The Undertaking of Lily Chen - Danica Novgorodoff

This book isn't what I was expecting.  I was expecting some sort of magical realism, I think, with lots of ghosts and specters and cool shit like that, and some really complex moral dilemmas, and some intense character development, and I just didn't get that.  Maybe it's because I'm just not a graphic novel person.  I try and I try and I try to enjoy them, but I really just don't get as complex of a story out of a graphic novel as I do out of a prose novel.  Anyway, let's get down to it.

I liked the art in this.  It's a pretty unique style in regards to how the people are drawn, but the scenery is what really got to me.  There are some absolutely stunning full-page scenery pictures in here that I would love to be able to purchase as full-size posters.  The story had really great potential.  It revolves around a man named Deshi, whose brother Wei dies in an accident.  Deshi's parents want him to find a dead girl to serve as a "corpse bride" for Wei so he won't be alone in the afterlife.  Deshi sets out to complete his mission, but it turns out dead young women are few and far between in his neck of the woods.  In fact, the only young woman to be found at all is Lily Chen, and she is still very much alive...

But no matter how much potential the story had, I think it just fell flat.  I didn't get a ton of character development out of this, and some of the stuff, from the romance to the ending, just seemed to come out of nowhere.  This book is also Lord of the Rings-esque, and not in a good way; there is a lot of walking, without anything else much happening for much of the book.

Overall, I was disappointed.  I think I might have loved this if it had been written as a prose book, but as a graphic novel it just didn't capture me the way I thought it would.

2 stars out of 5.

The Shining Girls - Lauren Beukes

Sometimes my university's popular fiction section has really good books showcased in it.  Sometimes it doesn't.  This is one of the "doesn't" times.

The plot revolves around a time-traveling serial killer whose mission is to kill a bunch of "shining girls."  Why these girls are shining, we don't know.  Why they need to die, we don't know.  Why the killer can travel through time, we don't know.  Why the the house is magical and allows this weirdness, we don't know.  How any of this works, we don't know.  It's never explained.  Any of it.

The chapters rotate between a wide variety of characters.  There are three main ones: Harper, our serial killer; Kirby, one of his victims who actually lived through his attack and now wants to find him; and Dan, a reporter who covered Kirby's case and is now acting as her mentor at a newspaper while helping her unravel the strands of the mystery.  Dan was utterly lovable, with Kirby's own good in mind.  Kirby was self-destructive.  I can understand wanting the person who attacked and nearly killed you to pay for it, but chasing him into an abandoned house by yourself and with no weapons?  Not good.  Harper is just...meh.  There's absolutely no empathy between Harper and the reader, which makes him an extremely off-putting main character.  It made his chapters a chore to read, which shouldn't have been the case.  Harper's killer psychology should have been fascinating, but it wasn't.  he just killed people for apparently no reason, even when we could see inside his head.  Considering his chapters carry about half the book, that wasn't a highlight.  The other characters are Harper's other various victims, who each have one or two chapters a piece, and those chapters vary greatly in quality.

There's one chapter with Kirby in the time-traveling house that occurs in the narrative way earlier than it probably should have, ruining some of the suspense.  The time travel premise seems to rely on the idea that time is a series of loops, but Harper doesn't ever face any consequences for messing with time, and surely he has to be messing up something with all that back-and-forthing and killing people.  I really, really loved some of the victims and would have liked to see them for more than just a few pages.  Some of the writing was quite good, particularly later in the book with the Kirby and Dan chapters, but early on Beuke's conveyance of negative emotions (anger, fear, sadness, frustration, etc.) relied heavily on the use of profanity.  Don't get me wrong, I don't mind profanity.  But I don't think that it should be the basis for conveying your characters' emotions.

Overall, this book did not shine, unlike the girls it was supposedly about.

2 stars out of 5.

The Scarecrow King - Jill Myles

It should not be a surprise to anyone here that I adore a good fairytale.  It's not a secret at all, really, and I am a huge fan of the retold fairytale trend that has been sweeping the media (books, TV, movies, all of it) in recent years.  I have read many, many fairytales, but I don't believe I'm familiar with the King Thrushbeard story.  That, of course, is what The Scarecrow King is based off of.

Our heroine in Rinda, the younger princess of Balinore.  Her mother was a commoner, and while Rinda's older sister seems to have gotten their father's royal genes, Rinda herself seems to be common to the core.  Her father hates her, for a complicated medley of reasons, the primary one seeming to be that her mother died giving birth to her and Rinda reminds him too much of the woman he really loved.  So he pushes her away, and Rinda tries to get his attention by--surprise, surprise--acting out.  In her case, she enjoys spending astronomical amounts of money to piss him off.  For example, the opening scene finds her tossing pearls to fish for kicks.  Rinda's father wants her gone, so he decides to marry off both his daughters.  Imogen, the older of the two, already has a beau, so that's easy.  Rinda doesn't want to get married, and embarks on a quest to alienate every eligible man she can find, including the visiting king.  Furious, her father declares that if she won't marry any noble, then she'll marry the next man who turns up at the castle steps.  The next morning, Rinda finds herself married off to a truly terrible minstrel.

It's really no spoiler that the minstrel is the visiting king in disguise.  We know that, but Rinda doesn't, and watching her fumble her way through her supposed new life as an impoverished minstrel's life is amusing.  Her character develops so much over the course of the story, transforming from a spoiled brat into a poised young woman willing to go to amazing lengths to protect the people she cares about.  Myles' world is also incredibly rich for such a short novel.  The Birthrights of the people of Balinore are interesting, and manifest in such manifold ways that I would love to read more about them.  The Ghost Roads were an intriguing idea with a hint of menace, but nothing to drag down the spirit of the story too much.  The romance builds at a good pace--no insta-love, but no waiting until the last five pages for emotions to appear, either.

I do wish Rinda and Alek had encountered some more troubles on their journey and been forced to rely on each other a bit more.  While the part of the story which took place in the mountains was great, it wasn't really that much of a trial, except for the very end, and I would have liked to see more things happen to bind them closer together.  I also would have liked Imogen to a bit less...plastic.  She wasn't nearly as complex a character, and I would have liked to see her developed a bit more despite her relatively little page time.  Still, these are minor complaints, and I devoured The Scarecrow King in one sitting.  Which wasn't very hard, considering it's a short book, but it was so utterly charming I couldn't help myself.  I would definitely recommend this to someone looking for a short, romantic fairytale-inspired read.

4 stars out of 5.

Storm Glass - Maria V. Snyder (Glass #1)

Let me begin by saying that Storm Glass was substantially better than Touch of Power, my last encounter with Maria V. Snyder's work.  However, it definitely has some serious flaws, which lead me to believe that either Poison Study, which I loved, wasn't actually as good as I remember it being, or that it was a one-hit wonder and Snyder has deteriorated since.

The plot of this book revolves around Opal Cowan, a young magician with powers linked to glass.  She first appeared in Snyder's Study series, and that's where the trouble begins.  Though this is the first book in a completely new trilogy, it absolutely cannot stand on its own.  Someone who had not read the entire Study trilogy would be utterly lost when faced with many of the characters and situations Opal faces.  Having read that first trilogy, I knew what was going on, but there was so much mentioned from it that was never explained that a new reader wouldn't know what was being discussed for a significant portion of the book.  While this means that readers of the first series don't have to hear a lot repeated, it also means that Snyder risks alienating new readers by leaving them dazed and confused about what's going on.

There are a couple of plot lines going on in this book, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.  One deals with the struggles of the Stormdance clan.  The glass orbs they use to trap the energy of storms have been sabotaged, and they're killing the dancers.  Opal, as a glass magician, is the obvious choice to help discover what's going on.  She's also the obvious choice to help disband a diamond smuggling and counterfeiting operation by telling which gems are glass and where they came from.  These plot lines intertwine, with characters coming and going and things generally progressing.  But about three quarters of the way through the book, Snyder introduces what looks to be another plot line, which relies entirely on material from the first three books.  Some of it is mentioned, very briefly and in passing, in Storm Glass, but not with enough sense.  Also, Opal says she's been having weird dreams related to this plot line ever since her return from the Stormdance lands, which doesn't make any sense because they're not mentioned anywhere before she announces she's been having them.  There is one weird dream she has, but it doesn't appear to be connected at all; apparently it was meant to be, but when it's actually mentioned as a tie-in, it just doesn't make any sense.

Opal is an interesting character in that she's not your typical kick-ass heroine.  She has some unique abilities, but she was also put through a lot of shit in the past, and it's left her with very little confidence in herself.  She doesn't believe that she can actually do anything worthwhile, so her development throughout the course of the story is interesting to watch.  Kade the stormdancer is awesome, and I wish he had been more prevalent in the book.  One of things I didn't like was Snyder's decision to implement the dreaded Love Triangle.  While Ulrick's character wasn't bad, I would have preferred him as a non-love interest.  He was moody and possessive and overall just not a good example of what should be looked for in a relationship.  And then when you throw in the weird Devlen element... Ugh.  I think this could have been de-complicated quite a bit.

The writing is a complicated mix.  I think it gets more complex as the book goes on, because it starts off very simplistic (not in a good way) but that might just have been me adjusting to how it was written.  I think Snyder does a pretty good job capturing Opal's emotions and thoughts, but the descriptions are somewhat lacking.  They're very much tell and very little show, and I think that might stem from the first person nature of the book.  (I generally really don't like first person narratives much at all.)

Still, I overall enjoyed this much more than Touch of Power, and I'll probably read the next book, Sea Glass, to see where Opal goes next.

3 out of 5 stars.

Chills - Heather Boyd (Distinguished Rogues #1)

Ah, historical romance.  How you toy with my heart.  So, I'd previously read Boyd's An Accidental Affair, which I did not review here but would recommend to someone looking for a juicy historical romance with a pretty good plot attached to it.  I enjoyed it enough that I looked up what else Boyd has written.  (I spend my weekends devouring historical romances and books about food.  It's my "me" time.)  Chills is the first in a series that An Accidental Affair is apparently related to, but not directly situated in, so of course it was natural book to read next.

What can I say about this...?  Blah.  That's all I can say.  The book is about Constance "Pixie" Grange and Jack, the Marquess of Ettington.  Constance is recently impoverished due to her mother's gambling problem and needs to marry someone rich to cover her debts and avoid prison.  She turns to Jack's twin sister, Virginia, to help her on her husband hunt.  As the debts keep appearing, though, Constance's list of possible husbands gets shorter and shorter.  Meanwhile, Jack--who is also Constance's former guardian, following the death of their fathers--is insulted that he hasn't been included on his list.  As a subplot, Virginia has a love-hate relationship with Jack's best friend Bernard, though she has a darker past linked to her marriage to a now-deceased lord.

Anyway, Chills is downright boring.  It felt nothing happened for the entire book.  Jack and Constance spent the entire thing taking one step forward and two steps back around each other.  Virginia and Bernard's plot would have made a much more compelling main storyline, while Constance and Jack could have easily been relegated to subplot territory without losing anything.  Also, the title.  What?  What chills?  The only chill anyone gets in this book is from falling into a pond.

The long and short of it?  An Accidental Affair was enough to persuade me to read the next book in this series, hoping it will be better, but I wouldn't recommend Chills on its own merits, of which there are few.  (There are a few good kissing scenes, but they are disappointingly brief and nothing steamier comes about until the very end.)

2 out of 5 stars.

Beautiful Ruins - Jess Walter

Beautiful Ruins could not be a more apt title for this book, because that is exactly what it is: the stories of the beautiful ruins of the characters' lives.  The plot revolves around three people: Dee Moray, Pasquale Tursi, and Michael Deane.  Dee first appears as a dying actress in the tiny Italian fishing town of Portovergona, where Pasquale is attempting to build a beach and a cliffside tennis court to draw American tourists to his tiny business, the Hotel Adequate View.  Michael Deane is the man who sent her there.  The story takes place in several different forms.  There is a "past" timeline, set over the course of a few days in the sixties, which is where the original action occurs; this timeline pops up every other chapter.  The chapter which do not take place in the sixties take place in a time known as "recently," with some additional characters (Michael Deane's much-aggrieved assistant, Claire Silvers, and the would-be script writer Shane Wheeler), or in other portions of the past.  There are also chapters out of books mentioned in the main course of the story, as well as a play excerpt and Shane's movie pitch.  It may seem disjointed, at first, but it all comes together beautifully (the theme word of this review, evidently) to show what each of the characters considers important, and what has shaped them into who they are.

The writing in this book was stunning.  It was, quite honestly, pure poetry.  There were times that it could have tended to be a bit "tell"-y, but Walter's narrative voice worked all of the description and action into a tight-woven tapestry that left a vivid picture of the book's events planted firmly in my head.  The language struggle is artfully and accurately portrayed--the lack of knowledge, the inability to convey the depth of emotion one desires with an inadequate vocabulary, the span of what, indeed, can be lost in translation.  The last chapter was almost complete exposition, and I normally hate that, but again, Walter paced it in a voice that left me in tears from the wealth of built-up emotion in this book and all of its beautifully ruined characters.  All of them are seriously flawed in some way, and none of them end up where they thought they would, but they all are charming and engaging, even the slimiest of them.  Walter ties up every loose end, not leaving you hanging about anyone, and weaves all of that into the sense of a larger story that all of us are involved in.

While words are easy to find when describing something you dislike, writing about something you love is typically challenging.  That's my problem in this review.  I loved Beautiful Ruins.  That's really all there is to it.

Five stars.

Pink Slips and Glass Slippers - J. P. Hansen

The more that I read free e-books, the more I realize why they're free.  While I've discovered some truly amazing (Intisar Khanani's Thorn was free when I got it, and was breathtaking) most of them just fall flat.  Pink Slips and Glass Slippers is no exception.

The plot revolves around Brooke Hart and Chase Allman, who both work at a pharmaceutical company called Pharmical.  Brooke is the vice president of what's essentially a customer support division, and Chase is CEO.  Brooke goes gaga over Chase at first sight, and he does the same for her.  After a bout of drunken sex at a hotel each is staying at--separately; Brooke for a wedding and Chase for a charity event--Brooke gets fired and the relationship-that-could've been goes up in smoke.  Meanwhile, Chase tries to deal with his missing, drug addict wife while raising a three-year-old son.

Overall, the plot, or shall I say plots, dragged.  They dragged on and on and on.  Not to mention that there was little no relation between them.  Hansen felt the need to info-dump every single detail about every single character, no matter how minor, and every single setting, no matter how superfluous.  For example, I don't need to know every detail about the North Carolina research triangle.  I don't need to know every single song every character listens to in the car.  I don't need to know the makes, models, and colors of the cars all of the characters drive.  These details don't build atmosphere, and they don't advance the plot.  Rather, they slow the narrative down with their unnecessary weight and left me nodding off when I should have been absorbed in a romance narrative.

That said, this is billed as a romance, and it's really not.  The romance is minimal.  The bulk of the book is Chase raising his son and Brooke trying to get her shit together, each of which could have been a compelling plot in a "literature" book, but not smashed together with a romance and ultimately kidnapping plot.

Hansen also doesn't have a very good grip on his characters.  First off, he apparently has no idea how old his female lead is.  He never explicitly states her age, which is fine, but his implications are all over the place.  Upon Chase's first appearance, Brooke knows he is forty-one, "yet he appeared her age--quite young to be running a multi-national company."  This sentence seems to imply that Brooke is a good deal younger than Chase is.  Yet later, when Brooke sees Chase with Oksana, who is twenty-six, Brooke is apparently old enough to be Oksana's mother.  Next, Chase is apparently a devoted father, but when his son is kidnapped he doesn't want to call the police because he's afraid of risking his job.  I'm sorry, but if you're a devoted parent and your child is kidnapped, you call the fucking police.  You don't go flying all over the country and having sex in the Cinderella Suite at Disney World while your kid is missing.  Almost all of the secondary characters are complete assholes, with little to no variety amongst them.  Another inconsistency, this time in plot: Brooke is "blackballed" from all the pharmaceutical companies in the area because she slept with Chase, but this happens before anyone else knows about it.  What?  How does that work out?  Did Chase's evil secretary travel back in time to deliver the news to everyone before she actually received it?  And another gap, this time in research: Disney World does not look or work anything like Hansen described it.  If you're going to make shit up, just use an imaginary location.  If you're going to use a real location, do your freaking research.

Also, the writing just isn't that good.  The transitions aren't smooth, but rather jump from one thing to another with no apparent connection between them.  The bulk of the book is all "tell" and no "show."  For example, when Hansen writes about Chase, he writes that "He had an alluring charisma, highlighted by piercing brown eyes with gold flecks."  What eyes are supposed to have to do with charisma, I don't know, but Chase never actually exhibits that supposed charisma.  In fact, he can't agree on anyone with anything, when a charismatic person would be able to persuade people to his side.  There is mixing metaphors.  There are an abundance of comma splices.  This reads much more like a very rough draft than a completed product.  A 336-page romance novel should take me a couple of hours to finish, if it's intriguing; this one took days.  And the weren't savory days, either.  Honestly, the only reason I finished the damn book is because I never leave books unfinished.

I have no idea why this book has so many five-star reviews and such a high rating on Goodreads.  My only thought is that the author got everyone he knows to rate it highly despite its overall poor quality.  I don't know that for a fact, of course, but it's been known to happen before, and I certainly wouldn't rule it out in a case like this.

1.5 stars out of 5.