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Succubus Blues by Richelle Mead
Georgina Kincaid #1
Kensington Books 2007
343 pages
Horror; Urban Fantasy


Georgina Kincaid is a succubus. Has been for, well, quite a long time. There are a few perks to giving up her mortality: immortality, of course, and the ability to shape shift her physical appearance and her clothes - always handy. Her boss, Jeremy, is an upper level demon who likes John Cusack movies so much he's opted to look like the actor too. Since she absorbs energy from any men she gets intimate with, she can't have an ordinary relationship with a human - ah yes, she may be a lower level demon but she has a conscience and a good heart.

Living in Seattle and working in a bookshop gives her the opportunity to meet her favourite author, Seth Mortensen, at a book signing there. Only it turns out she's already met him - and said some things she really wished she hadn't. Her embarrassment's not going to go away any time soon: he's decided to move to Seattle, where his brother lives, and her boss decides Georgina would be the perfect person to show Seth the city.

If only that were the worst thing happening in her life. Someone or something is killing and attacking her fellow demons, and since the victims are so close to Georgina, she ignores Jeremy's directive to keep her head down and stay out of it and starts piecing the truth together - a truth that turns out to be a lot closer to home than she ever could have wanted.

This is I think a great example of a "comfort read": fun, funny, pretty engrossing, engaging characters, easy on the brain, makes you want to read the next book. Okay that last one doesn't really have anything to do with comfort reads but I ran out of adjectives. Friends on Goodreads seemed to always be talking about it in glowing terms, but it took me a while to finally get hold of it - in the horror section. I'm not sure exactly what genre it belongs to. It's a bit of everything, it seems. There is some romance, but not a lot. I don't read much horror so I'm not sure if it has many of those qualities. Urban Fantasy seems the best fit, sort of like the Dresden Files and The Night Watch.

Mead is probably better known for her YA series, Vampire Academy, but this is a good adult read: sexy and mature, there's a good balance between Georgina's sense of humour, the silly chick-lit-like situations she finds herself in, and the darker tones of the novel, the seedier truth underlying her life and her world. She's a strong female character who knows her limitations - relies on her brain rather than brawn, she's the first to admit she's not violent and has little in the way of defences. She's also quite sophisticated, and sharp, and even though she narrates in first-person, a lot of her character comes through: you can tell she's a bit too noisy, a bit impatient, a bit sarcastic even. The flaws in her personality come through especially well in her dealings with the sweet and quiet Seth. Actually, she reminded me of some of my online friends, people I could easily see living Georgina's story, and that made her especially endearing to me. Yes she's a demon, a succubus - an immortal who drains the energy from mortal men, who can even kill them through intimate physical touch, especially if they're "good" men. But she's no killer. There's nothing black-or-white or too simplistic about any of the supernatural characters in Succubus Blues, and I really appreciated that.

The plot was well constructed, if a tad predictable. She misses a few obvious clues or is slow to hit upon a particular meaning in a clue, but she does get there. And keep you entertained while you wait. She doesn't always make the best decisions, but again, her flaws make her more endearing. I also can't deny that her job at the bookshop, and her relationship with such a nerdy, sweet, strangely charismatic and sexy author, doesn't appeal to me, as a bibliophile. The non-demon-world scenes and storyline were perhaps more interesting to me than the who's-killing-demons storyline, but probably only because it was such a successful parallel. There were a few points where my interest waned, but overall it was thoroughly engaging.

Reviewed in January 2010

Tags: horror, urban fantasy

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
HarperCollins 2001
568 pages
Fiction


I can't think of a single other book where I got to end and wanted to ask someone for my time back. Most books that I've strongly disliked or thought were crap were genre books, typically short and relatively fast reads. At close to 600 pages, there is nothing short or fast about The Corrections, and nothing to savour in its slowness either.

The story - about a depressingly typical and dysfunctional, middle class Middle American family from the 60s to the present - is a thief. It steals your time, your energy, and any passion you may have. And it does this simply by telling the story of Alfred and Enid and their three children, Gary, Chip and Denise. Alfred and Enid you've already met. You may not know them intimately, but you have definitely met them. They don't even have to be American. Every white, ex-British colony is bound to have them. Any tacky, showy 50s suburb. They are the cliché that begat all clichés. The husband/father who works and works, is taciturn and sexually repressed at home, who is dull and conservative and safe and a non-presence who nevertheless creates in his children that intense desire to prove themselves, who is a European immigrant (we're all immigrants somewhere down the line but those who emigrated in the mid-20th century are the stuff of countless stories). He is supposed to be from somewhere in Scandinavia but he reads more like an Eastern European - which is where Enid is from. Poland, I believe. Another cliché. Obsessed with appearances, with saving coupons and jars and anything else that accumulates easily; obsessed too with what her "friends" think, with impressing said friends with her children's accomplishments (of which she lies about or embellishes), she could easily be my own grandmother, minus Poland.

Their children are no less miserable. Forty-something Gary, married to rich heiress with three boys, is clinically depressed and in denial. Academic Chip, having been kicked out for sleeping with a student and then stalking her, is writing an awful manuscript designed to take vengeance on the women who ruined his life. Sexually-confused Denise is a successful chef who has an affair with her boss's wife and then sleeps with him too. What's especially depressing about them is that they've all absorbed this need to succeed from their parents, and this fear of failures - but they're all failures, failures as human beings. They're also incredibly ordinary, no matter what stupidity they commit. Deeply unlikeable, they are mirrors held up in contemptuous fashion to American culture and the American dream.

"What is the author trying to achieve?" is what I kept asking myself. In the highly narrative style of prose used there lies a tinge of smugness, a hint of the author behind the scenes, an author exerting such a neutral tone that I was left with the impression that he didn't like these people either, or feel any respect for them. So why bother writing it down? Loosely plotted around Enid's attempt to get her wayward children home for "one last Christmas", before Alfred succumbs completely to his Parkinsons and dementia, I had little patience for their tribulations and even less for their excruciatingly depressing family get-togethers.

There are plenty of stories written about equally middle-everything families. Plenty of stories set in the most life-sucking suburb you can find. Ones that take a wise approach, or a humorous one, or a reflective one - something. The Corrections has been described, and I quote, as "a masterpiece", "the first great American novel of the twenty-first century", "wild, breathless and sharp as a knife" and "dazzling". Any time I see a book described as the next great American novel, I cringe. It's so ... American. Gotta be the best, gotta be better than everyone else. The competitive streak is something that really puts me off. So when you get a novel like this one, lauded as being revealing and wise and so deep, so deep - it becomes less about the quality of the story, the prose, the skill and talent and craft involved in creating it, the sheer hard work, and more about being better than other books. There's a pomposity about that that turns me off even more.

It doesn't help that Franzen famously refused to let Oprah include The Corrections in her lucrative Book Club, not wanting her stamp to sully his work. Many people found this to be pretty arrogant. I confess I wouldn't want Oprah's sticker on my book either, but if you want to make a living from writing it'd be pretty stupid to turn it down, financially speaking. It's ironic, is what it is - the kind of people (and I'm generalising again, bear with me), who watch Oprah and read her books are predominately middle class, people whose lives are nothing out of the ordinary - and she often picks books that speak directly to them. So it's ironic that Franzen would have written a book that fits Oprah's criteria to a tee, and then gone all elitist snob on her and essentially, by turning it down, said "it may be about depressing middle American people, but I don't want it read by them. They wouldn't understand."

One thing I did find quite fun in the book, especially after having read The Shock Doctrine last year, was the piss-take regarding Lithuania: an ex-politician set up a scam whereby he sold shares in Lithuania itself - the first country to be privatised and incorporated. After being shafted by neo-liberal economic policy, ordered to sell everything off by the WTO and the World Bank, the country, like all the others who were told the same thing, lost pretty much everything. It may not have ended well, but it was funny and satisfying while it lasted: selling a country off to rich foreign investors, predominately American, on false pretext and lies. And they bought it (the fabrication). It was quite clever.

I can't deny that there were some clever things about this book, or rather, about the story (not so much the prose), but it's not enough to make the entire reading experience worthwhile. And after all that exhaustive commentary and narrative, to have such a rushed, convenient ending (especially the bit about Chip), was, to use a word I try to avoid, lame. It took me nearly two months to read it, and another couple of weeks to summon up the energy to write this review, so that's about 9 weeks Franzen owes me. And yes, I will take instalments thanks.

Reviewed in January 2010

Tags: fiction

The Marriage Bed by Laura Lee Guhrke
Guilty #3
Avon Books 2005
374 pages
Historical Romance


I really enjoyed Guhrke's Girl Bachelor series of historical romances - set in the late Victorian period, which makes a nice change - so I've been keeping an eye out for some of her other books. This is actually the third in another series, but I didn't know that when I started reading it and frankly it doesn't make any difference.

Eight years ago, Viola, the beautiful young sister of a Duke, married the man she fell in love with at first sight, Lord Hammond. After the first blissful months, her happiness is destroyed when she learns that John not only married her for her money, but he was still seeing his mistress right up until their wedding.

Now, after years of living apart and never being seen at the same social gathering together, John needs Viola back. His cousin Percy and Percy's son have died, leaving the only person to inherit John's title and estates his imbecile cousin Bertie. Having painstakingly resurrected the land and improved conditions for his tenants, the last thing John wants is to see Bertie run it all to ruin. What he needs is a son of his own, and for that he needs Viola.

But Viola has never forgiven him, has never ceased feeling angry, hurt, humiliated. Learning that John lied about loving her was one thing; his unrepentant and unapologetic attitude about all his mistresses - before and after their wedding - is even worse. As the ton make bets on whether this famously estranged couple will reconcile, John and Viola must face all their past mistakes - and try not to make them all over again.

I didn't like this book until, oh, the last hundred pages or so. Mostly because I sympathised so much with Viola - yes, modern woman that I am - that I didn't want John anywhere near her. He's not a bad sort, not creepy or chauvinistic; it's that he cannot understand why his actions should upset Viola so much that she would kick him out of her bedroom - which is his excuse for going out and finding another mistress. It struck to close to home, reminded me too strongly of an ex-boyfriend, that for a while there I wasn't sure I was going to be able to finish it.

It would be too easy to cast John in the role of the devil. A stereotypical Man. A womaniser, a charlatan, a good-for-nothing. Guhrke doesn't write typical romance stories, that's for sure. You like him but don't like him - or, you like him in spite of himself. Something like that. He's no dashing hero. What he lacks is consideration for the feelings of others, in particular Viola. But you also can't hate him. Mostly, I felt sorry for him, which is a feeling I don't like to have for romance heroes. It takes the fun and sauciness out of it all. John is on a well-constructed learning curve in The Marriage Bed, and it's so satisfying that my estimation of the novel as a whole went right up. I'm not saying it's a "man-hating" book, not at all. It leans a little too close to a modern, feminist perspective, but while it was generally true that upper class women turned a blind eye to their husbands' affairs (not that they could have done much about it anyway, in most cases), and some may even have preferred the arrangement, providing they were discreet, there are always exceptions. Viola is one. She was young and naïve when she married, looking up to John with love, trust, respect and admiration. Her reaction is in keeping with her spirit, her personality and her youth, and you can see the girl she was in her recollections alongside the woman she is "now".

As hard as it was to read for much of the story, I had to admire Guhrke's ability in writing the miscommunication, the arguments, between John and Viola. Again, I have some past experience to draw upon in empathising, and it felt familiar enough to hit home. It didn't follow the usual structure of a historical romance novel, and every inch of ground won is hard fought for. A kind of "one step forward, two steps back" kind of thing. Or is it two steps forward...? Never mind.

Reviewed in January 2010

Tags: historical romance

Evil Genius by Catherine Jinks
Harcourt 2007 (2005)
537 pages
YA Espionage Fiction


By the end of last year I was in a total YA funk. I was feeling jaded, and extremely tired of reading about American teens in American schools and all the usual clichés that that comes with. So someone recommended Evil Genius to me as a book that would break me out of my funk - they even said they would eat their hat if I didn't like it.

Well, no need to break out the hat-dipping sauce, but I didn't enjoy it as much as I'd hoped either, even if it did meet the criteria.

Cadel Piggott is far from an ordinary boy. From a young age he exhibits all the signs of being a genius - the kind with no moral compass because he has no interest in people, and no understanding of them either. His adoptive parents, the grossly overweight and red-faced Stuart Piggott and his preoccupied, vain socialite wife Lanna Piggott, take him to a child psychologist recommended by the court, Thaddeus Roth. Dr Roth is not just a psychologist - he's the right-hand man of Dr Darkkon, a mad scientist now in prison for life in the US. Roth has been watching and waiting for Cadel for a long time: he is after all Dr Darkkon's son, and the two men have great plans for the boy. First, they must hone his genius mind into the right tool, in the right direction: to rule the world.

When Cadel is fourteen he finishes high school, thanks to an accelerated program, and enrolls in the Axis Institute - a place where people with skills society frowns upon, or locks you up for, can be nurtured and perfected. Thaddeus Roth is the Chancellor, and members of the criminal underworld are the professors. His classmates include a young man from Liverpool whose stench is so bad he has to wear a kind of spacesuit to protect everyone from his smell; twins with a penchant for shoplifting, aided and abetted by a telepathic connection; and a young medical student who's trying to turn himself into a vampire.

It's a place where explosions occur often, where students test their potions on each other and where cheating is admired - so long as you don't get caught. While Cadel hones his computer-hacking skills and learns all the secrets of the faculty, his online friendship with a young woman of great mathematical ability called Kay-Lee is the only sign of normalcy in his life - if you overlook the fact that he's pretending to be a forty-something, cynical maths professor in Canada. When Kay-Lee suddenly stops answering his e-mails and then tells him to sod off, he puts all his energy into learning why. The truth comes as a shock, but now he needs a plan. A dastardly, evil plan that will, he hopes, free him of the net that's been so carefully and thoroughly woven around him, and enable him to live his own life.

I didn't realise Jinks was Australian - and reading this, it's not easy to tell, despite the Sydney setting. So it didn't meet my need to read "home-grown" YA, sadly. I also found it a bit dull, especially the first half. Then it starts to pick up, but didn't really go anywhere very interesting. Part of the problem is that Cadel - who doesn't narrate but whose perspective, if you can call it that, is the only one we get - doesn't have much charisma, and his disinterest in other people makes him alienating without being interesting. It was hard to care about him, and for a genius, I thought some of his decisions, especially towards the end, were pretty dumb.

One of my favourite Harry Potter books is The Order of the Phoenix, and a great deal of that book is involved with school - classes, homework, not much action until the very end. But it never fails to engross me. I can't explain it, but I guess it comes down to how it's written. There are large chunks of Evil Genius that follow Cadel around the school, but I found it all too boring. I couldn't keep track of who was who amongst the faculty, and for a while there the story hung in limbo. It's not because this is a long book that I took so long to read it - it's a pretty fast read, for all its page numbers. No, it's simply because I kept losing interest.

It's not all bad of course. I just felt that it had a lot of potential but didn't deliver. There were some riveting bits, and some interesting characters, but overall I wasn't greatly impressed and have no burning desire to pick up the sequel, Genius Squad. I didn't hate it, not at all. I liked it. But mostly I'm just disappointed. After writing this out and failing to remember what I enjoyed about it, maybe it is time to break out the hat-dipping sauce after all. Or maybe I just left it too long to write the review...

Reviewed in January 2010

Tags: espionage fiction, ya

Cassandra's Conflict by Fredrica Alleyn
Black Lace 2008 (1993)
317 pages
Erotica


This book was recommended to me by Amazon because I'd bought To Seek a Master from them, which is by the same publisher. Now and then Amazon can draw your attention to a book you might not have ever noticed before otherwise, and it can work. I loved To Seek a Master, which is why I had high hopes for this one; I also knew to expect something pretty extreme from this publisher, and besides, the premise made me think it was the erotic, modern-day version of Jane Eyre: timid new governess Cassandra is hired to look after the two young children of a widower, Baron von Ritter, who has powerful charisma and some very extreme sexual tastes that often involve initiating shy young women into his games. Growing tired of his mistress's cruel sado-masochistic needs, the Baron turns Cassandra's initiation into a game that pits the unwitting woman against his mistress - only one will stay, but only he knows the rules.

What could have been a mesmerising novel of gothic atmosphere and erotic seduction, was instead a flat story with highly unlikeable characters and an unconvincing seduction. The Baron's so-called charisma, upon which the entire premise rests, is never really in evidence - instead, he gave me the creeps, and how he treated his two little girls made me despise him from early on. Remove his power to drive women wild and make them fall in love with him, and the motivation is entirely gone. I was told these women love him, but I couldn't believe it. I saw no real evidence of it, or what it was about him that made them love him. I especially didn't like his sexual tastes and I wasn't impressed by his skill - he was all technique, detached and cold and boring. It didn't help that the writing also got too technical, and the descriptions repetitive.

The seduction scenes lacked a necessary powerful ingredient to really make them work, instead of making the reader uncomfortable. By the time the baron decides to introduce Cassandra to the joys of enemas, I'd had enough. I'm sure there is a way to get a divine orgasm from an enema, but there's nothing sexy or erotic about it. It's all so clinical and messy and unpalatable. As is the focus on the belly and water-retention (not letting them pee and forcing them to drink more and more water as a kind of sexual torture until the final, orgasmic release) - I couldn't help thinking about how you can die if you don't pee, from the toxins that have been filtered from your blood having nowhere to go but back into your system. These characters think they're at the height of sexual discovery by defeating their boundaries and pushing themselves, but honestly, I couldn't help but feel they were missing the point.

There is an audience for this book and others like it, as badly written as it is, but it's not for me. I prefer the quietly simmering sexual tension and subtle build-up of grumpy Mr Rochester to the Baron's "baby-faced" charm. Yuck.

Reviewed in January 2010

Tags: erotica

Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
The Modern Library 2001 (1895)
452 pages
Classics


I actually have a head cold at the moment so forgive me if I seem less than coherent. It's also been over a week since I finished it so my memory's not as sharp on the details in that respect either.

When I was at uni the movie Jude came out and I went to see it at the State Cinema in Hobart. Lovely little old-fashioned theatre! I don't remember much of the movie, since we're talking about ten years ago, but aside from a melancholy Christopher Eccleston and a naked Kate Winslet, I do remember the cold, dark, stony dreariness of Christminster (Hardy's remaking of Oxford), and that tragic, awful scene towards the end - you know the one I mean, with the children. The depressing and tragic story stayed with me more as an impression of feelings and lack of colour than any concrete memory of the story, but that was more than enough.

Because of this, I never wanted to read the book, not even after enjoying Tess of the d'Urbervilles. I was too scared, too sure that the book would be as depressing as the movie and therefore hard to read. Probably because I knew something of what to expect, and dreaded worse, that I was so pleasantly surprised at how readable the novel is, and how less upsetting (relatively) the tragic scenes were to read. Another influence is how classic writers tend to go a bit overboard on emotional reactions, whereas we today find, aesthetically speaking, that a more stark, simple, less-is-more approach packs a harder punch. It's too easy to sink into melodrama.

Jude is a poor orphan boy raised by his great Aunt Drusilla, who has a bakery, in the small village of Marygreen. He is a sympathetic boy who feels sorry for the crows he is paid to scare away from a farmer's corn. He is also a dreamer, and from his first view of the mirage-like steeples and domes of Christminster which he sees from the roof of a barn, he yearns to be an academic. He teaches himself Latin and Greek and studies with old books donated by the schoolteacher, Mr Phillotson. When he is older, a young woman, Arabella, lures the naïve young man away from his books and manipulates him into a situation when he feels honour-bound to propose marriage to her.

Their marriage is a disaster from the moment they move into a little run-down cottage together, and ends when he has to kill a pig. Arabella leaves him to go with her parents to Australia, and Jude returns to his books and his dream of being admitted to the university in Christminster. Having trained as a stonemason, he departs Marygreen to seek work in the scholarly city and a way into its hallowed colleges. Jude's lack of worldly experience, his dreamy sympathetic nature and his naïve expectations lead to great disappointment: without money or a wealthy patron, there is nothing for him but to be a stonemason.

Jude doesn't give up on his dream completely, but ignoring the profound class and income differences makes a plan to save money. His dream is once again left to lie fallow when he meets and falls in love with his cousin Sue Bridehead. Sue is a passionate but shy young woman, with an almost cynical view on religion and social traditions. An introduction to Mr Phillotson, some twenty years her senior, gets her a job in his school - as well as a marriage proposal from her much older mentor.

Jude and Sue are the ultimate star-crossed lovers - the obstacle being mostly Sue herself. She feels most secure in herself when she knows she has the hearts of men, but will not promise or give anything of herself in return. She strings Jude along, and Mr Phillotson too, and makes one very bad, very big decision that goes a long way to dooming them both. She's not manipulative like Arabella, or not in the same way - Arabella knows exactly what she wants: a man with "means" (money) who can ensure she has a comfortable life. Jude doesn't deliver on his potential there, and so she turns to a 'publican in Sydney. She seems cold-hearted and mercenary, but she is at least true to herself and doesn't pretend to be something other.

Sue on the other hand is one of those people who you sympathise with at the same time as you realise how much her flaws negatively affect the lives of those around her who love her. In a way, this is a novel about Sue. She captures the period: late-Victorian, a time of the Suffragette movement and women starting to work in the business sphere (as secretaries, usually, at least until they married); a time when more and more women were yearning to break free of the social roles and rules they had long since obeyed. Sue doesn't want to marry because it is confining, because it is a "rule", because she feels it would destroy love. She does not want to do something simply because society and the Church says she must, but on the other hand she doesn't have the strength of character to withstand their censure. She doesn't seem to really care about how Jude feels, so long as he doesn't abandon her (especially not for Arabella).

Jude himself becomes wise to the trend we can see in him: the effect women have on him and his pursuit of his dreams.

"Strange that his first aspiration - towards academical proficiency - had been checked by a woman, and that his second aspiration - towards apostleship - had also been checked by a woman. 'Is it,' he said, 'that the women are to blame; or is it the artificial system of things, under which the normal sex-impulses are turned into devilish domestic gins and springes [sic] to noose and hold back those who want to progress?' " (p237)

Hardy doesn't blame the women, I don't feel - as in Tess, he seems ultimately sympathetic of them and censorious of what they endure for the sack of society, tradition and religion. This is what he means by the "artificial system of things". Jude decides instead to pursue a more "natural" system - to be with Sue, to love her and live with her, and feel no shame for his love or their lack of "lawful wedlock". But it comes with a price, and devastating consequences.

The story, as it follows Jude and Sue moving around the county, struggling to come to an understanding on their relationship, reminded me of another book, another classic though a little-known one: Maurice Guest by Henry Handel Richardson (another woman writing as a man) - a story, if I remember correctly, about music students around the turn of the 19th/20th century, a depressing love story without a happy ending that sucks you in and forces you to feel when all you really want to do is hate and forget (by drinking lots of strong alcohol, like the characters do). I wouldn't mind re-reading it one day. Jude the Obscure - aside from having one of my favourite titles ever - also engages with you deeply on an emotional, empathetic level. It has fabulous atmosphere, almost colourless, and a somewhat hopeless tone. It's scope is narrow and follows Hardy's themes of class consciousness, the repercussions of trying to rise above your station, the strictures of society and the stupid rules it forces people to bend to at the destruction of their being.

It's not all doom-and-gloom. Hardy's ironic sense of humour is here as well, and I have to share one of my favourite quotes as an example:

"This was the sort of discourse that went on between them every day now. The landlord of the lodging, who had heard that they were a queer couple, had doubted if they were married at all, especially as he had seen Arabella kiss Jude one evening when she had taken a little cordial; and he was about to give them notice to quit, till by chance overhearing her one night haranguing Jude in rattling terms, and ultimately flinging a show at his head, he recognised the note of genuine wedlock; and concluding that they must be respectable, said no more." (p425-6)

I feel like this one scene sums up the irony of marriage that Hardy is trying to get across, and that it captures and supports Sue's fears.

This was Hardy's last novel - it received such censure from the public and the Church (one Bishop famously burned his copy) that he was disgusted and refused to write novels again, concentrating instead on poetry. Reading this over a hundred years after it was written, it feels quite modern and reflective, showing us at once how far we've come and how little has really changed. I may quibble over some of Hardy's clumsier plot devices, but ultimately it is a work of timeless artistic creation and philosophical thought.

Reviewed in January 2010

Tags: classics

The Spell Book of Listen Taylor (And the Secrets of the Family Zing) by Jaclyn Moriarty
Groundwood Books 2008 (2007)
479 pages
YA Fiction


This is the story of how I was tricked by this book. Yes, TRICKED!! This is the story:

Four years ago in January 2006, I was at Sydney airport waiting to board the plane to Canada. As you do, I was wasting time in the airport shops, more specifically, one of those little bookshops. One book caught my eye and I instantly fell in love the cover and the zany title and the even zanier, witty blurb. It was I Have a Bed Made of Buttermilk Pancakes by an Australian/Canadian author, Jaclyn Moriarty, whom I'd never heard of before. It was a couple of years old by then (first published in 2004), but I'd been living in Japan so I was behind in almost everything. It was also, being an Australian book, too expensive. Sadly, I put it back on the shelf, but I never forgot it.

A year or so later, I was browsing in Chapters and came across the book on a sale table. It was published by Anansi, a Canadian publisher, and had one of the fugliest covers I'd ever seen, which came in pink or blue. Against my better judgement, I bought the blue one; as soon as I got home I regretted it - I didn't want to read such an ugly book - but, being me, I couldn't get rid of it either.

Perhaps a year later, I read Moriarty's YA novel, The Year of Secret Assignments (or, Finding Cassie Crazy) in an afternoon and laughed myself silly. I picked up her other two books, Feeling Sorry for Celia and The Murder of Bindy Mackenzie but I've yet to read them. Sometime in 2008, I was thrilled to find in Chapters' YA section what I thought was a new Moriarty novel, or new for Canada, The Spell Book of Listen Taylor. I started reading it this month as part of my 2010 TBR Challenge (12 books that have been languishing, unread, on my shelves for a while, to be read in 12 months), and one thing that kept bugging me was the thought, "This doesn't read like a YA novel!".

About halfway through, after the third hot air balloon story, something occurred to me. Either the author is obsessed with hot air balloons (thinking of the lovely cover of the Buttermilk Pancakes book), or ...

I was at home when this epiphany hit me, on the couch in front of my bookcases, so I jumped up, grabbed the hideous Pancake book off the shelf, and looked again at the blurb. Zings. The Zing Family Secret. Ah. I flipped to the beginning, and found that it wasn't the same. I flipped through some more. It WAS the same book! They had just rearranged things! The time line is somewhat confusing, so for their Groundwood edition (Groundwood being Anansi's YA imprint), they reorganised it and sectioned it into chronological parts with helpful titles - the chapters still overlap, and it's still hard sometimes remembering that you're reading the same period of time, just from a different character's perspective, but it is more orderly than the original novel, which starts with one of the hot air balloon stories, goes next to the ending and then back to a beginning, and so on. Other things had been changed. The title, of course, was changed to give it more of a YA feel (the character of Listen is a wonderful character but she doesn't have that big a role). The character of Nathaniel was originally called Vernon (a name that completely changes his personality - "Nathaniel" works much better); some editing (read: removal of bits) to the narrative had occurred; and the "extracts from the Zing garden shed" were in different places.

I felt quite betrayed by this realisation. Firstly, because I had really wanted to read I Have a Bed Made of Buttermilk Pancakes, but specifically the one with the lovely cover which I wouldn't be able to do until I returned home (and who knows how many years that will be!); and secondly because I thought I was getting a whole new Moriarty book. Nowhere does it say on or in The Spell Book of Listen Taylor that it was originally published as I Have a Bed Made of Buttermilk Pancakes - no mention of this book is made whatsoever, in the author's bio or anywhere else.

Reading the blurb on the back of the Pancakes book, though, it makes mention that "This is her first adult novel." So that explains why it doesn't feel like a typical YA novel, or like her other YA books. For one thing, most of the main characters are adult women. There is Fancy Zing (married to Radcliffe, with one daughter, Cassie), Marbie Zing (Fancy's younger sister, living with Nathaniel and his daughter Listen), and Cath Murphy (Cassie's Grade Two teacher, alone and broken hearted). Listen and Cassie get to share their perspectives as well - it's entirely told from the women's point of view - but it is Fancy, Marbie and Cath whose story we are reading. And they are all having, or wanting to have, or suspect someone else is having, affairs. Not what you would usually read in a YA novel (not that teenagers can't or shouldn't read this - I liked reading "adult" books as a teen, and it's always great to get a different perspective on life than that of your own age group).

So despite loving the story, it loses a star for tricking me. Which is probably the publisher's fault. That's not the only reason it loses a star, though.

There are times when this book reads like someone who's visited Australia a couple of times, in summer, but hasn't really experienced it and doesn't really get it. These are the times, the only times (which aren't many - mostly in regards to the freak snow storm that hits Sydney in the story), when reference is made to the fact that this is set in Sydney. Otherwise, you would never know. Which is rather weird, because Moriarty grew up in Sydney, even though she now lives in Montreal during the Canadian summer (according to her bio). So why did I find it so lacking in authenticity? Regarding the before-mentioned snow storm, it's not the closing down of the city over two centimetres of snow that is hard to believe, but the things the characters think about it. Especially with Fancy having a Canadian neighbour - it seemed set up so the Australians would look stupid and incompetent, regardless of the fact that they all seemed to ski and that it DOES get cold so people DO have winter clothes there!

I find that, once I started noticing the way American publishers changed spelling and words in non-American-authored books into American spelling and words, I can't stop. It's very distracting. It's the same with typos and grammatical mistakes, but far more offensive because it's so insulting. I loved that they kept "campervan" and "mum", but somewhere between Australia and Canada, the manuscript acquired American spelling and some words were changed. We don't say "airplane", so why would these characters say it? Neither do we say "cell" (for mobile) or "candy floss". These changes grate on me. But which is the bigger sin? Changing a novel - character names, title, even the chapters themselves - so that it can be sold as Young Adult book, or the Americanisation of the text itself? Personally, for me it's the latter.

But what about the bloody story? I hear you ask, impatiently. Well, the story is great. Eccentric, not as funny as the other book of hers I read, but definitely zany. Clever too, in its structure, plotting, and revelation. Even reorganised into a somewhat more linear narrative for this edition, it's still a marvel how well it all comes together and the small details are not forgotten. There's irony rather than chuckles, and times when I wanted to smack Marbie on the head. (You will too, when you get to the Aeronautical Engineer parts.) The biggest thing I loved about it was, actually, Listen herself.

Listen Taylor is starting Grade 7 at a new school, and during the school Walkathon (I remember those!), her friends run off and leave her, and then shun her at school, and finally tell her that they decided to cut her out of their group. It's mean, and cruel, and awful, and it's something I could completely sympathise with. Brought back plenty of memories! What Listen goes through was more realistic and relatable, for me, than what I usually read in North American YA fiction (of which I've been reading quite a lot lately). Listen was a character close to my heart.

I also loved the character of Cath Murphy - she balances the weird Zing sisters nicely, adds a more familiar perspective, and is ultimately the driving force of the novel because of, well, the Zing Family Secret. Which is craftily revealed, slowly, so that you piece it together at just the right moments, exactly when the author wants you to. Truly skilled writing. Not to mention, the way it's written, which I also loved. Again, it's different from her YA novels - like the writing itself, not just the characters, is eccentric.

I don't know which edition to recommend. This Groundwood one is lovely to hold, the pages are just the right softness and texture, and the font is light and elegant. The Anansi adult edition is just as ugly on the inside as it is on the outside. As for the original Pan MacMillan edition in Australia, I don't know what that's like. Someone will have to let me know, and whether the right words are there - mobile phone, fairy floss, and so on. I miss them.

Reviewed in January 2010

Tags: fiction

Jane Bites Back by Michael Thomas Ford
Ballantine Books 2010
299 pages
Fiction


If Queen Victoria and Lizzy Bennet can be zombie hunters, and Darcy a vampyre, why not add Jane Austen herself to the ranks of the undead? (Seems like everyone's fair game these days.)

The premise is simple enough. Jane Austen isn't dead. She is in fact a vampire, currently living in a small town in New York state where she owns a bookshop. Her biggest concerns are the sweet attentions of Walter, a local carpenter - she likes him but you can't really have a relationship with someone when you're not only a blood-drinking immortal but also one of the world's most famous authors (and he has no idea); all the trashy self-help, cooking and workout books cashing in on her novels and her name (and she's not seeing any royalties from them either!); and the fact that in two hundred years she's had 116 rejections for her final manuscript, a novel called Constance.

These problems are forgotten when a man from her past turns up in her shop - and not just any man, but a dark, handsome, seductive, amoral man, the man who turned her all those years ago - the man we know as Lord Byron. And he's determined to have Jane, and will happily jeopardise everything she's achieved in order to blackmail her into joining him - be it threatening to turn Walter, or spreading rumours that her new novel, now finally picked up by a publisher, was plagiarised. Dead bodies turn up and then disappear, and a lunatic of an equally popular author is out for revenge...


If you're looking for something light, quick, fun and silly to read, and you're not offended by the premise, this will hit the spot. I usually avoid Austen spin-offs, especially the novels that are sequels to Pride and Prejudice - unless they offer a new twist. (Ford pokes fun at them himself in Jane Bites Back, and has Jane herself saying how much she enjoyed Pride and Prejudice and Zombies!) Seems like the classics are particularly ripe for a paranormal element: combining such serious, staid works with, for example, zombie mayhem. I can see why Austen's books are more "suitable" for it than, say, Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights - you can't really add all that much to such darkly gothic works; at least, not without them becoming completely campy. It would just be overkill.

I would never have the gall to write Austen herself, in a modern-day setting, as a vampire. I was surprised at how well it worked. Really surprised. Much is due to the simple, light, don't-take-me-too-seriously tone to the narrative, and much to Jane being a character who manages to balance somewhat-prim-lady-with-morals, with the whole "vampire thing". (She's very endearing, actually.) It even works with Byron - and the other one. (Gotta leave you some surprises! Plus it's hilarious!) Ford doesn't try too hard; I think that's the key. There is some element of vacuousness to it, an over-emphasis on feminine traits like the picking out of a wardrobe etc. that only a man trying to establish a female protagonist feels the need to dwell on. In the end, you don't think of the Jane-Austen-as-historical-figure-and-famous-novelist while reading Jane Bites Back; this is a whole other Jane, one whose fame and novels are just as fictional as she is.

In keeping with the light-hearted tone, the plot is fast-paced and not terribly introspective or reflective. It's certainly not like anything Austen would have written - but she doesn't narrate, so that doesn't matter. While in temperament she's believable, in deed she's very much influenced by this new, modern, vampire side. Dead bodies don't bother her; neither does spending a night with Lord Byron. Which is funny, because a lot of the time you completely forget she's a vampire. It's not an aspect of the novel that's really dwelt on or explored (I think Ford is saving that up for the sequel - no joke).

There are plot holes, and the really interesting questions that arise from such a premise are ignored, but such is the tone of the novel that you feel like you've joined a party where no one cares about serious things, and you can no longer remember why you thought they were important anyway. Until you've gone home/finished the book, with the taste of stale wine in your mouth and something funky spilt down the front of your top ...

... Then the sequel, Jane Goes Batty, comes out, and despite everything you find yourself back at that party, being silly and saying incomprehensible things, and shrugging whenever someone asks you something serious.

Reviewed in January 2010

Tags: fiction

Princess Academy by Shannon Hale
Bloomsbury 2007 (2005)
314 pages
Children's, Fantasy


The linder quarries on Mount Eskel make for hard labour, but the villagers who mine it wouldn't trade their life for anything. The linder stone takes skill to extract in whole blocks from the mountainside, and its qualities enable them to converse without speaking.

Fourteen year old Miri wants nothing so much as to join her father and older sister in the quarry. But she's small, and her father has forbidden her to set foot in the quarry. Instead, Miri tends the goats; teases her childhood friend, Peder; and wishes on the little miri flowers that she was named after to be allowed to work with everyone else in the quarry.

But everything changes the day the traders arrive for the last time before winter, bringing with them an official from the capital of Dunland - a messenger from the King. It has long been a tradition that the priests name the city from which the prince and heir to the throne must choose his bride. This time, causing great shock amongst the noble families of Dunland, the priests have named Mount Eskel - so overlooked it's not even considered a province of Dunland.

And so, further down the mountain in an abandoned stone manor house, the Princess Academy is established. Usually a formality, this time the girls aged thirteen to seventeen really must be trained - taught to read and write, how to walk and talk, about history and geography, diplomacy and economics.

Most of the girls don't want to become princess, and their families need them back in the village and quarry, but even so, competition sparks amongst them. Who will be princess? Could Miri, who does so well at her studies and was able to make the prince smile, be the one? (And what about Peder?) Yet when a threat comes to the Academy, curtseys and platitudes won't save them - only wits, mountain strength and Miri's determination.


This is the first Hale book I've read, and arguably her most popular one. It wasn't what I expected, but really it was better than I expected. It's one of those quiet fantasy books, like General Winston’s Daughter - nothing showy, no loud magic tricks or evil sorcerers or that tedious battle between good and evil (yawn). It also didn't follow those boring fantasy clichés that so many authors seem to enjoy perpetuating - a patriarchal social structure, for instance. Men and women work alongside each other in the quarry, and respect each other. Gender doesn't come into it. I got the impression that, despite classic hierarchies and class divisions, the rest of Dunland is much the same. The setting still had that typical medieval flavour, but with new angles and greater equality. Since it's Fantasy, not historical fiction, this is precisely the kind of thing I want to see - and don't get enough of.

The story is also disarmingly simple in its style - the prose has that lovely, unburdened quality that's usual in YA and Children's fiction - no fancy adjectives, no heavy-handed descriptions, no long-winded paragraphs: light on its feet, detailed and yet deceptively straight-forward. Perfect for its target age group (9-12) but just as enjoyable for the rest of us.

I loved Miri: she was a sympathetic character, a resourceful, intelligent, spirited girl you could really admire. She makes a great role model. The other girls weren't as fleshed-out as I'd have liked, but their characters still came through in small ways. The plot wasn't predictable, and the ending was very sweet. I also loved the small role economics plays in the story, not to mention the power an education gives you - Miri uses her hard-won knowledge from the Academy to improve her village's ability to trade, thus improving the quality of life on the mountain as well as their bargaining power. See, it's educational as well as a fun read!

Reviewed in January 2010

Tags: children's, fantasy

Little Bee by Chris Cleave
Original UK title: The Other Hand
Anchor Canada 2009
266 pages
Fiction


After two years locked up in a refugee detention centre outside London, Little Bee has finally been released. The sixteen year old Nigerian girl spent her time there having nightmares, coming up with new and inventive ways of killing herself should the bad men come, and perfecting her Queen's English.

Now free but still not legal, she goes to the only people she knows in England, journalists Andrew O'Rourke and his wife Sarah Summers. But when she arrives it is to find Sarah about to leave with her son Charlie, perpetually dressed as Batman, for Andrew's funeral.

Little Bee is about the tragic, frightening circumstances of Little Bee meeting Sarah and Andrew in Nigeria, how Sarah lost her finger and how guilt slowly drove Andrew to suicide, the deep connection between Sarah and Little Bee and how they help each other. It is also about the things people flee from - atrocities that are denied - and how the rest of the world turns its shoulder. It is about the atrocious conditions in detention centres - centres that are, in essences, concentration camps.

Little Bee herself is the kind of character you instantly fall in love with and care deeply for, from the first moment. She came vividly alive, an endearing mix of naiveté and worldly wisdom, of strength and vulnerability, of kindness and that oh-so-human quality of selfishness, which her story proves we all have. She doesn't try to milk your emotions or hide the truth from you, though it's understandable that she delays in telling it, being as judgemental as we are. Her voice is charismatic, intelligent, sweet, and funny, and this relieves some of the sadness of the story - it's not a depressing read, but a life-affirming one.

There's tragedy in her story, and at the same time laughter, often in surprising ways. Little Bee often speaks with irony without realising it - even her suicide plans take on the humour of extremes, a kind of farce that comes with being pushed further than you should ever have to go:

"In the [detention centre's] canteen there was a television that was always on. I began to learn about life in your country. I watched programs called Love Island and Hell's Kitchen and What Wants to be a Millionaire? and I worked out how I would kill myself on all of those shows. Drowning, knives, and ask the audience.

One day the detention officers gave all of us a copy of a book called LIFE IN THE UNITED KINGDOM. It explains the history of your country and how to fit in. I planned on how I would kill myself in the time of Churchill (stand under bombs), Victoria (throw myself under a horse), and Henry the Eighth (marry Henry the Eighth). I worked out how to kill myself under Labour and Conservative governments, and why it was not important to have a plan for suicide under the Liberal Democrats. I began to understand how your country worked. (p.49)

It's not the prospect of suicide that makes me laugh at this passage, or the circumstances that have led to Little Bee's need to always be prepared to take her own life - because it's infinitely preferable to the alternative, should the men come. No, it's the bleak absurdity of it all, the fact that there's no one in the world looking out and protecting Little Bee that is so awful it's painful (drawing attention to our own uselessness and uncaring, defeatist attitude), and also her astute yet naïve understanding of the country and culture that she finds herself in. I know sad things aren't supposed to be funny, but that's how irony works. (At the end of the day, it's hard to beat the British at this kind of sharp-edged irony.)

Sarah is also a blend of world-weary, sad, resilient and strong. She's a familiar person, with real flaws, floundering a bit yet able to rise to the occasion, to a need. She's the character most familiar to us because she's Western - and yet she goes further than we would ever think of in making other people's problems her own. In this case, it's the Nigerians whose villages were torched and families slaughtered, and who themselves live in fear of being caught and killed because of what they saw, all because oil was found under their homes - these are the people Sarah tries to help. The social and political commentary - "accusations", I should say - doesn't try to play it coy or be too subtle. What it does try to do is highlight the situation - one that the Nigerian and British governments have denied - and leave no wiggle room. The author, a columnist for the Guardian, makes no bones about his political stance; that combined with a skilfully written story earns him my respect.

Bringing it down to the human element, making it a story about people with names and faces and families and hopes and stories to tell, just like us, humanises a people who, in the face of atrocity, are so easy to ignore. It doesn't matter that this is fiction: it's based on true circumstances and contains many real stories. (It did remind me of another story I read recently, which touches on the clash between north and south Nigeria over oil and all the human casualties - in Say You’re One of Them)

One thing I really appreciated about the plot was how it brings the atrocities that happen ELSEWHERE, home. Around the turn of the century, detention centres were a hot, contentious issue in Australia. Refugees - called "boat people" because that's how they arrived - were locked up in these detention centres for years. The centres themselves, in pure Howard-Bush neo-liberal fashion, were privatised and out-sourced to an American "security" company which hired 18 year old dole bludgers with no training to work there, and gave them guns. Meanwhile, the refugees - "queue-jumpers", as Howard loved to call them - protested the conditions (and politics) in the only ways available to them: self-starvation sewing their lips shut, suicide, things like that. (And you thought we treated the Aborigines badly.)

The structure of this novel was excellent. It moved back and forth in time, sometimes revisiting the same scene more than once, in a different way, shedding new light on an incident that didn't seem important the first time round. It created a tight narrative, one that made you question and anticipate and wonder. There's also tension, dread and fear, especially towards the end. The ending itself is perhaps a bit overly dramatic and a wee bit manipulative, but I was so THERE that I didn't care, and it made me cry. This isn't a story I'll be able to forget any time soon, and I can't quite get it out of head that Little Bee isn't actually real but fictional. These things add up to a high recommendation from me.

Reviewed in December 2009

Tags: fiction

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
Translated by Hugh Aplin
Hesperus Modern Voices 2009 (1927)
212 pages
Classics; Science Fiction; Dystopian Fiction


A thousand years in our future, D-503 is just one number among many in the One State. The One State is a city, a society, that revolves not around the individual but around the collective we, like a hive, with the Benefactor in God-like status at the centre. D-503 works as a constructor on the Integral, the ship that will take their ideology and philosophy of life to other planets, to civilise and free other species. When an article in the State Gazette calls for poems, manifestos etc. to go in the ship, D-503 starts writing his Conspectus, a kind of diary that begins as his way of showing us what life is like in the One State.

A mathematician in a highly mathematical society, D-503 lives like everyone else, every day more or less the same, until he encounters I-330, a woman who brings out strong emotion in him, who scares and confounds him but who he becomes obsessed with. She leads him to the Ancient House, a remnant of long ago serving as a museum at the edge of the city, where the Wall keeps the jungle and wild things out of the pristine, perfect glass city.

As he tries to untangle and understand all the new sensations D is experiencing, he becomes unwittingly entangled in a revolt against the One State that, in this world where they have proven that the universe is finite, and where the One State is the perfected civilisation to end all wars and revolutions, can have only one ending.


If We sounds familiar to you, there's a good reason for it. This is the powerful, hugely influential book credited with being the inspiration and influence behind both 1984 and Brave New World. In the introduction, translator Hugh Aplin explains that "Zamyatin's vision of life in a technocratic future society was formed in part by his experiences in the North-East of England when he worked in the Newcastle shipyards during the First World War"; we tend to thoughtlessly or arrogantly assume that a dystopia like this is shamelessly based on Stalin's Soviet Union. I'm sure, since Zamyatin lived there too, it had its impact, but we can sometimes forget that other places, places like England and America, had their own problems. (It doesn't help that Animal Farm was an allegory of the Russian Revolution and Stalin's dictatorship.)

This is a tricky book to read. I could read it a hundred times more and still feel like I'm not getting it all. It's complex, but simple. Alienating, but readable. D-503's narrative voice is unlike anything I've read before, that I can think of. He deteriorates into a man who sounds like he's constantly high, tripping and paranoid at the same time. It's not always easy to tell if something's meant metaphorically or literally, and that did slow the story down for me. The usual cues and markers aren't always there, and I have the feeling that the reading experience engenders a feeling pretty close to what D is feeling himself.

The truth is, as much as I enjoyed the story, there are too many clever things happening in this novel, both narratively and stylistically, and I would have to devote a month of my time doing concentrated reading and research, ideally in a university setting, to grasp even half of it. I barely have time to even write this review, which is a good week or so overdue. Some of the maths scared me off. D talks about Chaos and mathematical equations and leaves me behind. But there are other parts of his increasingly turbulent psyche that are fascinating and engrossing.

Some of the passages, some of D's - or Zamyatin's - descriptive prose is an absolute delight to read. It's very visual, doesn't always make sense, but quite unique.

"The two of us walked as one. Somewhere far away through the mist the sun was barely audibly singing, everything was filling with the elastic and pearly, gold, pink and red. The whole world is one single, unbounded woman, and we're right in her belly, we haven't yet been born, we're joyously ripening. And it's clear to me, inviolably clear: everything is for me - the sun, the mist, the pink, the gold - it's for me ..." (p66)

"If you were told: your shadow can see you, can see you all the time? Do you understand? And then suddenly - you have a strange sensation: your arms are extraneous, they're a hindrance, and I catch myself swinging my arms absurdly, out of time with my steps. Or suddenly - you have to look round without fail, but you can't look round, not for anything, your neck's enchained. And I run, run ever quicker, and I can feel with my back that the shadow's following me quicker, and there's nowhere, nowhere to escape from it ..." (p79)

"The click of the annunciator. The whole of me flung itself into the narrow white slit - and ... and some male (with a consonant) number I didn't know. The lift hummed, slammed. Before me was a forehead rammed on carelessly and tilted to one side, while the eyes ... a very strange impression, as though he were speaking from there, from under his brows, where the eyes are." (p100)

Thing is, it's more interesting at this point to bring up the prose rather than the themes, because the themes are quite clear. They're common to this kind of dystopian novel, and the addition of science fiction doesn't really change that. If you were reading this for the first time as a teenager, say, or if you'd never had any exposure to dystopian worlds, the themes would be fascinating and mind-boggling. After all, it's one of the reasons why I love this genre.

Themes of what happiness is, and what it involves and what it costs. Themes of individual need versus a collective good. Themes exploring the point of living and having a conscience, of what sets us apart from other creatures - and symbolism, lots of symbolism. The translator's Introduction, as well as the Foreward by Alan Sillitoe, spells out a great deal of it, from the nature of the One States' "elections" (everyone votes for the same person, the Benefactor, simply by raising their hand en masse) to I-330's ego-centric letter "I". It's fun to play "spot the symbol" with We because there are so many - it's laden with double-meanings, meanings only we can understand because of where and how we live, in the time period we live in.

This is a fantastic book for discussion - there's so much going on, and so much to question and ponder and argue over. If you're looking for a good edition of this modern classic, I highly recommend this one. Not that I've read any others, but I was very impressed with this particular one, especially as I've had a lot of misses with Russian translations.

Reviewed in December 2009

Tags: classics, dystopian fiction, science fiction

Paradise Rules by Beth Kery
Heat 2009
326 pages
Erotic romance


Lana Rodriguez is a popular singer with a smoky voice and a childhood she's done her best to forget. When her assistant, Melanie, needs a holiday to escape her ex-husband's nasty divorce tactics, she agrees to go with her to Hawaii - the one place she never wanted to return to. As reserved and cold as she seems, Lana's eye is caught by the uber-attractive Jason Koa, a surfing coach and owner of a popular beachside restaurant.

Jason is part of a large family headed by Grandmother Lilly. Once an Olympic swimmer, he now lives on a boathouse, swims and surfs as much as he can, and manages his grandmother's books. He's also a fan of Lana's music, and when the opportunity arises, he arranges with his cousin Po to be her escort for a night.

One night isn't enough however. Jason wants more of Lana, wants to break down her icy facade and mean more to her than just sex. Luckily for him, Lana wants more too. Getting her to promise to spend an entire night and a day with him on his houseboat is as far ahead as he can think, but just when Lana decides to risk everything to be with Jason longer, their steamy, dreamy, passionate world comes tumbling down.

Beth Kery writes great sex. I mean that in both senses of the word: stylistically, and narratively. That is: good prose, good description. If there's one thing you can always count on, it's steamy, steamy sex. And let's be completely clear here: this is erotic romance. That is an actual sub-genre of Romance. A romance novel might have two or three actual sex scenes in it, but focuses mostly on anticipation and the build-up of sexual tension. There's some of that here, but erotic romance doesn't waste time (unless it's a boring one).

The thing about the sex in these books is that it's used to explore the characters' psyches, their strengths and flaws, their compatibility, their issues, their connection. This is the third way in which Beth Kery writes great sex. Without it, the whole novel would fall apart.

There were aspects of both Lana and Jason that I liked, and little things that bugged me. I don't care for heroines who get too stubborn and difficult, mostly because they're way too common. Lana had a bit of that here and there, and I'd like to see a different approach to the character-with-troubled-past-she-wants-to-hide-from. Granted, you'd have to find some other way to create conflict and resistance - the whole point of Romance books, anyway, is to find a way for the characters to resist each other, often needlessly. Hence the sexual tension. Hence why I can't read too many Romance novels, too close together.

The saving grace here is that Lana and Jason have an edge, and also that they desire each other and it's not the sex that they're resisting, but anything more permanent, more committed, more open and trusting. Or, at least, she is. I like a man (in the Romance novel sense), who isn't afraid to go after the woman he wants. I think this is why I like erotic romance so much: you tend to get decisive men and electric, passionate scenes. The emotional side builds more gradually.

Jason was a little too perfect, though. I know I had that complaint about the hero in Sweet Restraint, and maybe the characters' personalities are a little too similar, but for some reason I liked Jason. I did have to laugh at the bit about him winning 8 Gold medals at the Sydney Olympics - trying to steal the limelight away from the real golden boy of the pool that year, Ian "Thorpedo" Thorpe? Not gonna happen! (There was a little dig about Aussie surfers towards the end too - have to say, I don't even know the names of any of our surfers, but it still pricks my sense of national pride! And people say we aren't patriotic ... Maybe not, but we are loyal! And our sports people are our national heroes...)

The story of Lana's childhood was sad, but handled gently and subtly - no emotion-wringing heavy-handedness here! The setting was beautifully recreated - the closest I've come in real life is a pit stop at Honolulu airport where I had to sign away all my rights to America (not a nice feeling I can tell you!) while George W Bush grinned inanely down at me from a horrible gilded portrait on the wall; but in that brief stop-over I did get a sense of the quality of the air: humid, hot and sticky, with a different taste from any other humidity I've experienced, and a distinct feeling of being somewhere else. The tropical beauty of the islands - and their dangers - were simply but effectively rendered here, and even though it felt a bit weird reading it while huddled in my warm clothes with the fireplace going and the temperature outside at -20, it did transport me to Honolulu and make me want to visit the place (first time I've ever felt the inclination).

And did I mention that Beth Kery writes great sex?

My thanks to Beth Kery for a copy of the book.

Reviewed in December 2009

Tags: erotic romance

Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl
Little, Brown & Company 2009
563 pages
YA Horror/Romance


This is another book I bought for the pretty cover, and was ultimately disappointed by. I try not to think of star ratings while I'm reading a book, but with this one I would oscillate between being 2-stars-annoyed and 4-stars-entertained, all within the space of a couple of pages. It took me a long time to read - there was a gap in the middle where I put it down for a week or so and then struggled to pick it back up again (and not just because it's heavy!). If we have to compare, though, this is a better written book than the other recently released paranormal YA with a gorgeous cover and a similar setting, Fallen.


Ethan Wate lives in a small town in Gatlin county, in South Carolina. It's one of those small American-south towns where everyone knows everything about everyone, no one ever leaves, and they religiously reenact battles from the Civil War. Ethan's mother, an historian, died in a car accident and his father lives in his study, writing gothic horror novels. Cared for by Amma, who practices voodoo, Ethan has never felt like he really belongs here and yearns for the day when he can leave for university.

Over the summer before he starts grade eleven (or it could be grade ten, I'm not sure), he dreams every night about a girl he can't see, about holding on to her hand while something tries to tear them apart. Even though he never saw what she looked like, when he first sees Lana Duchannes, the new girl, on the first day of school, he knows it's her. She's the niece of Old Man Ravenwood, a recluse who lives in Ravenwood, the oldest house in Gatlin - because of this, she's immediately ostracised by the other kids. But Ethan is drawn to her, and pursues a friendship despite her initial animosity.

That they share a connection is undeniable. Ethan can hear Lana in his head, and it's not long before they are communicating telepathically. After that, it's not such a big step to take in her true nature: she's a Caster, and on her sixteenth birthday she'll be Claimed - she'll either become a Dark Caster or a Light one, and because of a family curse, she has no choice in the matter.

As the days count down, Ethan only becomes more determined to help Lana and unlock the secrets of her family.


I have, not issues, just problems, with this book. Let me first mention the things that worked, for me. I loved that it was told by a male character. These stories are usually about a mysterious, attractive boy and the female narrator's experience falling in love with said problematic boy. Here it's flipped over: Lana is the withdrawn, beautiful, ultimately dangerous love interest that honest Ethan falls for. He's a smart boy, better educated than his peers and doesn't share their "southern" mentality. To be honest, the people of Gatlin County do not come off well. All the stereotyped small-minded ignorance, religious superstition and conservative views of the American south are portrayed in all their cringe-inducing glory. It did actually make it harder to read, because such blatant small-minded ignorance is painful (no matter where it occurs).

There's great atmosphere in the book - set in a similar location to Fallen, it had much greater success at building a visual representation but still struggled to capture the other senses - smell, especially. Hot and humid and stormy places tend to have remarkable smells. There are some nice gothic touches but nothing terribly original. I liked the changing nature of Ravenwood.

The prose is solid but there's something unsatisfying about it. It lacks something that I can't quite put my finger on. At times the story is engrossing, but at others it's slow and dull - through it all, the prose holds steady, but ultimately has nowhere to go. One of the problems with it is that it couldn't capture the chemistry between Ethan and Lana. Their feelings for each other were lacklustre. Ethan tried, but Lana was so obsessed with her impending doom - or possibility of - that she often came off cold, aloof and uncaring. The authors included some nice quiet moments meant to solidify their relationship, but such scenes - scenes that I would normally love and that tend to be make-or-break for me - failed to hold my interest.

It took me a while to figure out what the numbers heading each chapter meant - they're dates, but because Americans write them backwards it wasn't immediately apparent. The dates do add some structure but it's not really necessary - Ethan, who narrates in first-person, keeps track of time well enough on his own, and since I stopped noticing the numbers it didn't do anything for building tension.

Part of the problem, plot and pacing-wise at least, is that there was no mystery as to when the Claiming would happen - Lana's sixteenth birthday - or what. Ethan's comment in the prologue about the story ending with a grave lends some uncertainty and tension, but the book is so long that the authors failed to keep that anticipation going. The beginning was strong, but once Ethan and Lana got together and her secret was out in the open, it floundered, struggling to be interesting in the build-up to the Grand Finale. It was too easy for me to stop reading, and too hard for me to finish. Too much dead wood, perhaps; too many stock characters; too forced, in the end. Including the parallels, which the authors highlighted, to the novel To Kill a Mockingbird - it would have been fun, if Stephenie Meyer hadn't already done it with "Romeo and Juliet" and Wuthering Heights. (And speaking of the ending, it was confusing. It seemed to have two different endings that didn't gel, that contradicted each other, but by then I simply didn't care if it was meant to be a clever narrative device or not. I just wanted to understand.)

Here's where my jaded, seen-it-too-many-times cynical side comes out. Maybe I just read it too soon after Fallen. Maybe I've read too many of these YA paranormal romances and I need a break. Maybe I'm just tired of reading about American high school kids, whose experiences are all so similar and the school system portrayed so clichéd and awful, that you can't help but start to wonder if that really is what it's like there. Maybe I'm just annoyed that I can't get hold of many books, YA or otherwise, set in my own country. And maybe it's just the end-of-the-year grumps, the winter blues, which I do tend to get, that's making it hard for a book to really grab me - after all, I normally prefer the long novels compared to the short. In which case, it almost seems unfair to read anything. Almost. At the end of the day, there's no such thing as removing yourself and all your baggage from the reading experience, so I really shouldn't apologise for it.

This is a fine debut achievement for the authors, and it has been picked up by Warner Bros for a movie. I don't know if it's the first book in a series, but the ending does allow for a second novel.

Reviewed in December 2009

Tags: gothic horror, paranormal romance, ya

Rasmus by Jørgen Clevin
Gyldendal 2008 (1945)
47 pages
Children's picture book


This was a gift from a good friend of mine for my birthday, inspired by a conversation we had about our favourite children's books (from when we were kids). This was one of hers, and I'm thrilled to have a copy. It is in Danish, but she also sent me a translation.

Rasmus is an ostrich, born in Africa, happily spending his days roaming the land when he is captured and sent to a zoo in Denmark. The days and weeks are repetitive and he misses his friends - the giraffe, the elephant, even the Negro [this was written in the 40s]. He and the zookeeper cry together. But look! His friends are here in the zoo - the elephant, the giraffe, the rhino, the lion and the hippo, all his friends from Africa!

The book is lovely - illustrated by the author with lots to see and notice in the details. The story is endearing but I'm not completely sure what the message is - don't worry about zoo animals, they're awfully happy? Maybe it's just an attempt to reassure us? But don't expect a story written in the 40s to have the same sentiments as one written today. I have a few books that are quite old in that way, including a collection of short stories about a "Negro" boy that once belonged to my grandfather or my father, I forget which. I certainly didn't read them, as a child, and think that the attitudes etc. were contemporary, and I wouldn't be worried about my own (hypothetical, at this point) child reading Rasmus - it'd be quite the discussion starter, actually - but I can understand why this book wouldn't get printed in America, for instance. Especially with one of the illustrations being of a happy black family, androgynous, wearing colourful shorts, with wiry black hair and giant, smiling red lips - and cacti in the background! (I remember watching a David Attenborough episode on cactus plants and I don't recall there being any in Africa?) But it's more dangerous to pretend that these depictions never existed.

Reviewed in December 2009

Tags: children's

The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy
Signet Classic 1982 (1905)
248 pages
Historical Romance/Fiction


If, like me, you watched the movie more times than you'd care to admit when you were growing up; or if, like me, you've read all of Georgette Heyer's Regency romances and then some, you'll love this book. It doesn't pretend to be anything extraordinary, it doesn't even offer a social commentary on the period in which it's set - written by an aristocrat who is clearly on the side of the aristocrats, it's easy to see where her sympathies lie. But it is a rollicking good ride, a fun adventure story, a very sweet and at times intense love story, and a daring, cunning dash into danger. For sheer entertainment's sake, I loved it.

Set in 1792 during the French Revolution when, if your history is a bit hazy, the French people rose up in revolt and began executing their wealthy aristocracy on "Madame Guillotine" - including the King and Marie Antoinette (their young son was famously unaccounted for, if I remember correctly) - stories of "innocent" aristocrats (especially women and children, who were beheaded alongside the men) being rescued and taken to England are perfect for a romantic adventure story.

When I was a little girl, my mother's best friend returned from a trip to Russia, where her family was from, with a birthday gift for me - a book printed in Yugoslavia called Girls' Adventure Stories of Long Ago. The very first story, and my favourite, was about a young girl fleeing France who is rescued by a Englishman with a secret identity, going by the name of Red Hawk. Adventure and romance ensued. So between that story and watching my sister's copy of The Scarlet Pimpernel, I was an early fan.

Lady Marguerite Blakeney is a beautiful, clever young French woman, once an actress, now wife to Sir Percy Blakeney, one of the richest and most well-dressed men in England - and also, so everyone thinks, one of the most inane and stupid. When her brother Armand, who is working on the side of the Revolution in France, is found out to be in league with the Scarlet Pimpernel, the man in charge of hunting down the Pimpernel, Chauvelin, uses the damning knowledge to blackmail Marguerite into helping him discover the Scarlet Pimpernel's true identity. When she realises who the Scarlet Pimpernel really is, though, it's too late to save him or her brother - she must to France to warn them, but Chauvelin's trap is closing in fast.

Originally written for the stage in 1902 by Baroness Orczy, it became so popular that she novelised it a few years later. In the 1982 film, Anthony Andrews - while lacking the impressive height and shoulder breadth described of Sir Percy in the book - did a fantastic job of portraying the urbane fop who hides his cunning and resourceful mind behind a mask of stupidity. I can think of a couple of heroes Georgette Heyer wrote who were likely inspired by Sir Percy. He is wonderfully charismatic, and the love he suppresses for his wife ever since he found out her role in the execution of an aristocrat, makes for a truly bittersweet romance. They both must learn to trust one another and work through misunderstandings in order to be happy again.

The pacing might be too slow for some readers, but I found the details engrossing and the build-up of tension and anticipation gut-tightening. While the first half of the book was recreated closely in the movie, the second half is quite different. It was a pleasurable surprise, and made the book less predictable than I was expecting. It might not have the cinematic build-up of the movie, or that final classic sword-fight between Percy and Chauvelin, but I found the original ending to be just as satisfying and far less clichéd. The characters are well-drawn and feel very real; we mostly get Marguerite's perspective (never Percy's), and while she doesn't always make the best decisions, she is at least understandable and even sympathetic. The true hero is, of course, the Scarlet Pimpernel, whose modern equivalent would be Batman - a superhero without superpowers, unless you count enormous wealth and a sharp mind.

Reviewed in December 2009

Tags: historical fiction, historical romance

Fallen by Lauren Kate
Fallen #1
Delacorte Press 2009
452 pages
YA Romance/Horror


This is a tricky book to review, for a very simple reason: I did not know what this book was about, or what kind of book it was, when I started reading it, and the slow reveal made for a pleasurable, interactive reading experience. So, I'm torn. On the one hand, I want others to have the same experience, which would mean I would have to keep mum about the plot etc. On the other hand, I really really want to talk about what actually happens. See? Torn.

I admit, unashamedly, that I bought this book for its cover (please, click on the image to get a better view, it's worth it). 2009 has been a very, very good year for YA covers, and this is easily in the top 5 (don't ask me what other books are in the top 5, because it's like the Tardis: bigger on the inside). It's gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous. Composition, typeface, colour, atmosphere - it has it all.

Since I got it for the cover, and on the vague assumption that it would be some kind of paranormal romance book (they usually are, with covers like this), I came to it with virtually no expectations. This turned out to be a great advantage for the novel, because the prose isn't its strong suit. "But what is it actually about?" I hear you asking. Let's not rush into these things. I'm still gawking at the cover ...


Lucinda Price hasn't had the easiest of childhoods. Since she began seeing shadows at a young age, her worried parents have dragged her around to psychiatrist after psychologist, hoping for answers. Only by lying has Luce managed to get off the hated medication and have a semblance of a normal life - until, one night at a beach party, the boy Luce was with dies and everyone, including Luce herself, wonders what she had to do with it.

She is packed off to a reform school called Sword & Cross in Georgia by a judge and her parents, a place dating back to the Civil War, complete with its own cemetery and church-turned-gym. The students are strange or crazy, many with tracking bracelets on their wrists; there are security cameras everywhere and a fence to keep them in. Within her first hour there, she is befriended by Arriane, and her eye is drawn to a gorgeous boy called Daniel. She feels like she knows him somehow, but after a friendly grin he gives her the finger. It's just the start of an immediate animosity on Daniel's part that Luce can't understand, or reciprocate.

She also befriends Penn, a ward of the school since her father, the groundskeeper, left her an orphan; and Cam, a green-eyed, handsome boy, makes it clear he's interested. But Luce can only think of Daniel, who wants nothing to do with her. As the appearance of the shadows increases, and her strange dreams of being held in Daniel's arms high in the sky persist, Luce is drawn deeper into a world of timeless love and a timeless battle between good and evil.


So that's my spoiler-free review - except that I've left a few hints you can choose to ignore or dissect, as you please. If you're really wondering what kind of paranormal this is, [spoiler! highlight to read] the title gives it away. If you're like me, you won't even notice. It meant nothing to me until I started putting the clues together - and it was fun doing it that way, figuring it out as I went. You WILL figure it out a LONG time before Luce does. Considering that hers is the only perspective we get (and the only reason we don't get her first-person narration is so that Kate can include a prologue and epilogue from Daniel's perspective) and that we start out with the same clues she does, this is somewhat surprising. She is a bit slow on the uptake.

Now, since I can't talk about the heavy symbolism or [blank] undertones, or any of the fun stuff, because just not enough people have read it yet, let's talk about something else that's become indicative in YA fiction over the last few years. How many YA books have you read that are about a girl, often a lonely or isolated or virtually friendless girl, starting a new school year (either at their regular school or a new one), and encountering a hot new guy who for some reason or other pretends to hate her?

I can tell you how many I've read - in fact, I'll list them for you:
Twilight
Jessica's Guide to Dating on the Dark Side
Deadly Little Secrets
Evermore
Evernight
Perfect Chemistry
The Vampire Diaries (kind of)

I bet you can think of lots more, and this list would be longer but I'm trying to limit how many of "these" I read. Possibly Marked should be on the list too, but I just can't remember. I've been told by trustworthy friends that Hush Hush is the worst culprit of all. And now we have Fallen.

To be fair, Daniel has a pretty good excuse, but when Luce flares up at his patronising "you don't understand" attitude and lets him have it, I had to say "Good on you Luce!" For much of the book, it's a puzzle-piecing read (and again, I really wish I could discuss the whole premise, but I made the decision not to give any spoilers and I'll stand by that), which makes it fun, but it's also hugely uneventful. That you only notice it in a vague sort of way is a good thing, but the prose still isn't strong enough to make this a really great book. It relies heavily on the formula mentioned above, plus symbolism and mythology, without questioning anything or being at all original.

One of things I really liked about Twilight (that others hated), was the original, or different, take on vampires. I'm not impressed by authors who utilise what's already out there - it's no challenge, and means they haven't really thought about it and lack imagination. Its a harsh criticism I know, but I've been reading adult Fantasy for years and years and originality is the big Sticking Point between good and bad Fantasy. I haven't put this book down as Fantasy, but the criticism still applies.

Another criticism I have brings us back to the prose: the descriptions were poorly drawn and sometimes conflicting. I had a hard time picturing the place - maybe because I've never been to that part of the world, but mostly because the descriptions were rather weak. I was also confused by the explanation of Sword & Cross, that it used to be a military outpost during the Civil War - and yet the only descriptions we get are of cinder-block dorms and a church that was built much later than the war. At one point she mentions had decrepit the place is, how it looks like it's decomposing, but mostly I couldn't visualise it at all. Even the church, with its vine-covered exterior, was a confusing site for me - especially considering it houses a large pool and other rooms. There just wasn't enough detail. Kate had the perfect opportunity for some beautiful atmosphere-building to match the lovely cover, but ultimately failed to deliver. I sometimes feel that YA authors are getting lazy. It's not enough to have all the elements there, to follow the formula. This book stands at 452 pages not because there are lots of words, but because the font is so damn big.

I will be reading the next book, Torment, though. The ending was just enticing enough, and Daniel said some lovely things that I've read before, and there's still plenty of things to be revealed that they're all being very secretive about. But I'll be hoping for more magic (of the reading variety), more passion, more originality.

Reviewed in December 2009

Tags: horror, paranormal romance, ya

The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson
Vintage Canada 2009 (2008)
465 pages
Fiction; Historical Fiction


I never intended to read this book. It was popular as soon as it came out, and that was one strike against it for me. It was about a burn victim who is visited in hospital by an apparently schizophrenic sculptor who insists she knew him in 14th century medieval Germany, and tells him stories about it and other characters. It just didn't sound interesting to me. I don't know where this belief that the medieval period is boring came from - no, wait, I do: blame the Arthurian legend (from approx. 6th century. The medieval period, or Middle Ages, runs from about 5th century to the 16th - everything was "medieval" for such a long time, it all starts to blur together when you're not looking closely at it).

Even though I studied European history from 1100 to 1914, and English from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Ian Fleming over the course of my undergrad, there's always been something about Arthur that made my eyes glaze over (there was a course that was solely on the literary and film representations of King Arthur that I went out of my way to avoid taking). Since this isn't founded on anything except being wholly un-captivated by The Sword in the Stone in primary school, I've recently become determined to do something about it. But I still didn't have any interest in reading this book until a friend's glowing review got me curious. That's usually all it takes. As for the popularity thing - I should have learned from Life of Pi that some books are popular not just because of a fad, but because they're excellent books. I have always had an emotional approach to books and reading, so it shouldn't be a surprise that my reading decisions are based on such flimsy, unfair criteria. Like how pretty the cover is.

Now that I've finally read it, I'm reluctant to write a review for it as well. It's one of those smart, too-clever novels that tend to make me feel ill-equipped to critique or analyse. On the other hand, I refuse to let a book intimidate me, especially one I liked so much.

The gargoyle is an obvious reference to the hideously burned unnamed narrator, who used to be a coke-snorting porn actor, writer and director. After dropping a bottle of brandy on his crotch while driving high and hallucinating arrows coming from him out of the woods along the road (a hallucination or a memory from a past life?), he crashes through the guard-rail and down the embankment. A fire starts and the brandy speeds it along; it's only because the car tips into the river that he survives at all.

He's a cynic, an athiest who doesn't believe that losing his penis and his looks and body in a fire is a punishment for the life he's been leading. He's a well-read intellectual who throws in all manner of facts and details yet remains unknown himself. He reminded me strongly of a Chuck Palahniuk protagonist. He also reminded me somewhat of my ex, not because they were similar, but because pre-fire, he was what my ex wished he were: naturally smart and talented (without having to try), a lady's man, etc, and also because he's a real guy's hero. His manner of speech, his harsh words and swearing and smart lines - again reminiscent of Chuck Palahniuk and writers like him, who are stereotypically popular with young men. Thankfully, it was a slim and fleeting comparison that soon faded away into unimportance, leaving me to enjoy the narrator for the characteristics that I could relate to, myself. His approach to God and religion isn't original or unique, but familiar. I could sympathise with him, and come to care for him, but I could never really know him.

While recovering from his burns and other injuries, he meets Marianne Engel. It's not until the very end that he refers to her as just "Marianne" - throughout the entire book, he uses both names, and I can't quite figure out why. It certainly reinforces and complements the distance that both the main characters have from us, and makes you wonder whether Marianne is even real, since using both of her names is like someone trying to reinforce a lie. You never really get to know either of them, and that's where the story lacked for me. It wasn't really noticeable until about halfway through, when you've given them enough time to warm up and open up - but it never happened. They remained aloof.

I'm torn. On the one hand, I can see it as being true to their characters - we're not all open and fuzzy people, are we. Especially not these two. But on the other hand, Davidson wants me to believe that they loved each other, not just in Marianne's story of 14th century Germany but also in the present. But I just don't feel it. It was contrived, forced. The author is talented, and for a debut novel this was excellent, it really was. The prose was compelling, the structure tight, I was never bored (my biggest fear) by the stories-within-the-story or by anything else, and I learnt a lot of interesting things about burns, medieval German nunneries and various other things - like the difference between a gargoyle and a grotesque.

But this is a love story pretending to be romantic while trying its hardest not to be. It's a love story without any love - none that you can really feel, anyway. I don't want to be told they love each other. I want to feel it. Love is an emotion, after all. But as messed up as the two main characters are, and for as much that is never really explained, love is a paradoxically simple, living emotion that cannot be truly suppressed. Oh we can say "yes but it's the narrator who's ostensibly writing the story, and he has issues aplenty so no wonder he comes across as distant" - but no, that's exactly why you cannot hide the love if it's really there. It will come through, deliberately or otherwise. It's the same with Marianne's stories. They left me cold. I struggled to even believe Marianne knew what love is. It wasn't in the what, but in the way she talked.

Marianne is an interesting character. There's a degree of magical realism to this story that totally hooked me. I have no trouble, in the realm of fiction, believing a character who insists she's been around for seven hundred years, that this burned man is the same man, born again, that she knew centuries ago, or the rest of it. But I never really liked her, and I didn't like the ending. For pretty much the entire book, I had that pleasant feeling of not knowing where the story was going or how it would end - that feeling of being taken on a journey by a story, a writer, and simply letting go and living it. I love that. And really, it was the only possible ending for this story. It was all leading there. But sometimes the perfect ending is also the wrong ending. Sometimes it's too perfect. In the last scene with Marianne, I actually hated her. Part of it is because I never really knew her, and I never sympathised with her. Also, her idea of God and her role in life, her whole "suffering is beautiful" crap really made me want to smack her.

Oh but there's so much else here to love. I found the book hard to put down, I was easily immersed in the details, the stories, the characters, the unflinching prose. It's a busy book, full of literary references and symbolism - nothing particularly subtle, more like fun. And even though the characters failed to really emotionally engage me, I won't be able to forget them.

Reviewed in December 2009

Tags: fiction, historical fiction

Skin Game by Ava Gray
Skin #1
Berkley Sensation 2009
294 pages
Paranormal Romance


I'm one of those readers who actually enjoys reading the copyright page. Yes, I really do. I'll also read the acknowledgements, dedication, author's foreward, byline, whatever is there. (The only thing I avoid are the quotes from newspaper etc. reviews. They have never, ever sold a book to me and they're a complete waste of paper and ink.) So in Ava Gray (aka Ann Aguirre)'s acknowledgements page, the page before chapter 1, she says "Skin Game started as a glimmer, a 'what-if' brain-storming session with my assistant, Ivette, wherein I speculated whether I could write paranormal romantic suspense, based in science rather than magic."

(Wow, I thought only Big Name authors like Margaret Atwood and Stephen King had assistants! Impressive.) This comment, about basing it in science rather than magic, led me to believe I was going to read a book along Dark Angel lines - the American-military-genetic-experiment kind of story. Granted, the background - the Whys and Hows and Whats - aren't explained here, are barely hinted at, so it could still be that kind of story. But what I got was quite a bit different - not bad in any way, but because I was expecting something, I kept waiting for it, and it never came. (This isn't, of course, the author's fault. It just is what it is.)

What I got was a story of a con artist, Kyra, who has the odd ability of temporarily stealing someone's best skill with a single light touch - be it singing or playing pool or fighting ... or less desirable skills. When her small-time hustler father is beaten to death by a casino-owner's toughs, Kyra vows revenge. Before the story even starts, she's managed to become the casino-owner's fiancee and toy with him before "winning" several million dollars and holding up a sign to the cameras that said "I was only in it for the money". Now she's on the run, living off small-town cons while she waits for her best friend Mia to return to the country and hopefully help her in disposing of her millions.

But the casino owner, Gerard Serrano, has lost pride as well as money - he's become a laughing stock of Vegas. He hires a hit man, Reyes, to find Kyra, find out where the money is and then kill her. Once Reyes finds her, he has to gain her trust - but in doing so he gains more than he ever wants to lose, and his reputation as a hit man who never fails is on the line. Kyra has got under his skin, and he's not sure he ever wants her to leave.

I've been disappointed a lot by paranormal romance this year - books that try to be sophisticated, funny, smart, touching, sexy, well-written: and turn out to be weak, confusing, lacking in chemistry, trying too hard and poorly written. I'm a BIG fan of Aguirre's Jax space opera series, but I still wasn't sure about this one - mostly because mixing romance and suspense has led to some very, very weak reads in the past.

I didn't have to worry about the prose, the plotting, the character development and chemistry - the only thing lacking was that it wasn't as, ah, steamy as I'd been expecting. Kyra and Reyes build some excellent sexual tension and chemistry, and I really liked both of them. They were strong characters, far from perfect, but not at all annoying. They didn't go through the usual paranormal romance relationship clichés, which I wouldn't expect of Aguirre anyway (I should probably be saying "Gray" but I can't think of them as two separate authors).

The plot is multi-layered: there's Kyra and Reyes, his job to kill her and the external threats to her life; there's Serrano and his machinations; and there's Serrano's right-hand-man, Foster, who is up to something himself - he's the one who hired Reyes, and he has his own secrets (which hint at him being something similar to Kyra - this is where the whole "military experiment" thing still seems possible), as well as fears. There's also Mia, who gets caught up in Foster's plans. The plotlines are interrelated and never get confusing: for all that there's a lot going on, it never feels crowded or complicated.

The characters are pretty straight-forward and not terribly original, but they are also very alive, very human-feeling. Even Foster, who seems downright alien at times, is a character you can empathise with or at least want to. For all the story's apparent simplicity, there's a lot more going on in the details, things that flesh out the characters nicely. As for romance, it's there too, but aside from the great chemistry between Kyra and Reyes, I thought it was a tad disappointing. Well-written, but not as satisfying as I'd hoped.

This is the start of what looks to be a well-thought-out, detailed, dangerous world that has plenty more secrets to reveal. I don't love it as much as the Jax series, but I'll be there to read Skin Tight when it comes out in June 2010.

Reviewed in December 2009

Tags: paranormal romance

Liar by Justine Larbalestier
Bloomsbury 2009
371 pages
YA fiction


Micah is a liar. You can't trust anything she says. She will lie about telling the truth, and she will lie about lying. Attention-seeker, the shrinks say. Jealous of her little brother, they say. Does she even have a brother? Maybe she just made him up. Maybe she didn't. Maybe her dad is an arms dealer, maybe he isn't. But there's one thing Micah's lies have in common: they all hide the real truth.

Now Micah's boyfriend Zach has been found, dead, in Central Park. The place where they spent so much time together. No one knew she was his after-hours girlfriend, or so she thought. Whispers are quick to sprout, but she's not the only one being accused of killing him. The truth is so much harder to tell, but Micah's determined to share it with us. It will take her a few tries to break the lying habit, with us at least, and since she's already an unreliable source, can we trust her truth?

What is Micah's big secret? How did Zach die? How are we supposed to believe her after all the lies she's told, even to us?

This book received some publicity before it's release because of a controversial decision made by the publisher to white-wash the cover. The main character, Micah, our oh-so-trustworthy narrator, is half-black. Or is it a quarter? She's described quite clearly, yet the publishers designed a cover that featured a blonde white girl. Uproar ensued, and the author gave her opinion too (which is very interesting to read, if you want to pop over for a quick visit). People won't want to read a book with a coloured girl on the cover? They should be ashamed of themselves. The opposite is true, if anything, besides the fact that there are so many young readers out there from all manner of backgrounds, who feel decidedly under-represented in the literary world. I wasn't at all surprised to meet Somalian Muslim girls in grade 10 reading Does My Head Look Big in This? - for once, a book that they could relate to.

A controversy like that isn't what made me want to read the book, though. At first, I didn't particularly want to read it at all. The blurb didn't entice me, and because of the nature of the story all the reviewers are keeping quiet about what the story's really about. Which is a good thing, because when I did get the book on a whim and start reading it, I was taken by surprise. And I like that.

Here's the deal: I'm not going to give you any clues. Micah does that, in Part One: Telling the Truth (except that she doesn't tell the truth, or not all of it). The clues build up, so that in Part Two: Telling the True Truth, her Big Secret isn't so unbelievable. It actually makes a lot of sense. The interesting thing is what role the reader takes in all this. I want to believe in her Big Secret. Not just because she succeeds in making it believable - somehow, lying about it to us after telling us she'll be truthful actually makes it more believable, not less - but because it makes the story a hell of a lot more interesting.

By Part Three: The Actual Real Truth, you'd think that you'd grow tired of Micah's lies. The opposite is true. Trying to guess what she's lying about before she 'fesses up becomes a game, a puzzle - one you probably won't win. More than that, her lies aren't cruel ones. They don't actually hurt people. And what's going through her head is a very interesting study. Even if her Big Secret is a Big Fat Lie, it could still be a metaphor for the whole teenage ordeal. Puberty, growing up, having everyone change and behave more maliciously, learning how to run the gamut and take it on the chin - or not. Moving out of the realm of childhood, where psychologically you are selfish, into adolescence where you start to learn how easily you impact other people: that's very much an integral part of this book.

The way teenagers seem to almost relish hurting their peers, especially emotionally or psychologically, is in a way a kind of experimentation, figuring out how people tick, how you can't move through the world isolated and unaffected. It's a hard period, a time when you learn consideration, self-awareness, and, hopefully, empathy (on a side note, I was sickened to hear some teenage boys from the nearby high school laughing about the woman whose baby died at Pearson International Airport recently, where they were getting ready for a holiday. She was holding the hand of her four-year-old and turned to talk to her, when the baby wiggled out of her other arm and dropped over the railing, falling two stories down and dying later in hospital. I can't imagine how devastated and guilty the mother must feel, and I wouldn't be surprised if the father secretly blames her too - but these boys hadn't discovered empathy yet and just found it funny). The motivations behind typical teenage behaviour, especially bullying and peer pressure, have been widely researched and studied, but it rarely gets as close to a true understanding as YA fiction does (or can).

Micah is a fascinating character and a strong protagonist who easily carries the story. She's frank and mature and a refreshing character after all the "good", no-swearing types who populate YA - there are many kinds of teenager, but I tend to think that the smart-mouthed, non-virginal ones get ignored: they certainly don't often get the limelight, when they definitely should.

Micah tells her story in bits, though, alternating between snatches of the past, details about her family, told in past tense, and what's happening "now", told in present tense. The tense changes enable you to switch readily, but the stop-and-start nature of her story-telling, the less-than-linear plot, does get a bit tiring. It is cleverly constructed and structured, but the constantly-interrupted flow of the narration makes you feel like you're watching an hour-long ad break, or one of those modern music videos where they don't stay on a shot for longer than a second or two, making it hard to tell what you're even looking at. Even though this structure and pacing works perfectly for the story and the way Micah reveals it, it sometimes makes it hard to really sink into it.

At the end, it's left up to the reader to decide whether Micah's telling the truth. I'm a pretty gullible reader, to be honest, which is what made this story interesting for me - I would believe what she told me because it was her story, and I was just the recipient. Whether I believe or not has no relevance on the story. So I choose to believe her, because I want to, and because it satisfies the story. If I choose not to believe her, then I wasted my time.

Reviewed in November 2009

Tags: crime/mystery, fiction, ya

Cosmic by Frank Cottrell Boyce
Walden Pond Press 2010 (UK 2008)
311 pages
YA Science Fiction


I've had this ARC sitting on my shelf for a few months now, and if I'd known how much fun it would be and how much I'd like it, I would have read it as soon as I got it. But it's a new author for me, and the blurb didn't make it sound all that interesting. Since this North American edition is due out early next year, I thought I should probably get reading. And it turned out to be just what I needed: a funny, laugh-out-loud, wistful and rollicking ride that reminded me at times of Roald Dahl (more on that later).

Liam is only twelve, but his growth spurt hit early. Now taller than most adults and sporting a new batch of stubble, he's mistaken for the new teacher on his first day of grade 7 at a new school. That lasted only so long as it took him to try to incite a walk-out, but it's only the first time he's mistaken as an adult. Since he looks about thirty, Liam and his classmate Florida have great fun doing things that kids can only do with adult supervision - until his dad, a taxi driver, catches him about to test drive a Porsche.

All that practice at pretending to be Florida's dad comes in very handy when he wins a competition to be among the first people to visit a new, state-of-the-art space-themed theme park in China. Faking a letter to his parents about his class going to the Lake District for a school trip is easy enough. The only problem is, he needs someone to be his child, to take along with him, because the competition is for a parent and child. Convincing celebrity-gossip-obsessed Florida is only part of the problem: when they arrive their host, Dr Drax, tells them that it is the four children who will be going into space. Their fathers will be staying behind.

To come so close and not realise his dream! He manages to convince Dr Drax that the children should have an adult present, but Dr Drax decides to let the children vote on which Dad they want with them by voting on them after a series of challenges. Problem is, why would the kids want a computer-game obsessed "dad" with them when they know he'll hog the controls?

Frank Cottrell Boyce is better known as the author of Millions, which was made into a movie. I haven't seen it, or read the book. Other reviewers have said it's a better book than Cosmic - considering how much I enjoyed this, perhaps I should read Millions too. Cosmic is an utterly delightful read - and I've been waiting for ages to say that about a book!

Liam is a funny, engaging narrator, a mix of precocious child and wise adult who is obsessed with the Waterloos of the world and a role-playing computer game called World of Warcraft (which comes in very handy for navigating his way through encounters with grumpy adults). He carries the novel easily. When you remember how much practice Liam has at pretending to be an adult, and of having adults who know he's a kid always expecting him to behave better, "big lad like you", it's not all that surprising. Sure, sometimes his voice was a little too mature, but it also has that naïve youthfulness that you leave behind before you hit 20. Usually.

The humour renders the implausibility of the plot unimportant, in that Hitchhiker's way. This is one of the first books I've read in ages that made me laugh out loud. It was a breath of fresh air, lightening my week, and some of the irreverence transferred to my own life - there's nothing better than the ability to laugh at the absurdities of our own lives.

The story is told by Liam from space, and is the story of how he got there. I haven't been so entertained in ages. It really is a silly story, and yet poignant at times too - it's no shallow, brittle kind of humour, but earnest, which also makes it just that little bit sad. There's also this pervading sense of ... something, possibly bad, because all through the book you know that these five children are stuck in space, orbiting the moon, completely cut off from Earth and home and their parents. It certainly did prove how bad an idea it was of Dr Drax's to send just children into space - they messed up their task because they were fighting over who got to press the green button.

This is a great book for all ages - as an adult I enjoyed it immensely. It reminded me of Roald Dahl not just because of the humour but because the five fathers and five kids winning a competition to visit some exciting new place and do challenges is highly reminiscent of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. This is the first North American edition and I do wish they'd left the spelling alone. It's very jarring to leave the British vocabulary but not the spelling, and seriously, when you hear or picture British people talking, they do leave the "U"s in!

Reviewed in November 2009

Tags: science fiction, ya

Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises by Earnest Hemingway
Arrow 1994 (1927)
218 pages
Classics


I first read this several years ago, around 2003 I think, while I was living in Japan. I remember really struggling to read the first chapter, which is the narrator's description and explanation of a character called Robert Cohn. I don't know why I had so much trouble reading it, just that I couldn't follow it, couldn't keep track of it. It wasn't a good way to start. Then, I was hoping right up to the last page for a happy ending. I felt cheated that I didn't get it. Kind of like "why the hell did I read this then?"

This time around (reading it again for a book club - I missed the meeting, incidentally), because I knew what to expect, I could focus on all the other things in the novel, knowing that the narrator, Jake, would still be alone at the end of it. That he wouldn't get to keep Brett. And I had no trouble reading the first chapter. Really, the prose is incredibly easy to read, simplistic even, except for when the descriptions get vague.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Set in 1924, Fiesta is the story of Jake, an American living and working in Paris, who goes to Pamplona in Spain to see the bull fighting with some friends, a mix of American and English ex-pats - one of which is Brett, Lady Ashley, a beautiful and charismatic woman of 34 who's waiting for her divorce to come through so she can marry a bankrupt, Mike Campbell.

Jake and Brett met during the war, when he was recovering from an injury. They fell in love, but his injury was of the groin variety so they can't be physically together - hence, she doesn't want to stay with him even though she loves him. Instead, she has casual relationships and affairs, while Jake has to watch. Sometimes he even introduces them. But there's nothing he can do about it.

The story is heavily detailed with the kind of descriptions that, while apparently perfectly acceptable in classics and other works of literature, can be the cause of some rather heavy criticism in genre fiction. Like so:

"I unpacked my bags and stacked the books on the table beside the head of the bed, put out my shaving things, hung up some clothes in the big armoire, and made up a bundle for the laundry. Then I took a shower in the bathroom and went down to lunch." (p.207)

It would be petty of me to ask, Where else would he take a shower? wouldn't it. Shame.

This book is all prose, very little plot. It's not that it's wordy, rather that it reads like a mouth full of crooked, over-crowded teeth. The dialogue is very 20s-specific, and if I was the kind of reviewer who liked to write snappy, witty, clever little reviews, the first thing I'd do is satirise the dialogue. Like so:

"I feel so rotten!" Brett said.
"Don't be a damned fool," Jake said.
"The count's a brick."
"Let's have a drink."
"Here's the pub."
"This is a hell of a place," Bill said.
"Why don't you see when you're not wanted, Cohn? Go away. Take that sad Jewish face away," said Mike.
"I feel like hell. Don't let's talk," said Brett.
"It's been damned hard on Mike."
"Do you still love me Jake?" asked Brett.
"Yes."
"Because I'm a goner. I'm in love with the bullfighting boy."
"It's been damned hard on Mike."
"Where's that beer?" Mike asked.

And so on. A lot of repetition, a lot of drunken mouthing off, a lot of really very pointless, empty conversation that goes round and round in circles. The problem is, of course, that the characters are all horrible, shallow, self-interested, boorish, ill-mannered, childish tourists, the kind that make you cringe. Jake is probably the only character you can feel any real sympathy for, but even he has his moments.

As the first-person narrator, it's amazing how little we know Jake's thoughts. He hides behind recounting pointless dialogue and describing mundane things. There are times when he gets thoughtful, wistful even, and those parts are what make the novel worthwhile. It's also very easy to feel like you're in Paris, and Spain. The heavily descriptive prose does help create a realistic, breathing setting. Especially when they reach Pamplona, to watch the bull-fighting. It just also happens to be the place where their behaviour becomes even more embarrassing.

I'm not sure if Hemingway was criticising his fellow ex-pats or not - but I think he is. Maybe he was just describing it how it was - and it is believable. Jake isn't a judgemental character, but I wonder how much of that is Jake and how much Hemingway? This edition doesn't come with any additional notes or introductions or appendices, so I haven't read anything about the novel that might shed light on this. As a chronicle of ex-pat life, especially among those who have money, in the 20s, and of bull-fighting, it's a success. But it's still two-dimensional.

As for the bull-fighting, it's one of the more interesting sections, especially towards the end where there's an involved recounting of three bull-fighters at work. We now know that bull's are red-green colour-blind; it's the movement of the cape that enrages them, not the colour. So I wonder what was wrong with the bull Jake assumed was colour-blind?

As simplistic as I've made this novel sound, there is quite a lot going on in the details, things that make it both interesting and deplorable. The bull fighting, for instance, is both a commemoration and a presentation of a highly controversial topic. There's certainly a parallel between the beauty and brutality of the bull-fighting, and the way these ex-pats treat each other. They are at once unlikeable, and likeable. It just goes to show how confounding humans can be, and how contradictory.

Reviewed in November 2009

Tags: classics

Night's Cold Kiss by Tracey O'Hara
Dark Brethren #1
Eos 2009
332 pages
Urban Fantasy; Paranormal Romance


There are two kinds of vampire in the world: the Aeturnus, who after centuries of bloodshed forged a treaty with humans to live peaceably together; and the Necrodreniacs, those vampires who have become addicted to the high they get from killing humans, draining them dry. It is a distinction that Antoinette Petrescu, the legendary Venator whose job it is to hunt down and execute Necrodreniacs, has never been able to see, not since her mother was murdered and her father died.

But now a serial killer is running wild in New York, targeting women who look an awful lot like Antoinette, and she must team up with the Aeturnus Christian Laroque - who used to bear the nickname the Crimson Executioner. With the help of Christian's friend and fellow Aeturnus, Viktor, and a bear-shifter called Oberon, Antoinette and Christian follow all the leads they can find. But what Antoinette finds is more than she ever could have expected: she comes face to face with a ghost from her past, learns the truth of her family, and discovers that the difference between sexy Aeturnus Christian and a filthy Necrodreniac is as wide as an ocean.


This book is marketed as Urban fantasy but I found it in the Romance section - for once, I think the bookshop has it right. Though it was gritty, it had the happy romantic ending that is the trademark of romance novels, and several sex scenes scattered throughout. Looking at the cover and reading the blurb, I was prepared for a Night Huntress-type book - it's one of my favourite paranormal series, and I wouldn't mind something a bit similar, but this one can't compare.

There were a few issues. One, Antoinette could get pretty annoying in her stubbornness - and her violence. It didn't quite add up: one minute she's an intelligent, deadly Venator, the next she's throwing a tantrum like a five year old. It made it hard to give a toss what happened to her. Secondly, I didn't buy the chemistry between her and Christian. I wanted to like Christian - he had all the markings of a dark, charismatic, enigmatic, powerful man/vampire, but failed to deliver. I didn't care for the way he treated Antoinette either - the way he tended to treat her like a child, so perhaps it's not surprising she sometimes behaved like one.

Parts of the plot were predictable - it was easy to guess who was the mastermind behind it all. On the other hand, the structure of government and parahuman departments etc. were confusing as hell. If the series continues with Antoinette and Christian as the main characters, it might work out, but it it doesn't it'll lose it's edge, and our chance to see these characters grow and develop and mature (they need it).

There were parts I liked as well, though it's been several days since I read this and it's not a good sign that I can mostly only remember the negatives. The prose relies heavily on well-worn descriptive clichés but at least the grammar is sound (except it could have benefited from more semi-colons or the start of NEW sentences!). The pacing is good, with some nicely timed slower scenes amongst the chases and fights. There's some good atmosphere: dark and gritty and a bit smelly, violent and nasty. Sadly, with under-developed characters and a lack of emotional intensity, it doesn't work for me. The potential is there, but so were my high hopes and, now, my disappointment. It was a three-star book when I finished it, but after writing this I have to lower it. I simply can't justify 3 stars anymore.

Reviewed in November 2009

Tags: paranormal romance, urban fantasy

Say You're One of Them by Uwem Akpan
Back Bay Books 2009 (2008)
354 pages
Fiction; Short stories


This cover has one of the most beautiful photos - I kept seeing it in the bookshop, picking it up and dithering but ultimately putting it down again. In the end, a few people on Goodreads got me interested in it - they were talking about how it was the latest book in Oprah's book club but that they'd read the sample story and it was so depressing and they didn't want to read something that upset them.

That actually made me want to read it. I want to be confronted, to be challenged, to be emotionally involved, to be taken out of my comfort zone, to learn something new, to experience something different. Sometimes I want a fun story, or a romantic one, and that's fine too. But I also thirst to have my intellect engaged, and to explore a culture, a way of life, an attitude or understanding, different from my own. And, even though I haven't yet read many, I love hearing stories set in Africa, fiction or nonfiction.

Maybe it's a primitive part of my subconscious that centuries of Anglo heritage hasn't quite subsumed, but I feel drawn to this land of human origins, to where it all began - Africa and the Middle East. In a way, aren't they everyone's ancestors? Aren't their cultures and beliefs everyone's heritage? And aren't their problems the concern of us all - not least because in many ways our "western" lands have caused some of them? I feel that if a book is confrontational, upsetting even, that makes it more important to read. To shut yourself off from negative experiences is detrimental, not just to yourself and the development of your world view, but on a collective scale to the world itself.


This collection of five stories - three short stories and two novellas - are set in Nigeria, Benin, Kenya, Rwanda, Ethiopia, revolve around the experiences of children from different socio-economic, cultural and religious backgrounds, and show how universal a tragedy is their lot, and the lot of all their people, but especially how the things adults do to each other effect children.

The first story, "An Ex-mas Feast", is set in a shanty in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya. There are street children and then there are street gangs - eight year old Jigana is a street child living with his street family in a tin hovel, sniffing glue to keep the hunger at bay. They're all saving so he can go back to school, including his oldest sister Maisha who is selling herself on the streets to rich white men. Jigana loves Maisha and would rather join a street gang than see her become a full-time prostitute.

The story goes back and forth between the present, Christmas, written in present tense; and bits from previous days, written in past tense. Their dialect is a hodgepodge of their native one and English, and can make it an effort to read. Sometimes I don't know if something is meant literally or not - I'm not even sure if Jigana and Maisha and Naema, Baby and the twins are even related to the ones they call Mama and Bapa. I'm not sure but I think not, except for the authority Mama and Bapa have. On the other hand, it's understandable that these children would want to have a family, a home, somewhere they can return to and belong - if they don't actually have one, they create one. But again, I'm not sure.

Akpan wrote the story from Jigana's first-person perspective, and he is wise for his age - that kind of maturity that comes from having no real chance to be a real child. The sense of distance and coldness that infects the prose works in this particular story, saving it from becoming melodramatic and indulgent.

In "Fattening for Gabon", two small children are being cared for by their uncle, Fofo Kpee ("Fofo" meaning uncle), because their parents are dying of AIDs, in his small tin shack by the coast in Benin. Fofo Kpee makes his living ferrying people across the border into Nigeria, and picking coconuts. He quite possibly has some serious debt, because he makes a deal with a corrupt immigration official who he calls Big Guy, to sell the children to child slavers in Gabon.

At first, Kotchikpa and his little sister Yewa are excited, and eagerly learn their lines in order to go over the border, while Fofo Kpee becomes almost paranoid about the deal. Soon his guilt sees him try to flee with the children, but escape is clearly not an option.

Reflecting the various colonial influences, the characters speak a mishmash of their native tongue, French and English, and at times it was even harder to read than the first story. Yet even with the unfamiliar native words sprinkled through their speech, you could still follow what they were saying. Here the distance inherent in the prose made it harder to get into the story - that and the increasing amount of detail present, though it does allow the story to focus on the inner heart and mind without the burden of plot.

As with the other long story, "Luxurious Hearses", not a lot happens: it's all in the details, and the interactions of the characters. But even though the story is written in past tense by Kotchikpa, it's too unemotional, too mature a voice. Yewa, who's only about six, feels like a real child. Kotchikpa is old enough to start seeing things differently, but he's on the cusp. That was a subtle distinction, and yet - and yet the distance created a coldness that made it hard for me to really sympathise, to really invest myself in the story. It could have been much shorter.

After the slow, lengthy story about child trafficking, the third is so short it feels over before it's even begun. Set in Ethiopia, "What Language is That?" feels like filler, like playing Danger Mouse to fill the gap between Doctor Who and Gardening Australia on the ABC. It's about two six year old girls from rich families who live across the street from each other and are best friends - until religious fighting in the streets forces their parents to prohibit their friendship because Selam is Muslim and the narrator is Christian. In their innocent, childlike way, they can't see that it should make a difference.

Because this story is written in present second-person voice ("you" instead of "I"), after the present tense of "An Ex-mas Feast" and the past tense of "Fattening for Gabon", it makes the book start to read like an amateur writer's notebook of experimentation. Yes, there are many ways to write a story, but that doesn't mean you should use it just because it exists and you want to try it. It has to work for the story, and second person rarely works. It aims for a universal voice, to create a common feeling, to involve the reader as protagonist - but often it's just unsettling, creepy or alienating. I'm not sold on it working in this particular story. In a way, it did, but I can't shake off this image of a writer who doesn't understand the "less is more" adage.

The fourth story, "Luxurious Hearses", is the longest and the most painful to read - simply because it's set on a stationary bus. On the one hand, it could be read as a superb story that puts a lone Muslim teenager on a bus of Christians, all fleeing north Nigeria for the apparent safety of the south, all bringing their differing cultural and religious values as well as their fears onto a bus while around them Muslims and Christians are killing each other - only to find that it's happening in the south now too. Tempers flare, suspicions turn nasty, the country is a new democracy but only in name: the police are still corrupt, and some want the generals back. They fight over who has the rights to the oil, over traditional beliefs and modern religions, and who gets a seat on the bus. The Luxurious Buses company sells tickets for every inch of aisle space as well as the prized seats - some buses are full of corpses, people killed in the north being returned to their families in the south for burial.

Jubril is the lone Muslim, pretending to be Christian but finding it hard when there are women all around him and the TVs on the bus come on. He undergoes many moments of revelation and change-of-opinions while on the bus, remembering how he got here, his past - born of a Muslim mother and a Christian father - and trying to keep his head down: not easy when your right hand has been amputated for stealing a goat, a sure sign that you're Muslim.

It's a fascinating exploration of the psyche of this fifteen year old, and into the people - the bus is a microcosm of the country, in a way: even when they're more-or-less of the same religion, strife occurs, showing it's not just religious differences that cause these people to turn on each other.

For as interesting as it is, though, it's also a slog to read. There's a wide variety of dialects on the bus, including people who can't pronounce "l" or "sh", making for an obstacle-course of dialogue. The ending isn't pretty but it is a natural culmination of everything that was brewing on that bus.

The final story is perhaps the most tragic - the story of a Rwandan family at the start of the genocide, "My Parents' Bedroom" is about Monique and her little brother Jean, and their beautiful, graceful Tutsi mother and their Hutu father - if you don't know much about Rwanda as a Belgian colony, the Belgians deliberately set the lighter-skinned, more classically beautiful Tutsis up as the superior native race, and the Hutus - darker, broader in the face - as the lower class, creating simmering racial tension that hadn't been there before until it finally exploded and they started killing each other - though soon enough it was the Hutus who were doing the worst.

What happens to Monique and Jean's parents is devastating, and here the distant, chilling quality of the narration creates both distance and intimacy. It's written in the present tense, and for once this does narrow time down to this moment, and not let you escape. Because we see things through Monique's young eyes, it's hard to tell at first what's happening, but as you near the end of the story everything makes sense - a harsh, brutal kind of sense. Like when she sees blood running down the lounge room wall, and how her parents seem so cruel to her even after she's nearly raped by a man in her own bedroom.

The stories are powerful - where they're let down is the writing. Akpan has potential, but he's not entirely successful here. That distance I keep mentioning, it's inherent in the prose of all the stories, even when they're written in first person, and it detaches you from the stories. The dialogue is realistic but too cluttered and hard to read, which breaks the flow and detracts from the point of the story. I didn't feel like it made the characters Other, just that it kept me from really understanding. Which could just be my flaw.

Sometimes it was hard to follow what was going on - the way a child sees things, no matter how mature they are, is going to be somewhat different - and there's plenty you need to infer, or that is implied. Which I don't mind at all, except that I lacked confidence in what I understood to be happening, because there was no definitive answer that reassured you that you were on the right track. Nowhere in "Fattening for Gabon", for instance, does anyone say that they're child traffickers - that one's fairly obvious, granted, but I wasn't 100% because I was wondering about a few other plausible possibilities until I read the interview with the author at the end. It's a small quibble.

All in all, these are some powerful stories, not sensationalised, perhaps a little contrived at times, and they don't try to force emotion or dictate your reaction, which I appreciate. I'll be interested in what the author, who is a Jesuit priest, writes about next - one thing's for sure, it will be set in Africa.

Reviewed in November 2009

Tags: fiction, short stories

The Darkangel by Meredith Ann Pierce
The Darkangel Trilogy #1
Little, Brown and Company 2007 (1982)
238 pages
YA Fantasy


Aeriel was bought at the slave markets as a baby and raised alongside her young mistress, Eoduin, the beautiful daughter of the town syndic. Now nearly a woman grown, she accompanies Eoduin in the climb up the mountain to collect hornbloom nectar for Eoduin's cousin's wedding - the tradition being that you are not married until the bride and groom have shared the bridal cup, and the bride's cousin must collect it on the day.

But when they reach the mountaintop, the Darkangel flies down, all pale luminescent beauty and a dozen black wings, and snatches Eoduin, carrying her off to make her his bride. No one in the town believes Aeriel - the Darkangel is just a story, after all - and some even accuse her of causing her mistress' death. Knowing that Eoduin's father means to sell her, she goes back to the mountain, hoping the Darkangel comes again so that she can kill him.

When he comes, the Darkangel is too strong and beautiful to kill, as cruel and selfish as he is. Instead he takes Aeriel back to his home, an abandoned palace carved out of the side of a mountain, to spin clothes for his thirteen brides. His brides are all indistinguishable, fragile wraiths, their hearts cut out, their blood drunk, their souls collected into little vials that hang from a necklace around the Darkangel's neck.

When the Darkangel has acquired his fourteenth wife in a year's time and collected her soul, Aeriel learns, he will take all the souls to his mother, a water witch, and become a full-fledged vampyre with his six brothers. Together the vampyres will carve up the world and rule absolute. Only Aeriel can stop him, but to do so she will have to escape the palace and find the starhorse, one of the wardens of the land created by the Ancients, those who first arrived and made the air and atmosphere, the plants and animals, before sealing themselves inside their domes, forgotten in all but name.

Even though the vampyre is a monster who must be stopped, Aeriel doesn't want to kill him, doesn't want his beauty and majesty to leave the world. But time is running out, and the stakes are high. Soon Aeriel will have to make the hardest decision of her life in order to prevent the vampyres from taking over the world.


The prose of this book reminded me of Alphabet of Thorn: they both have that fairy-tale quality, a slight distance between voice and character even though, especially here, you only get one perspective (Aeriel's). I don't know if there's a word for it, and it's hard to describe. It creates a certain tone, a kind of mythological or biblical tone, a flavour that works especially well with Fantasy and works very well here.

Aside from the sad fact that there was at least one typo on almost every single page (surely, Little, Brown & Co, when a book has been out for more than two decades, you'd have plenty of time to fix these glaring mistakes?), it's well written, with a controlled, measured pace that only adds to that fairy-tale quality. Aeriel is a sweet girl, the Darkangel an almost sulky, petulant teen who whines about how ugly his wives are in one breath, and threatens to strangle Aeriel in the next. He does have charisma, and even though Aeriel is in his thrall you can understand why she'd want to save him.

The other main character in the story is a duarough, a little man called Talb who turns to stone if he's caught in the sun. He lives in the caves beneath the palace and helps Aeriel against the Darkangel. Every fairy-tale needs a fairy godmother! and Talb fits that role. There is the Lorelei, the water-witch who steals little boys and turns them into vampyres, and a quest story that's pure Fantasy. Then we have Narnia-inspired beasts: magnificent talking animals who guard their part of the land with wisdom and fierce pride; and a dash of science fiction in the story of the Ancients. There's plenty going on here but it never loses its quiet, patient tone or measured pacing. Despite the variety of characters, the plot is simple and straight-forward, with no real surprises.

The only part I found lacking, which undermined the story, was Aeriel's love for the Darkangel. Even though she qualifies it as love "in a way", I thought she pitied him, felt compassion for him, and believed in the "spark of good" that still lay in him - maybe that is love "in a way", but there was so little interaction between the two that it was hard to see how she could develop these feelings for him, good girl or no. I don't like it when stories take emotions like these for granted, and don't spend time on developing them for the reader - it smacks of mere convenience for the plot's sake.

I never really understood the measures of time - Solstar is both "daylight" and the sun? I think the world might be a moon - they refer to Oceanus, a planet they guide by, which might actually be Earth. They say "day-month" and I was never sure if they actually meant months or not. It was so confusing it was distracting because I was trying to figure it out. An author's note would have been helpful.

Reviewed in November 2009

Tags: fantasy, ya