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.