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Book Review: Heart’s Blood by Juliet Marillier
Summary:
This retelling of the classic fairy tale, Beauty and the Beast, is set in a medieval Ireland facing the constant threat of Norman invasion. Caitrin, an Irish lass trained in the trade of a scribe by her now deceased father, runs away from an abusive situation and stumbles upon the mysterious Whistling Tor. The crippled lord of the area lives in Whistling Tor and seeks a scribe. The local villagers warn Caitrin against taking the summer job due to a fear of the host living on the hill, but Caitrin sees no other choice.
Review:
Fantasy is one of those genres that I have never been able to get into, but I do love fairy tales, so I thought maybe a retelling of a classic would work for me. When will I ever learn that I just don’t like fantasy?
Marillier does all the elements of a fantasy book well. She sets up the mysterious, old land of Ireland with just enough description to place the reader there but not so much as to slow down the action. Gothic mystery seeps through every page. The idea of the non-human servants and household members of the castle are creatively handled, as is the lord’s beast-like qualities. The members of the host who could so easily have flowed together are artfully individualized.
Additionally, the romance between Caitrin and the lord of the castle is one I actually approve of for once in a YA book. They both are flawed and have issues to work on, but love each other and have good hearts. Thank you. That’s what a relationship is supposed to look like. I would be entirely comfortable seeing a teenage girl reading this. It’s a healthy, realistic relationship.
Still, though, I had to force myself to slog through the book. I was bored a lot of the time. I don’t like long descriptive passages of a forest. I don’t like reading about dull politics of various areas of Ireland. I’m not interested in explanations of the other-worldly figures. The most interesting part to me was the mirrors all over the household, and they were not addressed fully to my liking. In spite of being able to recognize this as a well-told story, it failed to draw me in. I don’t particularly know why. My best guess is that it is fantasy, and fantasy has always bored me. I was hoping venturing away from the more typical knights in shining armor and dragons style fantasy would solve the problem, but I was wrong.
Thus, this YA fantasy retelling of Beauty and the Beast is creative and well-done. I recommend it to those who know they enjoy a good fantasy story, but those who do not should probably skip it.
3 out of 5 stars
Source: PaperBackSwap
Book Review: The Call of the Wild by Jack London
Summary:
Buck is a spoiled southern dog enjoying a posh life when one of the family’s servants steals him and sells him away to be a sled dog for the Alaska gold rush. Buck soon goes from an easy life to one of trials and tribulations as the result of humans fawning over a golden metal, but it might not be all bad for him in the wild Alaskan north.
Review:
How did I make it to be 24 years old without having read this American classic? My shame was somewhat alleviated when my dad told me he was in his 20s too when he read it for the first time. Honestly, I can see why this book is talked about so much.
Jack London understands animals. He doesn’t present them as talking to each other the way humans speak, but he does present them as sentient beings with unique personalities and ways of interacting. It’s not easy for them to understand what humans want, and yet humans expect them to figure it out. Of course, London also highlights the wildness at the heart of every tamed animal. That is part of what makes them amazing, beautiful creatures.
I can’t say too much more without spoiling the book. I can say that I rarely cry for a book, but I cried for this one. Animal advocates would do well to simply encourage people to read this book. I have a hard time imagining anyone not sympathizing with animals more after reading it.
Beyond that, London’s writing is vivid, the story complex and engrossing. I highly recommend it to everyone.
5 out of 5 stores
Source: Audiobooks app for the iTouch, iPhone, and iPad
Book Review: American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
Summary:
Patrick Bateman is a 1980s yuppie working a Wall Street job with a dark secret. He doesn’t connect to other people except in the moments he’s torturing and killing them. But is he really a psychopathic murderer or is it all in his head?
Review:
I have a high tolerance for and even a tendency toward graphic violence and sex in novels, so I feel the need to warn my readers that this book was shockingly graphic even to me, and I was unphased by Battle Royale. So take that warning as you will. If you can’t handle graphic violence and sex, this book is definitely not for you. That said, this book pushes those with a high tolerance for such things in their reading out of their comfort zone, which is always an interesting experience.
The book is told from the first person perspective of Patrick Bateman. This is essential for us to see and feel what it is to struggle as him. This, of course, is painfully uncomfortable because we are put in the head of a madman while he violently dismembers and eventually kills multiple people, mainly women. Some people don’t ever want to be in that person’s head. Personally, I feel it is essential to understand what drives some people to be psychopaths and Breat Easton Ellis has a frightening ability to get inside that head. It is chilling to feel that Patrick gets the same sense of release from killing someone as I get from having a glass of wine at the end of the day. Simultaneously, I don’t doubt this at all, because that is what it is to be a psychopath.
Bret Easton Ellis also does an excellent job of depicting Antisocial Personality Disorder. Essentially, people suffering from this disorder are incapable of connecting emotionally or empathizing at all with other human beings. Patrick recognizes this disconnect when he is talking with various people in his life. He suffers significantly from this inability to find any connection with anything but violence.
My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. (Location 8020-8023)
Beyond this, Patrick is completely confused about his world, and he knows it. He is unsure what is reality and what is not. This was one of the first aspects of mental illness to be recognized and seeing it all from the perspective of someone who is suffering from it is eloquent.
My mask of sanity was a victim of impending slippage. (Location 5975-5978)
Of course, beyond the uncomfortable identification with and depiction of someone suffering from one of the most difficult to understand mental illnesses is the depiction of the yuppie environment of the 1980s. What a vain, vapid existence these people lead. Extensive passages feature Patrick delineating every single designer name everyone in the room is wearing. One of the main issues in the week for all of the yuppie characters is getting into what is considered to be the best restaurant that week. Only the “best” alcohol is ordered. Only the “best” food is served, and it is served in such tiny portions that the yuppies are still hungry, yet this is considered to be better than being satiated. Frankly, I found these passages annoying to read, but they are necessary to the book. They show what a shallow, vapid world Patrick is in; one that he feels he cannot escape. These people are so selfish and lacking in empathy in that there is no way in hell they will ever notice anything is wrong with Patrick. It’s a scathing commentary on the yuppie culture.
The only negative from a writing aspect I can say about the book is the random chapters in which Patrick educates us on various musical groups. I honestly have no idea what the point of those are, and I skimmed over them. I definitely think Bret Easton Ellis should have cut them.
Overall, this is definitely a difficult book to read. It’s not comfortable or easy to alternate between identifying with a possible killer and being disgusted by his actions. Feeling sympathy for a killer is not something our society encourages, yet this book makes you feel it. Additionally, the passages depicting the yuppie world are vapid and annoying if for no other reason than because yuppies are vapid and annoying. Those difficulties though are what makes the book work. It takes the reader out of their comfort zone and forces them to confront things that they may not want to confront. Killers are not simply inhuman. They may do inhuman acts, but there are still elements of them that we may identify with. That is the truly scary part of American Psycho.
I highly recommend this book to everyone who thinks they can handle the graphic sex and violence. It will push your boundaries and force you to sympathize with those society depicts to us as the least sympathetic.
4 out of 5 stars
Source: Amazon
Counts For:
Reading Goals for 2011
It’s that time of year again! Time to think about my reading goals for the year. Since reading is pretty much my favorite hobby, I don’t like to limit it too much, but I do like to encourage myself to broaden my horizons and be practical. To that end, let’s first take a glance at my goals from January 2010.
Successful:
- Read one book of poetry. I read Beowulf. Not quite modern poetry, but still counts as poetry. :-)
- Read at least 3 graphic novels/manga. I wound up reading 8 and discovered a new format I love!
Unsuccessful:
- Read the books left over from undergraduate classes. Yes. Um. I only successfully read two of them. There’s still more left than I care to admit…..
- Read more nonfiction. There were only 7 out of 63, and all but one of those were memoirs.
- Control books owned by using Swaptree. Hah! I actually switched to PaperBackSwap, and my TBR pile has become…..daunting.
Goals for 2011:
- Frugality! This may be my favorite hobby, but I can be frugal about it. My TBR pile currently has 69 books on it, and that’s just the physical books. Let’s not even get into the eBooks awaiting me. So. My rule is to really think about my acquisitions before I acquire them and hopefully get the TBR pile back down so it fits on one shelf of my bookshelf.
- Read 100 books. Ok. I got to 70 this year. I think since I’m out of grad school now I should be able to do 100, yes?
- Travel the 7 continents. Since I can’t afford a real vacation, I want to take a virtual one around the world. For the inhabited continents, I want to read something set on that continent written by an inhabitant of the continent. So, no travelogues by old British dudes. Antarctica may be challenging…..but, hey, there are scientific expeditions there, yes? also, for North America, the US is not allowed. It has to be Canada or Mexico.
So, that’s it, but I think they’ll be challenging enough for me! Of course, I’ll also be reading books that count for the Mental Illness Advocacy challenge I’m hosting. :-)
Any special plans for 2011 reading? Advice on keeping the TBR pile more controllable?
Book Review: Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, With Recipes by Elizabeth Bard
Summary:
Elizabeth has always been drawn to museums and the Old World, so when she’s doing her graduate work in London and meets Gwendal, a Frenchman, she jumps right into dating him. Gradually she falls for not just Gwendal, but Paris in general, especially the food. This memoir tells about her falling in love and the process of becoming an expat in France through the lens of food.
Review:
This memoir starts out strong. Who doesn’t enjoy a good real life love story? Paris sounds incredibly romantic and appealing to anyone who enjoys open food markets, museums, and the big city charm of small spaces. Two things held me back from really enjoying the book though.
First, as a vegetarian, I really didn’t appreciate the incredibly long and frequent sections describing eating meat, cooking meat, how awesome meat is, etc… Where Elizabeth describes her future husband, Gwendal, telling her “I love you” for the first time over a piece of bloody meat, I was thoroughly distracted by the poor, dead, bleeding animal. I could not identify with Elizabeth at all in these frequent sections. How can she claim to be a romantic at heart yet have so much of her life revolve around eating innocent creatures? I wound up skimming a lot.
Granted, I know readers who enjoy eating meat themselves won’t be bothered by these passages, but I am fairly certain they’ll be irritated by the change of tone of voice partway through the narrative. From telling us about how lucky she is to be living this life in Paris, Elizabeth suddenly changes into a bit of a pity party. Poor Elizabeth, living in Paris with a man who loves her, cooking food for him every day, giving tours of the Louvre. This isn’t how she imagined her life would work out. Um….ok. I’d suggest Elizabeth try reading some memoirs of true struggles such as The Glass Castle and get back to us.
Overall, the scenes of real Paris life are interesting and enjoyable, but the frequent scenes featuring bloody meat and Elizabeth’s pity party really detract from the book. If you are a meat eater yourself and a foodie, you’ll probably enjoy this memoir anyway. I’d advise others to stay away.
3 out of 5 stars
Source: Amazon
Book Review: Alien Tango by Gini Koch (Series, #2)
Summary:
Kitty Katt only learned about the existence of aliens on Earth five short months ago. Incredibly hot aliens who wear Armani as a uniform and can run at hyperspeed. Now she’s the head of a special American government division working with the A-Cs to keep Earth safe from the extra-terrestrial threat of superbugs. Plus she has a hot A-C boyfriend, Jeff, who gives her the best sex of her life. Their new routine gets interrupted though when the team gets sent to Florida on a routine mission that quickly turns abnormal. Can the team figure out the threat at Kennedy Space Center? Just as important, will Jeff’s family accept that he’s dating a human?
Review:
I actually received a Kindle copy of this book for free as part of its promotion, so I was unaware that it’s the second book in a series until I was a couple of chapters in. Thankfully, the paranormal romance genre tends to take a few moments to remind the reader of what’s going on in the plot, so I wasn’t lost for too long.
Kitty Katt is the ideal paranormal romance heroine. She’s simultaneously strong and girly. She can kick major ass but also just wants to be held when the action is all over. Best of all, her wit and snark line up exactly with mine. I found her hilarious and would love to be her best friend. Or be her. In any case, she is 100% not annoying, which is not easy to pull off in the paranormal romance world. I want to visit Kitty again and again, which is kind of the point of paranormal romance series, yes? I kind of think of them as modern day serial stories.
I also really enjoy the alien angle. I fully admit I rolled my eyes at the fact that the aliens only wear Armani, but in that “this world is ridiculous but I love it” way, not in the annoyed way. The aliens tend to either be imageers or empaths. I’m a bit unclear as to what the imageers can do. I think that’s because I missed the first book. Kitty’s boyfriend, however, is an empath, which means he almost always knows what emotion she’s feeling. Talk about your dream guy. It’s a fun new angle as opposed to the over-done vampires and shapeshifters.
The plot is full of action and sex. It’s fast-paced with always one or the other going on. The sex scenes are believable, in spite of the alien factor, and very modern. Kitty is a gal who understands how things work in the bedroom but is also able to shoot a gun and outwit terrorists. The combination of well-written modern day sex scenes and exciting action sequences make for an intensely enjoyable read.
Overall, Alien Tango is the ideal paranormal romance. It puts something new into the mix–aliens–and features a heroine who is strong, modern, yet still retains some of her femininity. I highly recommend this series to all who enjoy a good paranormal romance and also to lovers of scifi who won’t mind some hot sex scenes tossed in.
5 out of 5 stars
Source: Amazon
Previous Books in Series:
Touched by an Alien
Book Review: Arizona Free by Doug Martin
Summary:
Three white collar schmucks sign up for a classic pyramid scheme selling energy drinks known as DINAmite. Gradually, they start noticing disturbing changes in the consumers of the energy drinks and find themselves pulled into the world of a nefarious plot to change humanity as we know it.
Review:
Not in years have I read a book I disliked this much. I generally try to find at least one redeeming quality when reviewing a book, remembering that not everyone likes what I enjoy, but honestly. This book is terrible, and I have zero idea how it managed to get published in the first place. The publisher’s website doesn’t give very much information on how and why they choose books to publish, so no answers to that particular question were found there. Anyway. On to why this is the first book ever to receive one star here on Opinions of a Wolf.
First, there’s the writing. I felt like I had landed back in beginner’s creative writing in high school and had been assigned the worst writer’s short story to critique. It abounds with showing, not telling. The dialogue is painfully fake sounding. Most of the characters are completely unmemorable, and the few that managed to put some image into my brain were simply charicatures lacking any dimensions at all.
I’ve read books before that struggled with sophomoric writing but that at least showed potential through a strong, uniquely imagined plot. There is none of that here. The plot changes its mind so many times throughout that I honestly have no idea what actually happened in the end. I’m completely baffled. You can’t throw that many surprises at a reader without offering some modicum of explanation or elaboration. The characters are simply straight up told “This is happening now,” and they go along with it.
Of course writing and plot are the core of what makes a good book, so it’s bad enough this book fails on both of those already, but it’s topped off with a nice icing of homophobia and womanizing. The characters and the narrator repeatedly make slams against gay people. One of the characters, Catherine, plays tennis with a lesbian, who yet again is a characature who speaks in the most fake Russian accent ever. This lesbian tennis player is interested in Catherine, and this of course grosses out everyone in the story, including Catherine. Also, the lesbian is turned into a hulk-like villain, complete with horns. I was so disgusted by the homophobia that I almost stopped reading the book, but I refuse to write reviews of books I didn’t finish, and frankly, I wanted a bad review of this homophobic piece of trash out there.
Bottom line, I can’t recommend it to anyone. It’s completely made up of bad writing, terrible plot structure, and rampant homophobia.
1 out of 5 stars
Source: Free copy via LibraryThing‘s EarlyReviewers program
Book Review: Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins
Summary:
Anna Oliphant’s dad totally sold out and started writing crappy books that for some reason became incredibly popular. Now he’s insisting that she spend her senior year at a boarding school–School of America in Paris. Anna knows she should be enjoying her year abroad, after all, it is Paris! But she can’t help but miss her friends and family at home. She slowly starts to find her own new circle of friends and discover the wonderful things in Paris…..and to realize that she may be falling for one of her friends. A boy who is decidedly off-limits for multiple reasons.
Review:
Perkins takes a typical YA storyline–teenage girl sent away to boarding school, complete with teen angst–and puts just the right amount of her own twists and flavors in it to make for a delightful, unique read. I enjoyed this as an adult, but I’m sure 15 year old me would have been in love with it, re-reading it, and sighing over the main interest St. Clair.
The setting of Paris is delightful. Perkins captures the binary of excitement and trepidation at being in another country for the first time enough so that Anna is realistic but not annoying. Similarly, all of the characters act like actual human beings. They are neither perfect nor evil. They are simply doing their best to figure out how to function in the world. I appreciated this, and I’d imagine teen readers would too. Similarly, Perkins describes Paris in such a way that I wanted to move there instantaneously myself if for no other reason than the descriptions of the bread and eating meals in cemeteries. This is what it should be to be young. Angst combined with first-time glorious experiences.
Perkins manages to be both subtly funny:
“Huh?” I have such a way with words. I should write epic poetry or jingles for cat food commercials. (Location 1054-1058)
And perfectly capture what it is to be an adolescent female:
It makes me dizzy. It smells like freshly scrubbed boy. It smells like him. (Location 3100-3104
This is what an ideal YA book should be. Realistic about what young people face, but also about who young people are. Holding out hope that they can become good people, and they can learn and grow and overcome their mistakes. I highly recommend it to teen girls, as well as to adult women who still enjoy YA.
5 out of 5 stars
Source: Amazon
Book Review: To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis
Summary:
Ned Henry is a time-traveling historian at Oxford, who has unfortunately been assigned to Lady Shrapnell’s quest to recreate an historic church. For the last…god knows how long, he’s been searching for the bishop’s bird stump in the 1940s. He finds himself suffering from time-lag and is promised a vacation in Victorian England where Lady Shrapnell can’t find him. Of course, the Oxford historians need him to take care of one teeny tiny little incongruity caused by fellow time-traveling historian, Verity, who just so happens to be as beautiful as a naiad. Of course, that could just be the time-lag talking.
Review:
Wow. Wow. I literally hugged this book multiple times as I was reading it. I love it that much. You know that old Looney Tunes cartoon with the abominable snowman who finds Bugs Bunny and then scoops him up and rocks him saying, “I will hug him and love him and squeeze him and call him George” ? If I was the abominable snowman, this book would be my Bugs Bunny.
It is incredibly witty in that highly intelligent manner that expects you to be educated to get the joke. Multiple references to classic literature, historic events, and more tossed around as quips and comparisons to events characters are currently going through. It also features the put-upon hero, Ned, who maintains a good sense of humor about the whole thing in that lovely self-deprecating way that makes me wish the character could pop out of the book and be my best friend.
Additionally, I love history as long-time readers of this blog know. History was one of my two majors in university. I was the 7 year old girl who sat around watching war movies and PBS documentaries. I also love scifi. Hence, the entire concept of time-travel is one of my all-time favorite things, and Willis handles it so intelligently and beautifully! I love that time travel is something only the academics do since everyone else finds it dull once it’s discovered they can’t loot from the past. It makes so much sense! I love the implication that non-academics are quite happy with shopping malls while Ned and Verity go traipsing around through the past navigating a world distantly related to our own. One of my favorite moments is when Ned discovers that Victorians actually used exclamations like “pshaw” that are found in Victorian novels. It’s a historian’s dream come true!
Finally, a significant portion of the storyline revolves around cats. Adding an extra layer of awesome to this is the fact that cats are extinct in the future, so Ned has never encountered one before. He makes the initial mistake of thinking cats are like dogs. Any cat lovers, I’m sure, can envision the hilarity that ensues from this little thought process. Also, seriously, Willis clearly understands animals perfectly. The mannerisms of the cats and the bull dog, Cyril, are written to a T.
Put together humor, time travel, history, and animals, and this is the perfect read. If you enjoy any one of those things, but definitely if you enjoy more than one of them, you absolutely must give this book a chance. I haven’t loved a book this much in years, and I just….I just want to spread the love. I also want to go re-read it right now.
5 out of 5 stars
Source: PaperBackSwap
Book Review: How To Be An American Housewife by Margaret Dilloway
Summary:
Shoko dealt with the consequences of her decision to acquiesce to her father’s wishes and marry an occupying American soldier and return with him to America in the 1940s. She did her best to hold onto the best parts of being a Japanese woman and meet the expectations of being an American housewife. But now she is sick from an enlarged heart, possibly the result of radiation from the bombs dropped on Nagasaki, and the consequences of her multiple decisions made in the war and occupation years are coming back to haunt her. Although her relationship with her biracial daughter, Suiko, is strained, Suiko still does her best to assist her mother, and in the process, learns something about herself.
Review:
I came into this book expecting it to be your typical book about an immigrant adapting herself to the surrounding culture. That’s really not what this book is about, and that actually is a good thing. It subtly addresses how complex not only family can be but inter-cultural relations as well. The world no longer consists of the simple, straight-forward rules that Shoko grew up with. Since the world is a smaller place, the concepts of what one should or should not do slowly change throughout her life.
Of course, I find everything about Japan completely fascinating, so I enjoyed getting to see it not only through Shoko’s eyes, but through her daughter Suiko’s as well. Japan truly has changed drastically in the last 70 or so years, and showing the difference in experience simply from Grandmother Shoko to graddaughter Helena is astounding. Often in America we only think about how our own nation has changed, but this is true for others as well. Reading about it is a mind-broadening experience.
Dilloway also handles the delicate situation of dealing not only with your parents’ immortality but also their fallibility and essential humanness in a gentle manner. It is there, but it is not preachy. It simply reflects the experience of realizing as an adult that your parents are people too, and they’ve had their own life experiences that they regret or have dealt with in their own way.
Still, although I found the story enjoyable to read, it fell short of being deeply moving or memorable. It felt as if it ended too soon, or we didn’t find out enough about everyone’s stories. In particular although I understood and felt for Shoko at the beginning of the story, by the end I felt distanced from her, wheras I was still rooting for Suiko. I think some of the choices Dilloway made for Shoko did not fit with the tone of the rest of the story.
Overall, I recommend this enjoyable read to fans of contemporary or historical realistic fiction with themes of inter-generational and inter-cultural conflicts.
4 out of 5 stars
Source: Amazon
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Opinions of a Wolf 