My Reading Frenzy

A different kind of magic world...

Before I read this book I heard it described as Harry Potter for adults.  In a superficial way, this is true.  Quentin does not know he is a wizard until he is applying for colleges and is offered a place at Brakebills, a magic school sort of in up-state New York.  Quentin practices magic, makes friends, drinks a lot, has some sex, travels to a magical world....oh, not exactly like Harry Potter right???  The book also did not have the cozy Harry Potter feeling.  Maybe some of you will disagree, but despite the death and horrors of Harry's life, I never had a feeling of impending doom, subconsciously I guess I felt books sold in the children's section would have to turn out alright.  In The Magicians I felt an aura of bad-ness.  I just knew it was not going to be ok.  In a way, I was correct, in others I was not.  (I am trying not to give anything away.) 

Just as there are overtones of Potter here, there is also a big smattering of Narnia, a splash of Middle Earth, and maybe even a bit of Alice in Wonderland.  I liked it, but I am going to digest for a bit longer before I delve into the sequel...it may go on my "Summer Reading" shelf.  

Spring Break Books

So, my totally valid and not weak at all excuse for not blogging in so long is that I was away for spring break.  Ok, I admit it, this is a lame excuse since I was only away for a week...a week ago.  So really, I have been slacking a bit.  This is mainly only a detriment to myself as the reason I blog in the first place is to better remember what I read and have someplace to look to remind myself what I have read and how I felt about it. 

The Springsweet by Saundra Mitchell, author of The Vespertine.  This book is not a direct sequel of The Vespertine, but instead involves the cousin of Amelia, who has her own supernatural power...she has a way with water.  This power comes in handy when Zora is sent by her mother to live in the Oklahoma Territory.  Zora's love has died (as detailed in The Vespertine) and she longs to escape Baltimore and the memories.  She compromises herself by publicly smooching a stranger and quicker than you can sing O-K-L-A-H-O-M-A she is off.  I enjoyed The Vespertine and this book did not disappoint.  It ends clearly pointing to a story that will bring the two girls together. 

 

The Shoemaker's Wife by Adriana Trigiani  I made a concerted effort to take along some of the non-YA fiction I have been wanting to read.  I love YA, but I do sometimes feel the themes can be repetitive, I also find adult fiction to be sometimes more challenging and thought provoking.  With that goal in mind, I purchased The Shoemaker's Wife the day it was released so I would have it for the trip.  While Trigiani's novels also repeat elements, I find them engaging and informative.  This one began in the mountains of Italy and ended in Minnesota.  Trigiani often focuses on Italian families, which is always interesting for me as we are not Italian.  I also like the tales of the immigrant experience as researched by Trigiani.  I cannot rave about this book being unique, or different, but it is another tale from this author who can be counted on to tell a good story. 

The Humming Room by Ellen Potter  This is essentially a retelling of The Secret Garden.  It could have been done poorly with trite modern additions, but Potter really kept the good bones of the story and made each character new and separate from those of Frances Hodgson Burnett.  I enjoyed revisiting a childhood favorite in this way.  I would not use this book as a substitute in the reading life of a child I love, but instead encourage reading both.

 

 

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles  This is the book I most enjoyed.  It takes place in New York City mainly in 1938; it begins on New Year's Eve.  Katey Kontent is the main character.  But her friend Eve and the young man, Tinker Grey, whom they meet on the book's opening night figure prominently in the next year of Katey's life.  In general I like historical fiction, but while this one addressed World War II and other world events tengentially, it is much more a story about day to day life for Katey, who has a job, lives in a small apartment and is just trying to make a life for herself with hopes for finding love and fulfillment.  I would not have known the author was male, if I did not know the author was male.  He smoothly tells the story from the perspective of a woman, reminding me a bit of Herman Wouk's Marjorie Morningstar.  I was originally attracted to this book by the cover, and it really lived up to my expectations. 

The Magnolia League by Katie Crouch  I did not actually read this book while on break, but I bought it in Charleston, SC (our first stop) at a little indie bookstore called Blue Bicycle Books right on King St.  They are a mix of new and used, with a great local authors section, where I found this book.  And that had that little extra something that makes an indie store great: a sweet, fluffy cat.  Alexandria Lee begins her time in Savannah by smoking a great deal of pot.  (For this reason I will not be able to take this to my middle school library.)  She is there because her mother has died and she is not yet old enough to be on her own.  Life is significantly different in upper-class Savannah than it was on the commune in California.  First of all, Alexandria finds she is legacy in the Magnolia League of which her grandmother is the grand pubah and her mother was a member.  What takes a bit longer is to discover why exactly the league members are so special, and why they cannot ever leave Savannah.  I am looking forward to the second installment in July, though I have made a pact to read through my TBR pile of adult fiction, including John Irving, Ann Patchett and others, this summer!  Sigh...so many books, so little time.  

Hunger Games Wowser

Just saw The Hunger Games.  It is an excellent movie, true to the book in all the ways that matter!  Go see it!  It reminded me of all the things I loved about the book, now I need to reread the book or books, probably all of them while I am at it! 

Two about Time

It seems that lately I like to blog after I have read two books rather than after each one.  In this way I can connect two books that may or may not have anything in common.  It is a nice challenge.  Most recently I have read The Orchid House by Lucinda Riley and Hourglass by Myra McEntire. 

The Orchid House was both engaging and disappointing at the same time.  The story was a good old "family secrets," historical fiction, England, modern tragedy book.  I like these types of stories when Kate Morton writes them.  This story reminded me of her work.  Julia is a concert pianist who has lost both her husband and son in a terrible car accident.  When she visits the estate on which her grandparents worked when she was a child, she discovers it is to be sold.  Visiting her grandmother she begins to unravel a mystery in which her family and the owners of Wharton Park, the Crawfords, are caught up.  This storyline is mingled with that told to Julia by her grandmother Elsie about the days at the estate both immediately before and after World War II.  The story has some surprises which keep it from being too formulaic however I say this having read the entire novel, the writing was appallingly bad.  Stilted conversations, too much telling rather than showing, and just a lack of engaging detail.  I stuck with it because the author was successful in making want to know what would happen.  There is another detail I feel like I need to mention but this is GOING TO BE A SPOILER, so stop here  and move to the next paragraph about the next book.  Julia finds out eventually that her mother was not the daughter of Elsie and Bill (two very British, white people) at all, but instead the daughter of Harry Crawford and the Thai woman with whom he fell in love after the war.  It is emphasized numerous times that Jasmine (who died many years before, when Julia was 11) looked strikingly like her mother, a Thai woman, yet at no point during or after her life has anyone questioned her parentage.  This quite frankly is ridiculous.  Even if she were described as having particularly Anglo features like her British father, which she was not, she is clearly NOT the child of Elsie and Bill.  This is really the one plot contrivance that was just too far-fetched to be believed.  Despite my forbearance because I enjoyed the plot, I will not be passing this book along to friends, or anyone else.  

Next, I am glad to say I read the wonderfully written time-travel book, Hourglass.  This is a YA novel combining romance, fantasy, adventure, and a pinch of teen angst.  Emerson sees people from the past, and has had extensive psychological and psychiatric intervention to discover why.  When Michael, who works for Hourglass, comes along he tells her these visions are simply ripples in time she is able to see because she can travel into the past.  He sees similar ripples from the future. This means they are a matched pair able to travel together anywhere in time so long as someone provides a portal.  Because Michael is devastatingly handsome and only a few years older than 17 year old Emerson angst and romance ensue.  (This book reminded me a tiny bit of Kerstin Gier's Ruby Red, but not enough to feel like a copy cat.)  Because there is to be a sequel, the novel ends rather abruptly with all sorts of unfinished business, this is of course an evil tactic on the part of authors and publishers to get me to run out to buy the next book, Timepiece, as soon as it is released on June 12th, but I am not eager, no not me.  

All about family

I do not choose sappy books knowingly, perhaps subconsciously.  However, I do tend to like books with happy endings (though I am pretty flexible in my definition of happy ending), which to me sometimes means sappy.  I am not just rambling here, but leading up to discussing the two most recent books I have read. 

The first is Lone Wolf by Jodi Picoult.  I read everything Picoult writes and have only missed two of her early novels, which I will most likely read some day.  I like all the books I have read, I do not like them equally well, but I do like them.  This newest release falls near the top of the middle.  What I most liked about this one is actually all the facts about real wolves.  What I liked least is the daughter, Cara.  Usually when I am not thrilled with a character it is because he/she is not realistic.  Cara is supremely realistic from her desperate need to ignore the truth to her selfishness, she is 17, no doubt.  I just did not find her to be a likable 17 year old.  My other issue with this book is that I have read 16 of Picoult's 18 novels.  They are meticulously researched, the characters are engaging, the dialogue is realistic, there are always surprises, yet somehow they are beginning to seem too much the same.  There is a pattern, a similarity about them that is becoming disconcerting.  This happened a few books ago and I keep reading, because I always like the books, I do not find them predictable, but yet I find them the same.  I am not sure what I will do about it, and it does not sound like a real reading dilemma, but it is.  Bottom line, this is a good book.  If you have read and enjoyed Picoult in the past you will read and enjoy this one.  If this will be your first, it is not a bad place to start, but you will not want to miss Nineteen Minutes, The Pact,  or Second Glance, which are my favorites.  

The book I finished just a few minutes before sitting down to compose this post is Falling Together by Marisa de los Santos.  This book begins with friendship and ends with love, but not in a predictable way.  It is also about the end of love, death, and healing.  It too is filled with realistic and likable characters.  I really like Pen and her daughter Augusta as well as her mother, father, and brother.  Cat I like less well, but that is as I think de los Santos intended.  The story revolves around three friends: Pen, Will, and Cat who lost touch (though "lost" is a bit inaccurate as they really "left" touch, or "stopped" touch) a few years after they had been fast friends in college.  Their ten year reunion brings all the memories and angst back to the forefront when Cat sends an unexpected e-mail to the other two.  Despite feeling like it will be all about the friendship, the book explores the separate lives of the three, especially Pen, to illustrate why they both do and do not need each other.  It was really well done and happy without sappy, and profound without preachiness.  I highly recommend it.  Also check out Love Walked In and Belong to Me by de los Santos.  

 

Chick Lit?

I am not entirely sure I believe in the concept "chick lit." It seems to me that novels written by and about females can be enjoyed by anyone.  In fact isn't the greatest achievement of literature that it takes fictional characters and places them in realistic (sometimes) situations that then help us each to understand something about ourselves and humanity in general.  This is, I believe, the whole concept behind the YA Saves movement.  The idea being, teens can read about fictional characters who are experiencing the tribulations of being young adults they themselves are experiencing and thereby feel less alone.  Because even though the characters are fictional, the author, who obviously understands and empathizes, is not. 

So, the two books I have read recently that started this rant are I Think I Love You, by Allison Pearson and A Grown-up Kind of Pretty by Joshilyn Jackson (whose reading and book signing I was fortune to attend last weekend).  Both books are by female authors and address particularly female experiences: teen idol worship and motherhood respectively.  However, I still would not necessarily classify them as chick lit. if such a thing does exist. 

Pearson's book spends a great deal of time in 1974 just before the "retirement" of teen idol David Cassidy.  While I know who he is, and have watched a fair few episodes of The Partidge Family, I was too young to have experienced the hype.  Petra, the main character is 13 in 1974 and fully a disciple of Cassidy.  The early part of the book spends a great deal of time describing Cassidy's appeal and Petra's obsessions in particular along with some of the other teen issues with which she was dealing (ie first boyfriends, false friends, and a strict mother).  Though Cassidy was not my crush of choice (Ricky Schroeder and Michael Jackson ca. Thriller) I understand Petra and her longings.  For me though, the second half of the book when Petra is an adult and mother was much more interesting.  The childhood memories are necessary to understanding some of Petra's insecurities as an adult, but the adult experiences are what make the book.  (Do not miss the transcript of Pearson's 2004 interview with Cassidy at the end of the book.)

Jackson's story is as fine as her previous novels (Gods in Alabama; Between, Georgia; Backseat Saints; and The Girl Who Stopped Swimming).  Three generations of Slocumb women Ginny, Liza, and Mosey fight, love, and heal with each other.  It sounds a bit hokey I guess, but as the three generations are only 15 years apart there are interesting intersections in their lives.  While Mosey is trying to avoid the fate of her grandmother and mother, Liza is recovering from a stroke brought on in part by her previous drug use, and Ginny (or Big) tries to hold everyone together while neglecting her own needs.  All wrapped up in these issues is the problem of the tiny corpse found in the backyard when the willow tree is cut down.  A "must read" for fans of Jackson, and a good place to start if you have not read her work. 

 
                                  

Peculiar Books

Yes, not a very clever title if I am writing about Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs but to mix it up I also have something to say about Where Things Come Back by John Corey Whaley (winner of this year's Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature).  Because I read these two books in quick succession they seem to me to have similarities. 

1.  Both deal with mysterious events in the lives of the teenage, male main characters.

2.  Both ultimately come back to the teenager's search for his place in this world. 

3.  Both young men have some psychological issues that require the advice of a professional. 

I guess that is about it!

So, Miss Peregrine's... is fantasy.  When Jacob seeks some answers about his grandfather's life after suspicious death, he travels with his father to Cairnholm, an unusual island off the coast of Wales, where his grandfather spent some time during World War II.  What Jacob finds is not just some peculiar children whom his grandfather knew in his youth (mull that one over for a few moment) but also some rather nasty...creatures.  Is feels definitely like many of the icky things chasing Jacob and the children as well as his grandfather so many years ago stand as a metaphor for the icky things that plague human beings throughout time.  One convention of the book that I am not so sure about is the use of antique photos.  The author explains in an afterword that the photos are all real and part of the collections of people who make a hobby of collecting odd, old photos.  What I am not sure about is how Riggs weaves them into the story.  It felt just a bit too contrived and therefore awkward. 

Where Things Come Back is 100% realistic fiction.  I personally love sci fi and fantasy, but a good does of reality is healthy for me from time to time.  Cullen lives in Lily, Arkansas where not much happens until there is a rare woodpecker sighting and Cullen's younger brother Gabriel disappears one day.  While the two events are not related to each other, both cause upheaval in Cullen's life.  

It is the structure of this book that is so intriguing.  Told in alternating chapters we also meet Benton Sage, and through him, Cabot Searcy, whose story intersects with Cullen's in a totally unpredictable and brilliant way. 

I can completely understand why the book received the Printz honor this year.  While it grapples with religious faith, love, sex, friendship, and family it is a brilliantly structured story that really is difficult to put down.  Throughout the reader is asking, why? how? who? what? and is left at the end wondering if...  It really is a fantastic read. 

 

 

Another Wonder from Diana Wynne Jones

Sometimes I read books and am sad that I waited so long to do so....but how am I to know they will be wonderful.  Well, I should know when the other books from the same author are wonderful, so maybe I am just trying to spread out the wonders, or maybe I am just a big dummy sometimes. 

Anyway, House of Many Ways is the sequel to Howl's Moving Castle, though neither Howl, nor Sophie are main characters.  Of course Calcifer and the castle are back as well, but also not the main characters.  Instead we have Charmain (who is fittingly, but mistakenly called Miss Charming by the residents of the Great Mansion), Peter, and a sweet doggy named Waif.  The residents of the Great Mansion are searching fruiously for either the King's gold or the Elfgift, preferably both.  They bring in Charmain who is currently house sitting for her Great Uncle William, the Wizard of Norland while he is away being healed by the elves, to help sort through documents in the libray that may have a clue about the whereabouts of both items.  Peter comes along to apprentice to the Wizard not knowing he is away.  Much magical tomfoolery and experimentation ensue.

This book is delightful and I will not wait so long to read Castle in the Air.

 

Rae Carson's The Girl of Fire and Thorns

I decided to finally read The Girl of Fire and Thorns (There was no good reason I had not read it already, it just had not made it to the top of any piles yet.) because it was recommended on a blog celebrating The Queen's Thief Week, in celebration of the series by Megan Whalen Turner.  This is a series I also came to late in the game, and LOVED and want to read again!  (In my defense, there are a lot of good books in the world and despite my best efforts, I cannot read them all.  And I do not want to limit myself to one genre in order to be a completist in that area. ) 

Yes, after having read The Girl of Fire and Thorns I can understand why The Thief fans would recommend it.  There is a lot of the same kind of political intrigue and machinations in both books.  The main characters, while female and male respectively are also similar.  The are not however tediously similar.  The Girl is original with lots of unexpected twists and turns.  Elisa is the current bearer, only one is chosen every century, with a Godstone in her naval.  Despite knowing some of the history of other bearers, Elisa does not know what her great work will be.  Once she marries her path becomes more clear. 

Elisa is a fully formed character with flaws, foibles, and strengths.  Despite the fantasy elements of the book, all the characters are believable and engaging.  The story moves quickly and does not feel like the first of a trilogy.  Though I am glad we will have more of Elisa in the next two books, I am satisfied with the completeness of the first. 

SLJ - Battle of the Books

Wow!  I have read only six of this year's contenders in School Library Journal's Battle of the Books, but they were good ones.  I have a few of the others on deck, but will have to go get the rest.  The first round bracket is a doozy!