Book Review: The Near Witch

The Near Witch by Victoria Schwab
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

3.5 stars

In Near, the children have a nursery rhyme about a witch who died hundreds of years before, whose voice can still be heard in the wind off the moors. When a stranger arrives in Near and children begin disappearing, it seems obvious to everyone but Lexi that the stranger is responsible. But can Lexi find out who--or what--is really behind the disappearances before the people of Near do something horrible to the stranger, and before her own sister goes missing?

Part ghost story, part cautionary tale about tolerance, THE NEAR WITCH is a nice little story. The characters are believable, well-developed, and well-written, even the nasty ones (and there are a few). Human nature shows in every person, both the good side of it and the ugly side of it. Secrets about Near are revealed with a regularity that keeps the whole story from being overly frustrating, since the truth about Near and the Near Witch is complicated and pretty horrible.

The only frustration I had with this book was the tendency for everything to be incredibly important and pressing . . . but had to wait until tomorrow. The story takes place over the space of a week, with a child disappearing every night, and even when Lexi has figured out the mystery and knows exactly what she has to do, she's told to go home and go to bed, and they'll deal with it in the morning. Days pass incredibly fast while nights drag; I had trouble believing that every day contained as little activity as it did.

That one irritation aside, this is a lovely book with good pacing, characters, and plotting. Definitely worth the read.

View all my reviews

RIP Anne McCaffrey

I was an awkward teenager.  And I do mean awkward.  I had no idea how to talk to people.  I was overdramatic beyond belief.  I was lucky to have a few friends older than I who put up with my antics, but I still spent a lot of time alone constantly wondering why I didn't have any really close friends.  Not a few times, I wondered what it would be like to be dead; surely then, all the pain and loneliness would stop.

I think I was in sixth or seventh grade when I first picked up Dragonsinger and fell madly in love with Pern, Menolly, and dragons.  I wanted a dragon.  Barring that, I wanted to be a harper.  I wanted to live on Pern, where everything seemed simple and happy, despite the threat of Thread.  I read Dragonsinger and Dragonsong dozens, possibly hundreds, of times before I graduated from high school.  Eventually, I also read the rest of the Pern series.  I started writing my own stories involving people whose best friends were dragons.

Later, I read Crystal Singer, then Acorna, then Powers that Be.  Each book or series gave me new places to wish I could go, new people I wished I could be, new escape mechanisms for a teenager who felt utterly alone, not understood, and disconnected from other people.  I argued with my pastor over whether dragons were always evil.  I wrote more stories.  And I read more McCaffrey.

So when I learned today that Anne McCaffrey has died at the age of 85, I knew I had to say something about it.  Anne McCaffrey made my teenage years more bearable.  She gave me something to dream about, helped get my passion for writing started, created worlds I wanted to visit more than anything else.  Without her books, I don't know how I would have gotten through high school without further dramatics.  Anne McCaffrey may have actually saved my life.

If there is any sort of afterlife, I hope she's being shown to the best seat in the house.  Goodbye, Ms. McCaffrey.  We'll miss you.  The dragons are keening, the crystal crying, the planet mourning your passing.

Book Review: Candlewax

(I'm trying out Goodreads' option to post the same review into a blog. If I like the result, I'll probably do this more often.)
Candlewax by C. Bailey Sims
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

FTC Disclaimer: I was provided with a free copy of this book by Terabyte Press for review purposes

Princess Catherine is running away, having decided that living alone in a neighboring kingdom is a better fate than marrying the horrid old man her parents have picked out for her. Unfortunately, her plans go awry when she meets up with a fairrier cat who insists that she's the subject of a prophecy that will lead to saving the world from unspeakable evil.

I had a great deal of trouble with this book, which eventually led to me putting it down entirely. First, the sentence structures are consistently simple and choppy, even allowing for it being a children's book. The repetitive sentence structures made the book incredibly difficult to read.

Also, the story had too many cliched elements: the princess running away from home because of an arranged marriage. The guardian animal bearing a prophecy. The princess losing all of her belongings in the first hours of her adventure.

Finally, I could not sympathize with either Catherine (who seemed far too impetuous and selfish) or the fairrier cat (who ate Catherine's horse and threatened to eat her dog unless Catherine came with him to fulfill the prophecy).

Due to these issues, I put the book down after about three chapters and have no intention of picking it back up, which is sad because the premise seemed to have a lot of promise.

Candlewax will be available April 3, 2012.

View all my reviews

Dream Dissertation

My dissertation director told me to put together a "dream" list--if I had all the time and space in the world, which books would I want to write about?  I don't think she quite knew what she was asking.  Here it is:

Fairy Tales

Lord Dunsany – The King of Elfland’s Daughter

Neil Gaiman – Stardust

Robin McKinley – Rose Daughter, Beauty, Deerskin, Spindle’s End

Mercedes Lackey – The Black Swan

Juliet Marillier – Daughter of the Forest

High Fantasy

Peter S. Beagle – The Last Unicorn

Tanya Huff – The Quarters novels (Sing the Four Quarters, The Fifth Quarter, No Quarter, The Quartered Sea)

JRR Tolkien – The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings

Robin McKinley – The Hero and the Crown, Chalice, Pegasus

George RR Martin – A Song of Ice and Fire (The Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Feast for Crows, A Storm of Swords, A Dance with Dragons)

Mercedes Lackey – Bardic Voices (The Lark and the Wren, The Robin and the Kestrel, The Eagle and the Nightingales, Four and Twenty Blackbirds, A Cast of Corbies)

Mercedes Lackey & Andre Norton – The Halfblood Chronicles (Elvenbane, Elvenblood, Elvenborn)

Ursula K. LeGuin – A Wizard of Earthsea

Tad Williams – Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn (The Dragonbone Chair, Stone of Farewell, To Green Angel Tower)

Tamora Peirce – The Song of the Lioness Quartet (Alana: The First Adventure, In the Hand of the Goddess, The Woman Who Rides Like a Man, Lioness Rampant), The Immortals (Wild Magic, Wolf-Speaker, Emperor Mage, The Realms of the Gods), The Protector of the Small (First Test, Page, Squire, Lady Knight)

Robert E. Howard – Conan (The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, The Conquering Sword of Conan, The Bloody Crown of Conan)

Robert Jordan – The Wheel of Time (15 books)

Historical Fiction/Fantasy

Sarah Douglass – The Troy Game series (Hades’ Daughter, God’s Concubine, Darkwitch Rising, Druid’s Sword)

Robin McKinley – The Outlaws of Sherwood

Juliet Marillier – Wolfskin, Foxmask

Arthuriana

Marion Zimmer Bradley – The Mists of Avalon

Mercedes Lackey – Gwenhwyfar

Stephen R. Lawhead – The Pendragon Cycle (Taliesin, Merlin, Arthur, Pendragon, Grail) and Avalon: The Return of King Arthur

Medieval Meets Modern

Marion Zimmer Bradley & Holly Lisle – Glenraven and Glenraven II: In the Rift

Robin McKinley – Dragonhaven

Jim Butcher – The Dresden Files (14+ books)

Satire

William Goldman – The Princess Bride

John Moore – The Unhandsome Prince, Heroics for Beginners

Patricia C. Wrede – The Enchanted Forest Chronicles (Dealing with Dragons, Searching for Dragons, Calling on Dragons, Talking to Dragons)

Esther Friesner, ed. – Chicks in Chainmail (Chicks in Chainmail, Did You Say Chicks?!, Chicks n’ Chained Males, The Chick is in the Mail, Turn the Other Chick)

That's 111 books by 22 authors.  Obviously, this will get seriously pared down before we even write the proposal for the dissertation, but if anybody ever wanted to see what my bookshelves looked like (at least the fantasy/medieval part of them), here you go. Bask in the awesomeness.

Random Updateyness

This week I successfully defended my Pop Culture prelim and have now officially passed that prelim.  Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of my Medieval prelim, and I'll be doing that again next semester (luckily, we have the best department ever and I'm getting lots of support toward passing it next time).  I'll still be starting my dissertation next semester, though, so I won't fall behind.  Also next semester, I'll be going through the process of learning to teach literature so I can start doing that next year--since that's sort of what I want to do with this degree, anyway--which should be awesome, since my first foray into the glamorous world of cramming books into undergraduate brains was less than successful.

So that's what I've been doing for the last little while and why updates have been sporadic; I haven't had time to read anything that's worth reviewing here, either because it's old or because it's academic.  But I'm actively working toward making this a serious review blog for books and TV and occasionally movies, so as soon as I finish A Storm of Swords (and the semester), reviews should pick up.

Book Review: Incarnate

FTC Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book from HarperCollins for review purposes.
Further disclaimer: Jodi Meadows is a friend of mine and I read bits of Incarnate in drafts, but I like to think this in no way influenced my utter adoration of this book.

From the flap copy:

NEWSOUL
Ana is new. For thousands of years in Range, a million souls have been reincarnated over and over, keeping their memories and experiences from previous lifetimes. When Ana was born, another soul vanished, and no one knows why.

NOSOUL
Even Ana’s own mother thinks she’s a nosoul, an omen of worse things to come, and has kept her away from society. To escape her seclusion and learn whether she’ll be reincarnated, Ana travels to the city of Heart, but its citizens are suspicious and afraid of what her presence means. When dragons and sylph attack the city, is Ana to blame?

HEART
Sam believes Ana’s new soul is good and worthwhile. When he stands up for her, their relationship blooms. But can he love someone who may live only once, and will Ana’s enemies—human and creature alike—let them be together? Ana needs to uncover the mistake that gave her someone else’s life, but will her quest threaten the peace of Heart and destroy the promise of reincarnation for all? 

This is a beautifully written book, rife with philosophical questions, descriptions that tear your heart out, and sympathetic characters.  Ana begins as a child, uncertain of everything except her own worthlessness, and grows into a confident young woman who insists on being in charge of her own destiny.  The constant reincarnation raises questions about the value of life--if you know you'll be back, is death an issue?  Should you fear it?  Welcome it?  Why should anyone care if you die or attempt to save you from dying?  The fact that people can be reborn into bodies of different genders creates a fascinating framework for the exploration of hetero- and homosexual relationships and asks whether bodies matter when souls are drawn to each other.

And did I mention the utterly gorgeous butterfly costume Ana wears to the masquerade?

Meadows writes lovely, fully-realized characters who invite emotional attachment, whether by rooting for Ana, feeling for Sam and his uncertainties, or hating Li (Ana's mother).  The sense that the reincarnated ones are very old, much older than they appear, is palpable, and Meadows handles very well the difficulty of writing characters who have lived longer than most of our current history, and Ana's reaction to them is one that most people would likely have--fascination, fear, and a deep sense of inadequacy.

Incarnate will be in bookstores on January 31, 2012.

This Is What I've Been Doing (Instead of Homework)

In the little bit of down time I've had between homework, teaching, prelims, and developing a repetitive motion injury in my wrist thanks to all the typing I've had to do for homework, teaching, and prelims (and blogging), I've been working on gifts for my dissertation committee.  I finished the first one tonight:

All of them will be Celtic themed. This one is dragons. The next one is peacocks inspired by The Book of Kells.  I plan to have them mounted and framed then give them to my committee after I defend.

Here's a detail shot of the dragons:

Preeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeettyyyyyyyyyyyyy.