One, Two Buckle My Shoe...

Over the summer, I've returned to a very old form of literature. It's also a very simple form of literature--in some ways.

No, it's not "See Spot run!" But that's a good guess.

I guess it's something that happen when you have a toddler in the house--you start reading books you first heard twenty (or more) years ago. It's an interesting experience. You start noticing things about the books that you never noticed as a kid.

The stories can be fairly innocuous at times.

Kids don't know much about the world yet, so it's easy to introduce them to new things. "Look! This is a strawberry. Strawberries are red. And caterpillars turn into butterflies."

Sometimes the stories make you scratch your head and ask why. Not, "Why is the world this way?" Rather, "Why? Why did anyone thing that was okay to write?"

I mean, if you were a mother bird bringing breakfast back to your just-hatched chick, and your chick started telling your about this cow and the dog and a hen and a thing called a Snort, wouldn't you start squawking bloody murder? If that happened to me, I know I'd want all the how-comes and where-fores.

I won't even get started on the stories that are all about the message--You can do it, if you try. Don't talk to strangers, or else. Don't be a greedy pig. Be nice to the kitty. It's going to be okay.

Good messages all of them (usually), but they can be overwhelming when they're rammed right down the throat of an innocent storybook.

Some of the stories are just devious.

One of the books we read recently was about a little old man who couldn't read. He could make beautiful wooden toys, but he only survives because his wife (who can read) handles the shopping...and the rest of his business, presumably.

Then she goes off on a trip and tells him what he needs to get at the store for his next few meals. As a kid, of course, I just thought this was part of the story. Trips are a normal part of life, right?

As an adult, however, I totally get it. If all she really cared about was his food, why didn't she just buy the groceries for him and leave them on the counter at home? She knew he couldn't get through the shopping trip without being able to read--she was setting him up for failure.

Then there's the entire Suess canon. I think we shall return to that topic when it's time to learn about alliteration, repetition, and rhymes.

Still, I would like to know--what if you do try the green eggs and ham...and you don't like them, even then?

Back Again, Almost

Hello again!

I haven't exactly been on top of things this year. My last post was about five months ago, or 159 days if you want to be precise. At the time, my husband, toddler and I were in the UK, and we've only now gotten back to our home state. 

Craziness might be the best word to describe this summer, considering it started with over 12 hours of flying and ended with driving across the entire US--with a toddler who dislikes long car-rides no less. But we made it.

We're technically not settled yet, since we wanted to take our time about deciding where we would be living for the next couple of years. We've planned another four months in temporary lodging while we make those decisions, but for now, our longest car-ride will be under two hours to visit family.

I meant to post more and tell some of the stories from our trip, but the craziness was a bit too much for that. I have worked on a few projects over the summer, including practicing some coding and html so I can work on websites. I also worked on some outlining for one of my novels a couple of times, but that needs a lot more focus still. I'd like to make that happen in the next couple of months, possibly using NaNoWriMo as my personal Finish Writing a Novel session. We'll have to see how that goes, though...

What about you? Any goals for NaNoWriMo or just for finishing a particular project by the end of this year?

Let's Go Eat Some Courgettes?

It sounds like eating puppy dogs, right? Corgis? Baby corgis might be called courgettes, right?

Or does it mean baby cougars?

I've posted about the strangeness of language before. I've tried my hand at learning a couple of languages now, so I can claim a certain amount of experience in that area, but this time, I'm talking about the strangeness of English.

English English.

We're in the UK right now.

Like any good researcher, I studied up on things before hand. Things like supermarket ads--so that I wouldn't look like a complete idiot the first time I stepped into a store and asked where they keep their carts. (Oops, trolleys?)

I still wasn't ready, though, when someone asked if my toddler went to nursery yet.

Sorry? Nursery, as in the room they send babies to at church?

Oh, right...nursery as in pre-school.

No, he doesn't go. Probably won't go in the sense that you're thinking if we home school as planned, but I won't get into that right now, and I don't think I'd send a two year- old off for the day anyway. That probably means I'm a really strange American, but yeah, let's just move on.

While we're on the topic of cultural differences, I have yet to see a washcloth anywhere. We've stayed at three different houses and one really nice hotel (actually a castle) so far, and no one has included a washcloth with the towel and hand towel. And no, the castle was not attempting to recreate an authentic medieval atmosphere. There just aren't any washcloths here.

Cultural differences aside, though, we've enjoyed the trip. We had more than the usual jet-lag, due to traveling with a toddler who doesn't like riding in either cars, planes, trains, or buses, but once we got over that, we've been able to explore at a nice, leisurely pace.

It's the little things that stand out right now, like how most of the buildings are either brick or stone--regardless of their age. Right now, we're very close to James Herriot's place, so we're surrounded by sheep farms. You should try following an unmarked public footpath through sheep-infested pastures sometime--that alone would be enough adventure to keep anyone happy. Plus the tea. We've even had tea with breakfast here.

Oh, and courgettes? You might know them better as zucchini.

Storm Siren: Review

Slave girl + political star might seem an unlikely combination, but it's a combination Nym is stuck with. She's the slave girl, of course, and the political star is her owner Adora, who wants to hide Nym in the shadows of her brilliant entourage.

Adora also wants to turn Nym into her pet WMD, which might work if Nym cooperates--and if Nym doesn't turn deadly too soon.

Welcome back to the second day of the CSFF tour for Mary Weber's Storm Siren. As always, you can find a lot of other people talking about this book at the tour's headquarters over here. Or, you can stick around and read my review right here!

First off, I was very excited to discover that this new fantasy author might soon become a favorite. (I'm waiting for the rest of the series, just to make sure.) Storm Siren has a lot of the elements that I like in fantasy--a mostly medieval setting, though with a fun steam-punk twist; vivid magical powers that bring both thrills and devastation; and an important legend woven into the story. Especially the legend...

Some fantasy gets away without have too much history in its world, while other fantasy gets bogged down. I won't go into much detail, but a huge part of why I loved this story was a certain legend introduced early in the novel. The legend, originally retold in a song, actually becomes important to the main story, instead of yet-another throw-away Tolkien/fantasy must-have-a-poem-in-the-story 'trappings.' So for me, the story gets a lot bonus points for both world-building and plot-development.

And for characters, there is Nym herself. Temperamental might describe her just as much as Elemental.

On that note, Storm Siren probably isn't the best choice for readers who like instant action or squeaky-clean stories. The story starts out slow--Nym spends the first half of the book getting oriented. It's partly the plot, which requires lots of political posturing and scheming to get the story going. It's also partly the writing, since Nym inserts a drama-queen attitude into the narration. She's got a lot of drama to be emotional about, given the way she's treated. At times, it's good drama. In her more emotional scenes, though, the attitude feels overwrought and repetitive.

After getting into the story, I mostly forgot the slow start, and Weber used Nym's past to develop some big issues like self-harm. (These particular parts do mean the book is better suited for an older-teen, mature audience.) Nym's past isn't pretty, but it felt real. On the other hand, her narrative interjections weren't always pretty either and in place, they got in the way of the story's flow. I still connected to her and the characters, but the emotional "telling" weakened the story's visceral punch.

Oh, and there is a sort-of romance running through all the political drama. Some readers believe there is also a love triangle, but I never really saw that in the story, at least reading it from Nym's perspective.

All that aside, I enjoyed the story, not to mention the cliff-hanger at the very end. Here again I differ from certain other readers, since some at least seem to assume bad things about the next book, based on this book's ending. I refuse to believe that particular train of thought, though, until I see more proof. I do believe there are plenty of bad things in store for Nym, but I'm hopeful that they will be the wonderful sorts of bad things that lead to another satisfying novel.

[My thanks to Thomas Nelson, Storm Siren's publisher, for providing me with a review copy in conjunction with this blog tour.]

Storm Siren: Blog Tour

Imagine...

Imagine a female Zeus--that is, imagine someone who is both illegal and downright impossible.

Curious how that works? Welcome back for the April Christian Science Fiction and Fantasy Tour. This month, we've been reading a book by a new author, the first in a series.

Storm Siren, by Mary Weber, introduces Nym, an unusual slave girl. Nym has had an unheard-of fourteen owners in the course of her young life. Given how she's destroyed all her previous owners, no one should want her now, but apparently someone does. Nym, after all, could make a powerful weapon in the nation's defense against one of it's oldest enemies. Of course, the idea could be a wee bit dangerous, considering that Nym has no idea how to control her own abilities, especially when people start getting on her nerves.

I rather liked this story, and I'll give you a longer review tomorrow, but for now, feel free to check out some posts by the other tour participants.

Enjoy the tour!

Julie Bihn
Lauren Bombardier
Beckie Burnham
Vicky DealSharingAunt
George Duncan
April Erwin
Carol Gehringer
Victor Gentile
Ryan Heart
Timothy Hicks
Janeen Ippolito
Carol Keen
Emileigh Latham
Simone Lilly-Egerter
Jennette Mbewe
Shannon McDermott
Meagan @ Blooming with Books
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Joan Nienhuis
Nissa
Jalynn Patterson
Audrey Sauble
Chawna Schroeder
Jojo Sutis
Steve Trower
Phyllis Wheeler
Michelle R. Wood

*Storm Siren - on Amazon
Author Website - http://www.maryweber.com/

[My thanks to the publisher for sending me a review copy of Storm Siren in conjunction with the CSFF Blog Tour.]

How A Star Falls: Review

What happens if you find a young woman who claims to be a star—not a Hollywood star, but a real star, stranded on your little corner of the California beach?

She turns your world upside down, to start with.

Of course, Derrick doesn't really believe Brielle's story, when she claims to be a star. That doesn't matter, though, because she's ready to turn his world upside anyway.

It’s been a while since I’ve mentioned any of Amber Stoke’s novels, and I'm about two months late reviewing this one, but that's my fault, not Amber's. I thoroughly enjoyed How a Star Falls—no hesitations, no reservations.

How a Star Falls is a contemporary romance novella. It's a bit shorter than you might expect, just a snippet of a story if you're used to full-length novels, but that's a good thing actually. It's enough to tell this story without any extra fluff. Just boy meets girl, with lots of beauty shining through the characters and the writing.

There's not a whole lot more to say. As a fan of speculative fiction, I was hoping just a little for the story to play out along those lines, but I still really liked how Derrick and Brielle interact and push each other to grow beyond the little bubbles they live in. If you like romance, I'd recommend you check this one out.

A Goat With an Attitude?

I saw this guy at the zoo yesterday. What do you think? Is he just enjoying the sun, or is he a character waiting for a story?

Emissary: Review

What if, after growing up in a remote farming village, you suddenly discovered that you didn’t belong there? What if you learned that you could wield incredible power? What if the power you wield hints that you belong to an accursed race of people, exiled, destroyed, and nearly forgotten?

Welcome back, and welcome to the new year!

 

I’m starting off 2015 with a review for the first book in a new fantasy series. It’s written under a new nom de plume, but by an author who is an old favorite. Emissary is Davis Bunn’s foray into epic fantasy, writing under the name Thomas Locke. Thomas Locke is a pseudonym created by Bunn as part of his efforts to branch out into fantasy from his usual adventure/thriller novels.

In Emissary, Hyam is an outcast farm-boy with an unusual knack for learning a particular dead language and a grudge against the mages who dragged him away from his favorite study and forced him to learn Elvish instead. Of course, for ordinary people, neither language is any good, since the mysterious races who once spoke them are long vanished.

Outside of Hyam’s village, however, dark powers have instigated revolution and devastation across the country. A series of attacks force Hyam out of his village and bring him together with two other misfits. Together, they gather the first of a resistance. Along the way, Hyam learns a lot about the world.

To be honest, I had some small issues with the book—there’s a lot of world-building in the introduction. Locke spends a fair bit of time introducing his character and explaining the backstory. You need the info to understand what’s going on, but the best suggestion I have is to skim through it and wait for things to pick up after a few chapters. Along with that, the story follows a pretty typical fantasy scenario—young man of unknown, mysterious heritage, just coming of age with an onslaught of highly unusual powers.

Some fantasy stories veer toward inner conflict as the protagonist learns to understand and use his powers, but Emissary takes a different approach. The story doesn’t lack for conflict, but Hyam does feel at times improbably competent for someone who grew up in a hick village. Once he meets his first challenge, he moves almost at once from farm-boy to leader. After that, one or two miscreants get in his way, but otherwise people seem to cooperate with him. They have good reason to—given the power that he controls—and presumably he learned a thing or two during his education with the mages.

As far as the rest of the cast goes, a young woman named Joelle adds some spunk to the cast, and she in turn is balanced out by Hyam’s other sidekick—an old mage at odds with most of his community. I liked both characters well enough and thought they added depth to the story with both fun and tragedy.

More importantly, apart from a few lurches along the way, the story does rise to an intense, earth-shaking climax. There are lots of theatrics thrown in, but the heart of the story comes down to Hyam’s power and how he uses.

If you are interested in the book, you can read several chapters of it for free from Amazon, as the short-story The Captive. You might also like to check out this post on Thomas Locke's blog with a series of Q & A links.

  

[My thanks to Net Galley and Revell for sending me an electronic ARC copy of Emissary in exchange for my honest opinion of the book.]

The Fatal Tree: Review

Imagine a universe knit together like a scarf--everything is connected, nothing is coincidental. 

Cut one thread, and the whole universe begins to unravel.

Welcome back to the CSFF tour for Stephen Lawhead's The Fatal Tree! Feel free to stop by the tour's headquarters here for a list of all the other participant's posts.

As I said yesterday, this is the final book in Lawhead's Bright Empires series, a time travel story. More specifically, it's a story about alternate dimensions. Lawhead centers this series on the idea that every decision or every major event in this world creates a new world, where a different decision has created a slightly different reality. In this world, new worlds are constantly appearing, which pushes the edges of the universe outward as ever increasing rates--as scientists have been able to observe.

I've read a variety of time travel stories, but not a large quantity. The Fatal Tree, along with the other Bright Empires books, fits into the genre pretty well, with a few fun twists. There are the ley lines in England, the Sedona vortexes, and the whimsical, but very serious Zetetic Society of ley travelers intent on exploring and decoding the finicky patterns of the ley lines.

In the previous four books, Kit Livingstone gets a crash course in ley lines and inter-dimensional travel, while trying to track down the missing skin map which holds the secret to the omniverse--though no one knows exactly what that secret is. Lord Burleigh, a dark and evil villain, is also after the map. Burleigh's schemes knows no bounds, but Kit, of course, has to avoid messing with history in his ley travels.

Then, in the fourth book, The Shadow Lamp, Kit learns that someone has already changed history. If he and his friends can't undo the damage in time, the universe's expansion will reverse itself and the world will end. All the worlds will end...

I've somehow missed reading Lawhead's books before now, but this series makes for a fast, fun story, especially when you add in the quirks of being able to time travel. After all, I'd love to be able to jump to another dimension and spend four years studying a foreign language as one of the characters does-- before coming back three days later to find nothing important has happened. It would be very convenient, if nothing else, and easier than trying to not meet yourself while using a Time-Turner.

Apart from the search for the Skin Map, though, my favorite parts is the idea of finding a place where you feel at home. At different points in the story, both Kit and his (former) girlfriend Wilhelmina find themselves stuck in strangely new worlds. I won't spoil anything by saying where they end up feeling most at home, but it's an interesting concept and makes me wish even more than usual that I could visit another era. 

Still, if I could change one thing about this story, it would be to add more depth to the characters. I tend to like stories for their characters. I like action too, which Lawhead offers in abundance, but for the first book in particular, the characters felt flat. That book, The Skin Map, ended with a great cliffhanger, but it took me another book or so until I really connected to Kit or Wilhelmina. Even then, Kit doesn't get a lot of development, and only one part of the plot involves major character growth. Incidentally, even that ended up being a bit chaotic and left me mildly confused at the end.

For sci-fi/fantasy fans, Bright Empires is a fascinating genre-bending series, combining elements of both science and myth. It's also a fun adventure read, with a large helping of imaginative extrapolation. None of the books stood out to me individually, but I did like the series as a whole and would recommend them to readers with a taste for fantasy. 

[My thanks to Net Galley and the publisher for sending me an electronic review copy of The Fatal Tree, in exchange for my honest opinion of the book.]

The Fatal Tree: Blog Tour

Have you ever wanted to figure out time travel? Do you wonder if life might be more interesting in the Stone Age--or in 19th century England, for that matter?

Merry Christmas and welcome once again to the Christian Science Fiction and Fantasy Blog Tour! This tour, we're reading Stephen R. Lawhead's The Fatal Tree, the final book in his Bright Empires series. In Lawhead's world, time travel is possible, but it's just slightly more complicated than turning a knob on a fancy gizmo.

The story starts in The Skin Map, when Kit Livingstone runs into his great-grandfather in a back alley of London. Livingstone, Sr., introduces Kit to the vagaries of time travel, but it's a business so tricky that only one man has ever mastered--and that individual only succeeded by means of a map tattooed on his skin.

With an arch-villain on the track of the skin map, a girlfriend who doesn't believe why Kit is eight hours late for their date, and his grandfather urging him to take up the family business, Kit is thrown into the crazy life of a time traveler.

I've seen this series mentioned a number of times, including when the previous books were featured on CSFF tours, but never got around to reading the books. So, when I heard that the November.December tour would be for The Fatal Tree, I had some reading to catch up on. I'll post my review for The Fatal Tree tomorrow, along with some thoughts about the series as a whole. For now, though, feel free to check out some of the other tour participants, as well as the author's website:

Julie Bihn
Thomas Clayton Booher
Beckie Burnham
Jeff Chapman
Karri Compton
April Erwin
Victor Gentile
Jason Joyner
Janeen Ippolito
Carol Keen
Emileigh Latham
Rebekah Loper
Shannon McDermott
Meagan @ Blooming with Books
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Nissa
Jalynn Patterson
Writer Rani
Nathan Reimer
Audrey Sauble
Jojo Sutis
Rachel Starr Thomson
Robert Treskillard
Steve Trower
Shane Werlinger
Phyllis Wheeler


The Fatal Tree - on Amazon
Author's Website - http://www.stephenlawhead.com/

[My thanks to Net Galley and the publisher for sending me an electronic review copy of The Fatal Tree, in exchange for my honest opinion of the book.]