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amediaI haven't been reading a whole lot, but even so, I've managed to get behind on writing about what I've read!
These are the books I've finished since mid-January; there's another one that I'm still in the middle of that I'll write about when I'm done, called The Knox Brothers by Penelope Fitzgerald.
Kendra Kandlestar and the Crack in Kazah was a free Kindle book, so I didn't have a lot of hopes for it. So I was pleasantly surprised that I enjoyed it quite a lot! I'm guessing it's aimed at middle-schoolers, maybe a YA audience. It involved time travel and had some entertaining paradoxes, and I liked the characters and setting overall, even if some of the names crossed the line into cutesy. Apparently it's not exactly self-published, but is published by a very small press; I poked around their website and they have some odd policies (they charge for editing???). I wouldn't mind reading the other books in the series.
Ice Shards was a novella in the Otherworld series. It takes place out of the usual three-sisters sequence; it's about, and is narrated by, another character. I was both annoyed and, despite myself, entertained by the story.
The "annoyed" part is easy to explain. There's gotta be a name for this syndrome. We have a character in the Otherworld series named Iris who is usually present in the background, but occasionally turns out to have surprising capabilities. (That in itself is a minor annoyance: we're supposed to think she's just a house sprite, but she's actually an exiled priestess, because everyone in this universe who's anyone is special and has hidden powers. It gets old real fast.) Anyway, I can put up with the minor annoyance, because I have to admit that it's sort of cool when she pops up and does something amazing and then goes right back to making waffles and scolding the were-kitty for not cleaning her own litter-box without skipping a beat. The really annoying thing is . . . well, there really ought to be a name for this phenomenon, but I can't think of what it would be: when someone takes a mysterious secondary character and EXPLAINS the whole backstory and thereby takes the mystery out of it. There was a briefly-mentioned character early in Dune - Count Fenrig? something like that - TODS read the first prequel novel and was disappointed to get this guy's whole life story, which kinda deflated the whole smoke-and-mirrors thing that the Count had going in Dune. I'm gonna call it the Fenrig Phenomenon. So that was my bigger annoyance.
[I was gonna call it the Midichlorian Phenomenon, but that really conflates TWO phenomena - the Fenrig Phenomenon of explaining something that should remain mysterious, and some other phenomenon that, no matter what fancy name we dress it up with, should be called what it is, namely Utter Stupidity. This novella suffered from the former, but not the latter.]
On the other hand, I have to say, with some reluctance, that the story was pretty darned good. Being a novella with a very specific topic, it was more sharply focused than a typical Otherworld novel, and the solution to the mystery buried in Iris's lost memory (even she isn't sure whether she performed a forbidden curse on her former lover) was, I thought, agreeably complex. It ended rather abruptly (I honestly think she had a page count to keep within, because this author usually errs in the direction of telling too much rather than too little), but other than that, I thought it hung together well.
Courting Darkness was the next Otherworld novel in the sequence, and wow, was it dark. Very very bad things happen to the eldest sister. They're not described in a way that suggests the author thinks the audience will enjoy reading about them--they're squicky in themselves, but they don't come across as gratuitous. The character's reaction is primarily to sweep her feelings under a mental rug and get on with battling evil, so I imagine the author is setting up psychological repercussions down the road.
Finally, two book club books!
Extra Virgin by Annie Hawes, for the book club meeting in January, was a memoir about a couple of English girls who go to work a temp agricultural job in Italy and decide to buy a house in a rural village where everyone produces olive oil. Culture clash ensues, is funny, is poignant, is (mostly) overcome. It's a book that I suspect would be absolutely delightful if savored, a chapter a night, over the course of several weeks, with the occasional glass of wine. Amazon's two-day delivery failed me for once - I watched the tracking with a kind of sick fascination as the book wended its way from Illinois to Texas by means of Massachusetts - it arrived the day before the book club meeting and I read all 352 pages in two huge gulps, the night before and the afternoon of. (The friend who suggested I join the club also had trouble getting hold of it and started reading it the day before I did. She texted me partway through and said she was having trouble staying awake! I could sympathize.) One thing I learned at the meeting from a member who had done some research was that, while the author is quite frank about leaving some things out (for instance, she tells us that she returns to England for about half of each year to earn money to live on in Italy for the rest of the year, and she doesn't report what goes on there, but we KNOW it's missing because she lets us know), she doesn't tell us that, in addition to herself and her sister, her ten-year-old son came to Italy and lived there with them! Now *there*'s a whacking great omission! How much can you leave out and still call it a memoir? Not going to quibble--it was still a fun book, although if you try to read it all at once you may find it soporific. Chapter a night. Glass of wine. Trust me.
The latest one was Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver, which I read for the meeting last week (we didn't meet in February). The author of this story was, in my opinion, both too good and not good enough. She creates interesting characters and family dynamics and makes the reader care. Then she says, whoops, I need to move them around like little cardboard figures so they can serve their true purpose as a metaphor for what the book is really about, namely, global warming omg we're all going to die aaaaah! Which means that a number of the most interesting plot threads are never tied up and others end weirdly. The fact that the author's point is well taken and, a scientist herself, she marshals excellent support for it, doesn't make the book any less preachy or inconsistent.
The writing starts out showily good, with the kind of sentences that throw you out of the story so you can admire them, which is just as much of a speed bump as bad sentences, and more annoying, because a writer this skilled ought to know better. Again, too good and not good enough. The writing does seem to get more transparent as the book goes along.
Finally, if I dared to invent a character named Dellarobia, with hair of an unusual shade of red, who is smarter than everyone she knows--she's admired by scientists for her quick mind despite barely graduating high school--and is still a size zero after two children--I know what you all would call her and you'd be right.
It was interesting to hear the women in the club talk about it - one of them loved it passionately because if there's one thing the book did convey (other than "omg we're all going to die") it was the joy and excitement of doing science, and she had been in a relationship with a scientist for more than twelve years and she loved every minute of it (except the part where he was never going to marry her). You never know when these unexpected personal revelations are going to come out - it gave me an insight into why she might have enjoyed the book even though I hated it. I love my book club.
These are the books I've finished since mid-January; there's another one that I'm still in the middle of that I'll write about when I'm done, called The Knox Brothers by Penelope Fitzgerald.
Kendra Kandlestar and the Crack in Kazah was a free Kindle book, so I didn't have a lot of hopes for it. So I was pleasantly surprised that I enjoyed it quite a lot! I'm guessing it's aimed at middle-schoolers, maybe a YA audience. It involved time travel and had some entertaining paradoxes, and I liked the characters and setting overall, even if some of the names crossed the line into cutesy. Apparently it's not exactly self-published, but is published by a very small press; I poked around their website and they have some odd policies (they charge for editing???). I wouldn't mind reading the other books in the series.
Ice Shards was a novella in the Otherworld series. It takes place out of the usual three-sisters sequence; it's about, and is narrated by, another character. I was both annoyed and, despite myself, entertained by the story.
The "annoyed" part is easy to explain. There's gotta be a name for this syndrome. We have a character in the Otherworld series named Iris who is usually present in the background, but occasionally turns out to have surprising capabilities. (That in itself is a minor annoyance: we're supposed to think she's just a house sprite, but she's actually an exiled priestess, because everyone in this universe who's anyone is special and has hidden powers. It gets old real fast.) Anyway, I can put up with the minor annoyance, because I have to admit that it's sort of cool when she pops up and does something amazing and then goes right back to making waffles and scolding the were-kitty for not cleaning her own litter-box without skipping a beat. The really annoying thing is . . . well, there really ought to be a name for this phenomenon, but I can't think of what it would be: when someone takes a mysterious secondary character and EXPLAINS the whole backstory and thereby takes the mystery out of it. There was a briefly-mentioned character early in Dune - Count Fenrig? something like that - TODS read the first prequel novel and was disappointed to get this guy's whole life story, which kinda deflated the whole smoke-and-mirrors thing that the Count had going in Dune. I'm gonna call it the Fenrig Phenomenon. So that was my bigger annoyance.
[I was gonna call it the Midichlorian Phenomenon, but that really conflates TWO phenomena - the Fenrig Phenomenon of explaining something that should remain mysterious, and some other phenomenon that, no matter what fancy name we dress it up with, should be called what it is, namely Utter Stupidity. This novella suffered from the former, but not the latter.]
On the other hand, I have to say, with some reluctance, that the story was pretty darned good. Being a novella with a very specific topic, it was more sharply focused than a typical Otherworld novel, and the solution to the mystery buried in Iris's lost memory (even she isn't sure whether she performed a forbidden curse on her former lover) was, I thought, agreeably complex. It ended rather abruptly (I honestly think she had a page count to keep within, because this author usually errs in the direction of telling too much rather than too little), but other than that, I thought it hung together well.
Courting Darkness was the next Otherworld novel in the sequence, and wow, was it dark. Very very bad things happen to the eldest sister. They're not described in a way that suggests the author thinks the audience will enjoy reading about them--they're squicky in themselves, but they don't come across as gratuitous. The character's reaction is primarily to sweep her feelings under a mental rug and get on with battling evil, so I imagine the author is setting up psychological repercussions down the road.
Finally, two book club books!
Extra Virgin by Annie Hawes, for the book club meeting in January, was a memoir about a couple of English girls who go to work a temp agricultural job in Italy and decide to buy a house in a rural village where everyone produces olive oil. Culture clash ensues, is funny, is poignant, is (mostly) overcome. It's a book that I suspect would be absolutely delightful if savored, a chapter a night, over the course of several weeks, with the occasional glass of wine. Amazon's two-day delivery failed me for once - I watched the tracking with a kind of sick fascination as the book wended its way from Illinois to Texas by means of Massachusetts - it arrived the day before the book club meeting and I read all 352 pages in two huge gulps, the night before and the afternoon of. (The friend who suggested I join the club also had trouble getting hold of it and started reading it the day before I did. She texted me partway through and said she was having trouble staying awake! I could sympathize.) One thing I learned at the meeting from a member who had done some research was that, while the author is quite frank about leaving some things out (for instance, she tells us that she returns to England for about half of each year to earn money to live on in Italy for the rest of the year, and she doesn't report what goes on there, but we KNOW it's missing because she lets us know), she doesn't tell us that, in addition to herself and her sister, her ten-year-old son came to Italy and lived there with them! Now *there*'s a whacking great omission! How much can you leave out and still call it a memoir? Not going to quibble--it was still a fun book, although if you try to read it all at once you may find it soporific. Chapter a night. Glass of wine. Trust me.
The latest one was Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver, which I read for the meeting last week (we didn't meet in February). The author of this story was, in my opinion, both too good and not good enough. She creates interesting characters and family dynamics and makes the reader care. Then she says, whoops, I need to move them around like little cardboard figures so they can serve their true purpose as a metaphor for what the book is really about, namely, global warming omg we're all going to die aaaaah! Which means that a number of the most interesting plot threads are never tied up and others end weirdly. The fact that the author's point is well taken and, a scientist herself, she marshals excellent support for it, doesn't make the book any less preachy or inconsistent.
The writing starts out showily good, with the kind of sentences that throw you out of the story so you can admire them, which is just as much of a speed bump as bad sentences, and more annoying, because a writer this skilled ought to know better. Again, too good and not good enough. The writing does seem to get more transparent as the book goes along.
Finally, if I dared to invent a character named Dellarobia, with hair of an unusual shade of red, who is smarter than everyone she knows--she's admired by scientists for her quick mind despite barely graduating high school--and is still a size zero after two children--I know what you all would call her and you'd be right.
It was interesting to hear the women in the club talk about it - one of them loved it passionately because if there's one thing the book did convey (other than "omg we're all going to die") it was the joy and excitement of doing science, and she had been in a relationship with a scientist for more than twelve years and she loved every minute of it (except the part where he was never going to marry her). You never know when these unexpected personal revelations are going to come out - it gave me an insight into why she might have enjoyed the book even though I hated it. I love my book club.
