I’m taking a break from Caleana and going back to some dragons and dragon hunters.
What I’m Reading Now: Rogue by Julie Kagawa
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Reader Problems
You know when you are reading a book. You love it. You love the characters. You become invested in one or two of the characters. For this instance, you are involved with two. You want them together. You totally ship them. They are finally realized they are in love with each other and finally, FINALLY, do something about it. They are happy. You are happy. All is great and then realize that you haven’t even reached the half way point of the book and there are at least two more books to come. You start to panic because you know the happiness your characters feel now is not going to last that much longer. Something bad is about to happen. You accidentally read the synopsis of the next book in the series, so you know there is a death is coming. Now your even more frazzled because what if it’s one of your beloved! NO! It can’t be! They are HAPPY! Can’t they be happy? You want to turn away and stop reading but you can’t. It’s a like a car accident as much as you want to look the other direction, you can’t help yourself from looking straight ahead. So you keep reading towards the inevitable. Hoping for the best but bracing yourself for the worst.
That is exactly where I am right now in the The Crown of Midnight. Something book is about to happen. I just know it and I’m not prepared for it. Nope, not at all. Pray for me brothers and sisters readers.
What I’m Listening to: The First Twenty Minutes by Gretchen Reynolds
The first twenty minutes –you mean the only 20 minutes, right?
This Month in Reality…..Travel as a metaphor for personal growth!
Let us rejoice in today, March 32nd!
I am indeed back after a lovely vacation hanging out with my sister and our parents! And, let me tell you: not only do I love traveling, but I also love travel memoirs! Since I discovered the genre of travel memoir in college it has been a genre I’ve always been happy to come back to. So, it might surprise you to know that until this month I hadn’t read Eat, Pray, Love. Yes, I saw all the hype when the book came out and then when the book was optioned and made into a movie. I avoided it because it seemed like a travel memoir that was going to make me angry. I thought it was going to make me angry because here’s this woman who is making a good living and has a good job and a husband who loves her and she just throws it away and travels the world. I thought she’d make me angry or worse, that she wouldn’t be sympathetic at all and I’d be reading an entire memoir where I don’t care about the person at the center of the story. (Yes, that’s right, not being relatable is a bigger problem than making me angry.) On top of that, traveling and exploring other cultures while either talking about how cheap everything is or glossing over the problems and idealizing the not-problems really bothers me. I was concerned that Elizabeth Gilbert was going to go to an ashram in India and talk about how deep and spiritual all Indians are and not put this ashram in the context of a country with large populations of people who have different religions which are antagonistic to each other. Or, worse, I was worried her biggest concern would be about the dogs. (Note: I’m happy when people are worried about animal welfare. I’m not happy when they’re so worried about animal welfare that it affects how they feel about seeing poverty-stricken people. This is especially troubling when you also think those poverty-stricken people have the most beautiful culture. Anyway, that’s probably a hypocritical rant for another day.) So, I didn’t read the book when it came out. Or, when it was made into a movie. Plus, I didn’t see the movie. I picked it up hoping that I would hate it and that would make me feel vindicated for avoiding it up until now.
No such luck. (Spoilers behind the cut).
Continue reading
Quick Review: Pip Bartlett’s Guide for Magical Creatures by Jackson Pearce and Maggie Stievfater
Since this book will not be published until April 28, I’ll keep this review short. First this book is adorable. Pip Bartlett is a smart, curious and kind girl, who just loves animals, especially magically ones. As far as she knows, she is the only person who can talk to them and they can talk to her. Of course, being the only one means that no one else believes you. After an unfortunate incident with a couple of unicorns, Pip gets sent to live with her Aunt Emma, who is a magical creatures vet for the summer. Pip is thrilled! When an infestation of Fuzzles threatens the town, it’s up to Pip, her new friend Tomas, Aunt Emma and Cousin Callie to save everyone.
Pip is great! She’s fun and funny. Honest in a way that only a kid can be. The book and Pip really come to life with Maggie’s illustrations. They give the reader not only a insight into what the creatures look like and how they behave but also gives us insight into Pip herself, as she interjects her own opinions and observations. Tomas is a good friend to have as a sidekick. The one drawback is the villain of the story is mean and rude but for really no reason than she hates all magical creatures. The good thing about being a series is that we have time to figure out why.
So if you have kids or don’t, check it out when it comes out later this month.
What I’m Reading Now: Crown of Midnight by Sarah J Maas
Review: Throne of Glass by Sarah J Maas
I am going to start by saying Celaena Sardothien is one badass chick. Seriously. She is a trained assassin. The best in all of Erilea. She is clever, smart and kill you with her bare hands if you annoy her. Yeah, she’s pretty cool. After the death of parents she was found by the the King of Assassins and was trained as an assassin herself. She soon proved to be the best and most feared assassin until she was betrayed and sent to a Salt Mines of Endovier. It’s more of a death camp then salt mines as most people don’t live long but Celaena is not like most people. After a year there she is introduced to the Crown Prince and the Captain of the Guard who offer an escape of sorts. Be the Crown Prince candidate in a competition to the King’s Champion aka become the official King’s assassin. If she wins, she only have to serve the King for four years and then she will be freed. If she loses, she comes back to Endovier where she will most likely die. Celaena does not lack for confidence and sees this as a winning proposition and agrees. Soon she is taken to Rithfold, the capital of Adarlan, the country that has conquered most of Erilea, including Celaena’s home country of Terrasen. She swept up in the contest as she soon finds that it’s not going to be as easy as she thought. First, a year in the salt mines has sapped a lot of her strength and second, she has a formidable foe in Cain. The King of Adarlan has outlawed magic from the land but Calaena finds that magic and mysterious powers are not completely gone. Not only is she battling the other champions but also a mysterious threat as well.
The book is a sort of mix of Hunger Games and Game of Thrones that definitely works. Celaena is strong, smart. clever and despite her brashness she is not fearless. She knows that her situation is tenuous and that any mistake will send her right back to Endorvier or worse death. She’s real. She’s not a shrinking violet like many heroines. She obvisously knows how to save herself but she’s not too proud to accept help when she needs it and yes even the more feared assassin needs help every now and then. Of course this is a YA novel so yes there are going to be suitors. First there is the Crown Prince, Dorian, who chaffs at the control of his father. Picking Celaena as his choice for the competition was sort of a rebellion on his part but he soon finds that Celaena is more then he thought and of course starts to fall in love with her. There is a whole subplot as to why Dorian hasn’t married yet. In a kind of role reversal, it’s Dorian who is the romantic who wants to marry for love and not out of obligation and Celaena is the more practical one. Her other suitor, is the young Captain of the Guard, Chaol. Serious and hard working, he is Dorian’s best friend who is always looking out for him. He has a quiet strength about him that honestly makes him a better fit for Celaena, in my humble opinion (TEAM CHAOL) but I’ll have to wait to read the other books to see how it plays out.
All and all, I thought this was a great book. Great characters and a good story. Celaena is a great edition to badass women in literature and I can’t wait to read how her story continues.
Review: Blood and Absinthe by Chloe Hart
These three novellas all packaged into one are your standard paranormal romance fluff that is the sort of mindless fun that you’d expect from anything that can be described as “standard paranormal romance fluff”. They weren’t really well written and I wasn’t in love with any of the characters but I didn’t hate any of them either. The novellas asked nothing of me and that was exactly what I was looking for.
Plus, I got them from a book bub blast for 99 cents.
The first of the three novellas follows Liz, a faery warrior whose job it is to keep dark paranormal things out of the world. She is forced to work with her nemesis Jack (who is a vampire) to fight a particularly awful demon. It turns out that they both are crushing on each other. The next sentence is a little spoilery in account of this story was kind of formulaic. It also turns out that Jack can lend Liz his super vamp strength so that she can kill the demon if they spend one night of passion together.
The second story follows Celia, Liz’s friend, who is a mage faery and a vampire named Grant. Celia makes a discovery about the faery absinthe that all of the fae use occasionally to up their strength and connect them to their magic. She goes to Grant for protection when she realizes someone is trying to kill her. Intrigue, mayhem and romance ensue. Fun times.
The final story follows Jessica, a faery princess and Vampire assassin Hawk as they try to save magic and keep the human world from being overrun with demons and other evil faeries. There was a lot of hotness early on in this one but I’ll admit that I didn’t finish it because I was kind of bored with the whole world by this point.
I do have one bone to pick with these stories (and in romance novels in general). Sometimes, the sexy bits of these books are problematic in that they show sexual encounters that should not be considered consensual (even though we, as readers with access to the thoughts and feelings of the characters know that that the encounters are consensual). This happened at least once in these novellas: a character was under the influence of a spell or some kind of drug or was having a waking dream and got all hot and heavy with another character. In the worst of these instances, when the non-magicked/drugged/dreaming character realized that they were having sexy times with an incapacitated person they chose to pretend like the incident never happened. This led the other character to wake up and realize that it had happened and to be confused about how to go forward. When I read the novella, I found it enjoyable. But, after I had finished reading it, I felt very uncomfortable with how this had played out. I was uncomfortable because this was a terrible modeling of how people should treat each other in relationships. If you accidentally have magical faery sex with someone who thinks they’re asleep and dreaming your reaction to realizing they thought they were dreaming shouldn’t be, “Well, I’ll just pretend like this didn’t happen.” At the very least, you should make sure that they are physically and emotionally okay. (Or, you know, turn yourself in for sexual assault.) This has been an issue that has been discussed a lot recently with the release of 50 Shades of Grey. It is an important topic to critique and discuss because literature and art allow us to explore our world in a safe space. If the representations that we encounter are problematic, we need to talk about why they are problematic and how they could have been made better. I’m not saying that Chloe Hart should have written any of her scenes differently. They were hot and they served the story and the reader even if they didn’t serve the characters. But, these novellas don’t exist in a vacuum, so it is worth discussing things that make us uncomfortable.
These novellas were fine and they were quick reads but I won’t be reading anything else in the series. Meh.
What I’m Reading Now: Pip Barlett’s Guide to Magical Creatures by Maggie Stiefvater and Jackson Pearce and Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas
So the pdf file Scholastic provided for Pip Barlett’s Guide to Magical Creatures takes a while to load each page thanks to all of Maggie’s amazing illustrations so I’m reading that at home and Throne of Glass on the train.
GOOD NEWS!!!! LAIR OF DREAMS IS COMING!!
Good News! Well good news for me. Lair of Dreams, book two of the Diviner’s series by Libba Bray is actually going to happen! Last November, I wrote about how the publishing date kept getting pushed back but Miss Bray confirmed on her blog that, Lair of Dreams has indeed been finished and will indeed be released this year! WOOHOO! I’ll forgive that the release date is even later then the last time I checked. Now the date is August 25 instead of July but hey what’s another month when I’ve already waited 3 years?
Bask in it’s Glory!!
So why am I so excited about this book? Well, the first book, The Diviner’s was amazing! Evie O’Neill has been shipped off to New York City to live with her uncle in the middle of the Swinging Twenties. It’s supposed to be a punishment but how could living in the greatest city in the world among the speakeasies, jazz clubs and Ziegfeld follies be anything but a reward. Evie gets caught up in a strange murder, when police consult with her uncle who is an expert in the occult. Soon she is using her strange power to help solve the murder and meeting other exceptional young people with powers of their own. It kinda has a little X-men type vibe. Like any moment, they are going to ban together and use their powers to fight evil!
The setting is great. All the optimism of the twenties. The characters are all likable and real. Miss Bray doesn’t shy away from the race and social divide of the characters and make it part of the story. There is so much going on but it doesn’t feel cluttered. It also has so much to build on that I really can’t wait to see where Miss Bray takes it. So finally! Finally! I’ll get to find out! In the meant time people, Go read The Diviners before the Lair of Dreams comes out.
2 Women, So Many Books 