Book Review: The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker

Title: The Golem and the Jinni
Author: Helene Wecker
Enjoyment Rating: *****
Source: Audible
This book would be rated: PG-13, I guess. Plenty of salty language, a little bit of sex

Chava is a golem: a woman made of clay and intended to serve her master, who awakens her on their journey from Poland to New York City and then speedily dies. She's not supposed to be able to live without a master, and just before she gets herself in trouble, a rabbi recognizes what she is and takes her in, hoping to give her a semblance of a normal life-- hoping he doesn't have to destroy her.

Ahmad is a jinni: a man of fire and spirit who had been trapped inside a copper flask for more than a thousand years, awakened only when a New York tinsmith attempts to repair the flask. But Ahmad has been trapped by a former master in human form, and he too has to find a way to blend in to life in New York City at the turn of the century.

Both go through life, struggling to find their way. Chava gets a job at a bakery and a man falls in love with her (much to her horror). The rabbi who cares for her dies. Ahmad hates being bound, hates the mundaneness of the human life. Eventually, the two meet. Neither sleeps, so they go on long rambles around the city, and they find their lives being bound together in ways they could not have predicted.

Wecker does a wonderful job recreating New York City in 1899, and makes her characters rich, complicated, and fanciful. The audio recording of the book is excellent, with George Guidall providing the perfect, haunting narrator. The story, with its flashbacks to Syria in the 800s and its range of magical characters, definitely keeps a reader interested and entertained. It's one of those books that is entertaining and enlightening, and a complete joy to read.

Book Review: Agent to the Stars by John Scalzi

Title: Agent to the Stars
Author: John Scalzi
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Audible
This book would be rated: PG-13 for language

Tom Stein is a Hollywood agent who just got a great deal for his highest-profile client, actress Michelle Beck, when he's called into his boss's office for an unusual proposition-- Carl wants him to drop a majority of his clients in order to represent a gigantic blob of slime from an alien planet. Although Tom is plenty freaked out, he agrees, and a madcap adventure ensues as Tom, Carl, Joshua (the alien), and Tom's assistant Miranda embark on a quest to introduce the friendly aliens to the human race in a way that won't inspire revolt and widespread panic.

I'm not someone who ordinarily enjoys science fiction. I think it helps, in this case, that the book takes place on Earth and the majority of the characters are human. As a devoted reader of the People Magazine app on my phone, this book represented a lot of what I like-- great characters, a quick-moving plot, an engaging narrative voice, and lots of Hollywood gossip, with a little alien extras on the side.

Book Review: Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness

Title: Shadow of Night
Author: Deborah Harkness
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Audible for iTunes
Books I've read this year: 97

Well heck, I'm not sure what to say about this book. If you liked The Discovery of Witches, Deborah Harkness's first novel about a modern-day witch who falls in love with a thousand-year-old vampire doctor, you'll probably like Shadow of Night. If you hated the fact that DOW was a cliffhanger and thought it had way, way, way too many details, then don't bother reading this one. I loved Discovery of Witches, in much the same way that I love reading People magazine. It was engrossing and easy to digest, if I don't spend too much time thinking about it. Shadow of Night takes place mostly in the 1590s in London, where Diana runs into many of the Renaissance greats, including Elizabeth I, Walter Raleigh, and Shakespeare. Let me put it this way, I will be following the witch, Diana Bishop, and her husband the vampire into the third and final installment. And I will have fun doing so. 

Book Review: The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

Title: The Night Circus
Author: Erin Morgenstern
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Kindle for iPad
Books I've read this year: 89

I read some of the reviews of The Night Circus before I bought it. It seems to be a fairly polarizing book-- some readers loved it, saying that they loved the magical world Morgenstern created, and others hated it, saying it was way too long and too detailed. I tend to like the weighty, verbose narratives that others think are bogged down (probably because I'm not a very good close reader), so I thought I'd really like The Night Circus.

The first night, I sat out on my front porch and read and read until the sky was dark and the sun-warmed concrete below had cooled. I was SO into the story of Celia and Marco, two young magicians who were called in early childhood to be opponents. Their mentors had made a sport of this over the years-- grooming their subjects and then pitting them against each other to the death. Together, Celia and Marco create the night circus, a traveling circus open only at night, which serves as the place where they display their fantastic skills. But over time, they realize that they're in love, which causes a problem (the whole "fight to the death" thing, you know).

I loved the first half of the book, when Celia and Marco are young and figuring out where they belong in Victorian society. I didn't feel that the world-building was overwrought or too detailed. In fact, I felt a little bit unprepared for the ways that Celia and Marco work to subvert and bend the rules in the second half of the book in an attempt to both keep the circus alive and outsmart the rules that their mentors set forth.

Book #15: I am Number Four

Title: I am Number Four
Author: Pittacus Lore

I wonder if I would have liked I am Number Four better if it had fallen into my hands during a less intense time of my life. Right now, with the Whitney Awards, and books I'm reading for school, and books I'm reading on another area of interest (if you've been following the blog and connecting the dots you can probably figure out what that is, but I'm still too much in the superstitious "fingers crossed" stage to come out and say anything), that I'm really not doing a lot of reading that's purely for pleasure. But my good friend Blue busted through I am Number Four when she was flying for work a few weeks ago, and she dropped it off at my house because she knows I'm a sucker for a good read.

Unfortunately, I didn't think it was a good read. I'm not much of a sci-fi girl, so I'm not really a good judge, but the book read like it wanted to be a movie (and surprise, surprise, the movie version came out this week). I am Number Four tells the story of John, one of nine children sent from their planet Lorien along with a guardian for each when the planet was being destroyed by baddies from a third planet. Lorien and Earth are remarkably similar, and the life-forms look indistinguishable, but as these Lorien children reach puberty, they all develop special powers. Also, the baddies are out to get the Lorien kids, but they can only kill them in a certain order. Numbers Three dies in the novel's opening scenes, and John, arriving in Ohio after a decade of transient life, is Number Four.

There was too much butt-kicking and not enough character development (like, for example, how did the main baddie come over to John's side? The transformation seemed too swift). I could definitely see Ed and Bryce enjoying the movie, but when hardly believable sci-fi teams up with cheesy romance and overblown action, and it's all presented in a package of a fictional author, it's too much for me to swallow. Good thing it was a quick read. And know I know one movie I won't be rushing off to see.

(Sorry, Blue!)

Book #29: Warbreaker (Whitney Book 29)

Title: Warbreaker
Author: Brandon Sanderson

If you look at Sanderson's 600+ page novel and feel nervous about jumping in, I'm here to say that even for a science fiction hater like me (and one reading under an ever-shorter deadline) Warbreaker was packed with the things all good books should come with-- interesting, well-drawn characters, a compelling plot, and ideas left to chew on once the reading is done. The king of Idris must send one of his daughters to marry the presumably evil god-king of Hallandren in order to avert a war. However, instead of sending Vivenna, who has prepared her whole life for the role, the king sends her younger sister Siri. Vivenna follows, and gets mixed up with mercenaries, and finds herself discovering that the rich colors of Hallendren make things appear different from what they really are.

Sanderson has a whole theory going on here about breath, how taking it decreases the life of the giver, and how it can be taken forcibly or freely given. The breath can then be used to animate inanimate (or dead) objects. I think a sci-fi lover would really get into all of that stuff. For me, it was the relationships between Siri and the god-king, between Vivenna and Warbreaker, and among the lesser gods of Hallandren, that made the story interesting.

Book #28: Servant of a Dark God (Whitney Book 28)

Title: Servant of a Dark God
Author: John Brown

I purposely left three books, Servant of a Dark God, Warbreaker, and The Undaunted, until the end of my reading for the Whitney Awards, and not because I wanted to reward myself with good books at the end. These were all big, huge books, and two of them, Servant of a Dark God and Warbreaker, are science fiction (and not just science fiction, but the Tolkien-esque "secondary creation" kind of science fiction that I avoid with all costs). So as I write this review, keep in mind that I was stepping way, way out of my comfort zone to read this book. It's something I never would have picked up if not for this contest, even though it was quite a coup for Brown to snag a contract from Tor, the premier sci-fi publisher, with his first novel.

It should also come as no surprise that I didn't love it, or even really like it. While I think part of that problem just comes with my aversion to this genre (it makes my head hurt to have to figure out all of the new vocabulary that comes with a book like this). While I expect to feel lost for a while when jumping into a book where the world is not our world but resembles it quite a bit, I never quite got over feeling lost while reading Servant of a Dark God. I usually try to distill the events in a book into one or two sentences, but that's pretty much impossible to do here. Suffice it to say that the characters in the book, especially young Talen, learn that things in their world aren't what they appear to be, and that good can masquerade as evil (and vice versa). The last hundred pages or so are pretty interesting, but after slogging through 350 to get to the good stuff, I just felt exhausted by the time I got to the end.

Book #36: Wings (Whitney Book 16)

Title: Wings
Author: Aprilynne Pike

I started reading Wings at about 6:30 this morning. It's not a long book (290 pages, with large type), and even though I cleaned up a massive waterfall caused by an overflowing toilet (don't ask), went on an eight-mile run, and did the normal mom stuff of making lunches and driving to and from schools, I managed to finish the book by about 1pm. It had me hooked. As I read, I kept thinking to myself, "This has got to be the clear-cut YA winner; it's a great story, good characters, interesting writing, and it's definitely hooked me as a reader." Then I sat down with the list of finalists in front of me and realized that it's not even nominated in the YA category, despite being published by HarperTeen.

Before I talk about the book, I want to say this:

supernatural elements + teen protagonist= Eyes Like Mine (general category)
supernatural elements + teen protagonist= Wings (speculative fiction category)
supernatural elements + teen protagonist= My Fair Godmother (YA category)

Gosh I'm confused. I know that teen protagonists don't automatically make the book Young Adult. I can think of plenty of examples of great fiction (The Secret Life of Bees, To Kill a Mockingbird, half of Dickens) with teenage characters that aren't geared toward a teenage audience. But with ample descriptions of first love and high school life in both, I would say that both Wings and Eyes Like Mine are squarely teen. If Wings falls in the speculative category, then why doesn't Fablehaven? Both books have fifteen-year-old female protagonists who have special relationships with fairies.

I really enjoyed Wings. My daughter, on the other hand, is annoyed by it, both by the title and by the premise. Apparently she read a similar book a few months ago, also called Wings, written by ED Baker, where the main character, like Laurel in Pike's book, started to grow fairy wings. Pike does a great job getting teen relationships right, constructing Laurel's character, and working through both the suspense elements and Laurel's transformation from "girl" to fairy.

Book #10: The Year of the Flood

Title: The Year of the Flood
Author: Margaret Atwood


You can talk to me all you like about why I should like science fiction, but it's never going to be the genre that attracts me most. Maybe I'm unimaginative or something, I don't know. Anyway, The Year of the Flood is set in a North America of the future, after the world has seen the consequences of both global warming and rampant corporate scientific greed. This is a highly-fractured world, with well-educated corporate types living behind gates, corporate police keeping order, crime and gangs ruling cities, and religious cults reacting against the whole of it. Ren and Toby both end up living with the Gardeners, a group of religious vegetarians who live a simple life and revere Saints E.O. Wilson and Mahatma Gandhi. Both end up leaving the group, but come together again after a plague destroys most of the world's population.

There are some authors whose entire body of work deserves to be read, even when she writes in a genre that you're not really all that into. For me, reading Margaret Atwood's more straightforward fiction, like The Blind Assassin, is like a most delicious entree: it's substantial, it's filling, it's challenging, and when I put the book away, I'm fully sated and see the world differently. I see the world differently after reading The Year of the Flood too (in a scare-the-pants-off-me kind of way), but instead of feeling like I ate a delicious and complex entree, I feel more like I got a heaping portion of vegetables. Good for me, yes, and substantial too, but not as enjoyable as some of her other work.

Book #66: The Angel's Game

Title: The Angel's Game
Author: Carlos Ruiz Zafon

I hate it when I break my own rules. One of my cardinal rules for reading books is that when I really fall in love with a book, I need to pace myself a little bit before reading another book by the same author, otherwise I always end up disappointed. It's like eating a second ice cream sundae in one sitting. The second one is never as good as the first, even when it would taste great a week later.

I think the rule especially applies for an author like Ruiz, whose style is so dark, so different from what I normally read that it's like entering a different world. But my reserve came through at the library after months of waiting, so I dove in.

The Angel's Game is the story of David Martin, a Barcelona orphan with a talent for writing, who starts out writing for a local newspaper, moves on to a long-term commitment churning out potboiler novels, and writes himself ragged in a creepy old mansion. It's also sort of a prequel to The Shadow of the Wind, with a 1920s Sempere and Sons bookshop as a setting for much of the action. When Martin's mentor runs off with his best girl, he takes on an ambitious writing challenge for a mysterious patron. The project turns out to be much more than he bargained for, and once again, the reader goes on nailbiting journeys through the macabre streets of Barcelona (is all of Barcelona macabre, or just in Ruiz's novels?), watching Martin making stupid mistakes and also gestures full of grace.

The Angel's Game is a good book. If I hadn't just read The Shadow of the Wind, I think I probably would have liked it a lot more. But the thing that frustrated me most about the novel was not that I found some of the characters frustrating or unbelievable (although I did). It's just that The Angel's Game seemed to change the whole premise of The Shadow of the Wind. It's almost Halloween, so I'll use this analogy. I love movies like Hitchcock's Rear Window, where strange, almost unbelievable things happen, but they can all eventually be explained by events in real life. I don't like movies like Carrie, where events take place that are outside the realm of reality. When I read The Shadow of the Wind, I thought Ruiz was writing Rear Window kinds of books, but The Angel's Game is a Carrie kind of book. I thought I was getting one thing, and I was really getting another. The two books are eventually supposed to be part of a series of five novels. Will I read the other three? Of course, but I also won't be surprised when supernatural things start happening for which there can be no rational explanation.

Book #33: The Left Hand of Darkness

Title: The Left Hand of Darkness
Author: Ursula LeGuin

Genly Ai arrives on Gethen, a wintry planet inhabited by hermaphrodites, in order to convince the Gethenians to join an intergalactic trading alliance. Along the way, he faces many obstacles and finds a friend to help him achieve his goal.

I blogged about this book at fMh, so if you want to find out how I felt about it, check out the discussion over there.

Book #75: Specimen Days

Title: Specimen Days


Author: Michael Cunningham


I was pretty skeptical when I started reading Specimen Days. In general, I don't like short stories, and I don't like science fiction. And the book, although three hundred pages in length, is really three novellas, loosely connected by Walt Whitman's epic poem Leaves of Grass. Prior to starting the novel, my only experiences with Leaves of Grass came from reading it in an American lit survey class in college and from watching With Honors a few too many times with my roommates. The only line I could recite was "I effuse my flesh in eddies" which I thought was very creative sexual wordplay unique to my situation.


So the other night, when we were lying in bed, Eddie asked me what the book I was reading was about. I felt sort of silly as I explained that it was the story of three people (Catherine, Simon and Lucas) who lived in all three stories. In the first story, all three are Irish immigrants living in New York during the height of the industrial revolution. The second story takes place in the near future. Cat is a black cop who profiles suicide bombers, Simon her white investment banker lover, and Lucas is one of the suicide bombers Cat should turn in. Finally, in the third story, Cat is a lizard from another planet, Simon is a droid with human qualities, and Lucas is a dwarf on the run.


I know, I know, it sounds weird. Really weird. I guess at times I thought the stories were weird. But Michael Cunningham seems to me to be one of the only authors who could pull off a set of stories like these and have the characters and their plights really be the focus. If you read and loved The Hours, you probably know what I mean. And you'll probably also appreciate (if not love) Specimen Days.


--originally published 11/11/06

Book #14: Never Let Me Go

Title: Never Let Me Go


Author: Kazuo Ishiguro


Have you ever had the experience of looking at someone (in a National Geographic or in King Kong maybe) and thinking-- we look so different, how could we possibly even be same species? In Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go the main characters, students at Halisham School in England, look like everyone else, but they're regarded as complete outsiders, untouchables even, by the people around them.


What Ishiguro does so well in this novel (as well as in Remains of the Day) is delve into the mind of his narrator, and help his audience see the world from the narrator's perspective. By the end of the novel, we see Kathy as fully and heartbreakingly human.


If my review seems a little bit vague, it's intentionally that way. Part of the interesting and terrifying part of Never Let Me Go is slowly realizing why Kathy and her fellow students are different from the world around them. I think it would be hard to read the novel, come to understand and identify with Kathy, and not gain insight into your own view of what makes someone human.


--originally published 3/6/06