Speed-Reading Book Nerd Reviews

Last Watch

By Sergey Lukyanenko.

Previous book here.

I don't really know what to say about this one. I finished it a few days ago and I'm not overly clear as to what went on. The overall themes of this book are (a) Merlin, the last zero-point uber-magician, (b) the "Crown of the World" thingie he hid that may do uh...something with regards to the levels of the Twilight that might bring back the dead people there, and (c) what's the nature of the Twilight, anyway? Which gets a little obscure and weird.

In book one, "Common Cause," Anton goes to Edinburgh to investigate the death of a young Russian man at a "Vampire Castle" tourist attraction. Looks like a vampire actually did him in, you see. The location is a particularly weird one, magically speaking. And apparently Merlin used it as a stash place for "the Crown of the World." Whatever that is, Merlin probably hid it so far into the Twilight (on the seventh level) that nobody but him (or Anton's daughter Nadya) should be able to get to it. And yet, it looks like some folks are trying to get in anyway. And they know to shoot Others with automated guns that they can't sense or stop too well. This case does NOT get solved in this story--all Anton finds out is that a Light One, a Dark One, and an Inquisitor--all Higher power levels--are working on this together.

In book two, "A Common Enemy," Anton is sent to Uzbekistan to look for Rustam, an ancient Other that knew Merlin back in the day who might know something. Anton first asks about this at the Night Watch offices--which amusingly enough are right next to the Day Watch offices because there's few Others in the country. Nadya gives Anton a heads-up to look for a fellow named Afandi, who turns out to be a really old but low-powered (and perhaps a bit dim, or he's faking it?) Other in the Watch. But after more automated guns come after them, they need to flee. Afandi knows how to find Rustam, so they follow him to an area where a bunch of Others were turned into living stone by an awful spell many yonks ago. Rustam informs them on how the Crown works, but then they find out who one of the conspirators (the "Final Watch") are....and I'll talk about that below the spoiler cut.*

In book three, "A Common Desitny," Anton finds out that someone he used to know** is also in on the scheme. Tons of guards are put on little Nadya to prevent anyone from going after her and forcing her to go after Merlin's Crown. However, that just means that the bad guys kidnap Anton and sic Schroedinger's Cat on him (really!) and rig up a nuclear bomb to go off on his family in order to force him to think up a way to get them to the seventh level and get the Crown. Anton, being an awesome thinker, does figure it out. However, the results of that aren't what the Final Watch expect...

I found this one a bit hard to follow, given the weird concept of it. I liked how it resolved some characters (Rustam and Afandi and Merlin) and brought back some other ones and resolved their issues.*** On the other hand, the drastic character changes done on the Final Watch crew confused and baffled me, and in one case just plain didn't seem right somehow*. The big ol' revelation of what the Twilight is also seemed strange.****

I'm glad to hear this isn't the final book in the series (though god only knows when a translated version of the next one will make it to publication in America), because this just left a weird taste in my mouth. Three and a half stars.

The Heidi Chronicles, Uncommon Women and Others, and Isn't It Romantic

By Wendy Wasserstein.

After reading Wendy and the Lost Boys, I decided to do some play reading. Which will make for an odd review here, I think.

Uncommon Women and Others: This play is based off of Wendy's strange experiences at going to Mount Holyoke for college during the sexual revolution. In the midst of transition, the school was going from a place where Gracious Living was practiced to well...ladies boinking whoever they like and wearing pants. It sounded like it was a schizophrenic time in Wendy and the Lost Boys, and it comes across that way too in this play. I'll admit that uh...I had problems with relating to this play. It's just so foreign of an environment to me--and I speak as someone who's been in a college environment for a long-ass time. Somehow the weird world that these women were living in threw me off enough that I had a really hard time getting into it. Sure, there was the occasional moment of relating to the women's 21-year-old angst as to what their future plans are, but mostly I just wasn't into it.

I'll also admit that this play might make more sense if you see it staged (a la Shakespeare), because I don't really get why the play starts out with the women meeting up for lunch around 10 years after college, then spends most of the play in college, then cuts back to 10 years later and that's it. It also didn't really seem like it had much plot beyond "coming of age," really. So by itself  I'd probably give it two stars...but really, this may be just my problem and it may just be Not For Me.

Isn't It Romantic (note: it isn't!): Isn't It Romantic, on the other hand, I related to greatly. It honestly felt pretty fresh and current to me, seeing as it deals with the perennial issue of "who should I settle down with, if anyone at all?" It features Janie, a girl who starts dating a Jewish doctor. Perfect, right? And he's okay as a person...though he certainly uh, Takes Charge a lot, and suddenly decides stuff for Janie without telling her that they're moving in together and things like that. And he calls her Monkey, which ain't her favorite romantic endearment ever. The other featured girl is Harriet, a career woman who starts sleeping with her boss's boss, who unabashedly has a girlfriend at home and doesn't give a shit about her. It's obviously doomed from the getgo there.

I loved this quote on the problem: "Well, if you live with him, you won't have to wonder who'll hold you at night, what will happen if you don't pay your taxes, or even, if you want children, who you could possibly get to be the father. You won't read articles in magazines about single women and have to think of the fifty different reasons why you're different from that. You won't begin to notice younger men on the street or think I'm not really hurting a married man's wife if I have an affair with him, because if it's not me, it'll be somebody else. But Janie, how could you sleep next to a man as nice as Marty and lie to him and say I love you?" Good point.

I liked how Janie resolved things, though Harriet's resolution--a last minute engagement to a guy she's known two weeks-- is frustrating for everybody. By itself, I give it four stars.

The Heidi Chronicles: Heidi was my first introduction to Wendy Wasserstein and the only one here I've seen live. I loved it. Though I'll admit that I find it harder to get into just reading it in play form, and it seems a little wordy and weird in places. It's a play that covers the same old issue that women who never settled down with a man have all the time, and yet is really, really set in the time period (60's-80's) what with all of the political commentary and snarking. It features Heidi, a woman who becomes an art historian and who never does settle down with a guy even though other folks do. Her life fits into the feminist movement, and yet she always feels alone in her life circumstances somehow. Her best friend since high school, Susan, goes through a drastic amount of changes. Her gay best friend Peter comes out of the closet and lives life as he wants to.

She has a downright hypnotic relationship over the years with Scoop Rosenbaum, a lawyer/journalist fellow who even Heidi describes as a "charming creep." And by god, he is. He's unabashed about what you get with him--not faithfulness at all--and pops in and out of Heidi's life over the years. I'll always remember seeing the first scene between them in the theater--even though the actor playing him wasn't the hottest thing going, and indeed the fellow is being irritating when he meets Heidi at a dance--there is something THERE that grabs you. It's Scoop's line at the end of the scene that just gets me in the gut somehow and makes you root for him despite his mostly-douchiness:

"Maybe I'll remember it one day when I'm thirty-five and watching my son's performance as Johnny Appleseed. Maybe I'll look at my wife, who puts up with me, and flash on when I was editor of a crackpot liberal newspaper and thought I could fall in love with Heidi Holland, the canvassing art historian, that first snowy night in Manchester, New Hampshire, 1968."

Well, maybe it makes more sense when you watch it. But at the time I was all, DAMN, THIS ACTOR IS GOOD. So's the line, really.

Anyway, Scoop marries another woman because he'd rather settle for someone who will be his wifey-poo rather than Heidi, who'd want to be equals. And while we're told Heidi dates others over the years, somehow Scoop continues to be an off-and-on friend in her life. And Heidi seems adrift, like in her speech on "Women, Where Are We Going." She hasn't prepared a speech ahead of time, but instead talks about being in the locker room with a random assortment of women--single and hot, old ladies, moms--and feeling both worthless and superior at the same time. "It's just that I feel stranded. And I thought the whole point was that we wouldn't feel stranded. I thought the point was that we were all in this together." Good point. You really feel for Heidi in that moment--as well as in a TV interview when the men on stage literally drown her out. Eventually Heidi figures out a way to feel less stranded. As a focus on the plight of the modern adult single woman, this play rocks. Four stars.

Overall, I'll give this three and a half stars. I'd probably skip "Uncommon Women" in a reread, but the other two are gut punchers in a good way.

Twilight Watch

By Sergei Lukyanenko.

Previous book here. This one goes back to the "Night Watch" style of having Anton tell all 3 stories. It takes place a few years after the last book, and Anton is now married to Svetlana (who quit the Watch) and has the world's most superpowered child, Nadya.  The overall story for this one-- and it's a lulu-- is answering the question, "Can a human being be made into an Other?" As far as anyone knows, the answer is 'no," and while it's a desired thing, it could also totally fuck up the world if this power existed. So naturally...

In book one, "Nobody's Time," anonymous letters are sent to both Watches and the Inquisition indicating that a human knows about Others and somehow got a Light Other to promise they'd do it. But if the Light Other can't do it, then s/he will die. Anton is assigned to investigate for the Light side. Edgar (who quit the Day Watch) and another vampire investigate for the Inquisition, and Anton's old neighbor/ex-friend, the vampire Kostya, is the Day Watch investigator. Which is a little awkward for everyone since Kostya kinda has a grudge against Anton and yet still sort of likes him. Masquerading as a human, Anton moves into a rich person's building (which is oddly SUPER unfinished, like Anton has a shower but NO toilet!?!) where the letter seems to have originated from. He makes friends with a human neighbor, Las, and eventually finds the culprit. But who the Light Other was...well, hoo boy there.* (Further discussion goes below the spoiler cut.*

In book two, "Nobody's Space," Anton finally gets vacation time out of Gesar, and joins his wife and kid in the country. Then two neighborhood kids run into a pack of werewolves in the woods and are rescued by a ah....suspicious "botanist." Anton tracks her down and finds that her name is Arina and she's a very long-lost witch who spent sixty years asleep. That turned out to be for a good reason, as she's a wanted woman. Arina is friendly enough, but when the Inquisition comes, she shows she'll do whatever she can to better her position.** Anton finds out from her that there was a book written by a witch named Fuaran who HAD eventually figured out how to convert a person into an Other and written the instructions down in a book. Which may or may not exist... We also find out that the reason Others exist is that they have less inherent magic than humans do, so they are essentially parasites. This changes everything when you look at it that way.

In book three, "Nobody's Power," the Arina investigation continues--and an Inquisition member is killed. Presumably the winner actually FOUND Fuaran's book and ends up on the run with it on a train. The remaining investigating team boards the train, where Anton runs into his friend Las again. Las seems to have ah... spontaneously hopped on the train thanks to someone's magical suggestion. But why? The consequences of someone having that power--and what do they want to do with it-- are staggering, and force Anton into a situation he never intended and didn't want to be in.***

I just noticed that I haven't had much in the way of review commentary beyond the plot rundowns here for this one: I continue to enjoy the developments in this series, and I think the overall theme of this one is done really well. The only thing that weakens it a bit is that Anton, unlike every other character, has no personal stake in wishing he could make humans into Others. But hey, that's the plot already, what can you do.

I do wish women had more prominent roles in it though--even if the main women are all super-powerful, it sure seems like most of them aren't doing much. Svetlana gets into action in this one, but doesn't want to be in the Watch--well, she has good reasons to be annoyed with Gesar and not want to be in, but I do kind of wonder if part of that is supposed to be the whole "it's so bad when your wife has more power than you do magically" thing, and it's somehow "better" if Svetlana sticks to traditional wifely things (didn't she used to be a DOCTOR?!). It's not really strongly emphasized if that's the case, but I wonder if because this is a Russian male author if that was in his brain subconsciously. But on the other hand, despite the doom and gloom Anton was given in book 1, they're still together and happy, so...screw that! As for other ladies, Nadya's a child and another one is dead, but where the hell is Olga? I miss her and she's hardly around any more. This made Arina's entrance onto the scene very welcome--for all of these Great Sorceress-types, we need some lady dynamic in here.

Four stars. A compelling story, and my favorite overall one. Good job!

Day Watch

By Sergei Lukyanenko and Vladimir Vasiliev.

Previous book here. As you can probably guess from the title, this book purports to tell stories featuring the Day Watch/Dark Ones. Rather than featuring one character, this book handles things differently. I'm not sure how much of that has to do with the co-author on this book, but it's a definite change in how the story is told compared to the previous book.

The first story, "Unauthorized Personnel Permitted," is told by Alisa Donnikova, a Dark One witch featured off and on in Night Watch (even though I didn't mention her in the original review). Alisa used to be the girlfriend of the Day Watch leader, Zabulon. Until the end of Night Watch, when Alisa did something stupid and while Zabulon saved her bacon, he has pretty much ignored her for the last year. Alisa cared greatly for the dude and has been bummed out ever since. We start out the story following Alisa around on her day. Interestingly enough, for someone who is totally dedicated to the dark side and freedom and doing whatever she wants, Alisa has her good and bad moments. She deals with a mother that stresses her out (and nearly curses her!), she has a depressing philosophical discussion with the guy who drives her to work about being evil--and yet, she still saves a mouse that two of her colleagues are scaring the crap out of. That's Alisa for you--sometimes evil, sometimes not. She's definitely done terrible things in her past once she became an Other--oh, the joys of being a teenage girl who finds out her mom's a cheater around decision time--but at the same time, she has feelings like everyone else.
Alisa and the rest of her coworkers go out on a mission to save a witch who's getting busted by the Night Watch. During the operation, she saves the day--but at the cost of burning out her own powers. This impresses Zabulon, who said he'd thought he was wrong about her before, but indicates that he's going to get back together with her later. But first, he's going to send her on a vacation. Vacation if you're an Other turns out to be working at a children's summer camp, where Alisa can feed off of her charges' nightmares and recharge her powers back up. Even without her powers the girl's a terror--she forces two guys who wanted to rape and rob her into raping each other just by holding them at gunpoint. (I should probably be more offended at that, but as a girl, well, part of you does think, "Hah, now you know what it feels like.") But with her charges, other than feeding off nightmares, she's okay. While on vacation, Alisa ponders taking a human lover for the summer--Zabulon doesn't mind.
However, Alisa falls in love with Igor, a fellow camp counselor. It's total love at first sight, and without her powers she wonders if he's an Other---she somewhat hopes he is, and also hopes he isn't so he doesn't interfere with her relationship with Zabulon. A few days after they fall in love, she's sucked up enough power to charge herself up--and discovers that Igor is a LIGHT Other. Who'd been in the same situation she had--powers drained, sent to camp to rehab himself--and they fell in love without having any idea what the other one was. I'll finish talking about this below the spoiler cut, but it really got to me.

The second story, "A Stranger Among Others," switches back and forth between a first person viewpoint and third person narration, which I'll admit I wasn't too thrilled with. It's just...kinda weird to do that. The first person is told by Vitaly, a Dark Other visiting Moscow from out of town. He's got some weird case of amnesia and doesn't really remember what he's doing there or how he's got tons of cash on him. And he keeps stumbling across bodies, and ends up taking out a few Light Others. Meanwhile in the third person sections, both sides are freaking out over the theft of Fafnir's Talon, a supermagical gadget recently stolen by the Regin Brothers, a weird Dark sect from another country that isn't in the Watch. We see Anton in here frequently, but from a third person point of view. Of course Vitaly ends up with the talon, and the Inquisition shows up to investigate the entire situation. But little does Vitaly know what he's really in Moscow to do...indeed, only Zabulon seems to know where this is going--and he once again visits Anton to give him a heads-up on what to do. Yes, it's another complicated gambit, only this time a lot of people end up surprised. Again, I'll talk about it below the spoiler cut.**
I did not like this story so much until the end--Vitaly's an obscure and confusing narrator, though given the nature of his plot, that's to be expected. I also just found the switching between first and third (and reading about Anton in third rather than first) to be disconcerting. On the other hand, the ending of this one does answer a question that should have come to mind while reading the first book about equal and opposite powers...so that's a good point.

The third story, "Another Power," finally follows up on both of the following stories. Igor and the Regin Brothers have been sent to Prague to be dealt with by the Inquisition, and Anton has been tapped by the Night Watch to be Igor's advocate. A fellow named Edgar--featured heavily in this story, but this time the entire thing is told in third person--is dubbed as the defense for the Day Watch. Despite my bitching about third person in the last story, the third person and switching actually works in this story and is needed since it switches between Anton and Edgar trying to figure out what Zabulon's ultimate plan is. While getting drunk with Igor, Anton tries to figure out why Zabulon would set up his girlfriend and why it would benefit him to take Igor out of the picture. On his own, Edgar tries to figure out the Fafnir's Talon part of the plot--and figures out exactly what Zabulon had in store for him. And it's a giant UH-OH.*** We finally find out what the endgame was going on, and who's going to win and lose.

This is an intriguing series. I had issues getting through parts of this one and in some ways I feel it's a little weaker than the last book--but in other ways, I was blown away. So overall this one gets four stars too.

Night Watch

By Sergei Lukyanenko.

There are humans, and there are Others. Others are the magically inclined folks of the world, the ones who can see and access the Twilight, a gray in-between magical world. Some folks are magicians and witches, others are vampires and shsapeshifters. There's the Light side, and the Dark side. Light side folks care about the welfare of others, Dark folks prioritize themselves. It's a tale and battle as old as time.

However, both sides are at a truce right now. What that means is that nobody battles, and everybody keeps tabs on each other. The Light Ones have a "Night Watch" that keeps track of what the Dark Ones do, and the Dark Ones have a "Day Watch" that keeps track of the Light's actions. If a Light One gives a slight magical bonus to someone, it means that a Dark One can do the opposite on their end. Any advantage or action must have an equal action happen in return. It's a total stalemate and not like joining the Jedi Knights. What kind of magical world is this, anyway? It's certainly not a fun one.

The narrator of our story, Anton, is a midlevel magician/programmer working for the Moscow Night Watch in 1998. Usually he's not the guy sent out for field ops, but in this book, he ends up doing more of them than he'd like. There are three stories in this book, featuring Anton, his partner Olga, a newly discovered Other teenager named Egon who refuses to choose a side (but leans toward the Dark anyway), and Svetlana, who I'll finish mentioning below the spoiler cut.*

In the first section, Anton comes across Egon and rescues him from a couple of vampires, and comes across Svetlana in the subway. She's got a super nasty black vortex curse on her that will not only kill her, but take out hundreds or thousands of people around her. Anton is caught between two cases--the case of the vampire he killed and the one still after Egon, and trying to save Svetlana, or at least the people who will also die around her. Anton turns out to have the ability to lighten Svetlana's curse by just talking to her...but who put the curse on such a good woman, and how can the Night Watch get that person to call it off?

In the second section, there's an undiscovered Light One going around killing off whatever Dark Ones he accidentally stumbles across on the street. There's four possible suspects as to who did it...and Anton is the only reasonably plausible one who could have done it. Except he didn't. Uh-oh. Anton and his partner Olga do a body swap to try to thwart the framers, but when that goes to hell, Anton's forced to figure out why he's being used as bait in this scenario and what endgame the higher-ups are going for.

In the third section, almost the entire Night Watch is given three days off of vacation, but Anton can't enjoy it so much. He keeps wondering why this is, and what kind of scheming is being directed towards his girlfriend to accelerate her magical development. Nobody will tell him what they have in store for her, but from what he can figure out, it won't end well. And when the head of the Day Watch shows up at his house feeling the same way...well, what third option is there to take now?

There's a lot of secret scheming and gambits going on in this book, and Anton becomes a pro at taking a third option when faced with a bunch of predicted shitty choices.. I am not 100% sure that I quite understood all of the gambiting going on, but I think I almost did, so that might be good enough. And despite the world building being of a more depressing nature than I prefer--then again, this is a Russian novel and we all know how those go--I kept on reading this book and wanted to know what was going on with the characters. And the rest of the series. Go figure. I didn't think I'd like it, but when two friends were really into it, I caved in. And now I'll be checking out book 2.

Four stars.

To Weave a Web of Magic

By Claire Delacroix, Lynn Kurland, Patricia McKillip, and Sharon Shinn.

Four fantasy stories;

"The Gorgon in the Cupboard" by Patricia A. McKillip: A strange-ish story about a painter and his model. A few years ago, Harry was painting Jo, who was modeling for a painting of Persephone. Then she got pregnant and ran away, leaving the painting unfinished. She returns (though Harry doesn't recognize her--way to use your artist's eye, bud) after the death of her baby and the rest of her family, feeling sadder than ever. This time Harry paints her as Medusa. He also ah... called upon a muse for help with his art, and the spirit of Medusa answered. I... honestly don't get how the hell this works, exactly, other than Medusa seems to somehow hang around the painting/Harry's cupboard and have conversations with him. That part is weird. Actually, I never really figured out where this story was going, other than it seemed to imply that Harry and Jo should get together. But they don't quite. It's not badly written to read, but I never quite got a handle on what it was supposed to be doing either. By itself I'd give it... somewhere between 2.5 and 3 stars.

"The Tale of the Two Swords" by Lynn Kurland.  I find it odd when a short story has a framing story (heck, there's two of 'em in this book). This kind of starts out like the old time version of The Princess Bride, with an 8-year-old boy wanting adventure and wanting to be told a story. So he's told the story of Mehar, an awesome weaver fleeing an arranged marriage and a dickhead father who put a price on her head. She runs to the king, only to find him and the mage she wanted to talk to dead. She does, however, hit it off with the remaining royal family member and heir to the throne, Gil. Then after they get married, they need to deal with a bad guy. The story then returns to the framing story...and I guess I'll just leave it at that. I'm not sure why the framing story was so important to have it--yeah, you figure out the "twist" pretty easily and then after that, I don't know where it was supposed to go. I did like the main story quite a bit--it was very sweetly done. So by itself, three stars.

"Fallen Angel" by Sharon Shinn: This was my favorite of the lot, probably because I liked what Samaria story I've read before. Eden is a rich and pampered high caste girl with an abusive father that everyone puts up with. She's always been a very good girl, stays well behaved, and doesn't exactly plan on objecting to whoever it is her husband picks for her. Even though arranged marriage hasn't gone so well for her mother. However, she's fascinated by meeting Jesse, a teenage angel with the urge to roam and some angst. They quietly hit it off upon meeting, but it takes several years to come to fruition. In the meantime, scandals happen that tear Eden's family apart and change her life forever. Jesse gets blamed for one of them, but Eden knows better. This was a powerful and fascinating story. I do feel like it had a little too much setup/worldbuilding going on (several years pass in between action), but other than that, it was great. By itself, four stars.

"An Elegy for Melusine" by Claire Delacroix: This one has another framing story--even more "meh" than the "Two Swords" story. The tale is told of Melusine, a half-fey, half-mortal woman cursed to turn half-serpent once a week by her fey mother, who seems to want her child to embrace mortality. Or not--she seems to go back and forth on that. Anyway, Melusine marries a fellow named Raymond, who she makes arrangements for to get him out of trouble and secure him a land to rule. She asks to marry him, he asks for ten sons. The marriage soon becomes a love match...but most of the sons are born disfigured, evil, or both, and naturally that takes a toll on happiness. In the end, Melusine follows her heart...and probably shouldn't have. It's a sad story. Compelling, but sad as hell. By itself, three stars.

Overall book review: three stars.

Blood Memories

By Barb Hendee.

Elisha Clevon is part of a very small family of vampires. And they're losing their lives.

The book waits until the middle of the story (and switches from first to third person) to explain the back history of the characters. I'm not sure why, since I found the back stories compelling enough to start out with, really. In order to explain the book, I'm going to mention those backstories earlier than the plot does.

Elisha starts out as a serving girl to Lord William and Lady Katherine. Their son and heir, Julian, isn't around much, but he gives everyone the willies. Lord William gets a case of dementia/Alzheimer's, and Elisha becomes his constant caregiver. Katherine is bothered as hell by this, and keeps hounding Julian to do something to cure his father. Eventually Julian--who of course is a vampire--caves in and vamps his dad. Not only does that not cure his dad, he's now made a half-senile man who can't even feed properly immortal. Julian's idea to deal with this is to vamp Elisha, BARELY vaguely explain a few details of that, and then shove her and his dad onto a boat headed for the new world. Thankfully for Elisha, Julian did bother to tell another member of the vampire family, Edward, to meet their ship and show Elisha the ropes.

So for a hundred-plus years, Elisha's spent her time taking care of William and either living with or near-ish to Edward. And all goes well until the night Edward just flat out loses his damn mind and becomes suicidal and does enough shit to force people to call the cops..and then Edward runs outside and burns in fire. Elisha's first knocked the hell out by the psychic vampire whammy of picking up Edward's memories as he dies...but oddly enough, so does one of the cops at the scene. Elisha's forced to hide in a hole during the day, but when she wakes up, the cops have been through the place, and seen her car, and she knows she and William have to run. Finding the address of another vampire family member she's only met once, Maggie, she flees to Seattle for help.

Maggie and Elisha hit it off as friends/family members, and Maggie teaches Elisha how she hunts for food. See, in this family you always have to kill your prey (as far as Elisha's been told), so Elisha usually sticks to feeding on jerks. Her special gift as a vampire is amplifying the feeling of helplessness and needing to be taken care of, so she offs anyone who wants to take advantage of that. Then the cops track her to Seattle and one of them kills again...leading Elisha alone and forming an odd bond with the psychic cop. Left at loose ends with a killer on the loose, what's a girl to do?

This is an interesting coming of age novel. Even though Elisha's like 180+ years old or something like that, she's led a pretty sheltered existence and doesn't even know the extent of vampirism or if any other vampires exist in the world. She ponders who can be her ally under her new circumstances. And after she starts coming into her psychic powers with the help of her new friends, she becomes a target for her crazy-ass sire. How's she going to handle that?

The story feels like it's just winding up, but you do feel Elisha's plight and her development. Oddly enough, I actually liked the third person flashback scenes even better than the first person narration, and that's not normally something I say. I do think they could have been integrated into the book a little sooner/more often than being chunked in mostly one spot, but the story gets more developed as time goes on. Elisha's not an outstanding personality, but she's a thoughtful one and working on coming into her own. And while a lot of the way vampires operate is pretty typical for most fantasy stories these days, the very small world these characters come from (heck, there were only 8 vampires in the original family) makes it different because at this point, the survivors have no idea if they're alone in the world or what. I think the story to come might have potential there. I'm giving this three and a half stars.

Wendy and the Lost Boys

By Julie Salamon.

This is a biography of the awesome playwright Wendy Wasserstein.

People tell you all kinds of stupid shit when you remain single and they do not. "You'll find the right person eventually, it'll happen when you're not trying, there's someone out there for everyone." Then I think of folks like Wendy, who spent her entire life not married even though she wanted to be, getting nagged all the time to just get married already, and...well, she never did get married and find The One, did she? She wanted the traditional husband-and-children lifestyle, seemed to feel obligated to want it on top of that what with being Jewish and the parental nagging, and she didn't get it. Okay, so things probably could have gone better had she actually dated straight men in the last couple of decades of her life, which as far as I can tell, she did not. That didn't help. But those were the sorts of fellows that felt drawn to her enough, and she to them. But as usual, the gender thing ruined it all, and she ran out of time.

I don't know if that has anything to do with the review, really, but it bothers the hell out of me that people spout shit like that. And the end of her life just made me so sad for so many reasons. Not so much of a case of "she failed" so much as she tried to make it happen and it didn't go well, and her life ended too soon, and ARGHHHHHHHHHH. 

Okay, okay, I'll try to tone down the angst for the rest of this review.

So Wendy grew up the youngest of five children in a ah...strange family that hid its secrets. Like Wendy's mom being married to one fellow for her first couple of kids and then marrying his brother after he died. Like her first son getting brain damage from an illness and getting put into a home and otherwise forgotten by the family, to the point where Wendy spent most of her life not knowing this information. Her oldest sister and other brother were high-rolling business types who rolled in and out of marriages, her younger sister stayed married and lived quietly in another state. Wendy couldn't help but compare herself to them--and her mother couldn't stop doing it either. Wendy floundered in college, didn't know what to do with herself, and eventually fell into playwriting, basing her plays on her family and friends in real life with very little fictionality. People, ah...had thoughts about that. But she came into her own and had a very successful career writing and giving speeches and mingling with the famous folks of NYC.

The title is very apt because the 'Lost Boys" theme runs through it often. As for her dating life, it seems that any straight man Wendy dated was only so-so about her, and she was only so-so about them. The folks she really hit it off with were all gay men, and she had varying degrees of ah, intimate relationships with them. She wanted to get married and have kids with someone, but none of her "husbands" (as she declared her close gay guy friends) could bring themselves to go that far. Finally taking a page from her own play The Heidi Chronicles, she spent many years getting artificially inseminated. Bizarrely, it didn't work until she was 48(!) years old, and due to miscarriage risk she kept it a secret until she gave birth. Alas, while she finally had the child she'd always wanted, having a baby destroyed her looks and health entirely. She got cancer and died only a few years after her child's birth.

Sigh...

Well, she definitely won in the career portion of her life. Wrote great plays. She did finally get the child she wanted, even if that didn't go very well or for very long. And she had a lot of friends.

It's hard to review a biography. You can't really help how the plot goes--this isn't reality television :P But I can say that the author did a good job of covering as much of Wendy's life as she could find out about, and got great coverage from the folks still living as far as I can tell. You do get to find out what was behind the plots of Wendy's works, which is always interesting to me--had no idea she was THAT based in real life...and didn't usually bother to tell anyone that before they got a ticket to opening night. The shadier aspects of Wendy's personality aren't given short shrift, but don't make you hate her either. We've all got dicey parts of ourselves that we're not proud of.

Even though I wish it ended differently (hah), this gets four stars.

Canyons of Night

By Jayne Castle.

When I read Jayne Krentz/Quick/Castle books, I pretty much know what I am going to get. A fairly tepid (or at least not steamy) but pleasant enough relationship without that much strife, a lot of interesting world building and creatively done psychic powers, some kind of mystery--and in the case of the Harmony series, super interesting alien world building and DUST BUNNIES!!!!! I won't lie: I read this series primarily for the dust bunnies. Then the alien worldbuilding. Then the bunnies again. Overall, it seems like all of her books come out at about three stars. Pleasant reads, but not massively memorable. That's pretty much what you get. However, this one...seems to have come out half baked even for that standard.

A note about the cover: who on earth is that hooker in the black bra and leather pants? Because our heroine wears glasses and is an antiques dealer, and I just don't think she'd tromp around wearing that outfit. Dear lord, I feel sorry for authors being stuck with whatever completely nonsensical "sexy" skank with no head covers that marketing determines will "sell," even if the characters in the book stay reasonably dressed at all times.

Back to the plot: Charlotte and Slade are from Rainshadow Island, a place with a strange Preserve that's fenced off so nobody can get in there. It's a weird place, and yet ah, people seem to be able to get in there fairly easily. When they were teenagers, Charlotte was being attacked by a bunch of creepy pervs, and Slade saved her. She had a crush on him after that and gave him a special knife she tuned to him psychically. However, Slade left the island to go work for the feds. Fifteen years later, Charlotte's returned to take over her dead aunt's antique shop and Slade has quit the feds and become the police chief on Rainshadow. While on the job, Slade suffered a psychic-power-wrecking injury, and he's lost a couple of levels of power--and he's been told that he's going to eventually lose it all. He took the police chief job here on a temporary (in his mind, anyway) basis while he works out how to run his own PI firm. Of course he and Charlotte get romantically involved pretty much immediately, without a whole lot of stress about it.

The mystery of the book is kind of weak. We're told that, oh, btw, Charlotte had a stalker (which she has apparently just not paid that much attention to!) who turns up dead in her shop. He went creepy on her after she tracked down some ancient snowglobe for him and then was unable to persuade the owner to sell it. Then the owner dies and Charlotte somehow receives the snowglobe. Then the case just gets...freaky. Let's just say that about the time where some ancient automaton toy of Sylvester Jones was left in Slade's place to KILL HIM happened, I was all, "what the fucking fuck? You couldn't have just used a gun?" By the time we got to the villain ranting and spilling the whole beans unnecessarily, I was just rolling my eyes a lot at the plot stupid. There's also Some Kind Of Weirdness going on in the Preserve. However, you're not going to find out what the hell it was in this book--it's vaguely set up and then left as a cliffhanger for the next book, whatever that is. It was awkward and strange to leave that hanging, and just came out kind of pointless.

Even the dust bunny in this book doesn't really have a plot. Rex has two character traits: he eats a ton of zucchini bread, and he absconds with a clutch purse from Charlotte's shop, which he insists on carrying around a lot. In other Harmony books, this would end up being some kind of important plot point (i.e. Silver Master). In this book, uh... the bunny just likes a purse. There are occasional short debates as to whether or not Rex carrying around a purse impugns Slade's manliness. It is determined that the answer to that is "No, it doesn't." Whatever happened to dust bunnies psychically knowing stuff about the case and helping out/saving the day? Poor Rex.

Two and a half stars. Not a total stinker of a book, but it's not very well done.

The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels

By Ree Drummond.

Recently I was attempting to read Carrie Fisher's "The Best Awful." I gave up on it fairly quickly even though I love Carrie Fisher, mostly because it was weirding me out.. The book is so very obviously a thinly veiled version of Carrie Fisher's own life--the "turns out my husband is gay, I went off my meds and into the hospital" phase--that I couldn't even pretend for a second that this was a fictional story and review it in that manner. I don't know why she didn't just call everyone by their real names and write it in first person--maybe she had to work up to "Wishful Drinking." But it's kind of hard to review a person's real life, other than "Is this an entertaining story?" and "Do I like hanging out with these people?" In the case of the book I am reviewing today, both answers are yes...but I do kind of wonder at times just how neatly it all fits with romance novel tropes.

"Pioneer Woman" is an autobiography done by a popular blogger writing about her life on a ranch with a bunch of kids and a really hot cowboy husband. While ranching and cooking and hordes of children aren't my interests in life, I was told that the love story between her and her husband was adorable. I looked and yes, yes it most certainly was. So when I came across the book recently, I snagged it.

When we begin, Ree is a 20something girl from Oklahoma who's been living in LA with her longtime boyfriend J for years. She's certainly fond of J, but is no longer feeling the love in the same way. When he gets a job elsewhere, she declines to follow him, AND moves back in with her parents in Oklahoma while she tries to figure out what to do with her life instead. J, bizarrely enough, cannot seem to figure out that he's been broken up with--Ree blames herself for not being clear enough, but she seems fairly clear to me, what with moving to another state and all. Eventually Ree decides that she wants to move to Chicago and enjoy the city life there. Because Ree's always been a city sort of girl--felt she was too good for the hometown growing up, likes expensive shoes and sushi and flirting. She's in the shallow fun phase of life. I did wonder how the hell Ree was just kind of piddling around at home with no job--at least, it doesn't sound like she has one even then. Likewise, I wondered how she was moving to Chicago without having lined up a job first either. I'm not sure how loaded her family is, but they probably have to be...somewhat loaded, I guess, for them to be okay with her just vegging for months.

Then one night in a bar, she falls at first sight for a hot cowboy, who she dubs "Marlboro Man." He whammies her. But then he doesn't call, and Ree continues to make plans to move soonish. Months later, he calls--he was seeing someone else at the time and had to break up with her first--and they are madly, obsessively, instantly, perfectly in love despite their differences. And it does indeed seem to be a perfect match. Ree may be rather shallow and immature at this point in time (but not in a bad way, just in a "still growing up" way), but the Marlboro Man just rolls with it and is amused by her city folk ways, like sleeping in past 5 a.m. and wearing heels when she probably shouldn't be. Ree is also a well, clumsy heroine, the likes of which we usually see in movies. She falls down in heels in the country, she accidentally runs over her dog, she falls out of a semi, she wrecks her car in front of MM's mom, she gets WAY too overheated at a wedding... When will the movie rights of this be sold already? The stories are darned funny, but it's almost too good to be true on the romance scale.

There isn't really a villain in the piece. The big dramas boil down to:

• whether or not Ree can bear to move to Chicago after all--guess what, she can't.
• whether or not J will finally figure out they're broken up already--he takes a long time to get the clue, complete with surprise plane flight and last-ditch diamond (see what I mean about it being like a movie?).
• Ree's parents, who seem to have been happily married for years, finally have their relationship fall apart horribly while Ree's still in the house hearing it. This one's pretty devastating to her.
• And finally... can a "city girl" stand to give up sushi and clubbing for life to marry this man? Because it's clearly going to be a choice of Ree giving up her entire life to be a ranch wife and mother, if she can stand it. As you can figure out, despite the wildfires and mountain lions and disgusting things the Marlboro Man has her do to cows, the answer is yes. Heck, she's already weaned herself off sushi and being a vegetarian for love...

It's an oddly old-fashioned story, what with Ree insisting on going home every night rather than sleeping over until after the wedding, Ree not really seeming to have anything occupying her time other than dating as far as I could tell, and her giving up anything to do with her own life to just follow the Marlboro Man's already pre-set ranch life. Except for mentions of car phones and early cell phones, it almost seems like it's out of another time, probably the 1950's. I guess it works since it doesn't sound like she had anything of her own going anyway or any job activity she was interested in (until blogging), so it's not like she's missing out on her own goals. It's mostly about her transition to dealing with a much more grownup life where the stakes are higher--what with the nature and the animals--and where she doesn't have a clue. It's a good thing Marlboro Man doesn't seem to mind that, and finds the city girl antics to be amusing most of the time.

Overall, it's a very blissful twue wuv story, wrapping up schmoopily with a very happy wedding. AND THEN REALITY HITS. Oh dear lordy, does it ever.  Their honeymoon ends early due to excessive vomit and financial disaster, Ree's parents' marriage finally ends after holding it together long enough for the wedding, MM has a relative die, Ree of course gets pregnant and is incapacitated by more vomit for months, nature is scary, and getting the hang of ranch life is pretty tricky. But by the end, she's on her way to becoming a real ranch wife and mother.

As a story, it's adorable. It's the most real life romance novel-ish story I may have ever read, except it's missing bad guys, ex-girlfriends, and Big Misunderstanding drama. None of which are missed, really. I'll admit that once Ree settled into married life, I was feeling more weirded out at the old-fashionedness. I'm pretty much the antithesis of her personality-wise and didn't relate to her life as much. But that's my own deal.

I do need to point out that the juicy romance stuff is all online already--the book is based on it-- and the new material is the post-wedding stuff. Which is, well, shorter and more summarizing than the original material. It is somewhat a different style, and you miss the details and build that you got with the pre-wedding stuff. Maybe she lost interest, maybe she just didn't have as much romance to milk what with all of the vomit, maybe "happily ever after" is harder to write while real life is kicking in with a vengeance. Anyway, I can see why some folks had a problem with it compared to the original romance. But even though it's shorter and faster, it at least wraps up the story well enough to get it to a good place to end.

Four stars.