The Ghost Bride (Audiobook)

Title: The Ghost Bride

Author: Yangsze Choo

 

Read by: Yangsze Choo

Publisher: Harper Audio (2013)

 

Genre(s): Fiction, Fantasy, Mystery, Historical Fiction

Length: 12 hours and 8 minutes

Synopsis: "Would you like to be a ghost bride?"  Li Lan is shocked by her father's suggestion.  After all, though marrying off the dead is not entirely unheard of in colonial Malaya, it is rare for the bride to be a living woman who would be condemned to a life of widowhood.  Though Li Lan has no interest in becoming such a bride, she is curious about the circumstances that led to the suggestion.  Her intended, it would seem, was the heir to the Lim family, a young man she had never even met.  Now, however, all of his family is showing a keen interest in her, from the new heir Tian Bai to his dead cousin, who's begun appearing in Li Lan's dreams and is anything but charming.

My Rating: 3 Stars

My Opinion:  I did enjoy this audiobook performance, since it is somewhat rare to find a book read by its author.  Li Lan isn't exactly the most interesting protagonist, but through her explorations, we are treated to an extensive, lushly described, and sometimes fantastical view of her world, both in life and death.  The historical notes Choo includes at the conclusion of the story are nearly as interesting as the book itself.  There's a lot going on in this story, ranging from romance to a sort of supernatural version of Law & Order.  With the historical context in place, that combination makes a lot more sense, but during my first listening, I found it somewhat difficult to work out where the story was going, and why on earth that seemed like a logical option.  Though there were things about this book that puzzled me, I did enjoy the performance overall, and the concept behind it in particular.

The Rook (Audiobook)

Title: The Rook

Author: Daniel O'Malley

Read by: Susan Duerden

Publisher: Dreamscape Media (2012)

Genre(s): Fiction, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Crime Thriller, Mystery

Length: 17 hours and 51 minutes

Synopsis: When Myfanwy Thomas awakes in a park, surrounded by corpses wearing latex gloves, she has no idea who she is or how she came to be in such a situation.  Her only clues are several letters in her pocket, addressed to her by the woman who had previously inhabited her body, the personality she'd been born with and which was mysteriously erased.  This is only the beginning of Myfanwy's trip down the rabbit hole.  Soon she begins to realize that there is far, far more to her life-- or rather, the life she's inherited-- than she could ever have guessed.  Her prior self has left her a road-map in letters and documents, but when one awakens to find oneself an administrator in the government's secret supernatural department, there are bound to be some adjustments to make.

My Rating: 3 Stars

My Opinion:  This book started well, but lost momentum before long.  I've read other reviews comparing The Rook with the film The Bourne Identity, but I really think it's really much closer to Ghostbusters.  It may have been Duerden's performance, but instead of playing as an actual thriller, this audiobook came across as a parody of one.  In truth, I can't tell which was the actual intent.  Duerden has Myfanwy sounding like a little girl rather than the competent administrator she is (repeatedly) purported to be, and the voices she adopted for some of her other characters crossed the border into ridiculous.  O'Malley has an interesting concept here, and some really unique ideas, but I did not enjoy this audiobook as much as I had hoped.

The Farm

Title: The Farm

Author: Emily McKay

Publisher: Berkley Books (2012)

Genre(s): Fiction, Young Adult Fiction, Science Fiction, Dystopian Fiction

Length: 420

Synopsis: Lily can still remember the Before.  Not so long ago, there were no raging, bloodthirsty creatures that used to be human, until a virus turned them into the Ticks.  Teens weren't kept on Farms to serve as blood donors, keeping the Ticks fed and pacified.  And Mel, her autistic twin sister, wasn't communicating only in cryptic phrases of nursery rhymes.  But that was all Before, and now, Lily can only think about how she can get herself and her sister off the Farm and across the desolate United States to the safety of Canada.  The night she plans to escape, however, she runs into Carter, a classmate from the Before who seems to have all the answers.  With so much at stake, can she really afford to trust him?  Or, perhaps more importantly, can she really afford not to?

My Rating: 3 Stars

 
My Opinion: I just don't know what to make of this one.  It seems to be good conceptually, but there were a few wrenches in the works that made it less than a favorite.  I love the idea of the Ticks, and the Farms are suitably grim and dystopian, but there are a couple fantastical twists thrown into the plot that I had a hard time swallowing in McKay's scientifically based world.  I liked the struggle Lily faced in trying to care for her sister in a whole new world, but I found most of the other characters one-dimensional and hard to believe.  There's a lot of dystopian lit for young adults hitting the market right now, particularly with the popularity of books like The Hunger Games and Divergent trilogies.  Some of it is good, and others not so much.  I would recommend many other books over this one.

The Windup Girl

Title: The Windup Girl

Author: Paolo Bacigalupi

Publisher: Night Shade Books (2009)

Genre(s): Fiction, Science Fiction, Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

Length: 359 pages

Synopsis:  Life is uncertain in Bangkok.  Everyone's got a secret to hide.  Anderson is working with the hated AgriGen company, out to steal the genetic biodiversity the company needs to keep its seed stocks one step ahead of mutating diseases.  Emiko is a wind-up girl, one of the New People genetically engineered for perfection and now discarded as last year's model.  Hock Seng is a refugee; once the master of a great trading empire, he was forced to the fringes of society when he fled.  As tensions in the city grow between the Environment Ministry's "white-shirts" and the powerful forces of Trade, whose secrets will be profitable?  And whose will lead to disaster?

My Rating: 3 Stars

My Opinion:  I really, truly, desperately wanted to like this book.  With a great premise and so much potential (not to mention multiple awards and rave endorsements from great authors), I was really prepared to love this book.  I didn't.  I'm not certain what it was that didn't click.  Perhaps it's the jumble of characters, all with unclear motives and mixed loyalties, or maybe the slow, steady pacing that's less of a roller-coaster and more of a stroll in the park...albeit a grim, impoverished, dangerous, gritty park.  The characters seem realistic, the world Bacigalupi's created is so plausible it's terrifying, and yet I never really felt a part of it.  It honestly pains me to say that I didn't enjoy something so well written and thought out, as this clearly is, but I could not relate to the characters and could not find a flow to the story.  It took me ages to get through as I waited for the other shoe to drop, and now here I sit with the shoe still dangling.  I don't love books that wrap all the loose ends into a nice neat bow, but here I felt that the story never really got started.  The characters appear only at the fringes of one another's lives, with a few notable exceptions.  Their narratives feel disjointed, and while they permit the reader a bird's eye view of this Bangkok of the future, I found myself wanting to be more than impartial observer.  The world of the story is so deeply envisioned that I wanted to feel it myself.  Unfortunately, I never found my way through that fourth wall into the story, and though I watched until the very end, I walked away from it unmoved.

The Infects

Title: The Infects

Author: Sean Beaudoin

Publisher: Candlewick Press (2012)

Genre(s): Fiction, Science Fiction, Young Adult Fiction

Length: 347 pages

Synopsis:  Nick Sole’s life is not exactly ordinary.  Unfortunately, it’s not-exactly-ordinary in all the wrong ways.  His sister is a whiz with videogames, but since she’s been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, no one but Nick seems to treat her like a person.  His mom walked out when they were young, and his dad lost his job in research and development at Rebozzo’s chicken factory.  Now he’s the Dude instead of a dad, and it’s up to Nick to keep the family together, working nights at the chicken factory just to pay the rent.  When Nick makes a terrible mistake on the factory line, he finds himself shipped off to a juvenile reform camp where everything begins to fall apart.  Everything, and everyone.  Literally. 

My Rating: 3 Stars

My Opinion: I’ll admit, I don’t love zombies.  There seems to be a bit of a zombie glut in pop culture right now, and I’ve had my fill, as it were, of desiccated flesh.  This book seemed to be trying to find its niche within the ranks of the animated dead, but it couldn’t quite decide where it wanted to go.  Did it want to snidely mock horror movies and the zombie genre in general?  Did it want to suggest a dystopian future that picks up where the typical zombie flick leaves off?  Did it want to write a poignant teen story?  Well… yes.  But it wanted to do all those things at once, and in different ways.  There’s a lot about this book that’s not bad.  In fact, it has elements that are quite good.  But to me it really did feel like three or four different books that coexisted alongside one another rather than merging together into a single story.  It’s unique, yes, and I’ll give it points for that, but it felt at times like someone had cut and pasted chapters from Louis Sachar’s Holes alongside pages out of Twilight and the script to some poorly done B horror movie featuring a cast of largely superfluous and utterly unmemorable teens. 

The Boilerplate Rhino

Title: The Boilerplate Rhino

 

Author: David Quammen

Publisher: Scribner (2000)

 

Genre(s): Non-Fiction, Essay

Length: 245 pages

Synopsis: Quammen spent fifteen years as a magazine columnist, writing "Natural Acts" for Outside.  Selections from the resulting essays, hundreds all told, have previously been collected and published in book form.  Now, twenty-five essays unpublished since their appearance in the magazine have been brought together in a new offering.  From beetles to black holes and rattlesnakes to rhinoceros, these essays explore nature in all its glorious facets.

My Rating: 3 Stars

My Opinion: Quammen is a skillful writer.  He's well trained and clearly knows what he's doing.  He's done the research and seems to be at least moderately interested in the subject matter.  What these essays lack is passion.  I don't mean to that to be a personal statement on Quammen's writing style.  I doubt the greatest writer in the history of language could write a nature column for fifteen years and have each and every essay ring with the kind of devotion that would leave readers starry-eyed with wonder.  Some of these do have a spark to them, though these tend to be the pieces that focus on writing or literature as much as nature.  The voice is sometimes distractingly cynical, and the essays occasionally seem to miss their target.  It's a difficult style-- these are not anecdotes; there's little to no narrative structure to bring the reader along.  Moreover, these pieces collected from a large body of work with no underlying thematic structure.  Though the pieces selected for this collection were grouped intentionally within the book, each is designed to be taken out of context and read without consideration of the pieces before and after.  Unfortunately, having been published together, it becomes difficult for a reader to separate them.  Some of these resonated with me more than others, but I found that those I didn't like as much seemed to dampen those that did.  It took me longer than normal to finish this book as I tried to space out the essays and gain perspective on them individually, but still, they lacked the kind of spark I've found in other nature writing and essays.  If Quammen were to research and write a full length book, I'd certainly like to read it, but I would recommend other essayists ahead of him.

Turnskin

Title: Turnskin

Author: Nicole Kimberling

Publisher: Blind Eye Books (2008)

Genre(s): Fiction, Gay/Lesbian Interest

Length: 259 pages

Synopsis:  Tom Fletcher is a Shifter, born with the ability to changed his physical appearance in remarkable ways.  For the most part, though, he downplays his skills; raised in a rural community of non-Shifters (known as Skins), it seemed prudent to keep a low profile, with one notable exception.  Tom is a playwright and an actor, and his Shifting abilities give him opportunities onstage that no Skin could hope to match.  Unfortunately, his hometown isn't exactly a center of culture.  He knows he's destined for the stage, but he'd have to travel to the city of Riverside to have that chance, and as a Shifter, regulations make such travel difficult.  Opportunity goes hand in hand with danger, however, as Tom learns when he meets the mysterious Cloud Coldmoon.  Before Tom realizes it, he's swept up in a whirlwind romance, suspected of murder, and fleeing to Riverside with little more than his scripts and the name of a theatre run by his cousins.  Tom finds that the city has its own problems, and soon realizes that the person he's been all his life might not be the person who can succeed in Riverside.  He's finally been offered his shot at a life on the stage, but what face will he have to wear to get it?

 

My Rating: 3 Stars

My Opinion:  This book seemed to have so much potential.  It was, to be extravagant with my metaphors, rather like a souffle: brilliant ideas played off one another, rising to unexpected heights and opening the door for everything from social commentary to art criticism.  But...somewhere in its creation, someone slammed the oven door and this particular souffle fell terribly flat.  Tom's voice is disconcertingly young, in ways that  go beyond the naivete of a country bumpkin moving to the big city.  I had to reread the initial pages several times before I could come to the conclusion that he wasn't a teenage boy.  The conflicts arise and dissolve with no real logic.  Major problems present themselves, often quite suddenly, then are pushed to the side, forgotten and unresolved, or resolved unrealistically.  The characters feel sketchy and one dimensional at times, and the romance that ostensibly drives the book forward never really rings true.  Generally, issues like this would have cost the book an additional star in my rating system, but the concept of this novel really is magnificent.  Kimberling's world offers a chance to consider concepts of identity in its extremes.  What does the idea of gender mean to a group of people who can change their appearance completely?  What about the concept of race?   What about sexuality?  Unfortunately, she all too often couches this conversation in terms of extremism, making it almost a satire of itself.  The heart of the story, however, is not satirical in nature, and considering the entirety of the book in such a light would undo the self discovery that's intended to be the true theme.  The book itself seems to morph from moment to moment, uncertain of where it's headed or even where it's been.  Before it can offer lessons on self-discovery, it would first have to take its own advice.

The Silver Bowl

Title: The Silver Bowl

Author: Diane Stanley

Publisher: Harper (2011)

Genre(s): Young Adult Fiction, Fantasy

Length: 307 pages

Synopsis:  Molly's mother went mad and her father's a drunkard.  She's not even a little surprised when, at seven years old, her father decides to ship her off to the king's castle to work as a scullery maid.  What does surprise her are the visions that occasionally possess her, shocking visions of death and destruction that always come true.  Before her arrival at the castle, there was no way for Molly to know when the visions would strike, but when she's promoted to silver-polisher, she discovers that simply polishing a particular silver bowl brings them on.  These aren't any ordinary visions though.  They all pertain to the royal family, and none of them are good.

My Rating: 3 Stars

My Opinion: 

This is a well constructed little story.  It's got all the elements it should: rather appealing characters, logical character development, a decent plot.  And yet, unlike Molly's silver, it just doesn't shine.  The setting is a bit odd: fictional kingdoms with fictional geography (not to mention magic), and yet there are still somehow mentions of ancient Greece, Rome, and Persia.  It doesn't feel as fully imagined as it might, especially given that the underlying structure is sound.  Though there's nothing really wrong with this book, I don't see it shooting to the top of anyone's favorite book lists or the bestsellers' list either.

Deadly

Title: Deadly

Author: Julie Chibbaro

Publisher: Antheneum Books for Young Readers (2011)

Genre(s): Realistic Fiction, Historical Fiction, Young Adult Fiction

Length: 287 pages

Synopsis:  Prudence Galewski didn't expect much more from life than a job as a typist or shopgirl.  That's what awaits her and all her classmates at Mrs. Browning's School for Girls, and, in 1906, that was typical.  Despite her expectations, Prudence is dreams of doing more with her life.  She watched her brother die of gangrene and her father ship off to war, never to return.  She longs to make a difference, to "get a job fighting death."  When she gets the chance to work as a secretary, typist, and assistant at the Department of Sanitation, she realizes her opportunity has come at last.  Together, she and her employer work to determine the cause of a recent outbreak of typhoid fever.  The closer they come to an answer, however, the more puzzling the case becomes.  All the cases seem to be related to a cook named Mary Mallon, but how can they convince a perfectly healthy woman that her very presence is deadly?

My Rating: 3 Stars

My Opinion: 

Though I may be flying in the face of general consensus, I was not really a fan of this book.  It earned the National Jewish Book Award in 2011 and the cover review blurb is from The New York Times.  Nonetheless, I was underwhelmed.  I am a fan of historical fiction, particularly this era.  I am currently pursuing my own Master's degree in epidemiology, so of course the subject matter was interesting.  It just... didn't click.  There are so many different facets to this novel-- Prudence's brother's death and her father's disappearance, her relationship with her mother and with a friend who moved away to Virginia, her schoolwork, her job with the Department of Sanitation.  And yet, none of them seem deeply interwoven.  Perhaps this is due to the view of Prudence's life through the pages of her diaries.  She describes events as she sees them and not as they relate to one another.  Accurate though this may be, it does not make for a deeply engaging read.  The historical aspects of this book are obviously well researched and well presented, but again, the scope is limited to Prudence's perceptions.  For readers unfamiliar with this period in history, there is little societal context presented beyond the disparate fragments of war, sanitation reform, and societal expectations for women.  As a public health professional myself, I was also a bit bemused by Chibbaro's choice of rebellious career for her protagonist.  Prudence's mother is a midwife and the field of nursing has always been dominated by women.  These would have been clear and respectable alternatives for Prudence if, as is evident so early on, she despises the idea of being a shopgirl.  Today, as a student of public health following in the modern equivalent of Prudence's footsteps, it is rather amusing for me to sit in classes that are 80% female, reading studies by women scientists and textbooks by women authors.  It's a field of science where women are not only permitted, but often predominate.  I do hope that this book inspires young women to pursue careers in their field of interest, whatever that may be, but if I were to recommend a book for that purpose, it wouldn't be this one.

Pegasus

Title: Pegasus

Author: Robin McKinley

Publisher: G. P. Putnam’s Sons (2010)

Genre(s): Young Adult Fiction, Fantasy

Length: 404 pages

Synopsis:  For more than seven hundred years, the Kings of the humans and pegasi have maintained the Alliance, the agreement that keeps both societies safe from the beasts of the surrounding wildlands.  Though the Alliance is strong, the relationship between such different cultures has always been difficult.  Even to speak to the pegasi people requires convoluted interpretation by human magicians.  Princess Sylvi, the fourth child of the King, is not particularly looking forward to doing her part to maintain the Alliance by being bonded to a pegasus prince.  On the day of the ceremony, however, something happens that changes the course of history and earns Sylvi both  powerful enemies and a closer friend than she could imagine: she and her pegasus can talk.

My Rating: 3 Stars

My Opinion: 

It hurts me to say this, but this book was not very good.  Robin McKinley is one of my very favorite writers and I wanted to like this book.  It’s been on my to-read list for ages.  But… I was disappointed.  I would suggest that perhaps my expectations were too high, but not a single one of McKinley’s books has ever disappointed me before, and certainly not as badly as this one did.  It felt as though it had not been properly edited; sentences seemed to be missing words or had gained words that made no sense.  The story flits back and forth between the main plot line and contributing scenes until I wasn't sure where one ended and the other began.  The concept is difficult.  The pegasi are not human, but do represent a sentient society.  Unfortunately, as alien as they are, their society seems forced into a human mold.  It doesn't seem to be a naturally developed culture; part of this comes from the issue of interpretation.  So much of this story revolves around the inability to speak to and understand the pegasi.  This translates as an inability to speak to the reader.  It's confused and meandering.  The past is as important as the present, but combining these two story lines only further muddles the tale.  The characters are, eventually, engaging.  By the end of the book, I can almost recognize McKinley's signature ease of storytelling.  Though it leaves the reader on a cliffhanger ending, I won't be adding the sequel to my reading list.  This is not representative of McKinley's body of work, and she remains one of my favorites.  I'm just not sure what went so wrong with this particular novel.