When Bloggiesta #4 was announced I figured that since my weekends are usually lacking in plans, the weekend from the 21st to the 23rd of January would be free. Secure in my not-much-social-life, I signed up with Mr. Linky. Of course, weeks after this, my brother tells me he’s coming to NY for a wedding and plans to crash at my place. This was still not a problem for Bloggiest because dear brother said he was going into the city most of the weekend. Sounded like I’d just see him at night.. great, I can still do Bloggiesta!
My first indication that my weekend plans would not be as I expected happened when the brother called on friday. First of all, the flight was later than he initially told me, so instead of taking the train to our place, he wanted me to pick him up at JFK (easily the WORST AIRPORT in North America to have to drive to). So. After work on friday, I spent all of an hour improving my blog before I had to drive to @&#&@ing JFK. By the time we got home it was about 10pm. I worked for another 20 minutes on the blog, but that was about it.
Then on Saturday, instead of running off to the city with his girlfriend, the bother brother asked if we could all go into NYC together and check out the Natural History Museum.
These are my brother’s pictures. I am the responsible one in my family.*cough*.
Anyway, silly times were had and also brunch was eaten (quite a good Eggs Benedict), but no Bloggiesta was happening.
I left the city early but got home around 6pm. I worked on Bloggiesta again for an hour or two, but around 8:30, the brother and his girl called to be picked up at the train station. As soon as we did the pick up at the train station became a munchie run to the White Castle in Yonkers.
This led to:
I deeply regretted eating as much as I did right after eating it.
OK, I STILL pulled my laces up and worked on my blog after this! This deserves credit I say! We went to bed at 1am. I worked for an hour.
What I’ve done so far:
I’ve created a wishlist 2011 page on the wordpress blog. I also created a wishlists parent page which explains what the wishlists are, and now the child wishlists from 2009 onwards are dropdown from that parent page.
On the livejournal blog I updated all the broken image links that happened when vox went down (vox is where this blog originally resided and where my images were hosted until I ported everything to wordpress at the end of last year). In the past 2 days I managed to edit ALL the posts from August 2008 to May 2007 and fixed all the links. Very tedious and I kept sighing deeply. I’m glad it’s over.
What I’d still like to do:
Work on my About page
Work on a review
I didn’t really have huge goals for Bloggiesta and I’m pretty happy with what I’ve done so far, particularly when I’ve been multitasking. I also had a lot of fun reading through my old entries from the first year of having this book blog. My voice has changed a lot — my first reviews had a more enthusiastic, off-the-cuff voice and now I think my reviews are more formal and diplomatic. My reviewing has definitely evolved. There are some reviews I did that I wish I worked more on (I have a bunch of reviews when I first started where I just started using bullets), or was less snarky. I also forgot that when I first began this blog I rated the books on a scale of 1 to 10. There are quite a few reviews I reread and quite liked though. Like my review of Liz Berry’s Easy Connections and Easy Freedom. And my review of Sherry Thomas’ Private Arrangements which makes me laugh a little bit now. I was obsessed with the hero and heroine being apart for 10 years.
This is a review for an ARC I received from the publisher after requesting it.
My memory is going because I can’t remember the first blog that introduced me to this book. I might be Presenting Lenore when she had her Dystopian week. She highlighted Across the Universe as a dystopian YA book to look out for in this post, and she included a link to the excerpt of the first chapter. I know that reading the excerpt is what sold me, although I do admit that the pretty cover also helped (I am a sucker for a starry backdrop).
The Premise: From the blurb: “Amy is a cryogenically frozen passenger aboard the vast spaceship Godspeed. She expects to wake up on a new planet, 300 years in the future. But fifty years before Godspeed’s scheduled landing, Amy’s cryo chamber is unplugged, and she is nearly killed. Now, Amy is caught inside an enclosed world where nothing makes sense. Godspeed‘s passengers have forfeited all control to Eldest, a tyrannical and frightening leader, and Elder, his rebellious and brilliant teenage heir. Amy desperately wants to trust Elder. But should she? All she knows is that she must race to unlock Godspeed‘s hidden secrets before whoever woke her tries to kill again.”
My Thoughts: Across the Universe is about 400 pages long but it feels much less because of short alternating chapters written from Amy and Elder’s points of view, which is combined with a fast-paced plot. The story starts with a bang: Amy narrates the terrifying feeling of being frozen in preparation to join her parents on a 300 year journey across space to the planet Alpha Centauri. While Amy and her parents sleep along with other scientists and military personnel needed after the ship lands, a crew maintains the ship through generations. 250 years later, sixteen year old Elder is learning how to be the next leader of the ship under the supervision of his mentor, Eldest, and running into problems due to his ignorance of the ship. Improbably, the two teens meet. Through some accident or act of chaos, Amy is thawed 50 years ahead of schedule, almost dying in the process, and she has to adapt to a very different world than she is used to.
Life on the vast spaceship is fascinating. There are three levels: Keeper, Shipper, and Feeder, which correspond to the three types of people who live and work on it. Elder and Eldest are the Keepers, with access to all levels, Shippers work on the Shipper level where the research labs and the bridge are, but live on the Feeder level where a collection of small trailers house most of the ships residents. The Feeders are only allowed on the Feeder level where they farm and produce day-to-day products like textiles. All the lives are strictly regimented and controlled by Eldest, but his vicelike grip on the Godspeed begins to raise questions in Amy and Elder’s minds. Elder realizes that his education has glaring holes in it, and Amy sees a society with a disturbing lack of soul and a too-easy acceptance of authority. The only people who don’t seem mindless are those in the mental ward. The more time Amy spends on the ship, the more she and Elder realize that things on Godspeed are not right. All the while, some murderer is killing people in the cryo-chambers by turning them off so they are thawed improperly and die in agony.
All this is well and good. There’s a sense of urgency in the writing and an invitation to keep flipping pages to see the big picture, but at tlmes I felt like the focus on the twists came at the expense of introspection. The book brings up a lot of questions about right and wrong when survival in an enclosed environment is at stake. Eldest and those before him made certain choices that made sense to them at the time. When Elder and Amy find out about those decisions, instead of delving into their motivations and whether they had any merit, the book misses an opportunity in my opinion by making a provocative topic overly simplistic. Some of the big reveals were things I could easily guess, enough for me to feel impatient with the characters in not figuring things out earlier, so I wish that the space for these predictable puzzles was used instead on what science fiction does best: make the reader think. Across the Universe begins to take us there, but then abruptly does an about face, leaving me feeling somewhat unsatisfied. To top it off, I keep having moments of “but what about _____?” after finishing this book — several inconsistencies never explained. I’ve read online that Across the Universe is the first in a series, and maybe what seems inconsistent now will be fixed later, but I have a feeling it won’t be.
The book cover and the blurb suggest that this book has a certain amount of romance in it. It is there, but it is extremely low key and for the most part platonic with the suggestion that in time there will be more.
Overall: This is a really promising debut — science fiction, dystopia, a fast paced plot and really interesting world building. These are all good things and for that alone, I’d recommend the book, but it didn’t quite hit the mark in terms of substance — there was more focus on grabbing the readers attention through plot twists than on really making the reader think. It skirts this territory, then scurries off, and that doesn’t really satisfy my science fiction reader sensibilities.
I’m passing along my ARC copy of this book — to someone willing to review the book (on their blog, goodreads, wherever). Open to everyone but first come, first served! Taken!
This weekend is the 4th edition of Bloggiesta, hosted at Maw Books Blog, and I’ve signed up! What is Bloggiesta? From Maw Books Blog, it is: “ a blogging marathon. A opportunity to cross those nagging items off of your to-do list and improve your blog while in the good company of other awesome bloggers doing the same thing.”
I’ve already been working on my blog layout on wordpress, but I plan to do a little more. Working on my about page and updating my wishlist pages are up there in the to-do list as well as continue to fix the images on my livejournal. I’ll probably also work on new blog posts while I’m at it. I’ve been sick for about 3 weeks now, so the posting here hasn’t been as consistent as I’d like. Hopefully I’ll have plenty of time to do Bloggiesta – my brother is coming to visit this weekend, but he will be going into NYC most of the time so I don’t expect to be playing host too much.
While I’m at it — anything you’d like to see on this blog? Suggestions (constructive ones please) are welcome!
I bought this book based purely off this review by calico_reaction over at Dreams and Speculation. Wild West setting with an alternative history involving Warlocks and Witches? I shall have to try some of that.
The Premise: It’s 1876, and Emily Edwards, the Witch of a small town called Lost Pine, is getting desperate for money in the face of competition from the fancy mail-order company, Baugh’s Patent Magicks. So she does a bad thing. She creates a love charm and uses it on Dag Hansen, the timber man who has brought jobs and prosperity to Lost Pine. When she does, she’s almost immediately called out for it by the town clairvoyant, Besim. Besim also reveals that the zombies working in the town mine are going to break free. Besim is ignored by everyone, since he’s made bad pronouncements before, but Emily knows he’s not lying about her use of bad magic, so she goes to check out the mine, along with irritating town newcomer, Warlock Dreadnought Stanton. One thing leads to another and suddenly Emily has a mysterious blue stone lodged in the palm of her right hand, she’s fleeing Lost Pine with Dreadnought Stanton, and evil Warlocks who want the stone are trying to kill them both.
My Thoughts: This reads very much like a Wild West cross-country adventure which just happens to be set in an alternative world where magic is an accepted part of life. I imagine Emily Edwards and Dreadnought Stanton are dressed up much like Jodie Foster and Mel Gibson in Maverick, (minus the confidence artist personalities), as they take horse, train, and a hybrid mechanical-magical flying machine from one destination to another, chased by various men bent on getting the blue stone embedded in Emily’s hand. The author has mentioned in guest posts a pulp novel influence, particularly Horatio Alger, and she eludes to the influence in The Native Star with characters who read pulp fiction from Mystic Truth Publishers, and magazines like Ladies’ Repository.
The world building goes along with the pulp fiction influence. There’s Wild West adventure staples mixed with Victorian era sensibilities. Emily has to deal with being a woman in a world where women were often expected to stay at home and act proper, but she’s grown up with a lenient father in a town where she is respected for her witchcraft. When she ventures outside of Lost Pine, the disparity between her rural upbringing and the straightlaced expectations of how she should act is a big one. There’s even a sort of woman’s suffrage movement in the form of a group called the Witches Friendly Society.
Along with this mixed attitude about women, is a mixed attitude about magic. It’s something everyone knows exists, but whether magic is a natural part of life and can be explained scientifically or as the work of the devil depends on who you are talking to. This world is on a cusp of change, and I think that whether Progress comes at a price is a big question. Some advancements are for the better, but some come at a cost that people are only beginning to discover.
Of course, it’s often the bad guys of the story with the condescending attitude towards women or who want to eradicate all Witches and Warlocks. Her companion on the road, Dreadnought, clashes with Emily over other things. The two have a bickering sort of relationship and although this sort of thing suggests a romance is on it’s way (which is correct), the romance is a very low key one — the adventure and magic are in the forefront of the story most of the time, and the banter gave me a little chuckle or two as a bonus. This is not one of those stories where there’s a lot of sexual tension in my opinion, maybe because the focus on the book is more on the plot than it is on character development.
I enjoyed the way that magic was explained in this story. There are three forms of magic – animancy (spirit magic), sangrimancy (blood magic), and credomancy (belief magic). Emily Edwards, who with her Pap, the local magic practitioners of Lone Pine, California, practice animancy. Dreadnought Stanton is a credomancer, and his magic comes from belief. The use of blood magic (sangrimancy) has been outlawed with a notable exception. Hobson takes the idea of magic and a natural explanation for it a bit further when she introduces an ecological component — magic, once used is absorbed by the Earth and recycled, and the process creates waste in the form of a sticky black tar-like substance known as Black Exchunge. This has some significance in the story and I enjoyed learning as the Emily and Dreadnought did, the significance of Emily’s blue stone in relation to magic.
I’m looking forward to the next book, The Hidden Goddess, out this April.
Overall: A very fun story that combines pulp fiction, magic, Wild West adventure, a bit of steampunk and romance in a seamless way. I enjoyed the alternative history and how magic fit into the Victorian mindset where Progress and Tradition often butted heads. This is very much a plot-driven story, and I liked how the world-building felt effortless. The only thing that I personally would have liked was more room to really delve into the two main characters, but the second book promises to give us more, so I’m looking forward to it.
This is a book I’ve held back on buying until I decided that the self-inflicted torturing to hold back the TBR had to stop. I’m glad I bought it but Holy Shizz, I need the third book now!
My review for Book 1:
Mind Games –
The Premise: Justine Jones continues her work as a disillusionist for Packard, and her newest target is Ez, a dangerous highcap who can manipulate a person through their dreams. It seems like business as usual, until Justine starts wondering if Ez is really responsible for the murders she was imprisoned for. Meanwhile, a new band of killers is hitting Midcity – the Dorks. These unknown people have been shooting at seemingly random Midcity dwellers, who are later identified by Packard’s men as highcaps. No one can figure out how the Dorks can tell that their victims are highcaps or how they are impervious to highcap abilities, including precognitivity. Justine fears for the safety of the highcaps in her life: her paramour Otto Sanchez, and her enigmatic leader, Packard.
**** There are spoilers for the first book in this review, so if you haven’t already read book 1, you may want to avert your eyes and skip to the ‘Overall’ section ****
My Thoughts: One of the things that I love about this series is the comic-book, fight-between-good-and-evil feel. In Midcity, a sprawling metropolis with a comic book name, live highcaps, people who have superhero-like powers hidden behind ordinary facades. Among the highcaps are two powerful men: Sterling Packard and Otto Sanchez. While Otto thrives under the glowing approval of his fair city as their Golden-Boy mayor, Packard is a criminal mastermind who is content to manipulate Midcity in obscurity. Each is the other’s greatest enemy.
The good guys have a little tarnish on their armor and the bad guys believe that they’re White Knights protecting the city at all costs. Sometimes it’s hard to tell who is who. Especially if you are our books narrator, Justine Jones. In the first book, Mind Games, she trusted Packard until she found out that disillusioning people comes with a price — total reliance on Packard or becoming a mindless vegetable. Similarly, she distrusted Otto (he was her target for disillusionment), until she discovered his past with Packard and the real reason Packard wanted him disillusioned. This reader is firmly in the Packard camp, but that doesn’t mean the way things ended in Mind Games left me despairing. The relationship between Justine and these two different men is a work in progress, and I’ve been having a great time trying to pick up on the author’s hints about what’s coming next (and nodding to myself when I realize things set up in the first book. This includes the first person present narration — ha, I see what you did there, Ms. Carolyn Crane). I said this in my review of the first book, and I’ll say it again: it’s been a treat to revel in the GREY! And while Justine doesn’t seem to be asking this question, I am: who is the real hero and the real villain? I think Double Cross steps us closer to the answer.
Double Cross begins shortly after Mind Games left off. Packard works with Otto’s people in an uneasy alliance in return for his continued freedom. His group of disillusionists, which includes Justine, are still working, but now their targets are those highcaps imprisoned by Otto over the years. Justine, as is her nature, wonders if Disillusioning these people is the right thing to do: would they prefer imprisonment over being rebooted? She doesn’t feel free herself because she has to keep ‘zinging’ people with medical fears to stay alive; she doesn’t want to do something that gives herself relief at the expense of others. This leads her to be dismayed when Packard remarks that Ez, her newest target, doesn’t seem to have the right personality to have done her crimes. Unfortunately for Justine, circumstances allow Ez a way to worm into her and Packard’s dreams, which means she has to disillusion her or be a victim of Ez herself.
With Justine’s involvement with both men, she’s yet another reason for them to be rivals. Justine is relieved to be back in the good graces of the charismatic Otto, whom she thinks is the perfect man, and stays wary yet drawn to Packard. Packard warns Justine about Otto’s character, but Justine sees manipulation in everything Packard says. Underneath it all, Packard and Otto’s past is simmering under the surface. I’m happy to say that Double Cross settles some questions about that past and what started their rift. It also settles which man Justine really loves, but it’s not quite time for an HEA yet. Anyway, there were hints made in Mind Games that finally make sense, and I was happy with the story I got. For extra points Packard and Otto’s past neatly dovetails into the present. Perhaps a little perfectly, but I liked the way things went, and I liked how their past informs their current journeys (one towards redemption, another towards moral ruin).
I think that Double Cross is the book that has me more obsessed about the three main characters and their relationships, but I would be remiss if I didn’t say that it furthered my understanding of a couple of favorite side characters as well. The two I felt I got to know a little better were Shelby, the eternal pessimist, and Simon, the gambler. Shelby surprises us with a little bit of optimism in this story, and it was rather delightful to see her character grow. Simon is his usual self but he and Justine have an understanding . Although Simon keeps doing risky things, and Justine sometimes has to stop him, they have a friendship of sorts.
So. The ending. It was a bit of a cliffhanger and I’m not sure what to say about this. I won’t say anything about what the cliffhanger was about, just my reaction to it: I am surprisingly OK. I usually hate a cliffhanger, but you guys, this one was a little bit awesome. Although I would like to know WHY there is no information online about WHEN the next book is out EXACTLY(?!?!! Why?!?!) I’m not feeling so totally sideswiped that I will go out on a killing rampage. I warn you though: you will want to read book 3 really badly after reading Double Cross, so this may be something you want to take into account when deciding when to read this book.
Overall: I’m loving this urban fantasy series and despite the cliffhanger ending (really, when is book 3 out?), I think this installment is as good if not better than the last. As usual, there’s an excellent balance of imperfect characters with a well thought out plot. The three core characters (heroine, and two men whose roles haven’t been solidified yet), show us a little bit more who they really are in each book, but I still can’t predict their next move. I’m very satisfied so far with where things are going, but I’m relieved that this is a planned trilogy — the final book can’t come soon enough.
The Library in Paradise in the 1998 movie, What Dreams May Come is one of my favorite libraries on the silver screen. Imagine all those books, waiting for you to float upwards to reach and read them! The only thing I’d change is having so much water nearby, although I guess these books are supposed to be indestructible.
Here are some captured images from the movie. Anyone else have a favorite library from a movie?
This book is one that just came out recently (November 2010) and I got a copy through another blogger – this is a review of an ARC copy.
The Premise: Madeline (Maddy) Black has been fending for herself (with the help of her building’s gargoyle, Beezle), since the death of her mother when Maddy was 11. She’s also an Agent of Death, whose job it is to usher newly dead souls to the Door (to the afterlife or something else, Agents never know). To supplement her income, Maddy writes recipes and rents out an apartment in the building she owns in Chicago. Life is busy and there’s no time for a social life, until Maddy becomes the focus of power struggles among supernatural beings. She gains a really good-looking tenant, Gabriel Angeloscuro, around the same time that demons and a shadowy, terrifying beast appear to attack her.
My Thoughts: This books world building started off quite promisingly with the details of Maddy’s job as a Agent, trying to coax an unwilling soul into being untethered from her body and going to the Door. The description of the powers that come with Maddy’s job – the wings, the ability to speak to souls, invisibility (to most people), and how she does it felt like a fresh new take on the idea of reapers, shinigami and psychopomps. I think that if this book had been just about that aspect of Maddy’s life I would be interested, but Black Wings takes it further by introducing us to the world of angels and demons because of Maddy’s unique heritage. She never knew who her father was, assuming he was either dead or abandoned her, but most of her problems are from being his offspring. First there is an attack by a monster that almost gets Maddy, then demons appear at her front door trying to do the same. Her new tenant, Gabriel, is linked to all of it but can only tell Maddy so much. All of this is affecting Maddy’s ability to do her job and her boss J.B., another good-looker who Maddy constantly clashes with, is not happy, and neither is Beezle, who feels responsible for her protection.
Maddy spends much of the book ping-ponging from one surprised revelation to the next — from who she is to who Gabriel and the other players in the whole mess are. Interspersed among the narrative told from Maddy’s first person point of view, are flashbacks in which Maddy relives part of the life of someone named Evangeline, a peasant girl who fell in love with Lucifer and had his children. There is a lot of fallen angels and their offspring world building here.
All of these things make for a fascinating world, and the writing is paced well to keep the pages turning, but I’m afraid I had some nits along the way. One of them is that although this is definitely an urban fantasy, I have this weird associative feeling between Black Wings and young adult paranormals, and I think that the timing of this read is why. First of all, fallen angels are very popular in young adult fiction right now. Secondly, I’ve just read Almost to Die For by Tate Hallaway and Glimmerglass by Jenna Black (two YA paranormals), so the idea of a girl discovering she’s the daughter of someone supernaturally powerful puts to mind those books. The idea is familiar, and so is falling in love with someone put by her side by her father, which Maddy does with Gabriel.
Then there’s Maddy’s voice. Maddy is supposed to be 30 in this story, but she often acted a lot younger and used phrases that felt more appropriate from someone in high school. She says things like “Knock much?”– is this the influence of Buffy the Vampire Slayer? That’s fine, but Buffy was high school/college age, not 30. Maddy mouths off at really inopportune times, not unusual in a UF heroine, but a couple of times she pushes it and ends up looking more immature than spunky. Her virginity and impetuousness with Gabriel underline her youthfulness.
I also found myself unable to connect to the relationships Maddy had with other characters in the book. They don’t feel quite real. Although Gabriel is gorgeous and a little broken, the lack of lead up to their attraction made their relationship feel superficial, and when Maddy’s friend dies early in the book, she seemed to barely mourn. It felt like I was reading someone going through the required motions with no thought behind them. Basically: I wanted more.
Those problems with Maddy aside, when she wasn’t speaking or making eyes at Gabriel, she seemed a lot more like the UF heroine I’d expect – she tries to help innocent people from the demons and monsters on the street, she wants to figure out what’s going on before more people die, and she wants to do her job. Sometimes she stumbles in these goals but she’s determined and that makes her endearing. And she’s not a pushover — she figures out quickly when someone is trying to use her. When she does figure out what’s going on at the end of the book, she makes some very smart moves, and that makes the last part of the book, the strongest part of the book for me.
I’m not sure what to make of J.B. He seems set up as a third in a love triangle but it feels half-hearted. I feel like we’re going to see a twist that involves him in the next book. I hope he gets to play a bigger role. There’s a few players and story arcs set up in Black Wings that look promising for book 2, Black Night, which comes out Autumn, 2011.
Overall: Black Wings is a fairly good read that I’d recommend with reservations. The biggest issues I had was Maddy’s sometimes inappropriately irreverent voice and the lack of depth in her relationships, but on the other hand, I did like the way the story ended and how Maddy ultimately handled things. There’s plenty of set up here for to encourage me to read the second book, but I haven’t decided yet if I’ll continue. I think this is a book a lot of people have liked, so not everyone will not have the problems with it that I did.
As you can see, I still haven’t made my yearly goal to read 100 books, but the number is climbing upwards! The problem is that reviewing books (2006 and 2007 I didn’t review as I do now), cuts into reading time. Oh well, I won’t stop reviewing!
Out of those 82 books, these were my favorites (click on the book to see my review):
Blew me out of the water – Two books this year just had the perfect mix that made me feel like I was in utter love from start to finish. Unless I don’t feel consumed to a semi-obsession, a book won’t get on this list.
These books I loved and came close perfect (and wow, I had 9 of these this year. Up from 5 last year)
(Note: The Man Who Loved Pride and Prejudice is the repackaged mass market version of Pemberley by the Sea and Cordelia’s Honor is actually 2-books-in-one – I linked to the first book)
Goals for 2011:
1) Keep working on the TBR but don’t worry so much about how many books I buy. Last year I held back on buying books when I wanted to because I was concerned about the size of my TBR (it was 190, now it’s over 250). I’ve decided not to do that – if the TBR grows, it grows. Instead I think I’ll focus on trying to read more often than I have been (this year I often had rows of days where I read nothing. I’d like to read even a few pages a day as long as I read something)
2) Try to read 100 books – this is a long standing goal, just for a number to aim for. I don’t think it will ever not be a goal!
3) Be better about reading challenges – I sign up for online book clubs and challenges and I pretty much NEVER complete them. I suck at it. I’m going to try to read books for book clubs and challenges early this time. And oh man, I’d love to complete the Everything Austen challenge for once. Both times I joined, I got 4 out of 6 Austen related books/movies read and watched, then ran out of time. In 2011.. oh, I will get 6 out of 6. I WILLLLL!!
4) Stay easy going in this blogging thing. I think that will all the book blogs out there, it’s easy to put pressure on yourself and lose perspective. I want to make sure to remember that I do this because it makes me happy.
As soon as I could, I picked up the first book in Sarah A. Hoyt’s urban fantasy duology, Draw One In the Dark, based on my enjoyment of Darkship Thieves and on the promising blurb on the Baen website. Yeach though, this is a book cover that screams “I probably also own a howling wolf t-shirt” ..you do this on purpose Baen, you have to.
The Premise: Kyrie Smith and Tom Ormson both work at a the Athens Diner, in Goldport, Colorado, but they don’t really interact with one another. Then one night Kyrie goes out to the back parking lot of the diner to investigate a noise. She discovers Tom in dragon form, standing over a corpse. When he changes back to human form, he has no idea what happened, and Kyrie decides to help him until she can figure out what is going on. Kyrie is a shape-shifter too (her other form is a panther), and she understands the turmoil and loss of memory sometimes caused by the inner beast. The two find out that this is not the only body in recent weeks, and that Tom’s past is catching up with him: people he stole something from are looking for him.
My Thoughts: Tom is confused about what’s going on at first, particularly since he can’t remember why he’s standing over a dead body and is covered in it’s blood. Kyrie is the one who has it together and tells him what to do so he’s not caught naked and covered in blood. When they realize that they’re both shifters, the whole situation creates a sort of tenous bond even though Kyrie’s initial impression of Tom hasn’t been favorable. They get to know each other along the way, although after the scene at the restaurant they find themselves leaving a dangerous situation only to find themselves in another one before they begin to figure out what’s going on. Their two problems are the dead bodies that keep showing up, and the dangerous people chasing after Tom. Along the way, they are helped by other characters – Officer Trall, who is investigating the recent deaths, Keith, a college student who is Tom’s next door neighbor, and Tom’s father, who has connections to Tom’s pursuers.
This series has a completely different voice from the last Sarah Hoyt book I read, Darkship Thieves. Instead of first person, which is common in urban fantasy, Draw One in the Dark is in third person and jumps between Kyrie and Tom, and later, to a lesser extent, to Tom’s father, Edward Ormson. There is no kick-ass female heroine with special abilities. Instead we have a ragtag group of everyday, ordinary, people for which shifting has often been a burden. This book definitely does not romanticize the ability to shift or the shifters who can do so.
The ordinariness of the characters bring to mind the Kitty series by Carrie Vaughn so I think I’d recommend this book for readers who enjoyed that one. The world building here is much like that of Vaughn’s as well – it’s not necessarily a place where people understand magic and they react to it within what they can fathom. Kyrie and Tom for instance have no idea why they can change. It’s something that began to happen in puberty and upset their already-stressful teen lives. They’re still trying to figure out how it all works – how to tell other shifters, what affects their shifts, and how to have an ordinary life while keeping this side hidden. I liked that there’s enough complexity in the lives of the characters (not just in Kyrie and Tom’s) that we see missteps and flaws in all of what they do, even though ultimately these are the good guys. This is particularly true of Tom’s father Edward, who comes to Goldport thinking he has to clean up after his screw-up son again, only to realize that he may have failed his son as a father in the first place.
Before Draw One in the Dark starts, Kyrie didn’t think much of Tom, and wrote him off as a junkie who will eventually disappoint everyone, even if she has never seen him act high in the six months he’s been working at Athens. When she spends more time with him, she realizes that this impression was a self-defense mechanism. She’s actually attracted to him, but years in the foster system has made her wary. As for Tom, he’s always thought Kyrie was pretty but way out of his league. These observations about each other are often peppered throughout the story, and there’s a sort of puppy-dog eying of each other throughout with neither really doing much about it. Their fledgling romance is further complicated by Rafiel Trall – police officer and lion shifter who has an interest in Kyrie, particularly since she’s another cat shifter.
Overall: Quite a solid contemporary/urban fantasy, with a rather thoughtful perspective on shape-shifting and how it may affect a person’s life. It puts to mind books by Charles de Lint or Carrie Vaughn, mostly because the characters are ordinary and unvarnished. I thought that Tom and Kyrie’s awkward steps towards a courtship was sweet but romance here is not really of the searing kind. It’s more of an everyday, two kids you like who end up liking each other kind. I’d read the next book, Gentleman Takes a Chance, to see these characters grow. It also makes me realize how versatile this author is because the voice in this story is so very different from the other book I’ve read that was written by her.
I’ve been lusting after this book for a while, so long in fact, that I forgot exactly where I first learned of it’s existence and my need to own it, but I vaguely remembered it was an author’s blog on my friend’s list. Turns out that was Ilona Andrews, who had a guest post by Sarah A. Hoyt about Darkship Thieves in January last year (now that’s a long time to want a book, but not really my longest stretch – sad isn’t it?) In her post she talked about this space opera where a bad-girl socialite heroine with Daddy issues meets a bio-engineered hero with calico-hair and issues on top of other issues. Anyway, I not-so-subtly asked for it for Christmas – and lo, it is mine.
The Premise: Athena Hera Sinistra was sleeping in her father’s space cruiser in a return trip to Earth, when she wakes up to find someone in her room. Although Athena is a socialite, she’s also been put in to, and escaped from, several boarding schools and institutions, and she has the ability to sometimes move at speeds that others cannot match. One thing leads to another, and Athena flees in a life pod, her father’s goons in hot pursuit. In desperation, she flies into dangerous territory and stumbles upon Kit Klaavil, a prickly man who surprises her by having even faster reflexes than her own super-speed.
My Thoughts: I was pretty happy to begin this book and have it match my expectations of page-turning action and space opera goodness. Racing through the bowels of a space ship and beating up thugs along the way, followed by a pursuit in space, and a surprising rescue — it’s good stuff. The reaction of Kit and Athena to each other was hilarious — even though Athena is over-matched, she uses all the dirty tricks at her disposal, and Kit’s reaction to this is fun to follow. Once the dust settled, I was glued to the pages, wondering where things would go next.
The story doesn’t disappoint in it’s exploration of Kit’s character, and in turn Athena’s when Kit takes Athena back to his home — an asteroid home to people very different from Earth, but whose very existence and beliefs are due to Athena’s home world. As Athena struggles to figure out Kit’s world and it’s rules, we’re introduced to ideas about the ethics of genetic manipulation, cloning, societal laws, and bureaucracy. These ideas were very provocative, but I was most drawn to the characters in this story, and into the odd courtship that takes place between Kit and Athena. Darkship Thieves isn’t quite a science fiction romance because a lot of the story deals with things like technology and morality, and there isn’t a focus on romance, but there is a quiet progress towards a relationship. I think that Kit, who lives with the world at arm’s length, is now a favorite hero although I also quite like Athena’s tough, unloved, rich girl voice.
Of course, being a girl who likes the falling-in-love bits, after the relationship hit a particular point and the story gets back to the conspiracy that led to why Athena had to flee her father’s spaceship, I think I lost a little interest. I don’t know if it was the pacing, or my just wanting more of Kit and Athena together, but the last part of the book didn’t have quite the zing I felt in the first. The more I think about it, the more I think it may have been the latter for me, but I think this is the only real problem I had with this book. The other was minor: when I first started reading Darkship Thieves, I thought Athena was in her mid-twenties and Kit was over thirty, when they were supposed to be 19 and 22. There was something in Athena’s been-there-seen-everything tone that made her seem older to me.
A note on the cover: Ug, I know. Half-naked women on covers does not draw in a female audience. All I can say in defense is that this scene does happen early on in the book and it does make sense in context.
Overall: Finding this space opera with a dash of romance has put me in a happy mood. Sarah Hoyt’s space opera has the edginess of Ann Aguirre’s minus (so far) the heartbreak. I’m eager to try other books by this author and I’m looking forward to the second book, Darkship Renegade, out sometime in 2011.
These are my brother’s pictures. I am the responsible one in my family.*cough*.
I deeply regretted eating as much as I did right after eating it.
specficromantic 