Speed-Reading Book Nerd Reviews

From Bad to Cursed

By Lana Harper

 

Previous book here.

 

Isidora Avramov, little sister to Talia, is overall a good egg despite being an Avramov. The Avramov family's magical affinity is necromancy/demons/dead people/ectoplasm, which pretty much creeps most people out, but especially the Thorn family because they have an opposite affinity for life. Most of the Avramovs these days aren't dark side people, but Issa does ah...enjoy summoning demons for fun and stress release from time to time. Maybe this isn't the best hobby ever...?

 

Issa has a bit of a grudge against Rowan Thorn from the last book. As a teenager she volunteered at an animal shelter, where she felt like Rowan kept riding her butt (to be fair, sounds like there was some reason to), so she pranked him with uh, squirrels. Ever since then, she's grudge-y towards him. However, after someone magically attacks Rowan's cousin Holly and drains her magic--which seems like an Abramov sort of thing even though none of the current bunch has any issues with Holly--the family is reasonably under suspicion. Issa is appointed to investigate the situation--I note she swears her own innocence about it at the start--with Rowan. As the "whodunit" of the situation gets weirder and weirder, Issa and Rowan obviously become closer in the hubba-hubba kind of way, and realize perhaps they are Not So Different after all, in a very pleasant way.

 

Overall, I enjoyed this book, but I don't think it's going to stick in my memory after reading it for very long. Everything was pleasant and fun and sweet (with a bit of demon creepiness thrown in from time to time!), but probably not something I'd feel compelled to re-read again. So, three stars.

 

 

 

 

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Rest in Pink

By Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer.

Previous book here.

The shenanigans continue in Burney, Ohio. Liz and Vince are still happily dating/boinking, Anemone has settled in and started dating the police chief, George, and little Peri Blue has moved into Anemone's rented "Blue House" since her mom went to rehab. Grandma Faye is hellbent on kidnapping poor Peri, but Anemone and Liz (who have legal paperwork saying they're in charge here) are dragons protecting her, and Liz accompanies Peri to every after-school lesson. 

However, someone's setting fires all over town, and it looks like it's Faye's evil jailbird brother Mickey, who's out of jail and back to his old vendetta against the Blue family and/or trying to get money. In addition to the actual fires, Thomas Thacker, Anemone's previous ghostwriter who she fired, also wants to get vengeance against well, Anemone, Liz, and I guess whoever the heck else he wants? He moves into a motel, starts hacking into the Burney Facebook page* and starts threatening to publish a book about all the secrets of Burney. To which I am all, this is a small town, what audience do you HAVE for this book?!, though it does get amusing when it starts to get a bit of out of town tourism. People are hard up for cash, buildings are on fire, and two companies, Vermillion and ECOmena (look at that last name real closely), are trying to buy up the buildings in town. George is getting harassed by the major and forced to take on a layabout detective mole, which leads him to promote Vince to detective status. And Vince is still detecting the whole "Navy Blue, was it suicide or not" thing from the last book. 

• note: some of this is absolutely the funniest shit, between the running gag of the hacking, a certain undeserving somebody begging for people to GoFundThem and getting next to nothing, and later when someone else starts hacking the page and writing posthumous entries involving "yes, all your dead pets are in heaven," it just gets funnier and funnier.

I feel like this book got even more into the cases, the mysteries, and the world. I enjoyed Liz's musings on writing Anemone's book, as she's decided to frame it all around Anemone's housing fixation throughout her life. Even though Liz doesn't seem that inclined to parent, she does clearly enjoy having Peri around. Anemone's desire to fix things and house people becomes more of a plotline, and while I'm still trying to figure out what Anemone is famous for (not acting, apparently, maybe just having a bunch of ex-husbands...?), she's a great character to have move to town. Liz also has a bit to deal with with the family revelations from the last book, and while she's mostly avoiding the parents these days, her family references are hilarious. (And then come to bite her in the ass a bit when Mickey comes to town.) . I also enjoy the use of pink in this book, from the color of the corpse to a pink weapon. It all works together great. On a personal note, Liz and Vince are admitted commitmentphobics, but are creeping towards acknowledging that they are in it for the long haul. Vince engineers a special gift for Liz or two that are just freaking ADORABLE, and he just keeps going with it. I liked the resolution at the end about how nobody's going to leave. Awwwww. I also liked how Liz went into all of the bad history she had in the town and how she'd wanted to leave so bad to become someone else, too. I got verklempt. 

Even though to some degree it's not super mystery--like I said, you know who's getting up to shit here--I enjoyed the journey quite a lot. People though I was weird reading a book (on phone) while at a bar last night, but it was that good! I look forward to the third book next month, where it sounds like business and running for mayor may be the plotlines.

Quotes:

• Liz on ghostwriting: "The spine of their lives is rarely what they think it is, so my job is to convince them that this is what their lives are really about so that they get the book they want while telling the truth, or as close as I can come without depressing the hell out of them. They give me the plot and I make it make sense."
• Also: "Anemone has a dark side and I have seen it. This, of course, makes her fascinating to write about, but also nerve-wracking at times."
• Also: "I can tell you that for Anemone, a husband is a focal point. She loves him, and then she takes care of him, and that points her in a direction of accomplishment, something she can manage, and she becomes amazing at whatever that is. Not all her husbands appreciated that she was better at their careers than they were, but that was their problem. Anemone glows when she has a purpose. She's been a little short on purpose for the past ten years." 
• Also: "I'm saying that based on the patterns in your life, Burney is your next focus, and God help us all."
• More Liz: "You know, I'd be okay with my life being an open book if people would quit reading out loud from it." 
• Vince, when asked about the new detective: "He fell over backward in his chair today. We think tomorrow is going to be even better for him." 
• Vince: "But come on, it was two women and a kid. I was a combat-hardened Ranger. What could go wrong?"
• Rain: "Really, Vince, Burney is like Mayberry except with arson and murder."
• Liz: "I don't want you to rescue me, I want us to rescue each other, if that makes sense." 

There will be a Spoiler Space Quotes below the cut.

Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936

By Edward Sorel.

"After I read her memoirs and realized she had a gift for writing, I really fell for her. I decided to become her champion...She wasn't even a huge star, and that in itself made me want to shine a light on her. Then, too, the fluky way in which I found out about the scandal led me to believe that I was somehow fated to be the keeper of her flame. She was a great actress, and dammit--I want to see her on a goddamn postage stamp!!"

The author is a cartoonist who got really, really obsessed with the life story of Mary Astor, particularly the scandal of her second divorce/child custody trial, in which her diary was waved around like a big ol' threat. Per his day job, he throws in a fair number of cartoons he drew of the scandal, and mixes in his personal fascination of Mary's life with the occasional aside as to how he first married a woman he didn't love, got divorced, and married happily a second time. The author's writing style is dishy as heck, which makes it worth reading.

Though I am ah...wondering about the chapter in which he supposedly held a seance to talk with Mary herself from beyond the grave about her sexytime with George Kaufman. I note that in the acknowledgements, he mentions "the chapter where I imagine meeting Mary Astor," and having a friend "conjuring the actress out of a guy from the Bronx," which I will always wonder about. 

It's pretty short, and Mary definitely did not have a happy life or marital relationship (sounds like the first husband, who didn't want to have sex, was the best of the bunch), and she drank and drank and drank. Awww.

(Wondering what the diary was like? Oh look, excerpt.)

Here's some quotes so you get the idea of what I mean by the writer's style:

• "Forty years after my fascination with Mary began, I still cannot fathom her desire to simply play the bourgeois wifey and breed. Did she really have no ambition? No respect for her talent or profession? No curiosity to find out what she was capable of?"
• "Cursed with the world's foremost fixation on Mary Astor, I had to know more about what happened during that trip than the bowdlerized version she presented in her memoir...I decided the only thing to do was to channel her in Catholic heaven."
• "I was appalled at Mary's inability to protect her daughter from that hate-filled scene. Where was the ferocity she would show with Peter Lorre in Falcon, when she kicks him in the shins? How could she sit silently while her terrified daughter was forced to witness the hatred her parents now had for each other? Why was Mary powerless everywhere except on a movie soundstage?" (Me: "Because movies aren't real and this was real life?") 
• "As for the diary, its final disposition rested with the court. "It is part of the agreement," said Thorpe's attorney, "that no one, save the litigants, their counsel, and  the court, will ever know what became of that diary. It will remain a mystery." ... "In 1952 Mary's diary and its copy were removed by court order from the bank vault where it had sat for sixteen years, and, with a judge standing by, the pages were set aflame and turned to ashes."

It's short, but dishy and entertaining for what you get. Alas, I don't feel like I'm doing this book justice in the review, so read this one instead, it's better. Overall I give it 3.5 stars but only because I wanted more. It's fun.

Give Me A Sign

By Anna Sortino.

Lilah is a hard of hearing teenager with hearing aids and some hearing loss all her life (ditto her little brother Max). She lives in a hearing/mainstream world where she tries to read lips, still misses a lot of what people are saying, and it's frustrating. So she decides to get a job as a junior counselor at her old Deaf/blind camp, Camp Gray Wolf. (Which I note seems ridiculously easy to get a job at, but she did go there before and is known, I guess? Also maybe they have a hard time finding qualified people?). She makes new friends, meets a cute guy named Isaac that she has a budding-yet-a-bit-awkward romance with (Isaac is cautious about these things), and tries to learn more ASL, deals with campers, wonders if the camp is going to be saved from financial ruin, etc.* I note Lilah hasn't grown up knowing ASL and is trying to figure it out herself in this world. 

* I did crack up when an unnamed Big Name Deaf actress apparently donated enough money to save the camp. I yelled, "MARLEE MATLIN!!!" in my head so hard. .

Mostly it's just a pleasant story about finding your way in life and meeting people with different issues. Lilah quietly has some issues with Mackenzie, a non-Deaf counselor who thinks she's a translator and makes YouTube videos that aren't exactly accurate. She talks to another girl who comes from a long line of Deaf people who caved in and got a cochlear implant after having major problems when her dad went into the hospital (I note the girl says it still didn't really make everything better to do that), asking her about it since her parents are kind of pressuring her little brother to get one. Lilah herself vacillates between whether or not to wear her hearing aids all the time, and when she accidentally gets them wet and goes out without them, there's a painful incident in which she doesn't pick up what a salesclerk is saying and then there's a Police Incident with her and Isaac. That was the most startling and standout part of this book, and really points out the potential issues of just going around in the world when you can't pick up every detail.

Overall, I give it three and a half stars. It's pleasant, but the police incident is the one thing that really stood out to me. I always have had an interest in ASL/Deaf culture, so those aspects of it kept me interested as well.

 

The Seven Year Slip

By Ashley Poston.

 

This has an intriguing concept: an apartment that periodically slips in time into seven years in the past, with no particular logic as to how or why. You walk in one day from getting groceries and surprise, someone else hot lives there!

 

Clementine is a book publicist in NYC who's recently moved into her aunt Analea's apartment, which she's been warned about does periodic time travel for no known reason. Analea has recently well, killed herself (sorry, but has to be said) and Clementine was very close to her, and she's still grieving. She did hear that Analea had a time travel affair with the previous tenant, Vera, years ago, but somehow things didn't work out IRL for vague reasons. Therefore, Analea warned her that time travel romance doesn't work out.*

 

* Disclaimer: from what you read of the book later, I think this was more Analea's personal issues than anything regarding time travel?

 

Clementine finds her apartment slipping back into the past, when her aunt was on a trip and the apartment was being borrowed by another fellow, a friendly dishwasher/budding chef named Iwan. Iwan is hot and friendly and their apartment visits go great, if you know what I mean. But what about that seven year gap? Well, coincidentally in Clementine's time period, her agency is recruiting a guy for a book who turns out to be Iwan, albeit he's using his given/more generic name of James Ashton (Iwan being the middle name**) and he's become quite a budding star, even if he seems mysteriously less enthusiastic than he used to be. He certainly remembers Clementine, though.

 

** I give the author credit for thwarting the whole "why don't you just Google him in your time?" concept, even if one does wonder why he'd be doing the name change IRL.

 

Beyond that, this is sweet and Iwan/James is lovely, but the plot doesn't really have super much in the way of conflict, the seven year gap obviously doesn't really cause any issues in their connecting/reconnecting, etc. I did enjoy a reveal that I'll discuss below the spoiler cut ***, but then there's another reveal that gets extreme short shrift and I did not like that.**** This kind of seems like one of those books where the angst is about jobs more than anything else, as Clementine seems to be feeling "meh" about hers and James/Iwan may have a bit of his own issues. Time travel isn't as much of a factor as I assumed other than there being some duration between past sightings, for whatever reason.

 

In the end, the romance is sweet, but this ended up not being all that memorable for me? I feel like it needed more drama, and it had the potential for that, but it doesn't really go there. How would a seven-year time gap affect your relationship? What problems might that cause and how do you resolve those? What happened in the meantime for the guy does come up, but not extensively. Also wouldn't have minded hearing more about Analea and Vera. I think I just wanted more than this book felt like doing. Maybe that's on me, though.

 

Three stars.