4 Stars. Zany, unpredictable, and hilarious are probably the best words to describe this Western North Carolina tale. Written by 12 local authors, each getting a chapter, this seems to be a competition to see which one can throw the biggest curveball out for the next author to catch. They each did an [...]
Tally lives in the future, in a world where, at the age of sixteen, everyone is made superhumanly pretty. The thinking is that by leveling the playing field, so to speak, racism, bullying, low self-esteem, and all the negative things that can be associated with personal appearance can be eliminated. But not everyone wants to be made pretty. I love, love, LOVE the idea behind this novel. A book that points out how obsessed we are with appearances, is very readable, and is aimed at a young adult audience? In a way, I wish there were more of them. This is a terribly important message. Add to that the less-obvious-but-still-there message about sustainability and the environment? Sounds like a winner to me! And it kind of was. Westerfield pulled off the "preachy" stuff without sounding preachy at all. The story was pretty action-packed and I really did keep turning pages. There was just something missing. I'm having a very hard time putting my finger on it. Partly, this truly felt like a young adult novel. I do read a fair amount of YA, so that's not typically an issue for me, but this really did feel young. I think I wanted a little more meat to the story. (I really am having a hard time with this.) I felt like there should have been more history between Tally and Shay in order for everything to happen the way it did, but then that would probably have changed everything. So I guess the storyline feels a little forced initially. I think I was partly frustrated with Tally for just not telling everything she knew. I'm a firm believer in confessing what you did wrong, getting it over with, and then generally finding out that things go a little easier for you…
It seems like I run into references to Dorian Gray pretty frequently (Most recently in James Blunt's song "Tears and Rain"). I decided to pick this up because I was tired of not understanding the references. The Picture of Dorian Gray begins with one of Dorian's friends, a painter named Basil Hallward, just finishing his portrait. Lord Henry is visiting Basil and happens to meet Dorian. Henry sort of becomes the devil on Dorian's shoulder, asking something like, "Isn't it a shame that this portrait will be forever beautiful, perfect, innocent, and pure, but you will age, wither and die?" This hits Dorian hard. In a temper tantrum, he prays that the opposite should happen. He wants to live unsullied and have the portrait bear the marks of his living. His prayer is answered. This frees Dorian to live the life of cruelty, debauchery, and addiction that he wants. The portrait is hidden away in the attic and it looks more and more horrifying. But since Dorian is forever a beautiful 20-year-old Adonis, no one ever knows about his secret life. To me, this book was cautionary tale about not judging by appearances and how you might be able to hide your sins, but you can't hide them forever. I was shocked to read the introduction (after finishing the book) and find out that the critics at the time of publication thought the book was immoral and terrible! The first version included some "homoerotic" scenes which upset readers in the 1890's. Wilde's popularity wasn't helped by the fact that he was jailed for two years, basically for homosexuality. It seemed to me like Oscar Wilde and Dorian Gray became the same person in the minds of readers and no one wanted anything to do with the book or the author.…
Azoth is an 11-year-old boy barely surviving in the streets of Cenaria City. He's part of a brutal gang of children who will do anything in order to survive. But Azoth wants to do more than survive; he wants a way out of the Warrens and he sees an apprenticeship with master assassin Durzo Blint as his ticket. Now if he can just find Durzo and persuade him of the same thing... My sister shoved this book into my hands and said, "Read this. Now. It will be your next book crack fix." That might have set my hopes a little too high, but it was still a great read. The beginning was a bit startling. Fairly or not, I think of my baby sister (who is 30, by the way) as being more innocent than I am. So when the book is suddenly talking about rape as a means of subduing the boys in the gang, I was appalled. It wasn't graphic, but there was no question what was going on. I started texting her about it. She didn't remember it at all. "Oh, maybe that's why The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo didn't bother me." Blink. Blink. Okay.... But the author addresses this in his interview at the end. He says, "Hope isn't vibrant unless it has to be chosen over despair. Redemption is cheap unless there's a suffocating darkness in which even a hero is tempted to hide....without that, light and peace are meaningless, worthless, boring." OK. I get it. I actually make this same argument to my husband whenever he asks why I read "stuff like that." Granted, what I normally read doesn't get this dark, but he has to listen to me working out what's going on within the darker parts of my books. He…
Dr. Alice Howland teaches psychology at Harvard. A brilliant researcher and professor, she has a field-changing body of work behind her and looks forward to many years of pursuing her passion. Then she starts noticing serious lapses in her memory. She finally gets scared when she goes out for a run and gets lost a few blocks from her home, in an area that she has lived in for decades. She goes to the doctor, and is eventually diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease at fifty years of age. I've heard a lot of people talk about how much they loved this book. I decided very early on that it was not for me and forgot about it. Then my book club decided to read it. I have dreaded it. (Sorry, Sonya, but it's true.) I even voted to read it and I still dreaded it. Reading about a brilliant woman losing herself to Alzheimer's? Way too serious and heart-breaking for me. Just so you know where I'm coming from, no one in my family has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's. I've never had to watch this happen to someone I love. But, working in healthcare for as long as I have, I've seen what it does. It scares the pants off of me. I've never worked anywhere that leaves me caring for the same patient for any amount of time, so I haven't seen the progression in one person. But I've seen the shells that this disease leaves behind. I vividly remember one 46-year-old patient I had with early-onset Alzheimer's. I literally watched that man die of a heart attack. And that seemed the better alternative to what I had seen before he went bad. That same empty shell, who seemed incapable of doing much more than rattling his bed rails.…
This is the story of King Arthur, Guenever and Lancelot. I think we all know how that goes. I've been reading this off and on for the past six months. I would start to read it, lose interest, and pick up something more interesting. I finally decided that it was time to either give up on it or finish it because I was tired of it taking up space in my nightstand. That was a good place for it because I couldn't read more than a chapter or two without falling asleep. That's not like me at all. The first part of the book is like the Disney movie, The Sword in the Stone. Should be pretty cool, right? I liked that movie. But this is terrible. The basic plot is the same, but the writing is pretty dense and dry. The author keeps referring to Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. I don't know if The Once and Future King is supposed to be a "good parts" translation of the first book, but I sort of got the feeling that's how it worked. Either way, it did feel like a long (677 pages in my edition, to be exact) book report. Can't you remember those book reports you wrote when you were a kid? "This happened, then this happened, then something else happened, The End." That's how this felt. The characters never felt real, the place never felt real, and I never really cared about any of it. Probably the best parts of the book didn't even involve the "real" story at all. T. H. White would occasionally go off on tangents about how people and politics really haven't changed so we shouldn't think that we're any better than what we may be tempted to look on as the…
Kathryn Dance is an investigator working for the California Bureau of Investigation. Her specialty is kinesics, a fancy word for body language. She's one of the top in her field, so when new evidence emerges in a cold case suggesting that imprisoned cult leader and murderer Daniel Pell may have one more homicide to his name, she's called in to interrogate. But Pell escapes and she's left leading a manhunt, trying to catch the "Son of Manson," as he was called, before he can either kill again or persuade someone else to kill for him. Let's get the cliche out of the way first: I couldn't put it down. My eyes felt like sandpaper and I had a headache, but I just had to find out what happened next. The action just kept coming. The plot was full of surprises for me, right up until practically the last page. The book was well-written and seemed to be well-researched. Kathryn was a great female protagonist, strong, quirky, funny, likeable, but not too perfect. The other characters were maybe not quite so well-drawn, but I still liked them or hated them. There were two things keeping me from giving this five stars. First, the ending dragged out too long for me. I always use the comparision, "You know, it's like that movie 'Speed.'" The story was over for me but more surprises kept popping up. I get frustrated when that happens. The big thing that kept this from being a five star book was the constant explanation of kinesics. There's a pretty extensive explanation of what Kathryn looks for when she's interrogating in the first chapter of the book. I'm a smart girl--assume I got it. Instead, we get quite a bit of repetition like how "I swear" inevitably signals that someone…
Twins Marion and Shiva Stone are orphaned when their mother, a nun, dies in childbirth and their father denies them. They are blessed to be taken in and raised by an Indian woman who loves them with every fiber of her being. Cutting for Stone primarily follows Marion as he grows up in Ethiopia and then immigrates to the US. That's a pretty weak synopsis, but it's hard to capture this book in just a few sentences. It started off just a little slow, which is why I'm only giving it 4.5 stars. I could see the potential for a fantastic story so I kept reading, but the entire first part--131 pages--is technically only one day with a lot of flashbacks and back story thrown in. I started to feel like, at this rate, the twins might be a week old by the time I finished this 658 page book. But then it picked up and I never looked back. In fact, I sat down to read for just a few minutes while I was eating dinner one night and I finished the last 150 pages of the book. I just could not put it down. I was fully invested in what happened with Marion by then, and that's about the point where I really and truly started to worry for him. I liked reading about Addis Ababa and Ethiopia. I hate to admit it, but before reading this, I couldn't have even told you which country Addis Ababa was located in. I would have taken a guess at somewhere in the Middle East and been completely wrong. And who knew that it's at an elevation of about 8000 feet and it's cool and misty? That doesn't fit my "We Are the World" image of Africa. As soon as I…
Rachel Sorenson has just escaped an abusive marriage, but she's still not free of her ex-husband. Frank comes along every few nights, talks his way past the security guard at her apartment building, and goes upstairs to beat on her door and demand that she take him back. Police say they just don't have the manpower to guard her around the clock, so she's dealing with this largely on her own. Little does she know that someone is watching her. Harry Landon is a photographer obsessed with Beauty. Not subjective beauty in its many forms, but perfect, unblemished, divine Beauty. He thinks he's found his goddess in Rachel. He watches her through his telescope at all hours of the day and night. He takes pictures of her. He knows that the goddess resides within Rachel, and when he cuts her, Beauty will burst forth in a blaze of light. This is one of Charles de Lint's pseudonym books--the books he wrote openly as Samuel Key as a signal that this book is darker than his normal fare. I didn't care for From a Whisper to a Scream, so I've never been too interested in picking this one up. I finally gave in and read it in my attempt to read the Newford books in order. I was pleasantly surprised for the most part. This was a straight-up thriller that was rocketing along and ratcheting up the tension. It seems a little unlikely that one woman would have two stalkers at the same time, but once you let go of that, this was a genuine page-turner. Frank is a textbook study of the abusive husband. Harry is terrifying in his convoluted, violent logic. Events just keep snowballing until the tension is almost unbearable. And then. Oh, and then. It fell apart…
Yelena is now in Sitia, where she meets her long-lost family and starts to learn how to control her magical powers. But life isn't really any easier for her here than it was in Ixia. Sitians believe she's a spy from the north, sent to pave the way for the Commander's takeover of their country. Others believe that her magic is too powerful and think she should be...neutralized. While she's trying to acclimate to her new surroundings, a serial killer starts preying on young women, and Yelena is next on his list. Too much. Just too much. I still love Yelena, and I was a little lost without Valek (although I still dislike his name). But this book seemed to lack focus. I know that life is rarely neat and tidy with only one thing going on, but there are so many people out to get Yelena for wildly different reasons that it just got a little ridiculous. I did enjoy seeing Yelena learn to interact with her family and her tribe again. She's so endearingly awkward and uncomfortable that you can't help but feel bad for her. It's nice to see that she's not perfect! Her relationship with her brother is not what I expected and it bothered me at first, but it's explained toward the end of the book. But Yelena is still Yelena with all that implies. I loved watching her kick some butt and readjust some nasty attitudes. The Sitians really don't know what to make of her. I liked that she has a big heart and will do pretty much anything to help someone out. It can be small, like helping beggar children, or big, like laying her life on the line for someone else. She stays true to herself no matter the external pressures…