Author Archives: Anna

Nora & Kettle

by Anna

By Lauren Nicolle Taylor

Nora_and_KettleThis is another BookBub offer, so available for free on kindle, but it is quite a bit different from the light entertainment I’ve gotten before. Amazon describes it as a reimagining of Peter Pan (Kettle = Pan), but I wouldn’t have gotten that on my own. There is no light-hearted whimsy, and the children live in anything but a dreamland. Set just after World War II, Kettle is a Japanese-American teenager trying to make do on the streets after having been separated from any family he had in the internment camps. Nora is the daughter of a wealthy but violently abusive councilman. The author includes a trigger warning at the beginning of the book for graphic depictions of domestic abuse, and she isn’t kidding around.

A minor spoiler, and additional trigger warning: a kitten is introduced briefly, bringing a spark of joy to the life of one of the peripheral characters – one of the Lost Boys, a gang of Japanese-American orphans hiding out in the subway tunnels. As soon as the kitten is introduced, I feared for its safety, and sure enough, it is killed in its next scene. That’s the kind of book this is.

The writing is very good, and I was so invested in the characters and storyline that I couldn’t put it down, but the book sort of dragged me down the whole time. As good as it is, this was not a welcome addition to a year that is already sucking ass.

Mira’s Last Dance

by Anna

By Lois McMaster Bujold

Miras_Last_DanceRebecca is a much bigger fan of Lois McMaster Bujold than I am, and she already raved about the first three entries in this series last year, but I’ve jumped in to review the fourth because…whoo, boy.

Before we started this blog together, I don’t think any of us realized how much more prudish I am than either the other reviewers. I get easily embarrassed by reading pretty much anything more explicit than a kiss on the lips, and I very much appreciate just the literary version of a ‘fade to black.’

Which this story actually does! However, the situations that are set up before the polite drawing of the curtain where almost too much for my poor weak sensibilities. This is really a novella with an estimated reading time of a little over an hour, but it took me a full week, with all the breaks I had to take to repose myself.

Now, I’m sure this all sounds very titillating, but before you jump right in, it is not at all a stand-alone book. The four Penric & Desdemona novellas feel more like a single, serialized novel than sequels, and this one picks up from the moment the last one ends. Each one also builds in intrigue (and scandalousness), so the first couple are fun but comparatively decorous.

More Disappointments from BookBub

by Anna

Fear the Drowning Deep

By Sarah Glenn Marsh

Fear_the_Drowning_DeepThe most difficult books to review are those that aren’t really good or really bad – just all those mediocre books.

It seemed so promising! Set on the Isle of Man at the very beginning of the 20th century, it could have explored a fairly unique place and time for YA novels. Unfortunately, Fear the Drowning Deep is just really silly.

Sixteen-year-old Bridey spends the entire book careening between crises, making very little distinction between being teased by her sisters, forced to get a job by her parents, and witnessing the disappearances of various friends and neighbors. Her most consistent character trait is that she hates and fears the ocean, which is more than a little inconvenient on a small island where fishing is the main economy.* Of course everything comes back to that, and she must face her fears to save the day.

It became such a hodgepodge of fantasy elements and mundane details that I couldn’t get a good sense of whether the fantasy was rooted in actual myths from the time and place, and the book did not inspire me to do any additional research. Adding to the disconnect was the mundane details were often given far more drama than the fantastical—a sea serpent must just be dealt with, , but a nosy and judgmental neighbor can warp your entire life, apparently.

*This lead to an extra level of unbelievability for me, which was not the author’s fault. I just love the ocean so much that I can’t even conceive anyone feeling otherwise. If I could live where I could see and smell the ocean all the time, I would be in heaven!

Twisted: The Girl Who Uncovered Rumpelstiltskin’s Name

By Bonnie M Hennessy

TwistedTwisted, on the other hand, is not silly or mediocre — it is confusingly both very good and very bad, so I was never sure if I was enjoying it or not (up until the big climax, when I was most certainly not). It is a retelling of the Rumpelstiltskin story, which is a big part of the problem, since that story is awful. The central woman in the original story has almost no personal agency, and is tossed from man to man: her father to the king, to Rumpelstiltskin, and then back to the king, who becomes her husband.

By trying to flesh out the story and give more depth to each character, the author took on a really challenging task, but unfortunately it just highlights how awful all of the men are and how terribly they treat the heroine. Early on I told Rebecca that I couldn’t tell whether the book was chauvinist or misandrist, which is a very odd spot to be in. Set sort of indeterminately in an England-type place in an 18th-19th century-type time, the king is now a duke in this version, with neighboring lands to heroine Aiofe’s previously wealthy but now struggling family. Mild spoiler: early on in their relationship, he clumsily tries to engage with her, crowding her space and touching her without permission (very bad! men are the worst!), at which point Aiofe panics and prepares to attack with an ax she has on hand (oh…uh…I’m not sure that was a capital offense, actually).

The entire book continues this way in a very unsettling manner. Is Aiofe a competent woman who faces potential threats squarely, or an unbalanced child who brings trouble onto herself with her assumptions and over-reactions?  Is the Duke an entitled nobleman trying to break from his upbringing in order to make honest human connections, or is he a sociopath who values other people only in how they can serve him? Is Rumpelstiltskin a damaged spirit looking for acceptance and understanding, or a sulky godling who demands complete devotion? These would all seem to be pretty stark opposites and yet they somehow seemed to exist simultaneously, which made for a very unsettling read, and not in a good way.

Honestly, I felt like this book was somehow gaslighting me, which fits in with the characters pretty well, actually. By the end, the extreme amount of emotional labor that the various female characters all had to do for the various male characters really soured me on the whole thing.

Sandman Slim

by Anna

By Richard Kadrey

Sandman_SlimOh, man, this book is like if author Richard Kadrey took everything I love in fiction and put it all in one book – dark and moody hero detective in a noir-ish mystery, with violent action and Judeo-Christian mythology thrown in. (Have I mentioned before my love for schlocky Judeo-Christian horror movies, like “The Omen” and “The Prophesy”? I have!)

I was having trouble figuring out what else to say about it, really, so I went to see what people wrote on amazon, and more than a few mentioned how immature and dislikable the protagonist was, which embarrassed me a bit, since I rather liked him. James Stark, aka, Sandman Slim, was literally sent to Hell during a magic-ritual-gone-wrong in his late teens, and the novels opens with him finding his way back to Earth eleven years later, set on revenge toward those who sent him down.

He returns a bit psychotic, with some serious impulse-control issues, but I give him a lot of leeway, what with his early adulthood in Hell. As the backstory began unfolding, I realized that it reminded me a bit of The Magicians. Kinsey has previously favorably reviewed The Magicians, but when I read it later, I didn’t like it much at all – I thought all of the characters were spoiled brats who made everything and everyone around them worse. Sandman Slim felt like a natural conclusion to The Magicians – all of their arrogant blundering has finally bit them in the ass, and the one bitten the worst has grown up (a little) and is going to make the rest of them pay. It was just very satisfying, and has seriously been the best thing in the last couple really crappy weeks.

Even More from BookBub

by Anna

Murder at Merisham Lodge

By Celina Grace

Merisham_LodgeFinally back to actual good-quality books from Bookbub! I tried to claim that perhaps my special discrimination for these free books only worked on mysteries, but Rebecca isn’t buying it. Anyway, this is another historical mystery, set in 1930, but what really makes it stand out is that the detective duo is a couple of maids at the titular Merisham Lodge. When the lady of the house dies in mysterious circumstances, they find that their very invisibility to the ‘upstairs’ members of the household make them ideal investigators. They work with a charming and patient investigator with a refreshing lack of romance. In addition to an intriguing plot that I couldn’t guess at all, the details of the below-stairs work and lives is fascinating.

Death at the Manor

By Celina Grace

Death_at_the_ManorWhile Murder at Merisham Lodge is considered Book 1 of the series, there is a previous novella, alluded to but not spoiled in the novel, in which the two maids come across their very first suspicious death. I immediately paid a whopping $0.99 for Death at the Manor, which was quite short and not as well fleshed out as the novel, but still very entertaining and well worth a dollar.

Hushabye

By Celina Grace

HushabyeThe novella then included an excerpt for Hushabye, the first in a series of modern-day murder mysteries by Grace, featuring newly transferred Detective Sergeant Kate Redman, who must familiarize herself with her new team while investigating the kidnapping of an infant and murder of a nanny. I discovered that it was free for Kindle, as well, so I downloaded it in full and read it in about a day. The novel lacks some of the originality of the historical series, but is still very, very good, also with a plot that kept me guessing and a wide variety of interesting characters.

No Game for a Dame

By M. Ruth Myers

No_Game_for_a_DameOn the other hand, this looked really promising – a female hard-boiled detective in the 40s – but fell real short of my expectations. The 1940s setting just felt like a gimmick, with obvious and clunky references to period-appropriate elements. Also, for some extremely peculiar reason the author also kept the ugly racial terms, which I don’t like in books actually written in the 40s and which I’m not going to tolerate in books written more recently. Less problematic, but still a peeve of mine, is when so-called tough ladies are written in ways where they just come across as bitchy. True tough ladies – and I’ve known a lot – are straight talkers that don’t take bullshit, but they are not needlessly rude or aggressive, and it is a lazy cop-out to write them that way.

More from BookBub

by Anna

The Witch Hunter

By Nicole R Taylor

Witch_HunterI wanted to keep my BookBub free-book lucky streak so badly that I tried to convince myself that The Witch Hunter was a good book until I just couldn’t lie to myself anymore. It starts off promising, if extremely derivative of Charlaine Harris’ True Blood series: antebellum vampires feuding with backwoods werewolves, with various women caught in the middle, all in swampy, small-town Louisiana.

Now, I actually liked Harris’ books quite a bit (before the series went off the rails entirely), but there were a couple of points that detracted for me, and this book actually corrects those issues right off the bat. The Witch Hunter features three female protagonists introduced early on, and all three are given distinct identities and relationships to each other, unrelated to the male characters. The central male protagonist comes across as a complete asshole, but in a refreshing change, all of the other characters fully recognize and deprecate this about him, though they also then excuse it to a ridiculous degree.

So that’s the good; here’s the bad. The writing and plotting are amateur-level sloppy. In fact, there are enough typos that I wondered whether the book was self-published without the involvement of any sort of editor. As the plot picked up, the characterizations, which I’d previously admired, couldn’t keep up and shifted so wildly from scene to scene that they all appeared either mentally deficient or psychotic. It was a drag to the final scene, which ends in a cliff hanger that I will not be following up on.

Entangled

By Nikki Jefford

EntangledEntangled had the reverse affect: I was groaning right off the bat, but once I’d settled into hating just about every character, protagonist and antagonist alike, I was drawn into the plot itself and looked forward to seeing where it went. The absurd plot was what originally drew me to the novel (well, that and being free): teenage witch Graylee dies mysteriously in her sleep, and even more mysteriously, wakes up several weeks later in the body of her twin sister. Only handsome, brooding warlock Raj, who had been lurking around Graylee recently, suspects the switch!

Well, that’s not exactly true: Graylee tends to tell just about everyone she meets, until a good half dozen people are in on the secret. This so-called ‘secret’ is that she and her twin switch off consciousness, each having control of the body on one day and then unconsciousness the next. Graylee complains extensively about how shallow, jealous, and malicious her twin is, while at the same time mocking less attractive classmates and the differently abled. She also seems to have an oversized antagonism toward her twin, which made me suspect an unreliable narrator, giving the book a greater sense of suspense and intrigue than it would otherwise have had. In the end, the unpredictable insanity of the plot saved this book for me – it wasn’t a good book by any stretch, but it was sure an entertaining one!

A Perfect Union of Contrary Things

by Anna

By Sarah Jensen with Maynard James Keenan

A_Perfect_UnionRebecca referred obliquely to this book in her comment to my previous review, saying that she guessed I had lost all perspective of writing quality while in the middle of this book. We all have books that we are too embarrassed to review on this site, and thus admit to reading. I was torn about this one, but I think it is time for me to admit my love for Tool. I am a 40-year-old, mild-mannered woman, and yet I just love Tool’s music. I try to ignore the general Tool fanbase as much as possible, and honestly I’m super conflicted about frontman Maynard James Keenan – I have so much admiration for his music, but every time he stops singing and starts talking, my admiration steadily falls.

Still, when Keenan partnered his long-time friend Sarah Jensen on an official biography, I was certainly interested (though still a bit embarrassed).

The Forward opens with “Maynard James Keenan is a mysterious fountain of constant creation. From his soul-searching lyrics, and extraordinary music in multiple bands to his astoundingly delicious wine, he has permeated our culture like no other artist. He straddles guises and genres and makes us wonder what could fuel such original superhuman output.”

Uh oh, I thought.

Skipped the rest of the Forward to the Prologue: “He sings of the fire’s spirit, of the taste of ashes on the tongue, of the truth on the other side of the mirror. He sings of the desert that is no desert place but a land breathing, flying, crawling, dying—alive with spirits of ancestors and the untold tales of children to come.”

Oh, nooo.

Continue reading →

BookBub

by Anna

I’ve been sort of sulking over Kinsey suddenly discovering Dorothy Sayers and being able to read all of her books for the very first time, and wishing that I could discover some amazing new author like that, too. Then I ran across BookBub a few weeks ago, and while I’m not saying it is bringing me any Sayers-quality books, I’m having an enormous amount of fun with it!

BookBub is basically a site that lists the many, many free and discounted ebooks available through various venders. You can sign up to get daily emails with recommended deals, and I currently look forward each day to seeing what is on tap! Even if most of the books look terrible, I still love reading the little blurbs about them, and I’ve already downloaded five new books to try out, cost-free! Out of those, I’ve read two, and enjoyed both quite a bit, so I’m two-for-two, so far!

last_necromancerMy first free download was The Last Necromancer, by C. J. Archer. Set in Victorian London, Charlie is a young woman who has been living as a boy on the streets for the past five years after her vicar father threw her out after discovering she could raise the dead. She is kidnapped by a secret society trying to track down all necromancers for an unknown purpose. The secret society, of course, is headed by a handsome and fascinating man, who unfortunately turns out to be a very problematic love interest, the weakest part of the book. It sounds ridiculous, and it is, but I still got a kick out of it!

maids_of_misfortuneMaids of Misfortune, by M. Louisa Locke, is actually a good book, set in Victorian-era San Francisco, where Annie Fuller runs a boarding house and a small clairvoyance business out of it, in order to make ends meet. Right of the bat, it is charming, with wonderful details about both businesses and the various characters she meets through them. The characters are all so well written, with nuanced and realistic humanity, that it completely made up for the somewhat predictable mystery. It continually surprised me with little realistic details that most books brush right over, and which I appreciated a lot. I not only highly recommend it, I’m looking forward to continuing the series.

I excitedly told Rebecca about this, and she hasn’t had quite the positive experience I have. For one, she was lazier about setting up her account, so she wasn’t getting as interesting recommendations. She has also been not quite so fortunate in her downloads, though I’m ascribing at least some of that to a lack of discrimination. She downloaded thirteen, started five, finished three, and mildly enjoyed one. She’s sticking with it, though, for the love of browsing and then getting free books.

Honestly, the best thing about it is how completely risk-free it is: no cost and no clutter!

Some topical advice from “The Thin Man”

by Anna

The stream of “alternative facts” from the White House over the last few days reminded me of a passage from one of my favorite books, Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man, which I’d like to share (no spoilers, but mild 1930s sexism):

We went into Mimi’s bedroom. She was sitting in a deep chair by a window looking very pleased with herself. She smiled gayly at me and said: “My soul is spotless now. I’ve confessed everything.”
            Guild stood by a table wiping his face with a handkerchief. There were still some drops of sweat on his temples, and his face seemed old and tired. The knife and chain, and the handkerchief they had been wrapped in, were on the table. “Finished?” I asked.
            “I don’t know, and that’s a fact,” he said. He turned his head to address Mimi: “Would you say we were finished?”
            Mimi laughed. “I can’t imagine what more there would be.”
            “Well,” Guild said slowly, somewhat reluctantly, “in that case I guess I’d like to talk to Mr. Charles, if you’ll excuse us for a couple of minutes.” He folded his handkerchief carefully and put it in his pocket.
            “You can talk here.” She got up from the chair. “I’ll go out and talk to Mrs. Charles till you’re through.” She tapped my cheek playfully with the tip of a forefinger as she passed me. “Don’t let them say too horrid things about me, Nick.” Andy opened the door for her, shut it behind her, and made the o and the blowing noise again.
            I lay down on the bed. “Well,” I asked, “what’s what?”
            Guild cleared his throat. “She told us about finding this here chain and knife on the floor where the Wolf dame had most likely broke it off fighting with Wynant, and she told us the reasons why she’d hid it till now. Between you and me, that don’t make any too much sense, looking at it reasonably, but maybe that ain’t the way to look at it in this case. To tell you the plain truth, I don’t know what to make of her in a lot of ways, I don’t for a fact.”
            “The chief thing,” I advised them, “is not to let her tire you out. When you catch her in a lie, she admits it and gives you another lie to take its place and, when you catch her in that one, admits it and gives you still another one, and so on. Most people—even women—get discouraged after you’ve caught them in the third or fourth straight lie and fall back on either the truth or silence, but not Mimi. She keeps trying and you’ve got to be careful or you’ll find yourself believing her, not because she seems to be telling the truth, but simply because you’re tired of disbelieving her.”

So, let’s do our best to take Mr. Charles’ advice and not get tired. We need to keep calling Trump on his lies each and every time. It will be exhausting and often seem pointless, but I think it is important to keep reminding ourselves what the truth is and reminding him that we won’t be exhausted into believing him.

And Then There Were None

by Anna

By Agatha Christie

So, over the holiday season, Rebecca and I finally broke down and got Amazon Prime. I’d been resisting because Amazon does some really shady stuff with pricing and publishing, but that free two-day shipping is really seductive. The streaming service isn’t so bad, either, and I finally got a chance to see the recent BBC production of “And Then There Were None,” which I’ve been eagerly waiting to be widely available. I remember reading and really enjoying the novel in high school, so I remembered the basic premise – that ten people are invited on a holiday weekend at a remote island mansion, where they are murdered one by one over the course of a few days – though I didn’t remember all the details.

aidan-turnerI have to admit that I mostly wanted to watch the miniseries because I am a shameful sucker for a pretty face, and Aidan Turner is just so damn attractive. He is so attractive that I’ve watched two very mediocre shows (“Being Human” and “Poldark”) solely in order to look at him. He was very good in this, though his character also turned out to be the most problematic part for me.

Mild spoiler from the first few chapters: all the people on the island are accused of murdering one or two people, except for Turner’s character, who unrepentantly admits to killing about 20 African tribesmen. The other characters are appalled, but not enough to my mind, given we are talking about a large-scale massacre. The other characters make stifled British exclamations over it, but still seem to view him as dangerously fascinating. It really did come across as killing 20 Africans is equal in “badness” to killing one to two English people.

and-then-there-were-noneThat was the one sour note for me; overall, it was all very dramatic and fun to watch. Since there was a fair amount of sex and violence, I wondered what liberties the show had taken to ‘modernize’ the source material, so I checked out the book, and it turns out, not much. That Agatha Christie was quite the salty lady! The show ups the ante just a bit on both, but still sticks remarkably close to the original novel.

I’m not going to spoil anything more of the plot – murders! sex! violence! racism! – but Agatha Christie said that she considered this her most difficult plot to write, and her care and eye for detail really shows. Since I already knew whodunit, I could see all the small ways she had revealed that person throughout the plotting, which provided additional enjoyment to rereading it.