Sequels, Follow Ups, Trailers, and Recommendations

by Kinsey

As the holidays come barreling towards us, I first want to point you toward my entry last year on good Christmas books. I haven’t started my annual rereads yet, but I need to get on that. It doesn’t feel like Christmas to me until I’ve read a few Connie Willis short stories.

https://biblio-therapy.com/2011/11/27/christmas-reads/

But if you don’t want to create an entire holiday reading plan, here a few other things that have come up lately that relate to some of my past posts.

Remember when I raved about The Girl of Fire and Thorns by Rae Carson? And said that I wasn’t sure whether it was going to be part of a series? It is! The second book, The Crown of Embers, is out now and it might be even better. I’m not going to go into any detail, since talking about this one would spoil the first one, but I loved it and it reminded me a lot of Bitterblue. The only downside is that it ends on a bit of a cliffhanger–Elisa’s story is clearly going to be a trilogy.

Now remember when I, and everyone else in the world, raved about Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn? I recently read one of the books she wrote before that, Sharp Objects, and it was equally compelling and creepy. In fact, if anything I felt even ickier after reading that one. So if you liked Gone Girl and want to read a disturbing mystery novel, Sharp Objects is perfect. (Also, we get a surprising number of Google hits on things like “gone girl linda holmes hugged the book.” So for the record, future Google searchers, I feel confident that she hugged the book at the point where Amy’s journal ends, and that next section of the book starts. Is that clear without being too spoiler-y?)

One of the best things about seeing the last Twilight movie in the theater (oh yes, I did), was that they showed about 10 different awesome previews. My sister was thrilled about the Catching Fire trailer, but I was most excited about City of Bones. I’ve already explained how much I like those books and, at least in the previews, it seemed like they had the look of everything right. I am too old to recognize any of the teenagers playing the leads in the movie, but I am excited about the parental-level casting. Aidan Turner, who was a vampire in the Being Human series (the BBC one, not the Scyfy remake), is Luke and Jonathan Rhys Myers is absolutely perfect as evil, creepy Valentine.

Finally, if you’re not already reading Tomato Nation, well, I don’t see what you’re even doing on the Internet. But just in case, one of the recent entries in her advice column, the Vine, asked readers for book suggestions for preteen/teenage readers. The comments on the entry are great, reminding me of YA books I loved and introducing me to some new ones. The comments to Anna’s recent Sunshine post included some discussion about what ages that book would be appropriate–the comments on that Vine post might provide some other great options.

Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance by Bujold

by Rebecca

Captain Vorpatril AllianceCaptain Vorpatril’s Alliance
by Lois McMaster Bujold
2012

This is an excellent fast-paced romantic adventure comedy. I sped through it in two days and kept giggling to myself. It just leaps from one ludicrous situation to another and yet, the plot still tracks beautifully. I can see why and how these situations came about, and I can also see why and how these characters managed to get themselves into these situations, even if I want to slap them upside the head for doing some of the things they do.

Interestingly, it takes place prior to Cryoburn, which might explain why Cryoburn made so few references to off-planet events in general, less to avoid spoilers than to avoid a sense of WTF?.

There’s an elopement with the use of a box of instant groats, a 100-year-old buried treasure, a 30-year-old hidden bomb, a handful of beautiful ladies (all of whom are extremely wily), a handful of wily men (many of whom are extremely beautiful), cross cultural laws and smuggling rings and bounty hunters. And, in the middle of all of this, is Ivan Vorpatril, who has, much to his dismay, lots of experience regarding such insanity.

In previous books in this series, Ivan generally gets drawn into his cousin Miles’ crazier plots despite his own efforts to remain an innocent bystander. In this book, though, Miles appears in only a quick cameo, and Ivan manages to get involved in a crazy plot all on his own. The book also develops a few other secondary characters from the series, showing more of Byerly Vorrutyer and Simon Illyan than we’ve gotten previously.

While it’s more than a bit self-indulgent, the book maintains its self-indulgence with aplomb and delivers an immensely fun roller-coaster of a story that I enjoyed immensely.

Steel’s Edge (excerpt)

by Anna

By Ilona Andrews

Book cover: Steel's EdgeSo, Rebecca has previously reviewed the third book in Ilona Andrew’s Edge Series, and in her review she wrote that she thought each book in the series was better than the preceding one, which I disagreed with. The third book was actually my least favorite and had pretty much convinced me to bow out of this series.

Then, I was bored one day and noticed that Andrews had posted a lengthy excerpt from the brand new fourth book, Steel’s Edge, on her website; I figured it couldn’t hurt to read it, just to congratulate myself on my decision not to read any more of them.

However, as you have probably noticed from this lead-in, it is really good! Each books features a male protagonist introduced in a previous book and a new female protagonist, and I was almost immediately interested in the new female character. Both characters are also in their early- to mid-30s, which is both refreshing and increasingly more relatable to me. I’m now very much looking forward to reading this one, though I’m at least sticking to my guns on not buying it, so I’ll await the library.

—Anna

Sunshine

by Anna

By Robin McKinley

Book cover: SunshineYou know those Eat This, Not That books? This is a Read This, Not That book review. During the height of the Twilight craze, whenever I saw someone reading or talking about the Twilight books, I wanted to grab them and shout, “Go read Sunshine!”

It is definitively the best spunky-young-heroine-and-vampire novel I’ve yet read, and that is saying a lot considering both how saturated that market is and how many of them I’ve read. McKinley has a long history of writing strong female leads (The Blue Sword was one of my favorites growing up), but lately she’s been sort of dicking around with dragons and pegasus, when she must know perfectly well that her fans all want a sequel to Sunshine.

The heroine, nicknamed “Sunshine,” is just out of high school and working as a baker in her family’s cafe (there are lots of extraneous but delightful descriptions of pastries) in a post-magic-war world where various magical creatures are an acknowledged reality but avoided if possible. The world-building is solid and interesting, and the action begins fairly quickly when she gets randomly kidnapped by a gang of vampires.

Avoiding spoilers, but attempting to describe what makes this book so much better than the Twilight series, especially for teen female readers: Sunshine acts almost entirely on her own recognizance at all times, relying on her own intelligence and summoning up unexpected personal strengths when the situations call for it. The particular vampire she aligns with is both frightening and intelligent, and their alliance is born out of need and not romantic in any sense (at least not right off the bat).

Sunshine actually takes three-dimensional characters, puts them in fraught situations, and then fleshes out how that changes and matures them. It is seriously the anti-Twilight, and everyone should read it (although perhaps not young kids, because it does have sex and violence).

—Anna

Twilight, An Argument For

by Kinsey

Last week, Rebecca wrote quite a scathing review of the Twilight series, identifying a whole range of problems, from bad writing to bad gender models. However, we also wanted to offer another perspective on the whole phenomenon, and since I am the one here who has read all the books, saw all the movies in the theater, and say in my own bio that I like the books, the favorable review fell to me. But this is a challenging assignment, because it’s not that I actually disagree with anything Rebecca said. I think she’s right about all of it. On the continuum of me, Anna, and Rebecca, I am clearly the most pro-Twilight among us, but I will freely admit that these are Not Good books. Nonetheless, I like them, and I’m going to try to explain why.

First, let’s quickly run through some of the key problems with the books, just so that you know I’m aware of them:

1) The Twilight books are not-well written. The Host, Meyer’s non-vampire sci-fi novel, is actually kind of interesting, giving me hope that she might be able to turn out okay material. The Twilight series is not that okay material.

2) Bella is completely uninteresting. Seriously, totally blah. Say what you will about Kristen Stewart, she makes that more character more interesting than the source material. Which leads into the biggest issue . . .

3) Wow are these not feminist at all. Like, let’s make sure that the female characters have no agency whatsoever, and are completely at the whim of stalker-y, creepy, borderline-abusive men!

NONETHELESS, I like these books! They’re like Cheetos–you know they’re not good for you and you know you will feel a little ill when you’re done, but in the moment you enjoy yourself. I don’t want a relationship like Bella and Edward’s, but I sure wanted to find out what happened to them. The characters didn’t feel like real high school kids, but I enjoyed thinking about how much more interesting high school would have been if there had been vampires around. I also found that I enjoyed the books and the movies more when I had placed them in the proper context. These aren’t sci-fi books featuring teenagers, or coming of age stories with a supernatural twist. These are teenage romances that happen to feature vampires. When you read a Harlequin romance novel, you know that there’s a formula involved and that you’re going to get a certain set of ideas and characters. A romance novel may not lead to any epiphanies, but it will entertain you. The Twilight books aren’t trying to create an intricate vampire mythology, but once I read them as romance novels telling sort of fantastical love stories, it made more sense.

Plus, I am fascinated by Mormonism, and I love how you can SEE Stephenie Meyer’s Mormon worldview coming out in crazy vampire plot points.

Look, sometimes when I read I want to be challenged or to learn something or to be comforted. And sometimes I want to shut my brain off so that I forget the world around me. I wouldn’t want this to be the only thing I read, and I wouldn’t want for young women to read these without having taken the number of feminist theory courses I have. But I have read a whole lot of crappy Dan Brown and Michael Critchon books in my day, and if I’m going to pass the time on an airplane or at the end of a stressful day with something, I’m happy to pass it with sparkly vampires.

Twilight by Stephanie Meyers

by Rebecca

Twilight
By Stephanie Meyers
2005

In honor of the last of the Twilight movies coming out, Biblio-therapy is going to be posting two reviews: one positive and one negative. I’m posting the negative review. I read it when the series was only just becoming a phenomenon. Someone told me that I’d love because I like young adult fiction and I like vampire books.

Alas, I did not like it, but I also wasn’t horribly offended by it.

There were a few good scenes, a few interesting premises, but overall the characters and plot didn’t hold together for me. The only character I actually felt any empathy for was the main character’s poor beleaguered father. I took this as a sign that I was, perhaps, finally aging out of my YA fiction reading days, and got on with my life.

It’s not that it’s a bad book, per se, because, let’s face it, I have read and enjoyed many quite bad books. The problem is that it’s bad in ways that I can’t wave away with a thoroughly suspended disbelief or a good faith effort to believe some character is not an idiotic milksop in need of a spine.

I am perfectly capable of overlooking all of the weird and outdated sexual advice presented in metaphor that has offended so many readers. At least the advice is presented metaphorically and in regards to vampires rather than outright (I’m looking at you, Barbara Cartland).

Belle is something of an idiot, making peculiar and random decisions, trusting strangers too much and her family too little. I found her mostly confusing. Why does she do the things she does? Is it just the “she’s a teenager” excuse that lets her get away with random acts of idiocy? I have apparently become an old woman, shaking her head at “kids these days.”

Edward is an unfortunately standard paradox of a stoic individual, putting great effort into showing how stoic he is so that everyone else can look at him and see that he’s really hurting inside and is a soft woobie. Also, as any strong guy (vampire or not) should know, that excuse of “I can’t help myself” is not a valid excuse for anything. If you have the strength to hurt someone then you had damn well better have the control to refrain from doing so.

Some of the basic premises of the story are even more problematic than having characters that I simply didn’t care for.

Bella enters school as a new student, having been nothing special before, and is suddenly the most popular and desirable person there. This is completely random. There’s no reason for it, either internal to the high school social structure (why did the kids like her?) or external to the plot arc (what did it bring to the plot?).

Despite first appearances, the trope of instantaneous and unexpected popularity is not inherently terrible; it can be done well. In fact, Meg Cabot has a few books that deal with exactly that issue and do it well: How popularity occurs and/or is manipulated, and what some of the related issues are. Stephanie Meyers, in contrast, avoids all of the real complexities and looks at the issue of popularity very much from the perspective of an unpopular student: I want to be popular but I don’t want to be like those popular girls*, and if I were suddenly popular I would show a becoming amount of humility and talk about how I really didn’t want it, so there.

Then we come to the sparkly vampires. This is possibly the best thing ever since the Care Bears and/or My Little Ponies. I’m not even joking. Here are Vampires that can’t go out into the sun because they Sparkle! How is that not awesome?

However, it does raise the question: why can’t they go out into the sun and share their sparkly magnificence with the world? They have none of the traditional vampire weaknesses:
• They don’t fall dead during the day.
• They can’t be staked.
• They’re too fast to be snuck up on.
• They’re too strong for it to matter if they are snuck up on.
• They have family and community ties.
• They aren’t creating enemies by eating anyone.

So why are they hiding?

If you answer: “Edward is a teenage boy (no matter how long he’s been that way) and doesn’t want to let anyone know that he naturally looks like he’s covered in glitter,” I would definitely agree with you. That would be an awesome answer. Unfortunately, it’s not Stephanie Meyer’s answer.

She doesn’t give an answer. Vampires hide because they’re vampires and hiding is what they do.

Admittedly there are bad vampires, too, who do go out and make enemies by killing people and fail to make allies by, you know, killing people. However, they still have all the other strengths of these Meyer Vampires. So why are they hiding out in the wilderness rather than simply living in a house and eating anyone who tries anything?

The vampire culture, such as it is, is a hold over from the traditional vampire cultures of other books, all about angst and dark secrecy. The problem is that Meyer has changed the vampire mythos so much already that it’s disappointing that she didn’t follow through on the repercussions of those changes.

So, to sum up, it was a story about stupid people making random decisions in a world that didn’t make sense. This was not, alas, the worst book I have ever read, or even real competition for the title, but it was still pretty bad.

However, one good thing about this book (and movie) is:

It’s very popular and has gotten a lot of creative people talking about it (positive and negative) and a lot of those responses are quite hilarious.

* I must have been really lucky in my high school because the popular girls that I knew (not very many of them, admittedly) were all very nice. They were popular because they were nice and outgoing and people wanted to be their friends. That’s what made them popular.

The Uninvited Guests

by Kinsey

A couple of weeks ago Anna posted about A City of Ghosts for Halloween, and I wished I had read something spooky so I would have a seasonal recommendation, too. If I had just finished The Uninvited Guests a bit earlier, I could have told you all to go read the creepiest thing I have come across in quite a while.

The book starts off as a fairly typical English house party story–an upper-class family has guests for the weekend, and everyone is very concerned with dressing for dinner and who will marry who, etc. But then things take . . . a turn. I don’t want to talk about the plot too much, because I don’t want to give anything away, so instead I’m going to talk about how the book made me feel. Which was waaay creeped out. I was initially reading this before I went to bed at night, but I started feeling such a sense of dread after each chapter that I had to start reading it only during daylight hours. Even when nothing obviously bad was happening, things still felt so ominous that at times I wasn’t sure I could finish the book. But I kept going and I was glad I did–the author did a beautiful job of building up to a very eerie climax, raising the tension so slowly that I almost didn’t notice at first.

And now I am going to go read Anne of Green Gables or The Railway Children or something else wholesome and happy so that I can sleep at night again.

Willful Impropriety

by Anna

Edited by Ekaterina Sedia

Book Cover: Willful ImproprietyIn spite of considering myself an avid reader, I don’t actually buy books very often. I have a history of moving every 4-5 years, and after a couple of times moving countless heavy boxes of books, a large personal library just seems cumbersome. However, when I saw a copy of Willful Impropriety in the store, I bought it without a second thought. Young adult fiction, with some Fantasy elements, set in the Victorian Era? Yes, please!

Plus, I had originally heard of the book on the blog of one of the contributing authors, Genevieve Valentine, of whom I’m a big fan. (Also, she tends to contribute stories to more esoteric collections that are not picked up by my library.) Valentine is a bit of a conundrum for me, though. I love both her blog and her fictional writing, but they are shockingly different. Her blog is very funny with acute analysis of current popular culture, while her fiction has a lyrical and melancholy tone, and her story in this collection is no exception.

I was also pleasantly surprised that another of the authors, Caroline Stevermer, was the co-author, along with Partricia C. Wrede, of Sorcery & Cecilia, which I’ve already raved about here. Her story was probably my favorite of this collection, and has inspired me to track down some more of her books Another author, M. K. Hobson, whose story felt a bit like a P.G. Wodehouse story but with magic, also wrote The Native Star, which Kinsey recommended to me a while ago, and while is definitely going on my to-read list.

The introduction to the book describes that young adult literature set in the Victorian Age seemed like a complimentary match, since YA Lit is often about rebelling against the status quo to establish an individual identity, and the Victorian Age sure had a lot of status quo to rebel against. But after more than a dozen stories, I was a little saddened by how many of them ended with the heroine finding a solution in a relationship with a man.

Which, of course, is one of the few historically accurate ‘happy endings’ for women, but the stories didn’t stay so rigidly accurate in other features, so having them return to that trope was a bit of a bummer. The stories that did not include such a pat ending stood out all the more, though.

— Anna

The Handmaild’s Tale

by Anna

By Margaret Atwood

Book cover: The Handmaid's TaleWarning: this is going to be a blatantly and quite politically biased post. As everyone, left- and right-leaning, has been saying, Tuesday is going to be quite a deciding factor for our country, and will take us in one of two very different directions. (I’m feeling a bit guilty myself for having moved my vote away from a key swing state this year.)

Early on in the campaigns, I was so taken aback by the backlash against Sandra Fluke and the willingness of conservative women to outrageously slut-shame other women with no awareness of how such language could eventually come back to bite them as well. In discussing this very fact, I read the below comment on Videogum, one of the blogs I read daily:

Has everyone read “The Handmaid’s Tale”? It’s a. GREAT, and b. set in a future America where a very repressive regime that is pretty shitty to women has taken over. There is a passing moment where the narrator talks about how a woman she knows used to be a great big televangelist who would always talk about how a woman’s place should be at home is turned into a chattel slave like every other lady once the new regime takes over, and how she seems mad that someone “took her at her word”.

After reading this comment, I thought perhaps The Handmaiden’s Tale could give me more insight into this kind of mindset.

This book is terrifying, far scarier than any horror story I could have picked for Halloween. My only comfort was that it seems unrealistic that such a drastic change could happen all within one generation. In the novel, the narrator went to college, got married, and had a daughter, all before she was restricted to being a “handmaiden,” a fertile woman supplied to couples unable to have children in order to surrogate for them by government orders, in her mid-30s. Although maybe Atwood’s point is that if you aren’t paying attention or participating in politics, it could run right over you before you even notice.

In addition to terrifying, though, the book is enthralling; I couldn’t put it down. I’d worried that it would be painful to read, but the narrator takes such a matter-of-fact tone that even the most stressful scenes had a comfortably numb tone that both made them easier to read and reflected the mental state one would have to be in to survive. I’d thought about ‘live-blogging’ my progress through it, but I devoured it in a matter of days, and then spent the next couple of weeks trying to write a post that encapsulates all of my feelings about it, which turns out to be impossible. Instead I’ve compiled a little game for you – it will be fun!

Here is a list of quotes, some from The Handmaid’s Tale and some from a variety of political leaders and pundits; can you tell the difference?

  1. “If you look at the Scriptures, I believe it’s clear that God has designed men to exercise authority in the home, in the church, in society, and in government.“
  2. “Our country might have been better off if it was still just men voting. There is nothing worse than a bunch of mean, hateful women. They are diabolical in how than can skewer a person.”
  3. “Money was the only measure of worth, for everyone, they got no respect as mothers. No wonder they were giving up on the whole business. This way they’re protected, they can fulfill their biological destinies in peace. With full support and encouragement.”
  4. “Nature demands variety, for men. It stands to reason, it’s part of the procreational strategy. It’s Nature’s plan. Women know that instinctively.”
  5. “The problem with women voting is that women have no capacity to understand how money is earned. They have a lot of ideas on how to spend it. And when they take these polls, it’s always more money on education, more money on child care, more money on day care.”
  6. “What we’re aiming for is a spirit of camaraderie among women. We must all pull together.”

Answers after the break.

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