House of Many Ways by Diana Wynne Jones
Rating: 7 out of 10
Charmain Baker has been brought up to be a “respectable” young woman by her mother, which means she has no experience with housework, real life, or that most vulgar and low-class of things: magic. Her great-uncle William, however, just so happens to be the Royal Wizard of High Norland, and after falling ill, calls in Charmain to look after his tiny cottage and his even tinier dog, Waif, while he is off with the elves, being treated for his mysterious sickness.
Charmain soon realizes that Great-Uncle William’s tiny little cottage is more magical than it originally seemed–for instance, in in order to get to the bathroom from the living room, one must open the door between the living room and kitchen, and immediately take a sharp left into the doorframe. Other hidden parts of the house are connected to the past, and one hallway leads directly to the Royal Mansion where the King and Princess live. A magical house with doors that lead mysterious places might sound a little familiar to fans of Diana Wynne Jones’ writing, with good reason, as the characters of Howl’s Moving Castle (Sophie, Calcifer, and Howl himself as well as a new addition to their family) make a decent cameo and are heavily involved in the plot.
The plot reveals itself as Charmain slowly finds out that not all is well in her country of High Norland–a disgusting and extremely dangerous creature called the Lubbock prowls the meadows outside town, and for some reason the gold in the Royal Treasury keeps disappearing. The King has become so poor that he must sell of many of the royal portraits and pictures that used to line the hallways of the Royal Mansion. Sophie, a famous witch, has been called in to help solve the problem, and she brings with her Calcifer the fire demon, her son Morgan, and a small, beautifully angelic, golden-haired boy who calls himself “Twinkle” and claims that “Thophie ith my auntie.”
I have really liked Diana Wynne Jones’ writing every since I first picked up her books in elementary school, and House of Many Ways was a great example of her storytelling. There was adventure, mystery, magic, and a good amount of humor when Sophie and her family showed up. I really identified with Charmain as her favorite activities are reading and eating–me too. But in the beginning I actually didn’t like her all that much, which I think the author may have done on purpose…? She is a little spoiled, a little lazy–but I believe most of it comes from having such a sheltered lifestyle.
Great, fun read.
Thief With No Shadow by Emily Gee
Rating: 7 out of 10
Summary: Melke is a wraith, able to walk unseen. Feared by all, hunted and hated, she has lost everything–except her younger brother. Now she is forced to do the unthinkable: in exchange for her brother’s freedom, she must use her magical gift to steal.
Melke’s thieving has devastating consequences. The stolen necklace was strung with tears, and without it Bastian sal Vere can’t break the curse that is destroying his family–a curse that will reach its brutal climax at the next full moon. He strikes a desperate bargain with Melke: a healer to save her brother’s life, in return for the necklace.
But undoing her crime may cost Melke her own life. The necklace is deep within a salamander’s den, a place of flame and pain that no thief has ever returned from. And time is running short. The moon grows full, and someone must face the creature that laid the curse and suffer its terrible vengeance.
My Thoughts: I picked this up after reading Emily Gee’s other novel The Laurentine Spy, which I read and enjoyed previously.
Thief was much in the same vein–adventure and new worlds and fast pacing, with a little bit of romance and desperation thrown in. It was a great story and good way to escape normal life for a little while.
One problem I had is something I tend to pick on with some books… the “perfect” character. I thought Liana, the sister of our main male protagonist, was incredibly perfect, unbelievably so, a little one-dimensional. She’s beautiful, kind, nice, understanding, un-prejudiced, and she has an amazing healing ability! She was also very damsel-in-distress. I much preferred the main character, Melke, who had to overcome lots of obstacles in the novel and made mistakes, like any real person does.
There is mature content (sexual violence) in this novel, however, which I actually wasn’t expecting at first. And I don’t agree 100% with how Gee dealt with it, her characters’ reactions to it… but anyway.
The actual cover looks a little better than the one I have in this post, the image quality and the colors are kind of off and slightly demented here, not sure why.
Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger
Rating: 7 out of 10
Release Date: September 29
Summary: When Elspeth Noblin dies of cancer, she leaves her London apartment to her twin nieces, Julia and Valentina. These two American girls never met their English aunt, only knew that their mother, too, was a twin, and Elspeth her sister. Julia and Valentina are semi-normal American teenagers–with seemingly little interest in college, finding jobs, or anything outside their cozy home in the suburbs of Chicago, and with an abnormally intense attachment to one another.
The girls move to Elspeth’s flat, which borders Highgate Cemetery in London. They come to know the building’s other residents. There is Martin, a brilliant and charming crossword puzzle setter suffering from crippling Obsessive Compulsive Disorder; Marjike, Martin’s devoted but trapped wife; and Robert, Elspeth’s elusive lover, a scholar of the cemetery. As the girls become embroiled in the fraying lives of their aunt’s neighbors, they also discover that much is still alive in Highgate, including–perhaps–their aunt, who can’t seem to leave her old apartment and life behind.
My Thoughts: I just finished reading my ARC of this novel today, and I had very high expectations because I loved loved LOVED The Time Traveler’s Wife by Niffenegger, and I was really looking forward to reading her next book. Thanks to her agents I was able to get an advanced copy.
It took me a little while to get started on this one, but Ms. Niffenegger has the ability to sort of just enmesh you and absorb you into whatever she is writing about at the moment. There was a lot of old Victorian imagery (the Highgate Cemetery in London, a very central part of this novel), kind of soft and grey, just a little bit romantic, even though the story starts on a funeral, and a lot of that mood just permeated majority of the beginning of the book, so much that when certain modern things popped up, such as Julia or Valentina mentioning Google Earth or anything else really now, I got a little surprised. That was how prevalent the mood was.
I feel like nothing really got started until the middle or the end, and most of the story was just meandering along, following the daily lives of the twins and their neighbors. I really liked the side characters, especially the neighbors: Martin, suffering from OCD, and his absent wife, Marijke. The Little Kitten of Death.
The trials and tribulations of the twins themselves, Julia and Valentina, didn’t really catch me as much. I was sympathetic to their problems, but the plot twists regarding their story, and their famiy’s story, did not especially affect me–a few times it was a little anticlimatic.
Her Fearful Symmetry was more of an ode or a literary devotion to Highgate Cemetery itself–it read like a fascinating place, and I’m sure if I ever visit I’ll be just like one of the clueless picture-taking American tourists that Niffenegger describes as Robert guides tours through the cemetry. Therefore it was less like a plotted novel, which I guess Time Traveler’s Wife was, it was so meticulously plotted and planned and…. anyway.
I wasn’t amazed, which is perhaps a little unfair because, like I mentioned before, I had such high expectations. It didn’t matter too much, because I just like reading the author’s writing… transportive. Some lines she writes really get me, they either describe in the perfect words something I’ve felt before and never could say myself, or present something new that I haven’t thought of before.
Ghostly romantic… and lovely writing.
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
Rating: 7 out of 10
Summary: Nobody Owens, known to his friends as Bod, is a normal boy.
He would be completely normal if he didn’t live in a sprawling graveyard, being raised and educated by ghosts, with a solitary guardian who belongs to neither the world of the living nor of the dead.
There are dangers and adventures in the graveyard for a boy–an ancient Indigo Man beneath the hill, a gateway to a desert leading to an abandoned city of ghouls, the strange and terrible menace of the Sleer.
But if Bod leaves the graveyard, then he will come under attack from the man Jack—who has already killed Bod’s family . . .
Beloved master storyteller Neil Gaiman returns with a luminous new novel for the audience that embraced his New York Times bestselling modern classic Coraline. Magical, terrifying, and filled with breathtaking adventures, The Graveyard Book is sure to enthrall readers of all ages. (from bookjacket)
My Thoughts: This is classified as a book for children or whatever, but I really enjoyed it. I thought the whole idea and set-up was very original and intriguing–a boy raised by ghosts in a graveyard? I also like Gaiman’s writing style–I haven’t read too many of his other books, I kind of tried the first Sandman when I was younger but it was a little too scary for my taste–and I like how The Graveyard Book sounded and felt a little like a fairy tale at times.
Bod grows up in the graveyard and learns all sorts of necessary and slightly ghostly things.
Bod studied hard, and asked questions. Tongiht Bod asked about Hauntings, getting more and more specific, which exasperated Mr. Pennyworth, who had never gone in for that sort of thing himself.
“How exactly do I make a cold spot in the air? he asked, and “I think I’ve got Fear down, but how do I take it all the way up to Terror?” and Mr. Pennyworth sighed and hurrumphed and did his best to explain, and it was gone four in the morning before they were done.
Just a little creepy, but kind of in a cute way. I liked Bod a lot, and how the book followed him growing up and figuring out things about his Graveyard world, and the real world outside. There’s also conflict and danger when he faces down his family’s killer, and there was a certain surprise and twist that I didn’t see coming at all.
The Laurentine Spy by Emily Gee
Rating: 7 out of 1o
My Thoughts: I was unable to find a decent summary of this book anywhere online… I first heard about it from Angieville, another book blog, and I think her summary sums everything up the best. Read it here.
I really liked this book, it was a nice, not too long adventure that gave me an escape from the mundane world for a day. Especially after the slightly depressing non-fiction that I’ve been reading lately on WWII and other disastrous events.
I liked the idea that these spies, each named One, Two, and Three, did not know each other’s identity, but had the very real possibility of interacting with each other on a daily basis with no knowledge of it at all. It created a lot of tension and plotting int the novel and I thought the author paced everything really well. I was rooting for the little romance that developed and for the main characters to have happy ending, which is always a nice thing.
Good way to spend a few hours. I will be checking out the author’s other books.
Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl
Rating: 7 out of 10
Summary: Pessl’s stunning debut is an elaborate construction modeled after the syllabus of a college literature course. 36 chapters are named after everything from Othello to Paradise Lost to The Big Sleep that culminates with a final exam. It comes as no surprise, then, that teen narrator Blue Van Meer, the daughter of an itinerant academic, has an impressive vocabulary and a knack for esoteric citation that makes Salinger’s Seymour Glass look like a dunce.
Following the mysterious death of her butterfly-obsessed mother, Blue and her father, Gareth, embark, in another nod to Nabokov, on a tour of picturesque college towns, never staying anyplace longer than a semester. This doesn’t bode well for Blue’s social life, but when the Van Meers settle in Stockton, N.C., for the entirety of Blue’s senior year, she befriends sort of a group of eccentric geniuses (referred to by their classmates as the Bluebloods) and their ringleader, film studies teacher Hannah Schneider.
As Blue becomes enmeshed with Hannah and the Bluebloods, the novel becomes a murder mystery so intricately plotted that, after absorbing the late-chapter revelations, readers will be tempted to start again at the beginning in order to watch the tiny clues fall into place. Like its intriguing main characters, this novel is many things at once–it’s a campy, knowing take on the themes that made The Secret History and Prep such massive bestsellers, a wry sendup of most of the Western canon and, most importantly, a sincere and uniquely twisted look at love, coming of age and identity. (Aug.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
My Thoughts: I thought this book was a great idea, and really admire the author, Marisha Pessl, for doing her research and following the theme of a college literature course so well. There are all sorts of citations and quotations and famous works included, most of which I was oblivious too, but added to the overall atmosphere.
There were a couple of weak spots where I felt like the story fell through or didn’t apply or wasn’t relevant, and I kind lost interest 3/4 of the way in–but when I started reading again the last few chapters were much much better. I liked the ending a lot, creative and open-ended.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
Rating: 8 out of 10
My Thoughts: I have read a few short stories by Foer previously and liked him a lot as a writer, but never tried his novels.
9-year-old Oskar has made it his goal to solve a mystery left behind by his father, a victim of 9/11. Oskar finds a strange key in an envelope labeled “Black,” and using his logic, begins a quest to find every single person in the five burroughs of New York City with the last name of Black. Whilst doing so, Oskar meets many strange, new, and interesting people
The author also includes letters from older generations of Oskar’s family–his grandfather and his grandmother, both of whom experienced great tragedy in the firebombing of Dresden, and who eventually help Oskar in his quest.
I thought Foer did a great job of writing (sort of indirectly) about 9/11, which is something that most people are still wary of talking about, much less writing a fictional novel on. I really liked Oskar as a narrator. When he meets Abby Black, one of the first Blacks that he encounters on his journey, he hands her his business card:
OSKAR SCHELL
Inventor, jewelry designer, jewelry fabricator, amateur entomologist, francophile, vegan, origamist, pacifit, percussionist, amateur astronomer, computer consultant, amateur archeoloist, collector of: rare coins, butterflies that died natural deaths, miniature cacti, Beatles memorabilia, semiprecious stones, and other thingse-mail: oskar_schell@hotmail.com
home phone: private / cell phone: private
fax machine: i dont have a fax machine yet
