Rakes & Protectors

The Rake by Mary Jo Putney (Zebra Historical Romance)

Disclaimer- I was provided an ARC of this novel.

The Rake is actually a reprint of the title The Rake and the Reformer. A lot of times this angers me, because I rebuy it on the basis of the cover art and didn’t pay attention. I hate buying the same book 2,3 times (and I have, with Kristen Brittain). However, this was a lucky chance because although I’d heard of the author, I’d never read her novels before.

Alys and Reggie are perfect for each other, even if they don’t know it. Each has a fatal flaw that they must overcome (and it has to be them to do it, not the other person), which makes it extremely real. The other person doesn’t “fix” the bits, they just enable the other to fix the bits themselves.

At turns heart wrenching and heart-warming, I would definitely recommend this book. It appears it was originally released in 1989, which labels it as a definite classic. Because quite frankly, readers’ tastes have changed so much over the past couple of decades that for one to still be relevant this long… Well. Bravo!

Lady Protector, L.E. Modesitt Jr. Tor Fantasy.

If this one is part of a series, I did not enjoy it any less for not having read the previous novels. It sucked me in and kept me there for the length of the novel. I was upset by only having my normally scheduled breaks because I wanted to keep reading it.

Mykella becomes the Lady Protector moments before the book opens. She has to deal not only with an imminent war but also the nefarious leeching of the country’s coffers. Who can she trust? How does she oversee everything and get to the battle in time? How will her powers help her, and can they harm her?

L.E. Modesitt does something in this novel that I’ve never seen in a novel before. It is written in a tight third person point of view… But I don’t think it ever goes to another point of view than Mykella’s. It is so tight as to be almost first person.

That gave me pause. Why third, even so tight, instead of first person? First person wouldn’t have the effect, it’s a little more casual than third. It is beautiful, though. If you ever want an example of a third person point of view that tightly held together… Use it.

I’ve gotta try that. It has to be so hard. The temptation to pull back and add scenery or pop into someone else’s point of view must be so great. Kudos, Modesitt!

So, over all 2 great books in very different genres. Hope to have some chick lit and an actual regular fiction book for next time!

Under Suspicion

Under Suspicion by Hannah Jayne

Wow. Just wow. I read Kim Harrison, Charlaine Harris, Jeanine Frost (sp?), Mary Janice Davidson… and now Hannah Jayne.

Under Suspicion excels because of the heroine, Sophie. She wants sooo badly to be kick-ass, but just can’t quite pull it off. Which is just as well, becuase I’ve got to tell you that I LOVE a heroine who has a soundtrack to her life, even if she didn’t get Bon Jovi. And when she starts asking “What would Paula Do?” I dare you not to laugh so hard you get a cramp. I double dog dare you.

The mystery portion was very well written, as was the underworld component. This is apparently the latest in a series that I haven’t read yet, but don’t let it discourage you. I jumped right in and didn’t “miss” having the other books, although I’m probably gonna go looking for them very very soon.

Ta Ta, my lovelies. I think tomorrow or Thursday, we’re gonna have a discussion about actual brick and mortar book stores. What thinkest thou? Let me know, or I’ll inflict my Dyspraxic’s Disneyland on you all. Or maybe my latest book

Have a great week!

World Building

We’re gonna talk about world building tonight, kiddos. I recently realized that I read a lot of series, especially in the fantasy genre. (wow, wyn, great alliteration there!). Successful authors of a fantasy series, or any series, has to do with these things at some point or another.

The author needs to keep it fresh for themselves, allow themselves to grow while still hanging onto the original readership, and keeping from going out of their ever loving mind while doing it. Because who wants to read, let alone write, the same novel over and over again?

This first came to mind with me while reading one of Mary Janice Davidson’s novels (Undead and Unwelcome, I think). Because that book blew me out of the water. While before there had been lots of cute jokes, there hadn’t been a whole lot of growth. Until that book, when it took a hook for the dark side and the main character started to grow up. It was a humbling moment. As a writer who reads a lot, it showed all the ways to grow not only your own writing but your character at the same time, dragging your core audience gasping and yelling at you all the way.

Bridge of Dreams, by Anne Bishop was the second novel to make me wonder about that. Part of a series that is preceded by Sebastian and Belladonna, Bridge of Dreams takes the reader to a portion of the world that feels foreign, new and exciting along with new characters. But the world was built that way from the very beginning, giving limitless options for scenery, potential stories, lots of ideas. (The way the three sisters are handled is amazing!)

Kind of like Anne McCaffrey with the Pern series. You have the normal books, then of course there is the southern continent, and the sci fi element they may or may not go back to but even if she does, the people in the here and now are trying to figure out what feels like future technology.

And of course there’s Lynn Flewelling, who with the Bone Doll’s Twin took me and shook me completely to my core. She went back into her land’s distant past and told the story of the queen. That trilogy is written so differently from the Nightrunner books that it was a “WOW” moment.

So. Writers! Have your escape plan hatched. Because if you’re lucky, you’ll need it!

Night Circus

“A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.” – Oscar Wilde (as quoted in Part One of The Night Circus)

Le Cirque des Reves is a magical, mystical place. One moment there, gone the next, it offers its visitors a glimpse of magic. Contained within this magical realm are Celia and Marco, who are bound by their own masters in a contest. The magic created becomes more and more complex, the players are swept up along with their companions on the way.

Told in present tense, this book is haunting and beautiful and it echoed for a while. I couldn’t seem to pick up anything else after I read it, so I waited a few days until I could settle down and read something new. Something different. When what I really wanted was to go to the Night Circus again. This is a seriously beautiful, haunting story. I want to write like this when I grow up.

 

Night Circus

Erin Morgenstern

Doubleday

 

5/5 stars

A Perfect Blood Book Review

So what happens when you’ve written several books in a series? You need to keep the pace moving, freshen up things a bit and yet still keep your readers right there with you.

Unfortunately, keeping things fresh and mixing them up often means killing off a character. It’s already happened in Kim Harrison’s The Hollows series, when Rachel’s vampire love is killed. Again.

A Perfect Blood, by Kim Harrison ( Harper Voyager, hard back) is a great read. Fast paced, great action… but it also feels like a bridge. Because even though boyfriends come and go, there has been nothing that could compare to the little (strange) family of Rachel, Jenks and Ivy.

Instead, something— someone else is popping up more and more frequently. I like the play between Rachel and Trent, find it extremely interesting. But I’m also wondering where Harrison is going with it. Because it felt almost as if Rachel was distancing herself from her family.

There are other minor characters in A Perfect Blood that make things interesting. Wayde, the were-bodyguard who can’t seem to get near Rachel whenever she’s snatched. Winnona, a poor girl who is transformed… her body monstrously, but opening her eyes to loyalty, friendship and magic at the same time.

This was a really good read. I blew through this in a little more than 24 hours (keeping in mind that I had to sleep, and play with my son and feed him and all that mommy stuff too…) and towards the end I was telling my son “In a minute” quite a lot.

It will be interesting to see where the relationships land in the next novel.

Except, since I bought this in hardback I probably have to wait another whole year.

SIGH.

It’ll be worth it!

Black Jewels Trilogy

The Black Jewels Trilogy

Book One, Daughter of the Blood, by Anne Bishop, Roc Fantasy, 1998.

Book Three, Queen of Darkness, by Anne Bishop, Roc Fantasy, 2000.

Yes, this review is missing the middle book. I couldn’t find it when I sat down to re-read the series. I also need to post a WARNING on this series. Sex in this series is used as a weapon against both women and men and is very brutal. It isn’t graphic, but it is disturbing. It’s also a very big symptom of what’s wrong in the world the characters inhabit.

This series carried me through one of the roughest times of my life. I haven’t touched these particular books since I left that situation. I have read the additional books ( 2 short story collections and 3, no 4 novels), but not the first trilogy.

They are even better than I remembered.

Tight writing, believable characters you can root for even when their names are Saetan and the Sadist. These are people with considerable power who have to make the tough choices. And there are consequences for their choices; The Twisted Kingdom, the realm of insanity, is travelled by more than one of the characters.

And quite frankly, the scene where Daemon comes to grips with her not returning to him, the fact that he become The Sadist again because she requested it, believing that everyone in his family would hate him but it was ok because she’d be there… and then she wasn’t… I’ve cried my eyeballs red every single time I’ve read that scene. I’ve read it a lot, too.

As I said, I met the books of Anne Bishop when I was going through the roughest time of my life and needed the escape.

I’m so happy that now I’m out of the situation, the books still resonate.

Cuz that’s what we’re all really after, isn’t it? A really great read.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Movie Tie-in Edition)

By: Jonathan Safran Foer, Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

 

After saying that I stay away from books that have been made into movies, here is my second one. I hope you can forgive me. Truth is, I don’t know if I could forgive myself for *not* reading this book. It was that good.

It starts out with a whimsy about a teapot. It’s what drew me in and had me throwing the book into the cart in Target (that and the fact that I knew the only 4 new books I have at home are duds). The teapot is one of many inventions that the young narrator comes up with in his quest to safeguard those he loves and retain his closeness to his father, who died during the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Again, it’s a novel told in threes. Am I just  attracted to that? Or just noticing it more now? This one is told first person from Oskar, a young boy, and through the letters of his grandparents. It’s also full of color, pictures, weird pages… must have cost a bundle to print. I have to admit, I didn’t get the chapter with the red lined areas… Too much work for me LOL.

But the novel is beautiful, the writing great even as the format of the book challenges the way we normally write books. They do add another dimension to the novel, make it interactive. I searched, just as young Oskar must have, for his dad’s name on the pages in the art store. It’s an amazing technique to bring the reader right into the action.

 

Next time, I’m gonna get me some of my favorites out of the book case and turn myself loose on some of my all- time favorites. There’s Elizabeth Haydon, Carol Berg, Lynn Flewelling… We’re going to get our  fantasy on during the up- coming weeks.

 

Dragon Riders

What makes a book a classic? Is it universal themes? Or readability, five, ten, twenty, a hundred years into the future? Being a fantasy fanatic, there are very few “modern classics” to pull from. J.R.R. Tolkien. Zelzany. McCaffrey.

I resisted reading Anne McCaffrey’s Pern series for decades. How many, I didn’t realize until I read the copyright notice AFTER reading the book. The book was published a few months after I was born, so it is… twenty one twice plus one.  Hehehe.

The first time I remember anyone telling me about the books was while I was in college. At the time, I resisted because I was writing about dragons. I didn’t want any influences on my world building, characters and dragons. Quite frankly, I was jealous too. I *wanted* to be Queen of the Dragons!

For some reason, I never did pick up any of the Pern novels. Despite often running out of books to read, new authors to try, being bored out of my skull… You get the idea. Never. Once.

So on Saturday I was given a brief respite and ran to the book store. My brother Leonard, who has very different tastes in books than I do, highly recommended it. “You loved Tolkien. You love that Game of Thrones series. I can’t stand those types of books.”

“I guarantee you’ll like Anne McCaffrey,” he told me.

Normally I take recommendations with a grain of salt. This time I went ahead and jumped in and I am so glad I did. Because it is simply amazing. What makes it so? It’s a fairly great idea, even though I’m not sure why the Sci-Fi elements need to be in there (to be fair, there are a lot of books left to plow through, so it might actually be needed later). It reads well, even after forty some odd years (drat, I spilled the beans).

For popular fiction, or genre fiction, to become a classic though there has to be magic. An audible pop in the reader’s mind when all cylinder’s start firing and the book sets out pell mell for the finish line. It’s still kind of funny to me that I ignored this series for so long.

No more!

Yay! I have a new series by a writer who was very prolific and whose son has taken up the pen!

SIsters Weird

Sisters Weird

 How many of you have sisters? One thing about siblings is that we have a collective memory, a history that transcends the ups and downs of our lives. We also often love eachother feircely even when we can’t stand eachother.

Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown (Penguin Publishing Group, released in paperback 2/7/12.) Not only does it honor the collective memory, it tells the story from a collective first person point of view. I was charmed by many things in the story: characters, library cards instead of televisions, the use of The Bard… but what really rocked my world from both a reader’s and a writer’s viewpoint was the Point of View.

I have never even heard of a plural first person narrative. Nope. I take that back. But that was a split personality, and quite frankly each personality was different.  So, in fact, I have never read anything quite like this novel.

The plural first person perfectly captures the nuances of being sisters. An excellent read, I give it 5 out of 5 stars.  

This week, I’ll be posting on Tuesday and Thursday because I have a bag full of books which is always a good thing… Possibly on Wednesday. Thinking of doing a Writing Wednesday post, and get me honest about that as well.

Branching Out

There are times in a reader’s, even in a writer’s, life where one is forced to branch out. Not because what we read (or write) is suddenly boring, or because our favorite authors have suddenly become lame. Mostly because, if you’re like me, you’ve already read all the books that you like and suddenly find yourself with the prospect of either going without (OH! The Horrors!), re-reading favorites (which can be fun in and of itself) or branching out.

Let’s branch out for a bit. Not a whole lot, but just a wiggly little bit.

Enter Scrapbook of Secrets by Mollie Cox Bryan (release date February 2012, Kennsington Mystery). I like scrap booking, and I like funny mysteries so I decided to give this one a try. And really, who can resist any novel that begins with “For Vera, all of the day’s madness began when she saw the knife handle poking out of her mother’s neck.” (Never fear, her mother is a force to be reckoned with all throughout the novel). As a matter of fact, most of the novel revolves around Vera, her mother, and a newcomer to the area, Annie. I really identified with Annie, trying to balance being a wife and mother along with a need for some professional (writing) release. Although the novel is set up so that you think the author is extremely unsubtle about who did it— it was a surprise when the whodunit was revealed. And all the clues were there! I give this one a solid 4 out of 5 stars.

And let us not forget Austentatious by Alyssa Goodnight (release date February 2012, Kensington Books). Nicola James is an engineer with a list, a plan, and… a fairy godmother? With the appearance of a diary that gives her advice ala Jane Austen as fairy godmother, Nicola’s life goes from left-brain logical to a walk on the whimsical side. Especially when Fairy Jane decides that she needs a gentleman that decidedly does not fit in with her plans. Not only a good read, but the author appears to have had a rollicking good time writing it. I love books like that, where the author’s passions come out. Another four out of 5 stars.

In personal news, it’s early Sunday morning. Ray is out back playing. I already have my laptop on and thanks to my friend Rie, I have a great idea for a short story on a hoarder of a wizard. So I’m off to get that written. Have a great week, my lovelies! Hopefully I’ll have more to post by about midweek. I’m in the middle of a Sheryl Woods and have another in the stacks waiting to go.