A Certain Slant of Light

by Laura Whitcomb

Story summary: Ghosts fall in love, relationships break and relationships heal, people struggle with death and abuse and Sad Things, the physical world is discovered to be glorious.

Why You Will Like This Book:

• People overcoming issues! I love books like this, that give hope and show dragons can be beaten.
• The visual descriptions! I'm not really one for visual descriptions, but these struck me as quite inspiring.

And Why You Might Not:

• There is definite sexual content. I think it makes sense given the context and type of story it is, but it deserves a warning.
• The practicing Christians are all portrayed in a negative light.

Scarlet

by Marissa Meyer

Story summary: Retelling of "Little Red Riding Hood" in a future, cyberpunk world. Also a continuation of the "Cinderella" retelling from the first book, Cinder.
And see also the next books, Cress and Winter.

Why You Should Read This:

• Great scifi world, funny and interesting characters, just all round great fun.
• Wicked moon queens! Mental control powers! Charming space captains! Sentient spaceships!

And Why You Shouldn't:

• There's a fairly typical YA romance. Can be slightly offputting for me.
• There ends up being a lot of characters with points of view, and it switches up a lot. I like this, but sometimes it can be a bit tiring to switch up so much.

Cruel Beauty

by Rosamund Hodge

Story summary: Retelling of "Beauty and the Beast" (with maybe a bit of Hades & Persephone thrown in?).

Why You Might Like This Book:

• The characters are flawed and faulty without being morally repugnant. Complexity, ftw!
• The cover is beautiful. Yes, don't judge a book by its cover and all that, but sometimes sitting down to read something that looks so nice has a reward of its own.
• In a similar isn't-supposed-to-be-relevant vein, the main characters are called Nyx and Ignifex! How cool are those names? I want to call my daughter Nyx, but I don't think I could get away with that, sigh.

And Why You Might Not:

• The beauty/sexiness of the "Beast" was emphasized more than I like. I like my BatB retellings to actually have ugly Beasts, not just beautiful Beasts with a dark side.
• Coming off from that, the romance was also not my style. There was a sort-of love triangle that bothered me, and way too much emphasize on beauty/sexiness as opposed to getting to know each other.

Captain Vorpatril's Alliance

by Lois McMaster Bujold

Story summary: Now it's finally the turn of Miles's cousin Ivan (known as "Ivan, you idiot.") to have his own book, his own story, and his own adventure.
See the others in this series: Shards of Honor, Barrayar, The Warrior's Apprentice, The Vor Game, Cetaganda, Brothers in Arms, Mirror Dance, Memory, Komarr, and A Civil Campaign.

Thoughts: I've always loved Ivan. It was so refreshing to finally get a book where he gets to have the adventure. Of any of the non-Miles characters so far whom I would have wanted most to get their own book, it would have been Ivan. (Well, also Cordelia, but she already got a book.)

This book wasn't as mindblowing and fast-paced as some of the past in this series. But it would be like that. This is Ivan, not Miles. The romance between Ivan and Tej was sweet, and if not ideal for my taste (Ivan is a bit too much of a womanizer for that), it is at least significantly better than my taste overall for the romance in A Civil Campaign. And Bujold does seem exceedingly good at creating people that suite each other very well. Every single romance in her books so far is unique and well done, even the ones I wasn't fond of.

And then there's Tej's family. LMB does family relations soo well, and I loved their chaotic presence. You also got Tej introduced to all of Ivan's extended family, and it was immensely amusing to see their reactions to Ivan, Tej, and her family.

Altogether, great fun.

Note: The cover to the left is the one I read. Generic, but not horrible. But there's another one--and this one features on the back cover of the one I read--and it made it horribly embarrassing to read this book in public. Sigh. LMB does NOT have good luck in covers. None of them (at least in the English versions) manage to portray all of the uniqueness, sci-fi elements, and character study elements of this series at once.

Grade: 3 1/2 stars

Travel Reading Part 5

For the last three months, I've been gone, walking across Canada with a group called Crossroads Pro-Life. I was very, very busy, but I did manage to read a few books. Blogging about them was a different story, however. So it's been so long now since I read many of them, that I thought I could do travel posts like I did last summer, and just write a couple sentences for each book.
Here goes:

"A Civil Campaign" by Lois McMaster Bujold
Grade: 3 stars, maybe 2 1/2?
Actually a bit disappointed in this one--the first time for this series, I think. I'm not sure, though, if it was the book itself, or the fact that I'd just started Crossroads, or the fact that I'd heard more hype for this one than the others. It was definitely more Romance heavy, though, even than Komarr, and some of the romances were not to my taste. I still think Ekaterin is the perfect wife for Miles, though, and I greatly enjoyed the parts with them and with the Emperor Gregor.



"Odd Thomas" by Dean Koontz
Grade: 4 stars
A thriller/mystery/paranormal, where a fry cook named Odd who can see the dead and hints of the future has to save a town from a horrible fate. Dean Koontz is Catholic, and it shows up in little interesting ways in his books, which is quite cool for me. The mystery/thriller/paranormal part was interesting (especially the bodachs!), but I think it was Odd's character and relationships that stood out to me most (unusual for this kind of book).



"Brother Odd" by Dean Koontz
Grade: 4 stars
Third book in the Odd Thomas series (I was told to skip the second). This time, the Catholic elements are even more obvious, as Odd goes to hang out at a monastery while recovering from the events of the first novel. The paranormal aspects were more interesting this time as well (those weird bone creatures! and the bodachs!). Great fun.



"The Ruins of Gorlan" by John Flanagan
Grade: 3 stars, maybe 2 1/2?
First book in the Ranger's Apprentice series. Fairly standard beginning to a children's fantasy series, with a few attributes that make it stand out. Although... I forget what they are because it's been so long, haha. Obviously doesn't stand out that much. But I know I really enjoyed the training sections (seriously, some day I'm going to write a story that's half training montages--I love them), and the character of Horace.


"The Burning Bridge" by John Flanagan
Grade: 3 stars
Second book in the Ranger's Apprentice series. This is where it first starts to become less of a cliched fantasy series, but one of the main parts of this is a spoiler, so I can't talk about it. Horace is still my favourite character, and I hope he just grows more awesome as the series progresses.

Retro Friday Review: The Masqueraders

by Georgette Heyer

Retro Friday introduction: This great book blog called Angieville started a meme called "Retro Friday", where one reviews old favourites. I thought this would be a great chance to talk about books that I read before starting this blog and am now re-reading, and perhaps to redo old blog posts that are sadly lacking in quality. Without further ado, here is Angie's regular Retro Friday intro followed by my thoughts on "The Masqueraders", which I recently re-read.

Retro Friday is a weekly meme hosted by Angie @ Angieville and focuses on reviewing books from the past. This can be a favourite, an under the radar book you think deserves more attention, something woefully out of print etc.

Grade: 5 stars
Story summary: Two adventuring siblings on the run from their involvement in the Jacobite rebellion cross-dress in order to avoid detection. Then follows adventures! escapades! duels at midnight! love and romance! shenanigans!

Thoughts: This is one of my favourite Heyers, along with Cotillion, A Civil Contract, The Grand Sophy, and Friday's Child. And as with the rest, it surprised me how much I liked it. Romance (and Historical Romance) is not generally my "thing". But Heyer manages, with those five at least, to make it so fun and interesting that I actually rather love it. Cotillion and A Civil Contract because they are so unusual for Romances, The Grand Sophy because Sophy is indeed one of the Grandest things there is, and Friday's Child because I have rarely read a romp so innocent and fun and lovely.
With the The Masqueraders, my love is for the relationship between the brother and sister, Robin and Prudence. I love good, strong sibling relationships in fiction--there are FAR too few of them. And together these two dazzle and deceive the upper-class with their wit and consummate acting skills.

Really, it's just so darned fun. There are tons of stories out there with girls masquerading as boys (from Shakespeare to many a modern YA book), but rarely any with boys masquerading as girls. And usually if that does happen, it's because the male in question is particularly feminine in some way. But here, though both siblings are much better than normal at passing for the opposite sex, they truly shine as their own. Plus, did I mention the duels at midnight? And shenanigans?  And last but not least, Robin and Prudence's father. He. is. amazing. I think it would have been awesome to have a book about all three of them having adventures together before the events of this book.

One unfortunate downside is that it can be pretty darn confusing at the beginning, before everyone is revealed to be who they actually are. I know people who have stopped reading it right near the beginning because of this. But once you get past that, or once you're at the re-reading stage, it's alllll good.

P.S. Robin and Prudence are so awesome that they made it onto my list of Top Ten (Or So): Conmen.