Shine On, Harvest Moon

This year's autumnal equinox, which took place on September 23, occurred in conjunction with an event that doesn't happen all that often ~ a harvest moon.  So it's rather interesting that Harvest Moon, an anthology of three fun new fantasy novellas, is being released on October 1, not long after that unusual event.  Coincidence?  I wonder.  At any rate, it's pretty clever, as are the stories which all have as a motif a harvest moon.  In other respects, they all are quite different. 

A Tangled Web by Mercedes Lackey is a story of the Five Hundred Kingdoms, this one a retelling of both Hades's abduction of Persephone and the doomed attempt by Orpheus to rescue Eurydice from the Underworld.  As is common with Lackey, her retelling turns the myths pretty much upside down.

Cast in Moonlight by Michelle Sagara is set in the world of Elantra.  It tells how teenager Kaylin Neya joins the Hawks, a peacekeeping force, and helps them break up a ring of child abductors and murderers. My introduction to Elantra and its different species was pretty much my favorite of the bunch, and I'm looking forward to starting this series. *doing the happy dance over finding an excellent new series to start*

In Retribution by Cameron Haley, Domino Riley is a mob lieutenant who executes a guy named Benny after he attempts to murder her.  This wasn't just an ordinary mob hit, though, nor is this mob run-of-the-mill.  Rather, Domino Riley is a master magician, as are many of the other mobsters.  Although Benny doesn't have much "juice" (magical power), before he dies he puts a Jewish death curse on Domino that has her being stalked by Samael, the Old Testament Angel of Death.  It was okay, sometimes amusing and other times rather gruesome, but I never really warmed to the character, though by the end I was curious enough to want to read more novels about Riley.

Publication Date: October 1, 2010

As an aside, I started this about a month ago, but, after I finished Mercedes Lackey's novella, I stopped reading, mainly because I wasn't familiar with the other two authors' and their work. I guess I was in one of my "not interested in trying anything new" moods. Thank goodness that didn't last long because, while I enjoyed the Lackey offering, the second turned out to be really good. I wasn't quite as thrilled with the third, but eventually I enjoyed it too once I got into it, especially since urban fantasy is a new subgenre for me and one which I think I really like a lot.  I do hope this teaches me be less resistant to trying new things.

DISCLAIMER: I received this free unproofed eGalley, sent to my Kindle by the publisher with no strings attached, through http://netgalley.com/. The opinions expresssed are my own, and I am being paid nothing for my review.

Murder in Ancient Rome

In the debut novel Roman Games by Bruce Macbain, Pliny the Younger, a somewhat straitlaced Senator and expert probate lawyer, is ordered by the Emperor Domitian (the last of the Flavian dynasty and the nemesis of Lindsey Davis's detective Falco) to solve a locked-door murder of a hated informer. While making his bumbling way toward discovering the culprit and how the deed was accomplished, he uncovers a lot more going on than he really wants to know.

Roman Games is well-written with a good plot and well-developed, multi-layered characters and contains no anachronisms of which I was aware. It falls somewhere between Roberts's SPQR mysteries and Saylor's Gordianus series in terms of seriousness and well-researched historical detail. I haven't read a lot about the reign of Domitian, so Roman Games was interesting for that reason too.

I found the protagonist Pliny to be a bit tiresome, what with his seemingly unrelenting naivete, his slight pomposity and an insufferably proper attitude, though he was certainly a decent man.  I also found him a bit unlikeable (for one thing, he treated his pregnant wife of FOURTEEN like, well, a child ~ a lovable one but a child nonetheless, and a slightly stupid one at that), and I feel that he didn't do much in the way of growing during the course of the novel, but it wasn't enough to put me off reading it or looking forward to the next installment (I'm sure this is the beginning of a series). Certainly, idealistic honorable courageous men who stood up to the imperial bullies were at a premium in those days, and from what history I've read of the time it wasn't unusual for women to marry young and be treated like children or halfwits. Still, I hope as the series advances, so too will Pliny. And his child bride.

The subject matter was darker and the action more brutal than any of the other Roman mysteries I recall reading recently and, thus, more realistically portrays life in those dangerous days, but I didn't find it outrageous or prurient in any way.  Lots of swearing, especially by the soldiers, but quite a bit of it was, if you'll credit it, in Latin.  I enjoyed those parts a lot.  Many of the characters were historical personages, including Pliny, and much of the action was based on first-person accounts by Pliny and others.

In any event, as an aficianado of ancient Roman mystery/detective series, I'm excited to have another Roman detective to follow and highly recommend Roman Games to anyone who enjoys the Falco, Gordianus, Corvinus or SPQR mysteries.

For more plot information, here's the blurb from the NetGalley website:

"Rome: September, 96 AD. When the body of Sextus Verpa, a notorious senatorial informer and libertine, is found stabbed to death in his bedroom, his slaves are suspected.

"Pliny is ordered by the emperor Domitian to investigate. However, the Ludi Romani, the Roman Games, have just begun and for the next fifteen days the law courts are in recess. If Pliny can't identify the murderer in that time, Verpa's entire slave household will be burned alive in the arena.

"Pliny, a very respectable young senator and lawyer, teams up with Martial, a starving author of bawdy verses and denizen of the Roman demimonde. Pooling their respective talents, they unravel a plot that involves Jewish and Christian 'atheists,' exotic Egyptian cultists, and a missing horoscope that forecasts the emperor's death.

"Their investigation leads them into the heart of the palace, where no one is safe from the paranoid emperor. As the deadline approaches, Pliny struggles with the painful dilemma of a good man who is forced to serve a brutal regime—a situation familiar in our own age as well.

"The novel provides an intimate glimpse into the palaces and tenements, bedrooms and brothels of imperial Rome's most opulent and decadent age."

DISCLAIMER: I received this free unproofed eGalley, sent to my Kindle by the publisher with no strings attached, through http://netgalley.com/. The opinions in the review are my own, and I am being paid nothing for my review. Please note that parts of the story may change between now and publication date. The novel is due for release in October 2010.

The Diviner's Tale

I recently received the unproofed eGalley of The Diviner's Tale by Bradford Morrow from NetGalley.com and finished it last night, having read it on my new Kindle over the course of a few days.  Before I talk about the novel itself, let me just say that the experience of reading unproofed galleys on an eReader is just the slightest bit unwieldy.  For starters, the formatting can be nonexistent in places, with paragraphs running into each other, lack of double spaces between paragraphs, and the like.  Nothing too daunting, just...unwieldy.  I didn't hold it against the novel, though, or the process, which overall was one of othe most pleasant I've ever experienced, at least as compared to the one other unproofed galley I ever read, which was spiral bound and printed on 8x10" paper and pretty hard to deal with physically.  I'm sure that was so a reviewer/editor could make notes in the margins, and of course it made perfect sense.  It was just unwieldy in a whole different way.  I was able to make notes and highlight portions of the eGalley on the Kindle without much trouble (just had to remember which button to push when, and to remember to even make notes, especially when engrossed in the story).

So, the technical stuff out of the way, let me just say that The Diviner's Tale, which is the story of the redemption of a family damaged by tragedy as much as it is a ghost story and mystery, has some of the loveliest prose I've read in a long time, with wonderful metaphors and similes and lyrical language.  Here's the first of the passages I highlighted because of a sweet turn of phrase. 

Cass Brooks is a diviner, a witch some call her, who makes her living by locating water (and other lost things, as the story goes on to show) using metaphysical techniques that go back generations in her family.  She's out on some undeveloped, densely forested property in upstate New York, dousing for water so the new property owner can build a huge resort hotel with a fake lake on its grounds.  While she goes about her work, she reminisces a bit about her divining work:

After the twin towers went down, I found myself exploring bonier, harsher, uninhabited land for people from the city looking to relocate, to Thoreau for themselves a haven upstate.   

"To Thoreau for themselves" ~ wonderful! 

Cass is not easy in her vocation, feeling that the world is correct in viewing her a charlatan, that she's a fake who will never be a true diviner like her father the other men of the Brooks family before him were but who must stay in the business because she needs the income her divining brings in.  She ruminates:

No going back, fake or not.  The thing was, for whatever little techniques I had developed to enhance my chances of, as it were, swimming along with the Brookses ~ my own confession will come in due course ~ nothing I had ever done could explain my forevisions, as we called them in our family.

"Swimming along with the Brookses" ~ oh, my.

As to her odd ability to see snatches of the future ~ what she calls "forevisions" or "the monster" and which is something she's been able to do since childhood ~ this ability is pivotal to the story, though a newly developed ability to apparently see into the past becomes even more important.

At the risk of letting slip a spoiler, the past ~ as personified by Cass's fore- and aft-visions ~ plays an important role in the story.  As someone close to her begins to lose the past due to the onset of Alzheimer's disease, Cass begins to recover her own past, which she has hidden from her own conscious mind. 

She describes the symptoms of Alzheimer's in its early stages and its terrible effect on the victim:

...[W]ords [he] had known so well once now eluded him once in awhile, as if they were butterflies and his net had holes in it, flaws in its webbing he didn't know how to fix.

All the while, Cass's past is struggling to come out into the light, both in waking dreams and dreams she has when asleep.  She describes one waking vision where she is talking to someone whose long-ago death affected her deeply:

What's it like there in the land of the dead...?

Like nothing, like floating in warm flowers.

Can you see me?

There's nothing to see except your worries and hopes.

What do they look like?

Knives hovering over you.

The hopes, too?

The hopes especially.

Damn, gives me shivers every time I read that.

The main protagonist and, as I saw it, an unreliable narrator, Cass was annoying in parts ~ the kind of annoying that makes you want to say, "What the heck are you thinking? Why are you doing that? STOP!" and her growth was not delineated in a way that worked well for me. I guess what I'm saying is that I just never quite warmed to her. I loved her twin sons, though ~ Jonah and Morgan, who talk to her and each other like no other 11-year old boys I know but who charmed me and made me wish I'd had twin boys just like them. Other characters were equally charming, some were easy to dislike, and some left me cold. I found the villain ~ or at least the motives for his actions ~ relatively unbelievable, resulting in a lack of strong feeling about him. Not fatal but disappointing, at the very least.

There were some other minor flaws ~ a string or two left hanging at the end (but nothing that presages a sequel), incohesiveness in parts of the storyline due perhaps in part by the illogic of some of the character's motives, and a denoument that was a bit abrupt and somewhat confusing, at least in its chronology. Still, it pulled me in and turned out to be a good read, actually a really good read, and one that to my mind is best savored slowly rather than raced through.  I'm going to look for some of Morrow's earlier novels and am also looking forward to buying a copy of The Diviner's Tale when it comes out next January. I give this 4 stars out of 5.

DISCLAIMER:  This was a free unproofed eGalley, sent to my Kindle by the publisher without strings attached.  The opinions in the review are my own, and I am being paid nothing for my review.  I apologize that I can't give page numbers for the examples set out above, and note that parts of the story may change between now and publication date.

NetGalley, My Kindle's New Friend

The other day, I learned from Valerie Comer over at Little Worlds about NetGalley, a website where publishers can submit unbound galleys of as-yet-unpublished books that early reviewers can request and read as eBooks and then, it is hoped, review.

I signed up right away (because I don't have enough books to read), clicked on a bunch that I thought looked good, and right away got two eBook galleys from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.  I've already started reading them ~ The Janus Stone by Elly Griffiths and The Diviner's Tale by Bradford Morrow (both of which I'm relieved to say are quite good so far).  The Diviner's Tale and The Janus Stone are both due out next January.  I'll be reviewing them here any day now, but here's what the publisher has to say about The Diviner's Tale:

Walking a lonely forested valley on a spring morning in upstate New York, having been hired by a developer to dowse the land, Cassandra Brooks comes upon the shocking vision of a young girl hanged from a tree. When she returns with authorities to the site, the body has vanished, leaving in question Cassandra’s credibility if not her sanity. The next day, on a return visit with the sheriff to have another look, a dazed, mute missing girl emerges from the woods, alive and the very picture of Cassandra’s hanged girl. 

What follows is the narrative of ever-deepening and increasingly bizarre divinations that will lead this gifted young woman, the struggling single mother of twin boys, hurtling toward a past she’d long since thought was behind her. The Diviner’s Tale is at once a journey of self-discovery and an unorthodox murder mystery, a tale of the fantastic and a family chronicle told by an otherwise ordinary woman.

When Cassandra’s dark forebodings take on tangible form, she is forced to confront a life spiraling out of control. And soon she is locked in a mortal chess match with a real-life killer who has haunted her since before she can remember.

And a blurb from Joyce Carol Oates: “Luminous and magical, fraught with suspense, beautifully and subtly rendered—a feat of prose divination.”

Sounds yummy, doesn't it!

Having stayed up late into the night reading The Janus Stone, I'm a bit further into it so can discuss it from my own perspective rather than relying solely on the opinions of the publisher and others.

The Janus Stone begins with Ruth Galloway, an archaelogist, being sent to a dig in Norwich where some old bones, apparently without a skull, have been unearthed from beneath an ancient mound thought to be the remains of the wall of a Roman villa.  Not long after that, in a nearby town, the bones of a child ~ also missing its skull ~ are found buried under the front door step of a Victorian mansion that is being demolished to build a fancy hotel, and Ruth is called in to investigate that grisly find.  Are the bones from a Roman-era ritual sacrifice, or is the killer closer at hand?

The Janus Stone is a follow-up to The Crossing Places, Griffiths’s first mystery, which I confess I have not yet read.  (Based on how good the second book is, I'll be remedying that little oversight as soon as I can.)  I think it would have been better had I read the first book in the series before starting the second.  The relationship between Ruth and the investigating detective D.I. Harry Nelson is a developing one and, I suspect, would have been better understood had I been with them from the inception.  The mystery itself, of course, is fine on its own and, despite not having read the first, I'm really enjoying it. 

Still, if you are new to this author, I urge you to begin at the beginning, with The Crossing Places.  This works out well, since The Janus Stone won't be available for another six months.

My eBooks Have FOUND A HOME! And Roommates. Lots of Roommates.

For awhile now, I've been thinking about getting an eReader.  I don't travel all that often, maybe twice a year, but, whenever I do hit the road (or the skies, as the case may be), I tend to bring a lot of books along.  Last October, when I flew across the country to spend a week with my little sis in North Carolina, I packed seven books, and it wasn't enough!  I had to borrow a couple from her, which could have been a problem, because she buys the books of one author almost exclusively.  Good thing I like Stephen King. 

Seven books ~ even paperbacks ~ take up a lot of real estate in a suitcase, which I usually stuff to capacity with clothes and shoes, plus lotions and hair product and facial cleansers and the like.  (Because you can't buy that kind of stuff in North Carolina or New York City.  Right.)  And my carryon is always filled with camera and lenses and laptop.  Anyway, it occurred to me that an eReader would solve the problem of carrying around so many books, but the question then became: which eReader?  So I did an in-depth study of the three main eReaders on the market today, as well as a few that are not so well-known, and distilled the information down to what is important to me.

The Kindle2, with its 6" eInk screen, allows you to buy books from Amazon.com from anywhere in the world using wifi or 3G, or by downloading to a computer and then sideloading to the Kindle.  (This is important to me because I'm considering moving to a small Central American country so I can afford to retire in a year or so.)  Another nice feature is that you can use it sideways, in landscape mode.  You can't, however, borrow eBooks from the library, which is an issue for me.

The Nook, in addition to being prettier than the Kindle and sporting that fun little color touch screen below the 6" reading screen, allows you to read library eBooks on it.  It's also less expensive than Kindle, if you buy the one with wifi only at $149 ($50 more if you want wifi + 3G), but you can't buy books from Barnes and Noble unless you are actually physically located within the U.S. (or Canada and a few U.S. territories, like Puerto Rico). Also, it doesn't have landscape mode.

The newest 6" Sony Touch doesn't have wifi or 3G.  It also costs more than the least expensive Nook.  The Touch, however, does allow you to read library eBooks on it, and in landscape mode.  It also comes with a stylus (!) with which you can handwrite notes and highlight stuff, plus you can turn the pages with either a button or by swiping the screen with your finger (it has a touch screen).  And you can get it with black borders, which is easier on my eyes and less distracting than white.  But I've heard that the screen has a bit of a glare, which doesn't work well in certaint kinds of light.

All these things I learned online.  Now it was time to try them out IRL (in real life).

I went to B and N to check out the Nook.  I handled it, fiddled with the controls, changed the font sizes and read a few pages of some books on it.  It was pretty, felt solid, and I really liked reading on it.

Then I went to Target and looked at the Kindle2, which was about all I could do with it because it wasn't hooked up.  Physically, it wasn't quite as pretty ~ the white plastic borders around the reading screen were wider, and there was that awkward button keyboard below it, plus it felt lighter and somehow flimsier. 

I didn't get to a Sony store to check out the Touch.  I couldn't find it, even though I used a map, because I got lost in the black hole of a mall parking structure.  It was a nightmarish ten minutes until I found the exit and escaped.

I went home and, for another week, agonized over which eReader to get.  Then one night last week, while I was sound asleep, I had a very realistic dream in which I was agonizing over which eReader to buy.  I woke in the morning tired, with a bit of a headache, and with the certain knowledge that I better stop shilly-shallying and just buy one of the dratted things before I drove myself crazy(er).

So I did a tad bit more online research and, last Saturday, went to a different Target and again looked at the Kindle2.  This time, it was hooked up to play a demo, so I was able to see the font sizes, landscape mode, how the text looked, as well as hold it in my hands.  I dithered for a little while, walked around the electronics department to think about it, then told myself it would be the perfect birthday present to myself.  When I learned that Target has a 90-day return policy with no restocking charge on the Kindle, that clinched it.  I bought it, figuring I could return it after using it for awhile, if it turned out I hated it. 

 

Well, I got it home, charged it, and have hardly put it down ever since except to work and sleep and shower and other things that involve water like washing dishes and brushing my teeth.*  I love it.  I love having dozens of books at my fingertips.  I love the lightness of holding it in bed at night and reading.  I love that I can change the font size depending on how tired my eyes are.  I love the ease with which I can get books on it.

 

I've loaded it with some free books, like Les Miserables, Great Expectations, the Complete Works of Shakespeare, She by H. Rider Haggard, classics I've been meaning to read for a long time, as well as contemporary novels like The Heir by Paul Robertson, Irresistible Forces by Brenda Jackson, and Vigilante by Claude Boucher, that I thought I'd try out, not having read anything by those authors before.  I've purchased three eBooks from Amazon.com:  Kitty and the Midnight Hour by Carrie Vaughn, Blood Rites by Jim Butcher, and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender, and the process was quick and easy.  (Too easy: twice I found I had purchased eBooks that I hadn't intended to buy. Luckily, I was able to reverse the purchases right away.)   I also loaded it with free "samples" of books from Amazon.com that I think I might want to read:  The Help by Kathryn Stockett, Dead in the Family, the new Sookie Stackhouse novel, and World War Z by Max Brooks, among others.

I do mind not being able to download and read library eBooks on it, because even as rich as I am (haha, that was a joke), I can't afford to buy every book I want to read, but for now I've got enough eBooks to last awhile.  We'll see whether, in a month or two, it becomes a major issue.  After all, I can always trade in the Kindle and buy the Nook or Sony Touch for myself, or maybe even keep the Kindle and also buy the other as an early Christmas present for myself.

*  *  *

*You may wonder why I didn't mention not being able to read on the Kindle when driving.  That is because the Kindle will read the eBook to you!  Granted, the voice is mechanical and sometimes pronounces words in a distinctly weird way, and it will never beat a really well-read audiobook (which can be played on the Kindle, as well as both the Nook and the Touch), but it's great if you're right in the middle of a juicy part and have to hop in the car to run a quick errand.  Just click on the "Text-to-Speech" feature and listen while you drive.  Then when you get back from your errand, you can continue reading from where the voice left off.  So far I haven't used that feature, but I think it's pretty cool.