A great holiday gift idea for younger children: "The Cat, The Dog, Little Red, The Exploding Eggs, the Wolf, and Grandma" by Diane and Christyan Fox

Two things make me love a children's book:  an offbeat sense of humor and the opportunity to use funny voices while reading it aloud.  This book succeeds on both counts and will amuse adults as much as -- perhaps even more than -- their children.  I'm not a big fan of the overly sweet and sincere types of children's books and this one just hit my funny bone.  I laughed out loud in the children's section of the library the first time I read it.  And book pusher that I am, I forced it onto a father who was there looking at books with his children.  As part of my evil plan to ensure that every child gets a book for the holiday season, I suggest this would make a delightful gift!

Although this book is ostensibly about Little Red Riding Hood, it is really about the two main characters:  Cat and Dog.  Cat is a bit of a superior know-it-all and Dog is an overly enthusiastic goofball. Cat is reading -- or trying to read -- the story of Little Red Riding Hood to the Dog.  But Dog loves stories about super heroes and super villains and exasperates Cat with his constant interruptions and questions. Nevertheless, Dog's recap of the story after Cat finally gets to the end makes a lot of sense!  The illustrations are simple but perfectly fit the story and the text is hilarious.

I wondered if children would find this book as funny as I did, so I loaned it to a co-worker for a weekend to see how her four-year-old daughter liked it.  They read it every night. Her daughter thought it was hilarious and had to tell her Grandpa about the exploding eggs and now my co-worker thinks she might have to buy it for Christmas.  I think that is an excellent idea!

Because Cat and Dog are such characters, this book gives great opportunities to pull out some funny voices when you read it aloud.  It really begs to be read with distinctly different voices for Cat and Dog -- preferably ones that fit their personalities in the book.  It will enhance the reading experience.  There is a lot of back and forth between the two characters and the Dog is constantly interrupting the Cat so the different voices will help clarify the conversational flow as you read aloud.  (And be really fun.)

I received a free copy of this book through the Amazon Vine program in exchange for my honest  review.

Reconnaissance - When Sci-Fi Meets YA the Right Way

Title: Reconnaissance (Paradise Reclaimed #2)
Author: Aubrie Dionne
Publisher: Inkspell Publishing 4/5/13

Nova Williams has lost her one shot at Lieutenant hood and at love. Lieutenant Crophaven has promoted her rival, Andromeda, all because her lifemate, Sirius, sacrificed their mission to win back Andromeda’s love.

While sneaking out to prove Andromeda is a fake, Nova finds an alien ship hovering over their colony. Lieutenant Crophaven assigns her to a reconnaissance mission, giving her a second chance to redeem herself. Sirius must fly her and a research team to the vessel to decide if they are a threat. Thrown together with the lifemate that betrayed her, she battles with her own jealousy while her team battles for their lives.

Can she forgive Sirius in order to save her team and warn her colony?

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This was an amazing sequel. The story has a lot of classic science fiction elements paired with a great cast of main characters. Book one flows directly into book two with a shift in perspectives from Andromeda to Nova - rivals since school. There is a hint of a love triangle - but it dissolves very quickly and is more of a school age crush finally ending than anything.

Most of the story takes place on the alien ship that Nova has discovered hanging out nearby. These aliens are not nice creatures. They were written brilliantly and gave me the heebie-jeebies everytime that skittered (yes, they skitter) into a room or scene. There was quite a bit of suspense as Nova and Sirius explore the ship and I loved every word of it.

The romance was really on the back burner most of the time. I knew it was there hovering in the background waiting for the right time to pop up again. It was nice not having teenage love shoved in my face every few minutes. I would highly recommend this to any sci-fi YA lovers out there.

Parallel Books in Parallel Universes - The Duplexity

I really hoped i'd like this book, as both the plot and the meta-plot (two books, each tracing one side of the universe-swap) appeal to me.

I didn't just like it. I loved it. Even the minute bits like a girl-scientist, a platonic hetero-friendship, a boy-artist, all the stuff that never seems to make its way into YA fiction felt very natural here. And yes, there was an unlikely romance that developed quickly, but it wasn't just gazing into each other's eyes and knowing instantly that they were soul mates; they actually had to get to know each other first. And the icing on the cake: no forced love triangle! In fact, no love triangle at all!

The mystery of what the heck happened to Danny weaves into Eevee's own personal renaissance to make a story that just has a life of its own. Real world obligations prevented me from reading it all in one sitting, but i totally could have. And when the sequel comes out, i'll call in sick if i have to.

Because if there's one thing wrong with this story, it's that the whole time i wished i was reading Part 2. Dystopia Danny coming to a reality that seems a lot like ours was riveting, but i'm twice as excited to read about Slacker Danny landing in dystopia.


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Now That You're Here (Duplexity Part 1) 
Author: Amy Nichols
Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers (December 9, 2014) 
Received free of charge from the Amazon Vine program

Best Books of 2014

Just in time for the holiday season, here are some of our bloggers' picks for the best fiction and non-fiction books of 2014. Rest assured, we agonized over these choices. Please tell us why you agree or disagree in the comments. And if you think there's a book we overlooked, let us know!

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Silea's picks:

Fiction: Red Rising, by Pierce Brown
This book starts with a gut-punch and never lets go. While relying on many of the tropes now common in YA fiction (member of a suppressed class trying to bring the system down, etc), it manages to be entirely unique.


Non-fiction: The Vinedresser's Notebook, by Judith Sutera
This book is simple, meditative, and contemplative, based primarily on grape vine metaphors to teach patience and humility. Though short, it's powerful. I don't believe it's possible to read this book and not become a better person in the process.

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Suzanne's Picks

Fiction: An Unnecessary Woman, by Rabih Alameddine:
Aaliya isn't the most likable fictional character: she shuns her neighbors, preferring books to reality. But then her reality is Beirut, through civil war, chaos and lots of family upheaval. Aaliya, however, is an astute, wry observer of those realities, and Alameddine is a lyrical writer: the combination has made the novel, one of the first I read this year, one of the most memorable and my favorite.


Non-fiction: A Spy Among Friends, by Ben Macintyre
Focusing on Kim Philby, one of the British spies whose betrayals rocked the British establishment in the 1950s and 1960s, this takes a different approach to the story, telling the tale through the eyes of Nicholas Elliottt, Philby's closest friend in MI6. For Elliott, Philby's betrayal was more than just treason: it was a personal violation of the most profound kind. The book is both a fast-paced spy yarn and a heartbreaking tale of betrayal and misery.

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JWP's Picks

Fiction: Crossover, by Kwame Alexander
Josh Bell thinks his school year is going to be all about basketball and how amazing he and his twin brother can be on the court, but life has something else in store.  His words zing off the page showing how great poetry can be to illustrate life's good and bad moments. 

Non-fiction: Birdmen: The Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss, and the Battle to Control the Skies, by Lawrence Goldstone
A title with a little bit of everything, Goldstone makes the history of heavier than air flight available to even the least scientific of minds.  Thrills, chills, spills and daredevils from the golden age of early aviation all highlight the battle to get airplanes and their inventors off the ground. 

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Dunyazad's Picks

Fiction: The Book of Strange New Things, by Michel Faber
I judge the quality of a novel by how much I wish I could be reading it when I'm doing other things. In this case, those other things included visiting friends for the weekend and attending the National Book Festival, but I still found myself sneaking out this book to read a few pages whenever I could. The story of a missionary witnessing to aliens on another planet while his wife experiences apocalyptic conditions back on earth was unlike anything I've read before.

Non-Fiction: How We Learn, by Benedict Carey
This is probably the non-fiction book that's had the most real impact on my life this year. It's a fascinating synthesis of recent and not-so-recent findings in learning science, or in practical terms, a book full of evidence-based suggestions for how to learn more effectively and efficiently. Besides the helpful ideas themselves, I found it extremely encouraging just to read that forgetting is not the enemy of learning, that there are specific techniques that make it easier to remember foreign vocabulary within a reasonable time frame, and so on. This book gives me reason to hope that I'm nowhere near the limits of my abilities yet.

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TakingaDayOff's Picks

Fiction: My Wish List, by Gregoire Delacourt
This book asks an unoriginal question (What if you won the lottery?) and answers it in a completely original way. A compact story that felt simultaneously surprising and inevitable.


Non-Fiction:  The Shelf: Adventures in Extreme Reading, by Phyllis Rose
A book in which reading a random shelf of library books becomes a discussion about book covers, undiscovered authors, blurbs, how libraries decide which books to discard, dog training, and occasionally, literature. The Shelf combined two of my favorite topics, books about books and harebrained schemes, brilliantly.



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Sandy Kay's picks

 Fiction: Red Rising, by Pierce Brown
If you mixed together a dash each of Lord of the Flies, Hunger Games, Hogwarts Academy, and Roman history and set it hundreds of years in the future you might come up with this book. But it is fresh and exciting even with all those familiar elements. I could barely put it down and can't wait for the next book in this trilogy due in January 2015.

Nonfiction: Dear Luke, We Need to Talk, Darth: And Other Pop Culture Correspondences, by John Moe
I read mostly for entertainment so don't do much nonfiction. This collection of John Moe's imagined letters, e-mails, text messages, and other correspondence behind some favorite pop culture references made me laugh. 

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CK's picks

Fiction: The Secret of Magic, by Deborah Johnson
Deborah Johnson stole my heart back in January with The Secret of Magic, a masterful interweaving of tradition, resilience, injustice, idealism, and respect. In impeccably measured prose that is all the more beautiful for being unassuming, Johnson introduces us to an idealistic young lawyer, a gentle and righteous father, and the author whose words have impacted both their lives. Even as she evokes the tensions of the post-WWII South, she also layers in such talismans as ladybugs, mistletoe, and a mailbox full of bluebirds. These and many other moments sing of simplicity while they hint at deeper meaning. 

Non-fiction: The Nazis Next Door, by Eric Lichtblau
Coincidentally, my other selection also centers on events in the U.S. just after WWII. Eric Lichtblau's The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men is a thorough, professional, and incredibly frustrating exploration of the warm welcome the U.S. government extended to a number of people involved in the German war effort. This book is an implicit indictment of the choices some members of our government made that ran counter to the tenets on which we like to think the social contract of our country exists. When you tackle this worthwhile book, give yourself permission to partake of it in 50- to 60-page increments. 



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Note: Most, if not all, of these were received as ARCs through the Amazon Vine program. 

Woman as Object in Sergei Lukyanenko's The Genome

Title: The Genome
Author: Sergei Lukyanenko
Publication Date: 12 December 2014

Note: ARC received via Amazon Vine program

*Warning: Contains potential spoilers throughout*

Sergei Lukyanenko’s The Genome is classified as science fiction and probably best considered under the speculative fiction label.  The story of Alex, who finds himself the captain of a spaceship that takes non-human species on tours and on which everyone seems to have a secret, is told largely through dialogue.  This type of writing should provide the author the ability to make each character unique and make them sound like rounded people.  Instead, the dialogue often reinforces the one dimensionality of the characters by not allowing us, the readers, to observe their actions.  The lack of dimensionality may be due, at least in part, to the fact that the majority of the characters are speshes.  That is, people who have been genetically altered for certain tasks.  Alex, the main character, is a pilot spesh whose main abilities are described as piloting space craft and keeping the occupants of the craft safe.  He is, we are told, incapable of love as a result of these specializations.

Lukyanenko’s book has a problem with all the characters, but women in particular.  Of the two females that play the largest part in the narrative, neither manages to rise above the need for a man or escape Alex’s need for occasional sexual gratification.  To be fair, even the male characters in the book are fairly one-dimensional and no one outside of Alex seems present other than to help Alex’s emotional journey get from point A to point B.  However, portrayal of two of the women is particularly problematic considering they have the most specializations of anyone in the novel.

First, let us consider the doctor and stereotypical large black woman, Janet.  Yes, that is how the book describes her when her physical appearance actually comes up.  Despite her various specializations (she is part of Alex’s crew for her capabilities as a doctor but lists four others), Janet’s main problem is that she apparently needs a man by the end of the book.  When we first meet her she is a bit opinionated and may be trouble in the event of non-human species coming aboard the ship because of her past role as an executioner-spesh.  She even assists Alex with a dilemma in her role as doctor early on, but sometime after having sex with Alex that role is no longer of consequence. 

The penultimate sequence in which we learn anything about Janet illustrates the dilemma of her going from being a doctor and having opinions and struggling with her ingrained dislike of non-humans to her apparent need for male affection.  Alex, as peeping tom, watches her attempt to seduce the now confused homosexual character Puck.  The author makes a point that she is completely naked while Puck is only half so.  The scene is meant to show that Alex’s emotional abilities have changed from the beginning of the book and that he moving beyond just having sex for gratification.  However, even he thinks of her as a sexual object, something to be observed and desired for her body instead of her spesh abilities.  If her early role was to be a co-conspirator, her later role is that of satisfying a man’s desires even if he does not know what those are.

This brings us to Kim, a fourteen-year-old nymphet.  While the opening chapter is one of the best and introduces Alex to Kim and both to us readers, it, too, is not without challenges when taken in context of the whole book.  Age withstanding, Alex is thrown immediately into caring for her when he realizes she has yet to undergo the spesh equivalent of puberty (which is described in terms of a caterpillar’s changing into a butterfly in one night) to the point that she is naked and he is clothed in a non-erotic sense.  It is intriguing to note that the author makes a point of Kim’s changes being internal and mental compared to physical so that her outward appearance to Alex is basically the same before and after the metamorphosis.  However, with those mental shifts comes the problem of her imprinting on him.  Kim not only wants Alex’s love but needs it and not just in the mental sense.

Muddling the waters, of course, is the fact Kim is only fourteen.  Even if she were four years older, thus making the pairing more appropriate, Kim’s role is still to push Alex into a situation where he wants to be capable of loving another regardless of physical attraction.  He wants to see her as more than something to have sex with.  As soon as he sleeps with her (and the same holds true with Janet to a degree), Kim’s initial defining characteristics take a back seat to her pre-described function in Alex’s life.  Kim’s dialogue in relation to her need for Alex is uncomfortably misogynistic.  Kim seems to look to him for love and acceptance in order to be a person herself.  To make matters worse, we find out that she’s essentially been programmed this way by another character who claims he can help Alex find that feeling he longs for.  The argument then becomes something akin to woman not only needing a man to survive but that they have no purpose in life without men filling a void and telling them they need to be a certain way.

If you’re looking at The Genome and thinking it’s going to be thought provoking and speculative from the item description, I’m telling you it’s not.  The writing never sits on an idea and explores it instead opting for a musical chairs approach and hope you win the cake in the end.  The book reads like a morality tale more than science fiction.  In fact, the science part is mostly connected to the genetic alteration that makes speshes and the very brief space travel that occurs.  This is truly more the speculative variety, but not good.

Thematically, Sergei Lukyanenko inserts some talking points, but the lack of exploration and explanation are obvious the further in you go.  Things just are the way they are more often than not.  Characters, too. If there is anything to be gained from the book it’s the talk of how genetic alteration is not without risk.  However, even that theme gets mired in the muck of people being treated solely as.  Were the men treated more equally in tone, I might not feel so negatively toward the book.  There is an obvious difference, too, when you look at Puck in particular.  Alex mostly ignores the fact that Puck is not only homosexual but a natural (i.e. not genetically enhanced).  Yet Alex actively pursues sexual encounters with women he knows he cannot possibly have a mental romantic attachment to.  That the detachment is chalked up to genetics just cheapens the relationships and encourages the male dominant narrative of men treating women as objects rather than fellow humans, which is odd because the book seems to be saying something about acceptance of all sorts of people and their beliefs.

I cannot, in good conscience, recommend this book.  It’s sad to think that, even in the future, women would just be objects for male gratification.  Genetically altered but still just objects.  This type of thinking does not good storytelling (scientific, fantastical or otherwise) make.

Tudor Mysteries! The Newest, the Best, and the Ones to Watch For...

The Queen is dead; long live the Queen! So begins The Tudor Vendetta by C.W. Gortner, the third in a trilogy of mystery novels revolving around a young man whose life is interwoven with that of the young Elizabeth Tudor

When Brendan Prescott hears the news, he is ready to hop on his horse and head off to London in a second. After all, he has been in exile in one of Switzerland's Protestant enclaves for years, having had to flee the Catholic court of Mary Tudor to protect both himself and the young heir to the throne, her half sister, Elizabeth. But now the bitter middle-aged queen is dead, and with her, her reign of religious terror, and Elizabeth has ascended to the throne. Before long, Brendan and his mentor, spymaster Francis Walsingham, who has spent the last several years trying to teach him everything from how to detect poisons to the intricacies of secret codes, will indeed be back in London. But all is not well at court. Elizabeth may be on the throne, but that doesn't mean that her enemies have been vanquished. Nor have Brendan's own foes all disappeared: his old enmity with Robert Dudley, now the queen's favorite, burns as hot as ever, and he keeps having uneasy dreams about a villain who should be -- who almost certainly is -- dead. And yet... And meanwhile, he can't find a way back to the love of his life, Kat, whom he had to abandon without a word when he fled to the Continent to escape the old queen's wrath and vengeance.

So when Elizabeth calls on Brendan to solve a puzzle, warning him that it involves a dark secret of her own, he is all too eager to help. At the very least, it will extricate him from his woes at court and give him a way to demonstrate his loyalty. But when he heads north to investigate the disappearance of Elizabeth's loyal lady, Blanche Parry, he finds enmeshed in even more secrets than he had imagined. It's bad enough to discover that he has been asked to conduct his investigations in a household of devout Catholics who have little reason to love the new queen; far worse to discover that the secrets they are keeping threaten not only his life but the safety of the realm.

This is more of a rollicking adventure yarn than the kind of mystery yarn that relies as much on rich character studies and detailed, slowly developed plots. They are fun and lively entertainment -- puzzles are solved, sure, but the next event is just as likely to be a swashbuckling sword fight, a desperate race on horseback to save a life, or rescue someone from poisoning, as it is anything that reveals something about Brendan's personality beyond the basics established at the outset. He's an adventure hero of a certain type, and that's pretty much all you need to know. Which is fine, because this is entertainment fiction, pure and simple.

Two caveats, one large and one small. If you're a historical purist, you may want to approach with caution. Gortner takes some liberties with the known facts -- and even the probabilities -- of history in his stories, including the parentage of Brendan himself, and one of the biggest is the key revelation of the novel. I confess my eyes rolled and I groaned to myself: it was simply such a challenge to my credulity. But it's not literally impossible, as are the most bizarre inventions of Carolly Erickson, so I tried to ignore it and soldier on, and soon got back into the flow of things. But if you're really a stickler for this kind of stuff (I'm struggling to avoid spoilers) you may want to beware. The second caveat is much smaller. Read the first two books first: you'll understand why Brendan feels his fate is so tied to Elizabeth's, why he loathes the Dudleys, understand just why Kat is important to him and why even dreaming of the assassin from book two terrifies him so much. The brief explanations provided are adequate, but you won't feel you've just walked into a movie half an hour after it has started. And you'll have so much more fun: while the novels aren't as thoughtful or well-constructed as are Gortner's biographical historical novels (The Last Queen, etc.), they are still fun. 

A copy of the book was made available to me by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Tudor England, and especially Elizabeth England, seems to be increasingly fertile ground for authors writing historical mysteries. I can think of several other fabulous mystery series that you might want to hunt down, the grandaddy of them all being one set in the era of Henry VIII, Elizabeth's father.

Dissolution by C.J. Sansom: This is the first in a series of books; the latest, Lamentation, will be making its U.S. debut early in 2015 and I can say (having read it) that it may be the best of them all. Sansom's hero is an unlikely figure: Matthew Shardlake is a lawyer and a hunchback who, in spite of himself, keeps getting embroiled in the doings of the great and the good at court. Sansom does a simply amazing job of combining the lives of ordinary Londoners (and their court cases) with the high stakes political battles -- the dissolution of the monasteries, war with France and in the upcoming book, the battle over which court faction will be in pole position when the king dies, to hold power for the young Edward VI. Just, wow.

To Shield the Queen by Fiona Buckley: First published in the late 1990s, this series is being reissued and continued -- hurrah! Young widow Ursula Blanchard is asked by Elizabeth Tudor to help quash rumors about the ill health of Amy Robsart, the wife of Robert Dudley, her favorite. Then Amy dies -- of a broken neck. Murder, suicide, or...? Ursula sleuths for the queen and juggles her own divided loyalties, as she is wooed by an attractive man who may not be a supporter of Elizabeth. First of a great series.

Martyr by Rory Clements: You didn't know that William Shakespeare had a big brother, John, who was in Walsingham's employ as an "intelligencer"? For shame! *Grin* These novels are lots of fun, set in the final decade or so of Elizabeth's reign, a period that we tend to think of as calm (Mary Queen of Scots now headless; the Armada sunk). Not in Clements's eyes! Great plots; richly-developed characters and lots of shades of grey. His evil characters are those incapable of seeing the world except through rigid and violent eyes of zealots, whether Protestant or Catholic. I'm now reading the latest book, The Queen's Man, which is a prequel. 

Heresy by S.J. Parris: The first in another Elizabethan series, this one revolving around an unusual real life character: renegade monk Gioradano Bruno, who fled to England to escape the Inquisition. It worked, albeit briefly, and the author has imagined a role for him here as spook: a philosopher of whom the authorities can take advantage, with entrée to places those authorities can't go (like the French embassy). Parris sets her stories in the 1580s, and real life characters range from the likes of Sir Philip Sidney to Walsingham -- and she tosses in some great stuff about the philosophical debates of the age, to boot. 

How We Remember

MUSEday Tuesday

Section 60: Arlington National Cemetery

I visited Arlington National Cemetery as a teenager, and still remember how awestruck I was by its solemn beauty and its vastness. Heroes slept there, I knew, but they reposed at a remove. My visits since then to other veterans' cemeteries have been similar, except when I'm at the graves of loved ones whose lives overlapped mine. Then, my visits are quiet, largely solitary experiences, confined to the draping of a hand-sewn lei or the positioning of flowers, and accompanied by memories and tears.  

These moments all have their place, but they are so very different from what Robert M. Poole describes as the everyday events at Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery, where a number of veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are laid to rest, intermingled with veterans of earlier conflicts. 

With eloquence and grace, Poole invites us to meet some of the many pulsing hearts that make Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery live on.

Family members and friends visit the graves of these veterans, leaving flowers, keepsakes, and mementoes, and drawing comfort in the bittersweet process of revisiting everyday memories as well as the ache of recalling how their loved ones died.

Somehow, those left behind -- whether civilians or veterans, whatever the year their loved ones passed -- have built a community. Poole touches on this by showing interrelationships, such as Vietnam veterans "being there" for those mourning more recent losses.

With compassion and respect, he also explores the toll of such combat-related issues as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other challenges that active-duty servicepeople and veterans both confront. Notably, neither he nor his military and civilian sources shies from such painful subjects, including suicide.

Reading stories like those shared here can be extremely emotional, but it is necessary.... Necessary for understanding fear and bravery, necessary for understanding what makes a person willing to die for a comrade or a principle, and necessary for working through grief, whether immediate or at a distance.

"No man is an island," philosopher John Donne wrote four centuries ago, "every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main." Those at rest in Section 60 and those who keep their memories alive live this philosophy. Daily.

As one whose relatives sleep at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific and other veterans' cemeteries, I admire the people who have worked to keep the memories of their loved ones so tangible and visible. I hope their grace and generosity in sharing their stories starts a groundswell of everyday remembrance that spreads nationwide.


ARC courtesy Amazon Vine; cover image courtesy Bloomsbury Publishing

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SECTION 60: ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY
WHERE WAR COMES HOME
by Robert M. Poole
Bloomsbury Publishing
Released Oct. 21, 2014