The Diviners

Title: The Diviners

Author: Libba Bray

Publisher: Little Brown Books (2012)

Genre(s): Fiction, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, Young Adult Fiction, Steampunk

Length: 578 pages

Synopsis:  It's an age of jazz and glitter, movie stars and bootleg liquor. Evie O'Neill of Zenith, Ohio, is determined to make the most of it, but at seventeen, she's long outgrown Zenith's nightlife.  She craves the rush and excitement of the big city and when her parents decide to send her to New York City to stay with her uncle, Evie jumps at the chance.  Soon she's whirled into the kind of life she's always dreamed about: nights spent dancing in exclusive speakeasies, days shopping and sightseeing with friends.  But not everything is as it seems.  Everyone has a secret to keep, even Evie herself, but when a string of gruesome murders with ties to the occult rocks the city, she, and her secret, may be the only way to save them all.

My Rating: 4 Stars

My Opinion:  Hats off to Libba Bray!  She's managed to put together a massively complex book that's clearly only the tip of her creative iceberg.    This book is a pop culture collision of everything the self-proclaimed "nerd" demographic will love (and I say that as a self-identified nerd and without an ounce of condescension): magic, monsters, ghosts, demons, cults, mutants, superpowers, con men, showgirls, even a nod at steampunk.  With the new film adaptation of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby renewing interest in the Roaring 20's, I think this book has hit the right audience at the right time.  The stars are aligned for the next big hit, but I think that something is just the slightest bit amiss.  

 For me, books seem to come most alive when they are more than the sum of their parts, rather than the sum of more parts.  True, this book has everything, but I think that everything was, in this case, a bit too much.  The main characters are often driven by the central plot, which is excellent...until the plot finishes before the book does.  Many of the characters are merely being set up for the sequel, and though I don't mind loose ends at the end of a book, I am perplexed when characters who seem important never quite interface with the aspects of the text I had thought most important.  This is particularly concerning given the plot-based drive of the book's action.  I tried re-framing the text under a character-driven lens, but it just doesn't work.  There are too many characters so focused on doing so many things that there wasn't space for their development to be the story's central anchor.  

Overall, the book works.  It's a quick read, cleverly written, well thought out, and meticulously researched, but for me, there's too much material for this one thick tome.  There's enough in Bray's imagining to have written series following each of her intriguing characters.  Of course, there's always the sequel, Lair of Dreams, which I plan to pick up as soon as it's released (supposedly spring of 2014). 

Dracula (Audiobook)

Title: Dracula

 

Author: Bram Stoker

 

Read by: Alan Cumming, Tim Curry, Simon Vance, Katherine Kellgren, Susan Duerden, John Lee, Graeme Malcolm, Steven Crossley, Simon Prebble, James Adams

Publisher: Audible Unabridged (2012)

 

Genre(s): Fiction, Fantasy, Classics, Horror, Audiobook

Length: N/A

Synopsis: The mysterious happenings surrounding a group of friends and the enigmatic Transylvanian nobleman, Count Dracula, are revealed through the personal papers of those involved.  From Jonathan Harker's perilous first visit to Castle Dracula to the Holmes-esque musings of Dr. Van Helsing, here is the whole story of this most famous of vampires performed by an all-star cast of voice actors.

 

My Rating: 5 Stars

My Opinion:  I have not read the text version of Bram Stoker's Dracula.  Nor have I seen the movies, actually.  I know the story, of course (who doesn't?), but this was my first encounter with the original, and I must say I was absolutely delighted.  The structure of the story lends itself well to a full cast of performers, reading out "their" diary entries, letters, and newspaper clippings as the story of the Transylvanian count unfolds, and the horror in the voices of these skilled actors is more effective, I think, than any big-budget Hollywood film.  In fact, not being able to see, even just the text, adds to the nerve-wracking nature of this experience.  There's no looking back to double check that the door was locked and barred, and no peeking ahead to see if that dog in the street was really the count in disguise.  By the time the true nature of the count was revealed, I was completely hooked.  I listened to the vast majority of this book in one sitting (true, that one sitting was a twelve hour drive and there wasn't much else to do, but I think the point is still valid).  My one disappointment comes not from this performance, but from the text itself.  After so much build up, risk, and peril... the end of the book degenerates into repetition, followed by a quick, neat ending that doesn't feel nearly as satisfyingly emotional as the rest of the text.  There's not even a sense of shock that the whole ordeal is over.  Even with the brief, sentimental epilogue, it simply ends.  Though the text ends poorly, in my opinion, the legacy clearly lives on, and as Halloween gets closer, I'm sure we'll see still more the effects this classic work of literature had on our culture.  

Books for Boys

Supposedly, boys are pickier readers than girls are... I'm not sure where that assumption came from, nor do I have any statistics to back it up.  I do, however, have quite a few friends and family members who are English and Language Arts teachers, and they report a certain luke-warm attitude toward reading among their male students.  I, of course, believe that everyone is a reader, and if someone claims not to be, he (or she!) just hasn't found the right book yet.  That being said, here are a few suggestions that might appeal to the gentlemen:


Historical Fiction:
       The King Raven Trilogy by Stephen Lawhead
       Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gold
       The Song of Albion Trilogy by Stephen Lawhead
    
Fantasy/Science Fiction/Horror:
       Abarat by Clive Barker
       Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
       American Gods by Neil Gaiman
       The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer
       The Myth Hunters by Christopher Golden
       The Magicians by Lev Grossman
       A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin
       The Road by Cormac McCarthy
       The Abhorsen Trilogy by Garth Nix
       The Matt Cruse Trilogy by Kenneth Oppel
       The Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud
       Darwinia by Robert Charles Wilson
       Dragon and Thief by Timothy Zahn
       Fire Bringer by David Clement-Davies
       Peeps by Scott Westerfeld
       Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld
       The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness
       Unwind by Neal Schusterman
       The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
       Retribution Falls by Chris Wooding
       Feed by M. T. Anderson
       The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch
       From a Buick 8 by Stephen King


Mysteries/Thrillers:
       The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown
       Thr3e by Ted Dekker
       The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larson
       The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock
       Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind
       Acceleration by Graham McNamee
       The Knife and the Butterfly by Ashley Hope Perez
      

Nonfiction/Memoir/Biography:
       Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
       The Hot Zone by Richard Preston
       The Demon in the Freezer by Richard Preston
       A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
       Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
       Puppies, Dogs, and Blue Northerners by Gary Paulsen

From a Buick 8

Title: From a Buick 8

Author: Stephen King

Publisher: Pocket Books (2002)

Genre(s): Fiction, Science Fiction, Horror

Length: 356 pages

Synopsis:  At a quiet Pennsylvania State Police post, there’s a secret in Shed B.  Under a tarp rests a midnight blue ’54 Buick that’s a good deal more than it seems.  For Ned Wilcox, the post has become a home away from home, the one place where he can cling to the memory of his father, Trooper Curt Wilcox, who was killed by a drunk driver.  He fits in amongst the men and women of the post, but now that he’s discovered the Buick in Shed B, he’s about to be taken into a new circle of trust.  From the points of view of those who were there, Ned will learn the story of the Buick and its impact on the troopers, his father, and now himself.

My Rating: 4 Stars

My Opinion: I’ve read some horror before, though it’s not generally my go-to genre.  Clive Barker’s got some wild stuff, but I actually hadn’t read a Stephen King book before.  Shocking, I know, but I just hadn’t gotten around to it.  Several of my coworkers were putting together an impromptu book club, and the text of choice was this one.  Of course, being a reader, I wanted in.  I didn’t actually own the book, though, so I had to wait to start until someone else had finished it, but I caught up soon enough.  It’s a quick read with an interesting cast of characters and a central mystery that’s both unspeakably weird and startlingly mundane.  As much about story-telling as it is about the horror of the Buick, it’s not as grim as I expected.  There was only one scene, actually, that really left me nightmare prone, but perhaps that’s because I’m a softy in some respects.  It’s good, though, not too complex for a quick summer read, and not so surface-skimming that I fail to care about the characters.  It’s also oddly thought-provoking, discussing the difficulties of believing what one cannot see and of conveying the truth of something with words alone.  It’s the perfect book for summer, I think, especially a summer like mine, spent in a cabin in the middle of the woods.  Who wouldn’t want a little scary story at bedtime?