Yikes!

Wow.  I can't believe that it has been more than two months since I've put up a post.  Somehow, with the whole feeling of suspended animation cause by the Coronavirus lockdown, I seem to have lost all sense of time!  I checked out a small haul of books when the libraries first started closing, and I thought I'd run out and have to dig into the few books I own and haven't read yet that I've been saving for just such a scenario (not that I ever imagined the world would come to a standstill - just that I wouldn't be able to get to the library for some reason!), but I seem to have been much more busy than ever with everyone staying home!

So here is the rundown of what I've managed to get through:

The Rift, by Rachael Craw, was a weird science fiction/fantasy mix, based on the premise that there was an island with a protected herd of deer and inhabitants called Rangers who managed and protected the herd from hunters who would come and try to poach them because it had been discovered that their antlers held some magical healing properties that could cure cancer and all that.  Apparently, they had these properties because the deer were descended from some woman from Greek mythology who was turned into such a creature, and there was this rift in the space-time continuum that sometimes let in some kind of hell-hound or something that hunted the deer and killed people, but if they bit a person and they didn't die, they would get some kind of powers like special sight or something.  I pretty much hated the premise.  I also didn't like the female lead in the slightest.  The hero of the story, however, was everything you would want him to be, which was the only reason I kept on with the book past the third chapter.  Surprisingly, by the time I was about halfway through, I saw why the author chose the dumb backstory, and the interaction between the hero and his band of friends got pretty darn good, and even the female lead became sort of likeable.  So.  Maybe don't abandon the book right from he start like I almost did.  Who knows?  You might actually enjoy it.  (Reading Level ? / Middle Grade +)

Minor Prophets, by Jimmy Cajoleas, was okay.  There was nothing particularly great about it, but there was also nothing that particularly bothered me about it.  It was about a teenage boy who had seen visions for his entire life.  After his mother dies, he and his sister are convinced that their stepfather is trying to kill them, so they end up running off to their estranged grandmother's defunct commune.  Once they get there, though, things get weird, and it turns out that the commune housed a cult and the grandmother starts grooming the boy to be their new prophet.  The story has some suspense, and a bit of a mystery with an interesting twist at the end; overall it was a decent read.  Much better than any of the books I abandoned, so go ahead and give it a try.  (Reading Level ? / Middle Grade +)

Walk on Earth a Stranger, by Rae Carson, is the first book in a series.  I actually also read the second book, Like a River Glorious, but the library system in my city has lost the third one and I haven't managed to track down a copy yet.  So far, I have loved and hated this series.  Mostly I loved it.  It is set in Georgia at the end of the 1840's, and is all about a girl who can sense gold.  Now, this is very fortunate for her and her family, because it allowed them to hide away a nice little stash during the Georgia gold rush of the preceding ten years.  It was also fortunate, because the story takes place at the beginning of the California gold rush.  It was not so fortunate, however, because the girl's nefarious uncle somehow discovered her ability, thus murdering her parents, stealing their stash, and trying to take custody of our heroine.  This book and its sequel follow the girl as she runs away, meets up with her half-Cherokee best friend (who wants to be her boyfriend), and makes the journey across the country to California.  I love historical fiction, and this one is VERY well written, with perfect characters and dialogue and everything else that makes a good book.  So why did I hate it?  Well, a major premise of the series is that women back then were second-class citizens who had no rights, that they couldn't own land, and that they were at the complete mercy of the men in charge.  Stupid.  I don't know why we have all been sold this lie - I have been doing extensive research into 19th century Georgia for my other blog, and I have read through many deed books and court records, and you know what?  There were a LOT of women who owned land, both jointly with their husbands and in their own right.  So I say once again, if you are going to write historical fiction . . . Know. Your. History.  And that was my rant, but if you can ignore that problem and not let yourself get brainwashed by the propaganda, well, go ahead and read this series, because everything else about it was awesome.  (Reading Level 4.8 / Middle Grade +)

I waited a long, long time to check out Sally Green's The Smoke Thieves duology and when I finally got my hands on it, I was very disappointed!  It turns out that the books have plenty of action and intrigue, but are just as much a double love story.  One of the love stories is actually a love triangle between a princess, her bodyguard, and the prince she is betrothed to.   I didn't like the princess or her bodyguard, and the dialogue between them was so bad it was painful to read.  I liked the prince a whole lot more, but unfortunately, he was kind of a minor character.  The other love story was between two young men - the illegitimate son of a prince and the prince's servant.  I  liked the illegitimate son of a prince pretty well, but really, really, really didn't like the servant he was in love with.  My favorite characters of all were an unlikely pair of demon hunters, but one is killed off by end of first book (maybe he's not really dead - I mean, their part of the story was the best!)  Anyway, both books in the series were super thick, taking forever to read, and trying to get through them was sooooooo tedious that I decided to just quit 87 pages into the second one.  (Besides, I still had eight library books on my shelf more than a month after the libraries closed!)  This series was nowhere near as good as Green's Half Bad trilogy, so if you haven't read that yet, pick those books up instead.

Toward a Secret Sky by Heather Maclean was . . .  was . . . dumb, I guess?  It was one of those books where the girl falls for the hot angel guy, only this one was set in Scottland so the angel guy wore a kilt . . . Yeah.  It was pretty dumb.  I managed to get 130 pages into it before I needed to read something better, so I set it aside thinking I might go back to it - I didn't, and, looking back, I'm not sorry.

Okay.  I actually read Revenge & the Wild, by Michelle Modesto, way back in January.  Let me rephrase that.  I actually attempted to read it.  I made it all the way to page two, not enjoying a single minute of it, and then the story went like this: "Ahead of them on the right was the Tight Ship saloon, a squalid hole in the wall with piano music and cigar smoke rolling out of the open windows.  Westie's horse reared up as an elf and a young man crashed through the swinging doors into the street, a twisting ball of fists and foul language. . . an ogre and a dwarf (or what Westie thought was a dwarf; she was always getting them confused with the bakhtak - stocky little creatures blamed for causing nightmares) stepped out of the saloon behind them to watch the fisticuffs."  And I was like, um, no.  Fantasy and Wild West do not mix.  So, I quit reading.  Which was just as well, because as I went back just now to type that little bit up for you, I noticed that a couple of paragraphs later it continued with, "The ogre looked from the young man to Westie's mechanical arm, then dropped him to the ground.  On the opposite side of the road, at the blood brothel, a group of vampires cheered for the fight to continue . . . "  I think I've given you enough to decide whether or not to give this one a go.  For me it was a definite NO.

Cursed, by Thomas Wheeler, was another book that just was not for me.  It was supposed to be a remake of the Arthurian legend, but with a girl as the main character instead.  I was worried that I wasn't going to like it because it was based on a screenplay for a tv show (or something like that).  It turns out my fears were well-founded, because I didn't like it.  I tried so hard to like it.  I made it through something like a hundred pages before I finally gave up on it.  Uuuuggghh.  I don't have anything else to say about it.

I feel pretty conflicted about Sarah Cross's Kill Me Softly.  It was a fairytale retold kind of book, set in modern times but in an imaginary place, and the concept was quite interesting - there are people who are cursed and are fated to live the fate of a fairytale character, but everything happens through a modern lens - like the girl fated to be like Snow White has a stepmom with big fake boobs and the huntsman is their gardener (ha ha!).  I actually loved the concept.  What I hated was the way the author carried it out at times.  The main character?  Hated her (most of the time anyway).  She was not likeable at all.  However, I loved the brother of her 'boyfriend' who had a love-hate relationship with her.  I loooved the dialogue between those two.  I hated, hated, hated the fact that the main character was only 15 years old and was hooking up with a guy who was 21 (um, hello?)  I hated the fact that neither the author, nor her editor, nor any single character in the book seemed to have a problem with the idea of a grown man having a relationship with a young teen.  I get why she set it up that way, but I think she could have put a little more thought into how to get the same dynamics without presenting something as being acceptable that our society does not accept.  (I could stand on my soapbox for an hour on the hypocrisy in tv shows and books when it comes to real life vs what is accepted in fiction.)   Anyway, I loved the way the book focused on the dark nature of the original fairytale stories, and I loved the way it all turned out in the end, so I guess if you balance the parts I enjoyed with the parts that made me absolutely cringe, I'd say this is a three-star book.  If only the book was as good as its cover. . . .   (Reading Level 5.0 / Upper Grades)


Yeah, so, my whole lockdown reading experience was far from great.  Maybe that's why I didn't make better progress (I still have three of those books I checked out in March that I haven't even started!!)  I'll try to read more often during the next month, and hopefully I'll have some good books to share with you afterward.