Girl, Serpent, Thorn

Girl, Serpent, Thorn

By Melissa Bashardoust

There was and there was not, as all stories begin, a princess cursed to be poisonous to the touch. But for Soraya, who has lived her life hidden away, apart from her family, safe only in her gardens, it's not just a story.

As the day of her twin brother's wedding approaches, Soraya faces a choice. Below in the dungeon is a demon who holds the knowledge she craves, the answer to her freedom. And above is a young man who isn't afraid of her, whose eyes linger not with fear, but with an understanding of who she is beneath the poison.

When her choices lead to consequences she never imagined, Soraya begins to question who she is and who she is becoming... human or demon. Princess or monster.  

I don't really recall Bashardoust's first book, Girls Made of Snow and Glass, but I do remember liking it well enough, and I'd had no objection to reading this second novel, which, if you look past how annoying the protagonist is, is also a pretty good read. But alas, what is a book without a protagonist?

So, as you may suspect from the blurb, Soraya puts her trust in the wrong person and in an effort to remove her poisonous curse, ends up somewhat accidentally letting a 100 year old demon rain destruction on her family and home and murder a bunch of people during her brother's wedding. "Accidentally" in the sense that she very much meant to do what she did, she just didn't realize there would be consequences.  Or well, she knew there would be consequences, she just didn't think anyone would notice them?

As one reviewer put it: "Soraya isn't a particularly clever or brave heroine." Accurate. So maybe she's a beacon to all those middling girls, who have no particular virtue to recommend them, but Soraya doesn't even really seem to have strength of character either.  She naturally doesn't want to be shut up in a room unable to touch people, but instead of asking her mother about the curse, lets several demons persuade her to steal the family's protective talisman and burn it, setting off the aforementioned Red Wedding-style chain of events. 

Then, after she's been forcibly taken to the demon mountain base, and appears to regret the fact that her country has been taken over and she's caused the deaths of a lot of people (soon to include her own brother and mother) she's presented with the former captain of the guard, who says he always knew she was dangerous her instinct is to... kick him. And then after she's freed the "good" demon, Parvenah, from prison, where Parvenah had been stashed for the last century by the bad demon, Soraya turns around and betrays Parvenah again to the bad demon (long story). Parvenah's sisters ask Soraya to try to rescue her again and Soraya is like... it's too hard, man, I feel like I keep making bad choices, I just give up.

I mean, yes, she has been making bad choices, and yes, she comes around eventually, but what a dishrag. Not the kind of person I would build a whole story around. It makes the whole thing feel like an obligation, which, I mean, it kind of was. Sometimes I don't know why I do these reading challenges, I feel like I have to force myself to finish half the books.

 

5: A Book With A Snake On The Cover Or In The Title

 

Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales

Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales

By Heather Fawcett 

Emily Wilde has spent her life studying faeries. A renowned dryadologist, she has documented hundreds of species of Folk in her Encyclopaedia of Faeries. Now she is about to embark on her most dangerous academic project studying the inner workings of a faerie realm-as its queen.

Along with her former academic rival-now fiancé-the dashing and mercurial Wendell Bambleby, Emily is immediately thrust into the deadly intrigues of Faerie as the two of them seize the throne of Wendell's long-lost kingdom, which Emily finds a beautiful nightmare, filled with scholarly treasures.

Emily has been obsessed with faerie stories her entire life, but at first she feels as ill-suited to Faerie as she did to the mortal world-how could an unassuming scholar like herself pass for a queen? Yet there is little time to settle in-Wendell's murderous stepmother has placed a deadly curse upon the land before vanishing without a trace. It will take all of Wendell's magic-and Emily's knowledge of stories-to unravel the mystery before they lose everything they hold dear.

Another small disappointment. The book is enjoyable and a reasonably satisfying conclusion (I assume) to the series, but the entire plot hinges on Emily reading a bunch of fairy tales and then doing the things in the stories, to the same effect. It's kind of boring. There's very little in the way of surprise, and Emily displays basically no ingenuity, which is one of the most entertaining parts of the previous books - her plans and plots.  Although the book is as long as the earlier ones, it seems like very little happens: she and Wendell journey to his realm and get settled in, they discover the old queen has poisoned everything, they investigate and stop her (mostly by dull research and using again, the exact templates we see Emily read about several times when comparing various stories) and then Emily has to ask someone else to save Wendell (this involves more library time for her and the actual rescue is done by someone else off screen pretty quickly) and then Emily decides to save the queen - this is pretty much Emily's only action piece and it's arguably far too little, too late.

 We spend some time with Wendell and Emily, there's a few entertaining pieces, mostly concerning Wendell's uncle, when Wendell has to win a battle against him, and when Wendell's cat, Orga demonstrates her irritation with him. But Taran never really manages to fulfill early hints at menace or duplicity, so it's another piece of tension gone. The book flirts with the idea that Wendell becoming a faerie king could change him for the worse and make him tyrannical as well, but then kinda just backs off of it completely. Emily rescuing Wendall from his own transformation might have been an interesting point of tension, but again, it peters out to a big old nothing-burger.

Look, there's absolutely nothing wrong with a cozy story with characters one presumes you like, but it doesn't live up to the earlier books in the series and if it had been the first in the series I would not have gone further. 

19: A Highly Anticipated Read Of 2025

Honeycomb

Honeycomb

By Joanne M. Harris

An entrancing mosaic novel of original fairy tales. The toymaker who wants to create the perfect wife; the princess whose heart is won by words, not actions; the tiny dog whose confidence far outweighs his size; and the sinister Lacewing King who rules over the Silken Folk. Dark, gripping, and brilliantly imaginative, these magical tales will soon have you in their thrall.

 

 This collection of fairy tales feels, well, "real" is the wrong word, but maybe "lived in"? It feels like these have been sitting around for a few hundred years, maundering through Europe and getting jotted down by Perrault in passing.  Well, for the most part.  Some of them (the barnyard animal voting series) are fairly heavy-handed comparisons to the current American political environment.  

The book contains a multitude of short stories - and here it's important to note that this version at least (and hopefully all of them) is exquisitely illustrated and put together, feeling both whimsical and substantial - generally no more than three pages each.  Periodically, we'll catch up on the latest doings of the Lacewing King, a faerie king who starts off  terribly cruel, but then faces a series of punishments and setbacks (mostly orchestrated by people whom he's pissed off) and tries to find love and redemption. It's interesting, but not really what I wanted from a book of grim fairy tales. I wanted all of the stories to be short, pointed, and harsh.  I mean, the first story ends with some eye-snatching. That is some quality dark content!

The book itself is very nice, the illustrations are top-notch accompaniments, and the paper quality is weighty and feels rich.  I was a quarter of the way through when I bought a copy as a gift for someone, it impressed me that much.  We'll see if they like it though!

47: A Book Featuring a Parallel Reality

Vassa in the Night

Vassa in the Night

By Sarah Porter

 

When Vassa’s stepsister sends her out to buy lightbulbs in the middle of the night, she knows it could easily become a suicide mission. Babs Yagg, the owner of the local convenience store, has a policy of beheading shoplifters―and sometimes innocent shoppers as well.

But Vassa has a bit of luck hidden in her pocket, a gift from her dead mother. Erg is a tough-talking wooden doll with sticky fingers, a bottomless stomach, and ferocious cunning. With Erg’s help, Vassa just might be able to break the witch’s curse and free her Brooklyn neighborhood. But Babs won’t be playing fair….

I really wanted to like this one, but almost from the beginning I found myself disenchanted with it.  Part of my problem I think, is that the author assumes more familiarity with the original Russian folk tale than I had.  Even though we had flashbacks to Vassa's mother, father, Babs/Bea's relationship and Picnic and Pangolin, none of them really explained what was going on with the BY franchises, why Babs and Bea weren't friends (or how they'd become friends in the first place, and what kinds of powers each had), or how Vassa fit into the continuation of these events from the past.  Erg, the doll, tied Vassa to the magical world, but also, Erg was where Vassa put her own feelings in when her mother died? So, then, if the Erg feelings are absorbed back into Vassa, does that mean that Vassa is no longer drawn to the magical world? Because that's the reverse of how those things usually work: you have to become a complete person before your magic works correctly is a time-honored trope of the genre.  And for good reason!  It makes sense, unlike this book.

Characters just float in and out of the book, and frequently we'll be in the middle of a scene just to cut away and be abruptly transferred to a "night/dream" sequence and never really resolve or wrap up the first scene.  It was very disjointed, and didn't feel intentional.  If it was intentional, great, I hated it.

I also objected to the dialogue and characterization.  Is this chick fifteen? Why does she sound so stilted when talking to people? Why is she so casual about the decapitated people in the bodega parking lot (why is everyone so casual about the decapitated people in the parking lot)? Apparently magic is acknowledged and recognized in this world, but when obviously bad magic is extending night-time and a local franchise is murdering people, uh, the reaction is to watch more tv? Okay, fine, I guess.  But seriously, everyone's frankly ho-hum attitude is a really weird choice to make for the author.  It's like, how serious is this problem? Clearly no one else cares, so why should we?  Even to the point that teenagers are playing games with the store where the potential risk is getting their head (or other parts) cut off?  Everyone's decisions and thought processes in this book are just...confusing.  In a bad way.  

Dexter and Sinister, the disembodied hands for example.  Are they unwilling agents of Babs Yagg? Cooperative villains? Dexter has a change of heart and decides to help Vassa and get itself killed in the process for.. what reason, exactly? Because Babs is mean to him (again)? Or is it because the plot required it?

And there's a lot of people complaining that Vassa didn't actually do much (or anything) herself to solve the tasks given to her, which is also true.  Vassa's primary purpose was going into the store in the first place, and after that... unclear how she derives any character development since she blacks out a lot and the problem gets solved without her involvement.  And frequently, she creates these problems, by having no damn sense.  She see-saws between unbelievable naivety about her situation and the dangers, and some sort of "inner understanding" of all things.

I think there's the germ of a good book in there, but I was pretty disappointed by this one.

 

The Iron Will of Genie Lo

The Iron Will of Genie Lo

By F. C. Yee

 

Genie Lo thought she was busy last year, juggling her academic career with protecting the Bay Area from demons. But now, as the Heaven-appointed Guardian of California, she’s responsible for the well-being of all yaoguai and spirits on Earth. Even the ones who interrupt her long-weekend visit to a prestigious college, bearing terrible news about a cosmos-threatening force of destruction in a nearby alternate dimension.
 
The goddess Guanyin and Genie’s boyfriend, Quentin Sun Wukong, do their best to help, but it’s really the Jade Emperor who’s supposed to handle crises of this magnitude. Unfortunately for Genie and the rest of existence, he’s gone AWOL. Fed up with the Jade Emperor’s negligence, Genie spots an opportunity to change the system for the better by undertaking a quest that spans multiple planes of reality along with an adventuring party of quarrelsome Chinese gods. But when faced with true danger, Genie and her friends realize that what will save the universe this time isn’t strength, but sacrifice.

Yes, the story is about a reincarnation of a metal rod from ancient chinese mythology in the body of a Californian teenager.  I know this, and I love it anyway.  Genie Lo is dry and funny and trying desperately to keep her head above water in her home life, college applications, boyfriend problems, and keeping her commune of demons from breaking out and wrecking havoc over the countryside.  

On a college visit, staying with her friend Yunie's cousin, Genie ends up getting enmeshed in several demonic and non-demonic army retreats (drawn to her aura), and joining forces with various gods, in the absence of the jade emperor, to stop the threat and potentially ascend to the throne of heaven.  Genie's got her money on Guanyin, while Quentin is backing his old buddy Guan Yu, with straight-A student type Nezha, and former defeated foe (and emperor's nephew) Erlang Shen rounding out the contenders, and Great White Planet tagging along to keep score.  

It's just a really charming book, and the characters are (mostly) trying their best. It manages to blend the mom's sudden and scary illness/college visit/mysterious absence of jade emperor and new demonic presence really well, although mom's illness got maybe the shortest shrift.  There's obviously themes going on in there about sacrifice and doing the right thing, and there's a scene which perfectly encapsulates the infuriating attitude of those born to invisible privilege. Surprisingly, I think Genie's mom nailed it at the end when she talks about how sometimes we have to accept that we can't control or guarantee the future, and all we can do is keep making the best decisions we can and supporting each other (and also the importance of letting your teenage daughter have a normal college experience, even if is she an ancient magical beating-stick).  I mean, that kind of anxiety is something I still struggle with, and I am much older and less prone to beating people up than Genie is. 

The old characters, particularly Erlang Shen, really got developed and fleshed out.  Erlang Shen become less of a three dimensional villain, what with his explanation for his earlier actions, and his relationships with some of the other characters adding a humane side to him.  As far as the new characters went,Yunie's hilariously deadpan older cousin blew everyone else away, but there wasn't a really sour note.  

The tone of the book wavers somewhere around Avatar: The Last Airbender (which makes sense, since the author's other book is an Avatar book) and Kung Fu Hustle, with the mix of martial arts, comedy, and sudden bursts of warmth and heartfelt interactions.  It's interesting how much happens "offscreen" - Yunie's adventures, and her parents' reconciliation could both have been much longer sections of the book, but we breeze past everything at a pretty good clip, and I didn't mind the recap-style overview, although others might.

The ending tag also really hit the spot for me.  I was honestly not sure if there would be a third in the series, so I was (a) glad to see how things got wrapped up and (b) COMPLETELY surprised by how things got wrapped up - the (SPOILER ALERT) time jump really tugged my heartstrings, the way that they kept working towards rescue and not giving up even years later.  I'm kind of mad though that we didn't get to see Genie in college, and all the stuff in between.  I also forgot about the three versions of the Ruyi Jingu Bang, and thought she already had the cloning power, so it's good that the rescue wasn't supposed to be more built up.  If there ever is a third one, I'm on board.   Especially since they make so many interesting allusions to what happened in the interim! A collection of short stories set in this timeframe would be perfect.

Just as a side note, um, do her mom and dad not notice that she's made of iron and has glowing eyes?  Let's make that one of the short stories!    Come on, do I have to do all the hard work here?

Ten Second Reviews

Men to Avoid in Art and in Life

By Nicole Tersigni

This was like the froth on a cup of coffee: fun to contemplate, but when it came to drinking the stuff, basically intangible.  I like the idea, but maybe it's better enjoyed on a scrolling read, rather than in book form.  There's some attempt to match topic and art, but not always successful.  Like I said, briefly enjoyed, and briefly remembered.  

Hex Life: Wicked New Tales of Witchery

Edited by Christopher Golden and Rachel Autumn Deering

Well, first of all, it's very hard to compete with the gold standard of witch stories, which is, obviously, Nine Witch Tales, by, ahem, "Abby Kedabra", published in 1968. But there's always room for second place! 

Okay, I know this is dumb, but I liked the length of the stories.  And I know, I know, that sounds like I'm damning with faint praise, but honestly, if I'm reading short stories, one of things that bugs me is when I get like, five twenty-page stories, and then like, one seventy-page story. That is no longer a story, sir, that is a novella.  Also, as much as I like shakin' things up (to wit: very little) I much prefer orderliness.  Anyway, to the actual review!

Some good ones, some not so good ones. Of the ones that stuck with me, I have to call out Sarah Langan's The Night Nurse, which is definitely NOT something I should have been reading as a pregnant person and Tananarive Due's Last Stop on Route Nine was chilling and spooky, and took me down a Dozier School for Boys hole, which is where I thought the story was going (it wasn't but it was still satisfyingly spooky).  Angela's Slatter's Widows' Walk, Hillary Monahan's Bless Your Heart, Ania Ahlborn's The Debt, Chesya Burke's Haint Me Too (which felt inspired by Beloved, at least in the beginning style), and Theodora Goss', How to Become a Witch-Queen,were all above average, enjoyable witchery stories.  

I felt a bit let down by Helen Marshall's The Nekrolog, and Kristin Dearborn's The Dancer, both of which were really great, but wrapped up without a satisfying resolution. Both felt like they were excerpts from a much larger universe, but even thought the world was interesting and well-done, I wanted something more complete in my stories.

I also feel like calling out Rachel Caine's Home: A Morganville Vampires Story, and Amber Benson (yes, of Buffy fame)'s This Skin, which were my least favorites, by far. Home was part of a larger universe thing, and I don't know if the people were more sympathetic if you read the books, but in the story, this witch comes to town, looking for a drop of blood from the vampires who murdered her and her husband in order to resurrect her husband and her murderers basically are huge assholes to her, basically being all "she's a terrible person, blah blah blah" even though they're the ones who killed her and frankly should be expecting revenge. And then she doesn't even do anything that bad to them, she just leaves once she gets the blood.  This Skin was a let down, again with a protagonist who didn't draw you in, one of those ones who thinks they're soooooooo much smarter than everyone else, and when things don't work out, it's hard to tell if it's because we're meant to believe that the narrator did get away with murder because they're just that smart, or because the narrator is an idiot and has just puffed themselves up into buying their own hype. 

Queen of Nothing

Queen of Nothing

By Holly Black

 He will be the destruction of the crown and the ruination of the throne

Power is much easier to acquire than it is to hold onto. Jude learned this lesson when she released her control over the wicked king, Cardan, in exchange for immeasurable power.

Now as the exiled mortal Queen of Faerie, Jude is powerless and left reeling from Cardan's betrayal. She bides her time determined to reclaim everything he took from her. Opportunity arrives in the form of her deceptive twin sister, Taryn, whose mortal life is in peril.

Jude must risk venturing back into the treacherous Faerie Court, and confront her lingering feelings for Cardan, if she wishes to save her sister. But Elfhame is not as she left it. War is brewing. As Jude slips deep within enemy lines she becomes ensnared in the conflict's bloody politics.

And, when a dormant yet powerful curse is unleashed, panic spreads throughout the land, forcing her to choose between her ambition and her humanity...

I was so excited to read this I decided to get it immediately from the library instead of waiting until 2020 when it would have qualified as a "Author with Flora or Fauna in the their Name" category.  Anyway, before I get to the review, I have to say something.  I will sometimes spend a little time thinking about my review before I actually sit down to type it, and I think it took me less then ten minutes to start wondering about fairy dicks.  Okay, bear with me: they (the fairies, not the dicks) have tails and wings and are like, random different sizes, but they all have human compatible dicks?  Shouldn't this, AT THE MOST, be like a donkey-horse → mule situation? (Also, sidebar, I totally forgot what the name of the hybrid animal was just now, I remembered that JENNY is a female donkey, but not what a mule is, le sigh).  I say this not as a critique against Queen of Nothing, which certainly didn't invent human-elf fucking, but you know, I spent a lot more time thinking about the actual compatibility of penises than I thought I would going in.

Anyway, that's it! That's the review!

Haha, just kidding, I will put the dicks to bed and talk about the rest of the book.  Like, 98% of it is not about dicks.  Maybe 97%, because Taryn gets knocked up, which also involved dicks, but offscreen.  Who else (raise your hands) thought that Taryn's pregnancy was going to be relevant at some point?  Because I definitely did.  I thought that was a big old Chekhov's Baby, ready to go off at any moment.  But it went nowhere!  Again, not really a critique, just pointin' out.

This did feel like a really short book though - much shorter than books 1 or 2; and some of that may be because the story is even more straightforward now (no huge betrayals or double crosses that I can remember, although I cannot be relied on to be accurate in this regard), and we have just a few action scenes seems like, before we get to the denouement.  Honestly, that is my biggest complaint - feels too short, ends too soon, want more drama, more angst, more reunion scenes with Cardan, more everything!  This is one where I kinda hope she ends up writing maybe another series set in this world, or some short stories about Jude et al, because I enjoyed my time with her.  Except her name, which I don't love and always makes me start singing the Beatles song, and it's distracting and annoying. AND IT'S DOING IT AGAIN.  What a sapfest that song is.  Anyway.  I enjoyed this book, the series, and the resolution.  Two thumbs up.  And one dick.

Ten Second Reviews

The Devil in Music

By Kate Ross

Alas, we've come to the end of our series, and I am actually very disappointed that there won't be any more - this was a pleasant delight of a set.  As before, coincidences and lucky chances abound without alluding to them, and it's a very chunky book, but you just don't seem to mind any of that.  I may at some point get the whole set to sit down and enjoy.  I really couldn't say that these are the best books in the world, but I just really had a good time with them, and in the end, isn't that what matters?  Anyway, Julian Kestrel solves another (couple) murders, this time whilst on Lake Como, which did nothing to make me satisfied with my own little plot of land.  Truly the rich are to be envied.

My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories

Edited by Stephanie Perkins

This was more of a hit or miss for me (which most anthologies are, despite my glowing review of How Long Til Black Future Month? and the, uh, next anthology, below).  It's definitely a YA & love/romance-y one, particularly at the start, which I guess I... wasn't expecting?  Now that I think about it, I think I just picked this one up in the library and didn't really look at reviews or anything, so... surprise! Here's my one sentence reviews:

• Midnights, by Rainbow Rowell: boring, nineteen year olds like each other after several years of being friends.  
• The Lady and the Fox, by Kelly Link: girl falls in love with weird guy she only sees at Christmas if it's snowing.  He's from like, three hundred years ago, so who knows how that culture shock is going to go but let's pretend they have a future together.
• Angels in the Snow, by Matt de la Pena: hispanic guy falls for white girl while he's housesitting at some rich person's place - not bad, but after the previous two, needed something stronger than this.
• Polaris is Where You'll Find Me, by Jenny Han: Um, what the heck did I just read? Young human girl raised up by Santa falls for an elf, but also has a thing where she tells lies about meeting a Scandinavian boy and also really wants to leave the North Pole. This feels like it ends on a cliffhanger, but it's crazy enough that I was starting to get into it.
• It's a Yuletide Miracle, Charlie Brown: Ah, here we run into our series second theme: depressed people.  It kinda came up with Angels in the Snow, and in this one, a young christmas tree salesman is picked up by, and rearranges the furniture for, a young lady whose father left her and her mother because they were his bigamist family.  Fun at the outset but a little too saccharine to finish.
• Your Temporary Santa, by David Levithan: another one about a depressed family, although I wasn't quite clear on what fatherly disaster had befallen this one - another abandonment I guess.  This was fine, less romance because the couple was already together, so it was just someone doing something nice, which is more of what I was looking for in this set.
• Krampuslauf, by Holly Black: trailer park girl invites a demon back to a party, and he turns a cheating boyfriend into a donkey.  Good times! Two thumbs up.
• What the Hell Have You Done, Sophie Roth? by Gayle Forman: lonely city girl gets picked up by black guy on her small town midwest college campus.  I think I gave this one more of a pass because the stories before were a bit better/different.  If this had been placed third or fourth in the book, whoa.
• Beer Buckets and Baby Jesus, by Myra McEntire: Juvenile delinquent and good girl fall for each other during mixed up Christmas Pageant process.  At least this was a little bit funnier than the other boy-meets-girl stories, but also more of the same.
• Welcome to Christmas, CA, by Kiersten White: young teen hates everyone in her small town, until she meets the new diner cook who knows what food everyone needs. I definitely thought that the cook was going to turn out to be like, an elf, or an angel, or some other supernatural being, but he was just another juvenile delinquent, but this one was my favorite by far, especially when she learns that her mother and de facto step-father have actually been scrimping and saving for her and her college fund (so obvious, but it's CHRISTMAS).  Sniff.
•  Star of Bethlehem, by Ally Carter: Young singing sensation switches places with Icelandic girl and flies to Oklahoma where she feels okay about singing Christmas Carols again. This one felt way too long, and I can't help but HATE the very end, where the local judge is telling people that apparently it would be pretty easy to undo the guardianship her manager has over her.  In favor of these people she met a week ago, I guess.  Mmmmhmmm, yeah. 
• The Girl Who Woke the Dreamer, by Laini Taylor: The Strange the Dreamer series has been on my list forever (I think I was waiting to see if more books in the series were coming out???) and this gave me the push to get it. I didn't want to read too closely in case there were spoilers for the book series, but the beginning is really interesting and well written, and it inspired me to check more books by her out, so what else do you want?

Nine Witch Tales

By Abby Kedabra

Man, I LOVED this book when I was growing up, some twenty-five years ago, so I bought an old copy online, and it does NOT disappoint, this book is wild. I really mostly remembered the first story, where the twelve horned witches come in to do some sewing and then send this woman on errands like, "fill up a bucket using this sieve".  But all of them are fun, and short enough you don't get tired of them: haha, the one about Kowashi's mother, who developed an appetite for eating fish, bones and all, and he whacks her on the head and realizes she's a witch demon cat, and then! Casually, at the very end it goes: "Not long after this, Kowashi discovered that the wicked cat had killed his real mother and buried her in the garden." And then it just ends. FIN.  MAJESTIC.  I LOVE IT. And the curious woman who uses the magical ointment and is dragged all over and then wakes up in a barn and gets fired because her employer thinks she's drunk, lol. There's comeuppances and escapes, and each story is a delightfully spooky and scary-but-not-too-scary tale.

 

The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge

The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge

By M.T. Anderson and Eugene Yelchin

Uptight elfin historian Brangwain Spurge is on a mission: survive being catapulted across the mountains into goblin territory, deliver a priceless peace offering to their mysterious dark lord, and spy on the goblin kingdom — from which no elf has returned alive in more than a hundred years. Brangwain’s host, the goblin archivist Werfel, is delighted to show Brangwain around. They should be the best of friends, but a series of extraordinary double crosses, blunders, and cultural misunderstandings throws these two bumbling scholars into the middle of an international crisis that may spell death for them — and war for their nations. Witty mixed media illustrations show Brangwain’s furtive missives back to the elf kingdom, while Werfel’s determinedly unbiased narrative tells an entirely different story.

Soooooo, okay, I really wanted to like this more, and I should have, but I couldn't enjoy it much because Brangwain Spurge was such a DICK.  I spent most of it wanting him to fall into a deep crevasse and die, while simultaneously being very fretful about Werfel's house, job, life, and his pet, because no one seemed to care about Werfel.  And his pet icthyod.  BEKKY!!!!!! Her getting smacked around is a direct result of Spurge's assholery and I for one do not forgive him.

Anyway, it's a very clever and well executed idea, that we're getting two different stories, from the goblin perspective and the elfin perspective (and for those of us who are kind of thick, like me, both the comments about Spurge's pictures not matching their actual appearances at all plus finally getting to see Werfel at the end made it very clear that Spurge is a liar and a FUCKTARD).  As clever as it was though, it was actually pretty depressing too, the way that everybody seemed bound and determined to go to war, although it sounded like that was mostly on the elf king's side of things, since most of the goblins were pretty nice to Spurge until his true colors showed through.

What a rude fucking houseguest.

Anyway, I also realized upon finishing that the author, M.T. Anderson, was also responsible for one of the most horrifying deaths and autopsies in "young adult" fiction (The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing: Traitor to the Nation), such that, despite being an otherwise excellent book, I have been unable to bring myself to re-read it so that I can finally read the sequel.  Given these products, I'm a bit worried about the inside of Anderson's head - it seems like it might be a most distressing place.

Anywhoodle, I'm glad that Werfel and Spurge are buddies now, but I haven't forgotten that Werfel's house was firebombed because of Spurge, and I do not forgive him.  Not to mention, now that both leaders and a ton of people got killed in the end, both countries are incredibly unstable right now, and I am very concerned about future wars. 

Ten Second Reviews

The House with Chicken Legs

By Sophie Anderson

This is like a middle school reader version of Baba Yaga, where she adopts like an eleven year old girl and then shit happens.  I will be very honest: I did not finish this one and only sort of limply flipped through the final pages (Baba never comes back?!).  Among other things, a kid from the Lake District in England tells our heroine Marinka that he is really into " soccer". It brought me in mind of the first Harry Potter book, in which things just got semi-randomly changed for an American audience (because we do not know what a philosopher is, I suppose) and that was twenty-three years ago (sniff) and we've all come a long way since then, and frankly a little cross-cultural contamination is good for the soul anyway.  Let's raise some fricking cosmopolitans.  Anyway, this may be impolite, but I want to shout out to Nine Witch Tales which is actual witch horror for middle school readers, because back in the 60s they didn't care about "mental health" or "not terrifying young readers".

Fatal Inheritance

By Rachel Rhys

This one was certainly nicely atmospheric - and I don't mean it's suspenseful or thrilling, but that it feels nicely of the time and place, i.e., 1948 post-war French Riviera.  I went along for the ride, but I did have some bugaboos: Eve's a doormat until she needs to be otherwise for the sake of the plot, and then she'll quietly subside again.  I never really got a feel for her personality - is she chafing, is she demoralized, is she seizing her opportunity here, what is it?

And the solution to the mystery bugged too.  So her mysterious inheritance is basically unrelated to the "accidents" which keep befalling her, since those are just about the lost Nazi art smugglers who want to get into the house.  And the art is in Guy Lester's house because...? I never made the connection of when and how it got buried behind the wall, and why it needed to be removed conveniently when Eve was still in the house.  Smugglers really demand punctuality and courtesy when removing stolen items, I guess.

But the tagline, "She didn’t have an enemy in the world…until she inherited a fortune." isn't really true: she didn't have an enemy because she inherited a fortune, she sort of just managed to wander into a criminal ring simultaneously with inheriting a fortune.  It's not a very surprising mystery (you know who is mysterious and angry but falling in love with her, and who is mysterious and nice but secretly using her very early on, and the terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad thing that Guy Lester did is clear about halfway into the book, although they save the "revelation" for much later) but it's not a bad piece of fiction, and it's such an interesting setting that the novelty at least, should keep you going until the end.

How Long 'Til Black Future Month?

How Long 'Til Black Future Month?

By N.K. Jemisin

N.K. Jemisin is one of the most powerful and acclaimed speculative fiction authors of our time. In the first collection of her short fiction, which includes several never-before-seen stories, Jemisin equally challenges and delights with narratives of destruction, rebirth, and redemption.

Spirits haunt the flooded streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In a parallel universe, a utopian society watches our world, trying to learn from our mistakes. A black mother in the Jim Crow South must save her daughter from a fey offering impossible promises. And in the Hugo award-nominated short story "The City Born Great," a young street kid fights to give birth to an old metropolis's soul.

Anyway, this book and a random comment elsewhere made me realize how much I was enjoying these short stories, and the last time I felt like this, which was when reading Connie Willis.  Short stories are tough, man!  I just put a book in the giveaway pile because I read like, four of the ten stories are didn't really get into any of them.  Obviously not all of the ones in a collection are going to be knock-outs for me, but here's some of the ones I liked best:

•  Red Dirt Witch, which combines the fae and Civil Rights Era Alabama,

• L'Alchemista, whose main character is a down-on-her-luck chef in Italy, who is given some magical ingredients,

• Cloud Dragon Skies, about the consequences of interference with nature again after we already fucked it up and then agreed to live with it,

• The Storyteller's Replacement, which uses the framed story to tell a story about a king who eats a dragon heart in order to get a massive hard-on, but karma revisits him in the form of his daughters (somewhat similar to a story by Kate Elliot, whose book of short stories I wasn't into nearly as much)

• The Brides of Heaven, about the interrogation of a woman who, in her desperation to re-seed a male population which has died off, has allowed something...wrong...into their homes

• Walking Awake, which is about a woman who works  at a body replacement facility slowly realizing that she's doing something awful and fighting back,

• Sinners, Saints, Dragon, and Haints, in the City Beneath Still Waters, which is about post-Katrina New Orleans, except with dragons (and sinners and saints and haints and the battle for the City's soul).

Not that the others aren't good - at a minimum, they all do that good sci-fi thing where they tell a story about our world using another world, i.e., The Ones Who Stay and Fight (which is a direct response to The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, by Ursala K. LeGuin, which I had to look up because I'd never read it) is a reminder that we've simply accepted how fucked up things are, but even in a world that demands cruel things, we don't have to let ourselves be cruel, or simply walk away and wash our hands of those necessary evils.

Or the Narcomancer, which I enjoyed, and which was more straight-on fantasy, but which felt also like the shorter version of a bigger world (which she says in the introduction it was).  Henosis, which is about legacy, combined with a touch of Shirley Jackson. Or The Effluent Engine, which is a steampunk New Orleans spy-action story, set around the time of the Haiti Revolution. I'm telling you, if you like sci-fi or fantasy at all, you gotta read this. Or The Evaluators, about a predator that takes on the shape of those it hunts (which, I'll be honest, only made a little bit of sense to me, but it felt cool).  There's definitely something for everyone. Also a lot of like, pregnancy horror, so I would say not to read it if you're expecting.  Pregnancy is enough horror all on it's own. 


So this was a bit of a last minute add-on because The Woman in the Window got pushed to 2020, and in the spirit of the competition, I decided I would definitely read a book being made into a movie that was actually released in 2019, but when all was said and done, I didn't really want to read The Goldfinch, since I'd already tried A Secret History and hated it, so I decided I would make Where'd You Go, Bernadette? my selection for 01, and move How Long 'Til Black Future Month? into 16.  Long story short, I am very glad I got prodded into Black Future Month, and very sad I read The Woman in the Window which turned about to be for nothing, nothing!


16: A Book With A Question In The Title

Ten Second Reviews

As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride

By Cary Elwes and Jay Layden

Essentially Cary Elwes' behind-the-scenes look at his role and interactions in The Princess Bride, and, although it certainly has the benefit of a built-in, forgiving audience, it also manages to tread the same fine line of the movie, that is: it's sweet without being sappy, funny without being mean, and gentle without being weak.  It gives you the same "This world may be populated with fundamentally good people after all" feeling that The Great British Bake-Off does.  It makes you nostalgic, and definitely in the mood to re-watch the movie.  Even though it's not "juicy", there's plenty to make you feel like you were there during filming, and you do get a sense of the various personalities on set.  A lovely, nostalgic, easy read.

The Extremely Inconvenient Adventures of Bronte Mettlestone

By Jaclyn Moriarty

Ten year-old Bronte receives the news that her mostly absent adventurous parents have been killed by pirates - and that their Last Will and Testament requires her (under pain of her town collapsing) to visit her father's ten aunts and deliver gifts to them.  But as she visits orange orchards, dragon hospitals, cruise ships, water sprites and musical kingdoms, she begins to realize there's more going on that she originally suspected. This one was delightfully plotted - although the generous hints throughout the book mean that you'll probably guess what's happening long before we get to the reveal (except one where I was completely surprised - happily so) there are so many strings and sub-plots that it's never boring.  Plus, in addition to the book-long narrative, each aunt is like a mini-adventure, including a crime puzzle, an avalanche, tidying up for depressed people, fleeing pirates, saving babies, and learning magic.  It's a real confection of a book, as Bronte's instructions include many restaurant recommendations along with travel tips, and the master spell reads like a recipe.  There's some darker points as well, which, although it makes sense there would be, given that the book is about events set in motion by the murder of her parents, does feel a little off sometimes, given the upbeat and candy-colored attitude the rest of the book has.  Given the large cast of characters, it also doesn't get confusing or crowded, and it's a pleasant and ultimately feel-good way to spend an afternoon. 

Comic Bonanza

Here's a round-up of a couple of kid-friendly(ish) comic books I've been reading:

Courtney Crumrin, Vol. 1: Courtney Crumrin & The Night Things

By Ted Naifeh

Courtney's parents have dragged her out to a high-to-do suburb to live with her creepy Great Uncle Aloysius in his spooky old house. She's not only the new kid in school, but she also discovers strange things lurking under her bed.

This one is why I'm calling these "kid-friendly (ish)" emphasis on the "ish".  Courtney is a somewhat darker take on the beginning witchcraft dabbler tale, both figuratively and literally.  I mean, everything is kid-appropriate, but at one point a changeling takes away a baby that Courtney is watching, and although she tries to get it back (being captured and sold herself) her uncle basically tells her in the end, "Forget about trying to get the baby back, these things happen, his parents won't even notice." And they don't!  That was a more chilling story than I expected it to be.  Anyway, these are set up as four short stories, all in black and white.  I would have loved to have them in color, but I suppose it sets the mood.  Courtney herself is an entertaining little curmudgeon.  The last story finds her losing energy, only to realize she's been replaced by a doppelganger who is living her life (and doing much better at it apparently).  In the final confrontation, you think that Courtney will let the doppelganger just take over since everyone seems to prefer it to her, but she comes out swinging hard with a "fuck everyone else, I'm a difficult and unpleasant person, and that's exactly how I want to be!" that completely saps the doppelganger.  Good on you, Courtney.  I would never want to meet you in real life, but bless your confidence. 

Goldie Vance Vol. 1

By Hope Larson and Brittney Williams

Sixteen-year-old Marigold “Goldie” Vance lives at a Florida resort with her dad, who manages the place. Her mom, who divorced her dad years ago, works as a live mermaid at a club downtown. Goldie has an insatiable curiosity, which explains her dream to one day become the hotel’s in-house detective. When Charles, the current detective, encounters a case he can’t crack, he agrees to mentor Goldie in exchange for her help solving the mystery.

This one is a lot of fun to read, colorful, bouncy, basically Nancy Drew in 60s Florida, if Nancy weren't so lily white.   Whereas Courtney was a loner and preferred it that way, Goldie has a colorful cast of supporting characters, including friends, enemies, potential ladyfriends, adults who seem to exist mainly for spoiling fun, and also: aliens!  Yes, I was really getting into the story when it took an abrupt right turn into Martian colony weirdness.  This was set up so the mini-stories merged into a longer connected story, so we'll have to see if all of the mysteries end like that.  It was a little off-putting, but I (a) enjoyed the rest of it enough to keep reading and (b) can kind of see where they're going with the 60s cold war and space-focus (one of Goldie's friends wants to be an astronaut) so I will allow it for now.

The Lost Path

By Amélie Fléchais

Three young boys set off from Camp Happiness, map in hand, determined to be the first to find the treasure before anyone else. But the shortcut they take leads to something far more spectacular and sinister! All manner of magical beasties live in these woods, and the kids find themselves caught between warring Forest Spirits. Will the three boys find their way out of trouble? Get your map and ready, set, go!

This was something I picked up and bought during my sojourn on Free Comic Book Day solely because of how beautiful it was, and that definitely panned out.  It is gorgeous, done in multiple color and drawing styles.  I would have liked something 100% in color, just because the coloring that was there was so beautiful, but, I acknowledge that (like Courtney) the black and white was an appropriate style choice for those sections - when the three boys are simply wandering in the woods.   I agree with a lot of other reviewers that felt the story-line was lacking in comparison to the illustration.  The story is good, but it felt oddly incomplete and only half explained.  We wind up in the middle of fighting forest spirits, but it was hard to tell who was on what side and why.  A crown/hat becomes a Chekov's Gun that never goes off, and when I got done, I went to look if this was intended to be a stand-alone story or not.  So far it is, which is a let-down.  Overall, a beautiful, but otherwise somewhat empty, little book. 

The Wicked King

The Wicked King

By Holly Black

After the jaw-dropping revelation that Oak is the heir to Faerie, Jude must keep her younger brother safe. To do so, she has bound the wicked king, Cardan, to her, and made herself the power behind the throne. Navigating the constantly shifting political alliances of Faerie would be difficult enough if Cardan were easy to control. But he does everything in his power to humiliate and undermine her even as his fascination with her remains undiminished.

When it becomes all too clear that someone close to Jude means to betray her, threatening her own life and the lives of everyone she loves, Jude must uncover the traitor and fight her own complicated feelings for Cardan to maintain control as a mortal in a Faerie world.

I think this second book vastly improved upon the first.  It took out everything I didn't enjoy about the first book - the murky motivations, the lengthy character list, the lack of direction - and streamlined everything and put this story in MOTION.

The first book suffered from too-much-setup-ishness.  After reading The Wicked King, it's almost like this was the book she started with, and then went back and tried to fill in the blanks with Cruel Prince.  In Cruel Prince, I could never figure out why Jude even wanted to stay in Faerie - her parents had been murdered, she was cruelly humiliated and out-classed in faerie talents, her oldest sister was hell-bent on leaving.  There just didn't seem to be anything there for her, and her unwillingness to leave even as she complained over and over again of the horrible way she was treated was legit confusing. Plus, there were about five too many plots and machinations.  It never really gelled until the last few chapters when Jude decides to get her little brother on the throne as safely as possible.

So Wicked King really deals with all that head-on: Jude has a simple, clear, and logical goal: Keep Cardan on the straight and narrow until she can figure out how to get a long term plan in place for Oak, and everything else follows from that.

Even the relationship between Jude and Cardan feels more natural (well, as natural as a mortal teenager and faerie prince with a tail can be, I suppose).   I appreciated him starting to self-actualize (shout out to Lilly Moscovitz!) and scheme a little scheme himself by the end of the book.  It definitely is tropey to have Jude and Cardan assume the other isn't as into them, even as they deliberately push each other away, but the warm 'n' fuzzies it generates is why these are tropes in the first place.

The other thing I enjoyed much more about Wicked King is that the time spent with various characters feels more balanced: we spend a lot of time with Cardan and develop that relationship, we get away from Lorne and Jude's sister, who is in this baffling semi-abusive relationship and intent on marrying this guy even though she doesn't seem to like anything about him. For real, if you have to ask your sister to ask the king to keep a lid on your fiance's partying, CALL THE WEDDING OFF. Like, there is literally nothing appealing about Lorne, so his chick-magnetism is doubly crazy.

All in all, I'm looking forward to the third book, and I'm even considering re-reading the first in light of my warmer attitude about the second.  See, this is why I put a moratorium on starting series that weren't finished last year, and it was very refreshing, and then you get a couple of books as gifts and you wind up knee-deep in cliff-hanging sequels.

11: A Book With An Item Of Clothing Or Accessory On The Cover

The Winter of the Witch

The Winter of the Witch 

By Katherine Arden 

The Winternight Trilogy introduced an unforgettable heroine, Vasilisa Petrovna, a girl determined to forge her own path in a world that would rather lock her away. Her gifts and her courage have drawn the attention of Morozko, the winter-king, but it is too soon to know if this connection will prove a blessing or a curse.

Now Moscow has been struck by disaster. Its people are searching for answers—and for someone to blame. Vasya finds herself alone, beset on all sides. The Grand Prince is in a rage, choosing allies that will lead him on a path to war and ruin. A wicked demon returns, stronger than ever and determined to spread chaos. Caught at the center of the conflict is Vasya, who finds the fate of two worlds resting on her shoulders. Her destiny uncertain, Vasya will uncover surprising truths about herself and her history as she desperately tries to save Russia, Morozko, and the magical world she treasures. But she may not be able to save them all.

After two duds, I was very glad to get back to Katherine Arden's Winternight Trilogy.  This one was a bit of a freebie, since I had already read - and loved - the first two, I had a pretty good idea I would enjoy this one.  Although sometimes trilogies end in disappointment!  I'm reminded I still have the Tearling trilogy unfinished, because by the time the third came out, I realized I needed to re-read the second as a refresher, and, well, reviews were kinda negative, so I never bothered.  Invasion of the Tearling is still sitting out, waiting for me.  Oops.

Anyway, I have no such ill-news on The Winter of the Witch (which I keep calling the Season of the Witch, because that song is just a perfect earworm).  It's great!  Very boring, I know.  The reviews are a lot easier when you can just bitch for three pages.  Not to say that the book is boring, in fact, it starts off almost immediately with a tragedy, a beheading, and a frantic flight, that give it a feel that you're really jumping straight from the second book to the third without pause.  Literally, since the third is set immediately after the second.  Even after that though, it slows and picks up speed in ways that you don't expect.  There's a big climactic battle that you think would be the finale in another book, but you've got another whole narrative to finish.  [Sidebar: I don't think I reviewed this one here, but another great book that does this is The Library at Mount Char, which really gets you there, gets you wondering what else is there to do, and then pulls a whole other surprise out of its hat.  Another highly recommended read, but not for the faint of heart!]

Not to say that I loved everything about it - I thought the parts where she ends up romantically involved with Morozko were a distraction and unnecessary for her character.  She never seemed to need a romance, and I didn't really want one for her, even though there had been hints that way in earlier books.  Plus, since it has been awhile since I've read the first and second, the whole jewel storyline felt like it was very much built up in the first two books, both as a mystery and a plot point, but it seemed like it kind of fizzled into nothingness in the third.  I just feel like that was oddly unfinished, although maybe I just need to go back and re-read.

I can't help but compare this book to the Waking Lands books (unfairly perhaps) as how to write and plot well versus adequately. For example, in Waking Land, Elanna is beat up enough that she mentions pulling her shirt up and her ribs are black and blue.  Yet two pages later, she's riding a horse and jumping abruptly into the arms of her beloved whatshisname without even a passing thought to it.  In Winter of the Witch, Vasya gets the shit beat out of her, and she feels it for days, for weeks or months (time passes kind of weirdly for a while). It doesn't get forgotten in service of a cliche.

This trilogy as a whole is a wonderful deep dive into Russian folklore and feels like the best kind of fantasy: heavily and painstakingly plotted, not a thing out of place or out of character, and three books long.  Both the Winternight Trilogy and Naomi Novik's newest, Spinning Silver have rapidly replaced Orson Scott Card's Enchantment as my favorite psuedo-Russian fantasy (which definitely has some weird sexual issues that I enjoy less as I get older and wiser). 

This one I originally had down as my 2019 published book, but I'm switching this and Wicked King because I don't know what's in Wicked King but I feel like the domovoi creatures and the Firebird, for sure, better match the:

27: A book featuring an extinct or imaginary creature

Bitter Greens

Bitter Greens
by Kate Forsyth

French novelist Charlotte-Rose de la Force has been banished from the court of Versailles by the Sun King, Louis XIV, after a series of scandalous love affairs. At the convent, she is comforted by an old nun, Sœur Seraphina, who tells her the tale of a young girl who, a hundred years earlier, is sold by her parents for a handful of bitter greens...

After Margherita's father steals parsley from the walled garden of the courtesan Selena Leonelli, he is threatened with having both hands cut off, unless he and his wife relinquish their precious little girl. Selena is the famous red-haired muse of the artist Tiziano, first painted by him in 1512 and still inspiring him at the time of his death. She is at the center of Renaissance life in Venice, a world of beauty and danger, seduction and betrayal, love and superstition.

Locked away in a tower, Margherita sings in the hope that someone will hear her. One day, a young man does.

There are a lot of shitty men in this book.  Don't get me wrong, some of the women are cruel, too.  But about two thirds of the way through the book, I was just like, over men.  In particular, Louis XIV, the so-called Sun King, who sounds like a real ass. And let's not forget the Italian man who lined up thirty-nine men to rape Selena's mother.  But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Bitter Greens is told in three tales: in the French court of the late 1600s, Charlotte-Rose de la Force, the real author behind our most familiar Rapunzel tale, Margherita, an Italian girl in the late 1580s, who is the basis for Rapunzel, and Selena Leonelli, born in the late 1400s, who becomes both the model for Titian and the witch to imprison our Rapunzel.   The book begins with Charlotte-Rose's incarceration at a convent (as opposed to exile in England, which was a fate worse than death, apparently) and frames the Margherita story, which frames the Selena story. 

This was beautifully written - each section is satisfying and meaty, and the heroines (for even Selena is the heroine of her own story) are all, as much as possible, active participants in their own lives. But it's also kind of long, and there's a lot of unpleasant stuff that happens - even to the real life character, Charlotte Rose, like every time we go flashback, she's undergoing some new humiliation.  Seriously, TWO men whose families kidnap them to avoid them marrying her? That's impressive.

It's still a good book, but I definitely did not understand why anyone would even want to be at the French court, it sounds like a complete hellhole, full of drama and backstabbing and people who hate you and constantly trying to stay on the good side of a terrible king. I've read another (fiction) book that revolved around the witchcraft and sorcery scandal and purge of King Louis' court - The Oracle Glass by Judith Merkle. The tone of that felt kind of the same, and I was kind of like, why would anyone subject themselves to that?  Was non-court life so much worse?  I do think that some of the lengthy Charlotte-Rose parts could have been excised without much impact though, since it's a lot of humiliations and degradations one after the other, and more time spent on the things she enjoyed - the salon, and frankly, we don't even get to meet her husband.  That might have made it feel a little less unbalanced.  I also didn't get the sense that Charlotte-Rose thought much of god except that (in her darker times) that he'd forgotten her, so some of the drama about converting to Catholicism felt low-stakes.  Overall, there are happy endings, three of them, just as a fairy tale should have, but it can get kind of depressing first. 

I still enjoyed this, and thought it was a very well written, interesting book about a real person and a well-done integration of fantasy into history; and I'm already putting another of her books on my to-be-read list: a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, set in Nazi Germany. 

And speaking of which, I saw Miracle of the White Stallions, and it was perfect - cheesy, with a distracting American accent for the hero, and German accents for everyone else, particularly the villains, and plenty of shot of horse dancing.  Two thumbs up!


 22: A book with a title that contains "salty," "sweet," "bitter," or "spicy"
1.08

Cinder

Cinder, by Marissa Meyer

Sixteen year-old Cinder is considered a technological mistake by most of society and a burden by her step-mother.  Being cyborg does have its benefits, though: Cinder's brain interface has given her an uncanny ability to fix things (robots, hovers, her own malfunctioning parts) making her the best mechanic in New Beijing.  This reputation brings Prince Kai himself to her weekly market booth, needing her to repair a broken android before the annual ball.  He jokingly calls it a "matter of national security," but Cinder suspects it's more serious than he's letting on.

Although eager to impress the prince, Cinder's intentions are derailed when her younger sister, and only human friend, is infected with the fatal plague that's been devastating Earth for a decade.  Blaming Cinder for her daughter's illness, Cinder's step-mother volunteers Cinder for plague research an "honor" that no one has survived.  But it doesn't take long for scientists to discover something unusual about their new guinea pig.  Something others would kill for.

Okay, is it sad that this now counts as more posts in one month than in all of last year?  What a shallow pool!  Anyhow, Cinder!  I will say this: I was not particularly heartened by the reviews I read of this, but what I realllllly wanted to read was the forthcoming sequel, Scarlet (which will not be published until,  hmm, February, although that has not stopped an alarming number of young ladies from posting gif-filled reviews on goodreads based on ARCs.  Screw cyborgs, in the future, all communication will take place via gifs) but you gotta read Cinder first, so read it I did.

Okay, so, just to forewarn you, this review is going to be a lot of "spoilers" (it's in quotes for a reason), and a lot of "I want my fairy tale fantasies to have more reality, myah!" (just go ahead and imagine that whole sentence in Skeletor-voice).  So, Cinder (for reasons other than the fact that hundreds of adaptations and variations have been published on roughly the same storyline for hundreds of years) is pretty predictable.  The basic facts as we expect them to be in a Cinderella story are: unwanted daughter/loses out on doing something fun/but has a good heart/earns a reward/gets a She's All That style makeover/and some male attention/usually while also giving everyone who was mean to her a karmic kick in the pants.  So when you set your story in a futuristic world where people live on the Moon (more on that LATER) and a plague has been sweeping the world, and cyborgs are real, and so on, you give yourself a lot of opportunity to surprise your readers.  But intentionally or not, Meyer gives the equivalent of a flashing red beacon to the fact that Cinder is this missing princess from the Moon:

They said [Queen Levana had] killed her niece, her only threat to the throne.  Princess Selene had only been three years old when a fire caught in her nursery, killing her and her nanny. 

Some conspiracy theorists thought the princess had survived and was still alive somewhere, waiting for the right time to reclaim her crown and end Levana's rule of tyranny, but Cinder knew it was only desperation that fueled these rumors.  After all, they'd found traces of the child's flesh in the ashes.

Anyone who doesn't read that (which pops up pretty early on, only 11% of the way through the book) and immediately go, "Well, we've got a missing princess there, and a young lady missing a pound of flesh here....I think I might know where this is going," should maybe consider getting their gullibility meter checked.  And once we know that, it becomes less fun, and more of a drag to keep waiting and waiting for Cinder to figure it out, which: 45% of the book until she finds out that she's from the Moon (they say "Lunar" in the book, but I think saying she's from the Moon more accurately expresses how odd I find this concept.  And how did they not notice Moon refugees flying in from outer space and landing on Earth? That's never really explained.  I mean, we watch every asteroid and meteoroid that gets even fifty thousand miles away, I'd think that we'd have a grasp on people actually landing within our atmosphere by the time this book takes place.  Plus, where do people live on the Moon? Is it all indoors? Have they transformed the Moon's atmosphere, because otherwise, how are people movable between both locations?  And how come Prince Kai appears to never have seen a Moon spaceship, or Moon building materials before?  Hasn't he been going to school?  Do we not have cameras anymore? What is going on?!?!) and 98% of the book until she finds out she's the missing princess herself, which is just - by the time that penny drops, I was ready to pull my hair out.  Or someone else's hair, but same thing, really.

So, really, the one thing I was surprised by was that her sister (and the king!) actually die of the plague.  DIDN'T SEE THAT COMING, DID YOU?  After all that, she gets down to Peony in time to hear her last words but not shove the antidote down her throat. I will be real here folks: this reminded me of nothing more than The Hunger Games: a young teenage woman, beset by a dystopic society, will do anything to save her younger, flower-named sister, who is unfailingly gentle and kind, and is, in the end, unable to do so.  But you know what?  I read two chapters of the Hunger Games and was immediately wrapped up in Katniss' attempts to protect Primrose (so much so that when I found out she doesn't survive the series, I put off reading the third book in the trilogy for over two years) whereas here, I felt nothing when Peony died.  That's in part because I am also part cyborg and thus unable to feel human feelings, but also because Cinder just does not engender the same quality of urgency and emotion that The Hunger Games does. 

OH!  And the other thing, that is brought up (justly) in other reviews, but which I wanted to touch on as well here: what world is this, where they have a deadly plague, but absolutely no quarantine measures?  I mean,  not even checkpoints for different sections of the city - Cinder just waltzes back after hiding out when her neighbor comes down with it.  You know who else has that kind of disease prevention mastery?  The CDA in Monsters Inc.  Which is a cartoon movie about monsters.  As another reviewer said: no wonder they have a problem with this disease.  Also, what what what is this place that just allows a seventeen year old prince whose mother is dead and whose father is currently dying to just go waltzing about random marketplaces?  This is not Aladdin, y'all, and maybe I should be worried about how many kid's movies have made their way into Cinder.  Cinder does have the feel of a mish-mash (and I can't tell you how distracting it was to have "Kai" from the Snow Queen fairy tale, pop up as the prince in this Cinderella story): in addition to everything else I talked about above, for some reason the evil queen kept reminding me of the Wizard of Oz. 

It's okay, the book keeps moving along briskly enough that you don't really stop to bitch about all this when reading it.  But the constant need to overlook thickheaded narration, weird reality holes, and reminders of other media takes its toll on the overall experience.  Cinder did not really keep me rapt, and having read it, I'm not at all on tenterhooks about how Cinder is going to get out of the prison she winds up in at the end of the book.  In fact, knowing that she eventually meets up with Scarlet, the main character in the sequel, makes me less interested in reading it.  Meyer has a really interesting idea here, and I want it to really shine, the way that it can.  For now, though, it's got a wee bit too much polishing that still needs to be done.   

Fairy Princesses: Double Header Review Day

Darkfever, by Karen Marie Moning

MacKayla Lane’s life is good. She has great friends, a decent job, and a car that breaks down only every other week or so. In other words, she’s your perfectly ordinary twenty-first-century woman. Or so she thinks…until something extraordinary happens.

When her sister is murdered, leaving a single clue to her death–a cryptic message on Mac’s cell phone–Mac journeys to Ireland in search of answers. The quest to find her sister’s killer draws her into a shadowy realm where nothing is as it seems, where good and evil wear the same treacherously seductive mask. She is soon faced with an even greater challenge: staying alive long enough to learn how to handle a power she had no idea she possessed–a gift that allows her to see beyond the world of man, into the dangerous realm of the Fae….

As Mac delves deeper into the mystery of her sister’s death, her every move is shadowed by the dark, mysterious Jericho, a man with no past and only mockery for a future. As she begins to close in on the truth, the ruthless Vlane–an alpha Fae who makes sex an addiction for human women–closes in on her. And as the boundary between worlds begins to crumble, Mac’s true mission becomes clear: find the elusive Sinsar Dubh before someone else claims the all-powerful Dark Book–because whoever gets to it first holds nothing less than complete control of the very fabric of both worlds in their hands…. (Amazon)

I have been somewhat out of sorts of late; in the kind of fey mood where I pick up a book, only to put it down again 20 pages later, and unable to read anything besides old and worn favorites. I have also been playing a lot of games on my kindle instead. BUT! I recently downloaded a book which seemed like it had a lot of potential (It was marked down to $1.99) and a book I requested from the library several months ago (no exaggeration) finally came in, so I got back on that horse, and well, here I am!

All of that was an introduction to letting you know that I was displeased, although I am generous enough to say that it may, possible, be a result of the mood, and not the books. And then again, maybe not. Let’s sharpen our claws!

First up was Darkfever. This is the first in a series, about a girl whose sister dies while studying abroad in Dublin. Given the mysterious and horrific circumstances of her death, our heroine, MacKayla, is incensed when the police declare that they have no leads and are closing the case. She sets off on her own to investigate, and winds up in over her head, entangling herself in the world of the Fae, and in a search for an object of power, a long-lost book which holds the key to the end of the world. It sounds super-fun, if not the most thought-provoking treatise in the world, right? WRONG. It’s a good thing this was on my kindle, because I was tempted to throw the book a few times. I literally rolled my eyes when I was reading it. Here, in alphabetical order, is my list of complaints:

1. MacKayla
2. MacKayla
3. MacKayla
4. MacKayla

Like, holy crap, I really wanted her to die. In my opinion, hoping the heroine dies is not the mark of a hugely successful character. Things I hated about her: the way that she always talks about what she wears, and how beautiful she is. That’s not a joke. At one point, while trying to disguise herself, she says that she could never be ugly, but she’s going to shoot for average. And her attitude! She makes one mention of how grief must have turned her mind to mush, but her actions and behavior are systematically ridiculous. She is in the midst of trying to figure out the cause of her sister’s brutal murder, so she wanders around town, asking people about the very thing that got her sister killed, and then shacks up with the first person who knows anything about what she’s talking about. My reaction to that would be, “So this sinsar dubh that my sister mentions in her last, desperate attempt to warn me – you know all about it? And you followed me to my hostel and spied on me, and told me that you’d be willing to kill for it? I think maybe I will not take you up on that invitation to stay at your creepy bookstore, on the edge of an abandoned city block.”

Honestly, you’d have to be pretty stupid to trust this guy (“Jericho Barrons” Don’t even get me started), and yet that is exactly what Mac appears to do – she tells him all about her sister, and the clues she finds, and lets him tote her around and use her as a magical sniffer-dog. I guess maybe that could be a strategy too, though, like, hey, if he is my sister’s murderer, I’m going to pretend to be in cahoots with him, so he thinks we’re on the same team, and doesn’t kill me, too! Except that Mac is not so much “pretending” as she “going along with everything he says, even if he gives no explanation as to his own motivations and goals, and generally keeps her in the dark about everything.”

Oh, but Mac is an individual, a spunky, fun, feisty woman. You can tell by the way that she disobeys like, the one obviously sensible order from Mr. Barrons to dress appropriately and instead wears a long peach skirt and rose colored fuzzy sweater to a vampire’s lair. Because she is an Independent Lady. Not only is this ho-bag tagging along with some random dude who has given her no reason to trust him and about a hundred reasons not to, she’s also ignoring any good advice he’s giving her. Which is to say: when your sister has been murdered, and you’re looking for her killer, and you’ve been sucked into an underground world with magical beings, most of whom seem to want you for nefarious purposes, or just plain want to kill you, and you’re going around stealing priceless artifacts from very bad men, don’t you think the very last thing you should be doing is dressing like you’re rainbow brite at a mime party? As in, YOU’RE DRAWING A LOT OF ATTENTION TO YOURSELF, GENIUS.

That’s not some awesome “damn the man, grrrl power” moment. That’s asinine. That is. . . I am still angry about it.

Moving on: Mac’s assumptions. Someone needs to sit this girl down and have a long talk about how when you assume, you make an ASS out of U and ME. Or, really, in this case, she is making an ASS out of HER and HER. And sort of me, a little, because I am the fool who’s still reading. There is a point, in the story, in which she says, after seeing her protector walk through an alley without getting harassed by these bad-guy Shade-creatures, “There were really only two possibilities I could think of: either Barrons was lying to me about the Shades, or he’d struck some kind of dark bargain with the life-sucking Fae. Whichever it was, I finally had my answer to whether or not I could trust him. That would be a great, big NOT.”

Okay, first of all, now you realize you shouldn’t be trusting him? Not when he put you in a wrestling hold and bruised your ribs? Or choked you? Or how about the fact that you have no idea who this guy is, because he has given you no background information? Or the conversation you overheard in which his – uh, sex toy/bookseller? – tells him to stop using you? No, those all seem perfectly trustworthy.

Second of all, those are the only two possibilities? I feel like Murray, in Clueless, when Cher and Dionne are talking about Christian, and how Cher almost had sex with him, and he goes, “Yo, are you bitches blind or something? Your man Christian is a cake boy.” Yo, Mac, are you blind or something? There are a lot more possibilities than that. Liiiiiiiike, maybe the Shades know this guy is stronger than them and they don’t want to get into a fight and die. Or he’s wearing the magical equivalent of a protective hamster ball. Or these are his employees, and they’re kinda dim about the whole “not eating guests” thing. It could be anything! Sherlock Holmes, you are not.

As I said, this is the first book in the series, and I could not believe that people would actually recommend it, but upon reading the reviews, the consensus is that in the second book, MacKayla doesn’t display the same dimwitted fuckery that she does in this one. Although, obviously, that’s a pretty low bar to meet. And yet, the power of the reviews is such that I am almost tempted to get the second one and see if it improves as much as people say. Like, one million happy readers can’t be wrong. Can they?

It’s such a terrible temptation – MacKayla has a lot of potential to be awesome, and not the shallow dipshit she was, and I’m already sort of swayed, from reading the prologue to the second book, which mentions all the super cool things, without all the not so bright stuff.

P.S. I totally read the second book (Faefever or Moonfever or Bloodfever or Kittenfever or Clownfever or some such nonsense. I can't keep them straight) since I wrote this review, and it's true - Mac does turn out to be much more awesome in the second book. However, there's apparently some sort of gang rape scene in the third, so I have no idea how Mac continues to develop as a person, since I am in the mood to not read about that.

The Ordinary Princess, by Mary Margaret Kaye

Along with Wit, Charm, Health, and Courage, Princess Amy of Phantasmorania receives a special fairy christening gift: Ordinariness. Unlike her six beautiful sisters, she has brown hair and freckles, and would rather have adventures than play the harp, embroider tapestries . . . or become a Queen. When her royal parents try to marry her off, Amy runs away and, because she's so ordinary, easily becomes the fourteenth assistant kitchen maid at a neighboring palace. And there . . . much to everyone's surprise . . . she meets a prince just as ordinary (and special) as she is!(Amazon)

The second book I read was The Ordinary Princess, because there’s nothing like reading about being mind-controlled to strip in public and present yourself for rape to get you in the mood for a children’s book! Just kidding, I was super titillated by that section of Darkfever. It’s like Ms. Moning read my mind.

So, movingonbeforeyoustarttobelieveme, The Ordinary Princess! I didn’t like it. It sounds sweet – a princess is given the gift of ordinariness, and she sets out to find her fortune. But it ostensibly celebrated ordinary people and pursuits, while giving them lives that were anything but. Look, I get that peeling potatoes can be a refreshing change of pace from the bright lights of the paparazzo, but maybe try working for more than two months before you start singing the praises of the proletariat, sister. If Princess Amy were truly ordinary, then she would have really been up the creek when she gets fired.

Let me put this into perspective for you: Amy, while picnicking one day, falls in with a group of young ladies who tell her that her days playing in the countryside are numbered, since the royal family is importing a dragon to entice young knights to fight for the privilege of the princess’ hand (and get shanghaied into marriage before they get a good look at her ordinary face). They tell her this, and add, “Ho-hum, I suppose that’s nice for them, but if only this dragon weren’t going to single-handedly destroy the countryside and eat all the livestock.” Wow, I like that attitude: Yes, the rulers of my kingdom are going to ravage the country and ruin our lives, but it’s all in an effort to get their daughter married off in some sort of underhanded scheme, so whatever.

And so Amy leaves town, and lives in the woods for awhile (why not), until her clothing falls apart and her fairy godmother tells her she needs to work, so she can get paid, and buy a dress. Amy toddles off, and gets a job right away as maid in the castle, and loves it, for whatever reason. Here is the thing, her godmother asks her, “Isn’t it great to be ordinary, isn’t it soooooo much better than being pretty?” And Amy is all, “Yeah, it’s the best!” But Amy’s been working all of six weeks at that point. That is less than half of a summer vacation. And when Amy (rightfully) gets fired, she has a fall-back position of being a fucking princess. So, I think she’s out of her gourd. Plus, how could anyone get behind a job that requires a year’s wages for a single common dress? No, really, they pay her 2 pfennigs a week, and a dress is 100 pfennigs, so she’d have to work for a year to get a new dress. And frankly, a dress you wear everyday is not going to last much more than a year. So Amy is in a job that basically pays for the clothes on her back and nothing else. What is she going to do when she’s too old to wash dishes, and carry pots, and clean things? Who’s going to want to be ordinary then, huh?

P.S. These reviews may be somewhat scattershot, since I wrote them in a fit of pique (obviously) and then went about my business for awhile, and didn't bother to edit them for posting. But I stand by every word, even if I can't remember what they were.

Atomic Element 26! Double Header Review Day

Iron Duke, by Meljean Brook

It's been nine years since the Horde, an oppressive empire from Asia, were run out of England. However, detective inspector Lady Wilhelmina Wentworth will never be able to escape their cruelty: her mother was raped during the invasion, and Mina is half Horde. Mina crosses paths with the revered Iron Duke Rhys Trahaearn, a former pirate captain who was instrumental in fighting the Horde, when a dead body is tossed on his estate. What begins as lust sparks into full-blown romance as the two learn more about the nefarious Black Guard and catch a murderous madman. Airships, zombies, nanotechnology, outlandish secondary characters, and a complicated heroine round out the novel. - Publisher's Weekly

This week's theme is two-fold: first, the obvious metallic royalty thing going on, which I find amusing, since it sounds like they belong to a single series, but in fact have nothing in common. I would totally read The Iron Dowager Queen, too! The other theme is procrastination, i.e., I read these books so long ago, I had to return them to the library, since they do not let me renew books more than once down here in this god-forsaken wasteland, but I've been putting off writing about them, until I had other things I wanted to put off more. Don't judge me, juggling onerous tasks is how I got so spry and nimble! Also, I know that doesn't make sense and I don't care. WHAT.

The Iron Duke, which I have typed as The Iron King twice now, is a really fascinating alternate history steampunk book, and although there are a few instances where I was kinda scratching my head, for the most part Ms. Brook does a good job of absorbing you into the story, and giving you enough world-building to get you interested, but not enough to overwhelm you. In Iron Duke, nanotechnology of some sort was introduced to foodstuffs imported into England (sugar, particularly), and once all the population had sufficient intake, they were activated, so that the people were controlled by the Horde, and kept insensate, apart from the brief periods of frenzy, which were basically induced orgies, meant to control the population growth.

As a brief aside, was the Horde supposed to be Asian, like, the Golden Horde? This was never explained to my satisfaction, and I will be honest with you, at first I thought they were aliens, and this was some sort of sci-fi thing, but I kinda got the impression that they were actually humans. Plus, they're sexually compatible with the English (rrrrawr), but visually separate, since people can tell from looking at Mina that's she's a hybrid. Or a half-breed. A mule. More zippers, mule! (I said, don't judge).

[PS I was just reviewing this for editing, and I realized that blurb up there totally says that the Horde is from Asia. HAHAHAHAHA, obviously my reading comprehension leaves a little something to be desired. But it's not clear in the book, is my point, nyah.]

Anyhow, Mina is pretty awesome, like the Mina from the League of Extraordinary Gentleman, who is based on the Dracula Mina (I was about to say Batman's Mina. I should not be writing this post, for real, yo), who is, by all accounts, also pretty kickass. To sum up: naming your child Wilhelmina is still a horrible thing to do to them. She is on a police force of some sort, that part's only partially important, because we get right to the good stuff right away: a body that fell on the Duke's property, who has been dropped from such a height as to break every bone in his body, and leave him a gelatinous sack. Also, he was frozen when he was dropped! DUN DUN DUN!

I will be honest, I only partially followed the plotline, mostly because it didn't really make much sense, and because not knowing it only slightly impeded my enjoyment of the book. This ain't no War and Peace, y'all, I don't need to remember why this pirate lady went out of her way to drop a guy on the Duke's house, which seems really stupid, since the last thing I would want is some pissed off Ironman bent on revenge chasing me around on a dirigible. In a dirigible? On a dirigible. DIRIGIBLES! One thing this book has lots of is dirigibles! Or uh, airships? Either way, a method of transportation I have no desire to try out, especially after reading this book. And seriously, how could the Duke, who is, apparently, entirely iron inside his insides, not have to like, stay in one place on the ship? Wouldn't that much iron, wandering around deck, trying to make out with people, be like, super unsteady, and tip that sucker over?

I just looked it up, and answers.com (which is a very reliable source) says that cast iron weighs 450 pounds per cubic foot. So, if he's like, five cubic feet (google failed me on my "how much cubic feet per person" inquiry, which I do have to admit is probably not asked very often, and should probably be restricted to the even more esoteric, "how many cubic feet are all the bones in the human body", which makes me sound like a serial killer), then he weighs well over 2000 pounds. You know what else weighs 2000 pounds? A small car. Can you imagine trying to have sex with a car on top of you? Really? You need help. Even if he's only like, one cubic foot worth of iron, that's still like, the same as a big fucking llama. I got sidetracked, I apologize.

So the Duke sees Mina, and thinks she's a hot piece, which he is one hundred percent correct about, and decides he's going to follow her around town, trying to mack on her, and generally being about even money in the helpful:horny odds. Now, I do have to mention, the one truly not good part of the book, is where he rapes her. I KNOW. I didn't want to say it like that, but it kinda is like that, no getting around it. She says no, he continues, because, and I forget this exactly, he's like, in some sort of sex-haze, and doesn't realize no means no. And he realizes later, and prostrates himself, and she forgives him, and they fuck off into the sunset. It's bullshit, but I got through it, and liked everything else, so my experience of the book was not ruined. It's just. . . it's rape, man, and FOR NO GOOD REASON. I have no idea why that scene was written like that. It really made me dislike the Duke, whereas I had been ambivalent before, and the eventual rehabilitation of his character just doesn't seem worth the total smear job.

Like, The Iron Duke really needed not to be a romance book, because all the non-romance parts (besides the bewildering plotlines, which I accept some blame for, I have a short memory) were great, and all the romance parts kinda skeeved me out. The world that Ms. Brook created is delightful, all the nuances, and details, and stuff, even if it's got some holes. I just wanted Mina to team up with the Duke without all the angst, and then for them to go off and like, hunt krakens and bulldoze zombies and solve crimes. I don't think that's too much to ask.





The Iron King, by Julie Kagawa

Meghan Chase has a secret destiny—one she could never have imagined…

Something has always felt slightly off in Meghan's life, ever since her father disappeared before her eyes when she was six. She has never quite fit in at school…or at home.

When a dark stranger begins watching her from afar, and her prankster best friend becomes strangely protective of her, Meghan senses that everything she's known is about to change.

But she could never have guessed the truth—that she is the daughter of a mythical faery king and is a pawn in a deadly war. Now Meghan will learn just how far she'll go to save someone she cares about, to stop a mysterious evil no faery creature dare face…and to find love with a young prince who might rather see her dead than let her touch his icy heart. - From Amazon

This book is totally not like the Iron Duke, in that this is a) a teen book, b) not steampunk, c) set in Louisiana and faery, not Europe and airships, and d) not exciting. Two things this book is sorely lacking: ass-kicking and exploding zombies.

I apologize in advance, not only am I sickish (this - a runny nose and sore throat - is usually about as sick as I ever get, so I milk it for all it's worth), and have a long day ahead of me tomorrow, I also didn't have much to say about this book even right after I read it, so I'm doubly short on words now. I was very excited about the premise, and also because I got the first two chapters on my kindle, and it was very tantalizing. But now I've read the whole thing, and I am very let down. First, the characters are kinda paper-boardy. Cardboardy. Two-dimensional. Meghan is flat, Robin is flat, and honestly, I skimmed the last half of the book. I didn't want to! It was just. . . not gripping, and kinda telegraphed, so I got bored waiting for everyone to do what I knew they'd end up doing, like, twenty pages back. Except that time Meghan gets drunk on fairy juice. Did not see that coming.

But things like that were part of my discontent with the Iron King: the events didn't really flow, they seemed more like, squares on a gameboard, like now you have a chase scene, now you have a dance scene, now you have your three main characters face-off and wow, I'm bored just trying to describe it. I feel badly, since it's not a bad book, I just sorta was expecting better, and it's so bland. It was a let-down.

Plus, you gotta compare it to that other book about going into fairyland to switch a changeling back, Heir to Sevenwaters, by Juliet Marillier, and this one just does not compare. Not that the changeling isn't frightening. That's some Omen shit right there. I've been trying to think of something else to say about this book, and it's just not coming. It really is that bland. So I am going to bed. I hope you'll all join me for the next installment, The Iron Maharaja.