Fiction

Today’s Book – Prophecy of the Sisters

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Usually I reserve Thursdays for talking about the book I’m currently reading but I thought I’d do something different today and talk about a book I want to read.  OK, there are a lot of books I want to read so this was actually slightly difficult in terms of narrowing the list down but you will all be happy to know I managed to succeed.

The book is the Prophecy of the Sisters by Michelle Zink.  The book was released in 2009 so it’s not a new addition to my list but one I have glanced over a few times and wondered about.  I did a little searching…young adult book about sisters, one good, one evil and a looming prophecy that involves tattoos, death, and secrets.

More about the book is here and below is a book trailer I found.  I think this one may make its way up the list.

Short Story Quick Reviews – The Gauntlet and The Queen’s Witch

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The Gauntlet: A Kit Marlowe Short

By Karen Chance

Smashwords Edition – Free Nook download from Barnes & Noble

3.75 stars

Kit Marlowe is a vampire working for Queen Elizabeth I.  He’s sent to the Queen’s prison in search of a witch to help with his work.  He finds the woman he needs at the prison, a powerful witch named Gillian, and decides she’s fit for what the Queen wants but before he can get out with her, a magical battle takes place between coven witches and mages, and Kit is forced to fight alongside Gillian to get out alive.

Witches, mages, and covens battling it out for the right of survival and throw in a vampire for fun and well, just call it fun.  Why not?  When I read this book I was on a fantasy bender and also a short story run which is not my usual preference but something was really appealing about this.  An hour’s worth of reading for a magical battle was just what I needed.  Chance didn’t skimp on the magic and while it would have been great to have more information on how the magical system worked, there wasn’t much time for that but I was OK with it.  Kit and Gillian carry it off and though much is left unexplained, it was still entertaining.

 

The Queen’s Witch: A Kit Marlowe Short

Karen Chance

Smashwords Edition – Free Nook Download from Barnes & Noble

3.75 stars

The Gauntlet’s follow-up.  Having recently escaped from a prison stronghold with a vampire named Kit, Gillian is now a witch with a price on her head.  Kit, however, needs her once more promising to take Gillian and her daughter to safety after she helps him procure a jewel meant to poison the Queen.

I have a Nook and while browsing the Barnes & Noble online store one day I found these free downloads.  Both looked interesting enough so I took advantage.  Really, free books, how could one not.  🙂  This one is short, only 37 pages, but it was fun.  Gillian and Kit have an entertaining relationship and it being so short there isn’t much background here — more is in The Gauntlet which preceded this one — but I found myself liking the two characters more and more and wondering if I could find more shorts.  And then I thought I would even be willing to pay.  Gillian and Kit feel like fully developed characters and while the story does feel as if there should be more, it was a good few page for me.

Review – Un Lun Dun

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Un Lun Dun

By China Miéville

Del Rey Books

E-ISBN: 978-0-345-49723-9

4.5 stars

Cute — describing Un Lun Dun in one word.  Cute would fit but it probably wouldn’t suffice. While there were so many things in this book that I loved (Curdle the milk carton for instance) there was even so much more to sink into that I feel I’m almost at a loss to write this review because I want to share absolutely everything which would ruin it so I will try for some restraint but I won’t promise it completely.

Deeba is the best friend of Zanna and as it turns out Zanna is supposed to save UnLondon but she doesn’t know it yet.  You see, Zanna is the Schwazzy, the savior of UnLondon and when strange things begin to happen to her, she investigates and her curiosity leads her to, you guessed it, UnLondon with Deeba tagging along.  Deeba, well, all she wants to do is get home and when she and Zanna are finally returned to their London, all she can do is think of UnLondon and how she can get back there.  Determined to help now that Zanna “the Schwazzy” can’t, she finds a way to not only find UnLondon, but also to save it — or at least she hopes to.

Miéville has an acute refined ability to take something so simple, the world we live in for example, and turn it around so it becomes something almost unrecognizable.  I say almost because he lets us glimpse the unusual but then pulls it back just far enough so we start to wonder what he’s really after.  Is that another world I just saw, or I am dreaming, fallen into a mental state, or maybe, just maybe that world is out there, waiting…waiting for the right time and place to show itself.  In Un Lun Dun, he does that along with taking the everyday mundane (umbrellas and milk cartons) and making them the most spectacular of characters.  Yes, characters.  He takes a milk carton living in UnLondon and gives it the personality of a lap dog that only wants to be loved and trot around about your heels.  He elevates umbrellas from simple rain protection to ultimate smog repellant then transforms them into a rebrella that will help to defeat evil.  It’s this ability to take the everyday and take it to the unbelievable that keeps me reading and coming back for more.

The City and the City was my first Miéville book and I was hooked from page one.  Kraken was an absolute treat and I couldn’t wait to find out what treasure was hidden in Un Lun Dun.  I can say it was absolutely full of gems and I honestly can’t wait to get my hands on more of his writing.  For the curious, he has a new book out, Embassytown, which takes place on an alien planet.  Ask me if I’m buying that one.  Yes, the answer is yes.

If you haven’t read any Miéville, one, start, and two, start with Un Lun Dun.  It’s fun, cute if you’ll indulge me, but also a way to meet a writer that will take you places you never imagined possible within the confines of the page.  It may be considered young adult, and completely different than his other books but that’s something to love about his writing — incredible diversity.

 

 

Review – A Clash of Kings

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A Clash of Kings

By George RR Martin

Bantam Books

eISBN: 978-0-553-89785-2

5 stars

Spoilers abound so feel free to skip this review if you want to read the series yourself and experience it without my opinions.  No feelings will be hurt in the process.  And, honestly, I don’t know how else to write this review without spoilers considering so much is going on in this series.

If you’re interested, my thoughts on A Game of Thrones can be found here.

In reading about these books, one thing that always comes up is that Martin if not a writer afraid of killing off main characters.  I love this and hate it at the same time — I become attached and he takes away just like that.   A shame but it’s also wondrous.  He’s writing about a medieval world where people are constantly fighting and in most cases, one or more lose their heads.  The death of main characters in his books makes total sense when you look at on the whole.

Beginning A Clash of Kings exactly where A Game of Thrones left off, Eddard Stark has lost his head, taken off by the new boy king, Joffrey, who spends his days being cruel to Stark’s daughter, Sansa, who was promised to be his wife.  All of Westeros is at war with no less than four men proclaiming themselves king including Robb Stark who now calls himself King of the North.  The capital, King’s Landing, is in flux with Joffrey as king, her mother Cersei playing Queen’s Regent, and her dwarf brother, Tyrion, acting as the hand to the king.  Chances for peace low, fighting goes on with everyone dying at a rate one has trouble imagining.  Daenerys, a young widow but still refusing to accept the loss of her power now that she’s tasted it, is still contemplating how to return and Jon Snow, Stark’s bastard son, is finding life as a member of the Night’s Watch more dark and despairing than he ever thought possible.

Wow.  If I had to use one word that would be all I need to describe this book.  Martin tells this story from 7, 11, 13 (I didn’t count them all but there are many) points of view.  It feels overwhelming sometimes but there’s too much going to and you can’t put it down.  You keep reading and reading interested to know what’s going to happen to each and every character.  You have that much invested.

For as much as I want to keep going with this series, I’m taking it very slow.  I could simply devour every one of these books one after the other, but I won’t.  I’m forcing myself to take it slow; one book every few months.  I’m doing this for several reasons: 1.) it’s a planned seven book series, only five books are written with the fifth coming out this July; 2.) if I come to the end of book five with nothing to look forward to for years, I may go into some sort of withdrawal and I can’t have that.

If you have a chance to pick up this series, do it.  It’s intimidating, 800+ pages, but the story is so good, fantastic really, that you’ll be completely entranced.  I highly recommend this book and the whole series, even though I’m only on book two.

Review – Witch Woman

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Witch Woman

By Jeanette Baker

Self-Published/Brio Press

ISBN-13: 978-0671017347

3 stars

Annie McBride, newly widowed, is trying to find her way without her husband.  Venturing out to visit the cemetery, she finds a small child sitting on the bench near his grave, naked and alone.  She takes the child home with her but the child doesn’t speak for days although she warms to Annie’s kindness.  Annie, a witch who gave up practicing when she married her husband, goes to a fellow witch to ask for help.  Answers are not as forthcoming as Annie would like so she packs up the little girl, now named Margaret, and the two leave town.

Maggie McBride, now an adult caring for her aging mother Annie, finds out she adopted.  After her mother’s death, she decides to return to her mother’s hometown of Salem, Massachusetts to open a holistic store in the old house left to her and possibly learn more about her mother in the process.  Giving up her job as a police profiler, she finds roots she never knew she had which includes a talent for witchcraft.  Tapping into the past through a spinning wheel inherited from her mother, Maggie finds herself drawn to the story she is witnessing and in particular a woman named Abigail March whose life she is seeing in the visions brought on by touching the spinning wheel.  Her forays into the past come a halt when the neighbor’s daughter goes missing and her skills as a police profiler are needed.  Maggie suddenly finds past and present combining in a way she never imagined possible.

This is a self-published book which I tend not to review but considering this year I’ve read several, I seemed to have broken my own rule.  One of the reasons I tend not to read self-published is because I feel the books need a tad more editing.  This one felt fairly comfortable and I didn’t have problems with it.

I thought the time travel aspect was good and I particularly enjoyed those bits where we see Abigail’s life and her witchcraft abilities growing through her children.  Those parts of the story felt genuine and I was easily entertained with this story line, in fact, I wished there had been more of it.  Maggie, I felt was a tad hard to get attached to but there’s a reason for this and not wanting to give too much away in terms of plot, I won’t mention it but it became clear as the story went on.

I wasn’t sure what to think of this book going in but I wanted to keep an open mind.  I wasn’t completely impressed or completely underwhelmed either.  Somewhere in the middle on this one I guess.  The witchcraft element was well-done and the historical time travel/visions were good.  I just wish there had been fewer intrusions from the present on that story line though.

More information about Witch Woman can be found on Jeanette Baker’s website.

Review – The Restorer

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The Restorer

By Amanda Stevens

Mira

ISBN: 978-0778329817

4.5 stars

I saw a few mentions of this book around and thought it looked interesting — a woman who restores cemeteries for a living and sees ghosts.  I love characters with odd jobs and well, ghost stories are always for me.  After a slight bit of wrangling between NetGalley and my Nook, I found myself tied to the book until the last page.

Amelia Gray has spent her life in cemeteries.  Her father was a caretaker of several cemeteries in South Carolina outside of Charleston and she would spend her days with him helping to clean, restore, and appreciate the calmness that came with hallowed ground.  When she is still quite young, she sees her first ghost which prompts her father to give her the rules: never look at them, never make eye contact, and never let them in.  Amelia follows these rules closely which leads to a lonely life but one that isn’t plagued by ghosts.  As an adult, she adheres to the rules until the day she meets Devlin — a local police detective working a murder that just happened to take place in the cemetery Amelia is currently restoring.  Unable to pull herself away from Devlin, a man haunted in too many ways, Amelia finds herself breaking one rule after the other until the ghosts begin to close in on her.

There was something so intriguing about Amelia.  She wasn’t a character who made rash decisions but when she can’t pull herself away from Devlin the story starts to get good.  She’s not a trusting person by nature, and even if she can’t say for certain that she trusts Devlin, she can’t reason with herself to stay away.  As for Devlin, there are too many things wrong with him that in some ways you don’t want the two to get together but they have a good chemistry which adds to the story.  Although, this is far from a love story and the love element itself if really narrow which I liked.  Amelia has too much baggage to get involved and frankly a cemetery restorer seems to have more appeal as a lone character and if you read this, you’ll see what I mean by that statement.  Her baggage consists of ghosts and some odd family history which perplexed me when it wasn’t revealed but this is a series so I knew that was going to happen at some point and was all right with it.

The ghosts.  I have to give props to Stevens here because I think she did a fine job in making ghosts creepy again.  I love a good ghost story but sometimes I feel as if every description of a ghost is cold — and yes, she did follow some standards here, icy fingers, hair standing up on the back of the neck — but what got me was the way they looked at her knowing full well she could see them.  Each time Amelia encounters a ghost there is a stare down moment when they wait for her to acknowledge them which she doesn’t do making it all the more tense as she forces herself to look through and purposely not fall into their gaze.

Several loose ends are left hanging by the end but I was ok with it as I usually am with a book in a series.  Although I do think the book can stand on its own which is a plus.  The Restorer is the first book in the Graveyard Queen series and I will be waiting for the others.  I do feel I need to give a fair warning out though — if you’re not a lover of ghost stories, this book can be creepy and may induce wanting to sleep with the lights on if you’re easily freaked out about things like ghosts.  Although, that’s part of the fun isn’t it?  🙂  For those on the creepy side, I recommend this one.

I downloaded an ebook copy of this book from NetGalley.

Review – The Hypnotist

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The Hypnotist

By MJ Rose

Mira Books

ISBN: 978-1-4268-5469-9

4 stars

Lucian Glass is an FBI agent with the Art Crime Team, a long suffering artist, and a man damaged by not only his past but his job.  Working though a recent head injury, headaches plague him along with dreams of unknown women and the love of his life — a woman murdered at 19 years of age.  Attacked in the same robbery where his girlfriend lost her life, Lucian lives with guilt over not being able to save her and surviving.  That guilt pours over into his job tracking and retrieving stolen art.  When he is pulled into a case involving his dead girlfriend’s family, his life takes one stumble after the other pulling him into a game with too many players all wanting the same thing.

The Hypnotist is the third book in The Reincarnationist series.  I haven’t read the two previous books:  The Reincarnationist and The Memorist.  As a standalone book, The Hypnotist worked but as a person who loves a series, I wished I had read the two earlier ones but was already into this one when I realized that was the case.

Lucian is a tortured person and one who doesn’t seem to want much help either.  As a character, he can be frustrating but it also lends him the sad artist persona, sketching away in his notebook trying to ease headaches that only cease when he’s frantically drawing women he doesn’t know.  A sculpture with a mythical power that no one understands fully is at the center of the story but the focus is on its heist, however, I wanted to know more about what it could do.  It was a part of the story I started to get into when it ended.  In fact, a few of the story lines ended abruptly for me but also left me wondering if another book is in the works.

I liked this book and moved through it fast.  I’m a lover of museums and staring at art for no other reason than to admire its simple beauty and I found myself getting entranced by that aspect of the story.  I haven’t been to the MET in years (much of the story takes places there) and this book made me want to go back.  It also made me want to pick up the other two books to get the back story

I won this book through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers Program.  The book was downloaded as an ebook from NetGalley.

Review – The Mistress of Nothing

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The Mistress of Nothing

By Kate Pullinger

A Touchstone Book

Simon & Schuster

ISBN: 978-1-4391-9386-0

4 stars

I love historical fiction and the longer the better which is why I was surprised by this little book and how much I did like it even if I did feel as though there could have been more in terms of the historical.  In the end, it was about the characters more than the place and I came to terms with that over the course of 250+ pages.

When Lady Duff Gordon makes the decision to move to Egypt permanently for the sake of her health, her maid, Sally Naldrett, is excited, joyous even at the prospect of a new life.  Always a woman of low means, Sally is happy with the idea of being her Lady’s mistress but when they finally arrive at their destination in Luxor, the formalness of England begins to dissipate and she finds herself more a friend and confident than a servant.  Her relationship with Lady Duff Gordon is not the only thing in her life to dramatically change — she falls in love with Omar Abu Halaweh, the dragoman brought on to assist Lady Duff Gordon.  Unfortunately, he is already married with children.  Their relationship becomes too much for Lady Duff Gordon and Sally finds herself alone and abandoned in a country not her own but one she loves as if it were.

As I said, this is a very short book and oddly, when I finished, I found myself furious.  Lady Duff Gordon ruins Sally for what she considers a betrayal.  But the irony in that is she has helped servants in the past who have been in the same position as Sally so after being fascinated by this person and the way she defined her role as woman, mother, and wife, I found her intolerance towards Sally hateful.  I want to say she ruined the story for me but she didn’t (although I would have liked to have seen more about Egypt itself and what was happening at the time — it’s hinted at but not discussed).  These two women, how their lives changed and how they were in many ways forced to not only accept but manufacture their own endings is really what this story is.  My annoyance with Lady Duff Gordon quickly turned to a sort of understanding.  I say sort because her treatment of Sally was truly hateful and a way to transfer her pain to another without having to deal with it.

Lady Duff Gordon was a real person and while I know nothing of her, she was an interesting person to revolve this story around.  What it also gave me was an interest in more historical fiction about Egypt which I will be looking for in the near future.