Month: December 2016

Newbery Snippets

On By cherylmahoneyIn Reviews1 Comment

I’ve been continuing to read Challenge books faster than I review them, especially Newbery Medal winners (they tend to be short, and they’re so good for audiobooks!)  I thought I’d try to give just a few thoughts on some recent reads.

Roller Skates by Ruth Sawyer (1937)

Ten year old Lucinda finds herself with a sudden new freedom when her wealthy parents go to Italy and leave her with a teacher to care for her.  She straps on roller skates and goes exploring through 1890s New York, making friends of all she meets, whether they’re “suitable” or not.

There’s a lot that’s charming here, with a nice message against snobbishness and for finding friends in unexpected places.  It feels a bit like the Betsy-Tacy books, set in a similar time period with a plucky girl lead.  And yet, there’s also a darker undertone that sits oddly with the rest of the book.  There are two real tragedies in here, and also the hint that Lucinda turned her back in some way on what she learned (and who she was) during this one unusual year.  The tragedies and the turning away could be connected (and probably should be), and yet that’s never really drawn out and feels more like a discordant note.

It’s a charming read, but I feel like there should have been something more here… Continue reading “Newbery Snippets” →

Favorites Friday…for a Book Club

On By cherylmahoneyIn Favorites Friday3 Comments

Two weeks out from NaNoWriMo, I’m trying to get back to more normal blogging, which means I need a good Friday post!  Surfing around to my usual places for bookish topics, I landed on the Broke and the Bookish’s Top Ten Tuesday archive.  One of their past topics was best books for a book club.  I’ve been in a book club for years, and it got me thinking…what have been our best reads?

1) The Magicians by Lev Grossman – I hated this book.  So did half the group.  The other half disagreed, generating probably our best book discussions ever.  For those of us in my half, Quentin is still a benchmark five years later for irritating characters.

2) Rejection Proof by Jia Jiang – Another one I hated.  It was so good to have a group of people to discuss it with!

3) Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman – This one just wins because, I mean…Good Omens!  You can’t go wrong with Pratchett and Gaiman.

4) Night Circus by Erin Morganstern – So I confess, this one is on the list for one reason.  I mean, I liked the book–but the particular book club appeal is that devotees of the circus start wearing black and white, with long red scarfs.  So that’s what I wore to the discussion.  And that’s just a fun potential with this book.

5) Libriomancer by Jim C. Hines – Heroic magical librarian.  This was one of the books I read and started telling everyone to read, including my book club.

6) The Giver by Lois Lowry – I love this incredibly deceptively simple book.  So much scope for a book club discussion.

7) Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith – No, really!  There’s a collection of very tongue-in-cheek discussion questions at the back and we had a semi-serious discussion around them.  I may have started some impassioned quoting of Winston Churchill (“We will fight them on the beaches, we will fight them in the streets, we shall never give up and we shall never surrender”) for the question about why the characters didn’t just abandon England to the zombie hordes.

8) A Game of Thrones (or whatever the first in the series is called) by George R. R. Martin – I didn’t actually read this one.  But we got so many new people out to the meeting where we discussed it.  So if your book club has a recruitment goal…

9) Ready Player One by Ernest Cline – Mostly I get book club picks from the library, but somehow I bought this one.  It was universally liked, and my copy made the rounds to a large number of my non-book club friends.  Always a good sign.

10) Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris – This is a fun, irreverent holiday essay collection–but the real reason it’s on here at the end is to give a slightly sappy, holiday-themed end to the post, because this book holds the honor of having been under discussion at the meeting where two of my dear friends met…who have now been married for several years.  I’ve heard her say that his defense of the moral choices in this book was what first caught her eye.

Any members of a book club out there?  What have been your best reads?

 

Book Review: Heartless by Marissa Meyer

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fantasy, Reviews3 Comments

I hate it when I have to begin a review by saying how much I respect the author—but…  Unfortunately, today I have to say that I hugely respect Marissa Meyer and absolutely loved her Lunar Chronicles—but I found Heartless to be sadly disappointing.  It’s true that Lunar Chronicles set the bar very high and that may have been a factor, but I found Heartless frankly baffling on a couple of levels.

Heartless brings us to weird and whimsical Wonderland, where Catherine just wants to open a bakery—even though her mother, minor nobility, is determined that she will marry the kind but foolish King of Hearts who has come courting.  When Catherine meets the mysterious new court joker, Jest, she swiftly falls for him, even though there seems to be no way they can be together.  Also, there’s a Jabberwock turning up here and there attacking—which I can’t quite figure out how to put smoothly into my plot description, because it doesn’t fit all that smoothly in the story either.

For three-quarters or more of this book, I was hopeful.  Catherine is a reasonably good heroine.  I don’t love her the way I loved Scarlet, Cress or Winter, but I didn’t love Cinder either and she was still an engaging heroine.  Catherine had potential, and she did make mouth-watering-sounding pastries.  I didn’t love Jest the way I loved Wolf, Thorne (!) or Jacin, but I also didn’t love Kai and he was still fine (and grew on me over the series, for what that’s worth).

And I liked the idea of a heroine who didn’t want to marry a king, she just wanted to run a bakery, and was trying to figure out practical concerns like paying the rent.  That’s SO right up my retelling-alley.

But.  For those three-quarters of the book (more or less), there was also a bit of a sense that the story was spinning its wheels.  Catherine has clear goals, but she keeps hitting walls.  And the Jabberwock plot thread, while an interesting mystery that was actually quite well done, felt oddly disconnected from everything else.

Mostly, I kept reading along wondering how Meyer was going to manage the ending.  I had heard this described as the origin story of the Queen of Hearts, and I didn’t quite see how we were going to get from here to there in a way that would be satisfying.  Well, surprise.  It wasn’t.

And from here THERE BE SPOILERS so you have been warned!!  But I really can’t discuss this book without discussing the ending. Continue reading “Book Review: Heartless by Marissa Meyer” →

Book Review: As You Wish by Cary Elwes

On By cherylmahoneyIn Reviews3 Comments

Only occasionally do I read a book and start telling all my friends they should read it too–but this was one of those times.  Though really, you should all listen to it: the audiobook of As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride by Cary Elwes and Joe Layden.  Because Cary Elwes reads the audio, and it’s an utter delight.

The Princess Bride ranks high on my list of favorite movies as a nearly perfect one (more on that in a bit).  The book is enormous fun too, and this look behind the scenes at the making of the movie just adds to it all.  Cary (and after listening to this, you’ll start calling him Cary too) takes us through the challenges of bringing the screenplay to production, how he got involved in the project and why he was especially excited (having loved the book as a kid), inside stories of excitement and mishaps in the filming, stories about every major figure involved, and what the impact has been on all their lives.

If you believe Cary, the cast and crew of The Princess Bride are the most wonderful, talented people you could ever meet, and the filming was just about the most fun you could ever have.  I’m just cynical enough to suspect some gloss here, as he gets downright effusive at times, but I’m optimistic enough to believe it’s, oh, 95% true.  You can see it when you watch the movie: they are enormously talented, and they really look like they’re having a wonderful time. Continue reading “Book Review: As You Wish by Cary Elwes” →