OK, Fine

Subtitile: Why I think Lelia's should spend her limited reading time on more worthy books (like The Garden) than the Charlaine Harris Vamp series.

Now, I read this like 3 years ago, and I didn't finish it because I thought it sucked, so this review is probably going to be a bit lacking. My apologies.

So, it started off well enough. The main character is some flavor of psychic, in that she can hear other folks thoughts. Ok, cool. This 'talent' of her's makes her pretty skittish about being around other people, it's noise, noise, noise all the time. Strangely enough though, she's a waitress in a bar. I don't remember how the author justified this decision. She also lives with her grandmother, the only cool character in the book.

For various reasons, she rescues a vampire from blood harvesters. Vamp blood in this world has healing properties, and people trap and drain vampires and sell the blood on the black market. Vamps are legal people, but viewed with extreme predjudice. Still, basically interesting premises, and holding my attention. It turns out that the vamp is completly silent to her, she can't remotely hear his thoughts, and she finds this comforting, and the unlikely romance between the two begins. We enter dangerous territory in a vamp book as far as I'm concerned. When the author decides if this is still an horror/mystery, or if the book is going to be a supernatural romance. (bear with me, there are cetain 'formulas' of romance that I abhor, that completely turn me off of books, no matter what else is going on in them)

There is some conflict between Sookie and her family over land ownership (I think, possibly inheritance, can't remember) that leads to a very strained relationship between her and her brother(?, possibly a cousin). Basically extremely obvious murder set up stuff. This is where the details are really fuzzy, as I don't remember the timeline of the events. The grandmother is killed. The GRANDMOTHER. The only character that I liked! And quite honestly, it seemed really unecessary. It felt so much like purely a plot device to rope Sookie in the main plot of the book. There were already other murders happening. It seriously pissed me off. Of course, it looks like a vamp kill, etc., etc.

Other stuff that put me off:

We meet a group of "evil" vamps. We know they're evil because they hang out in a bar/club and wear SPANDEX. Why the hell do authors think 1) Spandex says evil?; 2) Spandex is acceptable club wear anymore?; 3) Spandex is 'fetish' wear (yeah, if you have an 80's fetish)? 4) Spandex is sexy? Apparently the undead have no taste, and that's why they're evil, inflicting spandex upon the world. I say this like I've seen this device before? Well, I have. Too many times.

This is one of those romance formulas that I was talking about earlier that will make me run screaming from a book, so I admit this is a personal taste thing:

Sookie is a virgin. Not a teen virgin. An adult virgin. Her thought hearing is so severe that she could never be intimate with anyone. OK.....kind of with you, sort of. So, she sleeps with her new vamp buddy, because he's so quiet, in one of those ridiculous romance scenes of "I'm a virgin please be gentle with me I've never been with anyone before, but you're so different" CRAP that I HATE. And this amazingly touching sex scene of Sookie losing her vriginity and finally being able to lose herself in another person LASTS FOR A PAGE AND A HALF. This incredibly important and life altering moment in Sookie's life is given a page and a half. I really don't like the "I'm a virgin and so this sex is more justified and meaningful" romance world crap. I don't find anything romantic about virginity. But the fact that the author was so disrepectful of this moment to give it only a page and a half was offensive. And before you ask, no, it wasn't and off camera sex scene. I would have been fine with an off camera sex scene. If you are not confident enough as an author to write a good sex scene (whether in just the details of it, or fearing backlash from your audience), you should move it off camera and give your characters some respect in doing so.

It was an interesting world, despite the characters. It was really too bad it lost me in the details. Unfortunatly, this is the most highly recommended other series for fans of the Anita Blake books. I don't agree with this at all.

Rock On Pennsylvania!

Dover voters oust intelligent design supporters.

The Plucker - Brom

Once in a great while a book gets published that is so different, so beautiful, so completely perfect that aquiring it and reading it just makes everthing OK again. The Plucker was this kind of book for me.

I love fairy tales. I love stories about the dark side of childhood. I love stories that are original, yet tap that deep well of beliefs and superstitions inside of us and make us feel this is somehow familiar so must be true on some level and we start watching the shadows a little more closely.

The Plucker is an illustrated book for adults. Not a graphic novel. It is a picture book. It is a fairy tale, but a dark, dark one, so not so appropriate for the younglings. It is a horror story, evil comes, evil kills and destroys, and evil perverts what it touches. It is a fairy tales, so evil is defeated, but with a high cost. The toys will never be the same.

I'm not going give a summary, or get into what the story is about, you can read for yourself on the website. The book is beautiful. I don't know who will like it besides me. I know I have dark tastes, but this book it worth being aware of, and certainly worth a read if you're ready for it.

Perfect - Natasha Friend

I read this book just before we moved. I'm not sure why I wanted to read it at the time, other than I had yet to read a YA novel that dealt with eating disorders. I've learned a lesson here. Do not pick a book at random purely based on topic.

The gist of the story: Main character is discovered throwing up by her little sister and in the way of little sisters informs mother. Mother "makes a deal" with main character. Main character is forced to go to an eating disorders group. Seems pretty good as a start. Main character meets 'the most popular girl in school' in said support group and learns that even folks who seem perfect have problems. Ok, still with you Ms. Friend, even if this is a little heavy handed. We have several, rather graphic, passages describing the binging and purging motions both girls go through, supporting each other as they become closer friends, and even new ways to do it and ways to hide it from others. Graphic is good with a subject matter like this. It puts the reader right there, so kudos Ms. Friend.

So, what my issue? You all know me well enough to realize that this is leading up to a "what the hell". Well, remember that they're in a support *group*, which implies that there are other girls dealing with these issues? All we get of those girls is a name tag at the beginning of the story, and rather demeaning descriptions (the Skeleton, the Whale). We never find anything else about those other girls, they are simply wallpaper. Also, for a book about eating disordes there is very little talk about body image. There are a hand full of "oh, I hate my body"'s, but it's more as if the author is paying lip service to the disorder rather than bothering to delve into the psychology of it. We have instead a plot line in which we find out that Isabelle's dad has died, and her mother is refusing to deal with the death, and therefore not allowing the girls to deal. Binging and purging is Isabelle's way of "dealing", it's something she can control. Fine. Bullemia is a disorder that has roots in trying to control things that are out of one's control. But to suggest, as this books does, that that all it's about is irresponsible. Isabelle confronts her mother, they bleed the old wound, and finally deal with the death, and Isabelle GETS ALL BETTER. She stops "feeling the need" to vomit. It is implied that if her "perfect" friend would just deal with her home situation, she will get better too. But she's just not ready yet, and so continues the behavior. There is no mention of the bonecrushing self esteem issues that can cause girls (and boys) to have eating disorders. It's as if the author herself was in denial that self image plays a huge role in eating disorders, and I found that rather disturbing.

I would not recommend this book. I might recommend using it as a supplement to something that discussed body image, because the 2 messages together make up a whole. But Perfect by itself feels like it missed the point, or was simply too afraid to go there. It was strange.

Looking For Jake - China Miéville (Guest Blog)

Hiya! This is a "special edition" guest blog from Chrissy's husband, Jeremy. I've just read Looking for Jake, which Chrissy said she was sadly not going to have time to review, but wanted a review for it.

There were a couple surprises waiting for me to discover:

• This is a book of short stories that I actually enjoyed. No, really.
• The author, China Mieville, is a guy. That was only semi-related to the name - I didn't discover the gender bit until the very end, when I read the 'about the author'.

The collection is 14 short stories, for some reason labeled as science fiction, likely due to the fact that, well, they're really weird.

How weird?

I won the lottery!
     I mean, I didn't win the lottery. But I was one of a bunch of runners-up, and it was a peach of a prize. An invitation to a special, licenced Christmas™ party in the centre of London, run by YuleCo itself.
     When I read the letter I was shaking. This was YuleCo, so it would be the real deal. There'd be Santa™, and Rudolph™, and Mistletoe™, and Mince Pies™, and a Christmas Tree™, with presents underneath it.

- from 'Tis the Season

Some of them I was a bit indifferent to (including the title piece), because they started a bit interesting, but would then either fizzle or go somewhere stupid. Even those, however, had some neat ideas (also including the title piece).

But, boy, the ones that are good, are GOOD.

"Reports of Certain Events in London" details the events that follow after our lead receives incorrectly addressed mail from the 'Brotherhood of Watchers of the Viae Ferae', a secret society that tracks roaming feral streets and the battles between them.

"Entry Taken From a Medical Encyclopedia" details "Buscard's Murrain", a curious literary disease, also mentioned in The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases.

"Details" is creepy. Really really creepy. I'm now trying to avoid ever staring at anything for too long:

     "I opened my eyes fully, for the first time.
     "I had chosen an old wall. I was looking for the answer to some question that I told you I can't even remember now, but the question wasn't the main thing. That was the opening of my eyes.
     "I stared at the whole mass of the bricks. I took another glance, relaxed my sight. At first I couldn't stop seeing the bricks as bricks, the divisions as layers of cement, but after a time they became pure vision. And as the whole broke down into down into lines and shapes and shades, I held my breath as I began to see.
     "Alternatives appeared to me. Messages written in the pockmarks. Insinuations in the forms. Secrets unraveling. It was bliss.
     "And then without warning my heart went tight, as I saw something. I made sense of the pattern.
     "It was a mess of cracks and lines and crumbling cement, and as I looked at it, I saw a pattern in the wall.
     "I saw a clutch of lines that looked just like something... terrible - something old and predatory and utterly terrible - staring right back at me.
     "And then I saw it move."

But the best, the one that's kinda stickin' with me when I look out into the dark or catch a reflection, is The Tain. This won the Locus Award for Best Novella. Good. It's a story about post-apocalyptic London that has been overrun by Imagos, bringing about what could be the end of humankind.

The only technical bit of the story, but it's so deliciously complex, I had to look up some references after reading it:

     There is something called the Phong Model, Sholl said. It's a graph. It's a model to show how light moves. The shinier the surface, the more precise and bright the reflected light, the narrower the range in which it can be seen. The model used to describe how light bounced off concrete and paper and metal and class, its angle of specular reflection narrowing, approximating the angle of incidence, its bright sport brightening, as the surfaces became more mirrored.
     But something happened, and now Phong describes a turning key.
     It used to be a sliding scale. Asymptotic. An endless approximation to infinity or zero. It's become a threshold. As the reflected brightness grows more precise, as its angle of exit narrows to more closely mimic its entry, it's approaching an edge, it is becoming a change of state, he said. Until a critical moment is reached: until light meets the sheen of a gloss surface, and everything alters, and the light unlocks a door, and what was a mirror becomes a gate.
     Mirrors became gates, and something came through.

It bounces between two different characters: the human, 'Sholl', who is trying to make sense and survive, but has a plan; an unnamed Imago who gives us insight (and history, but the quote's insight):

I have seen my people debased. Entities more powerful than your moon made to smear scarlet wax and fat on peeling lips, lick it off lumpy teeth, made to preen with you. Bulked into spasming fibrous meat and mutely raising and lowering iron bars, without complaint, unable to complain, as you stared at yourselves, at them, made to wear your sweat-wet clothes and jostle mindlessly from machine to machine as you worked to change you shapes. You have put mirrors by your beds, or over them, and trapped my people in your clammy fuck-embraces. You made us fuck each other, stare at the eyes of our siblings with shared hatred and apology as the bodies you made us wear did the corporeal things you did.
     For six thousand years, and forever, you have held us down. Each of us alive and watching, and waiting, and waiting, undying all that time. You didn't know, but not knowing is no excuse. And you have taken our freedom away in slow increments, until in a sudden flurry of three centuries you sped it all up, and took away our last escapes, and made our world yours.
     One day, we whispered. We had whispered it forever.
When it came, the time was not one day but many, stretched out over months, a luxuriant, languorous release, in pieces, in parts and parcels, and the more infuriating but ultimately the more wonderful, liberatory, for that.

So, all in all a good read, but definitely dark. A strange uplifting dark. Read it, but prepare for it to leave a strangely pleasurable melancholy taste.