Hiatus

I hate to do this but between extra hours at work and getting ready for the holidays, there is no way I can keep up with any kind of schedule. I know I've been posting a crappy amount this year but next year should be better. I did make my goal of 52 books read this year already though so as soon as I can find 5 minutes to myself, I'll be scribbling and editing reviews. I hate working retail for the holidays.

Back on New Years, Sorry for the wait.

Fanfiction Crossovers

    I may have mentioned before that I read a lot. Sometimes “real” books don’t satisfy me or I want something completely off the wall or my book has been left at home for some reason. During these times I like to read fanfiction. Now I know what you are thinking, “fanfiction? How dumb can you get?” And yes, there is a lot of bad and weird fanfiction. There is also a lot of good fanfiction. I’m going to point out my favorites just because I can. I tend not to read works in progress since I hate investing a bunch of time into something that may be abandoned mid-story. The only exceptions I make to this are writers who have written the story and are just posting chapters til it ends.

     The first thing to know before searching for fanfiction is some of the abbreviations that people use to label their stories. This website has most of the basic ones: http://mokisfanfictionblog.com/blog/mokis-fanfiction-glossary/. This way if there is something you don’t want to read, you are forewarned and can skip anything you might find offensive. I try to keep to stories based on things I already like: Firefly, Buffy, Harry Potter, various other movies and TV shows. I read a lot of crossovers which are stories involving two or more categories.


My five favorite crossovers (in no particular order):

1. Various – Tales from the Barman

http://www.tthfanfic.org/Story-11757/Methos+Tales+from+the+Barman.htm

     This story is huge. It was originally started by a person going by the name of Methos on a site named Twisting the Hellmouth, a fanfiction site for Buffy fans. The main idea of the story was Xander got tired of fighting the good fight and opened a bar. Xander having his typical luck, opened said bar on a dimensional crossroads. He trades a drink, sometimes a meal or a place to set up for the night, for good stories and a small token from the patrons. There are so many good stories (and universes) included in this that it’s impossible to talk about them all. The whole community decided to kick in and add their own chapters to this story. After six months and 269 chapters, the story winds down. A couple years later, the tales were resurrected and another 101 chapters have been added to the epic. Some stories are funny, some are cute, and some are touching. There is a little something for everyone in this massive fanfiction.

2. GhostWriter84 – Rule Eight

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9408955/1/Rule-Eight

     Sadly this fanfic was never finished. It is a crossover between Zombieland and the Walking Dead. It takes place after the Zombieland movie and around Season 3 of the Walking Dead. The Zombieland crew has worked themselves across the country and run across Rick’s group. They are taken in by the group. The story follows what happens through part of season 3 with Florida, Columbus, and the girls’ special brand of insanity added. Unfortunately, the story ends after 9 chapters and hasn’t been updated since March of 2014. It’s a shame because the story was well written and the characters were true to their official counterparts.

3. Jedi Buttercup – Things That Never Happened to Buffy Summers

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/1977157/1/Things-That-Never-Happened-to-Buffy-Summers

     This is a collection of short (less than a paragraph usually) stories about things that never happened to Buffy aka the Slayer. It’s mostly her running into characters played by former actors from Buffy the Vampire or the spinoff Angel. This one is a neat little collection, a palette cleanser type of story. There’s no big reveals, just a few what ifs to entertain you for a few minutes.

4. Nonjon – Browncoat, Green Eyes

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/2857962/1/Browncoat-Green-Eyes

     This is a cross over between Firefly and Harry Potter. It sounds like it wouldn’t be a good idea but surprisingly it works. Shortly after his wife’s death, a depressed Harry Potter puts himself into stasis until the next big bad shows up that he can help defeat. Fast forward 500 years to the Firefly ‘verse. After the Miranda wave, the Alliance hears of this “wizard hero” and wakes him up to take care of their River Tam problem. What follows is an entertaining look at the world of Firefly and the chaos Harry Potter brings to the future as he tries to figure out what happened to all the wizards and how Earth was made uninhabitable.

5. Livi2Jack -- Window Of Opportunity Bonanza

https://www.fanfiction.net/Stargate-SG-1-and-Bonanza-Crossovers/68/414/

     During a mission gone wrong, the Stargate is hit by blast of energy from a Jaffa ship as the team is trying to evacuate. The overload shuts down the gate and the last scientist to go through is catapulted back to the Old West, where it turns out the Ponderosa ranch and Virginia City exists. The SG-1 team receives packets of letters written by the scientist and held in trust by Wells-Fargo. The story goes back and forth between surviving the Old West and trying to get the scientist back to the present. It’s a great example of how a writer can put an original character into a fanfiction without going over the top about it. Too many writers go over the top with original characters, like adding the character to the main group or writing themselves into the story without making it believable. For the unexpected mix of Old West and Stargate technology, the story is entertaining and keeps my attention the whole way through.

Circle

And now for something completely different. An actual movie review.

     The movie opens in a dark room with a bunch of lit up, red circles around a center console. People appear standing on the circles. Every few minutes, the console sends out electricity of some sort and kills one of the people. After a few minutes of panic, the people figure out the rules of this game they are forced to play. The person with the most votes will die every few minutes (the time gets longer as fewer people remain) until only one remains. What happens after that is anyone’s guess.

     What a weird movie. The whole movie is a big debate over who is the worthiest person to survive until the ending. There is small twist at the ending but it’s nothing earthshattering. There is no real beginning or ending. It is one big middle. There is minimal explanation of how they ended up in the circles or what happens after the final person is left and no real character development. The only actress I recognized was Julie Benz. Despite this, I have been arguing with people since I’ve seen it over whether this is a good movie or not. The choices of the characters make you think but there’s not a lot detail about why this happened. It’s an hour and a half long but was paced well. It didn’t feel like I’d been waiting to finding out the ending that long. One person’s opinion is that some writers had a good idea but didn’t really know how to flesh out an ending. I find myself agreeing with this opinion the more I think about it. If you are curious or like character driven stories, it’s on Netflix and worth the time to watch it. I’d love to hear some other opinions on this one. 

The Black Company -- Glen Cook

" We are minions of the villain of the piece. There are no self-proclaimed villains, only regiments of self-proclaimed saints. Victorious historians rule where good or evil lies. We abjure labels. We fight for money and an indefinable pride. The politics, the ethics, the moralities, are irrelevant.”

     The Black Company is a mercenary troop working for the city of Beryl. When the city riots and their employer plans to betray them, the Company defects. They escape with the help of a recruiter for the army of the Lady. The Lady is the leader of the largest army ever seen in recent times and happens to be one of the ancient evil sorcerers locked away centuries ago. She and ten of her followers were released when a curious wizard freed them accidentally. The Lady left her husband imprisoned and began her own bid for world dominion. The Lady’s campaign is failing on most fronts with only the Black Company led forces having any kind of victory. The story is told through the eyes of Croaker the Company’s physician and chronicler. He catches the fancy of the Lady through an ill-advised crush early on and his penchant for writing only the truth in the Annals of the Company. Over the 2 years of the campaign that the book covers, Croaker and the Company take out the leaders of the Rebel faction but it’s not enough. The Lady’s stronghold is surrounded by the Rebel, her own cadre of sorcerers is warring among themselves, and the strength of the Black Company is the only thing holding the army together.  Will the Lady stop her enemies in time? Will the Company survive this predicament? You’ll just have to read it to find out.

     This is the first book of a fairly long series. The writing may seem disjointed until the realization that you are reading the actual Annals of the Company as they are being written. A lot of reviews have issues with this and the fact everyone has descriptive names. There are reasons for both these things and are explained as the story goes on. This is a book that needs the reader’s full attention or details will be missed. It is almost impossible to get a full impression of this book on a first reading. So much is happening between the war, special missions, and things that are learned near the end of the book, that it’s hard to keep everything straight. I’ve read this book a half dozen times and I’m still trying to figure out some of the behind-the-scenes action. This book is great if you like long stories, big payoffs, and lots of world building. It keeps you guessing until the final ending. 

World War Z

Continuing with the feeling of Halloween, what could represent Halloween better than zombies?

If you’ve see the movie, forget the movie. It has almost no similarity to the book aside from the locations and not even then does it follow book. Now if they’d called the movie something else it would have been hailed as brilliant but fans of the book who saw it were outraged and made that known with good reason.  Instead of concentrating on individual survival, the novel concentrates on governments and groups as a whole.  The solution to the plague wasn’t even similar. The main character didn’t mention a family or work with Navy. The American government was barely involved since most of the East Coast was lost fairly early. The book didn’t even technically take place during the apocalypse.

The book starts with an introduction from the “author” who is a reporter. This intro explains the whole purpose was to document the years of the zombie war so that the history wasn’t lost or worse repeated. The book is a series of a cross between personal interviews and military reports about the plague years. It starts with the idea of this book and follows current government figures and survivors their survival stories back to Patient Zero. Once we figure out how the plague starts, there’s a small afterward from various interviewees that hint at what various governments are preparing next.

I don’t know how Max Brooks managed to write such a moving story about zombies but the realism of this book blows the stereotypical zombie movie out of the water. It’s easily imaginable that people would cope with a zombie invasion the same way the people in the book did. I can see something like the Reddecker plan being put into action and the consequences to the people involved would likely be the same. People talk about the “politics” being left out of the movie, but it’s not what I would typically think of as politics. There’s no voting or long winded speech making to groups of people. The political aspect is more the cause and effects of the government actions. All of the characters make decisions they regret and lose people to the virus. If you are a fan of zombies but you want a more realistic approach to the storytelling, this is nice change of pace from the action-packed, gore fest zombie movies tend to be. 

Vampires in the Lemon Grove

     A book of short stories I recently checked out from the library is Vampires in the Lemon Grove. Now I’m not usually a fan of short stories, I like my stories long, drawn out, and with sequels. Short stories rarely have enough depth to satisfy my need for conflict and escapist tendencies. If I want something short, my go-to is fanfiction (and I’m not ashamed of that either). The title of this book intrigued me though. I really wanted to know why vampires would be hanging out with a bunch of lemon trees.  Fortunately, I didn’t have long to wait since it was the first story of the book. It was a delightfully creepy little story about the only two vampires in the world and their lives together. Despite the old stories, blood did not sate the thirst of these vampires, nor did they stay young forever. Pretty much the only bits of the usual vampire legend that turned out to be true were the never-ending thirst, being able to turn into bats, and being fairly impervious to injury and death.  The whole story kept me thoroughly entertained and the ending was a bit sad and unexpected.

     The rest of the book, on the other hand, was a mixed bunch. The book was front loaded with the best stories and the ones at the end kind of had an “I need something to make this longer” vibe to it. Some of the earlier stories were enough to keep me awake at night for fear of nightmares. The ones at the end were the standard every day in the life of so and so types. If they’d stuck with the horror theme, I’d have been up all night and then hurrying to buy this book for my all friends who enjoy horror novels and movies. Horror is kind of a hit and miss genre though. Some things that scare some people won’t necessarily bother others. If you like creepy creatures and tales of metamorphosis, definitely check this book out. If you prefer zombies or action adventure in your horror tales, you might want to give it a pass. 

OMG! Internets!!!

Yea, Took a little longer to get our internet up and running after the move than I thought it would. Since my reviews have been delayed so long, I have a few extra written. I'm going to post a few extras over the next couple weeks to get all my Halloween/Creepy reviews posted.

The Measure of Katie Calloway – Serena Miller

     In post-civil war Georgia, Katie Calloway is a young wife who has a little brother to take care of and an abusive husband to avoid. When she discovers her husband off visiting relatives at a surprisingly early hour and a booby trap set up in their barn meant to kill her, she flees. She runs as far north as she can manage and ends up in Bay City, Michigan. She falls into a job at a lumber camp that will pay for both her and her brother to stay on the run and make them nearly impossible to get to until spring. What follows is a tale of faith, determination, and pride as Katie learns to cope with life in the wilderness and deals with the aftermath of abuse. She even manages to learn to love again.

     This is a Christian historical fiction novel. I’m not the biggest fan of Christian novels merely because they seem so preachy and that one aspect takes over the entire novel.  “Bad things have happened but because you believe in god, everything is perfect now” story lines with no character growth are just bad writing. Serena Miller does not do this. She has characters that mature and learn things and struggle with faith as well as the situations in the books. When her character Katie is questioned for lying about their names and origins by her little brother, she justifies her decision instead of extemporizing about how it’s ok and god will forgive them. The author uses the characters to demonstrate that it is possible to care about other people who don’t exactly share your faith. The writing is amazing, the characters are well rounded and believable, and the Christian aspect isn’t overwhelming. This book has something for everyone. Over all this book is great and I was so impressed I’m actually rereading it already. 

Confessions of a Part time Sorceress -- Shelley Mazzanoble

Confessions of a Part-time Sorceress: A Girl's Guide to the D&D Game By Shelly Mazzanoble

     Talk about super long titles. The thing to remember before picking up this book is that this is a humor book. It has a little of the most basic information about D&D in it but it is primarily a humor book. The narrator of this little adventure is a self proclaimed girly girl who never really saw the point of playing D&D even though she works for Wizards of the Coast. She believed all the stereotypes about gamers: overweight, smelly teenage boys playing dress up in their parents basements. Her coworkers persuade her to play a game with them and those stereotypes all get thrown out the window. She puts all the character classes and races into her own little categories and defines them in an extremely girly style with quizzes to help the reader decide which to be. She does the same with equipping her character as well as everything else to do with the game.

     I really enjoyed her stories of things that happen in her games from sound effects to attempting to make her friends play with her as a sort of social experiment. The side bars have some interesting information in them; a little bit of history, some themed recipes and my favorite: a list of famous people who play D&D. Maybe it was the fact I read this right after Ready Player One and was feeling nostalgic or because I’m tying to persuade some of my friends to play the game with me but I seriously enjoyed this book for the humor and the extremely basic information and how to present it to people who’ve never played before. This book was short enough that I finished it in a couple hours and I couldn’t put it down once I’d started reading.

Call the Midwife -- Jennifer Worth

     

I’ve been reading a lot of nonfiction lately, among them a series of books titled Call the Midwife. I started this series because I was fascinated with the TV show. (New season airing now!) Call the Midwife is the story of Jennifer Lee a new midwife sent to work in the East End of London during the 50s and 60s. Jenny Lee fresh out of school leaves a relationship with one of her professors to help the women of the East End without really understanding what she was getting into. From a privileged family, she doesn’t understand how poverty and the aftermath of war affect large groups of people. The midwifery practice she joins is run by a group of nuns who have lived, worked, and taken care of the people of the East End for generations. Over the course of the books, Jenny Lee discovers herself and what it means to help people who can’t help themselves. She learns to overlook poor sanitation and hygiene and look at what makes people human. She included so many stories of both tragedy and overcoming the odds that it’s hard not to be emotionally moved while reading. Knowing that it’s a biography makes the whole thing feel closer to home. This type of thing makes me want to break out a recorder and capture every story that people on the street are willing to tell me, from the most mundane to the most extraordinary.

     Comparing the book to the show is really only possible because the writers tried to follow the story while adding things to make it interesting. Good writers help TV shows and movies sell books. The show has its tense moments but with the exception of the season finales the episodes almost always have happy endings. Of course, it is best to remember it is a fictional dramatization of a biography and only follows the outline of the books. They start with the same basic main characters but as the show goes on characters get combined, new ones get made up and introduced, the history and future of the characters get left out or not explained, and events get moved around. It’s narrated by Vanessa Redgrave who I’ve always thought has the perfect voice for it. My only real complaint about the show is even when the real story ended with a bad ending, death, loss of faith, etc., the writers almost always changed it to something happy. The few sad endings that were included were the ones where Jenny learned something important from it. Some of the stories that changed were very powerful and taught a lesson about endurance and making the best of things and how people cope with tragedy but since, one of the other nurses and not Jenny learned a lesson, the story got abbreviated. With time constraints and budgets, the writers/producers have to pick and choose what gets rewritten and they did a fairly good job. Anyway, I think I’ve started rambling. If you like TV shows with depth to the story and emotional storytelling, this is a good choice despite all of the baby birthing scenes. The same goes for the book, definitely a story that needs to be read and reread to absorb the overall narrative. 

The House Girl – Tara Conklin

     This is a story told in two parts. It switches between the antebellum south circa 1852 and modern New York. First year associate at a prestigious law firm, Lina Sparrow, is tasked with finding the perfect client to be the face of a class action law suit to demand reparations for the descendants of American slaves.  Josephine Bell is a house slave on a struggling Virginia plantation. They are tied together by Josephine’s owner, Lu Anne Bell. After Lu Anne Bell’s death, her paintings and drawings were found and she was held up as a revolutionary before her time. Now, nearly 150 years later, her art is being called into question. Some claim it was done by Josephine since no rich, white, plantation owner could know the life of a slave so intimately. In this controversy, Lina thinks she may have found her perfect client as long as she can connect him to Josephine’s bloodline. Her only problem is Josephine disappeared shortly before her mistress’s death.

     This story sounds intriguing. The reparations aspect, a little family drama in Lina’s story, trying to find Josephine’s descendants, and the story of Josephine’s life itself should have combined to make a wonderful enriching story. The keywords there are should have. What we get instead is a story that pretty much goes nowhere. Lina is wondering about her mother and the history behind her death while searching for evidence of what happened to Josephine’s child and just does some of the dumbest stuff. Trying to seduce her mother’s former lover, a man old enough to be her father; not bothering to check for newspaper articles; not looking up the death certificate at department of vital statistics that as a lawyer should have been her second stop; or avoiding her dad when he spent the whole book trying to tell her the truth are not the acts of an intelligent, educated person. The law firm didn’t want the descendant of Josephine as the face of their law suit because he was “too white.” They needed someone “darker” to make it look good and, three quarters of the way through the book, the whole case was dropped for the flimsiest of reasons. Lina keeps doing the research though because she” must” have answers to the mystery of Josephine.  I won’t spoil any more of the story but the whole of Josephine’s story is unbelievable in the extreme. It’s not quite as bad Lina’s but it is still pretty awful.

     The writer has apparently never heard of normal colors, geography, research. If something is brown, its coffee colored. Blue eyes and/or blonde hair are described as pale and anything else is “dark.” The shadows were dark, the wood was dark, the house was dark, and all of the women’s hair and eye colors were dark except for Josephine’s (which were blue aka unusual) and anyone who was blonde. Every time Lina thought about her mother, it was the same paragraph about her fragrance, her laugh, her warm rich tones, almost as if it were copied and pasted every time the mother's name was written. The writer felt the need to print three entire pages of names while Lina was doing research into slave families trying to find a descendant. Three Pages! and then had the gall to finish the passage with “and the list went on and on.” There was no need for three pages of names, a dozen names would have done the job. I am fairly sure the author was trying to make a point about how ridiculously awful slavery was but we already know and understand how terrible it was. The author clearly did little to no research about the areas outside of New York that she was writing about. At one point Lina visits Richmond, Va. and travels to a town (that in reality) is 3 hours away. In the book, it’s an easy 45 minute drive, plus she keeps spelling one of the town names wrong. Yes, it’s pronounced Stanton but it’s spelled Staunton. As a whole, it took an interesting basis for a story and goes nowhere while being repetitious in the extreme and getting basic geography wrong. If I ever read this book again, it will be too soon.

Tilted World – Tom Franklin and Beth Fennelly

     I’ve been borrowing tons of books from the library on my kindle lately. The Tilted World was one title I picked up. At first, I was afraid it was going to be one of those Christian fiction novels that masquerade as something I would actually want to read. I was not only pleasantly surprised; I was blown away with the intensity of this story.

     Dixie Clay, a recently bereaved mother and the best moonshiner in the state, takes in an orphan that was found by undercover revenue agents during a shootout.  Little does she or the revenuers suspect, the missing agents they are searching for were killed by Dixie’s husband. With the waters of the Mississippi River rising fast and saboteurs on dam, will Dixie be able to turn in her abusive gangster husband to the revenuers and evacuate with her new child in time? Will the revenuers be able to find the moonshiners, find their colleagues’ murderer, and stop the saboteurs before the town is lost? You’ll have to find out for yourself because I’m not giving away anything else.

     This book was amazing. It managed to tell a compelling story with realistic characters extremely well. I felt so bad for Dixie and her orphan. I wished it was possible to be friends with Ingersoll. The back story portions for various characters weren’t overly and gave just enough information to continue the story without breaking the mood of the “present.” The atmosphere is almost tangible. The whole thing feels like watching an old black and white film instead of reading a novel. I was not familiar with either of the two authors but a little bit of easy detective work reveals that both are fairly well known and married to each other in the bargain. I’m looking forward to finding more of their work. Even if they don’t collaborate on any other projects, they’ve managed to create a masterpiece with this novel. 

Redemption of Althalus

     This book starts with the adventures of a thief having a run of bad luck. Unfortunately, even when he reaches the place he calls home, things don’t really go right for him. He gets roped into stealing a book from an unoccupied house. Sadly for him, the house isn’t quite as unoccupied as he’s been told. It contains a goddess masquerading as a cat. As the story progresses, they recruit a group of people to help combat the forces of the goddess’s brother, who are trying to unmake the world. Over the course of two years, the group fights the enemy generals one by one and leads their group to victory.

     I really enjoy this book. This is the last of the good Eddings fantasy novels. The Dreamers series that Eddings’ wrote after this book pretty much took the plot from this one, made slight changes to the main characters and stretched it into three books. Despite the length of it, much of the “traveling” is left out. All the scenes have some kind of significance to them. There’s a lot of recap time with the various forces and army commanders about what everyone else is doing and the fact they are working for deities is an open secret. Taking this book by its parts, this is substandard. The plot is typical, the characters act like every other character in every other fantasy novel, and the villains are unintelligent. Although something about the way David and Leigh Eddings put together the story still makes it an entertaining read and my second favorite of their novels. Maybe it’s that despite all the clichés, there’s more humanity in the characters and situations than many of the new books that are coming out now. I can relate to the girl who wants to hurt her father’s murderer, the thief who misses his friends of the past, the chronically hungry teenager even. This novel is very representative of their other works and it’s a good choice if you don’t want to commit to a 6-10 book series purchase but want to try them out. 

Sorry again.

It's been a while. My computer died and I had to wait for it to be fixed/replaced. Apparently crashing computers is a theme for me when I want to do stuff online. That being said, I have read about a million books the past few months and have another stock pile of reviews so I should be posting fairly regularly for a good long bit. We are moving in a few months but that shouldn't stop the updates.

Gone Girl -- Gillian Flynn

     The first half the book is told through the eyes of a husband whose wife has been kidnapped and flashbacks from his wife’s diary. The way the husband handles stress makes him look guilty even to people who love him. As facts come out, it becomes more and more obvious that he is the one who killed his wife and threw her body in the river. The husband denies any of this and has no clue what is going on most of the time. He supposedly racked up thousands of dollars on credit cards, (he swears he doesn't know what the police are talking about), a lady claims to be his wife’s best friend, (he says they barely knew each other), doctors report the wife was pregnant, (he says there’s no way that’s possible). It finally comes out that he was having an affair, which he actually was guilty of. By the time he finds all the things that were on the credit cards in his sister’s shed, I was completely convinced that he had multiple personalities or as was guilty as it is possible to be. When the second half starts, there’s a huge plot twist. We discover that everything we've been told is wrong and we find out what really happened to all of the characters. All of the characters go to a dark place and when the wife finally makes it home, things don’t end the way I felt they should.

     Up until the last twenty pages, it was a great story. The first half was well paced and when the plot twist came it was a total surprise. The second half of the book was surprising and unexpected. I hated the ending though. The characters were not likable by the end and were the complete opposites of their original personalities. The wife was a complete psychopath, controlling, and manipulative. The husband was controllable and awkward. When it finally looked like he was growing a backbone, the wife plays her final card and cements her control over him forever apparently. It was well written but I just have problems getting past the stupidness of the way the book ends. The characters get everything they want in the end even though they are awful people who do awful things to the people and world around them. Everything is wrapped up with a nice neat bow at the end. Maybe I’m looking for too much realism in this story but I wouldn't read it again. 

What did everyone else think?

The Book Thief -- Markus Zusak

     This book was nothing like I expected. I was under the impression that it was a book about a girl who stole books to keep them from being destroyed by the Nazis. I suppose that’s what I deserve for trusting movie trailers for book summaries. What this book was actually about is the childhood/teenager hood of a girl living with her foster parents in Nazi Germany. It is also narrated by Death. That right there should have told me this book wasn’t going to end well. As a matter of fact, within the first few paragraphs the reader is warned that it doesn’t end well.

     The story starts with Liesel witnessing the death of her younger brother on the train to her new home. The first book she steals (despite being unable to read) is a handbook on grave digging from the cemetery to remember her brother by. Then begins the introduction into her new life; her foster mother, who swears to express love; her foster father, who loves painting, playing the accordion, and always pays his debts; her best friend, Rudy, who is a local legend for his pranks and his bad luck. Her family eventually takes in and hides a Jewish man to repay her father’s debt to the Jewish man’s family. After a few years, things start to go all wrong because Germany isn’t doing too well in the war. The Jewish man leaves and is captured, Liesel’s father upsets the some local higher ups and is conscripted, food is hard to come by, and air raids happen quite often. Eventually the war comes to an end and inevitably no one comes through unscathed. Except for an afterward that takes place at the end of Liesel’s life, there is almost no information about what happens after the war.

     I still haven’t decided if I like this book or not. Aside from my initial misunderstanding about the subject, the narration of Death was obnoxious. Much of what he provided was unnecessary translations or weird tidbits of info that had nothing to do with the story. My biggest objection to the narration was that Death kept skipping ahead and hinting at the ending. It was almost as if the author could not think of any other way to provide information or wanted some kind of gimmick to grab the readers attention and didn’t know what to do with it once he found it. The story was well written and moving but the inclusion of Death and using German to hide swear words was so disruptive to the rhythm of the tale that it was hard to be fully immersed at times. I also feel there should have been more between the end of the last chapter and the afterward. The afterward takes place after Liesel had a long full life of marriage, adventure, kids, and grandkids but never explains how she meets any of these people or has any of the adventures. If the author was going to skip 60 or more years of her life, he shouldn’t have put so much emphasis on the years between the last chapter and the end of her life. If you are able to ignore some of these issues, it really is a beautiful story. Keep a box of tissues nearby if you are a crying type of reader because the end will rip your heart and stomp on it. 

Four & Twenty Blackbirds – Mercedes Lackey

Now I reviewed the other books in this series. I never could find a copy of this book but I had some luck. Some friends of mine bought a boxful of books and this one was in it. Fortunately, they were kind enough to lend it to me so I finally got to read it. 

From the summary on the back of the book: “...Tal Rufen is just a simple constable. But he really cares about his job, and when one of these murder/suicides happens on his beat he becomes obsessed. His superiors don't care -- the victims will never be missed, and their murderers are already justly dead. But every instinct Tal Rufen has cries out that he has seen only one small piece of a bigger and much nastier puzzle” That is all I can really say about the book’s plot without giving everything away. As any genre of book, this one leaves much to be desired. The mystery isn’t much of a mystery if you’ve read The Lark and the Wren (the first book in the series). I figured out who the murderer was in the first two chapters. As fantasy, there isn’t much magic or other races. The only spell that is actually performed and not just talked about is by the murderer to control the victim. There is a Haspur, the race of bird-men from previous books but his scenes are few and far between and while critical to the story, he is treated more like a plot device than an actual character. As a book belonging to a series about musicians, there are only the vaguest references to the Free Bards or even the Bardic Guild and characters from other books.

I had hoped that, like The Lark and The Wren, the book would change directions; the first half being Rune trying to qualify for the Bardic guild and the second half being her adventures with the free bards. I figured if it was so obvious who the murderer was within the first few chapters, then the second half of this more than 400 page book would have to do with the budding romance/crisis of faith that the Arch Bishop started having because of Tal Rufen or the building of the school they talked about several times or any of the multitude of things mentioned in what turned out to be throwaway conversations that might as well never have happened. They recapped the murders and the trail Rufen follows to Kingsford, four times. Four times! They have the exact same conversation with three different individuals and then they have a group session where they throw out the same ideas they had 50 pages ago. All in all, if this book had been half the length, it would have been an engaging story. As it stands, it was a whole bunch of repetition. It was worth reading once but I doubt I’ll ever feel the need to read it again. 

Ready Player One

  Ready Player One is set about 30 years in the future. The world has only gotten worse from the problems we’ve seen today except for one thing: the OASIS, an immense 3-D virtual reality world created by James Halliday and his partner. OASIS has anything anyone could want, it’s the internet but it feels real. People run businesses, get married to people they never meet in real life, in-game money is a far more stable currency than any type that is government issued. Then, James Halliday dies. In his will, he reveals that his entire fortune, $240 Billion, will be given to whoever can find and solve 3 puzzles he has hidden in the vast world of OASIS. Five years later, people are still searching for the answer to the first clue to find the first puzzle. James Halliday was obsessed with the 80s (when he grew up)  so 80s culture has become hugely popular in an attempt to find all this money. The real action begins when a high school kid discovers the location of the first puzzle. . There’s murder, intrigue, feats of derring-do in the real world as well as the virtual one, romance, friendship, and games. What more could you want in a book?

  This book is action packed and terribly fun to read if you have even a little knowledge of 80s pop or geek/nerd/gaming culture. There are references to every kind of genre you could wish in this book. I’ve seen seriously mixed reviews for this book. People either love it or hate it. The only problem is the people who hate give a multitude of reasons and the people who love it just say “OMG this book was great, go read it for yourself.” I loved this book. The first time I read it, I finished it in one sitting and wanted to start over again immediately. The characters are memorable; the story is engrossing; the setting and premise are fascinating. I will admit to being a huge geek and partly obsessed with some of the same things that the creator of OASIS contest loved. Anyone who is a fan of geek/dork/nerd culture will like this book just for the references. If you want a decent adventure in a dystopian future that isn’t too distant from now, definitely pick up this book and soon. 

Strip Mauled edited by Esther Friesner

Well, it turns out I was taken out commission by my twin nemeses of Bronchitis and Bugs for the last couple of months. Now that I'm feeling better and back on my feet, it's time to review all the books I read while I was recuperating. 

Strip Mauled Edited by Esther Friesner

     This anthology is yet another in a series of pun related short stories from this author/editor. This one was great because lately most fantasy stories have been vampire or dystopian flavored. Not these. These are all concentrated on urban or suburban werewolves. I originally picked up this book because I’m a fan of the Chicks in Chainmail series from the late 90’s and early 2000’s. The stories are clever and designed to keep you reading.

     There were a few of them that were kind of not in sync with the rest, such as “That Time of the Month” about hillbilly wolves moving to the suburbs and being chased out by the main character. The main character of that one was way too focused on “removing” people that threatened her “peaceful” existence. That sentence should probably read “murdering people that might expose the fact she was a werewolf“ to be closer to the truth. The writer tended to repeat things that didn't need repeating. Calling the antagonists “stupid hicks” and “dumb hicks” every other sentence gets extremely boring after a couple of paragraphs. There were quite a few gems in this anthology though. “The Fish Story” about a reporter who fights against a kelpie with help of her friend/love interest and her cousin or “Imaginary Friend” about a cop who is a werewolf with a pixie sidekick that no one else believes exists are awesome; I could see a whole book being written about their adventures. The clever one shots about the Cub Scout pack that consisted of kid werewolves and the home owners association for supernatural creatures were great but the best story of all had to be the Teleplay written about an alternate Sesame Street. It was the only traditional werewolf attack story but it was brilliant. Everything you've ever wondered about Sesame Street was mentioned: the Bert and Ernie characters having an unconventional relationship, Big Bird hating Elmo for stealing the spotlight, Elmo being crazy and not too bright. I had little to no problem figuring out which characters were supposed to be their Sesame Street counterparts. The reactions to the werewolf attack were spot on; the attitudes towards each other were believable and hilarious. It was definitely the best story to end the book with.

    I am glad I picked up this book. It was definitely a good read and if you can find it I heartily recommend it to anyone looking for a few laughs at the end of a long day.  

If anyone has any questions, comments, or book suggestions, leave me a comment and let me know.

~Wolfe