12 Days of Anime: Why Fairy Tales Keep Getting Stranger

I'm a fan of fairy tales, not the overly-tired retellings that pass for fairy tales in YA but actual stories about the strange and the prices it exacts upon it's characters. I have lots of opinions on fairy tales in general but the most pertinent one to this posting is that people simply aren't really making them, I can go an entire year and find only one or two amongst ALL of the media I consume.

I suppose people aren't doing it because it's hard. Fairy tales are full of weird turns and odd twists of logic which is something I'd generally only use to describe the worst books I read these days. I started thinking about all of this when I heard that Edgar Allen Poe wrote what's basically a 1001 Nights fanfic (called The 1002nd Night I believe) where Scheherazade spends her 1002nd night telling her husband strange tales of the modern day, so strange that he executes her for it!

I believe that this would be called "the opposite of a fix-fic".

But following the notion that fairy tales should be strange and unknowable to at least a degree, then yes Flip Flappers is absolutely a fairy tale. I was hesitant to call it one at first (wondering if I was overly influenced by it's cute ending sequence with fairy tale images) but the shifting conflict and worlds of the final few episodes convinced me that, while there's really no other story to compare it to in this regard, Flip Flappers is a strange fairy tale of courage, determination, and love. 

Book Review: Mechanica

Time to end the week on a, hmm, weak note? Well that's not normally how I try to do things but that's how it is sometimes!

Mechanica by Betsy Cornwell

Book Review: Uprooted

Ugh, between yet another cold and just a general feeling of "I have ideas but not the energy to write out these ideas" I seem to be off schedule again. Since I posted so little this past week, no catch-up post and in next week's catch-up post I'll talk about the comic review I skipped, Beautiful Darkness.

I'm familiar with Naomi Novik's name and writing due to her "master and commander with dragons fanfic"/Napoleonic-Wars-With-Dragons series and while I am a bit nervous that she took time off from it to write a completely different novel (as I would for any author) I do understand since that series is slated to be about nine novels and she's written at least six of them. So, it's not surprising that she chose to write about something other than dragons but this story is even more fantastical with it's creatures which I found interesting from a meta standpoint ("okay is she more interested in writing historical fiction or fantasy? Well this gives me at least part of the answer!"). Weirdly enough Amazon includes "Temeraire" in the title but I have no earthly idea how these stories could be connected, if magic is added into the Napoleonic Wars I think everyone is doomed, so I can only assume this was done to try and entice more readers and will reassure others that you can make this your first Naomi Novik book and enjoy it just fine.

Uprooted by Naomi Novik

Book Review: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

Since this is really late I'll be brief, I was aware of this book when it was first a serialized novel online but was always too busy to get around to reading it. I've also been hesitant to try it out since I've seen reviews of the later novels (the book was later picked up by a traditional publisher, hence why my library had a copy) that say they've gone downhill. The good news is that this book could be read entirely on it's own so if you're nervous like me worry not, no obligation to keep reading!

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by  Catherynne M. Valente, illustrated by Ana Juan

Book Review: Goose Girl

Shannon Hale is an author who I feel like I hear about more often than I should, which isn't a bad thing but just a curious thing. She started writing mostly middle grade books once I was already in mid-late high school at least so while I've read a little of her work before (The Princess Academy, also one of the graphic novels she's written for, Rapunzel's Revenge) I haven't been actively looking for her work since it's a little young for me. I forget how this one ended up on my kindle from the library recently (my to-read list is the size of a small mountain so it's rare I do remember recommendations these days) but wasn't too worried, I did enjoy The Princess Academy after all.

Goose Girl by Shannon Hale

Book Review: The Girls at the Kingfisher Club

See, this is a what I want in fairy tale retellings: it's not a story that's been retold 10 times in the last year alone and wasn't simply transplanted into modern day America. I'm also super fond of the 1920s in general so this was a triple bonus for me, especially since I tend to have awful luck finding books set in the twenties and thirties that I actually like.

The Girls at the Kingfisher Club by Genevieve Valentine

Book Review: Nightingale'sNest

As I've said before, I've been waffling over whether or not to continue putting up reviews of middle grade (and adult) books here or if I should try and keep my book reviews more consistent and only talk about YA. That is the majority of what I read but over the past month I requested a number of books which turned out to be MG and they were all rather good too! So I still want to talk about them but these will be shorter reviews, that just tends to happen when it's a shorter work and that's part of the reason why I don't read MG as much, I feel like their shorter length doesn't always develop the story as fully as it could but I thought that the next few books were the perfect lengths.

Nightingale's Nest by Nikki Loftin

Movie Review: The Tale of Princess Kaguya

I was under the impression that this movie had a one-night only showing in DC and was unhappy that I wouldn't have a chance to see it, until I checked back a week later and discovered it was a one week showing so I still had time! (and right after I bought this ticket I realized another location had opened up for the next week with a possibly even cheaper ticket price, curses) The movie won't be playing long in the rest of the country either so I bumped this up my reviewing queue a bit and let's get to it!

The Tale of Princess Kaguya

Book Review: Cress

Sadly I was unable to get a copy of the audio book of Cress after enjoying Scarlet's so much but I was consoled that a few months earlier I had a chance to go to a book signing and the audio book narrator was in fact there and did a small reading from the book which was rather nice. I feel like I'm a bit odd about book signings however since I usually go to them, listen to the author talk for a bit, and then leave without getting a single book signed. For me the more important part isn't trying to make a connection with the author in those five seconds you get to talk to them (unless it's Tamora Pierce but that was a special occasion and my friends are still jealous of that one) but even for authors I don't really like I enjoy hearing how they came up with their ideas and lives since hey, that's just another story and clearly I'm here because I like stories!

Cress by Marissa Meyer

My favorite books of 2013

I'm sure some people looked at that title and wondered if I got the date wrong, nope! Since I get so many books from libraries it takes a little while for me to get to everything and, since last December the list of books from 2013 I wanted to read was greater than the list of those which I had, I decided to revisit the idea halfway through 2014. I'm actually not done posting all my reviews of 2013 books yet, who knows if I'll ever be done, but all of the ones on this list I have reviewed previously so let's get started! Oh and, unsurprisingly, not only is this a short list but it's also all YA, I really am trying to read more broadly but I'm having a hard time finding adult fiction that simply entertains me as much as YA that's not straight-up non-fiction.

Book Review: Hero

This book was particularly hard to get a hold of. I'm not sure what is going on with one of my library systems but occasionally they'll list a book in their catalog which apparently they haven't actually received yet and it can take literally months for me to get an email saying it's on hold (I requested the fourth volume of Wandering Son around the same time, last December, and still have not gotten a hold of it, this isn't just me being impatient!). So I spent several months going "this idea I have for a story, did I really come up with it on my own or is that supposed to be the summary of Hero?" before I was finally able to double check for myself!

Hero by Alethea Kontis

Movie Review: The Snow Queen

Disney's Frozen is many things and not being very faithful to the original story is one of them. We all know that by now, actually I think everyone figured that out by the time a talking snowman showed up in the trailer, and that surely Disney isn't the first studio out there to take the story from the page to some sort of stage. It turns out there are quite a few of them, I might have to check out some of the others but I remembered hearing about one a few years back which was a Russian animated film that was taking a while to get out to the US. Well it finally popped up on Netflix a couple of months ago and, since it's been a few weeks since I last talked about an animated film (and it finally warmed up for a few days here), it seemed like the perfect chance to watch it!


The Snow Queen

Book Review: Enchanted

Not to be confused with the book Ella Enchanted, I think I had heard a little bit about this book before but what really caught my eye was when I started hearing people talk about it's sequel earlier last year, a mash-up of fairy tales that sounded fairly neat. And what won me over in the description was a little poem which I had grown up knowing talking about the characteristics of people born on various days of the week. I had always resented my line a little bit, "Thursday's child has far to go," thinking that it meant that I would take a long time to grow up. That may still be the case but this series has interpreted it much more literally, as someone who wanders the world traveling and after that of course I wanted to read it, even if Thursday doesn't appear in this book at all.

Enchanted by Alethea Kontis

Anime Review: Sunday Without God

This past year (so, 2013) I made a real effort to listen to the anime-bloggersphere and see what series that I didn't try in a given season (usually because I was too busy or just too cynical to give another show a shot) were worth picking up later and I did a pretty good job at getting them them sooner rather than later. There are still a few shows I didn't get to, I'm waiting until all of the OVAs for Yozakura Quartet are out before I tackle that, might get around to trying stuff like Majestic Prince and Attack on Titan if they ever announce second seasons, twitter is convincing me to try out a few things like Meganebu but that's mostly it, it just wasn't that big a year for me. And it's funny, I finished the summer out with just four shows and given that I could have easily made room for this one but when I tried out the manga adaptation (the series was originally a light novel I later learned) I was turned off by it. The pacing felt a bit weird and the character designs didn't quite work for me either. Funny enough I could say the same thing about this anime version but in a different sort of way. 

Sunday Without God (Kamisama no Inai Nichiyobi)

(Audio) Book Review: Scarlet

Back in the summer, around late June early July I believe, Marissa Meyer was hosting a contest where the winner got an audiobook copy of her latest book, Scarlet, and while I'm generally not that interested in audiobooks it sounded like she really liked how this one had turned out so I tried the sample clip and wow, I really did like it! I didn't win the contest but then I remembered, there are a number of podcasts/youtube channels I follow which are sponsored by Audible so if I was to say, take advantage of their free one month subscription and listen to the book within a month (and I had two big family trips coming up within that month) I could do that and support other things I loved, perfect! Plus, most of the time when authors have a book out they'll link to reviews of it, that's fairly normal. This book came out this past winter so I wasn't surprised to see that many reviews of it, what was worrying me was that Meyer was also linking to a lot of reviews of the ARC for her next book, Cress, which isn't due out until next winter and I was starting to get seriously worried that I'd be spoiled for Scarlet and/or Cress at this rate. So that was a bit motivator, and I have to admit this is actually the first time in all my years of media consumption that I've been worried about that, even when almost all the anime I follow is a week behind and I'm dodging spoilers daily as a result.

Scarlet by Marissa Meyer and narrated by Rebeca Soler

Summary: Scarlet has been raised by her grandmother on her farm for most of her life so she's quite distressed when she suddenly vanishes, and utterly frustrated with the police when they say that they can't find any evidence of foul play. She's determined to find out what happened but could never have imagined the kinds of secrets her grandmother was holding. Meanwhile, a certain lunar princess is breaking out of jail cells and dragging other criminals around with her in stolen spaceships, trying to find out answers to her secrets as well.

The Good: Hmm, well, this time around the little prologue that Meyer released wasn't as critical to the plot as I felt like the one for Cinder was, but on the other hand is a bit spoilerly (so perhaps it shouldn't be considered a prologue but an additional side story? But if you read it after the book there's not much point, everything in there has already been revealed). Honestly I can't say if I preferred this book or Cinder since they both had weaknesses but they were different ones, here I felt like the twists weren't as dragged out (especially if you disregard that other story) but didn't like Scarlet as a character as much. I did like the additional world-building in this book and was surprised yet happy to see that Kai was as important a character as he was, it's funny but adding that plot thread made the book seem tighter and made it a lot easier to keep the overall story focused. However, it does reinforce the fact that a lot of events will need to happen in the next two books in very short order and I'm worried not about the pacing of the individual books but about how far I can suspend my disbelief that world-shattering events all keep happening within about two months of each other.

The Bad: As mentioned above, the side story this time around presents a bit of a problem since it could be spoilerly, the story this time around plays around with "oh is it this thing or is the twist really this!" a lot more (both for Wolf and Cinder) which is good but depending on how you interpret it at first you could already know all the major reveals before you even start reading. I didn't like Scarlet a lot in some cases, she's a bit of a hot head and headstrong and wish that Wolf had been a better foil to her, hopefully that will happen in the later books now.

The Audio: Like I said, I got this because the preview clip really did sound nice and I liked how Soler was able to manipulate her voice enough to make all the character's sound distinct and easy to tell apart. It was a bit odd to hear what voices she used for some of the characters that had first appeared in Cinder (ie, not the voices I was expecting) but I got used to them fairly quickly and one or two of them, like Iko, seemed like a much better fit than the voice I had previously had. And thankfully this book is much shorter than Shadows of the Moon, I had at first been worried about trying to finish a whole book in a month but it's only a bit over 11 hours so it was much easier to manage, although it was frustrating that while on my ipod I can go to individual chapters to listen to I couldn't manage that on itunes on my computer, which is less the books fault and more a problem I have with Audible itself. 



So, for this book I'm going to give it a 3 out of 5 for having different problems than Cinder but being strong in other ways as well. That said, I feel like I'm still not enjoying the series as much as I should, it's setting itself up as this sweeping, sci-fi almost fantasy story with a large cast and politics yet something is just missing to make me love it, I'm just hoping that Cress (or Winter, the last protagonist, whom I'm trying to remember if we've already met) will be more up my alley and let me really enjoy the series).

Book Review: Six Gun Snow White

To get picky, I think this story is actually a novella, not a novel because of it's length but there's still more than enough in the story to talk about for a review. I have to admit that I still wish it was a graphic novel instead (when I first heard about it on Tor that's what I thought it was) but that's just personal preference, plus then I might confuse it too much with Rapunzle's Revenge. 

Six Gun Snow White by Catherynne M. Valente

Summary: Six Gun Snow White is the child of a white business man and the Native American woman he forced into a marriage and as a result has not had the happiest childhood. When her father remarries her step-mother makes her life even worse and after years finally takes a chance to run way into America's Wild West.

The Good: Well that was an interesting re-imagining, the story rather throughly tackled nearly ever element of the Snow White legend and re-worked it which I thought was very creative and much better than many of the retold fairy tales I've seen lately which borrow a few themes and drop the rest by the wayside. And I really did think that a lot of the details were clever, I felt like the story was an interesting blend of the original and new, Native American elements (not related to either but the new detail I liked the most was about Six Gun Snow White's step-brother, that felt like something which could have come out of a classic fairy tale with how odd it was).  

The Bad: In the end the story just felt a little too disjointed, I felt like it was trying to have multiple, episodic tales in it (all of which a re-imagining of a specific part of the Snow White legend) but I feel like the story should have tried to be a bit tighter especially since there are a few plot threads that go through almost the entire story, like the step-mother. That might have made this story even shorter still but it seemed to me that this choice stretched the story a little too thin  (I'll also admit I wasn't expecting it to be as, sad in tone as it was and that I prefer cheerful stories which almost certainly influenced how I felt about the book as well).

In the end it was an interesting little story yet I don't think I'll reread it so I'll give it three out of five stars. Oh and I have no idea why the hardcover's price is so crazy, I found a copy at my library easily so I'm not sure what's going on there. 

Book Review: Nightspell

While I do have internet to get these posts up I also have a lot of family engagements which do take priority. So I'll be getting these up when I can, at the very least everything will be up this week. In any case, some people might remember that last spring I won quite a few books from a whole range of authors and my favorite out of the bunch was one called Mistwood and I was pretty excited to read the author's next book after it, and not just because the bookmark for it she put in was really pretty looking. On that note, I think I would have picked up the book regardless because of how pretty the cover is, lovely color scheme although I noticed that on the back they use the same image as a castle except blown up and, well, I'm rather surprised that such a pixelated image made it through quality control before it got to the printers.....


Nightspell by Leah Cypress

Summary: Year's ago Darri's sister was sent away from her family's plains to marry the prince of Ghostland but complications have arisen and Darri is sent to take her place with their brother making sure the deal goes through. Neither of them are happy about this however, like the name says in Ghostland the dead walk among and in places outnumber the living creating an uneasy truce with politics that neither are used to. But Darri is determined, if she marries the prince then she'll finally save her sister from this living death she doomed her to all those years ago.

The Good: As a quick note, I believe I saw the back of the book proclaiming it to be a companion novel to Mistwood but you certainly don't have to read it to understand this one (I'm not sure if there are even any references to it, if there were they were so small I missed them). Moving on, in Mistwood I really liked some of the aspects of the setting and the fairy tale feeling Cypress was able to invoke without using any "real" stories (that I'm aware of) and she's pulled off the same thing in Nightspell without feeling like she's just repeating the same story or idea. 

The Bad: I feel like Cypress chickened out on the ending here. At the climax the characters come to a tough choice and I felt like the choice that was made was rather out of character and Cypress didn't want to write something that ended in tragedy. I suspect that this choice was supposed to either show how Darri has grown and no longer has a one track mind or possibly that she is still young and scared for what this will mean to those close to her, which lets her consider the other option, but given her feelings for the entire rest of the story it just felt incongruent with her previous actions and that really bothered me. All three of the point of view characters bothered me actually but this I'm sure at least was on purpose, they're supposed to be flawed characters (and none of them realize that their flawed which was more than a bit cringe worthy) yet by the end I can't say that any of them truly developed which is what really frustrated me (and made it so hard for me to accept that the characters made the ending happen rather than the ending happened because the author wrote it so). In the end this story just didn't gel for me and I'm rather frustrated about it.


So just a 2.5 out of 5 for this book yet I do still want to see what Cypress writes next, it appears that while I consistently like her settings it's her characters who are hit or miss for me. Altough, a quick glance online shows that this book is from 2011 and Mistwood is from 2010, meaning that she hasn't had a new book in almost two years and that's never a good sign for a newer author, hope that her books didn't sell terribly and force her out of the business (this is pure speculation on my part, I had better not see anyone quoting this as fact as I've seen with one or two of my other posts).

Webcomic Review Month 2013: Penny Dreadful, Polterguys Prince of Cats, Princess Princess

Whew, got the biggest batch of reviews for the month here, even though I'm a little sad I don't find as many great webcomics every year I have to admit it's nice that I don't have to make as many huge posts as this. Oh and the ComicMix March Madness tournament is still going on so if that's your thing make sure to go out and vote, think they've reached the quarter-final round as of writing this so it's going to finish up pretty soon!


Penny Dreadful by Maggie G Vicknair

The 20th century is barely a decade old and Penny Hart has found herself lost and alone in it. Through a series of strange events she finds herself in the employ of the Harker Institute of Super-Natural Studies and while she finds herself starting to enjoy her new life of adventure it's still a bit much to simply take in a stride.

As a heads up, this is one the webcomics which has a fairly dramatic art shift early on, apparently Vicknair completely changed the way she drew it starting in chapter two, so if you don't like the art very much in chapter one be sure to look at a later chapter before writing off the comic for that reason (and of course the art style does change and become more sophisticated as the story progresses as it does in practically every comic out there). As for the characters and plot I'm really fond of this one since the characters are just a touch sarcastic (well, more than a touch at times) and being a sarcastic person myself I occasionally wonder why characters aren't commenting on how strange their lives are. Despite this little extra self-awareness the copious supernatural elements of the story manage to feel just right for the story without anything out of place (although a little more exposition about how magic works in this world would be nice, I'm assuming that's simply coming later) and the story seems to be slowly revealing that there is a greater plot lurking behind the events of the individual chapters, can't wait to see what's going to happen!


Penny Dreadful can be read online and does not have a print version as of writing.


Polterguys by Laurianne Uy and Nathan Go

Fans of shojo manga will undoubtedly find something familiar about Polterguys but in a fun, enjoyable way. Like many a heroine, Bree finds herself living with a bevy of cute guys under strange circumstances but her's are a bit stranger than normal. While she's simply moved out of the dorms for a bit of piece and quiet the five guys living in her old house are all dead, none of whom can remember how they got that way, and there are demons out there who will happily hunt down a lost soul and send it off to wherever those souls go. In a moment of impulse Bree puts her own life on the line to give the boys a chance to find peace before they move on but can she really do anything to help? 

Bree is a likeable heroine whose relatable, has spunk, and also has a rather realistic experience of having college turn out to be different than she expected (although most of us didn’t have demons and ghosts to make the shift even harder). This first book neatly wraps up one plot while leaving plenty more for future installments and introduces a new one which might prove even more interesting in the end. I'm not sure when the comic is going to start updating again (as far as I can tell, from twitter and tumblr, I think Uy and Go have started outlining it but haven't gotten much farther so it's likely to be a while) but even if it's only as consistent as this first installment then I think it'll be worth the wait.

Polterguys can be read for free online or purchased as a book.


Prince of Cats by Kori M. Handwerker

Lee might be able to talk to cats but frankly that isn't a really big problem or concern in his life currently, high school is. In a small, conservative town where you can be rich or poor but never anything but straight and that certainly doesn't help when his relationship with his best friend Frank starts to change and neither of them feels quite sure where they want, or even expect, it to end up.

Yep this is another story with queer characters in it and, while there hasn't been anything that would be considered graphic by anyone so far, the about page does indicate that there will be some non-graphic sex scenes later on, readers with delicate sensibilities or a habit of reading webcomics at work be warned. Funny enough this is also yet another comic done in watercolors which I'm seeing more and more of these days and I rather like it. Obviously this has no impact on the story but I still like the feeling it gives. Getting to the actual story, it's a little slow moving and awkward but honestly that sums up a lot of high school as well. I am happy to hear that there are going to be other gender/sexual identities present in the story as well (since it always seems odd to me whenever you have a large cast of characters and every single one of them is straight and Prince of Cats is developing a pretty large cast of background characters), although a bit sad that it sounds like there will be an asexual character but they won't even recognize what they are in story. I can certainly relate to that, and it sounds like they'll be a minor character in the story anyway, but I at least hope I can recognize who it is.

Prince of Cats can be read online and the first few chapters are also available in print form.

Princess Princess by StrangelyKatie

I know I said that I wasn't covering any finished comics this year but I completely missed that this one was in fact finished so I'll just slip it in here. Princess Princess is a rather quick tale about a princess locked up in a tower whose recused by, well, another princess. The story is based on that simple idea but fleshes out its two princesses quite well into distinctly different people with their own problems and lives, it doesn't just change one of them from a prince and call that a day. It's cute, quick, funny, yes the two girls do like each other as well, and smarter than you'd expect so I recommend everyone to check it out over here if you have some time. And while you're there I'd also recommend another of Katie's comic's, which I've seen around on tumblr before but hadn't realized it was hers, which is even shorter and nicely bittersweet.


2012 "P" comics

2011 "P" comic (which weirdly enough also finished up within hours of me writing about it, I'm amused by the similar timing anyway)

(Audio) Book Review: Shadows on the Moon

So, many moons ago, the author Zoe Marriott had a contest on her blog which involved people all commenting and keeping up with their writing goals for each month and I talked about keeping up with my blog entries and when I fell behind (I think this was last spring so I was dealing with final projects at the same time, yippee). She then collected everyone who had commented on all the posts, put them into a drawing, and someone I won and recieved a mystery package which turned out to have a few different things in it including an audio book copy of one of her books, Shadows on the Moon. I'll confess, I was okay with audio books when I was on long car rides in elementary school but even back then they weren't my favorite method of getting to know a story since I could already read faster than they could narrate and just wasn't fond of how the voice work was handled. So I put off listening to this one for a long time, even though I was interested in the story, until December when I made myself get into the habit of listening to it working on various projects and thankfully once I got in the groove of putting it on and just letting it play I was able to get into the story and enjoy it regardless of my personal preference for these things. 


Shadows on the Moon by Zoe Marriott, performed by Amy Rubinate

Summary: Suzume lives a happy life with her family when the Moon Prince's men show up one day to slaughter her entire household on the charge of being a traitor and only she and a cinderman manage to escape. Ever since then she has to hide not only her feelings but what she really is, in the attack she discovered that she's a shadow-weaver (which is exactly what it sounds like) and, while it's certainly not illegal is hardly something she wants to tell the people around her and it becomes another tool she uses to hide behind. But living with that many lies takes a tole on a person and soon she begins to lose sight of everything except her goal, revenge.

The Good: I completely did not expect the story to get as dark as it did, I haven't had to do this before but people who are trigged by acts of self-mutilation should probably stay away here. It's not glorified or idealized but rather those are some rather, raw scenes, yet I liked how Suzume struggled with these problems since I can't remember the last time I came across someone with troubles like these in a fantasy book and I'm all for crossing of the genres in literature. As for the rest of the book, I have read some other really creative retellings of Cinderella so it's hard for me to say which one I thought was the most creative but this one is pretty high on the list. It's a very liberal interpretation/retelling and only keeps some of the barest themes but there's still enough to make it clear that this is a retelling. The setting, based on feudal Japan, seemed fairly realistic although honestly what I liked the most was how there were characters from that world's version of Africa present since again that was something I completely didn't expect*.

The Bad: The story wraps up a little too rapidly with an almost deus ex machina for a villain (which was vaguely hinted at earlier on but I still wish had had an actual explanation) and just super fast pacing for the last five chapters or so, especially in comparison to the other chapters. It made the ending feel a bit, well, messy and I wished for a little more conclusion on some of the characters, one or two seemed completely forgotten in the very end, so as long as this book was I wish it had gone on a tad bit longer just so it was a little smoother.

The Audio: Personally I'm not that fond of audio books that have just one person doing all the voices (although come to think of it I don't think I've ever heard a full cast audio book) but Rubinate keeps all the important character's voices distinct and never sounds tired or bored which I was impressed by since since book clocks in at nearly fourteen and a half hours (although since it is her job I guess I should expect such professionalism, although I still appreciate it). After a while I was able to get into the voices and such so I can say that yes this was a good audio book, it just didn't really change my preferences for print over audio books.

So I give this book a 4 out of 5 stars and plan on buying a print edition for myself (especially since that I've already donated the CD to the local library, since I couldn't get it to work on my old boombox I had just put it into itunes so I could listen to it on my ipod) and now I'm even more curious about her other works, to the library! For those interested, you can read the first chapter for free (and legally!) right over here, don't know if Audible has a preview of the audio book online however.



*although, looking over Goodreads I discovered that some of Marriott's other books seem to be set in an African-inspired fantasy setting, I wonder if there is crossover between the two....

Book Review: The Perilous Gard

Yep I'm a bit behind again and honestly I think I'm going to have to permanently move Monday's anime reviews to Tuesdays or Wednesday since I'm going to be busy every Monday this semester. Regardless, I have no idea how this book ended up on my to read list, since I don't have a lot of current titles to read right now I decided to start going down my to-read list from the top and this thing dates back to my livejournal days (2006-ish is when I think I made this). So yeah, no idea how a book a couple of decades older than me (and my copy certainly looked that old) ended up on my list, not that that has ever stopped me from reading something before!


The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope, illustrated by Richard Cuffari

Summary: After an unfortunate letter by her sister Kate Sutton has been banished to a far off keep of Elvenwood where the lord is mourning the death of his daughter and his brother is a grief-filled young man who says he killed her. But Kate soon notices that the local legends around the place seem to have a grain of truth to them and maybe more than that....

The Good: One thing I don't find as much in middle grade/young adult fantasy these days is historical fiction fantasy, normally it's just fantasy with the rarer historical fiction (yes I just read Grave Mercy which is also technically both but I still don't find it that often). In fact this book feels like historical fiction first with a bit of fantasy towards the end, mostly due to the character's attitudes towards the supernatural (it's almost Elizabethan England so superstitions don't seem quite as silly as they do now) which was a nice change of pace. However, it takes more than a little change of pace to make me enjoy a story.....

The Bad: This book is illustrated and my cover, the one above, seems to be done by the same man who did the pictures instead which, ehhhhhh. They didn't contribute anything and they were rather ugly as well, I didn't care for them and they made it a little awkward to try reading this on the bus or in public. Other than that, well, this book just didn't do anything for me. I have to give it a bit of a pass since, like I alluded to earlier, this is a book from 1974 so of course I'm going to think that people have done this kind of story (character is pulled into the fairy world and needs to be saved by the main character, a Tam Lin story) better since then*, especially since this book reads a little younger and young adult books didn't really become big until the 1990s (three guesses why there). While Kate was fairly developed Christopher felt a little flat and that made their relationship feel a bit flat and I felt like Geoffrey wasn't as rounded as he could've been either. So I found both the characters and the story a little simple, that combined with a setting that I've seen simply too many times just meant that I didn't really get anything out of this book.


So only 2.5 out of 5 stars for this book, it's not terrible but after reading so much I just didn't see anything in this book that made it worth reading for me, onto the next book on my list!  



*heck, I didn't realize it until the book started talking about the ballad of Tam Lin, which around here is a lesser known fairy tale, that Diana Wynne Jones' Fire and Hemlock was also an adaption of it which I liked a bit better (and came a decade later).