The Eyre Affair

Title: The Eyre Affair
Author: Jasper Fforde 
Rating: 2
Genre: Science Fiction
Length: 374 pgs. 

Synopsis: It's 1985 in an alternate reality version of England and Thursday Next is a LiteraTec, a detective who investigates literary mysteries. In this world, literature is a *big* deal. There's also time travel and vampire sand seemingly invincible villains. Thursday's uncle has managed to create a machine that uses bookworms (actual worms. who eat books) to transport people into works of literature. For example, right now his wife is lost in a Wordsworth poem. Enter Acheron Hades, whose villainy knows no bounds. He's learned that if you enter the manuscript of a book and make changes, those changes go out to every copy of the book ever created. Hades kidnaps Thursday's uncle and uses his machine to hold Dicken's Martin Chuzzlewit hostage. After that plot fails, he decides to go after one of the most beloved books in all of literature, Jane Eyre.

Review: It had so much promise! Who wouldn't want to read a book with literary detectives, time travel, and the ability to travel into books?! But oh my god, it was bad. Let's start with the setting: Thursday Next's world is weird and not in a god way. It's England, but alternate history, but set in the modern day, but not really, with vampires and genetic splicing, but everything else is normal, but the Crimean war has been going on for 100 years...you get where I'm going with this, it's just too much. It reminded me of Terry Pratchett, but on a really off day.

The characters left much to be desired as well. Thursday was one of the few fully fleshed out characters, yet her whole focus was on things that happened 10 years ago. Get over it, girl. She has the potential of being a really strong female character, but she ends up being just a stereotype. The other characters were just as bad. Acheron Hades (because of course you'd name your villain after 2 gods of hell) doesn't have any motivation other than being a pain in the side of the police. He doesn't seem evil, just bored. Everyone else, including the man Thursday left behind and yet can't stop think about, were instantly forgettable.

I was all for giving this book 1.5 stars until the point that Thursday went into Jane Eyre. Then the book really picked up and the plot got interesting, it's just a shame that it waited until the last 50 pages to do so. This book was a waste of my time. Skip it.

The Parliament Convenes: 2013 in Review

So, we know it's 2014. And we know everyone else has already published their year-in-review posts. But we're still writing 2013 on things by mistake, which means it's not too late to share our favorites from last year. Right?

Before we begun, if you're looking for something really good to read, The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman, The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, and Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein all made it onto multiple owls' top five lists for 2013.

Zelda

Five Favorite Books Read in 2013

1. The Archived by Victoria Schwab 
2. The Ocean at the End of the Lane  by Neil Gaiman
3. The Theory of Everything  by J. J. Johnson
4. Speaking From Among the Bones by Alan Bradley - This was definitely my favorite Flavia book! I adore this world and I especially adore Flavia! I love listening to the audiobooks for these, Jane Entwistle does a great job! I constantly get little sayings from these stuck in my head. I have yet to find someone that doesn't like Flavia (and we are talking a wide range of ages, genders, and reading interests)! 
5. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green - I was nervous to read this one, but I actually don't remember crying when I read the book. I plan on going to the movie and ugly crying with my friends, but I don't think the book made me cry. However, I loved it. John Green is a wonderful author and really knows how to connect the reader and the character so you feel their emotions for fully and are immersed in their world. 

I noticed something odd about my top 5 books. They are ALL blue. Apparently I'm pretty into that color.

I read less in 2013. School, oddly enough, is a time suck. My goal in 2012 was 100 and I just made the cut! 2013 was lowered to 75 and I managed to squeeze out 84. 2014? Yeah....about that....my goal is 50. So far we have a whopping 3 books under our wing. School is trying to ruin my life! Ok, that may be a bit dramatic. But seriously...

Reading Goal for 2014: 50 

Like Sonya, I would also like to read more non-fiction. I noticed a trend in my non-fiction: animals and eating disorders. I don't entirely know what that says about me, but you can't say I don't know what I like. I just get bored very quickly with real people and their lives and I tend to give up. I read 5 non-fiction books in 2013. That is kind of embarrassing....I can't help that I love my murder books and my teen angst!

Sonya

Five Favorite Books Read in 2013

1. Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein - I could not put this one down, and was an absolute wreck at the end of it. My husband saw me crying over this book and thought I was being a bit melodramatic. Later, I tried to explain to him what had me so upset and as a result, ended up crying in the middle of the coffee shop where we were playing Scrabble. If that isn't a good book, I don't know what is.
2. Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor - This book was so inventive with the world the author created. It had great tension and the story and suspense just kept building. The writing was wonderful and I always wanted to know what would happen to Karou and her mysterious Akiva.
3. Graceling by Kristin Cashore - Another amazing YA book where the author creates a captivating world with compelling characters with quite interesting abilities. I devoured this first book in the trilogy as well as the following two books. All three were top notch but the first was my favorite.
4. Life of Pi by Yann Martel - I read this book in one day. I couldn't put it down because I had to know what was going to happen to Pi and the animals with him. Reading this was like being unable to turn away from a train wreck. So many awful things happen in the duration of this story but I just couldn't stop. Then, the twist at the end where Martel leaves the reader wondering if it was all real just blew my mind.
5. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy - This may have taken me 6 months to finish but nonetheless it was well worth the read. The story is beautiful and tragic, and we can't help but sympathize with the toils women had to deal with in that time. I already knew how this one ended but it did not diminish the poignancy with which Tolstoy shows Anna's spiral into madness.

Library School definitely put a damper on my reading for the past year and a half. In 2012 I read 66 books, and in 2013 only 30. Granted, some of the books have been outrageously long books like Anna Karenina and Vanity Fair, but still. It looks like my favorite books from 2013 were dominated by young adult novels. It really is my favorite genre.

Reading Goal for 2014: Nonfiction!! I want to find a nonfiction book that I can like as much as I like a great novel. I've read a handful of nonfiction books but none have really kept my attention or made me want to read them. I basically end up browsing through the book. In addition, I definitely want to read more than I did in 2013. Only 30 books. Pitiful. I think a nice healthy reading goal is 50. (Zelda, we can try to recommend nonfiction to each other! And compete to see who makes it to 50 fastest!)

Nox

Five Favorite Books Read in 2013

1. Between Shades of Gray by Ruth Sepetys - This story of a teenage girl who is shipped to a Siberian work camp with her family and thousands of other Lithuanians moved me to tears multiple times. There was so much about the history behind this story that I wasn't aware of and the story of these survivors was incredibly inspiring.
2. Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell
3. NOS4A2 by Joe Hill
4. Great North Road by Peter F. Hamilton - A very big concept SF book complete with alien swarms, sentient worlds, medical-enabled long life, inter-world portals that could easily have become unwieldy, but Hamilton keeps it grounded by focusing on the human condition. Normally I'm not a huge fan of something that is so purely science fiction, but the world building in this book blew me away.
5. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green - I'll admit, I was afraid to read this book for the longest time because of the hype - usually when everyone loves a book, I'm disappointed, but I'm happy to say this wasn't the case in this situation. Rarely does a book come along that deals with such a hard topic with the humor that John Green does with this book. Although I had been warned that this was a "crying book," I still wasn't able to adequately prepare myself for how moving the story was.

Wow, so I definitely read fewer books in 2013 than 2012. Who knew that grad school would take up so much of my free reading time. When I did find time, I wanted to numb it with terrible television rather than invest in a book. I also read some pretty terrible books this year that had come highly recommended. My two biggest disappointments were Wicked, which I started after seeing the musical last fall and couldn’t even finish and Forever, the classic book that I found waaaay too focused on sex.

Reading Goal for 2014: I've decided not to focus as heavily on numbers this year, but instead focus on reading widely. While taking a course on Young Adult literature last semester I realized just how few books I had read written by minorities or who had main characters of another race. Living in North Dakota means that my daily life is pretty homogenous, so my goal this year is to expand my horizons.

Madeleine

Five Favorite Books Read in 2013

1. Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein (the link will take you to a post my human alter-ego wrote for a public library blog, or you can read my review of the follow-up book on Owl You Need is a Good Read)
2. Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
3. Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
4. Teaspoon of Earth and Sea by Dinah Nayeri
5. Burial Rites by Hannah Kent

Struggling for some originality here, but grad school really cuts into the free reading time! I read 107 books in 2012 and only 70 books in 2013. I've already dissected my 2013 reading with charts and graphs. Honestly, it wasn't my best year for reading in more than just numbers. I liked all the books above, but I liked my top five books of 2012 a lot more. My worst book of the year was Vanity Fair, which I couldn't even finish. On a more positive note, I did reread several of my favorite books of all time: Jane Eyre, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and The Book Thief.

Reading Goal for 2014: 50. And I want to make it to at least 1945 in my Newbery Medal Reading Challenge. With the Newbery Challenge and potentially a Reader's Advisory class this summer, I think I should be able to make it over 50 books.

Lesser Expectations

When Dicken’s wrote Great Expectations, he created one of the most intriguing literary characters I’ve ever come across. The ghastly specter that was Miss Havisham is the most visual memorable character, although she’s not the lead in the story. Ronald Frame has taken her intrigue and attempts to tell the story of what came before. What happened in this woman’s past to make her so….let’s go with crazy.

When I saw that Gillian Anderson and Helena Bonham Carter had been cast to play Miss Havisham in BBC and film versions respectively, I was appalled. Miss Havisham had to be old! But if you look at the dates, it runs true that should would be in her late 30s at the start of the novel – when Estella and Pip are young. For a woman in her 30s to be so ravaged by the past, it must have been quite a story, so I can see why Frame chose her to base his story around. Unfortunately, that’s about where Havisham stops being interesting.

 

Rather than being a story about a woman’s decent into madness, it was a tale of a rich middle-class teenage girl who went to parties. It didn’t tie into the story of Great Expectations until maybe the last third of the book and even then, the connections were flimsy at best. This could have been the story of any random woman, not Miss Havisham. But at the same time, I don’t think that would have been enough to save it. The only character that was well fleshed out was that of Catherine Havisham. None of her relationships were explored in any real depth and when her best friend moves away, it was a mystery why they were friends at all, other than Frame calling them best friends. I think maybe he just doesn’t how women work: their friendships, their relationships, their teenage years as a whole. Some male authors can write women well, but less than 30 pages into this book I knew without looking at the back cover that it was definitely written by a man. 

What could have been a great, in-depth character study turned out to be poorly painted façade. What a letdown.

Women after the War

Wake tells the story of three women living in the aftermath of World War I.

• Ada is a mother grieving over the loss of her son Michael, and thinks of little else – pushing her husband away in the process.
• Evelyn works in the army pension office keeping to herself after losing her fiancé. Her brother came home from the war changed in some way she can’t understand, nor can she understand why their relationship has grown so distant. 
• Hettie is a taxi dancer at a dance hall in London, where she meets many men with missing limbs. She longs for a different life and just might get the chance when she meets a mysterious stranger.

While it’s not normally a book I would have picked up in the bookstore, the cover and description intrigued me and I was excited to give it a read, but I had an incredibly hard time getting into the story. I was reading it as a break from homework and for the life of me couldn’t keep the girls straight in my head. Running through the novel is the story of the Unknown Soldier, who I think was supposed to relate to each of the women in their own way, but just fell flat. The writing was uneven, but I so wanted to like it; it had such a great premise! I wish Hope would have chosen one story to focus on. I think that would have cemented the emotional impact she was going for.

If you would have asked me 75 pages before the end I would’ve said that it was starting to look like a really good book, but then it just sort of ends before anything actually resolves. These women who have danced around each other are finally going to interact! Oh wait, no. They keep going on with their lives, which may or may not have changed over the course of the novel. Overall, this was an enjoyable book, but I was left wanting more. If Anna Hope writes another book someday, I’ll definitely give it a shot – this book was so close to brilliant!

I received my free review copy from Random House and will be available February 11, 2014.

I hunt (and read) killer books

I'm finally back to serial killer and death books. It's been so long and I've missed them. I Hunt Killers by Barry Lyga tells the story of Jazz (short for Jasper). A body was discovered in a field just outside of town and Jazz just had to take a look. He makes a habit out of spying on the cops when he hears interesting calls over the police scanner, but this one is different. When he sees one of the policeman hold up an evidence bag containing a single severed finger, Jazz knows that there's a serial killer in town. You see, Jazz is the son of the world most notorious serial killer, Billy Dent, who over the course of his career killed 124 people. This type of death in small Lobo's Nod was sure to cast suspicion on Jazz.

Jazz was afraid of two things in the world, and two things only. One of them was that people thought that his upbringing meant that he was cursed by nature, nurture, and predestination to be a serial killer like his father. The second thing . . . was that they were right.

To the outside world Jazz seems "impressively well adjusted." He has a girlfriend, Connie, and a best friend who's been with him for years, the incredibly loyal hemophiliac Howie. But on the inside Jazz knows he's not normal. He constantly has to remind himself that "People matter. People are real. People matter."

He doesn't want to turn out like Dear Old Dad, but knows that he's irrevocably scarred for life from his experiences from his childhood. His father started coaching him on the basics of how to be a functioning sociopath at a young age. Jasper has also been having terrifying dreams where he can feel himself cutting into human flesh hearing his father say, "Nice job, son. Nice good cut. It's just like chicken." And Jazz can't figure out if it's just a dream or a repressed memory seeing how no one knows what happened to his mother.

Since Jazz knows so much about murder and he wants to prove his innocence (to himself and others), he volunteers his services to the local police.  After all, who better to find a killer than a killer?

As the murders continue, Jazz is the first to recognize the victims as copies of his father's first murders. Someone is trying to recreate Billy Dent's murder spree. As the town is going through the motions by the book, which takes time. Jazz takes it upon himself to try to find the killer, but as he starts examining clues and the deaths more closely he starts losing touch with himself and fears that the killings are all because of him.

Who is the murderer: The police chief who had a mental breakdown after catching Jazz's father? The reporter who would do anything to get back in the spotlight? The new detective who just happens to be from the same town as the first victim?
And what will become of Jazz? Can he hold it together or is he destined to become his father?

Pretty in Pink meets Pride and Prejudice?

For as long as she can remember, the only thing Caymen has known about the rich is that they can’t be trusted. Her mother got pregnant with Caymen when she was very young and was disowned by her parents and abandoned by the father, who coincidentally was very rich. As a result, Caymen and her mom eke out a meager existence by running a shop that sells porcelain dolls and living in the small upstairs apartment. When one of their store’s patrons sends her grandson in to pick up a doll she had ordered, Caymen’s first instinct is to write him off as a snobby rich-boy, but there’s something about him that makes her want to give him a second chance, or a third, or as many as he wants. Even though everything from her past tells her that he’ll use her and run away when she gets bored, Xander genuinely seems to like her and they start hanging out. They both feel imprisoned by their families expectations, so rather than have dates, they take turns hosting career counseling sessions where they try different activities to discover what it is they truly love. This is adorable as all get out, but leaves Caymen confused to what exactly their relationship is. Caymen's mother and best friend are both pushing her towards Mason, a lead singer of a band who on paper seems like a much better fit for her. And then there’s Xander who keeps showing up on the cover of Star magazine with a movie star girlfriend. It seems like everything is going wrong for Xander and Caymen, but if they're so wrong for each other why is Caymen happier when she’s with him? Happier than she’s ever been.

Everywhere I turn, I see The Distance Between Us described as Pretty in Pink meets Pride and Prejudice, which maybe...? I’ve never seen Pretty in Pink, but I assume from movie posters that poor girl Molly Ringwald falls for rich boy Andrew McCarthy, who seems like a major douche. I have however read Pride and Prejudice and honestly didn't see much resemblance. This book seemed like a fairly normal story of poor girl and rich boy hit it off and was fairly fluffy, but enjoyable. The relationship between Caymen and Xander is perfectly executed with plenty of swoony bits, but there were times where I wished Caymen would just ask Xander what was going on in his head or let him know what was going on with her. I found it to be typical teen fair, but a welcome one. This would be a wonderful beach book, of course now we're on the verge of winter. Mexico here I come!