The Bards of Bone Plain

No one knows where Bone Plain lies, or if it even exists outside of poetry, or what the three tests bards are said to face there may consist of, or if madness and deathlessness are truly consequences of failing the tests or just another metaphor.  This hasn't stopped bardic students at the school on the hill from writing their final papers on Bone Plain for centuries, and Phelan Cle has every intention of being another of them; the benefit of a topic on which everything has been said is that he shouldn't have to think very hard.  Meanwhile, the king's youngest daughter Princess Beatrice spends her days at an archeological dig vaguely supervised by Phelan's eccentric father, Jonah Cle, excavating artifacts covered with unreadable hen scratchings.  When the Royal Bard nearly chokes on a fish bone and announces his retirement, neither Phelan nor Beatrice has much initial interest in the competition to choose a replacement, but then his research and her excavations start leading in the same direction: towards the semi-legendary bard Nairn the Wanderer, the Unforgiven, who failed the tests of Bone Plain and may still be seeking redemption.

It's always difficult to summarize a Patricia McKillip novel briefly; her work is so intricate and her prose is so beautiful that the only way to do it justice is to read the whole thing.  I may as well say up front that she is one of my favorite fantasists, not least because she can tell a whole story in one book, but also because her writing is so lyrical; I always think it should really be read out loud.  She is also one of the few authors whose novels I still buy as a matter of course; I mostly borrow novels from the library and only buy reference books that I intend to use often, but I bought this book as close to the day it came out as I could.  I can't recommend it enough.

Troubled Waters

Only as he lies dying does the exiled Navarr Ardelay tell his daughter Zoe to remember that she is part of her mother's family too.  Only under duress does Zoe return to the capital city, when royal adviser Darien Serlast collects her from her remote village, telling her she has been chosen to be the king's fifth wife.  Once she reaches the city, she walks away from her escort for no reason she can name, still numb with grief, and settles in with the homeless community by the riverbank.  There, she gradually comes to discover what it was that neither her father nor Darien Serlast would tell her: that she is the missing heir to her grandmother's power, and the rightful head of one of the five greatest families in the kingdom.

When she's on top of her game, there's no one like Sharon Shinn for creating fantastic societies that feel real. I particularly liked the elemental system in this one: everyone is ruled by one of the five elements, earth, air, water, fire or wood. Each element is associated with certain blessings, and temples offer a sort of do-it-yourself divination where people can draw a random blessing.  The politics of palace and riverside both made sense, because both places were inhabited by people who felt real. 

I don't know if this is meant to be a stand-alone novel or the start of a series, but I know I'd be interested in more stories in this setting.

Pegasus

The thousand-year alliance between the humans and the pegasi has been maintained, in spite of a near-total mutual inability to communicate, by the ritual bonding of individual members of the two royal families: human king to pegasus king, king's child to king's child.  Even so, the bonded pairs need interpreters, and each pair is assigned a human magician as Speaker.  But when the human princess Sylvi and her assigned pegasus bondmate Ebon discover at their first meeting that they can speak to each other perfectly clearly, mind-to-mind, many on the human side (especially the magicians) are disturbed by the closeness of their friendship.

There was a time when I loved Robin McKinley's work unreservedly, and I still make a point of reading everything she writes.  I was particularly pleased to win this one as an advance copy from LibraryThing's Early Reviewers giveaway; I got it in the mail the day before my birthday, a good two weeks before the publication date, so I read it with no preconceptions.  But I think I would have liked it better if I had known beforehand that it isn't a whole story in one book; it ends very abruptly, leaving all the plot threads hanging, so there's evidently at least one more volume coming up whenever the characters get around to telling Robin what the rest of the story is.

I will read the rest of the story whenever it appears, of course.  I liked the characters, and the description of the thoroughly different pegasus culture was fascinating.  I'd have liked a little more resolution, though.

Bewitching Season

Twins Penelope and Persephone Leland have opposite reactions to their upcoming presentation at court and coming-out season in London: outgoing Pen is determined to enjoy every social function, while the quieter and more bookish Persy is sure she will freeze up or otherwise disgrace herself.  Though both girls hope they may catch a glimpse of Princess Victoria, whose birthday they share, what Persy is really looking forward to is returning home at the end of the season and taking up her studies again, especially the studies in magic that their governess Miss Allardyce has been conducting on the side.  But both their expectations of the season are thrown out of reckoning when Ally disappears, and the twins try to use their magic to find her.

This YA novel by Marissa Doyle is clearly a fantasy with romantic elements, rather than a romance with magic.  The characters are engaging enough, though by the end of the story Persy's constant self-deprecation began to annoy me as much as it did her sister Pen! Fun story, though, and it made me interested in hunting up the sequel, which my local library does not own.

Shades of Milk and Honey

Unlike another noted Regency-era father of daughters whose estate is entailed on a cousin, Charles Ellsworth has set aside a yearly sum for the provision of his children, though he worries it won't be enough. He has no fears for his younger daughter, Melody, whose face is her fortune, but he can only hope that Jane's many accomplishments will be enough to recommend her to a suitor--perhaps the Naval captain visiting his aunt, the viscountess.  Jane, for her part, finds her barely-formed hopes of another neighbor shadowed when her beautiful sister sets her sights on the same man.  No one quite knows what to make of the taciturn professional artist creating an elaborate glamour for an upcoming ball.

In this delicately beautiful fantasy of manners, Mary Robinette Kowal's first novel, "glamour," or the magic of illusion, is a recognized art form, commonly used for decorative purposes in country homes, and one of the accomplishments a young lady of quality is expected to dabble in, along with watercolor painting and playing the pianoforte--Jane is noted for her skill at all three.  The novel made me think of the conversation if Jane Austen could have invited Lord Dunsany over for tea, and I found it almost uniformly charming--though maybe because Austen is a favorite author of mine, or because I've read so many lesser Regency romances, the Action Girl scene at the climax was a little jarring. Still, highly recommended!

The Red Queen

As a child Lady Margaret Beaufort hoped to become a nun, had visions of Joan of Arc, and was thrilled to realize she had spent so much time praying that she had "saint's knees." But the heiress of the royal house of Lancaster could not be allowed to follow her own inclination; her destiny was to provide a male heir for her house, and to that end she was married off to the king's half-brother Edmund Tudor when she was just twelve, half her husband's age.  At thirteen she became a widow and a mother in short succession, and embraced a new ambition for her life: that one day her son would be king and she would be My Lady, the King's Mother.  But this vision came to seem increasingly unlikely after the house of York came to power.

I was talking to a coworker at the library about this book.  She and I were first and second on the hold list for it as soon as the library had ordered it, because we had both liked The White Queen so much, and after we finished this second one she remarked to me that she had read a lot of novels about this period, but Philippa Gregory was the first author to make her understand and sympathize with Margaret Beaufort's point of view.  So often Lady Margaret is presented as simply the Mother-In-Law From Hell.  Here she's incredibly self-centered and very narrowly focused, but you really do get why she might have been like that.  Wonderful book, and I'm very much looking forward to The White Princess now!

talk it up

When I was six years old, I very badly wanted to grow up to be Wonder Woman.  Here's why:

I swiped an old pair of sunglasses frames without lenses to practice losing them gracefully as I spun out of being Diana Prince.

So now they tell me Wonder Woman is going to have a new costume, just in time for the third iteration of her eponymous series to be renumbered as Wonder Woman #600, as if she's been in continuous publication as one book all this time. 

Here's what I have to say about that:  I don't remember seeing anything about Batman in the New York Times the other week, when issue #700 of his eponymous series came out.  Superman #700 didn't get much notice in the mainstream press either, though they both inspired a lot of chatter at the comics blogs. 

I know that Status Quo is God in comics, and this probably will not last very long, for the moment the writer and editors are all being very coy about that.  But if they were trying to get everybody talking about a character who, in spite of her iconic status, traditionally doesn't sell a lot of comic books, boy, they succeeded in a big way!  Well done.

Under Heaven

Shen Tai, the second son of the late general Shen Gao, chooses to honor his father's memory during his mandatory two years of mourning by traveling to a distant western battlefield and burying the bones that lie there. There is no way to distinguish between the fallen soldiers of his own Kitan Empire and the Taguran enemy, so he doesn't try.  To honor his efforts, a Kitan princess married off as part of the peace treaty sends him a gift that will change his life, or possibly destroy it.

There's not much that makes me happier than a new novel by Guy Gavriel Kay.  I think he's just about the best prose stylist writing fantasy today, except maybe Patricia McKillip; his books are so beautifully written they just beg to be read out loud. His extensive research into the historical models for his invented countries and societies (this one is his take on Tang China) informs the setting without drowning the story in scholarly pedantry.  His characters always seem like real people that you would recognize if you met them.  And he nearly always manages to make me cry towards the end.  Beautiful, beautiful book.

Wyatt Earp (1994) and Tombstone (1993)

In Tombstone, when Wyatt Earp joins his brothers Virgil and Morgan in the eponymous town in Arizona, he finds his reputation as a lawman has preceded him. He insists he's left all that behind him; all he wants now is to go into business, earn a comfortable living, and conduct a quiet, peaceful life. But the conspicuous lack of law and order in Tombstone prompts Virgil and Morgan to step up as U.S. Marshals, and their attempt to enforce an ordinance against carrying weapons in town turns into the infamous gunfight at the OK Corral.  When Virgil is later crippled and Morgan killed, Wyatt embarks on a messy vendetta that bears very little resemblance to law and order.

Wyatt Earp covers a greater span of the man's life, from teenage longing to join his brothers at war to an old age still seeking new horizons in yet another gold rush.  The Tombstone story is given a lot of time, but so is the leadup to it in Dodge City, which the earlier movie took as a given, assuming that everybody knew that legend including the viewer.

The films have invited comparisons to each other since they first came out, of course.  Doc Holliday is probably the most compelling character in either one; Dennis Quaid is almost unrecognizable in the role, but Val Kilmer looks like he had more fun with it (point for Tombstone).  It's hard to do better than Sam Elliott's "Best Mustache in a Supporting Role" as Virgil (point for Tombstone again). 

I may as well stop counting points and just admit that I liked Tombstone better.  It seemed more focused; Wyatt Earp didn't seem to be able to figure out what kind of movie it wanted to be, or what kind of character Wyatt was. The plot was clearer in Tombstone, and in spite of the massive number of speaking roles I didn't need a scorecard to tell the characters apart.

The Sheen on the Silk

Widowed physician Anna Zarides disguises herself as the eunuch Anastasius so that she can move freely in the upper echelons of Byzantine society and investigate the murder of royal connection Bessarion Comnenos, hoping to prove her twin brother Justinian innocent of the crime for which he has been exiled. Nobody she meets in Constantinople makes this easy for her, and many of them have their own reasons for making sure the truth never comes out.

Anne Perry takes a break from her usual 19th- and 20th-century English settings, traveling very far afield to 13th century Constantinople. If her intent was to show why the term "Byzantine" now has pejorative connotations of "devious, surreptitious, and intricately involved" she has succeeded brilliantly.  "Anastasius" finds herself floundering in very deep waters indeed, trying to navigate not only currents of imperial and international politics, but also personal vendettas and the ever-present questions of religion.

Unfortunately, it seems like a whole lot of nothing happens in this book.  Inside the storyline Anastasius struggles for years to learn anything useful from the major players remaining in Constantinople, while the reader slogs through chapter after chapter without learning anything more. 

It does Perry a disservice to market this book as a historical mystery.  It works a lot better as a historical novel about revenge.

The Adventures of Jules de Grandin

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson meet Mulder and Scully.  Jules de Grandin, physician and consultant for the Sûreté, has also been described as the occult Hercule Poirot, but I don't much care for Poirot myself so I'm going with the supernatural Sherlock instead.  The Watson in this series of short stories by Seabury Quinn, published in Weird Tales beginning in 1925, is also a doctor, a New Jersey GP named Trowbridge, though he narrates the tales with more of Scully's skepticism than Watson's admiration sometimes.
 And I had no idea these stories even existed until I read one of SF Signal's Mind Meld columns about a month ago, asking assorted authors for their recommendation of an underrated fantasy series.  It was S. Andrew Swann who recommended de Grandin, and his remark that Quinn is to gritty noir urban fantasy what Tolkien is to grand high-fantasy epic got my attention.  I'm a big fan of the Dresden Files, and I quite liked the X-Files when they weren't going overboard on the conspiracy (I liked the monster-of-the-week stories, so sue me), so of course I had to look up de Grandin.

Interlibrary loan is a wonderful invention, is all.  The de Grandin stories were collected in the 1970s, but those paperbacks are long out of print now; my library couldn't find a copy of the first one anywhere in my state, and had to borrow it from a much larger library system in Dallas for me.

The Adventures of Jules de Grandin collects the first seven stories, including the one that introduces the characters of de Grandin and Trowbridge and what would become the standard setting for the stories, the town of Harrisonville, New Jersey, possibly the epicenter of more weirdness than any town since Arkham, Mass. Vampires, werewolves, zombies, mad scientists, curses, it's all here, and de Grandin is just the man who knows how to deal with it all.

There were 93 de Grandin stories in all.  I'm tracking down the rest of them now.

Robin Hood (1922)

As King Richard the Lionheart prepares to go on Crusade, his good friend and trusted knight Robert, Earl of Huntingdon, distinguishes himself in a tournament and wins the heart of Lady Marian Fitzwalter. In Richard's absence, however, his brother Prince John takes advantage of his position as regent to enrich himself and his cronies, squeezing every possible penny out of an increasingly distressed populace until a grassroots resistance begins to coalesce around a certain merry outlaw in Sherwood Forest.

Douglas Fairbanks as Huntingdon/Robin, Wallace Beery as Richard, and Alan Hale as Huntingdon's squire/Little John: how can you go wrong?  It probably says something that two days after I watched the DVD I don't remember the actress who played Marian, though.

Interesting take on the legends.  There's no trace of the Norman/Saxon tensions that would be so prominent in the gloriously Technicolor Errol Flynn version sixteen years later, and certainly no hint of the pagan mysticism of even more recent versions.  Robert is seen to accompany King Richard on Crusade, but never reaches the Holy Land, so there's no chance of adding a Muslim to the merry men. 

I watched this with my brother, who fell asleep in the first thirty minutes.  It's pretty long for a silent movie, but I found it entertaining.

Gateway

When Daiyu admires a black jade ring at a booth at Fair Saint Louis, the elderly Asian vendor tells her it is meant for her because her name means "black jade." Persuaded to buy it, Daiyu passes under the Gateway Arch wearing it and finds herself transported to another world, where the continent was colonized from the opposite direction; instead of being an adopted Chinese teenager in the United States, she is, to all appearances, a young woman of the ruling Han class in Jia.  Kalen, the kindly white boy who takes her in hand during her initial panic, is a desperately poor laborer a step away from being homeless, but he knows the people who needed Daiyu or someone like her to come to their world, and he takes her to someone who can explain: she must infiltrate the highest level of Han society to send another traveler back to his world of origin.


I like Sharon Shinn's novels, and I recommend them often, particularly to people who don't necessarily read a lot of fantasy but do like romance.  The romantic element in this one kind of takes a back seat to the politics, but is still an important part of the story.  I liked the concept of many different worlds, or "iterations," made by various gods in imitation of an original world they all thought they could improve on; Jia is not the original, and neither is Earth.  Daiyu seems oddly passive for a large part of the story, but she has a brain and she's not afraid to use it.

The Lost Symbol

Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon agrees to do a favor for his old friend, Smithsonian Museum director Peter Solomon, by giving a lecture in the Capitol rotunda when the scheduled speaker cancels at the last minute.  But when he gets there he finds he has been brought to Washington on false pretenses, his good friend is in considerable danger, a very scary lady from the CIA is demanding his help on an unspecified matter of national security, and somehow the Freemasons are mixed up in it all in ways that could cause worldwide political and economic disaster.

I wasn't first in line to read this book when it came out a while ago, but I always figured I'd get to it.  I quite liked The Da Vinci Code, though I wasn't as bowled over by it as a lot of people seemed to be; possibly because I'd already heard of the theory about what the Holy Grail really was.  I thought it was an acceptably entertaining potboiler, and that's pretty much what this one is too.  Some of the predicaments Langdon gets into are genuinely thrilling, and I'll probably go see the movie when they make one.

The Mapping of Love and Death

In 1932, the remains of a cartography unit missing since 1916 are uncovered in France.  One of the men was an American, allowed into the British army because his father was born in England and because his specialized skills were needed so badly, and papers found on his body indicate he had conducted a romance with an English nurse during the war.  His parents hire Maisie Dobbs, psychologist and investigator, to find the woman who wrote the letters.  But his father has an additional request: find the man who murdered his son just before the whole unit was shelled and buried.

I wasn't sure I liked the direction the Maisie Dobbs series seemed to be going in the last couple of installments, particularly the sudden revelation of Maisie's hitherto un-hinted-at gypsy heritage and psychic faculties, but this volume seemed to be something of a return to form.  Maisie does a bit less psychologizing than in some of the others, but manages some top-notch investigating, and developments in her private life are nicely integrated into the story.  I'm quite interested to see where the character goes from here.

Changes

I suppose it can't really count as a spoiler if it's mentioned in a book's first line, never mind that it was revealed on the author's website and (I'm told) his Twitter feed prior to publication, plus it's in the jacket copy, but I still feel like I ought to warn people to brace themselves for this one:  Harry Dresden has a daughter.

It comes as a shock to him too.  The girl's mother, Susan Rodriguez, exited the series seven books ago after an attack by Red Court vampires began the process of turning her into one of them; she joined the Fellowship of St. Giles to fight both the Red Court and her own half-vampire nature.  Now it turns out she hid her child from everyone, including Harry, to protect her, but word of her got back to exactly the wrong vampire, and little Maggie has been kidnapped by Red Court Duchess Arianna Ortega.  Harry knows he'll need more power than he and his personal friends can raise to rescue his child, and when every supposedly good entity he goes to for help turns him down, for what seem to them to be insurmountable reasons, more questionable sources of power come inevitably to mind.

Twelve books into the series, it's getting difficult to summarize a new entry without recapping a hell of a lot of backstory.  I'm not really complaining about that; one of the things I really like about the series as a whole is the way that seemingly minor characters or plot points in early books later turn out to have much more significance than they appeared to at first.  This volume even has a callback to the barely competent sorcerer Harry defeated in the very first book, Storm Front, and includes nearly all of the supporting cast Harry has built up over the whole series, though a number of them (Marcone, Kincaid, and the archangel Uriel among these) only make cameo appearances.

This one is also the first to end on such an appalling cliffhanger.  And I have to wait another year to find out what that last page meant?  I'm also really looking forward to exploring the ramifications of some of the hard choices Harry had to make this time, and I'm just glad Jim Butcher has no record of missing his deadlines. 

Dead and Buried

Benjamin January, surgeon and musician, is playing at the funeral of a fellow member of the Faubourg Tremé Free Colored Militia and Burial Society when a drunken pallbearer stumbles, the coffin splits open, and the body of a white man falls out.  That's the first shock; the second is that Hannibal Sefton, January's disreputable white friend, immediately recognizes the corpse as a friend from his long-ago days at Oxford.

I picked up a copy of Barbara Hambly's new historical mystery at the Public Library Association conference in Oregon last month, and the publisher's rep remarked that at Severn House they all sat up and took note when the orders for it started rolling in even before it was reviewed anywhere.  It's been six years since the previous installment, and I'm sure I wasn't the only reader who reacted with glee to the news at the author's website that a new publisher had picked up the series and we'd finally be getting a new one.  I recommend this whole series to everybody I know; you can pretty much read them in any order, but I think it does help to start with the first one, A Free Man of Color.

The mysteries are great, but the characters and setting are even better; the novels give a wonderful sense of what it was like in New Orleans in the 1830s, and especially what it was like for the free black community.  The supporting cast is strong, and it was particularly cool in this new one to finally find out a little about Hannibal's life before he washed up in New Orleans, eking out a living by playing fiddle.  I tore through this novel in a couple of days, and I hardly ever do that any more.

Fables, vol. 13: The Great Fables Crossover

Jack Horner returns to Fables from his own book to give warning of a threat to the universe as they know it: Kevin Thorn, the Writer, now has the power to obliterate the Fables' whole existence with a stroke of his pen, once he overcomes his idiot brother, Writer's Block.

I get all my Fables, like all my comic books these days, not in monthly magazines but in the trade paperback compilations, and I have not been keeping up with the Jack of Fables spinoff series. I read the first volume, and there wasn't a page--there was barely a panel--that didn't make me want to hit the main character over the head with a baseball bat while muttering Daffy Duck's immortal line, "Jack--you're a jerk."  I can only assume he's written to be that obnoxious on purpose, but I can't imagine to what end. Me, I wholeheartedly and unreservedly despise the guy, and I just don't want to read about him.

So it was with some consternation that I found myself agreeing with Jack when he introduced one installment of this story by grumbling that this should have been called the Great Jack Crossover instead.

Make no mistake, this is primarily a Jack story, not a Fables story, for all that Bigby Wolf and Snow White are in at the big finale. That said, I don't recommend that Fables fans skip this one; even though it doesn't much at all advance the main Fables storyline about Mister Dark, some of the side story about what's going on at the Farm looks like it has the potential to be important later, and the introduction of Jack Frost, son of the Snow Queen, was so much fun I might actually look into Jack of Fables again to see what Jack Frost is up to.

A Play of Treachery

When Joliffe the player agreed to serve the Bishop of Winchester in a confidential capacity, he didn't expect to be sent to France; but there he finds himself, beginning his official training in spycraft in the household of the very young widow of the Duke of Bedford.  While he practices with weapons, ciphers, and maps, he also comes to perceive undercurrents in the household, and when the hints of secrets lead to the murder of one of the young Duchess's ladies, his studies suddenly have a practical application.

Joliffe is changing, and he's not sure it's for the better.  His last guest spot in one of Margaret Frazer's "Dame Frevisse" series of medieval murder mysteries was set many years later than his previous appearances in her series or his own, and it was kind of a shock to see where the author thinks he'll end up when the intermediate steps of how he gets to that point haven't been written yet.  He's been an unofficial or semi-official investigator in previous books, but this novel starts the process of turning him into a pro, taking him from the sharply observant actor he's always been from his first appearance in The Servant's Tale to the solitary expert spy of The Traitor's Tale.  It may not be a comfortable journey for him, but for the reader it looks like it's going to be well worth making.

whew

Now that I've given this site a fake archive by copying all the posts I wanted to save from my mostly defunct MySpace blog, how about a book meme to mark the start of new content?

Because I am a librarian, here is the ALA's list of the 100 books most frequently banned or challenged in American libraries in the decade 2000-2009.  The ones I've read are marked in bold print.  How many of these have you read?  I've only gotten to 26 of them (counting the whole Harry Potter series as one entry), which I guess means I have some reading to do before Banned Books Week rolls around again this fall.

1 Harry Potter (series), by J.K. Rowling

2 Alice series, by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

3 The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier

4 And Tango Makes Three, by Justin Richardson/Peter Parnell

5 Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck

6 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou

7 Scary Stories (series), by Alvin Schwartz

8 His Dark Materials (series), by Philip Pullman

9 TTYL; TTFN; L8R, G8R (series), by Myracle, Lauren

10 The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky

11 Fallen Angels, by Walter Dean Meyers

12 It’s Perfectly Normal, by Robie Harris

13 Captain Underpants (series), by Dav Pilkey

14 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain

15 The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison

16 Forever, by Judy Blume

17 The Color Purple, by Alice Walker

18 Go Ask Alice, by Anonymous

19 Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger

20 King and King, by Linda de Haan

21 To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

22 Gossip Girl (series), by Cecily von Ziegesar

23 The Giver, by Lois Lowry

24 In the Night Kitchen, by Maurice Sendak

25 Killing Mr. Griffen, by Lois Duncan

26 Beloved, by Toni Morrison

27 My Brother Sam Is Dead, by James Lincoln Collier

28 Bridge To Terabithia, by Katherine Paterson

29 The Face on the Milk Carton, by Caroline B. Cooney

30 We All Fall Down, by Robert Cormier

31 What My Mother Doesn’t Know, by Sonya Sones

32 Bless Me, Ultima, by Rudolfo Anaya

33 Snow Falling on Cedars, by David Guterson

34 The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big, Round Things, by Carolyn Mackler

35 Angus, Thongs, and Full Frontal Snogging, by Louise Rennison

36 Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley

37 It’s So Amazing, by Robie Harris

38 Arming America, by Michael Bellasiles

39 Kaffir Boy, by Mark Mathabane

40 Life is Funny, by E.R. Frank

41 Whale Talk, by Chris Crutcher

42 The Fighting Ground, by Avi

43 Blubber, by Judy Blume

44 Athletic Shorts, by Chris Crutcher

45 Crazy Lady, by Jane Leslie Conly

46 Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut

47 The Adventures of Super Diaper Baby, by George Beard

48 Rainbow Boys, by Alex Sanchez

49 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey

50 The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini

51 Daughters of Eve, by Lois Duncan

52 The Great Gilly Hopkins, by Katherine Paterson

53 You Hear Me?, by Betsy Franco

54 The Facts Speak for Themselves, by Brock Cole

55 Summer of My German Soldier, by Bette Green

56 When Dad Killed Mom, by Julius Lester

57 Blood and Chocolate, by Annette Curtis Klause

58 Fat Kid Rules the World, by K.L. Going

59 Olive’s Ocean, by Kevin Henkes

60 Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson

61 Draw Me A Star, by Eric Carle

62 The Stupids (series), by Harry Allard

63 The Terrorist, by Caroline B. Cooney

64 Mick Harte Was Here, by Barbara Park

65 The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien

66 Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, by Mildred Taylor

67 A Time to Kill, by John Grisham

68 Always Running, by Luis Rodriguez

69 Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury

70 Harris and Me, by Gary Paulsen

71 Junie B. Jones (series), by Barbara Park

72 Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison

73 What’s Happening to My Body Book, by Lynda Madaras

74 The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold

75 Anastasia (series), by Lois Lowry

76 A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving

77 Crazy:  A Novel, by Benjamin Lebert

78 The Joy of Gay Sex, by Dr. Charles Silverstein

79 The Upstairs Room, by Johanna Reiss

80 A Day No Pigs Would Die, by Robert Newton Peck

81 Black Boy, by Richard Wright

82 Deal With It!, by Esther Drill

83 Detour for Emmy, by Marilyn Reynolds

84 So Far From the Bamboo Grove, by Yoko Watkins

85 Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, by Chris Crutcher

86 Cut, by Patricia McCormick

87 Tiger Eyes, by Judy Blume

88 The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood

89 Friday Night Lights, by H.G. Bissenger

90 A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeline L’Engle

91 Julie of the Wolves, by Jean Graighead George

92 The Boy Who Lost His Face, by Louis Sachar

93 Bumps in the Night, by Harry Allard

94 Goosebumps (series), by R.L. Stine

95 Shade’s Children, by Garth Nix

96 Grendel, by John Gardner

97 The House of the Spirits, by Isabel Allende

98 I Saw Esau, by Iona Opte

99 Are You There, God?  It’s Me, Margaret, by Judy Blume

100 America: A Novel, by E.R. Frank

Turn Coat

Private investigator and professional wizard Harry Dresden has spent half of his adult life looking over his shoulder for Donald Morgan, Warden of the White Council; Morgan's been watching for any infraction of the Laws of Magic, so that he could execute Harry on the spot with the Council's blessing.  And now Morgan has collapsed at Harry's door in a bloody heap, after asking to be hidden--from the Wardens.

Super!

I read the first couple of Dresden Files when they were new, and really liked the character and the concept, but the third one lost me halfway through.  I didn't like where I thought I saw it going, and I just wasn't in the mood for vampires, and I put it down unfinished.  Always meant to go back to it, somehow never did, though I was vaguely aware of the series as the years went by.  Oh look, there's a new one out, I should go back and read those.  Oh look, they've made the jump from paperback originals to hardcover, good for him, I should read those.  Oh look, there's a graphic novel--

It was the graphic novel Welcome to the Jungle that really made me sit up and think, I need to read those now.  I got hold of it in February, and by the first week of March I'd read all ten of the extant novels, then had to wait a month for this one, the eleventh, to come out.  Waiting a year for book 12 is going to be difficult.

The great thing about reading the whole series in a breathless rush like I just did is that that made it easier to track the character development and the interweaving plot lines.  Harry has clearly matured over the ten or twelve years of internal chronology, and I'm very much looking forward to seeing what changes are in store for him before we get to the big apocalyptic trilogy that Jim Butcher promises to cap off the series.

Originally posted at MySpace 4/18/09

Chalice

Mirasol was a beekeeper, good at it and happy in it, when the mantle of the Chalice unexpectedly fell on her with the death of the previous holder.  Without training, without help outside of books, she fought to hold the province together--literally, in some cases, as she has to close a crevasse in a neighbor's farm when his cows start to fall into it--until the true Master of the province could return and take control.  But the previous Master's heir was sent off to become a Priest of Fire, and has gone so far into Fire that he may not be able to live among humans again; and though a new, unrelated candidate for Master is waiting in the wings, the transition to a new ruling family could be disastrous.

Robin McKinley turns from more contemporary fantasy to a fairy tale setting.  The system of land magic, where the Master and the Chalice are roles in a ruling Council responsible for the maintenance of the land itself as well as for the good of the people living on it, is never fully explained; the reader finds out about it piecemeal, much as Mirasol is forced to piece together her own training for the job.  I really enjoyed it, but then I like the kind of story where not everything is spelled out for me.

Originally posted at MySpace 11/24/08

The Bell at Sealey Head

Judd Cauley would rather read than run the inn he owns with his blind father, but their cook is so awful they rarely have guests, so he has a lot of time to read.  Raven Sproule is courting the daughter of the richest merchant in town, but Gwyneth Blair would rather write stories.  Up at Aislinn House, Lady Eglantyne is dying, or perhaps fading, and Emma the housemaid sometimes finds a completely different house behind the doors she opens.  Then a young scholar arrives to investigate the one thing that is the same in both worlds, the unseen bell that rings every day at sunset.

It's hard to summarize a Patricia McKillip novel, and there's not much point in trying.  To give any accurate impression of what it's like I'd have to read out the entire book.  McKillip is one of my favorite fantasy writers working today, not least because (gasp) she can tell a whole story in one book instead of going in for these Bloated Epics that seem to be so popular now.  But the main reason I snap up every one of her new books as soon as it comes out is that her writing style is so amazing: poetic and lyrical, but not overblown.

Originally posted at MySpace 11/23/08

Four Queens

Thirteenth-century Count Raymond Berenger V of Provence had four beautiful daughters: Marguerite, Eleanor, Sanchia and Beatrice. Royal marriages at the time were formed for political and financial advantage, but even though Provence had little strategic importance and its count was always in debt (frequently taking out loans and pledging the same castles over and over as security), all four sisters married into royalty, and all were crowned as queens. Marguerite was Queen of France and Eleanor Queen of England. Sanchia and Beatrice married their sisters' younger brothers-in-law, Richard of Cornwall and Charles of Anjou; Richard was the richest man in England, and bought enough electors of Germany to be crowned King of the Romans, while Charles was offered the kingdom of Sicily by the pope.

Nancy Goldstone's book about the sisters, Four Queens, is subtitled The Provençal Sisters who Ruled Europe, and the author ably demonstrates that not all medieval women were the helpless ornaments that we now sometimes assume they were. The queens' mother and their mothers-in-law were all capable women with a strong influence on European politics as well. Great stuff.

Originally posted at MySpace 3/1/08

Dragonhaven

Some 200 years after actual fire-breathing dragons are discovered in the wilds of Australia, Draco australiensis is seriously endangered.  Among the small number of dragon sanctuaries is Smokehill, a National Park in North America, where Jake Mendoza has grown up with his parents, the directors of the park.  Since the death of his mother two years ago, his father has been kind of overprotective, but finally agrees to let Jake go out into the park with one of the Rangers and then go on for an overnight solo hike. 

Jake walks straight to a dying dragon lying next to a dead poacher and the dragon's newborn babies, also dead--all but one.  But the only thing more illegal than killing a dragon is acting in any way to preserve the life of a dragon.

Robin McKinley is one of my favorite fantasy writers.  Her retellings of fairy tales are very evocative.  Lately she's been writing more in the urban fantasy vein--her book before this one, Sunshine, is the best vampire novel I've read in some time--although this one is more like wilderness fantasy, since there's absolutely nothing urban anywhere in it.  Still, the setting is contemporary, and rigorously realistic.  Aside from the dragons, of course.  It just makes the dragons seem more realistic as well.  Great stuff, and highly recommended.

Originally posted at MySpace 1/21/08

Enchanted

Giselle is beautiful, with masses of red hair, and lives in a tree house which her animal friends are happy to assist her in maintaining, at least until the man of her dreams appears in her life, as she is sure he will.  Edward is a handsome prince whose main pastime is troll hunting, but who is beginning to feel something is missing from his life.  Both of them tend to burst into song quite a lot.  When Giselle literally falls into Edward's arms, they immediately agree to get married the very next day, because we are not just in Disney Land or Disney World, kiddies, this is the Disney Universe, beautifully rendered in the kind of 2D hand-drawn animation that not even Disney does much any more.

The obligatory evil queen/witch is Edward's stepmother, who fears being deposed if Edward marries.  So she pushes Giselle down a magic well, and Giselle, now played by Amy Adams, emerges from a manhole in Times Square in her ridiculously poofy wedding dress.  Robert, the cynical (or realistic, if you like) divorce lawyer whose young daughter demands that he rescue the princess in distress, thinks she escaped from a Hallmark card, which is not far wrong.  Luckily one of Giselle's friends (a chipmunk) witnessed her fall into the well, so before long Prince Edward and Pip the chipmunk also burst out of the manhole in search of her.  Queen Nerissa can't have that, so she sends a henchman to sabotage any attempt at rescue, and later follows herself to make sure the job is done right.

I really liked this movie.  I am, of course, susceptible to fairy tales, and make no mistake: this is an affectionate sendup of all the Disney classics--pay attention to who's on the screen when you hear snatches of other cartoon soundtracks!--but it is a fairy tale in its own right, not a subversion of the genre.  I saw it with my friends the Brit and the Frenchwoman earlier this month, and the Brit was kind of disappointed in the conventionality of the happy ending (and I'm not giving anything away here, because come on, it's Disney); she liked Robert the lawyer's early attempts to protect his daughter from fairy tale expectations.

I never had any illusions that Prince Charming was coming for me on a white horse, even as a kid.  But I do like a movie with a happy ending.

Originally posted at MySpace 12/24/07

Her Royal Spyness

In 1932 Lady Victoria Georgiana Charlotte Eugenie Rannoch ("Georgie" to her friends) has just turned 21 and had her allowance cut off by her impecunious half-brother, the Duke of Rannoch ("Binkie").  As a member of the British royal family, no matter how minor--she's 34th in line for the throne, by her calculations--her education has been more decorative than practical; nonetheless, Georgie sets off for London (without even a maid, much to her sister-in-law's horror) to make her own way in the world somehow.  Becoming a detective wasn't an option she had in mind, but she turns her hand to it all the same when she comes home one night to find a body in the bath, and her brother is accused of the murder.

This is the first in mystery writer Rhys Bowen's new cozy series.  I quite liked her contemporary mysteries set in Wales, featuring Constable Evan Evans, though her other historical series, set in turn-of-the-20th-century New York and featuring Irish immigrant Molly Murphy, didn't grab me so much.  This book was great fun, though, and reminded me strongly of Carola Dunn's Daisy Dalrymple series, though that's set about ten years earlier.  Great characters and lots of humor. 

Originally posted at MySpace 12/14/07

Reserved for the Cat

Ninette Dupond's father vanished when she was a child, and her mother has recently died.  A moment of glory on stage, dancing the title role of La Sylphide when the prima ballerina is unexpectedly injured, turns into disaster when one review is a little too good, and Ninette loses her position with the Paris Opera Ballet at the insistence of the star.  Then the tabby cat that hangs around her house speaks in her mind, and tells her he can make her a star if she just does what he tells her.

This is the latest in Mercedes Lackey's Elemental Masters series, a set of historical fantasy novels retelling fairy tales in early 20th-century settings.  The common thread is a theory of magic based on the four elements, Earth, Air, Fire and Water.  I like all of these, and the ones where the base fairy tale is not immediately obvious are my particular favorites.  I was almost at the end of this one before I realized what tale it was, though once I'd guessed it I could see there were earlier episodes that should have tipped me off.

Originally posted at MySpace 12/13/07

Becoming Jane

Jane Austen never married.  When she was about twenty, she had a flirtation with one Tom Lefroy, an Irish relative of her (much older) friend Mrs. Anne Lefroy.  He couldn't afford to marry her, and at the end of his visit to his relatives they went their separate ways.

From these sparse facts a movie has been spun, with Anne Hathaway doing a creditable English accent as Jane (though I didn't see this one with my British friend, as I did Miss Potter, so I'm not sure what her verdict on the dialect would be) and James McAvoy as Tom, depicting their flirtation as extremely similar to the courtship of Darcy and Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice, starting in mutual disdain and coming around to a passion that can't be denied...except that, as we know from history, Jane Austen never married Tom Lefroy or anyone else.

It's the kind of movie that makes me want to find a  book that'll tell me the real story, because I know that wasn't it.  But it was pretty to look at, well acted all around, and adequately entertaining for a Sunday matinee.

Originally posted at MySpace 9/16/07

The World Without Us

An article on animal and plant life in the vicinity of Chernobyl--unexpectedly thriving in the absence of humans in spite of the radiation level--led author Alan Weisman to expand the question to what would happen if people disappeared everywhere.  Assuming we didn't destroy ourselves in some messy way that would affect the rest of the planet, but were just quietly removed from the picture as of now, what would come next? 

Some of the speculation is optimistic, some not so much.  Talking about what might happen to landscapes or species without any further human interference requires a good deal of background on what we've done to them already, and some of that made difficult reading.  The prospect of what's likely to happen next assuming that humans carry on as we've been doing lately is mostly outside the scope of the book, though the author did have an interesting (and, I think, extremely unlikely) suggestion for how not to screw up the world even more.  Very interesting book.

Originally posted at MySpace 8/16/07

Empire of Blue Water

Henry Morgan hated being called a pirate.  As far as he was concerned, he was a privateer, and his attacks on Spanish settlements were all part of his patriotic service to his own country, first under Cromwell and later under the restored King Charles.  The fact that they also made him fabulously wealthy was a side benefit, secondary to the fact that his successes against Spain led to his being knighted and appointed deputy governor of Jamaica--at which point he turned around and worked on eliminating his former buccaneering colleagues.  It was all part of serving his king.

Empire of Blue Water, by Stephan Talty, takes an interesting tack in tying Captain Morgan's career to the rise and fall of Port Royal, Jamaica, at one time the wickedest city in the Western Hemisphere.  Unfortunately, the author also chooses to create a composite character to illustrate the experiences of a typical pirate of the time, and the interjection of Roderick into Morgan's documented campaigns adds a disorienting note of fiction to the proceedings.  It's a readable and interesting book, but I wasn't always sure the author was taking it seriously.

Originally posted at MySpace 6/23/07

The Children of Hurin

I've been reading the new book by J.R.R. Tolkien, who has been dead for 34 years.  It's a story I'm familiar with from its iterations in The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and The Lays of Beleriand: Húrin, the lord of the (human) House of Hador in the First Age of Middle-Earth, is an ally of the Noldor Elves in their interminable war against Morgoth, the force of evil, until he is captured in battle.  When he still refuses to knuckle under, Morgoth curses him and his whole family, and Húrin's son Túrin and daughter Niënor grow up under the curse unbeknownst to them.  The book is mostly about Túrin and how everything he ever does turns out badly for him and those who love him...and, really, for everyone around him whether they love him or not.

It's a story that must have been close to Tolkien's heart, seeing as how he spent pretty much his whole adult life writing and rewriting it in prose and in intricate alliterative verse.  It's also bloody depressing, without a paragraph or even a line of redemption for anybody in it.  The emphasis on man's inability to escape his fate is very strong.

But I think it works better as a standalone tale between its own covers than it does as a chapter in a longer book.  The illustrations by Alan Lee are great as well.  Far be it from me to argue with Christopher Tolkien, who has been editing his father's papers almost as long as I've been alive, but I disagree with his decision to end the tale rather abruptly after the death of Túrin, then append an awkward epilogue about the parents; either leave them out entirely, or give them their own chapter! But I'd love to see the other two of Tolkien's three "Great Tales" given the same treatment, though I don't know if that's possible given the extant variations.

Originally posted at MySpace 4/27/07

Miss Potter

An unmarried woman in her thirties in early twentieth-century England could have a pretty hard time.  At 36, Beatrix still lived at home with her parents.  She couldn't go anywhere without a companion to maintain the proprieties.  But she had written a story, illustrated with her own paintings, that she thought would be worth publishing, and publishers Frederick Warne and Co. agreed that The Tale of Peter Rabbit was thoroughly charming. Her parents disapproved of her association with a family "in trade," but Beatrix Potter found that she approved of the youngest Warne brother Norman more and more.

I have to admit I've never really read anything about the life of Beatrix Potter, so I can't say how historically accurate this movie was.  I saw it with a British friend, who said all the lovely Lake District scenery made her very homesick; she also said Renee Zellweger's accent was pretty believable.  I enjoyed the movie enough that I'll probably look up a biography of Beatrix now.  It's a very quiet film, playing out mostly in drawing rooms and gardens, but I like that kind of thing.

Originally posted at MySpace 4/17/07

Fables, vol. 1: Legends in Exile

Centuries after being driven from their individual magical homelands by an unknown Adversary, various characters from folklore and fairy tales (and a few classic children's books for good measure) are living in relative peace and quiet in New York, in a community they call Fabletown.  The Big Bad Wolf (now in human form) is the Sheriff; King Cole is the mayor; Snow White (long since divorced from Prince Charming, who turned out to be all style and no content) is the deputy mayor who actually gets all the work done.  In the first collection of this ongoing comic book series, Bigby Wolf is dismayed when Snow White inserts herself into his investigation of a Fable's disappearance and possible murder, but even he has to admit she has reason to take a special interest; the victim is her sister, Rose Red.

I love this series.  I used to be a minor comic book geek: I collected a couple of superhero titles (in mylar bags with cardboard backing), but I had pretty pedestrian tastes.  It really wasn't until well after I got thoroughly X-Menned out and gave up on superhero comics that graphic novels as a format really took off in this country.  They're doing amazing things in graphic storytelling these days, in every genre from the traditional superhero fantasy to tell-all memoirs.  This series is straight fantasy without the superheros (though Bigby Wolf gets to save the day in dramatic fashion a few times) and it's great stuff: Brilliantly written and excellently drawn.

Originally posted at MySpace 3/30/07

World War Z

The subtitle says it all: "An Oral History of the Zombie War."  Although some of the numerical and factual data was previously published in the UN Postwar Commission Report, this collection of individual experiences told in the words of the individuals concerned adds an important personal dimension to the tale of the worldwide zombie attacks, from the earliest known outbreak in China to the clean-up operations that still continue ten years after the official end of the war.

From vampires to zombies, and holy cow, this is a brilliant book.  The author, Max Brooks, had written a humor book on how to survive a zombie attack, and follows it up with this...novel? collection of stories?  I'm not sure what to call it, and I'm not the only one confused by it; my library catalogued it as non-fiction, in the 818s--the humor section, maybe thrown off by the author's previous classification as a humor writer or maybe just by the fact that he's the son of Mel Brooks.

It is not humorous, though it is occasionally funny.  It is violent, gory, frequently horrifying, and wonderfully written: the oral history structure requires the author to tell his story in short sections, each in a different "voice," and he pulls it off beautifully.  I can't wait to recommend it to everybody I know.

Originally posted at MySpace 3/10/07

Morrigan's Cross et al.

Twelfth-century Irish sorcerer Hoyt fails to destroy either the newly-made vampire that used to be his twin brother Cian or the demon queen Lilith who made Cian into what he now is, but is promptly recruited by the Morrigan, goddess of battles, to find five other individuals to join him and form the core of an army to defeat Lilith in the far future.  In the 21st century, family feeling is something Cian hasn't thought about in a long time, and he isn't sure how Hoyt persuades him to help, but he finds himself persuaded nonetheless.

Only Nora Roberts could make me like a series with vampire sex in it.

I cordially dislike paranormal romance, especially the kind with vampires.  I picked this one up on the recommendation of a friend, and was pleased to find that it's really more fantasy than romance--although the romantic subplots in this book and its two sequels, Dance of the Gods and Valley of Silence, are quite strong, and the sex scenes can get pretty steamy, as you'd expect from the author.  I've read some of her science fiction/detective/romances too, and the same holds true there.

But what I like about Nora Roberts is that her books (the few I've read, anyway) have good plots.  The sex advances the plot instead of the other way round, as in some other vampire books I could mention.

Originally posted at MySpace 3/9/07

Some Danger Involved

Broke and homeless in 19th-century London, and unable to find honest work because of prospective employers' aversion to his stint in prison for theft and assault, young Thomas Llewelyn drops the battered suitcase containing all his worldly possession in the trash as he stands in line to apply for one more job; one way or another he won't be needing it any more.  Either he'll be hired, or he'll jump off a bridge into the Thames.  He gets the job, as assistant to private enquiry agent Cyrus Barker (who hates the term "detective"), and is soon caught up in his first case when a young Jewish man with a marked resemblance to conventional depictions of Jesus is murdered and left hanging up on a telegraph pole as if crucified.

No surprise that some of the author's previous publications were in Sherlock Holmes journals, though Llewelyn's character as smart-mouthed amanuensis occasionally seems more like Archie Goodwin than Watson.  He's a bright kid, though, and learns his new profession quickly.  There's some anachronistic dialog, and some unlikely elements--would an Englishman, even one who grew up on the streets after the death of his missionary parents in China, be teaching martial arts classes to the police?  I wonder.  But a fun, well-plotted story.

Originally posted at MySpace 1/28/07

The Beautiful Cigar Girl

When John Anderson employed a young woman named Mary Cecilia Rogers in his Tobacco Emporium in 1838, pretty shopgirls were fashionable in Europe, but a novelty in the United States.  Her presence behind the counter drew hordes of customers into the shop, she was described in the papers as the Beautiful Segar Girl, and she became pretty much the first young woman in New York to be famous for being famous.

Three years later she was dead, her battered body pulled from the Hudson River.  The crime has never been solved.

That didn't stop Edgar Allan Poe from thinking he'd solved it.  He transferred the setting of the story to Paris, named his murdered girl Marie Rogêt, and gave it to his armchair detective Dupin to figure out (as Poe thought he had figured it out) purely from newspaper accounts.

Daniel Stashower's book about the murder and its aftermath, The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder, has more to say about Poe than about Mary, if only because the historical record doesn't tell us a lot about Mary.  It's a very clear and interesting portrait of Poe, though, and it doesn't pretend to have solved the mystery of Mary Rogers.

Originally posted at MySpace 1/15/07

Childe Morgan

I stumbled across Katherine Kurtz's first novel, Deryni Rising, when I was exactly the right age: thirteen, a year younger than one of the main characters in the book.  At the time I thought the fourteen-year-old king was the main character; only later, rereading the book from the perspective of my own increasing age, did I realize it's really about the 29-year-old Duke Alaric Morgan, halfbreed of a detested and distrusted race of sorcerers and one of the flat-out coolest characters I've run across in a fantasy novel.

I tore through the three volumes of the Chronicles of the Deryni, and hunted down the Legends of Saint Camber trilogy as well--a prequel series that I didn't like as much, largely because it had to lead into the vicious persecution of Deryni described as historical fact in the other series, written first but set two hundred years later.  So as a fan, I was personally a little disappointed when I heard that Kurtz had chosen to postpone writing a Childe Morgan trilogy (even though I didn't know any more about it than the name) in favor of three more thoroughly depressing Heirs of Camber novels, in which nearly all the sympathetic characters die wretchedly.

And now she's finally come around to the Childe Morgan series I've been waiting for, leading up to the events described in her very first novel.  And I have to admit I'm disappointed in them.

I suppose they could never have lived up to my hopes for them.  But it just seems like this one in particular, the second in the series, is just a place holder.  An Amazon reviewer described it as a collection of characters in search of a plot; I also got the impression that really not much happened except some traveling back and forth.

Originally posted at MySpace 1/7/07

What Angels Fear

On a foggy morning in London, days before the Crown Prince becomes Regent for the mad old king, Viscount Devlin is minding his own business in much the same way he has since he sold out his commission in the army and came home from the Napoleonic Wars, waiting for his opponent in his fourth duel in six months.  At the same time, a murdered young woman is discovered drenched in blood in a church, and the evidence points to Devlin.  A young constable is mortally wounded during his arrest, and Devlin decides on the spot that his only chance of vindication is to investigate the crime himself, even though that means fleeing from the law.

I've read a lot of Regency romances in my day, so Regency mysteries are right up my alley as well.  This one reminded me of the short-lived Julian Kestrel series by the late Kate Ross, not only for the setting but for the author's unflinching look at the underside of London society--something that most of the romances don't even consider, or gloss over.  Devlin is an intriguing character, and the supporting cast are all well-drawn.

This book is the first by C.S. Harris, a New Orleans author {edit to add: at least under that name; she's also written romances as Candice Proctor, and thrillers as half of C.S. Graham} ; the second novel is called When Gods Die, and I've got my name down for it at the library where I work.

As a side note, not long ago I also read Jane and the Barque of Frailty, the latest in Stephanie Barron's series featuring Jane Austen as the sleuth.  In this one she was in London to oversee the publication of her first novel, whereas previous volumes had been set in various parts of the country; so this one was more like the romances I'd read, with its social round.  It also dealt with less respectable characters, but in a more genteel way, mostly evading the hard necessities of a courtesan's life; a scene where the current star of the demimonde explains in no uncertain terms just what made her run away from her family seems out of place, almost anachronistic.

Originally posted at MySpace 1/1/07

Eragon

I finally read this book last weekend when I was trapped in an airport and didn't have anything better to read.  I suppose I could have found a news stand and bought a Sudoku magazine or something, but the friend I was traveling with had loved this book and forcibly lent me her copy, and I wanted to get through the thing and give it back to her before we landed at home.  I did this, although I wouldn't have made it if our flight hadn't been delayed for 45 minutes.

I'm not even going to bother describing the plot, except to say that if you've seen Star Wars, picture it with a telepathic fire-breathing dragon and you've got the gist of Eragon.  The only excuse for this tripe is the author's youth: he's retelling the stories he liked, which is exactly the same thing that I did at his age.  The difference being that I didn't have parents who would self-publish my tripe. 

It's an inoffensive book, and acceptably entertaining if you don't expect any original characters or insights.  Not bad as airplane reading, but I won't be rushing out to buy the sequel.  Nor will I be seeing the movie.  No need; I've already seen Star Wars.

Originally posted at MySpace 12/17/06

Terrier

Tamora Pierce mentioned the Provost's Dogs, the proto-police force of her pseudo-medieval city of Corus, in her very first novel about the fantasy kingdom of Tortall, Alanna: The First Adventure.  She hasn't said much about them since, but in her new series she delves into the history of the Provost's Guard.  Beka Cooper is a rookie in the Guard--since they're the Dogs, she's a Puppy--learning to walk the fine line between law and justice on one side and workable corruption on the other, always keeping in mind that her first responsibility is to the people of her district, where she grew up.

Interesting departure for Pierce in some ways: her first foray into first-person narration, for one thing.  Most of her books have been about knights or mages, both in their own ways elite classes even when they came to their current status from a background of poverty; this one looks at the city's poorer class from the inside.  This is also her first prequel series, set two hundred years before her other Tortall books, in the age of the lady knights who had become legend long before Alanna disguised herself as a boy to train as a page.

But I have some problems with the character of Beka; she's too smart, and gets too much respect for a rookie, and her announced character flaw of extreme shyness hardly slows her down at all in practice.  When her training partners refer to her as "the sharpest Puppy of all" the dreaded words Mary Sue inevitably sprang to mind. 

Not that this is going to stop me from reading the rest of the series.

Originally posted at MySpace 12/2/06

The Prestige and The Illusionist

When I was on my long weekend in Virginia last month I went to see The Prestige one day and The Illusionist the next; I'd missed The Illusionist when it played here, so I was glad my friend didn't mind seeing it again.

In The Prestige (based on the novel of the same name by Christopher Priest, which I have my name down for at the library where I work), two young magicians in turn-of-the-20th-century London start out as colleagues and friendly rivals, but when one of them ties what may or may not have been a faulty knot as part of a water escape trick in which the other's wife dies onstage, their relationship turns to escalating acts of sabotage and deepening obsession.

In The Illusionist (based, very loosely, on the story "Eisenheim the Illusionist" by Steven Millhauser, which I've read) the young son of a cabinetmaker falls for the daughter of a noble family, and years after they are forcibly separated, he meets her again when she comes onstage to volunteer for one of his illusions.  But she is now a duchess, and about to be engaged to the Emperor's son; and the Crown Prince has a reputation for violence that doesn't bode well for any woman in his orbit.

I'm glad I saw them in the order that I did, because I liked The Illusionist a lot more and if I'd seen it first I might have been disappointed in The Prestige.  Unfairly so, since they're not the same kind of story at all: The Illusionist is a fairy tale, and doesn't pretend to be anything else, while The Prestige is a much grittier story of obsession and revenge that abruptly takes a left turn into steampunk.  Most critics are saying that The Prestige is clearly the superior movie, and I'm not saying it isn't; just that the comparisons between the two are unfair to both films.

Besides, The Illusionist has characters I could sympathize with, and in The Prestige everyone turns out to be a right bastard.  Not what I personally am looking for in my escapism, thanks.

Originally posted at MySpace 11/4/06

Under orders

Dick Francis returns with his first new novel since the death of his wife, who was also his chief researcher.  He retired, but has been talked out of retirement.  I think he may have gotten some bad advice.

Most Francis novels are stand-alone; he's only used a couple of recurring characters in his entire writing career.  This new one brings back Sid Halley, a jockey who became an investigator when catastrophic injury ended his racing days.  Sid has been featured in four books, which almost qualifies him as a series hero.

In this book a jockey is murdered after winning a race for a trainer who was visibly angry with him afterwards.  Accusations of race-fixing fly.  A racehorse owner asks Sid to look into that angle, while the murdered man's father wants him to find the killer.  Another death seems to provide an answer, but Sid is sure it's not the right one, and his belief is reinforced when he starts to receive threats--not to himself, since it's been well-established that threats only encourage him to keep digging, but to his new girlfriend.

Well-plotted, though in hindsight I see I probably should have guessed at least one of the villains from the Law of Conservation of Characters.  At the time I just enjoyed the ride.  But the style isn't nearly as polished as I'd come to expect from Francis, and the research shows too much; a couple of the characters have an unfortunate tendency to go in for highly technical lectures instead of more natural dialogue.  Some of the characters behaved in out-of-character ways, a problem that wouldn't have arisen if this novel didn't have a cast that had appeared before.  It was pretty good, but not one of Francis's best.

Originally posted at MySpace 10/13/06 

Samaria series

Archangel
Jovah's Angel
The Alleluia Files
Angelica
Angel-Seeker

I don't want to fill up the entire front page of the blog with Sharon Shinn books, so I'm going to talk about this series collectively.  It's her longest running series; the first volume, Archangel, was her second novel ever (copyright 1996), and the fifth and latest, Angel-Seeker, came out just a couple of years ago.  The first three form a loosely connected trilogy, and the two others are stand-alone stories set in the same world.  The first one reads like a fantasy, with its angels praying in song to a very hands-on god; only in the second volume, Jovah's Angel, does the series turn out to be science fiction after all.

I am a long time fan of Shinn, so of course I was aware of this series, but for a long time the first chapter of Archangel totally failed to grab me.  Some time recently I bought my own copy at the best local second-hand book store, just so I'd have it lying around the apartment if I was ever in the mood for it.  A couple of weekends ago I shrugged and opened it, and proceeded to fall into it headfirst.  I had to go to the library where I work on my day off to get the next volume, and should have just checked them all out while I was there.

As always with Shinn, colorful world-building, convincing action, and a goodly helping of romance in each book.  Reading them all one right after the other, though, they started to sound a bit alike, especially since in three of the first four the main romantic plot involved the ruling Archangel's search for the person the god Jovah had decreed he (or she) should marry.  The fifth volume does not involve direct contact with Jovah at all, and may turn out to be my favorite of the lot.

All excellent, however, and it definitely pays to read them in order.

Originally posted at MySpace 9/16/06

Knights of the Black and White

I am endlessly fascinated by the Knights Templar, the order of military monks founded shortly after the First Crusade and disbanded a little over 200 years later, to the point of wondering if I might have been one in a past life.  I'm oddly protective of their memory, and you can't convince me they were guilty of the horrendous accusations that led to the suppression of the Order.

And Jack Whyte is a favorite author of mine.  His reimagining of the Arthurian cycle in terms of strict historical possibility (if not always plausibility) is one of the best treatments of those legends I've ever read.

So I was pretty excited when I heard he was taking a break from his version of Lancelot to give us his version of the Knights Templar.  This novel, the first of a planned trilogy, follows Templar founder Hugh de Payens from young manhood through the first few years of the Order in Jerusalem, and ends just before the original nine Templars send an embassy to the Pope to enlist his aid in promoting the Order.

And I'm very sad to say I'm disappointed in this book.  It has hardly any action, and what there is seems peripheral.  The dialogue is mostly didactic; the characters make speeches rather than having conversations.  There's no villain for the first half of the book, and the bad guys in the second half don't seem to present much of a danger.  Not recommended, alas.

Originally posted at MySpace 9/1/06. Reprinted to prove I don't unilaterally like everything I read!