Far better, and more plausible, a book than most of her offerings. I enjoy them like a big, greasy bucket of popcorn, but like popcorn, there is often dissatisfaction or even disgust following rapid consumption. That said? No jarring anachronisms hopped out of this book and beat me over the head, so that makes it one of the best books of hers that I have ever read.

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So, this book was the sequel to Empress by Karen Miller, which I found very surprising. The first book introduced us to Hekat, who quickly became apparent as the villain of the trilogy’s arc. I kept reading, despite disliking Hekat, in the hopes that someone–anyone!–would give her what was coming to her.

The second book in the series introduces us to Hekat’s foil–the Princess Rhiann–and it tickled me a little that Rhiann doesn’t actually start out all that likable. I’d read this as a criticism of the book, but I think it’s a deliberate ploy on the part of the author. Rhiann really does grow and change and mature as the book progresses, and if she’d started out perfect (gag) the story would be substantially less interesting.

So this book sets up what should be a fascinating confrontation between Hekat and her scorpion god (really a sacrifice-fueled demon) and Rhiann and her kinder, gentler (pseudo-Christian, probably real if somewhat absent) god. There’s a lot going on here, under the surface, about religion and the nature of faith, and I’m very curious to see how it plays out in book three.

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My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Kristof has long been one of my favorite columnists at the NYT, and many chapters in this book are expansions of editorials he’s written for them over the years. Kristof’s view of the world and how to make it better isn’t knee-jerk liberalism. He offers solutions that are practical and even, at times, gritty. He points the finger of blame at governments and cultures, but cautions against top-down imposition of solutions from the West. Instead, he tells the stories of the women he’s encountered and makes it impossible to discount the problem as too large to address. The reader is filled with hope, because every 10.00 donated or invested by the reader could go to help THAT woman improve her lot, and as a result, her country, and in turn the world. This is the manual, the handbook, for the Girl Effect, and they couldn’t ask for a better one.

Highly recommended.

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My rating: 1 of 5 stars
I’ve been reading more YA since I have been in law school. It’s digestible, undemanding, and lately has had a lot of promising titles in genre fiction. I have avoided the monster of the genre, since there’s a lot about Twilight I know beforehand that I’ll find objectionable. I had hoped that Fallen would be different.

But it’s really not.

This was my first YA romance, and I found it really disturbing. The main character is flat, dimensionless–probably so that young women readers can project themselves onto her more completely. She’s just a placeholder for both the author and the reader to get a little wish-fulfillment fix, since Luce can be just like ~anyone~ since she’s not at all REAL. The love interests are a little more real, but that ends up being a bad thing. Luce is obsessed with one of them, to the point that even though he’s a raging jerk to her she LOVES him from about page 100 on. For no reason. Though they’ve had no positive interactions. If literature teaches us how to act, and I believe that it does, then this book is teaching every young woman who reads it that social abuse is a marker that someone is your SOULMATE. UGH.

The idea was generally good. The execution leaves a lot to be desired. I suspect I won’t pick up book two, even if it has a really gorgeous cover…

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My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is one of my very favorite comfort books. It’s a retelling of the French Revolution, but with magic, and it’s really well done on top of that. Lots of authors, in writing in historical or historically-based settings (I’m looking at you, Phillipa Gregory…) cheat on making their main characters likable by setting aside any and all inconvenient beliefs of the day. The hero or heroine is the Lone Voice of Morality, somehow living in a culture and never adopting ANY of its beliefs that might be unpalatable to a modern reader. Paula Volsky resists that urge, and Eliste is exactly a product of her upbringing and her culture. The lessons it takes to bring her around, to help her grow up, are the central story of the book. It’s a story that couldn’t be told if Eliste were already in possession of modern morality; it would be a BORING story.

But in this case, we get to watch this character change and grow as her refined society falls apart, crushed by the weight of its inherent injustice. It’s a fascinating rendering. Highly recommended.

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My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is pretty much exactly the kind of book I expected Richard Castle to write. It’s funny, it’s short, and it has many sentences that start with “And.” It also has more name dropping of consumer items–perfume, booze, etc–than any book I’ve read in recent memory.

That said, this book was an incredibly fast read, and I enjoyed the whole thing. It did prompt me to wonder, though, if I were Kate Beckett, and I read this book, how on earth would I face Richard Castle at work the next day? It’s like finding out your work buddy writes slash about you that he posts on the Internet.

I’m not sure I would recommend anyone buy it, but to check out from the library or borrow from a friend? Sure!

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My rating: 5 of 5 stars
At last, I found books that made me really understand the scope and depth of Bujold’s talent as an author.

This series did a lot of things right by me. It rejected the standard (tired) fantasy genre tropes right and left to tell a genuinely moving story about a small group of people committed to changing the world. There are no kingdoms. No nobility. No boy or girl with a special destiny or super-secret pedigree of awesomeness. It’s not set in a medieval, white European setting. In short, it’s a story created and told whole cloth, without any of the dumb, lazy shorthand that other authors rely on to give world-building short shrift. There’s magic, but characters work out the particulars of it with actually scientific experiments. It’s really quite something, and I was surprised nearly at every turn when Bujold rejected the standard fantasy trope to do something different.

The first book in the series is a romance, but the three novels after are post-consummation, and the characters have objectives and plans to change the world for the better. Book Four doesn’t bring us fully to the new world our characters want to create, but like the real world, we see glimmers of hope in the changes they are successful in bringing about.

I can’t recommend this enough to people who like the genre.

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