#CBR12 Book 73: "The Diviners" by Libba Bray

Page count: 578 pages

Audio book length: 18 hrs 14 mins

Rating: 4 stars

#CBR12 Bingo: The Roaring 20s

17-year-old Evangeline "Evie" O'Neill can sense people's secrets if she holds a personal object belonging to them and concentrates hard on it. She becomes decidedly unpopular in her home town when she gets drunk at a party and reveals that one of the town's golden boys knocked up a hotel maid and paid her to have the problem "dealt with". He accuses her of slander and threatens to sue her family. Evie can't very well reveal how she knows the details of the story and isn't exactly unhappy when her parents send her to stay with her bachelor uncle in New York City anyway. Evie dreams of going to parties, seeing shows, and gossipping with her best friend Mabel, daughter of radical socialists, who live in the same building as Evie's uncle Will. 

Before Evie even makes it to the museum that her uncle Will runs, she's been kissed and pick-pocketed by the roguish Sam Lloyd at Grand Central Station. At the museum, she's introduced to Jericho Jones, the tall and deadly serious young man that her uncle has taken under his wing (and who Mabel has a massive crush on). While Jericho seems just as scholarly and stick-in-the-mud as Evie's uncle, he has secrets of his own. Mabel and Evie also befriend Theta Knight, a glamorous Ziegfeld girl, and her "brother" Henry, a talented piano player who live in the same building as them. Important to the story is also Memphis Campbell, who used to have the gift of healing, until his mother was dying.

All of these young people from different social backgrounds and locations in the US meet up over the course of the story, as a comet is about to travel over New York City and a series of gruesome murders with occult connections catch the attention of reporters. The police ask Evie's uncle Will to consult, but it's not until Evie's party life style threatens to have her sent back home that she reveals her psychic powers and how she's able to read objects at the murder scenes (and feel a connection to the creepy murderer). 

This is a big book, with a lot of different point of view characters. It seems impeccably researched, with so many details about city life in the 1920s, complete with period slang (which got a bit confusing at times). January LaVoy, who narrates the book, did an excellent job differentiating between the large cast of characters of both genders. I've heard her narrate quite a few books now, and I really like her.

While I can see that Evie possibly can get on some people's nerves as a protagonist, there really is such a wide variety of significant characters set up in this book that everyone should be able to find someone to identify with. I think I was a lot more sympathetic to Mabel, the shy and bookish best friend rather than with the vivacious party girl Evie - but pretty much everyone in the large cast is well-drawn and interesting in their own right. Obviously, I don't think Evie appreciates a good museum enough (I would love to have access to the museum "of creepy crawlies" that uncle Will manages). 

As far as I'm aware, this is the first of four books of historical fantasy, setting up the various pretty young things we encounter in this book as "The Diviners" of the series title. Evie, Sam, Jericho, Theta, Henry, Memphis, and his younger brother all have unusual abilities of some kind. While the murderer is unmasked and stopped by the end of the story, it's made very clear that the looming evil that is awakening is not vanquished for good and Evie's adventures in the Big Apple are clearly just beginning by the end of this book.

This book has been on my TBR list almost since it came out, but I kept putting off reading it since I knew there would be more books in the series. It's now been completed, and based on the first book, I will absolutely be checking out more installments. I just need to summon up the energy for lengthy books with a fair amount of peril and grisly murders, which I'm not necessarily now. 

Judging a book by its cover: This book has been out since 2012, and as a result, has a number of covers by now, most of them in some shade of purple. This is the cover on my e-book copy, where you see the silhouettes of some of the prominent characters, as well as some background images of 1920s New York, where the book is set. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

#CBR12 Book 69: "Emerald Blaze" by Ilona Andrews

Page count: 400 pages

Rating: 5 stars

#CBR12 Bingo: Green

Spoiler warning! This is the fifth book total in the Hidden Legacy series, and the second book about Catalina Baylor. This review may spoil details from previous books in the series. If you want to start at the very beginning, the book you want is Burn for Me. If you want to start with Catalina's books, the first book is Sapphire Flames. 

It's been about six months since the end of the last book, where Catalina Baylor made a very unfortunate, iron-clad deal with her evil grandmother to save Alessandro Sagredo's life, only to discover that he was so caught up in his quest for revenge that he packed up and left town pretty much immediately after, breaking her heart in the process. Not that Catalina has been wallowing in self-pity and comfort eating while contemplating her emotions, she's been busy strengthening the power of her house and barely surviving dangerous missions as the deputy warden of Texas. 

Now the heir to House Morton has been horribly murdered and members of four other prominent Texas houses are suspects. There are also strange mutated monsters running around Houston, controlled by an unknown force. Catalina is given the mission to find the guilty party, is deeply unhappy when she discovers that Lander Morton, the grieving patriarch of House Morton, has hired Alessandro to dispatch his son's killer, once the murderer is found. Alessandro is no longer the carefree, easy-going flirt he was six months ago, he seems hard and focused now, and is much more willing to share things, both information and his feelings with Catalina. He insists that someone is trying to kill her, and he is in Houston again to protect her. Since Linus Duncan, Catalina's boss agrees to let Alessandro act as her bodyguard, she doesn't really have a choice but to cooperate with him. 

The man that Alessandro has been hunting since he was a teenager is now openly planning to kill Catalina, and possibly Linus Duncan too. Alessandro is willing to do whatever it takes, even risk his own life, to keep Catalina safe. He is unaware of the bargain Catalina made with her grandmother to save his life, effectively giving up any chance they might have had for a future together. Can the two stop the danger that could destroy Houston, survive, and actually have an honest conversation about their feelings?

Once again, the husband and wife writing team that makes up Ilona Andrews have produced an action-packed, funny, and emotional novel. I never stop being amazed by their creativity when it comes to conjuring up new and truly bizarre supernatural threats for their protagonists to face off against. They always have the best monstrous beasties, but of course, the most monstrous threats facing any hero or heroine of theirs is thoroughly human. In this novel, we discover what Alessandro's quest for revenge actually consists of, and why he's been training to become one of the world's top assassins since he was a teenager. We discover the truth behind why Nevada suddenly resigned as head of House Baylor and more or less publicly severed ties with her siblings. Nevada, very heavily pregnant, is much more present in this book. Leon also gets a lot more to do, while Cornelius and Bern sadly take more of a backseat in this story. 

It's hard for me to review books I really love, and I feel that every time I review an Ilona Andrews book, I pretty much end up repeating the same superlatives again and again. If I haven't convinced the people who read these reviews to start reading Andrews' books by now, it will likely never happen. But you're missing out on some of the best (if not THE best) paranormal fantasy being written today.

Judging a book by its cover: I stand by what I said when commenting on the cover for Sapphire Flames, this is the first non-self-published series where Ilona Andrews actually have decent looking covers. I like the various shades of green and the female cover model's dress. I think they've kept the same woman portraying Catalina from the previous cover shoot, but it looks like the male model, portraying Alessandro, has been replaced. Also, it could just be unfortunate shading, but the male model appears to have a soul patch, which is NOT attractive. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

#CBR12 Book 68: "Viscount Vagabond" by Loretta Chase

Page count: 228 pages

Rating: 2.5 stars

#CBR12 Bingo: Shelfie

Official book description:

Catherine Pelliston simply would not abide by her father's wishes and marry the slovenly Lord Browdie. But her escape through the streets of London only seemed to lead her from bad to worse. First, she was robbed. And then, her supposed "rescue" by a kindly old woman stranded Catherine in a bordello -- where the handsome Viscount Rand was intent on sampling her wares! A dire predicament indeed-especially when the dashing aristocrat decided to assume full responsibility for the ravishing runaway by taking her, quite against her will, into his home. But little did Catherine know that her struggle to preserve her virtue had inflamed the debauched gadabout's heart ... and might well net her a husband worth desiring!

This is one of Loretta Chase's early romances, originally published in 1988, and later re-issued in e-book format in 2012. One of her most famous novels, Lord of Scoundrels, didn't come out until 1995. This book is both shorter, and a lot less sophisticated than her later, more famous works. It's also not terribly memorable. I finished this book in mid-August and even now, reading through the blurb, I can only barely remember plot specifics. 

Chase's early writing really doesn't have the same wit and spark as many of her later novels. There are no classic, bad-ass heroines like Jessica Trent, charming rogues like Rupert Carsington, or enigmatic spies like the Comte D'Esmond. Catherine is pretty painfully naive and very lucky that the nobleman she appeals to doesn't in fact ravish her, but rather takes pity on her, rescues her, and promptly deposits her with his very respectable sister, who can act as her chaperone. See, I remember that much. I also recall that the sister's husband has a much better grasp of the various notable families of the ton, and therefore knows immediately who Catherine actually is and which family she's run away from, and happily aids his wife's matchmaking attempt for the rest of the book. I remember there was a potential of scandal when someone (not entirely sure who now), possibly Catherine's not-quite-fiancee, figured out that she had spent some time in a brothel - but it all comes right in the end - natch, this is a romance novel.

Checking my records, I actually bought this e-book back in 2012 (when I was still discovering Ms. Chase's back catalogue) and it's been sitting on my shelf ever since. I could have used it for the White Whale square, but it's one of those books that I've had for so long, I'd more or less forgotten about it when I was planning my Bingo Card. It did, however, fit in my Alphabet Soup reading challenge for V, and once I looked it up on LibraryThing, I was surprised at how long it had been on my digital shelves, unread. It's not exactly easy to take a photo of a digital book, but here is a screenshot of the LibraryThing shelf - which is the best I can do to fulfil the demands of the Shelfie square. 

In conclusion, if you're not a true die-hard completist about Loretta Chase, this is a book that is entirely skippable. If it didn't fit into a number of my reading challenges (I can cross off a bingo square, it fits in my historical fiction challenge, in my two TBR challenges, as well as the alphabet challenge) and I already owned it, I doubt I would have ever read it. 

Judging a book by its cover: This is the rather generic cover given to the new digital edition when I got the book. The original 80s cover is a true marvel of pastels, a very brooding hero and a swooning heroine in his embrace (but wearing historically appropriate outfits, which is more than one can say for a large majority of more modern historical romances published today - Lisa Kleypas' Ravenel series and Tessa Dare's Girl Meets Duke, I am especially thinking about you right now. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

#CBR12 Books 65-67: "The Sandman, part 1" by Neil Gaiman and Dirk Maggs

Page count: 632 (covers the collected volumes of Preludes and Nocturnes, The Doll's House and Dream Country)

Audiobook length: 10 hrs 54 mins

Rating: 4.5 stars

#CBR12 Bingo: Happy (I never thought that Sandman could be adapted into an audio story, so this made me very happy indeed)

Official book description:

When The Sandman, also known as Lord Morpheus - the immortal king of dreams, stories and the imagination - is pulled from his realm and imprisoned on Earth by a nefarious cult, he languishes for decades before finally escaping. Once free, he must retrieve the three “tools” that will restore his power and help him to rebuild his dominion, which has deteriorated in his absence. As the multi-threaded story unspools, The Sandman descends into Hell to confront Lucifer, chases rogue nightmares who have escaped his realm, and crosses paths with an array of characters from DC comic books, ancient myths, and real-world history, including: Inmates of Gotham City's Arkham Asylum, Doctor Destiny, the muse Calliope, the three Fates, William Shakespeare , and many more. 

In July 1998, my life changed forever. In those days, I still lived in a suburb of Oslo and didn't necessarily visit the centre of the city all that often. When I did, I always took a trip to Avalon, the dedicated fantasy/sci-fi/all things nerd book shop there (the book shop sadly closed long ago now). On a display table near the front of the shop was Fables and Reflections, by no means the first volume in the long-running Sandman series, but an excellent introduction. I think Neil Gaiman had recently visited Oslo for the first time, and the shop was promoting his most famous work. I had never read any graphic novels before but was drawn by the description of the series. I bought the book, started reading it on the bus on the way home, and my mind was blown. I had never read anything like it before, and I was utterly hooked on the stories of dreams and nightmares, the family dramas with references to all manner of mythology, classical literature, comic books, and the like. 

This was a time when Norwegian libraries were not particularly well-stocked with fantasy of any kind, and certainly not English-language comic books and graphic novels (I'm happy to say that that's changed massively over the last 20 years - one of the public library branches in Oslo is now dedicated entirely to comics and graphic novels in different languages. Hence, I had to buy each volume before I could read the full story. My records show that it took me about a year to get all ten volumes of trade paperbacks, some of which I've now had signed by Neil Gaiman himself. 

Funny story, one of them isn't actually signed to Malin, because my dear friend Ben was a bit of an idiot back when he took my copy of Preludes and Nocturnes to a signing in Newcastle. This was back before I really knew him, and he was still just my then-boyfriend, now-husband Mark's school friend. See, Ben and another of Mark's school friends, Ruth, had initially joked that his Norwegian girlfriend's name was Helga. By the time Ben was taking one of my precious trade paperbacks to Newcastle to get it signed as a favour, he'd met me several times, and knew my name was Malin. But when he got to the front of the signing line, and Mr. Gaiman asked him who to sign the book to, Ben (lovable moron) blurted out Helga, and only after he'd left the shop remembered that it was not, in fact, my actual name. This is also why I have a signed copy of Anansi Boys, where Neil Gaiman apologizes to me for getting my name wrong. 

 

Anyway, the long and rambling introduction to this review is included to show just how long Sandman has been part of my life, and how much it means to me. It was my introduction to graphic novels and the writings of Neil Gaiman. It showed me a whole new way of storytelling. I never thought it could be adapted well in a million years (I'm still skeptical about the Netflix series). I've rarely been so happy to tell you I was wrong. This was an excellent adaptation, and I think I liked parts of it a lot more than the actual original comics issues (while a lot of the artists and artwork used in the series was state of the art back in the 1990s, it's sometimes a bit "grimy-looking" now - unless you have the stunning Absolute Sandman volumes, that cost a small fortune). 

So how do you successfully adapt what is both a written and a visual medium, you ask? You hire an excellent ensemble cast, so that all of the various characters we meet in the pages of the first three volumes of the graphic novel opus are voiced by different and distinct voices (there's a huge ensemble of people who do multiple voices over the course of the audio drama, but never in the same scenes, making it much easier to keep track of who's speaking at any given time). You also get someone to narrate and describe the various scenes and characters in them (or occasionally add descriptions of the setting and characters to the inner monologues of one or several of the people in a scene), so the listener is told what they would have seen on the page if they were reading the comic. That the narrator here is Neil Gaiman himself (whose voice I find very soothing) just seems extra fitting.

I read several reviews of this audio drama that complained that with very few exceptions, everything is kept exactly as it was in the original 90s comics, with no attempts to adapt or bring it more up to date. This was mentioned as a criticism, I didn't think it was a problem. I also know the source material being adapted exceptionally well, having read the comics multiple times. Even so, as I kept listening, I actually pulled my trade paperbacks off the shelf to halfway follow along. To someone who's never read the original graphic novels, it may be harder to follow the plot, even though the team who adapted did a very good job in filling in with background sounds to give you an idea of action and plot.

Each issue of the comic is one approximately 30-minute long episode, with little audio credits and everything. It felt like I was listening to an old-fashioned radio play, and I loved it. How well the adaptation works for you may also depend on how you feel about James McAvoy. I love him and his voice, and think he did a splendid job voicing Lord Morpheus. Kat Dennings worked surprisingly well as Death. The only one I wasn't entirely happy with was the guy playing Desire, whose voice just didn't "fit" with my mental image of what it should be. 

A brief trigger warning towards the end. In both Preludes and Nocturnes, The Doll's House and Dream Country, there are elements of horror. The issue 24 Hours, for instance, where a number of people are kept trapped in a diner by an escaped Arkham Asylum inmate in control of Dream's ancient ruby and are slowly driven increasingly more insane over the course of the story was even more horrifying than it is on the page because all the various people got their own voices and felt more real than they do when you just read them. It was harder to stay detached. There are also stories of serial killers, and child abuse and women being raped and beaten - so be aware of that. 

Now I'm left impatiently waiting and hoping that this becomes enough of a success for Audible that they'll choose to adapt the rest of the series as well. Recording audio dramas must be something that should be perfectly doable even now, with production halted on so many things due to Covid-19.

While I'm choosing to use this for my "Happy" square for this year's bingo, it could just as easily have fit with "Nostalgia", since this was such an important part both of my adolescence and so ground-breaking for comics in general during the 1990s. 

Judging a book by its cover: I have tried to track down the name of the cover artist for the dark, broody image of Dream, without any luck. It's a good depiction of Lord Morpheus, and I like that it looks like he himself is made up of sand or dust and kind of blurring at the edges a bit. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

#CBR12 Book 63: "Boyfriend Material" by Alexis Hall

Page count: 432 pages

Rating: 5 stars

#CBR12 Bingo: Reader's Choice (replaces How-To)

Official book description:

Wanted:

One (fake) boyfriend

Practically perfect in every way

Luc O'Donnell is tangentially--and reluctantly--famous. His rock star parents split when he was young, and the father he's never met spent the next twenty years cruising in and out of rehab. Now that his dad's making a comeback, Luc's back in the public eye, and one compromising photo is enough to ruin everything.

To clean up his image, Luc has to find a nice, normal relationship...and Oliver Blackwood is as nice and normal as they come. He's a barrister, an ethical vegetarian, and he's never inspired a moment of scandal in his life. In other words: perfect boyfriend material. Unfortunately, apart from being gay, single, and really, really in need of a date for a big event, Luc and Oliver have nothing in common. So they strike a deal to be publicity-friendly (fake) boyfriends until the dust has settled. Then they can go their separate ways and pretend it never happened.

But the thing about fake-dating is that it can feel a lot like real-dating. And that's when you get used to someone. Start falling for them. Don't ever want to let them go.

A lot of contemporary romances are marketed as rom-coms nowadays, but very few of them actually feel as if they fit the description. Boyfriend Material, on the other hand, is frequently laugh out loud funny (and not just if you went to university with a bunch of British poshos, so parts of this feel terribly familiar) and the plot is even structured as a traditional British rom-com, complete several quirky and supportive secondary characters (one group for each protagonist, with some overlap) and a plot with big third act complications, grand gestures to win the other back and so forth. 

While I have known of Alexis Hall as a writer since he briefly reviewed new to him classic romances in a very witty way over on Dear Author a long time ago now, I've only actually read one other of his books, and that was back in 2014. That was also a m/m romance, but it was, if I recall, considerably more angsty and Hall's writing skills have greatly improved since then. 

The vast majority of contemporary romance that gets published is set in the US, and that's not surprising. Yet this book is very British, and as someone who lived in the UK for six years, and lived in dorms with and interacted with a lot of the same people as several supporting characters in this book, it felt refreshing and very comforting that this was set in London, and people drank cups of tea when they were upset and did other things that felt very familiar to me. 

Luc and Oliver work as a couple because they are both absolutely hopeless but in very different ways. They're just sort of getting by until they meet the other, who both complicates and improves their life. I loved both of them and had absolutely no problem understanding why they each had a number of very supportive friend groups, who invested a lot in getting their fake relationship to blossom into something actually real. 

If The Right Swipe felt like it just wasn't entirely for me, at least not at the time when I read it, this book, however, seemed like it was exactly what I needed and just hadn't realised until the moment when I picked it up. I stayed up way too late into the night reading this, which in itself is unusual these days, when it takes a lot more for a book to catch and hold my attention. As I have already mentioned, it made me laugh out loud several times while reading it. That's not to say that there isn't seriousness throughout, as well. 

I would love to see this book turned into an actual movie. Netflix seems to be doing big business resurrecting the rom-com as a profitable genre. Get on this, will you?

Judging a book by its cover: I've seen this cover compared to the cover for my beloved Red, White and Royal Blue several places online, which I find amusing, because with the exception of both books featuring two cartoon dudes on the cover, they look very little alike. The former book is bright pink, while this book is actually red, white and blue - so perhaps that is the source of the confusion? I do like the various nods to London sights on the cover, not to mention the absolutely essential cup of tea. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

#CBR12 Book 60: "Born to Run" by Bruce Springsteen

Page count: 528 pages

Audio book length: 18 hrs 12 mins

Rating: 4 stars

#CBR12 Bingo: Music

Official book description:

In 2009, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band performed at the Super Bowl’s halftime show. The experience was so exhilarating that Bruce decided to write about it. That’s how this extraordinary autobiography began.

Over the past seven years, Bruce Springsteen has privately devoted himself to writing the story of his life, bringing to these pages the same honesty, humor, and originality found in his songs.

He describes growing up Catholic in Freehold, New Jersey, amid the poetry, danger, and darkness that fueled his imagination, leading up to the moment he refers to as “The Big Bang”: seeing Elvis Presley’s debut on The Ed Sullivan Show. He vividly recounts his relentless drive to become a musician, his early days as a bar band king in Asbury Park, and the rise of the E Street Band. With disarming candor, he also tells for the first time the story of the personal struggles that inspired his best work, and shows us why the song “Born to Run” reveals more than we previously realized.

Born to Run will be revelatory for anyone who has ever enjoyed Bruce Springsteen, but this book is much more than a legendary rock star’s memoir. This is a book for workers and dreamers, parents and children, lovers and loners, artists, freaks, or anyone who has ever wanted to be baptized in the holy river of rock and roll.

When this book came out in December 2016, it was a natural Christmas present for both my husband and my mother. I always had plans to read it for myself but was in no immediate hurry to do so. Nevertheless, when there was a bingo square devoted to music, it seemed like the perfect book to choose. I listened to the audiobook version, narrated by Springsteen himself, and featuring snippets of some of his most well-known music. Springsteen is an excellent storyteller, as evidenced in much of his lyrics over the years, and I already knew that he could be funny and self-deprecating from interviews I've seen or live shows I've been lucky enough to go to myself. I'd also experienced some of his openness and honesty about his life in the Springsteen on Broadway show, but this book gives you so much more detail about his life and career.

I've been listening to Bruce Springsteen's music since long before I knew what it really was. For all that Norway has fewer than 6 million inhabitants, he really does have a very large following of die-hard fans in this country. My mother is one of them. We would listen to cassette tapes of Springsteen's music in the car on longer journeys (by no means only Springsteen, there was Abba and Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon and a bunch of other artists too), The Boss holds a special place in my mother's heart, and as I've grown older, in mine too.

My husband, the man I've been together with for twenty years at this point, also loves Bruce Springsteen. He's camped outside ticket offices in all kinds of weather many times, which is one of the reasons we've been lucky enough to see Springsteen live almost every time he's toured Norway since we moved back here from Scotland in 2004. Buying concert tickets online is too risky, you see, the systems inevitably crash and get overloaded. Springsteen sells out arenas in Norway in minutes (I think the record is seriously something like 6 minutes for 30 000 tickets) and the best way to be guaranteed tickets is buying in person at the arena ticket office (where they reserve a small amount of the tickets). Springsteen is an amazing live performer, and he has never given less than an absolutely awesome show when he tours.

Bruce Springsteen and Steve van Zandt (who starred in the Norwegian-set and produced drama Lillyhammer for several seasons) were also the only international artists to perform during the 2012 memorial concert for the victims of the 22nd of July 2011 mass shooting. Springsteen and the E-Street Band had done a concert in Oslo the day before and wanted to show their respect to the victims and their families. So it's no wonder he's beloved by his Norwegian fans.

I don't listen to or care about music in the way my husband does. For him, music is absolutely essential and he can't believe how often I can listen to a certain song, yet never seem to pick up specifics from the lyrics. He wrote his Masters' Thesis on the lyrics of Bob Dylan. To me, music is something perfectly nice to have on in the background when I'm reading or doing chores or wandering around, but I might just as well listen to an audio book. Music rarely moves me to tears or gets me emotional, in the way it affects my husband. Hence, I don't really tend to read in-depth artist interviews and the like, and this is the first musician autobiography I've read. Even having seen the Springsteen on Broadway show, where he's very honest about his rather dark childhood and his own struggles with depression, I hadn't realised the extent to these things. 

Things I learned while reading this book: despite being famous for writing about cars and driving, Springsteen didn't learn to drive until he was in his 20s. His father was a paranoid schizophrenic who wasn't diagnosed until late in life. Springsteen has had several really serious bouts of crippling depression, but touring is one of the things that helps him combat them. Springsteen wrote The River, possibly one of my two favourite songs of his (the other being Thunder Road) about his sister Virginia and her husband, who are still happily married to this day. The politicians working to make Born to Run as the official song of New Jersey really haven't listened very well to the lyrics of the song. Springsteen didn't realise that Courtney Cox was an actress hired to be in the Dancing in the Dark video until much later, he just thought she was a fan of his selected to dance on stage with him. Patty Scialfa is clearly an awesome lady. 

I really don't know how this book would work for someone who isn't at least a casual fan of Bruce Springsteen, as I'm not sure you'd care all that much about his life and career if you're not. It's an entertaining and really well-told book, however, and I can very much recommend listening to the audio.

Judging a book by its cover: The cover photo of Springsteen was taken in 1978, a year before I was born. By this point, Springsteen had released four studio albums, including Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town. The car he's sitting on is a Corvette, a car he could well afford, as his career was really starting to take off. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

#CBR12 Book 59: "Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging" by Louise Rennison

Page count: 272 pages

Rating: 3 stars

#CBR12 Bingo: Nostalgia (set in the 1990s, when I was a teenager)

Official book description: 

Angus: My mixed-breed cat, half domestic tabby, half Scottish wildcat. The size of a small Labrador, only mad.

Thongs: Stupid underwear. What's the point of them, anyway? They just go up your bum, as far as I can tell.

Full-Frontal Snogging: Kissing with all the trimmings, lip to lip, open mouth, tongues ... everything.

Her dad's got the mentality of a Teletubby (only not so developed). Her cat, Angus, is trying to eat the poodle next door. And her best friend thinks she looks like an alien -- just because she accidentally shaved off her eyebrows. Ergghhhlack. Still, add a little boy-stalking, teacher-baiting, and full-frontal snogging with a Sex God, and Georgia's year just might turn out to be the most fabbitty fab fab ever!

If I read this book (the first in a long series about opinionated teenage girl Georgia Nicholson) at the right time, i.e. when I myself was a teenager, or near enough to it, I probably would have liked it a lot more. As a woman who recently turned 41, I'm very obviously not the target audience, I think this would probably be most suitable for the younger segment of the YA readers (I think older readers would want something a bit more sophisticated). 

We follow Georgia Nicholson for a full year, through her diary entries. She complains a lot about her parents, especially her painfully exasperating dad, as well as her toddler sister, whom she clearly also loves a lot. Georgia is preoccupied with being popular, wearing make-up and getting the attention of boys. Since she goes to an all-girls school, with strict uniform requirements, being fashionable and cool, not to mention meeting boys regularly, is a bit of a challenge. 

In many ways, Georgia and her friends, as described in this book, reminded me a lot of the girls we see in the delightful British sit com Derry Girls and meant, that while I didn't exactly relate a lot to her, neither did I find Georgia as exasperating as I suspect some adult readers might. She clearly has a lot of maturing to do, and could clearly be a slightly more understanding and patient daughter and certainly a more supportive friend. Alas, she is a teenage girl, one of the most self-absorbed and narcissistic creatures on the planet. 

I got this book for free in an e-book offer several years ago. It was a fun enough read, but I doubt I'll be seeking out more books in the series. There are too many other books out there, aimed more at my demographic, that I could be reading instead. 

Judging a book by its cover: The cat on this cover is nowhere near as big or mean-looking as the Angus of the book is described. Georgia claims he's the size of a small golden retriever. I imagined him a bit like Greebo from Pratchett's Discworld books, myself. They could really have done with making the cover a bit more exciting, actually. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

#CBR12 Book 58: "Bellweather Rhapsody" by Kate Racculia

Page count: 352 pages

Rating: 4.5 stars

#CBR12 Bingo: No Money (in fact, won in the prize raffle for the first annual CBR Bingo)

Official book description:

Fifteen years ago, a murder-suicide in room 712 rocked the grand old Bellweather Hotel and the young bridesmaid who witnessed it, Minnie Graves. Now hundreds of high school musicians have gathered at the Bellweather for the annual Statewide festival; Minnie has returned to face her demons; and a blizzard is threatening to trap them all inside. When a young prodigy disappears from infamous room 712, the search for her entwines an eccentric cast of conductors and caretakers, teenagers on the verge and adults haunted by memories.

As I mentioned above, I won a signed (!) copy of this a few years ago in the first Cannonball Bingo raffle. It's also been favourably reviewed by a bunch of people I trust, and so it felt appropriate to read it for this year's bingo. 

Because I never seem to learn, I'm back to reviewing things I read about two months ago, and despite promising myself that I will be good and take notes while reading and especially after finishing a book, I never do. It's not like I'm lacking in pens or notebooks (I have SO many!), I just can't seem to find the time or energy to actually sit down and jot down my thoughts upon completing a book. So this review will be a bit of a jumble of things I remember liking in the book.

As I'm sure you can guess from the book description, this is a mystery novel featuring a large and eclectic cast of characters in an old, rather spooky hotel. There are strong personalities both among the teenage and adult cast, there are mysterious disappearances, there are unreliable narrators, strange coincidences, and unexpected connections between individuals who initially seem to have nothing whatsoever to do with one another. 

We meet the wonderfully named Hatmaker twins, Alice and Rabbit, who are both going to the now pretty delapidated Bellweather hotel (think the hotel from the Shining) for a weekend retreat for talented young musicians. Alice is ambitious, outgoing and despite wanting to be a star actress, struggles with empathising with anyone else. Her twin Rabbit is introverted, reserved, nerdy and devoted to his instrument. He also very much wants to come out to his sister at some point during the weekend, but has no idea how to begin approaching the subject. 

There's also the Hatmaker's chaperone, a woman with a lot of buried trauma and violence in her past. There's Alice's roommate, a child prodegy with a very contentious relationship to her icy and controlling mother, the eccentric conductor of the student orchestra (a former prodigy himself), the aging concierge at the hotel who wants everything to run smoothly and fondly remembers the hotel's glory days, as well as the mystery guest with her emotional support dog who shows up right as things start getting really dramatic.

All the characters felt wonderfully real and complex. Some of them are deeply dislikable, but they all seem like actual people, and just seeing the various ways in which they interacted would have kept me turning the pages, even if there wasn't a mystery to be solved. There are a lot of twists and turns. I think I'd figured out a couple before they were actually revealed, but mostly, I was frequently surprised and entertained by this story. I can see why so many people have rated it highly.

Judging a book by its cover: The cover of this unusual mystery might not make a lot of sense until you've actually finished the novel. The big hotel in the background, all the snow, and the lonely grand piano, with the knocked over piano stool. The choices the cover designer has made make more sense after you've finished the story. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

#CBR12 Book 54: "Take a Hint, Dani Brown" by Talia Hibbert

Page count: 320 pages
Rating: 5 stars

#CBR12 Bingo: Yellow

Official book description:

Danika Brown knows what she wants: professional success, academic renown, and an occasional roll in the hay to relieve all that career-driven tension. But romance? Been there, done that, burned the T-shirt. Romantic partners, whatever their gender, are a distraction at best and a drain at worst. So Dani asks the universe for the perfect friend-with-benefits—someone who knows the score and knows their way around the bedroom.

When brooding security guard Zafir Ansari rescues Dani from a workplace fire drill gone wrong, it’s an obvious sign: PhD student Dani and ex-rugby player Zaf are destined to sleep together. But before she can explain that fact, a video of the heroic rescue goes viral. Now half the internet is shipping #DrRugbae—and Zaf is begging Dani to play along. Turns out, his sports charity for kids could really use the publicity. Lying to help children? Who on earth would refuse?

Dani’s plan is simple: fake a relationship in public, seduce Zaf behind the scenes. The trouble is, grumpy Zaf’s secretly a hopeless romantic—and he’s determined to corrupt Dani’s stone-cold realism. Before long, he’s tackling her fears into the dirt. But the former sports star has issues of his own, and the walls around his heart are as thick as his... um, thighs.

Suddenly, the easy lay Dani dreamed of is more complex than her thesis. Has her wish backfired? Is her focus being tested? Or is the universe just waiting for her to take a hint?

While this is the second book in the Brown Sisters series, you don't strictly speaking need to read Get a Life, Chloe Brown in order to understand or enjoy this one. It works perfectly well on its own, but the first book is also a very sweet and enjoyable romance, which I would also highly recommend. 

It's so much harder to review books that you really love, isn't it? I can't even put into words entirely why I adored this book, maybe it was just the right book at the right time for me? Nonetheless, I will try to put down some bullet points about why I am certain this book is going in my top 10 at the end of the year, and quite possibly in my top 3.

Things I loved:

• Zaf. Zafir "Zaf" Ansari used to be a professional rugby player (not like national level or anything, but he still had a promising career ahead of him). Then his father and beloved older brother died in a car accident, and Zaf's world imploded. The press got wind of the accident and the extra attention combined with his crippling grief caused him to spiral into anxiety and depression. Now, years later, Zaf is trying to use his knowledge both of mental health issues and athletics to teach young athletes to get in touch with their softer side and combat toxic masculinity. His sports charity isn't exactly going too well though, as Zaf could be better at social media than he is, and he's also deeply reluctant to advertise his past as a professional player, worried that his tragic back story is going to be brought up again. As well as being a super guy who volunteers to work with angry youths, Zaf is a loyal friend, great son, brother-in-law and uncle (I adored the relationship he had with all of them) and he reads romance novels in his spare time! He's also tall, and strong and fit and has a gorgeous beard. How can you not love a hero like that?
• Dani. While Danika "Dani" Brown is a much harder nut to crack, being super focused on her research, her Ph.D and her goal to becoming a professor. When she's focused on work, she can forget to sleep or eat, and certainly about things like a significant other's birthday or anniversaries and such. Due to a series of bad relationships, Dani has become convinced that she is utterly unlovable and that she has neither the time for or need of softer feelings like love and affection (despite the fact that she clearly loves and is deeply loved by her two sisters, her grandmother and her best friend Socha). She wants a no-strings-attached, purely sexual relationship with someone, but nothing involving mushy things like hand-holding, cuddling, spending the night together or the like.
• The various friend and family relationships in this book, both on Zaf's and Dani's side. There's an amazing cast of supporting characters here. With the exception of Sorcha, Dani's best friend, I'd "met" all of the ones on Dani's side before, in Get a Life, Chloe Brown. Dani's older sister Chloe; Red, Chloe's boyfriend; Eve, Dani's younger sister and their rather eccentric grandmother all appear to lend support at one point or another. On Zaf's side, there is his lovely mother, his best friend Jamal, his sister-in-law Kiran and his snarky niece Fatima (who is also one of Dani's students). These characters felt completely real to me. There's a tiny secondary romance happening behind the scenes between Jamal and Kiran, which I would also happily read a whole book about.
• The relationship between Dani and Zaf, even before they agree to 'fake date' and are just flirting and trading quips every morning. The way Dani is concerned about Zaf and his feelings, even when she claims not to care about anyone else. The way Zaf is utterly fascinated by all of Dani's knowledge and academic expertise and not at all threatened by the fact that she is brilliant and driven and has very clear career plans. The scenes where they are forced to play a 'newly-weds' type game on the radio, unexpected, and discover just how much they know about each other, even though they're only pretending to be a couple, is lovely and very funny.
• The grand gesture that Dani performs in order to prove to Zaf that she actually cares about him (and the secret she reveals that she's been working on in the epilogue - such squee!)
• Slightly spoilery - NO pregnancy epilogue, because for a lot of people, having babies is NOT the goal!

I love this book so much and while Eve, the youngest sister, sort of annoyed me in the first book (she has a tendency to use the wrong word for things and get annoyed when others try to correct her - it drove me mad), I am now really excited and hopeful about her book as well. Based on the first two books in the series, Talia Hibbert has my complete trust and I'm so glad I've discovered another contemporary romance author to enjoy.

Judging a book by its cover: While I'm normally not the greatest fan of the cartoon cover trend, for some reason I'm charmed silly by the ones on Talia Hibbert's books. The little cartoon Zaf carrying Dani, with her bright pink hair, and the little pile of books in the background, it all works for me. I also really like that while the first book in the series was a pretty boring white, this is a cheerful and distinctive bright yellow.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR12 Book 53: "The Ten Thousand Doors of January" by Alix B. Harrow

Page count: 385 pages
Audio book length: 12 hrs 20 mins
Rating: 4 stars

#CBR12 Bingo: Debut

Official book description:

In a sprawling mansion filled with peculiar treasures, January Scaller is a curiosity herself. As the ward of the wealthy Mr. Locke, she feels little different from the artefacts that decorate the halls: carefully maintained, largely ignored, and utterly out of place.

Then she finds a strange book. A book that carries the scent of other worlds, and tells a tale of secret doors, of love, adventure and danger. Each page turn reveals impossible truths about the world and January discovers a story increasingly entwined with her own.

Little January Scaller is fully aware that even though she gets to wear fancy dresses and take trips to foreign locations with the rich Mr. Locke, her father's employer, she doesn't really belong in his big, sprawling mansion in Vermont. He's an old, white man, she's a little girl with dark hair and skin a brownish coppery hue. Her mother is dead and her father travels the world, risking his life and acquiring exotic treasures for Mr. Locke's collection, but is hardly ever back long enough to spend any time with his little girl. The only friend January has is the grocer's boy, Samuel Zappia, who sneaks her adventure stories to read and who she manages to get away to play with on weekends. But as Mr. Locke's ward, January is expected to behave well, and not "consort with the help". 

While on a journey with Mr. Locke to sell some artifacts, January finds a strange door in a field and manages to open it by writing about it in her journal. The door opens to a beautiful seaside village somewhere obviously different, and January finds a foreign coin, before Mr. Locke discovers her and burns both the door and her journal. He hires a strict governess to take care of January and admonishes her that she needs to stop being so wild and start behaving properly. When she's seventeen, January finds a strange book called "The Ten Thousand Doors" and the book makes her realise that she didn't imagine the incident with the strange door when she was younger, and there's a lot more mystery and adventure in the world than she imagined.

The Ten Thousand Doors of January is a remarkable debut that has been nominated for pretty much all the major genre awards (the Nebula, the Locus, the Hugo, the World Fantasy Award) and while it's a bit slow to start, it tells a story of travel and adventure, portals to other worlds, friendships, love, but also dark forces with the wish to colonise, subjugate and control, taking riches and resources to enjoy as your own. I enjoyed the book a lot, but with every piece of foreshadowing, I found that I had figured out where the story was going long before the actual reveal. There were very few real surprises for me over the course of the novel. Considering the book is about portal doors between our world and various exciting fantasy worlds, I wish we'd gotten to explore and see more of the various other worlds than we did. Some of the supporting characters, like Samuel and Helen, January's loyal friends and helpers, could also have gotten a bit more characterisation. 

Still, it's a good read with an interesting message about family and belonging, as well as condemning colonisation and the appropriation and subjugation of foreign cultures to gain wealth and riches. I liked it a lot, but I didn't love it. I'm nevertheless very interested in seeing what Alix B. Harrow writes next.

Judging a book by its cover: I'm not entirely sure what I think of this cover, it gives you very little idea what the book is about or what you might expect to meet between its pages. There's a number of colourful flowers, with elaborate keys hanging from them, and what appears to be a keyhole, or maybe a portal doorway. Considering most of the Doors in the book don't require keys of any kind, I'm not entirely sure what the cover designers were going for. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR12 Book 52: "Call Down the Hawk" by Maggie Stiefvater

Page count: 480 pages
Audio book length: 13 hrs 45 mins
Rating: 4 stars

#CBR12 Bingo: Orange

This is the start of a new series, so it stands alone. You don't have to have read Stiefvater's Raven Cycle series, starting with The Raven Boys, but it gives a lot of useful background to Ronan and the other Lynch brothers. 

Official book description:

The dreamers walk among us . . . and so do the dreamed. Those who dream cannot stop dreaming – they can only try to control it. Those who are dreamed cannot have their own lives – they will sleep forever if their dreamers die.

And then there are those who are drawn to the dreamers. To use them. To trap them. To kill them before their dreams destroy us all.

Ronan Lynch is a dreamer. He can pull both curiosities and catastrophes out of his dreams and into his compromised reality.

Jordan Hennessy is a thief. The closer she comes to the dream object she is after, the more inextricably she becomes tied to it.

Carmen Farooq-Lane is a hunter. Her brother was a dreamer . . . and a killer. She has seen what dreaming can do to a person. And she has seen the damage that dreamers can do. But that is nothing compared to the destruction that is about to be unleashed. . . . 

In this new Dreamer trilogy, Maggie Stiefvater takes some of the characters from her Raven Cycle, like the deeply spiky and hostile Ronan Lynch and his boyfriend Adam Parrish and writes a new story, which also gives more room and development to some who were very peripheral supporting cast, like Ronan's brothers Declan and Matthew. She also introduces a number of new characters, like the talented art forger Jordan Hennessey, who hides the fact that all the women she lives with, are in fact, copies of herself that she dreamed into being. Women who will become comatose shells if she ever dies - and with each dream where she brings forth a copy, she comes a little bit closer to that point. There's also Carmen Farooq-Lane, who works with a group of people determined to track down dreamers, and either make them stop dreaming (which is impossible, then they'll eventually die) or kill them. There is a dangerous prophecy, you see, that one or more dreamers will bring forth the end of the world. While she's unhappy about her assignment and haunted by the fact that she had to help bring down her own brother, she really doesn't feel she has a choice. She's helping to stop Armageddon. 

Ronan and Declan, always at odds, are both haunted by the legacy of their father, the charming, but dangerous Niall Lynch. He was killed very suddenly, and clearly didn't have the time, or possibly just didn't have the inclination, to teach his son the art of dreaming safely. Adam, Ronan's true love, has gone away to college, and due to the dangers that Ronan can manifest when he dreams, he cannot move from the family home, and unfortunate and difficult to explain away things happen when he goes to visit Adam at school, effectively banning him from campus. Now he basically starts having guest appearances in his dreams from another dreamer, who keeps setting him tasks and leading him on a merry chase, for reasons unknown. 

Declan, the eldest, left with the legal responsibility for his brothers when their father died, and their mother, a dream creation of his, drifted into sleep forever, tries desperately to appear as normal and inconspicuous as possible. He dresses to be non-descript, he makes sure to make himself invaluable to his employers in Washington D.C, but not so much so that he might get promoted into a position where people might take a good look at him or his family. Declan has trouble eating and sleeping and worries constantly, something neither of his brothers seem aware of at all. Declan comes to discover that there are more secrets in his past than even he suspected, and he and Ronan will need to find a way to work together to figure them out.

Sweet, good-natured Matthew Lynch has absolutely no idea that he isn't actually one of Niall's three sons, that he was dreamt into creation by Ronan as a child, and raised alongside the two young men he considers brother. If Ronan and Declan are united in anything, it's that Matthew is to be kept safe, and unaware of his own true nature. But something is up with Matthew. He keeps leaving his fancy prep school and running off to look at a particular river - and it may prove difficult to keep the truth from him for much longer.

As well as the Lynch brothers, we have Hennessey and her unfortunate dreamt sisters, whose doom is approaching all the quicker if Hennessey doesn't learn to control her dreams more. While Ronan learned little from his own father, Hennessey learned even less from her famous artist mother, who committed suicide in front of her. She sets a timer to keep herself from falling asleep for more than a few minutes at a time, knowing that each time she dreams properly, she brings out another copy of herself from the dreams, and comes one step closer to her own death.

There is also Carmen Farooq-Lane, who has to babysit a surly, German, teenage visionary, trying to figure out where the dreamer who is going to doom them all is located. She's dutiful, yet conflicted and frequently feels frustrated about her mission brief. 

I remember thinking that The Raven King, the fourth and concluding volume in the Raven Cycle wasn't everything I wanted it to be, and was a bit let down by the ending and pacing of the book. In October 2019, Maggie Stiefvater posted a lengthy, very honest blog post, explaining just how little of the book she actually remembers writing, because she was struggling with really debilitating health problems at the time, and nearly died before they figured out what was wrong with her. So it seems the fact that it works as well as it does is remarkable. 

Now that Stiefvater is healthy again, she writes as lyrically and vividly as always. She's hidden that Ronan is one of her favourite characters, and that there is a lot of her in him. He's a character who it's difficult to like, because he's so angry and defensive and sharp, but you can't help but love him. I really liked learning more about his brothers, and hope the family dynamics become something closer and healthier in the coming books, after some of the revelations in this one. 

I was glad to revisit characters I already knew, and it's always good to meet more of Stiefvater's creations. She writes so well, and I'm glad she's healthy and thriving and writing a new series of books for me to enjoy. Neither the title nor the release date for book 2 is out yet, so I shall just sit, impatiently waiting, for more about the Lynches, and Jordan and Hennessey and Farooq-Lane. I suspect they are all going interesting places. 

 

Judging a book by its cover: This is one of those books that I ended up owning both in paperback and audio format. The paperback I have is the UK edition, where the hawk on the cover (and of the title) looks a bit more stylised and the colour scheme is more peach than orange. Nevertheless, the audiobook cover is the US one, with a lot of orange both in the font used for the title and in the background for the swooping hawk. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR12 Book 51: "The Disasters" by M.K. England

Page count: 368 pages

Rating: 3.5 stars

#CBR12 Bingo: Violet

All Nax Hall has ever dreamed of is going Ellis Station Academy and qualifying as a pilot. Unfortunately, he fails his entrance exam and is sent packing after less than twenty-four hours. Sharing his fate are Rion, Case and Zee, and while they're all waiting for their one-way shuttle back to Earth, they are witness to a terrorist attack on the space station. The four teens manage to steal themselves a small shuttle and narrowly escape getting killed by the attackers. While they know that jumping their space ship into one of the new colony worlds means they can never return home, they have no other choice if they want to escape being exploded.

After crash-landing their shuttle on al-Rihla, one of Earth's earliest colony planets, the four runaways decide that they need to contact the authorities and warn them about the attack on the Academy. They quickly discover, however, that individuals on board the station were clearly working with the terrorists, have covered up the extent of the attack, and blamed what damages couldn't be hidden on Nax and his new crew, who after all, stole a space shuttle and did an unauthorised jump through space. All channels of communication to Earth are cut off, there is no way for our young fuck-ups to warn anyone about anything. They also only barely avoid getting arrested, helped by the mysterious Asra, who wants to help them, in return for some assistance with a heist - they need to steal another space shuttle and take her with them when they fly off-planet. 

The five young fugitives come to realise that the terrorists' plot is much wider-ranging than just taking over Ellis Station Academy. They only have a limited amount of time to track down help and try to save multiple colony planets from being destroyed. 

This was one of the four books selected for Cannonball Book Club's June meeting - The Future is Queer. There's a bunch of LGBTQIA-representation here, as well as representation of other kinds. Nax is bi, Rion is gay, Zee is trans. Nax and Asra (as well as their families) are Muslim. This was a fun book once it got going properly, but I'm not giving it more than 3.5 stars because I wish we'd had a bit more backstory and characterisation given to Rion, Case and Zee, and it took me quite a while to really get into the book (even with the action-packed start). I picked it up and put it down multiple times in the first few chapters. Once they all agree on their exciting space heist and the subsequent rescue mission, I read through the rest of the book quite quickly.

Nax has a complicated relationship with his parents and older brother. Asra's family situation is also very complicated. I wish I could tell you more about the others, but that wasn't really covered, which is one of the things I would have liked MORE of. 

Still, this is England's debut novel and I'm sure she's going to improve in time. It wasn't a bad book, it just could have been even better with a few improvements. 

Judging a book by its cover: Purple is my favourite colour, so I'm in no way complaining about the choice of background colour here. I just think that maybe the cover could have been a bit more elaborate than a space helmet with some spray paint on it. It's a bit too minimalist for my tastes. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

#CBR12 Book 50: "Beach Read" by Emily Henry

Page count: 384 pages
Audio book length: 10 hrs 13 mins
Rating: 4 stars

#CBR12 Bingo: Pandemic (read what you want)

Official book description: 

Augustus Everett is an acclaimed author of literary fiction. January Andrews writes bestselling romance. When she pens a happily ever after, he kills off his entire cast.

They're polar opposites.

In fact, the only thing they have in common is that for the next three months, they're living in neighboring beach houses, broke, and bogged down with writer's block.

Until, one hazy evening, one thing leads to another and they strike a deal designed to force them out of their creative ruts: Augustus will spend the summer writing something happy, and January will pen the next Great American Novel. She'll take him on field trips worthy of any rom-com montage, and he'll take her to interview surviving members of a backwoods death cult (obviously). Everyone will finish a book and no one will fall in love. Really. 

I suspect quite a few people who picked up this book, based on the bright, colourful cover and the light-hearted title were in for quite a surprise if they hadn't read up on the book in advance. This book is not a light, funny, frothy summer read. It doesn't feature anyone sitting or lying on towels on golden sand (despite living in actual beach houses, Gus and January spend remarkably little time on the actual beach). It is nevertheless a good romance, where the characters spend a lot of time reconnecting (they used to go to college together) and becoming fast friends before they realise that they've fallen for one another.

It just seems like it's important to address that our heroine, romance author January Andrews, starts the book in a pretty dark place. When her beloved father unexpectedly died, she discovered that he'd been having an affair. Not only that, but her mother knew about it, did nothing, and helped hide the fact from January. In the months after his funeral, when she was overcome with grief, January's handsome doctor boyfriend dumped her. Now she's pretty much homeless, broke, and needs to write a new book in a few months, or her publisher may drop her. Unfortunately, her belief in true love, meet-cutes, and happily-ever-afters has been completely obliterated. Because she has nowhere else to stay, she's forced to go stay in the beach house in Michigan where her father used to meet up with his mistress. Living in the town where said mistress still resides, in fact. Living in her father's love nest isn't exactly inspiring her creative juices.

To make matters possibly worse, she discovers that the surly neighbour who plays loud music at late-night parties is none other than her old college critique partner, now bestselling author, Augustus Everett. January is used to her writing being dismissed and assumes acclaimed literary darling Augustus will think the same as most others. She's rather relieved when she discovers he suffers from writing block too. The neighbours make a bet - Augustus will try to write a romantic comedy with a happy ending, while January will write something dark and serious that will please literary critics. The first one to get their book published wins. The loser will enthusiastically promote the other's work. January will teach Gus about all the popular romance tropes, he will help her do serious research and allow her to sit in on his interviews with survivors of a death cult.

Changing pace and genre seems to invigorate both of them, and soon both January and Gus are writing more than they have in months. They develop a fast friendship and start talking to each other about a lot of things, but both of them take time to share the emotional scars of their pasts with one another, which is one of the reasons the romance hits a few snags before they find their happy ending. Who wins their little contest? You'll have to read the book to find out.

As far as I'm aware, this is Emily Henry's first adult book, she's previously written a number of young adult novels with some form of paranormal element. I'd only read A Million Junes before this, but have now really liked two books of hers and will absolutely be checking out more in the future. 

Judging a book by its cover: Both the title and the cover of this novel are highly deceptive and frankly actively misleading to the reader. The cover and title promise a fluffy rom-com with people lounging around on beaches, reading, and relaxing. It promises a low-stress, effortless, well, beach read. As this book is about grief, and frustration and overcoming emotional abuse and generally have two characters that at least initially start out some pretty dark places, this cover feels like false advertising. You are not going to get the book promised on the cover.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR12 Book 41: "The House in the Cerulean Sea" by TJ Klune

Page count: 400 pages
Rating: 5 stars

#CBR12 Bingo: I Wish (Travelling anywhere right now seems like an utter impossibility, but I would love to be able to hang out on Marsyas Island with its cast of unique residents)

Linus Baker does not live an exciting or interesting life. When he's not visiting orphanages and checking up on children and teens with unusual abilities or magical powers, he sits in his utterly anonymous cubicle and writes detailed and thorough reports. He goes home to his non-descript little house, occasionally exchanges words with his crabby neighbour, takes care of his vicious cat and the only thing he has that brings his life any brightness are his old records, which he listens to after work at night. He doesn't even dream of anything different, he just goes about his routine life, getting a bit older every day.

Then he's given a highly unusual assignment. He's summoned by the Extremely Upper Management at the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, who feel he'd be the perfect person to carry out a very confidential mission for them. He needs to travel (for the first time ever!) to Marsyas Island, to visit the orphanage there and determine whether or not the six children who live there are dangerous, and write his usual comprehensive reports, both on the life in the orphanage and about the enigmatic Arthur Parnassus, the man who runs it. He's not allowed to tell anyone about this assignment (not that he'd have anyone to share the news with) and he has to promise to be as forthright and thorough as he always has been in the past.

Linus packs up the Department's giant book of rules and regulations, a small suitcase of clothes and his anti-social cat and takes the train, from the dreary city where he lives (and it always seems to be raining) to the stunning coastal town of Marsyas, where everything looks like a stunning postcard and it seems like everything is in bright jewel-tone colours. He's met by a rather hostile young lady who escorts him over to the island and drives him to the orphanage. She knows who he works for and doesn't seem to believe that he has the children or the orphanage's best interests at heart.

Once he's at the orphanage, Linus meets the unusual charges who reside there: a gnome who keeps threatening to murder him and bury him in her lush garden; a forest-sprite; a wyvern who collects coins and buttons; a peculiar gelatinous green blob who wants to be a bellhop more than anything in the world; a nervous, young man who turns into a Pomeranian when startled; and last, but not least, the literal Antichrist. He also meets the charismatic and charming Arthur Parnassus, who unlike the woman who drove Linus to the island, doesn't seem all too worried about Linus' reports or the fact that he's there to report back to the Department in Charge of Magical Youth.

For the entirety of the first week, Linus is rather unsettled and worried, but as he spends more time on the island, getting to know its unusual residents, as well as the tensions they face with the residents of the nearest town, he starts to loosen up, opening himself up to new experiences and change. He begins to see that while the children all have abilities that may be considered a threat, they are also still just children, who need love, protection, acceptance, and a family, which Arthur provides for them. Yet Linus comes to understand that Arthur may be too over-protective, as well, and that the only way for the locals and the orphanage to co-exist peacefully, is if there is more openness and understanding between them.

The world is a truly miserable place the moment, even in the parts of Europe where we've successfully managed to flatten the curve enough to more or less go back to the way it was before Covid-19 hit (although everyone is strongly recommended not to travel abroad anywhere unnecessarily, and I'm not sure I'd feel comfortable doing it even if the government said it was safe). Reading can be a wonderful escape from the constant onslaught of depressing news stories, and this book is truly a blessing in dark times. It's clearly going to be on my top 10 best books of the year, and it's such a delightful, magical little story.

This book is all about the need for a proper home, for someone to understand you and support you and nurture the best qualities in you, while curbing your bad impulses. Linus has been alone for so long, living such a dreary life, he doesn't even know what to do with himself when that begins to change. All the children at Marsyas Island are so strange and unusual that they don't fit anywhere else. Some of them have been shuffled from place to place, without any sense of security. Arthur meets them with love and understanding, but clearly also sets firm rules and boundaries for them. He does, of course, also have a history and reasons for acting the way he does, and once his secrets are revealed, it's not surprising that he's wary about letting the children interact more with the wider world.

As well as a lovely story about finding your true home and the blessings of found family, there is a slow-burning romance at the centre of the story. Drab, self-conscious Linus doesn't entirely know what to do with himself around the glamorous Arthur, but it becomes clear that the attraction is mutual, if very slow-burning. There is also a sweet, unexpected secondary romance revealed towards the end of the book. I absolutely loved this book and can already see myself re-reading it for comfort in the years to come. If you're looking for a respite from the horrors of reality right now, it's well worth picking up.

Judging a book by its cover: While I love the cover image, with its pastel skies and beautiful, quirky scenery, I don't recall the orphanage described as perching precariously on a cliff's edge like that, ready to plummet into the ocean the next time a violent storm swept past. I can see that it adds to the fairy tale feel of the story, but would possibly have preferred if the house looked a bit less like a potential death trap.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR12 Book 38: "House of Earth and Blood" by Sarah J. Maas

Page count: 816 pages
Rating: 4 stars

#CBR12 Bingo: Red

Official book description:
Half-Fae, half-human Bryce Quinlan loves her life. By day, she works for an antiquities dealer, selling barely legal magical artifacts, and by night, she parties with her friends, savoring every pleasure Lunathion—otherwise known as Crescent City— has to offer. But it all comes crumbling down when a ruthless murder shakes the very foundations of the city—and Bryce’s world.

Two years later, her job has become a dead end, and she now seeks only blissful oblivion in the city’s most notorious nightclubs. But when the murderer attacks again, Bryce finds herself dragged into the investigation and paired with an infamous Fallen angel whose own brutal past haunts his every step.

Hunt Athalar, personal assassin for the Archangels, wants nothing to do with Bryce Quinlan, despite being ordered to protect her. She stands for everything he once rebelled against and seems more interested in partying than solving the murder, no matter how close to home it might hit. But Hunt soon realizes there’s far more to Bryce than meets the eye—and that he’s going to have to find a way to work with her if they want to solve this case.

As Bryce and Hunt race to untangle the mystery, they have no way of knowing the threads they tug ripple through the underbelly of the city, across warring continents, and down to the darkest levels of Hel, where things that have been sleeping for millennia are beginning to stir…

House of Earth and Blood is the first volume in Sarah J. Maas' new series, Crescent City, and surprisingly, her first book fully aimed at adults. Considering the really very graphic descriptions of both sex and violence in the Court of Thorns and Roses series, I puzzled at that, but it turns out that when Ms. Maas writes for adults, she writes pretty much exactly the same way, but the characters swear a whole lot more. I guess that's how you know it's aimed at grown-ups instead?

There's a lot to like about this book, and I stand by the 4-star rating I gave it back in April, when I finished reading it. It does, however, have quite a few flaws as well, such as the constant swearing to indicate the change in its intended audience.

Secondly, NO way the book needed to be over 800 pages long. Just absolutely no need for it. The first third of the book or so is super slow and Maas pretty much does the opposite of info-dumping, she portions out little bits of relevant plot information so slowly it's infuriating. It isn't until the final 150 pages or so that the reader actually starts getting a clearer picture of everything that is going on and is able to fully engage with the characters and the story. Spending as long as Maas does introducing a bunch of characters that will then not be appearing in the rest of the story, except in flashbacks, seems a little redundant, even if she wants to show just how important they are to Bryce.

Thirdly, I don't want to speculate on whether it's patriarchal expectations or the author's own preferences that make her basically write descriptions of every female character as an exaggerated parody of the male gaze. We get it, Bryce and her various female friends are all super hot, while all looking completely different, they're clearly sexual fantasy fodder for anyone who fancies women. To be fair, most of the dudes seem to be pretty heavily objectified too, but the descriptions of them didn't seem to go into so much detail.

Finally, I understand that in books like this, there is by now an expectation of a central romance. I didn't really see that Bryce and Hunt needed to get together and found their romance a lot less interesting than pretty much all the other inter-personal relationships of the book.

So, what did I like? The world-building is excellent and I found both the ancient history and the details of the way Crescent City is built up really interesting. The various supernatural creatures and the Houses that belonged to was very cool and I'm sure we'll discover more about this in later stories. The failed rebellion and the harsh way the former rebels were punished was also intriguing, and once she actually got the plot underway, and didn't just establish background info, so to speak, the mystery that Bryce and Hunt have to unravel was rather fiendish.

I liked Bryce and her relationship with her brother, for all that it's fraught, shows a lot of promise. Friendship and loyalty is a very prominent theme throughout the book, and Bryce and Danika's friendship, in particular, was incredibly strong and important. The way Bryce eventually reconnect with her other friends after processing her grief was also very encouraging to me.

Once the plot really kicked into gear, I had trouble putting the book down and blazed through the final parts. Not entirely sure that the ending played by the rules as previously established in the story, there seemed to be some "deus ex" involved, but it was nevertheless very moving, and just like I will forgive rather a lot from big dumb action movies that entertain me, I can forgive quite a bit from books like this too (this is TOTALLY the literary equivalent of a summer blockbuster, at least if you ignore the too long, super slow start).

In conclusion, as the start of a new series, I liked it more than I liked Throne of Glass and A Court of Thorns and Roses. Now, Maas completely blew me away with book 2 of ACoToR, so I have high hopes that this series may improve exponentially now that the parameters of this new fantasy world have been established.

Judging a book by its cover: I know Maas herself loves this cover, and it's certainly elaborate. I just think that there may have been too much red used, and honestly have trouble making out all the details. I can see why the intention to make it look as if the cover image is pretty much saturated with blood is there, there's some pretty bloody and gruesome murders to be solved over the course of this book, but it seems like the various intricacies of the cover image might have been easier to distinguish if there wasn't quite so much red.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR12 Books 34-37: "The Murderbot Diaries" by Martha Wells

Total page count: 650 pages
Total rating for the series: 4.5 stars

#CBR12Bingo: Gateway (this would work as an excellent gateway into sci-fi fiction)

All Systems Red - 4.5 stars
I have reviewed this first novella before, back in 2018, and my original post can be found here. I decided to re-read this first Murderbot story and then read the following three novellas in preparation of the full novel about everyone's favourite misanthropic sec unit, being released in May 2020. By now, when I've finally gotten around to writing my review, the book has of course been out for several months, and I have yet to find the time to read it (June REALLY wasn't a particularly good month for me, reading-wise).

Murderbot, of course, wishes that everyone would just leave it alone to enjoy all its downloaded entertainment, but instead, the humans they're supposed to protect keep getting into scrapes and it has to do its job as a Sec Unit. Once we went into lockdown, I would have happily just self-isolated at home and binge-watched Netflix and HBO, but instead I had to take care of and entertain a rapidly developing two-year-old, and remote teach up to ninety teenagers a week (15 of which I also had to call at least once a week to make sure they were doing OK), while my own mental health steadily deteriorated. Honestly, Murderbot is way better at performing its duties in a high-pressure environment than I have been for the last few months.

It was nice to revisit the beginning and get re-familiarised with the crew that got Murderbot to start feeling all those inconvenient feelings and emotions.

Artificial Condition - 4.5 stars
Murderbot doesn't want to become anyone's "pet" Sec Unit, instead, it goes off on its own, trying to figure out what actually happened in the mining disaster where it killed a number of humans and actually became Murderbot. Discovering the truth of the past will also help Dr Mensah, the kind human who technically now owns Murderbot, as further evidence against the big corporation that may or may not have tried to kill Dr Mensah, Murderbot and their entire crew can only come in handy.

Murderbot makes a new friend, who is even smarter than it is, a Research Vessel going by ART. After a slightly tense and antagonistic start to their relationship, Murderbot and ART bond over their love for space soaps.

Along the way on its new mission, Murderbot also encounters some new humans that it starts feeling protective of. It's all very inconvenient.

Of course, Murderbot's further adventures are just as entertaining, if not better, than the first novella. I really liked ART, and the friendship that developed between it and Murderbot. I also really like how Martha Wells manages to include slower, more introspective passages with tense and fast-paced action scenes, as well as more chances for Murderbot to develop and become more of its own individual.

Rogue Protocol - 4.5 stars
Murderbot continues in its quest to gather evidence against the evil GreyCris corporation and ends up on another mission, protecting hapless humans who don't know to take proper care of themselves. Murderbot needs to find an identity of its own because it's certainly no longer a proper SecUnit, but it's also not a human, nor does it want to become one. In this story, Murderbot meets a group of people travelling with a bot, who they treat with kindness and respect, a bit like a pet (the very fate Murderbot wishes to avoid). Yet Miki the bot, who is all that is optimistic and naive, so pretty much the diametrical opposite of Murderbot, comes to teach Murderbot some important lessons.

While Miki was an interesting character to introduce, I missed Murderbot's snarky friendship with ART in this one. It's also clear that the story is moving towards reuniting Murderbot with its first crew, and I kind of just wished the story would get to that place. Of the four novellas, this was my least favourite. By all means, very good, but it felt more of a bridging story than the others.

Exit Strategy - 5 stars
Murderbot still fights the notion that it has emotions or feelings, but it's pretty much the only thing that can explain why Murderbot decides to expose itself to danger when its actions in the previous story now means that GreyCris, the corrupt corporation that previously tried to kill Dr Mensah and her crew (while Murderbot was hired to protect them) in fact means has been able to take Dr Mensah hostage. Murderbot still doesn't want to be anyone's pet android, but Dr Mensah and her crew always treated Murderbot with respect and sometimes even kindness, and it cannot stand by and let GreyCris win.

Murderbot has to reunite with its old crew, convince them that it wants to help, then they have to find Mensah and rescue her, with everyone hopefully making it back to Preservation in one piece. Of course, Murderbot doubts it will be joining the others, it seems like GreyCris are pretty determined to take it down, once and for all.

As a lot of long-time readers of my reviews know, I don't tend to read a lot of sci-fi. I'm reading more of it since I started going to my local nerd bookstore's monthly book club since we alternate a fantasy and a sci-fi book every other month. Yet the Murderbot novellas are sci-fi that I thoroughly enjoy, probably because it's very heavily character-driven (even if our protagonist is not a human) and there is a very good balance of exciting action scenes and quieter introspective scenes where Murderbot has to interact with others and further develop as an individual. I'm very glad that Martha Wells has written a full-length novel about Murderbot now, and that there seems to be another coming out in 2021. I adore Murderbot's snary, misanthropic but secretly emotional self. I will happily keep reading whatever Ms. Wells chooses to publish.

Judging the books by their covers: All the novellas in the Murderbot series have very elegantly designed covers with a thoroughly science fiction feel. I don't think you'd doubt for a second what genre of book this was, with any of them.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.