Novels Now

Wayfarer by R.J. Anderson
Faery Realms, #2

Pages: 296
Ages: 12+
First Published: June 22, 2010
Publisher: Harper Teen

Rating: 5/5

First sentence:

The Queen is dying.

Acquired: Received a review copy from Harper Collins Canada.

Reason for Reading: Next in the series.

Wayfarer continues the story started in Spell Hunter (Knife UK). The publisher has upgraded the recommended age range to YA which I find more appropriate, though this book is tamer than the first. The story however, if very detailed and intricate.

The entire cast of book 1 returns, including Knife and Paul but this time the main characters are Linden and Paul’s nephew, Timothy. Now that the Queen is on her deathbed it is time to find the other faeries and see if the Oakenfolk can get their magic restored to them so they may survive as a people. The Queen transfers half her magic to Valerian, her chosen successor as Queen, and the other half to Linden, the chosen one to undertake the journey. At 15, Linden is not expected to leave until she has matured a bit and learnt to master her new magic but when she sees that Timothy is running away she grabs her opportunity to travel quickly by hiding in his backpack. What she finds out about the rest of faerydom in England sends terror through her heart, an evil so horrific it threatens both faeries and humans. Linden and Timothy are sent on a quest to the western most tip of Wales to find a group of faeries only known to exist through ancient human folklore.

This book is even better than the first one! The plot has become much more intricate and involved with several layers to it. There is of course the main peril to contend with but there are also side stories involving a few separate characters here and there. The main plot is wonderfully entertaining, fast-paced and a unique take on the faery realm. It is also a story of personal values and beliefs. The Oakenfolk have a high code of honour and Linden is placed in a world of temptation when she enters the human domain. Her values often seem weak and small when compared with the corruption going on around her. Timothy himself is a “missionary kid” who since coming to England for schooling six months ago now questions the faith he grew up with and has become somewhat bitter toward it. He experiences a personal journey of Faith as he questions the hypocrisy he finds in some Christians and experiences the true love he finds in others as well as starting to acknowledge the work of God in his own life. Another thing I really liked was the dynamics between Linden and Timothy because they were not romantically involved at all. They became great friends and both are great characters. Linden puts on an act of bravery but is really very scared deep inside, though she is a completely honourable person. Timothy is a character who is not very likable at first, but grows and develops as a person as the book progresses. A fine story of personal Faith journey, Welsh folklore and faery magic.

A Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell

Random House, 2010

Historical Fiction, 479 Pages

Set on the Island of f Dejima in Japan in the early 19th century, Jacob De Zoet was trying to make a name for himself. Jacob has come all the way from Holland as a young clerk in the hopes of making his fortune. The plan was to go back to Holland to his fiancée and marry her with the approval of her wealthy father.

Neil Young’s Greendale by Joshua Dysart. illustrated by Cliff Chiang. foreward by Neil Young

Pages: 160
Ages: 18+
First Published: June 15, 2010
Publisher: Vertigo
Rating: 3/5

First sentence:

On a warm spring day way back in 1985, two precious children were born to Edith O’Reilly and Earl Green.

Acquired: Borrowed a copy from my local library.

Reason for Reading: Long-winded reason follows. (LOL) When I heard that this graphic novel was based on an album I though that was so cool and I suddenly had imaginations of what could come next, the graphic versions of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”, Queen’s “News of the World”, Meatloaf’s “Bat Out of Hell”. It is an awesome concept. Now I don’t like Neil Young as a singer {sorry} and have never heard of this album but was so intrigued with the concept and thought “Neil Young is Canadian so the book would qualify for the Canadian Book Challenge”; I might as well read it.

So here we have the Green Family going back to a great-grandmother living in the town of Greendale, America, population 20 to 25,000. When Sun Green (the main character) was born her twin Luna died in infancy. She is now a 17 year old teen. Her great-aunt Ciela Oaks married both Green brothers, leaving one for the other and eventually one day simply disappeared into the Botanical Gardens forever. Her daughter, Sea Green, also disappeared one day as a teen into the forest never to return. Now Sun is feeling strange, thinking of the past Green women and being followed by a man who obviously represents Satan. Bad things happen. Strange things happen.

Sun becomes an activist. An anti-war, anti-meat, anti-hunting, anti-big electricity companies, anti-oil drilling left-wing mouthy irritant. At this point, I know this book is not for me. I quickly started skipping over all the bubbles full of the political ranting, which was a large portion of text. Honestly the whole political part of the book could have been removed and it wouldn’t have made any difference to the story as the book really doesn’t go anywhere. The two plots, the girl’s political coming of age and the mysterious hippie, nature, environmentalist magical element of the Green woman and the fate of the Green women just kind of flop and end abruptly. And so will my review. Weird and so not my kind of story.

Live to Tell by Lisa Gardner

Detective D.D. Warren, book 4

Pages: 385 pages
First Published: June 13, 2010
Publisher: Bantam Books

Rating: 4.5/5

First sentence:

I don’t remember than night much anymore.

Acquired: Received a review copy from Random House Canada.

Reason for Reading: I’m a fan of the author and had read the previous book in the series.

This book had me from the beginning as it dealt with some of my favourite topics, mental health and psychiatric wards. Plus it was back to my favourite kind of thriller, that of the serial killer though this time with a twist: a mass murderer serial killer.

D.D. Warren is a great female character who can carry a book on her own. This time her partner Phil has a shadow, Alex, a former agent who has been a Professor at the Academy for years. D.D. compares Alex to George Clooney and he soon becomes her shadow and main partner throughout the crime solving. We start off by meeting a handful of severely disturbed children, mostly through abuse, who are living on an acute psychiatric ward. We also meet an 8yo boy who is also suffering from a multitude of psychiatric disorders and diagnoses and ultimately he is at risk of harming others but his mother has decided to take full responsibility for his care. This ultimately lead to her husband leaving her and taking their daughter with him for safety’s sake.

Warren’s case opens when a family is found murdered in their home. It looks like the father killed the kids, mother and then shot himself but then they realize it may be a murder case. Then another family is killed in their home. This time the father has obviously been posed to look as if he killed himself after murdering the family. Who killed these families? They seem to have absolutely no connections whatsoever so how could they possibly be related? Are they? For nurse Danielle this becomes all so real as it brings back the 25yo memory of the night her father shot and killed her mother and two siblings but left her as the lone survivor, on purpose.

As I said, I love D.D. as a character but I do think it a shame that the author has to write her as someone so obsessed with s*x. As a single women, D.D.’s constant inside chatter and vocal lamentations of when she will ever get *it* again are rather disturbing and unnecessary to this reader. But thankfully readers are not privy to anything more real.

Another fabulous read from Gardner. A page-turner and exciting. I had my eye on the wrong person for most of the book, which is always fun for me when I don’t figure it out right away. The reveal wasn’t terribly surprising in the end but the driving force and motive of the killer was a real shocker and well done. An incredibly engrossing story that not only thrilled but was fascinating with details on how children abused beyond the point of psychological return can be treated, cared for and most of all shown love.

Ice Cold by Tess Gerritsen
Rizzoli & Isles, book 8

Pages: 322
First Published: June 29, 2010
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Rating: 5/5

First sentence:

She was the chosen one.

Acquired: Received a review copy from Random House Canada.

Reason for Reading: Next in the series.

Tess Gerritsen consistently writes a series that aims to please her fans. Ice Cold is no exception. Placing her main characters in a new location freshens things up a bit and Gerritsen has given us an exciting new plot. This was a page turner for me and one of my favourites in the series.

Maura goes away to a medical convention where she meets an old friend from college and skips out early to join him and his friends for a short ski trip before they all must fly home. They get lost on a remote road, stranded in a blizzard and end up in an abandoned village called Kingdom Come where it appears that everyone has simply vanished in the middle of making/having dinner. Later Rizzoli receives news that Maura’s charred remains have been found at the bottom of a cliff in an SUV in the mountains. Full of grief, one thing does not sit right with Jane about the accident so she goes out to see for herself where it happened and she and Gabriel are lead into a world of revelations about Maura and other events that have been happening in the area.

It was great to have Gabriel back as a main character, since he’s been left out of the last couple of books. Jane was great in this book! She is such a great character. Maura on the other hand I’ve never particularly liked, but at least she didn’t spend this whole book moping about her stupid choice of relationship. Mope and whine she did, but she was pretty busy with her part in the plot. The plot is something has been done a lot lately in other books, but it was a new type of adventure for Rizzoli and Isles. The ending has a double twist and I loved how it finally turned out. Another great entry in Gerritsen’s series, that was exciting, page-turning and one of those can’t-put-it-down books! Looking forward to next summer’s book Ms. Gerritsen!

Confessions of a Prairie Bitch: How I survived Nellie Oleson and Learned to Love Being Hated by Alison Arngrim

Pages: 300 pages
First Published: June 15, 2010
Publisher: IT Books
Rating: 5/5

First sentence:

I always envy people whose detailed memories extend back to the womb.

Acquired: Received a review copy from Harper Collins Canada.

Reason for Reading: I’m a big fan of LHOTP. I read Melissa Gilbert’s memoir and was anxious to find out more and very excited when I saw Alison had a book out.

Alison Arngrim’s narrative is a pleasure to read. Just by reading the title we get a glimpse of what kind of attitude we can expect to find inside the covers. Arngrim is also a stand-up comedienne and with that knowledge it explains the easy going narrative style full of humour that made this book such a fun read.

Alison starts by telling of her childhood, brought up in an unconventional family, and of her s*xual abuse by her older brother. The meat of the book, though, concerns her life growing up on the Prairie and she provides fans with what was so sadly lacking in Melissa Gilbert’s book. We get a behind the scenes look at the filming and the actors. Alison is funny and no holds barred without being catty or dishing dirt. Yes, she tells what people were really like, if they were generally not liked she says so. She has many funny and sometimes just strange anecdotes to relate about the seven years she played Nellie Oleson. I really appreciated her tone. She talked about every major character on the show, all the children, and the adults that Nellie would typically have scenes with. So unfortunately Mr. Edwards, one of my favourites, was only mentioned briefly in passing. I was thrilled that Alison spoke of Jonathan Gilbert frequently and so fondly since Melissa had reduced him to a few sentences in the middle of her book. Melissa Sue Anderson gets the short end of the stick as worst personality on the show. Mary was always my favourite and I was startled that Melissa mentioned her in passing only three times in her book. Alison refers to her many more times and while never being mean or nasty does relate many instances which let us know why she was not fond of her and she outs Gilbert’s opinions of her as well. I would love Melissa Sue’s view of this but apparently her book doesn’t address any of this and is getting bad reviews so I’m not sure if I’ll read it or not, at this point. The Little House cast were Arngrim’s family and when she left the show she felt a real sense of loss without them in her day-to-day life. She and Melissa Gilbert became great friends on the show and remain so to this day.

The memoir then ends up with Alison’s life after the Prairie. Going on to her activism for AIDS, her two marriages (the second which has been successful) and her determined and relentless campaign on changing the laws on incest which at the time gave those perpetrators a loophole of not having to do any prison time. This involved her having to go public with her abuse on the Larry King show in 2004.

A very satisfying read. I always have a nonfiction book on the go and usually read a chapter, perhaps two, at night before settling in to read my current novel. But Confessions was written in such an easy, fun, narrative style that I couldn’t put it down after two chapters and read it as quickly as a novel. A great insider’s peek behind the scenes of the filming and especially the personalities who made up The Little House on the Prairie.

The Nobodies Album by Carolyn Parkhurst
Doubleday, 2010
Fiction; 320 pgs

For more information about the author and her books, visit her website.

Source: Received book through BookBrowse First Impressions Program.

Broken by Karin Slaughter
Grant County, Book 7

Pages: 402 pages
First Published: Jun. 22, 2010
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Rating: 3/5

First sentence:

Allison Spooner wanted to leave town for the holiday, but there was nowhere to go.

Reason for Reading: I read the author’s newest book every year.

After an anonymous tip, police find an apparent suicide weighted down in the local lake. It doesn’t take long before the suicide is proven to be a murder and when police go back to her house they find a masked man inside who flees, seriously stabbing an officer before he is caught. The man turns out to be a 19-year-old mentally challenged local whom everyone knows to be a gentle soul. Sarah Linton is in town visiting her family for Thanksgiving, the first time back since the death of her husband. She becomes involved when the 19-year-old begs to see her as she used to be his doctor. Special Agent Will Trent is called in to the case and works with Lena Adams, knowing something is going on at the police station that someone is covering up, while Sarah is bound and determined to prove that it is Lena who has screwed up once again and this time she’ll make sure she pays for it.

This is not a serial killer mystery, but the number of bodies does pile up a bit and the reason behind the murders is a reveal as much as who the killer is. Slaughter keeps the identity of who the killer is closely guarded, not giving many clues, which could annoy some readers. I was able to figure out the killer’s profession but couldn’t for the life of me remember having met such a character, so while I didn’t completely solve it I wasn’t surprised when it was finally revealed but I realized how difficult it would have been to have figured it out before the reveal.

It’s a good mystery. I read the book over two days. It was not a page-turner but Karin Slaughter at her worst would still be a good read. The killings were interesting, though not Slaughter’s best work. A good story and worth the read.

My problems come in with the characters. Slaughter’s books are so character driven. If one has read all her Grant County and Will Trent books to date, one knows there is a whole personal history behind each and every one of the fixed characters. It was obvious in the last book that there is an attraction between Will and Sarah, I’m not impressed with that, and it continues on in this book. I don’t particularly like Sarah as a character, never have, right from the beginning I’ve always preferred Lena Adams. Lena Adams as a character has grown tremendously, especially in this book, and yet it feels like she has been put out to pasture. As it also feels like this is the last Grant County book as there is no one left to write about. I somehow find it doubtful, but I do hope the author considers continuing to write about Lena Adams. Perhaps her move is not an ending but a new beginning. I can only hope, as we see what Slaughter has in store for us readers in the future.

The Passage by Justin Cronin

Pages: 766 pgs (ARE)

First Published: Jun. 8, 2010

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Rating: 4.5/5

First sentence:

Before she became the Girl from Nowhere - the One Who Walked In, the First and Last and Only, who lived a thousand years - she was just a little girl in Iowa, named Amy.

Reason for Reading: As soon as I heard of this book, which was before any of the buzz or hype had started, I knew I had to read it as I love apocalyptic novels and this had all the ingredients that made it sound like a book I had to read.

First, all the buzz, the hype, the comparisons to classics in this genre and the talk about this book is true. I fell into this door stopper tome and became hypnotized by the world I had entered. I can’t remember the last time I carted an almost 800 page book to the beach with me! But once I had started reading, I was trapped and could only stop reading for the very essentials of life. I have not read Justin Cronin before but this is an author who can write and I will be checking out his two previous works.

Essentially, this is the story of a girl who saves the world. The plot is so complex it is almost impossible to give a summary without writing pages but I’ll try. A hideous scientific experiment goes terribly wrong and a virus is exposed in the United States. It eventually destroys modern civilization on the North American continent (the fate of the world is unknown), leaving behind scattered groups of survivors and horrible infected persons who have been turned into something no longer human. Because of their lust for blood and some of their habits such as death by exposure to light the media, in the early days referred to them as vampires and occasionally to the virus as the “vamp virus”. However, throughout the book various groups have different names for the infected ones, most commonly called virals, and while some names such as “dracs” refer to vampires, everyone knows these are people who have been infected with a virus. In my humble opinion, this is not a vampire book.

One of the survivors is a little girl who was also experimented on, the last one. She turned out different though, she appears perfectly normal and a CIA agent rescues her where they then flee to the mountains and live a reclusive life. A hundred years go by and now commences the majority of the book. How life is being lead now with the remains of civilization around the new societies, living in a world where nighttime is to be avoided, using sources such as batteries but having no replacements once they are gone. This life can only last so long and one day into it walks a girl. A strange girl, who may hold the fate of humankind in her hands.

I just love this book so much!! There are so many characters and all are so deftly created to be complete, complex human beings. The world Cronin has created is amazingly real and is one that is completely believable of a post-apocalyptic society. His characters deal with real issues such as brotherly tensions, falling in love when it is not reciprocated and when it is, overcoming personal fears, and personal growth. The Passage is a journey in many ways. A physical one across land, one of growth personally for each character and a spiritual one as deep questions are raised and realized.

My only problem with the book is that nowhere in the book’s description does it tell me that this is the first in a proposed trilogy. It took a little googling to find that out. So the ending is an ending but it is also a beginning and while I look forward to continuing with the story in the future I was a little miffed at first that the seven hundred odd pages wasn’t going to give me a finite ending. My final word, though, is if you like post-apocalyptic books this is a Must Read as it will no doubt go on to become a classic.

Captivity by Deborah Noyes

Pages: 352 pages
First Published: Jun. 1, 2010
Publisher: Unbridled Books
Rating: 3.5/5

First sentence:

A bell is tolling for me, Clara thinks, awakened in her chair by the wind.

Reason for Reading: The Victorian era is my favourite time period to read about and I always find the Spiritualist movement fascinating, in that famous, intelligent people were some of the most hardy believers.

Set in the 1830s to 1850, this is a tale of two stories. First is based on the true life story of The Fox Sisters who could talk to the dead through rappings and virtually were the beginning of the entire Spiritualist movement. Secondly, is the story of Clara, 40 or close to, spinster who lives with her aging father. She has made herself reclusive for many years after the scandalous ending to a short but passionate affair of the heart. The main character from each story eventually meet but the point of view continues to switch back and forth from one person’s tale to the other’s.

I had a hard time getting into this one. I struggled through the first hundred pages not because they were hard to read but because I found the Fox sisters devoid of character. There are three of them. Alice, the youngest, starts out as a main character but eventually drifts to the background and is not ever given any personality for the reader to hold any opinion of her whatsoever. Alice is replaced by the eldest sister, Leah, who is the stereotypical mean, bossy, all business older sister and while we are given an outline of who she is, that is all the reader has to go by and no personality shows through that one doesn’t feel for her either good or bad. The sister who is given the protagonist’s part is middle sister, Maggie, and it takes an awful long time for her character’s development to attain the point of having her own personality. Thus making those first pages hard for me to get through.

On the other hand, I was taken with Clara’s story right away. She is a woman “of certain age” whose father, after many years of it being just the two of them, has started to bring round a widow who is obviously insinuating herself into her father’s graces and trying to interfere in Clara’s solitary, reclusive lifestyle. Clara goes back to the 1830s and slowly tells the story of her first (and only) love, the terrible tragedy and why she has ended up stowed away in her own room for so many years. This is what kept me reading for those first hundred pages.

Clara’s story eventually meets the present and Maggie and Clara meet. At this point the two stories are still told separately but the characters from each story now overlap. It is also at this point the pace picked up for me. Maggie became an interesting person with depth. Not until the end of the story do we get to see the inside workings of Maggie’s seances but we see the drain they have on her and both her feelings of pleasure and pressure at having to perform.

Ultimately though, this is a story of unrequited love and bitterness. Clara has three spinster aunt’s who try desperately to marry her off, while she has no interest. Then once her affair of the heart has broken her they become nasty and mean-hearted to Clara for she had what they never did. Maggie also finds herself a man who is devoted to her but he is a gentleman and he wants her to choose between her scandalous lifestyle and him. Then there is Leah, in the background, who always has a different husband. These women think they need a man (or needed a specific man) to set them free but they all hold themselves captive by there own doings. A man’s love will not set them free. They must set themselves free first, then they will be at liberty to love.

The second half of the book was really good, kept me turning the pages and I’m glad to have read the book. An interesting look inside one of the more unusual fads of the Victorian era.