C.A. Gray's Blog, page 53
January 10, 2020
Viva Durant and the Secret of the Silver Buttons
Today’s podcast review comes from this blog review of Viva Durant and the Secret of the Silver Buttons.
The post Viva Durant and the Secret of the Silver Buttons appeared first on C.A. Gray.
January 6, 2020
Review of Scarlett
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2nd Review: Jan 2020
I remember loving this the first time around, but in retrospect I think what I actually loved was probably just the ending (which was still quite satisfying). It took a VERY long time for me to feel like Scarlett was really the same character that she was in GWTW this time through, but I can pinpoint the moment it occurred: about 2/3 of the way through, when (spoiler alert!) Rhett divorces her and then marries someone else. Prior to that, she’s too weak and clingy, obsessed with him and begging him to love her. I can see why Ripley thought this was consistent with her character, though, considering that’s kind of how she was with Ashley Wilkes in GWTW–but that’s just not Rhett and Scarlett. It wasn’t until the moment that Scarlett thought she’d lost him forever that she really picked herself up by her bootstraps and started to build another life for herself.
I did have issues with the fact that Scarlett leaves her children by her first two marriages for her (hated) sister Suellen to raise, so that she can first run after Rhett and then gallivant around Europe unencumbered. She was self-centered in GWTW, but that seemed cold even for her. She redeemed herself only once her real turning point came, after she gave birth to Kat. This was an interesting plot point: after having three babies before and really caring very little for any of them, suddenly, because of what she represents (Rhett, whom she can no longer have), Scarlett falls in love with Kat. It’s implied that Rhett was completely right before this, that Scarlett only wanted him because she couldn’t have him, and probably would have tired of him quickly, had he capitulated. After Kat, though, Scarlett finally becomes unselfish, and capable of love. She grows up, in other words.
This tale isn’t the sweeping epic that GWTW was by any stretch. While it tries to show culture of Charleston and Savannah in the Reconstruction period, there’s really no politics at all, whereas there was tons in its predecessor. Then Scarlett spends the rest of the book in Ireland, which was interesting from a cultural standpoint. It’s portrayed both as a wonderful, carefree community, and also a place filled with superstition. I loved watching Scarlett rise in the ranks of the titled and important of Europe, almost in spite of herself. We finally got to see her reach her potential–and so did Rhett.
The ending really makes the story, though. While GWTW was amazing despite the ending, this one is only great because of the ending. It probably wouldn’t have been nearly so satisfying if we hadn’t had to wait for it through all the turbulence and misunderstandings that came before. But I could have done without a good chunk of Scarlett in Charleston, making a fool of herself while chasing after a man who wanted nothing to do with her.
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1st review: December 2014
WOW. So very very satisfying. When I finished GWTW I absolutely had to get this one for some closure (and I read other people’s reviews to make sure I would get it… I’d have been *pissed* if this one ended sad or on a cliffhanger too!) But it didn’t.
Now, I will say early on, the characters seemed a bit clumsier than they did in Margaret Mitchell’s hands in the sense that Ripley would come right out and say things that Mitchell would show in the way the characters behaved, allowing the reader to draw the appropriate conclusions. But I was impressed with how well-researched the book was, so I either got past this, or it stopped happening so much as the book went on.
One other frustration from early on was that Scarlett’s behavior toward Rhett made me cringe with shame for her (“You idiot! You’ll never win him back that way!”) And this went on for a few hundred pages, to the point where I started to think the whole thing was going to be like a soap opera (whereas the original GWTW was an epic, and the historical setting was very important to the story.) But after one pivotal moment, all that changed, and Scarlett became the heroine we loved so much from the original book, and the one Rhett fell in love with, too. The rest of the book, from that point on, was utterly absorbing.
Down to the last 23 pages, I almost didn’t want to finish, because I didn’t see how she could possibly wrap it up happily. But she DID, and I was totally satisfied! Anyone who felt grief-stricken when GWTW was over should definitely read this, you won’t be disappointed!
My rating: ****
Political content: historical only
Violence: none to speak of
Sexual content: present but minor and tastefully done
Language: none that I can think of
The post Review of Scarlett appeared first on C.A. Gray.
January 3, 2020
A Matter of Will, Adam Mitzer
Today’s podcast review comes from this blog review, A Matter of Will.
The post A Matter of Will, Adam Mitzer appeared first on C.A. Gray.
December 31, 2019
Review of Gone With The Wind
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2nd review (read Dec 2019):
Wow. This second time through I gritted my teeth from the moment Scarlett tells Rhett that she doesn’t want any more children until the end, anticipating all the awful things to come. I would never have suffered through the vicarious misery a second time if not for the sequel, “Scarlett,” which redeems all and which I plan to reread immediately for its satisfactory closure! But a few things I noticed this time that I did not notice the first:
First, Melanie is such an enormous character. I don’t think I fully appreciated how pivotal she is the first time through in Scarlett’s overall life and (in this book) in her too-late transformation, but she really is. She’s a caricature of goodness, and yet she has a quiet strength that makes her so much more admirable a character. She’s a perfect foil to Scarlett, and she’s so necessary to Scarlett’s ultimate self-awareness at the end.
Second, I’m a little surprised this book hasn’t been banned in schools considering how negatively blacks are (in some cases) portrayed in the story. But I guess it was never required reading when I was in school (much, much too long I imagine!) so it probably isn’t now. But it does paint such a complex picture of the political world in which Scarlett lived, not just in the Civil War but especially in the Reconstruction. There are such nuances between what are now stark delineations of good and evil. You can really see how both sides came to believe what they did.
Third: while I utterly despise heartbreaking endings like this one, I also see that Mitchell could not possibly have ended it any other way and maintained its enduring power. I think the very reason why it is so haunting is because it’s a cautionary tale. Scarlett is a scoundrel, though because we’re in her head, we can see why she does what she does, and empathize with her most dastardly deeds, even if we can’t actually root for them. I also see this time through that she isn’t entirely to blame. She and Rhett share many of the same follies, which is the other side of the coin that makes them so perfect for each other. He might have had her toward the end, if he hadn’t been so fearful of her rejection and clung so selfishly to his pride to protect himself from the possibility of it. She might have had him toward the end, if she hadn’t behaved in exactly the same way. Even before Rhett spoke the line, I kept wanting to shake Scarlett and tell her, “Can’t you see that you’re throwing away your happiness with both hands?” But until the end, every time Rhett tells Scarlett he loves her, he does it such in a mocking way that she never believes him. She’s too self-involved to see that he actually means it.
I am so glad, though, that Mitchell’s last few lines leaves open the possibility of a reconciliation with Rhett, and I even think she intended for the readers to assume that at some point she does get him back. After writing a thousand-page epic, she probably felt that there was no more poignant place to end the story than where she did. Had she kept going, it would have been anticlimactic, and would have nullified the very powerful cautionary moral of the story: Scarlett at last reaps what she deserves. Even so, for us romantics , I’m so grateful that someone saw fit to write a sequel once the copyright expired (which I assume is why it took so long!)
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1st review from December 2014
Oh! Gut wrenching!!! My good friend warned me that I would grieve when it was over, and I read it anyway… and while on one hand I wish I’d heeded her warning, on the other, it is such a great story that it’s worth it. The characters are incredible, and although the love story actually gets very little “screen time” for a 1000+ page novel, it’s the underpinnings for everything they do. All of the history and politics of the time are also quite relevant, so it’s educational as well. But at bottom, it’s a morality tale. Both Scarlett and Rhett are morally bankrupt, and so they do what they must do, and you watch it destroy their lives… and yet you root for them anyway, knowing that Margaret Mitchell could have written it no differently without changing them into different people.
I have hope, and choose to believe, that once Scarlett becomes a decent person (which she FINALLY does), she will have the wherewithal to turn her life around!
My rating: ***** (+++)
Political Content: quite a bit, in fact there’s more about the war and Reconstruction than about Scarlett and Rhett’s relationship, but it’s historical of course.
Sexual Content: present but in marriage and tastefully done
Language: I’m sure it was quite shocking for the 1930s but very mild by today’s standards
Violence: very mild
The post Review of Gone With The Wind appeared first on C.A. Gray.
December 27, 2019
Supernova by Marissa Meyer
Today’s podcast review comes from this blog post, Supernova.
The post Supernova by Marissa Meyer appeared first on C.A. Gray.
December 26, 2019
Review of Viva Durant and the Secret of the Missing Buttons
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A fun middle grade listen reminiscent of Nancy Drew! (Not that I’ve read those in several decades, but this makes me want to revisit a few of them.)
Viva is 14, and visits her grandmother in New Orleans for a summer. She’s not at all excited about it until she stumbles across a newspaper article written by a man who claims to be the descendant of “Miss Mary Mack,” of the nursery rhyme song (which I’d never heard of before, and I wonder if it actually exists or if it was written for the purposes of this book.) The descendant believes that the lyrics to the song are actually a treasure map, and he’s searched for the treasure all his life but never been able to find it. Viva takes it upon herself to follow the clues to find the treasure herself… but she has to do so under the guise of chores for her grandmother, to keep her from finding out what she’s doing.
It’s a lighthearted adventure and mystery without any gore or violence. I like Audible originals because they usually involve music to create the atmosphere, and this was no exception. I also appreciated the fact that this story involves African American characters without making race an issue, one way or the other. Politics and racism never enters the story, which I find refreshing.
My rating: ****
Language: none
Violence: none
Sexual content: none
Political content: none
The post Review of Viva Durant and the Secret of the Missing Buttons appeared first on C.A. Gray.
December 17, 2019
Review of A Matter of Will
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I was very pleasantly surprised by this one! It’s not my usual genre, in part because thrillers like this are often also full of violence, language, and sexual content that causes me to put it down early on (or never pick it up at all.) I only downloaded this one because it was one of Audible’s Daily Deals, and I expected something supernatural from it, due to what appears to be the primary antagonist’s name: Sam Abaddon. (Abaddon is also the destroying angel in the book of Revelation, so I thought he might turn out to be the devil incarnate or something.) While that didn’t happen, Sam’s character was so intriguing to me that I overlooked the language (which was not at all as heavy as I’d have expected for a thriller) and the one descriptive sexual encounter in the book.
The story follows Will Matthews, an optimistic late-20-something to the point of naïveté who works at an investment firm. He meets Sam and his stunningly gorgeous girlfriend Eve at a hockey game. Sam is clearly in the top 1%, and for reasons that are never quite clear to Will, he takes him under his wing, allowing him to become his personal investment banker–for millions of dollars. (This part of the story also intrigued me because I know next to nothing about the world of Wallstreet, so it was educational as well. The author either has first-hand experience, or did a lot of research.) At this point the story sounded a lot like the true “Billion Dollar Whale” story, of convoluted shell companies created for the purpose of laundering enormous sums of money. Meanwhile, Will dates and falls in love with Gwen, an up-and-coming attorney assigned to a high profile murder case. Here too I was impressed with the insights into the world of litigation–the author again either had firsthand knowledge or did his homework. Gwen is the more skeptical of the two, and warns Will on several occasions as his ties to Sam grow deeper and more binding. Will doesn’t listen–until it’s too late.
What really surprised me, though, was the way in which Will discovered it was “too late.” I really didn’t see it coming at all. A major twist shows up about halfway through the story, and from there we get to experience all of Will’s revelations along with him. Perhaps I should have guessed, but when I’m engrossed in a story I don’t even try because it’s more fun to be surprised!
Very engrossing tale, with a satisfying ending. I tore through it in a few days!
My rating: ****
Language: there is some but not as much as you might expect for a story like this
Sexual content: there’s one sexual encounter described in detail, but it’s skippable.
Violence: present but it’s pretty much gunshots and stabbing, and there isn’t a lot of gratuitous gore. It just states it and moves on
Political content: none that I could tell
The post Review of A Matter of Will appeared first on C.A. Gray.
December 13, 2019
The Toll by Neil Shusterman
This week’s podcast comes from this blog post, The Toll by Neil Shusterman.
The post The Toll by Neil Shusterman appeared first on C.A. Gray.
December 9, 2019
Review of Supernova (Renegades #3)
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What a pleasant surprise! I loved Marissa Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles and liked Heartless a lot too, but I was less than impressed with the first two in this series (Renegades and Archenemies). They just didn’t strike me as all that original. The superhero thing has been done into the ground at this point, and I also had some logical issues with Nova’s core motivation. But somehow Supernova managed to turn that all around, or at least most of it.
The story opens with Nova and Adrian still in love, and still on the same Renegade team, ostensibly. But neither is yet aware of the other’s secret identity, or of the fact that they are archenemies (and I do love a good secret identity trope. Marissa Meyer seems to specialize in those.) The Renegades have developed Agent N, a substance that drains prodigies of their powers, and intended to use it against the Anarchists. But the Anarchists got hold of it and used it on some of the Renegades instead. Ace Anarchy is Nova’s uncle and the leader of the Anarchists, but he’s in prison. Nova is still playing both sides, and it’s only a matter of time before her identity is discovered. I figured it would play out in the usual way: at the very end, at the most climactic moment, Nova and Adrian will face each other as their alter egos, all will be revealed, and they will hate each other all the more for it, only later learning that they can work together toward a common goal…
But this isn’t what happened at all. I don’t want to spoil it, but Meyer definitely broke the mold of how these types of stories should go. I still had some issues with Nova’s motives for being an anarchist in the first place, but even those get turned on their head. Since throughout the series both the Renegades and the Anarchists are painted in shades of gray, I kind of wondered how it could possibly end (since a story like this kind of needs to be good vs evil), but gray did indeed sharpen into black and white in a big reveal at the end that made the climactic moment satisfying in a way it otherwise couldn’t have been. And in the end, an unlikely and innocent character saved the day (which I LOVED–such a great twist, and I was so glad this character finally got a chance to shine, after three books’ worth of foreshadowing). I love happily ever afters, and we got one in the end!
My rating: ****1/2
Language: none
Sexual content: none
Violence: “comic book” violence only
Political content: some, but no more than what was already set up in the previous two books that I can recall. Though it did annoy me a bit in those–does EVERY popular story have to go there?–and I rather suspected the publisher made her add it in.
The post Review of Supernova (Renegades #3) appeared first on C.A. Gray.
December 6, 2019
The Mermaid’s Sister, by Carrie Anne Noble
Today’s podcast comes from this blog post of The Mermaid’s Sister by Carrie Anne Noble
The post The Mermaid’s Sister, by Carrie Anne Noble appeared first on C.A. Gray.
