Girls in the Moon - Janet McNally

First off, can we take a moment to step back and appreciate the brilliance of this cover design?  The New York skyline with Luna and Phoebe's silhouettes, emblazoned against a moon that is also a microphone--whoever did this cover design is a pro.  (Clearly, because I assume they did get paid for it, but you know what I mean.)

Girls in the Moon was my Book of the Month selection for January.  I also picked up Lucky You by Erika Carter (which isn't due out until March) but GITM was my primary choice.  I wasn't actually thrilled by the description, but it seemed to fall into the realm of mildly interesting, so I went for it.  Boy, am I glad that I did.

This is a positively lovely book.  I think that's really the best word for it.  Lovely.  The story is that of Phoebe Ferris, who's finishing out her summer vacation between her junior and senior years of high school by visiting her older sister, Luna, who lives in New York when she's not touring with her new band, Luna and the Moons.  Also to be considered is that Phoebe and Luna's parents are Meg and Kieran Ferris, two of the members of a band that was big in the 90s called Shelter.  Kieran hasn't been in Phoebe or Luna's lives for the past three years, but Phoebe knows he's also in New York, so she plans to see him while she's there, too...and maybe learn something about her parents' rock star past, which she can't remember and which her mother refuses to really speak of, going so far as to pretend she's not Meg Ferris whenever anyone asks.  Oh, and she wants to see Archer, the bassist in Luna's band who Phoebe has been texting since they first met earlier in the year, and who is probably the only person who knows about Phoebe's budding poetic, lyrical talent.

Phoebe is a character with whom it is easy to empathize.  Her summer has pretty much been a disaster for two reasons.  First, she and her best friend got into a fight over a boy.  (Ah, high school.)  Well, not really a fight, but something that has certainly put a damper on things, especially because said friend lives directly across the street.  And then there's Meg herself, who is pressuring Phoebe to talk Luna into staying in college instead of going on tour with the Moons.  She's a little introverted and seems to think in song lyrics sometimes, jotting them down in text messages when they come to mind.  And while she doesn't crave fame and fortune, she wants to know more about her family and where she comes from, something that her mother has been reluctant to discuss and her father hasn't been present to.  She wants to make her own way but isn't sure how to do so, unlike Luna, who always seems to know exactly what to do and when to do it.

None of the characters here seemed superfluous and the setting of New York was perfect here.  I've only been to New York once, and I hated it for the short time I was there, but this made me want to go back and see it in a different light.  Luna's life in New York isn't perfect and Phoebe's aware of it, but she savors her time there nonetheless, and seems to really live.  Then there's the beauty of McNally's writing itself.  It's not overwrought and is actually pretty simplistic, but she has a way of just making things very clear and picturesque at the same time.  I didn't feel like there were any big plot holes here, and the secondary story going on--Meg's story, going back in time from the present to essentially when Shelter first started, in leaps and bounds, just a few pages at a time--lent another dimension to Phoebe and Luna's story in the present.  And the lyrics spattered throughout the book, single lines as they are, seem exactly like lyrics to the sort of songs I would have loved to listen to when I was Phoebe's age, and probably even still today.

Overall, this was an absolutely beautiful read, and a wonderful first Book of the Month for 2017.  It has a sort of nostalgia and optimism that's perfectly suited for these rather grim times, and I wholeheartedly recommend it.

4.5 stars out of 5.

Mechanica - Betsy Cornwell (Mechanica #1)

Mechanica has been on my to-read list for a while, and I finally got to it as part of my 2017 reading challenge, for the category of "A book with a title that's a character's name."  Now, to be fair, Mechanica isn't the given name of the main character of the story--no more so than Cinderella is the given name of that character.  Rather, it's a nickname given to the character by her evil stepfamily.

As with the traditional Cinderella story, Nicolette is rather abused by her stepmother and two stepsisters in the years following the death of her father.  But unlike the traditional Cinderella, Nicolette--also known as Nick--is a mechanic and inventor, following in the footsteps of her mother, who mixed magic and mechanics to create fabulous miniature creatures which can create tasks assigned to them in addition to simpler inventions that make life easier.  Nicolette's world is also one that's torn by an ongoing conflict with the Fey, who hail from a continent across the sea and have been suppressed by her country, Esting, for years.

This was a delightfully refreshing fairy tale adaptation.  I don't mind adaptations that stick fairly faithfully to the originals, and I was initially a little disappointed when I found that Nicolette wasn't adhering as closely to the "poor girl treated as a maid finds a prince and falls in love" trope as I'd anticipated, no matter how much mechanical and innovative padding was added to the story.  (I also, from the cover, kind of thought that Nicolette herself was going to be some sort of automaton, but that's mostly because I clearly did not read the description.)  But in the very beginning of the book, Nicolette finds herself fascinated by how the Fey build families and friendships, and that becomes a compelling motivation for her.  She doesn't just want to fall in love.  She wants to be loved, in more ways than romantically, and that is what propels her throughout the story.  Yes, she wants to be free of her stepfamily, but it's more than just that.  That is such a lovely and unusual motivation for this type of story that it was, in the end, very refreshing, as are Nicolette's choices when she is ultimately faced with them.

That said, I still didn't love the story.  I wish that the stepfamily had been given a bit more dimension.  Cornwell tries to give the stepmother a bit of humanity toward the end of the book, but backpedals from it pretty quickly--Nicolette doesn't want to see her stepmother as human.  I found that rather disappointing; I'd hoped for better from her.  There's been a recent trend of giving the stepfamily a bit more humanity and I would have liked to see that continue here, but that wasn't really the case.  Additionally, I would have liked to see more interactions between Nicolette and Fin.  Considering her emotions towards him, I think it would have been good if they'd had more interactions than Nicolette could count on one hand.  There are also a few worldbuilding things I would have liked to have seen fleshed out more--like the Ashes.  Someone mentions they're cursed, and yet that doesn't seem to go anywhere, nor does Nicolette seem to be that concerned about that possibility.  But perhaps those will be ironed out in a future book?

Overall, a refreshing fairy tale adaptation, with some lovely, innovative elements, but I think it could have done with a bit more depth.

3.5 stars out of 5.

Radiance - Grace Draven (Wraith Kings #1)

This was our the latest theme read for the Unapologetic Romance Readers group on Goodreads.  Every so often (roughly once a month, but often times with a bigger gap depending on how lazy we are) the group has a "theme read" alongside the monthly read, to give people who aren't interested in one a chance to read the other.  Radiance was the winner out of a group of nominations for a "slow burn" read.  I'll admit, I was a little disappointed going into it, because I was really rooting for Mariana Zapata's latest--because she is the queen of the slow burn--but I gamely stepped up.

Well, this wasn't quite my cup of tea, and I have to say that I don't see that it was a slow burn, either.  At all.  The story is about Idilko, a human princess, and Brishen, a Kai prince.  Kai are kind of like dark elves but with claws and fangs.  The two are married as part of an alliance between their two countries, since both of them are of the royal line but aren't actually in line to inherit.  But despite having never met each other and being essentially repulsed by each others' appearances in the beginning, the two are lovey-dovey pretty much right away.  They're always calling each other "wife" and "husband" as terms of affection, they're sleeping with each other (literally sleeping) right away on the road and pretty soon after they get to Brishen's home, they're holding hands and giving each other little signs of physical affection.  And then they suddenly decide they're physically attracted to each other and to do the dirty.  There's really no "burn" here at all--it's basically all there to begin with.  There's a little bit of apprehension and a good deal of culture shock to get over, but nothing that is ever seriously presented as a real obstacle to Brishen and Idilko being together.

The characters themselves are fine.  I really liked both Idilko and Brishen, who both had good backgrounds and personalities of their own.  The side characters were very promising, too, from Brishen's female warrior cousin to the neighboring lord-across-the-border who has a good relationship with Brishen despite their countries being at odds.  Draven also does a good job building up the culture of the Kai realm.  They're a nocturnal race, and a race with magic, in comparison to humans who have none; they have a basis of trade and a court that's functional but absolutely vicious at the same time.  The contrasts between human Idilko and Kai Brishen are extremely apparent, and I think that really helps put the reader in Idilko's frame of mind as she struggles to adapt to her new surroundings and her new people.  BUT.  This book was supposed to be a romance, and I didn't get that at all.

There's another little side-plot going on here, with someone trying to kill Brishen and/or Idilko, and then something else with Brishen's mother being a royal and potentially homicidal bitch, that may or may not be connected to the central murder plot.  Including the epilogue, this is pretty clearly a setup for future books that will deal more with political machinations and international relations than with building the relationships between the characters, which was the focus of this book.  It seems like a strange combination, but maybe there will be another relationship built up in the second book.

Overall, I like the characters, and the writing and world-building are decent, but the book didn't ring as romance at all to me, and since that's what the description, cover, etc. all clearly indicated it was, I was definitely disappointed.

2 stars out of 5.

Sparrow - L. J. Shen

This was the buddy read for January 2017 in the Unapologetic Romance Readers group on Goodreads.  It took me a while to get around to reading it, but I finally approached it without actually knowing anything about it.  Yeah, I hadn't even read the sentences on the cover...so going into this, I had no idea that it was a mafia romance.  I clearly know that now, and before I dig into this review, I'm going to have to say this: mafia/mob romances are clearly not my genre.

The story here starts with Troy Brennan, the hero, killing a priest.  Things pretty much go downhill from there when he forces Sparrow Raynes, the daughter of one of his dead mobster father's employees, to marry him.  Sparrow has no idea why this is.  But she's totally hot for Troy and he's hot for her.  Cue drama.

I have serious reservations about the characters in this book.  Clearly the book starting with the hero murdering one person and talking about the very brutal murder of another isn't a great start.  And then there's his mistress and the way he taunts Sparrow with her.  Does he cut this relationship off eventually?  Yes.  But not until significantly after his marriage to Sparrow.  There's a lot I'm willing to tolerate in a romance hero, because it's fiction and escapism and all, but infidelity and outright murder are two of the things on my very short "absolutely not" list.  And then there's Sparrow herself.  While she professes to be deeply disturbed by Sparrow's actions, she doesn't actually appear to be very disturbed.  When he ultimately confesses the murders to her, she's actually elated because he told her, rather than being worried about what these past actions might mean for her.  And then there's the end... Sorry to anyone who feels differently, but I have deep concerns about that.  Because if a guy is willing to kill for you, I don't think there's anything to stop him from killing you if you do something he doesn't like.  And that's not hot at all.

The writing here is fine.  People who like rough sex and danger will probably like this.  The side plot is pretty see-through, with the person who called the hit on Troy's father being pretty evident from the beginning, but I guess that's not the main appeal here.  I think that people who like this genre and legit bad boys will probably like this, but I also think that I've pretty clearly established that this is not my genre, and I didn't really enjoy reading this much at all.

2 stars out of 5.

Blood Bound - Patricia Briggs (Mercy Thompson #2)

Let me tell you, the covers of this series drive me crazy.  No one dresses like that to fix cars OR to fight evil.  Since this is a series that's pretty clearly aimed at women, I am baffled that it's marketed so blatantly to men in the cover department.  But I picked it up anyway, because it was available from the library, the first one was okay, and I needed a paranormal romance title for the Unapologetic Romance Readers' 2017 Reading Challenge.  (For more information about that challenge, you can check out our forum here.) 

This book finds Mercy repaying a favor she owes the vampire Stefan, and getting mixed up in the hunt for a demon-possessed sorcerer in the process.  Meanwhile, she tries to balance Samuel, her werewolf roommate who she was at once point in love with, and Adam, the sexy werewolf Alpha of the local pack.  And there are definitely some indications that Stefan might have some romantic feelings towards Mercy, too.  Hm... I'm not sure how that works, being as Briggs has pretty clearly laid out that vampires in her world really are dead, but I guess it does, somehow.

Anyway, I do like Mercy as a heroine.  She recognizes her strengths and weaknesses, and she does her best not get in the way when she realizes that something is above her abilities.  Does she ultimately get involved?  Yes.  But she does it only when she sees that she's uniquely suited to solving the problem and when pretty much everyone else qualified to go in on it has either been devoured by it, or refuses to get involved...and when everyone she loves seems to be in danger.  She's also doing her best to figure out the Adam/Samuel thing without unnecessarily hurting anyone or having to give up any of the things that are important to her.  The way she and Adam interact is absolutely delightful.  They banter, they annoy each other, they sometimes infuriate each other, and yet they also want to kiss each others' faces off at the same time.  Adam had claimed Mercy as his mate prior to the series starting, supposedly to keep her from getting in trouble with the other wolves, who would otherwise kill a coyote shifter like Mercy--and yet those very wolves seem to recognize her authority as his mate anyway, indicating there's probably something more there.  Very interesting...

The romantic tension isn't resolved here, and the main plot is bloody.  Very bloody.  It's indicated that probably forty more more people have died by the time it is.  In the process, Mercy gets pretty messed up and also opens a door that can't be closed, hinting at a lot of turmoil involving vampires in the very near future.  It's hard to say a lot more about this without involving a lot of spoilers, but suffice to say that I really liked it, and it definitely intrigued me to read more of the series, much more so than the first book did.

4 stars out of 5.

Silvern - Christina Farley (Gilded #2)

Silvern is the second book in Christina Farley's Korean YA fantasy trilogy, which began with Gilded.  The main character is Jae Hwa, an American Korean who has moved to South Korea with her father for his work a few years after the death of her mother.  In the first book, Jae Hwa broke a curse on her family that had doomed generations of women to death at the hands of the demi-god Haemosu.  Now, just when she's starting to think that life might get back to normal, she finds out that the god of darkness, Kud, wants her to find the White Tiger Orb, one of the six that are supposed to protect Korea, and bring it to him...or he'll kill her friends and family.

This was not a good book.  This series had a lot of promise in the beginning and while the first book had its issues, the promise of a non-white MC, Korean mythology, etc. made me want to read this second volume.  I finally got around to it (despite having owned it for a long while) because it has a tiger on the cover and I needed a book to fulfill my 2017 reading challenge category of, "A book with a cat on the cover."  I went into it with high hopes, but found myself so terribly disappointed.

In theory, Jae Hwa should be an awesome heroine.  The book starts with her preparing to get her second-degree black belt in tae kwon do.  She lives in Korea and has killed a demi-god and is kind of mistress of his realm now.  So cool, right?  But her martial arts trend toward descriptions of back flips and cartwheels--which, of course, are terribly efficient modes of transport, much more so than, you know, running--and flying kicks which would be more at home in a bad martial arts movie than in any sort of efficient fighting scenario.  She can shoot a bow but she never has it with her when she needs it.  (This is probably semi-excusable, because walking around with a bow in modern Korea all the time would be a bit weird, but still.  One would think that if one was being stalked by murderous magical creatures, one would pass up being weird for being prepared, at least some of the time.)  And on top of my frustrations with Jae Hwa, the plot itself is just whack.

See, to get this mysterious orb, Jae Hwa has to go to North Korea.  Yes.  North Korea.  And she convinces her school to send her, along with her best friend, boyfriend, grandfather, and another young member of her grandfather's secret society, who, by the way, is also putting the moves on Jae.  Hmmm...  Can this possibly go well?  No.  No it cannot.  Even the thinnest veil of logic is missing here--this is a school trip, supposedly, but fully half its members do not belong to Jae's school.  And Jae's father, who believes his daughter to be mentally unstable, agrees to it.  What?  He doesn't like it, but he still lets her go.  As an American.  To North Korea.  Ugh.

And then there's the pacing, which is entirely off.  There are chapters where different creatures are attacking Jae & Co. every two paragraphs, and then long stretches of chapters where she and her friends do nothing but plan parties or read books.  It's very uneven, stacked in some places and lacking in others.  I thought that an interesting love triangle might actually liven things up here, but that clearly didn't go as planned, so that ended up being a no-go, too.  Ugh.  The end of the book has a bit of promise, but honestly I can't go through another book of this stuff, so I don't think I'll be reading it.

I'll give it 2 stars out of 5, but it's more for the promise it displayed than the actual delivery.

The Man in the High Castle - Philip K. Dick

Everyone is talking about the new season of The Man in the High Castle that recently came out on Amazon.  I am not one of those people.  I've seen a handful of episodes from the first season, but the show requires more attention that I typically have to give TV shows and so I haven't made it much farther, despite liking what I did see.  But, of course, there's a book!  How convenient!

Well, for those looking to the book from the show, I think I can safely say this: they're not very similar at all.  So you can just put that aside.  The structure of the world--an alternate reality in which Germany and Japan won World War II and essentially divided up the rest of the world between them, with Africa being destroyed and the free United States relegated to a strip of land called the Rocky Mountain States--is the same between the show and book, but that seems to be about it.  The plot revolves around a few characters.  Nobusuke Tagomi is a Japanese trade minister working in San Francisco (under Japanese control).  Frank Frink is a Jewish American also living in San Fran.  Juliana Frink, his estranged wife, is living in the Rocky Mountain states teaching judo.  Robert Childan is in San Fran, too, and sells American cultural artifacts to the Japanese, who are apparently crazy for them.  The one thread running through all of these is the I Ching, a sort of oracle book, and a book called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which depicts another alternative reality in which the US and Great Britain won the war and took over the world.

Over the course of the book, Tagomi tries to attain new technology for Japan but finds himself instead embroiled in a conversation about a plot against the Home Islands by Germany, the leader of which has recently died and the position is which is in a state of flux.  Frink tries to set up his own business.  Childan finds out that some of the artifacts he has are fakes and tries to re-establish his position.  And Juliana, all the way in Canon City, Colorado, finds herself mixed up with an Italian truck driver who introduces her to The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, and eventually sets off with him to meet the mysterious author, Hawthorne Abendsen, also known as the Man in the High Castle due to a fortress he purportedly built to protect himself against his detractors--his book is banned in all German-controlled territories.

While alternative histories typically have fascinating premises, I didn't find myself enjoying this very much.  It was mostly the writing; it's very abrupt and choppy, and I couldn't find myself engrossed in it at all.  It almost reads like a bad translation of a book written in another language.  Granted, some of the main characters are speaking English but it's presumably not their first language--but even the characters whose first language is English speak in such an abrupt and choppy manner, and all of the characters' internal dialogue, which one would assume would be smoother, is the same.  All of the people start to blur together and while some of the events were interesting, I couldn't seem to care about any of the characters as individuals.

The end of the book is thought-worthy.  Juliana's discovery regarding The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is definitely the thing that leaves an impact, rather than any of the other story lines.  It's very meta and did appeal to me, even though the rest of the book did not.  I think this is probably what will ultimately tie into the Amazon series the strongest--this ultimate end concept, even though so much seems to be different.

Overall, an interesting world and end concept, but not a book I enjoyed very much.

2.5 stars out of 5.