Battle Magic - Tamora Pierce (The Circle Opens #3)

I was so disappointed by this book.  Tamora Pierce is one of my favorite authors, and I had such high expectations for Battle Magic because everything Pierce writes is normally of very high quality.  In this case, however, I feel like she fell very, very flat.  Part of this is the nature of the book.  It's an "in between" book, a book that happens between two other books but is written and released after them; in this case, Battle Magic comes after Street Magic but before Melting Stones and The Will of the Empress.  Now, doing short stories and novellas in between other works is all the rage these days, but Battle Magic doesn't fit that description.  It's a full-fledged novel, at well over 400 pages.  But, having devoured everything Pierce has written, including Melting Stones and The Will of the Empress, I already had an idea--a pretty good one--of what happened in this book.  That didn't deter me.  I re-read books all the time, and knowing what's going to happen isn't necessarily a bad thing.  Good writing an easily compensate for that.  But in this case, I felt that the writing just...wasn't...good.

It absolutely breaks my heart to say that, but it's true.  Pierce spent this book fleshing out a conflict mentioned in Melting Stones and The Will of the Empress, between two countries that seem to be very loosely based on China and Tibet.  Gyongxe is like Tibet: a high mountain country that is one of the holiest lands in the world, a place where the gods are closer.  Yanjing is like Imperial China, and wants to take over Gyongxe.  Now, these two countries aren't copy-and-paste representations of their real-world "counterparts," but it's easy to see where the inspiration came from, especially in the beginning.  As the book goes on, Pierce fleshes out the countries more and more (this is something she's so good at) and the differences become more marked, the distance between reality and fantasy wider.  That's as it should be.  Pierce also incorporates a wonderful magic system that we haven't seen before, based on teamwork and shamanism rather than the individual mages featured in her other books.  And all the hallmarks of a great, gritty fantasy are there: an invading force, a defending country, a small group of people trying to make a difference, and such wonderful magic.  But then it just fell apart.

Going into this book, I knew things wouldn't go well.  I knew, for example, that there was going to be torture; Evvy talks about her feet being caned in Melting Stones.  "Wow," I thought.  "Pierce is really getting grown up with this one."  But she didn't.  There's a short torture scene, but I felt it lacked real emotion.  I felt that most of the pivotal scenes in this book lacked the emotion that Pierce is normally so good at portraying.  Big, pivotal moments were brushed over and skipped.  It felt like Pierce couldn't decide if she was writing an advanced young-adult fantasy or one for much younger readers, and that muddle really got in the way of enjoyment.  And the end...which is a literal deus ex machina.  Pierce's characters normally have such agency and direction in her books, and in this one they were just dragged about and didn't really affect anything, especially at the end.  Without them, everything would likely have been pretty much the same, and that was disappointing.

This was most definitely not Pierce's strongest work, and considering that I waited so long to read it, I was extra disappointed.  Some of the settings and magic were lovely, and we actually get some scenes from Rosethorn's perspective, which was nice, but so much was just...missing.  I'm very, very sad about this.

2 stars out of 5.

Stone Devil Duke - K.J. Jackson (Hold Your Breath #1)

Historical romances frustrate me more than any other genre, because in no other genre do I find such a wide array of quality with so few indicators as to what's going to be good and what's not.  Why?  Because they all look the same.  I am a sucker for a girl in a pretty dress (even if the dresses are hardly ever period-accurate) and so whenever they come up, I continue to fall for them. Every.  Single.  Time.  As for this one?  Well, it fell pretty much in the middle, quality-wise.  Let's go!

The plot follows Aggie and Devin.  Devin the titular "Stone Devil Duke," as he is widely known throughout the ton, though there isn't really a reason for him to be known as such.  At one point, it's said that it's because of something he witnessed when he was younger--but then it's said that pretty much no one knows about that, so why it would be such a widespread nickname, I have no idea.  Aggie is a young lady of quality who spends her nights dressed as a cabbie and loaded down with pistols as she hunts for the men who killed her father and scarred her.  She doesn't usually pick up fares, but Devin ends up in her cab and gets pulled into the mess and then, of course, finds himself completely unable to leave.

I didn't find Aggie and Devin's relationship plausible.  Characters in historical romances often have near-instantaneous connections, but this one felt off even when taking that trope into consideration.  Aggie wants absolutely nothing to do with Devin, and yet when she finds herself stuck with him, she suddenly surrenders pretty much her entire quest to him because their relationship is, very abruptly, more important to her.  She has no real reason to think that Devin will actually follow through on his promises to her, as he's done nothing to show that he would.  In fact, given that she sees him talking to one of her attackers at one point, she should have every reason to suspect that he might be in on the whole thing--what a plot twist that would have been!  But no, Devin and his compatriots are nothing but what they appear to be.  For his part, Devin basically marries Aggie because he has to-slash-because he wants to have sex with her.  Fair enough, I guess.  But still, I didn't think these two had any real connection until after they were married, at which point they proceeded to have hot sex (which was well-written, I felt) and the mystery which occupied so much of the first part of the book abruptly fell by the wayside, only to be neatly tied up in the space of two chapters later on.

The mystery was the other thing that bothered me.  When the background for it finally comes out, it makes sense--but it takes forever until that background comes out.  Additionally, there's no real "mystery" to the component of Aggie's brother, who is gone and then just reappears without anyone having any success at figuring out what happened to him--not even a little.  Not much of a mystery if there aren't any clues.  And then the villain... In my view, a mystery should provide you with clues to figure out who the villain really is.  This didn't.  It just suddenly comes out, and everyone is like, "Oh, it's him," and then they go on with their lives.  Blah.

The writing here wasn't bad.  The dialogue seemed a bit stilted in places (a good deal of places) but the rest of it was okay.  The sex was good.  The characters' backgrounds and the setup was good.  I'm just not sure that I really liked how the main story was executed, dropped, and then picked up again; I feel like the threads could have been twined together a bit more artfully.  This was okay, but it wasn't something I devoured, and it's not something I'll be reading again.

2.5 stars out of 5.

Outlander - Diana Gabaldon (Outlander #1)

Oh my stars, I feel like I've been reading this book forever.  Looking at the page count, I can see that's almost 900 pages, so that's not that surprising.  What makes it even less surprising is that Outlander contains one of very few things that will significantly slow me down while reading: phonetic accents.  Let me tell you, phonetic accents are terrible.  I hate them.  When people in the NaNoWriMo community ask about using them, my advice is always one word: Don't.  To me, phonetic accents make your character not only harder to understand, but also less intelligent, like they don't know how to speak properly.  Most of the time, a phonetic accent is not necessary to delineate where your characters are from, and that was especially the case here.  We get it, Gabaldon: Most of your characters in this book are Scots.  This is abundantly clear in everything they do, your constant references to kilts, plaids, sporrans, dirks, etc., calling your main character "Sassenach..."  Need I go on?  You didn't need to make me struggle through 900 pages of phonetically-written dialogue, too.

Okay, that aside...this is a monster of the book.  I mean, 900 pages for what basically boils down to a historical romance.  That is a huge page count.  And it's only the first of seven books.  One wouldn't think that it would take a time-travel romance so long to unravel.  I don't think it took that long to build Jamie and Claire's relationship--which, for the record, I did think was well done.  It's a classic, and some would say trope-y, relationship: the warrior and the healer.  Still, it's classic for a reason.  Those two roles allow the leads to compensate for each other's weaknesses, and I also that their personalities matched well.  I didn't mind the main plot: modern woman gets accidentally sent back in time to the eighteenth century and gets mixed up with a bunch of Scots while being pursued by those who think she's a spy.  That said, this isn't exactly a book one can take seriously, despite the amount of mortal peril that comes up.  Plot holes abound, and the plot just keeps going and going and going long after it seems like it should have stopped.  I almost think I would have preferred to see the separate plot points here split up and made into separate stories with separate main characters.

Also...Claire's married.  And while everyone tells her it's totally cool that she has a husband, she can still get married again and it's not a problem at all, I just don't buy that.  There's no excuse for being unfaithful. Well, okay, there are, but Claire doesn't have any of those because she can go back and chooses not to.  So basically she just buys into this whole thing that everyone, including priests(!) tells her about adultery being okay.  Which, considering how adultery was viewed (another woman is pretty much burned at the stake for it!) seems terribly unlikely.  Also I find it hard to believe that more people didn't think Claire was a witch, all things considered.  And as for her treatment for PTSD...uhm...what was she thinking?

As others have said, this book isn't exactly a literary masterpiece, and I have to think that, all told, it was written for exactly the same reason Fifty Shades of Grey was: housewife escapism.  However, I am interested in one of the books later in the series, which looks like it involves Claire's daughter Brianna as more of a main character, so I might keep reading for that purpose alone.  And this did knock out my category of "A book published the year you were born" for the Popsugar challenge, which is good, too.  Overall, it's like others have said: it's junk, but the kind you want more of in a weird sort of way, just like more "traditional" historical romances are--except you could fit three of those into this.  Which I would have preferred...

Anyway, 3 stars out of 5.

Cress - Marissa Meyer (Lunar Chronicles #3)

Oh, I love this series.  But let me tell you, I wasn't planning on reading Cress just yet--'til I got the email.  It was Goodreads "New Releases by Authors You've Read" email for October, and when I went to the full page, there it was: Winter.  The final book in Meyer's series.  It was marked as being released on October 13th.  And I went in a frenzy.  I hadn't read Cress yet!  I hadn't read Fairest yet!  I had to read them!  So I scurried off and bought Cress, and absolutely devoured it.  Eager for what was next, I went to check out Winter...and found that it's real release date is not October 13th, but November 10th.  Goodreads had lied to me!  How dare it?  Well, it looks like the first two chapters of Winter will be available for preview on October 13th, and that's what the email referred to--which is a pretty big cop-out, if you're asking me.  Now I have to get Fairest and make its short length last an entire month until I can get my hands on Winter and this series' luscious conclusion.

Because that's just what Cress was, just like the Cinder and Scarlet, the first two books in the series: luscious.  The characters, the relationships, the stories, the futuristic setting...It's all just wonderful.  In Cress, Meyer brings in her third heroine of the series, Crescent Moon--the titular Cress.  Cress is our Rapunzel.  She has spent seven years trapped in a satellite orbiting Earth with only an array of computers to keep her company.  A Lunar shell--that is, a Lunar without the gift of glamour, for those of you who haven't been reading along (you should be)--she should have been killed as an infant, but was kept alive by one of Queen Levana's lackeys.  Cress' computer skills are top-notch, and she's been doing Mistress Sybil's bidding for years, hacking Earthen systems and hiding Lunar ships.  Until recently, when a change of heart--or perhaps a realization that what she was doing was wrong--resulted in her switching sides and helping the renegade Cinder and her allies.  All Cress wants in return is for them to rescue her from her satellite and take her to Earth.

Of course, things can't be easy.  The rescue attempt goes wrong.  Cress and Thorne (one of Cinder's allies) end up separated from the rest of the group, castaways in the Sahara desert.  Scarlet ends up a captive of the Lunars.  Wolf is nearly dead.  And Cinder has to figure out how to fix it all and stop Emperor Kaito's marriage to Levana, which would result in pretty much the end of the world.  It's a lot for a teenage girl, even a cyborg princess teenage girl, to handle.  But she does, with aplomb, and you can't help but root for her.  Meanwhile, everything else just gets...worse.  Darker.  Human (Lunar?) trafficking, slavery, torture, and plague all feature in this book, and while it's aimed at young adults, Meyer definitely doesn't pull punches in the telling.

Meyer did something different with Cress' character.  Cinder and Scarlet are both solitary, strong-willed young women who have definite strengths and skills and have been exercising them for a long time.  While they may end up in unfamiliar situations, they're still on their own world (for the most part) and know how to deal.  For Cress, that isn't the case.  An exile for most of her life, her only knowledge of Earth coming through the internet, she's naive and a little immature.  She gets through situations by pretending she's someone else.  She desperately wants a fairytale romance, in opposition to Scarlet and Cinder, who might have love interests but are more concerned with more pressing matters.  Cress isn't as strong as Scarlet and Cinder.  She can't fight.  She can hack a computer, but that doesn't do her much good when she doesn't have one.  She can't navigate, she can't fix things, she has no real knowledge of her new surroundings.  Consequently, she has a very different character growth trajectory than Meyer's other heroines.  Cress has to gain confidence in herself, which is something that Cinder and Scarlet didn't struggle with as much.  It was different, and I liked it.  While Cress is definitely naive, she's not so in a way that made me want to slap some sense into her.  Instead, I cheered for her, watching her grow and develop and come into her own.  Cress isn't going to be a butt-kicker, but she's definitely an asset to Cinder's team and I look forward to seeing more of her.

And Thorne.  God, I loved Thorne.  Maybe that's because, for most of the book, he's not a point-of-view character and you only see him through Cress' perspective, but I loved him nonetheless.  I think Meyer did a great job fleshing him out in this one, making him more than the wacky criminal we'd met previously in Scarlet.

Speaking of Scarlet...I would have loved to see more of her and wolf.  They're greatly lacking in this book, and while I can see why, I still wanted more of them.  Meyer had to separate Scarlet and Wolf for the plot to work and to keep the tension in their relationship.  They got very intense very fast in Scarlet, and I think it might have gotten boring if they had just figured everything out in this one--which they inevitably would have done if they hadn't been separated.  But these are fairytale adaptations, and happily ever after can't come until the very end, so I suppose I'll just have to deal with it.

And Winter!  We got our first glance at Princess Winter here!  So awesome!  I can't wait to see more of her.  How am I going to go an entire month Winter-less?  I don't know.

I only have one complaint about Cress and this series in general.  I love that Meyer adds a new fairytale and a new heroine in every book, but when they're all being added to each other, it means that each one ends up getting progressively less page time.  It means the story has to jump around more in order to cover everyone.  By this point, there is a lot of stuff going on, and while it doesn't get convoluted or hard to follow, none of the girls really got the coverage I would have liked.  This might be a good thing--I liked Cress, but it's possible that too much of her would have driven me away, and the reduction of Scarlet's role sets up for the next book.  But...still.  I felt just a tiny bit like I was getting gipped out of page time with my girls because the book, even at almost six hundred pages, just wasn't long enough to contain the awesomeness of them all.

Here's the thing.  I read many books I like.  I even read a good number of books I love.  But Meyer's Lunar Chronicles fall into a separate category all together: books I will read again and again and again.  They're very different, and they're just good.  I love them, so, so much.  I can't wait until Winter comes out, and then hopefully a box set, because I have the Kindle editions but would love to have these in the flesh (print?).

4.5 stars out of 5.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone - J. K. Rowling (Harry Potter #1)

Does this book even need to be introduced?  I think not.  But let me give you a little insight as to why it's appearing here, so many years after its initial publication when one more review cannot possibly do anything to influence anyone in regards to it...

So, when I was little, my mother bought me the first two books in the Harry Potter series as a reward for helping out with a family garage sale.  The third book was coming out the next day (as I remember it) so she thought it would be a good way to feed my voracious appetite for books.  These were, of course, the original US-edition hardcover editions, very different from the cover art I've posted here.  I read the first two, we picked up the third, and then settled in for the wait for the fourth.  We went to the midnight release for the fourth, and the fifth.  (Am I remembering this right?  Maybe the fourth was coming out and I had the first three...hm...)  We pre-ordered the sixth, but I ended up with two copies because I was on vacation with my dad when it came out and couldn't possibly wait a whole ten days to get the pre-ordered copy when I returned home.  And then the seventh came out, and I...never got it.  I don't know why.  I knew it was out.  It just kind of fell off my radar, and I didn't actually end up reading it until shortly before the seventh movie came out--and even then I only got the copy from the library.  Meanwhile, through forced sharing with my demonic little brother, my beautiful books had been utterly destroyed, which means they never got re-read.

Enter the Popsugar Reading Challenge and its category, "A book from your childhood."  Also enter the beautiful, paperback box-set of the Harry Potter books in which, when you line them all up in their box, the spines form a breathtaking picture of Hogwarts.  I saw that set, and I immediately knew it was a great replacement for the books that were destroyed--so I asked my boyfriend for it for my birthday, and he promptly obliged.  And, reading this for the second time ever, I'm reminded of why so many people find these books to be, quite frankly, magical.

Rowling has this very British way of writing very outrageous things very matter-of-factly, which somehow makes them seem perfectly plausible.  Neil Gaiman does this, too, and I think it's a trait that makes them so successful as fantasy authors, because this matter-of-factness just makes everything seem real.  Of course there's a school for witchcraft and wizardry lurking in the British countryside; how could I have ever thought differently?  And Rowling is, of course, an astounding world-builder.  Many have droned on and on about her worldbuilding, about all the morals these stories have to offer kids, teens, and even adults, and I won't bore you by repeating what's been said many times before.  All those people were right.  Does the Harry Potter series have plot holes?  Yes.  Yes it does.  But I don't think that those plot holes at all detract from the story.  There's just such a breathtaking world people with such extraordinary people and things that you get swept up in it all, and I don't think the holes that exist detract from that feeling one bit.  The boyfriend has never read Harry Potter (he has seen some of the movies) and I recommended to him that he give it a shot--as everyone should.  This really is an example of fantasy at its finest, with all of the beautiful worldbuilding of some of the more massive books (Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings) but with a much higher "readability" than those doorstopper books.

4.5 stars out of 5.

The Headmaster's Wife - Thomas Christopher Greene

This novel was split very evenly into two halves: one half that I hated and one half that I liked quite a bit.  I can imagine that the first half might bother some people quite a bit; it definitely rubbed me in a ton of wrong ways--and I definitely don't consider myself a sensitive reader.

So, Arthur Winthrop is the main character in the first half, which is written in first person.  Arthur is found naked in Central Park, wandering through the snow.  When the police take him in and ask him what he was doing, he reveals a strange tale that involves rape (or, at the very least, coerced sex) and murder amongst other less-than-scrupulous activities.  In the second half, Arthur's wife Elizabeth is the main character.  Her part is written in third person.  You definitely have to read both parts to understand the first.  Reading the first part, I could tell that something was off, but I wasn't sure what, and even knowing that something was off, that some of the things that Arthur remembered couldn't be quite true, I still didn't like it.  The fact that Arthur was relating all of these things, that he wholeheartedly believed he had done these things and was okay with it, and that we were still supposed to like him, didn't agree with me at all.  If Arthur had shown real remorse for what he had done, or believed he'd done, it might have might have been different, but as it was...no.  I can't be sympathetic toward someone who legitimately believes he has committed rape and murder, and yet only cares about being let go so he can continue to walk around the park naked.

On the other hand, I liked Elizabeth's part--mostly.  It still had some parts that I really frowned upon (there is no excuse for adultery in my opinion) but, overall, Elizabeth was a much more sympathetic character than Arthur, and the reality of the second part agreed with me much more than the strangeness of Arthur's.  The second part is the one that makes everything sensible, and it did make me grateful that I kept reading, though it didn't make the first part sit any better.  The language through most of this was lovely, but the whole conception...I don't know.  It encapsulated a lot of things that I feel could have been handled much, much better, and overall left a bad taste in my mouth and a sick feeling in my stomach.  I don't think there's much more to say about it than that.  The second part was better than the first, but couldn't fully redeem it, and because of that (combined with a wishy-washy ending) I felt this one was severely lacking.

2 stars out of 5.

The Monuments Men - Robert M. Edsel

The Monuments Men came to my attention during one of the most awesome courses I took in college, "Indiana Jones in History," which wasn't about Indiana Jones so much as it was about historiography--that is, who gets to tell history and how they form those narratives.  As part of the course, we read The Rape of Europa, which is about the looting of art, sculptures, etc. from locations all across Europe during World War II, as well as the efforts to protect and preserve those same cultural items and to retrieve the ones that were stolen.  It was interesting, and the Monuments Men factored into it, and I consequently didn't really have any interest in reading The Monuments Men because I figured The Rape of Europa had already covered it all.  And then, of course, The Monuments Men became a movie.  I still didn't really have any interest in reading it...until the Popsugar Reading Challenge threw out "A book that was made into a movie."  While I had other books that had become movies, I'd also picked up The Monuments Men when it was on sale on Kindle, so I figured this was as good a time as ever to read it.  And?  Well, it was much, much better than The Rape of Europa.

Don't get me wrong.  Europa was good.  But it was a very academic work, one that was written for more of an art history audience.  It seemed to rely heavily on the reader knowing the names of tons of artists and tons of pieces of art, and its scope meant that it went from place to place very quickly.  The Monuments Men also jumped from place to place, but Edsel did this very purposefully to build tension and cover a select handful of people rather than to just cover as much territory as humanly possible.  Edsel also focuses exclusively on the work of the Monuments Men in the areas of France, Germany, and Austria, mostly from D-Day onward, and the recovery efforts of the few who made it into the Monuments Men's ranks.  By restraining his scope, Edsel manages to make this a narrative history that, while it's well-noted and researched, still manages to be engaging and readable to someone who isn't totally versed in either WWII history or art.  Instead of producing laundry lists of art and artists, Edsel uses a few well-known artists (Vermeer, Michelangelo) and a few iconic pieces of art (The Astronomer) to illustrate his points and keep a continuous narrative.  Consequently, the book is informative while also reading like a gripping war story.

I had two main complaints about this book.  The first was the chapter length.  Edsel's chapters vary wildly in length; some are only a handful of pages long, taking less than five minutes to read.  Others are more than four times that long.  While none of the chapters were bad, the differences in length could be frustrating.  There were many times that I wouldn't start a new chapter because I just didn't have time for it--though if it had been the length of the other chapters, I could have read two or three more.  The other complaint was that, at the end, Edsel suddenly seems to switch from telling a story to solving a mystery.  I didn't necessarily mind the mystery-solving aspect, because most history books do revolve around an argument that tries to "solve" some aspect of history.  However, in most cases, the entire book revolves around building and supporting an argument; any narratives are secondary to the argument.  In this case, it was the other way around.  Most of the book was a narrative, and the argument came out of nowhere at the end, which just seemed...odd.

Okay, there was a third thing, and that was that Edsel suddenly took a moralistic approach at the end.  World War II was horrible on so many fronts.  We know that.  (Well, most of us do.  There are certainly Holocaust deniers out there, but I doubt they'd be reading this to begin with.)  Edsel's random preachy moment at the end, about one of the Monuments Men recovering a painting that he, as a German Jew, had never been allowed to see when it was on display, came across as rather abrupt, and it would have been best if it had been either left out or worked in a bit more subtly...which would have been hard, because the Monuments Man in question really wasn't even involved for most of the story, and instead seemed to have been incorporated only for this purpose.  It was weird.

Despite the rather jarring bits at the end which didn't seem to properly incorporated, I did enjoy this.  The narrative style worked well, and the book as a whole was engaging.  I definitely read on later than I should have on several occasions, because it was just so good.  I might even read this one again.  Maybe.  We'll see.

4 stars out of 5.