Audio Book Review: Daughter of Smoke and Bone

Daughter of Smoke and Bone (Daughter of Smoke and Bone #1) 
By Laini Taylor
Narrated by Khristine Hvam
****

“Once upon a time, an angel and a devil fell in love. It did not end well.” 

Karou is a teenager who attends a school for the arts in Prague. She has blue hair and tattoos, the most obvious of which are the eyes on each palm and "true" and "story" on each wrist. She's also a brilliant artist and her friends love to look at her sketch book for the fantastic creatures she draws there. In addition to the beautiful drawings, Karou tells stories of the different "characters." What her friends don't know is that these creatures are real, and they're Karou's family.

Karou's family are Chimera - creatures made up of different animal parts (kinda like the Sphinx). Unbeknownst to Karou, her family has been fighting a war for a century: a war against the angels.

Enter Akiva, a beautiful angel who comes to earth to close the portals Karou's family uses to access our world. Akiva meets Karou and the sparks (and flames) fly. They fall in love, but there's far more to their story than either could possibly guess.

Daughter of Smoke and Bone is a mesmerizing mix of love and hate, peace and war, romance and tragedy. Taylor has fused together two worlds in a fascinating and believable way and Hvam narrates it beautifully. And just when you have hope that everything will work out for our star-crossed lovers, Taylor comes along and sucker punches you. Thank heaven's there's a sequel!

This is a great story for anyone who enjoys paranormal romance, mythology, or stories that take place in foreign locales. Highly recommended.

P.S. Check out this book trailer I did for Daughter of Smoke and Bone!

Book Review: Cast In Honor

Cast in Honor (Chronicles of Elantra #11) 

By Michelle Sagara
*****

"Do these cracks look strange to you" she asked. "What cracks?" Which answered that first question. "You know, when I first started training with the two of you, we had normal cases." ―Michelle Sagara, Cast in Honor

When our story opens, Kaylin and Crew are trying to get to the point where they can go on the hunt for Nightshade, who disappeared in the last book. But an investigation changes everything; and it turns out the investigation has more than a little to do with Nightshade.

We get to see more of some old characters, like Ybelline and Moran, and we're introduced to new characters Gilbert and Kattea, both of whom are pivotal to the investigation. And in the process, we learn just a bit more about Ravellon and the Shadows that abide there. Because of these new characters, and the mystery at the heart of this story, this entry in the Chronicles of Elantra felt a little different than the previous books. It added to the world building of the series, but it felt more removed from the overall story arc than the the last few books. 

The build up with Moran at the beginning of the book didn't really take off, as I expected it to. I have to assume that Moran's story will be coming up in the next book or two. As we haven't delved into the Aerian culture the way we have with other Elantran races, I'm anxiously awaiting that story line. 

As always, I loved this book and I can't wait to get my hands on the next!

**I received an Advanced Review eGalley of this title from NetGalley**

Book Review: Indexing

Indexing (Indexing #1) 
By Seanan McGuire
****

“When you’re late in a fairy tale, people wind up dead. And not true-love’s-kiss, glass-coffin-nap-time dead. Really dead, the kind of dead you don’t recover from.” 
― Seanan McGuire, Indexing

Police procedural meets Grimm Brothers. In the fairy tale justice system, memetic incursions are considered especially dangerous. In the Real World, the dedicated detectives who defend Happily Ever After are members of an elite squad called the ATI Management Bureau. Beware of their stories. Chung Chung.

Indexing is the story of a team of agents who investigate memetic incursions - where fairy tales invade the real world. Seems it happens more often that you'd think. Nice girl with a dead mom, stepmother and two stepsisters? She's ripe to turn into a 510A "Cinderella." Despite Disney's best efforts to subvert the grimmer aspects of the original tales (pun intended), fairy tale incursions rarely have an HEA. 

It took me a while to get into the story, but it wasn't long before I became *involved*. This story was written as a serial - new chapters added on a regular basis, rather than a full book offered all at once. I didn't read it in installments, thank heavens, as I'm not sure I could have handled that. But the story definitely would have worked in that format. I just have no patience. 

This was a cool story and a new twist on old fairy tales. Recommended.

Audio Book Review: Shades of Milk and Honey

Shades of Milk and Honey (Glamourist Histories #1) 
By Mary Robinette Kowal
Read by Mary Robinette Kowal
****

“Perfection is different to every viewer.” 
― Mary Robinette Kowal, Shades of Milk and Honey

From Goodreads:
Shades of Milk and Honey is an intimate portrait of Jane Ellsworth, a woman ahead of her time in a world where the manipulation of glamour is considered an essential skill for a lady of quality. But despite the prevalence of magic in everyday life, other aspects of Dorchester’s society are not that different: Jane and her sister Melody’s lives still revolve around vying for the attentions of eligible men.

Jane resists this fate, and rightly so: while her skill with glamour is remarkable, it is her sister who is fair of face, and therefore wins the lion’s share of the attention. At the ripe old age of twenty-eight, Jane has resigned herself to being invisible forever. But when her family’s honor is threatened, she finds that she must push her skills to the limit in order to set things right--and, in the process, accidentally wanders into a love story of her own.

From Me:
A delightful cross between a Jane Austen story of manners and...well, magic. If I had to compare this story to anything, I'd say it's fairly similar in tone to that of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, though Shades is not as dense. 

I loved Jane, she was very Anne Elliot-esque, and Anne is probably my favorite classical heroine. Her sister, Melody, on the other hand, frustrated me to no end (people who act like her generally do). 

I listened to the audio book version of the story, and it was read by the author, who did a wonderful job. I always feel like I'm getting the truest version of the story when it's read by the author, and Kowal did a lovely job with the telling.

I'd recommend this book to fans of Austen, fantasy, and historicals. It'd also work well as a YA crossover.

Book Review: Murder of Crows

Murder of Crows (The Others #2)  
By Anne Bishop
****

“Are there weapons in a bookstore?'
'It's a store full of books, which are objects that can be thrown as well as read,' Monty replied blandly.
The Crows cocked his head. 'I had no idea you humans lived with so much danger.”
― Anne Bishop, Murder of Crows

I am finding myself completely involved in this series. In this sequel (to Written in Red), Meg is a little more settled in the Courtyard, and the terra indigene (the Others) welcome her as their own, but where the conflict began in the first book, we now take the next step.

In most stories, I find myself rooting for the underdog; I think most people do. In this series, the terra indigene, though they can die, are far stronger than the humans (and elementals are off-the-charts BAMFs - do not tick off an elemental or their ponies!). The terra indigene had the "Americas" first - they just let humans rent space. And the humans are expected to follow certain rules (like don't pollute the water) or else they won't receive the natural resources they need OR they'll be evicted off the land OR they'll be eaten. 

In this world, even though the terra indigene are clearly NOT the underdogs, I'm still totally rooting for them. While not all humans are bad, and in fact, many are doing good things to pave the way for a more balanced relationship with the Others, there are some nasty pieces of work among the human element. These particular humans do some truly heinous things that were a little difficult to read - the text didn't get particularly graphic, but it only takes a few words to get a horrible mental image of what they're doing. So I was definitely cheering on the Wolves and Others as they tried to figure out who and where these problem people were. I love me some comeuppance, and the Others can certainly dish it out.

In addition to this main story arc, we are introduced to a new people group, the Intuits, and we get a little more detail into the Humans First and Last movement. We also see a relationship developing between Meg and Simon, though neither of them have any idea about how relationships work in general, so that was fun to read - it added a little lightness to some of the darker elements of the story.

Highly recommended.

Book Review: Written in Red

Written in Red (The Others #1) 

By Anne Bishop
****

“There would be a spike in the number of girls who went out for a walk in the woods and were never heard from again. There always were when stories came out portraying the terra indigene as furry humans who just wanted to be loved.

Most of the terra indigene didn't want to love humans; they wanted to eat them. Why did humans have such a hard time understanding that?” 
― Anne Bishop, Written in Red

This book is a little hard to categorize. I was expecting a typical urban fantasy, but this was anything but typical. It was more like a fantasy world built on top of ours. TVs and cars were still a thing, but the names of the week, countries, and cities were all different. The background to the story is that when the humans were created, the Others were created, too. The humans were kept separate so they could thrive, but when they started venturing out, they discovered that they weren't alone. While it's not explicitly said that it was early American colonists who met with the Others, Bishop describes colonists coming to the New World and getting eaten by the natives/Others before a smart leader decided to trade shiny baubles and ask for permission to use the land. 


In the present day, the Others (which are a people group that are able to change shape and can choose to take human form) are basically running things - they control all the natural resources (considering that elementals are included among their numbers, this makes sense - that having Water around means they control the water supply, and so forth), and they're far more powerful than the humans and could easily wipe out humanity, but they like human inventions, so there's a sort of truce in place among the Others and the humans. Enter Meg, a human on the run from some shadowy group, who finds shelter among the Others. And considering the fact that the Others look at humans as Meat, finding herself feeling safer among them than the humans she's running from makes for an interesting story.

I love what Bishop did with the characterizations. Many of the others have an animal form - one they took on for themselves a very long time ago - and because they've had this form for so long, they've taken on many of the attributes of that animal. So the crows like shiny things, wolves occasionally sniff crotches, and the horses like sugar lumps. 

The mystery of Meg, what she was, who she was running from, and what she could do, was intriguing. And like Kaylin Neya of the Chronicles of Elantra series, she finds herself being liked by and under the care of some very powerful creatures, creatures who normally have little patience and even less respect for humans.


I found myself fascinated with Bishop's world and her characters, and I can't wait to read the next book in the series, Murder of Crows.

Book Review: Cast in Flame

Cast in Flame (Chronicles of Elantra #10)

By Michelle Sagara
*****
eGalley provided by NetGalley

"On the second day after her return to Elantra, the city she policed as a groundhawk, Private Kaylin Neya fell out of bed, daggers in hands, knees bent. After one confused moment, she sheathed her daggers, took a brief look around the otherwise empty royal guest chambers that served as her temporary home, and let loose a volley of Leontine curses." --Cast in Flame, Michelle Sagara

I really, truly love this series. Every time I pick up a new book in The Chronicles of Elantra, I think that I should re-read the previous titles to refresh the story (these books are dense and a refresher would be helpful), but I can never put off reading the newest book! And after a chapter or so I'm so deep in the world that it doesn't matter anymore.

In every fantasy world there are rules for how the world works, and generally those rules center around some kind of magic. In Sagara's world, there's plenty of magic, but the power in the magic is in "true words." I love that there's a whole fictional world built on the power of words. I also love that Kaylin (our heroine), though armed, generally saves the day by compassion and hope, rather than epic sword-fighting or laser-beam eyes.

In Cast in Flame, Kaylin has just arrived back in Elantra after her eventful trip to the West March. She's still homeless and living (uncomfortably) in the Palace. Her dragon roommate is having issues with the Dragon Court, and the Barrani that returned from the Green are causing trouble, too. Kaylin has to sort out a new threat AND find lodging that will accept a dragon and the Dragon Court's intrusion, and she's not sure which job will be more difficult.

A great addition to a great series!

Book Review: Fourth Grave Beneath My Feet

Fourth Grave Beneath My Feet (Charley Davidson #4) 
By Darynda Jones
*****

“I lowered the gun but didn’t holster it. Not just yet. She could turn out to be psychotic. Or a door-to-door salesperson.” 
― Darynda Jones, Fourth Grave Beneath My Feet

A little background on the series: Charley Davidson is a PI and helps out the cops as a consultant, namely her dad as she was growing up and now her uncle. It turns out it's a lot easier solving homicides when you can talk to the murdered folks. Charley not only sees dead people, but she's the grim reaper -- she helps the dead with their unfinished business and they can pass through her to the other side. She's also incredibly sassy, which I love. Oh, and she's kinda dating the son of Satan (literally, not figuratively).

Back to Book #4. In most urban fantasies, the main character goes through a lot -- much of it violent and bloody -- but generally they bounce back from horrible events pretty quick. In Third, Charley was tortured. In Fourth, there are actual ramifications for that torture. One thing I really liked about this book is that Charley suffers from PTSD; she's afraid of leaving her apartment and feels fear with the slightest provocation. It brought more reality to the fantasy.

Now, it's a rare event for me to guess the mystery before it's revealed, so it's not strange that the mystery and twist with the PI investigation came as a surprise to me, but I still like it when that happens. And the danger-level (as well as what Charley is able to do with her as yet undiscovered powers) was also raised this time around, so I'm looking forward to where the story goes in book five.

Highly recommended.

Book Review: Half-Off Ragnarok

Half-Off Ragnarok (InCryptid #3) 
By Seanan McGuire
*****

“Let's go commit senseless acts of science.” 
― Seanan McGuire, Half-Off Ragnarok

I've been reading (and loving) Seanan McGuire's InCryptid series. The first two books follow Verity Price as she works to keep the Cryptid population of NYC safe from the Covenant (Cryptids are creatures that aren't scientifically recognized as existing - think Big Foot and chupacabras. The Covenant is an organization that hunts and eliminates monsters, aka cryptids.) while trying to maintain a professional ballroom dance career. In these books, most of the cryptids are vaguely humanoid in appearance, or, at least, can hold a conversation (Aeslin mice are the BEST).

Half-Off Ragnarok took me by surprise. I assumed after reading the first two books that the series was focused on Verity and her adventures. Turns out it's more of a Price Family series. This time around we meet Verity's brother, Alex. He lives in Columbus, Ohio with his cuckoo grandmother, revenant grandfather (Alex's mother, their daughter, was adopted), and his unwell cuckoo cousin. Alex works at the zoo in the reptile house, where he's supposedly doing normal zoo-type research, but he's secretly breeding basilisks in the back room. Suddenly people are being petrified, his girlfriend may know more than she's letting on, and the local gorgons may be involved.

The switch from talking cryptids in the big city, to more animalistic monsters in the Midwest was kinda cool. I wasn't expecting the change, but it made this new book really fresh. But we also got to stick with the family, so the characters were familiar and comfortable. Another great addition to a fantastic series!

And now I really can't wait for Antimony's story.

Book Review: Libriomancer

Libriomancer (Magic Ex Libris #1)
By Jim Hines
***

“Every libromancer had a first book. Etched more sharply into my memory than my first kiss, this book had been my magical awakening.”

I went into this book ready to geek out. I mean, seriously, seriously, geek out. The story opens on Isaac Vainio, a cataloger at a library in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. But he's not just a librarian, he's a libriomancer. Isaac could perform a very specific kind of magic: he could reach into books and pull out anything that appeared within the pages (restricted only by the size of the page). He got into a bit of trouble in his job as a libriomancer, so he's been benched; his only connection to magic now is cataloging books for his library, but also for the magical organization he used to work for.

Then he gets attacked by Meyerii vampires (also known as sparklers) and finds himself in a magical war between Libriomancers and vampires, a mysterious enemy, and the disapperance of Johann Gutenburg (inventor of the printing press and founder of the Libriomancer organization), with only a sexy dryad and a fire spider there to help him.

In theory, this book should have been an uber-awesome, bibliophile geekfest. I wanted to love it. It referenced some of my favorite things, like Narnia, Doctor Who, and the very idea of reaching inside of books. And while the book wasn't "bad," it wasn't as good as I wanted it to be. I just couldn't get engaged in the story. It did pick up toward the climax, and some really cool things happened during that part of the book, but it was a bit of an effort to get there. It's worth a look if you're a geeky bibliophile like myself, but The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde is similar in theme, but superior in...well, everything.

Book Review: The Last Dragonslayer

The Last Dragonslayer (The Chronicles of Kazam #1)
By Jasper Fforde
18,000,000 Stars

“The Kingdom of Hereford was unique in the Ununited Kingdoms for having driving tests based on maturity, not age, much to the chagrin of a lot of males, some of whom were still failing to make the grade at thirty-two.”

There are no words for how much I absolutely adore this book! I want to carry it around with me everywhere, hugging it to my chest, whilst skipping and singing.

This book made me as happy as this guy jumping around with a lemur.

But seriously, if you're a fan of cleverness, wit, and general awesomeness, then this is the book for you. Jennifer Strange is 15 and runs Kazam, an employment agency for wizards in the Kingdom of Hereford. Magic, though, doesn't have the umph it used to; it's dwindling, and some fear it may be disappearing forever. Magic carpets are used to deliver pizza. Wizards are hired to rewire houses. But Jennifer is having a hard time getting these jobs for the agency; she keeps getting underbid by non-magic plumbers and electricians.

Suddenly, though, magic starts to grow again. The wizards are able to accomplish feats of magic that they haven't been able to do in decades. And anyone who has ever had any kind of premonition suddenly starts to see the same thing: The Last Dragonslayer will come and slay the last dragon.

I don't want to give too much away, but I'm telling you, I haven't read a book that made me giggle this much or provided me with such a general feeling of happiness the way this book did. I lurved it! The writing is fun, the characters (like the wizards Moobin and Full Price - who has a brother called Half Price) are wonderfully and creatively rendered, and the plot feels completely new - I've never read anything like it!

Jasper Fforde is one of my all-time favorite authors, and I'm thrilled he's written a new series for teens! 

Book Review: The Peculiars

The Peculiars
By Maureen Doyle McQuerry
(2 out of 5 stars)

"Maybe it was only goblin women who were restless and wanted to see the world. She didn't know.”

Description from Goodreads:
This dark and thrilling adventure, with an unforgettable heroine, will captivate fans of steampunk, fantasy, and romance. On her 18th birthday, Lena Mattacascar decides to search for her father, who disappeared into the northern wilderness of Scree when Lena was young. Scree is inhabited by Peculiars, people whose unusual characteristics make them unacceptable to modern society. Lena wonders if her father is the source of her own extraordinary characteristics and if she, too, is Peculiar. On the train she meets a young librarian, Jimson Quiggley, who is traveling to a town on the edge of Scree to work in the home and library of the inventor Mr. Beasley. The train is stopped by men being chased by the handsome young marshal Thomas Saltre. When Saltre learns who Lena’s father is, he convinces her to spy on Mr. Beasley and the strange folk who disappear into his home, Zephyr House. A daring escape in an aerocopter leads Lena into the wilds of Scree to confront her deepest fears.

My Review:
I had such high hopes for this book. I really like the steampunk genre, which this fits into, and the cover art was pretty great. However, I didn't get into the story. The main character, Lena, thinks she's a Peculiar. Her father was rumored to be a goblin, though most people in the city didn't really believe in that sort of thing. Lena is sure she is, though, because she has super long hands and feet, which both have a third joint. Lena has been told all her life by her grandmother that goblins are no good and implying that Lena has the same wild nature as her father (even though she's actually pretty meek and compliant). So Lena is never sure if her urges to see the world and find her father are normal or if they're part of her wild side.

Which would have been fine...except she's so whiny about it! And despite the fact that she's the heroine and you're supposed to like her, she did so many stupid things and acted so pathetically that I really couldn't stand her.

My other issue with this story is that the author was too heavy-handed with any element related to her brilliant inventor character - basically, he's so smart that he's figured out medicine, mechanics, etc, before their real 20th century inventors, and the same goes for the steampunk elements. I think it goes back to the first rule of writing: show, don't tell. And McQuerry did an awful lot of telling. I really don't know how to explain it any better than that, but suffice it to say, it took me out of the story and caused me to roll my eyes several times.

All that being said, this was an easy and quick read, and if you're into steampunk or fairy stories it may be worth it to give it a shot.

P.S. The character on the cover is not Lena. Lena has long hands and feet, not wings. The winged girl is a minor character who isn't in the story too much.

Book Review: Cast in Ruin

Cast in Ruin (Chronicles of Elantra #7) (*****)
by Michelle Sagara West

I've posted on several of the books in the Chronicles of Elantra series, and it still rates as one of my favorites. Cast in Ruin is the most recent publication, and unlike some series, each new title is as fantastic as the last.

Elantra is a fantasy world filled with strange people groups, including people with wings, people who resemble lions, elf-type people with a superiority complex, and dragons who can make themselves look like people. And there are some humans, too. In the last book, a new race entered Elantra through some kind of portal after losing their home to the same shadowy menace that plagues the outer fiefs of Elantra.

Private Kaylin Neya works as a sort of police officer/detective upholding the Dragon Emperor's laws, and when she's not walking her beat and investigating crimes, she tends to save the world a lot. Mysterious tattoos cover her body and allow her do work magic that no one understands and no one is able to duplicate. This magic generally means she's the first, last, and best line of defense against the aforementioned shadowy menace.

These books read, to me, like a procedural drama. You follow along as Kaylin goes from one place to the next, investigating the current mayhem and acting instinctively against the threats to Elantra (which is a good thing, since she knows just as little about the markings and her gifts as anyone else - and possibly less than some). And while it's not incredibly fast pace, it does have a consistent pace, and I had a hard time putting it down.

In Cast in Ruin, Kaylin is sent to investigate 7 identical dead bodies, and not identical as in twins, but identical as in everything about the corpses is exactly the same. And with the shadows encroaching on the fief, Kaylin doesn't have a lot of time to figure it out.

I would totally recommend this book to anyone who loves fantasy novels or is looking to test the fantasy waters. They are awesome!

Book Review: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, by Ransom Riggs (DNF)

I'm afraid I'm going to have to mark this one as DNF - Did Not Finish. I wanted to love this book. I expected to love this book. And I think that my expectations were so high that when it just turned out to be "good" instead of "fan-freakin-tastic" I lost interest. Then the book was due back at the library, and I just gave up all pretense of reading it and returned it. 

One thing I did love about this book was the awesome photos. The author took crazy old photos he had collected and created characters from them. I love that. Seriously. It was such a cool idea and I loved looking at the photos whilst reading (and skipping ahead to just look at them); they were creepy and eerie, sometimes wackadoo, and just plain wonderful. If you come across this at the book store or library, at least give it a skim for the photographs, but don't let the fact that I couldn't finish it deter you; it was a good book, I was just expecting something else.

Book Review: Glimmerglass

It's been so long since I've blogged! My abject apologies! But I've managed to read many books in the meantime, so let's commence the reviews!

Glimmerglass
By Jenna Black
(*****)
From Goodreads:
Dana Hathaway doesn’t know it yet, but she’s in big trouble. When her alcoholic mom shows up at her voice recital drunk, Dana decides she’s had it with being her mother’s keeper, so she packs her bags and heads to stay with her mysterious father in Avalon: the only place on Earth where the regular, everyday world and the magical world of Faerie intersect. But from the moment Dana sets foot in Avalon, everything goes wrong, for it turns out she isn't just an ordinary teenage girl—she's a Faeriewalker, a rare individual who can travel between both worlds, and who can bring magic into the human world and technology into Faerie.

Soon, she finds herself tangled up in a cutthroat game of Fae politics. Someone's trying to kill her, and everyone wants something from her, even her newfound friends and family. Suddenly, life with her alcoholic mom doesn't sound half bad, and Dana would do anything to escape Avalon and get back home. Too bad both her friends and her enemies alike are determined not to let her go . . .

From me:
Dana is a half-fae/half-human girl who finds out her heritage makes her special in a supernatural way and a target for people who want to exploit or eliminate her.

While a lot of bad stuff happens to poor Dana, she's a bit too whiney for my taste. Some of minor characters show great potential, and with the introductions and initial plot set-up out of the way, future stories could be more interesting, too. That is, if Dana can suck it up in later books.

Book Review: Darklight

Darklight
by Lesley Livingston
(*****)

From Goodreads:
Much has changed since autumn, when Kelley Winslow learned she was a Faerie princess, fell in love with changeling guard Sonny Flannery, and saved the mortal realm from the ravages of the Wild Hunt.

Now Kelley is stuck in New York City, rehearsing Romeo and Juliet and missing Sonny more with every stage kiss, while Sonny has been forced back to the Otherworld and into a deadly game of cat and mouse with the remaining Hunters and Queen Mabh herself.

When a terrifying encounter sends Kelley tumbling into the Otherworld, her reunion with Sonny is joyful but destined to be cut short. An ancient, hidden magick is stirring, and a dangerous new enemy is willing to risk everything to claim that power.

Caught in a web of Faerie deception and shifting allegiances, Kelley and Sonny must tread carefully, for each next step could topple a kingdom . . . or tear them apart.

With breathtakingly high stakes, the talented Lesley Livingston delivers soaring romance and vividly magical characters in Darklight, the second novel in the trilogy that began with Wondrous Strange.

From me:
When a book follows the text of another story - a tragedy - particularly Romeo and Juliet, you know the main characters are going to have problems. Look at New Moon - poor Bella had a whole lotta issues with her boyfriend that she had to deal with that paralled R & J. This book had a similar feel. Though, like New Moon, you know that no matter where the book is going at any given moment, there will be another book in the series to fix whatever is going wrong in this one. It's *gotta* have a happy ending eventually.

We get to know the characters better in this book, ones that we only got a taste of in the first - impressions change, and we no longer know who is good and who is bad. There is also a lot more action and new threats.

An enjoyable book and an enjoyable series. I look forward to seeing where this story goes.

Fantasy: Alphabet of Thorn

Some time ago, I was browsing through Half Priced Books and found a book with a truly lovely cover. I thought I may have read something from the author before (the artwork style seemed familiar, but I wasn't sure if the illustrator was connected to the author), but I figured something that pretty was worth the dollar this clearance book cost even if the book sucked. (Pretty, isn't it?)

The book is Alphabet of Thorn written by Patricia A. McKillip. According to the cover, she's a 'World Fantasy Award-Winning Author,' so I figured this would be a good book to dust off and use for my assignment. Plus, I would achieve the satisfaction of having one less unread book on my bookshelf, not that there are many, but they mock me.

This story takes place in a fantasy world (rather than an earth-bound fantasy) called Raine, and follows several characters. First is a young woman who was abandoned as a baby and left on the edge of the cliff. Nepenthe (don't ask me how to pronounce that) was raised in the palace that was built into the cliff where she was found, and was raised by librarians in a library (fun!) deep beneath the palace. She's a translator who has come across a mysterious text that was written in a language of thorns and has some mysterious hold over her. A young girl, about 14 or 15 I think, has just been made queen over Raine. No one thinks she can handle the job, particularly the old king's advisor, the mage Vevay. Finally, there is a young man named Bourne (and every time he was in a scene, I recalled the yumminess of Matt Damon in the movies of the same name) who is a student at the mage school who is discovering new abilities as well as an affection for Nepenthe. The Kingdom of Raine is suddenly at risk, and these characters have to figure out where the danger is coming from and what they can do to stop it.

Intermixed with all of these characters' points-of-view is a back story of a conqueror and a mage that lived 3000 years before and their story. McKillip did a good job of going from one story to the next, but there were a few times where I had information overload, particularly because she holds out till the end of the book to tie everything together. Fortunately, the ending was satisfying and all the loose ends were tied up the way I like them (I loathe open-ended stories).

When I started reading this book, I wasn't sure I was going to like it - it felt like McKillip was trying to write in an old folktale style and I thought that maybe she was trying a bit too hard. I only felt that way for a chapter or two, though. I don't know if that's because she found her flow or if I just got used to it, but I had no problem with her writing style the rest of the story. She also changed the points-of-view with the start of a new chapter (not every time, but she rarely, if ever, switched them within the chapter); I enjoyed this and it fit with the unhurried flow of the story. I could easily get through a chapter and put the book down to pick up again later. I didn't realize this at the time, but I think I was in the mood for an unstressed read (not that there wasn't mystery or suspense, but something about certain types of fantasies gives the timing a magical quality and the anxiety of the stressful moments gets lost in the flow of the story). McKillip created a believable fantasy world that you could dive into and wade out of without difficulty.

This story definitely fit the fantasy vibe, and if you're looking for a story with the flow and style of an old fairy or folk tale, McKillip may be right up your alley. I would even say that this story lived up to its cover.

Book Review - Cast in Shadow

Title: Cast in Shadow
Author: Michelle Sagara
Paperback: 480 pages
Publisher: Luna; Original edition (August 1, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0373802366
ISBN-13: 978-0373802364
Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.1 x 1.2 inches

A story where words are not only mightier than the sword, but they are also capable of blowing up a building.

At the onset of puberty, Elianne discovers words like tattoos forming on her arms and legs. Then all hell breaks loose - children are being murdered and found with these same marks in the fief of Nightshade - her home - a rough, lawless, wrong-side-of-the-river place. Seven years after she escaped from Nightshade and found a home in the grand city of Elantra, Elianne, now called Kaylin Neya, finds that history is repeating itself.

This fantasy story, the first in the Chronicles of Elantra series, takes place in a beautifully described world with strange races and many problems. Kaylin is a Hawk, one of the three branches of service in the Halls of Law, in which she is part of the police force for the city. She is sent back into the heart of Nightshade to investigate the resurgence of these murders with former friend and current enemy, Severn. With the help of a Dragon lord and the Lord of Nightshade (a Barrani, an immortal, elf-like race, who are as arrogant and cold as they are beautiful), Kaylin must learn about the ancient language that makes up the marks on her body and the powers they give her in order to fight the evil that's searching for her.

While much of this story is made up of the fantastic, at its heart is the trauma of Kaylin's youth and how she struggles to overcome it. She is forced to face the past before she can move on to the present concerns. This story envelops the reader in its fantasy world, but what I found most compelling is Sagara's depiction of words and names and the power they can hold. In this place that power is tangible; it can both save a life and bring down walls (both figuratively and literally). Recommended.