Ordinary Day

Note: This is a late review from my 2010 book log, posting as I’m trying to get caught up. The 2011 book log will commence once the 2010 reviews are up to date!

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There is a distinct level of irony in reading a book about a girl whose profession is “restorer of old books” in ebook form. And in some ways, the dichotomy of this–of reading a book about an old profession via very modern means–carried over into my reaction to the plot. Not entirely positively, either.

Our heroine, Brooklyn Wainwright, inadvertantly stumbles across the murder of her mentor, and as a result is drafted in his stead to restore a rare and supposedly cursed copy of Faust as the showpiece of a family collection. But she’s also suspected of both murder and theft, and repeatedly runs afoul of a dour security agent hired to investigate the goings-on.

Toss in the obligatory Colorful Family, and you’ve got decent makings for a fluffy but entertaining cozy mystery. Problem for me was, Brooklyn for me as a heroine oftentimes fell kind of flat. My main beef with her was the repeated scenes of snark between her and her nemesis, Minka LaBoeuf; most of the snark was unfortunately merely petty rather than actively witty, and the situation wasn’t helped much by Minka not serving a plot function above and beyond “being there for Brooklyn to be snarky at”. She’s regularly described in spitefully unflattering terms, up to and including digs at her weight. This wasn’t cool, and rather than accomplishing the goal of having me feel snarky to her because Brooklyn was, it instead made me feel sorry at Minka and annoyed that narrative space was being wasted having Brooklyn pettily snark at her.

This really though was my only real problem with the book. Brooklyn does have an entertaining family, and once Dour British Security Guy actually unwinds enough to start being a real character, he’s fun too. The latter third of the book is the best, even given a brief and unnecessary diversion into “cozy paranormal” territory rather than just “cozy”. Two and a half stars, though for Goodreads review purposes I’ll go ahead and round up to three.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

Note: This is a late review from my 2010 book log, posting as I’m trying to get caught up. The 2011 book log will commence once the 2010 reviews are up to date!

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The third of Elizabeth Lowell’s Donovan books, Pearl Cove, is perhaps one of the earliest Lowells that levels up a bit for me in general quality of plot and character development. It’s still formulaic–I haven’t met a Lowell suspense novel that isn’t, even if it’s a formula I happen to enjoy. But this one at least does a better job than others.

This time around we have the focus on Archer Donovan, the oldest of the Donovan brothers and the one who’s generally in charge of everything the younger generation of the family does. He’s a former international operative, with the obligatory unspecific hints about Awful Things He Did When He Was Younger, and he’s got the suitably jaded outlook on life to go with it. And, unsurprisingly, a portion of his Awful Background(TM) is plot-relevant, for it turns out he’s got sordid backstory with his illegitimate half-brother–a bitter, crippled man named Len McGarry. Who, it turns out, has just died under mysterious circumstances. And Archer learns this from Len’s widow Hannah–who, it turns out, is the obligatory Only Woman Archer Has Ever Loved(TM).

Naturally, Archer must hightail it down to Australia to help Hannah find out who murdered her husband, and what happened to the priceless necklace of black pearls he’d been assembling.

I quite enjoyed the “solve the murder mystery” aspect of this story, and the chemistry between Archer and Hannah was suitably edgy and compelling, even given the gyrations Hannah’s backstory goes through to get her into a position of being a widow yet still more or less sexually innocent. The only part of their interaction I didn’t enjoy was the Big Misunderstanding trope rearing its head, since a good chunk of Hannah’s early interactions with Archer are her assuming that he’s just as much of an asshole as her dead husband was, without any particular justification at all. Once they get past the Big Misunderstanding, though, it’s fun to see the Donovans reacting to their brother finally being in love, and all of them coming together to help him and Hannah ultimately solve the crime. Three stars.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

Note: This is a late review from my 2010 book log, posting as I’m trying to get caught up. The 2011 book log will commence once the 2010 reviews are up to date!

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The second of Elizabeth Lowell’s Donovans series, Jade Island, continues the adventures of the jewel-loving Donovan family. This time around the camera’s on brother Kyle, the brother who’d gone missing in Amber Beach and who now gets his own time in the spotlight. He’s being eyed by the powerful Tang family as their way in to doing business with the Donovans–and the Tangs intend to have their unacknowledged relation Lianne Blakely try to seduce Kyle to get their in to the Donovans assured. Meanwhile, Kyle’s older brother Archer is sure Lianne must be involved with stolen jade, so he wants Kyle to put the moves on Lianne.

That our female lead Lianne is half-Chinese and driven by the desire to be accepted by the Tang family is simultaneously one of the best and one of the most disappointing things about the story: best since Lianne’s a nice change of pace from the standard whitebread heroine, disappointing because Lowell played up the “look how awesome the (American) Donovan family is compared to the (Chinese) Tang family and Lianne would be much better off marrying into the Donovans, wouldn’t she?” angle way too hard. There is some decent mileage with Lianne’s conflicted relationship with her parents as well as her grandfather, and that gives her some obvious reasons to want to be accepted by the Tangs. But it would have been nice to see some other positive aspects of the family, just to let us see that they weren’t all assholes.

But hey. As it stands, for what it is, Jade Island‘s a decent enough read, even if it’s on the fluffy side of romantic suspense. Three stars.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

Note: This is a late review from my 2010 book log, posting as I’m trying to get caught up. The 2011 book log will commence once the 2010 reviews are up to date!

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Say you’re a big fan of steampunk. Say also that you think the world needs more queer short fiction–and in particular, F/F. If both of these apply to you, you absolutely need to check out Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories, a forthcoming anthology from Torquere Books. Editor upstart_crow (JoSelle Vanderhooft) kindly sent me an ARC of this antho, and I can happily say it was one of the more unusual anthologies I’ve read, not only because of the lesbian aspect but also because of the sheer diversity of stories and the emphasis on non-European and non-American cultures when possible.

Hands down, my favorite story in the whole thing was N.K. Jemisin’s “The Effluent Engine”. Fantasy fans may recognize that name from The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, which got a whole lot of favorable buzz; now that I’ve finally read something by this author, I can see why. I very much enjoyed her story, thanks to my ideal level of romance (i.e., it’s an aspect of the story but not the dominant point of the plot), the intrigue (a female spy in New Orleans is looking for hotly sought secrets of clean methane production, because whoever gets hold of that gets airship superiority), and the emphasis on Haiti. The heroine of this story is Haitian, and it’s just after the revolution in that country–so not only do you get a lesbian romance, it’s multi-racial and multi-cultural as well.

“Brilliant”, by Georgina Bruce, mostly worked for me as a character study–although again, we have an emphasis on non-European culture, as there are references to the “Egyptian Empire”, and the title character of the story is the daughter of the Nigerian ambassador to Cairo. Nice.

D.L. MacInnes’ “Owl Song” was a bittersweet one, which I didn’t entirely enjoy. And yet, the ending of it was haunting and powerful.

“Where the Ocean Meets the Sky” by Sara M. Harvey somewhat contrasted for me with Jemisin’s story, since there’s more emphasis here on the sexual attraction between the two main characters and not quite as much on the actual plot. But that said, I quite enjoyed that the plot featured a colorful character from San Francisco history, Emperor Joshua Norton I.

Beth Wodzinski’s “Suffer Water” gets points for a nice little blend of Old West, nanotech done steampunk style, a relationship gone wrong, and a bit of mad scientist to boot.

In “Steel Rider”, Rachel Manija Brown brings us a tale with a bit of anime-style mecha to spice up her steampunk. There’s a hint of Jewish culture here as well as Aztec and Mexican, not to mention all sorts of interesting questions about the world only barely seen in this story.

Shira Lipkin’s vignette “Truth and Life” is a glimpse of the sadness of a brilliant engineer.

Matthew Kressel, in “The Hands that Feed”, brings us a solid little tale of a shopkeeper with hidden talents, and the seemingly innocent young woman she comes to love. Our two heroines are Jewish and Hindu, as well as separated by thirty years of age, which makes for quite the unusual pairing indeed.

My fellow Drollerie author Meredith Holmes brings us “Love in the Time of Airships”, a tale of romance across social classes–and a woman who discovers not only that she has romantic inclinations she never dreamed of, but that her so-called husband is far more dangerous than she ever imagined.

Teresa Wymore, another fellow Drollerie author, has some intriguing glimpses of genetic manipulation shaping the society that exists “Under the Dome”.

“Clockwork and Music”, by Tara Sommers, is a poignant tale of a young woman who must wrestle madness, possibly nefarious intentions of the doctor who looks after her in a sanitarium, and the clockwork servants that carry out his will. All she has to sustain her is the love of a fellow inmate, who may or may not be mad herself.

Mikki Kendall’s “Copper for a Trickster” is brutal, and believably so, if you take a steampunk culture and think about how it would have impacted the development of African slavery. Protagonist Dalila and her beloved Ashaki are willing to do anything to free themselves and the children enslaved with them–but Dalila learns the price of the bargain they make with the Hare.

“Sleepless, Burning Life”, by Mike Allen, is perhaps the oddest piece in the collection. The prose is almost more metaphor than narrative, and even after having read through it, I’m still not entirely sure what it’s about. There are goddesses and priestesses and gears involved, and that’s pretty much what I came away with; more than that will have to wait until I get a formal copy of the anthology. (This was the first of two stories where I found the watermarking on the ARC to interfere enough with my ability to read the story that I will need to re-read it later.) Still, there’s imagery to be admired here, as well as the sheer lyricism of the writing.

And lastly, we have Shweta Narayan’s “The Padishah Begum’s Reflections”, another piece complex enough that I had a hard time reading it given the watermarking on the ARC and reading it on my iPhone. There’s a lot of jumping around between time frames in this story, which made it hard to follow on a small screen–but I glimpsed enough complexity of plot in this final piece that it’s another reason I absolutely want to acquire a full formal copy of the book.

In conclusion: highly recommended for steampunk fans as well as readers in search of lesbian fiction as well as fiction that embraces non-Western cultures. Not every piece was to my particular tastes, but they were all solid, and I look forward to buying my formal copy. Four stars.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It wasn’t until I actually started reading Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood that I found out it was in fact a sequel to Oryx and Crake, which I am told is actually a better book. This I didn’t find a hardship, because I did actually like The Year of the Flood. And thankfully, it stands alone from Oryx and Crake since it’s less a true sequel and more a covering of the same events from the points of view of different characters.

Make no mistake, Atwood’s renowned aversion to being associated with the genre aside, this is definitely an SF novel. We’ve got a futuristic setting of indeterminate timeframe, in which a decadent civilization is about to fall. Its apocalypse is, I’m given to understand, covered in more detail in Oryx and Crake; here, instead, we have a character study of two women involved with a religious sect who preach the coming of the Waterless Flood and who are taking steps to try to survive the disaster along with stores of foodstuffs. Toby is one of the so-called “Eves” of God’s Gardeners, drawn into their company despite her own lack of personal conviction, and finding purpose in teaching the children; Ren is one of those children, whose mother eventually flees with her back to the society they’d come from, where Ren eventually becomes an exotic dancer. What happens to both women as the Flood finally occurs forms the overall pattern of the book, winding back and forth between their backstories and on up to the Flood itself.

A lot of this book’s character-driven rather than plot-driven, though, which resulted in the overall plot being rather thin. There are decent sequences all throughout, with interesting periodic bursts of outright action as the Gardeners schism in the years leading up to the Flood. Ultimately though things don’t so much resolve as meander to a halt. I didn’t mind this so much since Atwood’s language and worldbuilding were lovely, but others may find that a problem.

Since this book focuses on a religious sect, be prepared for that to drive a lot of the character motivations; they’re especially forthright in their abhorrence of eating meat, for example. It fit well with the characters for me, though, and seeing how different members of the Gardeners reacted to their own tenets provided a substantial amount of the character conflicts.

Overall I found this a good, solid read and am looking forward to checking out Oryx and Crake. Four stars.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I came into Zoe Archer’s Blades of the Rose series courtesy of the fine ladies at Smart Bitches Trashy Books, when they chose the second book of the series as a book club read. Pretty much right out of the gate I wanted these books, and I’m not ashamed to admit that a big part of that was because of the covers on Books 1 and 2. First and foremost, I want to thank whoever did the cover art! Gabriel on the cover of Book 1, I’m not ashamed to say, totally slew me for looking like he stole Indiana Jones’ outfit, and even aside from that appealing to my fangirl sensibilities, I just found it such a refreshing change from a lot of the shirtless, overmuscled guys on the covers of romance and paranormal romance these days.

Happily, the book itself also proved to be quite enjoyable. Warrior, as the opening book of a series, has the task of setting up the world for us, and it does a nice strong job of doing so by giving us our hero, Gabriel, drawn into saving a man’s life in a brutal attack. The man he tries to rescue dies, but not before begging Gabriel to take a message–and a mysterious compass–clear around the world to Mongolia.

Gabriel, you see, has stumbled into the ongoing conflict between two factions at war over magical Sources, artifacts all over the globe which are so named for being the repositories of great power. The Heirs of Albion are bent on securing these Sources for the greater glory of the British Empire, so that Britain might take over the world. Pitted against them are the Blades of the Rose, sworn to avoid using any magic save that which is theirs by gift or by right, and to keep all Sources safe in the hands of their rightful people.

And the man Gabriel has to take the dire message to? He is of course a Blade, living in Mongolia with his daughter Thalia, who is naturally afire with the ambition to follow in her father’s footsteps. Neither want to embroil Gabriel in their affairs, but Gabriel won’t be put off easily. He has after all come all the way from England at the behest of a dying man. Also, Thalia is awfully, awfully hot.

It’s a nifty worldbuilding concept, and Archer has great fun with it, setting up an engaging blend of period adventure and supernatural activity that hearkens indeed back to the aforementioned Indiana Jones as well as the Mummy movies with Brendan Fraser. As these are in fact paranormal romance novels, you do have the obligatory blazing chemistry between the lead characters and more than one sex scene in which they indulge it–but for once, my tastes in such things are actually pretty in line with what a romance novel has to offer with that. Archer’s very good at giving her female leads strong sexual agency, and the sense of equality between her heroines and heros is awesome both within and outside of romantic contexts.

In this particular story, as she’s been brought up in Mongolia, Thalia is very much afraid that a man from her native Britain will expect her to behave like a proper British lady–and she’s delighted to discover that Gabriel, as a commoner and a foot soldier, is just as happy that she’s anything but. The two of them must set out to find and protect the Source the Heirs are targeting, and along the way, have themselves quite the adventuresome ride. There’s a bit too much obvious pointing at characters who are destined to have their own installments as the series progresses, and a bit too much simplistic motivation on the part of the bad guys. But all in all this was fun and it made me quite interested in continuing with the series. Three stars.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Now we are TALKING.

He Shall Thunder in the Sky is perhaps my absolute favorite of the entire Amelia Peabody series–and as I’ve indicated in my reviews of several of the earlier books, it’s got some very strong contenders for my affections. It won’t have nearly as much meaning if you don’t read the series through from the beginning, but for readers who do, there is a great deal of reward to be had. There’s not only the culmination of the love story of Ramses and Nefret, there’s also the culmination of Ramses as a mature character and the equal of his parents, and a Big Reveal about the background of Sethos, the Master Criminal.

The book’s not a hundred percent perfect; I’ve got logistical quibbles with the Sethos part of the arc, for example. Odious cousin Percy, while credibly showing his true odious colors, is nonetheless not nearly as effective a villain as he should have been. Plus, I have a few “wait, what?” moments in regards to how Thunder ties back in with events in The Falcon at the Portal–specifically in revealing certain activities of Ramses’ and Nefret’s. I can’t say too much about that part since I don’t want to get into spoiler territory, but suffice to say that the details in question seemed a touch too melodramatic for even the Amelia Peabodies, which are at their height gems of melodrama! Ditto for the Big Reveal about Sethos.

But. I wave aside what quibbles I have with the story on the grounds of the sheer awesomeness that is Ramses in this book. He’s making a big noisy name for himself in Cairo as an avowed pacifist, refusing to participate in the ongoing bloody conflicts of World War I, and it’s getting him blackballed by everyone in Cairo society. It’s all a front, of course–because if you’ve been following the series up to this point, you know that Ramses has a stellar talent for disguise. So does the British government by this point in the series, and they’re making use of Ramses by having him do intelligence work. David’s in on it too, as the two friends put their lives on the line infiltrating a local cell of Egyptian nationalists so that Ramses can impersonate their leader. Not even his own parents know what’s going on, and once they realize the danger their son is putting himself in, they must do everything in their power to assist him. And to keep Nefret from finding out.

This being an Amelia Peabody, there is of course the obligatory preternaturally intelligent cat. This time around it’s Seshat, who’s a rival for her ancestress Bastet in how devoted she is to Ramses; he in turn is finally willing to acknowledge the potential awesomeness of other cats in the world. And of course we have the point of view shifting back and forth between Amelia and Ramses, which (aside from one weird choice of scene order at an early critical juncture) is wonderful stuff. Amelia’s relationship with her adult son is much different than her relationship with him as a boy, and one tender scene in particular they have is particularly aww-inducing.

Action scenes with Ramses here are among Peters’ most tense in any of her work, particularly at the end of the story. And, melodrama aside, the big climactic rescue scene in Thunder stands out for me as one of the most memorable of any of her books.

All in all, five stars.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

The most recent of the long-running Amelia Peabody series, A River in the Sky, is also unfortunately thus far the weakest for me in the series to date. Like Guardian of the Horizon, it’s one of the “lost journals” of the Emerson saga, going back and filling in gaps of time between previously written books. In this particular case, this one falls after Guardian of the Horizon and before The Falcon at the Portal. Unlike Guardian of the Horizon, however, it doesn’t really have much substance to it. Amelia, Emerson, and the rest of the main cast seem like cursory versions of themselves, and Peters’ writing here has the same issue that I’ve noticed in other recent books (the last few of this series, as well as Book Six of the Vicky Bliss books): to wit, her historical vivacity and spark just are not there.

I really wanted to like this one, too. It does have going for it the fact that it’s set in Palestine, which is a first for a series that beforehand spent the majority of its time in Egypt, with periodic stories in England. There are also several good dramatic scenes where Ramses and David are on the run from the Bad Guys Du Jour, and the obligatory set of colorful side characters. But by and large the Emersons as a group are in reactionary mode rather than really being active all throughout this plot, and there isn’t even much of an archaeological subplot going on to provide interest in the meantime, either.

Overall, I’m sad to react to this one mostly with ‘meh’. I’m enough of an Amelia fan at this point that I’ll keep reading the series for the sake of being a completist, but for everybody else, this one is definitely skippable. Two stars.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

The tenth Amelia Peabody novel, The Ape Who Guards the Balance, opens with one of my very favorite scenes in the entire series: Amelia barging out to participate in a suffragette rally in London, ready, willing, and even eager to get herself arrested for the cause of women’s rights. Never mind how she winds up having an inadvertant run-in with Sethos who’s planning to rob the very residence she and her fellow suffragettes are targeting for their protest; no, what really sells this whole sequence for me is the note-perfect reactions Emerson and Ramses and their butler Gargery have to the entire situation, up to and including Ramses coming along to lend his support, and Emerson and Gargery asserting their disbelief that any constable in the city is worthy of the task of arresting Amelia P. Emerson.

Really, it’s an excellent start to a very strong novel in the series overall. It’s not entirely perfect, mind you. There are stretches where even a diehard fan like me finds it a bit hard going. Stick with it though–and for the love of Amon-Ra, if you’re new to the series, do not start with this one. The death of a character much beloved of the Emersons takes place in this installment, and you really need to have been following the series from the beginning to really appreciate its impact on the family. Especially upon Amelia, since this incident affects her personally all throughout the subsequent books.

Ramses starts coming into his own for me as a fully adult character with this book, too. He’s had plenty of time to be a full-fledged character, sure, but only as of this book does he really start feeling like a grownup to me. And by ‘grownup’, I mean, ‘swoonable hero’. It helps a lot that as of here, Peters has a better handle on how she wants to present the “Manuscript H” sections of the story. This in turn gives Ramses a much more consistent voice, and goes a long way to establishing him as a romantic hero to rival his father. Four stars.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In a series that’s famous for being primarily set in Egypt, The Deeds of the Disturber, Book 5 of the Amelia Peabodies, is quite distinctive in that it’s set in England during the off-season, when the Emerson family is between digs. It also has the good fortune of being my very favorite book involving Ramses as a child. Sure, that boy’s formidable even in Books 3 and 4, but here, put up against the odious Percy and Violet, the children of Amelia’s brother James, Ramses gets his first real stretch of character development.

You’d think that the Emersons being at home means they’d get a break from their detectival adventures, but you’d be wrong. There’s a new exhibit with a mummy at the British Museum, and of course there are Mysterious Persons showing up in ancient Egyptian garb causing disturbances at the exhibit. Worse yet, people have started to die at the museum, and rumors are beginning to fly about a curse. Cue the Emersons, even though Emerson himself is frantically trying to finish a manuscript. And even though Amelia has to juggle managing not only her husband and son, but also her niece and nephew, who have been unceremoniously thrust upon her by her brother. The redoubtable Amelia is hopeful that exposure to other children, “normal” children, might be good for Ramses–but it should surprise no reader of the series that things go very, very badly. Fights break out, accusations are hurled, and as is so often the case with young Master Ramses, things wind up on fire.

The Young Lovers Du Jour are a refreshing change of pace–none other than Kevin O’Connell, the Emersons’ simultaneously most liked and most hated reporter, and his rival, Miss Minton, who’ll stop at nothing to scoop him on the story of the curse at the museum. And it’s fun to see characters here that we don’t normally get to see in an Amelia Peabody novel, such as the Emersons’ England-based servants, all of whom take an inordinate amount of interest in the family affairs (Gargery, the butler, is Awesome). Emerson gets his obligatory Scenes of Being Heroically Wounded, not once but twice even, and there is even a mysterious woman from his past cropping up and giving Amelia cause for Grave Concern. Coming as we are off of Book 4, this is fun tension, given that the tables are now turned and Amelia has to have her own battles with doubt.

But really, read this for the excellent Ramses mileage! And keep an eye on that kid Percy, because we will be seeing him again! Five stars.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.