Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies was one of those books I’d been hearing about for ages, and I’ll cheerily admit that glancing at the blurbs on it and the other books in the series in a bookstore did pique my interest. I did not, however, get a chance to read this one until it was handed out briefly for free in PDF form as part of a promotion for Westerfeld’s book Leviathan.
Survey says: less complex than I would have liked, which so far I find is the risk I run when I delve into YA. On the surface, there’s decent worldbuilding here in a sort of Logan’s Run-like, futuristic setting where every member of society is given an operation at age 16 to turn them into a “pretty”. Tally, about to turn 16, is ardently looking forward to her turn, since the transition means she’ll have no responsibilities for a while and will get to indulge in non-stop parties and fun.
This being a dystopian setting, though, she naturally finds out that not everybody is as enthused about becoming pretty as they should be. When her best friend escapes the city in search of a hidden enclave of people led by a couple of doctors who have discovered disturbing truths about the operation, Tally is forced to go after her and infiltrate the enclave as a spy.
All of which is a tasty little core of a story, to be sure. That said, I frequently found the worldbuilding thinner than I would have liked even as I appreciated the base concepts. Same deal with the characterizations of most of the cast. Tally read for me as too simplistic, and I couldn’t really nail down whether this was because it was a YA novel and therefore less complex than I prefer, or simply because Tally as a teenaged girl was being portrayed believably as a teenaged girl. Her primary motivation is at first of course to be a pretty–which seems reasonable for all the young people in her society, since that’s what they have drummed into their heads. But even afterward, as she starts cluing in to what’s going on, she is wishy-washy about committing to changing things, and half the time only seems interested in doing so because she’s attracted to the son of the doctors who run their little colony.
Overall though I did like the read, and I’ll probably be buying this sooner or later to get a proper copy, as well as continuing the series to see what happens next. There is a cliffhanger, and it got me well enough that yeah, I’m in for more. Three stars.
Nora Roberts really does love her some “girl who’s been away for ages goes back to family home in a small town, and OHNOEZ THERE’S A MURDER” plots, and Carnal Innocence is yet another one of those type of books. Fortunately, this is a plot formula that Ms. Roberts does well. So even though there’s nothing terribly out of the ordinary in this novel, it’s a fun read nonetheless.
This time around we’ve got a world-famous violinist, Caroline Waverly, returning to the small Southern town of Innocence to recuperate from a grueling performance schedule, romantic betrayal from her conductor and lover, and her domineering mother. But there are murders going on in Innocence; young women are being lured out at night. And one of the initial prime suspects is Tucker Longstreet, one of the sons of a local old and wealthy family, with a reputation for being quite the lady-killer. The question is, of course, does this mean literally?
This being a Nora Roberts novel, the answer to that question is a no-brainer. Roberts takes her usual circuitous (but not too circuitous) route towards identifying the real killer, and along the way sets up some quite nice chemistry between the prim Caroline and the lazily charming Tucker. I quite liked both characters, not only because of my partiality to lead characters who are musicians, but also because Tucker invariably reminded me of Sawyer from Lost. He has the same kind of rogueish Southern charm, and that’s a quality that Roberts writes with engaging skill.
Since the setting is Southern, there are racial tensions here as well as religious ones. Both of these are played a little heavy-handedly at times in the plot, but on the other hand, I still found them realistically done. The inevitable awful family secrets among the Longstreets, coming to light, set the book up for a resolution that did actually surprise me a bit, too. Three stars.
It gives me great, great glee to think of Jim Hines’ version of Little Red Riding Hood: a formidable assassin, “the Lady of the Red Hood”, whose magical cape grants her the ability to take on wolf form. She’s the central new character in Book 3 of his Princess series–and it just so happens that she’s coming back for a second round against Talia, “Sleeping Beauty”, one of the few warriors to ever successfully stand against her in battle.
Turns out that the Lady of the Red Hood has been unleashed on the kingdom of Beatrice and Theodore, and she’s aiming for a rematch with Talia.
That we get a whole lot more of the backstory for Talia in this installment of the series is my other favorite thing about it. Our three heroines are forced to venture into Talia’s homeland to track down who’s hired the Lady of the Red Hood to come after her, and in the process, we get an excellent portrait of a kingdom that’s been forced to reshape itself ever since Talia’s unhappy story began a century before. Tensions are high between the humans and the fairies, and equally delicious between our heroines and the the assassin who’s come after them.
If I had any quibbles at all with this story, they lie in wishing that Talia’s homeland was a bit more distinct from Danielle’s; save for a few changes of style in naming of places and people, I had a hard time telling the kingdoms apart. It didn’t help either that the heaviest influence on types of fairies in this series is still European, which struck me as weird in Talia’s clearly Arabic-influenced kingdom (with the exception of the peris). But this was a pretty minor quibble overall and I quite enjoyed this latest book, including the advancement of the romantic subplot! Four stars.
Fatal Affair, a Carina Press release by Marie Force, promises to be the first of a series involving the same romantic couple. I must give Ms. Force points for this, as I quite like to see a series develop the relationship between an established pair–J.D. Robb of course comes to mind for this. I must also give the book points for a nice juicy murder mystery, featuring the slaying of a young Senator. The investigating detective must give this case everything she’s got, since she’s under harshly critical eyes for the death of a child on her last case. And if that wasn’t stressful enough, she discovers to her shock and dismay that the Senator’s assistant is none other than her old flame.
All of which make up a nice little story. I had some quibbles with it from a stylistic perspective; there were a few too many coincidental things that seemed to have been put in for the convenience for the plot, such as our heroine’s chief of police also happening to be her uncle. On the other hand, the murder mystery was genuinely engaging, and I certainly won’t turn down a look at Book 2 with these characters. Three stars.
I won On Her Trail by Marcelle Dubé as part of Carina Press’ launch promotion, which rather tickled me since it was one of their initial releases I’d scoped out and put onto my buy list. Woo, free book!
If you look at the blurb for this thing, you can see the basic core concept that made me think this might be fun: “Laura Thorsen returns to Canada only to run afoul of the mob”. “Canada” and “mob” are not two concepts I expect to encounter in the same book. Nor are “ghosts” and “mob”, since Laura’s mother turns out to be haunted by the ghosts of her husband and a former lover. So yeah, this sounded fun and I was happy to get a chance to read it.
Overall I found the characters engaging, although the story felt a bit more weighted than I’d have liked towards the paranormal side of things. The backstory on Laura’s mother and the ghosts is excellent, as is the uneasy relationship between Laura and her mother. On the other hand, the suspense side of things, involving the newspaper expose that puts Laura on the run in the first place, doesn’t quite come together for me and I’m not sure why. I can’t say in fairness that it didn’t get as much development as the haunting plot, because it did–it’s just that it seemed like the book was weighted more towards the haunting and the mother/daughter tension than it was towards the mobster/story plot. I think I’d have liked a bit more balance between the two, or perhaps a bit more buildup to the presence of the ghosts in the plot.
Laura and her love interest Mack had some nice lightly played chemistry, and my only regret here is that Mack struck me as almost too laid-back a character. Writing this review several weeks after I actually read the book, I couldn’t remember the poor guy’s name. I couldn’t help it; this is what the book gets for one of the ghosts being named Sawyer, which promptly trumped Mack in my head. (Thank you, Lost!) Three stars.
Bernita Harris’ Dark and Disorderly did not at first impress me by its title. But as I thought the concept sounded fun, I made sure to pick it up when Carina Press went live earlier this year. Turns out, I was very glad I did. Dark and Disorderly turned out to be a lively book indeed.
Coming out of an imprint of Harlequin, you’d expect this book to lean more towards the “paranormal romance” end of the urban fantasy/paranormal romance spectrum. And while you could make a good case for that, for me as a reader it read more like pure urban fantasy, for two reasons: 1) good worldbuilding, and 2) way less emphasis on the romance between the leads, although of course there was one.
Let’s talk worldbuilding first. This is a universe where ghosts and the other expected batch of supernaturals exist, and our heroine, Lillie St. Claire, is essentially a city-employed ghostbuster. I quite liked the scenario Harris lays down, that supernatural incidents have been on the rise only in the last couple of decades, and that Lillie is one of a generation of children known as Talents–and in her particular case, maybe even something above and beyond. It was just the right blend of supernatural and real-world for me, with a city trying to work out its infestation of ghosts as a municipal problem; this felt very real and believable.
Props as well for the story starting off with a serious bang, when what Lillie thinks is the corpse of her recently deceased husband assaults her in her own bathroom. That seized my attention nicely, and once that initial punch was delivered, the arrival in the plot of police sergeant John Thresher made a great followup. And when Harris described her hero as “not ugly, exactly, just… rugged” and with “a face like a box of hammers and jaws like angle irons”, I was instantly charmed. I’ve had a surfeit of super-sexy heroes, not to mention overly florid description of heroine’s reactions to them, so this won me right out of the gate. So did the chemistry between Lillie and John, which was quite strong and yet never over the top. Major, major points for that.
This is Book 1 in a series, not terribly surprisingly, but I’ll definitely look forward to coming back for more. Intriguing questions are raised about Lillie’s background that hopefully will be answered in forthcoming books–not to mention the bigger picture of supernatural happenings in the world at large, and I’m quite interested in seeing how Lillie and John will play into that. My only quibbles with the story were minor ones indeed, and overall I found this highly enjoyable. Four stars.
If you’re anything at all like me, you probably can’t hear the words “the Little Mermaid” without immediately having a cartoon crab start singing “Under the Sea” in your head. But then again, if you’re anything at all like me, you’ll also probably find Jim Hines’ The Mermaid’s Madness a strong cure for that particular earworm.
Book 2 of his Princess series does indeed adapt that particular fairy tale, and to particularly good effect. This time around we’ve got our three heroines, Danielle, Snow, and Talia, having to delve into why the local undine are attacking human ships and sailors–and why their leader, the mad young queen Lirea, has nearly murdered Queen Beatrice. Lirea’s backstory, which tells how she gained the power to transform into human shape out of love of a human prince but then lost him, is darkly tragic and an easy match for the original Hans Christian Andersen version of the tale.
I appreciated that the main male characters weren’t quite figureheads here, either, even as the primary focus remained on the women. King Theodore and Danielle’s husband Armand remained primarily off-camera, but on the other hand, they were also doing things, which is all I ask. Better still, we got some delightful developments about Talia and Snow, about which I shall not expound because oh my yes spoilers. Points as well for Danielle succeeding in being both a mother and an effective warrior and heroine; that’s a pretty rare thing in fantasy novels, still.
Definitely worth checking out if you like your heroines of the mold of Wicked Girls Saving Themselves (h/t to ), and keep an eye out for the dryad ship captain who will, if you’re a filk fan, very likely remind you of Tricky Pixie’s “Dryad’s Promise”. Four stars.
I’ve heard Jim Hines’ Princess novels described as “Disney Princesses meet Charlie’s Angels”, and yeah, that’s pretty much right on the money. Say what you will about the Disneyfied versions of fairy tales–but okay, yeah, I have a soft spot for them as well as the original tales from which they sprang. So plowing into a series that draws elements from both forms of the classic tales was deeply satisfying indeed.
In this particular fantasy universe, all the traditional fairy tales we know and love actually happen in one form or another. And in this universe, “Cinderella” is known as Danielle Whiteshore, who’s just married her beloved prince. But when her stepsisters try to assassinate her in revenge, she discovers to her amazement that her mother-in-law, Queen Beatrice, has two seemingly unobtrusive “servants” whose stories are every bit as renowned as hers: Talia, a.k.a. “Sleeping Beauty”, and the young witch Snow, who is of course “Snow White”. Talia and Snow are entrusted with not only defending Danielle and teaching her to fight, but helping her rescue her husband as well.
Danielle, Talia, and Snow are all wonderfully realized characters, and in particular I very much liked how Talia comes from a culture that’s clearly Arabic in design as opposed to the more typical European-flavored cultures that usually show up in fantasy novels–including, well, this one. Her backstory is hands down the darkest of the three, though, and a far, far cry from Disney’s Princess Aurora, that’s for sure. I get great amounts of glee though thinking of “Sleeping Beauty” as the fiercest warrior in Beatrice’s entire kingdom.
The only place the book felt a bit shaky to me though was that for all the truly excellent women in this story, Danielle’s husband felt like an afterthought and got barely any camera time at all. The fact that I can’t even remember the poor guy’s name even as I write this is probably a testament to how little presence he actually had in the story, which was mildly disappointing to me given that his kidnapping is what drives most of the plot. I’m all for girl power in my fantasy novels, but not at the total expense of the boys! (Fortunately, Hines improves on this later on in the series, and both Danielle’s husband and her father-in-law become better developed characters.)
Still though, very strong start to a very strong series. Four stars.
If you love zombie novels, and you’re looking for a light, fast read, you should greatly enjoy Robin Becker’s Brains: A Zombie Memoir. Which is pretty much right what it says on the tin: the “autobiography” of sorts of a man who falls victim to a zombie outbreak, only to retain his sentience, the ability to write, and the blossoming ambition to gather other zombies like him and eventually confront their creator with the fact that they still are thinking beings!
A great deal of the book’s Funny comes from how our protagonist, Jack Barnes, is a pompous blowhard of an English professor–and he knows it and is at peace with it. He tells the reader straight up that he has a messiah complex, which for me made him delightfully straightforward, and after a while I couldn’t help but root for him and the other zombies he gathered around him, each with their own special ability. There’s Joan, the former nurse who patches up her fellow zombies’ rotting corpses with whatever she can find; there’s “Guts”, a boy who retains the ability to movie at human speeds; and “Rosencratz”, a former soldier who amazingly retains the ability to speak (and thereby providing the impetus for some great doubletakes out of the human characters who encounter him later).
The ending is not terribly surprising, certainly not if you’ve seen at least a few zombie movies–and if you have, it’ll fit in quite nicely as a twist on those for you. Me, I found the route TO the ending more satisfying, especially with bits like our band of plucky zombies shuffling along the road trying to sing “Silent Night”. It was, indeed, to laugh! Buy it in ebook form if you can; the print form’s in trade, but it’s so short a book that it’s almost not enough book for that price. Either way, check it out. Four stars.
Since I haven’t actually been buying books for any of this month, you’d think I’d get caught up faster on my reading and reviewing, right? Not so much. See my previous posts about all the shenanigans involved with our shiny Great Big Sea contest entry!
That said? I did want to do a quick summary of everything I’ve read lately. Full reviews will be coming, but this is to let you know what’s on the way! And now, recent Book Log entries, the short form:
#47 – Brains: A Zombie Memoir, by Robin Becker. As you might guess from the title, we’re talkin’ zombies here, folks. Short, quick, and hilarious. Four stars.
#48 – The Stepsister Scheme, by (Jim C. Hines). First of Hines’ Princess novels, introducing his versions of Cinderella, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty. Think Disney Princesses meet Charlie’s Angels and you’ll get a very good feel for what this series is about. Highly entertaining! This one sets up what happens to this version of Cinderella after she gets her prince–and her stepsisters refuse to take this lying down. Four stars.
#49 – The Mermaid’s Madness, by . Second of his Princess novels. This one is the series’ take on the Little Mermaid. Darker of tone and overall, IMO, more cohesive than the first. Four stars.
#50 – Dark and Disorderly, by Bernita Harris. This is the first book I’ve read from Carina Press, and I gotta say I enjoyed it quite a bit. Nice urban fantasy, with the romance angle handed with a light touch–exactly how I like it. This particular UF heroine dispatches ghosts, and she knows she’s in trouble when the corpse of her dead husband attacks her in her own bathroom. Four stars.
#51 – On Her Trail, by Marcelle Dubé. This was also from Carina Press, although I actually won it as part of their launch promotion, which was pretty nifty. ^_^ This one is romantic suspense with just a touch of paranormal involved, and while it didn’t pack as much punch as I might have liked, I nonetheless found it a good read. Three stars.
#52 – Fatal Affair, by Marie Force. Another Carina, this one also romantic suspense, although with a political angle to it rather than a paranormal. A young Senator has been murdered, and the detective who has to work the case turns out to be the ex of the Senator’s assistant. Three stars.
#53 – Red Hood’s Revenge, by . Third of the Princess novels, just out a few weeks back. I LOVE his take on Red Riding Hood–who in this universe is a dread assassin who goes by the moniker Lady of the Red Hood, and whose red cape is magical and can give her wolf-shape. Also, great backstory here for Talia, the Sleeping Beauty character. Four stars.
#54 – Carnal Innocence, by Nora Roberts. One of her standalone romantic suspense novels, and yet another one with the formula of “outsider settles in a small town she’s got family ties to and is soon embroiled in MURDER ohnoez”. Nothing hugely unusual for Roberts but as usual, nicely executed. Three stars.
#55 – Uglies, by Scott Westerfeld. YA. This of course is the first of Westerfeld’s acclaimed dystopian YA series, and I’d gotten a free PDF of it a while back as part of his promotion of another recent book, Leviathan. Wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Found it more simplistic than I would have liked, but hey, it’s a YA novel–and his worldbuilding was fun. I’ll probably be buying an actual copy of this eventually. Three stars.
#56 – Matters of the Blood, by (Maria Lima). First of her UF series set in Texas, with a heroine who comes from a supernatural family and who’s just starting to come of age–and into her powers. Yet another UF series with a vampire love interest, although I do totally give Lima props for her colorful Texas setting, and I found the overall plot engaging. Four stars.
#57 – Blood, Smoke and Mirrors, by Robyn Bachar. This one was reviewed very well by the ladies over at Smart Bitches, so I had to check it out on general principle. Straddles the line between UF and paranormal romance, but for me slides more towards the latter since there’s heavy emphasis on the heroine’s relationship with her ex–as well as with the obligatory Mysterious Vampire. I found the heroine a bit too mouthy for the sake of being mouthy, but on the other hand, also liked that aside from being magically gifted, she was pretty much a regular girl. Three stars.
#58 – Crocodile on the Sandbank, by Elizabeth Peters. This is me beginning my Great Amelia Peabody Re-Read! :D I do of course have a long history of loving these books, and this one in particular, in which our heroine Amelia Peabody meets the irascible archaeologist Radcliffe Emerson–and in between arguing like crazy with him, must solve the mystery of a mummy’s appearances around their archaeological dig. Five stars. Because I love it so.
#59 – The Curse of the Pharoahs, by Elizabeth Peters. Book 2 of the Amelia Peabodies, mostly notable for me by the initial introduction of Amelia and Emerson’s son Ramses–who at this point has only a brief appearance to lay the groundwork for his later catastrophic precociousness. ;) Four stars.
#60 – The Mummy Case, by Elizabeth Peters. Book 3 of the Amelia Peabodies, in which Ramses for the first time actually accompanies his parents to Egypt, and general chaos ensues, surrounding a stolen mummy case as well as Emerson’s fury at being stuck with a dig site not worth any time or trouble. Muaha. Ramses is a bit too twee at this point of the series with his constant mispronunciations of “th”, but on the other hand, I love to death that he’s as eager to excavate as his parents are. Four stars.
#61 – Disturbed by Her Song, by Tanith Lee, Esther Garber, and Judas Garbah. This is an anthology that came out via Lethe Press, and which Outer Alliance members were invited to review. The latter two names are actually characters of Tanith Lee’s, and she’s using a conceit of “channeling” them, making all of the stories in the anthology theirs. While I found the conceit not to my taste, I very much admire that the stories by “Esther” have a much different feel to them than the ones by “Judas”. Both characters are queer, and so their stories all generally focus on same-sex love and desire. None of it is overtly erotic–but there’s some truly seductive language in here, and that’s almost eroticism enough. Will definitely be posting a fuller review later. Thanks to Craig Gidney for letting me review it!
