Something Approaching an Excuse

Or maybe it's a reason.

Normally I manage to get through a book every 2-5 days (depending on the book) and post a review here. Clearly, that hasn't been happening lately.  There are a couple of reasons:

1. I'm a week out from my second attempt at the PhD preliminary exams. This is also my last attempt. If I don't pass them this time, no PhD for me.  Needless to say, I'm a bit stressed and spending most of my time reading stuff on and from the Middle Ages, none of which you, Gentle Readers, really want to hear about.

2. When I do get to read for fun, I'm in the early stages of a re-read of everything by Anne McCaffrey that I own, a re-read that I meant to start a couple of months ago when she died, but I got bogged down with books I needed to review as well as prelim and dissertation stuff, so I've only now gotten to start.  I'm sure I'll be interspersing the McCaffrey with other things (right now I'm reading Jingo by Terry Pratchett because a friend lent it to me), but I'm not sure how many of them will actually get reviewed (unless the whole reason I've got them is to be reviewed).

Once the prelims are over, I have about a week of attempting not to panic while the readers are deciding my fate, four weeks to put together my prospectus for my dissertation, and about five weeks to try to bang out a first draft for my dissertation.  (And, I just remembered, I have about a week to write the proposal for the paper I intend to submit to that medievalism-in-George-Martin thing.  Eep.)

But I always make time to read for fun.  And reviews will be forthcoming again soon.  I just need to get through the next week.

Awesome Compliment

This past week, I participated in a writing workshop with C.S. Friedman (who is lovely, by the way).  The entire group received several compliments from her on our writing skills, and one guy was even told that he really needs to start submitting his writing to horror magazines.

I was the recipient of a wonderful compliment on a "hook" prompt; we were supposed to write the first paragraph of something, not worrying about where it was going or what the plot was or anything else, just getting a hook constructed.  My opening line: "According to the spiders, there was a body in Toby's basement."

Before I got any further, Friedman blurted out, "Oh, that's lovely. I like that."

Needless to say, her encouraging remarks and genuine enjoyment of my writing (mine specifically, though she loved everybody's), gave me a driving need to get back on this novel, even if it means stealing fifteen minutes to an hour of time from studying or dissertating or grading or any of the millions of other things I need to be doing in order to do so.

So right now, after an afternoon of grading, I've got Scrivener open and I'm hacking away at the end of BLACK DEATH.

Book Review: Divergent by Veronia Roth

Divergent by Veronica Roth
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In post-apocalyptic Chicago, people are divided into five factions, each based on the opposite of what that faction believes destroyed humanity. Beatrice is born and raised in Abegnation, but when it comes time for her aptitude test, she splits evenly across three factions, making her Divergent. She chooses to leave her family and join Dauntless, getting swept up in a mess of politics and a power grab that could leave everyone she knows dead--or worse.

I inhaled this book. If I hadn't had to get up the next morning, I would have finished it within hours of buying it. As it was, I neglected studying for a major test in order to finish reading.

Brilliantly paced, brilliantly characterized, with a deep understanding of human psychology, this book is easily just as good as The Hunger Games (which I also loved), and if what I'm hearing about Insurgent is anywhere near true, this trilogy may well rival that one.

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Book Review: Shadow Moon by Marilee Brothers

Shadow Moon by Marilee Brothers
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Bell Bridge Books provided me with a free copy of this book for review purposes.

Allie just found out she has a twin sister, and that the twin is necessary to her mission to save the world from Trimarks. So she goes searching for her twin, aided by Junior a new friend. But instead, she gets captured, nearly killed, and discovers that her twin isn't the girl who will help her.

The second and third books in this series were a bit slumpy, but this one picked back up and fixed a few of the issues that I had with the other books. So I'm trying something new with this review: I'll show you the issue I had, then how this book fixed it.

I'm not sure I like that the Trimarks are Born to Be Evil and the Star Seekers are Born to Be Good. In this book, we discover that the Trimarks are actually part Unseelie faery. THAT I can live with. They're not entirely people, and the part that isn't people is traditionally evil. I wish we'd learned this earlier.

I found the excuse for getting rid of Junior--he's been cast in a Mexican soap opera! As one does--kind of flimsy and Allie's quick, almost eager, bounce to Beck as her love interest rather jarring and sudden. I'm still a bit grouchy about the way Allie bounces from guy to guy in each book, but at least this time she bounces back to Junior. And his fame and money do help out quite a bit in this book.

The entire Faerie (or, as it's called here, Boundless) episode was a radical tonal shift for the books, which have for the most part been pretty down-to-earth (as down to earth as an urban fantasy novel can be). I'm growing to like the faerie aspect better, mostly because it explains a lot, though I think the less time Allie spends in Boundless, the better.

[Allie's guardian angel]seemed like a useless piece of plot that could easily have been left out. I stand by this one. She pops up again (for the last time, apparently) in this book, but doesn't really add anything; Allie already knows everything she has to tell her.

Generally, I wish the faerie thing had been included earlier, possibly even in the first book. Throwing it in as late as the third one was a bit head-spinning, and it took me a few chapters into the fourth book to get my feet back under me. The pacing of all four novels is a bit slow at first, then flies into breakneck speed through the last few chapters; I think that could have been a bit better.

I'm glad the fourth book picked back up after the slumpiness of the second and third ones, and I bet the next few books continue to get better.


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Book Review: Moon Spun by Marilee Brothers

Moon Spun by Marilee Brothers
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Bell Bridge Books provided me with a free copy of this book for review purposes.

Allie's in trouble again. This time, she's learned that she is part forest faerie, part Tuatha de Danaan, which explains her powers but puts her in an awkward position when her grandmother, the forest faerie, comes looking for her help. And when the message is delivered by a faerie Love Talker who thinks that he and Allie are destined to be mates. And when the Queen of the Seelie fae demands that Allie return to Faerie and live there.

I had mixed feelings about this book on more than one front. For example, Junior's back! And he's so cool about Allie being part faerie that it helps her get more comfortable with it, too. BUT Junior's only around for a few pages, and he seems to think that nothing's different about his relationship with Allie, despite having disappeared to Mexico to become a TV/movie star. Beck disappears for this book, as well, eventually kind-of breaking up with Allie. She's got yet another new guy, the faerie love talker Ryker, and the vibe with him was . . . odd. Which could be a function of him being a faerie and not used to human interaction, but the only way he can travel through faerie quickly is via lip-lock? Really? What does he do when he's alone?

The entire Faerie (or, as it's called here, Boundless) episode was a radical tonal shift for the books, which have for the most part been pretty down-to-earth (as down to earth as an urban fantasy novel can be). On the plus side, Brothers has her own version of Faerie that doesn't borrow heavily from any particular mythos that I recognized but still kept recognizable facets of it--like time moving differently and the landscape responding to your desires.

I'm already a few chapters into the fourth book, and I can attest that many of the issues I've had with the plots of the first three books are beginning to be cleared up. But I'll talk about that in the next review.

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Book Review: In Search of First Contact by Annette Kolodny

In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery by Annette Kolodny
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Duke University Press provided me with a free copy of this book for review purposes.

The modern understanding of the discovery of America is heavily colored by two hundred or more years of historical or pseudo-historical research by Americans and Europeans alike, all shaped by personal, political, and social biases. In In Search of First Contact, Annette Kolodny has taken on the massive task of sorting through all of the extant material, from American historians to Icelandic sagas to Native American stories, in order to clarify the arguments and help readers understand the tangled histories.

The first chapter compiles and explores the body of literature written about the Native Americans and the European and American assumptions about their history. These assumptions mostly served the dominant Eurocentric ideology of the time and were usually in place to facilitate European destruction or resettlement of the natives. Not until 2000, she claims, did historians begin insisting upon a reexploration of history that would give the natives their own history rather than defining them in terms of European discoveries.

The second chapter is a close reading of the Vinland sagas--The Greenlanders' Saga and Eirik the Red's Saga--meant to show that the strange land the various Viking groups landed on was America and the Skraelings they dealt with were Native Americans. Conflicts between the groups are explained through cultural analysis and the Vikings' description of the natives is compared to current knowledge of the native tribes and their customs. Kolodny concludes that, while we cannot be certain that Vinland is America and the Skraelings are Native Americans, mostly due to the lack of detail in the sagas, there is strong evidence, both textual and archaeological, for both conclusions.

The third chapter explores the surge of interest in pre-Colombus American discoveries, primarily driven by the desire of the Romantics to have a Classical, or at least pre-English, American heritage. While the wide-open prairies and undiscovered country west of the Mississippi intrigued people, they also wanted castles and ancient ruins. The Norse discovery and settlement of America would have provided this in spades. Hence, literature, history, and archaeology all began to seek or create the signs of Viking settlement in North America. Later, of course, much of the evidence for a Norse settlement was called into question, though most people continued to believe that such a settlement existed, though they were unable to find it. Some even claimed that the Norse had discovered a settlement of Irish in the regions now known as Georgia and South Carolina. Continuing the previous belief that the Native Americans had destroyed a more advanced culture, these people claimed that the more advanced culture was Irish and Norse in nature. These claims helped to support the Indian-removal policies which were rampant at the time as well as the exclusion of immigrants with darker skin, hair, or eyes. The politics and social attitude of the time were that American belonged to white Protestants, and any historical evidence of the Norse or Irish having settled America before the Native Americans only helped to fuel these attitudes and policies.

Chapter four examines the misconceptions of archaeologists unearthing burial mounds and the concurrent romanticization of Norse mythology through the work of poets such as Longfellow and Whittier. This romanticization also became useful for post-Civil War men with the Vikings' perceived hypermasculinity and for the early women's movement with the perceived societal equality of the Danes. Fascination with Norse culture, therefore, swept through the nation, and being able to (however erroneously) connect America with the Vikings gave America a sense of an ancient history that the Native Americans did not provide.

In the late 1800s, religious squabbling broke out over who discovered America. At first, the fight was merely between Columbus and the Puritans; one Catholic, one Protestant. However, as chapter five chronicles, the Catholic church glommed on to the idea of the Norse not only discovering America, but evangelizing, as well, which gave them double the claim to the continent. This began a mass attempt at discrediting the whole idea that the Norse had landed in America, rather than just Greenland, in the first place, as well as attempts to cast Columbus as a scientific explorer rather than a religious one (which, if I'm not mistaken, is when this whole ridiculous idea that Columbus discovered the Earth was round began. Kolodny doesn't discuss this, though). Ultimately, it was WWI which removed the Northmen from the public consciousness as discoverers of America; any association with Germanic forebears was now unthinkable.

Chapter seven shifts focus to the natives and the evidence of first contact which might be available from their point of view. Obviously, their point of view is filtered through the European point of view, and hence suspect, but Kolodny further filters the information through what we know of the instructions given to European settlers and their biases. Otherwise, our information about European first contact comes through native petroglyphs, which must be interpreted rather than read. This examination continues to native lore in the final chapter, examining one specific tale and its potential meaning as well as the European hype surrounding it.

Kolodny's conclusion is that the evidence for Norse settlement of America is thin, though it cannot be entirely ruled out. Neither can the possibility that they landed but didn't necessarily settle.

In Search of First Contract is a dense, heavily-researched book which pulls together a wealth of information about the purported Norse settlement and where our modern understanding of it came from. It shows a great deal of work and clear synthesis which scholars of the subject would find quite helpful. This is not for beginners in the subject, certainly, but would be quite helpful as a resource for graduate students or other middle-level historians curious about the Norse and America.

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Book Review: Moon Rise by Marilee Brothers (Spoilers)

Moon Rise by Marilee Brothers
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Bell Bridge Books provided me with a free copy of this book for review purposes.

Following the crisis at the end of Moonstone, Allie has lost her powers and her boyfriend. So being inducted into the Star Seeker club is no picnic, especially since so many hopes rest on her. And when she learns that the prophecy that makes her the moonstone bearer has a second part, one that explains why the Trimarks want it so badly, it just seems unfair.

This books seems to suffer from second-book-itis, a common ailment for sequels and especially for middle-of-a-trilogy books. It slumps a bit, especially after the high stakes and fast pacing of the first book. Not a lot happens, and what does happen seems less important.

Allie's main concern in Moon Rise is regaining her powers, which she's lost due to guilt and PTSD after killing a Trimark at the end of the first book. Helping her with this is half-demon Beck, a spirit healer and all-around hunky guy. Junior, her previous boyfriend, has disappeared to Mexico and not returned. Her powers come back toward the middle of the book, just in time for her to get into life-threatening danger . . . again. By being kidnapped by Trimarks . . . again. This time, however, they don't get her mom, they're second-rate Trimarks, and she's rescued by Beck and his sister within a few hours. Overall, the entire thing was a lot less tense than Moonstone.

A few specific complaints: I'm not sure I like that the Trimarks are Born to Be Evil and the Star Seekers are Born to Be Good. Without the element of choice in there (which there is a little bit, since the Star Seeker council is getting information from an unnamed Trimark double-agent), everything's just a little too black-and-white. I hope in future books this greys out a bit.

Also, I found the excuse for getting rid of Junior--he's been cast in a Mexican soap opera! As one does--kind of flimsy and Allie's quick, almost eager, bounce to Beck as her love interest rather jarring and sudden.

As previously mentioned, second books in a series are often a bit on the weak side, and I anticipate the next books picking up a bit and fixing a few of the issues I had with this one.

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Book Review: Moonstone by Marilee Brothers

Moonstone by Marilee Brothers
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Bell Bridge Books provided me with a free copy of this book for review purposes.

Allie is quintessential white trash--she lives in a trailer with her unemployed mother, she doesn't know who her father is, and none of her clothes fit right. But when she discovers that she actually has magic power, and that her destiny involves using that power to guard an amulet from evil people who are seeking it, her life gets a whole lot more interesting.

I generally enjoyed this book; Allie is a strong, determined character who, unlike a lot of strong female characters, isn't afraid to ask for help or take it when it's offered. Her attitude toward her burgeoning magic power is healthy and cautious; she doesn't immediately rush off to use it against everybody who's ever picked on her, but neither does she try to pretend it doesn't exist. She doesn't tell her mother about it immediately because she's afraid Faye will use it to make money. And when the bad guys start coming after her, she is sensible in picking her battles, running when she has to and fighting when she can.

The story was occasionally shaky, and it might be that some of the loose threads will be picked up in later books. Allie's "Spirit Guide" is a ghost who, if Allie doesn't succeed, will be stuck at the Seattle-Tacoma Airport for the rest of her existence. Otherwise, she gets to go to heaven. But she shows up a few times to tell Allie that she's already passed her tests, not really providing any guidance at all. She seemed like a useless piece of plot that could easily have been left out.

Moonstone is generally an interesting story with believable characters but occasionally tripped over itself.

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