Author Archives: Rebecca

Touch of Power by Maria V. Snyder

by Rebecca

Touch of Power
Maria Snyder
2011

I read the first few (short) chapters on Amazon, got hooked, checked the book out from the library and read it in an evening. It was a fun light read that was pretty much just what I needed to relax with. It’s one of those books that balances between being a fantasy-adventure novel with a strong romance plot line and being a romance novel with a strong fantasy-adventure plotline.

I believe this is the second fantasy universe for this author, and while the universes have distinct rules of magic and society, the character dynamics in Touch of Power were really similar to those in Poison Study (the first book in the other universe). If you like the one, you’ll probably like the other, (I certainly did) but go in expecting the same type of thing rather than anything spectacularly new or inventive.

The plot is a really common one for romance novels: There are two secretly awesome people – sometimes their awesome is secret from the world, other times their awesome is just secret from each other – who each feel that the other person has wronged them in some way. They then proceed to act either aggressively or passive aggressively at each other in response and things escalate until a final showdown reveals that they have both misunderstood the situation and wronged the other, not in the original perceived acts but in their responses. This can be written at various levels of quality, but when done well it’s a wonderfully self-indulgent bit of character drama. When done poorly, it convinces me that both characters are judgmental idiots. Snyder does one of the better jobs of writing this plot line (although no where near as good as Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice) and manages to largely avoid the pitfall of idiocy.

In this book, Healers with magical healing abilities have been blamed for the great plague that swept the land and thus they are generally killed on sight. Our heroine is a Healer and our hero is a guy who badly needs someone healed and will do whatever it takes to help his friend. Under the circumstances, you can see why they start off with the wrong impression of each other. It was a great deal of fun seeing the characters struggle to work together and waiting to see when the big reveal would happen.

I’ll discuss that  a little more under the spoiler cut, but in general, this is a fun book. I enjoyed it and I recommend it the same way I would recommend a summer blockbuster or a soap opera. It’s not high literature, but I’m rarely in the mood for high literature. It’s fun and relaxing and should be enjoyed as such.

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“Magic Bites” by Ilona Andrews

by Rebecca

Magic Bites
by Ilona Andrews
2007

Since I reviewed Magic Gifts yesterday, I decided I needed to go back and introduce the universe. Magic Bites is the first in a seven-book series, five of which have been published at this point and two of which I am avidly waiting for. While each book has it’s own stand-alone plot, the characters develop across books. There are also four short stories and an upcoming book that are tangential to the main series.

But first, some background:

There have been a huge number of books published recently with:
1. Spunky female protagonist
2. Vampires
3. Werewolves

Off the top of my head, authors who have written these books are:
Patricia Briggs
Stephanie Meyer
Laurel K. Hamilton
Charlaine Harris
Robin McKinely
Ilona Andrews

And whole lot more.

These are, frankly, just the ones that I’ve personally read, and read recently. (Some of these I liked, some of these I didn’t, and I’ll tell you all about it if you ask nicely… or if you refrain from yelling “No!” loudly enough.) There were a lot more whose covers I’ve seen in bookstores and simply couldn’t bear to read because I was positively glutted with spunky female protagonists dealing with vampires and werewolves (SFPDwV&W).

However, I am still going to write a review of Magic Bites recommending this book to all of you other readers out there who are similarly glutted on SFPDwV&W.

It’s fabulous and you should read it.

Ilona Andrews the author, incidentally, is actually made up of a married couple: Ilona Andrews the person and Gordon Andrews her husband. I went to a convention they were at recently and got my copy of Magic Bites signed by Gordon Andrews. He wrote:

This book is terrible. Start with Magic Strikes. It’s the best.
To Rebecca
Gordon and Ilona Andrews
Don’t read this book!

I, on the other hand, am perfectly willing to tell you that despite being half of the author, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about and you should definitely read Magic Bites, and you should read it before reading Magic Strikes (which is the third book in the seven book series.)

Magic Bites is their first published novel and shows some of the uncertainty of a first book, but were it shines is in world building. This book is an introduction to the characters and to the world. The characters are fun and idiosyncratic and the world is magnificent.

It’s urban fantasy, set in Atlanta, Georgia, with magic, but the book explains how and why the magic is there, from an educated layperson’s perspective.

The werewolves aren’t just werewolves, they have an extremely contagious magic-based virus that has both physical and mental symptoms. They have a culture and a reason for that culture.

Vampires, on the other hand, are dead. They are dead and they are bloodthirsty and they will kill you unless piloted by a “Master of the Dead.” The Masters of the Dead have a massive corporate/cult structure of their own.

And our main character, spunky female protagonist that she is, has motivation and history and reason for all of her character strengths and weaknesses.

This book introduces the reader to a world that has vampires and werewolves and a spunky female protagonist and also, unlike pretty much all other others, makes sense.

(In fact, it makes enough sense that I can quibble about little mistakes in the logical structure of the world because there’s enough logic there for there to be mistakes! If you’re at all interested, I would absolutely love to nitpick in the comments section, because this is a book, and the beginning of a series, well worth reading and thinking about and nitpicking.)

“Magic Gifts” by Ilona Andrews

by Rebecca

“Magic Gifts”
by Ilona Andrews
2011

I like Vampire-Werewolf type books. And I have strong opinions regarding which ones are good and which ones… aren’t, but for now, I want to talk about something that one of my favorite authors did for Christmas:

She (actually “they” since Ilona Andrews is a husband-wife duo, but I’m going to go on and refer to her as her) gave her fans a novella. It’s free for download from her website, in pdf, kindle, or epub from her blog.*

The story has Kate Daniels (mercenary fighter and only recently acknowledged consort to Curran) and Curran (Beast Lord) dealing with vampires, attorneys, neo-vikings, and fae. All they wanted was to go on a nice date, but stuff keeps on happening. It’s awesome!

The events happen after the events of the fifth book in the Kate Daniels series and in the background of the sixth book (Gunmetal Magic, which focuses on Andrea Nash, Kate’s best friend and coworker).

As a heads-up, because this is a Christmas present, free to the fans, it was not given a professional lay out or a final professional proof reading, so expect a few typos and layout problems, but the story itself hangs together and the world building is where this author really shines and she shines here, too.

So thank you, Ilona Andrews, for a wonderful Christmas present, and I hope readers here enjoy it, too.

* This was posted late on Christmas Eve 2011, and will be available for two weeks. After that, it will be cleaned up and made available as a short story included at the end of Gunmetal Magic.

“Mastiff” by Tamora Pierce

by Rebecca

Mastiff coverMastiff
Tamora Pierce
(2011)

Despite the many other things I should have been doing, I bought and read Tamora Pierce’s latest book as soon as it came out. I loved it, of course.

Given that I loved it, of course, you can see that I might just be a tad biased in my review. I grew up with this universe. I love these books, and I love this author. Her first book (Alanna: The First Adventure) was published in 1983, and since then she’s written 26 other novels, generally broken into quartets, and set in one of two universes.

Both of the universes she writes are magical fantasy: Tortall has knights and wars and a pantheon of gods; Emelan has mages and priests and pirates. Fun!

Each quartet of books stands alone, although there are often brief appearances of the characters from previous quartets for the delight of those readers who have recognize them.  And while the characters develop through their quartets, the plots of each individual book also stand alone for the most part.

Mastiff, her most recent book, is set in Tortall and is the third book in a rare trilogy rather than a quartet. In Terrier, Becca Cooper was in training to be a city guard; in Bloodhound, she was finally an official city guard.

In Mastiff, Becca Cooper is one of the best of the city guards and thus given the hardest tasks. I think that’s why Mastiff struck me as slightly more mature than other of Pierce’s books. While she’s not formulaic, per se—each plot is different and each character is unique—she writes coming-of-age stories, generally of young girls. There are multiple stages of coming of age, and each quartet will follow a character through some of them.

Becca had her coming of age experiences in the first two books and had, in fact, come completely of age. In this, the character development was very much that of an adult in an adult’s world. Good and evil are not necessarily clearly delineated and sometimes even when they are, you wish they weren’t. The book starts with the funeral of Becca’s fiancé whom she had been intending to break up with and is then immediately sent on a mission to stop a traitor to the crown intent on civil war. There’s guilt and betrayal mixed in with adventure and mystery.

There’s also a sense of foreshadowing throughout this entire series. It’s set a hundred years prior to her first book, and for those of us who have read the Alanna series, we can see developing the social changes that Alanna will have to fight against.

I enjoyed the book immensely, I enjoyed the series immensely, and I enjoy this universe immensely. I definitely recommend them all. But if this is an entirely new universe to you, I recommend that you start with the first book in any of the quartets (or trilogy):
Alanna: The first adventure
Wild Mage
First Test
Terrier

“Jenny Pox” by J. L. Bryan

by Rebecca

The cover of Jenny PoxJenny Pox
by J. L. Bryan
(2010)

I thought about not reviewing this book because I do not want to give it additional name recognition. But such is procrastination from my work: I not only read the book, I am now gong to tell you all about the experience.

The book’s premise is a high school drama with a few magical powers thrown in. It seemed like a fun quick read.

After reading it, my final conclusion is that if this is common for young adult fiction, I can see why so many people like Twilight. I didn’t like Twilight but it is orders of magnitude better – in writing style, in characterization, and in plot – than Jenny Pox.

Despite being relatively short, Jenny Pox reads like three books. Not complete books, no, but three sections that have very different writers with very different opinions on character and style and plot. It starts off quite well and is enjoyable for about the first third of the book and then doesn’t so much go down hill as fall off the edge of a cliff and hit bottom a long ways down.

And because I think it was awful and not worth reading, I have no compunction about give spoilers.

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Tarzan of the Apes

by Rebecca

Tarzan of the Apes cover imageTarzan of the Apes
written by Edgar Rice Burroughs
(1912)

Reading Tarzan of the Apes proved to be an experience.

I don’t know when I first heard the story of Tarzan. I assume that I acquired it from the aether of having grown up in a well-read household. It is a fun archetype: A child, orphaned and abandoned far from humanity, is raised in the wild by animals and grows up strong and clever.

The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling, written in 1894, has the same basic premise. There are a number of more recent books with the same premise, although they tend to add telepathic communication to the mix. I’d watched movies and cartoons of these classic stories, and read reworkings of the archetype many times before I ever got around to reading Tarzan of the Apes, as written by Edgar Rice Burroughs in 1912.

I don’t consider myself an easily offended reader, and I wasn’t even offended, precisely, by reading this book. Astounded, maybe. Appalled. Intrigued in the way of watching a train wreck. It is, I think, the single most prejudiced book I have ever read. If there’s a prejudice you can think of, it’s in there.

Sexism: check!
Racism: check!
Nationalism: check!
Classism: check!

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“And Tango Makes Three”

by Rebecca

And Tango Makes Three
Written by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell
Illustrated by Henry Cole
(2005)

I am hardly the first and I won’t be the last person to read a book purely because it was banned. In fact, it’s a bit of a tradition for Banned Book Week: go out and read a banned book. I decided for a couple of reasons to go straight to the top of the banned books: here’s a book that’s the most contested, most banned book in the entire United States for four out of the last five years. (It was knocked down to second most banned book in 2009, but it rebounded back up to first place in 2010.)

This book has owned the American Library Association’s banned book list every year since its publication. Wow.

And then there’s the other reason why I picked this book. It is, in no particular order:  nonfiction, a picture book, intended for a kindergarten audience, and about penguins.

“Um…,” I hear you say. “Why exactly was it banned?”

Perhaps you ask tentatively because, well, the mind kind of boggles at the potential horrors that are being done to and with penguins.

They are… nesting and raising babies. This is the kind of thing that penguins do. In fact, most species do. They find themselves a mate, they make for themselves a nest, and they have babies, generally rather cute babies.

“Um…,” you say again. “So why…?”

Well, the book focuses on a specific penguin couple and their specific little baby penguin at New York City’s Central Park Zoo. The two adult penguins are both male. The egg they hatch was given to them by one of the zoo-keepers. (Noted in the author’s note at the back, the egg came from the nest of one of the other penguin couples who had a bad habit of abandoning the second of their two eggs.)

The story is about this couple of male penguins who put together a nest, and raise a baby penguin.

cover picture for And Tango Makes Three Shall I reiterate the fact that it has topped the banned book list for four out of the last five years?

So the fact that this book is so often banned is rather appalling for at least three different reasons:

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“To Know a Fly” by Vincent Dethier

by Rebecca

To Know a Fly
written by Vincent G. Dethier
illustrated by Bill Clark and Vincent Dethier
Forward by N. Tinbergen
(1962)

This is a side-splittingly funny nonfiction book about the study of flies.

Take a moment to consider that, and now give me the benefit of the doubt for a few paragraphs to prove how this seemingly impossibility is not only possible but true.

Consider being in a laboratory setting. There are serious educated men (this being the 1960s, they were all men except for the cleaning lady), mysterious lab equipment, official white lab coats, a sterile environment, and, of course, the lab animals…who are all flies. Now consider those serious educated men attempting to coral those flies (not easy), keep that environment sterile (virtually impossible), and perform little experiments with them (a bit of a hit-or-miss proposition). This is the story told by Vincent Gaston Dethier, a leading American entomologist, i.e. a scientist who studies bugs. He writes in the same manner that I image he spoke at dinner parties, about the amusing and amazing things that had happened that day, intended for an audience made up of whoever his neighbors happened to be.

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