Speed-Reading Book Nerd Reviews

Wild Ride

By Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer.

Note: this book has a prequel story online, which I HIGHLY RECOMMEND that you read. Read it first, then read the book, then go back and read the story again when you're partway through the book (at least that's what I did). Not that you won't follow along fine without reading it if you must, but it gives good backstory.

This book is awesome!

Dreamland Adventure Park is a theme park that secretly doubles as a prison for five unkillable Etruscan demons, who are stashed in chalices around the park. There are five humans (known as the Guardia) that are magically dubbed to keep these guys in jail. However, the current Guardia staff is getting on in years, and new blood is needed, AND a couple of demons just got out...

Meet Ethan Wayne, a soldier who just got out of the military due to a bullet lodged too near to his heart that's going to kill him. He's come home to his family park, but never quite believed the stories old Gus told him about the park's demons. And then there's Mab Brannigan, theme park restorer, whose mother always swore up and down the park had demons (and she called Mab "demon spawn"), but Mab just thought she was crazy. Her uncle got her the job, but he seems to be up to something bad.

Ethan can't help but notice that something weird's going on, especially when he spots a shooter in black running around the park and oh, things trying to kill them. When his mother tells him he's been dubbed the new Guardia Hunter, he's...well, you can guess. But when an a hot demon-gun-toting agent from Department 51 comes to investigate the joint with her partner, Ethan finds a reason for living...well, that and saving the world from demons.

Mab, on the other hand, after having an "hallucination" of a "robot clown" when her restoration of the park mascot goes awry, meets a cheerful fellow named Joe who just wants to be there for her. Naturally, there's...something funny about this. And when someone in the park is going around killing anyone who cheats on their significant others (even if they aren't romantically involved yet!), something's gotta be done. Mab finds herself getting enlisted in the battle against demons, and finding out all kinds of things about herself that she never knew, and a family she never knew she had.

I'll restrain myself from saying more, other than the authors' website is much fun to read and if you'd like more preview information, go there. 

I'm giving this five stars. Did not want it to end, it was big epic fun, and I enjoyed the twists, even the ones that I guessed.

The Play Goes On

By Neil Simon.

Years ago I read Rewrites, Neil Simon's first memoir, and loved it and was sad to see it end (on a sad note, with the death of his first wife from cancer). I only recently found out he wrote a sequel picking up from there.

As a fan of his work, I enjoyed hearing the thought processes behind his plays (same as I enjoyed in Rewrites),  especially the favorites. Though this book is well, even sadder because Neil dates and remarries, and the marriages are happy until well, they aren't. I enjoyed reading about Marsha Mason, #2, who seems like a personable chick. Though legally he's constrained from writing about wife #3, who wanted privacy, from what you do find out about her is how and why he loved her. Neil Simon writes very affectionately about his women, but less clearly about how the marriages broke up. Even beyond legal restraints, one gets the idea that he has little or no idea how they ended (though one might ah, guess workaholicism might have something to do with it). But I think Neil is a sweetie, and this ends on a sad note. (Though thank you, Wikipedia, for informing me that he's still married to #4, so good for them.)  I get the feeling reading this that Neil was pretty broken by the time of the memoir-writing, and thus it goes accordingly.

But still, a good fan read. So, three and a half stars.

To Say Nothing Of The Dog

By Connie Willis.

This is one of those books that everyone seems to love and highly recommend, and it was on my "get around to it someday" list. So someday came and I read it, and...I dunno, I'm not as overwhelmingly In Love as I expected to be. It's a fun fluff read, but not laugh-out-loud hilarious (except once in a while), and kind of boils down to "mildly entertaining while I read it, but I won't remember much about it." Also, it really felt like reading Thursday Next, except slightly less wacky. If you like Thursday Next, or thirties detective novels (okay, I do), you'll enjoy that. And it's fine, I just wasn't blown away. And was mostly slightly confused, but I think the book's supposed to be like that.

Anyhoo: Ned Henry works for some time-travel historical organization that's currently being run (roughshod) by its biggest financial backer, Lady Schrapnell, who read her great-great-great-grandmother's diary about going to Coventry Cathedral and seeing some gorgeous "bishop's bird stump" and it changed her life. It also changed Lady Schrapnell's life, and everyone else around her's, because she's determined to rebuild the bombed-in-1940 cathedral to its former glory. And it simply MUST have the bishop's bird stump in order to be complete...except nobody can freaking find the thing.

Ned, suffering from a whopping case of time-lag, gets prescribed two weeks of bed rest...which is not going to happen in his own time with Lady Schrapnell around. So he gets sent out to the nineteenth century, at a time where fellow researcher and scorching hottie Verity Kindle just saved a cat from drowning and managed to travel with it through time. Which is not something that's supposed to happen (don't ask me why live people can go through but not cats, but somehow this never comes up), and meanwhile in between everyone freaking out over Lady Schrapnell, they're all worried about time slippage and incongruities and finding out what the hell's gotten messed up in the timeline. Ned finds out fairly early on what he's messed up in the timeline--interrupting a fellow named Terrence's meeting of his future wife AND leading Terrence to be introduced to the g-g-g-grandmother, Tossie, who's supposed to marry a "Mr. C" fairly soon. Though nobody can find out who the hell Mr. C is, either. Verity and Ned run around trying to figure out how to get things un-screwed up, not to mention looking for the dang bird stump. 

Eh...it's entertaining enough, I cracked up in spots. ("How does oo stan' your mistress talking ootsy-cutesy baby talk to oo? 'Oo ought to swat her when her does it.") There's also a very funny scene involving the infamous words, "as you wish." But in the end, it was just okay for me.

Three stars.

Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage

By Elizabeth Gilbert.

This got bought for me as a gift a few months ago, but I only received it recently. I honestly don't know why this book got the ragging on that it did in reviews, other than "It wasn't exactly Eat, Pray, Love again!" To which I say, uh, grow up, folks, that's not doable and you'd end up pissed if she had done that anyway.

Anyhoo, I'm a Liz Gilbert fangirl after reading EPL. I can't help but like her take on spiritual issues, which are balanced out with a sense of reality and making fun of herself. Despite having drastically different subject matter here, she's still fun to read, and says/points out things that I think people should hear.

Disclaimer: I love reading books on marriage. It fascinates and horrifies me. As a permasingle, I'm not going to have to deal with the issues of it, but if I were ever romantically involved with a foreigner and forced to marry whether I wanted to or not, I would so write a book like this. That's probably why I love it and it may very well be my favorite of my marriage-analyzing books, but even beyond my own personal narcissism, I thought it was excellent. When Liz Gilbert is trying to figure out how to deal with a situation, she researches the hell out of it and interviews people so she can figure out how she'll handle it, and this is a good book for finding out how that sort of process works.

I'd like to point out how the author starts the book:

1. Back when she wrote books about men, people thought she was fabulous.
2. Write one book about women's issues that's a giant hit, and somehow she becomes a "chick lit" author and that's terrible.
3. She can't rehash a hit and isn't going to try. To which I say, you go girl. 

The plot of this, so to speak, is that Liz and Felipe decide that after their traumatic divorces they will NEVER marry, pledge themselves to each other in a hotel room alone at one point, and spend several years meeting up in different countries. Eventually they get the bright idea to have Liz move back to the US and Felipe joins her for 3 months at a time, leaves for awhile when his visa's up, then returns for another 3 months, over and over.

Even Liz is all, "Yeah, WHY DID I NOT FIGURE OUT THAT THIS WAS GOING TO CAUSE PROBLEMS WITH HOMELAND SECURITY? Duh!" Sure 'nuff, eventually Felipe gets busted and not-deported (what the technical term for this is, nobody knows) and forbidden from entering the US again UNLESS he and Liz get married. Period. Neither one of them are happy about this, but don't want to break up, so they'll have to suck it up.

While they wait around for most of a year for the legalities to go through, they go bum around southeast Asia because they are both broke (Felipe can't run his business without access to America, the poor bastard, and EPL hasn't been published yet) and southeast Asia is cheap. While they bum around and Felipe gets more and more fed up about it, Liz reads tons of books on marriage, doing research and trying to resign herself to the institution again, given how it went to hell for her on the first go-round. She also periodically talks to folks in southeast Asia to get their drastically different takes on marriage.

Points made that stood out to me:

• How marriage was all about literally erasing a woman's identity, i.e. coverture. Women's health and finances go down compared to men's. And when it comes to a woman's personal goals, she's likely to give them all up for the family. (This is something that the author's relatives have always done, and it truly weirds her out and makes her sad.) But even so, if one has to get married, now's a better time for it than before.
• Marriages are more likely to last if you're educated, older, have few or no children, and if the husband helps with the chores.
• People are more likely to fall in love while traveling and/or while in a stressful situation, AHEM.
• Infidelities happen when you let someone else become more emotionally intimate with you than you are with your spouse.
• Some people want to get married specifically so that they can feel "chosen." 
• If you look across human populations of all varieties, in every culture and on every continent, there's a consistent 10% of women who never have children. Yes, even in those kinds of religious communities.
• People just don't consider your coupling to be legitimate without a wedding ceremony/witness to your vows being made, so that you can be HELD to them. (I particularly liked the chapter on how Liz didn't want A Wedding and her family and friends insisted.) 

Finally, Liz finds a book by Ferdinand Mount called "The Subversive Family" which finally convinces her and makes her feel better about having to enter The Institution. Mount thinks all marriages are automatic acts of subversion against authority because every time some New Regime comes down the pike, the first thing they do is try to change your loyalties to them/swear to singledom...but they can't possibly eliminate the need to pair-bond, nor can they find out what two people are saying to each other in the dark at 3 a.m. They may try to eliminate or control marriage, but in the end, every governing body has to give in and approve of it. (Hope for gay marriage, y'all.) And that's where Liz is finally okay with it all, and me too. That's just nifty.

And then, reader, she marries him.

Four stars.

Black Magic Sanction

By Kim Harrison.

Previous book here.

I hate it when I read a book in a series I love and then think, "Man, I don't know if I ever want to read this series again," but this seems to be That Book for me with this one. Dammit.

(Note: I am not giving out specific spoilers for the latter half of the book, but I will hint at things. And I will mention things that ah...you would be able to surmise on your own in the first half as things that are inevitably going to happen later.)

The plot: Rachel, who's been shunned by the witch community for practicing black magic, is now being HEAVILY pursued by the coven of ethical standards, who either want to kill her, stick her in Alcatraz, neutralize her magic/remove her reproductive organs, and/or all of the above, period. The only loophole they offer is if she signs her life away to Trent, but you know Rachel's not doing that either. Even worse, the coven is snagging old enemies of Rachel's (most notably, her crap-for-brains traitor ex Nick) in order to grab her.

So Rachel spends the entire book running like hell, and trying to come up with a way out of this situation. She eventually comes up with A Scheme So Crazy It Just Might Work (and man, it's crazy), mostly with the assistance of Pierce the ex-ghost and her demon teacher Al.

Stuff I didn't like in this one:

I hate to say it, but Rachel probably spends about 70% of this book acting like a total idiot. Seriously. Blundering around, doing stupid crap on impulse, and fucking up all over the place to the point where I was all, "I used to think this girl was smart? Really?" I was starting to kind of hate her for roughly the first 300 pages of the book. Then I put it down for a few days to let my steam blow off, and when I went back to it, found myself liking it at the point where I'd stopped reading (see below) because that's when Rachel started to act smart again. Then she comes up with her Crazy Plan, and...yeah, I dunno what to make of that, if it was smart or stupid. But either way, it was driving me batshit. And when the occasional character would take time out to tell Rachel how smart she was, I wanted to SMACK THEM because right now, that was SUCH a lie. (Even Rachel didn't buy it.) There's also one point where Rachel calls someone out for doing dumb impulsive plans and I thought, "Hey pot, look at how black YOU are, you giant hypocrite."

Honestly, this is why I didn't like the book. I know Rachel's crazy impulsive, and tends to do some dumb shit and some smart shit, but the smart-to-dumb ratio was way, way off and it made me mad.

Then there's Pierce, speaking of stupid things. I don't think I'm the only fan out there who is all, "Greeeaat, another bad boy love interest. Because clearly Rachel hasn't learned jack about this enough to not go there." Once again, it was another example of "I know I shouldn't, but I'm gonna be stupid anyway." So that was annoying. I never know what to make of the character (and his extremely strange dialogue) anyway, but I was pretty well annoyed at him being another example of stupidity on her part. He's a nice dude, and god knows he and Rachel are pretty similar in their methods of operation right now, but really, does she need someone who works the way she does? Do her bad tendencies need encouraging? Argh. Short of re-hooking up with Nick or deciding to boink Al, well...it can't get much worse on the man-picking. And he's SO into every freaking aspect of the story that even if you like the guy, you'll get sick of him.

Don't even get me started on bringing Nick back and the stupidity of that one.

And after reading the last book, I was encouraged that Rachel was finally coming out of denial about her own turn to the dark side. Hah hah, no, she's back to whopping amounts of "I'm not a demon, I'm a white witch!" denial again in this one for 98% of the book. Argh. I know some people need to live in denial in order to survive mentally, but in Rachel's case, girlfriend needs to get the hell over it because denial is what could get her killed already. 

Also, Ivy is way on the sidelines for this one. I didn't miss the usual dose of Ivy-angst that comes along with Ivy-heavy plots (though at least she and Rachel are over that), but it was really strange that she wasn't involved in the plot as much as usual. You pretty much forget Vampiric Charms exists for large swaths of the book because it's focused on Al/Pierce/Nick so much.

So, what did I like about the book, if anything?

Well, I liked how Rachel's relationship with Al has changed and grown for the better. They're at more of an agreement with each other and getting along for the most part, so it's less hideously scary power struggles and more cooperation. They're still not going to agree on some things, but like Rachel's relationship with Trent, they can manage to come together without constant dire trouble now. So that's nice, and interesting. 

The coven's pursuit of Rachel is genuinely horrifying and scary, and they give her a group antagonist that's pretty freaking hard to go up against. So on the level of challenge, that works. Hell, I'm still not sure if Rachel's Crazy Plan would thwart this bunch!

Also, some major stuff goes down with Jenks in this book, and I will say that how this was handled was probably my favorite part of the book (i.e. the part where I wasn't hating it any more). This is where Rachel starts improving, and while it seemed like on some level there wasn't enough time to process those events, I at least felt like here was where the series I knew and loved was still there.

Two and a half stars.

Eat, Pray, Love

By Elizabeth Gilbert.

Yeah, yeah, everyone else has reviewed this already, but I figured I'd put a review up before I got around to reviewing Committed, which I recently read.

I don't recall why the hell I read this, because when I heard about it at the time I thought, "Why the fuck would anyone want to go off to an ashram in India? Holier-than-thou plus BORING." But somehow I read it and it wasn't. Go figure.

You should know this already, but just in case: Liz Gilbert was a writer, known for writing books about manly men and having a lot of relationships. She hit 30, 30 hit back, her husband wanted babies now...and Liz figured out that um, actually, she didn't. And since that's the Ultimate Dealbreaker Of Life, she knew that would end the marriage. So she goes through hell, husband is unbelievably pissed at her for not having babies/divorcing, divorce drags out for years, she loses her money, etc. She also gets involved with another dude that she's very obsessed with, but soon enough that relationship hits the rocks too.

But she does get the idea (and pitches it as a book deal so she has the money to do it, and since she's written books before she gets one) to bugger off out of the country for a year. Four months in Italy to stuff her face and take life easy and take Italian lessons and generally recover from the hell, then four months in India at an ashram to study meditation and whatnot, and then four months in Indonesia to reunite with this old holy man guy she met there ages ago who predicted that one day she'd come back and study with him.

And that's about how the plot goes, with some unexpectedness here and there. Ashram life is not easy, sitting her arse down to do it in the style they want her to is not her favorite thing ever, figuring out whether or not she should be dead silent or her usual chatty self is confusing, and she meets an infamous friend who tells her some interesting things. And then there's Bali, where much to her surprise, she meets an older man, gets romantically involved, and there's a happy ending. (I strongly suspect that had that not happened IRL, this book might not have been the hit that it is. Well, everyone loves one of those, after all. But hey, even life comes out like fiction sometimes.) 

The thing that makes this book awesome is that while Liz is spiritual, she's also questioning, and she goes back and forth about what she believes, and snarks on herself, and generally writes in an entertaining tone that you can relate to, even if you're like me and have zero interest in ashrams. She's NOT holier-than-thou by ANY means, even if other than her marital drama/post-marital drama period, she seems like one lucky duck in general. You can get what she's talking about and relate to it.

So, four stars from me. It's good even if you aren't into this sort of thing.

Stormqueen!

By Marion Zimmer Bradley.

Yes, I got more of those books again, currently the earlier books in the series.

Stormqueen! (oh, that exclamation point!) focuses mainly on two people whose laran (psychic ability) gives them a whole lotta shit. Allart Hastur is cursed with the ability to see all possible futures, something that nearly made him go insane before he went off to a monastery for years to learn some control over it. He would have happily stayed a monk forever, but his father yanks him out of there and demands that he start producing heirs. Allart doesn't want to pass on his genetic anything, especially when he has visions of his monstrous children killing his wife. But he falls in love with his matchmade wife (who he's had visions of) Cassandra anyway, and they well, gotta work something out. Adding to Allart's troubles, his older brother Damon-Rafael is very determined to get a legal heir of his own somehow AND take over the throne of Darkover because he's next in line after the prince, who's infertile. Unfortunately for Allart, Damon-Rafael's unstinting ambition will lead to hell on Darkover, so Allart can't stay the hell out of it.

Then there's the titular Stormqueen, Dorilys of Rockhaven. Speaking of Heir Club For Men, her father, Mikhail of Aldaran, was also looking for a surviving heir, and took a lady named Aliciane as a mistress to get one. Unfortunately, the Rockhaven psychic gift is storm sensitivity/control. In men it's not overpowering, but in women, well, giving birth to a daughter will kill the mother. And they inherit the power in utero...so from birth Dorilys has been a lightning lass and all kinds of trouble and spoiled because how well can you discipline someone who can shock or kill you accidentally? Most of the plot revolves around how to solve the Heir Club For Men dilemma AND how to keep Dorilys under control and with her sanity intact enough to produce an heir...plus, well, finding a guy she won't kill if he tries something. And using her talent to both save lives and kill them.

Oh yeah, did I mention she's 11 years old?

To be honest, the story is interesting, but pretty much DOWNRIGHT HORRIFYING. The latter half of the book comes up with an incredibly squicky solution to the Heir Club For Men dilemma that creeps closer and closer to the major squick going down, and frankly, after awhile I just couldn't stop thinking "EWWWWWWNOOOOOOOOOOOOO" all the time.  I'll explain it below the spoiler cut, but without spoiling I will just say that if you choose to read this book, bring your brain bleach.

I think the point of the book was to point out horrors that come from (a) ambition, and (b) succession, and dear lord, it succeeds at that. But in the end, the horrors kind of prevent me from being all, "Yeah, I'd totally read this again." Just...argh.

Three stars. Not badly written, but the mental images in my brain, man... Darkover used to go to really sick places.

Dragon Keeper

By Robin Hobb.

This is the long-awaited 2-book sequel to the Liveship Traders series...but I wasn't too thrilled with book 1. It is a case of "I wrote a long one-title book and they made me split it into two," but in book one, things BARELY ramp up at all. I felt like the premise got established and that's all. Plot? Not so much of that yet. I can't help but think that either (a) the entire massive book should have been put together in one volume, but cutting most of this one's words so they could do that, or (b) if there had to be two books, that the plot of this one got expanded massively. This is a book about a journey, but when it takes more than 3/4 of the book to GET STARTED on the journey? Problem. I also suspect it might have helped the book to not cover the 5 years between Ship of Destiny and this book so well, and maybe just did some "one, two, skip a few," and skimmed the details.

Here's what there is:

• It's established, very slowly, that the dragons finally hatched...but deformed and sickly and unable to take care of themselves. The Rain Wild city of Cassarick gets awfully sick of taking care of them, five years in.
• Tintaglia somehow found herself an undeformed mate somewhere and flew off with him, abandoning the entire enterprise.
• The dragons themselves get the bug up their asses to try to find the city of Kelsingra, which according to their memories was pretty spiffy. Never mind the logic of this place being abandoned for ages and nobody really knows where it is, let's go anyway.
• Cassarick's population is all, "Good riddance, get rid of 'em, and hey, wait, can we go dig up some more treasure there?"
• But the dragons, as was mentioned, can't take care of themselves. Thus keepers must be hired to take care of them. Cassarick takes the opportunity to get rid of more unwanted population: specifically the Rain Wild kids who came out looking more dragonish from birth than usual. Yes, the town where everyone gets scales still snobbishly discriminates against people who start out funky rather than grow them later. Sheesh. Our heroine on this end of the story is Thymara, a 16-year-old whose dad saved her from death from abandonment and her mom has resented her ever since.
• The too-dragony-kids have all been forbidden from having relationships ever ever ever, but since the kids are on their own now, this might change. One guy shows interest in Thymara, but he's creepy and rather power-mongery. A couple of other possible love interests float on the edges so far.

On the other end of the story, we have Bingtown Trader daughter Alise Kincannon, whose biggest sin in life is being plain. She was plotting her spinster life out, and decided to become an expert in dragons by digging up every old scroll onthem she could find. Unfortunately for her, her childhood friend Sedric is secretly romantically involved with Hest Finbok, a rich, handsome, closeted trader who's going to have to suck it up and find a wife and produce an heir. Sedric suggests Alise for the job, and Hest makes it fairly clear that she's going into this to produce an heir and otherwise she can use his money as she likes for her hobby. Alise has it written into the wedding contract that she will eventually get to take a trip to see the dragons. However, Hest is a massive jerk (even beyond the part where Alise has no idea he's gay or why he acts the way he does about bedroom activities). When Alise finally insists on her wedding trip five years into their crap marriage, and Sedric sticks up for Alise, Hest forces Sedric to be the one who accompanies her.

Once Alise arrives, she quickly gets herself invited along on the dragon trip, along with the liveship owner she came up with that has a crush on her--and some secret dealings with a Chalcedean in dire straits. Did I mention that everyone in Chalced knows that if they get ahold of anything dragon, their dying duke will reward them (assuming he lives)? Sedric wouldn't mind getting a piece of that pie either.

Yeah, that's...about it for the plot. It's set up, but that's mostly it. Like I said, the journey doesn't even start for most of the book, and I didn't feel like the really interesting plot developments were starting to happen until (minor spoiler below the cut). I will certainly read #2 when it comes out in the US, but mostly I was just frustrated that I wasn't blown away by this in the way that I was by Liveship Traders. That trilogy piled things higher and deeper and raised the stakes and astounded me in every book, in almost every moment, and this one just plain isn't doing that yet. I hope for better things in book 2. 

Two and a half stars.

Ship of Destiny

By Robin Hobb.

Previous book: Mad Ship.

And just when you think things can't get any worse...

You've got one freed dragon, a bunch of sea serpents who finally know what they are and what they're supposed to be doing, liveships in the same situation, a missing Satrap and Malta among enemies, a pirate edging closer to the dark side, Bingtown trashed... what the heck do people do?

Well, just keep reading.

Five stars. I don't even know how to cover all the details of this one, but it's marvelous. The resolutions are truly surprising.

Mad Ship

By Robin Hobb.

Previous book: Ship of Magic.

Oh man, things get piled even higher and deeper.

Captain Kennit's career improves (even as his physical health isn't so much), and Wintrow goes through drastic changes. The captain is manipulating everyone around him, but is he evil? It's a debatable question since his motives are evil, but he also has a tendency to bring out the very best in those around him. (Tricksy guy, that Kennit.)

The Vestrit family, in all kinds of dire straits, team up with Brashen and Amber to purchase Paragon, a liveship that went crazy years ago. Can he be sailed? Can he deal with the seas again? And whatever happened to make him go mad in the first place? 

Malta gets courted by Rain Wilder Reyn Khuprus, who sees a lot more in her than the rest of the world does. Malta enjoys the flirtations she's got going on, but once she realizes how screwed her family really is, starts growing up in a hurry and it's marvelous. Back at home, Reyn is being mentally harassed by a cocooned dragon who's trapped in the ruins of the Elderling city the Rain Wilders mine for goods... and she switches to Malta when Reyn can't/won't save her.

The Satrap of Jamallia decides to visit Bingtown...and boy, does he ever treat his Bingtown expert companion Serilla like crap. And when the Chalcedeans come...

Four star drama! Really good, addictive series. I enjoy the plot developments, the tricksiness of Kennit, seeing how he brings out the best in people. And also seeing Malta grow up. It might be a bit abrupt and sudden, but it's still cool.