New to Me author: Holly Black

Most people have heard of The Spiderwick Chronicles I'm sure since they're making it into a movie but I wasn't familiar with Holly Black's work at all until I picked up Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale from the library a few weeks ago. I have since devoured Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale, Valiant: A Modern Tale of Faerie, and Ironside: A Modern Faery's Tale and today, after visiting the library again, I brought home with me White Cat and The Poison Eaters, both brand spankin' new books from Ms. Black. I am very excited to have them in my grubby little hands. I would drop the book I'm currently reading to start these babies but I can't do that to Magic Strikes by Ilona Andrews. That would just be so wrong.

Welcome to the realm of very scary faeries!

Sixteen-year-old Kaye is a modern nomad. Fierce and independent, she travels from city to city with her mother's rock band until an ominous attack forces Kaye back to her childhood home. There, amid the industrial, blue-collar New Jersey backdrop, Kaye soon finds herself an unwilling pawn in an ancient power struggle between two rival faerie kingdoms — a struggle that could very well mean her death.

When seventeen-year-old Valerie Russell runs away to New York City, she's trying to escape a life that has utterly betrayed her. Sporting a new identity, she takes up with a gang of squatters who live in the city's labyrinthine subway system.
But there's something eerily beguiling about Val's new friends. Impulsive Lolli talks of monsters in the subway tunnels they call home and shoots up a shimmery amber-colored powder that makes the shadows around her dance. Severe Luis claims he can make deals with creatures that no one else can see. And then there's Luis's brother, timid and sensitive Dave, who makes the mistake of letting Val tag along as he makes a delivery to a woman who turns out to have goat hooves instead of feet.
When a bewildered Val allows Lolli to talk her into tracking down the hidden lair of the creature for whom Luis and Dave have been dealing, Val finds herself bound into service by a troll named Ravus. He is as hideous as he is honorable. And as Val grows to know him, she finds herself torn between her affection for an honorable monster and her fear of what her new friends are becoming.
Bestselling author Holly Black follows her breakout debut, Tithe, with a rich, harrowing, and compulsively readable parable of betrayal, abuse, friendship, and love.

in the realm of faerie...
...the time has come for Roiben's coronation. Uneasy in the midst of the malevolent Unseelie Court, pixie Kaye is sure of only one thing—her love for Roiben. But when Kaye drunkenly declares herself to Roiben, he sends her on a seemingly impossible quest to find a faerie who can tell a lie.
Miserable and convinced she belongs nowhere, Kaye decides to tell her mother the truth—that she is a changeling left in place of the human daughter stolen long ago. Her mother's shock and horror sends Kaye back to the world of Faerie to find her human counterpart and return her to Ironside. But when Kaye returns to the faerie courts, a battle of wits and weapons is being waged over Roiben's throne, and she soon finds herself at the center of it all.

Cassel comes from a family of curse workers—people who have the power to change your emotions, your memories, your luck, by the slightest touch of their hands. And since curse work is illegal, they’re all criminals. Many become mobsters and con artists. But not Cassel. He hasn’t got magic, so he’s an outsider, the straight kid in a crooked family. You just have to ignore one small detail—he killed his best friend, Lila, three years ago.
           
Cassel has carefully built up a façade of normalcy, blending into the crowd. But his façade starts to crumble when he finds himself sleepwalking, propelled into the night by terrifying dreams about a white cat that wants to tell him something. He’s noticing other disturbing things too, including the strange behavior of his two brothers. They are keeping secrets from him. As Cassel begins to suspect he’s part of a huge con game, he must unravel his past and his memories. To find out the truth, Cassel will have to outcon the conmen.

From the dust jacket:

In her debut collection, New York Times best-selling author Holly Black returns to her Modern Faerie Tale series (Tithe, Ironside, and Valiant) in two darkly exquisite new tales, "Going Ironside" and "The Land of Heart's Desire." In the first story, "The Coldest Girl in Coldtown," a girl is drunk on the street - but for a reason you'd never guess. Then Black takes readers on a tour of a faerie market, introduces a girl poisonous to the touch, and another who challenges the devil to a competitive eating match.

These twelve stories, two of which are published here for the first time and each of which is illustrated by Theo Black, have been published in anthologies such as 21 Proms, The Faery Reel, and The Restless Dead, and have been reprinted in many "Best of" anthologies. 

The Poison Eaters is Holly Black's much-anticipated first collection of stories, and her ability to stare into the void - and to find humanity and humor there - will speak to young adult and adult readers alike.

See? Tithe, Valiant, and Ironside were all good enough for me to stay up and finish them before I would put them down. Granted, these YA novels only take me a few hours apiece to read but I liked all three nonetheless. All three books about not-so-nice faeries, I enjoyed Tithe and Ironside the best as they both focused on the same set of characters. Fans of the Wicked Lovely series by Melissa Marr would probably enjoy this interpretation of modern faeries. The heroine, Kaye, proves that green chicks are cool. Just ask Captain Kirk :)

Review: Wild Ride by Jennifer Crusie & Bob Mayer

The wildest ride at Dreamland isn’t the roller coaster.

Lots of women think they’ve fallen in love with a demon. Mab Brannigan really has...

Mary Alice Brannigan doesn't believe in the supernatural. Nor does she expect to find that she’s the newest recruit in the Guardia, an elite team of demon fighters formed centuries before to guard the five Untouchables, the most powerful demons in the history of the world, now imprisoned right there in the Dreamland amusement park. That would be bad enough, but there’s a guy she’s falling hard for, and there’s something about him that’s not quite right...

Then there’s Ethan Wayne, a former Green Beret who’s come home to Dreamland to die. Ethan has his own problems including a bullet in his chest inching closer to his heart, a true love who shoots him on sight, and a mother who drags him into the Guardia after he’s possessed by a crazed killer mermaid demon. Between ducking his mother’s attempts to reform him and dodging the bullets of a secret government agent he’s pretty sure is his soulmate, Ethan really doesn’t have time for demons, touchable or not.

But rocky romances and demented demons aren’t Mab and Ethan’s only problems: they’re also coping with a crooked politician, a supernatural raven, a secret government agency, an inexperienced sorceress, a betrayer within the Guardia, and some mind-boggling revelations from their own pasts. As their personal demons wreck their newfound relationships and real demons wreck the park, Mab and Ethan find out that the Untouchables have escaped and opened the gate to hell on earth. Now they’re facing down the Devil himself and finding out what everybody who’s ever been to an amusement park knows: the end of the ride is the wildest.

I have no idea what Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer were thinking when they wrote this book and certainly I wouldn't be so presumptuous to tell one of my favorite authors what to write about in the future but as a faithful reader, I have one thing I really need to say: Please stay away from paranormal stuff in the future. Please. Pretty pretty please.

I so wanted to like Wild Ride. I have written about how freaking fantastic I think Jennifer Crusie is (Bob Mayer deserves a mention too) and how I love her books but I have to admit, when I read the blurb for this book way before it came out I got a little nervous. Why is Jennifer Crusie writing about demons when she writes about regular people so well? I got even more nervous when Jane said she couldn't even finish it. Whoa! I had prepared myself for a book that had some problems that weren't so big that they couldn't be ignored but she couldn't even bring herself to finish it? That's so not good, I thought, but I put on my big-girl panties and sat down with this alleged odious book to see what I thought anyway.

I think this is was a mess. The goofy Jenny Crusie humor was there in spots thank goodness but the overall tone of the book was sad. "...a former Green Beret who's come home to Dreamland to die"? What's entertaining about that? And Mab, a repressed woman who spends more time involved with her artistic works than with people? What about the demonic possession and death in an old amusement park? That definitely sounds plausible to me since clowns are freaky but am I going to want to read a romance with that as the setting? Probably not. Sounds more like a Dean Koontz novel.

Maybe it’s because my copy is an ARC and they hadn't completely worked out all the bugs but some things aren’t clear, like how Ethan and Mab are basically strangers that graduated from the same high school class but by two-thirds through the book, with what seems like little interaction, are close and think of each other like siblings. I would have liked to have seen more of what their childhoods were like and seen them fleshed out a bit more. We are told that Mab’s mom was a bit fanatic about demons in the park but why? Some real family history would have been nice instead of little bits supplied when only necessary.

Not only were the platonic relationships out of whack but the romantic relationships are different than usual too: in Jenny Crusie books, the main male and female characters become romantically involved by the end but usually fight in the beginning. My favorite example of this is Bet Me. In this one, Mab falls for a drunkard who is possessed by a demon and pays her the slightest bit of attention. She goes instantly from obsessing about the decorations and artifacts in the park to becoming a infatuated with a man, then falling again with one look at another while Ethan ends up with a Homeland Security soldier who fights the paranormal, a female GI Joe. Ethan and GI Jane make sense but after Mab quickly gets over her demon and she falls for that other guy, it seems more like an afterthought, as if they don't want Mab to feel left out of the happy ending.

I'm not going to talk about all the demonic stuff happening at Dreamland except to say that in the right author's hands, it could have been good and scary as I don't think it was meant to be a romance. Though there are some amusing things about Wild Ride that stuck out to me, like there being a witch named Glenda and the squabbling demon spouses. There were periods where Wild Ride had the feel of Agnes and the Hitman, the only collaboration of the three between Crusie and Mayer that I felt was a success. Those periods were the reason that I made it through Wild Ride and for them, I thank you. On crusiemayer.com they have for a free download a short story prequel to Wild Ride called "Wild Night". I haven't read it yet as I found it as I was writing this review but maybe that will be the backstory I was looking for. Jenny Crusie has a solo book out on August 31, 2010 called Maybe This Time. Ironic title, don't you think?

Review: So Enchanting by Connie Brockway

The Scottish hamlet of Little Firkin has one important industry: the guardianship of Amelie Chase, a witchling banished by the ton for her alleged supernatural powers, and entrusted by her benefactor to Fanny Walcott. But the scheme is hitting a snag: Little Firkin is cramping Amelie's style, anonymous notes are threatening her life, and now, two handsome travelers arrive with tantalizing links to the pasts of both women. And what's happening in Little Firkin is so enchanting, it's going to take a leap of faith to believe it.

I haven’t read a romance with such entertaining lovers since Lord of Scoundrels by Loretta Chase. Plenty of wit and humor and just a drop of the paranormal made this book a pleasure to read. It's not perfect but it made me laugh. I picked up Brockway's Skinny Dipping at the book sale on Saturday and am looking forward to it.

Review: Burning Lamp by Amanda Quick

The Arcane Society was born in turmoil, when the friendship of its two founders evolved into a fierce rivalry. Nicholas Winters’s efforts led to the creation of a device of unknown powers called the Burning Lamp. Each generation, the Winters man who inherits it is destined to develop multiple talents — and the curse of madness.
Plagued by hallucinations and nightmares, the notorious crime lord Griffin Winters is convinced he has been struck with the Winters Curse. But even as he arranges a meeting with the mysterious Adelaide Pyne, he has no idea how closely their fates are bound, for she holds the missing lamp in her possession.
Their dangerous psychical experiment makes them the target of forces both inside and outside the Arcane Society. And though desire strengthens their power, their different lives will keep them apart — if death doesn’t take them together.

As Rebecca from Dirty Sexy Books mentioned last week in her review of Fired Up, the first part of this Dreamlight Trilogy of which Burning Lamp is part two, the numeration of these books can get a little confusing. Reminds me a little of trying to put in order comic books, what with all the volumes and restarts that Marvel and DC do so horribly well. Anyhoo, I didn't like Fired Up all that much but thought that Burning Lamp is much better. Of course, I prefer her Amanda Quick historicals to her Jayne Ann Krentz contemporary romances anyway. There is something about that time period that makes the men more extraordinary to me - maybe it's that they had a more difficult time period to live in and that makes them stand out more? When many of the men dress like dandies and are more girly than I, men that are men back then seem even sexier than usual, right?

Who could be more manly than a crime lord? Can you imagine a crime lord dandy? LOL. Griffin Winters is definitely no dandy but he's not but he's no Scarface either. And Adelaide Pyne is no typical lady of the haute ton. These two were pretty entertaining together. It's really too bad that the concept of this trilogy is so ridiculous - a tacky-looking lamp is the solution to letting the men descended from the creator hold on to their sanity? Really? I would picture it to be more like a lava lamp or something. I was satisfied to see Griffin and Adelaide interact with some of the past lovers in the Arcane series along with seeing one of the subplots that's been in the Quick installments of this series be partially resolved. The next book, Midnight Crystal, is being published one of Krentz's other pseudonyms, Jayne Castle, and is part of her futuristic Harmony series. It's release date is August 31, 2010.

Review: The Reckoning by Kelley Armstrong

My name is Chloe Saunders. I'm fifteen, and I would love to be normal.
But normal is one thing I'm not.
For one thing, I'm having these feelings for a certain antisocial werewolf and his sweet-tempered brother—who just happens to be a sorcerer—but, between you and me, I'm leaning toward the werewolf.
Not normal.
My friends and I are also on the run from an evil corporation that wants to get rid of us—permanently.
Definitely not normal.
And finally, I'm a genetically altered necro-mancer who can raise the dead, rotting corpses and all, without even trying.
As far away from normal as it gets.

Oh boy. I was really looking forward to this book so I'm thinking that my expectations were a bit too high since I love the characters in this trilogy, not to mention the romance between Chloe and Derek, but the story is kinda weak. Crazy grown-ups chasing after kids with supernatural powers? Where have I heard that one before? I've seen this argument in other places but I didn't agree at all until I finished this one. Is this reader's remorse or reader's lament I wonder? I admit that the story didn't wow me all that much from the beginning but it was the payoff of what happens between Chloe and Derek that kept me reading so this is probably more of a lament than a regret.

This set of books is the first part of the series but the ending wasn’t really an ending and I was hoping for one once I heard that this was their last book. I want more Chloe and Derek! Maybe they’ll be revisited by the new pair in The Gathering, which I assume will be out this time next year.

Review: Lady Be Good by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

She's wickedly funny and passionately romantic, and now Susan Elizabeth Phillips has a new contemporary romance, called Lady Be Good. This is the tale of Lady Emma Wells-Finch, who has been as prim and proper as British headmistresses come, and Kenny Traveler, a modern-day cowboy who plays sports rather than riding the range. They run headlong into each other -- Lady Emma's out to get wild, and Kenny has to straighten up -- and together they make sparks.

Susan Elizabeth Phillips’s books always seem to feature a male sports athlete in the midst of some professional crisis and a woman with an emotional one. It's a tried and true formula that works even if it's pretty predictable but that's okay since SEP infuses her books with good humor, lots of chemistry, and crazy yet entertaining families. Lady Be Good was particularly enjoyable for me as I didn’t want to reach into the book and smack anyone; the last book of hers I read, Heaven, Texas, made me want to knock some sense into the leading man on a regular basis. I liked both “Kinny” (that is the Southern pronunciation of Kenny) and Emma in equal measure and it was fun to witness him testing her naivete and even more fun when she had her revenge on him. Some parts were pretty ridiculous but I always laugh out loud with SEP's books; I do love those authors that consistently make me laugh with their humor and cry with their drama. Lady Be Good is a typical SEP romance and I recommend it to any of her fans.

Review: Falling for Gracie by Susan Mallery

First comes love, then comes marriage…
At least, that was Gracie's plan at the ripe old age of fourteen. She loved eighteen-year-old heartthrob Riley with a desperation that made her a town legend. Even now that she's all grown up, the locals in sleepy Los Lobos won't let her forget her youthful crush.
And how can she, when she's face-to-face with Riley at every turn? The onetime bad boy has come back to town seeking respectability—but the sparks that fly between them are anything but respectable! Gracie's determined to keep her distance, but when someone sets out to ruin both their reputations, the two discover that first love is sometimes better the second time around.

Lying on the ground in front of a boy’s car so that he can’t go on a date with his girlfriend is certainly something that I haven’t tried before. But Gracie did, though I don’t think it worked all that well for her. I liked this book about a woman who was exiled from her hometown for being a little too, um, enthusiastic in sharing her feelings for the cutest boy in town while they were teenagers. I did think it pretty unlikely that Gracie and Riley should end up together even if that was the obvious logical conclusion from page one and I have to say, I didn't like Riley all that much. His intentions towards the town in which he grew up were pretty diabolical and since these romances always end in a HEA, you just knew he would see the errors of his ways before it was too late. Otherwise, Falling for Gracie is a better than average, quick-read romance that satisfied my "sweet" tooth :)

Review: Waiting for You by Susane Colasanti

It's sophomore year, and Marisa is ready for a fresh start and, hopefully, her first real boyfriend. But after popular Derek asks her out, things get complicated. Not only do her parents unexpectedly separate, but Marisa has a fight with her best friend, and Derek, the love of her life, delivers a shocking disappointment. The only things keeping Marisa together are the podcasts from the anonymous DJ, who seems to totally understand Marisa. But she doesn't know who he is . . . or maybe she does.

I knew by the time that I finished the first chapter that I wasn’t going to love this book. This is because Marisa used the word “like” about a hundred times. And this book was about a teenage girl with an anxiety problem. How original. Marisa has what she thinks is an abnormally normal life but I think if you removed the anxiety element of Marisa’s story, it would be pretty boring. The depression she occasionally suffers is about the only thing in her life that makes her different from most other teenage girls though I believe Susane Colasanti accurately captured the urgent feelings that teenage girls get while they try to make it through this turbulent period of life and while I kind of liked Marisa, I didn’t love her. Or want to root for her. I did like a few of the other characters and I didn't have any issue with Colasanti's style. I felt this was an average YA novel that left me unaffected by reading it.

Best Book of April 2010

Obviously, since I haven't reviewed many of the books I read in April, I haven't yet discussed this one so I shall do this review now, instead of later. The spoiler danger is minimal so all are welcome.

Review: Angelology by Danielle Trussoni

A thrilling epic about an ancient clash reignited in our time- between a hidden society and heaven's darkest creatures
 
There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bore children to them.
Genesis 6:5

Sister Evangeline was just a girl when her father entrusted her to the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration in upstate New York. Now, at twenty-three, her discovery of a 1943 letter from the famous philanthropist Abigail Rockefeller to the late mother superior of Saint Rose Convent plunges Evangeline into a secret history that stretches back a thousand years: an ancient conflict between the Society of Angelologists and the monstrously beautiful descendants of angels and humans, the Nephilim.

For the secrets these letters guard are desperately coveted by the once-powerful Nephilim, who aim to perpetuate war, subvert the good in humanity, and dominate mankind. Generations of angelologists have devoted their lives to stopping them, and their shared mission, which Evangeline has long been destined to join, reaches from her bucolic abbey on the Hudson to the apex of insular wealth in New York, to the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris and the mountains of Bulgaria.

Rich in history, full of mesmerizing characters, and wondrously conceived, Angelology blends biblical lore, the myth of Orpheus and the Miltonic visions of Paradise Lost into a riveting tale of ordinary people engaged in a battle that will determine the fate of the world.

Here's a great way to start this review: I HATED the ending. So much so that this book was almost a wallbanger. Yeah, it was that frustrating. And it wasn't an ending like Atonement where the author yanks the rug out from under you but it pissed me off just the same. But. Once I finished the book, I went on Trussoni's website and saw that there will be a sequel called Angelopolis. Ooh. Then I calmed down. Actually, she's writing a series of these books and the rights to Angelology has already been bought by a major movie studio. That is definitely a no-brainer since angels are all the rage these days.

So, I HATED the ending for a little while but now just have some issues with it. I thought that the ending was a bit rushed; there was a ton of explanation, inspection, and action leading up to the conclusion, barreling towards it actually, and then BAM! Bad things happen and that was that. I felt so cheated! The conclusion was predictable too and while that's not really a good thing, knowing that there will be a sequel makes what happened pretty necessary. 

I may as well mention too that I found Evangeline to be even more frustrating than the ending. I've been trying to think of another character I've read that was more clueless than she but I'm coming up empty. Evangeline had been witness to much of the backstory and she still couldn't piece things together without lots of help. I was a little bit proud of her at the end but just a little. After all, she did let her father put her in a convent without protest. I'm sorry, but I would not be a good nun. And not just because of the obvious reason :) Neither was Evangeline - she falls for the first man she meets outside her family or the convent that catches her attention.

Speaking of the backstory, a big chunk of the middle of this book is a flashback covering about four years during WWII but the actual progression of the plot speeds through only two days. When I finished Angelology, I felt that the book did indeed stretch two days into years but conversely, the flashback seemed much shorter even though it covered four years. It took me a while to get absorbed in the story - and I did, halfway through the flashback - and by two-thirds of the way through Angelology, the plot really gets rolling. Unfortunately, it gets rolling into its ending. 

I haven't read many reviews of Angelology but I'm sure it's been compared to The Da Vinci Code. Possibly The Historian too and those are both legitimate comparisons because Trussoni definitely did her homework for Angelology; as with The Da Vinci Code and The Historian, there's just enough factual and true history to make the reader wonder how much of what she writes about is true. Using Abigail Rockefeller as a central figure without ever presenting her directly was a clever idea and it worked - I looked her up. I bet the MoMA is loving this book.

I will definitely be reading Angelopolis whenever it comes out since I have to know what happens. She better pick up the story right after Angelology ends or I might be throwing a book that day. I originally gave Angelology a B- but have since changed it to a C. I was intrigued yet disappointed with this book and that little part of my brain that HAS TO KNOW what's going to happen isn't going to let go anytime soon. That has to count for something, right?