Author: cherylmahoney

I'm a book review blogger and writer. I have published four novels, The Wanderers; The Storyteller and Her Sisters; and The People the Fairies Forget; and The Lioness and the Spellspinners. All can be found on Amazon as an ebook and paperback. In my day job, I'm a Marketing Specialist. Find me on Twitter (@MarvelousTales) and GoodReads (MarvelousTales).

The Curse Strikes

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fiction FridayLeave a comment

This week for Fiction Friday, I thought I’d share another excerpt from The People the Fairies Forget, my young adult fantasy novel.  You can read a little about the premise here, and catch up with previous excerpts here and here.

            In brief, the story so far: Princess Rosaline was cursed by the Evil Fairy Echinacea at her christening to prick her finger on a spinning wheel and die.  Good Fairy Marjoram transformed the death curse into a spell for enchanted sleep until awakened by a kiss.  Tarragon (a free agent fairy unaffiliated with either group, and our narrator) thinks the whole thing is kind of stupid.  He also has a wager on with Marj about whether True Love can be found among non-royalty; he says yes and she says no.  He’s chosen a goatherd named Jack and a kitchenmaid named Emmy, who works at Rosaline’s castle, to prove his point, although the details of how this will be demonstrated have yet to be revealed to the reader.

            As we join, Rosaline has just pricked her finger.  Marj, out of deep concern that Rosaline will be lonely if she wakes up in a hundred years and everyone else is gone, has put the rest of the castle to sleep too.  Tarry has seen to it that Jack and his herd of goats, including the Little One, a baby goat, have come to the castle to investigate.

*********************************

           When we arrived at the main entrance to the castle, Jack stopped short to stare at the yards and yards and yards of thorns.

            The area around the castle was by no means deserted.  A considerable crowd had gathered already, and more were arriving.  Many looked on with eager curiosity and loudly theorized regarding what had happened—they were plainly onlookers, come to see the excitement.  Others, the ones who appeared more distressed, had to be friends and relatives of the people inside.  Marj should’ve seen what she’d caused.  But she wasn’t there, of course.

            The goats settled in and started eating the lawn.  Jack eyed the thorns.  They weren’t just thorns.  Marj would never dream of magicking up something that plain and ugly, so she’d made enchanted roses instead. There were roses swarming all over the outer wall of the castle and spreading at least three hundred feet out into the fields in a tangled mass far above our heads.  They had vivid red blossoms and sharp thorns.

            Jack scratched the Little One’s head, and stared at the roses.  “I have to get through there.  How am I going to get through there?”

Continue reading “The Curse Strikes” →

Inspired by Shakespeare–Or So I Was Told

On By cherylmahoneyIn Reviews, Young Adult1 Comment

Today—a rant.

I picked up Starcrossed by Mark Schreiber because it was described as a retelling of Romeo and Juliet.  Also because I wanted to query the agent, but that’s another story.  I even read a review of the book that described it as being a really obvious retelling of R&J.  And I thought, all right, I like Shakespeare, I can go for that.

I am now giving fair warning—if you’re looking for a good retelling of R&J, watch West Side Story.  Don’t read Starcrossed.  This book is no more Romeo and Juliet than it is Hamlet, and I was immensely gratified to see the hero actually point that out halfway through the book.  He was having this discussion with the heroine, who was adamantly convinced that R&J was telling the story of their love.

"Do you bite your tongue at me, sir?" -- The Capulets and the Montagues--not appearing in Starcrossed

But she’s kind of a flake, so that doesn’t signify much.  I’ve read Romeo and Juliet and I’ve seen it performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford, so I feel I can make a claim on knowing how the play goes.  Am I right in thinking that the feuding families are just a LITTLE essential to the plotline of R&J?  You can replace them with feuding gangs, I’m fine with that, but if no one’s feuding with anyone, you don’t have Romeo and Juliet.  All you have is a teen romance with some ups and downs, and that’s pretty much every teen romance ever written.

I might forgive this for not being Romeo and Juliet if it was a decent story in its own right…but it’s not.  It’s the love story of Christy and Ben.  They’re together.  They’re not together.  They’re back together.  This gets in the way, that gets in the way, one obstacle doesn’t have much to do with any other obstacle, yeah, yeah, the course of true love doesn’t run smooth, but I would like to feel that the course has some kind of point to it rather than obstacles thrown up for the sake of obstacles.  Especially obstacles like OH NO, you lied to me about your birth date and now our astrological signs are not aligned!!!  I swear I’m not making this up.  This book is contrived, it’s angsty, I disagree wholeheartedly with the reviews it’s getting on Amazon, to the point that I refuse to link to them.

And for heaven’s sake–who names their heroine Christy Marlowe in a book that, theoretically at least, is supposed to be based on a Shakespeare play? Maybe someone who believes Marlowe wrote the plays (by the way–he was dead at the time.  I’m a Stratfordian).

It just goes to show.  Claiming to be inspired by the Bard, A) does not mean you really are and B) does not guarantee a good book.

My sympathies, Mr. Shakespeare.  You deserve better.

2011 Support Your Local Library Challenge

On By cherylmahoneyIn Ruminations6 Comments

I recently started following a blog that seems to be very much into various reading challenges.  The blogger just posted one that is perfect for me.  Here’s the descriptive paragraph:

Here’s a new book challenge for you. All you have to do is read at least 12 library books by the end of the year. For more information and the guidelines of the reading levels, click here. Happy reading.

The top-tier level is 100 books.  True story: I was rather sad when I realized that Christmas was on Saturday this year because it was going to disrupt my usual weekly library-going routine.  Happy about Christmas–but sad about the library.  So I think I’ll aim for the top-tier on this challenge.  That’s two a week?  On it.

Update: Follow progress on this challenge, and a few others I joined on my 2011 Reading Challenges post.

Following Scott Through Antarctica in 2083

On By cherylmahoneyIn Reviews, Science Fiction, Young Adult3 Comments

As you may know from reading past posts, I’ve developed a small obsession with Antarctic explorers lately.  So when I was doing some writing at the library and my eye caught the word Antarctica blazing (freezing?) out of the fiction section, I had to investigate.  I found Surviving Antarctica: Reality TV 2083 by Andrea White.

The story is set in 2083, where five fourteen-year-olds are on a reality TV show recreating Captain Scott’s historic trek to the South Pole.  But in this dystopian future, reality TV has reached a whole new level of realism–where no one interferes, even when that means people die.  And when you’re sending kids to recreate a journey where five men did die…well, that guarantees some good adventure programming, right?

Scott and his men at the South Pole

They had me at Scott.

I admit I was in it for the Antarctic explorers side of things, so I was pleasantly surprised to find a fascinating dystopian society too.  In this future, the government has gone broke.  Since they can’t afford anything, like scientific research and schools, they’ve decided that the way to keep the people complacent and uncomplaining is to provide better entertainment, and keep them watching television all the time.

It’s a disturbingly insightful idea.  Over 97 million people voted in the most popular American Idol vote.  About 106 million people voted in the 2004 presidential elections.  Sure, this would be more impressive if those numbers were reversed…but that’s not a big gap when you’re talking about two things as different as a TV show, and deciding the leader of the country.

So between looking ahead to a disturbing potential future and looking back to a fascinating past, you’ve got something good here.

About that past–my particular Antarctic obsession (if you’ll let me go a little poetic about it) swirls directly around the bundled and slightly frosted (but still charming) figure of Captain Lawrence “Titus” Oates.  I think Andrea White’s interest in Antarctica would shift left a little to bring fellow explorer Birdie Bowers into more direct focus.  Titus, sadly, does not come up by name until 160-odd pages in.  But I respect her interest and bring this up not as a criticism and only as a comment on my personal preferences.  I’m sure Birdie was very nice too.

Ultimately I think the concept of this was more interesting than any individual characters, although the five kids (plus one not on the mission) were all good enough characters in their way.  But it’s mostly the ideas in this book that make it work, rather than the individuals, or even the plot.  The individuals are fine, and it’s a good plot, but it’s more about the ideas.  It’s a thought-provoking book.  It might make you think about your television, or about reality TV.

It also makes me wonder if I’m going to be able to hunt down any more novels set in Antarctica.

Author’s site: http://www.survivingantarctica.com/

2010 End of the Year Round-up

On By cherylmahoneyIn Ruminations4 Comments

A lot of blogs I follow are doing End of the Year Round-ups of the books they’ve read.  So for the last day of the year I thought I’d suspend Fiction Friday for a week and join the trend by posting a review of my year in reading…

1) Best Book  –  In some ways I have an easy answer here, because I reread two of my favorite books this year.  The Blue Castle by L. M. Montgomery, and my favorite Star Trek novel, First Frontier by Diane Carey and James I. Kirkland.  Barring those two, I think I’d have to go with Rapture of the Deep by L. A. Meyer, another installment in the Jacky Faber series.

2) Worst Book  –  The second half of The Time-Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger.  I actually liked the first half, but then it went wildly downhill.  Right about when they started trying to have a child.  Just adopt, all right?  Really.

3) Most Disappointing Book  –  A tie here.  Sundays at Tiffany’s by James Patterson had this great premise about an imaginary friend.  I was looking for another White Darkness, and instead I got a badly written romance with a lame twist ending.  Second candidate is Beatnik Rutabagas from Beyond the Stars by Quentin Dodd.  Probably no one but Douglas Adams could live up to that title.  Dodd was plainly aspiring to be Douglas Adams but all he produced was a book of total randomness (and I like randomness!) with nothing at all to tie it together.

4) Most Surprising (in a Good Way)  –  The Far Side of Evil by Sylvia Louise Engdahl  –  This was a sequel to Enchantress from the Stars, and turned out to be both darker and more thought-provoking than I expected…in a good way!  Both excellent books, but very different from each other.

5) Best Series You Discovered – Golden and Grey by Louise Arnold  –  I found this only in the last month, and have really been having fun with it.  I’ll have a review up in the next week or so.

6) Most Hilarious Read  –  I read several Discworld books by Terry Pratchett this year, and I have to place all of them as the winners of this category, with honorable mention to A Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag by Gordon Korman.  I might give it to Korman, but it wasn’t a new read, so it feels more fair to give it to the new (to me) books.

7) Most Beautifully Written  –  The Blue Castle by L. M. Montgomery  –  Her writing is always incredible, and this is one of her best.  There’s just no comparison with anyone else I’ve read this year.

8 ) Can’t Believe I Waited Until 2010 to Read It  –  Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen  –  I actually did read this before, long ago in about seventh grade.  But I barely remembered it.  Unfortunately, since I read it when I was twelve, I had this impression it was a difficult read, which made it off-putting to pick it up again, even though I kept meaning to.  Finally I actually bought it, still didn’t get around to it for a long time, went through a period where I resolved to read all the books I owned but hadn’t read, and finally read it then…it’s a lot easier to read when you’re not twelve.  And it’s a lovely book.

9) You Mean I Didn’t Read That in 2010…?  The White Darkness by Geraldine McCaughrean is my favorite book that I didn’t actually read this year.  I wrote a book review and watched the miniseries that inspired one of the characters and altogether feel like I have immersed myself in this novel…even though I listened to the audiobook in 2009, and haven’t actually read the novel since at least 2008.

10) Most Looking Forward To in 2011  –  Tortall and Other Lands: A Collection of Tales by Tamora Pierce  –  I don’t know much about it, but it sounds exciting!  She’s been a favorite author for many years, who does not publish nearly as frequently as I would like…