false 10 132 118 true 5651698 read 0 true 2906272 currently-reading 14 true 2906271 to-read 29 false 2931898 ya-books 24 false 2931901 historical-books 13 false 2931908 rachel-s-absolute-favorite-books 0 false 2969868 craft-business-of-writing http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/78530324 Lighting Their Fires: Raising Extraordinary Children in a Mixed-up, Muddled-up, Shook-up World (Hardcover) by Rafe Esquith
bookshelves: to-read
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/76274203 to: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (The BuckShaw Chronicles, #1) by Alan Bradley
Murder mystery set in 1950’s English countryside and focused on stamp collecting. The protag is an 11 year old girl genius who is an expert in chemistry and especially poisons. The whole story has an old-fashionedness that I really enjoyed. Flavia is a wonderful character and I look forward to more books about her.

I only have two complaints. First, at times the clues to the mystery felt a bit contrived. The deceased name (in connection to the stamp on the dead bird’s beak) felt too convenient. Same with some of the drops of information, etc.

Second, although Flavia worked as a character, there were times her voice (written in 1st person) was 40-year-old-man & not 11-year-old-girl. For example (from page 147), she thought the following about a washstand leg: “as if some sour old chamberlain were looking on dyspeptically as his mistress unfurled silk stockings over her long, youthful legs.” An 11 year old cares about old men’s mistresses? Uh, Yeah.

Still, I thoroughly enjoyed Flavia's wit and intelligence and childishness. Her relationships with her sisters (I was dying to know the outcome of the poisoned lipstick), the inspectors, and Dogger(especially) really made this book work.
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/75404132 to: Sea Change (Hardcover) by Aimee Friedman
Ordinary teenage girl (who is really stunningly beautiful, but doesn’t realize it) becomes the object of obsession of paranormal boy and chaos ensues. This time it is mermen off the East Coast.

This book would have been written in a style too young for me if it weren’t for the under-age drinking & sexual references. I would not recommend this for younger girls. I found the message that true love is determined by sexual desire incredibly offensive.

Occasionally I also wanted to whack the heroine upside the head for not getting clues that were glaringly obvious. And the majority of the characters were rather cardboard.

On the other hand, the paranormal aspect was well done. Mer-people as characters can be a bit cheesy, but the author handled them well by using hints and suggestions rather than beating us over the head with sea lore. I felt like the way the story unfolded worked quite well, as this is clearly a set-up for a series.
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/74422497 to: Graceling (Hardcover) by Kristin Cashore
YA Fantasy about a really unusual female lead. At 8 years of age, Katsa was 'graced' with the ability to kill. She became her royal uncle's 'hired thug' and grew up doing the dirty work in his kingdom.

The story if of her learning to free herself from his control and then taking on an greater/eviler ruler who also wants Katsa under his thumb.

Everything about this story worked, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. However, the theme is that marriage makes a woman lose her self identity and become something of her husband. The ideal, according to the story, is to have romantic, emotional, sexual ties to a man, but not make those ties permanent. I feel like what Katsa really needed to learn (and didn't)was that the ideal is two people creating a bond, giving of themselves, and sacrificing self, in order to create something strong, better, larger than either one of them could be alone. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/64075144 to: An Echo in the Bone (Outlander, #7) by Diana Gabaldon
bookshelves: historical-books
I never in a million years thought I’d give DG less than five stars. She’s one of three authors on my release-date auto-buy, and I’ve been eagerly awaiting this book for years. But having spent the last couple of weeks reading it, I really don’t even know what to say (I know I should take that back – I ALWAYS have something to say and I’m about to say it).

Problem one: It took me several weeks to read. I’m a compulsive reader. I can’t sleep with a story unfinished, and yet Echo never grabbed me. I went several days without evening picking it up because I didn’t feel like it. I never felt emotionally engaged. A good lot of the time, I just didn’t care what was happening. And even worse, I felt bored by the story.

Problem two: The book is so physically big that it hurt to read. And I mean that literally. I had shoulder and elbow pain from holding it up. It really, really needed to be cut. There was a point where I wished DG had cut out the last 150 pages and replaced them with “Six months later.” There was just too much of mundane life and while beautifully written, it had no presence, no force, no suspense. The book overall needed more focus on story and less on how to fix a collapsed lung using nothing but tar and a bird feather. Many of the elements got lots of story didn’t end up leading anywhere (such as Ian & the two orphan girls. I expected them to show up again.)

Problem three: Timing. The book is really three different stories. Jamie & Claire in 1777 America (mostly), William (Wee Willie) Ramsome in about the same time period, and Bree & Roger in 1980’s Scotland. But the timelines didn’t happen evenly and so I was often rather confused. For example: William is leaving to go find Dr. Hunter in the rebel camp. Then we switch to Jamie/Claire and cover 7-8-9 months time in a hundred or more pages. Then we go back to William who has found the doctor a day or so later. This went on throughout the book, and made me crazy. Since one of the main foreshadows of the book is that Jamie & William would meet again, I could never tell if they were even in the same time / same place.

Problem four: Pacing. The book has more of an episodic plot rather than linear. It unfolds around smaller incidents that contribute to a greater whole. Many of the smaller incidents involve the William, Lord Grey, and the battles of the American Revolution, Jamie & Claire trying to make it to Scotland, Roger and Bree making a life in more modern Lallybroch. Things move slowly, but beautifully. I have learned to expect that from DG, and she is so good at it that I enjoy the details and the history and the true-to-life characters (knowing that she is as historically accurate as possible). But in this book it was way TOO slow.

And the last couple hundred pages (the ending?) were just strange. First things slow down so much that pages and pages are devoted to reminiscing and revisiting the past and death and… (well I can’t tell you everything!) Then it switches so that the story & people move so fast I can’t keep up. And the turn-about surprises are SO surprising that I have a hard time believing them. I’m left with a feeling of ‘where did that come from?’ and ‘why did that happen?’ and ‘you’ve got to be kidding me!’ The end was hugely dissatisfying, and yet that was (to me) where the real story was. The good stuff was glossed over.

So while DG is still one of the masters of the written word and I will probably fork out another $30 for her next book, I overall am rather disappointed. I feel like she is more interested in showing all the neat historical details she has learned than in telling a story. She has lost the story. And that makes me so sad because I have spent something like 16 or 17 years following these characters and being invested in their final outcome (we all know it comes back to that ghost watching Claire brush her hair). Please DG, go back to telling us their story rather than showing us what it was like to live in the eighteenth century.
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/71840483 to: Heartsinger (Hardcover) by Karlijn Stoffels
bookshelves: ya-books
Five stars for writing craft, word-smithing, and story telling. This is a beautifully done book. The use of repetition was extremely well handled and the story came together perfectly. (and the English is a translation – so hats off to the translator as well.) It is written as an old fashioned fairy tale, which really worked.

One star for my reaction after finishing. I sat there, staring at the cover, and felt mildly depressed. That is not why I read books.

It is the story of Mee (the name isn’t accidental) – the singer of sorrows. He travels the land attending catastrophe and funerals to sing the truth of individual’s lives and thereby give comfort. As he sings, we learn different stories of different people, including a princess named Esperanza on a far off island that spends her entire life staring at herself in mirrors. Her people want Mee to save her from her mirrors along with the help of Mitou (say that aloud), a girl known as the merrymaker.

This is a book of messages. Each person Mee meets had a story message, the book overall had a message. The problem is that these messages were all so sad. They were about human relationships: parent-child, husband-wife, hero-followers, sex (although not overtly – the sexual story was handled via metaphor). Each one showcased the negative – abuse, abandonment, loneliness, craving, infidelity.

I think the overall message was of chasing hope (Esperanza) and finding self, but it didn’t come off nearly as strongly as the negative. I have a hard time seeing teens enjoying this. It is more the type of book to read because you want to dissect it and figure out what is beneath the surface.

Great cover - but misleading on what is on the pages.
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/70873302 The Help (Hardcover) by Kathryn Stockett
bookshelves: to-read
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/70681044 to: Writing for Emotional Impact (Paperback) by Karl Iglesias
Fascinating book about writing. It’s not for the easily intimidated though. This book assumes a working knowledge of ARCs, Three-Act-Play, Character Development, Etc. It is written for screenwriters, although 99% of the content applies to novelists as well.

It teaches something very specific – How to connect the two primary emotional ARCs of a story. The emotions of the character on the page. The emotions of the audience beyond the page. Fascinating stuff and he teaches it in a very applicable format.

This earns a place on my very small keeper shelf for writing craft (right next to Swain).
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/70679107 Art Of Dramatic Writing: Its Basis in the Creative Interpretation of Human Motives (Paperback) by Lajos Egri
bookshelves: to-read
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/69402556 to: Shiver (The Wolves of Mercy Falls, #1) by Maggie Stiefvater
bookshelves: ya-books
I was really excited to get my hands on this book. It’s gotten a ton of buzz, and if I’m honest I LOVE the cover. Also, the print-type for the entire book is the same navy/gray as the cover, and for some reason I found this both appropriate and athletically pleasing (It’s not hard to read either. It looks black in dim light).

I enjoyed the first twenty pages of the book. And the last twenty pages were reasonably good. However, everything in between was a total disaster. I know a ton of people loved this book, and I just can’t see what they got out of it that I didn’t.

It is very much over-written. Instead of a sunset we are given a ‘screaming red sunset.’ Instead of light coming thru a window we have ‘frigid white light’ (and those are both from the same paragraph). In trying to be poetic (a theme in the book), the author constantly lapses into purple prose. The worse being Sam (the werewolf hero) regularly spouting poetry in his thoughts in the form of song lyrics. “I was a leaking womb bulging with the promise of conscious thoughts…” So… HE was menstruation… coming to life? (That is so disgusting it makes me crack up – And I can’t seem to get it out of my head!!!). Some of the metaphors are pretty atrocious too.

The story itself is the same as Twilight. Average girl with oblivious parents becomes the object of obsession of a paranormal boy. Chaos ensues.

I was quite interested in the werewolves – their history, biomechanics (they are scientific not magical) etc. But at the end of the book I knew almost nothing about them.

And the plot has HUGE holes in it. I spent the entire reading saying, “Well why don’t they just…” The biggest example of this is the wolves themselves. If Sam doesn’t want to be a werewolf, why doesn’t he just move to Coastal California where the temperature is so moderate that the winters won’t turn him into a wolf and the summers don’t require air conditioning? Problem solved. (And yet when someone suggest to him that he look at other living options he got mad rather than consider it. This kind of stuff just drove me nuts. It makes no sense!!!)

Too many things just happened without having any significance or without being explained. Or they happened so conveniently that it felt forced. Other than the romance, the plot just kind of wandered around.

It is a miricle I finished. I put it down at least twenty times and only kept picking it up because I wanted to find out where the wolves had originally come from. (see paragraph 5 above for the answer)
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