Movie Review: Miss Hokusai

Sorry for the delay, it's been a week guys. I have decided that the worst part of being an adult is not having breaks anymore, school breaks were really great. I mean, I'm glad I have weekends off now so I can see awesome movies but it's still not the same.

So, Miss Hokusai currently is not licensed in the US but somehow Otakon was able to have a special showing of it as part of DC's cherry blossom festivals (along with Up on Poppy Hill and Letter to Momo). I was pretty thrilled to have a chance to see it and really hope someone picks it up soon (it rather feels like a GKIDS film) so that everyone else gets a chance.

Miss Hokusai

Anime Review: Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu

Before the season started I was tentative on this title, it sounded like it could be good but I really hadn't heard much about it. I knew it was about rakugo, knew what the basics of rakugo was, and that it was a josei title. So it was for an entirely unrelated reason that I was optimistic, the last time I was curious but had no idea if a josei title was going to be good was Chihayafuru and we all know how amazing that series turned out to be!

Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju

Book Review: Walk on Earth a Stranger

Ack, darn work for getting in the way of my review writing, how dare you make me tired after 8 hour workdays and make it hard to focus! So a quickie for a book I don't have much to say about anyway, that seems fair

Walk on Earth a Stranger by Rae Carson

Book Review: Belle Epoque

I don't really have anything to open up this review with so I'll just make a general announcement first. It only recently occurred to me that it is both late November and that I've barely read any 2015 books. So, while I have checked out several armfuls of them from the local library I doubt that I will have reviews of any of them up before the end of the year and thus, like this year I'm going to push my general listing of the best books of 2015 back. Probably not until June this time, this year I realized I didn't actually need a full six months, but March or April seems likely.

Belle Epoque by Elizabeth Ross

Book Review: The Agency Book One: A Spy in the House

I might have messed up that title slightly since it's written a little oddly wherever I've seen it but oh well, at least this way it's easy enough to understand what book I'm referring to. I had seen a post on the The Book Smugglers blog recommending the latest volumes a few months ago and decided to go ahead and check out the first book so I could see if I wanted to catch up to this later volume.

The Agency 1: A Spy In The House by Y.S. Lee

Manga Review: Spirit Circle

Funny story, I actually had this post all ready to go last night and completely forgot until 11:30 to actually hit post so I decided to wait until morning. Which means, this post originally appeared on Organization of Anti-Social Geniuses!

This is one of the many manga I first tried out when I was using friends' guest passes on Crunchyroll and frankly my luck for finding good series on there was pretty terrible. Honestly it still is but I'm lad I stumbled across this one, I actually had no idea it was by the same manga-ka as The Biscuit Hammer and after I enjoyed this series so much I was convinced to try The Biscuit Hammer again and I think that one is growing on me too!

Spirit Circle by Satoshi Mizukami

Book Review: Mortal Heart

I ALMOST saw Robin LaFevers last year when she was on her Mortal Heart tour but sadly her talk was the same night, same time as another talk I had already signed up to go to in another part of the city so I wasn't able to. I expect the world to better arrange itself to fit my social schedule in 2015 although for some reason I don't think that is going to happen...

Mortal Heart by Robin LaFevers

Book Review: The Golem and the Jinni

Wait this is a 2013 book? Shoot, I was totally going to add this to my "best books of 2014" list because it's easily one of the best books I've read this year. I know I said I was going to focus more on reviewing YA books on this blog, since clearly I like them better and I feel like I give them more interesting reviews, but I had seen it reviewed on some mostly-YA book blogs before and honestly thought it was one. And it's a good book, a great book even, so let me try and convince people who like YA and adult fiction alike to give it a shot!

The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker

Book Review: Nobody's Princess and Nobody's Prize

As is a running theme on this blog, there are some books that have been on my to read list for entirely too long and it's just because I can't get a hold of them and I don't have the budget to blind buy. A lot of times they fall off after a while, I can't remember why I put them on in the first place or the summary starts to sound more stale but this one never did since it's about Helen of Sparta/Troy and, well I'm not named after her but I am interested in the legend*. There aren't as many stories about the Trojan War as there are about other parts of Greek mythology and Helen is always portrayed as either "madonna or whore," and innocent woman who is kidnapped and may-or-may-not have Stockholm Syndrome or someone who willingly deserted her husband and died for it. I was really hoping that these two books would do something different, originally I was going to review them separately but decided that it actually made more sense to talk about it in one review rather than rehash a lot of the same points two times. So there will be some spoilers but not anymore than you'd get if you looked at the summary for the second book before you read the first!

Nobody's Princess & Nobody's Prize by Esther Friesner

Book Review: Climbing the Stairs

Most of the time I try to make sure that I don't read very similar books one after another (or movies, anime, etc) but I remember that last fall I had a huge stack of books checked out from the library and was just trying to get through them as quickly as I could. So, hopefully everyone here enjoys historical novels and next week's book is sort of historical as well (well, it's set in the past which I think makes it historical....)

Climbing the Stairs by Padma Venkatraman

Book Review: Out of the Easy

Since the end of the year is very close by now this means two things, one that all of the books I read that came out in 2013 get priority for being reviewed (so that everyone knows what I'm talking about in my end of year wrap-up) and two that I'm now suddenly finding all of said books at the local library, it seems to happen this way every year. I seem to recall hearing about this book this past summer and while it's not quite my cup of tea (straight historical fiction which I could tell from the setting was going to be running into a lot of ugly stereotypes) it sounded interesting enough so I was more than happy to pick it up when I came across it in person.


Out of the Easy by Ruta Sepetys

Book Review: Cinders and Sapphires

So, I just realized that my last manga review for November never actually posted (what the heck blogger) so that's up now right below this post, talking about a manga called Qualia the Purple which, odd as it sounds, might fit in well with Verical's line. Since I already needed two reviews tonight I'm going to call that my first review and get on with writing this one, all these late nights for work (getting home just a bit before 10pm and with a headache most nights) is just not helping my blogging schedule, even if I start writing the posts earlier in the day.

There's no special reason why I picked up this book at the library, I believe I had heard of it before (and I do make a point to try and grab as many books as I can that have come out in the past year) but the setting interested me more than anything else. I'm only half joking when I say that since I didn't watch this year's season of Downton Abbey (looked at the summaries of it and decided that I didn't want to deal with those plot twists) that I needed something set in Edwardian England to tide me over and this seemed like the next best thing!

Cinders and Sapphires by Lelia Rasheed

Summary: The Somerton estate in England is in a tizzy not only because the lord of the manor is coming back with his family after spending years as an administrator in India but because they've just learned he's to remarry immediately after he returns. And that's not the only love in the air, it seems like nearly every other character has a secret tryst going on and if any of them were revealed it could damage the reputation of the entire household.

The Good: I will first admit that it's been a little while since I read this, had I realized how long it would be (and how many books I would read in-between) I would have written a rough draft of this review earlier. I didn't however and I must say this, I'm having a hard time recalling any parts of the book I truly liked. This isn't to say the story was written poorly, the characters were consistent, the problems they encountered made sense for the setting and I liked how the growing movement for India's independence became a subplot in the story (the world can't truly be called global in the pre-WWI era but that doesn't mean characters in stories have to be ignorant). But despite all of this bits of solid writing it just never connected for me and I'm having a hard time recalling any specific details that I did enjoy. 

The Bad: The story is comparable to Downton Abbey not just in terms of setting but also in the number of characters, all with their own subplots, that it tries to balance yet I feel like ultimately fails. It tries too hard to make everyone sympathetic and I just couldn't care about the main relationship since it was one where the characters had an immediate attraction and then started to get to know each other, this means that by extension the readers were being told to care about these two characters before we were ever given a reason why. In the end I never ended up sympathizing with any of the characters and, since this is a story about these specific characters and their lives more than anything else, ultimately that means the story failed for me.


Overall I was rather disappointed with the story and am giving this book 2.5 out of 5 stars. I don't plan on reading the next book in the series, guess I'll have to look elsewhere for my Edwardian England fix!

Manga Review: A Bride's Story (volume three)

Due to real life craziness (work, prepping for thanksgiving, my online class, studying for the JLPT, too much time spent on tumblr, wait is that even an IRL thing?) no emanga review this time but I was recently able to finally get a hold of the third volume of A Bride's Story. For some odd reason my local libraries before I moved had volume four but not three and, even though I read it, it was too long ago for me to do a proper review (plus, volumes four and five are the same "arc" so it would make more sense to review both of those at once) along with this one. But enough chit-chat, let me tell you why I still adore this series.

A Bride's Story by Kaoru Mori

Summary: Mr. Smith, the British researcher who had been staying with Karluk and Amir's family, has decided it's time that he go off and explore more of the region and meet even more people. But when trying to meet up with his guide some things go a little strange and he briefly becomes a houseguest of a widow and her lovely, welcoming daughter Talas.

The Good: I didn't see why so many people were saying this was a sad story until very late in the book and I was amazed at how easily Mori made the switch from a happy, hopeful mood to one that decidely wasn't. While I enjoyed Emma, her earlier work, I never quite connected with any of the characters or sympathized with their relationships (the trouble with having quiet characters, like Emma, is that it's a surprisingly thin line between having them be mostly internal characters and having them come off as rather flat) but here I feel like her storytelling skills have grown and that she is more successful in conveying more subtle and mature relationships.

The Bad: Well, while I did enjoy the chapter when the cast went "hey we're hungry, let's eat!", because it appears that Mori can also draw some beautiful food porn, it did feel a bit out of place in the story. Perhaps she wanted to have Mr Smith and Talas' story fill an entire volume and realized she would be a chapter short otherwise but I thought it was an odd place to put it regardless. 

The Art: I, and the rest of the internet, have made no secret about how much I adore the level of detail Mori puts into her art here and, while I certainly enjoy the story, it's the art I look forward to every time. In fact, normally when I read manga I'll get a hold of a few volumes in a series and either read one a day for a few days or read them all in one sitting, similar to how I read print novels in large chunks (which can end up being all at once when I lose track of time). But with this series that just doesn't quite feel right, instead I prefer to read it a chapter at a time, spending a long amount of time on each page, right before bed as I'm relaxing. I think that should tell you quite a bit about the art, I consider it to be so engrossing that it's the one time I change my habits.



So I'm still heartily recommending this series and hope that one of my new local libraries has the fourth volume so I can re-read and gets a copy of volume five soon (since that only came out two months ago I can almost guarantee that they don't already have a copy, plus even if they did the waiting list might be quite long).

Book Review: Aftershocks

There was no extra-special reason why I grabbed this book to read, just a few little ones. I had seen it for years sitting on the library's shelves and thought it might be interesting because it was historical fiction but something about how the summary was written just sounded so dull that I had no interest in it. But after reading Fire Horse Girl (which is set a few decades later) I came back to it, interested because of the fact that it had Chinese characters from San Francisco's Chinatown in it and it sounded as if there was an multi-racial relationship in there which is unusual even today in fiction (I think, if I'm wrong please correct me, I don't see it that often). Although, I already mentioned that the summary was misleading by making the story sound boring and that wasn't the only way it was misleading....

Aftershocks by William Lavender

Summary: While Jessie might want to be a doctor her parents are trying to raise her as a proper young lady, after all it's the Edwardian era and women of the upper class simply do not work outside the house. She persists in studying books smuggled out of her father's library and defies the family in other ways she she sneaks out to try and find their dismissed maid in San Francisco's Chinatown where she discovers that she has an even more important reason to care about what happens to it's inhabitants during the 1904 earthquake.

The Good: This book was distinctly different from what the summary led me to believe and most of the time I liked that. It had a lot of different subplots which gave it some added realism and while I constantly waffle on my feelings of progressive characters in historical fiction (on the one hand, it's hard to write a believable character in a historical setting who is more progressive than they should be because of their setting, on the other hand these people did exist so why can't the main character be one of them) in the end I did like Jessi and thought it was appropriate here.

The Bad: As alluded to earlier, the multi-racial romance I was hoping to find did not actually occur in the book and that made me sad, sad that it wasn't here and sad that it doesn't happen much at all in young adult even though we live in such a diverse world. As for the actual book, it's a book that's rather hard to describe since while the main even is certainly the earthquake it's not actually the trigger for a lot of the events in the book and only happens about halfway through and I'm afraid my summary doesn't do the book justice either. Also, despite everything she does Jessie still came off as a bit too flat for me (while she does disobey her parents he doesn't have any major failings, perhaps that's why, after all fiction dictates that if someone doesn't have major failings that they can't be a "real" character, even if you meet people who appear to be just that in real life all the time), the other characters did too but they weren't the main character so that was less important. 


Overall I'm going to give the book a three out of five for being interesting while I was reading it but not something I'll remember for very long, given how much trouble I had finding the cover image for it I suspect I'm not the only one with that feeling.

Book Review: Without A Summer

So, I know I had said I wasn't particularly interested in reading more novels in this series since I suspected that nothing was really going to change from story to story but, well, it was sitting in the new books section of my library and looked really nice and shiny! Plus it had a colorful cover, yep I don't have a really good reason for why I picked it up anyway.


Without A Summer by  Mary Robinette Kowal

Summary: Jane and Vincent are back in England and taking private glamural commissions again which takes them out to London during the season and Jane invites her sister along. While trying to make sure her sister has enough to do Jane begins to hear rumors of something involving the Catholics which may or may not be related to the overly chilly year they are having, a bit of misfortune that same have started blaming on the glamourists.

The Good: I can safely I've never seen fiction set during "the year without a summer" before, although knowing the true cause of the bad weather (I was already familiar with the disaster and figured it out as soon as I glanced at the summary) did take out some of the tension. I did like how Kowal used it to recreate similar protests and social upheaval of the real 1800s, most of which I hadn't been aware of until I looked at the notes in the back and that's one of my favorite things about alternate histories, taking a real world issue, changing it a bit to fit the setting and yet in the process informing the reader in such a way that they don't realize it's happening.

The Bad: I was more or less correct, after the charming first volume it seems as if the books are starting to fall into a routine (Jane learns of a plot, suspects the worst, it turns out to not be the worst but more communication could have helped even more) and I don't like routine in my books, if I want to read the same idea over I'll go reread a book I already love. So yet again, technically and story-wise there's nothing wrong here but character wise I am starting to get bored, although I'm not sure how much character development actually is appropriate for fully grown adults.


In the end I'm giving this book 3 out of 5 stars since while I did enjoy it more than the previous book I still feel like the original book stands strongest on it's own. I've heard that Kowal plans to have even more books, I suppose it must be selling well, and I guess that if I come across any more of them in the library I'll pick them up but otherwise I won't be going out of my way to read them. 

Book Review: Mare's War

I picked this one up at the library since I remembered it was a title on my to-read list and I've actually been in the mood lately for something with a more historical bent to it.

Mare's War by Tanita S. Davis

Summary: Octavia and her sister Tali are less than thrilled that they have to spend a large part of their summer vacation with their rather unconventional grandmother Mare. She smokes, drives fast cars, and wears high heels which throughly embarrasses her two granddaughters but she wants to take this summer and tell them her story and how as a young black woman, just a girl really, she joined the women's army in World War II and was even more unconventional than they had thought.

The Good: Mare's story was just as engaging and interesting as I had hoped, I liked how the story covered not only her time in the Women's Army but also her life before and a bit about her time after the war (and it was nice to see that just because the war was over doesn't mean her group was disbanded immediately since you still need to start with the reconstruction after the war). I liked the characters, although at times I wondered if Octavia and Tali were included in this story so that the author could get a little soapbox-y about inequality (it was how the lines were set up just a little too perfectly to lead into those bits) and felt like everything was also well paced. Since Mare isn't one of the key players in World War II this story is more character focused than plot focused and I thought it was really well pulled off.

The Bad: I'm in two minds about Octavia's half of the story, on the one hand I can see how Davis wanted to use this summer as a way to get Octavia (and Tali) to grow but on the other hand it was a bit boring. I think the story could have stood perfectly fine on it's own if it was just about Mare, although obviously then it wouldn't have been able to include the very end of the story in the present day, and I might have preferred it that way. Again, there was nothing wrong with the characters of Octavia and Tali or the plot, setting, pacing, any of that, it was just a bit dull and I don't feel like it was really needed in the end. 


I'm giving this book a 3.5 out of 5 for having an interesting historical story yet a duller half with the present day story. And of course I need to also plug both Flygirl (black girl passes as white to enter the WASP) and Code Name: Verity (British spy recounts to her diary, which is then read to her captors, how she and a friend, also a pilot, ended up working in the British military up to the point of her capture in German-held France). All three of these are great works of historical fiction although Verity is the most likely of the three to make you cry, just a warning about that (and I have no clue what it's sequel, due out this year, is supposed to be about or how that's even going to work).

Book Review: The Musicians Daughter

For those who don't follow my twitter or tumblr (which I suspect it a large number of people) the past couple of times when I've gone to the library I've just grabbed a ton of books, quite possibly more than I'll have a chance to read this summer! And whenever I do this there will be a number of books in my pile, once I've gotten past the top of the pile with all the books I've wanted to read for a while, where I look at them and go "huh, this could be interesting but I'm not completely sure why I picked this up."  Sometimes I end up really liking these books and other times, well, they fail to leave an impression.


The Musician's Daughter by Susanne Dunlap

Summary: Theresa Maria's father is a court musician in 18th century Vienna and when he's murdered one night she realizes that there was much more to him than that. She then sets out, questioning everyone she knows, about why her father died and what happened to his precious violin in the process?

The Good: This is certainly a setting I haven't seen before, there have been many times when I've seen people complain that so many books (usually fantasy, which this isn't) are set in Europe and I feel like they're being too generous. Austria lies in the middle of Europe and even then that's too far away for many stories to be set, literature is in some ways fascinatingly limited and it's sad that even a setting like this which I've at least heard of from my history classes is almost exotic (especially since they didn't use as much as I think they should have). And on that note I found the underlying plot, regarding freedom for the serfs and land for the Romani, interesting and want to read more (nonfiction) about all of that which is for me what I hope to get out of every historical fiction I read, a renewed interest in perusing history especially history which I'm unfamiliar with.

The Bad: I'm not exactly sure how a book that had intrigue, action, and multiple little climaxes managed it but I found this book just a bit dull. Perhaps it's because I also found Theresa Maria to be a bit of a bland protagonist, yes she was smart enough to be able to keep up with (and was largely unsurprised by) the political machinations that have crept into her life and brave enough to try and save those close to her but she like most of the rest of the book just failed to leave an impression on me. The pacing did feel a little off as well, that there were too many events happening in such a short span of time to feel believable and perhaps if some of the plotting had been simplified to build up the world and Theresa Maria more that would have made the book stronger.


In the end I can only give this book 2.5 out of 5 stars since it was really that dull, even if I want to read more about the time period because I want to read about that since I've never read about it before, not because of how it was portrayed in the book.