Bruiser by Neal Shusterman

Tennyson is very concerned when his sister, Bronte, starts a new project, in the form of social rehab of a loner, Bruiser, who looks like he's descended from the Hulk. Tennyson feels their home life is already complicated enough with their parents separating. But Tennyson gets to know Bruiser and realizes that he's an okay guy, if a little wierd. He and Bronte figure out that Bruiser has a secret as terrible in practice as it is wonderful in the abstract. They try to help him, but sometimes the person in the mirror needs help the most.

"Bruiser" is told from four persectives, and I was impressed with how convincing each of the voices were. I loved the Special Thing Bruiser could do, which I won't describe here. It was cool and very believable, though.

I also loved the theme of how pain is a necessary part of life, and it reminded me a bit of "The Giver" in that way. I'll just say that Bruiser changes a lot of things for the people he cares about, and sometimes protecting someone isn't in their best interests.

Thanks to Around the World Blogs for lending me this ARC. The book was released in June, and the paperback will come out in April. Definately worth reading and nothing was out of place. I highly recommend.
Glutton for Punishment?

Books, Schmooks.

I keep meaning to blog about the books I've read lately, but can't seem to get to it. So, quickly now, here's the books I read in March that were worthwhile. Some information below might be considered mid-book spoilers, but no endings or magnificent twists are revealed.




My top book pick for this past month: The Wood WifeMy quick search for the cover again led me to Amazon. You can't really click to read more. I'm not sure why they don't make it easier to get a quality file of the cover. Don't they want people to know what they're looking for?


Anyway, here's the best of what I read, all checked out from the library, with one exception, noted below.
The Kingdom of Ohio by Matthew Flaming In the late 1800s, a young man tries to help a young woman who mysteriously appears near the subways in NYC that he is helping to build. He helps her track down her previous tutor, Mr. Tesla, who can't remember her, but is smart enough to understand that the information she has will make time travel possible. Very good read.

Leviathan by Scott Westerfield Very fun YA steampunk. A girl masquerades as a boy so she can join the Royal Air Force on board a dirigible that's a living, hydrogen breathing, genetically modified whale. A young prince, Alex, recently orphaned when his parents, the archduke Ferdinand and his wife are murdered, must flee before he is killed too. They meet when the Leviathan is damaged near Alex's hiding place. Can any agreement be reached between the Darwinists, resposible for the Leviathan, and the Clankers that build fantastic, morally responsible machines. (Think giant walkers like in Star Wars with the Eewoks.) My nine year old son LOVED it, also. Recommended for ages 12+ on Amazon, but what do they know? ;)

The Giant's House by Elizabeth McCracken This book really explains why librarians are such an odd lot;) (That's for you Teresa, with love) A beautiful love story that really didn't make sense for me to like, because it's weird for an adult to fall in love with a young man 12 years younger than herself, then throw in that the young man is a giant (really, he had an unrelenting pituitary gland). The woman librarian was such a lonely person, so afraid to be unloved. I highly recommend this book.

The Golden Apples by Eudora Welty Ahhh/Groan! This was an academic exercise. I read 'One Writer's Life' and 'The Optimist's Daughter' in late February or early March, and just couldn't find the time to finish this one. This I can say: I read half the short stories and feel that my writing is less confusing by comparison. I was never sure that I was making the right assumptions or understanding what she was implying. Amazing dialogue. Amazing characters. But my brain hurts, and I'm trying to find comparable novels, so I moved on. I will definately be back.

The Secret Year by Jennifer Hubbard Read this this afternoon. A boy deals mourns the girl he'd secretly had a relationship with for a year after she dies. I'd flipped through it pretty heavily in the bookstore, but wasn't impressed. But I'd already requested it at the library and it came in, so I checked it out. I intended to read just the first chapter, as part of my personal study of opening scenes, but got hooked. On the scale of idealistic versus realistic, this was heavily weighted for realism (sex, drinking, a few instances of language) but I liked it. You are warned. I think the most surprising thing for me was that I sympathized with the main character so much. I didn't expect to after flipping through it and reading a few chunks.

Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame Smith I saw the book trailer and then saw it at Sam's Club and bought it, on IMPULSE. I know. Book trailers aren't supposed to work. And I didn't realize that on the back cover, Abe is holding a severed head behind his back. I'm two thirds through and it's good. Not a character-driven story, but interesting and well-written. 

The Wood Wife by Terri Windling I got this book as part of my search for comp novels and loved it. It reminded me of The Forests of the Heart, by Charles DeLint, but much more intimate. A writer, Maggie, goes to live in the mountains of Arizona when a writer that she'd corresponded with dies and leaves her his house. She discovers that the land is more alive than she could have guessed when the shapeshifters and shaman and mages of the mythic world reveal themselves to her. Loved it, loved it. Great adult fantasy, not much language at all. I think the 'F' word was there, but I'm not sure, so it definately wasn't over-the-top.

Happy reading! Anybody else read any of these? Anything to add? I know I glossed over these, but I wanted to share and didn't think I would get to them if I made myself blog about them separately.
Glutton for Punishment?

Bag o' Books

Anything is cute and snappy with the o' in it, right?

Exhibit A

I go to my tiny local library twice a week and write while my little guy is in preschool, so I'm not tempted to do the dishes. Haha! Like that would EVER happen.

This has been fantastic because now I tend to get my books back on time and thus pay less fines ( I try to look at fines as a charitable donation to support the book-reading public, but somehow fines still feel punitive).

I've gotten a bit out of control. I have a whopping 50 books out right now. I know. Before you tell me I'm a book hoarder, I will say that probably 30-35 of them are books for my kids (we made a pilgramage to the downtown library recently). I will be sad to see some of them go back- especially the picture book 'Captain Flinn and the Pirate Dinosaurs' by Giles Andreae. And some are for my hubby. I find it easier to have one account where all of the books I have sworn to protect and return are listed in one place.

Our library has a limit of sixty books and I have finally met that number! Fifty out plus ten waiting on the requested shelf. (I was reading up on agents a few days ago and pulled up my library account and requested a bunch of the agents' favorite books. These books tend to be high quality, but not all of them are according to my taste. So I won't read all of them, but it's informative, nonetheless.) If I was one day late per book that would cost $12.00. That's very charitable.

I'm still slogging through 'Jonathon Strange and Mr. Norrel' by Susanna Clark, studying the dialogue. I love the humorous footnotes, but, man, it's long. I could have finished ten other books in the time I've been sipping away at this one.

I've been reading "Making the Perfect Pitch" by Katharine Sands (good, but not necessary if you read agent blogs) and am excited about starting 'Soulless' by Gail Carriger (never read steampunk before, unless you count 20,000 leagues) and 'The Godfather of Kathmandu' by John Burdett (which I picked out for my hubby but it looks really interesting and I didn't see any f-bombs when I thumbed through it, so we'll see). Hubby is slogging through HP7 and I'll have plenty of time to read it before he starts if I cheat on 'JS and MR. N'.

Update- Godfather of Kathmandu, really interesting, engaging narrator who is a detective/consigliere for a Thai mob boss and a devout (really) Buddhist. He spends a fair amount of time in the seedy parts of town investigating a murder of someone with a fondness for working girls. Too bad for me. I'd suggest passing if you're squeamish about mentions of sexual practices (no in the room sex scenes) and what sounds like a very honest rendering of what that life is like. What I read was so very funny and informative (about Buddhism and Thai culture, etc.). Over the line for my tastes, though. 

I used to never read more than one book at a time, but I don't stay up until three am to finish something if I'm dabbling in multiple books, so it's kind of freeing. I guess I have no choice but to return some picture books. The kids'll never know why!

Anybody else excited about the third "Hunger Games" book? The cover is very blue. I was surprised that there was no splash of yellow on it, but what do I know? You can check out the Scholastic blog for more details and to see all the covers side by side. I highly recommend; I stayed up really late to read these books, and so did hubby.

Okay, more on my mind, but I'll save it for later. Bye for now!
Glutton for Punishment?

Conflict in 'Forests of the Heart' by Charles de Lint

We've all read "Grab the Reader by the Throat" and "Conflict on Every Page!" And we all bow to this bit of wisdom: you must force your reader to stay awake all night, even though they have to get up for work at 6 am the next morning. You must thrill them, author. You must take control of their minds and FORCE them to read on! Once they put the book down, they may not return!.

I just read a book that defies those maxims-- or does it?

Cool cover, isn't it?

Forests of the Heart by Charles de Lint starts out a bit slow. The opening scene is of a girl, Bettina, asking her grandmother why her mother and sister doesn't believe the old stories--stories of spiritwalking, coyotes giving dubious advice, and the place in between here and the spirit world. No one dies, and the Abuela and Bettina certainly understand each other. But it invites the reader to be part of a relationship where the old spirits are real and dangerous, not because they're bad, but because they are concerned with the land as much as about the people. That's intriguing to me.

De Lint takes a good hundred pages to warm us up, pages where we start to understand the rules of his magic, the myths that turn out to be real. To set the characters into place. And I liked it. I'm sure books like this supply the reservations with half of their tourists, hoping to see a great spirit-walker in the flesh, some ancient-eyed Indio who can turn into a hawk or a spider. It makes me wish that we had our myths back, that we could all believe in the old ways.

But, a thriller it was not. The major conflict is not revealed until the book is about 1/3 through. So it was a little bit of a stretch to trust the author that something will, in fact, happen.

The reader's attention is kept by the many small conflicts- Hunter's record store isn't doing well. He's going to have to let someone go, but who? Miki, the talented Celtic musician who's supporting her brother? And Miki and her brother, Donal, are fighting- he's drinking himself into the grave just like their father did, always angry about the wrongs society has done him and no girl will give him a decent chance. It's too bad he and Ellie, a talented sculptor broke up. And on and on.

Forests of the Heart sat on my kitchen table with three or four other books for about two weeks. I read a few pages at every meal. Some days I didn't get to it at all. But scene by scene I cared a little more and I finished it and loved it. So if you're trying to understand what agents mean about coflict on every page, I'd recommend this book. It's a great example of subtle conflict that works.
Glutton for Punishment?

A Blind Eye

I'm 6 years behind, but I just finished "The Time Traveler's Wife" by Audrey Niffenegger.
My sister said the movie wasn't great, but the trailer explains the premise of the book pretty well.



This is less a book review, more of a book club discussion with myself. This book was really amazing...but I have mixed feelings. When you start to write, you start to understand why shows have so much murder and fights and sex. It's entertaining. That's what writers and actors do. They take us to the highest highs and the lowest lows and let us experience situations without having to live with the consequences. I think that can be good and bad. It depends.

Like many avid readers, I disappear into books. I hear nothing, see nothing but the story. And when I pause a story, it's disorienting, so I like to read books all the way through, regardless of the number of pages. But even when I'm done, I get echoes of scenes in my head. So when I read a book where a child dies, I remember how that affected the other characters and hug my kids a little tighter. If the story involves lost love, my gratitude for my husband is renewed.

'The Time  Traveler's Wife' was beautiful. When I was done, I held my children. I kissed my husband. And I thought about who we are becoming. What kind of a person he will be in twenty years? Who will I be? I hope that we will be better than we are now.

But some echoes leave me feeling icky. I wish that there wasn't the scene where Henry is alone with himself in his bedroom and his dad walks in. Thankfully, the writing was vague. Throughout the book, the reader is present in the bedroom with Henry and Clare, but I do not think that the writing was meant to arouse as much as it was to explain how important sex was in the lives of these characters. It was a force of bonding, reconciliation, healing, 'a means to an end' for Clare, and a type of gravity for Henry. Is it not so important in all of our lives?

Do those scenes ruin the book for me? My brain thinks that it should have, yet I still felt uplifted. I'm not sure how that works. If you have characters having sex before they're married, but they've already met when he's thirty-something and they know they're going to get married, is it still as bad? And how much information is TMI?

I really liked the idea that if we could know who our spouses were going to become, we wouldn't mind the wait. So, I'm glad I read most of it. How about you?
Glutton for Punishment?

The Last Apprentice

The Last Apprentice Series by Joseph Delaney

I haven't read the whole series- just the first four books-which right there tells you that these are a great read. I might read one book in an okay series, but not two, and certainly not four.

Tom Ward is the seventh son of a seventh son with some odd talents like seeing the dead. His parents have run out of money to pay for a more "mainstream" apprenticeship, so Tom is sent to the Spook to learn the art of fighting witches, warlocks, and other evil creatures that make life hard for folks in the County. It is lonely work, and some of it is scary, but Tom is a natural. He soon meets a girl in pointy shoes (the exact kind of girl in the exact kind of shoes that the Spook warned him to stay away from!) and struggles with if she is a benign witch or a malevolent one. Tom can't trust her...but there's something about her that makes him want to.

The Last Apprentice has the most innocent 'romance' I've seen in a recent series- it's very believable and doesn't push kids into adult situations. There's no mention of kissing until Alice's cousin tries to entrall Tom in a later book.

It reads a little darker than early Harry Potter, but is on par with the later ones- there are boggarts and witches, spirits and demons, and Tom spends a lot of time digging pits and lining them with his iron and salt mixture to trap them.

There's an interesting theme about the role of a Spook versus the role of a priest. In the beginning books, Tom seems to think that the priests just pray and aren't active enough in their fight against evil, but his tone changes as he becomes more experienced. I don't know how that will turn out, but the Spook respects his brother the priest, though the reverse is not true. 

Tom does make a lot of poor decisions, but some young men do *wink*, so it's not unbelievable. I'm not prone to nightmares, and didn't find the images particularily scary, but a lot of other reviewers have. I will wait until my son is at least 12 to introduce him to Tom Ward, but I'm sure they'll be good friends!  
Glutton for Punishment?

A Girl Can Dream

I pull out my slim, purse-sized, indestructable (even if I drop it in a sink full of dish water or slam it in the trunk of my car. Yes, I destroyed phones in those ways.) reading device. Sweet. It’s fully charged after only half an hour. Or perhaps it charges itself without being plugged in...

I browse a list of books (similar to the one I just finished) on my NetBoox account (only $19.99 a month. Awesome dream!)

Still browsing. Nah. I'm tired of reading space opera and wizards. I want something romantical.

Something paranormal. In ‘Books I’ve Previously Enjoyed’, I find one that I actually enjoyed. I tap “Something Like This, But Different”.

This one’s about Lara, a girl who is kidnapped and taken back to the Garden of Eden. When she runs away and is detained by FBI agent David Hatton, she finds love and the strength to endure the pain of mortality.

Hey…that’s my book! Wow. My first novel. It did pretty well, too. It sure is nice that it will be in eprint until the end of time. Ahh, nostalgia.

I'll check out "People You Know Have Read". My sister recommends this one, and it’s rated PG-13. For nudity…that could mean anything. Let’s look-there’s a scene where she is in an accident and the doctors cut her clothes off to save her life. That’s sounds fine. Only 200 people have read it, but they’ve rated it four and a half worms, too. I wonder if they've all read the book. I wish somebody would figure out how to stop inflated reviews (hint, hint. I don't have a clue about how you'd do that, though.)

I’ll preview the first chapter. Hmm. Why is she doing that? Ahh, now I see…but what about her father and the ostrich farm? This is interesting and well-written, thus far. I’ll take it.

A Day Later…

Wow. That was a great book. I’d like to own that. I’ll just click here, pay the $3.99 to get my hard copy sent and then I can read it whenever I want.

And I’m putting a star next to it so my other sister and my friends will see that I read it and loved it. Add a few lines to recommend it, and I'm done.

*Fog clears. Kelly blinks in bright sunlight*

It was only a dream?

That sounds pretty easy, doesn't it, Sony/Amazon/Netflix/Barnes and Noble?

Heck, if Google could give me this experience, I might not mind them taking over the world.

What's your techno-dream?

This article from "Backspace" (retelling the 1996 cut of book supply drivers intimately familiar with their routes and the resulting drops in sales and pressure on the remaining books) is what prompted my dream. The great thing is that people will be their own market specialists in the near future- if Amazon hasn't done that already.

Glutton for Punishment?