Review: Blackbird by Anna Carey

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blackbird I admit that I have had this book sitting on my Nook for awhile now.  It was one of those it’s on sale impulse buys.  I read Anna Carey’s her Eve series.  It was great until the last book.  I was really frustrated with how Eve spends the entire series running away from getting pregnant to only get pregnant anyway. So I bought this book but held off reading it and really only decided to read it because it’s not that long.  Only about 186 pages on the Nook.  It’s completely different from Eve.  Instead of of being another dystopian novel, it’s a contemporary novel.  Our heroine wakes on a LA subway track with no memory of who she is or how she got there.  All she has on her is a bookbag, money, a fresh shirt and a notebook that instructs her to stay away from the police and call this number.  She does and arrives at the appointed office to find that it’s empty and the safe is open with money missing.  She’s been set up and forced to be on the run.  She quickly realizes that she’s being followed and some of them want to kill her.  She turns for help to Ben.  A boy she caught selling pot on her first day.  The two set out to try to figure out who she is and what is going on.  Why are people trying to kill her?  Who is orchestrating it?  Who is she? Is there anyone one looking for her?

The intriguing thing about this book is that it’s written in the second person.  I’m not sure I’ve read a book written in that voice before.  In short stories yes but not a novel.  It lends it well to the narrative.  It really adds to the uncertainty and paranoia of our character. However it took a while for me to get used to it.  “Sunny” as she calls herself since she doesn’t remember her name is resourceful.  She has small snippets of her past but she doesn’t know if they are real or not or how they relate to what is going on with her.  She finds that she knows how to do things that suggest that maybe she wasn’t all that innocent as she would like.  She knows how to pick locks and how to evade people who are following her.  She also knows how to fight.  This makes her a little uneasy about herself.  I like her, she’s quick on her feet and smart.  She comes to the same conclusion of what is going on the same time I did but her story isn’t over yet.  We have one book to go to find out more about the people who are hunting her and if she finally be able to out run them or take them down.

Review: Nimona by Noelle Stevenson

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nimonaSo It may surprise you or at least my friends who read this blog but this was the first graphic novel I’ve ever read.  Yeah, I know.  I talk a good game.  Kate and I watched the Saturday morning cartoons of X-Men and Spider-Man when were kids and, well, I pay attention.  I listened to my friends and customers when they talked about various superheroes.  I’ve pretty much seen all the movies.  I’ve read various articles and critiques.  I love Agent Carter.  So I’ve paid attention and have been able to piece together this and that, enough that when I talk about comic characters and movies, I’ve come off as I know what I’m talking about.  I’m a total fraud and I know it.  I’m trying to fix that.

Nimona isn’t your typical superhero story.  Actually she a villain’s sidekick.  One day she shows up at Lord Blackheart’s place telling him she is going to be his sidekick and help him take over the kingdom and finally defeat his nemesis, Sir Goldenloin and the Institution of Law Enforcement and Heroics.  Blackheart is resistant at first since there are rules but Nimona will not take no and once she shows him her shape-shifting abilities, he gives her a chance.  At first, she’s a little bit too enthusiastic and dives in head first but eventually she and Blackheart find the perfect working relationship.  After their first mission into the Institution, they come across the Institution’s questionable plans and it makes you ask who are the heroes and who are the villains.

There are many things I liked about this book.  One is Nimona.  She’s spunky, funny, loyal, brave, vulnerable, angry, lonely, friendly.  She’s all those things and more.  She clearly hasn’t had an easy upbringing.  Her ability has made her an outsider, a monster, but really she is just a little girl looking for somewhere to belong. Lord Blackheart is a smart, curious man who feels he has been wronged and then took up the role he thought he was expected to play.  He is really the first to see Nimona for who she really is.  The world is not black and white.  There is both good and bad and all of us.  I was really taken with the story.  The artwork was very nice.  I liked the medieval aesthetic with a modern twist.  Nimona is drawn as a sorta emo girl with pink and purple half shaven hair.  She’s round not thin.  She’s real.  I was really touched by the story.  It wasn’t just good versus evil or what does it mean to be good and evil but also finding our place in the world.  Hoping to be judged on who they actually are and not what they are perceived to be.  Isn’t that what we all ultimately want?  I truly loved this book and I can say my first foray into graphic novels has been a success.

This Month in Reality: Witches, Midwives and Nurses! Oh, My!

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2016 has really started off with a bang. You could maybe tell by my lack of posting? I’ve had a lot of ups and downs. But, I have managed to get a little reading done (just not a lot of review writing. I have been writing, but that’s another story.)

The bang 2016 started out with was a family member in the hospital. (They’re fine now.) While they were in the hospital, I tried to do my best and not panic. If I’m calm, they had no reason to not be calm, right? They had to be taken out of the room for various tests (Again, they’re fine now) and to occupy myself while they were out of the room I read a book on my phone. I read Witches, Midwives, and Healers by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English.

I thought that was an appropriate thing to read in a hospital.

This is a short pamphlet of a book written in the 1970s. It discussed midwifery, the rise of medical professionals (as opposed to healers), the popular health movement of the 1830s and 40s, and feminism and the need for women in medicine today. This was a really short book; it was only 59 pages, but I learned a lot from it. I didn’t know about the popular health movement. Or, I knew about it tangentially because I know a little bit about patent medicine from visiting the Coca-Cola museum in Atlanta. (And, even though there was probably a lot wrong with some of the ideas the popular health movement was spreading, there was also probably a lot right about it.) Ehrenreich and English tell us a story about the movement pushing the equivalent of know-your-body courses (still a good idea) and also supporting a lot of self-advocating amongst patients. (The movement is described as espousing the virtues of frequent bathing, loose-fitting clothing for women, temperance and eating whole grain cereals. Any of that sound familiar?) The movement they describe also seems to have been initially supportive of women and minorities and in line with the cause of civil rights. While some of the professional societies out right banned women and minorities from their ranks, schools in the popular health movement did not do so (at least with the same frequency.) Unfortunately, from the description that Ehrenreich and English give, it would also seem that women threw other minorities under the bus in order to gain legitimacy and when favor to their causes. No cool, bros. So, I learned a little about the insidious underbelly of the history of the women’s rights movement.

What I found most interesting about this book (and also incredibly sad) were the conclusions. They conclude that the medical profession isn’t just an institution that discriminates against women, it is one that has been designed to exclude them. That was probably true in the 70s and it is still true today. Last year I reviewed the book the First Twenty Minutes and one of the things I found hardest to swallow about that book was the amount of research the author presented that was done only on male bodies. Women and men are different! There is a fairly large amount of scientific evidence to support that! (Also, there’s probably not just men and women! Gender as a binary is probably not a real thing!) Just as examples from recent news: women have different heart attack symptoms than men (and new research shows women aren’t aware of this) and women with ADHD present differently than men. They also conclude that we have become mystified by science and don’t know how to argue for what we need in the face of a scientific (or scientific sounding) argument. (Recent blow ups of twitter about whether or not the Earth is round seems to show that we still have a lack of scientific literacy.) They suggest that there needs to be an opening of the medical profession so that all women can have access to medical expertise when they need it. I still think that’s true.

So, this was a good read and a quick read. Not a bad way to start out the year in reality!

Rereading Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard

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red queenSince I have already done a review of this book, I’ll just give a few observations.

  1. You should never join a revolution when you are still in morning for dead brother.  You really shouldn’t make any life altering decisions really.  Mare is so blinded by her own rage and pain that she doesn’t see what is going.
  2. Which she would have if she had her wits about her.  She may not be book smart but she’s definitely street smart.  Her emotions got in the way and despite multiple people telling her not to trust the guy, including the guy she does anyway.
  3. I’m glad that I read Cruel Crown because I totally forgot about that one character dies and I glad we got a little bit more backstory on him, even if it was just a little bit.
  4. GIRL CAL IS IN LOVE WITH YOU THE WHOLE TIME!  HOW COULD YOU HAVE MISSED IT!!!
  5. I really dislike Elara and I hope she has a very painful death.
  6. Poor Lucas
  7. It should be an interesting dynamic between Cal and Kilorn.

Bring on Glass Sword.

Review: Cruel Crown by Victoria Aveyard

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cruel crownCruel Crown is the collection of two prequel novellas to Red Queen. The first novella is Queen Song where we get the backstory of Cal’s mother and what really happened to her.  The other is Steel Scars that follows Farley as she leads the Scarlet Guard into Norta.  They both were pretty good.  Giving more insight into world the books take place.  Since Red Queen is told from Mare’s point of view, things like how the silver hierarchy is set up and how the Scarlet Guard works isn’t give much detail because Mare doesn’t know these things in much detail. That’s what kind of great but these little novella’s.  I’ve written in the past about how it’s trendy for YA authors to write novellas or short stories that take place in between books or prequels.  Sometimes they are just filler but other times they serve the purpose of filling in wholes that didn’t have time to get to in the narratives.  They also usually focus on supporting or minor characters instead of the protagonists in attempt to flesh out the world a little bit but usually they are of little importance.  If readers don’t read them, it’s no big deal.  They will still be able to the novels without missing anything.

Of the two stories I liked Queen Song the best.  It follows Queen Corianne before she became queen.  She’s the only daughter of a once great house that is down on their luck.  She catches the eye of Prince Tiberius, Cal’s and Maven’s father.  It follows their courtship, their short marriage and her eventual death.  She’s a feisty and curious girl, who is interested in mechanics and how things work but in a world where her only role is to be married off her dreams will never happen.  When she meets Prince Tiberius things start to open up for her.  She finds an equally lonely person to commiserate and love but never really gets over the feeling of being weak and useless.  Among those helping her feel that way is rival Elara, who would become Tiberius’s second wife and Maven’s mother.  She’s a powerful mind reader but the extant of her power is not truly revealed until the end.  Over the course of the story Corianne falls deeper and deeper into paranoia and sadness.  She’s been accused of tricking the Prince into marrying her.  She suffers many miscarriages until Cal is born.  She believes that Elara is behind it and ultimately she is right but no way to prove it.  It’s really quite sad.  From the very beginning there is a sense of foreboding since we know from Red Queen that she is dead and is believed by suicide. I kept hoping that there would be some kind of happy ending but knowing there would not.

In Steel Scars we get to know more about Farley and her motivations for not only for the Scarlet Guard but also for Mare.  We know in Red Queen that the Scarlet Guard is a resistance movement against the silver leadership but I assumed only in Norta.  I guess I’m going to have to go back and read it again.  Farley is from the Lakelands and comes to Norta to start the Scarlet Guards operations there.  While there she meets Shade Barrow, Mare’s brother, who becomes a spy for them.  Mare believes Shade to be dead until the end when it’s revealed of his involvement but also that he is like Mare.  Red blood with Silver powers.  We really don’t get much else from the story then that and why Farley is keen to recruit Mare.  Also, i think we are seeing the budding relationship between Farley and Shade.  There might be other hints for Glass Sword, the next book in the series but we will have to wait and find out.