“Imagine a place where the dead rest on shelves like books” The Archived is absolutely beautiful and original. I devoured this book in one sitting. The Archived is the story of Mackenzie Bishop who is a Keeper of the Archives, a vast library where the stories of everyone who has ever lived are kept. She is tasked with retrieving the recently dead and taking them to where they will become the Histories. Schwab is brilliant, balancing grief and regret and love and life like a master. Amazing book.
Frost Burned is the latest book in the best selling fantasy series Mercy Thompson. I love that Mercy is quite the kick ass hero, saving just not her coyote shifting skin but also her packs. Fans of the series will love her newest offering.
Bad Girls is the perfect foil to the book I just read about women who changed the world. While Girls who Rocked the World was about scientists, activists, and heroes who made the world a better place, Bad Girls is about women who made their mark in a different way. There are blood baths, axe slayings, fallen women, and outlaws. Mata Hari, Typhoid Mary, Catherine the Great, and Salome. Yolen and her daughter and co-author Stemple debate in asides between the chapters whether the women were really as bad as history paints them or were there other circumstances to consider. Fun read and who doesn’t love a bad girl?
Undeadly is a great debut novel by Michele Vail. It is the first book of what seems will be a promising series The Reaper Diaries. Vail’s Undeadly is a refreshing new take on the zombie genre by mixing necromancy with Egyptian mythology. Great characters and the romance that is inevitable in teen fantasy is not as sticky sweet as the norm.
Shifter’s Wolf is the debut novel of fan favorite Patricia Briggs who writes the popular werewolf fantasy series Mercy Thompson and Alphas and Omegas. It was written in Briggs senior year of college and while she shopped it around, it was never picked up. Only after the success of her subsequent novels and a through edit was it published. Fans of Briggs will enjoy the book. She is a consummate storyteller with great characters and world building but it is evident to a reader of her later works that this was a first novel.
Confession: Growing up, my very best friend’s father was a taxidermist. There were two house rules, the squeamish should not go into his work shed in the back and never look in the black trash bags in the freezer. Even so, sometimes when you dug for strawberry ice cream a small frozen paw would peek out and wave at you like a lost drowning soul. Given that childhood horror, Let’s Pretend This Never Happened was so the book for me. The author is a blog writer from Texas who grew up trying desperately to fit in but always thwarted by her taxidermist father, maniacal turkeys, roadkill excursions, and dead animals as decor. Lawson’s writing is very intelligent and irreverent and to use a much overused cliche, laugh out loud funny. The very best summation about perhaps the funniest book I read in a very long time is a blurb on the back cover “There’s is something wrong with Jenny Lawson-magnificently wrong. I defy you to read her work and not hurt yourself laughing.” There was actually a blurb that suited even better from Jesus but it had the f word so I thought perhaps not to offend others. And perhaps to give a heads up if you have issues with the f word, you most likely won’t enjoy this book as much as I did. Otherwise, read, read, read. And yes, that is a mouse corpse dressed as Hamlet on the front cover.
October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepard is a heartbreaking poetry collection from noted writer and LGBT activist Leslea Newman about the 1998 murder of twenty year old Matthew Shepard. Shepard was abducted from a bar in Laramie, Wyoming, beaten and robbed, tied to a fence where he bled and cried for eighteen hours until a passing biker found him, and died after laying in a coma for five days. Shepard was targeted by the two young men for being gay. The poems are told from various points of view, the fence, a doe who laid beside him that night, his attackers, his family and friends. Absolutely beautiful poems about a horrendous hate crime. Must read.
Girls Who Rocked the World is a collection of 46 short biographies of women who changed the world. It is a great mix of famous and less famous women ranging from the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Hatshepsut to actress Natalie Portman. It is a children’s book so it is light on the scandals and controversies of the rich and complicated lives of some of these women but it is enjoyable quick read for Women’s History Month.
The Madman’s Daughter is a new take on H. G. Wells classic The Island of Daughter of Dr. Moreau. It tells the story of Juliet Moreau who is living in disgrace after the disappearance of her surgeon father who was accused of gruesome experiments and forbidden science. After a chance meeting leads her to her father’s assistant, she learns that her father is living on a remote island in the south Pacific. She sails off to find him and the truth. As any reader of Wells will know, Dr. Moreau is conducting experiments melding animal and human. Very Gothic and true to both the plot and tenor of the original work, The Madman’s Daughter is a thrilling dark ride through madness and genius, romance and horror.
Gritty short story collection by some of fantasy’s best authors like Patricia Briggs, Jim Butcher, and Holly Black with urban settings. Dark and atmospheric, great fantasy read.
Interesting book on the history of salt. It is amazing what is now so plentiful that we throw on our roads as a de-icer was once a precious and rare commodity that caravans crossed the desert for and created empires. Salt discusses methods of salt extraction, uses of salt as a preservative and seasoning, and the practical applications of salt in industry. Fun fact for the day; salted fish sauce has long been a flavoring used by societies from the Romans and Greeks in antiquity to the cuisine of southeast Asia and China today and initially, our favorite condiment catsup was an anchovy tomato sauce until the Americans and the British moved away from having fish in the sauce.
Another fun short story collection by today’s big stars of fantasy and science fiction.
Whilst non-readers of science fiction and fantasy might contend that the genres by their very natures are fanciful and unrealistic, there are tenets to their storytelling as with any other writing. One of the integral aspects of fantasy and science fiction is world-building. A writer can choose to create a wholly new world or implant their story in a world already created like Oz or Grimm tales Regardless of the type of world, there are rules. One of the rules is that the world must make sense and if it our own world, is should be explained how it fits into our reality. J. K. Rowling inserts magic into our world by telling the reader that Muggles are unaware of the magical, Laurell K Hamilton goes to great length discussing the coming out of fairies to society, Jim Butcher’s Chicago is full of citizens being surprised by the existence of the supernatural. Thus lies my discontent with The Peculiars. McQuerry goes to great length to firmly place the book in our world in the late 1800′s. Her characters discuss Charles Darwin and evolution, steam engines rattle down rails, and horse power is being replaced by machines. And yet, there is a land to the north called Scree where non-human creatures call Peculiars are rumored to live. It was very unsettling and jarring, is this our world or is it not? McQuerry is a good enough writer with an acceptable sense of pacing and characterization but I could not get past what I see as glaring flaws in her plot.
A must read for fans of Downton Abbey and Upstairs, Downstairs. Charming period piece about a rich American girl whose mother has aspirations for her to marry a title. Very witty and intelligent; full of sables, Chippendales, and landed gentry.
Do you ever cheer for the monster? Wish that you were an evil genius? Think that the mad scientist should win once in a while? Then The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination is the book for you. Full of nefarious plots and slavering Igors, it is a wildly entertaining romp of short stories where the superheros are often just stupid saps and the wicked do not get their just deserts. Muahahahahaha!
Very entertaining short story collection by some of the big names in fantasy and paranormal fiction like Jim Butcher, Charlaine Harris, and Rachel Cain. Great read for fans of the genre.
Literary Rogues is a very entertaining read about the bad boys and a few bad girls of literature. Nothing new that we didn’t learn in Lit 101; Bryon was a sex fiend, Coleridge was an opium fiend, and suicide is a very real hazard of the writing profession. While perhaps not groundbreaking , Shaffer, who writes for Maxim and The Huffington Post, has a breezy fast paced writing style very well suited to stories of vice and excess with a healthy dose of genius and madness thrown in. Good fun light read.
Here, There, Elsewhere is a charming collection of short stories from William Least Heat-Moon who lives just south of Columbia. Heat-Moon is best known for his travel collection Blue Highways released in 1982 chronicling his journeys through small town America after he lost his job and he and his wife separated. Heat-Moon has a very lyrical prose form that well suits his subject matter of the beauty and wonder that is found down every road. I highly recommend Here, There, Elsewhere not just for the local connection but for Heat-Moon’s artistry of words. Beautiful book.
The Unwanteds is one of this year’s Mark Twain nominees. It is the story of the land of Quill where every year there is a sorting of thirteen year olds. Some become Wanted and go on to positions of power and influence, some become Necessaries who do the manual jobs, and some are Unwanted who are purged and sent to their deaths. In actuality, the Unwanted are taken to a magical land where their talents of creativity and imagination which had doomed them are cultivated and nurtured. But their world can not remain hidden forever. I really liked the ideas of this book but found the premise to be much more promising than the execution. The world building was very spare and the characters not very well developed. A lot of fluff and very little bones.
Nine hundred and nineteen members of the People’s Temple died on November 18, 1978 in Jonestown. Guyana. Hundreds of members survived. Some people were still in California waiting to come to Jonestown, some were running the offices in the port city of Kaituma receiving supplies and new arrivals, some escaped through the jungle, and one elderly woman slept as the murder squad passed over her, thinking she was already dead. Thousands of more people lost their children, parents, sisters, brothers, and spouses to Jonestown. Stories from Jonestown is about the survivors. Leigh Fondakowski, who wrote the critically acclaimed play and movie The Laramie Project about the murder of Matt Shepard, conducted three years of interviews preparing for a play about Jonestown. The experiences that she and her collaborators collected from people are recounted in their own words and voices. This book is not National Enquirer sensationalism of Jim Jones with his orgies and drug use, of dead bodies littering the jungle, of poisoned kool-aid, and brainwashed cultism. Stories from Jonestown is about well intentioned people reeling from the Vietnam war, the assignations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr, and the seeming breakdown of American justice and ideals. Jim Jones and the People’s Temple promised racial and social equality, a new society where black and white, wealthy and poor, old and young would care for each another and worship, eat, and live together as one. These are the stories of parents watching the footage on the television and praying their child was not there, of members who know that had they been there, they too would have obeyed the order to drink, a man who left his child behind as he escaped. These are stories of regret and anguish, of accountability and shame, of people who remember Jim Jones as a monster, or a fallen saint, or their father. These are stories of how Jonestown has never left them, in dreams and griefs and night horrors. This is the story of how a promised social utopia spiraled into torture, paranoia, suicide, and murder. These are stories that must be heard.