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Giveaway: The Reflections of Queen Snow White by David C. Meredith (INTERNATIONAL)
This giveaway is now over! Since no one entered, there are no winners.
I am super-excited to get to offer up my first giveaway of 2014 here at Opinions of a Wolf. Lots of the indie authors whose books I accepted for review in 2014 also were interested in me hosting a giveaway at the time of my review, so there will be plenty more coming up in the future too.
There are TWO ebook versions of The Reflections of Queen Snow White
What You’ll Win: One ebook copy of The Reflections of Queen Snow White
How to Enter: Leave a comment on this post stating your favorite part of the original Snow White fairy tale. Your comment must also contain your EMAIL ADDRESS so you can receive your ebook.
Who Can Enter: INTERNATIONAL
Contest Ends: February 13th. Two weeks from today!
Disclaimer: The winners will have their ebooks sent to them by the author. The blogger is not responsible for sending the books.
Book Review: The Reflections of Queen Snow White by David C. Meredith
Summary:
Snow White lived decades of her happy-ever-after, but when Charming dies she is sent reeling into a depression. Not even their daughter, Raven’s, upcoming marriage can snap Snow White out of it. When wandering the halls of the castle, desperately seeking to be alone, she re-enters her old step-mother’s quarters. Now covered in dust, she discovers her stepmother’s magic mirror, which she never knew about before. The discovery will have far-reaching consequences.
Review:
This is my first read of the 12 indie books I accepted for review here in 2014 (see the whole list). I surprised myself a bit, reaching first for the fantasy, but I was in the perfect mood for a slightly pensive retelling of a fairy tale. The book takes an interesting angle for retelling the story, jumping ahead to Snow White’s elderly years, but it unfortunately doesn’t reimagine Snow White herself quite enough.
The narrative choice of having an elderly Snow White discover her stepmother’s magic mirror that then forces her into introspection on herself and her life is a great idea that works well. We already all know the end of the fairy tale, so flipping it on its head to start at the end addresses that fact head-on. Now the question isn’t, will this fairy tale end the way all the other retellings do. Instead, it looks on a psychological level at the impact of Snow White’s early years on her later ones. It also is an interesting way to address end of life issues. Snow White is elderly and stuck in a bit of a rut. She’s uncertain how to go on without her husband of so many years. These are relevant issues that don’t get addressed often enough in literature, and re-using the Snow White fairy tale to look at them works wonderfully. It thus is a familiar story and setting with a different focus, which is a great tact to take for a fairy tale retelling.
Snow White herself, however, hasn’t been tweaked enough to make for an interesting heroine. I admit, I was hoping for someone who either had found or would find her own strength. The Snow White we see in Disney and other retellings really is a bit of a shrinking violet. This Snow White stays that way. Over and over she is the helpless girl who must be rescued by others. She doesn’t flee the castle, someone else tells her, practically forces her to. She is then saved first by the dwarves and then by Charming. Later in her life, after leaving the official fairy tale, we find that she is a simpering clueless virgin on her wedding night who must be guided by Charming. Then even later she is heinously assaulted by some ladies of her court, and she again must be saved by someone else. Even in the end of her life, she doesn’t pick herself up and continue on. A magic mirror knocks some sense into her. Because fairy tales often remove so much agency from the “good” women in them (only evil women are allowed agency), I prefer to see retellings give the women more agency. Snow White could still have the character flaw of being a bit timid and eventually learn how to save herself. It’s not an all-or-nothing scenario. The way Snow White and her story is presented here reads a bit too traditionally medieval. I want a retelling to take me new places with the character, not extend the same ones.
This issue alone would have led me to give the book 4 stars, but, unfortunately, the book is riddled with spelling and grammar errors. I only marked the most egregious ones, and I still had 12 on my list. Issues such as saying someone laid down in the floor, instead of on the floor (loc 2302), putting the apostrophe in the wrong place (“princes’ tongue” instead of “prince’s tongue” (loc 1315) ), and just flat-out using the wrong word (“followed suite” instead of “followed suit” (loc 1084) ) sorely damaged my enjoyment of the novel. I don’t expect perfection from authors or editors, we are all human, but more than a few errors is something that truly negatively impacts the reading of the novel.
Overall, this retelling of Snow White takes the interesting angle of focusing on the end of her life. This allows the author to explore issues relevant to the elderly, such as losing long-term loved ones and coming to terms with the path your life has taken. Although this plot gives the fairy tale a new focus and extended plot, Snow White herself has not been updated at all. She is still the simpering violet who must be saved by all around her. Some readers may be bothered by the number of errors in the spelling and grammar in the book. Recommended to fans of traditional fairy tales with only a slight twist who won’t be bothered by a lack of editing for spelling and grammar.
3 out of 5 stars
Source: kindle copy from author in exchange for my honest review
Book Review: Something Spectacular: The True Story of One Rockette’s Battle with Bulimia by Greta Gleissner (Audiobook narrated by Dina Pearlman)
Summary:
Greta Gleissner finally achieved her lifelong dream of making a living just from her professional dancing. She landed the prestigious job of being a Rockette in the New York City show. She hoped that this newfound stability and prestige would cure her of her bulimia. What was there to binge and purge about when she was living her dream? But her eating disorder she’d had since a young age won’t just disappear because of her newfound success. Soon, her bulimia is putting her job–and her life–at risk.
Review:
I was immediately intrigued by the elements of this eating disorder memoir that make it different from the, sadly, so many others that exist. Greta’s eating disorder peaks in her 20s, not her teens. She was a Rockette, and she’s a lesbian. An eating disorder memoir about someone in their 20s in the dance industry who is also queer was very appealing to me. What I found was a memoir that gives insight to having an eating disorder, the impact of homophobia, and an inside look at the professional dance world told in a non-linear, honest, and engaging manner.
Greta tells her memoir in the framework of a play. There are scenes, acts, overtures, etc… This lets her address the story in a non-linear way that still makes sense. The overture, for instance, shows a dramatic moment when her eating disorder was at full tilt and destroying her life. Then she backs up to the few months before she became a Rockette. The time of auditioning then being a Rockette is interspersed with flashbacks to help us better understand her life. Finally, she enters an inpatient clinic, where we get flashbacks in the context of her therapy. It’s a creative storytelling technique that brings a freshness to her memoir.
Honesty without cruelty to herself or others is a key part of her narrative voice. Greta is straightforward, sometimes grotesquely so, about her bulimia and what it does to her. The eating disorder is not glamorized. Greta takes us down into the nitty-gritty of the illness. In fact, it’s the first bulimia memoir I’ve read that was so vivid and straightforward in its depictions of what the illness is and what it does. In some ways, it made me see bulimia as a bit of a mix between an addiction and body image issues. Greta was able to show both how something that was helping you cope can spiral out of control, as well as how poor self-esteem and body image led her to purging her food.
Greta also is unafraid to tell us about what goes on inside her own mind, and where she sees herself as having mistreated people in the past. I never doubted her honesty. Similarly, although Greta’s parents definitely did some things wrong in how they raised her, Greta strives to both acknowledge the wounds and accept her parents as flawed and wounded in their own ways. You can hear her recovery in how she talks about both them and her childhood. She has clearly done the work to heal past wounds.
The memoir honestly made me grateful the dancing I did as a child never went the professional route. It’s disturbing how pervasive body policing and addictions in general are in the dance world, at least as depicted by Greta. Similarly, it eloquently demonstrates how parents’ issues get passed down to the children, and sometimes even exacerbated. Greta’s mother was a non-professional dancer who was constantly dieting. Greta also loved dancing but her mother’s body image issues got passed down to her as well. Food was never just food in her household.
One shortcoming of the memoir is that Greta never fully addresses her internalized homophobia or how she ultimately overcomes it and marries her wife. The book stops rather abruptly when Greta is leaving the halfway house she lived in right after her time in the inpatient clinic. There is an epilogue where she briefly touches on the time after the halfway house, mentions relapse, and states that she ultimately overcame her internalized homophobia and met her now wife. However, for the duration of her time in the clinic and the halfway house, she herself admits she wasn’t yet ready to address her sexuality or deal with her internalized homophobia. It was clear to me reading the book that at least part of her self-hatred that led to her bulimia was due to her issues with her sexuality. Leaving out how she dealt with that and healed felt like leaving out a huge chunk of the story I was very interested in. Perhaps it’s just too painful of a topic for her to discuss, but it did feel as if the memoir gave glimpses and teasers of it, discussing how she would only make out with women when very drunk for instance, but then the issue is never fully addressed in the memoir.
Similarly, leaving out the time after the halfway house was disappointing. I wanted to see her finish overcoming and succeeding. I wanted to hear the honesty of her relapses that she admits she had and how she overcome that. I wanted to hear about her dating and meeting her wife and embracing her sexuality. Hearing about the growth and strength past the initial part in the clinic and halfway house is just as interesting and engaging as and more inspiring than her darker times. I wish she had told that part of the story too.
The audiobook narrator, Dina Pearlman, was a great choice for the memoir. Her voice reads as gritty feminine, which is perfect for the story. She also handles some of the asides and internal diatribes present in mental illness memoirs with great finesse.
Overall, this is a unique entry in the eating disorder memoir canon. It gives the nitty gritty details of bulimia from the perspective of a lesbian suffering from homophobia within the framework of the dance world. Those who might be triggered should be aware that specific height and weight numbers are given, as well as details on binge foods and purging episodes. It also, unfortunately, doesn’t fully address how the author healed from the wounds of homophobia. However, her voice as a queer person is definitely present in the memoir. Recommended to those with an interest in bulimia in adults, in the dance world, or among GLBTQ people.
4 out of 5 stars
Source: Audible
Counts For:
Book Review: Who? by Algis Budrys
Summary:
In an alternate late 20th century, the Allies are still at a cold war with the Soviets. The Allies’ best scientist, Martino, is working on a secret project called K-88 when there is an explosion. The first rescuers to him are Soviet. The norm is for Allied prisoners to ultimately be returned across the line. But the Soviets claim that Martino’s skull and arm were badly damaged and return him with a metal, robotic head and arm. Is this man really Martino, or is he a Soviet plant?
Review:
I was excited to read this book because the idea of a transhumanist/cyborg American made that way by the Soviets has a James Bond like appeal. Unfortunately, it feels a bit more dated than I was anticipating, as well as compared to other older scifi, and doesn’t fully address some questions it raises.
Immediately, there are a couple of plot holes that aren’t addressed until close to the end of the book, which made it a bit frustrating to read. First, why did the Allies put their best scientist in a lab on the border with the Soviets? The answer to this, given at the end of the book, is pretty flimsy, and only works if you are willing to believe the Allies are very stupid. Second, it makes sense that they can’t verify Martino’s identity with his fingerprints, because the Soviets could have taken off his remaining arm and put it on someone else. However, why can’t they verify who he is with DNA? Presumably, he has some living relatives somewhere they could compare to. DNA was discovered in the 1860s (source) so to never even address why they don’t use it is a bit bizarre. The book mentions toward the end that Martino’s parents and uncle are dead, but you can conduct kinship tests using dead bodies. It still baffles me that the government in the book didn’t simply dig up Martino’s father and run a DNA test. Even if DNA testing wasn’t widely known of when the book was published, one would hope a scifi writer could see its future implications, imagine the applicability, and address the scenario. The fact that DNA wasn’t addressed at all, and Martino’s place near the Soviet border wasn’t satisfactorily addressed really removed a lot of the intensity and interest one should feel from the situation.
Another way Budrys showed a lack of imagination for the future is in the strict gender roles and lack of women in the military or the sciences in the future he has envisioned. Women are only seen in the book in strict 1950s gender roles. As wives and mothers and not once in the military or in the sciences. People in the sciences are referred to as the “men” not even leaving room for the idea of a woman in science. I know this is a symptom of the times, but I also know that more progressive and forward-thinking scifi was written in the same decade. It was a bit jarring to me to read a scifi that excluded women so much, when I’m so used to women being present, at least nominally, in scifi.
All of that said, the writing of individual scenes was quite lovely. Budrys evokes setting and tensity well. I particularly enjoyed the scene of Maybe-Martino running through the streets of New York City, which reminded me of an old noir film. Budrys also shows a good understanding of what it is like for people who are incredibly highly intelligent. He writes Martino at a young age as both brilliant in science but also dumb in interpersonal relations. The fact that he got this and demonstrated it in the 1950s is to be commended. There is also some solid commentary on the American education system and a desire for it to encourage more independent thought.
Look–these guys aren’t morons. They’re pretty damned bright, or they wouldn’t be here. But the only way they’ve ever been taught to learn something is to memorize it. If you throw a lot of new stuff at them in a hurry, they’ll still memorize it–but they haven’t got time to think. (loc 9163)
Overall, this is an interesting concept that wasn’t fully fleshed out nor the possible weaknesses fully addressed. It is definitely a scifi of its time, with its hyper-focus on the Soviets and the Cold War that could almost feel kitschy today. A short read with an interesting premise, albeit a lack of female scientists, soldiers, or government workers. Recommended to scifi fans who enjoy some old-fashioned red scare in their reads and don’t need the science to be perfect.
3 out of 5 stars
Source: Netgalley
Book Review: Sleepless by Charlie Huston (Audiobook narrated by Ray Porter and Mark Bramhall)
Summary:
In an alternate 2010, the world is slowly falling into disarray, partially due to terrorism, but mostly due to a new deadly illness. SLP makes the sufferer an insomniac, unable to sleep for years, until they fall into a state of insanity known as the suffering. The sleepless, as those with the illness are known, change the structure of society. Movie theaters are now open 24/7, there’s an increase in sales of odd and illicit things, as the sleepless get bored. Most importantly, the sleepless have moved much of their energy into online MMORPGs. Some spending countless hours gold farming there, making a good buck with all their hours of alertness.
Park, an old-fashioned cop, is determined to save the structure of society, one bust at a time. He’s committed to his work, in spite of his wife being sleepless and being increasingly unable to care for their infant daughter. So when his boss asks him to go undercover to look for people illegally selling the one drug that can ease the pain of the sleepless–dreamer–he agrees.
Jasper is an elderly ex-military private investigator without much of an eye for sticking to the rule of the law who is asked by a client to hunt down and return to her a thumb drive that was stolen. He slowly discovers that that thumb drive ended up in the middle of much more than some art thieves and finds himself sucked into the world of illicit dreamer.
Review:
My partner and I both enjoy a good noir story, so when we saw this summary on Audible, we thought it would make an entertaining listen for our 12 hour holiday road trip. The story was so bad, we could only take it for about an hour at a time and eventually just turned it off so I could read out loud to him from a different book. I eventually soldiered on, though, because I honestly just had to finish it so I could review it. In what should be a fast-paced noir, there is instead an overwrought amount of description of unimportant things that slow what could have been an interesting plot down to a crawl.
Noir as a genre is a thriller that generally features a hard-boiled detective (sometimes a hard-boiled criminal). It’s fast-paced and usually short featuring a lot of grit and mean streets. One thing Huston does that puts an interesting twist on the noir is he incorporates both a cop who is being forced to turn detective and a criminal-style private investigator. He features both sorts of main character. This intrigued me from the beginning. However, the writing includes far too much description of unimportant things for a crime thriller. For instance, there is an at least 5 minutes long description of a computer keyboard. I could literally space out for a few minutes and come back to the audiobook that was playing the entire time and miss literally nothing. It would still be describing the same chair. This really slows the plot down.
On top of the overly descriptive writing, the narration is overwrought, like a stage actor trying too hard. The best explanation I can make for the narration is, if you have ever seen Futurama, the narration switches back and forth between being Calculon and being Hedonbot. Now, I admit, the audiobook narrators played these parts perfectly. In fact, I had to check to see if they’re the same voice actors as Calculon and Hedonbot (they’re not). I really think the audiobook narrators are what saved the story enough to keep me reading. I kept laughing at the visual of Calculon and Hedonbot doing this overwrought noir. But that is clearly not what makes for a good noir. The tone and writing style were all wrong for the plot.
In addition to the writing style, there’s the plot. In this world that Huston has imagined, gamers have become all-important. When people go sleepless, they become intense gamers. If they don’t do this then they become zombie-like criminals. I don’t think this is a realistic imagining of what would actually happen if a huge portion of the population became permanent insomniacs. Not everyone is a gamer or a criminal. There’s a lot more options in the world than that. Additionally, in this alternate 2010, the art world now revolves around MMORPGs as well. The art work that is now sold is thumb drives of the characters that people make in the games. There is a long speech in the book about how making a character in an MMORPG is art. Yes, somepeople might think that. But it is incredibly doubtful that the entire world would suddenly overnight start viewing character building in an MMORPG as an art form. I won’t explain how, because it’s a spoiler, but the gamers also come into play in the seedy underworld of illegal drugs. At the expense of a plot that follows the logic of the world the author has created, gamers are made to be inexplicably all-important.
I also must point out that the science in this book is really shaky. SLP was originally a genetic disease that suddenly becomes communicable. That’s not how diseases work. Communicable and genetic diseases are different, they don’t suddenly morph into one or the other. Additionally, in the real world, there’s no way an illness would be given a scientific name that is an abbreviation for the common name (SLP for sleepless). Think about swine flu. The common name is swine flu, the scientific name is H1N1. Similarly, the drug to treat SLP’s official name is DR33M3R, which is just the street name, dreamer, in leetspeak. This isn’t fiction based in true science.
One thing I did appreciate in the book is that the semi-criminal private investigator, Jasper, is gay. He’s extremely macho, ex-military, and he bangs his also macho helicopter pilot. I like the stereotype-breaking characterization of Jasper. It’s nice to see a gay man given such a strong role in a thriller.
Overall, this alternate 2010 noir gets too caught up in overly long descriptions of mundane things and an overwrought narrative style to keep the plot moving at a thriller pace. The plot features an unrealistic level of importance for MMORPGs and the gamers who play, as well as unsound “science.” One of the hardboiled main characters is a stereotype-breaking gay man, however, which is nice to see. Recommended to those who enjoy an overly descriptive, overacting narration style with gamers featured unrealistically at center stage who don’t mind some shaky science in the plot.
2 out of 5 stars
Source: Audible
Book Review: Ecstasy in Darkness by Gena Showalter (Series, #5) (Bottom of TBR Pile Challenge)
Summary:
Ava Sans is hoping to move up to a full agent at New Chicago’s Alien Investigation and Removal (AIR) team. But before she can, she and her best friend, Noelle, are assigned to capture a powerful vampire who can manipulate time. McKell, recently cast out from the underground tunnels the monarchical vampires call their home, is having to adjust to living with daylight and is desperate to find out the secret these above ground vampires have for moving around in the daylight without burning. Used to seeing humans only as food slaves, he’s disturbed to find himself inexplicably attracted to Ava Sans, who just so happens to smell like butterscotch.
Review:
I rarely impulse buy books in drugstores and, after reading this book, I think that’s probably the wiser move. I bought this in a CVS due entirely to the cover and didn’t pick it up to read for three years. When I did, I saw it was the fifth book in the series. Fortunately, this isn’t the type of series that it’s necessary to read in order. Unfortunately, nothing about this book made me want to go read the rest of the series. It suffers from a meandering plot, ridiculous dialogue, two-dimensional characters, constant cock-teasing of the reader, and an entirely misleading cover (that I suspect was misleading on purpose).
This series focuses on a different romantic pairing in each entry. They all have ties to AIR in some way. The previous couples make cameos in other books, but the actual plot from the prior books doesn’t have much impact on this one. All that needs to be known is there was a war with the aliens, New Chicago is not on Earth, vampires are an alien species that are allergic to the sun and live underground on this planet, the vampires make humans their food slaves, and some of the vampires have started living above ground. Oh, and there’s this alien called the Schön Queen who looks beautiful but actually is a rotting, disease-ridden creature who gives those who bang her an illness that makes them her voodoo zombie slaves. Those who read a lot of pnr will understand that that’s a pretty simple plot summary for a series this far in.
The actual plot for this book basically is that Ava will help McKell lure vampires to interview to find out how they live in daylight and he will, in turn, come willingly to talk to the head of AIR. AIR wants to find out if McKell’s blood can be used to save victims of the Schön Queen’s disease. If the book stuck to this simple, straightforward plot it would work. But it meanders all over the place, tossing in red herrings, asides, diatribes, and scenes that seem to happen just for the fun of it. This book is over 500 pages long. That is not enough plot to support that many pages, unless the characters are stopping to bang a lot, which was honestly what I was expecting. That’s not what we get though.
The cover definitely implies that this is a BDSM book with a lot of sex. The only thing that ever happens with a whip is McKell comes over to Ava’s house with the whip intent on actually beating her up with it (in a to get revenge way not in a sexy BDSM way) but then he never uses it on her. She mentions it in a giggling aside toward the end of the book, and McKell states he would never ever whip her. He loves her too much now. I know the author generally doesn’t have any impact on the cover design at all, but somebody somewhere must have known they’d be pulling in people expecting BDSM only to have BDSM scorned within the book. Not cool. That’d be less irritating, though, if there was at least a lot of sex of some sort in the book. Instead, we repeatedly find Ava and McKell getting hot and steamy only to stop just short of having sex. They have sex twice in the book at the very end. You seriously have to read at least 400, maybe 450, pages to get one full sex scene. Which is incredibly frustrating because by far the best writing Showalter does is of the sex scenes. They’re tantalizing and realistic with some things we don’t always see in romance novels, like the guy going down on the girl, for instance. This book would have been at least three stars if Showalter’s steamy scenes had led to actual sex scenes throughout the novel. But instead, the reader just gets going with excitement only to have it yanked out from under them to go check in on that meandering plot.
The characters are so two-dimensional that it’s essentially impossible to truly care for them. McKell is a vampire with a temper. A bad boy, supposedly, that Ava inexplicably falls for. Most of his presence in the book consists of snapping at Ava and being shocked she doesn’t obey him and then being turned on by that. Ava, on the other hand, is traumatized by growing up on the bad side of the tracks and has a big inferiority complex. She also smells like butterscotch. And tastes like butterscotch. And her hair looks like butterscotch. She’s a piece of butterscotch candy who says boo hoo poor me and I want to prove to everyone that I’m not trash so oh hey let’s fall for this bad boy vampire who treats me badly that seems like a great choice. I admit by the end of the book McKell is treating her well but his transformation is out of the blue, not gradual. Plus, Ava falls for him when he’s a bad boy and never stands up for herself or says I deserve better. She ends up with an ok guy but only because he magically transformed, not out of any agency of her own. The supporting characters are even less well-developed. I can say maybe one or two things about them all, but nothing that makes them truly come to life in my mind.
Overall, this is an overly long pnr with a light, meandering plot and only two sex scenes in over 500 pages. While the sex scenes are well-written and tantalizing, the rest of the book is dull, with two-dimensional characters it is impossible to come to truly care for. The romance uses the bad boy/wounded woman trope and does nothing to make it deeper or richer. Those who think from the cover that this is a BDSM pnr should be aware that it is definitely not. I would perhaps pick it up in a library or at a friend’s house to skim through and read the sex scenes, but there is definitely better pnr out there to devote your time to.
2 out of 5 stars
Source: CVS
Previous Books in Series:
Awaken Me Darkly
Enslave Me Sweetly
Savor Me Slowly
Seduce the Darkness
Book Review: The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are by Brené Brown
Summary:
Brené Brown, PhD, LMSW, is a social work research professor. She’s spent years studying vulnerability, courage, worthiness, and shame. In this book, she presents her research on what she calls “Wholehearted living,” a way of living shared by the most content people she has interviewed in her years of research. Dr. Brown argues that the key to a happy, fulfilled life is to engage with the world from a place of worthiness. The book also offers 10 guideposts on how to fully achieve Wholehearted living.
Review:
Dr. Brown was a guest speaker on the only podcast I listen to (On Being with Krista Tippett). Her episode where she discussed the power of vulnerability struck such a chord with me that I sought out one of her books to read. This was the first one I could get my hands on. Although at first the text seems simplistic, particularly compared to the podcast I listened to, with time the overarching picture Dr. Brown is painting becomes clear, and it truly is inspirational.
The guideposts each consist of one thing to cultivate and one thing to let go of. Each guidepost ends with suggestions for working on both. For instance, guidepost two is cultivate self-compassion and let go of perfectionism. The chapter ends with a link to an online quiz to see which areas of self-compassion you need more work on. I like that Dr. Brown gives the reader both something to stop doing and something to replace it with. It’s easy to say, “Don’t do this,” but it’s much harder to give someone something positive to replace it with. Some of the guideposts felt more relevant than others, but that will definitely be a personal thing for each reader. For instance, I didn’t really need someone to tell me to get creative instead of comparing myself to others, but I did need to hear about cultivating calm and stillness and letting go of anxiety. How useful you will find the book will probably be related to how many guideposts are applicable to your own life. Skim through the table of contents and see how the different guideposts resonate with you.
Dr. Brown’s advice is based on scientific research, but she also brings a real person element to her book. She is very honest with the reader about her own vulnerabilities as a person and as a woman and which guideposts she struggles the most with herself. Some of her stories may seem a bit silly at first to the reader, particularly since Dr. Brown’s life seems to be a relatively easy one, but ultimately they lend a sense of connection and realness to the book that allows the reader to ponder the information at a deeper level.
The issues she addresses are quite universal, including: the desire to fit in, shame, authenticity, perfectionism, resilience, hope, addiction, and power. At first what she states may seem obvious or too simple, but the reader will find themselves returning to these simple sentences later on at key moments and saying, “Huh, it’s not as obvious or as simple as I thought at first.” Here are just a few examples:
Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance. (page 26)
Healthy striving is self-focused–How can I improve? Perfectionism is other-focused–What will they think? (page 5)
I define calm as creating perspective and mindfulness while managing emotional reactivity. (page 106)
When we value being cool and in control over granting ourselves the freedom to unleash the passionate, goofy, heartfelt, and soulful expressions of who we are, we betray ourselves. When we consistently betray ourselves, we can expect to do the same to the people we love. (page 123)
Although the book can at first seem obvious and Dr. Brown’s personal examples overly simple, this book actually takes a complex topic and clearly explains it at a personable level, complete with suggested methods to implement the changes Dr. Brown suggests. This book presents the scientifically-researched fact that a happy, fulfilled life comes from living authentically and being kinder to yourself. Recommended to anyone feeling frazzled, stressed, or generally dissatisfied with their life. Dr. Brown’s book shows another, simpler way to be.
4 out of 5 stars
Source: Library
Book Review: Love Minus Eighty by Will McIntosh (Audiobook narrated by Kevin T. Collins, Eileen Stevens, and Ali Ahn)
Summary:
In the future, you can live forever. But only if you can afford to pay to be medically resurrected and any injuries sustained fixed. The rest put everything they have into freezing insurance, getting cryogenically frozen in the hopes that one day, someday, they might get resurrected. At the very least, they wont’ die. But beautiful women who die too young (and too not filthy rich) get a different sort of a second chance. They get awoken and given the choice of going into the cryogenic dating facility. Men will come through and pay to wake them up and talk to them, and if they fall for them, they’ll pay to have them resurrected and their injuries healed.
In this world, three different, yet intertwined stories are told. There’s Rob. A once-musician who accidentally struck and killed a jogger in the middle of his break-up with his reality star-esque wealthy girlfriend. He proceeds to take out a loan to visit the jogger to apologize but slowly the guilt turns into something more. Then there’s Veronika, a dating coach with a bad case of unrequited love and a need to feel like she’s doing some good in the world. And finally, Mira. A lesbian who was placed into the heterosexual cryogenic dating pool back at the beginning before they bothered to wake the women and ask them if they wanted to be there.
Review:
I was immediately intrigued by this book’s premise and then realized I’d already read another scifi book by Will McIntosh and enjoyed it. That book, Soft Apocalypse
The future is a near dystopic mess of most of the wealth being in the hands of the few. While some people have foregone civilization to live off the land, the rest of the have-nots spend their time in body suits, called systems, that are basically like a full-bodied smartphone. They reminded me a bit of Google Glass. Their systems filter out all the unsightly aspects of where they live, including garbage, and they also block pop-up ads that otherwise accost you on the street. Everyone pours their little bit of money into their systems because without one you fall entirely off the social stratum. This is already creative enough to be intriguing, but then McIntosh tosses in this idea that cryogenics and resurrection has been figured out but only the wealthy can afford to be resurrected and everyone else pours all the rest of their money into freezing insurance. Then we get the cryogenic dating program aka bridesicles, and oh wow. Any scifi reader can see what an interesting setting this is.
On top of this setting, McIntosh weaves three different, yet ultimately intertwined narrators. It’s a narrative structure I enjoy but only when done well, and McIntosh mostly pulls it off. Some things sometimes felt a bit like too much of a coincidence, but for the most part the intertwining made sense. All three narrators have unique voices and perspectives. They are well-rounded with flaws, even Mira, who is frozen a lot of the time, but they also are still likable.
The plot is complex and truly had me on the edge of my seat for the last third of the book. I was rooting for the characters and did not know what would happen. An unpredictable, yet satisfying, ending plays in perfectly with the plot.
I am of two minds about the presence of Mira in the story. On the one hand, I appreciate that McIntosh took the time to think about how the heteronormativity of the bridesicle program could affect a lesbian. On the other hand, it frustrates me that she and her girlfriend have their agency removed and spend most of the story frozen and at the whim of the heterosexual people around them. Having lesbians rescued by the straight folks just kind of rubbed me the wrong way. I sort of wish there had been some modern day queer person who helped them out in some way. That was the other thing that bothered me. The only queer presence was from the past in the form of Mira and her frozen girlfriend. In such a sweeping narrative with so many characters that is also set in a city, it seems odd to me we never encountered another queer character. Particularly when one of the main characters is a dating coach.
The narration of the audiobook was wonderful. Having a different voice for each narrator really helped keep the stories straight, and each of the narrators did a wonderful job bringing their characters to life.
Overall, this book presents a richly imagined near-dystopian scifi future that gets the reader to think about if living afraid of death is truly living. The three-narrator structure lends a complexity to the plot that keeps it engaging and consistently moving forward. One of the plot choices might rub some readers the wrong way, but if the world building and narrative structure appeal, it shouldn’t be much of an issue. Recommended to scifi fans who enjoy a city setting and some romance.
4 out of 5 stars
Source: Audible
Cross-Stitch #5: Dinosaur Love
The largest cross-stitch I made to gift for the holidays was for my partner, naturally. I thought these dinosaurs in love were too cute to pass by! I also chose to use my bf’s favorite colors for the color scheme: red, orange, and yellow.
Series Review: The Georgina Kincaid Series by Richelle Mead
Introduction:
I post series reviews after completing reading an entire series of books. It gives me a chance to reflect on and analyze the series as a whole. These series reviews are designed to also be useful for people who: A) have read the series too and would like to read other thoughts on it or discuss it with others OR B) have not read the series yet but would like a full idea of what the series is like, including possible spoilers, prior to reading it themselves or buying it for another. Please be aware that series reviews necessarily contain some spoilers.
Summary:
Georgina Kincaid loves her job managing a bookstore in Seattle. She’s not so sure about her job as Seattle’s only succubus, but she doesn’t have much choice about that one since she sold her soul to Hell back when she was mortal in ancient Greece. After hundreds of years of being a succubus, Georgina has started to feel guilty about stealing the life energy of good-souled men. So she’s switched to stealing the less high-quality life energy of bad-souled men. Her demon boss, Jerome, is none too happy about this. Things take an even more interesting turn when famous author, Seth Mortensen, moves to Seattle and chooses Georgina’s bookstore as his base of operations. Georgina quickly finds herself falling for him. Her first time falling for a man since WWII. Nobody seems to like the idea of Georgina dating Seth, except for Seth, but Georgina doesn’t have much time to wonder why as supernatural life carries on. Everything from an incubus plot to attempts at overthrowing her demonic boss (by another demon of course) to an escaped ancient supernatural power who feeds on dreams come Georgina’s way. Georgina starts to notice that Seattle seems to be facing more than the normal level of supernatural upheaval, and she starts to wonder why.
Review:
A tightly told, sexy, humorous series featuring an overarching plot that ties into all of the smaller plots and lends the series as a whole a greater meaning makes this urban fantasy stand out above the rest.
The series ostensibly focuses on the bad guys of the supernatural world, not something that is seen very often in urban fantasy. Yes, Georgina is a succubus with a guilt complex, but she is still a succubus, and she still goes out and does her succubus thing. She is not out trying to save the world. She’s just trying to get by day by day in the role she has chosen for herself–fighting on the bad guy side of the battle. But Mead does not let the series fall easily into clear good versus evil. It soon becomes evident that good guys can be on the bad guy side and bad guys on the good guy side. In most cases, one decision or the fault of birth decides where they land. Just because someone is a vampire doesn’t mean he can’t desire to help out his friends. Just because someone is an angel doesn’t mean they can’t make mistakes. And the rules aren’t always fair and sometimes incomprehensible. This gray complexity lends a lot of interesting notes to the series that otherwise wouldn’t be there, not least of 
which is the fact that the characters are able to be three-dimensional in this world Mead has created.
The characters, even the minor ones, are indeed three-dimensional. They sometimes make stupid choices, big mistakes, and are annoying. But they also make tough good choices, ones that aren’t easy but still happen. They fall in genuine love. They accidentally hurt each other but also sacrifice themselves for each other. They worry about having a bad hair day. They cry. They have great sex and bad sex. And they come to life in the reader’s mind.
The sex scenes, a key element of an urban fantasy series about a succubus, are never repetitive. They are tantalizing and sexy, except for a few which are aiming to show that sex can be bad. They range from the intense love making of a couple madly in love to a fun night out having sex in public at a public sex bar. And many positions and types of sex are covered as well. The sex scenes walk the line between barely mentioned and extremely explicit quite well. They are fully fleshed-out sex scenes without being extremely explicit.
The overarching plot, though, is what really made me fall in love with the series. Georgina became a succubus in exchange for her husband and all those who knew her forgetting all about her. She cheated on her husband, and she felt so much guilt at both the act and the pain it caused that she felt this was the best solution. At first, she goes into being a succubus with enthusiasm but over time her feelings change. Her hurt starts to heal, and she begins to see the good side of both humanity and life. She is in the throes of this complex situation of wanting to be good but having already signed a contract for the bad side of the fight when Seth shows up and everything starts going haywire in the supernatural world in Seattle. Eventually, she finds out that Seth is the reincarnation of her original husband, Kiriakos. He lived his life thinking he must have a soul mate but never meeting her, so when he died he struck a bargain to get more chances at meeting her. He has a limited number of reincarnations (10, I believe), that will occur in the same vicinity as his soul mate. His soul mate is Georgina, and she has met him multiple times throughout her life as as a succubus. This reincarnation as Seth is his last chance. From here, the story takes a hard look at what makes people soul mates, that being soul mates doesn’t mean no mistakes will be made, that love 
and a relationship aren’t an easy cakewalk and sacrifices and compromises must be made. It delves into the idea of redemption, and that being a good person and having a good life aren’t just something innate in you. It’s a beautiful love story, spanning many centuries, that takes a hard look at what makes relationships work. It also ties in nicely with the questions established earlier about good versus evil and if being good or evil is a one-time choice or something that happens over time. I never would have guessed that I could end up feeling so positively about a love story that begins with betrayal but that’s where Mead uses the supernatural with great skill. The story works because the betrayal is treated so seriously. Georgina’s betrayal of her husband (and soul mate) leads them both to centuries of pain. It is not something that can be just brushed off. It’s a mistake she made, yes, but just because it was a mistake doesn’t mean she can just say sorry and make it all right. On that note, Kiriakos/Seth also made mistakes when they were first together that he also has to work through. They both learn through time that you can’t just sit back and let the marriage happen. You have to pay attention, invest, and work at growing together.
The fun setting, tantalizing sex scenes, three-dimensional characters, and unexpected yet beautiful overarching plot about the nature of good and evil and love and redemption makes this series a stunner in urban fantasy. Highly recommended to urban fantasy and romance fans alike, although those who are irritated at the concept of soul mates might not enjoy it as much.
4.5 out of 5 stars
Source: PaperBackSwap, library, gift, Audible
Books in Series:
Succubus Blues
Succubus On Top
Succubus Dreams
Succubus Heat
Succubus Shadows
Succubus Revealed
This work by Amanda Nevius is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Opinions of a Wolf 