strange and random happenstance

Black Heart (Curse Workers Book 3) by Holly Black
Published by: Margaret K. McElderry
Publication Date: April 3rd, 2012
Format: Hardcover, 304 Pages
Rating: ★★
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Cassel is now "working" for the feds, though he is more freelance as he hasn't put pen to contract and he still wants to finish school. His main obsession though is still Lila. He's worried about her now that she's involved in her father's nefarious empire. All Cassel wants is the girl he can't have while walking the tightrope between good and evil. He really thought that he would be safe with the feds, but they just want to use him like his own brother's used him. The feds want Cassel to take out New Jersey's Governor so that the proposition to harm workers will disappear. It's not that the government is trying to use him that makes Cassel worried... it's that he doesn't follow their logic. Something is flawed and he things that maybe, just maybe, they are working against him as well. If he can just figure out everyone's motives and tell Lila the truth of his heart... well, maybe he could get a happy ending with the girl.

Let's talk about book series. They are the bane and bliss of readers. The bane because sometimes you just want to read a stand-alone book and these days, well, you're more likely to stumble into a series that you can't put down and have an obsessive need to finish then find a quick solo read. The bliss because, well, if you love the world and the story you never want it to end. But you can't just have a series to have a series. You really need a plot, a beginning, middle and end. You need something at stake, something that changes over time. While reading the Curse Workers books I was taken somewhere else and enjoyed the ride, but at the end, well, I'm left scratching my head.

Not much changes between the beginning of the series and the end. Cassel is still a killer, different then he thought but still a killer. So what was the goal of this series? For him to get the girl? To show the ineptitude of government? To show Cassel rise above his family's machinations? It's all so unclear. Was there a bad guy beaten and evil vanquished... no. Was there an epic battle with the fate of the world... again, no. If this series had been one book, well, it would have been an enjoyable book. But as a series... it feels forced and forgettable. Like the publisher told Holly Black, we're not taking it unless it's at least a trilogy and she acquiesced.

Speaking of publishers and series. If you are doing a series, one in which there is a new book every year, there is NO REASON to change the look of the books, the delivery time being so swift! I love how series look on my shelves. They have a weight, a presence that makes me sit back and admire them. There is nothing more likely to get my blood to boil then changing the look of the series. Ways in which to piss me off; change the size of the book, like the nice YA sized hardcovers to "Bestseller" size hardcovers. Change the initial release format, like paperback to hardcover or vice versa.

Worst of all though is what was perpetrated here on The Curseworkers. Change the style from photographic to really horrid crappy artwork. Yes, this is now a cover rant. What the heck is this cover in supposed to be? It's like a bad velvet painting with derivative 1970s type, but it you look at the swirls closer they're badly drawn people!?! The artwork is seriously bad high school level work. It's just bleck. I am 100% serious when I say that if this wasn't an author I liked I would never have picked up this book with this cover. In fact, I kind of didn't pick it up for the longest time... took me two years after publication to bother to pick it up, and I seriously considered getting it on kindle so that this hideous cover wouldn't darken my shelves.

So I should probably critique the contents of the book versus the covering... I'm sorry, this cover just, gaw. OK, the contents. As I have said, overall nothing much happens in the series. It's an enjoyable read, escapist, but it's this volume more then the previous that lets the series as a whole down and makes it forgettable. Up until Black Heart there was some interesting world building, some great characters that were more grey then black or white, and then the series went typical. How, are you asking, does a book with magic go typical?

Well, it became your bog standard mafia movie. Boy wants a better life, but it keeps pulling him back in, there's a girl, there's a deal with the feds to try to make this better life, things don't go according to plan, there's some kind of acceptably happy ending, then, the end. More then anything it felt like the book became A Bronx Tale. Your book can remind me of other books and other works and still succeed, but when I want to put down your book and watch or read the thing that it reminds me of, it fails. A Bronx Tale won.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: A Bronx Tale, Black Heart, Black Velvet, Book Series, Cassel, Curse Workers, Holly Black, Mafia, Red Glove, The Curse Workers, White Cat

Red Glove (Curse Workers Book 2) by Holly Black
Published by: Margaret K. McElderry
Publication Date: April 5th, 2011
Format: Hardcover, 336 Pages
Rating: ★★★
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Cassel has spent his summer celebrating the end of his mother's incarceration by getting back on the game with her in Atlantic City. Cassel is so worried about how Lila was cursed into loving him by his own mother that he isn't very concerned with his mother returning to her old ways; the ways that got her into prison in the first place. But Cassel doesn't care, he has his final year of school soon and will spend all that time trying not to think of Lila. Bit hard when Lila has transferred to Wallingford. Yet those are the least of his worries when the feds show up to interrogate Cassel about his brother Philip.

Turns out Philip isn't really the forgiving sort, even when it comes to family. To get revenge against Cassel he has turned narc and was going to tell the feds everything, until he was murdered... The feds are now looking to Cassel for help with Philip's murder, as well as a slew of other ones. While Philip's murder should bother Cassel the most, the other murders, or more accurately, disappearances, concern him more, because he thinks he might have done them himself. Then there's his mother, who has "aligned" herself with New Jersey's Governor who is for the anti-Workers bill. Walking a thin line between right and wrong in every aspect of his life, Cassel longs for normality, but the con keeps calling him.

One of the things that I love most about the Harry Potter books is that you get a feel for the character's daily lives amongst the chaos. Some of my favorite parts of the books are Harry, Ron, and Hermione just hanging out in the common room and doing their homework. There's something calming and homey about this. This, among many others, is the reason that the Harry Potter books are like comfort food in written form. Just sink into a chair in the Gryffindor common room and let the worries of the world wash away. That's what Red Glove felt like to me.

Like White Cat, Red Glove, is very much derivative of Harry Potter, but in this second installment it was almost entirely made up of those captured moments of rest at Hogwarts. Red Glove was a very non-demanding book. The mystery wasn't in any hurry to be solved and skipping a few classes to relax seemed of more importance. If I'm being honest, with things in my life as they are right now, this is exactly what I needed in a book. A quick read that wasn't demanding and felt like you'd had a good long nap after you finished it. A refreshing read if you will.

There is one thing that I thought had potential that was ill utilized, and I'm talking about the relationship between Cassel and his mother Shandra. For the previous volume she was in jail so their relationship was confined to phone conversations and we were unable to get how the dynamic of their relationship works. Now that she's out there's so much opportunity that Black could have exploited and we are left with one tantalizing glimpse of what could have been. Their relationship is very odd, the closest thing I can think of is Norma and Norman Bates on Bates Motel.

It's a weird vibe, what with the mother supplying endless girls to get Cassel over Lila, all while saying how ungrateful he is for the gift she made of Lila. Girls who may or may not be working girls it should be said. Plus the way Cassel just sits around watching his mother do her endless toilette to go on the game, icky spiders going up and down my spine. Yet the second Cassel is back in school, his mother is off his radar, though sometimes on his tv screen. I just wish this relationship had been explored more, because I think Cassel doesn't make much sense unless you look at his family. We already know how his brother's fucked him up, but his mother knew about that and also added in her own brand of sick.

Speaking of Shandra, she is just one of the many women in Cassel's life and I've got to say, there's a victim mentality with the three main women in Cassel's life. Shandra, his mother, Lila, the love of his life, and Philip's wife, Maura; all three women are victims. Shandra, because of her own impulses resulting in incarceration, Lila, because of years of captivity as a cat and then being whammied by Shandra, and Maura, whose memories were being wiped so that she wouldn't remember fights with her husband and therefore forget about leaving him.

Of course this could all be the cause of the world they live in and the life of crime they can't escape, but the fact that all three have been violated can not be forgotten. But Black does something interesting. She let's the victims have their revenge. She lets the oppressed claim a little of their own back. So while the depiction of women might seem bleak, they aren't weak in the end. Shandra gets out of prison and embarks on a major con that is for the benefit of all the cursed, instead of settling for her own comfort, Lila breaks free of her curse and starts to plan her future where she will take over her father's empire, while Maura... well, Maura's revenge is something you have to learn for yourself and then savor.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Atlantic City, Bates Motel, Gryffindor, Harry Potter, Hermione, Hogwarts, Holly Black, Nora Bates, Norman Bates, Red Glove, The Curse Workers, White Cat

White Cat (Curse Workers Book 1) by Holly Black
Published by: Margaret K. McElderry
Publication Date: May 4th, 2010
Format: Hardcover, 320 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy

Cassel almost killed himself. He didn't mean to and he has no idea how he ended up on the roof of his dorm in the middle of the night. But this little escapade has him suspended from school pending further inquiry into his "sleepwalking." In the meantime that means he's sent back to his family. His family of Curse Workers. His mom is actually in jail because of her manipulation of a millionaire, so he is thrust on his brothers and grandfather, all of whom are using their "abilities" to help the mob run by Zacharov. Zacharov whose daughter Lila disappeared a few years earlier. But Cassel knows the truth. He killed her. He killed the girl he loved. Though not with "magic" just his own two hands, because Cassel doesn't have any powers. He has no "magic." But growing up in his family he knows how to cheat, gamble, grift and con. So he has no worries about getting himself back into school, it'll be easy. Yet nothing is easy once a white cat walks out of his dreams and into his life.

There are times in life when there's just too much shit raining down on you that you don't think anything will help. All you want to do is get lost somewhere, for me that's usually between the pages of a book. But you have your doubts that it's even possible with the weight of the world on your shoulders. I was in such a frame of mind when I picked up White Cat and I can't lie, I struggled at first to get into the book. The blending of diverse genres wasn't drawing me in and the magic system seemed too loosely defined and the outside world kept nagging at me to pay attention to it. But then that magical thing happened. All book lovers will know what I mean. All of a sudden, about sixty pages in, the book hooked me. I didn't want to stop reading, despite the late hour and the emotional day making my eyelids droop. This book isn't by any means a masterpiece, it's not a book that changed my outlook on the world. But White Cat did give me a reprieve from the world and for that I will ever be grateful.

White Cat is a bizarre combination of genres, it's like the first X-Men movie with some Harry Potter thrown in with the larger framework being Boardwalk Empire meets Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, because that is the best con artist movie of all time hands down, there's no debating that fact. All these differing genres were more at war with each other then forming a cohesive whole, making the book very disjointed. The first major hurtle was the system of "magic" or I should say "curses." You are thrown headfirst into the deep end, where it feels like Black just expects you to intuitively know how this system works. I'm not sure if this was purposeful or not. Cassel himself is half ignorant of the workings of the world he lives in, so maybe this was to make use relate more to him and learn along with him. Which, if that is the case, I guess it makes sense, but it made the book hard to get into.

The aspect of the book that just made me latch on was when the history of Curse Workers was discussed. The way Curse Work is associated with the criminal element and Australia, being a penal colony, having many Workers is fascinating to me. Plus the prohibition gangster aspects and the rise of organized crime. Also the mythic and heroic history, like the Russian Folklore that peeps in, why can't the book be all this? I keep thinking, if this was done as a period piece, like Boardwalk Empire, it might, just might, be the coolest book ever. Also people wore more gloves in olden times!

But for everything that goes right in the book, for all the originality, there is an equally strong reliance on tropes. You better be a fan of worldbuilding to enjoy this book because there aren't many surprises in store plotwise. Two big plot points are so obvious, instead of leaving breadcrumbs to hint at the truth it felt like Black was leaving baguettes. Big crunchy French baguettes probably a day old so they are a little hard and capable of beating a man to death. Luckily Black doesn't wait to the book's denouement to reveal these obvious twists, because if they had been the big finale, this book wouldn't be being written about favorably right now.

But what I took most issue with is that the little gang, the threesome of Cassel, Sam and Daneca, are just Harry, Ron and Hermione. Now I know that J.K. Rowling didn't invent this pairing, she doesn't have a claim on it, but seriously, YA authors, stop emulating it! It's old hat, it's lazy, it's played out. In simple words, stop. Black is even more obvious then most with Daneca being an exact clone of Hermione, heck she even forms her own version of S.P.E.W. called HEX, for the repressed workers! And the whole bushy brown hair swot thing too. Yes the Harry Potter books changed YA literature forever. Guess what? You're not going to write the next Harry Potter so move on. Build you own world, write your own book, don't borrow, and in the case of your friend Cassandra Clare, don't steal. This could be an awesome series if it stays on track... and if it doesn't have anymore epic cover fails. Short haired white cat! Sheesh, not long haired...

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Boardwalk Empire, Cassandra Clare, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Harry Potter, Historical Fiction, Holly Black, J.K. Rowling, Mafia, Magic, Summer Series, The Curse Workers, White Cat, X-Men

Dead in the Family by Charlaine Harris
Published by: Ace Hardcover
Publication Date: May 4th, 2010
Format: Hardcover, 320 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
"Sookie Stackhouse has finally settled into a relationship with the Viking vampire Eric, and her errant brother Jason seems to have his life in order, too. But all the other people in Sookie’s life – Eric himself, her former lover Bill, her friend and boss Sam – are having family problems. Eric’s maker shows up with Eric’s ‘brother’ in tow, the ailing Bill can only be healed by a blood sibling, and Sam’s brother’s marriage is about to take place... or will it? The furor raised by the coming out of the two-natured has yet to settle; some people are just not ready to sit down to dinner with a man who turns into a dog. And Sookie herself is still recovering from her last ordeal. She’s definitely improving, physically and mentally, but she’s always going to have some dark moments now. The werewolves tell her that there have been strange and ominous passers-by in the Stackhouse woods; now Sookie is about to come face-to-face with one of her more distant relatives..."

The year long wait for a new Sookie book is FINALLY at an end. Addicts to these books, and now even to the series can testify to how long time seems to slow down in the wait. I can't help but think things are going to go horribly wrong... this cover is too happy and life affirming...

White Cat, Curse Workers Book 1 by Holly Black
Published by: Margaret K. McElderry
Publication Date: May 4th, 2010
Format: Hardcover, 320 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
"Cassel comes from a family of curse workers -- people who have the power to change your emotions, your memories, your luck, by the slightest touch of their hands. And since curse work is illegal, they're all mobsters, or con artists. Except for Cassel. He hasn't got the magic touch, so he's an outsider, the straight kid in a crooked family. You just have to ignore one small detail -- he killed his best friend, Lila, three years ago.

Ever since, Cassel has carefully built up a façade of normalcy, blending into the crowd. But his façade starts crumbling when he starts sleepwalking, propelled into the night by terrifying dreams about a white cat that wants to tell him something. He's noticing other disturbing things, too, including the strange behavior of his two brothers. They are keeping secrets from him, caught up in a mysterious plot. As Cassel begins to suspect he's part of a huge con game, he also wonders what really happened to Lila. Could she still be alive? To find that out, Cassel will have to out-con the conmen.

Holly Black has created a gripping tale of mobsters and dark magic where a single touch can bring love -- or death -- and your dreams might be more real than your memories."

Ohhhh... new series by Holly Black. And there's a cat! I'm in!

The Red Pyramid, The Kane Chronicles Book 1 by Rick Riordan
Published by: Hyperion
Publication Date: May 4th, 2010
Format: Hardcover, 520 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
"Since their mother’s death, Carter and Sadie have become near strangers. While Sadie has lived with her grandparents in London, her brother has traveled the world with their father, the brilliant Egyptologist, Dr. Julius Kane.

One night, Dr. Kane brings the siblings together for a "research experiment" at the British Museum, where he hopes to set things right for his family. Instead, he unleashes the Egyptian god Set, who banishes him to oblivion and forces the children to flee for their lives.

Soon, Sadie and Carter discover that the gods of Egypt are waking, and the worst of them--Set--has his sights on the Kanes. To stop him, the siblings embark on a dangerous journey across the globe--a quest that brings them ever closer to the truth about their family, and their links to a secret order that has existed since the time of the pharaohs."

Rick "Greek Mythology" Riordan is switching to my favorite type of mythology! Egyptian! Yeah for another book to add to my "Egypt Shelf." And yes, there is a shelf, don't judge me!

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Charlaine Harris, Curse Workers, Dead in the Family, Holly Black, Percy Jackson, Rick Riordan, Sookie Stackhouse, Southern Vampire Series, The Kane Chronicles, The Red Pyramid, White Cat