Review of Shades of Milk and Honey, by Mary Robinette Kowal

Fantasy, Fiction Review, Historical, Romance 0

shades_of_milk_and_honey_largeShades of Milk and Honey

by Mary Robinette Kowal

A Tom Doherty Associates Book (Tor), New York, 2010. 320 pages.
2010 Nebula Nominee for Best Novel
RT Book Reviews Reviewers’ Choice Award for Best Fantasy Novel 2010

Thank you to my sister Melanie for giving me this book for Christmas.

The book is essentially Jane Austen – with magic. Now, it didn’t enchant me as much as the other Jane Austen with magic series which began with Sorcery and Cecelia. I think the reason was that the sibling rivalry was a bit intense for my taste. The younger, more beautiful sister, Melody, is intensely jealous of her older sister Jane’s accomplishments. (I missed the love between Elizabeth and Jane in Pride and Prejudice.) Those accomplishments include ability with Glamour – magical enhancement of art and music.

The story is fun, in many ways mirroring Pride and Prejudice. I rightly looked for romance to develop with the most distasteful man Jane was initially introduced to. But things do stay interesting. I didn’t particularly like the jealousy subplot, as Melody also has some men to choose from. Does she really need to like the same ones as her sister? Meeting and getting to know the various eligible men and their sisters takes up most of the book. It was also not a surprise that one of the men turns out to be a cad.

Here’s a taste from the first chapter:

When all was settled, Jane seated herself at the pianoforte and pulled a fold of glamour close about her. She played a simple rondo, catching the notes in the loose fold; when she reached the point where the song repeated, she stopped playing and tied the glamour off. Captured by the glamour, the music continued to play, wrapping around to the beginning of the song with only a tiny pause at the end of the fold. With care, she clipped the small silence at the end of the music and tied it more firmly to the beginning, so the piece repeated seamlessly. Then she stretched the fold of glamour to gossamer thinness until the rondo sounded as if it played in the far distance.

The door to the drawing room opened. Melody leapt to her feet with a naked expression of welcome on her face. Jane rose slowly, trying to attain a more seemly display. She placed her hand on the pianoforte as the room spun about her with the lingering effects of working glamour.

But only their father entered the room. “Hullo, my dears.” The plum brocade of his waistcoat strained across his ample middle. He looked around the drawing room in evident pleasure. “Are we expecting company?”

Melody said, “Mr. Dunkirk said he would honour us with a visit this afternoon.”

“Did he?” Her father looked befuddled. “But I saw him not fifteen minutes ago passing through our fields with the FitzCamerons. They looked for all the world as if they were going hunting. Are you certain you did not mistake his meaning?”

Melody’s face soured. “His meaning was clear. But perhaps he preferred to spend the afternoon in the company of a lady than a farmer’s daughter.”

Jane winced as Melody flew from the room.

If you’re in the mood for a fun old-fashioned romance with a nice dose of magic, this book is a fun read.

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Source: This review is based on my own copy, a gift from my sister Melanie.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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Review of The Caller, by Juliet Marillier

Fantasy, Romance, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

caller_largeThe Caller

A Shadowfell Novel

By Juliet Marillier

Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2014. 437 pages.
Starred Review

The Caller is the third book in the trilogy begun in Shadowfell. You should definitely read the books in order. This is a wonderful culmination and completion of the story.

The book did not go as I expected. Neryn was planning to complete her training from the last two Guardians, and then go to the Gathering at Midsummer and Call the Uncanny Folk to fight on the side of the rebels. But early on, people and situations require her plans to be changed. The servants of the White Lady have been killed. The king, who rules the land with a reign of terror, has found a Caller of his own. He is planning to Call the folk to fight on his own side, and he doesn’t mean to ask nicely.

Meanwhile, Neryn’s beloved is in the middle of it all. It’s getting harder and harder for him to keep up the pretense of being a loyal king’s man. And how can he stand by while the Good Folk are being harmed?

Here’s how the book begins, in a Prologue that gets right into the action and the tension:

Done. He was done. No more lies; no more acts of blind savagery; no longer any need to pretend he was Keldec’s loyal retainer. His precarious double life as Enforcer and rebel spy was over. He had turned his back on it, and he was going home.

Crossing country under moonlight, he pondered what his sudden decision would mean. He would be at Shadowfell, the rebel headquarters, over the winter. He would see Neryn again: a precious gift, though there would be little time alone together in that place of cramped communal living. His arrival there would bring a double blow for the rebels, for he carried not only the news of their leader’s death, but also an alarming rumor, passed on to him by the king himself. Another Caller had been found; Neryn was not the only one. If true, these ill tidings set the rebels’ plan to challenge Keldec at next midsummer Gathering on its head. An expert Caller should be able to unite the fighting forces of humankind and Good Folk into one mighty army. He shuddered to think what might happen if two Callers opposed each other. He must take the news to Shadowfell as fast as he could. That, and his other burden.

I wasn’t willing to wait for the library to get this one – I preordered it as soon as I heard it was coming out. And I am glad I did; I will want to reread this trilogy many times, to once again enter the ancient Alban of Juliet Marillier’s brilliant imagination.

JulietMarillier.com
randomhouse.com/teens

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on my own copy, purchased via Amazon.com.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Please use the comments if you’ve read the book and want to discuss spoilers!

Review of Kilmeny of the Orchard, by L. M. Montgomery

Classics, Historical, Old Favorites, Romance, Teen Fiction Review 0

kilmeny_of_the_orchard_largeKilmeny of the Orchard

by L. M. Montgomery

Bantam Books, New York, 1989. First published in 1910. 134 pages.

I turned 50 last month. As a way of celebrating, later in the year during the few weeks when all three of us are 50 years old, two childhood friends and I are hoping to visit Prince Edward Island. In preparation for that trip, and as part of my celebration, I thought I’d reread L. M. Montgomery’s books. Update: The trip’s not going to work out after all this year, but we’re going to try to go before we turn 55. And it’s still a good excuse to reread the books!

Kilmeny of the Orchard is actually the first novel Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote, though she didn’t get it published until after her classic Anne of Green Gables was published and was immediately wildly popular. To be honest, as a writer it encouraged me greatly to learn this. If L. M. Montgomery’s first effort was a masterpiece, well, then, who was I to think I could ever write anything?

Let’s just say that after reading Kilmeny of the Orchard, I was not surprised to learn it was the author’s first effort. A lovely first effort, yes, but not a masterpiece like her first published novel.

Kilmeny of the Orchard, like all but one of L. M. Montgomery’s books, takes place on beautiful Prince Edward Island. It’s a romance, simple and sweet. There is lots of flowery description and the young lovers are good and true and the story will make you happy.

Yes, the plot is highly unlikely. L. M. Montgomery used to find surprising stories in the news and then put them in your fiction — not realizing that fiction needs to be less surprising than truth in order to be believed. Worse, there’s a villainous character who is clearly villainous because he’s from “Italian peasant stock.” And our heroine is essentially the most beautiful woman in the world, and innocent and sweet (even though she’s lived away from people except her aunt and uncle and the villain all her life). The hero is handsome and smart and rich, but working as a schoolteacher to help a friend.

However, you still can see the seeds of L. M. Montgomery’s greatness. She may overdo the description in this book, but she has a gift for it. And you can already see the quirky characters appearing whom she is so good at bringing to life.

All the same, this is the book that reassures me that L. M. Montgomery was human, too. She, too, had to work at her craft.

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on my own copy, purchased years ago.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Please use the comments if you’ve read the book and want to discuss spoilers!

Review of All the Truth That’s in Me, by Julie Berry

Historical, Mystery, Romance, Starred Review, Suspense, Teen Fiction Review 0

All the Truth That’s in Me

by Julie Berry

Viking, 2013. 288 pages.
Starred Review

I read this book simply because it’s in School Library Journal’s Battle of the Books, which commences March 10. I’m not sure what I expected, since I hadn’t heard much about it, but I was blown away and kept reading well into the night.

This is a rare book that’s written in second person voice, addressed to “you.” But the speaker is not addressing the reader. It soon becomes clear that she’s addressing the young man she loves.

Here’s how the book begins, with the heading “Before”:

We came here by ship, you and I.

I was a baby on my mother’s knee, and you were a lisping, curly-headed boy playing at your mother’s feet all through that weary voyage.

Watching us, our mothers got on so well together that our fathers chose adjacent farm plots a mile from town, on the western fringe of a Roswell Station that was much smaller then.

I remember my mother telling tales of the trip when I was young. Now she never speaks of it at all.

She said I spent the whole trip wide-eyed, watching you.

She still watches him. She remembers when he smiled at her, gave her posies. But something terrible happened, and now the whole village barely notices she is there.

We get bits of what happened, all along the way. We find out why she doesn’t speak. She was gone for two years. When she came back, she was out of her head, left for dead, with half her tongue cut out.

Then ships are sighted off the shore, coming toward the town. The Homelanders are bringing war to them, wanting their fertile farms. All the men of the town must fight, even though their arsenal was destroyed, even though they are doomed.

But Judith knows where to find help – only she must confront her own nightmares.

And after she does so, everything changes.

This book is marvelously constructed, revealing bits of the past at a natural pace, as it comes up in the present, finally with mysteries solved at the very end. I find myself wanting to read it all over again, knowing now how it all fits together.

And ultimately, it’s a love story. And a story of healing. And a story of courage. And a story of a wounded girl finding her voice.

julieberrybooks.com
penguin.com

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Please use the comments if you’ve read the book and want to discuss spoilers!

Review of Sense & Sensibility, by Joanna Trollope

Contemporary, Fiction Review, Literary, Romance, Starred Review 0

Sense & Sensibility

by Joanna Trollope

Harper, 2013. 362 pages.
Starred Review

Sense & Sensibility, by Joanna Trollope, is simply a modern retelling of Jane Austen’s Sense & Sensibility. You come away from it feeling like this is exactly how Jane Austen would have written it if she were writing today. There are no gimmicks. And don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love the gimmicks — like a science fiction retelling of Persuasion. But this is the same story told in modern times.

And I loved it! Sense and Sensibility is not one of my favorite Austen books, but even knowing what would happen, this one kept me up reading all through the night. A little thing that bugged me in Jane Austen’s version — that Marianne is so fragile she gets sick if she gets wet — was nicely explained by Marianne’s asthma, which is what killed their father.

I don’t have to tell you the plot, because this is really for people who’ve already read Jane Austen’s version. Joanna Trollope did a magnificent job of modernizing it to today’s situations and sensibilities.

As I write this review, I looked at the website mentioned on the flap, theaustenproject.com, and I learn that this is the first of Jane Austen’s six novels to be rewritten. I’m not sure how I will feel when they start tackling my favorites, like Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, but this first one is so excellent, that bodes well for the rest of the series.

joannatrollope.com
theaustenproject.com
harpercollins.com

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Please use the comments if you’ve read the book and want to discuss spoilers!

Review of Across a Star-Swept Sea, by Diana Peterfreund

Romance, Science Fiction, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

Across a Star-Swept Sea

by Diana Peterfreund

Balzer + Bray (HarperCollins), 2013. 449 pages.
Starred Review

Okay, before I begin the serious review, I’m going to gush a little. I LOVED this book! SO good! I stayed up all night reading it, and I’m not the least bit repentant. It helps that I have a 3-day weekend starting, but still, I haven’t read a book good enough to make me do that in awhile, and I’m so happy to find one.

Across a Star-Swept Sea is a sequel to the delightful For Darkness Shows the Stars, which was a science fiction retelling of Jane Austen’s Persuasion. You honestly don’t have to have read the first book. Some characters from the first book do make an appearance in the second book, but this one takes place in a totally different part of a future devastated earth, so their societies developed differently, and you don’t need to know about the society from the first book.

This book is a science fiction retelling of The Scarlet Pimpernel. As you can tell from one of the first Sonderbooks reviews I wrote, back in 2001, The Scarlet Pimpernel is one of my all-time favorites, and I’ve read it many times. That made me appreciate all the more what a brilliant job Diana Peterfreund did with this retelling. There was almost a scene-for-scene correspondence.

The big, fun thing she did was flip everyone’s gender. So “The Wild Poppy” is a 16-year-old girl, Persis Blake. It puts quite a different twist on the story.

The Scarlet Pimpernel is about a daring Englishman who saves nobles from the French Revolution. In Across a Star-Swept Sea, they’re in the same future earth as For Darkness Shows the Stars, where humankind was devastated by an accident with genetic engineering. People who used the genetic engineering gave birth to children who were “Reduced” — never having more intellectual capability than a small child.

The people living on the two islands of New Pacifica believe they are the only humans to have survived the wars. But one of the islands, Galatea, is having a revolution. Over the years, the people who were not Reduced, naturally, became the ruling class. The Reduced were capable of nothing but being servants.

However, a generation ago, a cure was developed, so that the Reduced were able to have “Regular” children. The new class of people, “regs” were still not treated well on Galatea, so they began a revolution. And the worst part is that they have developed a pill that destroys the brains of the former aristos, so they are now the Reduced ones, fit for nothing but service.

Persis Blake, in her many disguises as the Wild Poppy, is rescuing aristos from the revolutionaries. No one knows her identity, and she poses as an empty-headed socialite in the princess regent’s court of the other island, Albion. Their society has perfected genetic engineering, so she uses “genetemps” to disguise herself in any way she wants. But when one of those genetemps goes wrong and makes her sick, she’s saved by a Galatean medic who was looking for passage to Albion anyway. He’s handsome and seems to want to help the refugees, but can Persis trust the nephew of the revolutionary leader?

All the wonderful plot twists of the original are here, except that she tells you sooner (right away) the identity of the Wild Poppy. But those who know The Scarlet Pimpernel would know immediately anyway, and this works well.

If they didn’t take you seriously, they would never see you coming. Persis was the most stylish, the most glittering, the most frivolous girl in Albion. There was no way she was secretly orchestrating a spy ring.

This book is marvelously written and will make delightful reading whether you’ve read the original or not. Those who already know and love the original, like me, will appreciate this book all the more. Magnificent!

dianapeterfreund.com
epicreads.com
authortracker.com

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/across_a_star_swept_sea.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on my own copy, ordered via Amazon.com.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Please use the comments if you’ve read the book and want to discuss spoilers!

Review of Eleanor & Park, by Rainbow Rowell

Audiobooks, Award Winners, Historical, Romance, Starred Review 0

Eleanor & Park

by Rainbow Rowell

read by Rebecca Lowman and Sunil Malhotra

Listening Library, 2013. 9 hours on 7 compact discs.
Starred Review
2013 Boston Globe-Horn Book Award Winner

Sigh. I didn’t want this book to end. I hated going to work today, having to stop in the middle of the last CD. When I got home, I didn’t even think for a moment of leaving the CD in the car. (And I’d done the same thing on CD 5, finishing it in the house.)

I’ve always liked slow-burn romance, romance that shows the characters, slowly, realistically, falling in love over time, rather than just looking at someone and suddenly falling for them. This book is a realistic, slow, beautiful, exquisite love story.

I loved listening to the story. I liked the way you’d hear what one character was thinking, and then it would jump to the other character’s viewpoint. However, now that I’m writing the review, I wish I had the print book to share good bits with you.

I did *not* like the ending. However, considering that the Eleanor & Park were studying Romeo & Juliet in school (Eleanor being contemptuous that it’s called tragedy), and considering the parallel nature of the title, and that this was also a teenage love story between teens from very different backgrounds — well, it could have ended much worse. I was afraid all along this would end as badly as Romeo & Juliet. This isn’t too big a spoiler: Nobody dies.

But I hated the ambiguity of the very end. And there are many secondary characters whose fates I really want to know about. The author gave us so much detail along the way, is it too much to ask for a little bit of detail at the end? (Apparently it is.) I want to know more!

So you’ve been warned about the ending. But the journey is totally worth it. It starts toward the beginning of the school year when a new girl — Eleanor — gets on the school bus, and no one will let her have a seat. Park finally scoots over and gives her half of his seat, but they don’t even speak to one another for weeks. The back-and-forth narration shows us each one starting to wonder about the silent person on the bus. Then Eleanor starts reading Park’s comics over his shoulder. They still don’t speak.

Meanwhile Eleanor’s dealing with bullying in gym class and an awful situation at home, with four little brothers and sisters to worry about as well. Park’s problems are more along the lines of his Dad making him learn to drive a stick before he’ll let him get his license. As things progress, Eleanor cannot let her family find out about Park.

There were so many little things that rang so true. I liked the way neither would admit they were boyfriend and girlfriend until well after Park had gotten in a fight over something said to Eleanor.

The audio was wonderful and had me driving to and from work almost in a trance. It’s not family listening, though. It’s a love story, and their feelings do grow in passion, which could be quite embarrassing for younger listeners. (I love the way they each marvel separately over how amazing it feels to hold hands. Things do progress from there, but this doesn’t jump straight to making out without giving the small steps along the way their due.) I was listening in the car by myself, so I didn’t have to worry about embarrassment, but the descriptions struck just the right note of wonder and passion, without feeling trite.

If you’re ever in the mood for a love story, I highly recommend this one.

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Please use the comments if you’ve read the book and want to discuss spoilers!

Review of Every Day, by David Levithan

Romance, Science Fiction, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

Every Day

by David Levithan

Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2013. 324 pages.
Starred Review

Here’s an innovative and creative idea, executed well, the perfect vehicle for commenting on the human condition as it is expressed in teenagers.

David Levithan sets up the situation beautifully in the first few paragraphs:

I wake up.

Immediately I have to figure out who I am. It’s not just the body — opening my eyes and discovering whether the skin on my arm is light or dark, whether my hair is long or short, whether I’m fat or thin, boy or girl, scarred or smooth. The body is the easiest thing to adjust to, if you’re used to waking up in a new one each morning. It’s the life, the context of the body, that can be hard to grasp.

Every day I am someone else. I am myself — I know I am myself — but I am also someone else.

It has always been like this.

“A” borrows other people’s lives for one day at a time. He’s never been the same person twice. He can access certain memories from the person whose body he’s in, though he doesn’t like to overdo that, but needs to do enough to get by. He stays in pretty much the same area as where he went to sleep, and always someone the same age as him, which is sixteen during this book.

I’m using “he” for convenience. That’s the way I think of him since he wakes up as a boy at the start of this book. But he wakes up as a girl as often as a boy.

From living lots of people’s lives, A has all kinds of insights into what it means to be a teenager. That’s the brilliant part of this book that truly shines.

On only page four, A meets Rhiannon:

As I take Justin’s books out of his locker, I can feel someone hovering on the periphery. I turn, and the girl standing there is transparent in her emotions — tentative and expectant, nervous and adoring. I don’t have to access Justin to know that this is his girlfriend. No one else would have this reaction to him, so unsteady in his presence. She’s pretty, but she doesn’t see it. She’s hiding behind her hair, happy to see me and unhappy to see me at the same time.

Her name is Rhiannon. And for a moment — just the slightest beat — I think that, yes, this is the right name for her. I don’t know why. I don’t know her. But it feels right.

This is not Justin’s thought. It’s mine. I try to ignore it. I’m not the person she wants to talk to.

It throws off A’s carefully planned strategies when he keeps thinking about Rhiannon. He can at least e-mail her in every body. And then does he dare to hope that she is someone who might understand?

This book is full of great insights thrown in along the way. He talks about having siblings or not, being in a family that goes to church or not, relationships with family members, being able to tell his body is a mean girl by her friends’ surprise when he doesn’t make the cutting comment.

Here’s where he wakes up in the body of a drug addict:

There comes a time when the body takes over the life. There comes a time when the body’s urges, the body’s needs, dictate the life. You have no idea you are giving the body the key. But you hand it over. And then it’s in control. You mess with the wiring and the wiring takes charge.

That day it is all he can do to keep the body he’s in from going to get the drugs it so desperately wants.

Another day he wakes up in the body of a girl who’s written a suicide plan in her notebook, with a target date later that week. Here are his insights about that:

Some people think mental illness is a matter of mood, a matter of personality. They think depression is simply a form of being sad, that OCD is a form of being uptight. They think the soul is sick, not the body. It is, they believe, something that you have some choice over.

I know how wrong this is.

When I was a child, I didn’t understand. I would wake up in a new body and wouldn’t comprehend why things felt muted, dimmer. Or the opposite — I’d be supercharged, unfocused, like a radio at top volume flipping quickly from station to station. Since I didn’t have access to the body’s emotions, I assumed the ones I was feeling were my own. Eventually, though, I realized these inclinations, these compulsions, were as much a part of the body as its eye color or its voice. Yes, the feelings themselves were intangible, amorphous, but the cause of the feelings was a matter of chemistry, biology.

It is a hard cycle to conquer. The body is working against you. And because of this, you feel even more despair. Which only amplifies the imbalance. It takes uncommon strength to live with these things. But I have seen that strength over and over again. When I fall into the life of someone grappling, I have to mirror their strength, and sometimes surpass it, because I am less prepared.

I know the signs now. I know when to look for the pill bottles, when to let the body take its course. I have to keep reminding myself — this is not me. It is chemistry. It is biology. It is not who I am. It is not who any of them are.

But all those insights and observations are the frosting on the cake. A’s love story with Rhiannon is the heart of this story. And the question: Can he have a love story when he never knows which body he will be in the next day? How can he even make plans? Is this someone who can get to know him for who he truly is? But then, who is he, really?

I must admit that though the book is absolutely brilliant and beautifully executed, I thought the ending was a bit anticlimactic. In a way, I think David Levithan painted his character into too tight a corner. I would have liked a happy solution, but I can’t think of one myself. Now, I imagine a lot of teen readers will like this ending, and, actually, it’s a better ending than I probably could have come up with. So I’m not saying the ending is flawed — just warning readers it won’t necessarily leave you feeling happy.

Every Day does what great science fiction does best — lets you look at everyday life from a completely new perspective. Highly recommended.

davidlevithan.com
randomhouse.com/teens

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Please use the comments if you’ve read the book and want to discuss spoilers!

Review of All There Is, collected by Dave Isay

Audiobooks, Nonfiction Review, Romance, True Stories 0

All There Is

Love Stories from StoryCorps

collected by Dave Isay

HighBridge, 2012. 1 hour on 1 CD.

StoryCorps is an oral history project. The StoryCorps people have gone all around the country collecting people’s stories in audio form. This is a collection of some of the most moving love stories from the StoryCorps project, told in the voices of the participants themselves.

At first I thought this was the same stories as in the book of the same name. It is not, but is a smaller selection. However, since in this short audiobook you get to hear the voices of the people telling the story, it is very powerful.

You simply can’t go wrong spending an hour of your time listening to people talk about the great loves of their lives.

highbridgeaudio.com

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library audiobook from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I write the posts for my website and blogs entirely on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of Flame of Sevenwaters, by Juliet Marillier

Fantasy, Fiction Review, Historical, Romance, Starred Review 0

Flame of Sevenwaters

by Juliet Marillier

A Roc Book (Penguin), 2012. 434 pages.
Starred Review

I completely blame Juliet Marillier. Sunday afternoon, I should have gotten a whole lot of organizing and packing done for my impending move. Instead, I read Flame of Sevenwaters. I should have known better than to even start it, since pretty much all of her books has absorbed me to the extent that I forget about trivial things like eating.

This is the sixth book in her stories from Sevenwaters, completing a second trilogy. Each book completes a story, but there is an overarching storyline throughout each trilogy, so the books are best read in order. The second trilogy features three sisters from the household of Sevenwaters.

Flame of Sevenwaters takes place from the viewpoint of Maeve, who was sent away from Sevenwaters as a child to be tended by Aunt Liadan after she was severely burned in a horrible accident in which she tried to save her dog from a fire. Maeve is reconciled to the fact that there’s not much she can do, with her fingers that don’t bend. The people at Harrowfield are used to her shocking scars, but she’s been putting off going back home to Sevenwaters because she can only be an embarrassment at the high table, unable even to feed herself.

However, ten years after the accident, Uncle Bran is sending a fine young horse to her father, in hopes he can use it to placate a local nobleman after his sons and their companions disappeared on Sevenwaters land. Maeve does have a way with animals, and her presence will help calm the horse. The people of Sevenwaters are sure the disappearance is the work of Mac Dara, the powerful fey prince who’s the father of Cathal, a man who married one of the daughter’s of the house. Cathal’s been staying out of Mac Dara’s reach, but now it seems a showdown is at hand — and Maeve, despite herself, is going to be part of that showdown.

At Sevenwaters, Maeve finds two dogs alone in the forest. She slowly wins them over, and wonders where they came from.

This was the first time I had taken the dogs to the keep with me, but we had been practicing against this possibility. They had walked halfway there and back again with me and Rhian several times now. They had learned to stay quiet and calm while Emrys or Donal worked with Swift in the field or on the tracks around the clearing. They had learned not to bark at the cows or the druids. As for sleeping arrangements, I had not been displaced from my bed as Rhian had anticipated. Bear would have slept inside readily, but Badger did not like to be in the cottage when the door was closed. When night fell and Rhian began to secure our abode with shutters and bolts, he always went out to lie on the old sacks beyond the door. Bear would generally cast a sad-eyed look in my direction as he followed, but he would not leave Badger on his own. I had never before seen a dog with eyes of such a remarkable color as Bear’s, a mellow, lustrous gold-brown. Against his black coat, now glossy with good care, they were striking indeed.

I thought I’d figured out some patterns to Sevenwaters books, but this one breaks them. And it’s a wonderful culmination to the story so far. I sincerely hope this isn’t the end.

julietmarillier.com
penguin.com

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Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I write the posts for my website and blogs entirely on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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