strange and random happenstance

City of Bones (The Mortal Instruments Book 1) by Cassandra Clare
Published by: Margaret K. McElderry
Publication Date: March 27th, 2007
Format: Hardcover, 496 Pages
Rating: ★★
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Clary's life has been turned upside down. One night her and her best friend Simon are at a club when she sees something no one else can. There's apparently a shadow world in New York and for some reason Clary is starting to see it. After this shocking discovery Clary's mom Jocelyn is kidnapped and this new world of demons and angels and vampires and werewolves holds the key. There is a group of humans known as the Shadowhunters, and they protect the world from the demons from the downworlds. They keep all of humanity safe and ignorant. Clary has spent her life safe and ignorant, but only at her mother's behest. Jocelyn was once a Shadowhunter, part of the elite Circle lead by her husband Valentine to overthrow the Clave, the organizing body of the Shadowhunters. Jocelyn came to hate the purity of blood the Circle demanded and fled her husband and that world to raise her daughter as a mundane, safe from the dangers of this shadow world. But everyone's past comes back to haunt them. Valentine isn't as dead as everyone hoped and his ideals haven't changed in the fifteen years he has been in hiding. Can Clary, a girl just thrust into this other world, be able to help stop history repeating itself?

The concept of plagiarism is horrifying to me, yet in our society it is oddly pervasive and somewhat accepted. As a creative person who has artistic output the thought that someone would take my work, my blood, sweat, and tears, and claim it as their own, it makes my blood boil. I am so wary of the taint of plagiarism that I have this obsessive self-policing instinct that recoils at the thought that I would cut corners to get a faster or better end result even using just the bones of another person's idea. Plagiarism in any form is abhorrent to me. Yet there were many instances at school where students would get caught showing the work of others as their own. They would lift artwork straight off of deviantART and an observant student or teacher would call them out. Why you might be wondering am I ruminating on artistic copyrights? Well, even if you've only been half aware of the controversy, Cassandra Clare is an author who has, apparently, been rightly tarred as a plagiarist. She is an author who, while the taint has stuck, has also been accepted by the YA community and become very successful. An odd conundrum of our times where theft and unoriginality are king.

While the roots of the story start in fanfic, I want to make it clear that this is just one cast against one person and that fanfic is a thriving and interesting genre that uses pre-existing characters in new ways and isn't being denigrated by me. The bones (haha) of the case against Cassie is that in her fanfic trilogy devoted to Draco Malfoy she basically was ripping off not just witty dialogue from Buffy to Pratchett to Red Dwarf (classified by her as "an obscure British sitcom" and yes, in my mind she should go to hell for saying that) but full scenes and settings from other authors. She was called out, her work was categorized as plagiarized and was pulled from the site it was on. Yes, there was also a lot of name calling, Cyberbullying, and other horrid stuff you can read all about elsewhere, but the fact is she got a book deal from this. This alone disgusts me. But with the eyes of the world on her she wasn't able to rely on the witticisms of Joss Whedon anymore, she took her plot structure from her fanfic trilogy, stripped it down, rebuilt it, and what is left is boring. Even if you were unaware of all this controversy swirling around her you could not help but notice that this book lacks originality, it lacks that spark that's needed to make it more then just a mish-mash of other tropes and plot devices as old as the written word. Cassandra Clare, in my opinion, is a bad writer, not to mention morally corrupt and a bad human. She used the reflective glory of other "true" writers to give her work a shiny allure, that while tarnished, is still there.

But I can't ignore the fanfic roots of City of Bones mainly because this is so obviously Harry Potter from Draco's point of view. And even if I didn't know about the Draco Trilogy, once a flying motorcycle shows up, there's no doubt it's Harry Potter. This book is giving us front row seats to life with the Death Eaters, with a little more Nazism thrown in, sieg heil! In fact it's just too much of everything thrown in, too much borrowed and re-interpreted in a flat way. Here's some Harry Potter (a stele is so a wand no matter what Clare says), add some Rick Riordan, a little Piers Anthony/Bill Willingham (mundies, really, Fables much?), an aroma of Celtic mythology, a dash of Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, just have at it. But never once does all this thisness convert into something it's own, something cohesive and original. All this translates into major worldbuilding issues. I'm ok with a magical world coexisting alongside a mundane world, as long as it makes sense. Whether it's willful ignorance on the part of the mundanes, or spells and wards keeping them away, something has to be explained as to how this ignorant coexistence works. Having carriages going over cars and slipping in and out of traffic with not an eyelid batted, please.

The laziness in the worldbuilding though is never so obvious as in the characters that inhabit this world. City of Bones has this feeling of one epically long night of party crashing, much like the aforementioned Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, a book and movie I detest. When you go to these parties you meet people, you get vague impressions, and then they're out of your life forever. That's how I felt about all the characters. They are flat two-dimensional people who will maybe have a defining characteristic, but overall, they are forgettable. After almost five hundred pages with Clary all I know about her is she's a short red-head who draws. Seriously, this is ALL I KNOW about the protagonist of this book? Um... major flaw here. While I know people will jump down my neck for this, but I actually think Bella Swan has more of a personality then Clary. There, I said it. I do think that this issue would have been fixable it there was some buildup before throwing us into the action of the book. How about a few days spent with Clary living her normal life? Some way for us to identify with her and the world she's about to lose. A way for the reader to forge a connection, because without this bond I have no conduit to help me in this book's world, and it makes me care about nothing. Valentine could kill them all for how much I care about them and perhaps I would help him, especially with Jace.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Cassandra Clare, City of Bones, Clary, Draco Malfoy, Fables, Fan Fic, Harry Potter, Jace, Joss Whedon, Mortal Instruments, Nick and Nora, Plagiarism, Shadowhunter, Vampires, Werewolves

The Book of Life by Deborah Harkness
ARC Provided by the Publisher
Published by: Viking Adult
Publication Date: July 15th, 2014
Format: Hardcover, 576 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy

Matthew and Diana return from the past to find much changed and much the same as it ever was. There has been loses while they were gone, and they must morn them. But life goes on, as Diana's ever increasing belly shows. The time has come to find answers as the lives growing in Diana's belly depend on them. Matthew delves into the science side at Yale while Diana goes to England to find out the answers of Ashmole 782. New and old technologies are used to find out secrets of their supernatural kind. Secrets that will hopefully bring the Congregation to a new understanding of how the world works. Witches and vampires and demons are more alike then they are different and these similarities should be embraced not segregated. But in the end there will be a battle, but will it be political or will Matthew's dangerous past come back to haunt him?

The "All Souls Trilogy" baffles me. It has so much wasted potential but, like some other series that I have found middling, it has a fierce fanbase that I don't want to rile, as well as a few close friends. This is the same fanbase that can see no wrong in Outlander, the forty year old women who will beat you to death if you say anything against Jamie Fraser. I just don't get it. Maybe I'm just not at the point in my life where this reaches out and touches something deep in my soul, instead I'm sticking by my opinion that this is Twilight for middle aged women. Before I actually read this installment I was excited for the conclusion of this series. Shadow of Night really captured my interest with it's historical bent, but sadly this volume decided to focus on science versus history. The mess this resulted in felt like Michael Crichton writing YA. The writing was clumsy with the shift from Diana's first person narration to Matthew's third person narration. The ending was a trite cliche with an extremely unrealistic HEA. In fact, was there actually enough to merit the moniker "book" when anything of interest was unresolved and everything seemed like it could be summed up in an afterword?

Now for the fun part. The part where I take apart The Book of Life and point at everything that drove me crazy. Shall we start with Stevie Nicks? I think we shall. What the hell is it with Stevie Nicks and witches? Yes she's rumored to be one, but she denies it so often and then does an about turn that you could get whiplash. But the fact of witches identifying with her music has gotten to a point in our culture where it's so cliched that to use it you seriously are going to incur my wrath. It just shows a laziness that you can't think of something more interesting and will just rely on the stereotype. Wasn't this whole series trying to say that things are more complicated and confusing then what you'd expect? Well, that means I'd expect something better then Stevie Nicks. At least she didn't show up and do an extended music video in the middle of the book for absolutely no reason, thank you American Horror Story: Coven and Ryan Murphy for bringing me that cringe worthy moment in television history. That moment is also the first thing that popped in my mind while reading this book. Ug. Stop.

As Gallowglass says "This family was more fun when we had fewer medical degrees." Thank you Gallowglass, aka the one character I like, for pointing out the obvious. The characters zeal for scientifically researching the world of creatures and their problems, from studying blood rage to genomes to The Book of Life itself made me want to scream in frustration. I like the history, I don't like the science. Yes, in books that tackle supernatural beings we have to look at the world they now inhabit, the fact that DNA and genetics can uncover centuries old secrets, but do we need to do it in such detail? Let's all go to Yale and get a research grant and blah blah blah, blood rage, blah blah blah, babies, blah blah blah, what was I even talking about? Now I'm not saying science can't be interesting, but it's more interesting when it's real. When it's made up mumbo jumbo by an author that isn't that accomplished and has tons of plot holes and inconsistencies? No thanks.

But you know what's worse then science? Politics! I hate politics. I pay attention because it's what every good citizen should do. Also, I live in the epicenter of political evil right now, so, well, it's a main topic of conversation, as in, what stupid and illegal thing happened today? But do I want to read, watch, listen, osmose politics for fun? NO! Here we have ANOTHER book with an unnatural union being thwarted by a secret governing body that just doesn't get the world is changing. Again, Twilight much? Any urban fantasy author will tell Harkness that it's best to leave the overly political BS that governs your world off stage. Seriously, all those meetings in Venice where they were droning on and on about all the different species that Harkness has created I was more interested in the architecture. The boat rides to and from the meetings were more thrilling. How did she make Venice boring? Well, she made a lot of things boring and took a lot of pages to do it, so really, I shouldn't be that surprised.

Writing this review is making me realize why it took me a month to read this book. ME, who usually devours a book in a few days no matter the length. OK, let's get this over with. So, what annoyance shall I conclude with? Oh, how about Diana! At the beginning of this series Diana was the conduit for the reader. She was fairly normal, aside from the whole being a witch thing. But over time as her relationship with Matthew deepened, she has become something other then human, something more. She now has arrows and firedrakes and weaving IN HER ARM! Yes, it's kind of cool, but there's also the fact that she is totally unrelatable now. She's a superhero, so we can look up to her, but the truth is, do people really truly ever relate to superheroes? They might want to be them, but relatability isn't part of that. Maybe my whole problem with this book and it's fans is that I can't relate at all and perhaps it's better if we just keep our distance.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: All Soul's Trilogy, American Horror Story, Ashmole 782, Deborah Harkness, Gallowglass, HEA, Outlander, Shadow of Night, Stevie Nicks, The Book of Life, Twilight, Vampires, Witches, Yale

The Book of Life by Deborah Harkness
Published by: Viking Adult
Publication Date: July 15th, 2014
Format: Hardcover, 576 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
"After traveling through time in Shadow of Night, the second book in Deborah Harkness’s enchanting series, historian and witch Diana Bishop and vampire scientist Matthew Clairmont return to the present to face new crises and old enemies. At Matthew’s ancestral home at Sept-Tours, they reunite with the cast of characters from A Discovery of Witches—with one significant exception. But the real threat to their future has yet to be revealed, and when it is, the search for Ashmole 782 and its missing pages takes on even more urgency. In the trilogy’s final volume, Harkness deepens her themes of power and passion, family and caring, past deeds and their present consequences. In ancestral homes and university laboratories, using ancient knowledge and modern science, from the hills of the Auvergne to the palaces of Venice and beyond, the couple at last learn what the witches discovered so many centuries ago.

With more than one million copies sold in the United States and appearing in thirty-eight foreign editions, A Discovery of Witches and Shadow of Night have landed on all of the major bestseller lists and garnered rave reviews from countless publications. Eagerly awaited by Harkness’s legion of fans, The Book of Life brings this superbly written series to a deeply satisfying close."

Not very surprising to me that no other books are coming out this week. No one wants to compete with the juggernaut that is Deborah Harkness...

Seconds by Bryan Lee O'Malley
Published by: Ballantine Books
Publication Date: July 15th, 2014
Format: Hardcover, 336 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
"Katie’s got it pretty good. She’s a talented young chef, she runs a successful restaurant, and she has big plans to open an even better one. Then, all at once, progress on the new location bogs down, her charming ex-boyfriend pops up, her fling with another chef goes sour, and her best waitress gets badly hurt. And just like that, Katie’s life goes from pretty good to not so much. What she needs is a second chance. Everybody deserves one, after all—but they don’t come easy. Luckily for Katie, a mysterious girl appears in the middle of the night with simple instructions for a do-it-yourself do-over:

1. Write your mistake
2. Ingest one mushroom
3. Go to sleep
4. Wake anew

And just like that, all the bad stuff never happened, and Katie is given another chance to get things right. She’s also got a dresser drawer full of magical mushrooms—and an irresistible urge to make her life not just good, but perfect. Too bad it’s against the rules. But Katie doesn’t care about the rules—and she’s about to discover the unintended consequences of the best intentions.

From the mind and pen behind the acclaimed Scott Pilgrim series comes a madcap new tale of existential angst, everyday obstacles, young love, and ancient spirits that’s sharp-witted and tenderhearted, whimsical and wise."

I'm of two minds with regard to the new Bryan Lee O'Malley book (BTW, this is exempt from Harkness conflict, because they are so different). One mind is going, OMG, finally, something new since the final Scott Pilgrim, other mind, but his other standalone, Lost at Sea, sucked... see, two minds.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: A Discovery of Witches, Bryan Lee O'Malley, Comics, Deborah Harkness, Scott Pilgrim, Seconds, Shadow of Night, The Book of Life

Sever (The Chemical Garden Book 3) by Lauren DeStefano
Published by: Simon and Schuster
Publication Date: February 12th, 2013
Format: Hardcover, 384 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy

Rhine is now officially her father-in-law's medical experiment. Brought back to the family compound, her husband doesn't even know she's being "treated" in the basement, along with many other people who were supposedly long gone. Even when finally faced with the truth of his father's crimes, Linden can't quite cope and chooses to believe the lie he's lived his entire life. Yet he is savvy enough to try to protect his two remaining wives by hiding them at his uncle's house. After all that Rhine has been through she is surprised to see that two of her fellow captives are willing to help her find her brother and put right what went wrong.

Rhine's husband Linden and her sister wife Cecily help in the hunt for Rowan. Finding Rowan won't be as hard as Rhine thought. In the aftermath of her disappearance and supposed death in a medical experiment, Rowan might just have cracked, as his anti science rantings and bombing of medical centers would indicate. But maybe, just maybe, there's a giant conspiracy afoot which will make friends of enemies and hopefully end this death sentence hanging over all the world. Twenty is too young to die.

And then the series became a rip off of M. Night Shyamalan's The Villiage, which was a rip off of Running Out of Time... but with a bit more of a lean towards the Margaret Peterson Haddix book, and I threw my hands up in the air in exasperation. If it wasn't for that unexpected bloodbath at the end in which I took not just a little bit of joy, there would be nothing memorable about this book other then the faint melancholy I feel for what this series could have been. The unbelievability of the underlying reason for everything that happens means that everything in the book is on an unstable base and is therefore unbelievable as well.

Just because a book is set in a dystopian society doesn't mean that you get to ignore logic. The whole point of dystopian versus fantasy is that it is a possibility. Something could go wrong with our society, a virus, a massive power failure, a war, something that could go wrong does and we are plunged into a future nightmare. You can't just decide that I have this cool idea as to how society could became a certain way and force it on society. People have a hive mind mentality, they won't go against this hive mind, and what DeStefano suggests happens is so against the hive mind, it's unacceptable as what drives the plot.

So, now is the time if you haven't seen The Village to stop reading, because besides spoiling this book I plan to spoil the movie, neither of which are worth your time, so really, I'm doing you a favor. OK, so in the utterly predictable movie The Village, a group comes together and basically removes themselves from society. They have seen the horror that humanity has became and want to live a safe, insular life without any outside influence. The group makes this decision for their safety, their heath, and the safety and future of their children. Self exile for the continuation of the species. This is feasible on a small scale, because they are like-minded individuals who are brought together through grief and come to a similar conclusion.

With Sever we learn that the ENTIRE United States decides to eschew technology and anything outside the contiguous forty-eight states in exchange for perfect health and children with genes that will mean they live out their lives at the physical peak of humanity, which, of course, backfires on them. They even re-write history so that the outside world no longer exists. What country does DeStefano live in? The US going all "Village" and giving away it's love of gadgets and technology and access to the world for perfect health? Um no. We sadly live in a world where a person would kill someone for an iPhone, there's no chance in hell this would ever happen. To disconnect from the outside world, well maybe, but give up gadgets? No. The hive mind will prevail!

I can't believe in a virus that is caused by a situation that could never, ever, ever, happen. I'm sorry, I just can't buy into the world of this series anymore, which, by they way, it's title doesn't make any sense. "The Chemical Garden" um... yeah, not working. I thought it would be cool if maybe it was poisonous plants that did this, but using it as a pun on a hospital nursery, lame. Yet it is to do with what is in that nursery that the moral question the series is asking originates from. All this comes down to is the question of what would we do for our children? I'm not saying that the breeders could actually get everyone to agree to this world by playing the "children our our future" card, but I can see where they are coming from.

The Village was for the future and the children, and look what those parents did to give them a better world. Would we be willing to let our children suffer pain if it helped in the long run? Is Vaughn's evil experiments and dissection of his dead daughters-in-law excusable because it was for the greater good? It's kind of like trying to pardon a Nazis... medical advancement versus what is morally right. I'm sorry, but if I'm getting joy out of watching your characters die and comparing your book to a bad movie, there is no way that I'm really going to bother with these weighty issues. I'm just going to take your books to the used bookstore and get it off my shelves. I need the space for better books, not to dwell on philosophical conundrums.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Chemical Garden Trilogy, Dystopian, Fever, iphone, Lauren DeStefano, M. Night Shyamalan, Margaret Peterson Haddis, Running Out of Time, Sever, Summer Series, The Village, Virus, Wither

Fever (The Chemical Garden Book 2) by Lauren DeStefano
Published by: Simon and Schuster
Publication Date: February 21st, 2012
Format: Hardcover, 352 Pages
Rating: ★
To Buy

Rhine is free of her husband, but there is more then one kind of prison as she is quick to learn as she and Gabriel are captured by a madame who runs a carnival inside a wickedly electrified fence. Rhine and Gabriel are trying to get to New York from Florida and have only made it as far as South Carolina before their luck starts to run out. Kept in a drugged state, the two of them perform for madame's customers, hoping that they can break free and find Rhine's brother Rowan. But once free of the carnival they face more horrors then they can imagine, all with Rhine's father-in-law quick on their heels. Stowing away on trucks, Angel Blood withdrawal, unexpected comrades, creepy men, snatchers, danger at every corner with no money and no food. Rhine is starting to realize just how naive she was in thinking that she just had to get away from her husband's house, because his reach is far. Can she ever escape the marriage she was forced into and go back to her old life?

Never in all my years of reading books has a series gone to the bad so fast and so irrevocably. I might point a figure at Mary Norton and her Borrowers, but that was more her tendency to drop plot points and start each book from scratch then writing a hot mess that is just shit. If this series had been just content to leave well enough alone ending with just the right amount of hope and ambiguity with Wither then I'd be all for DeStefano. As it stands, I'm having a hard time coming to terms with a series that started out so uniquely and so strongly and having it turn so unoriginal, disjointed, dark, and dare I say, predictable?

Was this really how the series was outlined? Because Wither clearly states it's book one in a trilogy... so, seriously, this was the plan? THIS? I am just baffled. Fever has no identity, no core of originality, it quite literally doesn't know what it wants to be so it tries to be everything and fails at it all... it just has so many random dystopian tropes thrown into it that my head wants to explode. The impossible love story, evil carnies, the dying hooker with the heart of gold, the sad little crippled girl who everyone underestimates... blurg. When the book eventually got to the "good" orphanage, I expected a medley from Annie to be sung. Just no.

Yet Rhine is the biggest shock of all. She came across as a unique and intelligent, if confused, girl in Wither. What the hell happened? Now she's all naivete and seriously stupid. It seems as if once Gabriel and Rhine left the house they lost their identities in the process and became bumbling idiots. Rhine grew up on the streets of New York. She had to have been street savvy and smart to avoid capture all these years. The only reason she got caught was because it was a fake job set-up, not because she was dumb enough to be pulled off the street our dragged out of her home. Heck, her and her brother killed the last man who invaded their house! Yet outside Linden's estate, oh gosh, let's steal this boat, oh dear, we don't have money, shucks, we've been captured by an evil madame who runs a carnival and is going to turn us into sex salves... say what!?!

Rhine had how many freakin' months planning this escape and she didn't think to, oh, I don't know, steal a whole heck of a lot of the jewelry Linden gave her and hide it under her clothes to fund their flight? And how about not stealing a boat that can only run on fuel, I thought Gabriel knew about boats, so get something with a sail as well as a motor idiots. Oh, and yes Rhine, Gabriel is in love with you and wants something more, so stop acting like it's a shock, you do know what goes on behind closed doors, or in tents... and of course Vaughn put a tracker in your leg, before the wedding he obviously examined you to see if you could bare children, it only makes sense that he would tag you as the cattle he views you are.

Fever seems to take, not just one step back from the progress it made on women's rights and personal liberties, but it seems to jump off a cliff. Wither smartly showed us a world of exploitation and horrors that was relatable and fascinating, but never stooped to sensationalism. Everything had it's reason, everything was there for a purpose, to show us how the three wives coped, to show us what captivity did to Rhine's state of mind, everything in it's perfect place giving us a compelling narrative. Yet here it seems that the book has shifted away from the exploration of these salient arguments and instead has embraced exploitation.

The sex carnival seems to be not there for a discussion on the personal liberties of brides versus whores, but to my mind, there just for sensation, to make us shocked. Therefore all the good the first book has done is ripped down with shock for shocks sake with no insight, no deeper meaning. The sex and drugs that Rhine was previously exposed to were a creepy background threat lurking in the shadows, here the sex and drugs come forefront and are exploitative, and not in any way that is good or open for discussion. Seriously, a prostitution carnival? Just, no.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Angel Blood, Annie, Carnival, Chemical Garden Trilogy, Fever, Lauren DeStefano, Linden, Mary Norton, Rhine, Summer Series, The Borrowers, Whorehouse, Wither

Wars of the Roses: Stormbird by Conn Iggulden
Published by: Putnam Adult
Publication Date: July 8th, 2014
Format: Hardcover, 496 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
"In 1437, the Lancaster king Henry VI ascends the throne of England after years of semi-peaceful regency. Named “The Lamb,” Henry is famed more for his gentle and pious nature than his father’s famous battlefield exploits; already, his dependence on his closest men has stirred whispers of weakness at court.

A secret truce negotiated with France to trade British territories for a royal bride—Margaret of Anjou—sparks revolts across English territory. The rival royal line, the House of York, sees the chaos brought on by Henry’s weakness and with it not only opportunity in the monarch, but also their patriotic duty in ousting an ineffectual king. As storm clouds gather over England, King Henry and his supporters find themselves besieged abroad and at home. Who or what can save the kingdom before it is too late?"

Ok, after devouring all of The White Queen, I'm kind of now on a War of the Roses kick...

The White Magic Five and Dime by Steve Hockensmith with Lisa Falco
Published by: MIDNIGHT INK
Publication Date: July 8th, 2014
Format: Paperback, 336 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
"A murdered mother leaves a shop full of secrets.

Much to Alanis McLachlan’s surprise, her con-woman mother, Barbra, has left her an inheritance—The White Magic Five & Dime, a new-age shop in tiny Berdache, Arizona. Reluctantly traveling to Berdache to claim her new property, Alanis decides to stay and pick up her estranged mother’s tarot reading business in an attempt to find out who killed her. With help from a hunky cop and her mother’s live-in teenage apprentice, Alanis begins faking her way through bogus tarot readings in order to win the confidence of her mother’s clients. But much to her surprise, the more she uses the tarot deck, the more Alanis begins to find real meaning in the cards."

And speaking of magic (ie, The White Queen), this looks like a fun new series about magic!

The Hundred-Year House by Rebecca Makkai
Published by: Viking Adult
Publication Date: July 8th, 2014
Format: Hardcover, 352 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
"Meet the Devohrs: Zee, a Marxist literary scholar who detests her parents’ wealth but nevertheless finds herself living in their carriage house; Gracie, her mother, who claims she can tell your lot in life by looking at your teeth; and Bruce, her step-father, stockpiling supplies for the Y2K apocalypse and perpetually late for his tee time. Then there’s Violet Devohr, Zee’s great-grandmother, who they say took her own life somewhere in the vast house, and whose massive oil portrait still hangs in the dining room.

Violet’s portrait was known to terrify the artists who resided at the house from the 1920s to the 1950s, when it served as the Laurelfield Arts Colony—and this is exactly the period Zee’s husband, Doug, is interested in. An out-of-work academic whose only hope of a future position is securing a book deal, Doug is stalled on his biography of the poet Edwin Parfitt, once in residence at the colony. All he needs to get the book back on track—besides some motivation and self-esteem—is access to the colony records, rotting away in the attic for decades. But when Doug begins to poke around where he shouldn’t, he finds Gracie guards the files with a strange ferocity, raising questions about what she might be hiding. The secrets of the hundred-year house would turn everything Doug and Zee think they know about her family on its head—that is, if they were to ever uncover them.

In this brilliantly conceived, ambitious, and deeply rewarding novel, Rebecca Makkai unfolds a generational saga in reverse, leading the reader back in time on a literary scavenger hunt as we seek to uncover the truth about these strange people and this mysterious house. With intelligence and humor, a daring narrative approach, and a lovingly satirical voice, Rebecca Makkai has crafted an unforgettable novel about family, fate and the incredible surprises life can offer."

A house, multiple generations... the family, a little Royal Tenenbaum-esque, I'm sold.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Conn Iggulden, Lisa Falco, Rebecca Makkai, Steve Hockensmith, The Hundred-Year House, The Royal Tenenbaums, The White Magic Five and Dime, The White Queen, Wars of the Roses

Wither (The Chemical Garden Book 1) by Lauren DeStefano
Published by: Simon and Schuster
Publication Date: March 22nd, 2011
Format: Hardcover, 368 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy

Rhine is one of three. There were more girls, lots more. All snatched off the streets and locked in a van and driven for inspection by their future husband. The ones that weren't chosen had a fate that still haunts Rhine as she remembers the gunshots in her nightmares. The world is dying. Aside from the first generation who are gracefully aging, all females die at twenty and all males at twenty-five. Rhine has four years left to live and she doesn't intend to be trapped in a cage for the pleasure of her husband while her old life and her twin brother are out there, waiting for her return.

But Rhine and her sister wives, Jenna and Cecily, are kept under lock and key in their palatial rooms taken out just for special occasions, and never, ever, allowed to leave the property. They wait on their husband's whims while their fear of their father-in-law, Housemaster Vaughn, grows daily with rumors of his medical experiments in the basement. While Jenna and Cecily have accepted their new lives, Rhine can't, Rhine won't. She will gain her husband's trust and then make her move. With the help of a servant, Gabriel, she hopes to escape, no matter what her conflicted feelings about her husband, Linden, are whispering to her heart.

If Shirley Jackson was writing YA today, this is what her book would be like. There's just such a compellingly creepy vibe within this dystopian world that's part Logan's Run part Mormon nightmare that harks back to classics such as The Turn of the Screw and The Haunting of Hill House but written for the sensibility of today's teens who were raised on a steady diet of reality shows. There is a scary believability to the story that makes it that much more terrifying. The isolation of this small group of women as sister wives might seem to some preposterous, but I say, look to the past and you can see terrifying echoes of what was and what could be again.

As recently as the Victorian era women were literally property. Their husbands owned them and could do what they liked with these all too human possessions, from turning them into baby factories, using them as accessories, to locking them up in an asylum if they got out of hand. DeStefano has just taken what was and amplified it ever so much to pile on the creep factor. By taking away all choice in marriage (again, something that was rare anyway), by cranking down the ages of the brides, by allowing marriages to have more then one wife, and by adding medical experimentation, she has created a heightened reality that scares me yet I could totally see it happening, even today in some hidden compound in the woods.

Wither varies from other dystopian books in that while this virus that has somehow become a ticking time bomb in the genetic code making women die at twenty and men die at twenty-five is front and center, it isn't, in my mind, what the book is about. World plagues are common fare for post apocalyptic books and this does give Wither the every moment is precious and each moment left in captivity is one less moment of freedom vibe. Yet looking deeper, this isn't about the plague, or a downtrodden society, or a lack of creature comforts, which the characters actually have far more of in captivity then in freedom, it's about the encroachment of human rights and what all these things that have happened to society mean to woman, and a select few women in a large house in Florida, and four wives in particular.

While I mentioned earlier the Victorian mentality that is revived here, it also pays to just look at the world around us as it is. Women's reproductive rights seem to be a fine topic of discussion in the government where men who know nothing feel they have every right to say what happens to my body. Vaughn is just a totem of these people's views with his experiments and his liberties with his daughters-in-law's bodies. A plague killing us young, yeah, could happen eventually, but our rights to our own bodies, that could happen sooner rather then later and that really scares me.

Yet the acceptance of this world and this life would be the scariest of all. By having three wives we are able to see how three different people react to a similar situation. Jenna views it as a comfy prison to live out her remaining years, Cecily views it as her dream come true, while Rhine... Rhine is where it gets interesting. While Rhine never gives up on her plans to escape captivity, by having her as the book's narrator we get more insight into how she feels. While it is obvious that the wives come together with their traumatic bonding, a situation like this can not help but bring up Stockholm Syndrome.

Rhine has lived in a society where it was highly likely that at some point she was going to be snatched off the street and forced into some kind of bondage, either prostitution or marriage. So she already has an expectation of capture. Therefore, once captured, her expectations and reality will clash, and the question becomes, will she submit to her fate or fight? She does maintain a fight deep down, but also she is able to sympathize more and more with, not only her fellow wives, but with her husband. She grows to care for Linden. It is not known if Linden knows the full horror of what has happened to Rhine and how her life was destroyed by becoming his wife, so Linden could either be a co-conspirator or a victim like Rhine, but either way, Rhine does come to "love" Linden... her small acceptance of this life is the scariest, yet also sadly understandable, aspect of Wither.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Chemical Garden Trilogy, Lauren DeStefano, Logan's Run, Mormons, Rhine, Shirley Jackson, Stockholm Syndrome, Summer Series, The Haunting of Hill House, The Turn of the Screw, Victorian, Virus, Wither

Ruin and Rising (The Grisha Book 3) by Leigh Bardugo
Published by: Henry Holt and Co.
Publication Date: June 17th, 2014
Format: Hardcover, 432 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy (Different edition then one reviewed)

The Apparat's plan to win the war is to bide his time underground in his white cathedral with his disciples and rise victorious when all Alina's enemies have killed each other. While this kind of strategy has led to his long and successful career in the halls of Os Alta, Alina is going crazy underground as his prisoner. Her illness after the battle with the Darkling has left her sick and frail, but being so far away from the light she summons means she is unable to fully heal, unable to escape the Apparat and her growing fear that he might realize a dead saint is less work then a living saint. Luckily for Alina her fellow Grisha are concocting a plan to release her from this underground tomb and resume their hunt for the final amplifier in the hopes that then Alina will have the strength to defeat the Darkling.

Escaping though is the first and easiest step, and in truth, it wasn't easy at all. But working their way out of a labyrinth of underground caverns is quite easier then locating a rebel prince who has become a sky pirate employing guerrilla tactics or hunting down a mystical creature that may not even exist. All this just in the hopes that they might succeed. Yet with the Darkling striking out faster, sooner, and unexpectedly at every turn, Alina wonders how her misfit bad of Grisha can survive and how they even became compatriots in the first place. With despair driving them more then hope, Alina wants to be the light in the darkness but fears that her lust for power might make her more similar to the Darkling then she dares admit to anyone, even Mal.

A satisfying conclusion is the hardest thing to achieve. A delicate balance of all the possible outcomes while remaining true to the characters and giving the readers closure. Some might say it's impossible, others improbable, but Leigh Bardugo came very close to a perfect ending with non stop action and wit. Mal becoming even more Malcolm Reynolds as he paraphrases Nathan Fillion's character from the Firefly episode "The Message" to my delight. Though I do have issues with the improbability of the happily ever after, I still felt a satisfaction wash over me, with maybe a little eye rolling at the convenience of things. Yes, after a bleak tale almost everyone wants love to prevail, cue the happy welcome home to the Shire music and end credits, but there's me going, but can't it still be a little dark? Perhaps I should stop falling for the baddies and the rogues so that when they are vanquished or cast aside I won't be left there brokenhearted.

Yet my inability to stop falling for the bad guys was a foregone conclusion with the Darkling. What made Ruin and Rising so amazing and so fully rounded a book was the insight Bardugo gave us about him. Here we don't have just a mindless baddie whose sole goal is power and destruction. We don't have a cookie cutter villain with a goofy gimmick, like a bullseye iris (don't ask me why I'm thinking of Charles Dance in Last Action Hero, I honestly don't know). Bardugo gets that bad guys can't be all that bad, there has to be more. Here we have a multifaceted villain. He's not black like Spinal Tap none more black, he's black like an oil slick or the night sky, there's rainbows and depth, there's hints of blue that make the black blacker, but a splash of light every now and then. His back story is gut wrenching, especially if you read this edition with the prequel story "The Demon in the Wood." To the rest of the world he's this improbable being of such destructive force that he is terrifying, but to Alina, he's just a boy, like calling to like. What wouldn't we do if we spent lifetimes alone and persecuted? Your only wish to be loved and safe and have someone tenderly say your name. Your true name. To learn at the end that you are in fact truly alone, that would destroy anyone.

Aside from the whole wanting to go off with the Darkling, I also kind of really want to just move into the world of this book. Because I don't want this to be the end. I can't accept it for some reason and this has spurred me and my overactive brain on to start asking fifty million questions about the world Bardugo has built. I have so many thoughts on the worldbuilding that I can't sit still. I don't think it's a lack on Bardugo's part either as to insufficient information, but more my insatiable curiosity. Unless of course you have the same questions, then perhaps we all need to sit down with Leigh and work things out. The exception to this is the distances. I really don't think that Bardugo worked out her distances on her map very well. In the first book it took far longer to get anywhere, and as each book progressed it took less and less time to get from one place to another, yes, I know they had improved transport... but still, it's off. Make a key, stick to it, alright?

As for my other questions, I'd have to be like the Darkling and have a really long lifespan because, well, some things I want to know are past, some are present, and some are future, unless I had the ability to time travel, that would make this faster. Firstly I want to know if Morozova just created the applifiers or did he plan on using them. It seems like a lot of work to go around and make them and not use them. But if he used them, well, did they respawn on his death? But then they thought, maybe he didn't die, so then, well, it makes no sense. Though I really want to know more about the physics of the fold. So it's this big blackness dividing the country and it's the blackest black inside. Well, the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, this is a north south divide. How is there dawn in West Ravka or a sunset in East Ravka? Just how? See, I just need more and more books in the world to work this all out once and for all. Leigh's got to get on this ASAP.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Alina, Apparat, Charles Dance, Darkling, Firefly, Grisha, Grisha Trilogy, Last Action Hero, Leigh Bardugo, Mal, Nathan Fillion, Ravka, Ruin and Rising, Spinal Tap, The Fold