C.A. Gray's Blog, page 16
June 9, 2023
A Girl Called Samson, Amy Harmon
Today’s podcast comes from this blog review of A Girl Called Samson.
The post A Girl Called Samson, Amy Harmon appeared first on C.A. Gray.
June 6, 2023
A Girl Called Samson
A fantastic, engaging read! I’d probably give it closer to 4.5 stars, though, for reasons I will mention… but I loved it even more when I got to the afterword and found that it was based on a true story.
The story follows Deborah Samson (two names from Old Testament judges, which was never mentioned explicitly, though it was alluded to with her surname), who lived at the time of the Revolutionary War. Her selfish, terribly handsome father leaves her family when she is a child, and her mother can’t support her children alone, so she indentures them out as servants. Deborah goes to a family of all boys, where she helps out around the house, but really grows up essentially as one of the sisters, since she’s in the middle of the boys’ ages. As she grows, the eldest proposes to her before he goes off to join the army when war is declared, and he tells her that all the brothers are somewhat in love with her too, which is news to her: she’s a complete tomboy if ever there was one. She doesn’t answer him… and hears later that he is killed in the war. All of the brothers eventually enlist, though she especially bonds with two of the younger ones, Jerry and Phineas.
Meanwhile, Deborah (whom the brothers call “Rob,” though how they get that from Deborah I’m not sure), knows how to read and write but desires someone to practice with. The local pastor connects her with Elizabeth, a woman married to an officer in the army with three daughters. Deborah comes to regard Elizabeth as her best friend, though they’ve never met. Deborah becomes so interested in politics that eventually Elizabeth has to have her husband John answer her questions, which he does on several occasions. John, she learns, is promoted to General – and he writes to her as if she’s not “just” a girl. Deborah memorizes some of his letters.
Then one day John writes and tells her Elizabeth has died. This comes shortly after all of the brothers have enlisted and left. Deborah decides that since she can best the boys in most physical contests, and she doesn’t feel she has anything else to live for, but she’s very passionate about the cause, that she should disguise herself as a boy and enlist herself. Her first attempt at this is a dreadful failure – she’s exposed and shamed. But later she realizes what she did wrong the first time, and does a much better and more thorough job of it.
The bulk of the story from there has to do with her learning to get along with her regiment, while escaping all scrutiny, trying to pass herself off as a 16-year old boy whom puberty hasn’t yet caught up with, rather than a 20-something girl. Then one day she comes across Elizabeth’s John, and is struck by how handsome he is, which was my first clue where this was going (I’d thought she’d end up with one of the brothers). John is still grieving, and Deborah, as “Rob” the soldier, is able to encourage him. Eventually she becomes his aide-de-camp, even though she is not an officer. She falls in love with him, but of course it’s one-sided until he learns her secret.
The love story from there is a slow burn, but extremely well done–my only complaint was some of the explicit sexual references that come very late in the story. There is no actual sex before marriage though (that would not have been at all believable for the time, at any rate). She does encounter Phineas twice more as well, and it wasn’t at all what I’d predicted, but very well done too.
Apparently in real life, the romance never happened, though Harmon thought there were hints in letters that there could have been something between them. Still, enough of the story was true that it made the story all the better. I’ll be picking up more of Amy Harmon’s books.
My rating: ****1/2
Language: none
Sexual content: it’s a bit much but not until the end, and it’s over fast.
Violence: it’s war, but nothing gratuitous
Political content: historical only
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June 2, 2023
Stars and Smoke, Marie Lu
Today’s podcast review comes from this blog review of Stars and Smoke.
The post Stars and Smoke, Marie Lu appeared first on C.A. Gray.
May 31, 2023
Review of Stars and Smoke
Marie Lu’s books are always action-packed page turners, and this was no exception. I loved the concept: a 19 year old male superstar and a female spy team up to bring down a crime lord via his one weakness: his daughter, who is a huge fan of said superstar. Sydney (the spy) and Winter (the star) initially dislike each other, but at least on Winter’s side, that doesn’t last very long. Sydney takes longer to open up, due to trust issues, but she comes around eventually, and when she does, the sparks definitely fly. It was a bit unbelievable that a 19 year old girl would be such an awesome bodyguard/fighting machine/superspy, but I can suspend my disbelief on that, since female powerhouse fighters is such a common trope these days.
My major complaint on this book is really the same that I have with most Marie Lu books – she’s a great author, but either she or her publisher is VERY woke – she/they can’t seem to help themselves in throwing all that stuff in, even when it doesn’t serve the story in any way. Almost half the characters have to check one of the diversity boxes, which I could mostly overlook since it doesn’t usually interfere with the story much. The part that really got to me this time was that Winter (oh yeah) happened to have this little bisexual interlude where he hooked up with his male backup dancer. If you want to make the main character gay, go for it – and it can be marketed to those who want those books. If it’s a straight romance, it should be a straight romance. But it was very jarring and took me out of the story for a clearly heterosexual male to have had that episode in his life… like it was only there to check the box.
My rating: ****
Sexual content: none (though alluded to and it’s almost there)
Violence: there but not gratuitous
Language: there but not major
Political content: annoyingly heavy
The post Review of Stars and Smoke appeared first on C.A. Gray.
May 26, 2023
Many Waters, by Madeleine L’Engle
Today’s blog post comes from this blog review of Many Waters.
The post Many Waters, by Madeleine L’Engle appeared first on C.A. Gray.
May 25, 2023
Review of Many Waters
I had been dabbling with the idea of including the concept of the Nephilim (half human, half demons, as mentioned in Genesis 6 and also in Numbers) in my next book, so a friend recommended I check this book out. Since I love the concepts of quantum physics, I’d tried to listen to “A Wrinkle in Time” several times, but I couldn’t get through it, mostly because it was read by the author, and something about her voice just grates on my nerves. But this one had a different narrator, and the sample led me to believe that it could be read as a stand-alone anyway, which turned out to be true.
The story follows teenage twins Sandy (short for Alexander, which is a strange nickname for that) and Dennis, who stumble into one of their physicist parents’ experiments-in-progress. It transports them back in time to the Days of Noah, just before the flood. The world at first seems unrecognizable–L’Engle’s assumption is that pre-flood, everyone was much shorter and smaller than they are today, which is the opposite of the speculation I’ve always heard (if there was a canopy over the earth, the thought was that the extra protection from UV light would have allowed everything to both grow bigger and live longer.) In her version, people are mostly 4 feet tall, and woolly mammoths are also like tiny shetland ponies (no idea where the big bones of the skeletons came from then). I’m assuming the reason she made this choice is so that Sandy and Dennis could stand out as “giants,” which are similar in size to the Nephilim, whom they consider to be giants. The Nephilim are also very much the way that Stephanie Meyer described vampires: beguiling, beautiful, and deadly. For some reason the fact that Sandy and Dennis are identical twins baffles everyone, and it comes up over and over again that nobody can believe they’re not the same person, which seems odd. Not sure why there would never have been such a thing as identical twins back then. Also, there are a few strange fantasy creatures–one is critical to the story (unicorns, who only materialize when a believing virgin calls for them, and then vanish again once they’ve fulfilled their purpose), and others that seemed completely random.
The retelling of the days before the flood is mostly interesting, and particularly the dynamic between the Nephilim and the women they seduced. There’s a lot of seemingly unnecessary filler too, though–Noah and his father were having a spat over the best tents and vineyards, and Sandy and Dennis helped to heal the rift before his father dies. The Nephilim seem to feel threatened by the twins, and send a human woman to try to seduce them to get information about where they’re from and what is coming in the future. They both fall in love with a girl whom they know isn’t part of the biblical flood story (once they realize that’s what they’re in) so they’re afraid she’ll drown… but then it turns out God saves her by translating her directly to heaven like Enoch (why? No one knows.) Really it was an interesting time travel concept, but once the boys get there, then what? And the rest of the story is part of the “then what,” just to pad it out until the deux ex machina moment at the end (in the form of the unicorn who obeys the Uncertainty Principle) arrives to whisk the boys back to their own time before the flood waters begin to fall.
Very creative, in short, but only mildly entertaining.
My rating: ***
Language: none
Sexual content: none (though there’s a lot of attempted seduction going on)
Violence: none
Political content: none
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May 19, 2023
Review of Morgan Is My Name
When I was writing my first trilogy, I read all kinds of Arthurian legend original sources and retellings, but I’ve never yet come across a backstory for Morgan. So points for uniqueness! The story was very well written and engaging, as well.
It did follow the popular trope lately of rendering a villain sympathetic, though. From a philosophical standpoint I don’t always love that concept–there’s an argument to be made that there is some good and bad in everyone, surely, and a complex villain is far more interesting than one who is merely one-dimensional. You also can’t have a cardboard main character, or you have an uninteresting story. At the same time, I think the concern is that rendering villains sympathetic tends to further blur the lines between right and wrong, in a society that already sees these concepts as murky at best, and nonexistent at worst. (Take that to an extreme, and you’ve got an existential crisis waiting to happen.) There’s something refreshing and innocent about the old timey movies and stories where the good guys were true heroes, the bad guys were caricatures, and you knew exactly who and what to root for.
But I digress… Keetch did do a great job in rendering Morgan as a very sympathetic character. You utterly hated Uther Pendragon. You also hated Merlin, and later you came to despise Morgan’s husband. In fact, you hated most of the men in the story, come to think of it, which makes me think there might have been a slight toxic masculinity theme going on here too. Morgan fell in love with a squire who became a knight later, and while he wasn’t a jerk, he was portrayed as a coward ultimately. (Arthur came into the story very late, and he was all right, so that was something. He wasn’t a hero, but I can’t recall anything specifically negative about him.)
Another strong theme of the story, come to think of it, was kind of anti-religion. I didn’t notice it too much at the time, but Morgan is sent to a convent where she begins to learn “accepted” healing methods. She finds she has a supernatural gift of healing, which is considered “of the devil.” Nearly everyone except her closest friends (who happen to check some woke boxes themselves) thinks the same, so she has to hide her powers from everyone… until the very end, when she finally is ready to throw off the patriarchy and come into her own.
I enjoyed the story, but now that I stop to reflect upon it I can certainly see why it was written now.
My rating: ****
Language: I think there was some but it wasn’t overwhelming
Sexual content: it’s there, but it’s not gratuitous. The story does rail against conventions of sexual morality connected with it, though.
Violence: present but not gratuitous that I recall
Political content: pretty heavy
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May 12, 2023
The Bridge Kingdom, Danielle Jensen
This podcast comes from this blog review of The Bridge Kingdom.
The post The Bridge Kingdom, Danielle Jensen appeared first on C.A. Gray.
May 10, 2023
The Bridge Kingdom
I listened to this book almost in a single day — not necessarily because it was that amazing, though it was good. I just happened to have a lot of time to do busywork that day. I wouldn’t have downloaded it except that I was out of audible credits and it was free, and the cartoonish cover led me to believe I wouldn’t be listening for very long… I was pleasantly surprised at how good the writing was, how believable the characters, and how intricate the politics of this high fantasy world.
The story follows Lara, one of twenty daughters of a king of one nation (I forget what it’s called). Her father raised she and her half sisters in secret, though I never quite followed all the logic that she believed about why this was the case. They were trained to be warriors and assassins, and were kind of competing with one another in a “Bachelor” type of scenario for the best sister to be sent as wife to the king of an enemy nation, in fulfillment of a so-called peace treaty. The sisters were told that their prospective king-husband, Aren, was evil, as was his nation, oppressing their own people–and their job was to kill him.
What I didn’t quite follow was why Lara ever truly believed anything her father said. He clearly never loved any of the girls, and when the selection was made for her sister Marilynn, Lara overheard that he intended to murder her and all her sisters, leaving only Marilynn alive. Lara instead faked her sisters’ deaths, for their own good, so that her father would never seek them out again. She allowed herself to go as the prospective queen instead.
For some reason she continued to believe, despite this, that Aren’s people oppressed her own, and that her job was to kill him… but little by little she learns that he’s a good man, and that the political situation was a lot more complicated than that. She begins to fall in love with him and vice versa, even though she pretends to be a wilting violet and hides essentially everything about her history from her new husband. This of course sets up some massive, predictable misunderstandings and betrayals.
All of this was very well done, aside from the suspension of disbelief on why Lara remained duped for as long as she did. There are two main reasons why I don’t intend to read on in this series… the first is that, while I could overlook some sexual content (they are technically married from the moment Lara and Aren meet, after all), when they finally do consummate the marriage, the chapter is incredibly gratuitous–it probably would qualify as pornographic. It went ON and ON until I finally just skipped the rest of the chapter. Second, there’s a particular kind of narrative tension I absolutely *hate,* and it’s misunderstandings, where one character believes that another has betrayed him. The story ends with this, and it’s a long series, so I don’t know how long I’d have to endure the ongoing tension until it resolves, but I’m guessing quite awhile.
My rating: ***1/2
Language: there is some periodically… not over-the-top, but every word you can think of is there more than once
Violence: there but not gratuitous
Sexual content: waaaaay over the top, but at least most of it is only in one chapter. There’s some heavy innuendo throughout that I could have done without though.
Political content: fantasy only
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