Speed-Reading Book Nerd Reviews

Fall of Light

By Nina Kiriki Hoffman.

This is a sequel (of sorts) to A Fistful of Sky. Gypsum's not in it, but it features other LaZelle family members. This book's about Opal, who works as a makeup artist in the movies, particularly monster ones. Her magical talent involves illusion, and isn't terribly major beyond the use of disguise and light. Works great at work, though :) Opal's current job is a horror movie being shot in a small town in Oregon about a dark god, an evil coven, and two sisters. She exclusively works for the guy playing the Dark God, Corvus Weather. I had a crush on Corvus reading this and am not ashamed to admit it.

Opal has been in love with Corvus since the last movie they worked on together, and clearly he likes her back. But their budding relationship has a giant wrench thrown into it when (possibly/probably due to Opal using magic to create the Dark God's makeup job) Corvus starts being possessed by some actual dark god during the filming of the movie. The god (who later names himself as Phrixos) seems to be a local legend, and was influencing the local-girl screenwriter to write about him. He also thinks Opal's his handmaiden, and he doesn't mind taking on a few others. His intentions are ambiguous at best and downright suspicious at worst, but they seem to include acquiring more worshippers and getting his message out via the horror movie.

And Opal is pretty well stumped as to what to do. She's the only magical one on site to deal with this, but she's not a major talent and thwarting a god for good is clearly beyond her capacity. (No Anita Blake "suddenly we level up" moments happen here.*) Contacting her family for help doesn't do a whole lot**, and her attempts at getting her boyfriend to resurface only work for so long, and if the god consents to it.  As more of the cast and crew clue in as to what is going on, they look to her for help and protection, and I rather enjoyed how this book doesn't make too much pretense to pretending that nothing's going on and everything's perfectly normal. Let's just go with people accepting that Something Weird Is Going On and deal with it.***

Anyway, on her own and stumped, Opal realizes that she can't stay Ms. Nice Girl Handmaiden the way that she's been doing. When she came into her powers, Opal went into an evil/manipulative stage of life when dealing with men, and after learning the hard way, she locked that part of herself away. I was kind of reminded of A Fistful Of Sky in how Gypsum had to deal with the dark side of life when Opal had to reconnect with her dark side, and how they had conversations as to what was going on and how they were going to handle things. (There's a bit too many inner-naval-gazing moments towards the end that slow up the action, but at least they were interesting to read.)

In short: I was pretty well hypnotized by this book, sped through it as soon as possible, and then started rereading the darn thing again the second I finished it. 

There is, however, one major problem, and that's the ending. The book's around 305 pages, and around page 260-ish or so I started thinking, "Oh shit, this plot is NOT going to wrap up by the end of the book, is it?" And the more I read the more I was losing faith that it would. In the end it...doesn't quite. Well, it comes to an interesting stop, but there's loose ends aplenty hanging out in the breeze and I REALLY REALLY WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS AFTER THIS.**** I agree with this review in that I feel like this plot desperately needs a sequel, and I hope to god there is one forthcoming. (The Internets did not help me find this out.) But I suspect there isn't one and this is all we get, and the next LaZelle book, should it ever exist, will feature Flint or someone else rather than what just happened in Opal's world. DAMMIT.

But for sheer hypnotism factor, I have to give this book four stars. But if the ending had been more final, it'd be a higher number than that.

Comfort Food

By Kate Jacobs.

Gus Simpson (for the record, she's a girl) is the host of Cooking With Gusto!, a cooking show about how to put on parties and have a good time. Gus is a self-taught girl and a hit...or at least, she was in the past. Now she's turning 50, her ratings are down, budgets are being cut, and her show is about to get canceled. She's given one last shot at saving it, as long as she comes up with some gimmicks.

"He'd heard that all the well-known cooking personalities were retooling their programs on all the cable channels: Nigella Lawson was doing a thirteen-episode series dedicated to the barbecue, that most un-English of meals, and while wearing designer tankinis, no less. Gus's longtime rival, the incomparable Barefoot Contessa, was turning her program into a musical, set to lyric and score."

Gus takes finding out that her career's thisclose from being flushed down the toilet about as well as you'd expect--unthrilled, but gives it a last gasp anyway. In Gus's case, the gimmick chosen is live show + NBA star guests. The latter get snowed in, forcing Gus to throw her on-air party on the fly by dragging her daughters Aimee and Sabrina, best friend Hannah, and business associate/daughter's ex Theo onto the show (none of them cook). Her boss also forces his new paramour, former Miss Spain-turned-cooking-show-host Carmen Vega, onto the show.

The live show turns out to be a lot of fun to watch...which leads to Cooking with Gusto! being canceled in favor of a seven-episode run of a new show with Gus and Carmen as co-hosts, and Gus's extended family and friends being forced into every episode. Hannah, a disgraced tennis star who's been hiding from the media ever since, isn't too thrilled with this. And Theo's still pining for the engaged-again Sabrina, who has a short attention span when it comes to men and engagements. As for Carmen, All About Eve much? Carmen is genuinely into cooking and good at it, but she is very clear about where her ambitions lie.

Between the "SaTheo" shippers, Carmen's fans, Gus's fans, the mystery of Hannah showing up on the show, and the...interesting...things that happen when live on the air (i.e. accidental fire and ambush octopus), the new show gets high ratings for being a giant trainwreck that everyone loves to watch. But if the show keeps up, Carmen and Gus may very well kill each other. So the network forces the entire cast to go on a retreat together.

Uh-oh.

Plusses: I liked how Carmen was shown both in bad and good lights. She's got naked ambition, which makes her rather unpleasant to deal with at times. But she is genuinely wanting to do a good job and come through in the end, which I appreciated. I enjoyed reading about the making of the show, particularly how good of a job the hosts were doing AND the chaotic elements that got thrown in. I found myself liking Hannah, particularly the scenes where she was interacting with Carmen, Troy, or Priya. I enjoyed reading the book as a whole and experiencing the world of food TV from "behind the scenes", and how Gus stepped up to the plate on trying to roll with the times.I was definitely entertained.

Now for the minuses: to be honest, I'd say that most of the characters here don't come off as particularly well-developed. Specifically Gus's daughters, though this would apply on some level to pretty much everyone. Sabrina in particular is a shallow Runaway Bride hottie that you really don't feel any sympathy for. I kind of have to give some points to the author for making her ending not what you'd expect*, but I don't feel like it really helped develop her character or make her more sympathetic either. I am also kind of baffled why the author felt like she had to throw in Priya kind of after the fact as a character. Oliver as a love interest for Gus kind of comes out of the blue and doesn't feel particularly natural either--it almost felt like we had more introduction to him as a love interest for Aimee at first. I think I had a hard time grasping his character, given the two sides of him (former Wall Streeter vs. laid back chef), the two didn't seem to integrate for me. I probably enjoyed Hannah and Troy the most, followed by Gus and Carmen. And the ending is a little off for me. One element of it came out of the blue**, and some things are left wide open/unclarified with regards to a few characters***

But in the end, did I enjoy reading this book? I did. Maybe a little bit more than the knitting books the author wrote, even. So, four stars.

Casting Spells

By Barbara Bretton.

Chloe Hobbs is the de facto mayor/protector of the town of Sugar Maple, Vermont, as well as the owner of a online-famous yarn shop. Unbeknownst to the rest of the world, Sugar Maple is a refuge for shapeshifters, fae, vampires, sorcerers, and anyone else who had to make a break for it out of Salem back in the bad old days. Chloe's ancesstress Aerynn (kr8tiv spelling, sigh) cast a massive protective spell on the place preventing death from happening in the area, or Muggles picking up on what was going on, as long as a female descendant of hers is around to continue the line.

Problem is:

1. Chloe's sorcerer mom married a human and Chloe has NEVER come into magical powers (though it's presumed she will when she falls in love).
2. At age 30, Chloe has yet to find a suitable magical babydaddy, and the spell is starting to weaken after 30 years of no heir being produced yet. And her best friend's mom has had about enough and has decided to make a move to take over the town and move it into the fairy mists forever if Chloe can't get it done. Chloe also needs to track down the Hobbs family Book of Spells, which she can't do without magic. Talk about matchmaking PRESSURE there.

And sure enough, death has started to happen in Sugar Maple, when a visitor named Suzanne falls through the ice. Detective Luke MacKenzie of the Boston PD has been wanting a transfer out since his divorce, plus Suzanne was a friend of his, and he is pleased to be assigned to be the temporary police force in Sugar Maple for six months while this gets investigated (Suzanne had a high-powered married boyfriend).

Sugar Maple has no police (no need of any), and they don't have any death certificates except for Chloe's father, and the entire town is freaked out that a Muggle is going to figure out what's going on. Chloe, as de facto mayor, has to deal with Luke...and it's literal sparks at first sight. Much as she's tried to make herself interested in her best friend Gunnar, she feels no sparks. But the girl's got all kinds of pressure on her to mate with someone magical ASAP, and while a human might spark off her powers*, that doesn't mean she has to settle down with one, right? Meanwhile, Gunnar's twin Dane seems to be sucking him dry, and their mother is determined to get the Book of Spells for herself.

* note: this is a later spoiler in the book, but you can figure out that's what's going on.

I had a lot of fun reading this book, and enjoyed the worldbuilding. The stakes are pretty high, which I thought was good, and not everyone gets out unscathed. Luke's a pretty smart guy and I enjoyed his observations. I feel like he had to be a wee bit dumbed down at times to not pick up on things occasionally, but at least the author put in some rationalizations for him not doing so. And I enjoyed his random knowledge of banshees and how Salem, Mass. is laid out. Heh. The narration is good on both sides, and I enjoyed the characters. I hear there's a sequel, so I'll keep an eye out. Four stars.

The Actor and the Housewife

By Shannon Hale.

(Note: check below the spoiler cut for the starred remarks relating to the plot details I can't spoil.)

It's pretty easy to figure out that a book about the best friendship of a Mormon housewife/mother of four and an famous British movie star is...well, most likely based on a fantasy of the Mormon author and Colin Firth. (I say this having read up on the book, she admits that's where the idea came from and then things changed from there.) On the one hand, it seems kind of embarrassing to me to take that idea and run with it and make it into a novel. On the other hand, I spotted this book and picked it up over the other two I had originally come in that day to buy, so what does that say about me? That despite myself, the subject matter is something that a lot of us, even a blackhearted bitch like myself, are going to be curious about. And I wondered: can this be believable? Is it going to be like watching a Sandra Bullock movie, because that woman can make me buy any silly plot (i.e. While You Were Sleeping), or will I come out of this rolling my eyes in disgust?

Well, for the most part, I ended up buying it. Go figure.

The plot: Mormon, Utah-based housewife/mother of 3.5 Becky Jack writes the occasional screenplay in her spare time, and she's miraculously managed to sell one without an agent. (We'll get back to this later.) While in L.A., she meets and insults her favorite hottie actor, Felix Callahan. They end up hanging out and finding out that the two of them have the exact same caustic insulting humor. (We find out later in the book that Becky's family constantly roast each other with insults in a game called "Fun for Some." Heh.) They hit it off, and much to everyone's surprise, end up carrying on a mostly-phone-based best friendship. Yes, both of them are happily married. Yes, their spouses have concerns (which are covered in the book), but mostly the spouses deal with it pretty gracefully. Despite the "what if you met your favorite actor and he adores you, OMG!"-sounding plot, what this really morphs into is the old When Harry Met Sally question of "Can men and women really be friends, even/especially if they are happily married to other people?"*

I'm just going to talk about certain elements of the book separately:

Realism factor: Becky manages to sell multiple screenplays without an agent, living in Utah, and having very little in the way of connections to acting/the movie industry. Um, what? I get annoyed at this "fantasy artist" sort of thing (see Born in Fire/Born in Shame reviews for that bitching), and this is pretty dang bad. Actually, even the screenplay thing isn't so bad as the fact that Becky gets asked to star in her own screenplay opposite Felix, when not only is she not an actress, she has little to no acting experience. Dear God, no, I can't buy this worth a damn. It's such a bad setup to force her to have to kiss Felix, go on Oprah, and run into some tabloid trouble. Which I guess all of the above are inevitable things that would need to be covered in this sort of book, but dammit, I wish it was more believable.

I bet you're thinking, "Um, how WOULD you make this more believable?" Uh, have Becky have an agent? Have her work on screenplays more than she does (to be fair, she steps up her game at the end) over the years? Have her have some LA connections? Have her oh, act more, like act in local plays or something so she's at least done some acting beforehand beyond background extra? Have Felix make the movie on his own dime as an "indie" production where he can vanity cast his best friend and thus we're not supposed to believe that some big studio would go for this idea EVER? Have Becky be a Mormon housewife living in Southern California and be somewhat involved in "the industry" in her spare time more? (Okay, I don't know how prominent Mormons are in SoCal, I've only been friends with NorCal Mormons, but I don't think this would be entirely implausible. Though I guess it would eliminate the author's "write what you know" advantage, and the ward experience might be different.) 

So, on this level, it's frustrating. About the only thing I actually do buy is that these two would become friends, given their mutual warped senses of humor. Felix is also a loner and he doesn't seem too clear on how to make friends beyond his wife anyway, so I did buy him clinging on to the chick that he knows will take him down pegs and "keep him real." Their teasing is certainly fun to read, as well as the contrasts between Becky's religiousness and Felix's atheism, and his childfreeness versus her horde of kids. While there are difficulties here and there, they mostly work out a middle ground to meet on.

The spouses' reactions: I think the way the spouses were handled was actually pretty well done. Even though I think Mike and Celeste would both be more mellow about these things than your average bear (I do know folks who are this mellow, but they tend to be hippies and fairly rare), I think their concerns that they raise about the friendship periodically are reasonable. Mike is the more rational one that would have a problem with it more than Celeste (who's French) does, and Celeste is a fervent supporter of the friendship (with a few misgivings later). Now, Celeste does tend to pour it on with syrup about how she thinks Felix and Becky are soulmates in some weird way (even I thought, "This is kind of much even for a very mellow wife to say.") and how Mike should be okay with this, but given her generous attitude about things in general, I could for the most part buy it. And on Felix and Becky's parts, they are (well, I'm guessing Felix is) very open as to what they talk about and not hiding secrets or confiding things to each other that they wouldn't say to their spouses. B&F do a good job of making their relationship an open book to their spouses and minimizing the difficulties as best they can.

I actually liked Celeste quite a lot and missed her when she wasn't in the story so much. Mike, on the other hand, didn't really stand out as a personality to me compared to the other three. He seems like a nice guy (not "Nice Guy", I must say), and it's clear that Becky adores the guy for his nice-guy-ness, but I can't say he really made much of an impression on me.

Becky and Felix's friendship is off and on throughout the years mostly due to spousal issues of one kind or another, and the "can men and women be platonic friends" debate. In Mormon culture (and well, let's face it, in a lot of non-Mormon relationships too), apparently folks have to drop their opposite-gender friends after marriage. Becky's best friend was a guy named Augie, and she still misses him. She regards Felix as her new Augie and for the most part, is determined to keep this one. And when Mike expresses doubts, Becky tries giving him up and even talking to a religious leader, who tells her about "avoiding the appearance of evil." But in the end, they stick together anyway. Well, off and on.  I thought it was darned weird to make such a big deal about the first time Becky and Felix curb their friendship, make a big deal about renewing it with spousal approval, and then right after that they drift apart again. I would have timed that differently.

The narration: It's kind of weird. It's mostly a neutral, Becky-centered third person, but with odd editorial tone here and there that jars and stands out in a strange way. Sample quote:

"Imagine months of tests and treatments and anxiety over the unknown. Imagine then, because we won't enumerate. It was depressing a lot of the time, and Becky really hates a downer."

Um...yeah, this is odd. I didn't mind it in the "In which we blah blah blah" chapter titles, but I wasn't too fond of the out-of-placeness of the interjections.

The "can men and women really be friends" debate: Without spoiling too much, I will just say that this topic continues to crop up periodically throughout the book, to the point where it gets some serious debate.** I think this was handled very well for the most part. The ending will...well, let's say that it does not probably conform to expectations of certain folks who will pick it up.*** I was fine with that, as by the end I kind of felt like it could have gone either way and I would not have minded. But I suspect there will be a contingent who is rather upset.****

I'm going to give it three and a half stars, overall. It's not bad, folks. Some elements of the book will bother readers, but if you want to read about opposite-gender friendship, this book handles it pretty well.

The President's Lady: A Novel about Rachel and Andrew Jackson

By Irving Stone.

I first read this book years ago when I dug it up out of my grandma's house. Amazingly, it somehow feels "current" and relevant even though it's an old one and originally published in the 50's (I think). Even though it tends to skim and summarize (which is pretty needed given the scope of the book), you'll have a good time reading it even if you don't care about about old presidents. It's about the lifelong romance of Andrew Jackson and his wife.

When we first meet Rachel, though whose POV we see the tale, she's been thrown out of her house by her jealous abusive husband, Lewis Robards, who is constantly convinced that she's cheating on him. Rachel really doesn't know what to do about it other than keep going back to the guy--what is she worth if she's not a wife and can't get children?--and tries to "adjust" her behavior to please him, but anyone who's dealt with an abuser before knows how well that works, i.e. it doesn't.

While staying with her family, she meets and becomes good friends with Andrew Jackson, a local lawyer who's partnered with another friend, John Overton. The two of them become very fond of each other, but Rachel's really not the sort to cheat (no matter what Lewis tells you). But when Lewis continues to go berserk, Rachel finally gives up on the marriage, and her family sends Andrew out to rescue her. A woman can't get divorced, but after they find out from various sources that Lewis managed to get state law changed so that he could divorce her for adultery, she and Andrew get married. She and Andrew's romance lasts all their lives and makes you go "awwwwwwwww" pretty frequently. Even though there's not heavy emphasis on the physical, it's obvious that they adore each other.

But two years into marriage, the Jacksons find out that well, oops, that divorce hasn't actually come through yet, and the rumor mill was totally wrong. Rachel is horrified to find out that yes, technically she is an adulteress, despite her intentions, and they have to get remarried once the divorce officially goes through. You make one mistake and you never hear the end of it...which is to say, Rachel NEVER hears the end of her horrible, horrrible, wicked ways, and she becomes somewhat of a shut-in. This only gets worse whenever someone decides to pick a fight with Andrew (who's not against duelling or defending his loved ones if it's at all possible), and gets worse and worse as his political career escalates.

Their lives have a lot of rise and fall--Andrew's money seems to be "easy come, easy go", and while he achieves a lot, he always achieves it after some severe losses come first--and Rachel wonders why some people have quiet lives and others always have chaos thrust upon them. Even though she would have rather hidden on a family farm for the rest of her life and not had to hear constant slander about herself again, she sucks it up in order to make her overachieving husband happy so he can direct his energies elsewhere. I am quite fond of their love story, even though it ends, well... 

Even if you're not into history, you can read this as a sweet love story and enjoy it that way. I'll give it four stars.

Heaven, Texas

By Susan Elizabeth Phillips.

I've read a few other of the author's "football" stories and generally liked them, so I picked this one up. And then had serious doubts. But it recovered nicely.

The plot: Bobby Tom Denton (really, the name tells you all you need to know) is a recently-forcibly-retired football player who's looking for something else to do in life. He's agreed to film a movie as long as they did it in his economically-depressed tiny Texas hometown (though he apparently didn't bother to like, read the script!?), but the hometown's all hyped to have a "Heavenfest" and turn him into a tourist attraction. Bobby Tom isn't so thrilled about this, but he feels like the town "owns" him and he needs to suck it up.

This does not, however, get him at all motivated to get his ass down in time for filming. Which means that newbie production assistant Gracie Snow is sent up to Chicago to drag his ass down. Despite her best efforts, and they are a bit extreme at times, she can't drag Bobby Tom down any faster than he wants to go (which is to say, he drives down there and takes the looooong detour route). Naturally, Gracie gets fired for this, and a guilty Bobby Tom hires her as his assistant, but doesn't mention to Gracie that he's the one paying her bills.

Bobby Tom is your fairly stereotypical football player dude, likes the blonde bimbos, and forces all the various bimbos wanting to marry him to take a "football test." Gracie Snow, on the other hand...is a 30-year-old nerdy virgin who's spent her entire life until now working in the Shady Acres nursing home in New Grundy, Ohio. Naturally ,she and Bobby Tom meet when he "thinks" she's a stripper. I was all, "Please tell me you are KIDDING ME with this setup? Please? Especially the 30-year-old nerdy virgin stuff?" Not to mention the "oh, I luuuuv him" pages and pages around the middle beginning when Gracie's barely met the dude AND he lost her his job. And the "uh, do I buy this?" moments of Bobby Tom saying that gee, he just didn't feel like getting it up for the bimbos any more, but this barely A cup chick following him around was kinda getting him horny. Oh, and a fake engagement gets thrown in.  I was mostly just going, "Ugh, this SUCKS, MAKE THE BAD CLICHES STOP" for the first third of the book and debating whether or not to throw in the towel.

But occasionally there'd be some kind of awesome line that showed up, such as, "He's been telling that hooker story again, hasn't he?" and "That is for making me buy condoms in front of your mother!" And eventually Gracie comes into her own. Sure, she gets a requisite makeover, but it just allows the wild child in her that always wanted to bust out to get to do so. And she still stays true to herself in her own way, and earns the loyalty of the townsfolk. And god help me, but the author managed to make a love story between these two actually believable. It gets a little borderline rocky during the heavy conflict part near the end (I was getting nervous as to how this part was going down and was afraid it was going to have It Had To Be You's level of squick on that subject), but in the end, it works.

There's also an odd secondary romance between Bobby Tom's mom Suzy (who for some reason reminded me of April from Natural Born Charmer so much that my brain kept wanting to call her April), a widow who's still quite sad over her husband's death, and Wayland, the town rich guy who used to be the local "bad seed." Now Way's got millions, he's moved back to town and bought up the lone job-producing business in town, and he's threatening to get rid of said business in order to screw the town over for how they treated him and his mother back in high school. Suzy was always scared of Way in high school, but he had a crush on her. And when she comes to see him to appeal to his better nature about not moving the business out of town...well, he takes advantage of the situation to ah, kinda blackmail her into dating him. You'd think a guy who had issues about his mom being the town hooker wouldn't treat a girl like this, but...yeah. It's just rather weird. I kinda buy them having a relationship even though Way is the opposite of what Suzy went for before, but the "blackmail" and general situation is fairly weird. Again, I bought into the relationship by the end, but there was some original squick going on.

So, three and a half stars. Stick with it, it gets better.

Wizard's Daughter

By Catherine Coulter.

This book had some promise, but there are some major issues with it.

Note: I will be spoiling plot details in this farther along in a book than I normally do, at the 3/4 point or so. There's reasons for that.

I don't know what the marketing people were thinking with this one. Yes, "Wizard's Daughter" is a fine title, but given how the book is written (i.e. starting out with the heroine not knowing jack squat about her past and not finding out until the end), isn't that kind of just letting the cat out of the bag early?

Anyhoo, the plot:

The book starts out with a first-person prologue (which is snappy and I rather wish more first person had been used) with a Captain Jared Vail being saved by a mysterious being who asks him to take on a debt--which is apparently a cute redheaded girl. However, the redhead doesn't come along for about 300 years, and the firstborn Vail in every family has dreams of her. Nicholas Vail ends up being the lucky guy to actually meet the girl.

Rosalind was found nearly beaten to death at the age of eight, when she got adopted by the Sherbrooke family. She has no recollection of her prior life, other than that she can speak Italian fluently. The Sherbrookes didn't know who tried to kill her, but figured that looking for her parents might lead to the bad guys finding her again, so they didn't.

Nicholas and Rosalind get together and married almost immediately. They're personable folks and fun to hang out with. I enjoyed their attitudes, particularly Rosalind's when (a) her stepmother-in-law was ragging on her, and (b) explaining to prospective employees that yes, there's a ghost in the family estate, and isn't that the coolest?!

The mystery in the series (beyond Rosalind's origins, which the title gives away, grr) is when Rosalind's adoptive brother Grayson ends up with a mysterious book called Rules Of The Pale, which is written by a wizard named Sarimund and is instructions for how to survive in a magical world called well, guess what. (And also, a lot of angst about how he slept with Epona and she's pregnant with his kid and he's not allowed to see it.) Rosalind can read it instantly, nobody else can. 

Now, this sounds like an interesting premise, perhaps. Especially since Captain Jared Vail is the family ghost hanging around. But the author tends to veer off from the magic stuff to...talk about Nicholas's relatives. His father hated his guts and abandoned him at age 5 when he remarried a total twat, and then he proceeded to have three more sons. (And trashed the family estate since he is forced to leave it and the title to Nicholas. Class-ay.) The stepmother Miranda, oldest half-brother Richard, and next-half-brother Lancelot are one-note awful snots to Nicholas and Rosalind (well, at least the youngest brother is okay), and it just goes on and on. They're set up as the villains of the piece, except for where all they really do is storm into a room and act like brats. Repeatedly. The friendly Sherbrooke clan drops out of the plot entirely midway through the book, but clearly the author was having sooooooooo much fun writing jerky dialogue that she kept on bringing the rest of the Vails back even when it makes no sense to do so. Really, if you have characters threatening your lives at one point, don't bring them back suddenly claiming that they are worried about your safety. Because that makes no sense.*

Despite the interesting plot potential, we spend more time hearing about the Vails than we do about oh, the magical world that we're promised that the hero and heroine are going to go to. Spoiler: it takes 300 pages for them to finally get there...out of a 359-page book. So the entire magical premise is too short, takes too long to get there, and when you do, it's both weird (think Jabberwocky weird) AND answers get pulled out of asses, really. There's a whole lot of "But...that...makes...no...sense..." that you will be doing midway through the Pale.**

Oh, and did I mention that the dialogue tends to be painful? Here's one example:

"I love you too, Nicholas. It would seem I've loved you all my life--no matter which life. It is amazing how you make me feel, how you make me want to skip and jump and sing and perhaps play a rousing waltz on the pianoforte."

Um, yeah.

Two stars.

Long Hot Summoning: Keeper Chronicles #3 (Keeper's Chronicles)

By Tanya Huff.

The third (and sadly final) book in the Keeper's Chronicles (previous ones here and here) shifts the focus a bit to Diana, since she's finally hit graduation day and can be a full-fledged Keeper. Her first job involves her going to the Kingston mall, where a suspiciously named store called "Erlking's Emporium" is really working on creating a segue between the real world and the Otherside. The more the two malls resemble each other, the more weird things can creep in. Uh-oh. Naturally, Diana recruits Claire for help, and they go off with Sam. On the Otherside mall, homeless kids are turning into an elf army, Arthur of the Britons is leading them, and Diana finally confirms her interest in girls when she starts liking the captain of the guard, Kris.

Austin and Dean remain at home, where their current guests are a guy and his mummy. This, as it turns out, isn't going quite so well. When's Claire coming back already?!

This is a lot of fun and ends in a good place. I really wish this series had continued. Four stars.

The Second Summoning (The Keeper's Chronicles, No 2)

By Tanya Huff.

It's a few weeks after the end of Summon The Keeper, and Claire and Dean are still trying to figure out a Keeper/Bystander relationship. After much angst on the part of Claire to the point where people demand that they hook up or else Claire will accidentally damage the world because she's thinking about Dean, they hook up. And it is spectacular.

To the point of making a b....well, an angel and a demon in teenage human form suddenly start existing. (I swear that makes more sense if you read the book.)

Oops. No wonder Dean now has a whopping case of stage fright. Meanwhile, Claire has to go clean up all kinds of worldly damage. Diana, on Christmas break, decides to work on the case herself and manages to track down teen angel Samuel...then gets convinced that now that he's a human, he shouldn't be released/destroyed/killed.

Samuel's opposite counterpart, Byleth the teenage girl demon, well...acts about as you'd expect, even though battling humanity within her really throws her off. Keepers can't track either of them as long as the other exists in human form, so...how do you resolve that? Diana comes up with a good one, but once Byleth shows up on Keeper radar, she decides to go out with a bang...

Again, this is all kinds of fun and snarky. Especially if you like to laugh at teenage behavior. Or ship Claire and Dean. Four stars again.

Summon the Keeper (Keeper's Chronicles)

By Tanya Huff.

Claire Hansen is a Keeper, part of a genetic magical lineage that goes around fixing holes in the universe. She receives a summons at a crappy guest house in Kingston. And wakes up to find out that the owner has buggered out, leaving her as the new owner of the place.

The Elysian Fields Guest House has (a) a hole to Hell in the basement, and (b) a sleeping Keeper that went evil and has been put into magical stasis. Claire at first assumes that she's here to clean up this mess and then leave again, but she eventually figures out that she can't clean it up without letting the evil Keeper out to fight again. Elderly Keepers frequently end up housebound as they physically patch too-big holes with their bodies, and Claire's afraid that at the age of 27, she may very well end up stuck at this place forever, long before her time. With nothing to do but wait on the supernatural clientele that show up (including a vampire, werewolves, and "retired Olympians").

Inside the house are (a) her cat/guard Austin, who talks, and snarkily; (b) the ghost of a French-Canadian sailor named Jacques, and (c) Dean, the Newfie jack-of-all-trades who works there. Dean basically looks like Clark Kent, and he cleans, and he's the most Lawful Good fellow you ever saw in your life. He's also 20 years old, which freaks Claire out and halts her from acting on the attraction. Jacques is a pretty good guy as well, and as a Keeper, Claire could actually give him flesh (for sexual purposes only) if she so desired. But...well, he is dead.

And then there's Claire's sister Diana, who's 17 and the most powerful Keeper ever, and lives by her own logic. When she comes into town, Hell does break loose....

This is a fun book to read. It's all kinds of snarky good fun and I enjoy it a lot. Four stars.

A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder - How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and on-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place

By Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freeman.

In the store where I got this book, the owners of it had been debating buying it for themselves. Well, so much for that, eh? And I'm glad I snagged it. As someone who comes from messy genetics and is naturally messy herself (if I put it in a file cabinet out of sight, that sucker is GONE, folks. And I say this having just cleaned mine out), and there is all kinds of drama about having to muck out my relatives's houses...well, I had to get it.

Anyway, if you're a natural born slob, you will feel much better reading this. While the authors don't deny that the people who live in houses with fifty cats and a billion papers is not good, they also think there is a purpose and usefulness to mess, chaos, and disorder.

They cite the career of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who despite what he comes off as, really runs his life in a last-minute, random sort of way and that doesn't seem to have hampered his success any. They talk about how in order to get out of a rut of thinking, one needs to get a little crazy and less focused, and how breaking up your usual routine can help you become a better person. They mention that it's easier to work with a bigger mess at the last minute than early on (the Marines do it!). Some companies do better with leaving room to grow and having less rigid organization so that they can do it.

They are also fairly well opposed to professional organizers, who they point out will charge you a hundred-something bucks per hour to tell you the same stuff: "throw it out and put it in boxes." Indeed, a few folks are cited as actually doing the work themselves while the organizer looks on, because all they wanted was a babysitter forcing them to do it. The authors suggest a more relaxed approach to this. Though they do cite one particular organizer who figured out how to work with extremely messy people by taking an "emotional" approach. This was pretty cool.

I found this book to be pretty inspirational. I don't just mean in the "I don't feel so bad about how messy my house is" sort of way that you'd expect, I mean that it talks about LIFE. It applies mess and chaos to changing your thinking and how it can help improve lives. I definitely plan on using this to figure out my own personal stuff.

Excerpts of the book can be found here. Take a look.

Four stars.

Knit Two

By Kate Jacobs.

The sequel to The Friday Night Knitting Club takes place five years later. Since I can't talk about this at all without spoiling the end of FNKC, the rest of this review goes below the cut.

Four and a half stars. Good stuff. Even better than the first one.

The Friday Night Knitting Club

By Kate Jacobs.

At first I wasn't getting into this book--it was a little twee and tended to "sum up" a bit more than I like, especially in a third person book. But then I started getting into it. Go figure.

Georgia Walker is a single mom to a 12-year-old spunky daughter, Dakota. When she was pregnant and dumped by her boyfriend James, she started a knitting store, which is now a fairly big hit in NYC, and has an interesting social crowd that meets up on Friday nights, even if some of the members don't actually knit. But things are starting to go really weird for Georgia. First, James shows up, wanting back in Dakota's life. And then her ex-best-friend from high school, Cathy (now known as Cat), commissions her to make her a dress, and she also wants back in her life. Georgia's the sort who cuts people off when they dump her, and she's feeling pretty resistant to having these two forced back into hers.

James is well aware that he used to be a total jerk back in the day, and now he wants to make amends to both Georgia and Dakota, and he does. Meanwhile, Cat married a total asshole and is miserable in her marriage, and envies Georgia for having her own business and a kid and managing just fine. She thinks that if she tags along with Georgia, she'll finally figure things out for herself.

There's a fair number of people in the FNKC, and I can't say that the author managed to cover all of them very well. (I never felt like I knew Peri or KC very well, or cared what happened to them.) Anita, Georgia's mentor, is covered a bit more as she starts dating a fellow that's had a crush on her for ages. The other characters I liked beyond Georgia and company were Darwin and Lucie. Lucie's realized that while she really can't commit to a man, she'd still like a kid , and engaged in sperm banditry in order to get pregnant. Now, y'all know what I think about that sort of behavior, but at least it isn't a major focus in the plot. Darwin, on the other hand, is a socially awkward academic who's never managed to make a friend until she met her husband Dan. Now that Dan's living on the other coast doing his residency and barely has time to say hi, she's at a total loss (plus having other personal issues). She and Lucie become friends unexpectedly, and I enjoyed it a lot.

And then...well, the book ends on a sad yet hopeful note (more about that below the spoiler cut). However, this is probably one of the few books I've read, other than The Time Traveler's Wife, where I didn't mind that so much. In this case, it was fitting.

Four stars.

Attack of the Theater People

By Marc Acito.

I haven't read the previous book, How I Paid For College, but I so want to. Either way, I could pretty much figure out what went on previously (though I'm still curious as to how one does "just a little" prostitution!), and it was a fun read. It kind of reminded me of reading Bruno and Boots books, except there's no Boots/voice of sanity and everyone's a Bruno.

Anyhoo, Edward Zanni, when we meet him, is a 20-year-old student at Julliard in the 80's...and he's just been (temporarily?) expelled for being "too jazz hands", i.e not emotional enough onstage. This forces Edward to try to take up gainful employment of some sort for the next year. After bombing out of some jobs and suffering through working for a sleazy agent, Edward comes up with two jobs that really rely on his acting skills:

(a) party motivator/"Eddie Sanders from British MTV" at "bash mitzvah" parties, which he enjoys muchly and is good at,
(b) corporate spy/"stealth guest" at corporate events, because a hot stockbroker named Chad talks Edward into doing what turns out to be insider trading. Edward, being a drama geek and all, is totally clueless about this and is too busy drooling over cocktease Chad to notice this until the SEC comes calling.

In between those things, Edward is dealing with a 13-year-old girl stalker, living in an apartment under false pretenses, trying to train a deaf guy in how to sing for a show, lusting over a "straight" friend while trying to avoid the guy his friends are trying to fix him up with, and his dad just knocked up the housekeeper.

This book is quite a hoot, especially when the aforementioned "attack of the theater people" happens in order to nail Chad to the wall and get Edward out of jail time. Edward has a cool and fun bunch of friends to hang out with, and they're all kinds of entertaining quirky.

Especially fun moments to read about:

• The bowling scene, when the drama kids pretend to be each other when bowling.
• Edward teaching Gavin how to sing via a condom. "Mama said there'd be gays like this."
• Edward and Paula going to see Barbara Cook.
• Doug and Edward's conversation towards the end of the novel, regarding a certain book and inspiration.
• Edward's Broadway debut, about which I will not say more.

Four stars. Fun times!

Breathing Room

By Susan Elizabeth Phillips.

This isn't a bad one.

Dr. Isabel Favor's career as a self-help guru has just flushed down the toilet. Her accountant stole all her money, her name is mud in the media, and her fiance knocked up somebody else. Isabel somehow manages to afford to spend a few months in Italy, where she plans on renting a house and spending her days meditating and plotting a new book so she can make her money back.

It doesn't quite go that way, thanks to a random impulsive decision Isabel makes to boink one of those Italian gigolos. Not only does Isabel not enjoy the experience--she's not a one-night stand girl and this gives her the wiggins--the gigolo later turns out to be her landlord. Said landlord also turns out to be (in disguise, fairly often, with hilarious results) Lorenzo Gage, who's well-known in Hollywood for playing only villain roles. He's rumored to be the reason his last ex committed suicide (not really), and he's certainly spent his entire life being the bad boy. But he's intrigued by Isabel's innate goodness/primness, and then not so much on the primness. So the two pal around together and get involved, even though they both are fairly wigged about the idea.

Things get crazier when Ren's ex-wife Tracy shows up with her 4 1/2 kids, wanting somewhere to crash because she thinks her marriage with her current husband is over. Husband Harry shows up, and Isabel finds that marital counseling is pretty enjoyable. There's also the conspiracy by the villagers to get Isabel out of her rented house. I won't say WHY they want her out, but odds are you probably weren't expecting the reason to be what it is. In fact, it throws a supernatural twist into the book that you wouldn't expect, given the tone of the rest of it. It's a little random, and yet I enjoyed the SUPER random chaoticness that was the ending.

The main characters are good people. Isabel's journey from order to chaos is a good one. And Ren, despite being well convinced that he's an evil SOB, isn't so much. Much as I would generally roll my eyes at "hero plays with small children to prove he's good parent material"-type scenes, Ren's interactions with Tracy's kids are hilarious and fitting while still having Ren do the right thing. Much as he goes on a jerk reputation*, he isn't quite as bad as he thinks. Ren's latest movie role turns out to not be what he thought it was, and throughout the book he's thinking that Isabel will dump him when she finds out what it is. I deeply enjoyed how her reaction wasn't what he expected. 

So, four stars.