CBR14 Book 13: "The Beast and the Bethany" by Jack Meggitt-Phillips

Page count: 256 pages

Rating: 4 stars

 

Ebenezer Tweezer is 511 years old, but you'd never know it to look at him. He lives in a great big house, surrounded by exciting treasures and artifacts and all of this is possible because of the hideous beast he keep in his attic. In return for Ebenezer feading it interesting things, the Beast gives him potions once a year that keep Ebenezer young and beautiful. It's also given him all the special things in his house. However, the Beast is greedy and grows more demanding with each passing year. It only wants to eat things it's never tried before, which in 511 years you can imagine isn't that long a list. The Beast has decided that it wants to eat a nice, juicy child, which may be a line not even Ebenezer will cross.

 

Of course, if the Beast withholds Ebenezer's potions, he'll start aging at a rapid pace, and after a day or two of feeling the effects of age creeping up on him, Ebenezer starts pondering solutions. If he were to feed a really bad child to the Beast, would that really be such a terrible thing? At first, Ebenezer tries to steal a child from the zoo, but all the children there seem terribly well protected by parents. Then he's told about the local orphanage and goes there to find a child that will do instead. However, Ebenezer isn't expecting to get so charmed by so many of the children. Then he encounters Bethany, a very surly and unpleasant little girl, and she seems to be the solution to all of his problems. Then, when Bethany actually meets the Beast, she insults it so gravely it almost refuses to even consider eating her, which would very much be counter to Ebenezer's plans.

 

He decides to take Bethany away and try to fatten her up a bit (she's terribly skinny), while also trying to persuade the Beast that Bethany is in fact exactly the sort of plump and succulent child it has demanded. Completely contrary to Ebenezer's plans, however, is how he starts to warm to her and see actual improvement in her behaviour after a few days together. The longer the two spend together, the more like friends they become, and soon, Ebenezer can no longer live with the idea of feeding Bethany to the Beast. He is aging rather rapidly, though, and the Beast really doesn't like to be told it can't have what it wants. It's up to Bethina to come up with a solution that gets rid of the Beast once and for all, so she and Ebenezer can live happily ever after.

This is delightful middle grade book which I very much look forward to my own son reading at some point in the future. I suspect readers of Roald Dahl, A Series of Unfortunate Events or fans of Despicable Me would find it very entertaining. The book is illustrated throughout with beautiful and very funny pictures by Isabelle Folath, and it was a very quick read in a month when I otherwise managed to complete very few books. I know that there is now a sequel, so I suppose I should see if my local library has a copy. I wouldn't mind spending some more time with Bethany and Ebenezer. 

Judging a book by its cover: I pretty much adore this cover. The almost neon green to draw your eye in (on my copy, the endpapers are sprayed the same lurid colour!), the fang-tastic maw and the no-nonsense little girl in the middle. I wanted to read this the first time I saw it on a library shelf.

 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.  

CBR14 Book 12: "An Impossible Impostor" by Deanna Raybourn

Page count: 336 pages

Rating: 3.5 stars

 

First of all, this is book 7 in an ongoing series. I would not recommend that a new reader start here. The first book in the series is A Curious Beginning. 

Now for the official book description, because my memory is like a sieve:

London, 1889. Veronica Speedwell and her natural historian beau Stoker are summoned by Sir Hugo Montgomerie, head of Special Branch. He has a personal request on behalf of his goddaughter, Euphemia Hathaway. After years of traveling the world, her eldest brother, Jonathan, heir to Hathaway Hall, was believed to have been killed in the catastrophic eruption of Krakatoa a few years before.

But now a man matching Jonathan's description and carrying his possessions has arrived at Hathaway Hall with no memory of his identity or where he has been. Could this man truly be Jonathan, back from the dead? Or is he a devious impostor, determined to gain ownership over the family's most valuable possessions--a legendary parure of priceless Rajasthani jewels? It's a delicate situation, and Veronica is Sir Hugo's only hope.

Veronica and Stoker agree to go to Hathaway Hall to covertly investigate the mysterious amnesiac. Veronica is soon shocked to find herself face-to-face with a ghost from her past. To help Sir Hugo discover the truth, she must open doors to her own history that she long believed to be shut for good.

While a new Veronica Speedwell novel is frequently an instant must-read for me, it took me several months after this book's release to get round to it. I genuinely don't know if it's me, or the book, or a combination of the two, but this installment of Veronica and Stoker's adventures just didn't particularly work for me. 

The main reason for this is the central storyline of 'mysterious, possibly amnesiac nobleman from Veronica's past', the whole situation felt wrong to me. The reveal of the man's true identity and how he connected with Veronica felt melodramatic and a bit forced. Some of the things that came to light just went against what we've learned about Veronica as a character and I certainly cannot believe that this rather unimpressive individual made her act as she apparently did in connection with him. Hence the whole situation and the subsequent complications that arose felt wrong to me and took me out of the story to some extent. 

Additionally, there is the fact that the whole situation made Stoker sad. I adore the big, broody lug and more than once have felt as if Veronica is an idiot for not realising what a catch she has in him. She keeps being aloof and commitment-phobic, when she should clearly be putting a ring on it. So any story complication that upsets Stoker is going to sit badly with me. 

None of the additional family drama in the remote house interested me much either. I think that the only part of the novel I really enjoyed were the bits with the Maharani and her relatives. 

I'm hoping for an improvement in the next installment. I generally really enjoy Raybourn's books and it's not exactly like this book didn't pass the time well enough. It just didn't wow me, and one slightly less enjoyable volume is going to put me off the whole series. It would be good if Veronica realised that she's ready to commit properly to Stoker, though. 

Judging a book by its cover: I'm not sure I like the fuschia/purple colour they've chosen for the cover this time. I'm also not entirely sure who the silhouette with the butterfly net is supposed to be, it looks nothing like how Veronica is described. It looks like they took an outline of the fairy godmother from Cinderella and just stuck a butterfly net onto the magic wand. In other words, I've seen better.

 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

CBR14 Book 11: "Her Favourite Rebound" by Jackie Lau

Page count: 242 pages

Rating: 4 stars

This was an ARC given to me by the author. My views are my own. 

Sierra Wu shares the name of a popular fictional monster slayer (think Buffy Summers), but she's not exactly slaying in her personal life. A complete disappointment to her family since she decided that engineering just wasn't for her, she now runs a moderately successful greeting card store in Toronto. She's also divorced.

However, now she finally has something that her mother finds impressive, a billionaire boyfriend. She's dating the Colton Sanders and if her mother had her way, she would be halfway down the isle already. Sierra doesn't really tell her family until they've been dating for nearly a year, always waiting for the other shoe to drop. She can't shake the feeling that something is missing in her relationship, even before she's surprised on a date by one of Sanders' former business partners, who approaches her and claims she should break up with Sanders, as he isn't who he seems and absolutely doesn't deserve a stunning woman like Sierra.

Jake Tong didn't really believe in love at first sight until he first lays eyes on Sierra Wu, sitting alone at a table in a restaurant. That she turns out to be the girlfriend of Jake's asshole former boss was certainly not what Jake expected, and he does what he can to warn her that her rich boyfriend is a bad guy and she should dump him. 

Sierra, naturally, does not dump Colton, but she starts to question what he does in the time they don't spend together a lot more. She starts to research online and it isn't too difficult to find a number of stories that suggest Colton hasn't exactly gained his tremendous wealth through altruism and charitable works. There's a number of articles about his explotation of his workers and other shady business practices. She also seems to keep running into Jake, although the man swears he's not stalking her. She likes Jake, possibly more than a woman in a relationship should, but still refuses to listen to his suggestions that she kick Colton to the curb. That is, until Sierra goes to see Colton unnanounced, and finds him cheating on her with not one, but two women at the same time. She dumps him then and there and runs straight to Jake, who can't believe his luck.

Writing a romance where one of the protagonists is in a relationship with someone else at the start of the novel is never an easy thing to pull off, but Jackie Lau was very clear even in her promotional material of this book that Colton Sanders, billionaire, certainly wasn't anyone's HEA, and despite her attraction to Jake, Sierra is never unfaithful, something that cannot be said for her ultra wealthy boyfriend. Sierra discovers that Colton usually slept with other women on every trip away from her during their entire relationship, so she's not exactly too heartbroken after their split, or even vaguely tempted to take him back, no matter what sort of insane grand gestures Sanders tries to pull. 

 

It also helps that while Jake is smitten with Sierra, he never crosses the line into creepy or inappropriate, and while he does come to see Sierra at her shop a couple of times (she makes him spend a ridiculous amount of money on one visit), he also stays away from her once she asks for distance. Once Sierra discovers that Colton is, in fact, scum, Jake is very happy to comfort Sierra in any way she requires, and has no intention of becoming her rebound guy, no matter what Sierra might initially think. 

 

Sierra has a lot of emotional baggage to work through before she can get to her happy ending with Jake. She also has to figure out how to deal with the weight of her family's expectations, something Jake also struggles with. Jake has a lot of guilt for the stuff he did while working for Sanders, not to mention the things he enabled Sanders to keep doing. Jake now works to try to make amends for these things, and to prove to his family that he really has changed. 

 

I know from following her on Facebook that Ms. Lau struggled a bit more than usual to finish this book, and it's absolutely a more thorny and messy subject than she normally has in her frequently rather fluffy romances. I think she managed the emotional complexities really well, though, and while Sierra very much ends up being emotionally unfaithful to Colton, it's quite clear that he more than emotionally cheated on her, throughout their relationship. Making Sanders such an out and out bad guy possibly simplifies the emotional fallout for Sierra and Jake, but I didn't have a problem with it.

I think the final Cider Bar Sisters novel will be out next year some time. Ms. Lau has another couple of romances coming out later this year though, which I'm very much looking forward to reading.

Judging a book by its cover: I know that Jackie Lau uses stock photos to make her covers when she self-publishes, and while a lot of them turn out really well, I think this one is one of her lesser efforts. But hey, they can't all be winners.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

CBR14 Book 10: "Beyond the Hallowed Sky" by Ken MacLeod

Page count: 320 pages

Rating: 2 stars

Official book description:

When a brilliant scientist gets a letter from herself about faster-than-light travel, she doesn't know what to believe. The equations work, but her paper is discredited - and soon the criticism is more than scientific. Exiled by the establishment, she gets an offer to build her starship from an unlikely source. But in the heights of Venus and on a planet of another star, a secret is already being uncovered that will shake humanity to its foundations.

 

This book was the March selection in my fantasy/sci-fi bookclub, and the book description makes it sound like time travel is a MUCH bigger part of the plot than it really is. In fact, it's only really mentioned in the prologue and then never again. I'm sure it's going to be expanded upon in future volumes of this series, but since this is the first and only book so far, and no sequels have yet to be given release dates, it's a bit difficult not to feel a bit cheated. 

 

There were a whole load of interesting concepts visited in this book, but none of them really came together properly, and the whole novel ended up feeling like the setup for the next story, which doesn't exist yet. Set in the near-future, when the borders of the world have changed somewhat, one of our story's plotlines is set in Scotland, where a ship's engineer sees something that shouldn't really exist and starts to ponder space travel because of it. The second of the storylines is set on a space station orbiting Venus, where an andoid reporter is investigating and possibly spying. The third of the storylines is set far away on an alien colony, where there is mysterious happenings afoot and possibly hostile alien lifeforms in sentient rock threatening the Earth colonists. It's only in the very end of the book all these storylines meet up, and by that point, I wasn't really sure I'm too bothered about reading what comes next.

 

This seemed to be the general consensus of the member in my book club too. A lot of people were disappointed that the book seemed to promise time travel, then there was only a brief mention of it. Some thought that the storyline with the Scottish engineers dragged too much (me included) although there is some interesting stuff about artificial intelligence that pretty much anticipates your needs. By the time you've remembered that you should buy your wife a present, your social media AI has already placed and paid for an order of the thing your wife would most like. Pretty neat, but again not really explored in enough detail.

 

The clearly modelled on James Bond journalist/spy andoid on the space station had a lot of promise too, but I didn't like where his arc ended up. The storyline that possibly dragged the most for me was the one on the alien colony. We never really find out which faction of humanity has discovered faster than light travel and managed to send people to the far reaches of space, they're too busy trying to figure out why possibly ancient aliens residing in the rocks are trying to attack them. By the end of the story, it seems as if more of humanity is being sent to the alien planet to colonise, including the son of the Scottish engineers we've also read about, so I'm guessing the next book will explore life in space a lot more. Whether I will be picking up book two if it ever gets written, is another story.

Giving this book two stars might seem harsh, but I really did only find it OK. I kept putting it down and forcing myself to pick it back up, and I don't see myself ever wanting to reread it, or keep on reading the series. It seems like Ken MacLeod has written a bunch a books, but based on this novel, he's not an author I'll be reading anything more from anytime soon.

Judging a book by its cover: Fairly generic sci-fi cover, really. A wormhole or black hole or some sort of space portal. A teeny tiny little space craft. The hint of what is probably an alien planet. Nothing too exciting, nothing too objectionable.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

CBR14 Book 9: "Dear Martin" by Nic Stone

Page count: 226 pages

Rating: 4.5 stars

Justyce McAllister is a seventeen-year-old with a bright future, thanks to his grades and being lucky enough to have a mother who has worked herself to the bone to send him to the prestigious prep school in Atlanta. Then one evening, when trying to help his extremely drunken ex-girlfriend get home safely (she's half-black, but looks more like her Norwegian mother than her black dad), he's detained by a very aggressive cop who's convinced he was trying to carjack and abduct the girl. Even after the girl's actual parents show up at the scene to protest, the cop is reluctant to let Justyce go and the scars the episode give him aren't limited to the bruising on his wrists that take weeks to heal. 

Justyce suddenly finds himself becoming a lot more aware of race relations and especially the micro-aggressions that he and his fellow black students at the school (there aren't many) suffer, as well as how cases of police violence against black youths are being presented in the media, not to mention tried in the courts. His best friend Manny has a rich CEO father and lives a life of privilege very different from what Justyce has experienced growing up. Manny has a bunch of white friends and doesn't seem to understand exactly why Justyce suddenly seems to see racism everywhere. The fact that Manny's frequently insensitive friends can hold him up as a black success story to prove that, sure, there's equality now, doesn't exactly help matters. Justyce begins to spend more time with his debate partner, valedictorian S-J (Sarah Jane). She's Jewish, so a lot more used to having to fend off insensitive comments and micro-aggressions than Manny.

Justyce starts a journal, where he tries to model his life more on the teachings on Martin Luther King Jr, by writing letters to the dead preacher. This seems to work for a while, but all thoughts of journalling are gone from Justyce's mind after he and Manny go driving one evening, blasting their music loudly on the speakers, and a deeply unfortunate encounter with an angry off-duty cop ends with Manny dead at the wheel. Even more traumatic than being wrongfully arrested, Justice now needs to process surviving where his best friend didn't. He's gone from reading the headlines to becoming one himself, and the event leaves him shaken and deeply conflicted. 

My fellow English teachers and I taught this book in school along with The Hate U Give, and the two novels feature a lot of the same themes. Novels written by young black women, dealing with gun violence, racism and police brutality, with protagonists who are more or less the token black teens at their schools, with all the challenges that brings. Our tenth-graders could choose if they wanted to read this book, The Hate U Give or both (none of them chose both, unsurprisingly). One of my colleagues prefers this book to Angie Thomas', as she feels that the longer novel deals with too many themes that distract from the central message. As someone who really loved how Thomas wrote about Starr and her family, as well as the journey of personal development Starr had to go through after her friend Khalil is murdered by a cop, I think that novel still has the edge for me. This book is shorter, and doesn't spend as much time on the community and people around Justyce. Both books are excellent, and very important novels for readers interested in the #blacklivesmatter cause and the challenges sadly faced by a lot of young African Americans today.

One benefit for us teachers when using this as part of the curriculum, this novel doesn't have a movie adaptation that the kids can watch and then claim that they've read the book. In the subsequent group talks we had on the topic, it was very clear who had actually read and finished their assigned novels when we spoke about Dear Martin, the ones who hadn't just taken the easy way out and watched the film. Also published in 2017, I don't think Stone's novel has gotten the praise and attention that The Hate U Give did, which is a shame, because both novels are great and this book deserves just as big a readership as Thomas'.

Judging a book by its cover: A relatively simple cover, with a mostly white background and a young, black man in silhouette. I like how you see red lights like police sirens shining through the body of the young man, hinting at the contents of the book.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

CBR14 Book 8: "Project Hail Mary" by Andy Weir

Page count: 482 pages

Audio book length: 16 hrs 10 mins

Rating: 4 stars

 

Official book description:

Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission - and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish.

Except that right now, he doesn't know that. He can't even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.

All he knows is that he's been asleep for a very, very long time. And he's just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.

His crew-mates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, he realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Alone on this tiny ship that's been cobbled together by every government and space agency on the planet and hurled into the depths of space, it's up to him to conquer an extinction-level threat to our species.

And thanks to an unexpected ally, he just might have a chance. 

 

First of all, I want to apologise to any and all Cannonball reviewers if I'm in any way repeating things they have already said in their own reviews. I have very deliberately avoided reading them, so my review wouldn't be influenced by them. I would also like to apologise to all of my readers, because I probably don't remember all that much about this book, having finished it in February (a month after it was a book club selection for my fantasy/sci-fi book club - I even skipped the meeting so as not to get spoiled for the ending). 

It's been way too long for me (seven years, in fact) to be able to make accurate comparisons between this book and Andy Weir's first runaway success, The Martian. I would not be surprised to discover that the adaptation rights for this book were sold before the book was even published, as it's also about a wise-cracking astronaut stuck in space, so Ryland Grace and Mark Wattney probably share a lot of similar traits. The situations the two are in are generally pretty different, though, although so as not to spoil too much of the plot of the novel - why is Grace the sole survivor in a small spacecraft? Why is his mission so crucial for the survival of Earth and humanity? Why does he seem to suffer from complete amnesia when he wakes up? All of these questions are a lot more interesting if you discover them as you read.

I listened to the book in audio, and Ray Porter was a really engaging and well-balanced narrator. While Grace is stuck alone on the spaceship, there are a LOT of flashback sequences to before he ended up in space, and in these we encounter a lot of characters of both genders with a number of different accents. I think Porter managed to differentiate between them in a really good way. Later in the book, Porter is also given some rather interesting narration challenges, and I thoroughly enjoyed the book throughout, probably more so than if I'd read it on paper.

My main gripe, which I'm sure others have also mentioned by now, is that the major threat to Earth and humanity requires teamwork on an international and global scale, which sadly the pandemic of recent years has shown is entirely and utterly unrealistic. Were humanity ever faced with the sort of challenges they meet in this book, we would all be doomed, there would be no global coming together to solve a problem. Possibly the rest of the world with the USA opting out, but absolutely nothing like we see in this book. Now, this is a work of fiction, and I can see why Weir didn't want his version of humanity to suck as much as it turns out our real one actually does. But it was sadly rather grating.

Judging a book by its cover: While I'm not sure this cover really conveys most of the feel of this book, it does give the impression that it's a pretty action-packed sci-fi story, which is really all you need. The dramatic image of an astronaut seemingly plummeting through space in free-fall is certainly eye-catching, if possibly a bit misleading.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

CBR14 Book 7: "Hunt the Stars" by Jessie Mihalik

Page count: 428 pages

Rating: 4 stars

Hello, welcome back to Malin reviews things she read several months ago, in this case - FIVE whole months. Let's start off with the official book description:

Octavia Zarola would do anything to keep her tiny, close-knit bounty hunting crew together—even if it means accepting a job from Torran Fletcher, a ruthless former general and her sworn enemy. When Torran offers her enough credits to not only keep her crew afloat but also hire someone to fix her ship, Tavi knows that she can’t refuse—no matter how much she’d like to.

With so much money on the line, Torran and his crew insist on joining the hunt. Tavi reluctantly agrees because while the handsome, stoic leader pushes all of her buttons—for both anger and desire—she’s endured worse, and the massive bonus payment he’s promised for a completed job is reason enough to shut up and deal.

But when they uncover a deeper plot that threatens the delicate peace between humans and Valoffs, Tavi suspects that Torran has been using her as the impetus for a new war. With the fate of her crew balanced on a knife’s edge, Tavi must decide where her loyalties lie—with the quiet Valoff who’s been lying to her, or with the human leaders who left her squad to die on the battlefield. And this time, she’s put her heart on the line.

I enjoyed the first two books in Mihalik's previous series, Consortium Rebellion. But Malin, if you liked those books so much, why didn't you read book 3? To which the answer is obviously that I was busy or distracted with something else when the book came out, I bought it when it appeared in an e-book sale so I'd have it when I wanted it, and then I completely forgot about it because it wasn't the newest and shiniest thing grabbing my attention. In other words, Chaos Reigning, I will get round to you at some point. 

This, on the other hand, was new and shiny and caught my attention immediately upon release, especially because my friend Emmalita gave a positive review of the ARC. She has excellent taste and if she says a book is good, I'm likely to really enjoy it too. So never mind me not having finished Mihalik's previous series (the books are stand-alones, anyway), my brain wanted this brand of romantic space adventure escapism instead. 

I really have not done myself any favours by waiting five months before reviewing the book. Hence this is all going to be what I remember now, with my swiss-cheese depression brain. Tavi and her crew mates (think found family) are veterans of some sort of space war.  Now they basically work as bounty hunters of sorts. One of the generals from the enemy side of said war comes to Tavi with an offer she basically can't afford to refuse, because of course her spaceship is badly in need of repairs (these spaceships are so rarely new and state of the art). If I remember correctly, Tavi and her crew are humans, while the enemies are humanoid and could pass for humans, but have woobly psychic powers of some kind. Possibly only some of them have the woobly psychic powers, the general certainly does. But Tavi has trained herself to shield her thoughts, and she's taught her crew as well. Hence the general can't mess with them.

Anyways, they take the job, even though they're not exactly happy about it. Tavi charges the general a truly exorbitant rate, and figures that the mission has to be both very dangerous and very personal to him since he's willing to pay without hardly any haggling at all. The mission will take them to the general's home world. Is it all a trap? How long will it take, with both of them forced together on a small ship, before Tavi and the honorable and quietly dignified, but also dangerous enemy general fall prey to their pants feelings for one another? How many secondary romances are going to be set up as sequel bait? 

You'll have to read the book because by now, I really don't remember. As well as the ragtag bunch of found family members on a space hulk, we also have an adorable pet thrown in the mix. Tavi has a pet fox-like creature that she rescued during the war. Apparently, these creatures are seen as almost sacred on the woobly psychic alien world, so the fact that she's had one since it was a poor orphaned baby is also something that earns her the respect of the former enemies. 

As enemies to lovers romances go, I seem to recall that it doesn't take that long for the enemy part to fade away to mutual respect, and Mihalik seems to like sci-fi romances where each couple gets their own book. So in this one, it's Tavi and general Torran (I almost called him General Woobly, which I like better) who fall crazy in love and there will be at least two more books, I think, with a new couple in each one. There's a bunch of action both on and off the spaceship. There are quiet moments of getting to know one another, there are thrilling moments, and the occasional tense (oh noes we're in danger) moments. Even now, five months later, I remember the book fondly enough to give it four stars. It's not one of those reads that's likely to change your life, but it's entertaining and I liked spending time with the characters, and look forward to what comes next in future installments. 

Judging a book by its cover: There are some covers that do pretty much exactly what you need them to. This book features romantic science fiction, and the cover promises you exactly that. You've got your spaceship, your impressive space vistas, your heroic protagonists in silhouette, both facing away from each other and clearly together. The colour choices are pleasant, but I've seen a lot more interesting covers in the past. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.