The Firebrand

The Firebrand by Susan Wiggs

400 pages

This is the third novel that I have read by Wiggs that follows the lives of some young women who had been touched by the Great Chicago Fire. This third one follows Lucy, the intellectual of the group, as her father dies and she loses all the assets she has lived with her whole life.

In the Great Fire Lucy saves a baby girl from certain death after a woman dropped the bundle out of the window of a burning hotel. The heroic gesture comes after a rather humiliating night of being rejected by a potential lover (Rand, who unknowingly was married, oops).

Lucy raises the child as her own (with the help of her own mother) and names the child Maggie. Several years later (where our story picks up again) Lucy meets again the married man she had hoped to take as a lover. She needs his help as a banker to extend the loan on her bookshop (named the Firebrand after the moniker earned to Miss Woodhull-Claflin for her views on woman's sufragette) and learns that her daughter Maggie is actually Rand's daughter Christine that he thought died in the Great Fire. Since then he was divorced by Maggie/Christine's birth mother and was living all alone with his scars.

Lucy really does not want to tell him about how she became Maggie's mother but does eventually because she knows that it is the right thing to do. Maggie likes her "new" father, but needs her mother too so Rand eventually "proposes" an arrangement. Literally a marriage. Since Lucy had liked him all along it turns into a difficult kind of 'I-want-to-but don't-want-him-to-think-I-do' situation.

It is sort of cute and awkward and not nearly as risque as some of Wiggs' work.

Heroics for Beginners

Heroics for Beginners by John Moore

256 pages; medium-size print

This book seemed to take me quite awhile to finish - and not because it was bad or anything - but because it was such a parody that there was no urgency to get it done, get it read and make sure the characters live happily ever after.

Everything is mocked in this novel. The overall plot is that of a fairytale with princes and princesses trying to defeat an evil overlord. Once you get reading though you realize the fairytale plot is just a vehicle for the mockery. The prince is named Kevin and the princess is Rebecca or Becky.

The evil overlord took the path of most evil overlords and started out teaching. Giving essay tests and homework over the weekends sure paid off though because this evil Overlord, He Who Must Be Named, Lord Voltmeter has acquired an Ancient Artifact Model 7. With his Fortress of Doom (open Monday through Friday 9 a.m - 4 p.m. including gift shop), Ancient Artifact and a horde of minions Voltmeter is ready to take over the 20 fairytale kingdoms.

Prince Kevin is not exactly the heroic type and so when Princess Rebecca's father choses Prince Logan over Kevin to lead an army to defeat Lord Voltmeter (the prize being Princess Rebecca's hand in marriage) Kevin borrows the Heroics for Beginner book and starts off on his quest. Nothing quite goes right for Kevin starting with Becky wanting to be his comic sidekick and entering the castle through trickery (getting himself hired to clean the castle ducts).

It's cute and funny and worth reading but it didn't drag me into it. Several parts are just ridiculously comical and sarcastically amusing. It's great for a rainy day.

The Secret Swan by Shana Abe

The Secret Swan by Shana Abe

I've read Shana Abe before. My mom accidentally picked up a borrowed copy of "Smoke Thief" before I got to read it. She was bored at first, but then I noticed she couldn't put it down. :) The funny thing was that I asked her about it later and she said it was the most sexually explicit or risque thing she'd ever read. So I had to read it after that shining endorsement. I had to know if my mom's sensibilities were more sheltered than mine. (Of course)

A friend wanted to know -- was this book as risque as those Drakon books? My answer: Yep.

I think a lot of it just has to do with the author's preferences. Yes, some of it is gratuitous but other parts are used to make a point. Since sexuality happens to be a rather large part of life anyway...

The plot of this one is fairly medieval (I must be on an unconscious kick). The main character (whose name escapes me because it was hard for me to say so I always glossed over it: Amalgarin?) a plain girl infatuated with the Tristan (easy enough to remember) is arranged to be married to him. Tristan didn't really want to get married and so leaves immediately after the wedding for France to fight in a war after doing the whole consumation thing.

Eight years later he returns to the castle where he left his young wife to find only one woman remaining - a beautiful girl named Lily (also easy to remember) who claims to be the cousin of his late wife. 'Late' because she died of the plague. Yes, that plague.

They both get sick and there is a lot of personal history backtracking for them. Which is a bit annoying really. Also Tristan seems to be bipolar. A lot. He's all melancholy about his lost wife but is all hyped up about Lily.

It's readable and even enjoyable in parts, but I definitely liked the Drakon series much better. I'll have to try the Mermaid one to see if the pattern holds or if this was a fluke...

Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices from a Medieval Village by Laura Amy Schlitz

Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices from a Medieval Village by Laura Amy Schlitz

This is (technically) another children's book ...

Again... I didn't really realize it would be a children's book. I just knew that I wanted to read the latest Newberry award winning book. I guess I figured that if it fell into the same category as "A Wrinkle in Time" by Madeleine L'Engle then it must be good.

I was a little surpised at how thin it was. I was also surprised at how it is not just one coherent story (or even a story in the general prose form).

They are monologue and dialogue plays written by a librarian for the children in her school classes. She wrote them so that each child would have a starring role for three minutes.

They are poetic and easy to read with nice large print. The tone and vocabulary is all medieval - let's face it, I learned a few new words. Large colorful pictures are on every page and even the margins are colored and have text that explain certain words or aspects of the medieval culture/life. A large colorful map is on the first or second page and instead of locations being labeled the specific characters in the story are shown and labeled.

The tempo of the words is good and interesting -- I was particularly impressed with the two monologues done by the sisters talking about the apprentice boy their father has taken and how one of them must marry the apprentice for the apprentice to inherit the shop. The older daughter likes the boy and wouldn't mind marrying him but thinks the boy would want her sister (younger, prettier) instead. The younger sister thinks the boy will want her older sister (so he doesn't have to wait to inherit) but thinks that it's terrible that one of them will have to marry the boy in the end. The dialogues are completely different but manage to come together for a chorus type of refrain.

Another one that does this is the dialogue between the Jewish boy and the Catholic girl. They are able to put aside their differences for a little while and just be children playing together. The dialogue ends with the children saying together "Almost like she's a Jew;" "Almost like he's a Catholic."

The one down spot I can see - if I were the one performing the plays - would be having to play the role of the beggar child or the child of the villein where you obviously are not well-cared for and have to scrimp to survive. Or maybe that's just me being a girl and wanting the character I embody to be noble somehow...

All in all, it was a beautiful book and very easy to read. It took me maybe forty minutes of carefully thumbing through and looking at the pictures to complete it. :)

The Dragon Prince: A Chinese Beauty & the Beast tale

The Dragon Prince: A Chinese Beauty & the Beast Tale by Laurence Yep


I don't remember exactly why I was looking at Laurence Yep books online. Actually I don't remember why I thought this was a novel and not a children's book either. It might have had something to do with the fact that the very first Yep book I read was "Dragonwings," a YA book.

Regardless I picked it up at the library and was actually surpised to see the thin, little, hard-bound book sitting among all my fat novels. I leafed through it slowly before just sitting down to zip through it. The thing that really caught me wasn't the writing (which was standard children's fairy tale style) but the illustrations. Each drawing was vibrantly colored with plenty of attention to detail. All of the scales on the dragon shimmer with movement. The Chinese people depicted actually look Chinese and not like racially stereotypical Asians with yellow skin and severely slanty eyes.

The writing is passable and even amusing at points. I had a brief attention quirk at the thought of the unfortunate daughters named One, Two, Three... etc. all the way up to Seven. I was also a little confused about why as an author, if you are going to have masses of daughters in a Chinese story not to have eight (which is a lucky number because in Chinese it sounds like the word "prosper"). The antagonist then (Three in this case) should have been named Four. Four in Chinese (四) sounds like a different word: death.

4 stars overall (No death pun intended!) since the illustrations are so gorgeous and the story itself so timeless.

Happy (late) Easter

I got home from working at Target at 12:45 or 1:00 a.m. on Easter morning and sat down to finish the rest of Fatal Voyage. As usual, Kathy Reichs' writing is intense enough that I don't like to read it before bed. (I'm a happy-endings girl at heart.) However I get so worried about the characters... that I just have to know how it ends or I'd spend all night tossing and turning and worrying about what kinds of crazy things Tempe got into while I was sleeping.

So I stayed awake until three getting the details hammered out of who was accusing (stalking and trying to murder) Tempe. I was all proud of myself because I had a vague idea of what was going on... that it wasn't just one person at the heart of the corruption but probably several at the top levels to have had her so stymied at every turn. That's way more than I usually have -- I must be getting used to Reichs' novels. Usually reading her books ends up being like a bus ride in China; it's crazily confusing and you'd best hold on to your seat and when it's all over you end up asking yourself what exactly happened and do I ever want to do that again?

Inevitably I do. I need to know what is going to happen to Tempe (and Ryan). So I've ordered the next book from the library. In this last one Tempe promised to give Andrew Ryan a try which I'd love to see happen.

At the end of Fatal Voyage Tempe has figured out all the twists and dips (and cartwheels) through the plot maze. I was SO worried for her when the unknown assailant knocked her & Boyd (the dog) unconscious... and then she woke up bound and gagged! Lucky thing she had that scalpel in her jacket and that her assailant left his medical bracelet at the scene of the attack so that Ryan and the sheriff could find her...

4.5 stars overall. They are excellent books and keep me coming back for more but they don't really make my favorites list due to the graphic content and the way I am constantly scared for Tempe's life... I am after all a happy endings girl...

Too horrific to read before bed

Fatal Voyage by Kathy Reichs

Pages: 363

Pages Read: 114

I began reading Kathy Reichs' novel "Fatal Voyage" last night. In typical Reichsian fashion the novel jumps in with a scene of gore, a woman flying downwards through the trees naked and bloody severed from the rest of her body at the hips. The woman's position is compared to that of a car ornament.

The next paragraphs try to distance the reader from the carnage while filling in some background details. It's October, warm enough today but it will get colder etc.

It's masterfully done. Shock to reel 'em in and then distance to make them curious enough to stay. I started reading the Kathy Reichs novels after I fell in love with the Fox TV series "Bones" starring David Boreanaz and Emily Deschanel. I think I mostly wanted to find out who they had based Booth's character off of ...

The Temperance Brennan of the novels is nothing like the Temperance Brennan in the television series except for the shared name and occupation. Whereas TV's Dr. Brennan is completely naive or oblivious about some things (most notably pop culture), the novel's Tempe is well-studied on a range of different topics, married and separated and has a whole host of family, including a daughter, that she worries about in every book.

At 113 pages in several things have happened. The main plot has been introduced - a fatal airplane crash involving over 80 people - and Detective Andrew Ryan has come down to North Carolina to help investigate since his longtime partner, Jean Bertrand, was on that plane transporting a prisoner. Tempe has been sorting through bones and body parts, distancing herself from Ryan and poking into things that would probably be safer unpoked - aka normal Tempe behavior.

In the woods of the crash site Tempe finds a foot being gnawed on by coyotes and after scaring them off (with Ryan's help of course) Tempe tags it to the plane crash. After examining it later, the foot doesn't seem to fit with any of the plane crash victims listed on the manifest. So Tempe does her usual thing and pokes around. Not long after that an anonymous complaint was filed against her for mishandling evidence and trespassing and she is summarily fired. This just pisses her off and makes her dig deeper to find out the truth of who is accusing her and what does it have to do with the weird severed foot she found?

I'm typically a happy-ending reader and I did not want to face the idea of going to bed with all that blood and gore at the forefront of my thoughts... So I picked up a new manga called Sorcerers & Secretaries by Amy Kim Ganter.

The pages aren't numbered (and I'd rather not bother to count them) but I'm on Chapter Six and have perhaps twenty pages left to read.

The premise here is that Nicole is a secretary who writes and dreams of a fantastical fairy tale other world while living, working and studying in our boring dreary one.

She guards her dream log against discovery while fending off the catty drama of a "friend," avoiding a boy who'd like to be more than just "friends" and getting through her day-to-day life.

The situation takes a turn for the comical when the boy, who is normally pretty smooth, shows himself to be goofily infatutated with Nicole. Nicole brushes off all his attempts with a stoic cold shoulder and we don't even find out that she likes him until they have had several uninspiring encounters. All his flirting with other girls doesn't seem to show Nicole how desirable he is but that he doesn't care for Nicole in particular. So Nicole is wary of his attentions but it just makes Josh try harder.

The drawings are mediocre and even a little childish looking and I hope the plot warms up soon. I'm attracted to the idea of the plot but there's something about it that is not as satisfying as other manga (even American manga) that I have read. Perhaps it's not moving fast enough to keep my attention or well-fleshed out enough to be realistic. I'm not positive on that score yet so I'll have to get it figured when I have finished with this first book. Maybe once I'm into the second book I'll be hooked?