I was pointed at Meredith Duran’s Written on Your Skin by way of a link posted to Smart Bitches Trashy Books, and I’ve got to say that I was pleased at the pointing. Certainly for most of this book, I was treated to some delightfully caustic chemistry between the heroine and hero. Our heroine Mina is a young woman of delicate beauty who has been unabashedly letting everyone think she’s an airhead to disguise the fact that she’s diabolically clever; our hero Phineas, an English nobleman and spy.
The book’s opening sequence, where Mina must save Phineas’ life, is great fun. It is however only a prologue for the main body of the action, which takes place a few years later, when Phin must come to Mina’s aid. For me as a reader, though, the mechanics of the plot that actually brought Mina and Phineas back together took a massive backseat to the dynamics of their relationship, and I don’t think I did those mechanics justice, since I kept skimming to look for new scenes of interaction between them. I shall have to re-read this one to go back and get the rest of the details I missed.
Overall though the book read pretty well for me, even accounting for the skimming. My only beef that I came away with was the feeling that the happy ending came a bit too abruptly. When I get back to re-reading this one, I’ll see if I maintain that opinion. For now, three stars.
And Only to Deceive, first of the “Lady Emily” series by Tasha Alexander, is one of the “lady of the nobility solves mysteries” milieu, and it’s a decent addition overall. This time around the noble lady in question is Lady Emily Ashton, recent widow of Lord Philip Ashton, who must come to grips with the alarming idea that not only might her husband have been dealing in illicitly obtained antiquities–but he might have been murdered.
I’ll say right out that the big appeal of this for me was Emily taking a sadly belated interest in her husband’s work in ancient Greek artifacts, by way of trying to cope with the fact that she never really knew him before he died. This gives her an opportunity to develop her own intellectual pursuits, and I’m always a fan of a plot that lets a woman pursue education just because she likes it, and never mind that it’s in defiance of the expectations of society. There’s some fun here with Emily’s studies bringing her all too close to fruitlessly falling in love with the husband she might have had, too, which causes her no end of consternation. Especially when the possibility is raised that he might actually still be alive.
But of course, this wouldn’t be a period mystery without a primary love interest, and the gentleman filling this role is Philip’s best friend Colin Hargreaves. Colin and Emily have fairly standard but nonetheless engaging chemistry, with the obligatory sparks when Emily spends some time infatuated with another man as well.
Good fun all around, and I’m definitely looking forward to reading Book 2. Four stars.
I deemed this book Relevant to My Interests when I saw a blurb of it invoking the name of Barbara Michaels. And for the most part, that’s a not unreasonable name to invoke here. There’s a certain old-school feel to this book in both sides of its plot, the haunted house story and the heavy side helping of romance. By “old school”, I mean a return to what (at least in the books I’ve read lately) has been a vanishing art: encouraging the reader’s imagination as much by what’s not on the page as what’s on it. I miss this, both in things that are supposed to creep me out and romances I’m supposed to be cheering on.
On the other hand, speaking as an ardent fan of Michaels’ older books, I didn’t find this one quite up to par with those–although to be fair, I have no substantive reason for this. Mostly, it’s a question of the overall flavor of the writing, which I found more akin to the later Elizabeth Peters works (the last few Amelia Peabodies and the final Vicky Bliss). If you liked the style that Michaels/Peters took with those books, you will probably like the style of this one all right.
And all this said, the plot is rather fun. Our heroine, Claire, is the new kid in a real estate office, and she’s given the daunting task of finding a buyer for a local mansion where a gruesome quadruple murder took place. When she gets there, she discovers to her shock that she can actually hear the ghost of a young girl who was murdered there–and who can point her at the true identity of her killer, who is still at large. Meanwhile, Claire has a rivalry going on with Avery, the office sexpot, a character who takes a little while to get her feet under her. And both women aim for Ben Grant, the owner of the house Claire’s trying to sell.
Overall, a bit on the fluffy side but not bad. Three stars.
I have been buying a BOATLOAD of ebooks lately, so I decided today that since the redoutable Third Place Books is having a sale (20 percent off EVERYTHING), I should go show the print books some love. And here’s what I walked out of the store with!
Heart of Veridon, by Tim Akers; fantasy
Acacia, by David Anthony Durham; fantasy
The First, Third, Fourth, and Sixth Books of Outremer, by none other than desperance (somewhere I’ll have to find books Two and Five); fantasy
An Autumn War, by Daniel Abraham; fantasy
Dragon in Chains, by Daniel Fox; fantasy (which should also please desperance!)
So fear not, print-side authors, I’ll still love you too even if I get a lot of ebooks these days!
As 2009 leaves us I wanted to get in one last gasp of ebooky goodness on the Fictionwise sale, so I’ve done a slew of buying tonight off of Fictionwise! And for the sake of thoroughness, I shall also count the books I’ve picked up courtesy of the shiny gift card that spazzkat gave me for Christmas:
Pandemonium, by Daryl Gregory; fantasy
The Madness of Lord Ian MacKenzie, by Jennifer Ashley; romance
The Secret History of the Pink Carnation, by Lauren Willig; mystery
The Magicians and Mrs. Quent, by Galen Beckett; fantasy
Fall of Light, by Nina Kiriki Hoffman; fantasy
Consequences of Sin, by Clare Langley-Hawthorne; mystery, re-buy
Wicked Game, by Jeri Smith-Ready; urban fantasy, re-buy
Bad to the Bone, by Jeri Smith-Ready; urban fantasy
The Silver Wolf, by Alice Borchardt; fantasy, re-buy
Code of Conduct, by Kristine Smith; SF, re-buy
Skinwalker, by Faith Hunter; urban fantasy
Matters of the Blood, by Maria Lima; urban fantasy
Amazon Ink, by Lori Devoti; urban fantasy
Madhouse, by Rob Thurman; urban fantasy
Unleashed, by John Levitt; urban fantasy
The Family Tree, by Sheri S. Tepper; urban fantasy
Deathwish, by Rob Thurman; urban fantasy
Ghost Whisperer: Revenge, by Doranna Durgin; fantasy, media tie-in
The official final grand tally of books purchased by me in 2009 is therefore 210!
And for the record, the official tally of books READ by me in 2009 is 108. I am not caught up on book reviews but I will be writing the rest of them over this weekend and getting those posted for you all before I start the 2010 book log.
Hee, and solarbird adds that the official tally of books PUBLISHED by me is two! Here’s to 2010 adding to that tally. It’s been a great year for books, folks. Here’s to me beating all of these records in 2010.
There’s a fun meme going around Twitter today with the hash tag #10yearsago. For the benefit of those of you who don’t follow me on Twitter or Facebook, here are my contributions! It’s fun to write these down, especially given that this year was before I was regularly doing anything like blogging.
Y’all will notice there’s a whole lot of fandom and geekery here. This would be because, well, I was indulging in a lot of fandom and geekery that year! Which has certainly not changed at all in the ten years since.
I’m coming off a nice long vacation, thanks to my workplace having given the entire lot of us the week of Christmas off. This was as the cool kids say AWESOME, given that it meant that solarbird and I were able to have Longest Night without me having to take an extra day off for that. And that was a nice way indeed to fire off a relaxing break.
The weekend of the Solstice was pretty much given over to, aside from a special Solstice Murkjam (more on this in another post), a mighty rewatching of the entire extended edition Lord of the Rings trilogy. There are few movies I can happily watch over and over again, but these? Absolutely. Especially when Dara starts asking me questions about Middle-Earth lore and we get to Tolkiengeek. <3 Plus, this time around I started finally watching a lot of the copious extras in all three sets of discs, which I had never done despite owning these things for years now. I'm sure you all know by now, but yeah, lots of lovely stuff there and I've only barely scratched the surface of it all.
Did a lot of catchup of medical appointments during the week, and the highlight of that was getting to touch bases with both my endocs and say "by the way, I'm working on seriously trying to lose weight, just so you all know". In particular, wanted to check with the thyroid endoc to make sure I coordinate with him about how to reduce my T4 and T3 dosage as I drop pounds. I've already had to start tweaking my intake since I've dropped six pounds or so.
I dropped in on kathrynt to say hi in between some of those aforementioned medical appointments, and was treated to tea and a cookie and her delightful offspring informing us, when asked where her dump truck was, “it could be ANYWHERE!” Lillian continues to impress me with her smarts. This kid is going to be scary when she gets older. Hell, she’s kind of scary now!
Christmas itself was pleasantly low-key and featured first going out with mamishka to see the new Sherlock Holmes movie. Picoreview: big silly fun if you can buy that this was totally a fluffy, alternate-universe version of Holmes and Watson that didn’t bear too much resemblance to the canon versions. I did like many get a kick out of the chemistry between Holmes and Watson, and felt that poor Mary was sadly underused as a character, and that the actress playing Irene wasn’t quite up to the task of her own character’s awesomeness. But really, the thing I liked the most about the movie? The music. Especially the jigs during the action scenes and the take of “Rocky Road to Dublin”. I may have to buy the soundtrack on the strength of that alone.
Christmas evening, mamishka, darthhellokitty, and king_chiron all had dinner with us at the Murk and then we all watched the new Doctor Who, “The End of Time, Part 1”. Most definitely more on this in another post. There are rumblings of another group watch of Part 2 to come.
I closed out this past weekend with going, finally, with Dara to see 2012 before it finally vanishes out of the local theaters. We wound up having to catch it at the Alderwood Mall cinema, which was really kinda crazytalk since the place was swarming with after-Christmas shoppers and getting from our parking spot to the theater was a nerve-wracking exercise in dodging oncoming traffic. But we did manage to get there on time, and once we were actually settled in, despite being too close to the screen for comfort, we had a delightful time. I’m sure many of you already know this by now too, but yeah, this movie was awesomely bad. We’re talking epic levels of MSTable disaster pr0n, which is pretty much exactly what we were there for. Mutating neutrinos, baby!
Didn’t get a damn bit of writing or reading done, but on the whole, I didn’t really mind. I’ve been catching up on fixing broken stuff on this web site instead, and that sits well with me, since the long-undone tasks there were annoying me, and I found fixing those relaxing. I assure you all though that more writing and reading will be coming with the New Year.
And oh yes: with spazzkat coming home from Virginia on Sunday, we had our little house gift exchange. My nifty l00t: one box of Ninth Doctor DVDs (man, I do love Nine and Rose, I must say), one lovely tin of bath bombs from LUSH, one $50 Barnes and Noble gift card which I promptly spent on five new ebooks, and last but not least, this, which is pretty much the Best Possible Christmas Ornament to Give to Anna, Ever:
Carefully, Indy
There’s a button on it that plays the Raiders March when you press it. spazzkat knows me very, very well. <3
It was pretty much inevitable that, after loving Pride and Prejudice and Zombies as much as I did, I’d have to check out Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, the followup offering by the same press. In a nutshell: not as fun for me as P&P&Z, although it did still have its redeeming qualities.
I’ll say right out that unlike Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility never seized my attention nearly so much–in no small part because S&S didn’t have the absolutely amazing A&E adaptation to recommend it. (Mmm, Colin Firth as Darcy!) I do actually own a copy of S&S, but I didn’t remember a thing about it. So I went into Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters not knowing at all what to expect. Aside from, well, sea monsters.
This is a Britain where for reasons that are never revealed, all aquatic life in the world has suddenly turned seethingly hostile to humanity. Humanity has had to respond accordingly by altering social customs to place high value upon swimming, sailing, fishing, and any other skill that will improve one’s chances against oceangoing menance. In this setting, we have the Dashwood sisters exiled from their childhood home (as per the original) and embarking upon adventures involving monsters, pirates, a suitor cursed with slimy tentacles growing on his chin, and mysterious natives chanting prayers to unspeakable creatures of the deep (not really as per the original at all). There’s even a bit of steampunky interest when the sisters visit Sub-Marine Station Beta.
All of which are fun elements to throw into a story, but for me, they just didn’t mesh nearly as seamlessly as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies did. There are moments of humor–and I will give this book props for never descending into blatant sexual innuendo or jokes about bodily functions, which was P&P&Z’s one failing.
But it never quite got to the point of unrepentantly sailing past stupid and all the way into “awesome”, I fear. That said? “That was pretty neat” is still not bad at all. Three stars.
It’s a challenge and a half to try to write a sequel to no less august a book than Frankenstein, and for that alone, I must give my fellow Drollerie author Gary Inbinder props. I’m also pleased to say that although there were parts of the book that didn’t work as much for me, by and large, I feel he did an excellent job at his appointed task!
The opening of the book does ask you to accept the idea that sorcery of a kind exists in the Frankenstein universe, since the entire plot only gets underway when the monster, fresh from killing his creator, is taken in by an old Russian witch. In repayment for his working for her, she grants him his greatest wish: to be human and to be able to have a real life of his own. If you’re used to the version of the Frankenstein story more popularly depicted in the movies, the presence of magic may be jarring; however, my spouse pointed out quite correctly that the original story does heavily pursue the idea that Victor Frankenstein was dabbling as much in black magic as he was forbidden science in creating his monster. So it’s not too much of a stretch for me to allow for actual magic existing in this world.
But. This is really only the start of the plot, and the greatest portion of it by far is taken up by the creature–now calling himself Viktor Viktorovich–not only winning himself a life and a family in Russia, but achieving a meteoric rise to power. In fact, the vast majority of the plot is taken up with his participation in the wars against Napoleon. For me as a reader this had quite a bit of interest, but the real heart of the story doesn’t come until the final third, when the truth of Viktor’s origins begins to come back to haunt him.
And this is also where the story ultimately let me down a bit, since I was expecting more creepiness than I actually got, and one plot device in particular that was used as part of Frankenstein’s backstory struck me as quite unnecessary. But that said, overall I did find this a gripping read, and it’s worth checking out if you liked the original. Four stars.
I’m a huge Indiana Jones fan. To the tune of Raiders of the Lost Ark remaining my all-time favorite movie ever, and collecting every one of the novels I could get my hands on. I even went to go see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull twice.
So this should give you the proper context when I say that I really, really wanted to like Indiana Jones and the Army of the Dead. It combines two of my favorite things: Indy and zombies! Plus, it’s a story that’s set during World War II and which included Mac, the character we saw in Crystal Skull. So, cool, I thought, we can get a glimpse into what actually happened to Indy during World War II, which was one of the interesting little side details about the movie.
The big problem is, the character occupying the lead role of this story is not the Indiana Jones I know and love. He’s too prone to bursting into dry, didactic lectures, a habit we never once saw him have in any of the movies, including the last one. This character failure alone distracted me a lot from the story, and made it difficult for me to enjoy some of the other aspects of this version of Indy that I did like–for example, since this is an Indy up in his 40’s, it did seem reasonable to me that he was starting to get sensitive about his age and yet was still quite capable of being charmed by, and charming to, the young female lead.
A similar lack of character development pretty much plagued the bad guys as well, for the most part: the German and Japanese commanders. Since this is a WWII setting, it’s pretty much inevitable that we’d have Japanese forces involved along with the Nazis, and to be fair, this does add a bit of nice variety. And there’s quite a bit of plotting and counter-plotting between the two commanders as they both try to catch up with Indy and Mac to get the final MacGuffin. But none of it had quite the punch it should have had for me, and only occasionally did either of the commanders ever seem like real characters. They definitely paled in comparison to the actual primary bad guy: the voodoo sorcerer who was controlling the zombies.
And I will say that okay, sure, the zombie part of the plot was entertaining enough. But on the whole the story didn’t feel enough like a proper Indiana Jones story to me–because Indy just didn’t feel enough like Indy. Two stars.
