Kay
In a nut-shell: Canterbury Gothic (Ta, Stevie)
Tattoos, taxidermy, tragedy, big empty isolated farm house, buried family secrets; mystery both modern and victorian. Disillusion. Disgust when curiosity collector ancestor shown to be not enlightened exception but greedy vandal with maori burial artefacts, multiple stuffed huia discovered hidden in walls of house.
Well written, but felt utterly divorced from both heroines' motives, feelings. Narrator/main pov Cynical, self-centered, disillusioned; and me too, as she is revealed as author of the alternate chapters from ancestors pov and their characters to have been pure wishforfillment and spectacularly off in case of g'father.
Fascinating, but not, exactly enjoyable. (Sour grapes on my part too - old style tattoos, english degree, lucritive and quirky hoby, vintage style, overseas travel)
Oooo I just LOVED this! It's taken me a while to get around to it as I found the first chapter/intro a little hard to get into (it's only four pages...) but as ‘Silence' had been recommended by one of my favourite authors I perservered and was rewarded with a wry, thoughtful, quietly funny and quite terrifying read.
I really enjoyed Sagara's discursive writing style. Initially I found it a little distracting, but once the story picked up the pace this wasn't a problem. And Sagara does awkward, uncomfortably real conversations like few authors I've ever come across.
What I most liked about ‘Silence', I think, was that Emma, the main character (and potential Necromancer) tries, always, to be kind. To do the right thing. To reassure others that everything is OK. She's been doing this for so long it's become automatic, (despite having to cope with two very close bereavements, which would give anyone a free pass to be self-absorbed and surly!) so when the dead come into her life her first instinct is to help. She doesn't even have to think about it.
Emma's all-encompassing kindness is never presented as weakness, or a character flaw. On the contrary, she's a very strong, stroppy character; and it's the initial kindness and respect she shows to the lost and helpless dead which saves her - and her friends, in the end.
I will be hunting down Sagara's earlier books - I need something to keep me going until the sequel to ‘Silence' comes out next year!
I LOVED this book.
I picked it up expecting yet another slight and amusing riff on the theme of girl-with-21st-century-attitude-stars-in-retelling-of-classic-fairytale-set-in-unspecified-yet-still-annoyingly-historically-inaccurate-medieval-kingdom.
Instead, I was blown away by Merrie Haskell's impeccably realised and researched world - the 15th century principality of Sylvania, (a country so convincing I was quite shocked to discover in the Author's Notes that she made it up!)whose Price - lacking an heir and desperate for alliances to preserve his country's independence from it's rapacious neighbours - is prevented from marrying off his twelve daughters by a very inconvenient curse which not only causes them to wear their shoes to rags each night, but responds to any attempt to separate or remove the princesses from their tower bedroom with floods and earthquakes.
Enter apprentice herbalist and accomplished liar Reveka, a commoner recently transplanted to Castle Sylvian by her father, an ex-soldier. (Nice allusion to the Brothers' Grimm Twelve Dancing Princesses there.)Reveka's interest in the princesses' curse is at first solely motivated by the reward money, (which will buy her the chance to one day run her own herbary) but once she discovers the princesses' aren't the curse's only victims she becomes increasingly determined to break it, especially once she realises that the peace and stability of her new home rests on discovering the princesses' secret.
However, there are no easy fixes here and freeing the pricesses from their nights of dancing results in anything but a happy-ever-after.
This book was excellent in so many ways, but the best thing for me was that Merrie Haskell has that great and rare gift of knowing her world so well that she DOESN'T FEEL THE NEED TO EXPLAIN EVERYTHING. The characters know their own stories, customs and history, so we, the reader don't have to, and, while this book resolved the mystery of the princess's curse, Haskell has left many tantalising loose ends and unexplained mysteries, (amongst them the back-story of her gorgeously sympathetic Demon King) leaving me in desperate hope for a sequel.
In the meantime, I'll have to resort to googling Romanian fairy tales.
My first reading of this book involved frantically skimming it till 6am in the morning. Then I read it properly, and fell in love with it.
Mirror Dance combines the edge-of-seat adventure I've come to expect from Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan stories with the delving around in her character's psychologies I so enjoyed in her earlier books Shards of Honor and Barrayar.
The relationship between the clone brothers was beautifully explored as Miles saves Mark then Mark saves Miles, and comes to the realisation that he is a person in his own right and his success in life doesn't rely on being just like his brother.
During the course of the book self loathing, paranoid Mark discovers his own talents, and works out his place in the world as Lord Mark Pierre Vorkosigan (I loved seeing Cordelia and Arral through his eyes - I miss them!) He also develops a beautifully black sense of humor - “Never give aversion therapy to a masochist”!
As always with Bujold's books her precise vocabulary had me frequently reaching for the dictionary, but I like to have my brain stretched so I think that's a good thing.
This one is going straight onto my Want to Own! list.
This book horrified, intrigued and enlightened me by turns and I loved it!
At the start of the story 12 year old orphan Mary Lang is destined for the gallows. As a convicted thief in Victorian era London she is resigned to death when she is offered a second chance at life and a place at a school by a mysterious philanthropist.
The school, Miss Scrimshaw's Academy for girls, has a women's emancipation-type agenda and another, secret branch - The Agency - which trains women as private detectives with the idea that women behaving suspiciously are more likely to be overlooked and underestimated than men.
Mary's first mission as a secret agent is to investigate a rich merchant suspected of artefact smuggling. But once placed in his household Mary soon discovers she is not the only person investigating Henry Thorold, and that there is far more than just smuggling going on in the Thorold house!
Y.S. Lee vividly describes 1850s London, (She has a PhD in Victorian literature and culture and it shows!) from the smells and squalor of Mary's early life to the stuffy ballrooms and suffocating boredom which are the lot of the upper-class woman.
She also explores the sexism, class-ism and racism running rampant through Victorian Society; not only is Mary battling the disadvantage of being a female in a patriarchal society, she is the daughter of low-class immigrants AND she is half Chinese, a fact she hides from everyone for fear of prejudice. Without the intervention of her benefactors Mary never had a chance for a good (or even a mildly bad) life and her matter of fact description of the circumstances which led to her becoming a thief shocked the socks off me.
However, through the agency of the Agency(!), Lee gives Mary adventure, intrigue and a really cute love-interest. (They antagonise the hell out of each other, of course.)
To sum up; I am so glad this book is the first in a trilogy and I can't wait to find out what happens next!
Why did the heroines switch and the book turn from realism to magic realism in the last third? I did not care to find out. Was irritated as I found the origional heroine intriging, tho unsympathetic. Did not want to be suddenly in the non-entity's story.
LOVED the hairdressing industry intimacy, the feeling for Central Auckland & K Road's history.
Historical FICTION. Emphasis on the ‘fiction'.
Sanitising of Native American colonial experience by a non-Native American.
I made the mistake of initially assuming this was a book to be dipped into - and came away baffled. However, once I took the time to read each story - made up of several pages of strips - right through from beginning to end I was enchanted by Jansson's subversive humor.
A book about cars with more substance than the average board book.
A very simple storyline with cute cut-aways, clever design and a double-page spread containing lots of different cars make this book a winner for car obsessed toddlers.
The best, most surprising, amazing and thought-provoking anthology I have ever come across. I have been dipping into it for years and am still discovering new gems.
A breathtakingly terrifying tale of an OCD teen out for justice. Seeing the world through Lo's eyes - the reasons she HAS TO carry out her inexplicable (to others) rituals and impulses, even when it alienates those who love her, even when it puts her life in danger, was an eye-opener and a half.
Despite it's (to me) rather underwhelming title, ‘The Butterfly Clues' is a fast-paced fire-cracker of a read. I was so intrigued (and frightened!) that I stayed up half the night to finish it over six weeks ago, and it's characters and events are still vividly playing out in my head.
Nice board book. The cut away pages make turning easy for little hands. Simple, bold illustrations with a nice resolution at the end. One of my favorite board books so far.
So. Terribly. Heart-breaking. Heart-stopping, too. How can I possibly wait a year for the next book!