Oscar Wilde and the Vampire Murders

by Anna

By Gyles Brandreth

I picked this book up from the library on a whim (despite the truly hideous cover*), without any foreknowledge, figuring I like historical mysteries and I like Oscar Wilde. After starting it, it occurred to me that I’m not entirely sure I like historical novels that fictionalize real-life characters however, and this proved no exception.

Actually, much like with The Hangman’s Daughter, I found it frustrating that I didn’t know the actual historical events better in order to judge what was true to the real-life characters and what the author was inventing for the story.

The basic premise of the story is that Oscar Wilde meets up with Arthur Conan Doyle in order to solve a high-society murder mystery with some assistance from Bram Stoker. It sounds kind of cool, right? Oscar Wilde is a really interesting historical figure, very witty and extensively quoted.

Here’s the thing, though: fictionalizing him by shoehorning his various well-known quotes into fictional conversations comes across as lazy writing and makes his character almost completely insufferable.

Oscar Wilde is the protagonist and central detective of this book, which is the fourth book of an on-going Oscar Wilde historical mysteries series. All the other characters describe him as irresistibly charming, but through the scenes of the book, he comes across as melodramatic, egotistical, and often inconsiderate of those around him.

Honestly, it wouldn’t surprise me if he was all of those things in real life, as well, but I found him almost unbearable in this novel, always spouting off some witticism, regardless of whether it is actually pertinent to the discussion. He seemed to be showing off his cleverness at all times and that gets to be a bore really quickly in real life.

Poor Conan Doyle is described as sort of doddering and hide-bound (apparently Oscar Wilde’s brilliant detection is the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes), and my sympathies were entirely with him throughout the entire book. Toward the middle of the book, when I had to really slog through it (it picked up a bit toward the end when the mystery itself stepped up), Conan Doyle writes to his wife, “And Oscar, I confess, I am beginning to find rather ‘too much.’” Amen, Conan Doyle. Amen.

— Anna

*Excuse my going off on a graphic-design tangent, but when pulling the image of the cover of this book, I saw the covers of the previous books in the series, and they are just really attractive and create a really nice set that I can’t figure out what happened with the design of this cover. [Ah! With a very little of research (reading the reviews on amazon), I found that this book was previously released under a different title (Oscar Wilde and the Nest of Vipers) and with a cover matching the others. I would say that the new cover design seems like a mistaken attempt to capitalize on the vampire craze right now, but I did pick it up myself, didn’t I?]

 

The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane

by Anna

By Kate DiCamillo

Oh, Lord, this book! I knew I shouldn’t read it. When Kinsey mentioned it previously, comparing it to The Velveteen Rabbit, I even commented that considering how affected I was by The Velveteen Rabbit, I was going to steer clear of Edward Tulane.

Then, I was browsing in a used bookstore, saw a copy, and figured I’d just read the first few pages to see what all of the fuss was about. 20 minutes later, I was almost halfway through (it is a young readers book with large, well-spaced type) and realized that I had better put it down if I wanted to avoid embarrassing myself by crying in the middle of the bookstore.

The next day I checked it out from the library, waited until I had an evening to myself, and sobbed my way through the second half. And I mean really sobbed, not just tearing up or anything. Now, honestly, I think it is probably more hard-hitting for adults than children, since most children won’t completely resonate with the theme of losing people you love and learning to love again.

But if I were a parent, I don’t know that I could get through reading it to my child without completely embarrassing myself all over again. So, there’s that. Read it, but carve out a time and place to curl up by yourself and think about life and love afterwards (and get some eye drops in order to disguise red, puffy eyes).

[When googling for a photo of the cover, I ran across this review, which I think has a very good analysis, but with spoilers.]

—Anna

Devil-May-Care

by Anna

By Elizabeth Peters

Elizabeth Peters’ novels were some of my first adult novels, and I couldn’t have had a better author for transition. Her books are almost all mysteries, though when I think back on them, I can’t think of a single one that features a murder—they usually deal with theft of artifacts. They are all funny, with likable characters and light romance, which makes them perfect for a young teen graduating out of young adult books.

Devil-May-Care is my favorite of all of her books. It was published in 1977 and features a young woman caretaking her aunt’s mansion, which turns out to be haunted. Sound familiar?

Well, the heroine is smart, capable and mostly unafraid, and the other characters are all engaging and humorous. The plot moves along quickly and interestingly, and with great humor. One warning: each scene leads seamlessly into the next action, so it can be quite difficult to find a stopping point for breaks, leading to too many late nights this week.

A line toward the end of The Shining brought this book to mind for me and inspired me to pick it up again (very mild spoiler):

Continue reading →

The Hangman’s Daughter

by Anna

By Oliver Pötzsch

Before I got distracted by Isaac Marion’s zombies, I read The Hangman’s Daughter and was struggling with writing a review. It is difficult because the book has two very different themes. On the one hand it is a fairly run-of-the mill murder mystery, with somewhat slow plotting. On the other hand, it is a meticulously researched account of Bavaria in 1659 which is not a time or a place I am terribly familiar with. (The author actually is, though; he is writing about his own ancestors and used a lot of personal family papers in his research.)

I enjoyed it all-in-all, but it wasn’t an easy read. The mystery, for me, took second place to the historical aspects, which were fascinating but also disturbing. It turns out Bavaria in 1659 is not a terribly pleasant place to be, especially as a woman.

The accusation of witchcraft was still a prevalent and valid police matter and was dealt with quickly and brutally. Most shocking for me was how many of the characters didn’t actually believe in the charges of witchcraft, but still went along with it out of fear or convenience. The author makes a point of showing how accusations of witchcraft were used very deliberately to keep women in a subservient place, particularly those like midwives who had knowledge and careers of their own.

It was too historically realistic to be the fun murder mystery I was hoping for after The Shining, but it was undeniably interesting. Just know what you are getting into; the protagonist is the hangman (his daughter is disappointingly peripheral for being the title character, but I guess that fits in with the time period) and he does his job as both hangman and interrogator. Not exactly for the weak of stomach.

Addendum: as I was looking for a photo of the book cover, I ran across other reviews of The Hangman’s Daughter, which were all a lot more critical than mine but with which I generally agree. It makes me think that I’m just not a very critical person, which is a little unfortunate when writing for a book-reviewing blog.

Christmas Reads

by Kinsey

Now that Thanksgiving is over I can officially start one of my annual holiday traditions: the rereading of the Christmas books. I don’t tend to decorate much, but there’s a certain set of books that makes it feel like Christmas to me.

Miracle and Other Christmas Stories by Connie Willis
I am alternatively thrilled and aggravated by Connie Willis. To Say Nothing of the Dog is one of my favorite books, but Blackout and All Clear were interminable (this does not mean that I didn’t cry at the end, because I totally did). But I adore this book of Christmas short stories and read it every year. Each story has at least a hint of science fiction about them, but the stories span the range of emotions. There’s a romantic comedy that involves aliens invading at Christmas and a haunting thriller about three modern-day wise men driving across the U.S. in a blizzard. In my favorite story, Mary and Jesus accidentally stumble through time into a modern day church during Christmas preparations, and a busy mom has to help them get back to Bethlehem. Plus, the forward to the book includes Willis’s own list of favorite holiday books and movies.

The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets by Eva Rice
This one is not overly Christmas-y–although it does feature a Christmas scene–but  for some reason it puts me in a cozy, holiday state of mind. Perhaps because the story about British teenagers in the 1950s is so pretty and candy-colored that it feels like a fairy tale. I’ve read about a trillion books set in WWII England, but hardly any about the generation that came of age immediately after the war, so this offers a slightly different perspective.

Olive, the Other Reindeer
Yes, it’s a kids’ book, but it’s got a small dog! Named Olive! It’s just charming.

Comfort and Joy by India Knight
This just came out last year, but it immediately earned a permanent place on my list of holiday books. There’s not a lot of plot here, it’s just the story of a modern-day, many-branched English family trying to sort out how to celebrate Christmas. I adore India’s blog and love following her on Twitter because her writing makes you feel like you’ve just sat down with her to have a cup of tea and tell scandalous stories about all your mutual friends. This book feels exactly the same way and is full of all sorts of wonderful family and holiday details. I had to order mine from Amazon.co.uk last year, but now you can can get a nice, affordable American version.

Also, I think all of us would happier people if we all rewatched While You Were Sleeping during this time of year.

Warm Bodies

by Anna

by Isaac Marion

I heard this theory that vampires are popular when the Democrats are in power because the fear is that Democrats are moral degenerates, and zombies are popular when Republicans are in power because the fear is that Republicans are mindless hordes. It’s entertaining, but doesn’t really seem to hold true. The current vampire fad (these things do seem to see-saw) seemed to have started back with Bush in office, and right now I think we are seeing a decline in vampires and an upswing in zombies while Obama is in office.

Anyway, all of this is to say that I think Warm Bodies is very much talking about our current culture (at least in the U.S.), where people feel isolated and disenfranchised (i.e. dead). The zombie protagonist fights against his very nature to attempt to have memories and feelings, and it is poetic, sweet and depressing, all at once.

I like to imagine that the Isaac Marion was out with friends and they were talking about the current romanticism of creatures like werewolves and vampires that used to be fearsome and grotesque. And maybe a friend dared him to write a book romanticizing the truly morbid, zombies, and, by God, Marion won that bet!

It is, however, much more than a love story. Warm Bodies explores life, and what it means to be alive versus dead, regardless of biological conditions of life. Zombies is what lets Marion explore that. Walking dead characters want something more out of their existence, while living characters yearn for non-rising death in the post-apocolyptic land.

I think the author was able to really explore an idea that I’ve been rattling around in my brain for a while (but have been unable to really pin down), which is that our culture seems increasingly fascinated with the idea of an Apocalypse. Now, I have a tendency to assume my thoughts and feelings reflect the thoughts and feelings of our society as a whole, so definitely take that into consideration. It feels like in 1999, when Y2K was imminent, everyone was all abuzz with it, but with real concern and fear for the changes it could inflict.

The current 2012 talk feels a bit more wistful than nervous, like we know not to expect anything, but that we are actually hoping that something will happen. That there is a pervasive and growing idea that there is something wrong with our society, that we are on the wrong track, but that it will take a big upheaval to make a change and we need something badly to trigger this change. That is what Warm Bodies is all about to me.

I will say that the ending doesn’t quite stand up to the rest of the book, though it is still very good. Like a lot of authors who are trying to relate pretty complicated themes in a narrative structure, Marion somewhat wrote himself into a bit of a corner. Even so, I’m still going to go ahead and say it: come-what-may in December, I’m declaring this as my favorite book of 2011.

Oh, one last thing: the book begins with a scenario very similar to the short story that I previously posted about, but veers off into a new direction that was initially disconcerting to me, but of course paid off in the end. It does, however, undo some of the more simple sweetness of the original short story, which made me a little sad.

“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

I Am a Zombie Filled With Love

by Anna

by Isaac Marion

A friend sent me a link to a short story available online, which she found from The Bloggess:

I Am a Zombie Filled With Love is the sweetest, zombie-perspective love story you will ever read! It isn’t very long, so jump over there and read it right now! I was thrilled to read at the very end that it has become a full-length book called Warm Bodies that will be available in the U.S. in March. It is definitely going on my to-read list. I can’t wait!

Amended: It is out right now! It is being shelved at my library at this very moment, according to their website! I’ll have to run over there as early in the morning as I can drag myself out of bed (which probably means right at the crack of noon). I’m usually pretty frugal in my use of exclamation marks, but I’m just so excited!

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

by Kinsey

I loved The Magicians.  As I said in an earlier entry, I had not been interested in reading it and knew basically nothing about it when I started, but I was sucked in within a few pages and read like a madwoman until I finished. It was engaging and full of magic and fantasy, but also felt grounded and modern. Calling it Harry Potter Says Motherfucker is really quite a good summary.

I don’t want to go into many details, because I went into the book blind and really enjoyed seeing things unfold, but it’s a very Harry Potter-like set up: a normal teenage boy discovers there is magic in the world and enters a magical boarding school. However, it differs from Harry Potter in some significant ways. First, it is an adult book and there is a fair bit of sex and drugs and violence. Second, things are far less cute than at Hogwarts; learning magic is presented as a real slog, like trying memorize endless complicated multiplication tables, and it’s made very clear that magic can’t fix everything and can’t make someone happy. And third, Grossman doesn’t let things end at graduation, so there’s a real exploration of leaving school and transitioning to the “real world.”

The other thing I really liked about the book was that for me the tone and the writing fell somewhere in between young adult and adult. I worry that this sounds like a criticism, and it’s not. It’s just that as much as I love (LOVE) young adult fantasy books, they tend to be somewhat heavy on the fantasy/moral lesson side of things (Narnia, Robin McKinley, Harry Potter himself). Adult fantasy books, on the other hand, are often so dark that the wonder of magic seems tamped down by the MISERY and UNENDING PAIN OF EXISTENCE. The authors that come to mind here are China Mieville and Octavia Butler; I like both those authors, but when I finish one of their books I generally feel the need for a stiff drink and some restorative episodes of How I Met Your Mother. The Magicians does a nice job of balancing the idea that parts of life are sad and miserable but other parts (including magic) are awesome. It also uses a traditional YA template (magical boarding school, parents who don’t understand, real evil in the world) to talk about the kind of adult issues that come up in every hipster literary novel: “Why do I do such stupid stuff sometimes? What am I doing with my life? What does it really mean to be an adult?”

Abigail Nussbaum, who I mentioned last week, hated this book. I don’t personally agree with her take–she seems to ascribe a lot of socio-economic and religious themes to what I read as primarily a coming-of-age story–but she makes some really interesting points. (Note that her review includes a lot of plot details, so you may want to wait to read it until after you’ve finished the book.)

And finally, while doing some Amazon research for this, I stumbled upon the page for The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane. This is fairly recent children’s chapter book about a china rabbit that made me cry and cry. You think The Velveteen Rabbit is touching? That rabbit’s got nothing on Edward. This book is too much for me to ever read again, but everyone else should–it’s a surprisingly layered story about love and ego and heartbreak and personal growth. It’s got nothing to do with The Magicians, I just wanted to make sure that everyone knew it was out there.

Fables

by Anna

by Bill Willingham

Photo: Book Cover of FablesSo, I’ve watched the first two episodes of “Grimm,” one of the two new fairy-tale-themed tv shows this season; I’m not convinced yet that I even like it that much, but I’m not ready to completely give up on it, either. It stars a kind of doofus detective, but has a very funny Big Bad Wolf as a supporting character. While watching the second episode, I thought, “I really wish the Big Bad Wolf was the main character.” Which promptly reminded me of the graphic novel series, Fables, and how much I enjoyed them when I read them several years ago, borrowing the first 5 or 6 volumes from my neighbor.

That weekend when browsing a used bookstore, I ran across and promptly purchased the first issue of Fables. (They also had issues 3 and 5, which I might go back for, continuity-be-damned.) In the series, one of the two central characters is the Big Bad Wolf (named Bigby Wolf now), and he is a hard-boiled sheriff helping keep Fabletown under control.

Quick backup: the basic premise is that an enemy named only as the Adversary has conquered the magical world in which all the fable characters lived, killing many of them and forcing the rest to escape to our world (the Mundane world, i.e. New York City), and set up a hidden community there.

The first graphic novel introduces the reader to many of the characters, gives us the background history, and explains some of the nitty-gritty details of trying to run and control a secret community filled with disparate characters, all while being a clever detective story.

The other main character is Snow White, who is the Director of Operations of the new Fabletown, and is a strong, competent, ambitious businesswoman, which isn’t overwhelmingly common in the comic book world. All the other characters are fun and interesting twists on many traditional fables.

Anyway, the point is, I wish “Grimm” was Fables instead, or that they would make a tv show of Fables, or even better, a high-budget Lord-of-the-Rings-like movie!