Little bits of magic.  Now, back to the book…

I see this described as an adult Harry Potter because they have sex and drink, but wouldn’t Harry have done that if Hogwarts were a college? Ron certainly would have, and that Hermione… Just imagine her letting lose for a bit.  Frankly, the author deals with these similarities by addressing them directly in the text so you have to give some credit to him for that. I saw using the setting of a small magical school as a way to highlight how we grow up going to school to “be something”, then often flounder when that space of “being” isn’t filled up in all of the ways that we expect it to be.  They go to magic school and then what?  Nothing.  They travel in to the world of the books they read as kids (very Narnia) and then what.  They beat the bad guy and then what.  Nothing, nothing, nothing.  Nothing is ever everything we want it to be; nothing ever completes us. Not even when we can do magic.

This is all highlighted by the main, and my least favorite, character Quentin. Coldwater was a very fitting last name for him because he was always bogged down in his own dissatisfaction.  I understand feeling lost as to what your purpose is, but when he was in love he wasn’t happy, when he was with his friends he wasn’t happy, he would get exactly what he wanted (like secret admittance into a magical school) and immediately react to it in a negative way.  Maybe the truth is that I didn’t like that about him because it felt a little familiar, but I am not the hero in a novel.

The story felt kind of empty, pushed through, and not fully developed.  I found I didn’t really care, but I couldn’t stop reading either.  There is a lot going on: finding the school, attending the school, falling in love, graduating, first foray into the “real” world, trip to Fillory, back to the real world.  All of these things are important, but they also felt very black and white instead of full of color because there just wasn’t enough time to do them all really well.  Is there a solution to this?  Not an obvious one. 

I have to admit that I loved the end, and by that I mean the last paragraph, so it rebounded a bit but I am not sure if it was deserving.

Ivy is Evil

5.12 Wildwood

Anyone who lives in Oregon will tell you that ivy is evil.  It is impossible to get rid of, it sticks to everything, and it pricks you when you try to pull at it.  It is awful, and it is fucking everywhere.  So how great that someone has written a story about the wilds of Oregon where ivy is the ultimate evil.  I loved that aspect of this story and thought it worked very well, some others not as much. 

The story is not a new formula and is clearly an homage to The Chronicles of Narnia.  A young girl is told never to go near the Impenetrable Forest until her brother is taken there and she must go in to try to bring him home. Within is a world of animals and humans living in a time of turmoil while an evil queen plans to destroy everything and everyone.  Prue, and her friend (?) Curtis, end up playing major roles in the drama.  I know that this is a planned trilogy but am happy to report that there is a complete story here with no cliff hanger ending.  YEA!

Prue is rather too cool for school, which I guess is now the norm for Portland.  Her parents, she always knitting and he always reading, are lax to an extreme and when details are revealed about their past I had a hard time understanding how they could possibly act the way that they did.  Curtis and Prue clearly know one another before the story starts but I have no idea how.  My main issue with the book is that I needed to know more about Prue, Curtis, and their families before the Wildwood part of the story began.  I never got attached to them or understood their attachment to one another, and I felt I needed a bit more background knowledge to understand their actions.

 

The most successful part of the text were the amazing black and white illustrations.  I loved them and thought that they really added to the story.  However, the colored illustrations were a bit distracting.  Because they were in color, they were placed based on the printing instead of on the story, and so they came out of sequence and that took me out of the reading.  They were also well done but I didn’t think that they were necessary.

Suck it Twilight!

2.12 – Daughter of Smoke & Bone

Two friends, independent of one another, likened this to The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo and I would amend that to likening the heroine to Lisbeth Salander, as the overall plots couldn’t be more different.  This is not a murder mystery but a war mystery; a war between the Chimera and the Seraphim that will only end when one race is completely destroyed.  Karou is much like Lisbeth in the fact that she feels lonely and lost, yet has a wonderful network of support around her. She also can certainly take care of herself; and, the fact is, you root for her.

I loved the set up of the story and the setting of Prague, seeing the art and culture.  I loved that the author didn’t define everything as it was introduced, like Chimera and Seraphim, she showed us what they were instead of telling and so it all felt more real.  I love that the secondary characters were developed just as much as the mains.  I loved Brimstone (he is by far the most complex and honorable character I have found in YA since Macon Ravenwood burst through the doors of that cafeteria.) I loved that about half way through the book we got to go back and get the back-story that readers so often crave, we got to see and understand how things got to this point.  I loved the changes in time and point of view and found them pretty seamless to read.  I loved that even though the last words were literally, “To be continued…” I didn’t want to throw the book at the wall.  I felt excited to see what comes next yet also satisfied that anything that comes will be a continuation instead of a completion.  This may be a start of a new trilogy but it felt like a complete story and that is not easy to achieve

My one issue is that I have a huge concern that girls are going to start to really believe that you just walk down the street, look at someone, and suddenly realize your reason for being.  That love is an instant thing will make sense, and you will suddenly do anything for someone and they will do anything for you without any work or sacrifice. Sound familiar?

At least Karou stood up for herself and didn’t take the easy way out, and she loved her family as much as she did the boy.  But still… Really do we need to keep doing this?  I do think that the plot faltered here and became a bit tedious but then a huge time shift came and I was back on board. The soul mate thing is bothersome, but the fact is I would actually tell readers to check out this book while that other one… I still can’t do it.