4 stars Archives - Page 26 of 39

Dreams Made Flesh by Anne Bishop: Book Review

Dreams Made Flesh is a collection of four short stories/novellas centered around Jaenelle and her court. One of the events takes place immediately after the third in the Black Jewels series, so anyone reading this should keep that in mind. It definitely has spoilers for the previous books. My favorite story by far, was "The Prince of Ebon Rih." How I grinned as I read it! I've always liked Lucivar, but he really is cast as the older brother in the series. There is definitely more to him than that, so it was great to see him as a powerful ruler in his own right and a sexy-as-hell man. Watching him deal with that bitch Roxie was a pleasure. Seeing his insecurity in dealing with Marian was delightful. He didn't know what hit him. Absolutely loved it. My sister, who shoved this book into my hands saying only, "Read. This. Now." loves "Zuulaman." This is an event from Saetan's younger years that made him a legend. I liked it, but somehow couldn't help comparing it to Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana. You probably have to be inside my head to see how that happened. I loved Tigana and this story suffered for the comparison. And probably from my sister's buildup. Still, it was a very cool showcase of Saetan's raw power. "Kaeleer's Heart" would have been good, but it was a little too much like "The Prince of Ebon Rih." It was nice to see Daemon and Jaenelle together, but I felt like I had pretty much read the story already, just a few pages earlier. It is sexy to see the lengths that Daemon is willing to go to in order to protect Jaenelle though. "Weaver of Dreams" was just a confusing little legend and that's all I have to…

Fire by Kristin Cashore: Book Review

Fire lives in a country known as the Dells, and she is a human monster. There's a strain of wildness in the country that leaves some of the animals and people with impossibly seductive beauty and power. Fire is so named because of her hair. She can enter minds and control people and animals. But she is constantly in danger because other monsters want to prey on her and other people either love her or hate her too much. She does have a small group of friends that are like family though, and her world, while small, is as safe as she can make it. Yet she chafes against it. When she is invited to King's City to discuss how her power could be used to prevent a civil war from erupting, she jumps at the chance to go, despite the personal danger she puts herself in. I'll get my complaints out of the way first. Leck (from Graceling) is worked into this story and he does not fit. I don't see any purpose to his character at all. I kept expecting something more from that storyline but it just fizzled out. It is entirely possible though that I've forgotten something from Graceling that would have made it apparent why he needed to be in this story. The other thing is about Fire herself. I loved her as a character. She has almost limitless power yet she's afraid of herself. She has not had an easy life by any means, yet she does try her best to help where she can. She loves those in her circle with a love so intense that it's almost scary. She is willing to lay her own life on the line for them. But about three-quarters of the way through the book, she has…

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks: Book Review

Hanna Heath studies and restores rare books. She is offered the chance of a lifetime when she is contacted by the United Nations to restore a rare illuminated Haggadah at the end of the Bosnian War. Hanna manages to pull out a few clues to the book's history. As she follows up on the clues, we glide back and forth through time, visiting first Hanna, and then the story of the book's owners and saviors backwards through a long, tumultuous history. Hanna's story was almost just filler to me. I wasn't bored by any means, but I couldn't wait to see where and when the book would take me next. The characters in the book's history were fascinating and only at the end did I really get a good sense of how everything fit together. The hints were there, they were just so subtle that I didn't quite catch them. But the author wrapped everything up beautifully. None of this is a complaint, by the way. I found the whole thing intriguing. I loved the fact that there was a theme running throughout of people saving the book who weren't necessarily Jewish. Muslims and Christians living during times when everyone was fighting saw the value of the book and saved it. It just seems that so often, history and books seem to focus on the negative; it's nice to see that there are always people out there who are able to overcome prevailing prejudice and do what is right. I recommend this one to just about anyone. Reviewed January 15, 2009 Read an excerpt. Find author Geraldine Brooks on her website. Buy People of the Book at Malaprop’s | Better World Books Friday Flashback Reviews are a weekly feature here on The Introverted Reader. These are old reviews I wrote…

Odd and the Frost Giants by Neil Gaiman: Book Review

Twelve-year-old Odd doesn't quite fit in with the rest of his village. He crushed his leg when he was younger and that's left him with a limp. He'd rather be carving alone in the woods than hanging out in the hall with the other villagers fighting and telling stories. His stepfather is just awful. So Odd just leaves one day. He's going to stay in the shack his dead father left behind. On his first day alone, he comes upon a bear, a fox, and an eagle who need help. As one must in fairy-ish stories, Odd helped them. Then he discovered that they needed more help defeating a frost giant that has taken over their home and made it eternally winter in Odd's village. Can the boy with the limp save the day? I really liked this very short book. Odd is such a little fighter. Oh, not in the ways that the rest of his village fights, but just fighting for what he believes in and what's right. Fighting to grow into the man he wants to be, not the man he's expected to be. While the story itself is good, I liked what I took away from it more. Odd never really let his crushed leg hold him back. He learned to work through problems rather than walk away from them. There's the art of compromise as well, and possibly a little about forgiveness. The illustrations by Brett Helquist fit the story perfectly. A little rustic, they fit right into this story of Norway in the days of the Vikings. I love the book itself as well. A perfectly-sized little cloth-bound book, I could just hold it for hours. Do you have books like that? Ones that just feel like they're made for your hands? Recommended for…

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline: Book Review

Wade Watts is just your average kind of guy, living in his aunt's trailer, trying to get through the last months of high school, playing video games, and trying to solve a multi-billion dollar puzzle. Yup. Billion with a b. See, it's 2044 and video game designer James Halliday has just passed away without an heir. He's left a video will for the entire world, promising his fortune to whomever can find the "Easter egg" he's hidden within the OASIS, a virtual reality video game he created that everyone is addicted to. In order to find the "egg," egg hunters, or gunters, as they come to be called, must solve riddles and challenges that Halliday designed around his favorite things, and they all center around the 80s. Wade knows he's got this. He's watched War Games something like 32 times. He can sing lyrics to obscure 80s hits. His mind is overloaded with video game history and trivia. This should be a piece of cake. But things get complicated, as they always do, when a multi-national conglomeration finds a loophole in the will and starts tempting other brilliant minds to play as a team to solve the riddles. Wade is determined that these guys will not win at any cost. What a fun book! I don't remember a lot about 80s pop culture, but I had a blast recognizing all the little tidbits Cline worked into this novel. The world of the OASIS was fully realized and I could see the appeal. My one complaint with the book is the world-building though. While I did enjoy it for the most part, I felt that Cline got a little too involved in it and that led to some unnecessary info dumps. There would be a few pages in a row of…

The Greatest Generation by Tom Brokaw: Book Review

"'I think this is the greatest generation any society has ever produced.' I know that this was a bold statement and a sweeping judgment, but since than I have restated it on many occasions. While I am periodically challenged on this premise, I believe I have the facts on my side." So writes Tom Brokaw in the introduction to this book about the World War II generation, and he proceeds to make his case by telling individual stories of survival, courage, leadership, and trail-blazing. I pretty much loved this book. I have always liked reading books centered around WWII, but I haven't actually read much non-fiction, and especially not exactly like this. I got what I expected and more. I expected stories about the heroes, both celebrated and unsung, and their exploits in the war. I may have even expected stories about the women on the home front. I did not expect Brokaw to tackle some of the issues this generation had to overcome. He did not shy away from segregation, both in civilian life and the military. He confronted the issue of the Japanese internment camps. He took a close look at the women in uniform during the war and the paths they had to forge to get anything that even resembled equality. I was impressed that he included those topics, and I learned a lot from the personal stories he used to make his points about these issues. I also didn't really expect the personal stories to dwell so much on life after the war. I was a little disappointed at first; after all, the war was what drew me to the book. But I quickly got over it and realized that this generation didn't let one major event define their lives completely. They moved on and shaped…

The Odyssey by Gareth Hinds

Gareth Hinds undertakes the task of adapting The Odyssey, the tale of Odysseus's long journey home after the Trojan War, into graphic novel format. I wish this had been around when I was wading through The Odyssey in high school (and maybe college? I can't remember). I don't know what translation we read, but we needed a translation of it. I think most of us had only vague ideas about what was going on, and we probably only figured those out after the teacher spoon-fed them to us. The Odyssey is perfect for this format. It's a very visual story, with the sirens and Scylla and Charybdis, a journey to the underworld, the cyclops, and Circe's spell. I did like the illustrations, although they veered a little too close to the bulging muscles and gravity-defying breasts that most people think of when they hear the word, comic. Still, it's a manly tale, so they fit. I was a little surprised by the translation. I expected the writing to be very modern, but it's not. It's still very readable but formal at the same time. From page 4, Zeus speaking to Athena: "My child, what strange remarks you let escape your lips. Could I forget that wily hero Odysseus? You know I bear him no grudge--but Poseidon does, hates him for blinding his son Polyphemus the Cyclops. But come now, let us take up the matter of Odysseus's return. Poseidon must relent; he cannot thwart the will of all the other gods." I had forgotten much of what happens in the story, so it felt a lot like I was coming to this for the first time. I enjoyed it more in this format than I ever have before. This is a fabulous (re-)introduction to this timeless classic. Teachers, take note…

Queen of the Darkness by Anne Bishop: Book Review

**Possible spoilers for the first two in the series, Daughter of the Blood and Heir to the Shadows.** The evil queens, Dorothea and Hekatah, are trying to force a war and so gain control of Jaenelle. But they have no idea how strong she is or the lengths she is willing to go to in order to protect her people. Or of the lengths her people will go to try to protect Jaenelle. Either these aren't quite living up to the promise of the first book, or I'm not quite as enchanted by this new system of magic and these characters, but I'm not quite as in love with this series now. Don't get me wrong--I still read this 400 page brick in a matter of hours, frantically turning pages, and eager to see what happens next. But somehow Daemon wasn't the same sexy unknown that he was in the first volume, Jaenelle isn't quite as charming as queen, and there wasn't much of Saetan, whom I adore. But there was more of Surreal, and I loved reading about her. Jaenelle doesn't put in an appearance for several chapters, and once she finally did, I remembered a peeve of mine from the other books--the phrase "midnight voice." Oh my gosh, I'm irritated just repeating it! It's used to show when she means business as queen, but a more creative author could surely find another way to do that without beating that phrase to death. And then there's Karla's "kiss kiss." Ugh. My husband stumbled onto that phrase as I was reading this and never even saw what hit him coming. What a coy, pretentious, fake, supercilious little habit! But, really, I do love these books and the characters and look forward to reading more of them. Which reminds me of…

Big Stone Gap by Adriana Trigiani: Book Review

Ave Maria (Please don't call her Ava) Mulligan has lived all her life in Big Stone Gap in the mountains of Virginia. Yet she's still seen as a "furriner" by everyone else because her mother was from Italy. Ave is sort of a "pillar of the community"; she's the town pharmacist, she makes house calls, she directs the town's outdoor summer drama, she's one of two volunteers for the rescue squad--you name, she's in it. But after her mother's recent death, Ave learns some surprising news about herself that leads her to question the direction her life is taking and make some big changes. Probably the most important thing to me about this book is that I was either smiling or laughing most of the way through it, and at the end I was definitely left with a satisfied smile on my face. It was a sweet, yet funny story full of lovable, quirky characters. And two very viable male leads to think about! :-) I just finished reading The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society recently, and I think fans of that book will enjoy this one. Not that there's anything really similar between the two. But they both left me smiling, and those books are always fun to find. I'll continue reading the rest of this series. Reviewed February 2009 Read an excerpt. Find author Adriana Trigiani on her website, Facebook, and Twitter. Buy Big Stone Gap at Malaprop’s | Better World Books Friday Flashback Reviews are a weekly feature here on The Introverted Reader. These are old reviews I wrote on GoodReads. Thanks to Angieville and her Retro Friday Reviews for the inspiration and encouragement!I have an affiliate relationship with Malaprop's, my local independent bookstore located in downtown Asheville, NC; and Better World Books. I will…

Blankets by Craig Thompson: Book Review

In this autobiographical graphic novel, Craig Thompson describes his first love, his childhood relationship with his brother, and his loss of faith. I think there's something in this graphic novel that everyone can relate to. Whether it's the rush of falling in love for the first time, the bullies at school, or the tangled relationship with a sibling, Craig's experiences, while unique, are also universal. I know that doesn't make sense, but there you go. It was a bit cathartic for me to watch him working them out. Every frame rang true. His fights with his brother over the blankets in the wintertime. His isolation at school. His relief at finding other loners at church camp. The first infatuation and later love. I love the artwork. They show more of what Craig is feeling than the words do. The black and white pictures fit the stark feeling of this story, which mostly takes place in the winter. I know there's more, but I've waited too long to review this book. It's a lovely graphic novel. Just read it. Find author Craig Thompson on his blog and Facebook. I picked this up after reading Aths' awesome review over at Reading on a Rainy Day. Buy Blankets at Malaprop’s | Better World Books I have an affiliate relationship with Malaprop's, my local independent bookstore located in downtown Asheville, NC; and Better World Books. I will receive a small commission at no cost to you if you purchase books through links on my site.