The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

It's going to be interesting reviewing this book and not giving away anything important. I hate spoilers and try not to put them in my reviews but this book...? This book is a whole shelf of parfait's worth of layers. 

In The Thirteenth Tale, we are introduced to Margaret Lea, a somewhat reclusive bookworm who lives above the antique bookstore her father runs. Margaret spends most of her time reading old books and diaries, rebuilding the past of their former owners. She even states that she loves books and dead people who wrote them and doesn't have much time or interest in more contemporary fiction. That's until she gets a mysterious letter at the bookstore. Turns out that the letter is from the equally reclusive and elusive Vida Winter, one of the world's most popular author. After years of dodging reporters and interviews, Vida has decided to tell her true life's story and decided to tell it to Margaret.

After the initial shock of being saddled with such a wild task wears off, Margaret agrees to stay at Vida's estate to begin the interview to end all interviews. What unfolds is an amazing story of a once proud family that steady descends into ill-repute and scandal, then straight out madness. As the layers of Vida's story unfold, Margaret is pulled deeper into her dizzying tale that reveals a family past that would be too much for Maury or Springer, but yet one that is still wrapped in layers of secrets. Vida is still holding back and Margaret is set on discovering the truth. Margaret and the reader steady follows Vida down a twisted and creepy rabbit hole where clues to the truth are left in libraries, shadows, and in the yellowed pages of old first editions of Jane Eyre.

Much like Jane Eyre and other Gothic, 19th century novels, Setterfield builds a world of isolated landscapes, haunted English manors, and a hinting of perhaps a supernatural element. Is there really a ghost at the core of Vida's tale? Or something that's more earthbound and more horrible? And as Margaret sinks deeper into Vida's secrets, she comes face to face with her own family's secrets. Margaret and Vida's world is very atmospheric and envelopes the reader with every page, with every new secret and scandal, with each strange parallel that links the two women's lives. I must admit, that the first 3-5 chapters were almost this book's undoing for me. Either it was Setterfield establishing Margaret's uber immersion into her world of books, or it was the author's background in literature, but it felt that someone was trying too hard describing the antique books and their histories with heavy-handed words. Thankfully, once Margaret left the bookstore the heavy prose shifted and it was much easier to read. Setterfield also masterfully built the suspense and tension within the story with a deft execution of the art of misdirection and subtly, writing devices not seen delivered to this level in some contemporary fiction. 

On my scale of 1 (literary hari kari) to 10 (literary orgasmic bliss), I give this book a 6.5-7. It's a solid story, full of creepy mystery and suspense, but almost too much subtly at times that left this reader pondering about somewhat crucial pieces of information at the end. If you like your stories moody and atmospheric, that make you think, and have surprising scandals, you'll enjoy this book. 

Review of Extinction Machine by Jonathan Maberry

It's been a while, but I'm back! I'll spare you the dullness of why I've been MIA since June and get right into the review. 

Extinction Machine, the fifth in Maberry's Joe Ledge series, does not fail in living up to

the previous four installments. We join up with Joe a few months after the events of Assassin's Code, and from the first pages we hit the ground running. 

Hungover and still recovering from a night of pleasure with a dangerous woman, Joe wakes up to a world where the whole government is after him for crimes he never committed (cuz, face it, if he had, he'd admit to them in a heartbeat). Joe, his Echo Team, and the very DMS is under attack from the government all the while strange things are flying in the skies and the word "UFO" is starting to be tossed around with a lot less skepticism than a few days before. 

A super secret group of three, one of whom is an industrial titan with a blank check from the US military complex, are sitting in the shadows pulling strings and picking up pieces of strange technologies that may or may not be from beyond the skies. As Joe and the Echo Team tries to stay ahead of the government's unrelenting push to dismantle the DMS, they delve deeper into the dark and slightly crazy arena of conspiracy theories, shadow governments, aliens, and a Black Book that apparently holds the key to the earth's survival. And that book is rumored to be in the hands of a woman who is the nation's foremost authority on conspiracy theories... and who may not be what she seems.

Maberry delivers again with his pitch-perfect blend of action, suspense, and enough testosterone that threatens to give the reader contact 'roid rage, and yet is able to sneak in some genuine emotion and depth to the characters to keep them from being one dimensional brutes. He also continues to make the extraordinary plausible, dare I say believable. In previous adventures Echo Team has encountered zombies, genetically modified soldiers, and vampires (as well as numerous other baddies in the short story collection that fit in between the main novels), now Maberry brings us aliens. Aliens. And yet, the concept of life beyond our planet doesn't seem campy or extrapolated within an inch of the allowances of fiction.

Again, I really can't recommend this series enough. I can't recommend Maberry enough. His Joe Ledger series is a delightfully hyper-masculine romp while his Rot & Ruin series is a heart-breaking, devastating view of death and survival at the end of the world, and the Dead of Night series is a brutal front row seat to the zombie apocalypse. I have yet to read his Pine Deep series, his very first trilogy, but I will track them down and devour them to continue my Maberry binge. 

All right, now what you've all be waiting for. My rating of this book. On my scale of 1 (literary hari kari) to 10 (literary orgasmic bliss), I give Extinction Machine a solid 8. Towards the end there was just one little hiccup (it'd be a spoiler, so I'm not going to explain) that kept it from being a 9. 

So, there you have it. Go forth and read!

1984: A Review 16 Years in the Making

Never knew Big Brother had such piercing blue eyes.

Whenever someone says "1984", the very mention of that year brings to mind myriad of images of an overbearing government, a desolate future, and "Big Brother is watching you." No two people will read this book and come up with the same interpretation of it. I first read 1984 by George Orwell, I was 16-17 years old and I had to read it for A.P. English (Advanced Placement for those who aren't familiar with that term). At that time in my life, my adolescent brain couldn't wrap itself around the idea of a totalitarianistic government, a dystopian society where every aspect of one's life is controlled by a governmental party and the basic freedoms we take for granted are all but a blurry dream. At 16 or 17 years old, I had no personal reference to begin to compare and understand what that would mean to a society as a whole, what the lack of personal freedoms would mean to the individual, what such total control over the masses does to the people at a visceral level. Since then, I remembered Newspeak (doubleplusgood!), Big Brother, and that marriage/sex was highly regulated by the government. 

I had read Animal Farm (Orwell) a few years ago and I was finally able to grasp the political and sociological themes of his work. I was able to draw comparisons between the events on that poor farm and with what was happening (to a much lesser extent) in our own society. I felt then that I could possibly attempt to re-read 1984 since my brain had matured to the point of being able to fathom such heavy material. All I had to do was wait for the right moment. Flash forward 15-16 years and 1984 is chosen by my book club for the month of June. Most of the members of the club haven't read it or if they did, were like me and couldn't really remember much about it from when they had read it. So we went and tackled one of literature's heavy weights. 

As stated before, 1984 is set in a future where the world is divided into three main world powers, Eastasia, Eurasia, and Oceania. Oceania is where Big Brother rules and the government, known as The Party. Everything in a person's life is controlled by the Party: clothes, food, entertainment, recreational time, who one can marry, sex (is only for children, not for pleasure). Below the Party members are the common people, or proles; the 85% of the population who are dumbed down and kept complacent with gambling, alcohol, and sex. The Party is working on keeping all citizens dumb by feeding them over-hyped propaganda and fear of their enemies. 

The main character is Winston Smith, a disenfranchised member of The Party who works in the Ministry of Truth. In the Ministry of Truth, Winston's job is to go back through the archives of history and rewrite it to match the current events of the Party. If Big Brother had said that there'd be more food four years ago, but now it's been four years and there is actually less food, Winston's job is to go back into all the newspapers, magazines, films, photos, audio files, etc., and find all mention of that prediction and change it to say that Big Brother had said that there'd be less food. The past is constantly being changed as the present unfolds. With each edit, Winston grows disillusioned about his role within the Party. He breaks a rule for Party members and buys a journal from a black market store and starts to write down true thoughts about his life and what he thinks about the Party. His first act of thoughtcrime that would slowly open the door to others. Soon he finds himself in a forbidden relationship with a young woman named Julia, who wants to rebel against the Party but for more personal pleasure reasons than political ones. His vague discontent with his life steadily solidifies into something more. Winston goes on a journey that takes him to the threshold of going against the Party and Big Brother himself.

This is a deceptive book, it's not all that thick but boy is it heavy. Political genres tend to be. It really boils down to in the face of such corruption, can one person really make a difference? How does one fight for personal freedom and expression in the middle of complete oppression? Winston yearns for a whole systemic upheaval, a rebellion to surge up from the crushed masses; Julia, on the other hand, doesn't believe that one person can't change anything and only small freedoms can be stolen back from the Party. In the long run, especially with an Orwellian novel, there's only one outcome and it won't be pretty. Reading this book now, being older and knowing more about the world and how things work (or appear to work), 1984 begs to ask the reader "What would you risk, what would you be willing to do to regain your freedoms as a person? Are you just going to worry about your little personal bubble or are you concerned with the greater picture?"

Of course, we don't face the level of evil and powerlessness that Winston and Julia faced, but in our present times, we do face some elements of freedoms being taken: TSA pat downs at the airport, Patriot Act agents scanning phone calls and emails for potential threats, possible drones roaming the skies, government secrets of less than favorable acts that are only revealed when someone leaks them onto the internet... the list goes on. Much like the Party members and the proles, many of America's citizens barely know what's going on in the hallowed halls of capitol buildings and Senate/House/Oval chambers, but as long as their personal freedoms aren't being impeded they don't really care and prefer to play ignorant. They are the Julias of the modern world. 

Again, a lot of political comparisons can be drawn between Orwell's work and our current political theater. Which is probably way his works are still being used in high school English classes to this day. And of course, depending on your point of view politically or otherwise, you may take away something different from 1984 and/or Animal Farm. I for one am not terribly up to date on politics, on either side of the aisle. I try to gather as much information as I can and try to make as informed opinion as I can, given the spin of events and from differing news channels and media outlets, and the slant given to a five second sound bite taken out of context. The media only tells you what they want you to know... and that sounds eerily familiar. 

On my scale of 1 (literary hari kari) to 10 (literary orgasmic bliss), I give this book a 7.5. It's a thinker book with a doozy of an ending, but still very important and topical today as ever. I recommend you take another round at the book if you'd read it years ago, and certainly pick it up if you've never cracked the spine. And while you're at it, pick up Animal Farm; you won't regret it.

Snivel: The Fifth Circle of Heck Review

Two book reviews in one month, let alone in one week?! What's the world coming to? I've been inspired to read, which is something I haven't had a lot of motivation to do as of late. I adore this series and felt bad it has taken me this long to read the fifth installment. I'm not sure if this is going to be a simple review or more of an essay about this book. It was pretty powerful. Seriously, if you haven't picked up this series yet... what is wrong with you?

Snivel: The Fifth Circle of Heck, is the fifth book in the Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go series by Dale E. Basye. We follow siblings Milton and Marlo Fauster as they are sent to the next circle of H-E-double-hockey-sticks. Snivel is the circle of Heck where the Whiny Kids go, a world set in the summer camp of all kids' nightmares: a dreary, rainy world where the Grin Reaper runs around stealing laughter and mirth, monochromosquitos fly around sucking energy and lust for life from each Unhappy Camper, and Vice Principal Poe (yes, the Poe) is in charge. This circle is full of the trademark dark humor and play on words, as well as the odd placement of historical and literary figures in roles of teachers and camp counselors, and the plot thickens.

Events set in motion in Fibble, the circle for liars, where the plot for stealing the world and bringing forth the Apocalypse is revealed by the Fauster siblings, are now ramped up a notch in the world of Snivel. Apparently a new scheme is in the works involving Nikola Tessla and spiritual video games... it's bound to be a doozy, no? Of course, Milton and Marlo must find a way to save the day, and save the underworld, from the new threats that are rising to destroy the all the worlds as we know them.

And as with the other four volumes in this series, Basye does a smashing job of making this book more adult than the 9-13 yr old age rating the publisher stamped on the back. Again deeper themes of life and death, happiness and defeat, spirituality and humanity creep out from between the lines on the pages. As set up in the previous book (sorry, there are a few spoilers, but it's a series, it all builds on itself), a spiritual war is coming and Heck and the Place Upstairs are fighting for control of the world of the living, and humans are either going to be the prize or collateral damage when it's all said and done. Not only do Milton and Marlo have to save themselves from the horrors of Heck, they have to literally save the universe as we know it. 

This volume changes things up a bit, by bringing the siblings, and the reader, back to the Surface. Marlo finds herself on the surface and finds herself face to face with the realities of what happened after she and her brother died. The world, as well as their family and friends, have moved on without them and not always for the better. The most heart wrenching part of the whole book was when Marlo haunts her own house and sees what happened to her parents as they are left picking up the pieces after their two children died. I actually had to put the book down for a few days because it was too much. And calling Snivel the circle where Whiny Kids go is a misnomer. It's more where kids who have too much spirit, too much life, go to get "put in line". The soul crushing "activities" at Camp Snivel were meant to beat the children down, pull all their spark and life from their souls; which is where the monochromosquitos come in. With each bite from the insects the children's motivation, energy, very spirit for living is sucked from them and leaving the drained, mentally as physically (the children turn various shades of gray with each bite). As Milton and Marlo move through Snivel and go to it's sister world of Arcadia, they are thrown through the pendulum of human experience. Arcadia is a world of insane energy drinks, video games, over saturated colors and nerve-burned sensory overloads. First left with not enough spirit as to cause apathy, and then with so much stimulation it almost overloads the system, the siblings have to find a balance in the two circles, as well as find a balance of emotion in one's own life. Hopefully without giving too much away, I'll quote the "narrator" who provides metacommentary in the forward, middleword, and backward: "The truth is that happiness is found in its pursuit, not its possession."

I am seriously in love with this series. As mentioned before, Basye somehow disguises an adult-level allegory in colorful cartoony covers of children's books. I reviewed the first three books in the series back here and the fourth book's review is here so you can get the full scope of my love for these books, and also whet your appetite so you can go read them as well. I, for one, am going to head on over to Barnes & Noble this weekend and pick up the sixth book, Precocia: Where the Smarty Pants Kids Go. The seventh book, Wise Acres: Where the Sassy Kids Go, is out as well but it's in hardcover. I have a silly thing about hardcovers, so hopefully I'll finish #6 by the time #7 is in paperback in September. 

All right, before this review/essay/love letter goes on any further, I should give my rating. On my scale of 1 (literary hari kari) to 10 (literary orgasmic bliss), I give Snivel a nice, steady 8. That brings the series ratings to thusly:

Heck: The First Circle of Heck:

         Where the Bad Kids Go: 8

Rapacia: The Second Circle of Heck: 

             Where the Greedy Kids Go: 7.5

Blimpo: The Third Circle of Heck: 

            Where the Fat Kids Go: 7.5

Fibble: The Fourth Circle of Heck: 

           Where the Lying Kids Go: 7

Snivel: The Fifth Circle of Heck:

           Where the Whiny Kids Go : 8

Circles of Heck series thus far: 7.6

The Delilah Case Review

Another month and another book to review from our monthly book club. The book for May was The Delilah Case by Mickie Turk. 

The book starts with a death. Dominique Doucette is dead and now we have to find out why. We go back a few weeks to the beginning of a grand experiment: can six hardened criminals, convicted murders and sociopaths, live in a minimum security "prison" and undergo a drastic transformation with a brand new therapy meant to reshape the human mind? Dr. Dominique Doucette plans to find out. One of the nation's, if not the world's, most famous and lauded psychologists, Dominique plans to show the world that her revolutionary Desire Therapy is the wave of the future for reform and treatment of severely dangerous persons. She and her associates start the House of Mithras, an old plantation house turned into a minimum security prison, the first of its kind in the nation, in the outskirts of Dominique's hometown of New Orleans. But not everyone is so sure about having a group of convicted killers in their backyard. Protesters and friction from local law enforcement may derail the project before it even gets off the ground. Is that why Dominique is dead now?

We delve deep into the dark parts of New Orleans, as well as the dark recesses of the minds of the six appointed criminals. Even Dominique herself. She, too, has demons to hide and vanquish. Will she be able to keep her secrets at bay long enough to have some success with House of Mithras? Through the course of the book, we see the complex relationships in Dominique's live: her overbearing mother who pushed her to success at a young age, her old friend Darrnel who stood by her side through hell and back, a powerful voodoo priestess who is able to calm Dominique's darkness, and the convicts themselves give us a glimpse into the mind of evil. 

The story itself is an intense mystery that sends you on twists and turns as you work through the events leading up to Dominique's death. On more than one occasion I had thought I'd figured out "whodunnit" only to be proven wrong. It was a slow burn, building on itself and the layers of mystery and stories as they entwined. The story building, world building, and tension building of the author is finely done; however, the ending lost me and ultimately tainted the beginning of the book. Some major plot points, as well as the climatic ending seemed slap-dash, thrown together at the last moment, or as if the author forgot that she knew how things all tied together and hadn't bothered to put in larger breadcrumbs throughout the rest of the book. Such important pieces to the puzzle, such big revelations that left me with my mouth open when they were revealed... felt very sudden and my book group had the same reaction of "WTH? How'd she know that? When did she figure THAT out?" when we discussed the ending.

On my scale of 1 (literary hari kari) to 10 (literary orgasmic bliss), I give this book a 6. I almost went lower to a 5.5 because of the ending, but that wouldn't be fair to the beginning 7/8 of the book. I wanted to give it a higher ranking of 7, maybe even an 8, but the ending, the randomness of the big reveal and the hurried pacing of the last 5 chapters just left me... feeling rather "eh" about the whole thing. I do recommend you check it out if you're looking for something to read, but be prepared for the ending.

Review of The Help by Kathryn Stockett

Welcome back to my book review blog! I took an unexpected hiatus from this site to get some other projects done, but now I'm back. I recently joined/founded a book club with some former coworkers of mine, and today was the inaugural meeting where we discussed The Help by Kathryn Stockett, which I chose. I know I'm a little behind on this book, since it came out a few years ago, but there's so many books and only so much time. It was sitting on my list of things to read, and I finally decided to bump it up to the top of the pile.

The Help revolves around  a small group of citizens of Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s. We are

introduced to Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan, a young privileged white woman, Aibileen, an elder maid, and Minny, a feisty maid. Minny and Aibileen are maids for Skeeter's friends, Hilly and Elizabeth respectively. We alternate between the three POVs, giving the reader a chance to see the events through differing eyes and perspectives. Skeeter is the white woman seeking for something more in her life than just finding a husband and fitting into the debutante world of the genteel South. Aibileen is tending to her 17th white child and is just trying to get through each day as a maid the best she knows how. Minny is on her 19th job, having lost many before due to her unfortunate tendency to sass off to the families she worked for. Minny and Aibileen are good friends and barely know Skeeter, only seeing her at functions their employers hold.

Skeeter longs to be a journalist and a writer. She manages to get a job at the local paper as an advice columnist to give house keeping pointers. One problem: Skeeter knows nothing about how to clean a house. She asks her friend Elizabeth's maid, Ailibeen, to help her answer the letters for the advice column. After this uneasy alliance is formed, Skeeter contacts an editor in a New York publishing company about getting something published. The editor challenges Skeeter to write something she wants to write, not what she thinks she should write. A crazy idea forms in Skeeter's head about writing a book full of interviews of black house maids. A Civil Rights movement is just starting and the world outside Jackson, MS is changing, and Skeeter feels she wants to have a part in changing the culture and mindset of her segregated town. After asking Aibileen numerous times to be part of her project, Skeeter starts a chain reaction that she nor the maids who agree to help with the book saw coming.

This was a fantastic read. Kathryn Stockett dipped into her own personal experience of living in the South and having a maid to build the fictional characters of this Jackson, MS. Stockett does an amazing job of transporting the reader back into the 1960s South and helping the reader feel the polarizing world of the culture, a world of the Haves and Have Nots. The three main characters have their own struggles, so separate from each other and yet very fundamentally similar. Each character has their own personal boundaries, societal constructs that force them into certain spaces, certain roles, that neither feel terribly comfortable in. The Help takes the reader on a journey of rebellion, introspection, and self-discovery. It touches on the theme that we are the authors of our life's story and that we are only stuck in someone else's restrictions if we allow ourselves to be. As the reader, you are taken on a subtle roller coaster ride through a segregated world that can be both honorable and deceitful, beautiful and ugly, touching and terrifying. Within the same chapter we see the ugly truth of the class/race separation and also the humor of one well-put snarky commentary of the cultural constructs.

I highly recommend this book. If you've already read it, reread it. I bet if you read it again, you'll pick up on something that you missed the first time through. At our book group we speculated on what it would be like if Stockett wrote a sequel, following Skeeter in the new chapter of her life, and how interesting that would be. Again, highly recommend this book, either read it on your own or in a group. On my rating of 1 (literary hari kari) to 10 (literary orgasm), I give this book an 8.5.

Next month will be a new book for the book club, so hopefully I can get back into the habit of posting here again. Thanks for hanging on for so long. :)

NorseCODE by Greg van Eekhout

Holy crap! A new book review! It's only been about 6 months since I last put something up here... I've been a bad book review blogger. But I made it up to you few readers out there and have a new review for your pleasure. 

Norse Code, by Greg van Eekhout, takes us through an interesting journey into the world of Norse mythology. The nice thing about this book is that the author gives enough background and information about Norse mythology to help the layman figure out what's going on, but not too much as to make it into a overwrought mythology/literature lesson. 

The premise of the book is interesting and time-relevant with the Thor, Avengers, and other Marvel movies of the last few years: NorseCODE is a genetics company run by Valkyries to hunt down those on earth (Midgard) who are of Odin's bloodline. The end of the world, Ragnarok, is nigh and the forces of Odin and Asgard need to fill their ranks. Events set into motion eons before humans were even thought of foretell of gods' deaths and when Ragnarok will take place, meaning plans must be made. Which is where Mist comes in. Once human but now reincarnated as Valkyrie, she must now hunt down those with Odin's blood and hope they pass the test to fight on Asgard's front. After a potential soldier retrieval goes wrong, Mist now is on a mission to set things right, causing her to go AWOL from the Valkyries and join forces with Hermod, one of Odin's sons who has taken a self-imposed exile in all the other eight worlds save Asgard. She convinces this nomadic god to join her cause to break into Helheim (the underworld) to hep make amends for the botched retrieval job. As he is the only being to have entered and returned from Helheim without, you know, dying, Hermod was the god for her. But the two end up working together to thwart the dominoes falling to kick off Ragnarok. 

The plot was a well-written blend of urban fantasy and Norse myth, adventure and suspense. Is there more to the beginning of the end of the world? Is there someone on the "inside" working to make sure Ragnarok comes to fruition? Can a rogue Valkyrie and a god with commitment issues possibly stop the worlds from ending in a fiery war? You think that they're going to be able to pull it off until roughly the half of the book... then things take a turn for the worse. I was beginning to wonder if a) this was the first book in a series and things were going to continue in the following volumes or b) this was going to be on F'ing depressing book. And I did a little digging, no this book is not part of a series. Things aren't looking good for the beings of Midgard.

Of course, I will not say anything since I'm against spoilers, but I will say that this read ended in a way I did not see coming. However, I do have one pet peeve with this book. The genetics company, NorseCODE, in the grand scheme of the book, is barely mentioned and gets seems to be a small stepping stone to the rest of the "stop the end of the world" crusade that takes up the rest of the plot. I'm not sure if the author was looking for a cute play on words to get your attention (sadly, I'll admit that's how I was drawn to this book and ultimately purchasing it) and a secondary/tertiary plot point. The NorseCODE program does explain how the Asgardians are beefing up their army for the impending doom, and a little bit of the why, but the hunt for these Odin-born is not the focus of the story---as you think it should be if the book is named after it.

Unless the author was going for a play on words, given that normally people use Morse code to signal for help/get a message through (i.e., the Titanic?), then the title works. 

In spite of the a slightly misused title, I highly recommend this book for a good read on a lazy autumn or winter afternoon. If you're a fan of urban fantasy, of mythology and lore, and like your horses with eight legs, then this book is for you. On my scale of 1 (literary hari kari) to 10 (literary orgasmic bliss), I give this book a nice 6. It was a good read with a fresh take on mythology and fantasy, and an overall satisfying experience.


And no, this book is not going to be counted in my 100 Books in 1 Year challenge... I've completely failed on that and with 2.5 months left in the year, I'll just be happy if I read a book.