Flight into Fantasy

Title: Archangel
Author: Sharon Shinn
Genre: Fantasy
Grade: A-

Synopsis: In this book, we are introduced to the world of Samaria, which is ruled by angels, who can intercede for their people to their god, Jovah. Gabriel, one of these angels, has been groomed to take up the post as archangel, and now, six months before everyone on Samaria gathers to sing the gloria in praise of Jovah, Gabriel must find his angelica, the woman chosen by Jovah to sing at his side. However, Gabriel’s angelica is not the sort of woman he’s expecting. A farmer’s daughter, Rachel’s family was killed and her village destroyed, and she was adopted by the nomadic and slightly heretical Edori. However, the last few years, she’s been a slave, and on the eve of the day she is to be set free, she meets Gabriel.

My Thoughts: I enjoyed this book. It wasn’t one of my best reads of the year by any stretch, but it was quite pleasant, and I will definitely be reading other books by Shinn.

I really loved the characters, and in fact it’s Rachel who brings this book up the few paltry points from a B+ to the A- I’ve decided to give it. She’s an incredibly strong woman. She’s not easy to like, and often I really wanted to shake her, but at the same time, I understood her, and I respected that she wanted to keep her independence. And she really did, unlike in some romance novels where the feisty heroine stomps her feet and declares she wants independence only to happily swoon into the hero’s arms and produce eight kids in the epilogue. There was none of that for Rachel, and I got the sense she and Gabriel were always going to have struggles in their relationship, which made it more real.

I am also glad Shinn chose to explore faith in her books, and I enjoyed the brief lapses into theology. Each of the characters struggles with faith in their own ways, but the book is far from preachy.

Also, I loved the secondary characters. They were well-nuanced, and even the ones it was hard to like had glimpses of depth. And I have to say that I totally would have gone for the charming angel Obadiah over Gabriel any day, although, of course, I do see why Rachel wouldn’t.

I read a review online that compared these books to Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series, and while I can see the similarities (McCaffrey praises Shinn on the back cover, and it’s clear that she is one of Shinn’s influences) they didn’t bother me. There was enough here that was all Shinn that I didn’t feel the work was derivitive at all, even though it might be interesting to compare the two.

I really don’t have any major quibbles with the book. It’s a very pleasant book, and if you like slightly girlie fantasies, (which I do) then you should read this book. It’s thought-provoking, but very easy to read, and I'm looking forward to the rest in the series.

Title: Howling in the Park
Author: Mark Orr
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Grade A-

Synopsis: Nashville private investigator Harvey Drago isn’t your typical P.I. He’s been involved in a large number of cases involving things supernatural. And now he’s being hired by Sonia Cheryl, whose daughter was killed by something very distinctly not human. And as Harvey investigates, he begins to unearth some secrets that could put everyone in his life in danger.

My Thoughts: I’m not sure that this is going to be one of the better reviews I’ve ever written, because, well, I know the author, have met most of these characters before, and have some definite opinions about many of them. But I’ll try my best.

Given the grade, I obviously liked this a lot. Though I haven’t read Raymond Chandler, Dashiel Hammet or any other hard-boiled pulpy detective novelists, I do like the style. I especially like that sort of mystery when juxtaposed with SF or fantasy, hence the fact that Jim Butcher was another really good discovery for me. Orr manages to do the style justice. And though I haven’t read much mystery, I was engaged from start to finish.

Orr has a wonderful writing voice. Even though I was reading my ebook with a synthesized voice, I had no trouble picturing the way Harvey would talk without the author having to go to letter by letter recreation of local dialect.

As for the characters? There are definitely some intriguing ones. Harvey himself is kind of a cypher here, and I found myself with lots of questions about his past, his family, and some of the other cases he’s worked. We also meet a down on his luck alcoholic former history professor, a blind coffee house owner (it should be noted here that this really minor character worked well enough for me that I wasn’t even tempted to nitpick, even a little bit) and Big Stoop, a big hulking brute of a man with a mysterious past. (Big Stoop is a character I’ve met before in some of Mark’s other writing, and I love him to distraction, but there’s really not enough of him here except a few tantalizing glimpses, so I’m not sure other people will really get why this is.)

The humor in this story works well for me, too. It’s not in your face slapstick, but there’s a wry wit here that had me laughing out loud quite a bit.

Quibbles? I was left a bit cold at the romance, because I didn’t think there was much chemistry between Harvey and his love interest. There was, however, chemistry in spaids between Harvey and another secondary character, which I would have liked to see more of.

Would I recommend this book? Most definitely. And it’s on sale through fictionwise, so it won’t break the bank.

After only putting it off about six months or so, I finally placed an order with Nocturne Alchemy. I went with a theme, since I ordered Hatshepsut and Nefertari. Someone sent me a sample of the former, and I love the way it smells on me, plus it lasts forever.

I blame Atalanta Pendrag entirely for this. Also, I blame whichever lovely person sent me the imp of Hatshepsut in a recent sale. It does wonderful things on my skin, and is a great floral but not cloying scent.

In the meantime, I’ve spent way too much money. I bought some BPAL yule scents, and one of my roommates wants me to buy her two bottles based on sniffing some of my imps. I’ll probably take the opportunity to snag the other two Yule scents I want, and might post an offer to add other people’s stuff to my order so that we can get free shipping. But that won’t be for a while yet.

I see that Fictionwise has subscriptions to e-versions of several of the magazines I actually read.

I started out reading Asimov’s Science Fiction back in 1994 or so, because they offered it in Braille. When they switched to cassette versions of the magazine, I quit reading. In fact, though I picked up the subscription to Asimov’s again on tape, I haven’t been listening to them despite my good intentions. Why, you may ask? My blind readers totally know what I’m going to say.

That’s right, the narrators.

The National Library Service for the Blind‘s magazine narration department seems, at least to me, to be comprised of people who are either just starting out, or who the powers that Be knows would cause a normally sane, healthy adult to want to shove an icepick up their nose just to aleviate the pain of listening to these people. Sadly, some of these narrators have gone on to reading actual books, which is why I read ebooks now.

Anyway, I am thinking of picking up subscriptions to at least Asimov’s and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction through fictionwise. Because it’s far easier for me to ignore the synthesized speech from my computer or the dulcet tones of Crystal, the speech engine I use to listen to books I record onto MP3. Crystal sounds almost human, but still machine-like enough that it’s easy to ignore her quirks. Real humans don’t uniformly have the same quirks, and their quirks tend to involve things like talking out their noses or stumbling over or mispronouncing words.

I had to make a new MP3 CD of commute reads, and so here’s what made the cut.

• Archangel by Sharon Shinn: Because several of the blogs I’ve been reading lately indicate that her romantic fantasy will work for me.

• Elvenblood by Andre Norton and Mercedes Lackey: The first book in this series was a keeper for me, so I of course had to start the next one.
• Fall Dead by Ann Bruce: I like Bruce’s online personality as she’s a commenter at those blogs I mentioned. And plus her book got a good review somewhere although I don’t remember where. Anyway, romantic suspense as a genre usually doesn’t work on me, so we’ll see how this goes.
• Howling in the Park by Mark Orr – Well, I’ve already squeed some about this book, so I won’t repeat myself.
• Lover Revealed by JR Ward – I must have the crack!
• Naked in Death by JD Robb – Fine, I’m reading the Eve Dallas books. I can count myself among the romance reading elite. It’s not a book I’d ordinarily pick up, despite the near-future setting, but so many people rave about these books that I thought I’d at least see what happens.
• Slave to Sensation by Nalini Singh – I also hear wonderful things about this book, too. It looks fun, and so I will read it.

Yes, I know what time it is and that I should be asleep. But I have had one of those days that required a bit of crack to end things on a positive note.
Title: Lover Awakened
Author: JR Ward
Genre: Paranormal Romance
Reason for Reading: Ward laces her books with some form of literary crack.
Grade: B+

Synopsis: The Black Dagger Brotherhood is an elite group of vampire warriors whose job it is to protect themselves from evil, sociopathic slayers called the Lessers. The most feared of the brothers is Zsadist, who was once a slave. Z has shut out all emotions except pain and hatred, but when Bella, a young vampire from an aristocratic family is kidnapped and Z rescues her, they both find that they need to heal. Interspersed through this story are the stories of the other members of the brotherhood, a Lesser who’s obsessed with Bella, and, my favorites, Harry Potter (i.e. a young vampire named John Matthew) and Rehvenge, Bella’s brother.
A warning: It’s late. You really probably don’t want to read this if you haven’t read the book, as there will be spoilers and just general fangirly rambliness.

I really liked this book for the most part. Like I said in an earlier post, some of the camp factor is absent, (except for the names, which continue to be the cheesiest thing that ever cheesed.) But Ward is capable of making me care about these people.

Where to start? Zsadist… Yes, I see why he’s a fan favorite. I loved him here. He’s been through so much and I wanted to see him happy.

I also liked Bella. I liked that she had an important role to play in the climax of the book, and that gave her some closure I thought she needed.

I also love the John Matthew storyline. I very much want to see where it goes from here, and I even liked the fact that he’s beginning to come into his own.

Lastly regarding characters, I have to mention Rehvenge. It was nice to meet a tough civillian who wasn’t part of the Brotherhood, especially one who is definitely morally ambiguous. Rehvenge fascinates me, and I hope he has a book. Because I think he might be my favorite male vampire in the series so far. I loved his loyalty to his family, and his struggles to hide a rather big secret, and the fact that he did all sorts of amoral things just to keep his family safe.
Oh, and while I’m squeeing, there was no deus ex machina from the Scribe Virgin. Thank Cthulhu!

I also loved that Ward didn’t hesitate to kill off characters. I’m glad she did, as it made the fights between the Brotherhood and the Lessers seem more relevant, although the death did break my heart at the time.
So what can’t I squee about?

Well, first of all, Zsadist’s brother, Phury, irritated the hell out of me. I really wanted him to get the hell off his damn cross already. I really liked that at the end Zsadist calls him on it, too, but from what I’ve heard about future books, I have the feeling Phury’s whininess isn’t abating.

Also, a common complaint I’ve read is that there’s too much going on here. I agree, and yet again, Ward leaves a significant plot thread dangling near the end. Of course I will be reading the next book to see if she fixes it, and at least the manipulation wasn’t as bad, but it is still really cheap.

Oh, and yeah, I can’t talk about this book without talking about the Butch/Vishous… thingy. I don’t understand WTF was going on there. It’s like she threw in some bones (heh) to appease the slash fangirls without really explaining what they had to do with anything. Bad form, JR. Very bad form.

Overall, I liked this very much. Not quite a keeper, but still, B+ isn’t that bad of a grade.

It’s the time of month where I use my text-to-speech conversion program to convert a new batch of books into MP3 to burn onto a new commuting CD.

I know mostly what’s going on the CD, but I thought it might be fun to open the comment section. Consider this a general book recommendations thread. What should I be reading? Why?

Conversely, have you read anything really horrible lately?

Inquiring minds want to know!

And I’m not screening comments for this post, so hopefully the LJ spam bots will not take advantage of the fact, so go wild!

One of the books I know is making it onto my next commute CD is going to be Howling in the Park by Mark Orr, who happens to be one of the first people I met on these wild and wacky Internets.
I’ll be reviewing it sometime this weekend, because it’s a fairly shortish novel-length book and my romance crack isn’t going to last me all week.

Anyway, if I’m feeling ambitious I might ask him to do an interview and post it here. Because that’s the kind of blogger I am. Although, obviously, I make no promises.

“But, Shannon,” you may be asking yourself, “What’s this book, you know, about?”

I’m so glad you asked.

this review provides a good synopsis.

Full disclosure: Mark is perfectly capable of shilling his book all by himself. He didn’t put me up to this, and any fangirl squeeing is purely my own. I don’t even know if he knows that I have a blog. Although I’m sure he will if he’s prone to self-googling.

I just noticed the new BPAL update. Yeah, yeah, it’s been out for two weeks. I am slow.

Anyway, the Yule scents are going to kill me. I identified at least five that I must have. Right now.

Self-restraint, Shannon. Self-restraint.

So, thanks to a discussion with my mom the other day and a post on Smart Bitches today, I have discovered a book I am pretty sure I will hate.. It features vampires and is set in my favorite historical time period (by which, obviously, I mean, not) the Regency.

It could surprise me and be the best book of the year, but I am cynical so I have my doubts. At any rate, I am off to see if I can find an ebook, and then I will be adding the book to my next commuting CD. Because I cannot resist the question “Is it really that bad?”
ETA: Aww, darn! Not an ebook. I guess I'll actually have to settle for reading books I will, y'know, like. Oh, the sacrifice!

According to my Social Problems teacher (who would, presumably, not lie about such things) the notion of people marrying for love didn’t become common until about 1850.

So now every time I read a Regency set romance novel in which the heroine tosses her head and proclaims, “No, I won’t marry you, you notorious rake! I’ll only ever marry for love!” I will no longer be able to ignore that fact.

In other book-related news, I’ve started Lover Awakened by JR Ward. God damn this woman is my romance novel crack.

That being said, I am really dreadfully curious to see how she’s going to pull off a HEA (that’s, of course, Happily Ever After for those people who do not obsessively surf romance-related blogs like I do) between Zsadist and Bella. That boy is seriously messed up, and even though I am only on chapter 13, I already know that she’s going to have to do a whole lot to convince me that both he and Bella won’t be emotionally scarred for years to come.

Also, I am so getting a Harry Potter vibe off the John Matthew storyline. As I read about how he’s going to be in vampire training, I keep hoping he will have a Ron and a Hermione to bounce stuff off of.

Thirdly, this book is a lot darker than the other two and consequently there’s a lot less of a campy feel to it. This is both a good thing as Zsadist really doesn’t need or deserve a campy story, but the sense of fun isn’t quite as present in the world.

Title: Sweet Starfire
Author: Jayne Ann Krentz
Genre: futuristic romance
Grade: B+
Reason for Reading: I wanted to try a Jayne Anmn Krentz book. And I like science fiction. I was hoping the two would be tastes that taste great together.

Synopsis: On the planet Lovelady (which is a lovely, whimsical name), there are two distinct groups of people. Harmonics live a serene lifestyle of contemplation and are unruffled by emotions. Wolves are basically everybody else.

Cidra Rain Forest isn’t a full harmonic. She wants to be, but she can’t commune telepathically. But she believes there may be an artifact on the neighboring planet of Renaissance which will allow her to experience that telepathic communion. In order to facilitate her quest, she signs up as the assistant to Teague Severance, an independent mailman who is very driven and determined, and who also has something of a shady past. Severance, of course, isn’t sure he wants Cidra coming along mucking up the works, but of course he’s terribly attracted to her, and soon they find themselves on a rather high-stakes adventure full of danger and passion.

My Thoughts: This was a pleasant read. Nothing that’s going to leave me a massive puddle of fangirl squeeing, but definitely nice enough. I can see why Krentz is a comfort author for many romance readers. This would have been a great book to curl up with while drinking hot cocoa and eating soup.

The plot starts out fairly slowly, but picks up at about the halfway point, and there are a couple of tense moments. I remember as a kid that I tended to hate adventure books where the plot involved pitting people (usually kids) against the elements. But this is a plot that works well in a romance, and both Cidra and Severance relied heavily on each other.

As for the romance? Again, it was pleasant. I got the sense that Cidra and Severance were good together. What I especially liked was that Severance was possessive and protective without turning into a caveman. And Cidra managed to come across as a very quiet, strong woman without turning into a doormat. Both characters also grew a lot because of each other, and I really liked the end and how they each needed to test whether the intense circumstances they’d been in were enough to prove their love.

Also, I have to say, I was expecting a lot more cheese from the sci-fi elements here. I imagine more hard-core SF readers probably might find Krentz’s world-building a bit flimsy, but it all worked for me. I liked the whimsical touches she included as well as the violent ones. I mean, really. Severance has a pet rug named Fred. If that’s not terribly cute, I don’t know what is.

Negatives? You know, there weren’t very many. I didn’t really feel all that connected to the characters, and there were some places that dragged a bit. The book was very easy to put down, although once I was reading, I got into it. But that’s very much a personal thing.

I have one of Krentz’s earlier books, Fabulous Beast about half-finished. It’s just not one of the books I’ve added to my commuting CD so I haven’t had a chance to finish it while I’ve been at home.

These are the top one-hundred-six books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s
users. Bold those you’ve read. Italicize those you started but couldn’t, didn’t or
haven’t finished. Strike through those you despise. Put an asterisk next to those
you’ve read more than once. Underline those in the TBR pile.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote (We read the little kids’ version in high school Spanish, and I always wanted to find a translation I liked, but I failed.)
Moby Dick (We had an abridged version in our American literature book in high school. But I know I'll never read it.)
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : A Novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : A Novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a Memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon *
Oryx and Crake : A Novel
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : An Inquiry into Values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

So what we learn from this? Man, is Shannon going to have fun when she takes manditory lit classes later on in her college career.

Title: A Wish, A Kiss, A Dream
Authors: Shiloh Walker, Mary Wine, and Lorra Leigh
Genre: Erotic romance
Reason for Reading: I think I got this because someone told me I’d like Shiloh Walker.
Grade: C-

I’ve had a pretty good reading month thus far, but it was bound not to last.

The anthology starts with “Djinn’s Wish” by Shiloh Walker, which tells the story of Cat, an artist who was blinded in a car wreck. She inherits a magic mirror and the amorous attentions of Tam, the djinn trapped inside the mirror, who grants wishes and kisses to women. Naturally, Tam, our dginn, is drawn to Cat’s sweetness and the fact that she’s suffered. A lot. But will he risk everything to be with her?

My Thoughts: I would have loved this story if it had not featured an issue (blindness) of which I know a bit. Walker manages to incorporate a lot of the details of life as a blind person, but she could have used a blind beta reader to go over those passages. (Authors take note: I can’t possibly think of a single blind person who would be willing to do this. Nope, nobody at all.) And I probably don’t need to tell you about the end and the manner in which Cat’s eyesight is dealt with. I knew it was going to happen and yet, there was eyerolling action happening.

It’s a testament to the fact that I pretty much did like Walker’s protagonists that I was able to get past the things that kept throwing me out of the story. I’ll give this a C+ and try another Walker effort that doesn’t have this plot.

Actually, compared to the rest of the anthology, Walker is freaking Shakespeare, because the rest of the anthology was even more underwhelming.

Next we have “Paying Up” by Mary Wine. This seems to be linked to some other story, and I’m not really sure my heart can take any more of this universe, so if you want to start at the beginning of this series, I’d recommend you do your own googling.

Synopsis: Shane Jacobs is a military man who works for a super-sekret military organization that doesn’t exist. We are never told what he does, although I have a hunch it involves the pr0n channel and a lot of Astroglide. I think he might be psychic, or a werewolf or something, although I was confused on this point. Or maybe it’s that he has psychic friends, although, sadly for everyone, Dionne Warwick does not make an appearance in this story. Included among these friends, incidentally, is the heroine of the last book, who has a random inexplicable appearance here just to assure people that she’s still happy, which is great except I do not care. Anyway, Shane’s obsessed in an alpha romance hero kind of way with Christina, who he apparently rescued from bad guys in the previous book and who he had some kind of bet with. If she survived being shot, he would come claim a kiss from her. And so, in order to cash in on this bet, Shane does all the things you’d expect him to do: he buys her flowers, takes her to the movies and writes her beautiful love letters… Oh, wait, this is a romance novel. What I meant to say is he gropes her like she’s his winning lottery ticket.

OK, so here’s the thing. You can have an alpha male who is so obsessed with the heroine that she’s a little afraid of him and yet strangely drawn to him. I am told that Anne Stuart does a good job with this, although I’ve never read her so don’t take my word on it. Anyway, I would think that this would require two very well-drawn characters, and probably a very intense set of circumstances that would draw them together.

This story? Does not feature anything of the sort. We just have an alpha ape-man direct from Central Casting, and a feisty heroine. Cthulhu save me from feisty heroines! Even the sex starts out pretty well, but goes very bad as the author tries to figure out whether she wants to write purple, flowery romancey sex or earthy erotica sex. The balance she strikes is not a joy to read.

This story did have its pluses. You can never go too wrong with unintentional hillarity, and I giggled helplessly at points. Like everytime the author wrote “passage” in a sex scene. But since that wasn’t the sort of reaction the author intended, that’s not saying much.

With wooden characters, writing that was fairly awful at times, and a plot with more holes in it than a doughnut rack at Krispy Kremes, this one rates a C-.
The third story, “The Cowboy and the Thief” by Lorra Leigh, I didn’t even bother finishing. Leigh is inexplicably popular for reasons known only to her fangirls. The last thing I read by her, a short story in the “Hot Spell” anthology, featured a shrewish woman who falls in love with an uber-alpha with a barbed penis. This story features a shrewish female who is trying to recover a torque her father sold to an American cowboy. When Jack Riley refuses to be convinced that the torque is a precious heirloom, Angel decides to do what you or I would do in this situation, namely eat a lot of chocolate, mutter darkly to herself about what a creep this guy is for buying a family heirloom and plotting making sure her father, who sold said torque, ends up in a shithole nursing home… Except, again, this is a romance novel, so she breaks into Jack’s house in order to retrieve the torque. Jack, of course, is totally aware of this, and proceeds to molest her until, one assumes, they fall in love. I, however, will not be finding out what happens, because after chapter 1 sets up this ridiculous premise, I decided that there was no way I could get through the rest of the story.

So, the anthology as a whole? With one sort of pleasant story, one laughably bad story, and one so awful it makes my head hurt, I would recommend skipping this one. Grade: C-.

Title: Wild at Heart
Author: Patricia Gaffney
Genre: Historical Romance
Grade: A

Synopsis: It’s 1893 Chicago, and a man has just been discovered wandering around Southern Ontario. He doesn’t speak, and he’s completely wild. He’s brought to Dr. Harley Winter, an anthropologist at the University, who begins experimenting on him. During this time, the man becomes a source of fascination for Winter’s daughter, Sydney. When Sydney discovers that the lost man can speak, the anthropological experiments they’re trying become negated and it’s up to Sydney and her siblings to teach the man, who remembers that his name is Michael, to adapt to his new world.

My Thoughts: I decided to read this book thanks to Candy of Smart Bitches, who is an unashamed Gaffney fangirl. I chose this book to start because it contains a premise I wish I saw more often and which I love, that of a wild man teaching society what it means to be human. So I was predisposed to liking it, and then promptly fell into the book and didn’t emerge until I finished.

What I liked best about Gaffney’s writing is that she draws wonderful characters. Everybody is nuanced and three-dementional. We don’t have the stereotypical absentminded professor, the caricatured unsuitable fiance, or the annoyingly precocious child. Dr. Winter, his assistant Charles West, and Sydney’s little brother Sam are true characters in their own right.

And it goes without saying that I adored Sydney and Michael. Sydney was very much a woman of her times, and there are so many things about her that a less skilled author could have drawn out to make me dislike her. She’s a bit of a doormat at times, and of course there’s the bit about West, who starts out courting her. But I understood Sydney’s motivations, and I appreciated the fact that she seemed to be a genuinely kind person, with a few very human flaws. I especially liked that she wasn’t a virgin. She’d had sex in the past, with her husband who’s been dead for a while when the story opens, and she misses the intimacy, which is why she lets West sniff around her even though she doesn’t like him much.

As for Michael? Ahh, Michael. He was so completely perfect. I loved his wonder and horror as he discovers this new world, and I almost cried for his deep and abiding loneliness and the sense that he had that he just didn’t belong anywhere, once he was rescued and brought back to civilization. I also thought Gaffney struck a good balance when it came to his backstory. It was present, but didn’t overwhelm the story of his life in the present.

Also, I should mention that I loved the setting. I love that particular time period in American history, and plus, as I may have mentioned, I’m a bit bored with Regency set historical romances at the moment. So 1893 Chicago was a fun place to visit.

My only niggle is minor. It constitutes a spoiler, though, so I’ll just say that Michael’s real family felt a bit too fairy tale perfect for me. I don’t know what I would have wanted for him, but I’m not sure that they were it.

Aside from that though, which is something that may very well work for people other than me, this was a wonderful book. Highly recommended.

Title: The Mysterious Miss M
Author: Diane Gaston
Genre: historical romance
Grade: DNF
Synopsis: “The Mysterious Miss M is a living male fantasy – alluring, sensual, masked. But
when Lord Devlin Steele finds himself responsible for her – and her child – he comes
to know the real Maddy: the loving, passionate woman who drives away the nightmares
of the Waterloo battlefield.
But this aristocratic soldier can’t support his new family. He’ll only inherit his
fortune on marriage to a suitable lady – and Maddy is far from suitable. With the
dangers of London’s underworld closing in, how can he protect the woman he has come
to love?”

My Thoughts: I wanted to like this. I really did. But I thought the heroine was a twit for a long time in the first three chapters of the book, and I just didn’t buy her angst. Devlin, the hero, was nice enough, and I probably would have loved him if I’d met him under better circumstances, maybe even enough to keep reading. Unfortunately, what with Maddy not ringing especially true for me and the fact that I kind of glutted myself on regencies just now, I think I’d better put it aside for a different reading mood.

I know, two reviews in one day. It’s kind of amazing, really.
Title: The Elvenbane
Author: Andre Norton and Mercedes Lackey
Genre: fantasy
Grade: A

Synopsis: Two masters of epic fantasy have combined in this brilliant collaboration to create
a rousing tale of the sort that becomes an instant favorite. This is the story of
Shana, a halfbreed born of the forbidden union of an Elvenlord father and a human
mother. Her exiled mother dead, she was rescued and raised by dragons, a proud, ancient
race who existed unbeknownst to elven or humankind. From birth, Shana was the embodiment
of the Prophecy that the all-powerful Elvenlords feared. Her destiny is the enthralling
adventure of a lifetime.

My Thoughts: This was so good for most of the book. Then we reached a part that sagged a bit, which lowered my grade from the A+ I was considering, and then there were also a few tiny niggles that bring the grade down just a smidge, although other readers probably wouldn’t have the same issues I did.

To give a better summary, this is the story of Shana, whose mother was the concubine of Lord Dyran, a very powerful elvenlord, in a world in which elves have subjugated humans as slaves. Unknown to elves and humans, the world is also populated by dragons, who largely keep to themselves. Thanks to a previous uprising among half-elves, who have both elven magic and the innate human magics, it’s now illegal for half-bloods to be alive at all. Which is how we find Shana’s mother, crawling across the dessert pregnant with Lord Dyran’s child. She is assisted in the birthing of her baby by the dragon shaman Alara, who after some consideration takes the half-blood baby back to the dragons and raises her alongside Keman, her son. Unfortunately, the dragons don’t know what to make of Shana and they exile her.

So after all that, what worked? Well, both Lackey and Norton are good at drawing characters I could relate to. And what I especially liked was that there was some moral ambiguity. We have some truly good people, some truly evil ones, and some selfish, petty people of all the races.

While I’m talking about characters, I should specifically bring up Keman, Alara’s older child. I love him, and only wish we could have been even more inside his head. He is earnest, very bright, and something of a nerd by dragon standards, which means he gets bullied a lot. And I loved his sense of honor, and the fact that for a while he was the only one of the dragons who seemed to think of Shana as a person.

Shana wasn’t a bad character either. I was afraid she’d be a huge Mary Sue, but she didn’t come across that way for me, mostly because she really does go through a lot. I really felt for her when she was exiled, for example, and struggling to find a place for herself in a world she had no idea existed.

I also loved the world-building. When I mentioned this book to someone on a mailing list, his reaction was to say it sounded derivitive. But I didn’t feel that it was at all. But then, I find political intrigue fascinating, and I also like moral ambiguity, so even though there isn’t much beyond the elves, humans and dragons, it was enough to keep me interested.

This book is also a bit darker than a lot of fantasy I’ve read, and I thought it tackled some interesting themes, imperialism being one, the necessity of change being another, and exactly what is meant by sentience. These were all questions it was fascinating to explore in greater detail.

And then there were the things that would probably not please anyone but me. I really liked the slightly slashy relationship between Lord Dyran’s heir and a half-blood slave who turns out to be his cousin. So there were swlashy *and* cesty overtones. *LOL*

Of course, mentioning that leads me to my few niggles. First of all, I really didn’t like the doomed love arc of Shana’s. I thought it added a demension of conflict that didn’t need to be there, especially since we meet the guy she’s infatuated with relatively late in the book. And I was annoyed with her love interest for not simply telling her why he couldn’t be with her. He just assumed she wouldn’t care, which I thought was pretty arrogant.

It’s mostly because of the love interest subplot and another little adventure involving a manipulative and deceitful elven lady that slowed down some of the final sections. On the one hand, we did see Shana having some definitely childish moments. On the other, she was shunted to the side for much of this part.

My last niggle was that I felt like there were a few incidental characters whose povs we didn’t actually need. They bogged down the story with unnecessary verbiage.

But those quibbles were fairly minor, and even the parts that I thought dragged a bit still kept me absorbed. I would definitely recommend this book, and will definitely be reading the sequel.

Title: Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting By in America
Author: Barbara Ehrenreich
Genre: nonfiction
Grade A

Synopsis: Millions of Americans work for poverty-level wages, and one day Barbara Ehrenreich
decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare
reform, which promised that any job equals a better life. But how can anyone survive,
let alone prosper, on $6 to $7 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich moved from Florida
to Maine to Minnesota, taking the cheapest lodgings available and accepting work
as a waitress, hotel maid, house cleaner, nursing-home aide, and Wal-Mart salesperson.
She soon discovered that even the “lowliest” occupations require exhausting mental
and physical efforts. And one job is not enough; you need at least two if you intend
to live indoors.

My Thoughts: I had to read this book for my social problems class, which I’ve written about before. We’re supposed to be analyzing a social problem sociologically, and I decided to tackle the working poor specifically so I could read this book. Though a lot of what the book reveals is no great surprise to me, given what I’ve experienced and the stories I’ve heard, it was still a very insightful, thought-provoking book. The book really does emphasize the problems faced by the working poor, and I thought Ehrenreich’s closing analysis was spot-on.

I know a book is an A read when I actually am not only tempted to go back to my live journal before I’m finished reading it and write down my thoughts, such as they are.

Right now I am reading The Elvenbane by Mercedes Lackey and Andre Norton. The last Norton book I read was probably a B read. I don’t remember it being impressive, although I liked the protagonist well enough, and was only mildly irritated by the writing style. And Lackey, of course, was a favorite author of my teens. I know that when she is good, she is amazing, and when she’s bad, at least for me, she’s still quite readable. ( The Black Gryphon and Arrows of the queen survived well on rereads, and I still remember passages from When the Bough Breaks .

Anyway, The Elvenbane. It has great characters, wonderful world building, and a plot that has kept me engaged. There are definitely some elements I’ve read before, especially from Lackey, but they’re treated differently here. Some of the pretty simplistic morals in Valdemar are absent. There are good elves, complacent half-elves, and evil humans. And then there are the dragons, who are every bit as complex and individual as everyone else.

From the synopses of the rest of the series, I kind of suspect that the rest of the series won’t be entirely to my taste, although I will of course read them.

Title: Sin and Sensibility
Author: Suzanne Enoch
Genre: Historical Romance
Grade: C+
Summary: USA Today
bestselling author Suzanne Enoch delights fans once again with this enchanting tale
of a young lady determined to have an adventure and the white knight who charges
to her rescue.
After yet another beau was chased away by her three over-protective brothers, Lady
Eleanor Griffin decides she’s had enough. If she is to become a boring society wife,
then she’s going to have some fun first. But when her adventure turns into more than
what she bargained for, she is grateful for her knight in shining armour who rescued
her from what was sure to become a scandalous situation.
My Thoughts: For the number 1 suggestion as generated by Librarything, this was a disappointment. Although I haven’t read all that many historical romances as compared to other things I’ve read, I felt that I’d read both Eleanor and her knight in shining armor, Valentine Corbet, the Marquis of Deveril, (although sometimes he’s referred to as the Marquess in my ebook, which confused me) in other settings. Nell is your stock Regency miss who wants to escape the strictures of her society. Valentine is a notorious rake who prays to Lucifer because that’s supposed to convince us how blackhearted he is. I didn’t really like either of them, and I thought they were a bit cartoonish and over the top in their reactions to what was going on around them.

The other thing that bugged me about this book was the writing style. Enoch peppers the book with what she assumes are Regency British-isms that don’t feel right. Everyone refers to women as chits, and after a while I started to really notice it. And I’ve mentioned the part about Valentine half-gestingly praying to Lucifer. That wasn’t funny, and it was a bit lame.

What I did like were the moments of tenderness–though there were few–between Eleanor and her family. I got the sense that her brothers really did care about her, they just went about things in a very ridiculous way for large sections of the book.

My recommendation: There are so many better written regencies out there. Skip this one and read Julia Quinn instead, because she does the whole overprotective family, and a woman courting a rake, far better than Enoch, plus Quinn’s books are actually funny.

Title: The Keeper
Author: Sarah Langan
Genre: Horror
Grade: A-

Summary: Some believe Bedford, Maine, is cursed. Its bloody past, endless rain, and the decay
of its downtown portend a hopeless future. With the death of its paper mill, Bedford's
unemployed residents soon find themselves with far too much time to dwell on thoughts
of Susan Marley. Once the local beauty, she’s now the local whore. Silently prowling
the muddy streets, she watches eerily from the shadows, waiting for . . .
something
. And haunting the sleep of everyone in town with monstrous visions of violence and
horror.
Those who are able will leave Bedford before the darkness fully ascends. But those
who are trapped here—from Susan Marley’s long-suffering mother and younger sister
to her guilt-ridden, alcoholic ex-lover to the destitute and faithless with nowhere
else to go—will soon know the fullest and most terrible meaning of nightmare.

My Thoughts: Apparently, this is Langan’s first novel, and it’s very good, considering that. She manages to convey the oppressive atmosphere of a small mill town, and she did it so well that surfacing out of the book was like shaking off a heavy black cloud for me. I thought the theme of a town full of secrets was very well done, and I liked the claustrophobic feel of the place.

The characters also felt very real to me, although this is something I have to downgrade the book for just a little. These are very real, flawed people, but I still didn’t really like any of them. I don’t know that I necessarily need to read about everyone’s horrible sides, warts and all, in my escapist fiction. I think the book would have worked a lot better for me had there been at least one character I liked unreservedly.

The other thing that didn’t quite work for me was the plot. I thought it could have been tightened up just a little, and maybe the focus of the story could have narrowed even more to much greater effect. I also wasn’t all that thrilled with the structure Langan uses, because I thought there was a part where the suspence part just sort of stopped.

That being said, I loved the setting and the initial setup, and I even liked the end, enough that I’m going to give this one an A- and recommend it for anyone who likes horror.