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| # | cover | title | author | isbn | isbn13 | asin | num pages | avg rating | num ratings | date pub | date pub (ed.) | rating | my rating | review | notes | recommender | comments | votes | read count | date started | date read |
date
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date purchased | owned | purchase location | condition | format | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0451236912
| 9780451236913
| 3.66
| 350
| Sep 08, 2011
| Aug 07, 2012
|
Imagine a typical day in your life. You get up, get dressed, go to work or school. You take your kids to the park, make dinner, visit friends, learn s...more
Imagine a typical day in your life. You get up, get dressed, go to work or school. You take your kids to the park, make dinner, visit friends, learn salsa dancing. Now imagine that all around you, hidden beneath the ordinariness of life, is a War, an invisible War but a War nonetheless. You have no idea, but all those unexplained deaths? Assumed suicides? Shootings, stabbings, car accidents - they're not accidental, nor are they mindless. They're certainly not unexplained, just not to you. There is a War being raged across the globe, and Joshua is a Soldier in this War. At twenty-five, he's already had so many kills he's stopped counting them. Sent wherever he's needed by Intelligence, given a file on his next target, he kills and then moves on. And why? Because it's a War. It's been going on for as long as anyone involved knows about. Everyone born into the War - and those who married into it - have lost numerous family members, on both sides. But it's not chaos. It's very deliberate and controlled, and everyone follows three main rules: no killing civilians; no killing anyone under the age of eighteen; and if you have a baby before you're eighteen, it's to be handed to the other side. It becomes the enemy. Joshua has never questioned the War. He's lost everyone in his family except for his mother: his father, killed in a supposed car accident that was no accident; his beloved uncle, whisked away by men at the mall when he looked away (he was only eight); and his sister Jessica was killed when men came to the house as she was babysitting him. They weren't killed because they were Soldiers as Joshua is now. They were killed because they were part of the War, and as everyone knows, the War can only be won by beating the other side. Who is the other side? They are the enemy. They are evil. They must be evil, because if they aren't than Joshua's side is, and no one thinks they're evil. How did it start? No one knows, though there are stories. All they know is that they must keep fighting or the other side will win. It is while on a mission in Montreal to take out a pharmaceutical businessman that Joshua meets Maria, a student at McGill University, and falls in love. It changes everything, gives him something other than the War to live for - and Maria isn't part of it. She's a civilian, and as Joshua discovers after learning that she's pregnant, she's also only seventeen, fast-tracked through the school system. Now they're on the run, hunted by both sides: his because baby, if born, has to be turned over to the other side, and the enemy because Joshua has been given up to them, all the information on his kills released. Everyone is after them, these people could be anyone, where can they go? You can't just leave the War. You can't say you don't want to be a part of it anymore. Protecting Maria and their unborn child now becomes Joshua's whole life, but trying to leave the War turns out to be more dangerous than living within it. This book floored me, it's so good. It's just my kind of book: speculative, chilling, thought-provoking, psychological, tense, gripping, climactic, tragic. Written as a kind of journal of his life - or his life from a certain, recent point - Joshua writes his story directly to Maria, for her to read. I don't think that revealing the baby part of the plot is a spoiler because there is an epigraph at the very beginning that reveals it - for myself, I had already read the blurb for the second book and knew what happens at the end of this one, and that knowledge only added to the incredible layer of tension and tangible threat that rests heavily over the story, making it feel very real. I wanted to share some of that with you, though not all of it - if you want to know, then just read about the sequel, Children of the Underground. The novel, Joshua's story as told in his own words, opens with a murder. He details his assassination of a woman, a mother of two young children, right outside her house after she returns from work. This whole scene damn near broke my heart. One of the chilling lines is how she doesn't fight him, because she knows she has to die. But these people, all of them, are stuck in their own self-inflicted bubble: there is no reason, no justification, for any of these deaths, but if they admit the truth to themselves then they also have to face the fact that they've been gleefully killing innocent people. Aside from the Soldiers, there are people in Intelligence who gather information and tell the Soldiers who to kill, and manage all the money and weapons and so on (they are not just incredibly well organised but also scarily well funded); the rest live normal lives, going about their business, working regular jobs, having children - the only difference is that they can be killed at any time, once they're over the age of eighteen. You'd think that the plausibility of it all would sink the novel, that your skepticism and disbelief as a reader would make it fall apart. But the truly scary thing about it is just how plausible it really is. You don't know the inner workings, and you certainly don't know the Why of it anymore than they do, which puts you exactly in Joshua's perspective. The difference is that we are thinkers, critics, analysts, questioners, debaters. We like to think that if we were to learn about this at sixteen, as they do, that we wouldn't just buy into it, that we would demand answers and demand the right to opt out. Except that, for these kids, the War is already personal. They've grown up suspicious. They've already lost so many family members that they're simmering with anger and all it takes is a prod in the right direction, a face to aim their hatred at. The justification that "they are the enemy, they're evil, if we don't keep fighting then they'll win" is flimsy at best, and yet it becomes rhetoric, propaganda, and to question it is to question all the pain, all the loss, all the sacrifices people have already endured. You would be a traitor, a betrayer. They do question it, of course they do, especially because they've never been given a real reason for the War, but in the way of human minds, they talk themselves into a justification that they can live with. "So, we kill them because they're evil, just like we were taught when we were kids? That's what you're getting at?" That's a long quote to include here I know, but I felt the need to share it all to show the way their logic works. And this is where the truth of the novel shines: the fact is that on both sides of a conflict, everyone believes that they're in the right and the other side is wrong, evil even. Take any war. People don't fight unless they believe in what they're fighting for. The Nazis didn't see themselves as evil: they believed they were fighting evil and making their world a better place (I'm simplifying but work with me here). We just happened to strongly disagree in their vision. It's just that, in a war, innocence (or good and evil, if you believe in it) gets twisted, and the only way regular people can do things they would otherwise be repulsed by is by absolving themselves of responsibility. Jared's words speak to this ability humans have of convincing ourselves that when fighting for a "greater good", killing is necessary. And in war, it's not murder is it. With a severely black-and-white set-up as this, the story fits well into its American setting, but I can see it working elsewhere too. What really had my brain ticking over - perhaps due to all those cheesy American movies I've seen that inspire thoughts of this - was putting up my own hypotheses. I've no idea what could start this - could be something quite simple and small, in the beginning - but it's almost irrelevant at this point. One thought that occurred to me, though it has holes, is that there aren't actually two sides, but one large group split in two by the Powers That Be (who are unknown), put to fighting each other. That would be devastating, but I don't think that would hold up. The truth is, that both sides are identical. Each is told that the other is the enemy, is evil. Each holds the other to blame, they just don't know it. It's sociopathic, this War. And no one seems to understand or realise that it just can't be won. Joshua does start to question things a bit, but he's a product of his upbringing and training and the War is his whole life. When Maria tries to express her utter skepticism and disbelief over the whole thing, he reverts to type and just claims that she can't understand because she hasn't experienced it. And that is the way these things go. While reading the book, I kept thinking how analogous it is, representative of conflicts such as Israel and Palestine. When I described the story to my husband, he mentioned another one: Ireland and Northern Ireland. I've always struggled to really get into the headspace of people engaged in these kinds of conflicts because I can't help but see it as a bigger picture, but reading Joshua's story I was able to develop the empathy needed to see how it happens, and how hard - how impossible - it is to end it. The ending, reading it as a mother of a toddler, was really hard on me. I knew it was coming but that didn't lessen the blow - or block out the details. I just can't imagine what Maria could possibly do next, because even though this War is underground and no one knows about it who isn't a part of it, they're everywhere and so well organised and so secretive, and Maria has nothing: no money, no allies, no leverage. I am so so glad I have the next book ready and waiting for me! I'm glad that she carries the story on in the next book, as we only get to see her through Joe's eyes in this first book and while I liked her a lot and she was well fleshed out, her thoughts remained silent. For all the action and the violence - and there is graphic violence in this novel, just to warn you if you need it - it's a surprisingly quiet and very tense story. Hanging over it is this growing weight of paranoia - the characters have it, it keeps them alive they say, and you start to get it too. I didn't trust anyone, I expected the worst, and the weight of this endless suspicion wears you down. I love a book where you really live in the world as its described, as the characters live it, and that was very true of Children of Paranoia. I'm just amazed anyone in this War can sleep at night, knowing that after they turn eighteen, anyone can come from them at any time, always when they least expect it. How can you live with that? Ha, spoken by someone who's never lived in a war zone. People adapt. People continue to live as close to a normal life as they can, because what else can you do? And in this War, to give up would be the same as letting the other side win. Children of Paranoia is intense and gripping and had me glued to the page. A new favourite.(less) | Notes are private!
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1
| not set
| Mar 17, 2013
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Feb 27, 2013
| Paperback
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| 0062085530
| 9780062085535
| 4.37
| 8,297
| Feb 05, 2013
| Feb 05, 2013
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This review contains quite a lot of plot description, which you may want to avoid. Skip down to read my spoiler-free review. Juliette is safe in Omega...more This review contains quite a lot of plot description, which you may want to avoid. Skip down to read my spoiler-free review. Juliette is safe in Omega Point, an extensive underground bunker for people like her, people with unusual gifts. She's safe from the Reestablishment and safe from Warner who wants to use her - or encourage her - to use her power for her own gain. But her demons follow her even here. Convinced that the people of Omega Point avoid her, warn their children away from her, are afraid of her or see her as the monster she sees herself as, she hides away in her training room, achieving nothing. With pain and death coming from any touch with her bare skin, only Adam, the Reestablishment soldier who helped her escape from Warner's sector, can touch her. But something's not right there, either. When Juliette learns that Adam has been having himself tested for evidence of his own ability, she's concerned. When she sees what he's going through, the pain it causes him, she goes into an enflamed rage and causes severe damage with her gift. And when she learns that Adam's gift is essentially to disable other people's gifts, that he has been doing it instinctively but that Juliette's touch has been causing him pain because he's so open to her, the pain and sorrow are all hers. Knowing she can't take the risk of killing the man she loves, she makes the decision to separate from Adam. It takes the harsh words of Kenji, their friend and the second-in-command at Omega Point, to shake Juliette out of her pity-fest, her wallowing, her misery, and motivate her to learn how to control her gift and focus on the bigger picture. When several of their team are kidnapped and held hostage by the Reestablishment, it is Juliette who is called upon to make a prisoner swap. But it is not Warner behind this ploy, it is his father, Supreme Commander Anderson. The leader of the Reestablishment within North America, Anderson makes his twisted son sound like a kitten. His aim is perfectly simple: in order to break his weak son Warner out of his attachment to Juliette, he arranges for her to come to them so that Warner can kill her. But Anderson is so accustomed to everyone doing his bidding and behaving like petrified, useless idiots in his presence, that he has met his match and is about to learn a new - and painful lesson. Now Juliette and her friends have an enemy in their midst: Warner. Hoping to exchange him for their imprisoned friends, they place far too high a value on Anderson's love for his son and Warner's worth. And Warner causes trouble until Juliette is brought to him, where she will learn new truths that will shake her fledgling understanding of the world and her self. ________________________________________ While I enjoyed Shatter Me , the first book in the series, and indeed found much to love, certain things held me back from fully loving it. I went on to read the e-novella, Destroy Me , which is told from Warner's perspective and fills the gap from the last time he saw Juliette to the next time he thinks he sees her, and reading that really got me excited for Unravel Me. But I could never have imagined how much I would love this book. I haven't been this engrossed and completely addicted and totally caught up in a YA fantasy novel since Eclipse and its predecessors. I can't express how all-consuming this volume was, how quickly I tore through it and how much I hated tearing myself away so I could get some sleep (or how long I stayed awake that night, thinking about it). Again told in Juliette's distinctive and highly original voice, I found it easier to enjoy the poetry and symbolism in it than before, because while she does become as self-indulgent as in Shatter Me, each time she pulled back just before annoying me beyond salvage. And Mafi's prose really is something special, at times. Her writing is strong and confident here, well-practiced and smooth. Mafi is fully in control and no longer just experimenting (or building on an experiment). The style has become Juliette's voice and captures her character, her anxieties and even her slight split personality, extremely well. I couldn't imagine this series written in any other way. The prose is not just poetic, it's beautiful, and captures Juliette's consciousness and feelings in a way that regular prose could never do, adding an extra dimension to the story. Here's a sample from early on: Now my mind is a traitor because my thoughts crawl out of bed every morning with darting eyes and sweating palms and nervous giggles that sit in my chest, build in my chest, threaten to burst through my chest, and the pressure is tightening and tightening and tightening In the first book, I found myself torn between loving how the prose captured so perfectly Juliette's inner demons, her self-hate, her despair and victimisation, her loneliness and isolation, and finding that it went a bit too far, or that Juliette's extremely dismal self-esteem and sense of self-worth got tiring. I still think that Mafi didn't quite achieve a balance that time, but in Unravel Me the balance is just right. This is the story where Juliette grows, grows strong and confident and learns that she's more than a deathly touch, that she's not a monster, that she's worthy of love and loyalty. But it's also the novel where she questions herself even more, just along different lines than before. Warner makes her question so many things about herself, especially as owns up to her attraction to him. Every time she started turning into a character that I shook my head at and lost respect for, Mafi pulled back and turned the scene, the conversation, the theme, in another direction and not only kept Juliette the kind of person I grew to really like and admire, but she often threw interesting spanners into the works and took you, the reader, in whole new directions. Our favourite characters - Adam and Warner - are of course back, and new layers to them are revealed. I could feel Juliette's love for Adam and his for her, as well as their pain at discovering that Adam isn't after all safe from her touch. And Warner, ah Warner. I am a complete and utter sucker for this kind of character, the bad guy in love with the heroine - it's such a perfect recipe for the best kind of emotional intensity and mental anguish! He is becoming increasingly complex and so interesting that he's starting to overshadow Adam - and as much as I love Adam, I'm not sorry for this new development. They each speak to the different sides of Juliette: the side of her that wants to feel love and protection, tenderness and compassion, and the side of her that is darker, grittier and capable of so much. And then there's Kenji. In Shatter Me he was the mildly annoying soldier friend of Adam who I didn't quite trust: he was too perky, too silly, too much, and the way he turned up like that, well, I didn't trust him. And he annoyed me a bit. But oh does he come into his own here!! Kenji becomes one of the strongest and most interesting characters in the book. We learn that he has the power of invisibility, that he put on the goofiness as a tactic in Warner's sector because of Warner's "knack" (i.e., gift of empathy) for detecting traitors and liars. We learn that he is looked up to by everyone at Omega Point, that he was informally adopted by Castle, their leader, as a boy, and we learn that behind the smile is a very intelligent, very determined, very brave and loyal young man. He is the only one who tells Juliette to snap out of it, grow up and think of others, to stop wallowing and join them. I don't think he is or will ever be a romantic interest - Juliette's already got two, she doesn't need more, she needs a friend who will tell her like it is; besides, I don't like a heroine whom everyone loves, that's way too much and just not believable. But he, too, started to overshadow Adam. Makes me wonder how things with Adam will play out. In fact, I have no idea where the story will go from here, and I love not knowing. The ending isn't quite a cliffhanger, though Mafi could have done that, but it does leave a really open ending, with a lot of key players and events sort of up-in-the-air. Things beyond Juliette's personal life are heating up and getting serious - and dangerous - and with this background context for the private war Juliette's going through as a character, it makes for one very high-adrenaline story. Waiting for the next book is going to be really, really hard. There are plenty of surprises here, and lots of excitement. It's hugely gripping and deeply absorbing and will definitely keep you on your toes. I've always been a big fan of stories featuring people with special abilities, powers, gifts - my first foray into real fantasy was, after all, the Obernewtyn series. This satisfies the X-Men fan in me. I'm floored by how intense this book was, how emotionally engaging, how hard it was to put down. Mafi took all the things readers loved about book one and stacked more and more love on top of them. This is a sequel that more than holds up; in a way it supplants the first book entirely - yet this is an illusion, for without the depth and detail of the first book, this one would have much less meaning.(less) | Notes are private!
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1
| not set
| Feb 23, 2013
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Feb 06, 2013
| Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 1405266430
| 9781405266437
| 3.98
| 62
| Aug 22, 2012
| Jan 07, 2013
|
Now seventy-six years old, Hannah O'Brien puts pen to paper to tell the story of her unique childhood: when she was just six years old, a tragedy leav...more
Now seventy-six years old, Hannah O'Brien puts pen to paper to tell the story of her unique childhood: when she was just six years old, a tragedy leaves her and a friend, seven-year-old Becky, lost and alone in the bush. They are rescued by a female Thylacine - a Tasmanian Tiger - who takes them back to her den where her mate is. For about four years they live in harmony with the pair of Thylacines, learning to hunt and communicate through grunts and yawns - the distinctive wide-open mouth. Hannah takes to it quickly, Becky more cautiously, but soon enough the girls are more Thylacine than human. But this is the 19th century and with a bounty on the head of every tiger in the island state, life on the upper end of the food chain is far from a safe one. And while Hannah may be an orphan, Becky still has a father out there, a man who has never given up looking for his little girl. This book is powerful, magical, enthralling and - for someone who grew up in Tasmania and loves it more than any other place on earth - hugely sentimental in a deeply personal, nostalgic way. International readers may not be as familiar with the Tasmanian Tiger as Australians are, so I'll give you a bit of background. Thylacines (as they are properly called) are carnivorous marsupials. This means they have a pouch, like koalas, wombats, devils, kangaroos and pretty much every other native animal in the country. They once roamed across the whole continent of Australia as well as New Guinea, but after Tasmania separated from the mainland, they became confined to the island (probably the Dingo, which the Aborigines brought with them about 20,000 years ago, were too competitive for the tigers on the mainland). Then came the English settlers, and their flocks of sheep and poultry. When sheep started turning up mauled or missing, the farmers blamed the tigers. Classic scapegoat situation: do you blame the dogs you brought with you, or do you blame the weird and little-known native carnivore that might just be creeping you out?  The last Thylacine died in the Hobart Zoo in the early 20th century; they have since been classified as extinct and have certainly not been seen in the last 70 years or so since that time (though Tasmania is a wild place and we all live in hope that they're just hiding out - it's a vain hope though). Between the bounty on their skins, introduced disease and a shrinking gene pool, the Thylacine didn't have much chance of survival in the long term. It's just such a handsome, stunning animal, and very unique. It's jaw could open incredibly wide, much like a Tasmania Devil, and it was a distinctive creature, looking part dog, part tiger, but was actually neither. Sometime during the 20th century, the Thylacine became a Tasmanian icon, an emblem that captured everything we were proud of. The tiger figures prominently in our collective consciousness, our culture, and most certainly in our art. 
The other aspect of Australian culture that figures prominently in Louis Nowra's Into That Forest is the idea of people, especially children, being lost in the bush. (I studied this at university in one of my Honours English classes.) Australia is so untamed and wild, but that's not entirely it. There's just some quality to the Australian bush (forest) that lures us in. There are stories from early colonies of people just dropping what they were doing (like hanging the laundry on the line) and walking into the bush, never to be seen again. Certainly your chances of finding your way out again are pretty slim. Think Picnic at Hanging Rock as a story (book and film) that really exemplifies this. In the case of Into That Forest, the two girls didn't wander off; circumstances caused them to be lost in the bush with no hope of rescue. Being taken in by Tasmanian tigers isn't as far-fetched as it might sound at first: there are stories from settlers, even hunters, of tigers helping people. They were shy, elusive but very curious and very protective animals. Hannah gives them names - Dave and Corinna - but even without them, the tigers come alive. They aren't anthropomorphised at all, but by being so close to them the animals' personalities and individual characteristics become vivid. Hannah's transformation to pseudo-tiger happens quickly; she's so young, and less attached to her human life than Becky, and quickly grasps that if they don't do what they need to do to survive, then they'll die. The tiger dropped the bird on me lap. It were bloody and its head chewed, its belly tore open. I knew it were a present. Thank you, I said, and I swear, I swear on me mother and father's heart, that it knew what I said cos it kind of nodded as if saying Eat it and trotted outside. The bird felt warm when I touched it and I dipped me finger into its bloody chest and licked the blood off me finger. It tasted rich like molasses. Becky made disgusted noises. It's not cooked, she groaned. I told her I remember me father telling me stories 'bout how he ate snakes and cockroaches, so a bird were fine to eat. [pp.38-9] What's really extraordinary is how the two girls take to hunting, how the imminent chase and blood-letting makes them excited - this never really leaves them. So much of their life with the tigers becomes more real to them than the human world and society. They become nocturnal, because that's when the thylacines hunt. Their sense of smell and hearing becomes more acute, and they can identify all the bush sounds that they hear. Our world were a dark world. Most of our prey were creatures of the night like us. Sometimes at night it were like the whole of the bush were humming. There'd be the scratching, hunting, searching, fighting, snorting, barking, clicking noises of the dying bandicoots, the quolls, the mice, rabbits, dunnarts, possums, pademelons, grumpy wombats, swamp antechinus, potoroos, bettongs ... it may be the secret dark world to humans but to me and Becky it were easy to see in. I knew what every silhouette, every shadow meant, no matter how quick the animal or bird were. Day were when animals hid in their burrows or in hollow trees, night were when we all came alive. [pp.108-9] But the story isn't just about their time in the bush those four years; it's also about what came after. Hannah and Becky struggle to adjust to being human girls, and fight it, and the two parts of them are never really reconciled. This is a tragic story, make no mistake, and a deeply human one - "human" as it encompasses "animal". Written in Hannah's distinctive voice - one of the first things she does is apologise for her poor spelling and grammar - there are hidden layers to the story that make it so much richer. Life in the wilderness becomes more real and beautiful than anything human society can offer. This is magical storytelling at its best, effortlessly blending fact and fiction and recreating a long-gone historical setting in all its smells and sights and textures and colloquialisms. It raises questions of what it really means to be human, and what it means to be a "good" human. Readers of all ages will devour this, and it deserves to go onto school reading lists. One of the best books I've read this year. (less) | Notes are private!
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1
| not set
| Apr 11, 2013
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Jan 03, 2013
| Hardcover
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| 0007456727
| 9780007456727
| 3.70
| 10,911
| Oct 04, 2011
| Aug 30, 2012
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"When she woke, she was red. Not flushed, not sunburned, but the solid, declarative red of a stop sign." So begins When She Woke, the gripping near-fut...more "When she woke, she was red. Not flushed, not sunburned, but the solid, declarative red of a stop sign." So begins When She Woke, the gripping near-future story of Hannah Payne who pays for her crime of aborting the foetus in her womb by being sentenced to sixteen years as a Chrome. Blending the religious fervour and moralising of The Scarlet Letter with the chilling dystopian repression and tight control of The Handmaid's Tale, Jordan has created a very human story, one about love and loyalty, belief and redemption, a coming-of-age story set in a rigorously constrained religious society that is only one small leap of the imagination away from present-day United States. There are several kinds of Chromes, each a different colour designated to a certain kind of crime. Yellow is for minor misdemeanours. Blue is for child molesters. Red is for murder, and so the state of Texas - and most others - have decreed abortion to be. For refusing to name the father of her unborn child and the abortionist, Hannah received the maximum sentence. After being injected with compound that causes the skin mutation (which must be renewed every four months to avoid "fragmentation" of the mind, a side-effect created to ensure renewal because the dye - or "melachroming" - fades), every part of Hannah's being is controlled by the state. The first thirty days is spent in the Chrome ward, in a bare white room where there is no privacy and cameras record her every movement for the reality TV show that is the Chrome ward. Female Chromes, being rarer, tend to be more popular viewing material. Ninety percent of Chromes go mad during their time in the ward; Hannah comes close, no matter that she was determined to get through it. Once released, only her father will speak to her. Her mother has all but disowned her, or so Hannah believes, and her older sister Becca married a man with a small mind, strong judgements and violent tendencies who keeps Becca completely under his thumb. With the help of Reverend Aidan Dale, her former pastor at the Plano Church of the Ignited Word, now the secretary of faith for the president and something of a celebrity, a bed for Hannah has been found at a halfway house for Chrome women called the Straight Path Center, run by the reverend of another strict religious group - though it's soon clear that it's his wife, Mrs Henley, who manages everything. With rules dictating every moment of their day and everything they can and can't do, the centre focuses on rehabilitating the women, but as the days go by Hannah is quick to realise that this place is determined to crush her spirit utterly, and in the cruelest way possible. With her lover possibly moving on with his life, her family refusing to take her in, and nowhere to go, it seems like Hannah has no choice but to obey Mrs Henley and endure her manipulations. The world beyond the walls of the centre are a vulnerable place for a female Chrome, and Hannah has led an incredibly sheltered life, schooled in her faith and little else. Her one skill is sewing, and in secret she made elaborate dresses for herself, a creative outlet. And she believes in her sin, her guilt, her transgression against God, even while she questions everything else. But to survive in this new world that she's been thrust into as a Chrome, Hannah must question everything she ever believed, and come to some new understanding about her faith, and herself. This book had me riveted, and immediately became a new favourite of mine. All the disparate parts of the plot, the writing style and the context, came together so seamlessly. It is a novel of extremes and Puritanical drama nested in a high-stakes adventure story, but it also had its subtle, quiet moments. It's that balance that Jordan achieved that really won me over: a story about a woman losing her faith and then discovering a more liberated version would normally have had my toes curling in wariness and even disdain, but Hannah was so likeable, so utterly human in all her flaws and good points, her story so raw and honest, that instead I was caught up in her crisis. Hannah changes subtly over the course of the novel. You see the woman she had the potential to be in the snippets of the past as she recollects incidents, scenes with her family, so that the repressed Hannah, and the potential of Hannah, and the new Hannah, merge together without you hardly realising. With virtually no survival skills, little education and an upbringing rich in dogma and moral code, I wasn't sure what would happen to Hannah, whether she'd survive or whether even worse things would happen to her, once "outside". It made for a tense read, at times. Once again, she marveled at her certainty. Had becoming a Red given her an extra sense, a knowledge of the hidden desires and evil in other hearts? She shook her head as a more likely, less romantic explanation occurred to her: becoming a Red had forced her, for the first time in her life, to really pay attention. [pp.185-6] Hannah felt very real to me. She was a curious sort, whose curiosity was always repulsed, smothered. She was creative, and needed an outlet. While I kept feeling suspicious of Aidan Dale, her lover, for pretty much the entire book - is it because he was a preacher, that I felt instinctively suspicious, or because he was so popular, and such a charmer? - I could at least understand and sympathise with her feelings. I just wished that she hadn't led such an awfully sheltered life, that she had no room to explore and discover things naturally, and so understand her feelings, her body, her options. And certainly, now that I've had a child of my own, it was much more horrible reading of her lonely decision to abort than it would have been had I read this a few years ago. I still can't judge her for that. As Hannah loses her faith, her naivety, the world around her becomes harsher, crueler, full of jagged edges on which she catches herself continually. It is not that the world changes, but that the bubble that kept her safe and in ignorance has gone. The contrast is striking - not over-the-top, not even all that obvious (after all, Hannah's dystopian real world isn't that different from what we're familiar with), but watching Hannah learn to navigate her way through a crueler reality than what she'd ever known before, brings with it a mixture of pride in her, and sadness that it's happening to her at all. Being thrust out into the real world, away from her sheltered family life, enables her to meet new people, people who think differently, independently. They've come up with their own ideas, after thinking things through - something Hannah was never allowed to do. Her friend Kayla, a fellow Red from the Straight Path Center, is just one of the first to make her think: "Nah, I'm not religious. I mean, not like they taught us in church, anyway. I figure if there is a God, She's good and surged right now about the state of things down here." I'm sure this book would be hugely confrontational to readers who are staunchly anti-abortion, or deeply religious. While Hannah learns to have renewed faith in God, on her own terms, and never stops thinking of her abortion as a deed that murdered an unborn baby, even after hearing other perspectives on it, this is a story about questioning things, questioning other people's so-called moral right to make decisions about your body, your life. A story about questioning what people do in the name of God, and God itself - as a concept, an entity, a philosophy. It's a story about growing up, making decisions and mistakes, that you can be a good person without being brow-beaten or guilt-tripped into it. [Stanton] carried the conversation, entertaining them with stories of Columbus and its distinguished inhabitants, who'd once included Tennessee Williams and Eudora Welty. All Hannah knew about them was that they were both long-dead writers, but they were evidently favorites of Kayla's, because her face lit up, and she plunged into an animated discussion about them with Stanton. Listening to their exchange, Hannah was suffused with bitterness about her own ignorance. If she hadn't had to sneak books into the house and read them in hasty, furtive snatches, if she'd gone to a normal high school and then on to college as Kayla had, she too would have been able to assert that Miss Welty could write circles around Faulkner and have an opinion as to whether Streetcar Named Desire or The Glass Menagerie was Williams's masterpiece. She'd always believed that her parents had done right by her, but now, sitting mute at Stanton's table, she found herself seething over their choices. Why had they kept her life so small? Why had they never asked her what she wanted? At every possible turn, she saw, they'd chosen the path that would keep her weak and dependent. And the fact that they wouldn't see it that way, that they sincerely believed they'd acted in her best interest, didn't make it any less true, or them any less culpable. [pp.252-3] This is hardly the first book to so articulately point out the hypocrisy of religion, or how strict rules like what Hannah grew up with, stifle the spirit as well as the growth of the individual (which is the point, I'm sure). But it breathes fresh air on an old topic, and this futuristic, dystopian society is the perfect vehicle for Hannah's journey through self-discovery. She literally wakes up. She always had it in her - she was the daughter who asked pesky questions, not Becca, and who read books her parents wouldn't approve of and allowed herself a creative outlet through the dresses. Becoming a Red was a gigantic, cruel wake-up call, but when you're deeply entrenched in a strict religion like this, and you do genuinely love and respect your parents, nothing short of a drastic change in circumstances will do it. Because I'm not religious, not even close, and I'm pro-choice, I found the issues tackled in When She Woke invigorating. It doesn't shy away from hard questions or guilty consciences, and it always felt very real. I could easily imagine this wasn't a futuristic setting at all, because I can easily see the United States adopting these laws, and melachroming, if they had the technology. There is a lot going on here, some of it obvious, some of it not. I've barely even discussed the setting, but I find myself rambling and need to stopper it. The dystopian world was fascinating and solidly constructed, serving as context and propulsion for Hannah's crisis of faith and journey of self-discovery. To be honest, I doubt I would have enjoyed this so much if it hadn't had the science fiction and dystopian elements to it, though Jordan's writing is very enjoyable. Highly recommended, especially for those of us yearning for a good dystopian, speculative fiction read who've been relying on YA for it and coming away deeply unsatisfied. (less) | Notes are private!
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| Aug 10, 2012
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Aug 07, 2012
| Paperback
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| 174166716X
| 9781741667165
| 3.58
| 43
| May 07, 2011
| Jul 01, 2011
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Thea Farmer, a seventy-seven year old retired principal, has lost all her money after her investments tanked, and is now faced with the heart-wrenchin...more
Thea Farmer, a seventy-seven year old retired principal, has lost all her money after her investments tanked, and is now faced with the heart-wrenching reality of selling the house she just finished building in the Blue Mountains, her dream house, and living the remainder of her days in "the hovel", the old Federation-era cottage on the original property, with her beloved dog and companion, Teddy. She sells the house to a couple who seem enthusiastic and to really care about the place. Frank Campbell and Ellice Carrington are young - she guesses mid-twenties, but when she sees them move in with a young girl whom she figures for their daughter, she hastily revises her previous assumption. Even though she spent her life as an English teacher and then a principal at an all-girls boarding school, Thea doesn't like children. In fact, she doesn't like many people at all. She's irascible, intimidating, grumpy, opinionated, bossy, sharp-tongued and fairly scathing of others, and a product of a much different generation, with an out-of-date perspective. But she has manners, so after reluctantly accepting an invitation for drinks from Frank and Ellice, she returns the gesture by inviting them over to the hovel, and asking several other people she knows in the area because she doesn't feel up to dealing with them on her own. Despite this gesture, Thea has no intention of befriending the family or of becoming one of those old ladies who spies on her neighbours behind her lace curtains (not that she has lace curtains, and in fact her windows are covered in grime). Nevertheless, the "invaders" as she starts off thinking of them as, gradually become people she thinks far too much about, especially Kim, Frank's twelve-year-old half-Vietnamese niece, the one she thought was their daughter (they really are in the twenties). Kim is quiet and keeps to herself, spending her time reading and drawing sketches. When Thea finds her on one of her walks with Teddy through the bush, in a spot she could only have found by following Thea before, Thea is furious. But slowly the two oddballs befriend each other, thawing and becoming close friends. Kim even starts coming to Thea's writing class, run by a flamboyant man called Oscar. With the mistakes of her past - notably the reason why she was forced to resign - haunting her mind, Thea begins to worry about the family in her house, especially Frank, a music composer now working on an adult film that he leaves lying around where Kim can find it - and in Thea's experience, every teenager is a curious one. Her preoccupation with what is going on in that house, and how it might affect Kim, takes over her life and pushes her to a precipice of her own making. The Precipice was long-listed for the Miles Franklin Award in 2012, which is how I came to hear of it, and luckily a UK publisher had picked it up so I could get a copy from the Book Depository. Because this was an excellent book, truly gripping and compelling, without ever being contrived or even overly dramatic. In fact, it all slowly creeps up on you, but because it's told in Thea's voice - her journal, that she's keeping after Oscar asked them to start one - and her thought patterns and voice so gradually changes, it all comes together so perfectly. I don't know if I have the words for this one. At first I was liking it but not overly impressed - Thea's writing style was a bit erratic at first, a bit disjointed - but her writing improved (and this technique made her even more real, as a character) and you really, really, come to know the way she thinks. The true skill in this novel, the real beauty of it, is in Thea's voice. She's a very interesting woman, quite entertaining in her way, and sympathetic too. I'm sure we've all know older women something like Thea. I felt her pain for the dream house she had designed and built to her exact specifications, only to have to sell it because she couldn't afford to live in it. The otherwise untainted emptiness of everything affected me deeply. I thought, this is the last time I will ever see my house untouched, just as I left it. The last time ever that it will be my creation alone. If I can bear to set foot inside again, in some unthinkable future, it will not be the same. It will have taken on the patina of other people's lives. The way she thinks through her reactions to things, her opinions, is realistic and helps us understand her even more. As well, she has a dry sense of humour, totally self-deprecating, and she freely admits to her faults. I sound like one of those dreadful women in English detective stories. The cosy, old-fashioned sort that fly off Sandy's shelves. One of those village nosy parkers who spy on everyone through net curtains. Tea cosies, scones and prurient gossip: a lifestyle I abhor, and have strenuously avoided. Although scones and tea cosies have their place; one should never throw out the baby with the bathwater. I've had a tendency to do that, I suspect all my life. [pp.138-9] When you have a story with little action and a very plain plot that is narrated by an individual, that character has to carry the story. And Thea does. She lives, she's realistic, and for the duration of the story (which was far too short and ended far too soon, yet was perfectly structured and concluded), she completely filled my head. The skill Duigan displays in cleverly, finely crafting such gradual change in Thea, all so that the climax fits so perfectly, is impressive. It's so understated and subtle, and that's not easy to write. I don't want to give things away by talking about the mistakes of Thea's past and how it all came together at the end, but I have to say something about it - when I closed the book at the end I had one of those moments of speaking aloud, to express my admiration and just how it affected me. It's not a story that makes you cry or brings on other intense emotion, but I can't see it leaving you unaffected either. Personally, I had the delight of feeling deeply troubled, in that unsettled way that comes from something subtle and shocking yet also understandable. That troubled feeling, which we spend our lives trying to avoid feeling (and thus avoiding discussing the troubling issues that causes the feeling), that comes from something that is wrong, yet ... and yet. It's not that I thought Thea did the right thing, not at all, it's that I could understand why she did it, so well was she constructed as a character. It's a moral dilemma, but Thea has gone so far that she sees it more as an issue of not repeating the mistakes of her past, which is where she becomes understandable, even relatable. It's this moral tipping point, this conflict of right and wrong, that makes the book so absolutely delicious. Thea isn't the only character who comes fully alive, though. All the characters brought to life through simple sketches - a less is more approach, you could say, and all through the lens of Thea's oft-times old-fashioned opinions. As well as the human characters, Teddy also stands out, and so does the land. I'm a big fan of books set in Australia where the natural landscape becomes intrinsic to the story - the plot, the characters, but more than that, it becomes a character itself. That is my own personal experience with the land, and it's a prominent element in the Australian national identity - especially where the two meet, with people getting lost in the bush. We have centuries of stories, both true and fictional, about people, including children, wandering into the bush, never to be seen again, and having this at our backs - this allure, or lure, of the bush, the wilderness, a wilderness that has a kind of siren call, luring people in - definitely has an effect on our culture, our psyche, our relationship with the bush. My favourite course at uni was an English Honours class on this very topic, and I got to read some fascinating stories. The most famous is probably Picnic at Hanging Rock (the book or the film), and I'd also recommend Peter Pierce's non-fiction work, The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety , which is not about abducted children but children who disappear in the bush. The Precipice is rather like a writing exercise itself, and that was one of the things that really impressed me: how it was written. Unlike other readers (and they may think I'm dim), I didn't see the ending coming. In fact, I didn't know how it would end and until close to the ending, I didn't even see where the story was going. It was all so nicely understated, with a glimmer of insidious threat and tension, downplayed by modern sensibilities and basic morality. This is what it comes back to: I didn't see it coming, because for the longest time there was no justifiable reason for it; also, I like to think well of people, and I knew Thea's intimate thoughts - she lays herself bare - and she's such an "upright character". That's the beauty of it: we are ALL capable of ANYTHING, and The Precipice details that gradual psychological shift, and our ability to convince ourselves that something is the right thing to do. Yes all the clues are there, and if you're not as engaged in the story as I was you'll no doubt see it much more quickly than I did. I like stories to play out, though; I rarely actively try to figure things out, and while I had heard that this was a psychological thriller, I quickly decided that they must have been mistaken, because it didn't seem to be one at all. So I read this as straight-up fiction, unsure where it was going but figuring it was just going to be family drama. Other people might be annoyed or frustrated by this, but for me it was half the fun. I've reached the point where I'm going to start repeating myself and lose my audience entirely, so I'll just say that I loved The Precipice, both for the story it tells, the beautiful and clever way it's written, and the characters themselves - but also for giving me a chance to immerse myself once again in the Blue Mountains, which I've visited once and have never forgotten: they're beautiful, the kind of landscape that makes you quietly contemplative, and put everything into perspective.(less) | Notes are private!
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Apr 27, 2012
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| 0452297540
| 9780452297548
| 3.89
| 4,789
| Apr 14, 2011
| Mar 27, 2012
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Lincoln has never taken a decisive action for himself: he's quite content to let things happen to him, especially when it was his ex-girlfriend making...more
Lincoln has never taken a decisive action for himself: he's quite content to let things happen to him, especially when it was his ex-girlfriend making the decisions. After that disastrous break-up, he hasn't been too interested in much of anything. He took a while to finish his degree, then topped it up with a couple of Masters, and now is living at home with his mum and working nights at a newspaper as the IT security guy (even though he never took a single IT class). His job is simple: read through the e-mails caught by the WebFence program and send out warnings to those using e-mail and the internet inappropriately. It's 1999, after all, and not only is the looming threat of Y2K causing everyone major anxiety, but the whole concept of access to e-mail and the World Wide Web at work is still a fairly new one, and the Powers That Be at the Courier are deeply suspicious of their employees. After the initial spate of warning people not to look up porn or share offensive jokes, Lincoln doesn't have much to do. The only highlight of his job is reading the personal e-mails of Jennifer Scribner-Snyder, a copy editor, and her friend, Beth Fremont, the movie reviewer. Their e-mails are so entertaining, their personalities so refreshing and honest and witty, that Lincoln decides early on not to send them a reprimand - he wants to keep reading. When he starts to feel drawn to Beth, he knows he should stop reading her e-mail, but he can't. And when he makes the connection between himself, unbelievable as it may seem, and Beth's "hot guy" at work whom she has a crush on, his voyeuristic job becomes a bigger-than-ethical question: how can he meet Beth without being honest with her, and surely by telling her that he's been reading these private messages between her and Jennifer, she would be right to hate him and feel like she's been violated? For all that the ethical dilemma sounds hefty as I wrote it just now, this is actually a laugh-out-loud, clever, wonderfully written, sweet romantic comedy, better than the films too. I didn't intend on waiting this long to read Attachments, it just sort of happened that way. But here is a book that I would have loved no matter when I read it or what mood I was in or what was going on in my life. It's the kind of book you want to read again as soon you finish it; in fact, I didn't want it to end at all. It's a short book that reads fast and it ends at the right time, but while reading it I feel the weight of the pages left and worry, "The ending can't possibly be coming so soon?" It's the ultimate comfort book. This is mostly the story of Lincoln, an intelligent, sweet, good-natured and romantic man living with a kind of directionless comfort, day-to-day, with no plans for the future and not even any real desire to move out of his mother's house, even though he's twenty-eight. For the first half of the book or thereabouts, you automatically build a mental image of him based on the bare facts of his life: he works in IT, so he must be nerdy; he works nights, so he must be overweight and pasty; he lives with his mum, so he must be a loser. But he's not any of these things, not exactly. Yes, he plays Dungeons & Dragons every Saturday night with a group of likewise-misfit friends, but he doesn't live in a cliched world of comic-book heroes and greasy hair. He doesn't see any problem with living with his mum, a temporary arrangement, because he isn't an antagonistic man who's difficult to live with. Part of the fun of the novel is getting to know Lincoln and trying to figure him out. But one thing you can be sure of: you'll either fall in love with him or at least be incredibly sweet on him. In my book, he's a bit too-good-to-be-true: he's the kind of man many women want to be with, someone naturally romantic and caring as well as big and strong and handsome - sounds corny I know, but because he's so humble and shy and you don't get beaten over the head with descriptions of him, it doesn't come across that way. And for almost the entire book, we have no idea what Beth looks like either. Her personality comes across in her e-mails to Jennifer, so that like Lincoln, we're already firm friends with her even before we have a description of her. I like that, I like it a lot. We're so used to having that instant visualisation that some anticipation and having to work for it makes it all so much more worthwhile. The novel's humour made an instant connection with me. It's got that little bit of Bridget Jones going on, as well as the Hollywood rom-com - but better, much better done than that. And those true-to-life moments or discussions that have you nodding your head going, "Yes, exactly!" Like this one, from one of Jennifer and Beth's e-mails: J>> Do you want to hang out tonight? I need a break from Mitch. He's still in a funk about our successful use of birth control. (It's so true: I don't like Tom Cruise but I do like some of his movies (and I sometimes feel a kind of pressure to like him), and I don't know any man who finds Julia Roberts attractive, including my own husband - he refuses to see a film with her in it because he can't stand her.) I've been mentioning its likeness to rom-coms throughout and I have to add that, towards the end I got this horrible feeling that it was going to go all Sleepless in Seattle on me and I wouldn't actually get to see Lincoln and Beth together - I hate that about that movie, you never get to find out if they'd actually be good together: all that work and nothing to show for it but a shared smile! Ugh. So I want to let you know that it doesn't end like that, and incidentally the novel is fully conscious of its rom-com likeness and makes fun of itself for it, especially towards the end. There are lots of 1999-specific cultural references (always fun), and it never takes itself seriously. As soon as I finished it, which was altogether too soon, I wanted to start all over again. Relive some precious scenes. Read it with a clearer idea of Lincoln to better do him justice. But I'll wait. I'll put it on my shelf and know that it's there for those days when I need a laugh, a cry (there is one bit in particular that did make me cry, I felt immense empathy for Jennifer), and a good love story that's superbly written (meaning, no bad typos, gaffs, incorrect tense use or otherwise awkward sentences to distract me). Can't wait for Rowells' next book!(less) | Notes are private!
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| May 26, 2012
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Mar 30, 2012
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| 1594203334
| 9781594203336
| 3.88
| 9,272
| Jan 01, 2012
| Feb 07, 2012
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This isn't so much a review as a personal post, and I can't really apologise for that. It's a topic that's clearly personal to me, as I'll explain, an...more
This isn't so much a review as a personal post, and I can't really apologise for that. It's a topic that's clearly personal to me, as I'll explain, and one that a lot of us love to discuss. Hopefully, my meandering discussion will make you interested in reading this, because I think all new parents, or people currently pregnant or planning on having kids, would really benefit from reading this. I wanted to read this because I was curious, and because I heard the author interviewed on CBC radio, and also because I have an 8 month old son and some of the things she was talking about, I wanted to learn more about. But I honestly thought I wouldn't learn much. (I know, how arrogant am I!) After all, my baby was sleeping through the night at 11 weeks, and I am not nor ever will be the anxious, hovering, over-stimulating kind of parent. I'm not a neurotic, middle-class American parent from New York who wants her kid to be a child prodigy (Druckerman seems to know quite a lot of these). I've always seen him as his own person, with his own personality and his own interests. I have no intention of trying to mould him into anything, or force him to do soccer, fencing, piano and French lessons after school, every week. I won't be enrolling him in any activities at all until he's old enough to express an interest in an activity, and I certainly won't be putting his schedule ahead of my own life or that of the family as a whole. In short, having read the numerous anecdotes Druckerman presents here, I can say that I have nothing in common with the parents she's comparing French parents to, except that I am a parent. That's the context in which I started reading this book, and while that didn't exactly change - I'm more of a "French parent" than an American one - I found that there was in fact a great deal to learn here. Some things resonated with me because they reminded me a lot of how I was raised, back home in Tasmania. Other things clicked with me because, here in Toronto, I think there is a degree of overparenting going on - the intensity of which would vary depending on the area you live in. But there's a place that does music lessons for babies, and I have met some parents who've told me they haven't used the word "no" with their 1+ year old baby. There's just a general feeling that everyone's watching, everyone's judging, and you should feel guilty if you do something fun, for yourself. I've also, occasionally, detected a touch of competition amongst mothers describing their babies developmental progress. Which brings us back to Bringing Up Bébé. I find non-fiction books really hard to review because there's so much in them, so much to think and talk about, that I want to just quote the entire book with little commentaries between paragraphs, especially when they're as well-written as this one. I don't think I've read a more readable non-fiction book, ever. Druckerman has such a smooth, flowing, engaging style, I flew through the book and found it hard to put down. Between the humorous anecdotes, of which there are lots and lots (both of other people and her own family), the interviews with other parents, child psychologists, paediatricians, university professors and other experts, and the weaving of a memoir-like story in amongst the carefully reconstructed French parenting style, it's also one of the most fun books I've read in quite a while. I'm hardly the first to point out that middle-class America has a parenting problem. In hundreds of books and articles this problem has been painstakingly diagnosed, critiqued, and named: overparenting, hyperparenting, helicopter-parenting, and my personal favorite, the kindergarchy. One writer defines the problem as "simply paying more attention to the upbringing of children than can possibly be good for them." [...] Nobody seems to like the relentless, unhappy pace of American parenting, least of all parents themselves. [p.4] So begins Druckerman's investigation into understanding what French parents do differently. She stresses that, as a white middle-class American, she's referring primarily to white middle-class Frenchwomen, or Parisians. She's not speaking for the "peasants", as they're still considered to be, outside the city, or the lower classes. She's also comparing French parenting to American parenting of the kind mentioned above, but even so, the idea of the "terrible twos" and toddlers throwing tantrums, kids refusing to eat vegetables etc. is pretty universal among all of us, and she's right: we do expect it. But apparently among the French, not only are tantrums and bad public behaviour rare, the kids eat a varied healthy diet from the moment they switch to solids, and they're not cowed by a so-called strict upbringing but are "cheerful, chatty and curious." She doesn't claim that the French invented this style of parenting, or that no one anywhere else does it, but that in France it's part of their national identity. It's consistent, and doesn't come from a noted paediatrician or a book, in vogue one year, gone the next. There are some aspects - like the low percentage of breastfeeding mothers past the first three months (and it was low from the first week) and the school system for older kids, which she doesn't go into much - that aren't that great. But their attitude in general, and their approach to child-raising, is different from what Druckerman had known and thought was normal. Druckerman gives context for the current trends in American parenting - I think she may have missed a couple, but the things she brings up were enlightening and interesting (I'm not American so it's all new to me). She also gives historical background on French parenting and the invention of daycares - she doesn't say so but it is implied that the French invented the daycare. I was surprised to read that daycare is still frowned upon in America - amongst the middle and upper classes, anyway. Probably part of the problem is that is seems to be largely unregulated. In Canada and Australia, daycares are in huge demand and we're told to register our babies before we even get pregnant, in the hopes of acquiring a space - which will cost, in Toronto at least, anywhere from $1300 to $1900 a month. In France, it's all subsidised by the government, and of high quality. [caption id="attachment_12168" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="Pamela Druckerman and her three children, Bean, Leo and Joey"]  [/caption]As I mentioned, a lot of it seemed familiar, either because it was a framework that I grew up in in Australia, or because I'm already doing it with my own son or it's the approach I know I'll be taking over time. And for me - and my own parents - it was never about reading some parenting philosophy and adopting it, often rigidly, as people seem to do with them. It's about using common-sense and intuition, being sensitive to your child, but also about having a certain set of priorities. For French parents, according to Druckerman, the priorities in child-raising include: not letting your children rule your life establishing firm boundaries but providing a lot of freedom within them (the cadre) teaching children rather than training them teaching children to appreciate a wide range of good quality food from the very beginning; and teaching children to greet people politely (the three magic words in France are bonjour, au revoir and merci) Every time I see a child who is acting up in public (I'm sure they do it at home too, but I only see them in public!), throwing a wobbly, spitting the dummy, it seems very clear to me that the child needs, wants and is asking for, in the only way they know how, is for their parents to take control. It's clear to me that these children feel lost and unsure and are desperate for their parents to be in charge. Just think about how calm and reassured your baby feels when you're holding them in the warmth, security and loving embrace of your arms. As they get older, they still need to feel that love, security and in-charge-ness from their parents, just without being held like a newborn. The difference between us and the French is that many of us think children need rigid authority figures in their parents, someone who "lays down the law" and who they're basically scared of, whereas the French seem to understand the difference between authoritative and authoritarian (I can't find the pages where Druckerman talks about this but it's in the book somewhere!). It's hard to use the word "discipline" because it has so many different, sometimes subtle meanings in English, and is too easy to misconstrue. Kids need discipline. I agree completely with the people Druckerman interviewed who said that kids who are treated like kings (the "child-king") are deeply unhappy (and generally grow up pretty dysfunctional, too - such as, they're unable to deal with stress or frustration). Druckerman tries to explain and show what this actually means, because the word can sound scary. But it's no great mystery: it merely means being a responsible parent who provides the kind of safety net a child needs, without giving them a list of all the things they can't or aren't allowed to do. Children need to know their parents are in control, protecting them, but not stifling them. It's rather like building a rock wall in a lake to create a pond to keep your child in and also to keep dangers out, but within the pool the child can do whatever they want. Autonomy with limits. Kids need both, and they don't get either if you want to be your kid's best friend, career coach or military drill sergeant. The day after I finished this book, I was in the supermarket, at the check-out, when another mother joined the queue behind me with a toddler in a stroller. The toddler was doing a weird cry-yell-whine that was pretty irritating, to be honest. The woman was clearly aware that her kid was making an obnoxious noise and was probably quite embarrassed about it, because when talking to him didn't do anything she grabbed something off the display - I think it was Dentyne gum - and handed it to him, whereupon he promptly became quiet (and got a piece of gum out and started munching on it). It's so easy to get into this pattern, and after reading this book I no longer feel like it's naive to believe that I won't let that pattern happen (I've always felt pretty confident about this since we never really whined or nagged much with our mum when we were kids). The belief that all kids are like this, naturally, is one that Druckerman successfully deconstructs and counters. ... without limits, kids will be consumed by their own desires. [...] French parents stress the cadre because they know that without boundaries, children will be overpowered by these desires. The cadre helps to contain all this inner turmoil and calm it down. I got what she meant immediately about the cadre, but it did bring another thought to mind: that the French have perfected, smoothly, lovingly and without violence or child abuse, what Debbie and Michael Pearl tell parents to do in their hateful book, To Train Up a Child . Every time I think about that book, and the parents who have followed - and continue to follow - their instructions, I feel sick to my stomach. Every time I think of those poor children and babies - some of whom have died from being beaten - who are subjected to what essentially amounts to horrific child abuse, I just want to cry. And rescue them all. There are a lot of things that we parents do that we don't have a name for; in giving them a name and a description, Druckerman gives us all a bit of credit for our common-sense and intuition - because it's hard being a parent, and it's not often you get any recognition. The French parents she speaks to don't think they're doing anything special at all, because it's not some method with a catchy name (like "Ferberising") from a book. Take "The Pause" - reading the description, I realised that that's what I did with my son, without realising it or having a name for it. I was paying attention, observing, listening, being sensitive to his moods etc. It scared me a bit to read that there's a fairly short window for teaching your baby to sleep through the night - a few months, really - or they struggle to connect their sleep cycles for several years. I used to think that it had nothing to do with me, that it was all him, but now I know it was both of us, working together, to help him to learn to connect his sleep cycles. I met a couple at first aid training whose baby was 13 months old and had never once slept all through the night. Since the mother had insomnia while pregnant, she now hasn't slept through the night herself in nearly two years. This experience has made her decide not to have any more children. Having read this book, I feel awful for the many parents like them who struggle with a first child when they really didn't need to. I learnt some new techniques for introducing food and creating a good feeding schedule and menu (I was a bit of a picky eater as a child and sadly that's followed me into adulthood - I'm put off by a lot of textures, and my loathing of beans borders on phobia), one that incidentally reminds me a lot of my own childhood (breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea and dinner - which we call "tea" - with no dessert, though I'm not sure if that's just because we didn't have much money). I felt relieved, in fact, to learn that I don't have to constantly give my kid snacks, and that this is one reason why kids don't eat proper meals well in our society. I also learnt that a child as young as three can bake by themselves if you've been baking with them every weekend, which is great to know because cooking is definitely something I want to get my kids enthusiastic about, and part of that is letting them help and enjoy it (I want to do the same thing with gardening). Druckerman even includes the recipe for "yoghurt cake" that the French generally teach their little kids first - they later move on to cupcakes and other kinds of cakes. I'm looking forward to trying the recipe; already Hugh is happy to sit in his highchair, watching me cook, seemingly quite interested in my explanations of what I'm doing. I learnt that my instinct to resist the pressure to be constantly stimulating (i.e. dominating) my child's playtime is a good one, because they're much happier being their own boss in play and they really don't need you all that much - watching him to ensure his safety is generally enough (I balance this with reading stories, singing songs and engaging him, because he's still learning language etc. from me). And I learnt that my approach of listening, paying attention, being sensitive and learning my child's moods, behaviour etc. is a very good one - so a pat on the back for me. There's so much to talk about here, but I've already gone on too long. I'll end by repeating that I absolutely loved this book. It was written in a conversational style that also felt like an accessible documentary, with a mix of informative parenting tips and a great deal of self-deprecating humour (unusual for an American - maybe her British husband's dry sense of humour has rubbed off on her). The structure was spot-on, moving fluidly between different aspects of French and American parenting with graceful pacing (yes such a thing exists!!), building a picture of life in Paris, raising three young children, being an expat in France and dealing with common parenting fears. You can relate to Druckerman even if you had a different parenting experience from her, or have never lived in another country. I only wish I could start the book again, as a new reader, because it ended all too soon. (less) | Notes are private!
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This is one of the most beautiful, amazing, clever, brilliant, gorgeous, splendid, awesome books ever - truly it is impossible to stick to just one ad...more
This is one of the most beautiful, amazing, clever, brilliant, gorgeous, splendid, awesome books ever - truly it is impossible to stick to just one adjective when describing this book.  The Arrival is a graphic novel told only in illustrations, incredibly detailed pencil sketch illustrations that are as vivid as photographs - indeed, some are modelled on actual historical photos. The story, told in "snapshots" or in large, full-spread drawings, is about a man who leaves his wife and young daughter as something ominous spreads through the land - the stirrings of war, perhaps, or something worse. He travels across the ocean to a new land, where everything is strange and foreign and new. No one understands him and he struggles to understand them, but they are friendly people, the ones he meets - immigrants too, with their own stories of fleeing horror - and he makes friends. Time passes, and after the winter he has saved enough money to send for his family, and once together they have a real home (home is where the heart, or family, is, right?). Summarised like that, it sounds rather ordinary, but this book is anything but. Between the subtle body language and details in the individual pictures that speak louder than paragraphs of narration would, and the fantastical new wonders of the safe land, there is so much going on here that you could read it a hundred times and never get bored with it. The Arrival records a universal immigrant experience, though, as an Australian, it did make me think of all the Europeans who came by boat after WWII, who arrived in Sydney Harbour to find a place completely different to the one they left, right down to the birds and animals and trees (and in fact it was partly inspired by Tan's father who emigrated from Malaysia to Western Australia). The way everything is so strange to the man, from the new alphabet to new ways of doing things, is familiar and recognisable, and if you've never been an immigrant to a very different country, this will give you the perspective to truly understand what it's like for them.      Tan achieves a perfect balance between scary and depressing (the visions, stories and memories of what people have escaped - genocide, war, exploitation), and hopeful and scary-wondrous. Everything from the food and animals to the writing and architecture is incredibly different from what the immigrants knew before - and different to us, as well, creating that same sensation in us as the immigrant characters have. Nothing is as it seems to be at first glance: understanding is confined to whatever connection you can make to something in your own head, based on your own understanding of the world. In this way, Tan has created something quite brilliant, using art to not only vividly and empathetically portray the experience of arriving in a new land, but has used art in such a way that every reader will be able to empathise with the characters, even though you may not have anything at all in common with them. We all know art can transcend barriers and create bridges, and speaks in all languages: Tan's The Arrival exemplifies this. He communicates so much without using words, it's breath-taking. This is a book not to be missed. It made me cry, with that ache in my chest that I always get these days when I hear stories of sweet, remarkable, simple, ordinary but life-changing things (some things can be all of those things!). It's the kind of story that reaffirms your positive feelings towards your fellow humans, and reminds you to have more patience with people who don't speak your language so well, and can't understand what to you are the simplest things - not because they are stupid, but just because it's new and/or different. One final note: this is published by an imprint of Scholastic, which publishes children's and YA, and Tan typically produces picture books (of equally breath-taking quality). Children would definitely enjoy this, and you may find it only in the Children's section of a bookshop or library. But it is a book that defies age, and different age groups would get different experiences from it - each just as valid, none of them "wrong", and all enriching. My advice: splurge on the gorgeous hardcover, because this is a book you're going to treasure for ever and ever.(less) | Notes are private!
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This book contains minor spoilers for the series. After being summoned back to Obernewtyn from Sador not long after saving Rushton and his love for her...more This book contains minor spoilers for the series. After being summoned back to Obernewtyn from Sador not long after saving Rushton and his love for her, Elspeth finds herself waiting - for what, she doesn't know. Maruman told her the Old Ones bid her return to Obernewtyn immediately, but wouldn't say why, and then he disappeared and no one can find him. Elspeth is far from idle, though: there is plenty to do as Mistress of Obernewtyn while Rushton is away. The expedition to send four great ships to the Red Land to prevent the slavemasters from invading the Land, as foreseen, is paramount, and Elspeth knows she must be on one of those ships, with Dragon, the lost Red Queen, for it has been foreseen that she and Dragon will be in the Red Land together - and she's long guessed that Sentinel, the powerful computermachine that controls the world's sleeping weaponmachines, lies in the Red Land, where the final clue from Cassandra awaits her. And Ariel, her enemy and the Destroyer, has gone to the Red Land, so when Maruman suddenly returns the night before the Moon Festival, bidding her to go to the High Mountains north of Obernewtyn, she is surprised but assumes it's for final advice from Atthis, which was promised to her, though she's not sure how she'll make it in time before the ships leave, especially when Maruman tells her that she will never return to Obernewtyn or the Land again. She must leave everyone she loves and set out on the final journey to fulfil the foreseeing, lest the Destroyer awake the weaponmachines himself and destroy the world for good. With Maruman, her old friend and irascible feline companion, and Gahltha, the horse who pledged himself to help her, and Darga, the dog from The Farseekers who can smell taint, Elspeth makes her way into the mountains. Maruman, her only contact with Atthis, is grouchy and still angry over being left behind in Saithwold in The Stone Key and won't tell her anything for the longest time. In her own head, Elspeth turns over all the clues and signs she's gathered over the last few years, and is sure that she's here in the mountains to find Jacob Obernewtyn's body, for when he went into the mountains looking for a dream city, he took with him Cassandra's Key, which Elspeth needs to disarm Sentinel. After many days of travelling through the high mountains, avoiding tainted water and poisonous paths, they finally arrive at a vale heated by hot springs, a veritable tropical forest in the middle of the cold mountains. There, Maruman tells her that Atthis is dead, and that they're here at Wolf Vale to meet the leader of the Brildane, the wild wolves, to ask for his help. Without even knowing why or what, Elspeth must convince the Brildane to help her, or all will be lost. It's always hard to know where to start, when discussing your favourite series by your favourite author, after decades of waiting for the next book and the next one, and finally you're in sight of the end and it's terrifying. It's like having to say goodbye to someone you love - actually, not yet, I'm still at the stage leading up to that final goodbye, which made reading this volume particularly bittersweet. That, and the fact that it's finally happening, Elspeth is on that lonely mission that she first learned about at the end of The Farseekers, the one that always seemed so far off and yet too, too close. Like Elspeth, I had started to think that the time for leaving everyone she loves was still a long way off, maybe even not until the last minute. Though, when I started reading this, and knowing that there were just two books left (including this one), there still seemed like a lot to accomplish before that could happen. I'm still not sure how everything will fit into one final book, because unlike The Stone Key, this is not what I would call an action-packed novel. In terms of plot, the first third, say, is set at Obernewtyn and is much like the first half of The Keeping Place , concerned with smaller details and supporting characters, as well as giving Elspeth time to work some things out. When Rushton returns to Obernewtyn, they're able to finally cement their relationship - or should I say consummate? ;) - something Elspeth had been putting off for her fear of a mind merge with Rushton, and him learning all about her role as the Seeker - a secret she's kept all these years, at the bidding of Atthis. But she figures out a way to hide the knowledge within his own mind, ready to be revealed after news of her death - because she's always known she won't come back from this mission. The too-short moments between them succour Elspeth on her journey, and they affect the reader as well - the emotions are so vivid and tangible, you can feel everything they feel. Then when Darga appears, the sign she's been waiting for for so long - the sign that she must leave Obernewtyn forever - oh the pain at their separation! Poor Rushton, too. For all that Elspeth has been through, he's been through worse - and partly because of her too. Ariel tortured him because it was a way to inflict pain and cruelty on Elspeth, whom he needs alive despite how much he hates her. At times Elspeth has a sense of fatalism that I hadn't heard from her in a long time: I suppressed the urge to ask the animals why we had come this way. I told myself sternly that I had given up my life and my right to choose what I would do the moment I set eyes on Darga. I was in the hands of the Agyllians now and it would be better to give up the habit of speculating about possible courses of action and their likely outcomes since I had no power to decide these things. Logic and common sense were not to rule, if they ever truly had. I was no longer the mistress of Obernewtyn or guildmistress of the Farseekers, I was a tool in the hands of the Agyllians, to be used as they saw fit, to prevent the coming of a second holocaust. [p.365] It's not true, of course - she wouldn't be the only person who can disarm Sentinel and stop Ariel if she didn't use her brain, but she has these moments of bleakness and even depression throughout the series. She never once wailed at fate or did that thing that heroines do in stories these days, which is to stubbornly deny it all and refuse to have anything to do with prophecies etc. (like in Kresley Cole's Poison Princess, for example). She saw the importance of the mission, she lives daily with the reminders of the previous holocaust - which they call the Great White. And like all the people and animals at Obernewtyn, she values life, in all its forms. The idea of sitting back and not doing anything because she wanted to put herself first never occurred to her, because she's a strong person who, as aloof and cold as she might come across, loves deeply, and cares about her world. It's one of the things I love about Elspeth, and deeply respect. The chapters that follow Elspeth and her companions through the high mountains, until the meeting with the wolf, Rheagor, are surprisingly slow but still interesting. I found it hard - for the first time ever - to picture some of Carmody's descriptions of the terrain, and there were times where Elspeth's internal monologues, as she reasons her way through her knowledge and the gaps to figure things out, seemed surprisingly off the mark to me. Not that I would hold it against her - the sacrifices she has to make, the task set before her, are monumental. But there is a lot going on in the details in these chapters, not to mention building tension and a great sense of anticipation, because I have no idea what's going to happen next. As I was reading it, I did of course speculate on where it was headed, but I was in for some real surprises. I definitely did not expect what happened at Sky Lake, where Elspeth goes after her first meeting with the Brildane. There, she finds a small group of people who've been sent, separately and individually, by Atthis through their dreams. I was so surprised, it was the last thing I was expecting. Not to mention who was sent - they each have a purpose for being there, but apart from Swallow, they were all a surprise - but a good one. I particularly liked how much I came to like and appreciate Ahmedri, Straaka's brother from Sador sent to collect Straaka's bones, which means finding Mirium - which turns out to be an important element in Elspeth's quest. Everything starts to come together, especially when Dragon turns up. Lots of surprises! Like the previous books, themes of human intervention - read "meddling" - and arrogance, leading to devastating horror like the holocaust, or Great White, come up throughout. Relationships between humans and animals continue to be an important theme, as does humanity's strengths and weaknesses. Elspeth considers her own fellow Misfits, and is hard on everyone. Passing through the [rift], I could not help but feel that Jak's ambition to enable the little [taint-eating] creatures to adapt so that they could tolerate a brighter, warmer habitat and thereby be able to be relocated so they could consume and transform tainted matter in drier terrain, while understandable, stemmed from the same belief that had led humans to bring the world to the brink of destruction in the first place: the notion that we had the right to change the world and anything in it to suit our needs. Perhaps this belief was connected to the fact that although animals could live completely in the moment, we humans seemed to live almost entirely in our imaginings of the future or our regrets over the past. For if one dwelt completely in a moment, there was no room for thinking about changing it. There was only acceptance. [p.382] For the first time in the series, the book ends on a cliffhanger. It's a very impressive cliffhanger, too, with enough information to make me really, really worried and tense, and apprehensive, yet still with hope. The not-knowing is a killer, I tell you. The Sending is another exceptional addition to the Obernewtyn Chronicles, and really throws you for a loop, just when you were getting comfortable with where things were going. I kinda want to hug it and start it all over again, and I am torn between my yearning to finish Elspeth's story (and my dearest hope that she doesn't die but gets a happy ending), and my desire to never have the story end. I don't know how I'll face this series ending. I think I may need counselling when it's all over. That's how good this series is. (less) | Notes are private!
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Once upon a time, an angel and a devil fell in love. It did not end well. Karou is far from being an ordinary seventeen year old girl. It's not just her...more Once upon a time, an angel and a devil fell in love. It did not end well. Karou is far from being an ordinary seventeen year old girl. It's not just her blue hair, or the creative characters she draws in her sketchbooks and the stories she makes up to go along with them. It's not even that she's always disappearing, and no one can ever get a straight answer to a question about her private life. It's the fact that her hair is blue because she wished it that colour; the monstrous characters she draws in her sketchbooks are all real beings; and she's always disappearing because Brimstone, her father-figure, sends her on errands around the world to collect teeth, usually animal but also human. She grew up in a shop, a very unusual shop. One not in the human world but reached through magical portals that look like ordinary doors on the outside. Inside the shop, Brimstone - with ram's horns, ovine nose, crocodile eyes, human arms and torso heavily scarred, leonine legs and raptor clawed feet - spends hours bent over his desk, wearing jeweller's glasses, feeling the teeth, separating out the good from the bad and putting together necklaces of them. Helping him at this task are three other chimaera: Twiga, with a long giraffe neck, and Issa, half-snake, and Yasri, parrot-beaked. And Karou, though she has always been kept in strict ignorance concerning their work, what exactly the chimaera are, whether there are more of them, and what's behind the door at the back of the shop. But they are her family, and she loves them. They raised her from a newborn, and have always been generous to her. Thanks to Brimstone's wish-magic, Karou has collected over twenty languages, which she can speak fluently, has studied martial arts in Japan, and now attends an arts school in Prague. She has her own flat, hangs out with her best friend Zuzana, a marionette artist from Bavaria, and has just broken up with her cheating boyfriend Kazimir, a very handsome, very vain but not especially bright young man who aspires to be an actor. Karou is independent, resourceful, capable, intelligent, artistic, and beautiful, but she has always been alone. Amongst her chimaera family she is the odd one, the one kept in the dark. She can't tell her friends about them, or her errands. But her loneliness is more than that: she has always felt like there is something missing inside her, like she's not quite whole. When the doors that double as portals to Brimstone's shop begin to be marked with handprints, burned into the wood or metal, she's too busy and tired running endless errands, collecting teeth, to think much of it. But that's before she sees one of the creatures making those marks: a deadly angelic seraphim, an angel, a winged man with fiery eyes, so handsome it's hard to believe. But as soon as he sees her, he gives chase and tries to kill her. Everything in Karou's life changes that day. She has a near-deadly encounter with an angel, discovers what's on the other side of the mysterious door in Brimstone's shop, and pays an awful price for the knowledge. When the angel, Akiva, turns up in her life again, apologising for attacking her, adamant that he doesn't want to hurt her, something in her decides to give him a chance. Desperate to get back to Brimstone's world, she discovers a friend in Akiva, an ally - until he helps show her who she really is, where she came from, and the truth of that other world where seraphim and chimaera fight an endless war. Now this, THIS is what I'm talking about: fresh, original fantasy, rich and vivid and completely absorbing, it is my new favourite book. It should be shelved in adult fantasy as well as YA; it is mature, intelligent, thematically complex while being deceptively simple. Incorporating diverse elements of the fantasy genre to create a new story in a new setting, Taylor has written a book of exceptional power and beauty and sadness. It's hard to write a review of a book you love; your brain gets so excited it overheats like a car's radiator and leaks fluid onto the ground. I have to really collect myself and focus in order to write anything helpful with as few review-cliches as possible. So tempting to just say, This was awesome, read it! Which I do say, but let me try and tell you why I loved this, and why I think so many other readers would also enjoy it. (It would have helped had I done this as soon as I finished it, when it was fresh.) Karou was the best kind of heroine: well-developed, multi-faceted, talented and deadly but not invincible or invulnerable. Able to use her head as well as feel. She had none of the annoying character traits that pop up so often in YA fiction. As a teenager, she had that touch of provoking, obstinate hard-headedness and determination, especially with Brimstone, yet she wasn't immature or unreliable, selfish or stupidly stubborn. Instead, she felt very alive, like someone I would want to know and befriend, familiar even. The loneliness and lack that she feels isn't belaboured or overdone, not constantly in our faces, but simply there, a part of Karou. Was there another life she was meant to be living? At times she felt a keen certainty that there was - a phantom life, taunting her from just out of reach. A sense would come over her while she was drawing or walking, and once when she was dancing slow and close with Kaz, that she was supposed to be doing something else with her hands, with her legs, with her body. Something else. Something else. Something else. [p.82] There is such a nice layer of detail to the narrative, enough to flesh things out and give you a sense of time and place but not so much that it gets bogged down by it, or becomes slow. The pacing is even, smooth and fast without feeling fast - in the sense that, quite a lot happens even in the first few chapters, but it doesn't feel like you're being rushed. The supporting cast of characters were also great. I loved Karou's chimaera family, and my sympathies (as, I'm sure, they're meant to be) lie with the chimaera, as the persecuted race. This endless war between species, fuelled at first with bigotry reminiscent of the white colonisers towards the Africans, has reached a point of being almost impossible to stop. The seraphim have found one way to end it, though, and I dread to read about what Karou will find there, what will be left. Whatever the situation may be for the chimaera, we've certainly entered into a new stage in the war, one that leans closer to genocide. The magic aspect of the story is fresh and fun; I had no idea what the bones were for and couldn't guess (in fact, so clever is the writing that I barely even stopped to think about it: the necklaces of bones were small details, and Karou's errands, and the visitors to the shop, somehow directed your attention elsewhere). The inventiveness, of the magic and also of the chimaera themselves, was fantasy at its best. Likewise, the seraphim proved more interesting, more complex, than they at first appear. You are led to think, oh great, another story about demons and angels - and, for me, the worry that it's going to be confined to a classical biblical kind of angel, like plenty of other stories. But the seraphim may be winged, but their feathers burn. They may be beautiful, but they are cruel. They are superior because they have decreed that they are superior, and in the way we are familiar with: by colonising, by invading, conquering and "civilising" another land of disparate peoples and tribes and cultures. It is a very fine, extreme analogy of the human world. I didn't mark any stand-out quotes - I was enjoying the story too much to slow down and remember to do that. It is very well-written, in structure, plotting, character development, world-building, all of it. I haven't mentioned Madrigal yet, mostly because I didn't see how without giving things away, but I'll just say that I loved how her voice subtly changed after her revelation, how she is the same but not quite, not really. The stories of the past meshed with the revelation of the present. I could understand, and even sympathise, with Akiva's actions, too. Such is the strength of these characters, who seem at first to be black-and-white but are in fact deep shades of grey. The more I learned about Akiva, the more I liked him and the more torn I was by the end. How that will be resolved I can't imagine! But I definitely want to read to find out.  The second book in the series,
Days of Blood & Starlight
, is due out on 6th November 2012 and is available for preorder.(less)
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When Anna Oliphant's father, a popular author of maudlin soap fiction, tells her that he's enrolled her in a boarding school in Paris for her final ye...more
When Anna Oliphant's father, a popular author of maudlin soap fiction, tells her that he's enrolled her in a boarding school in Paris for her final year of high school, she's not at all pleased. She likes living in Atlanta with her mum, hanging out with her best friend Bridgette and working at the local cinema with cutey-boy Toph, who she was hoping was going to be her next boyfriend. Now she's been completely uprooted, one of a hundred kids at the School of America in a country where she doesn't speak the language and is intimidated by the natives. But when she makes friends with her neighbour, Meredith, and Meredith's friends Étienne St Clair, Josh and Rashmi, she finds that their lively company quashes her homesickness. And Anna is quickly drawn to St Clair in particular - he may be no taller than she is, but he's very attractive, has a great sense of humour and loads of charisma - and a British accent, even if he claims to be American. Anna and St Clair hit it off from the beginning, and even though she still has hopes for a relationship with Toph and St Clair has a girlfriend, Anna has to acknowledge that she has much deeper feelings for St Clair than mere friendship. But how does St Clair feel about her? His easy-going manner and good cheer hide a fear of being alone and problems with his own father, a controlling man who keeps both St Clair and his mother tightly under his thumb. It's a year of friendship, love and tears, and the kind of life lessons you can only learn when you're living on your own in another country. I loved this book. It was funny, warm, believable, endearing and, yes, very very sweet. I fell into the story quickly and lived in Anna's world; it felt like I was living it. It was so realistic without becoming dull and depressing because of it. I've spent a mere two weeks in Paris, staying with my sister Tara when she lived there, so I could definitely picture it - and totally empathise with Anna's feelings: I too was intimidated and while "thank you" and "please" were the first words I learned when I moved to Japan, I was too scared of saying it wrong in French to even open my mouth, relying totally on my sister's fluency. Anna's fear of being hated for wearing white sneakers (as, apparently, all Americans do when overseas) made me laugh. The sense of humour prevalent in the novel is one of the things that made it work - there's fantastic banter between Anna and St Clair, as well as Anna's thoughts, to entertain. But it's also the characters, and the simplicity of the plot, that ensure Anna and the French Kiss's success. The story follows a full school year, and is about as eventful as a school year tends to be: that is, not very. But that just made me appreciate it even more: if you have really strong characters and excellent dialogue and lots of chemistry, you don't need a mystery-abduction-love triangle-threat to your life-ridiculous plot to keep a romance going. On the contrary, I love (and search fruitlessly for) romances that are entirely character-driven, as this one is. I don't want a silly mystery, or an abduction of the heroine, or some other weird plot-line. Just give me wonderful characters who I fall in love with, an engaging narrative voice, and a slowly evolving depth of feeling - that's what real romance is! I loved too the little digs at Twilight : when Anna first sees St Clair, she has to mention his beautiful hair - in fact, she uses those words and gets quite excited by it, and she mentions his hair several times. It may be unintentional, but it instantly made me think of how Bella was always going on about Edward's hair. ;) It also, indirectly, acts as a counter to that story by depicting a realistic, healthy relationship that began as a very strong friendship (I loved Twilight, but I read it as a fantasy). There was also what I read to be a dig at authors like Nicholas Sparks - at least, when I read the description of the self-indulgent, melodramatic, depressing books Anna's father writes, Sparks is the author who instantly came to mind. I haven't read any of his books, but the previews of his movies look thoroughly self-indulgent and maudlin (which is why I can't bring myself to try one of his books). I did see the first, oh, thirty minutes of Nights at Rodanthe and nearly tore my eyes out. So it's fair to say that I saw eye-to-eye with Anna about a lot of things - and Perkins too no doubt, who is a librarian by day and interspersed the story with references to several books I loved, like Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress . The side-plot regarding St Clair's parents could easily have slipped the novel too far into soap opera drama, but it never came to the forefront or dominated the story for it to cheapen it. I can see this becoming a comfort read quite easily. It's a quick read, being light in tone, smoothly written and loads of fun; with one book, Perkins re-established my love and appreciation for Young Adult novels, which has suffered such a beating over the last couple of years with so many badly written, trite stories out there, quickly published in order to grab the tail end of a fad. Anna and the French Kiss was a breath of fresh air to this jaded reader. (less) | Notes are private!
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| Aug 22, 2011
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Aug 12, 2011
| Paperback
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| 0547366205
| 9780547366203
| 4.19
| 1,442
| Nov 28, 1979
| Aug 23, 2010
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| Feb 2013
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Jun 19, 2011
| Board Book
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| 1847249302
| 9781847249302
| 3.79
| 4,186
| Dec 31, 2005
| 2010
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There are a few rare books - like
The Chrysalids
- where I've said in my review: If there's one book you should definitely read this year, it's this...more
There are a few rare books - like
The Chrysalids
- where I've said in my review: If there's one book you should definitely read this year, it's this one. That's my strongest, most enthusiastic endorsement, brimming with excitement and the need to share a piece of genius with as many people as possible, and it's very much the case for Beckett's Genesis. Fourteen-year-old Anaximander has been studying hard for several years with her tutor, Pericles, for her examination to get into the prestigious Academy, to be one of those who help guide the nation. For her exam, she has focused on her most prominent interest: Adam Forde, a rebel and a hero from an age long gone, in 2075 when the country was a Plato's republic of philosopher-rulers, soldiers, technicians and labourers, the population divided at birth into rigid class lines, all after closing its borders - literally - to the rest of the world as the only place free of the plague that decimated other countries in the 2050s. Her exam is four hours long, and the three stone-faced examiners are intimidating and exacting. But Anax is well prepared, and she knows her subject matter so well, that she's modestly confident. Over the course of the exam, we learn through their questions and answers how the new republic was established, and what Adam Forde's role in it was. But with every detail we learn, more and more questions arise, because we, the readers, lack Anax's context, her knowledge of the present. Is it the same country? Is this society still in place or have things changed? We begin with zero knowledge, and must build an understanding of this futuristic world bit by bit. Or rather, we think we know, and we work on our defaults, picturing and understanding things in the only way we can, only to have these details constantly confounded, dismantled, leaving us to scrabble around for a new understanding to fit the new knowledge, upon which we build more - like a house of cards, there is every danger that a foundation card will collapse and bring the whole lot down. This is not a work of "fluff" - it is easy to read but it is not a lazy read. You the reader will be actively involved, every step of the way, in putting this story together. And I love that. There are plenty of times where I'm happy to just sit back and let a story tell itself, to let it reveal itself at its own pace and in its own words. But always I want to participate in the story at some level: I can't read and not think. Genesis is the antithesis of the thinking novel. It will make you think, yes, but it will also make you involved, make you participate. You are an active reader, and that's important because it's a deeply philosophical story that's intensely thought-provoking and mentally absorbing, and the one thing missing from the experience for me is a group discussion at the end of it. (This novel would be perfect for high school English students.) For such a short novel, there is a LOT going on here, and it's a very clever, unique and original story. Aside from creating a futuristic, post-apocalyptic dystopian society (home of Adam Forde), as well as sketching in Anax's own world (which we're unsure, for most the book, of the exact connection or why Forde is seen as a hero), it also delves into philosophy - especially the nature of being, but also the idea of an ideal society - and history. As a history (and English) teacher, I love a work of fiction that gets across how nuanced history is, how unfixed it is. Likewise, I get so angry when I read a book, especially a YA novel, or watch a movie or TV show that, simply out of laziness perhaps, perpetuates the stereotype of the bad History class and teacher, where students are lectured endlessly about famous events and expected to memorise dates and names. That is not what history is about at all! If you've ever had a secondary school teacher who did that, you deserve an apology. Not to mention that it puts people off history, the subject, and gives them the idea that's its boring and even alienating. Such a shame. But I digress. The society that Adam Forde grew up in is indeed based on Plato's Republic - and funnily enough was set up by a guy (a rich businessman) named Plato, though whether he assumed this name in sheer ironic arrogance is up to the reader to infer. I never did finish that book, but I read over half, enough to recognise the inspiration. And like with any utopian society, it quickly becomes a dystopia. The problem facing the Council of Philosophers was inevitable. In its beginnings, The Republic had planted the seeds of its own destruction. Plato's first dictum, which opens The Republican Charter, reads as follows: With the threat of the plague outside its mighty fence and over the ocean receding, The Republic sought to create a new threat, and used Adam Forde to do it. It didn't work, and for his reduced sentence he is used instead in a new robot project: to work with Art, an android that thinks and develops its own mind through interacting with others. Having spent all its time so far with the one Philosopher who designed it, its creator decided to use Adam as Art's new full-time companion. From there we get to what the book is ostensibly all about: the question of what makes a human, a human, and whether a robot can ever be treated equally, with a soul. The conversations - arguments I should say - between Adam and Art are the real meat of Genesis, though certainly not the only part of the book that makes you think. The one flaw in it is the connection between The Republic and the drive to build a real working robot, or android. I don't know whether I somehow missed it or if indeed it wasn't fully explained, but I wasn't sure where this ambition came from or what it had to do with The Republic. But it's a small side issue. In western culture, there has long been a philosophical debate about artificial intelligence, resulting in many famous movies and books. You'd think that after so much discourse on the topic, there wouldn't be anything more to add - but in fact, since there's no answer or solution to the possible ethical dilemma, there is endless room for musing. Beckett would have to have written one of the most original and hard-hitting takes on the matter in the last, oh I don't know, twenty years? There have been some fantasy novels come out in the last few years that also explore, or make use of, this subject-matter (e.g. The Windup Girl, The Alchemy of Stone), but nothing like this. However, if you enjoyed this, or you're interested in the topic, I absolutely have to recommend I, Robot by Isaac Asimov - it's really, really good. There is much that is insightful in this novel, and going back to the concept of ideas, I want to leave you with this quote from Art, speaking to Adam, in his argument as to why he's just as, if not more so, alive as Adam: 'You people pride yourselves on creating the world of Ideas, but nothing could be further from the truth. The Idea enters the brain from outside. It rearranges the furniture to make it more to its liking. It finds other Ideas already in residence, and picks fights or forms alliances. The alliances build new structures, to defend themselves against intruders. And then, whenever the opportunity arises, the Idea sends out its shock troops in search of new brains to infect. The successful Idea travels from mind to mind, claiming new territory, mutating as it goes. It's a jungle out there, Adam. Many ideas are lost. Only the strongest survive. In the end - and without giving anything away - we find that Anax's society has solved the problem that faced The Republic, and it is sad, truly sad. Leaving us with what is not said, an Idea of what makes us human, or what makes humans different, if not better. Beckett cleverly reveals a truth without directly saying a single word - the answer to Art and Adam's debate is the very ending of the book. Genesis is pure genius, in that regard. At the end, though, I was left with some unanswered questions - questions that weren't answered probably because they weren't relevant, and wouldn't have fit into Anax's exam. I still wonder, like: what happened to Eve? And what is the state of the rest of the world, now? If such details could have been incorporated, it would have solidified the world-building even more. On a final note, be careful what reviews you read. At a glance, I can say that there are some that give away too much, including the twist ending - yes, there is a twist, I knew that going in so I will pass that much along; it was ever-present in my mind and I had several theories, one of which was the true one, but I didn't get too distracted figuring it out, and the real ending was the real surprise for me. I first heard of this book through Bree (All the Books I Can Read), and I have to really thank her for her great review, which led me to read this terrific book. Go on, get it, read it, what are you waiting for?(less) | Notes are private!
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May 20, 2011
| Paperback
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| 0156011603
| 9780156011600
| 3.64
| 2,991
| 2000
| Jul 16, 2001
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Now here's a book that went from an intriguing premise, to gripping me at the first page, to totally taking over my mind - it's definitely going to be...more
Now here's a book that went from an intriguing premise, to gripping me at the first page, to totally taking over my mind - it's definitely going to be one of the best books I've read this year, I can tell you that now. I read this back in March and itched to write a review straight away, but made myself wait till it was next in line - I wish I hadn't now, because my thoughts were so buzzing at the time it would have made a more interesting and energetic review! It's also a tricky one to review, or summarise, because part of the allure and the utter absorption is in the gradual reveal of the truth, in the not-knowing, in the speculation right from the beginning. So I can't tell you what it's really about, only give you much the same outline the blurb does (which, as I re-read it now, knowing the true story, is actually quite cleverly written in the way it acts upon our assumptions - playing with language is key to this novel, but I'll get to that). Which was enough to pull me in, but others might pass it by due to lack of information. This is the story of Isserley, who drives back and forth along the Scottish highways looking for hitchhikers. Male, large, preferably unattached hitchhikers. With scars and large hands, her tiny petite frame is topped off by a pair of obviously enhanced breasts that are prominently on display. As she probes her male hitchhikers with casual questions and gets them talking, she quickly assesses whether anyone would really notice - or care - if they suddenly disappeared. If that doesn't make you wonder about what Isserley's deal is, then you probably wouldn't care for the book. For me, the notion of a woman driving around looking for male hitchhikers to kidnap, is definitely an intriguing one - if Isserley were male, looking for young women, we'd know exactly what to think. But a tiny woman who seems nervous no matter how many times she does this...? I didn't know what to think, and that was part of the initial fun. As the story unfolds and more and more clues are carefully, smoothly revealed, my mind went nuts coming up with theories. Normally, I never make an effort to predict where a story is going - I love the reveal in the hands of a skilled writer, and I don't see reading as a race to be right and outwit the author. I certainly didn't want to outwit Faber; I loved the excitement, the not-knowing, the guessing and revising of said guesses, as the truth became apparent. And "excitement" is just the word for it: it was more fun than being on a roller-coaster! I got a kind of adrenaline rush and found it extremely hard to put the book down, even after the truth came out. Even after every last truth is out, that's only half the book - by then you're hopefully hooked and in an odd way, sympathetic - at least, I was. I had no trouble identifying with Isserley, if I can use that word. I love being confronted in fiction, and having assumptions turned on their head. While the second half is quite different from the first - and I can't use the genre name I'd like to because that would be leading! - it was equally, if vastly differently, fascinating. I itched to know more and more, and without a doubt by the end I was sympathetic, despite it all. And that only adds to my fascination, because on a reasonable level, I shouldn't be. (Then again, I even found Humbert Humbert strangely sympathetic - in a disturbing way - in Lolita . I actually enjoy being pulled out of my comfort zone, seeing a different perspective - even if it's ultimately "wrong" - and trying to understand a different way of thinking.) Not being able to "reveal" what's really going on in the novel does make it hard to talk about all the things this book makes me so eager to discuss, especially language. I'm chaffing at the bit here! Under the Skin is such an intelligent novel, hugely thought-provoking and fascinating. I loved the way Faber used language to present an alien - to us - perspective, a different view of things, and turn our own comfort zone, assumptions and sense of righteousness on their head. I've read Fantasy novels (with blends of Sci-Fi) that do the same kind of thing, and they're some of my favourite books in the genre (sadly there aren't many of those around; most are disappointingly generic). For instance, the play on the words "human" and "animal" are hugely confronting and rather mind-bending, and really highlight the power of words, language and our ownership of them. I wish I could go into it in more details but always when I write reviews I'm conscious of wanting to give others the opportunity to experience books the way I do, to start a book with a sense of anticipation and wonder and let the story tell itself, rather than have a reviewer's words tell them what to think and expect. So as much as I want to keep talking about this fantastic book - which, I must emphasise, is truly weird and not everyone's cup of tea - I will stop here.(less) | Notes are private!
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| Mar 17, 2011
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Feb 12, 2011
| Paperback
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| 1897151845
| 9781897151846
| 4.04
| 49
| Sep 01, 2010
| Jan 09, 2010
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One of my favourite new books of 2010! This is an absolutely wonderful book that you'll just love. It's about, as you can tell, giraffe and bird. They...more
One of my favourite new books of 2010! This is an absolutely wonderful book that you'll just love. It's about, as you can tell, giraffe and bird. They hate each other, and the annoying things the other does all the time - things that seem designed to annoy them. But when they finally have had enough of each other and go off to better pastures, they find that they miss the other, and value each other's differences. It's no surprise that the author and illustrator lives in Toronto: it's one of those big cities with a hugely diverse population of people crammed in together, who don't always understand each other or even try, with racism simmering beneath the tension - especially when you get in the subway. Giraffe and Bird is about acknowledging differences in culture, lifestyle, habits, even looks and appreciating others regardless, seeing the value in others and learning to live alongside them. Accompanied by beautiful painted illustrations, the engaging and slightly cheeky prose will also teach some new words, like "abide".  (less) | Notes are private!
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| Dec 19, 2010
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Dec 16, 2010
| Hardcover
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| 0307397556
| 9780307397553
| 4.02
| 1,301
| Jan 01, 2009
| Mar 09, 2010
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This book became one of my favourites of 2010, and if there's one book I would recommend to you right now, it would be this one. Quirky, clever, hilar...more
This book became one of my favourites of 2010, and if there's one book I would recommend to you right now, it would be this one. Quirky, clever, hilarious, original, poignant, touching, flat-out brilliant all comes to mind in describing Come, Thou Tortoise. It was a random purchase for me, bought on a whim - I didn't know anything about it but I've always loved tortoises and it sounded interesting. Only goes to show how spontaneous book buying, with no research, can reap great rewards! Such a brilliant book only makes me feel impossibly inarticulate; I don't feel like I have any ability with words in writing this. How to capture the essence, or the eccentricity, or the sheer brilliance of the writing? I can only stumble through what I want to say. Audrey Flowers has been living in Portland, Oregon with her tortoise, Winnifred (who came with the apartment) when she gets a call from Uncle Thoby, telling her that her father, Walter, a university professor and researcher, is in a coma. Leaving Winnifred with friends, Linda and her aspiring Shakespearian actor boyfriend, Chuck, Audrey flies back to Newfoundland but is too late to see her father: he's already dead. Now it's just her and Uncle Thoby, the black sheep of the family with one arm longer than the other, each dealing with grief in their own strange way, while Winnifred learns Shakespeare from Audrey's friends and reminisces about the time they drove across the country, Winnifred riding the dashboard (she loves the heat vents). This novel is pretty impossible to summarise, but that's the basic set-up. Both Audrey and Winnifred narrate in first person, in their own distinct and unusual style. Both are wonderful and engaging characters that you'll absolutely love. Audrey - Uncle Thoby nicknamed her "Oddly", which fits her perfectly, is endearingly sweet and captures their love of puns - is both sharp and quick of mind, and also slow to catch on, not always bright and definitely odd. She's not at all stupid, she just thinks in a different way. This comes across vividly in the stories from her childhood, but even as an adult this odd mix of smarts and slowness is striking and balanced, making Oddly a wonderfully rich and realistic character. It's hard to describe her any better than that. Winnifred will undoubtedly be a favourite with anyone reading this, too. She's a most observant tortoise, and like Audrey, has that mix of childlike innocence and adult world-weariness. Also like Audrey, Winnifred enjoys puns. It actually makes a lot of sense that these two think alike - Audrey has a unique perspective on the world, and Winnifred is quietly eccentric too. Perhaps they rubbed off on each other. What's clever about how Grant wrote her debut novel, is how she's used the simple technique of not using dialogue punctuation. Normally, I don't much like it when authors leave out quotation marks. It can make a story almost unreadable, or at the very least, often confusing. Here, though, Grant shows how a stylistic device like this can complement and boost a story, as well as strengthen the narrator's voice. Writing is an artform, and deciding how to write something is just as important as character development or plot. Not using quotations actually makes the story flow seamlessly between dialogue and thought, or Winnifred's voiceless conversation. It makes scenes funnier, and grants greater insight. The other thing to note about how the book is written, is that there are no question marks. This troubled me a bit at first, because I wasn't sure whether I should read lines that were clearly questions, as questions (with inflection) or flatly, as statements. After a while, though, I just went with it. Will Audrey come back. That is the question. Or is an allegiance switch in order. And is an allegiance switch even possible, considering my options. Linda the Unkempt or Chuck Stanch. Stanch is Chuck's last name. This I learned last night when a Red Cross representative came to the door and referred to him as Mr. Stanch. That was Winnifred. It doesn't capture her personality but it's a good sample of what I mean by the ommitted dialogue punctuation and question marks. It's a device that's so cleverly used, and works so well with the characters and the plot and the scenarios and the humour, that it was worth expounding. Even more, it reflects both Audrey's childlike, insightful questions and her blindness and inability to ask the right questions. She'll focus on some inane point while around her something more significant is going on. There's also a subtle mystery, or puzzle, at play here. A family concern. The truth of Audrey's family (I won't describe it in any other way because talking about it openly will spoil it, and reduce it) is raw and touching and beautiful, and sad. And makes perfect sense. I didn't see it coming, though I never try to puzzle out such things. The blurb mentioned "her father's mysterious past" so I was looking in a different direction, or a bit off-kilter. That's the best way, though. I don't like second-guessing novels. While the humour made me smile and made me laugh, at heart this is a serious story about darker themes than is at first apparent. In a way, it's a black comedy - making light of the things that are painful and sad in life. There isn't a single character in this novel that won't touch you in some way, and many of them slip in under your skin without you even realising it, like Toff, a lawyer and friend of the family (so Audrey thinks), or her neighbours in Newfoundland. Even Chuck, the aspiring actor who complains about always having to play Antonio, shows a vulnerable side that speaks to you. It's all between the lines, or slipped into the sentences in subtle ways. What's not shown or explained is sometimes more vivid than what is, in Come, Thou Tortoise. I don't know how Grant will top this one, but whatever she writes next, I'll be there to read it.(less) | Notes are private!
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| Dec 24, 2010
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Oct 22, 2010
| Paperback
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| 1416971742
| 9781416971740
| 3.91
| 33,193
| Oct 06, 2009
| Aug 10, 2010
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Just look at this cover, isn't it GORGEOUS?! I absolutely love it. It's so rich, with such sumptuous detail, wonderful design and use of colour and al...more
Just look at this cover, isn't it GORGEOUS?! I absolutely love it. It's so rich, with such sumptuous detail, wonderful design and use of colour and all the elements of the story and its genres. It's simply RIPPING!! It feels nice too, with embossed bits, shiny bits, matte bits, texture in places so that if you run your fingers over it they get all excited and tingly! The one and only thing that bothers me is the cardstock used - the cover never lies flat but is constantly (even brand new and sitting on the bookshop display table) lifting up into the air almost vertically. Hey, it's a keen book, but covers get damaged this way. This is one of those books where the gorgeous cover completely matches - and does credit to - the absolutely wonderful story inside. I'm loving this - two YA novels in a row that I can utterly GUSH over! (Count how many times I capitalise my words as a cheap way of conveying enthusiasm - actually don't count, it'll get embarrassing!) Not only is Westerfeld an utter GENIUS here, but Keith Thompson's sketches are simply STUNNING! I found myself gazing and gazing at them. They match the scenes perfectly, and really make the world come alive. Oh, and would you just look at the stunning map:  Here you can see Europe, at the time of the Great War, separated along ideological lines of a new kind: the "Darwinists" depicted with impressive beasts, and the "Clankers" bristling with steam-powered machinery and weapons. The Darwinist countries, like Great Britain, have embraced not just natural selection but gene splicing, cross-breeding animals and creating incredible beasts called "fabrications" - including the Leviathan itself, an immense hydrogen ship that's not just one living organism - mostly whale - but a whole colony of organisms and beasts that each have a role to play. It's absolutely fascinating.  The Clankers, on the other hand - the Germans and Hungarians etc. - have the kind of machines that are clearly inspired by Star Wars, like this giant war machine. They come in smaller two-legged varieties as well. But I best stop long enough to give you a summary, eh: Prince Aleksandar, son to Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, grandson to the emperor, is secretly bundled out of the palace on the night his parents are assassinated in Serbia. His fencing master, Count Volger, and his master of mechaniks, Otto Klopp, get fifteen year old Alek away in a Cyklop Stormwalker (a two-legged machine), but it takes Alek a while to understand the seriousness of his position. Even though his grandfather made it so Alek could never inherit the empire (because he disapproved of the woman Ferdinand decided to marry), his father and Count Volger understood that with the continent bristling for war, Alek could prove a very useful hostage, or pawn.  Meanwhile, in England, sixteen year old Deryn is ready to take her middy's test and join the Air Service like her older brother Jaspert - as long as she can convince them she's really a boy. The test consists of being strapped into the seat below one of the earliest types of air ship - a Huxley. In essence a giant jelly fish filled with hydrogen that panics at the slightest thing, the Huxley goes mostly up or down and can't really be steered. But as Deryn is aloft, a storm comes and the Huxley panics - to save being smashed against a wall in its descent, she's forced to cut the rope that tethers it. Deryn keeps a calm head, and while she is drifting out to the Channel, is picked up by the Leviathan, one of the earliest and still the best air ship in the Service. Determined to be kept on board, she learns the way of the ship fast. When they make an unprecedented stop at Hyde Park in London to pick up a scientist and a very precious cargo, it is the first step in an adventure that will see Deryn and Alek meet in surprising circumstances - and form an even more unusual friendship.  So, how about some more gushing? Westerfeld has created a superb world, an alternate world of steampunk technology and inventive science, with a wealth of detail and imagination. But it would be a hollow world if the characters and the story weren't equally as entrancing. Oh, and Westerfeld gets extra points for including a THYLACINE!! (Well he is somewhat Australian, after all.) I love this animal, and it was great to see it in a story, finally. Deryn is the kind of protagonist I instantly love - a tomboy in the best possible way, with a mouth full of slang and stable talk (often invented for the world), a quick mind and passion - in this case, a passion to be in the air service and serve on board the Leviathan. She has her flaws, but she's got so much spunk and bravery - and she doesn't fret or panic. True to her more humble upbringing, she provides the perfect counter-point to the palace-bred Alek, though he too rises to the occasion, learns from his mistakes and shows courage in a time of peril. He sometimes comes across as a tad sullen and spoilt, but he's also willing to admit his mistakes, apologise for them, or do what's right despite the dangers. And then when you get the two of them together, they're just great. Their personalities are vibrant but the details are subtle and come across in dialogue and action. There's not so much of that reflective instrospection (did I just make up a word there?) that's so prevalent in YA and which drives me nuts. Aside from being a wonderful adventure novel in a highly creative world, Leviathan also presents some interesting themes on the nature of science, technology, ethics and attitudes and so on. The best stories for examining interesting themes like this are the ones that don't deal with them head-on. The ones that let them play out, that let the reader notice them, think about them, question their own thoughts and reactions. Books like, say, Fahrenheit 451 are great for what they do but are also deliberately obvious and in-your-face, which doesn't always leave much room for gaining perspective. I could ramble on but I better not - I think you get how much I enjoyed this, yeah? I'm looking forward to the next book, Behemoth, with great anticipation! (less) | Notes are private!
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Sep 01, 2010
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| 0618381368
| 9780618381364
| 4.29
| 1,762
| 2002
| Aug 18, 2003
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This is one of my favourite picture books, ever since it first came out, and it's taken me seven years to finally get a copy - but the wait is worth i...more
This is one of my favourite picture books, ever since it first came out, and it's taken me seven years to finally get a copy - but the wait is worth it. Wombats are lazy animals - cousin to the koala, which is only awake for about 45 mins a day - and oh so adorable. When I was in Grade 6 I did an assignment on the hairy-nosed wombat, and learnt about their unique defence tactic: like koalas, wombats have a hard plate of bone on their lower back. Koalas use this for sleeping in the fork of branches high up in trees. Wombats use it differently - when threatened by a dingo (the dog breed the Aborigines brought with them many thousands of years ago), the wombat will run for its burrow. The dingo follows, and when it tries to jump on the wombat's back to crush the neck with its jaws, the wombat will lift itself on its powerful, earth-moving legs and crush the dingo between the hard plate of the wombat's back and the roof of the burrow. Pretty cool huh? I was very impressed by this, back in Grade 6, and I've never forgotten it. Also, and I was hoping to have more info on this for you, my parents once had a "pet" wombat. So much of Diary of a Wombat rings true because of their stories - anyone who's had a "pet" wombat would no doubt agree (I'm sure the author has had one too at some stage). They're not pets like cats and dogs are, they just sort-of adopt you, like the wombat in this story. My parents had theirs - and I don't know what they called it, or how they came to have it, but I think it was a male - long before I was born, when they lived in Thornby Cottage. A couple of stories have always stuck with me: it took an aversion to one of their friends and had to be shut away when she visited; it really would scratch holes right through doors; and it once fell asleep behind a tyre of my uncle's car without anyone knowing it was there - when he backed out he ran over the wombat, but because of that hard plate on its back I was telling you about, it was fine, just got up and waddled away. So they're real characters, wombats. Diary of a Wombat is written from the wombat's perspective, and is incredibly adorable and funny. Her diary consists of sleeping, eating, scratching, and sleeping some more - until a family of humans moves in and she discovers she can get some tasty food if she bangs on tin rubbish bins. She's also protective of this new family, and valiantly does battle with the flat hairy creature (the doormat) before demanding a reward. Now I just need to get the next book, Diary of a Baby Wombat. I wouldn't mind getting hold of some of her other books too - I like the sound of Pete the Sheep-Sheep! :D(less) | Notes are private!
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| Jul 2010
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Jul 17, 2010
| Hardcover
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| 0316043915
| 9780316043915
| 3.78
| 9,125
| Feb 25, 2010
| Feb 25, 2010
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I read this book back at the beginning of January, but I'm so behind on writing reviews I've only now got to it - as a result, most of what I want to...more
I read this book back at the beginning of January, but I'm so behind on writing reviews I've only now got to it - as a result, most of what I want to say I've forgotten and all I can do is gush, because my sheer unadulterated enjoyment of the novel is the strongest remaining impression with me. :) Yeine ("YAY-neh") Darr, a minor noblewoman, is from High North, one of the "barbaric" northern lands. A descendent of the royal line, she is too minor and insignificant to be a problem to anyone - or so she hoped. Her grandfather, the king of of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, summons her to Sky, the royal palace suspended high above the land on a slender column and with the grace of the One God. Once there, she is named an heir - to compete against her two cousins, doomed to fail - and becomes embroiled in the plotting of the trapped gods that live in the palace. This was exactly what I needed when I read it, and could easily become a comfort novel for me - the writing style has that ease and smoothness, that lightness, the fast pace and romantic thread that I sink into so easily (when the plot engages me, anyway). I loved Yeine, I loved the setting, the world-building, the complex structure of gods and power, and I loved Naha - the god Nahadoth, the first god, now a slave in the palace. He may have been an obvious character but I simply didn't care: for me, he worked. He clicked. He made sense. He was alien enough to be utterly believable, and the way Yeine saw him ... let's just say that I too became a sucker for his tortured soul (if gods have souls, but you know what I mean). Like all Fantasy, it is easy to draw parallels between the fantastic world and our own; Fantasy helps us see our own world, our culture especially, fresh and often with new insight - if done well. Here, I was surprised at how quickly and eagerly I fell into the drama of the story: the squabbling, scheming, often petty gods, too powerful for their own good; and the scheming, manipulative, too-powerful Arameri (the royal family). I'm not generally a fan of drama, being too easily bored by it, but this was extremely tasty and left me barely satisfied. It's all quite simple, and that perhaps is what made it so successful for me. The insular world, the uncluttered writing, the characters drawn with sparse, brief strokes - you can never predict what will work for you, and sometimes you can't even pin down why it worked when others of a similar nature just don't. In a way, I found it nostalgic, reminding me of favourite books from my teen days like Polymer, or favourite authors like Isobelle Carmody. I found it a hard book to put down (I read it in a day), and an easy and entertaining read; I loved how it was written, and Yeine's voice, and felt bereft when it ended. I immediately ordered the second book but part of me is holding off on reading it, either afraid the second book won't grip me like the first did, or of not wanting to glut on a yummy thing too soon afterwards. Though, it has been three months... (less) | Notes are private!
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| Jan 03, 2011
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Jul 15, 2010
| Paperback
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| 0771069022
| 9780771069024
| 3.70
| 2,178
| Jan 01, 2009
| Jul 06, 2010
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I ostensibly got this book for a reading challenge, but I would have wanted to read it anyway - who could resist a gorgeous cover like that?! What's e...more
I ostensibly got this book for a reading challenge, but I would have wanted to read it anyway - who could resist a gorgeous cover like that?! What's even better is that I absolutely loved this book, and it's going straight to my Favourites list. Angel Tungaraza is a native of Tanzania who moved to Rwanda with her husband, Pius, when he got a contract to work at KIST (the Kigali Institute of Science & Technology), helping get the country back on its feet after the genocide. It's the year 2000, and with them are their orphaned grandchildren, Grace, Faith, Benedict, Moses and Daniel - the children of their son Joseph and daughter Vinas - and their servant Titi. Angel has plenty to keep her busy aside from the children: her cake business is doing very well, and the stories and problems of her neighbours in the complex where they live occupy her thoughts too. Whether it's the people who come to her home to order a cake for a christening, a birthday, an anniversary or a homecoming, or her old and new friends, everyone has a story, everyone has something to confide in Angel. Through Angel, we get a taste not just of her wonderful, colourful cakes but of what the people of Rwanda - no matter their ethnicity or religion - have been through on a personal level, and where their lives are now. I absolutely loved this book. It certainly reminded me of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency - anyone who's read it will find comparisons between Angel and Mma Ramotswe, but I also felt that Angel was a complete character in her own right, and I didn't even think about Mma Ramotswe again after the first time. I loved McCall Smith's book (I have more to read in the series), but I loved this one just as much. Angel was a wonderful character, solid and generous and shrewd, caring and with a great sense of humour. The novel fairly zings with colour and life and vibrancy; it's what I love to get when I read a book set in another country: a life experience. I want that insight into day-to-day living, into customs and traditions, differences and similarities. I'm fascinated by the different diction, by the attitudes and humour. Baking Cakes in Kigali is rich with that, as well as life lessons. It touches on the aftermath of the genocide - what people who survived live with, and also what's happening to those who have been accused of participating. AIDs figures somewhat prominently, as it's something that has touched nearly all the characters' lives, and there's a clever little scene between Angel and "the Canadian" who lives upstairs and is a consultant for the IMF. There are people from all over the world populating this novel, and it creates a real kaleidoscope of perspectives, attitudes and motivations. From the very beginning of the novel, I was thoroughly engaged. I think this is a debut novel; if so, it's a very impressive one! The prose is confident, smooth and perfectly paced. Parkin doesn't get fancy or experimental: her style is as honest and grounded as the character of Angel herself; a perfect complement. I always love it when a story is written in a style that matches the story itself, because it draws you so much more fully, and the experience is richer. The characters may seem like caricatures to some readers but to me they came across as honest portrayals, and each character is written with both humour and respect so that they are completely believable. While the author is a white woman originally from Zambia, all the stories in the book (the stories the characters tell Angel) are based on true stories people in Rwanda told Parkin; I didn't find that the novel had been written through a white Anglo lens - true, since I too am white and Anglo, it might not be noticeable to me, but that's my impression anyway. I feel cynical enough to spot it when I come across it ;) It's a world-wise novel, but it would be arrogant to say that Africans don't know what's going on. I really don't have any criticism of this novel. I was wholly satisfied; I was entertained; I learned a lot; and I got to really spend some time in a country I have never actually been to. It was especially good to read after having read some weightier, more depressing stories like A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali or the story set in Rwanda in Say You’re One of Them. Because both of those stories were so extreme - set during the genocide itself - Baking Cakes in Kigali provides the right kind of balance, and a great way to see what's happening in the country now. It also humanises the people again, who had their humanity ripped from them in 1994. I whole-heartedly recommend this book, and I can see myself re-reading this and enjoying it just as much the next time 'round. (less) | Notes are private!
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| Jul 18, 2010
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Jul 06, 2010
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| 189723161X
| 9781897231616
| 3.61
| 99
| 1996
| Oct 15, 2000
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This instantly became one of my absolute favourite reads for the year to date; I just loved it! Don't be put off by the naked woman on the cover - inc...more
This instantly became one of my absolute favourite reads for the year to date; I just loved it! Don't be put off by the naked woman on the cover - incidentally, they're photographs from c.1887, titled "Muybridge Animal Locomotion". I can almost grasp the connection between the cover and the story itself, but it's eluding me, not quite solid. Eduardo Sosa is an unemployed sociologist, living with his sister Adriana and her husband in an apartment in San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador. When a homeless, smelly old bum who lives in a yellow Chevrolet parks on the street outside, Eduardo becomes more than curious. He follows the man, Jacinto Bustillo, across the city, and when the right moment presents itself, he steals the man's identity. Now the yellow Chevrolet is his, and he finds that it's also the home of four venomous snakes. He names them and collectively calls them "the ladies": The plump one with the cunning eyes would be Beti; the slender one who moved timidly, almost delicately, would be Loli; Valentina exuded sexuality with her iridescent skin; and little Carmela had an air of mystery about her. (p. 25) The ladies tell him about Don Jacinto, how he lost his job and his wife and daughter when the husband of his secretary discovered she was having an affair with Don Jacinto, how the woman was killed in a mugging which Don Jacinto believed was the husband's doing, and how his own wife had thrown him out. With no planning Eduardo and the ladies begin a day of terror and carnage in San Salvador, all on his way to enact revenge for Don Jacinto - who Eduardo is already beginning to physically resemble. As the body count mounts, Deputy Commissioner Lito Handel finds himself leading the investigation of one of the worst massacres the city has ever seen. With the help of a journalist, Rita, they begin finding connections and motivations and pondering a political agenda, which seems to contradict the personal vendetta angle that's just as plausible. Why this Don Jacinto should be terrorising the city with four lethal snakes is a mystery, but since it's hard to hide a bright yellow, old American car and four snakes, it's only a matter of time before they catch the man they believe is Jacinto Bustillo. I don't often feel the urge to use that lovely cliché, "it's a roller-coaster of a novel!" but in this case, that's what popped into my head. It's a crazy, head-on-collision kind of book, absolutely gorgeous, incredibly lively and weird and bizarre: I can't express how much I loved it! It's a short novel that only took me a few hours to read, especially because Moya writes with such clear precision. The pace picks you up and carries you off and you become lost in the events. It's a spare kind of writing, with few adjectives. It produces an effortless read, one where there isn't a single awkward sentence, no clumsy descriptions, no lines that could just as easily be removed as left in. Every word is there for a reason. It has to be one of the most effortlessly controlled stories I've ever read, completely self-assured and confident, not a twinge of self-consciousness, second-guessing or doubt. Which allows you to invest completely in the actual story, putting your trust in an author who clearly knows what he's doing. There's matter-of-fact violence in Dance with Snakes; violence and mayhem and snake sex. The ladies are distinct characters, whom Eduardo feels a greater affinity for than any human in his life. The security guards weren't so composed once they saw that Beti had got out and was slithering towards them, hissing, her flat head raised, her eyes deadlier than ever. Terrified, they took off like a shot. But Carmela had a different nature; she was barely out of the car when she threw herself in the air and wrapped her body around one of [the:] guards' neck. He couldn't even defend himself. The impact and the pressure on his windpipe killed him instantly. (p.27) All Eduardo was doing was going to a shopping centre to get some water, and a bloodbath ensues. Actually, not really a "bloodbath", since the snakes' victims become swollen, bloated corpses almost instantly. I don't have a snake phobia; I wouldn't like to cross paths with a snake, but only because I have a healthy respect for them and the danger they represent. But they don't freak me out. Reading these descriptions, perhaps because the snakes have been anthropomorphised and are not an unknown, wild Other, you actually feel a kind of sympathy for them, rather than fear of them. Eduardo, who narrates the first and fourth sections, literally becomes Don Jacinto, but a different version of the same man. He's living in a kind of fantasy land, and may even be insane. Section two covers the police investigation, and is told in third person; while section three is told from Rita the journalist's perspective in present tense, before the story switches back to Eduardo for the climax. And the ending was great - surreal but great. The blurb presents an interesting perspective: "The non-stop action raises provocative questions about social exclusion and the role of the media, but this novel ... also evokes the tenderness of relations among those on society's margins." I think that's pretty insightful, and accurate. The novel does indeed have something to say, or offer, towards these points, but not in an obvious way. There's no character that has a line of dialogue that pinpoints this or gets across a philosophy about it. It's more the story itself that plays out a bizarre scenario that works like a kind of - not metaphor, but allegory almost. Yes I think that's the word I'm after. Roger is [Rita's:] partner, a Frenchman in love with the tropics, with whom she's lived for six months. A leftist who can cook and fuck wonderfully, but who's stubborn and domineering, qualities he showed again last night when he went to bed angry that she refused to believe that there could be political motives behind the snake attacks. "A destabilizing factor," he called it. Even that's possible now. (p.101) To some extent it reminded me of the mistaken identity scenario in Richard Flanagan's The Unknown Terrorist , the whole wrong-person-at-the-wrong-time thing, but not quite. Eduardo absorbs Bustillo's character, to a degree, and then adds to it. It only takes two days for him to turn into a slovenly bum who stinks of rum and sweat, with a beard and a hoarse voice. There's a comedy element to the story too, not a laugh-out-loud funniness but a dark comedy, an ironic undertone: the events become farcical in their magnitude, and in the theories the police and reporters come up with. There's also funny, subtle little bits of humour slid in, that keep it light. It's not by any means a bleak or oppressive story. It's humorous, and bizarre, but never sobering or morbid or depressing. This is a book I felt like re-reading as soon as I'd finished; one that I can see myself reading again and delighting in each time. Maybe it seems like a strange book - a book about poisonous snakes attacking people and a madman wrecking havoc, a book that seems to make light of tragedy, death and violence (and yet doesn't) - but all I can say is, it's a marvellous book, a book has to be appreciated for itself and not in comparison to anything else, that's brilliantly written and executed but never feels stiff or too polished for it. Have I raved enough yet?(less) | Notes are private!
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| Jul 11, 2010
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Apr 22, 2010
| Paperback
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| 1416580956
| 9781416580959
| 4.40
| 15,464
| Feb 16, 2010
| Feb 16, 2010
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When it comes to Kresley Cole, there's no such thing as "too much of a good thing". In fact, it only gets better and better. I love Cole, I love this...more
When it comes to Kresley Cole, there's no such thing as "too much of a good thing". In fact, it only gets better and better. I love Cole, I love this world she's created, I love her characters, she always cheers me up and makes me laugh, makes me feel, and has me on the edge of my seat. Pleasure of a Dark Prince begins at about the same time as the first (full-length) book does, A Hunger Like No Other. It's been a few years since I read that one but Cole artfully slips in enough details of that parallel story that you don't feel lost and confused. Nicely done. While Emma and Lachlain run around Europe together in that book, Lachlain's younger brother Garreth MacRieve, the "Dark Prince" (he's a bit of a lad - no, that's not a euphemism for "gay"), has had to take up leadership of the Lykae - a responsibility he doesn't really want. Besides, he misses his brother, whom he hasn't seen in a century. Living next door to the Valkyries, when he first sees Lucia the Archer he knows instantly that she is his mate. But, knowing that she might run, he pretends otherwise. Lucia was gifted with her ability to shoot true by a goddess, and if she misses she experiences agonising pain. She will also lose her ability if she has sex, and she needs it more than ever during the Accession, when the god Cruach rises: it's Lucia's job to shoot him and stop him from meddling with the mortal world. This time around, she and her sister Regin the Radiant are determined to kill the god for good - only they need a dieumort, a god-killer. Nix sends Lucia to the Amazon with the one thing she'll really need: Garreth. For Lucia must find a temple that no one has ever returned from - except Garreth. Determined to win Lucia over and protect her at the same time, Garreth makes a deal with her. As the time for Cruach to rise grows closer, their perilous trip through the Amazon becomes ever more fraught with dangers - one of them being the danger Garreth poses to Lucia's celibacy, and, consequently, her one chance to be rid of Cruach for good. As "plot-devices designed to keep lovers apart" goes, this one isn't as corny as you'd think. It was actually quite perfect, and really added to that conflicting feeling you get, where you want a happy ending but you don't see how. Cole does this to me every time: creates an inescapable situation, lets her characters really suffer until it seems like there will be no happy ending at all, and then comes up with a very neat solution in the nick of time. Nice. The further along you get in this series, the more intertwined the stories become, the more detailed the world, the better the adventures. Because the stakes are so high - life or death high, often with chained-to-an-evil-god-for-nefarious-purposes thrown in just to make me bite my nails - I find the suspense especially thrilling, and the sexual tension thrums. Then something'll happen, someone will say something, and I'll just start laughing. (Am I repeating myself? Tough titties.) If I had to give a definition of FUN, I'd say "Immortals After Dark". The over-arching plot-line (you really do need to read these in order, the full-length novels anyway) gets a new layer here and you can really feel the build-up as Something Big brews. I can't wait for more. These are real comfort reads for me, books where any flaws simply don't bother me, where I'm happy just reading. Offer me a choice between this series and a year's supply of chocolate and I'd pick the books. Hands down. Who needs chocolate when you've got these steamy sex-on-legs men and kick-arse women? Mmmm chocolate.... It goes well with sex-on-legs and strong women doesn't it?(less) | Notes are private!
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| Mar 21, 2010
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Mar 13, 2010
| Mass Market Paperback
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| 1416552723
| 9781416552727
| 3.59
| 851
| May 06, 2008
| Jun 16, 2009
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I read
The Society of S
, the first book in this series of "ethical vampire novels", last year and it instantly became one of my favourite reads all y...more
I read
The Society of S
, the first book in this series of "ethical vampire novels", last year and it instantly became one of my favourite reads all year. I especially recommend it for people who aren't keen on romantic vampire tales, or horror ones either - though fans of paranormal romance and horror are just as likely to enjoy this. Hubbard has taken a slightly different path from all the other vampire writers I've read to date, and has created one of my favourite fictional worlds. There's always the problem, when reviewing the next book in a series, of how to talk about it without completely spoiling the first/previous books. Especially with this one, which picks up where the last one ended. But I will do my best to avoid spoilers. Ari is a half-breed in a world where vampires live alongside humans, secretly and discreetly. Most survive on a tonic so that they don't need to feed off people; in fact, the entire vampire society is very modern and scientific. Ari, who narrates, is only fourteen - both her parents, Sara and Raphael, are vampires, but her mother was mortal when she had Ari - and Ari was home schooled by her scholarly, old-fashioned father; as a result, Ari's education is more classical than her peers, and also more advanced, though she's never heard of Elvis and doesn't know a lot of things about modern society. Now living with her mother and her mother's friend Dashay in Florida, Ari is just as lonely as before but quietly interested in making friends. She awkwardly befriends two rather stupid girls in the town of Saratoga Springs, Autumn and Mysty and, rather reluctantly, Autumn's brother Jesse, but when Mysty goes missing Ari finds herself to be just as much a suspect as Jesse. Yet Mysty isn't the first person to disappear - as well as other people, bees and birds have also been disappearing. It is the year of disappearances, and Ari is considered a suspect by some and a target by others. Because Ari is only fourteen - though she often seems much older - many people consider this series to be Young Adult. It's not. In fact, it annoys me that any novel with a teen-aged protagonist is automatically assumed to be YA. You will not find Hubbard's book in the YA section. Not Fantasy either. It's fiction, like Christopher Moore is fiction. By all means, teens can read these books, but they're not the target audience. It's also worthwhile to point out that this isn't a genre novel, and doesn't come with the tropes familiar to genre novels, especially vampire ones. It's refreshing, in that respect, though I enjoy the others too. What you get is a carefully and realistically created world in which vampires exist, vampires who can go out in the sun (but with lots of sunscreen because they burn easily), eat normal food and can have families - they just choose not to, for ethical reasons. Many also choose not to drink from humans, again for ethical reasons. In fact, they are greatly concerned with living ethically. This theme is what makes Ari, as the protagonist, a clever construct: she's still growing, still feeling her way through the vampire-human world, still discovering her ability to hypnotise people, read their thoughts etc as well as the reasons why she shouldn't. There are other groups of vampires in this world, who look down on humans, but Ari is not part of that group. The novels also weave in degradation of the planet, deforestation and other environmental concerns - in fact, it's intrinsic to the plot. While it doesn't have the clean, focused plot of the first book, I found that the deceptively scattered-looking plot of The Year of Disappearances, woven in amongst Ari's continuing coming-of-age and maturation, was gripping. Hubbard writes with a very steady, evenly-paced momentum, like a gently flowing river that has few rapids or sharp corners but offers plenty to do and see while moving inexorably onwards. I love the way Hubbard writes. It's simple and straightforward, but not simplistic or boring. Ari is a mixture of childlike naiveté and mature wisdom - she doesn't think like a "typical" teenager and she doesn't talk like one either, but she feels just right to me. I find her refreshing, familiar and understandable. It's true of most books, I think, that if you don't bond in some way with the characters then the book itself tends to fall flat (maybe "high brow" literature and the classics are different, but we are less forgiving of contemporary stories). If you don't connect with Ari or anyone else, you probably won't think much of the story and the way it's written, either. For me, I can sit down and read it in a day if I have one to spare, and be totally caught up in Ari's world. There's plenty here for me to chew on.(less) | Notes are private!
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| Jul 28, 2010
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Jan 21, 2010
| Paperback
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| 0590091107
| 9780590091107
| 4.06
| 648,796
| 1847
| Jan 01, 1962
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This is the first copy of Jane Eyre I had, from a school book club in grade 6. It's an awful cover but I kept it all the same!
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Jan 10, 2010
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| 0441017819
| 9780441017812
| 4.02
| 2,049
| Aug 29, 2009
| Sep 29, 2009
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With Morgut attacks on space stations and planetary settlements escalating, the ousted Farwan Corporation's supporters pirating space ships, and the S...more
With Morgut attacks on space stations and planetary settlements escalating, the ousted Farwan Corporation's supporters pirating space ships, and the Syndicate coming out in the open to offer protection from the Morgut - for the right price, the success of Sirantha Jax's mission as the Conglomerate's ambassador to Ithiss-Tor has never been more important. She needs to broker an alliance with the one species who successfully drove off the Morguta couple of centuries before, but there's a big problem: the Ithtorians hate and despise humanity, seeing them as smelly carrion-eaters with no manners. Jax arrives with new scars, both physical and psychological. Her lover and pilot, March, has become a cold killing machine who can't stand to be touched and only remembers that he loved her. She won't give up on him, but she has no idea how to fix the mind-reading Psi - Mair, a powerful Psi and Chi master, fixed his mind the first time through violent and painful means, ways Jax can't access and honestly doesn't want to. The idea of causing him more pain and nightmares on top of what he's already experiencing is anathema to her. But at least he hasn't run away to become a mercenary, at least he's here with her on Ithiss-Tor, as unstable as he is. Her best friend, the Ithtorian bounty hunter Vel, is with her to translate and guide her through the intricacies of Ithtorian etiquette, and her PA, Constance (now in her realistic human casing), is also a huge help. Jael, her Bred bodyguard; Dina and the pilot Hit; and Saul the geneticist, are with her as well, but all eyes are on Jax. No one really believes the irresponsible Grimspace Jumper who used to get drunk, dance on tabletops and display her breasts to the news cameras can actually pull this off. At worst, she'll add a new enemy to the Conglomerate's list. At best, she might escape with her life. I could gush endlessly about how much I love this series. It's superb. Each book just gets better and better, the stakes get higher, the details more complex, the relationships more complicated, the intergalactic world more vivid. Jax grows within each book, and from book to book, slowly maturing and becoming less and less selfish in the face of more and more demanding and tragic circumstances. A great deal happens in these books, but the characters never become lost amidst the plotting - if anything, they strengthen it and bind it tighter together. While Jax narrates, her growing ability to truly see people, wonder about them, try to empathise and understand them, gives us fully fleshed out supporting characters - and it's testament to Aguirre's skill that even when, in Grimspace, she was selfish and whiny and running from her own feelings and needs, you never tired of her but grew attached to her spunky ways and the characters around her, characters that we saw more clearly than she did. The plotting is tight in Doubleblind, but I'm still figuring out the connection between the story and the title. A "double blind" is a study, for example a test for a new drug, where the test groups don't know whether they have the drug or a placebo. Taken metaphorically or symbolically, it's not an obvious allusion and the best I can do at this point is take it as a reference to Jax's tenuous diplomatic mission, the inscrutable Bugs and their own scheming, and the "unexpected" traitor. I say that in air quotes only because it wasn't unexpected to me - the only thing predictable was the traitor, and who was behind them. But there was plenty else to keep me guessing. The way Aguirre handles the alien race, the "bugs" as the humans call them (because they look much like the insect aliens in the movie District 9, though more human in size), is excellent: their alien qualities come across well, and even Vel, who has spent so long amongst humans and is the only Ithtorian who likes humans, is undeniably alien. He doesn't have the same reactions and responses, his clever mind works differently, and you never forget what he is or that he is completely Other. But we do get to know him here, and he's become one of the most vivid characters in the series. I'm very fond of Vel. I absolutely love the way Aguirre handles Jax and March's relationship. At the end of Wanderlust I was left in despair and had to wait nearly an entire year to get my hands on the third book - that's a year of anxiety and heartbreak. By the end of Wanderlust Jax and March had become so much a part of me that I felt Jax's pain - and March's - like a physical ache. That tension and despair carries through here, and I loved the way she "fixes" him. Speaking of the year-long wait, if you haven't started this series yet I recommend you read the books close together. Even though Jax does some recapping, there was a lot I'd forgotten, details that are important - not to mention these books build like an ongoing climax, and even though this has one of the more complete endings, it also feels like the story has only just begun. One thing I noticed that I really have to mention, is the issue of a private company - in this case, the Syndicate - selling their services to the government - in this case, the Conglomerate - for a high price. It's a timely and subtle dig at the way the US government contracted out all its services to private corporations, especially for the Iraq war, based on the idea that they can do it better but at the cost of billions and billions of taxpayer dollars, most of which disappeared into "overheads" and resulted in half-finished, dodgy jobs. The Syndicate want the job, for a high price, of going to war against the Morgut. There would be a lot of money at stake, and it wouldn't surprise me if they were somehow egging the Morgut on to escalate things. Their use of advertising to gradually connect the idea of the Syndicate=safe and peaceful life in people's subconscious adds to this: visual commercials showing people relaxed and happy while Syndicate employees do the cleaning and cooking and war-faring in the background, seep in and become established fact. As one character puts it, "There will come a point when people just won't care about the truth, and all the exposés in the world won't matter." (234) This is one of the things I love about Fantasy and Science Fiction: their ability - or potential - to explore our own issues in a "neutral" environment. Doubleblind is a delicious, entertaining read, but it'd be a shame to miss the deeper meanings too.(less) | Notes are private!
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In a present-day America where suicide bombers blow up buses and cars and buildings, killing hundreds on an almost routine basis, twenty-something Jes...more
In a present-day America where suicide bombers blow up buses and cars and buildings, killing hundreds on an almost routine basis, twenty-something Jessica Zorich is an advertising copy writer with a slightly messy life, living in San Francisco. For a while now she's been in a kind-of relationship with her upstairs neighbour, Patrick, but now they just share coffee and toast and skirt around the possibility of being more. Spending the days after a series of five bus bombings at home, with Patrick, she goes along as she always has until she learns from a friend that there might be another woman in Patrick's life, Gretchen. On the night of Patrick's party, she meets a serious and intense artist, Josh Hadden - a lithographer. Suddenly launched into a new relationship where she willingly and lethargically follows his lead, Jess becomes his latest subject for his new exhibition, for which her entire naked body will be scanned. As the project moves closer to completion, Jess finds herself seeing Josh's behaviour in a more suspicious, intimidating light, as he dominates her world in more ways than one. Every so often, there comes along a book that seems to have been written just for you - telling a story you never realised you wanted to hear until then, in a prose style that meets every nitpicky expectation with nary a word of complaint (or typo!), about a character you feel is so familiar she could almost be you. And when you do find this book, and fall headlong into the world held tenderly on its pages, you become, ever so briefly, more vividly you - as if you weren't quite real before - and you don't want it to end, you don't want to say good bye to this character, fantasy though it all really is. Jessica Z. is such a book, a brilliant, dazzling work of art that is effortlessly written and beautifully told. My own summary does a poor job of capturing an outline of the plot - of the first half anyway - so you'll have to take me on faith that it's also an interesting story. The addition of suicide bombers to modern everyday American life is far from a clumsy gimmick or obvious plot device - it melds seamlessly into the background, and at first you're not sure exactly what's going on only that something is very wrong in our western world. Suicide bombers are always in another place, a place that's alien and unknowable to most, but here they are, practically on your doorstep (even if you're not American, the feeling's the same), a wild and dangerous Hydra in home waters. It's scary, with just the right amount of tension, never melodrama, and Jess's reactions and method of dealing are vivid and real. This is a book of subtlety, told in present tense which only helps suck you into Jess's world all the more. I recently watched a movie in 3D and I've realised, just now, that that's what reading this book was like: like it was right there, in front of you, in your face, that you were in it, a silent bystander or vocal participator in Jess' life. Rarely have I read a book where the line between reader and narrative was this transparent, and successfully so. Part of it was how familiar, knowable and understandable Jess was. There are few male writers who can write women this well, but Klomparens should get a medal for Jessica. It's not that I'm just like her, or have lived through something similar, but that she was knowable, like someone I'd like to be friends with. Her perspective, her thoughts, her fears and desires and the way she interacted with people - it all seemed like I did know her. There's a bit of me in her, perhaps, in some ways; but at the same time she was new and interesting and deeply sympathetic. If you bond with a main character, a narrator and protagonist, this well, the line between fiction and reality gets a little blurry. Then there's Josh, who's a bit of an enigma but is also completely understandable, as a character. Not always likeable, but here again Klomparens has perfectly captured the greys of human nature, how we boomerang in our impressions, perceptions and reactions to the people around us. You go from being drawn to Josh, to being repelled, to being angry with him and then crying over him. I've known so many people with bits of Josh, and the unbalanced relationship Jess has with Josh was familiar as well, that I felt everything Jess felt, and more. And yet, the realism didn't ruin the story, as it can. It comes down to Klomparens' skill as a writer - this may be his debut book, but it's imbued with the easy confidence that comes of having Margaret Atwood's long and fantastic career. There's nothing pretentious here, nothing about his prose that's trying hard to please, or to be clever, or to prove anything. I called it "effortless" and by that I mean that I didn't notice the hand of the author at all, and the words seemed to flow like this moment in Jess's life had been directed by a magician to imprint itself on the page, not consciously written there. It also has the most realistic yet completely understandable one-sided phone conversation I think I've ever read (between Josh and his sister) - much of the dialogue is also very natural, occasionally capturing those half-finished sentences and quick changes of direction we have, though it's not used often enough to become irritating. It's not a romance, but there is some sex - never gratuitous, always relevant, and very nicely written in a "less is more" style that says much without actually saying anything explicitly. It had the effect of erotically charging the relationship with Josh, that kind of unstable, slightly unhealthy relationship that reminded me slightly of Nicci French's Killing Me Softly (which I also highly recommend - just don't, ever, watch the atrocious movie!). It's not in the what or even in the how - it's in the subtle body language, the undercurrents that Jess detects, the something that is thrilling but at the same time unpredictable. There's also a political edge, lurking in the seams, timely and relevant that hints at big things but never comes out and says them. There's much that isn't directly explained but forces you to think over - the bombings and uncertainty is central to the book, while connected and unrelated issues of social justice and economics (the replacement word for "politics" since they're inseparable), play confronting but surprisingly quiet roles throughout. This is a very human story, never dull, wonderfully paced and revealing, with a powerful climax two-thirds through and a final act that nearly had me crying on the subway. My emotions went on a roller-coaster with this book; just the way I like it. Klomparens is a truly gifted writer and I can't wait for his next book.(less) | Notes are private!
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Philippa "Flip" Allison is a recently-divorced ornithologist working at the University of Pittsburgh, competing with her ex, Jed, for a fellowship at...more
Philippa "Flip" Allison is a recently-divorced ornithologist working at the University of Pittsburgh, competing with her ex, Jed, for a fellowship at Cornell which will allow her to join a team of field researchers looking for a very rare bird. After a playful lunch with her friends where they made naughty innuendoes about the characters in the book they're reading for their book club, Pride and Prejudice, Flip goes for a massage and gets more than she bargained for. The massage comes with the trip of a lifetime, the chance to "imagine yourself into your favourite book". What she really wanted was a trip to the lusty romance novel set in Venice that she's been reading, but her thoughts keep straying to Mr. Darcy. She finds herself in the Bingley home as a character who never appeared in the novel, Lady Philippa Quillan, months before Darcy meets Lizzie. Her character is well-established and comes complete with backstory, in which she and Darcy are old friends and once, nearly more. One thing leads to another and before you can say "Mr. Darcy!" she is intimately acquainted with the side of Mr. Darcy that we all like to imagine. Upon returning to the real world, Flip is horrified to discover that the rare first edition of Pride and Prejudice held in the University's library has changed, and continues to change, with the younger editions changing more slowly. During the infamous first proposal scene, Lizzie confronts Darcy about the affair and the bastard child that resulted, and Darcy never apologised - so no wedding. Not only that, but the tone and character of the novel has changed as well, taking on a more licentious tone. And it ends with Lizzie in bed with Wickham. In order to correct the problem within 24 hours, before the changes become permanent, Flip must discover everything that's changed - which involves getting her hands on that rare first edition, and then going back to Pride and Prejudice-land to ensure that Lizzie and Darcy marry at the double wedding ceremony with Jane and Bingley. In order to get at the locked-away book, though, she'll have to enlist the aid of the handsome but snobby Magnus Knightley, a visiting Austen scholar with a penchant for lime green socks - without telling him what's she done. As the two race through time, dodging Flip's egotistical ex, Jed, and his latest under-age girlfriend, the spark between them ignites. But getting Darcy into Lizzie's good graces isn't going to be easy, and they have one shot to make it work before Wickham scales the wisteria to Lizzie's balcony and ruins things forever. This book totally took me by surprise, on two counts. 1) I've only read about three P&P spin-offs before this one, and hated two of them, so I usually shy away from them (Colleen McCullough's was one I loved); and 2) I confess I don't expect all that much from romance books, contemporary or otherwise. There's just something about the prose that screams "LOW EXPECTATIONS" to me - though sometimes I need to read something light and silly, and they do fine. So, since I was already feeling leery about the P&P side of the book, my expectations weren't high elsewhere either. In fact, I almost didn't get the book, but on a sudden impulse picked it up again and thought, "Why not." And I'm so glad I did. This is one rollicking romp! But I don't want to reduce it to just "good fun", though it is that. The prose is sophisticated and almost flawless; it's by turns exciting, sexy and hilarious - sometimes all three at once; I loved the characters; I never once thought "oh, how could she do that to P&P!"; the pacing was fast, the sex tasteful yet sizzling, and my god, there was PLOT! Such wonderful, wonderful PLOT!! While the premise could have been a bit dodgy - how do you get Mr Darcy to screw a married woman in full view of a road where someone can see them, considering how stuffy he is? - but it was handled so well, the set-up so much better than I anticipated, that it all seemed perfectly plausible. Flip is great. She's smart but doesn't always handle situations well, and exacts a beautiful revenge on her ex who thinks she doesn't know he screws his girlfriends on her desk. The chemistry between Flip and Magnus was electric, and I loved them both. Don't think I'll ever think of scrabble in quite the same way again. You also get snippets of Jed and his current girlfriend, Io, that adds to the hilarity and pandemonium. With everything happening in a single afternoon and night, with the pacing so swift and assured, and the different subplots neatly connecting and supporting the main one - it grabbed me and didn't let me go. I was impressed also at her depiction of the historical period, especially the tricky part of staying true to the characters of the book while also incorporating this new lewdness that Flip accidentally introduced. It was very well done. Many times this book had me laughing out loud - Cready's clearly a fan of Blackadder (both Magnus and Flip watch it, though it's quite old now), and it's certainly infused her humour with irony and what we may as well call "British humour", which easily made a fan of me. It also had great moments of satisfaction, you know the ones, where you can't stop grinning and you want to crow. And I LOVED the scene in the incline car (chapter thirty-four, when you get to it): it was just so EEEEEEE! (Now you know what I sound like, gushing!) As fast as events moved, there's plenty of time to get to know Flip and Magnus and watch them reassess each other - Cready avoided making them live out a modern-day version of Lizzie and Darcy, which would have been just too corny for words. But there is a parallel, in their temperaments. Jed could be dismissed as merely a caricature, but he was a damn funny one and his scenes often made me laugh at him, vain idiot that he was. On a side note, this is sort of part of a series, but not one the author's named. Her first book, Tumbling Through Time, is about a woman being summoned back in time by her fictional romance hero character that she's been writing, so I guess there are similarities. The third book is Flirting with Forever (due out in 2010), and the title hints at a continuing theme, but I think they're all unrelated standalone novels. (less) | Notes are private!
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Jul 14, 2009
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There is a kind of history that gets overlooked, that doesn't get taught in schools or universities aside from a fourth-year optional course that no o...more
There is a kind of history that gets overlooked, that doesn't get taught in schools or universities aside from a fourth-year optional course that no one bothers to take. It's a history that is fundamental to understanding our world, both past and present and where the hell we're going. It's a history that touches everyone, regardless of class, gender, race or age, but that slips out the back door before anyone thinks to call it to account, put it on trial and expose its heinous crimes. I'm talking about economic history, the history of economics, and the power economics plays in everything that happens in the world. One of my biggest problems with the current trend in economic theory - what is called neo-liberal or neo-conservative economics, Chicago School economics, Reaganonomics, free-trade economics; whatever you want to call it - is that it's missing something pretty damn big: the human element. They talk about this economic theory not only as if it were the only way to do things, or the best way, but as if it is autonomous of people - governments, business people, workers, farmers, the homeless. That because of this absence of a human element, it is Good, and Right, and acts in Our Best Interests. Nothing could be further from the truth. It would be impossible for economics to behave independent of any human interference, or action, governmental or otherwise. Impossible, and undesirable. Those that benefit most are the same old villains: the greedy top 2% of the population, that holds more than 50% of "global household wealth". Trickle-down economics is complete bullshit, and always was. What the real result is, though, is an economic theory that is wholly unaccountable for what it reaps. There are many things I love about this book. Klein puts the human element back into Chicago School economics, detailing with exhaustive research the impact of the policies of this economic theory on the many peoples of the world it has been forced onto (forced is the right word; more on that later). Giving the "ordinary" people of the world a voice is incredibly important, and is like shining a light on the free market's blood-stained hands. It also exposes the real motivations behind the pretty speeches, the mercenary nature of this kind of economics, and the strings attached to the hands of the men (and few women) manipulating events and making the most money from it. Yes, it always comes down to money, for these people. What a predictable cliché they are! But dangerous too. What began as a book on the invasion of Iraq and what Klein at first thought was a recent "fundamental change in the way the drive to 'liberate' markets was advancing around the world" (p.10) became, as she dug deeper, something much bigger. She realised that Chicago School economics, and its figurehead Milton Friedman, has been experimenting with many countries over the last three decades, and that the theory is even older. The theory is one of "radical free-market 'reforms'", of using natural and man-made crises - shocks - to stun a population into a stupor while a government forces these "reforms" onto the country. This is one of the ironies of Chicago School economics, which Klein highlights: Friedman touted it as going hand-in-hand with democracy and freedom, when the exact opposite is true. The kind of economic reforms he advised leaders to put in place were the kind that instantly robbed people of jobs, freedom of speech and movement, even their lives. Their early experiments in South America - Chile, under Pinochet, and also Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay, Brazil - involved by necessity a dictatorship, or corrupting or manipulating a democratically-elected, often socialist government, and using further "shocks" - torture, imprisonment, disappearances etc. - to stop the people from revolting. Meanwhile, big international corporations would sweep in and buy up all the newly privatised industries, then dismantle them, fire everyone, and run off with the profits. Opening up a country for privatisation, in these cases, never benefits the country itself. This seems so glaringly obvious it's amazing that so many dictators and other leaders bought into it. Sometimes they had no choice. Often held to ransom by the IMF and World Bank, or even by "aid" money in the aftermath of these crises, these shocks, they bowed down to pressure and did what they were told. The Shock Doctrine traces the path of the use of Shock Therapy from humans to countries and their economies, from Chile to South Africa, from Russia to Sri Lanka, from America to Iraq. The need to create "clean slates" on which to build "model countries" and "model economies" was never more determinedly tried than in Iraq. Klein successfully shows how Washington's drive to wipe the country of its history, to break it down and then slap this new economy onto it, had in turn helped create the violence, the fundamentalism that wasn't there before - or not widely supported by its population. After the invasion, when Saddam was dethroned, the Iraqi people were indeed filled with new hope. They almost immediately began putting together their own local elections, democratically - for the first time in a long time - electing their own representatives. The man in charge of the country at the time, Paul Bremer, who was hurriedly writing new laws to open the country up to private investment from America, quickly put an end to these demonstrations of people's democracy. Hypocrites all. The book does end with some hopeful signs of recovery. South America, a place that has always had a highly politicised population, has come out of its collective shock and is slowly rebuilding, putting their countries back together again, picking up what was so bloodily interrupted all those years ago but this time with shock absorbers in place so that it cannot happen again. I have always highly admired the various people of South America, who - if they had not suffered what they did - would now be one of the most prosperous places in the world. By turning their backs on globalisation and free-market ideology, on disaster capitalism and all the muck that comes with it, they are once again on the path to something quite beautiful: a more ideal third way, a more harmonious structure that is as far from totalitarian communism (think China and the USSR, North Korea and Romania) as it is from disaster capitalism. They are the ones to watch. The Shock Doctine is not an easy book to read - the prose is inherently readable and approachable, but the subject matter is intense, often depressing, incredibly sad and disheartening at times, and fills you with rage. It has answered many of the questions that have puzzled me for so long, that no one else has bothered to properly explain - like why did Israel suddenly attack Lebanon, and why are they being such bastards with the Palestinians? What the hell happened to South Africa when Apartheid was supposed to end? Why is Iraq such a mess? and many more. Because the economic theory "began" in America, and was so readily absorbed in that country, a lot of the book focuses on that country and certain people from it - but it is also a victim of its own policies, and I learnt a great deal about the hollow government Bush Jr. and Rumsfeld created, which contracted out (at the cost of billions and billions of taxpayer dollars) so much of its responsibilities that when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, it could do nothing. It had no money, no resources, no manpower, no skills. Tragic. Klein doesn't go into why America, the institution, is so ripe a place for this kind of economic theory, but I believe the book goes well with Ronald Wright's What is America? I would have liked to hear more of what impact other countries, like the UK, had in Iraq, but they got barely a mention. According to the point of the chapter, though, they weren't important. I've seen elements of this economic theory play out in my own home country, without the use of shock treatment: John Howard implemented all sorts of disastrous and unpopular policies, from cutting funding to Austudy (now Youth Allowance), universities and public schools (my old primary school couldn't even afford a librarian and had to lock up its library for most of the week); he privatised Telecom (many Australians bought shares - it's ironic, because before privatisation they already owned it) and put through a new Minimum Wage law for 15 - 18 year olds, so that MacDonalds could fire its adult workers and hire cheap teenagers for the same job; as well as a law that enabled companies to fire employees and rehire them on contracts, meaning they had no job security (no unions either), no benefits or holiday or sick pay, and were essentially paid less. So sometimes it does happen without shock therapy - and Klein points this out too, though the cases are more rare and the policies are tamed down by the people - but Howard also had a dangerous majority and happily labelled anyone who disagreed with him (including the thousands of protesters) as hooligans and "un-Australian" - his biggest insult. The Shock Doctrine is important, profound, educational and eye-opening. I would say that you might need to be in the right frame of mind for it - if you whole-heartedly disagree with the importance of government regulations and services, with nationalised education, health care and industry, if you think that free-market economics is inherently "good" for the middle class and poor people, that America is doing a "good" thing in Iraq, if Friedman is your idol and you have stocks in Halliburton or Lockheed Martin or CH2M Hill, you are not going to like this book. Regardless of where you stand, it is confronting. But if you've ever felt the slightest unease over certain reforms and policies, if the word "progress" and "growth" don't necessarily equate "good" and "inherently right" in your gut, and if you care about the people no matter their country or skin colour, who have slipped further and further into poverty - this is the book for you. You might never look at the world the same way again, and that's a good thing. You might never blindly believe what you hear, and that too is a great thing. You might pause a moment to think "what's really going on here that CNN is smugly glossing over?" and that is a fantastic thing. (less) | Notes are private!
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| Sep 25, 2009
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Jul 02, 2009
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| 0425227707
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| 4.11
| 6,984
| Jun 02, 2009
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Serena James runs her own successful business, making people's fantasies come true. Whether they dream of being a head chef at a fancy restaurant, or...more
Serena James runs her own successful business, making people's fantasies come true. Whether they dream of being a head chef at a fancy restaurant, or a princess on a cruise ship, Serena's job is to make it happen. The one person whose fantasy she hasn't worked on is her own. Deciding to take the plunge, she approaches her friend Faith and asks her if she knows of anyone who fulfils sexual fantasies. Shocked as she is by Serena's fantasy to be a man's sex slave, Faith puts her in touch with her friend Damon Roche, who runs The House, a private club outside the city for people to indulge in all manner of eroticism. Damon is as attracted to Serena upon meeting her as she is with him, and when he hears what she wants he's determined to be the man to fulfil her fantasy. For Damon, though, it's no fantasy, and as the two explore the kind of relationship he wants more than anything, Serena has to face her own fears and decide which is the real her: the woman she is under Damon's expert care, or the woman who's resistant to the idea of doing it "for real". This is an extremely intense and erotic novel, and quite different from the other two Banks novels I've read, especially the first book in this series, Sweet Surrender, in which nothing really happened until the very end. Banks creates a very real, very sensual and incredibly erotic situation here and doesn't hold back. At the same time, it's a romance, and leaves you all warm and fuzzy. That's the big difference between straight erotica and romantic erotica - there can still be a bit of angst and soul-searching, but there's also a lot of love and a lovely happy ending. While it's not something I'd ever want in real life (I don't even see how it could be practical), it's a lot of fun to read someone else's experience - especially with Damon being as sexy as he is. Serena is a wonderful heroine, strong-willed and strong and secure enough not to agonise over what she's doing and what she wants - at least, not until she has to decide whether it really is just a fantasy or not, and even then her indecision isn't depressing or dark as it can be in erotica. In both this and the previous book in the Sweet series, Banks targets a modern conundrum, that of the independent woman battling her own needs and feeling ashamed of them. The thing that I enjoy about this is the emphasis on being strong in order to give of yourself. In today's world, women too often feel that self-assertiveness must of necessity equate holding yourself back, being dominant, maintaining control etc. The women here set themselves free by embracing what they desire and trusting the men they give themselves too - naturally, it wouldn't work with just any man. This is a sweet and loving story, but it's wilder than Banks' other books, very erotically charged, so it won't be for everyone who enjoys erotic romance. It has some scenes that are quite powerful but the emotional connection between the main characters, and the extent to which I empathised with them, made them all the more powerful and not in the least tacky. In fact, I delight in Banks' prose here, the simple but beautiful scenes she creates through her words. I didn't care greatly for the other two books of hers I've read, but this one touched me and I even cried a bit at the end. Highly addictive.(less) | Notes are private!
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| Jun 13, 2009
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Jun 08, 2009
| Trade Paperback
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