Misty of Chincoteague by Marguerite Henry / 158 pp.

Misty of Chincoteague is a classic children’s book that holds up well over time. I read this aloud to someone, and it was a joy to do so as the sentences flow nicely. While there is some regional dialect (e.g. horse = hoss), it’s pretty easy to read aloud.

A brother and sister save up money to buy a pony in the annual wild pony roundup. However, they want Phantom, a mare who has eluded capture every year. This year the brother will be old enough to ride along with the men. Will he capture the phantom for him and his sister? (Hint: Yes, he does.)

This is a good book for young or young-at-heart horse lovers, and is one of the rare horse stories where no horses die.

The Reader/Bernhard Schlink/218 pp.

Rachel already did a review of this book, so I'll try not to duplicate her efforts. A young man in 1960s Germany begins an affair with Hannah, a woman substantially older than himself. In addition to it being his first sexual relationship, the affair is significant because he spends hours reading to Hannah. One day he goes to her apartment and discovers that she has moved out and completely disappeared. Assuming she left without saying anything to him because she didn't love him anymore, the young man retreats into his studies and is unable to have any other close relationships for fear that those he becomes close to will leave him in the same way. As a college student he sees Hannah again, and discovers why she left, and what "the secret" is that caused her to leave.
The book is an easy read, well translated from the original German, with short chapters that allow you to read a few pages here and there, between other tasks. The narrator struggles with forgiving Hannah, and with his conflicting feelings for her.

The Reader / Bernhard Schlink / 218 p.

I didn't see the movie, but I guessed the "deep dark secret" that drives many of the otherwise mysterious actions of one of the major characters a few dozen pages into the book.  No, I won't share it here.  You will have to read the book or force yourself to stare at Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes for hours on screen...tough, I know...to find out.  Maybe author Bernhard Schlink intended the reader to guess long before the narrator does; in a way it is beside the point as he drags his narrator (the reader of the book's title) as well as the book's readers, into an emotional contemplation on relationships, individual choices, history and collective judgment and guilt.  Put that way, the book sounds terribly depressing, but believe me; it is not.  The beauty is in the details.  I read it in two sittings, and now I hope to find a copy in the original German.

Love Story / Jennifer Echols / 256 p.

Erin Blackwell moves to NYC to pursue her dreams of becoming a romance novelist, leaving behind he rlife on a horse farm and everything that went along with it. Including her grandmother's money. Erin's refusal to study business and take over the horse farm caused her grandmother to disinherit her and give her inheritance to the (good-looking) stable hand, Hunter.  Now, in NYC, Erin is working hard to get through her first year of college and putting herself out there in her creative writing class--even writing a fictionalized version of her own fantasy involving a horse farm and a certain stable boy. Then, her "stable boy" shows up unannounced in her creative writing class and wiggles his way into her life.



Erin was a character I felt like I could relate to. She made poor decisions, as many college freshmen do, and she showed over and over again that she had a lot of growing up to.  Yes, she was a tad whiny at times, but I don't know, somehow that worked with the person she is/was supposed to be (for me at least). Hunter was fabulous.  His undying love for Erin in the face of her stupidity is downright sweet.  He had a very stabilizing effect on the story overall as the very grounded character.

The ending felt a little "off" for me, but overall, for someone who is not generally a contemporary reader/fan, this book was a good read.  It was definitely a breath of fresh air to see COLLEGE students as the main characters in YA fiction.

Evergreen - Belva Plain 593 p.

Evergreen is one of those novels that span several decades as seen through the eyes of generations of a family.  Such books always contain themes of continuity and change, personality and situation, and how every person's combination of inner self and social world sets her on a trajectory that overlaps and intersects with the trajectories of others, and produces a vast alone-ness in each individual life.

The other major theme in this book is: what is love, and what is its relationship to personality experience, to loss, to truth, to religion, to money and to family?   The central impact that causes the ripples forming that theme in Evergreen is the two very different loves of Anna, the main character.  Paul is the man with whom she feels an instant bond, and Joseph is the man who adores her.  Both men remain in different ways in her life, and so she is doomed never to be whole.  But in this early-to-mid-20th-century world of Jewish immigrants fighting to make their own place in New York, of wars and the Holocaust in Europe, turmoil and tragedy everywhere, is anyone really whole?  Anna's are not the only hard choices that must be made.

Though it was published in 1978, this novel did not feel the slightest bit dated to me, but warm-blooded and real.

Tender Rebel / Johanna Lindsey / 372 p.

A pretty cute romance, about a Scottish heiress who flees to London to escape marrying her despicable cousin, and falls under the spell of a confirmed rake. I liked how Lindsey keeps you guessing at what obstacles will keep these two apart; for example, you might think that when the heroine mistakes the hero's nephew for his son, this would cause a rift for a large portion of the plot, but instead the misunderstanding gets cleared up almost right away.

Roslynn has a lot of spunk, though for such a strong-willed woman I had to roll my eyes at how quickly she abandoned herself to the hero's embraces, but she still earned bonus points in my mind for jumping out the window when she is kidnapped.

This book reminds me of the classic romances of Georgette Heyer, only with less historical accuracy and more sex.(Seriously, could she not do a little research on prices back then? If Mr. Darcy is considered extremely wealthy with £10,000 a year,then I doubt Roslynn could buy several thousand pounds of furniture and consider it pocket change, much less give her husband an "allowance" of £2,000 a month.) I admit to skipping the graphic sex scenes, of which there are maybe a handful, with a fair amount of innuendo in between. But for all its silliness, I liked the close-knit family of the Mallorys, and enjoyed chuckling over the pointless drama the heroine and hero caused for themselves.

A Storm of Swords / George R.R. Martin / 960 p.

(Note: this is the 3^rd book in the series, so if you don’t want the plot spoiled, I highly recommend you not read any more of this post, but instead go out and read A Game of Thrones.)

 At the end of A Clash of Kings, the number of claimants for the throne of Westeros has been whittled down, with Renly’s death and Stannis’ defeat at the Blackwater. Things look bright for the Lannisters; the Highgarden alliance will be cemented with the marriage of Joffrey to Margaery Tyrell, and the chance of a strong alliance with the Martells becomes a possibility. In the Riverlands, the “Young Wolf” Robb Stark has won every battle but damages his cause when he chooses love over honor. 

   

But don’t forget that this series is called A Song of Ice and Fire, and some of the most interesting events happen in the far north and south of the world.  Beyond the Wall, Mance Rayder’s forces are advancing, and Jon Snow is torn between his duties as a spy for the Night’s Watch and his attraction to the Wildling Ygritte. But in the dark worse things are gaining power, as Samwell Tarly finds out to his terror.  In the Eastern cities, Daenerys Targaryen begins to solidify her position of power, using her dragons and wits to launch a campaign of conquest.

As always, Martin keeps the reader hooked with blindsiding plot twists and shifts in character POVs that keep your sympathies changing. The most interesting new addition are the chapters narrated by Jaime Lannister, a character we’ve seem everyone else’s opinions of but whose true nature remained elusive. In all, Storm of Swords provides what we’ve come to expect from Martin, a mix of haunting history and thrilling political backstabbing, where no one is safe, for “when you play the Game of Thrones you win or you die.  There is no middle ground.”          

A Clash of Kings / George R.R. Martin / 728 p.

Since I hate spoiling information about the second book in a series when most readers of this blog haven’t read the first, see below for my review of the first book in the series, A Game of Thrones (which is going to be a series on HBO in April!); my thoughts on the second book are listed after it.

***

Don't mistake the two 'R.R.'s in this author's name for someone similar to Tolkien. While Tolkien's fantasy is about beauty and yearning and the desire for the restoration of a broken world, Martin's is about exploring the depths of (in)humanity. Don't expect the beautifully bittersweet Lorien, prepare for the gutters and sewers of King's Landing. This book is very gritty and dark.

Martin creates a host of realistic characters, warts and all. (Literally. You'll find boils, and open sores, and all other kinds of nastiness.)There are certainly characters who live by honor, or duty, or family, but they are just as likely to come to a bad end as those who are petty, selfish, or cruel. The world is brutal, justice is unfair, and prophecies exist but are just as likely to fail as come true. . .

And yet, this world is so compelling that it's impossible to look away. The characters defy categorization; you have many of the typical characters of fantasy: the noble lord who seeks justice, the bastard with no place, exiled royalty, the plucky tomboy, the cunning dwarf, the sinister queen, but if you think that means you can predict what will happen, think again.

And while nobles play their game of thrones, darkness creeps back at the edges of the world. . .

****Spoilers****

                At the end of A Game of Thrones, surprising deaths and political backstabbing has left Westeros with a power vacuum that many noble houses are anxious to fill. The Lannisters control the Iron Throne, but Robb Stark has sworn vengeance for his father’s death and rides as King in the North.  Both of King Robert’s brothers have claimed the right to rule, and raised armies to back them. The sea raiders of Pyke have decided to use this opportunity to carve out a kingdom for themselves.  But the series is not called A Song of Ice and Fire for nothing; two of the characters we care about the most are Jon Snow, whose duties take him beyond the Wall, as more disturbing truths about the undead wights glimmer at the edge of knowledge, and Daenerys Targaryen, the queen in exile who has awoken the first dragons to appear in hundreds of years.  

                With the addition of two new points of view, Davos Seaworth and Theon Greyjoy, the number of different characters we follow hovers at just below ten, with chapters alternating between their stories.  Sometimes it feels like characters are moved around just so we can get live journalists, as it were, on the scene to let us see all the events that are taking place, but as always, Martin’s masterful storytelling ability makes all the plot lines compelling.  The series is truly epic in scope, but the characters are flawed and fallible people with a depth of character development not often found in fantasy.  Your sympathies might be with the Starks and you might hate the Lannisters, but Tyrion Lannister remains one of the most interesting and sympathetic characters in the series.  Martin refuses to let you take sides completely, always shading the characters or the situation so that there is no obvious way out. This is one fantasy series that you won’t be able to put down with an “eh” after the first book, and the second leaves you desperate to start the third.         

The Lost Saint / Bree Despain / 404 p.

This is the second "Dark Divine" series by Bree DeSpain (preceded by The Dark Divine" and to be followed with Book 3 in December).  This series falls into the current young adult trend in publishing books with somewhat mopey female leads and exceptionally good looking "bad boy" male leads...who are generally supernatural in some way.  In this case, Despain has entered the world of werewolves and in her new take on the supernatural world, our main character, Grace, "cured" her boyfriend (in book 1), Daniel, of being a werewolf and has now inherited the powers herself. The second books opens with her struggle to control her new-found powers.  When a new Urbat (Despain's term for werewolves -- "Hounds of Heaven") comes to town and offers to train Grace to use her powers to fight evil, her relationship with her boyfriend and family are threatened as well as her grip on humanity.  Her new "trainer," Talbot, teaches her to access her powers through fear and anger and leads her down a dark path she doesn't even know she is on--one where she will eventually lose herself to the wolf and fall into the trap of those she is trying to stop.

I enjoy the world that Despain has created and find her writing style captivating.  The story pulled me in and genuinely kept my attention (which has been a difficult task as of late).  This book fits well into the currently popular werewolf/vampire literature for young adults. It is definitely a book where you need to read the first to understand/follow the second.  Despain has also ended this with quite the cliffhanger. You can't finish this book and not immediately want to pick up the next book. I won't say that this is the most enticing YA book that I've read in the last year, but it is definitely worth the time of readers who enjoy YA paranormal romance stories (and are slightly sick of sparkly vampires).

Julian Comstock: A Story of Twenty-Second Century America / Robert Charles Wilson (413 p.)

In an interview with Tor.com about his latest book, Canadian sci-fi author Robert Charles Wilson revealed that, upon deciding to write a novel set 150 years in the future, he looked to popular books of 150 years ago, to see the difference in culture and worldview that he would have to convey between today and his future setting.  As it turns out, this look backward ended up influencing Julian Comstock much more directly: the characters speak as if they had stepped from the pages of a mid-19th century novel, often to hilarious effect; the post-oil future looks uncannily like a coal and steam driven Victorian era...and somehow, nary a machine gun has survived what the novel's religious establishment calls "The False Tribulation" that followed the end of the "Efflorescence of Oil" and the era of "The Secular Ancients" (that is, us), despite ongoing war with the Dutch over Labrador, and various other conflicts.  As prediction in any linguistic or technological sense, the novel cannot be taken seriously.

Nonetheless: once one accepts the idea of a chunk of the 19th-early 20th century being picked up and plunked into the 2170's...this novel is a treat: a splendid read, with memorable characters, a social, political and religious world spun and extrapolated comically and tragically from the substance of America, past and present, and a narrative that is capable of stirring the mind and moving the heart.

-Rachel

Links to Tor.com Interview, Part I and Part II.

The Sunborn / Gregory Benford / 436 p.

I picked up The Sunborn on a rushed descend-and-grab mission to Columbia Public Library, just before it closed for the night, so that I'd have something besides the South Carolina history item (review coming later) to read on the way to a conference in Charleston, SC.  As it turned out, this sci-fi paperback was anything but light reading - for one thing, it was written by a physics professor and contains diagrams of the heliosphere. 

In much of science fiction (or at least, much of that genre that I read), fairly ordinary human dramas of the political, military, social or sexual kind are played out against a background of some future, spacefaring civilization, or some other universe and cast of characters and species.  But in this novel, the scientist-astronauts deal primarily with problems of...science.  (Imagine: the two main characters are female scientists, including one of reproductive age, and there's no romantic or sexual plot at all, for a change!)  Sure, some of the most amusing moments deal with interpersonal tensions between the explorers and the corporate and political interests "Earthside" in the mid- 21st century, and their troubles with information overload and battling bureaucracies, but that's all just background noise compared with the tumbling cascade of events that begins when weird electric energies on Mars and vast, methane-based...um...entities on Pluto show signs that seem, beyond all human expectation, remarkably like intelligent life.

By the end of The Sunborn, the characters still seem hardly more than sketches, yet deep questions of philosophy and even glimmers of theology are sparking through the pages, spiraling at once outward to the cosmos and inward to the memory and art.  I came away thinking, "Now this is true science fiction, worth every diagram."