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Booklog
I haven't posted about books in awhile, so let's do that, then! Most of what I've been reading lately has been nonfiction (history, mainly), but on the fiction end of things, here are a smattering:
Libby on Wednesday by Zilpha Keatley Snyder - I think I might've read about this one on![[personal profile]](https://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rachelmanija's blog. (Yep, here's that post.) It's YA and can basically be described as a rather nerdier version of The Breakfast Club. I loved it. Quiet, bright, socially awkward Libby was homeschooled until her parents decided to send her to school to get "socialized". She ends up in a creative writing class with a bunch of other social misfits, all of whom hate each other ... at first. It's not like you can't figure out exactly where the story is going, but I really like that particular trope anyway, and the characters (as well as Libby's big, weird, nontraditional family) are well-drawn and easy to love. I'll probably be looking for more books by this author, since I noticed when I picked this one up that the library has a bunch more.
Handle With Care by Jodi Picoult - Okay, so ... I really enjoyed 95% of this book, and then loathed the ending so thoroughly that I never intend to read another book by this author again (especially after going on Amazon, reading some reviews and discovering that this kind of WTF!ending is sort of a thing of hers). Which makes it difficult to write anything else about the book! But, basically, it's about a family torn apart by the mother's "wrongful birth" lawsuit on behalf of her disabled daughter (i.e. if she'd known her daughter would be disabled, she would not have chosen to give birth to her). Having been a disabled child myself, with a disability very similar to the girl in the book, and also kinda-mostly pro-choice, this was a really interesting topic to me -- the ease of slipping myself into the daughter's position made it a deeply uncomfortable book to read at times, but in a good way -- and I thought the author did a pretty good job balancing the different moral positions in the book without demonizing anybody. It wasn't flawless, but I liked it right up until that dreadful cop-out of an ending, which I'm still mildly bitter about, as you can probably tell. *g* ETA: This book is now thoroughly spoiled in the LJ comments.
The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells - I wanted to love this book so much more than I did. The world-building is just wonderful: it's set in a somewhat post-apocalyptic fantasy world with no humans, just many different races of strange, alien, vaguely humanoid beings. The main character, Moon, is a winged shapeshifter who's not really sure what he is, never having met another person like himself until an incident at the start of the book. The big problem I had with this book is that, first of all, what I thought it was going to be about (Moon's search for his people), is only the first couple of chapters and then it almost immediately falls into a slow-moving political plot that turns out to be the main plot thread in the book. I never really bonded with most of the characters -- with a couple of exceptions, I found them likable but bland; there were simply too many of them and not enough to distinguish between them. Still, others' mileage may vary. I can definitely tell that I would have been ALL OVER this book at a different time in my life; I've become a reader who is most drawn to character, but at certain times in the past I've been more enamored of world-building, and I think I would have loved this book if I'd happened to hit it at the right time for me.
The Devil You Know by Mike Carey - This is the first book in an urban fantasy series about an exorcist in a London infested with the ghosts of the restless dead, as well as an odd demon or two. It's pretty good: there's a rich sense of place, good character voices and an overall air of film-noir about it, and it's nice to see urban fantasy that's focused on something other than vampires and werewolves. Also, there's a twist at the end (actually a couple of them) that I absolutely loved. Still, it didn't really leave me wildly enthusiastic to seek out the rest of the series for some reason. I think I'll see if the library has them and give the next one a try. I think this series could draw me in over time, but right now it's kind of middle-of-the-road: enjoyable to read, but it was a book that I could pick up or put down, not stay up 'til the middle of the night finishing.
This entry is also posted at http://friendshipper.dreamwidth.org/347659.html with
comments.
Libby on Wednesday by Zilpha Keatley Snyder - I think I might've read about this one on
rachelmanija's blog. (Yep, here's that post.) It's YA and can basically be described as a rather nerdier version of The Breakfast Club. I loved it. Quiet, bright, socially awkward Libby was homeschooled until her parents decided to send her to school to get "socialized". She ends up in a creative writing class with a bunch of other social misfits, all of whom hate each other ... at first. It's not like you can't figure out exactly where the story is going, but I really like that particular trope anyway, and the characters (as well as Libby's big, weird, nontraditional family) are well-drawn and easy to love. I'll probably be looking for more books by this author, since I noticed when I picked this one up that the library has a bunch more.Handle With Care by Jodi Picoult - Okay, so ... I really enjoyed 95% of this book, and then loathed the ending so thoroughly that I never intend to read another book by this author again (especially after going on Amazon, reading some reviews and discovering that this kind of WTF!ending is sort of a thing of hers). Which makes it difficult to write anything else about the book! But, basically, it's about a family torn apart by the mother's "wrongful birth" lawsuit on behalf of her disabled daughter (i.e. if she'd known her daughter would be disabled, she would not have chosen to give birth to her). Having been a disabled child myself, with a disability very similar to the girl in the book, and also kinda-mostly pro-choice, this was a really interesting topic to me -- the ease of slipping myself into the daughter's position made it a deeply uncomfortable book to read at times, but in a good way -- and I thought the author did a pretty good job balancing the different moral positions in the book without demonizing anybody. It wasn't flawless, but I liked it right up until that dreadful cop-out of an ending, which I'm still mildly bitter about, as you can probably tell. *g* ETA: This book is now thoroughly spoiled in the LJ comments.
The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells - I wanted to love this book so much more than I did. The world-building is just wonderful: it's set in a somewhat post-apocalyptic fantasy world with no humans, just many different races of strange, alien, vaguely humanoid beings. The main character, Moon, is a winged shapeshifter who's not really sure what he is, never having met another person like himself until an incident at the start of the book. The big problem I had with this book is that, first of all, what I thought it was going to be about (Moon's search for his people), is only the first couple of chapters and then it almost immediately falls into a slow-moving political plot that turns out to be the main plot thread in the book. I never really bonded with most of the characters -- with a couple of exceptions, I found them likable but bland; there were simply too many of them and not enough to distinguish between them. Still, others' mileage may vary. I can definitely tell that I would have been ALL OVER this book at a different time in my life; I've become a reader who is most drawn to character, but at certain times in the past I've been more enamored of world-building, and I think I would have loved this book if I'd happened to hit it at the right time for me.
The Devil You Know by Mike Carey - This is the first book in an urban fantasy series about an exorcist in a London infested with the ghosts of the restless dead, as well as an odd demon or two. It's pretty good: there's a rich sense of place, good character voices and an overall air of film-noir about it, and it's nice to see urban fantasy that's focused on something other than vampires and werewolves. Also, there's a twist at the end (actually a couple of them) that I absolutely loved. Still, it didn't really leave me wildly enthusiastic to seek out the rest of the series for some reason. I think I'll see if the library has them and give the next one a try. I think this series could draw me in over time, but right now it's kind of middle-of-the-road: enjoyable to read, but it was a book that I could pick up or put down, not stay up 'til the middle of the night finishing.
This entry is also posted at http://friendshipper.dreamwidth.org/347659.html with
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She must have some way of inoculating herself against ending complaints, especially if they're so common. I don't know what that method might be, but it must run strong. She's written a lot of books. Heh. Maybe that's it?
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(The movie's not really worth it, though all the kid actors and Baldwin turn in excellent performances. That might just be my raging hatred of Cameron Diaz talking, of course, but GOD, I hate the whole story.
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*giggles* There is something to be said for that. Hey, I wish someone would pull up to MY house with a dump truck full of money and give it to me to write depressing, repetitive books!
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I have very, very few things I absolutely cannot stand in life, but creating a child for medical purposes is one of them. I hate it.
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It was quite eye-opening to go on Amazon and see a whole bunch of people saying the same thing about most of her books - pretty good, but SERIOUSLY, THE ENDING, WHAT. So it wasn't just me. *g* There are a number of authors who muff endings regularly (Stephen King comes to mind here) but not so spectacularly as to make me swear off their books forever. This was special.
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A version of "rocks fall; everyone dies"? ;D I haven't read enough of her to tell if there's a trend (see, vow *g*) but perhaps she's attractive to people wanting a "neat" ending? Where the questions raised are answered for you ~by fate~? Or something like that?
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The first book of hers I became aware of was "My Sister's Keeper" which just...UGH. I hate it.
(When I was in grade school, I read a lot of Lurlene McDaniel, because I was trying to understand cancer. Her books are shallow, but they're about a million times more real than the crap Picoult dishes out. She makes me see red.)
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What I loved about the book was how deeply steeped in its location it was; you get the impression that the series could not happen anywhere but London. I am hugely fond of a strong sense of place, and really love that sort of thing. I just wish I'd loved the book more than I did (I go into more of my complaints in my reply to the comment above this one ...).
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re: 'The Devil You Know'... I usually have looked at all Urban Fantasies out there. Never seen this one. I guess because the cover and style, they have shelved it in mystery, which I don't read as much. I've had some bad experiences with 'too gory' mysteries and I would rather not have all the death. While I'm curious, and I might pick up this one and skim some pages because it's got things I really like - urban fantasy/male leads/London. However, I have been burned a few too many times by mysteries (gore, gore, gore). *sigh*
One, that sounded so good - was a mystery (urban fantasy) about a guy/Sherriff who saw ghosts in medieval England and the ghosts were not very helpful in solving the crimes. And of course, he was very angsty about the whole thing. The problem - OMG, the pages and pages and PAGES of gory description of the corpse! (even more pages about the murder.) shudder. It's scared me so much I can't even remember the title of the book.
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And then at the end the woman "solves" the mystery of her husband's suicide, and that's the end of the cycle of grief. It's like A+B+C=husband kills himself, well, that's totally reasonable then, guess I can't blame him for it. And this is just ??? The one suicide I knew, I had to finally accept that there was no reasonable explanation because suicide isn't reasonable. That even if I found out every little detail about what was going on with him, as I wanted to do, that still would not explain it. So to come to the end of this emotional journey and find that...
I guess this is a problem with authors who want to deal with really messy complicated issues? Because those things don't ever actually resolve in reality, but the book has to stop at some point?
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On reflection, this makes me feel more kindly toward the "and it haunted her the rest of her life" nineteenth-century-esque sort of ending.