My mom gave me this book a while back on the pretense of it being a ‘just because’ present.  The truth was that she wanted to read it, but felt guilty spending the money on herself.  I bugged her about that just a little bit, but I love her lots.

Anyway, it started off that I was a bit uncertain about how it was going to be.  I’ve read my fare share of  Urban fantasy books and it seems to be a tough genre to get into without just coming out cheesy.   I think that every writer secretly wants to be the next Stephanie Meyer, but the truth is that a lot of people will say that even she didn’t do a very good job of it.    So, when I read the book description I was prepared to be disappointed, I have to admit.

The beginning of the book was a bit slow, and I thought that Harkness approached the whole “I’m a witch, my family are witches” thing a bit awkwardly, and yes with a fair amount of cheese.   I found it a bit cringe worthy, to be honest, but soldiered ahead hoping that plot would make up for what the characterization lacked.  I was relived when it did!

I’m a big fan of vampires and Deborah handled his personality a lot better than she did the silly witch’s.  I wasn’t too thrilled with the way she handled the idea of demons, though.  However, I suppose if Meyer can make vampires sparkly “vegetarians” then Harkness is allowed to make demons hipsters with ADD.

The deeper I got into the novel, the less awkward it became.  The plot sailed along, becoming romantic, exciting and intriguing.  I loved the relationships developed between the characters and the brief glances of history brought into the story.  Before I knew it, I was approaching the end, and there was not nearly enough pages left to tie everything up neatly.   I started to feel a little wary of how this was going to end.   I read the last page and at the very last sentence cried out, “NOooooo!”  just like Darth Vader, when it said the next novel would be out in 2012.   I really didn’t want it to end, I was so upset!   I certainly didn’t want to have to wait over a year to read the next one.  This is the exact reason why I much prefer to read completed series, I am not a fan of delayed satisfaction.

The novel ended so well that I can’t wait for the next one.  I think  it’s going to be along the lines of an historical novel, which is my favorite genre.  Combined with witches, vampires and demons I think it’ll be a hit.

In the mean time, I recommend this one as a fun, girly read.   You can get it here: A Discovery of Witches

An excellent article found on io9.com is a great way to get the blog up and running again, don’t you think?   This article is written under the premise that it is the opening which carries the short story; it grabs the readers attention and compels them to read the rest.  As I read the article I found myself thinking back to my most recent fiction attempt, which never got past 20k words for NaNoWriMo, and wondering which opening mine was, or even if it was applicable in what was/is ultimately a novel.

The 7 types of openings are:

1.  scene-setting

2.  conflict establisher

3. the mystifier

4.  third person narrator speaks to you

5.  first person narrator speaks

6.  the quotation

7. the puzzler

What’s great about this article is not only does it go into great detail about what each type is, it gives examples from great stories AND discusses when you should and shouldn’t use the opening in your story.  This is a great read and very helpful for writers, check it out!

It’s that time of year again, where summer vacation is new and exciting and full of promise and expectation.   I have time to read again and more importantly, to write!   What separates this summer from the last is that I am no longer a student!    I am now a fully trained and certified secondary English Language Arts and Social studies teacher.   Yay!!!   What remains is to actually find myself a job, which in the current climate of government cuts  to education seems pretty doubtful, unfortunately.   In the mean time I can write and educate the public about books and how to write good stories.  Every now and again I’ll come up on a book that’d be great for the classroom and I’ll write about that, too.

So, hello again, I’m back!

I borrowed this book from my English curriculum teacher and seeing as how I loved the other book I borrowed from her, I had high hopes for this one. The cover made me think that it would have a fantasy bent to it, yet she also mentioned it was about children and took place in England so I figured maybe it would be a fantasy/drama/adventure crossover of some kind. To be honest, I spent the entire first half of the book wondering what I had gotten myself into.

I have never been the kind of person who can just give up on a book, but I kept considering it over and over. It’s a very sizable book and took a lot of time to read, so I kept hoping that the next chapter would get better. Or maybe the next chapter. I very slowly got to the middle of the book, forcing myself to continue waking through the text. By that time, however, I was wondering why on earth the novel had been a finalist for the Man Booker Prize.

The problem was that the text was so dense with with discussion of politics, finance, drama, and art (particularly pottery), techniques and methods that the story was indistinguishable from all the unnecessary information. There is no denying that the prose was superior, but the text was so excessive that I felt the story was lost.

Underlying all the detail was the story of a family and its various branches, as the children mature and grow in the years preceding WWI. It wasn’t until after the children began to leave childhood and move on into life, establishing careers and starting families, discovering they people they would be come, through trial and error, that I actually began to see the true genius behind this novel.

In the first half of the book I just couldn’t understand the purpose if it. I couldn’t see where the plot was going or what the story was trying to accomplish as it just seemed to relate daily, ordinary and uneventful life of these families. Quite frankly, it was dull, unmoving and difficult to get through because of all the extra information about their society that I really wasn’t interested in. When the children grew up, however, I became invested in the people that those children were becoming. I was upset and sometimes horrified by their mistakes, and I was joyful over their triumphs.

In the end, the novel was a very close look at self realization and coming of age that was intimately revealing and real. All secrets were brought into the open, explored and the effects on the family examined so that by the end of the novel you understood exactly the character’s motivations and feelings. By the end of the novel I understood exactly what what the author was trying to accomplish, I just wish it wasn’t so painful to get there.

By all means, read this novel, especially if you have an interest in art, drama, pre-war politics and/or finance. If you are interested in these things, you will ultimately appreciate the first half of the novel much more than I did.

You can find this novel here:  The Children’s Book

Alien invasion stories are always a lot of fun so when I read about Out Of The Dark by David Weber in a story about upcoming books for September on one of my favorite Sci-Fi blogs, io9.com, I was interested. So after I finished Acclerando I popped right on the Kobo store and bought Out Of The Dark. Now that I’ve finished it I sorta feel like I wasted my money…

The book opens as a group of aliens, the Galactic Hegemony, spy on Earth in the 1400′s, specifically they watch Henry the Fifth as he slaughters the French at the Battle of Agincourt. As a group of creatures descended from herbivores they are horrified by the actions that humans are committing against each other. They resolve that something should be done about the humans lest they become like the only other warlike species they’ve encounter: The Shongari.

We jump forward to the 21st century and the Shongari are approaching earth ready for a colonizing invasion. They find a much more advanced human race – apparently we advance a lot quicker then everyone else in the galaxy – but decide to invade us anyway. From here it proceeds much like you’d expect an invasion story to go. They bombard the planet and wipe out our infrastructure and kill our leaders and we’re reduced to guerilla warfare to try and beat them. The Shongari take a serious beating but in the end it looks like they’re going to get the upper hand, then Weber pulls the crazies twist out of his butt that he could have.

Don’t get me wrong, I like twists, they can be awesome. Sadly this twist reeks of Weber painting himself into a corner and having no other way for there to be any sort of ‘happy ending’. There is no happy ending here simply because of the sheer weakness of what’s written. It’s sad when you figure out whats going on, you spend a chapter or two hoping that you’re wrong, but you’re not. The entire novel wraps up in a single chapter. The powerful, if somewhat hapless, Shongari are defeated in as little as two paragraphs. It’s a real let down.

If you stop around chapter 35 and make up your own ending you’ll like this novel a whole lot more. For most of the book it’s worth reading but the end will leave you frustrated. Don’t buy this book right now, when it comes down to $6 or so, or if you find it second hand, it might be worth it if you have nothing better to do.

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Out Of The Dark

This is the hardest review I’ve had to write to date! Accelerando by Charles Stross is one of the most insane books I’ve ever read, and I find myself setting here grasping at a way to properly describe it. The book is written as a collection of 9 separate, but heavily connected, short stories dealing with three generations of the Macx family, from early in the 21st century to the end and beyond and explores the repercussions of humianity finally hitting the ‘technological singularity’, the time when the rapid advancement of technology changes the world we live in so much that it’s almost unrecognizable to past generations.

Normally I’d go though a plot outline but it’s hard to do in this case, we start with Manfred, the patriarc of the family as he travels Europe in the 21st century spreading his ideas freely and ‘living 30 seconds in the future’ as he describes it. Then he gets a phone call from some lobsters and it gets real weird. This book moves a mile a minute for the first 3 sections and if you can’t keep up it’ll lose you real fast. There’s a thousand pieces of technological jargon and even more confusing ideas spewed in these chapters that’ll make your head spin if you’re not already deep in into this sort of thing it’ll leave you scratching your head and re-reading whole pages.

From there it slows down a little and we get the story of Manfred’s daughter Amber as she escapes her ‘crazy’ mother Pam by  venturing off to the moons of Jupiter. It’s becomes more standard sci-fi fare as Amber and the family cat (now a massively powerful AI, later a ‘weakly godlike intelligence’) decode and alien signal and find a router that’ll give them access to the galactic ‘Internet’.  They do this by uploading their ‘state vectors’ to a tiny space ship and launching copies of themselves to the router several light years away. The flesh copies stay home.

The final section deals with Amber’s son Sirhan who’s been mostly raised on his own after the living copies of his parents either die or move away. He’s now living of Saturn with refugees of the inner solar system who’ve been displaced by the Vile Offspring, a huge number of weakly godlike intelligences who are dismantling the inner solar system as part of a project to turn all the matter in the solar system into ‘computronium’, or smart matter, to host a massive computer to run their minds. We’re past the singularity and the world is very different place for the surviving humans. They must now, however, escape what they have made.

As I said, this book is insane, however, it is very well written and the characters come alive as you follow their experiences thought he future of the human race. Stross was a computer programmer (and so am I) and you can really see the influence of our current emerging technologies in his writing. Computers progress from wearable personal area networks, to full neural interfaces, to whole mind uploading thought the course of the novel and Stross paints a very concise picture of where he thinks the future lies. The pace of the novel is as fast as Stross predicts our technological advance and as I said before can lose you if you’re not already in a technological mindset going in. This probably isn’t a book for people who aren’t computer nerds but if you are you’ll enjoy it immensely as it doesn’t try to dumb anything down.

As an added bonus, Accelerando can be downloaded for free from Stross’s website.

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Accelerando

P.S.: Warning, if you Google ‘Accelerando’ you’re going to get a bunch of Japanese animated porn…just a heads up.

This was another book that my Education class was centered around as an example of teaching literature (and history) to adolescents.   It’s the first graphic novel I’ve read, the closest I’d come before being the Archie cartoons I read as a teenager.    When I mentioned to my husband that this was required reading for my course he was pleasantly surprised (it seemed, surprised for him is rather low key) that he had read it and enjoyed it.

Basically, the graphic novel follows Art as he interviews his father about his life during World War II, including fighting in the Polish army, meeting his mother, running from Nazi’s and life in an internment camp.

The book is drawn completely in black and white, and the ‘races’ are represented by animals; most noticeably the Jewish were mice and the Nazis were cats.    The polish characters were pigs, and the main characters were hiding and disguising themselves as polish, they wore pig masks.   It was really quite cleverly done, because it took me a while to discover that this what they were doing.  What this represented to me, is how there was no real noticeable distinction between races, if you weren’t looking for it.

The drawings were very clever, and packed full of symbolism that the average teenage reader might not see or understand.   The dialog was uniquely authentic and the voice of the father was very clear in my mind.  His character and story are nicely colored by the vignettes  of present life, in particularity his relationship with his new wife and son, and his attitudes towards money.

In short, this is an amazingly written and drawn graphic novel, rich in history, symbolism and culture that would be ideal for teaching students the history of the holocaust in a way that they will be able to identify with, and which will keep their attention.   I would definitely consider using this in the classroom, and it opened my mind to the possibility of using graphic novels, in general, as a teaching aid.

My own personal feelings of the graphic novel aren’t as positive, however.   While I fully realize and appreciate the value of the graphic novel, I can’t say that I actually enjoyed reading one.   The structure just doesn’t work for my mind; I kept getting tripped up by the occasional uneven panels, and most of the time I didn’t notice a lot of the graphics, just sticking to the dialog.   I wasn’t a big fan of the black and white method of this particular graphic novel, either, though I understand it creates a feeling of authenticity. This is simply my own deficiency, being a very quick reader of novels, and being used to creating universes in my mind through descriptive text, instead of having the picture drawn for me.

What it comes down to is I recommend teachers use this novel in their classrooms, and that lovers of graphic novels pick this up for themselves.    You can find it here:  Maus: A Survivors Tale

This novel was lent to me by my professor, and I actually expected it to be a bit of work to read in between readings for class, and writing assignments and what not.   I was pleasantly surprised, however.   The book isn’t incredibly long, only about 300 pages, and I flew through it effortlessly, finishing it in just a few day (basically over the weekend).

Shanghai Girls is ultimately a story about family and the bonds that are forged between them, over time.   The novel begins in Shanghai and is centered around two privileged sisters who’s lives are thrown completely upside down with the loss of their father’s money, sudden arranged marriages, and the invasion of Shanghai by the Japanese.  The two girls are forced to flee their country and emigrate to America.  The second half of the story is spent dealing with the life of Chinese immigrants in San Francisco, during a time when all Orientals were looked upon with suspicion after the bombing of Pearl Harbour, and then again during the communist threat of Mao’s revolution.

The book was incredibly easy to read, which is really a feat in itself considering the incredible depth of description and the completely alien world (at least to me, and probably  most readers) that the author brings the reader into.   However, the entire reason it was so easy to get through is because  Lisa See effortlessly weaves a landscape of incredible detail that truly made me feel that I was witnessing Shanghai, and later Chinatown, of the 40s and 50s.   It honestly boggles my mind, the amount of research that would have to go into creating such a complete environment.  Short of actually seeing and witnessing 1940s Shanghai myself, I couldn’t write with such depth and I am humbled by her ability.

In the end, what Lisa See managed to accomplish was to  open my eyes completely to Chinese culture, beliefs and family dynamic as well as how that changed, and stayed the same, due to Americanization.   I highly recommend this novel to any lover of history and culture.

You can find it here:  Shanghai Girls

As an education student majoring in English Language Arts, I’ve had the unique opportunity to approach literature from a completely different perspective than most people do.   While reading Pirate’s Passage I was also evaluating it as an educator, keeping in mind the novel’s potential for teaching teenagers.   This is a completely different way of reading than I’m used to, because it cannot be purely escapist, which is my sole reason for reading fiction, normally.  That’s not to say that I read the book from a completely objective point of view, either;  the whole point of reading a novel is enjoyment, after all.

My first impression of the novel was that it was very difficult to get into.  I believe I fell asleep somewhere around page 22, and then again ten pages later.  This could be solely attributed to the fact that I was reading before bed, but I do think that it also had something to do with the pacing.   This is a slow novel to get into.

The novel takes place in Nova Scotia, Canada, in the early 1950′s and begins with the daily routine of Jim, a 12 year old boy who lives in an ancient Inn on the coast.   The monotony of daily routine takes a turn when a mysterious Captain named Charles Johnson is blown in from the ocean during a storm.  The Captain decides to spend the winter in Jim’s mother’s inn, while making necessary repairs to his boat.   During this time, he hires Jim to do small errands and basically keep him company.

Most of their time (and indeed, the majority of the noveol) is occupied with the Captain educating Jim about the history of pirates, to help Jim in an essay for school.  During these stories, the reader gets the feeling that the Captain knows more than he lets on, and it even seems that he, somehow, may have been involved with pirates hundreds of years ago.   He often makes the statement “when I’ve gotten younger” which titilates the imagination of who, or what this Captain is and where he is from.

Unfortunately, that’s a theme that is never actually explored and because of that I was left rather disappointed with the outcome of the story.    I found the second half of the novel to be more engaging than the first; there was a lot less sailing terms being thrown around and a more plot than just daily life at the Inn, interspersed with Pirate history.  I still can’t be happy with the ending though.  There was so much more potential, and while the author makes an effort to wrap up loose ends, I really wish that the supernatural theme that was hinted at had been explored.

As an educator, the ultimate question is would I teach this novel?    The story and whether I liked it or not aside, it is a good example of children’s literature because it does a very good job of portraying every day life for young boy, including common issues which every boy eventually faces.  I can see how boys could relate to the character and be drawn into the story, however I think that girls might have problems getting into the story.   The history in novel is presented in a way as to be very enjoyable to students; short, sweet and exciting however there’s so much of it they might get tired of it by the end, like I did.

I probably wouldn’t use the book in a classroom, but I would suggest it for boys interested in pirate history.

You can find it here:  Pirate’s Passage

In the realms of Science Fiction these days the sub-genre known as ‘Steampunk’ has been gaining a good deal of momentum. If you’re not familiar with Steampunk it’s a form of fiction set in an era when steam is still used as the primary power source. Typically Victorian age time frames are used and there’s a lot of brass and iron machines about. Alternate history is often employed to show a ‘road not taken’ approach where we find dirigible airships sailing the skies and other machines that could have been. I like to describe it as Cyberpunk if it was written in the 1840′s.

Boneshaker by Cherie Priest is one of these alternate history Steampunk novels. Set in 1880′s Seattle the Klondike gold rush has happened about a decade early, and the US Civil War has dragged on an extra ten years thanks to interference by the British. In 1864 the Russians are looking for a way to harvest the gold in the Klondike and other parts of Alaska (which they still own at the time) so they hold a contest to see who can make the best digging machine. A genius in Seattle, named Leviticus Blue comes up with a remarkable machine called Blue’s “Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine”, or Boneshaker for short. On it’s first test run however the machine destroys the financial district of the then burgeoning Seattle and releases a strange and toxic gas the people call ‘Blight’. Rather then kill it’s victims the Blight gas turns them into the walking dead, that’s right, it’s a zombie novel. They never say zombie however, they refer to the undead as ‘rotters’. To keep the world safe from this gas the people build a 200 foot high wall around the core Seattle and meek out a meager existence in the Outskirts.

The book starts in earnest 16 years later when Briar Wilkes and her son Ezekiel are living in the outskirts as outcasts. Why? Because Briar Wilkes used to be Briar Blue, wife of the new infamous inventor and Zeke is his son. Zeke has never known his father but being a teenager he has a lot of angst so he sets off into the blighted city to try and find some evidence to clear his fathers name. Once inside the dead city however we find that there is still a population living among the deadly gas and roving rotters. They refine that gas into a drug called lemon sap and sell it to outsiders via smugglers who fly hydrogen filled airships into the city and trade goods for drugs. Briar hitches a ride on one of these ships to chase after her son.

Inside the city there is a strange dynamic going on where the survivors are quasi-ruled by a mysterious doctor who calls himself Dr. Minnericht. He’s a genius inventor who provides the surviving population of the city with fantastic inventions in return for favors and manipulates the idea alive that he just might be Leviticus Blue himself. Briar must confront this doctor and prove to both herself and her son that he isn’t her long lost husband….or is he?

I’ve never been able to really get into Steampunk, I’m not a huge fan of the Victorian era, but I took a chance on Boneshaker because the idea of steampunk + zombies sounded interesting. I’m glad I did. Boneshaker turned out to be a very accessible introduction to the genre. Priest creates a set of characters that are compelling and hook you into their lives. At the same time there is a rich back-story and strong world building going on around them that teases you with the “what if’s” that are presented. Priest also manages to build a strong sense of suspense when the denizens of Seattle are running for their lives from the rotters and you genuinely feel claustrophobic as the filters in the characters masks start to fill up with the Blighted air.

Overall this is a great book and I can see why it’s been nominated for a Hugo award. If you’re looking for an easy way into the Steampunk genre this is it. You’ll also be glad to know that this is just the first book in what Priest calls the ‘Clockwork Century’ setting and her next novel, Dreadnought is due out September 28th, 2010.

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Boneshaker