Author Archives: Anna

In The Woods

by Anna

By Tana French

Book cover: In The WoodsI really liked this book: it has a plot that I couldn’t anticipate and building suspense that I couldn’t put down, and the characters are where it really shines. The narrating detective’s female partner, especially, is tough, smart, and likable, and that’s a lot less common than it should be. My favorite passages of the book just follow the various officers working through the minutiae of the investigation. However, there were a couple of issues that kept me from loving it:

First, a pet peeve: I just hate foreshadowing. I know that is an important writing device for building suspense, but I hate it when the narrator says stuff like, “if only I knew then where this would all lead” or “at the time I was so sure I was right.” I just hate it, and this book was chock full of it. I will say that French put it to better service in this novel than I’ve seen in used before, but it still didn’t make me like it. I prefer to advance through the story at the same time as the narrator, and see missteps retroactively as well.

Second, from the very beginning, even on the back cover blurb (so this isn’t a spoiler; the full plot spoiler follows below the cut), it is known that the narrating detective’s past is related to this new crime. Though the book primarily focuses on the present-day murder, the cold case, with the same setting and similar victims, runs as a parallel undercurrent. Our narrator knows he shouldn’t be working this case, but he is obsessed and becomes increasingly unbalanced throughout the book. French does a very good job of subtly depicting his unraveling mentality, and I gradually began losing patience with his growing belligerence and incompetence and all-encompassing self-involvement.

So, I found the actual reading of the book a bit more a chore than I like in my for-fun books, but the twist ending (which I couldn’t even guess at) made it all worth-while, and I want to bring it up because I want to gasp over it with other readers, specifically Kinsey, who recommended it to me and mentions the second and fourth in the series here.

WARNING: I’m seriously spoiling the entire mystery in the following paragraph. Pet peeves aside, I really do recommend this book if you like the grittier-type murder mysteries and suspense, and if you haven’t already read it, you should check it out without my spoiler. Continue reading →

Femme Fatales: Femme and A Dame To Kill For

by Anna

Femme

By Bill Pronzini

Book Cover: FemmeAh, Bill Pronzini. You were one of my early introductions to pulp mysteries, and I have a lot of left-over affection for you, but I’m afraid I may have outgrown your nameless detective.

I hadn’t read a Bill Pronzini novel in at least 15 years, but I ran across this very short novella in the new releases shelf at the library and picked it up, as I do love a femme fatale! I also had very fond memories of Pronzini’s nameless detective series from high school; they are somewhat run-of-the-mill novels, but are told in first person by a detective who is never named (I was also at the time watching Clint Eastwood’s “The Man with No Name” series, so it was a bit of a theme).

I read Femme in the space of one delayed flight, so probably over 3 hours total, and it was the fluffiest of fluff. I have a bit of a problem with novellas, actually. Whereas authors seem to put extra effort into short stories to be concise and compact as independent entities, novellas have a tendency to just come off as reading like general outlines for a future novel, and this one was no exception.

The plot, characters, and setting were quite generic, which is especially problematic when it comes to a femme fatale. A woman who uses her very femininity to lure men to death and destruction really needs to stand out. This particular femme seemed no different than the average murderess on any given Law & Order episode. I get that it is more difficult to make violence stand out in this modern age, but that’s what makes writing a femme fatale such a challenge.

Now, if you want someone who is up to that challenge:

A Dame To Kill For

By Frank Miller

Book Cover: A Dame to Kill ForFrank Miller’s A Dame To Kill For is the basis for the new Sin City movie coming out next year, and coincidentally the only Frank Miller graphic novel that Rebecca owns. I really enjoyed the first Sin City movie and was torn over whether to read the graphic novel for the second one, and thereby “spoil” it for myself, but finally decided that part of the fun of the movie is seeing what a brilliant job it does of bringing to life each individual illustrated panel. (I saw in a “making of Sin City” that they actually used the graphic novel as the original story boards for the movie, which makes a lot of sense, given Frank Miller’s very cinematic style.)

While it is no spoiler that Frank Miller loves a femme fatale (or ten), I’m going to go ahead and spoil this particular book (and upcoming movie), so proceed with caution. Continue reading →

Rest In Peace, Elmore Leonard

by Anna

Elmore LeonardMan, 2013 has not been a good year for authors! Today, Elmore Leonard passed away, and even if you don’t think you are familiar with him, you are sure to be familiar with some of the movies and television shows he wrote or inspired: Out of Sight, Get Shorty, 3:10 to Yuma, and Justified, to name just a few. I was first introduced to Leonard through the very short-lived tv show Maximum Bob which ran for just seven hysterical episodes in 1998, but inspired me to read the novel with the same name and become a lifelong fan of the author.

I consider him one of the founding fathers of the craziness-in-Florida niche genre continued by Dave Barry and Carl Hiaasen, and if you haven’t read any of his work, you should definitely check it out if you want to laugh at some head-shaking craziness that doesn’t seem that farfetched anymore. Honestly, with Florida, you laugh so you don’t cry, and Leonard is very good at making the reader laugh. In eulogy, Vulture posted Leonard’s Ten Rules of Good Writing, and it is easy to see why I am such a fan.

—Anna

Magic Rises

by Anna

By Ilona Andrews

Book Cover: Magic RisesThis is the sixth book in Ilona Andrew’s Kate Daniels series, and Rebecca has previously introduced the series here.* It is my favorite in the over-abundance of series about spunky women in a werewolf- and vampire-populated world, but to my mind the series peaked at book 3 and went downhill from there. (As an aside, Rebecca and I had a lengthy discussion about whether this is a common phenomena; are trilogies so standard because authors tend to lose steam after the third book? There are a lot of series that support that thesis, and only a few that belie it.)

Maggie Q as Nikita

As an aside on first impressions, when I first got the book, I was somewhat taken aback by the cover. The featured woman looks somewhat different than previous illustrations of Kate Daniels, which is fine, artists change visions, etc., etc. But, doesn’t she look strikingly similar to someone else instead? I feel like, as an artist, you should take your inspiration from wherever you like, but maybe don’t make it so blatant.

A very mild spoiler for the series: book 3 settled a romantic tension that had run through all three initial books, and all the subsequent books have had relationship drama that I don’t care for, and increased violence, possibly to counter-balance the relationship drama, now that I think about it. A lot of the violence, too, was starting to be directed toward various magical (and deadly) creatures that populate the world, and I have a big problem with violence against animals, even fictional ones. A true hypocrite, I don’t have nearly the same problem with violence against people, which is why I was fine with the earlier books. I was still committed to the series, but was not anticipating this book with the eagerness I had earlier in the series.

In fact, this book way exceeded my expectations, and I believe rejuvenated the series a bit in a very clever way. Andrews changes the setting from Atlanta, Georgia, where all previous books are set, all the way to Europe, so there is a freshness just in the change of scene. With the new setting, she also constrains the number of characters, which had been expanding exponentially with each book, until the action started to get muddled with so many players. Magic Rises is pared down to just a cleanly written and plotted, extraordinarily fun supernatural adventure, and I am just so, so happy to have my favorite fluff series back.

One caveat to all of my praises: I went back to the earlier books to double-check a minor character’s name, and it reminded me of the casual humor and one-liners that made the early books such a pleasure. As the books have ratcheted up the drama and tension, that humor has mostly disappeared and I miss it. I almost feel like that as the authors have become more accomplished, they perhaps have edited out those parts as being less polished, and that makes me sad.

* There has been some update in information from this original review. The series has been expanded to ten books instead of the previously planned seven, when the authors realized that they would not be able to wrap it up conclusively in just two more books.

Dark Triumph

by Anna

By Robin LaFevers

Book Cover: Dark TriumphKinsey recommended the first in the His Fair Assassin series, Grave Mercy, just a couple of weeks ago as a fun historical romance about deadly nuns. I was at the library when I read her post, and figured, why not? I checked it out, despite the size of the book (large), the cover of the book (beautiful girl posing melodramatically), and the inside blurb description (“For how can she deliver Death’s vengeance upon a target who, against her will, has stolen her heart?”), and I gobbled it up within the next week. It is just nonstop fun with the historical intrigue, which I liked better than Kinsey, and lots of romantic hijinx. I had a great time reading it, but wasn’t sure I was going to continue to read the series until I read the little teaser for the sequel in the back, at which point I immediately went back to the library to get the sequel.

Dark Triumph follows a peripheral character introduced in Grave Mercy, another, more troubled novice of the nunnery for the God of Death. The book focuses more on the character and her past than the surrounding politics, and is thus able to make her more nuanced and interesting to follow. The two books remind me a bit of Ilona Andrew’s Edge series, where the first one is lots of fun action with somewhat generic heroine and hero, and the second one takes the more interesting side character and continues his story. While I liked Grave Mercy, I loved Dark Triumph, and literally struggled to put in down at times within the three to four days that I devoured it. So Grave Mercy is worth reading if only to then read Dark Triumph (which does not stand alone, so needs to be read sequentially).

I would be reading the third book in what I believe will be a trilogy if it was out already, but unfortunately I have to wait until Spring 2014. I’m not terribly intrigued by the heroine, already introduced in the background of both books, but I’m hooked on the series now. In the meantime, I will leave you with a phrase from a critic’s praise for Grave Mercy that I found amusing (from the back cover panel of Dark Triumph): “a plot that nods to history while defying accuracy.” (Yep, that seems about right.)

P.S. – While looking for the book cover image, I ran across the author’s website, where she has posted the first chapter of Dark Triumph, which gives an excellent preview to the book, and also does spoil Grave Mercy a bit, so use caution.

—Anna

Among Others

by Anna

By Jo Walton

Book Cover: Among OthersKinsey introduced me to Jo Walton through her Small Change series, which is actually pretty brilliantly titled, now that I think about it. The three books, titled Farthing, Ha’penny, and Half a Crown, are solidly written English murder mysteries with the added brilliance of being set in an alternate history in the 1930s and 40s in which England supported the German Nazi Party (which is not all that improbable: if not for Wallis Simpson, Edward, a known nazi sympathizer, might have stayed on the throne). Anyway, the mysteries themselves are intriguing, but it is the setting and characters that really make those books shine.

When I ran across several (very favorable) reviews for her new book, Among Others, I added it to my to-read list immediately. It was described in the reviews as a coming-of-age story set in a world of magic and fairies, and I was so there! It…isn’t exactly that. I still really, really liked it, but the magic is very much in the background, an alternate setting like in the Small Change series. It follows a teenage girl from Wales recovering from personal tragedy while attending a very British preparatory school, and on occasion she confers with local fairies for advice. The magic of the world is utilized very effectively as a way to look at the world around you and make decisions for the direction of your life. I quickly got over any disappointment in the marginalized fantasy because once again, the characters and settings were completely engaging.

I’ve insisted that Rebecca read it next because I think she’ll appreciate the one aspect of the book that I found a bit alienating. Very minor spoiler: Mori, the heroine, finds comfort and friendship in a SF book club held at her local library. Much of Among Others is a love letter to the genre of science fiction and all the great authors that founded the genre. I’m not much of a SF reader, though; I had only read a few books by the authors mentioned, and I had liked even less. (The book is set in 1979, so I kept having to bite my tongue against criticism over the omission of more recent authors.) The heroine and the club are very sniffy about people who don’t like science fiction, and the book does such a good job of carrying that feeling through in the writing that I felt the alienation a bit as a reader.

—Anna

Dark Places

by Anna

By Gillian Flynn

Book Cover: Dark PlacesDark Places made me feel terrible, but at the same time I read it straight through in just three days, staying up far too late into the nights.

Kinsey has previously reviewed two of Gillian Flynn’s novels, Gone Girl and Sharp Objects, and had recommended Dark Places to our friend Cara. (Kinsey in fact said that when Cara asked for summer reading recommendations, Kinsey, knowing her tastes, combed through all of her recent favorites for the most grim and depressing.) When I went to visit Cara a couple of weeks ago, I picked up her copy to just check out the first few pages. One of the first things I did when I got home was put a reserve on it at my library and then waited with literary withdrawal symptoms (lack of focus, irritability…) for my request to come in.

The book follows Libby Day, the sole survivor at the age of seven of her family’s massacre, supposedly by her older brother in a Satanist sacrifice. At the beginning of the book, she is a severely emotionally stunted adult who simply lives off of the charity donations that accumulated during the news frenzy of her family tragedy. She is nearing the end of her funds when she is contacted by a club of true crime fans who want to pay her to help them prove her brother’s innocence. She agrees solely out of financial desperation but becomes caught up in the investigation herself.

The book seesaws between Libby’s current search for the truth and first-person perspectives from both her mother and brother on the day before the massacre. I mean this as a total compliment, but as I read through it, the sense of doom and accumulating circumstances felt very real, like gathering storm clouds. (This is not a good book for Rebecca.) Like Kinsey described in Gone Girl, as a reader you have no idea how it is going to pan out, and keep wavering in each chapter: did the brother do it? Surely not, but wait, did he, though?

One night, after finally tearing myself away from the book, I was thinking about how insane all of this Satanist stuff sounds, like just completely bonkers, and all of a sudden I remembered it! For those of you who didn’t live through the 80’s, it sounds completely absurd, and it absolutely is, but it was also truly there: this very real fear that there were Satanist cults lurking in every town, just waiting to grab young children off the street and sacrifice them in a violent ritual. It is so ridiculous (and eventually discovered to be totally unfounded) in retrospect that I had completely forgotten about it until this book, and suddenly I remembered as a child, peering into graffitied tunnels (where I’m sure the local teens just went to smoke) and thinking, “that could be a lair for the Satanists.”

It really kind of boggles the mind when this kind of national hysteria occurs, and one of the most powerful aspects of this book is that it really brings home how unlucky individuals can be destroyed before we all recover our senses.

—Anna

The Outlaws of Sherwood

by Anna

By Robin McKinley

Book Cover: Outlaws of SherwoodI mentioned The Outlaws of Sherwood in my previous review as a possible non-homophobic treatment of a heroine-in-disguise romantic plot. I decided that since it had been years since I’d actually read it, though, I was a bit fuzzy on the actual treatment, so figured I’d better reread it.

Robin McKinley is a favorite author of mine, so even though this isn’t one of my favorite books of hers, it is still better than most books out there. It is also the most realistic and least romanticized version of the Robin Hood story that I’ve ever read/seen/heard. This can make it a bit slow at times—Robin is often unsure of himself and uncomfortable with his increasing renown—but the characters really shine. The outlaws of Sherwood Forest are desperate people who are simply trying to stay alive in a time of political and economic upheaval while keeping as much a moral compass as possible in their circumstances.

Unfortunately, per my previous review, the Little John storyline was not quite as extensive as I’d remembered, with the woman-in-disguise element dealt with summarily enough that it does not really address the issue of potential homophobia. On the flip side, the female characters themselves are, I believe, the most interesting and nuanced characters, so at least there is a strong feminist theme.

—Anna

Seven Daughters and Seven Sons

by Anna

By Barbara Cohen and Bahija Lovejoy

Book Cover: Seven Daughters and Seven SonsRebecca and I were discussing the other day whether it is possible to have a romantic storyline with the old trope wherein the heroine dresses as a boy without including even a hint of homophobia. You know: girl is disguised as boy, girl meets and falls in love with boy, and boy discovers the disguise when he also falls in love with girl since he just knew he could never have those kinds of feelings for another boy. The Fourth Vine writes up an excellent analysis of the inherent homophobic issues in Georgette Heyer’s The Masqueraders here.

I had suggested Robin McKinley’s Outlaws of Sherwood as a possibility, in which Little John says that after he began to have feelings for an apparent boy, he studied her more closely to see what was attracting him since he had never before felt that way for a boy, and then saw through the disguise. It is a fine point, but an important one that he didn’t automatically know that she was a woman because of his feelings, so he wasn’t immediately repudiating homosexual attraction. Confusion instead of repulsion.

Rebecca suggested Seven Sons and Seven Daughters, in which the middle daughter in a family of seven daughters dresses as a man in order to go out and make her fortune in trade like her male cousins do. I’d never read it, but was at loose ends, book-wise, so figured I’d give it a shot. It is also quite short, since it is more Young Readers than Young Adult (I would estimate late elementary/early middle school). It does still have some of the inherent anti-gay sentiment, though more by omission in that it never occurs to the love interest that he could be romantically attracted to a boy. Either he has a strong brother-like friendship with a young man or a great romance with a young woman, and the gender of his person of interest will determine that. Considering that this book is the retelling of an eleventh-century Iraqi folktale, that is pretty good.

More interesting than the treatment of the romance-in-disguise, though, was the description of the evolution of Sharia law in the Middle East. The heroine Buran’s family is very poor and pitied by the locals because having seven daughters and no sons at all is clearly a curse from Allah. Sons are how one gains wealth and prestige, and Buran’s wealthy uncle is considered additionally blessed with his seven sons. When coming up with her idea to set out as a man, Buran thinks back over the previous centuries, when women were free to be “musicians, scholars, warriors, poets, and merchants,” and describes how the caliphs had given their power away to the conquering Persians, who brought with them the hajib, and then the Turks, who brought even stricter restrictions for women.

Even though the book itself is very clearly pro-women, the pervading anti-women sentiment in the general society can be a bit shocking to modern ears. One reason Buran is able to stay disguised as male for several years is that no one believes that women have the minds for business strategy, so if someone is successful in business, that person is unquestionably male, all appearances aside.

As evidenced by this quite long review, this 220-page, large print book for young readers gave me quite a bit of food for thought, especially in our current political discourse on the Middle East, Islam, terrorism, gender roles, definitions of traditional families, and sexual equality. Not so bad for a couple day’s reading of a folk tale and love story.

—Anna

The Tightrope Walker

by Anna

By Dorothy Gilman

Book Cover: The Tightrope WalkerDorothy Gilman is most well known for her Mrs. Pollifax mystery series, but I like her stand-alone books better, and I like The Tightrope Walker best of all. Actually, Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore reminded me a bit of it, and I meant to mention that in the comments of Kinsey’s review, but I forgot, so I figured I might as well reread The Tightrope Walker and review it on its own. Both books feature a central character who is sort of lost and floating through life without a purpose until they get work in an eccentric shop, and both are drawn into a mystery through an artifact within the shop. How’s that for a very specific genre of books?

Both also have a sort of sincerity in the characters and the message that is not that common in modern books. I am very definitely a Gen-Xer and sincerity mostly makes me super uncomfortable (I am way more at ease with satire and irony), but in both of these books, I find it fresh, original, and charming. The Tightrope Walker is especially impressive, I think, with how it positively addresses the newish movements in feminism, psychotherapy, and new age philosophy in the 1970s. The heroine has childhood trauma that she works through with a variety of processes, but she is so optimistic about every movement and philosophy that as a reader you see the attractions of them all, even the ones that are more scorned today (the love interest is introduced early in the book doing meditation in a portable pyramid). It still reads so modern that every time I read it, I am a bit surprised when the heroine buys some bellbottom slacks.

—Anna