Give Thanks for Good Books

This post is part of a giveaway hosted by Beth Revis, author of the awesome Across The Universe (if you haven't read this yet, you should. You can find my review here.) You can find out more about this giveaway here. 

Well, this question left me somewhat stumped. As an avid reader, there are a lot of books that I could put here. So, do I put the book that got me back into reading last year? Do I put the book that renewed my faith in YA fiction? Do I put one of the books that left me in a flood of tears? Or do I put one that left me with a silly grin on my face? There are just too many to choose from! And then it came to me. It should have been obvious all along.

As you may or may not be aware, I moved country when I was 13 years old. Now, 13 isn’t a great age to undergo such a change. You need your friends at 13 and where I was, not only was I in a different country where people spoke a different language (and very little English) but I was also in an area renowned for being cold towards anyone not from their region. They don’t call them “the wooden heads” for nothing! Of course, I soon made new acquaintances, but these people already had their own friends and the language barriers only meant that I felt the loss of my old friends even more keenly. This wasn’t a good time for me personally or for my family as a whole as each of us was suffering from the same fate. I felt alone – the only things I had left to turn to were my dog and my books. Because I no longer had friends to hang out with at the rec (a big playing field in the village where I grew up – also had a swing set) after school, I threw myself into reading. In those first few months I spent most of my time reading or sleeping – being surrounded by a foreign language all day really takes it out of you and most days I would be in bed by 8pm! But one book in particular really helped. It was a book that I had already read a few times but it became the image of my last link to the life I’d left behind. It became a lifeline. I read it over and over. Even now, though it’s probably been at least six years since I last read it, I still view it with reverence and awe. The book was lost for a couple of years when I leant it to my brother and he did that thing where you put your book down somewhere then forget where and it doesn’t resurface until years later. This one just happened to resurface over this past summer. It’s now back with me, where it belongs. So I’m thankful for this book, for helping me through my darkest hour.

Which book? Kit’s Wilderness by David Almond.

And because my dog was such an important part of my life at this time as well, here's a photo of my beloved Rosa. RIP. I miss you. <3

Follow Friday - 04/11/2011

Follow Friday is a weekly meme hosted by Parajunkee and Alison can read. This week's prompt is a bit different.

Q: Today’s Question is something new, an activity. We want to see what you look like! Take a pic with you and your current read! Too shy? Boo! Just post a fun pic you want to share.

Here's a snap of me with my current read, Daughters of Rome by Kate Quinn. The light from the French patio doors is a bit strong but I'm afraid I couldn't be bothered to move my PC to the other side of the room! This is actually only one of my current reads but it was the closest one at hand, plus the cover is absolutely gorgeous!!

By Midnight by Mia James

This book must have caught my attention at some point as it was already on my Goodreads to be read shelf, though I don’t remember having put it there! A couple of days ago, I rushed to the station after class but it turned out that my ten minute window was not enough (I usually walk it in 15 mins, so there wasn’t a definite rush going on) and I got there just as the train was pulling out. Now, my train only goes once every half hour and on that particular day I had no reading material with me. So I went into the station bookshop expecting to end up with the most recent National Geographic magazine. Much to my surprise, I found this book instead. I even recognised the cover (presumably from Goodreads). Needless to say, I immediately bought it, without bothering to skim read the back cover to remind myself of the plot, and stuck my nose in.

Presentation: Average-sized YA paperback. The type is small. There are 236 pages broken down into a prologue and 41 chapters, some are short, others relatively long.

Story: After her father lost his job at the Scotsman newspaper, April Dunne finds herself dragged from the life she knew in Edinburgh to a new life of unknowns in Highgate, north London. Things aren’t looking too bright for April: her parents are constantly fighting, there’s been a high profile murder nearby, and she’s been enrolled at Ravenwood – a school for the very bright and the very rich. Though the popular crowd seems to accept her with open arms, she still has her reservations about them – even if she is intrigued by one of the boys, a certain Gabriel Swift. When April finds herself witness to a second murder, where Gabriel was also present, she cannot help but suspect him of the crime. Soon things escalate even further and April finds herself seriously contemplating the existence of vampires at her school.

Thoughts and impressions: Okay, I’ll admit it: at first I was worried that this book would go down the same road as Twilight. I live in constant fear of this these days when it comes to YA books about vampires with romance. It’s true that there was an instant attraction to Gabriel, but there was also an instant attraction to a number of the other boys at the school, so I can forgive this to a point… I’ll come back to this in a bit.

April soon meets Caro, an outsider at the school who does not try to fit in with the popular and the pretty. She’s a conspiracy nut, like April’s father, and the two are soon getting along famously. I liked Caro: she might have been determined to see looming shadows wherever she turned, but she was real, raw, and she was right to call April out on her selfishness when she did.

April, at times, could be dense beyond all reason. Her big panicked run through the whole of London? She’d got a stupid idea stuck in her head by then and just wouldn’t let go of it long enough to see sense. This is the only part of the story that really bugged me. The whole time I wanted to reach in, slap her and tell her to get over herself.

What’s more, I couldn’t believe that she never showed an interest in her family’s real surname. Vladescu? A black prince? Old Eastern European royalty? That couldn’t possibly be one hell of a nod in the direction of Vlad Tepes now, could it? That was too much on the “obvious” side for my tastes. For those that don’t know, the suffix –scu is added to names in Romanian to show lineage (or it was, from what I gather the practise has been dropped, much as it has in English) in the same way that the suffix –son is / was used in English: Johnson (son of John) ; Peterson (son of Peter) ; Hobson (son of Hob = Rob) – you get the idea.

I get the feeling at times that the authors have imposed too much of their own culture on April. They makes references to things that were already starting to lose their importance when I was young and I’ve supposedly got 5 or 6 years on this character. Unfortunately I did not stop reading to write these down, but there were a few of them dotted about the book. There were also a number of unfair stereotypes of Scotland (no summer, no autumn, endless cold, etc.) or details bent to fit the plot. April mentions that she’d never seen a fox in Edinburgh. A few years ago, I was watching a nature programme focused on urban foxes in Edinburgh. Now, it’s possible that April Dunne just never saw one, but the narrative makes it sound like they’re not there at all.

The story does not focus on the budding romance between April and Gabriel. In fact, Gabriel does not actually figure in the story all that much until towards the end. This in turn means that the romance does sort of come out of nowhere – the two characters don’t really get to know each other all that well before the romance comes into play. April’s instant attraction to him is fine. The fact that they have a whole one, or possibly two, conversations before she’s imagining being married to him is also fine (hey, at 16, I imagined whole relationships with people I barely knew.) But if Gabriel has shown no interest in girls since Lily (you meet Lily in the prologue when she dies), why is he now interested in April? There’s really not enough to the romance. I prefer relationships that build up slowly to ones that are just suddenly in your face. This is one of the latter kind.

So what is it about? It’s about unravelling the three murders (yes, there is a third but I’m not saying who as that’ll spoil it. Suffice to say, it hits much closer to home and makes all of this personal for April) and uncovering the reason behind the seemingly random and yet connected killings. It’s about slowly (and when I say slow, I mean s-l-o-w) coming to terms with the fact that vampires really exist and their existence is only scratching the surface of things. Indeed, much as she may reject the idea, April herself has a very important role to play in all of this. I hope that her family’s secrets, often hinted at, are explored in the second book.  I can’t believe that April hasn’t exploded already and demanded that they tell her, what with all the weak “we should tell her already!” “No, now is not the time!”s that are being bandied about. In fact, April seems to get somewhat one-track minded and ignores all the other things around her (the family name, the secrets, the man in the graveyard, Caro’s own problems (these are addressed once and never brought up again)) in favour of focusing on the vampire angle.

Don’t get me wrong, I liked the vampire angle presented in this story. It cannot be said that it’s a new take on vampire lore, but it is presented in an interesting and engaging manner most of the time. The exposition dialogues with Gabriel did not go down so well, as Gabriel sort of felt like an actor reading out his lines at this point. I just wish that more time had been spent on other things as well, such as those mentioned above and less time on endless inner monologues. Also, when the villain was finally revealed, they did that James Bond villain thing where they list all of their crimes. I’m not a fan of this style of revelation.

Style: Sometimes clunky, sometimes superficial. There are a lot of unnecessary paragraphs that just seem to go on and on and on and… The author’s strong point is describing emotions: when disaster struck and April felt like her whole world was falling apart, I was feeling it right along with her.

Final verdict: Though I enjoyed the book to a point, it wasn’t one of the best bits of YA lit that I’ve read this year and it was far from being one of the worst. I’m wavering between 2 and 3 stars, but I’m feeling nice today so 3 stars.

Extra notes: There are some ‘bloody’s and other forms of milder swearing, but I don’t think language use got much worse than that. No sex.

Truth or Dare by Celia Rees

With its broken spine and yellowed, sometimes fragile, pages, this book has seen a lot of love from me. It was first released in 2000 and I know that I read it at least once before we moved to France so I suspect that I read it for the first time when I was 11 or 12 years old. It underwent multiple subsequent re-readings, which was not something I did very often even at that age, so it must have struck a chord with me.

During my most recent shelf clean up session, I found Truth or Dare tucked away behind some other books. This surprised me as I’d thought it was still in France. After so many years I couldn’t remember very much about the plot and so, for reasons I won’t pretend to understand, I decided to revisit my childhood.

Presentation: Average-sized YA paperback with large, well-spaced type. My copy has 227 pages broken down into 27 chapters, but I believe that more recent editions have 30 or 40 pages fewer than mine.

Story: Joshua’s gran has just had a second stroke. Rather than putting her in a nursing home, his mother, Joanna, decides to go and live with her to take care of her. Josh is given no choice but to join her. Far from impressed with this situation, Josh retreats to his Uncle Patrick’s old room in the attic. There he finds a box of items that connect his interest in space and UFOs to Patrick’s interest in these same things. But Patrick is a taboo subject in this household. Gran, no longer quite fully there, drop some hints that maybe there’s more to Patrick’s story than Josh knows and Joanna finds herself revisiting the last year of Patrick’s life, the last year of her childhood.

Thoughts and impressions: The problem with revisiting books from your childhood more than ten years later is that they no longer hold that sense of awe that your memory insists was present all those years ago. It took me about fifty pages to remember what the “shocking twist” at the end was and after that it was all just refreshing my memory.

One of the problems was that, though I may have liked Josh ten years ago (maybe even sympathised with him), this time around his behaviour was at times irritating and voyeuristic (spying on the girl next door sunbathing using your dead uncle’s star gazing binoculars? Just no.) And what was with Katherine’s sudden change of heart? She rightly shows him up at the party but then she apologises for her actions and becomes a permanent fixture in the second half of the book. I didn’t buy that. There were better ways that that could have been handled.

The best bit by far was Joanna’s story of the events of the summer of space madness. This story was more engaging than Joshua’s and gave an interesting look at autism in a time before it was really understood. Any readers of this book should pay attention to the sometimes very subtle parallels between Patrick’s behaviour and his father’s. The grandfather is never portrayed as a sympathetic character but he does have layers that are sometimes only hinted at but expertly portrayed to show a link between him and Patrick.

And finally, the game. It comes in so far into the story that explaining it would mean delving into a whole bunch of spoilers so I’m not going to do that. But it is worth mentioning because at times I just could not follow what was supposed to be happening on the computer screen!

Style: Relatively simple but appropriate for the target audience. The narrative weaves between mostly Josh in the present day but sometimes also Joanna and Joanna in the past. This works well and neither story ever fails to be engaging.

Final verdict: So apparently this book appeals more to the younger reader in my experience. I still enjoyed the read but not as much as I remember having enjoyed it in the past. 3 stars

Extra notes: Aimed at and appropriate for a younger audience.

Faefever by Karen Marie Moning

***Warning***

This is the third book in a series. This review does contain spoilers pertaining to events in previous books.

***Warning***

After finishing Bloodfever I was very glad of my foresight when I ordered all the available sequels in one go rather than getting them one by one. Once I closed that book I literally only took the time to scribble down a few basic thoughts from which I intended to build my review before I opened this one and got back into it. It was at this point that I decided that though I am most definitely not a fan of Karen Marie Moning’s Highlander time-travel romance-with-a-touch-of-faerie, her urban fantasy series had me on the edge of my seat wanting more. I had high hopes that this book would take the story back to the more important arc of the series rather than the subplot explored in the second book.

Presentation: Mass market paperback. There are 370 pages broken down into a prologue and 19 chapters. The font is relatively small but spaced.

Story: Mac now knows how the Sinsar Duhb is travelling around Dublin. And it knows her. She seems to be surrounded on all sides by people who desperately want the book for reasons that are not always clear and they are willing to attack her, abuse her, or try to woo her loyalty to their team. But more important than even the Book, Hallowe’en is coming and if the ancient rituals do not work this year, the barriers between the realms will fall, allowing the Unseelie – ALL of them – to escape their prison and enter into our human world.

Mac has to do everything she can to save mankind.

Thoughts and impressions: Oh yes, definitely much better than book two! When I finished this book, it was all I could do to stop myself from jumping straight into book 4 before I’d even jotted down the basis for a review. What a cliffhanger! All I can say is that I’m glad I’m reading this now and not three years ago when I would have had to wait a whole year for the next instalment. I get the feeling that this book marks Mac’s lowest point in her story. At least, I can’t imagine how it can get much worse than this current situation. In the first book, Mac dropped a prolepsis mentioning that she would have to sell part of her soul in order to be able to resist V’lane’s overpowering death-by-sex Fae sexual appeal. Is this where that soul selling comes into play?

I’m not sure what to make of Barrons right now. I’m not sure whether I’m supposed to view him as a good guy or a bad guy. He certainly has his own secrets that he keeps closely guarded. Who the hell was the dead woman? Though I recognise that he’s going to be the romantic interest in all of this (even if I do occasionally find myself more partial to V’lane – at least he tries), he treats Mac more like a piece of his property than a woman he’s sexually interested in. As she tells him herself, she’s his OOP-detector and what he did to her this time was stooping to a new low. I consider mental violation worse than sexual violation. In Mac’s position, I’d have packed my bags right then and there and left him to find the book without me. But at the same time there are scenes where he presents himself as a very different person. All I know is that I shouldn’t really be rooting for him, but I am.

There weren’t so many light-hearted scenes in this book – but as the book pretty much ends as a dystopian, and represents Mac’s darkest hour, I suppose that’s to be expected. There were however a few of these scenes – in particular when Inventor Mac invents her MacHalo. I loved it and I was laughing right along with Barrons when he discovered her prancing around in it.

Christian, a Scottish druid, and Dani, a fellow Sidhe-seer, have both started to receive bigger roles in this book. They’re both very interesting characters, too. Dani's so full of energy, she's fun, even though she can also be a little frustrating at times. I like Christian and how he forces Mac to reconsider herself at every turn.

And the ending… oh the ending!

Style: Colloquial, but good. When Mac goes on about the things her daddy told her, sometimes I have absolutely no idea what she’s wittering on about, but hey!

Final verdict: It’s got to the point in the series now where I’m sucked in as of the first page and do nothing – don’t eat, don’t drink, very reluctantly nip to the loo – until I’ve finished the book. The ending completely blew me away, though what led up to it was occasionally a bit long-winded. 4 stars

Extra notes: Bad language is abundant in this series. Sex takes place.

Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist

This is a title that I’ve seen bandied about quite a lot over the past couple of years – admittedly usually being entitled superior to Twilight in all ways (though if you know me, you’ll know that I don’t exactly consider this ‘superior to Twilight’ position hard to attain.) The only Swedish lit that I have attempt to read before this was The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, but it lost me somewhere in the middle of the long-winded explanation about money laundering or whatever it was. I have, however, seen and enjoyed the Swedish film so I intend to reattempt TGwtDT at some point. So, anyway, Let the Right One In was chose as a book of the month read and this presented the perfect opportunity to finally push myself to read the book. I was interested in seeing how Swedish horror lit differs to American or British horror lit.

Before I bought Let the Right One In all I knew of it was that it’s about a young boy befriending a young girl who happens to be a vampire. As such, I expected to find the book in the YA section at the store. I went in, promptly forgot the author’s name and spent ten minutes looking for it before I gave up and asked the assistant whether they had it in stock. It turns out that I couldn’t find it because it was shelved under horror, not YA! A couple of weeks later, I tucked myself into my reading hidey-hole and opened to the first page. At this point, I didn’t know what, if anything, I was expecting from the book.

Presentation: My copy is a good quality paperback with large pages. The type is relatively small but well-spaced. There are 519 pages and each chapter corresponds to one day between October 21^st and November 13^th. Not all days have a chapter and some are very eventful so there are multiple chapters (day, evening, night) corresponding to that day. Some chapters are long, others comparatively short.

Story: Twelve-year-old Oskar is not a happy child. He gets physically bullied by three classmates who ensure that no one wants to be friends with him. On top of this, his body seems to betray him, often leaking from every orifice. Miserable, he takes refuge in a life of crime – stealing in order to get a rush.

Then one night his community is rocked by a shocking crime: a murder considered ritualistic in nature. The victim, a boy Oskar’s age, is found hanging from a tree, his throat slit, his body drained of blood. It’s all anyone can talk about. But Oskar has other things on his mind when he meets Eli, the girl who has just moved in next door with her father. Here he sees a chance to make a friend, to be someone other than ‘Piggy’ squealing for the class bullies. Little does he know that Eli is not an ordinary girl; her father is not her father but a man with less than savoury reasons for being with this child, doing horrible deeds to help her – deeds that have the community in uproar, clambering for his blood.

Thoughts and impressions: The book follows multiple perspectives through the events of the three weeks. There are five PoVs that crop up more or less daily and a number of others that come and go; some only appear on one specific day when their story becomes entangled with the whole. Most of the time I had no particular gripes with the PoV changes – especially as all the important ones come together in the end – but occasionally they were changing too fast and focusing on characters that would not reappear. Tommy’s was the only frequently occurring PoV that seemed to remain on a separate level to the main plot; I’m not sure Oskar and Eli are aware of what took place in the basement. I would have liked to have seen more of a conclusion to that bit.

The vampire lore presented in the story is fascinating, a different take on it all. At no point is the reader hand fed any of the lore and they are often left to join the dots or fill in the gaps. Each point is backed up by examples in the story, sometimes quite subtle so it you blink you miss it, others are the conclusion of a very long-winded plot point. Although I shouldn’t really be calling it vampire lore, should I? It is not so much presented as vampirism as an infection that Eli is suffering from and the infected suffer symptoms similar to the accepted effects of vampirism.

Right as of the very beginning of the story my heart went out to Oskar. To be bullied in such a violent manner with no one to turn to must be beyond hard to deal with. It’s easy to see why he latches onto Eli even though she appears dirty and bedraggled. She presents a new chance for him to be someone other than the loner that no one wants to befriend because he gets picked on. His family life isn’t perfect either, though certain points there are never resolved – for an understandable reason, mind, but the story finishes before that plot point is concluded. It took me a while to really warm up to him as a character though, especially with his game. The first time I thought it was really happening and I was wondering about his sanity!

As for Eli… gosh I cringed when I read what happened when Eli became infected. Everything considered, I suppose it should be Eli who is considered the antagonist of the story but she only ever kills in order to survive herself and does seem to feel remorse for her actions. In fact, all of the characters have darker sides balanced by their good (even if questionable) intentions - except perhaps the three bullies. This serves to give the story that much more of a realistic sheen.

I’m not sure if there’s really that much of a difference in the style of the lit itself. Maybe this one was willing to go one step further with certain taboo subjects but there are British and American authors who do the same. The main difference was, of course, the setting. It is obvious that the author is very well acquainted with this setting. He succeeded in portraying the beauty of his country – particularly when Oskar goes to visit his father - but at the same time he created a darker atmosphere to suit the tone of the story. Though filed as horror, for me the horror came a distant second to the social observation in the novel. The author focuses on real problems that every community has to deal with: bullying, paedophilia, alcoholism, broken families. A number of these scenes left me cringing whereas those when Eli is killing did not inspire any tingles of discomfort in me. As a comment on society’s darker sides, this novel shines.

The only thing that didn’t work for me was when certain Swedish words were dropped but not being familiar with Sweden or Swedish culture I had no idea what they were or how I should in turn view the passage where they were situated.

Style: A mix of styles and narrators can be found in this book. Usually the general third person perspective is used – following the story in one character’s head per passage. Sometimes it slips between two or even three PoVs in one passage, though. Occasionally the narration slips into third person omniscient and the tense here tends to be changed to the present to mark the difference. It took a little while for the style to really draw me in but it got there eventually.

Final verdict: I wasn’t completely blown away but I did really enjoy this book. By the time I was half way through, I was ignoring all my other reads because I wanted to know what would happen next in this one! 4 stars.

Extra notes: There might be some swearing, I got to the point where I wasn’t paying much attention to bad language. No sex but there are very strong themes of paedophilia. I would not recommend this book for younger audiences.

Nell Gwynne's Scarlet Spy by Kage Baker

This book was first released as a collector’s edition entitled The Women of Nell Gwynne’s. Considering that it garnered a lot of attention and the author sadly passed away shortly after, the publishers decided to republish it along with an accompanying short story. This was good news for me as it meant that I could get the book that had piqued my interest for less than the $100 asking price for the limited edition. Unfortunately, for a long time the only edition that came up on my book provider’s site was the German one, and my German is far too rusty to attempt to read a book in the language! So I found myself waiting until the English language edition became available. Having forgotten about the book for some time, I recently went back to check on the status only to discover that it was now available for ordering. I, of course, immediately put the order through, excited for what awaited me even though I knew absolutely nothing about the story. Yes, sometimes I get fixated on things that I know nothing about!

Presentation: A large, good quality paperback. The type is small but spaced. The original novella is 122 pages broken down into 18 chapters. There then follows a short story The Bohemian Astrobleme that is approx. 40 pages long and includes breaks in the text but no chapters.

Story: I’m only going to address the story of the original novella here. In The Women of Nell Gwynne’s, Lady Beatrice, daughter of a high-ranking member of the English army, finds herself fallen from grace and unacceptable in polite society after the death of her father. Instead, she turns to prostitution and is soon approached by the madam of a very exclusive brothel that deals only in secrets. When one of their agents goes missing on a mission, the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society (which works hand in hand with Nell Gwynne’s) sends the ladies to an ancient English manor hoping not only to find their agent but also to uncover just what the Lord has been doing with vast sums of money.

Thoughts and impressions: As of the very first lines, this book strikes you. It is probably largely due to the fact that the style is so very formal but at the same time… I can only think to call it in-your-face and cheeky. The main character is always referred to as Lady Beatrice because that is the name that she took for her prostitute persona. The reader never knows what her name was before this, though they do (briefly) follow her through the early years of her life and the events that led up to her decision to sell her body to earn her way.

The author introduces the reader to a steampunk early Victorian society where the underground Gentlemen’s Speculative Society has invented any number of interesting and quirky devices, such as mechanical lenses that allow the blind to see, but do not share their inventions with society at large. At least, not for now. But they do use these inventions to influence society with the help of the secrets that the women of Nell Gwynne’s extract from their high-ranking clientele. Some of the devices are great fun!

But the characters themselves are even more fun. There’s just something about writing about whores that allows the author to present the tight-laced society that they live in and characters that completely contradict everything about that society. Books about whores also always seem to have an undercurrent of dry, sarcastic humour and Nell Gwynne’s is no exception! I’m a big fan of dry humour when it is handled correctly, as it is here. Lady Beatrice always goes with whatever the flow but tries to subtly influence it to meet her means, sometimes with funny or unexpected consequences.

I believe that it was the author's original intention to continue this series of novellas but that life unfortunately did not allow for such. This is a great shame as it could have heralded the start of an excellent series about Lady Beatrice's adventures.

A quick note on The Bohemian Astrobleme: this short story delves more into the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society and the work that they do. It’s about a specific type of meteorite only found in Bohemia that gives a powerful electric shock to anyone who touches it after it comes in contact with a specific type of acid. It is soon ascertained that this red glass would make excellent battery fuel cells. Ludbridge, whom we met in The Women on Nell Gwynne’s is sent to Bohemia with two companions to track the origin of the glass. Lady Beatrice soon joins him and again the reader is treated to a delightful romp through this society with characters who are quiet and others who are too cocky for their own good.

Style: The greatness of this style stems from the juxtaposition of a very formal style and extremely informal situations. There’s just something about describing an orgy and then mentioning that the host had agreed to allow himself to be “fellatiated”!

Final verdict: Great fun. Short but it worked really well. I really enjoyed it, it was a quick read and I’ll likely go back and reread it at some point soon in case I missed anything. 5 stars.

Extra notes: Occasional mild language. The story is about whores so obviously there’s a certain amount of sex involved.