Review:
While I admired Laura Pederson’s strong prose skills, I was not drawn in by the story at the center of Best Bet. I lost interest after about 100 pages.

Many thanks to iUniverse for the review copy.

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Review:
I couldn’t get into The Long Way Home, despite Andrew Klavan’s stellar reputation. It had a lot of action but the plot and characters seemed too simply drawn.

Many thanks to Thomas Nelson for the review copy.

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Review:
I really enjoyed Gitty Daneshvari’s wit in School of Fear. She has a dry sense of humor that really animates all the characters and elevates the book beyond what could have been just a by-the-numbers genre read. You can tell that she really cares about language and wants to put something original into the world, which is not something you can say about some of the YA authors I’ve come across.

School of Fear has a sense of gothic adventure that reminded me of John Bellairs crossed with EL Konigsburg–in other words, it’s great fun for middle grade readers.

Many thanks to Little, Brown for the review copy.

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Review:
The Great Bazaar and Other Stories is a fun little read for fans of the world and characters created by Peter V. Brett in The Warded Man and its upcoming sequel The Desert Spear (which is so so so so so good, by the way–watch for my review and an interview with Peter in April!)

I enjoyed reading a few more stories about characters I have come to really love, particularly the healer Leesha, who delivers some unorthodox marriage advice to a troubled couple in one of the stories. I also loved Brett’s original opening chapter, showing Arlen as a young boy. The opening novelette, “The Great Bazaar,” serves as a nice teaser for The Desert Spear–you’ll definitely get excited for the book when reading it.

Many thanks to Subterranean for the review copy.

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Review:
I generally find memoirs to be self-indulgent, solipsistic, and narcissistic. Very rarely do the people with good stories also end up with the writing skills to engage the reader beyond the titillating details that sold the book proposal and turn their personal story into something that has actual resonance, meaning and importance.

Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven has a great story, but author Susan Jane Gilman has the literary chops to take readers beyond the merely therapeutic, telling what turns out to be a very big story about two very lost girls in one very confusing Communist country.

Plotwise, the book has an “Amazing Race” quality to it. Lots of deprivation, some racing around, squabbling between Susan and “Claire,” her traveling companion. There’s onscreen romance and offscreen sex, and hints of big drama to come on every page. That alone would make it a fun read, but Gilman invests her telling with a strong sense of history and place, as well as psychological perspicuity in her character building. It becomes clear very quickly that her primary goal is to tell a ripping good yarn. Too many memoirists forget this, becoming lost in a form of self-therapy. Gilman discusses her state of mind, but she’s quick to tie her emotional state into bigger questions of American and female identity. She’s not begging me to “relate” to her–she’s asking me to sit back and listen. And then she goes ahead and makes it very worth my while.

I totally want all my friends to read this book so we can talk about it. I was riveted by every page and weeping at the end. I loved it!

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Review:
The projects in Recycling is Chic were born out of Alchemy Arts, an arts group that began in Edinburgh and now exists worldwide.

The book is filled with tons of fun and funky projects, most of which aren’t made with a pattern. There’s everything from jewelry made out of toys (like Monopoly game pieces) to a huipil (Mayan shirt) made from an old t-shirt and fabric scraps to skirts made from curtains to a bracelet made from cut-up inner tubes.

I think that if you are the kind of person who can come up with this kind of thing on your own, you’ll get a lot of inspiration from these pages. For me, I am more the kind of crafter who likes to follow a pattern. I’m a worker more than a creator, if that makes sense. So I’m not sure if I’d actually make any of these things because I’m pretty sure they’d never look as cute as they do here. I just don’t really have the eye. But I am inspired to cut up and embellish some fleece mittens!

Many thanks to Marion Boyars for the review copy.

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Review:
It was SO much fun to return to the world of the Liveship Traders series, which was my favorite of Robin Hobb’s three Six Duchies trilogies. I’m aching to reread all of them again, to relive the adventure and romance and magic of what I think are the best-written epic fantasy books of all time.

Dragon Keeper is the first half of one book; the second, Dragon Haven, will be out in May. At the close of the Liveship Traders books, the last remaining dragon and some sympathetic folk aided a group of sea serpents to the hatching grounds to go into hibernation and become dragons. Now, those cocoons have opened, but only a few dragons have survived, and those who have are deformed, weak and unable to fly.

Meanwhile, a Bingtown spinster from a prominent family receives a most unromantic proposal of marriage. Alise will be given all the money and freedom she needs to pursue her scholarly study of dragons, the only price being a loveless marriage with a man who ignores her to pursue his own private interests. She longs to see the dragon hatchlings, having not heard the news that they are malformed, but her controlling husband is loath to allow her to travel.

The other main POV character is Thymara, a young Rain Wilds girl who lives near the hatching grounds and saw them emerge. Like many Rain Wilds babies, she was born too deformed to be allowed to live, but her father would not let her be exposed, so she has grown up an outcast, not allowed to marry and not expected to survive to adulthood. Working with the dragons represents a freedom she never expected to know, but the work proves to be more challenging and less rewarding than she hoped it would be.

The humans are no longer willing to tolerate the deformed dragons and their rapacious appetites, but fearful of angering the majestic queen of dragons, Tintaglia, they decide to help the dragons move upriver, where the dragons remember a grand city where their ancestors lived side by side with the Elderlings who tended and worshiped them. No one expects the dragons or their keepers to survive the trip.

I had toyed with the idea of waiting until May to read both books, but I just couldn’t hold out that long. And now May can’t come fast enough! Dragon Keeper is a splendid return to form for Hobb and a book I really, really enjoyed reading.

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Review:
Before I get into my review of Mr. Darcy Broke My Heart, I need to make a confession. The book’s editor–who also receives a heartfelt dedication from the author–is a good friend of mine. Like I was at her (small) wedding, and used to meet her for lunch at least once a month. My mother-in-law watched her cats. Her husband was instrumental in getting me and my husband together. I tell you all this because I get a lot of review copies of books but don’t let that influence my reviews. If I like a book, it’s because I liked it. And if I don’t like a book, I’ll tell you my opinion, too.

However, when it comes to books by friends I won’t pretend to be objective. I like to support their efforts in the world and give them a boost when I can. And in the rare event I couldn’t do that in good conscience, I’ve opted not to review the book at all. (It’s happened once or twice; I know a lot of writers.)

Fortunately, Mr. Darcy Broke My Heart is well-worth recommending to fans of Austen-inspired chick lit. It’s got some good musings on the nature of love and attraction, and gets in some nice jabs at some of the more overly zealous Austen fanatics.

I don’t think that Pattillo quite caught Austen’s voice in her fictionalized version of Austen’s first draft, but she did capture the spirit of her work. The prose just felt a bit too modern, not quite complex enough–though the other characters do admit that it’s not quite up to par with Austen’s published work. And I’m always bothered when a heroine tells an “accidental” lie that then goes on to color the plot o the book in a significant way. It’s a plot device that’s just a bit too convenient.

Many thanks to Guideposts for the review copy.

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Review:
Harmony Dust’s story as told in Scars and Stilettos is not without merit. The girl has been through a lot, from childhood sexual abuse to rape to poverty, all of which led her to a soul-crushing career as an exotic dancer. I just wish that the writing had been a little stronger. Nevertheless, this is a powerful story and I hope it helps a lot of women like Harmony.

Many thanks to Monarch Books for the review copy.

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Review:
Raven’s Ladder is the third intallment in Jeffrey Overstreet’s Auralia thread, began in Auralia’s Colors and continued in Cyndere’s Midnight. The basic gist is that King Cal-raven of Abascar, through the colors woven by the mystical (and missing) girl Auralia, and heiress Cyndere of Bel Amica, through the noble ambitions of her dead husband Deuneroi, have been given a vision of a different world, one that involves liberating the beastmen of House Cent Regus, under a deadly curse. The Keeper figures into things somehow, but it’s not God. It might not even be good, but it gave King Cal-raven a vision of a ladder to climb to bring his house to freedom.

In Raven’s Ladder, Overstreet has really hit his storytelling stride. I loved the first two books but found them both to foreground poetry over plot in some key places, making it hard to follow the story at times. Here, he’s sublimated his poetic impulses into the plot itself, and as a result I was able to fill in some gaps that eluded me in the first two books. That’s not to say that he’s a writer who gives up easy answers–not at all. There’s a lot of fearsome mystery to be found in these books, unanswered questions and stories as yet untold. But it seems he’s found the fine line between mystery and opacity without sacrificing the beautiful prose that has captivated from page 1 of book 1.

I continue to be happily impressed with the originality of Overstreet’s story. It has the genre trappings of epic fantasy (my favorite) but eschews the worn-out hero’s journey bildungsroman that has become so trite. King Cal-raven is a noble visionary, but he’s not above making questionable moral choices (like pitching the woo at a married woman), and he’s not a chosen one or anything dumb like that. All the political intrigue is subtle and fascinating and really comes into its own in this book. I can’t wait to read the last book and find out how it all comes out!

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