Book review: The Madness of Crowds, by Louise Penny

The Madness of Crowds by Louise Penny
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

*****Spoilers*****


I love Penny's fictional village of Three Pines, tucked in a valley in the woods somewhere between Montreal, Quebec and the US border. I love her characters, from Chief Inspector Gamache to Ruth the irascible poet laureate to all the other denizens of Three Pines and Gamache's fellow LEOs. What I don't love is how socio-political topics are becoming more and more prominent in her stories. Although not unexpetcted, it's getting to be a bit much.

It's not like she hasn't telegraphed this tendency. Since the first novels in this series, I've been a bit dubious about her giving Gamache an aversion to firearms: a veteran LEO, who's very capable of using a weapon...but won't carry one unless he has to (how does one determine that unless you're pre-cognizant). In this installment even Jean Guy decides not to pull the trigger in the story's climax, because, per the author, of "love". He feels he'd be a terrible father if he were capable of taking a shot at a person threatening another person with a shotgun. I think a man incabable of lethally defending an innocent person is not a "good man". What if it were his child being threatened? If he can't step up, he's useless.

The most onerous facet of this novel is the fantasy "post Covid" world she has constructed. Obviously this novel was written during the worst of the "pandemic", and Penny has drunk all of the government and media Kool-Aid regarding this crime against humanity. This novel takes place a few months "after the pandemic". The vaccines have solved the crisis, there is no more Covid, and everything is back to normal. Yay! Needless to say, this story will not age well in coming months and years. Firstly, things are NOT back to "normal" anywhere. Depending on your location in the world, you may have a free and open society again, or you may be facing restricted travel and economic ruin if you don't have a "vax passport". There are people, as I write this, who are so traumatized by all the fear porn from the government and their media lackeys, that the mere sight of an unmasked person makes them flinch. Secondly, as we deal with increasing cases of vaccine injury and death, coupled with the monumental ineffectiveness of the experimental mRNA drugs (they are not vaccines), this novel, unlike her others in the series, won't be "evergreen". 

Also "post covid" in this novel is a crackpot academic (reduntant?) who has posited that, post covid, the world's resources are limited and that forced euthanasia is the answer. What the actual heck? I have no problem with writing a character like that, but having half of Canada think she's right?! Sorry, not plausible. There is never a reasonable presentation of this character's arguments in the novel, such that a moral, reasonable human being would go along with her proposal. It's literally absurd.

Here's hoping the next novel sticks to a solid murder mystery and leaves the wacky sociopolitical fantasy out.

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Book Review: "Dancing on the Wind" by M.C. Beaton

Dancing on the Wind by Sarah Chester
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Moll Flanders, only not depressing. Would make an awesome Masterpiece Theater series. Whomever designed the cover for this (audio) edition should be fired, since this is a late 18th century setting and the cover illustration is over a hundred years off, fashion wise. Sympathetic but quirky protagonist, detailed look at several levels of 18th century English society, and believable characters all around. There are several points in this meaty story that a lesser novel would have saved for the action-packed climax at the end, but this one just keeps the drama coming. A few bewildering moments where the author seems confused about what various items of clothing are called, the worst of which are references to petticoats. A petticoat is tied at the waist and supports one's skirt(s). It does not have sleeves(?!). The framework cage that supports late 18th century skirts is a farthingale or panniers, not a "hoop", and it most certainly is not sewn into a petticoat...that I know of. Minor quibbles, but the first time I've run into these particular errors. At any rate, I love M.C. Beaton's writing and was pleasantly surprised to run across in the "available now" section on my library's website. Not sure why this is included in a "Regency" series, since the setting pre-dates that period by at least a decade and should probably be called "Georgian".

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"Darling Beast", by Elizabeth Hoyt

Don't judge this one by its cover!

Darling Beast by Elizabeth Hoyt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'm not a big romance reader, but I enjoy the occasional indulgence of one the same way I do the occasional rich, chocolaty dessert. Well, if it's it's good, anyway. If it doesn't grab me then I'm not shy about quitting a few chapters or pages in. I had the opportunity to pick up a copy of "Darling Beast", a charming historical romance, directly from the author this past weekend at the 2015 Emerald City Writers Conference. Ms. Hoyt is a hoot, and we spent a few happy moments commiserating about costuming in historical TV and film.

Having now read the book, it's obvious that she has put in the time doing research on the material and social culture of 1740s England, where the novel is set. All the historical research in the world won't help if the story is clunky or boring, however. I'm pleased to say that in this case the research is coupled with likable, interesting characters, an intriguing setting, and a bit of mystery to solve.

Oh, and there's just enough steaminess to keep a person warm on a cool Fall evening. Maybe enough that at a few points it felt like TMI time, but then I'm happy with "less is more". That said, although there are some HBO-worthy moments of passion, I never felt uncomfortable enough to skim and "get on with the story". Perhaps it was the grounded presentation of the lead characters, warts and all, with attendant touches of humor, that kept me engrossed even in their most private moments. Whatever the reason, I ended up binge reading the 321 pages, winding it up around 0300 and wondering where the time had gone.

This never happens to me with a romance. Well, hardly ever. Not only that, but I'm excited to get my hands on the next one in the series, and not just because it features a former Captain of Dragoons from this novel whom I found just as intriguing as this one's male lead. (clunky sentence penalty)

Anyway: If I chose to I could probably find something to nitpick about, but it would be infinitesimally minor. I think this is worth anybody's time. I'd love to see this as a film, as the setting(s) would lend themselves to a lush cinematic treatment, and the characters are varied and unique. Two thumbs up!

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"The Spook Lights Affair: Carpenter & Quincannon #2", by Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini

The Spook Lights Affair by Marcia Muller
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It takes a solid grasp of a historical setting to impress me, and these authors do exactly that and more. Add to that a perplexing suicide/murder/or?, a hunt for missing Wells Fargo money, and assorted other mysteries that may or may not be related, and you have an interesting tour of 1895 San Francisco and environs. This is so nicely put-together that I wasn't even aware that I was reading the second in a series until I checked the cover/title about a third of the way in. The authors weave in 19th century idiom and conversational style without it seeming forced or flowery, the principal characters are believable and engaging, and the conclusion satisfying without being melodramatic. Good solid mystery writing in the vein of Conan Doyle meets Dorothy Sayers.

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"Rogue's Honor", by Brenda Hiatt

Rogue's Honor by Brenda Hiatt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this charming, and occasionally steamy, Regency romance as I'm a very tough audience when it comes to the romance genre and historicals in general. Nicely realized setting, interesting arcs for the characters, plenty of bumps in the road to happiness without being overly frustrating, and a satisfying set of conclusions that don't come off as contrived. I love a strong heroine and Pearl is stalwart without coming across as bitchy, in fact I would love to have had a girlfriend like her in my early twenties. Very minor "technical" issues with how horsemanship is presented; nothing egregious, just the same old misconceptions about use of reins and legs, and for all I know this was common equitation in the early 19th century. Again: very minor.

Don't let the "Dread Pirate Roberts" cover put you off. Looking forward to reading more by this author.

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"The Banishment", by M.C. Beaton

The Banishment by Marion Chesney
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Hunting around for an audio book on my library's web site, I stumbled upon this little gem. A big fan of Beaton's Hamish MacBeth series, I thought I'd give it a go. What a treasure! Beaton may have out-Regency'd Georgette Heyer. I would like to have been a bit more deeply "inside the head" of any of the POV characters, but this is a minor complaint. This would make a charming feature film to rival anything made from Austen's work in the last few decades. Thank goodness Beaton cranked out piles of historical romances before she made it big with MacBeth. I'm looking forward to exploring them all.

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"A Heartless Design": why is this not alt-history?

A Heartless Design by Elizabeth Cole


This may be a good story. I don't know, because I didn't make it past the first few pages. The cover is pretty and vaguely Regency despite the bad/21st century hair on the model (not the author's fault), so I was guessing this was a historical romance. After a few paragraphs I was confused and thought maybe this was supposed to be alt history or Steampunk, and since I was reading an e-version had to look up the blurb online. Nope. It's listed as a "Regency romance". What with there being a steel (sic) ship with a mechanical drive system powering a screw, and all of it designed by a woman in the first decade of the 19th century, I would not consider it historical. Iron (not steel) cladding wasn't used for another fifty years, not to mention steam propulsion. Hopefully Cole makes a big deal of the designer being female, because that would have been huge back then, too. I'm not saying there weren't women designing things in the early 19th century (Ada Lovelace!), but it was not commonplace and they would have had huge social and commercial obstacles to surmount. Anyway, I couldn't continue with that much askew right out of the gate.

I can't give it a serious rating of any kind since I didn't read it.

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"The Martian", by Andy Weir: This is sci-fi

The Martian by Andy Weir
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is sci-fi at its best. Utterly compelling, technologically interesting, populated with believable characters, and edge-of-your-seat thrilling. Truly awesome.

Yes, I liked it.

I've looked at a few one star reviews that complain about it being overly technical or bloated with "too much math". Folks, this is a gripping blow-by-blow story of an astronaut..an astronaut...stranded on Mars. What were you expecting? The sheer amount of research that went into writing this is mind-boggling on its own. If you don't like hard sci-fi, then this one is not for you. I myself hate math and I LOVE this book. I have nothing but admiration for the kind of brains it takes to do what this protagonist does. He's a true superhero and this is the kind of science fiction I adored as a kid. Two space thumbs up, Mr. Weir.

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"On Stranger Tides", by Tim Powers

On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'm a huge Powers fan, so it's no surprise that I loved this. It's not your typical pirate tale, but then what's typical? This is not YA. It is, however, obvious to me that the writers of the "Pirates of the Caribbean" films had a copy of this in their possession from early on. In fact, I'd surmise that it has been the inspiration for the franchise since day one and not just for the fourth film, which bears almost no resemblance to this novel beyond the title and the fact that there are pirates, including Blackbeard (named "Thatch" instead of "Teach" in the novel), and a trip to the "fountain of youth".

***** minor spoilers *****

So many elements from the films seem cherry-picked from this novel that I couldn't get through more than a handful of scenes without flashing to aspects of the PotC franchise. Ironically, the only element that seems original is Cpt. Jack Sparrow, who has no counterpart in the book. Here you will find the basis for all the "voodoo"-inspired magic and sorcery, including crews of "undead" sailors, which add up to what amounts to a perfect back-story for Cpt. Barbossa (Phil Davies in the book). Although the female lead in the novel bears little resemblance to the films' Elizabeth Swann, it's no surprise that her name is "Elizabeth" and that she is placed in proximity to a mild-mannered but capable young man who ends up having to spend some time posing as a pirate.

My guess is that the screenwriters read this, saw it as great buffet of source material from which they selected a plate-full of tasty bits. Perhaps they optioned the book then and there. Perhaps they tried to get away with making enough changes that they wouldn't have to buy the option, but got called out on it after the first film and then entered in to a formal agreement with Powers, culminating in the fourth film using the book's title as the film's subtitle. Does it really matter? Not particularly. The films are what they are. The book is a separate entity. Powers certainly seems happy with the arrangement, and that's all that matters. To people who would cry, "But they ruined the book!" I would echo Powers' assertion that no film can "ruin" a book. The book stands alone. It has not changed. The films are what they are, which is to say that they are a different thing entirely. Nobody can change the content of a book by making a film that takes the story and turns it all topsy-turvy. That would be voodoo indeed.

I read some of this in paper, and listened to it all via audio book from Blackstone. The reader is pitch perfect, and manages to create distinctive voices from the very French Jack Shandy to the Robert Newton-esque Phil Davies to a hulking giant black voodoo practitioner with a voice like a sepulcher.  Imagine my surprise at finding it to be none other than.... Bronson Pinchot. I knew he was a good actor, but his character voices are a revelation. Well done.

By the way...  Tim, if you're reading this, I'm so sorry it took me so long to read this to completion. It seems like every time I picked it up something came up, or I had to read something else for a project, or who knows what else. Maybe I was hexed. Anyway, I hope they paid you a wheelbarrow of doubloons for the rights, because it looks like they were using it all along.

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"The Proposal", Regency romance by Mary Balogh

The Proposal by Mary Balogh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Finally, a romance novel that I actually like without reservation. Very few historical faux pax, and sexy without being trashy. Chock full of believable characters and dialogue, interesting settings, and story and character arcs. I was beginning to think this animal didn't exist, but here it is. I'm actually looking forward to trying something else by this author.

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The Cove, by Ron Rash, or "I lemmed another one"

As a kid I was a voracious reader. I would have been the cowboy on a long cattle drive who shot another cowboy for throwing the soup can in the fire before he could read the label. When I go to the library I usually come home with a big bag of paper books and CDs. The CDs are recorded books, because I want somebody to tell me a story whilst I'm driving or sewing or cooking or doing other onerous chores. I go through them like a chicken through a bowl of pumpkin seeds.  In my old age, however, I've grown very, very picky about what I read. The world is full of millions of good books. I do not wish to devote any time to reading something lackluster, trashy, offensive, or even just mediocre.

What this boils down to is this: I've become pretty ruthless about bailing on books that just don't enthrall me. The good folks at Sword & Laser coined a term a few years ago for this: to "lem".

'The term "Lem" means to not finish a book and abandon it. This term comes from when Sword and Laser were reading Stanisław Lem's Memoirs Found in a Bathtub. Veronica couldn't make it through the book so just gave up reading it.             (From the Sword & Laser FAQ at Goodreads)

I've started a lot of books in the last few years that have alienated me before the second disk (or chapter, whichever comes first). Most of them are not what I would call "bad" books, but they just didn't make me happy for one or more reasons. Some of those reasons could be things like unrealistic dialogue, glaring historical inaccuracies, glaring tech or weapons inaccuracies, women in romance novels acting like ninnies, lack of even one appealing character, gratuitous violence or sexual situations, sparkly vampires....you get the gist.

Sometimes the book is good, but the reader of the audio version I've chosen is annoying. I lemmed a romance novel a few months ago despite the interesting story because sound engineering was appallingly inconsistent. It was one of those efforts where somebody decided that a man should read the male POV parts and a woman should read the female POV parts despite the fact that it was mostly female POV. Anyway, the male POV sections sounded like they were recorded in somebody's bathroom on a dictaphone. The female reader's sections were nicely engineered, but the reader herself drove me nuts with her syrup on quaaludes interpretation of a Georgian accent. More recently I was saddened to lem a recorded book read by Will Patton, a fabulous actor and voice artist, because even after several chapters I hadn't come to a single likeable character in the story. Every character was evil or stupid or sleazy or all of the above. Yuck. Not my speed.

Today I lemmed "The Cove", by Ron Rash. Apparently he has some serious fans out there, if you look at the reader reviews over at Goodreads. I found his prose lovely and the setting of the story interesting, but this is another case where a voice artist alienated me. I think she was going for "down-home, unsophisticated but pure" but came across as flat and bored to my ear. The real deal-breaker was a scene where the female protagonist recalls the incident where she lost her virginity as a naive high schooler. It's appalling and tragic, and yet it's written in an off-hand manner that struck me as pretty callous. This is a traumatic moment in this girl's life, and I don't know if the subject ever comes up again in the story, but the way it's presented to the reader is so casual and bland that it's almost as if it's coming from the POV of the despicable boys who committed the violence. "Yeah, whatever. We did her. Har har." No thanks. I didn't need our girl to hark back to that day and lament, "...and then she spent the next forty-eight hours sobbing. She was scarred for life", but some kind of tone that conveys the shock and sadness of an event like that would have kept me engaged. As it was, I decided that it wasn't worth the risk of more of the same, so I moved on. I'd be interested to try something else by the same author, with a different reader or in a hard copy, because it was otherwise excellent.

Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves (no, it's not a YA fantasy novel)

Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves by Matthew Reilly
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book reads like a James Bond story on steroids. It's basically a running battle from start to finish, rarely slowing down to ease up on the running and gunning (and driving and exploding). In that way it's fluff candy for action-adventure enthusiasts, and I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but there are just too many really implausible moments for me to give it an enthusiastic recommendation. I'll say this much: at least Reilly knows his firearms. This in itself made the book more readable (listenable) than it could have been. Reilly is not a bad writer, in fact it's a telling thing that I made it to the end. I liked the characters, the dialogue is believable, the situation intriguing, the tech is cool, and the pacing is good. At some point, though, I realized that I was making the same pained face I made when I first watched "Van Helsing" (the Sommers film starring Hugh Jackman). The pain was from too many cartoony moments of disbelief suspended so thin it was beginning to fray and about to snap. No, wait, it did snap. Several times.



* * * Spoilers * * *




...like when our hero is electrocuted to death and then miraculously resuscitated via defibrillator, and immediately leaps back in to action. Want more of that kind of "getting blown across the room and through a window by an explosion with no apparent injury" type of thing? Read the book. The author also needs to bone up on how and why explosive compression works underwater. If an object sinks because it's open to the sea at multiple gaping points, it's not going to collapse catastrophically due to crushing pressure...because there is no pressure because it's open to the sea. And if our hero were in a water-tight compartment in said sinking object, which then would be in danger of structural failure due to high pressure, then he'd be awfully deep to swim to the surface for several reasons. Ask a diver. Ask any grade-school kid. Seriously. This is basic science stuff. Anyway, it was fun, but kind of goofy at times.



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In the Courts of the Sun, by Brian D'Amato - post-humanist bio-punk essay as novel

In the Courts of the Sun by Brian D'Amato
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Michael Crichton meets Neal Stephenson meets Frank Herbert with a Mesoamerican flavor. Good stuff about game theory and lots of fun tech in the beginning. Unfortunately, for my taste anyway, it bogs down in the middle with an endless journey to the horrors of 6th century Mesoamerica. It's very interesting in an academic way, but the long drawn-out descriptions of every little thing, including multiple acts of violence, really killed the pacing in my opinion. It was like he was channeling Jules Verne or Herman Melville, with laborious illustrations of Mayan culture and folkways and ceremonies and architecture ad nauseam.

I did enjoy the protagonist and his tongue-in-cheek approach to life, and although his relationships with other characters are a bit odd at time, this fits with his Aspbergers and other issues. Overall it's an amazing novel, but when I find I'm just waiting for it to be over, then I can't give it five stars. The last few chapters were so heavily philosophical that I felt like it sucked all the energy out of the plot and just became a treatise on post-humanism or something.

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Reamde, by Neal Stephenson

Reamde by Neal Stephenson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Engrossing, entertaining, dryly amusing...a real page turner. Lots of it to love! Guns, hackers, terrorists, spies, and MMORPGs. It ends a bit abruptly, but that's one of Stephenson's few and very minor weaknesses in my opinion. Mostly I felt squarely in the action and lost in the moment. He nails the experiences that I can personally empathize with, and the situations foreign to me to one degree or another ring true. Highly recommended. If you want a more detailed review, I'm sure there are scads of them.

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Watching Paint Dry

Writer's quote of the day, courtesy of @adviceToWriters:

"Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass."
      ANTON CHEKHOV

I wish more writers would take this advice. I just finished a couple of romance novels, both of which I found somewhat less than romantic. Mostly they were boring, and I don't use that word lightly. I think the word "boring" or "bored" is overused. I myself am never bored. The world is too full of things to do and think about. Some writers try to bore me with bland prose, a paltry collection of tepid adjectives, and sine-wave story arcs. They fail because I either speed-read my way to the end (paper) or start skipping tracks (audio). If it's really awful, I'll just throw in the last disc if I care to hear what happens at the end. I will not let them win. You can't bore me: I quit!

OK, I wasn't going to name names, but the last thing I tried to read was "Honeysuckle Summer" by Sherryl Woods. I should have known I was in for a rough ride when I saw it was the last book in the "Sweet Magnolias" series. "Honeysuckle", "sweet", "magnolia"...do your teeth hurt, yet? Woods is not a bad writer, but these kinds of books just leave me wanting to stab myself with a fork so I can at least feel something. The phrase "watching paint dry" sprang to mind frequently. This happened a year or so ago, before I started my quest to research romance novels in a more methodical way, when I picked up a couple of Debbie Macomber books at the library. She's local to me, and I love her tea house in Port Orchard, so I thought I'd give her a look-see. I can't remember if I made it past the first chapter of either book, but I do remember that they were the equivalent of sitting in the "fellowship hall" at church listening to nice, wholesome, yet bland people talk about their grandkids, golf games, the altar guild, and what they were planning for Sunday dinner.

Writing about ordinary people does not have to be coma-inducing. Rosamund Pilcher did it all the time, and I adore her novels. Then again, there's usually some kind of social or relational Macguffin in a Pilcher story: a regretted affair, a lost love, a buried secret like a hidden past life. Sprinkle that with some interesting events like, say World War 2, a natural disaster, a tragic accident, the appearance of some kind of villain, all contrasted with vignettes of charming but quirky everyday life, and you have Pilcher in a nutshell. That may sound boring, and it may be to some people, but she is so skillful with her writing that it isn't.

I think that's what writers like Sherryl Woods are trying to do. There is some past drama, a medical malady or two, and even a homicidal ex-husband, but she just doesn't have the chops to keep me interested. The only reason I bothered toughing out "Honeysuckle Summer" is because it was read by Mary Robinette Kowal, who writes wonderfully ("Shades of Milk and Honey") and is a talented Voice Over artist as well. She had her work cut out for her in trying to make this bland story interesting. She did succeed in making me want to listen to the last chapters, but it was a tough haul.

Major problem #1: Woods is very obviously trying to raise awareness about agoraphobia and anorexia (two different characters), but manages to harp on them constantly without actually educating us in any meaningful way. If you're going to be preachy, at least cover the issues in some detail rather than just giving the same surface treatment over and over.

Major problem #2: "Twilight syndrome" or "I only have ten adjectives and you're going to hear them over and over!" Please don't tell me that the hero is "handsome", tell me why he's handsome. Don't tell me the girl is "sexy", tell me why the hero finds her sexy. Points off also for overuse, any use, really, of "rugged".

Major problem #3: Lavish descriptions of things we've already seen multiple times. Things like the protagonist's back yard or the hero's broad shoulders. Also included here are lavish descriptions of cooking and meals. I don't care what they're having for lunch, unless it's pertinent to the plot or unusual in some way. I also don't care what color his or her shirt or jacket is unless, again, it's noteworthy for some reason. Can terrorists fast-rope in and start taking hostages already?! Ahem.

Here's hoping for some romantic romance in the near future.

Accidents Happen, by Louise Millar

Accidents Happen: A Novel by Louise Millar
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Mildly spoilerish.

This book was sent to me as a galley by Atria Books, through Galley Alley, and it's the second in a row that I've read containing the theme of "sad woman who has been through trying times is befriended by and falls in love with a 'too good to be true' guy who turns out to be too good to be true". This might even be a trope at this point, or at least a trendy theme in psychological thrillers. All I can say is that it is a delicate thing to write this kind of story so that the reader believes that the heroine is vulnerable but not overly credulous.

The story takes place in present-day Oxford, following the tortured daily existence of Kate, a 30s-ish woman with an eight-year-old son, who lost her husband in the recent past. Kate sees her life as a series of unlikely tragedies, feeling she's had more than her share of loss and accident. She's become obsessed with statistics and safety measures almost to the point of agoraphobia. Her husband's parents and her sister-in-law are naturally concerned, but their high-handed ways of demonstrating this concern are a huge source of friction. Kate meets a visiting statistics lecturer one day by chance...or is it? He seems literally to have written the book on the statistics of safety, and when Kate screws up her courage to talk to him they start a tentative friendship which immediately changes her outlook on life for the better.

Louise Millar skillfully sets her scenes in a detailed way that draws you in to the moment. The characters speak naturally and we spend just enough time in their heads to know what they're thinking without drowning in internal monologues. I found myself fully a quarter of the way through before I took a break.



**************More obvious spoilers*************





I subtracted one star from a perfect five for a couple of reasons:

1. The "sad woman needs a man to feel better and have a happy life" trope. I'm not saying this doesn't happen, but I prefer stories where the sad woman meets somebody who helps her find her happiness without needing to be the ultimate source of that happiness, if that makes sense.

2. Kate, our protagonist, is massively credulous to the point of stupidity. I would buy her being snowed by our Bad Guy if she were a 20-something college girl full of blind naïveté, but she's a 30-something woman with a child and an amazing menu of adventurous life experiences. I just don't believe her being so gullible, especially considering her paranoid obsession with security and safety. Bad Guy asks her to do some pretty sketchy things in the name of "bringing her out of her shell". By the second or third instance...no, after the first one I would have been very skeptical about this guy, and after a particularly creepy scene involving being stranded in a rural village with a gang of potential gang-bangers I would have punched this guy's lights out and called it quits.

The payoff is decent by the end, and the pacing is good. I always enjoy stories that take me to places I'd like to visit, in this case Oxford, England and environs. It's a nice couple of hours' reading.

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Redshirts, by John Scalzi

Redshirts by John Scalzi
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book is to SF novels what "Galaxy Quest" is to SF movies. It's not the same story, or even the same kind of story, but it has the same weight and tone and lovingly pokes fun at a beloved SF world. This is not to say it is pure book candy, as there are places that grow amusingly metaphysical. Don't overthink these moments; you'll just give yourself a headache. You'll laugh, you'll cry (well, get misty, anyway), or maybe you'll shout "SCALZI!!!" like Brandon Sanderson.

Read it. You can get through it in a long afternoon or a couple of days of light reading. If you enjoy Douglas Adams, Star Trek, or campy SF of any kind, you'll thank me.

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Among Others, by Jo Walton

Among Others by Jo Walton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So far it's like a trip down memory lane for me. I haven't read as many of the SFF novels as Morwenna, but where our lines do cross it's fun to hear her natter on about them as a teenager. I'm not a huge fan of first-person, and in this case you're stuck in the head of a fifteen-year-old, so it can get a bit droll at times. At that age the world revolves around you, and everything is a CRISIS. She tends to overreact to many situations in an overt and external way, which always drives me crazy in a person, but it's utterly believable and consistently written. I'll scribble a real review when I finish.

****

As is often the case, I finished this book and dashed off to other things without writing a review. Part of the reason is that while I enjoyed it for the most part, I didn't find it as engrossing or fascinating as so many others seem to. Do not let my tepid reaction stop you from reading it. I do think it's worth anyone's time... but I felt like the arc was a slow climb up a very low hill to a moderately interesting climax about fifteen pages before the end. Part of my reaction is because I'm usually not a big fan of first person perspective, and especially when one is stuck in the head of a teenager for 75,000 words or so. Even when I was that age I had little patience for the "it's all about ME" thing, and as a crochety old lady I have none at all.

Still, it was nice to re-visit so many of the things I read as a teenager and through my college years and see them through fresh eyes. Give it a try.

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Island Apart by Steven Raichlen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book resonated with me perhaps more than any other novel I have ever read. I'll still always have works like "Lord of the Rings" at the top of my favorites list, but LotR is more of a "I want to be there" and "this journey is important to me" kind of experience, "Island Apart" feels like the author got in to my head while he was writing and concocted a tale just for me. The setting, Martha's Vinyard, is an East Coast version of where I live in the Pacific Northwest. The male lead in the story is an extreme version of me: reclusive, introspective, and wary of painful contact with other humans. He's perfectly content in his solitude and comfortable living life his own way. The other islanders refer to him as "the Hermit", and it fits.

I'm a big fan of Rosamund Pilcher, and this is basically her style but told by a Yank in a Yank setting, with the requisite flashbacks to an earlier time and gentle explorations of interpersonal relationships in a colorful setting. Skillfully drawn characters galore. The female lead does a bit of overreacting at one point, dangerously close to the "psycho-harpies" who annoy me in cheap romance novels. But it's a brief, solitary moment and doesn't mar the story at all.

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The Children's Hour: A Novel by Marcia Willett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Charming story about dealing with love, loss and family. Sort of "Rosamund Pilcher light". Brave use of present tense for the flashback scenes of wartime England, but it works. Believable characters, nice character development arcs, satisfying resolutions without being overly saccharine. I would definitely read more by this author. I find this type of story to be good "summer reading".

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