Book 38: St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell

This is another one of those books that I've had for at least ten years and have no recollection of what made me buy it. I'm guessing I was caught by the title and the cover on a display in Barnes & Noble back when there was one within walking distance of my office, but who can say?

That's pretty similar to how I feel about this collection of short stories, honestly: a bit baffled and without a clear sense of how I got here. Each of the stories takes place in a fantasy version of modern reality, such as the titular Catholic school for reforming wolfgirls. That was one of the stories I enjoyed the most, but as with all of the other bizarre universes (a sleepaway camp for various sleep disorders that don't resemble our own at all, an alligator amusement park in the middle of a swamp, a boys' chorus used to bring down avalanches each spring in the great north), I never felt like I could hook into the worlds or the characters. Part of that may just be caused by the short story form, which often don't give me enough time to become properly invested. But most of these stories just made me feel either sad or alienated or like there was something I was supposed to be feeling, but didn't. I don't know that a book always has to have a distinct, identifiable point, but I kept feeling like I was either missing something, or that I just didn't like it, depending on the story in question. And I can't tell if this is the sort of collection that I don't think is very good, or that just isn't for me as a reader. It's not poorly written, on a sentence or even scene level, but I need something more from stories than what this collection gave me, and whether that's a failing of the book or simply a matter of taste or preference, I'm not sure.

Grade: C

Book 37: Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold

This is a story that exists within the context of a much larger series and world. It's the second half of the story begun in Shards of Honor, which brings together Cordelia, a Betan scientist and captain, and Aral Vorkosigan, a captain and noble of Barrayar. Barrayar is a world which had been separate from the rest of the intergalactic society until recently, and it is very war-focused and obsessed with bloodlines and physical abilities and all that. Cordelia and Aral fell in love and got married and Cordelia got pregnant, and on top of all of that, Aral is named regent for the 6 year old grandson of the dying emperor, Gregor.

Barrayar itself focuses on their marriage a bit but mostly on how they can survive in the political situation they're in, and there are attempts on Aral's life and on Gregor's and fights between Cordelia and her father-in-law. Things come to a head in two separate incidents: one in which Cordelia and Aral are poisoned, and while they receive the antidote in time, it affects the health of her baby. So she arranges for essentially a c-section in which the baby is then put into a classic sci-fi incubator and treated, but it's very uncertain if the baby will survive, and even if he does, he will likely be deformed or weak which has made her father-in-law disown him already. And then Gregor is attacked and there's a palace coup and they need to hide the child emperor until they can save the day.

These books are prequels, and they do feel like it in many ways. I haven't read the rest of the series, but I know that the protagonist is Miles Vorkosigan, so I know the baby has to survive one way or another. There's a lack of suspense at points as a result, and a feeling that the story is showing various aspects of the society for reasons I don't understand yet but will later. But the main ambivalence I feel about the story is I don't know how to feel about the culture and characters in general! There is a lot of very odd sexual politics--characters who are supposed to be people we like in some ways have very bizarre sexual desires and practices, and while Cordelia herself is also experiencing a sense of outrage over a variety of things, it's just an odd world to be a part of right now. I don't need my characters to all be completely good, but there's a level of moral relativism in this book that I'm not sure how to handle. And again, while there's plenty in the book that's high stakes, that's lessened by the fact that I knew at least one thing that had to happen, and from that I could extrapolate quite a bit more. I don't know! I can't tell if this just isn't exactly my style of speculative fiction, which is possible, or if there's something more that didn't sit quite right with me.

Grade: B

Book 36: It Takes Two to Tumble by Cat Sebastian

Now this is the sort of story I'm hoping for when I pick up a Cat Sebastian novel!

The central focus of this story is in many ways a version of the romance plotline from The Sound of Music. Captain Phillip Dacre has been off with his ship for two years, leaving his three children to be cared for by his sister and tutors after the death of his wife. His last letter from his sister informs him that his children have been running amok, and his plans for his summer at home in the countryside are to re-instill discipline in his household! But when he gets there, he discovers that the most recent tutor is the local vicar Benedict Sedgwick, who is wonderful at handling wild children as a result of raising himself in an even more chaotic home by his bohemian poet father. Ben is engaged to his closest childhood friend Alice out of a sense of friendship rather than passion, since she's quite ill and he feels indebted to her family, and also because his interest is in men rather than women so a marriage based on friendship seems to be the best he could ever want.

Of course, that becomes far more complicated once he meets Phillip and begins to see the caring man underneath the strict disciplinarian. There are other complications in the town caused by Ben's father and brother and Alice's family, but I honestly glazed over a fair amount of them, because the real point and draw of the story is the developing relationship between Phillip and Ben and with the three children as well. I found the story a bit tense at times because I kept being afraid that their attraction would be discovered when it shouldn't be, but it's not really a story that's interested in that kind of conflict. The resolution at the end is a bit too pat for my liking, but it's a reasonably satisfying fantasy ending of how two men could essentially share a life and three children together without raising too many eyebrows, without too many complications too easily waved away. It was definitely my favorite book by this author since The Lawrence Browne Affair.

Grade: B  

Books 34 and 35: Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis

I'm writing one post for two books because the story is really a single giant novel published in two parts, and I don't think discussing the two parts separately would benefit me or a reader in any way, since I've already finished both of them. So! Here we go.

These books take place in a larger book universe in which time travel has been invented at Oxford University in the mid-twenty-first century, and is used as a means of learning more about historical events by going back in time and essentially observing. The predominant theory is that historians can't make significant changes to history, so they don't need to worry about changing things, just to avoid something calamitous happening to them in the past, because if you die in the past you die in real life, too. In the first book we're introduced to three historians, Michael, Polly and Merope. Merope has an assignment in the English countryside during the Blitz (where she's known as Eileen), when children were sent away from London, Michael is about to go to observe the Dunkirk evacuation, and Polly is going to London itself during the Blitz to work as a shopgirl.

From the very beginning of Blackout the reader is more aware than the characters that something isn't quite right. The way time travel is supposed to work is that there's a drop location in time and place where a person goes when they want to be retrieved by the future again, and for all three of them their drops don't work. They each also get closer to the big inflection point moments of history than they had been taught they would be able to get, and Michael and Polly in particular begin to worry that they've both altered history that they weren't supposed to, and that the reason they can't get home is because they've changed things so much that England no longer wins the war. The book ends with the three of them finding each other in London (which was never a part of their assignment originally).

The second book is more chaos and inability to get home and talking at cross purposes and characters withholding information from each other AND from the reader even when it's in their POV and a couple of big reveals that are either lessened because the reader has realized the truth long before the characters have and/or because the characters really should have been more insightful in general. There's so much about this story that I like, and I enjoyed the setting immensely and Eileen's arc is delightful and the most genuine in my mind, but so much of the tension is from characters behaving in ways that may be understandable but that I found deeply frustrating. The entire story needed to be edited down by about two hundred pages between the two books, in my opinion, and there are aspects of how time travel is supposed to work in this universe that just felt almost unreasonable to me, someone who grew up watching Quantum Leap and has a lot of thoughts and feelings about what people are supposed to be able to change about history and what they're not. These are two books about incredibly high stakes--indeed, what I found the most affecting were the discussions of how many coincidences or quirks of geography resulted in England being able to win the war, and how close it all really was--but I never felt those stakes for the characters themselves, or felt that they truly appreciated what they were doing while they were doing it, and especially before they got trapped in the past. The role of a historian in the universe as described would really be the role of a spy and actor, and none of them seemed to fully appreciate that.

Having said all that, there's another book by the author in the same general Oxford time travel universe that I'm definitely going to read, because while I was quite frustrated by a number of things in these books, I also really enjoyed many aspects of them, and I'm glad I read them. They're the sort of books which are close enough to being great that the flaws are even more frustrating than they would be in a lesser story.

Grade: B

Book 33: Spectred Isle by KJ Charles

Not entirely intentionally, I have read a bunch of books this summer that have been stories about England in the first half of the twentieth century, but with a twist of some kind. This one is set five years after the Great War ended, and it's focused on a man named Saul Lazenby whose life and career is ruined by his experience in the war, but not in the way most were. He takes a job working for an eccentric older Major who is convinced England is at the center of supernatural happenings, and he's there to provide information as someone who had studied archaeology but can no longer be employed in a real position. 

He encounters a tree that spontaneously alights, and also encounters Randolph Glyde, who shows up at every new location Saul is sent to in order to investigate the secrets of the past. As the story progresses, it becomes more and more clear that there are in fact supernatural forces at work, a secret underworld of magic that had contributed to the War and subsequently weakened most of the protections that had existed for years. Randolph is the last of his family, which had been protectors of the world for centuries, and he's very grumpy about all of it. As the two of them are thrown together, their attraction to each other also grows and complicates everything even more. 

I liked a lot of aspects of this book, and the main pairing is a type that I generally enjoy a lot, two damaged people whose strengths and weaknesses complement each other in interesting ways. I wanted the mythology to be a bit more in some way, either more deeply explored or grounded, or even less explainable and incomprehensible. There were parts of it that were handwaved in ways that made it feel insubstantial to me, and I wanted it to either be more fully other or to not actually be supernatural at all. This is a book that at times felt like it wanted to be more of a speculative fiction novel and less of a romance, but in order for it to be that it would have needed to be far more detailed and complex to be satisfying for me. Still, I enjoyed it a lot, and this author writes very good early Twentieth Century gay romances in general. I think I would have preferred a book that was a more straightforward story about the Bright Young Things generation in Britain, and those who couldn't be (or refused to be) a part of that culture.

Grade: B   

Book 32: Hidden Sins by Selena Montgomery

I think one of the best parts of this whole book blog is being able to identify exactly what it is that I like and don't like in a story. Some of the books that I read and don't like are simply not good books; the story is thin or the writing is poor or the entire premise is flawed in some fundamental way. But other books are just not stories that I personally am interested in reading more of, and it's good to discover and confirm that, I think.

This is one of the latter kinds of books. It's a contemporary romance that's also sort of a thriller mystery, involving the hidden treasure of one of the main character's grandfather, and as it turns out that's not actually enough for me. The central conflict between the romantic pair is that they had been together when they were teenagers but then she had to leave him, and he's never forgiven her but he's also never forgotten her, and now she's on the run from bad dudes who are also trying to find this treasure, and there's a bunch of mythology about it all that could be interesting but feels both obvious and also so complicated there's no way for the reader to be involved in the discovery of the secrets. All in all, not the book for me.

Grade: C

Book 31: Choose Your Own Autobiography by Neil Patrick Harris

As is probably clear from the title, this is an autobiography. But it's also a book which cannot really be thought about independently from its specific form, and how it both makes it more fun and more interesting and also, in my experience of it, distances the reader from the subject in a way that's a curious choice for a biography!

Neil Patrick Harris is a former child star who got new life as an actor in his twenties and thirties on both a sitcom and Broadway. He's also openly gay and married to a man with whom he has two children, and the story of how he was outed and then more or less required to be an out public figure feels both quaint in 2018 and also is a good representation of how much has changed and also how much hasn't. This book was published in 2014, and much like Possible Side Effects (although even more startlingly, given how much closer in time it is to the present), the book reads like a tiny time capsule. There are bits and sections of this book that I cannot imagine being edited in the same way if it had been published today, and there's a security in what the future will look like that feels hard to remember experiencing from this vantage point.

The format of the book is to tell the biography in the same way as the Choose Your Own Adventure books did, where the reader gets to the end of a chapter and then decides what they what to happen next in the story. There are two problems with this format for an autobiography. One is practical: there is only one actual narrative to follow, and it's what really happened, and the book isn't constructed in a way to actually get the reader to experience all of the book unless you don't actually follow the paths, which feels poorly constructed! If you're going to make it into a game of sorts, it should actually work.

The second problem is bigger, which is that the story is told in the second person POV, since the conceit is that you are NPH and are choosing what will happen, etc. The problem with this in an autobiography is that it distances the reader from the subject in a way that's difficult to ever bridge successfully. It made me feel like NPH didn't actually have to reveal himself or his experiences in a way that wasn't artificial. I know more about what has happened in his career and life, but I don't actually feel like I know him better, and while that may mean that he feels like he succeeded, it's not what I want from an autobiography. I wanted less gimmick and more introspection, I guess.

Having said all that, it was still worth reading in the end, even if it made me feel like 2014 was forty years ago rather than only four.

Grade: B

Book 30: Possible Side Effects by Augusten Burroughs

Man, it's really fascinating to read a memoir of essays like this in 2018. Possible Side Effects is the fourth collection of personal essays based on his life that Augusten Burroughs published in the 2000s, and there was a period of time for five or six years when that style of writing dominated book publishing, in large part due to the success of his first memoir, Running with Scissors. I had read his first three books around the time they were published, and enjoyed all of them, but I had purchased this book back when there was still a Borders next to Penn Station.

The book is only twelve years old, and depicts events that take place in the 1970s through the mid-2000s, but it's remarkable just how dated it feels. That datedness isn't necessarily a problem; my reaction wasn't exactly 'oh this didn't age well,' but it was more an awareness of the fact that it was describing a different time, both in terms of the settings of the stories and the time in which those stories were written. I was reminded of a couple of essays in The Salmon of Doubt in which Douglas Adams described how he interacted with technology in the 1990s and how he expected technology and life to evolve as a result. It wasn't even that he was wrong about everything, but I had to grapple with just how differently the world I was a teenager was from how today is. We adapt so quickly to changes, even ones that feel (and, truly, are) monumental, and Burrough's descriptions of dating via personal ads and then craigslist postings and other methods of the trade feel simultaneously very familiar and completely foreign.

This book feels like a fourth collection of essays, which is to say that while the writing is still as inventive and compulsively readable, the stories being shared don't feel like the big jewels anymore. There's still something to be discovered in them, and I don't regret reading them as well, but I didn't really engage with them as a reader so much as I engaged with them as someone who is approximately the age now that Burroughs was when he wrote them, and that's an interesting place to be when thinking about the stories. I discovered from reading them that I still deeply care about whether the person of Augusten Burroughs is doing okay now; he's married, although not to the man who he was dating while writing this book, and he's working on a couple of projects, although nothing too major, compared to his earlier successes. But I really hope the life behind the wiki entry about him is happy.

Grade: B

Book 29: Dragon's Blood by Jane Yolen

This is one of those books which I've had for I don't know how many years and yet had never read. So I finally did, and it was charming!

The book is set on a desert world where dragons are raised and trained to be fighters in pits for entertainment, essentially like gladiators. The protagonist is a boy named Jakkin, whose father had been killed by a feral dragon he had been attempting to train. As a result, he had become a bond boy who had to work off his debt by cleaning and raising dragons on essentially a dragon ranch. But he had a plan to clear that debt by stealing a dragon egg or hatchling and raising it on his own to be a fighter.

It's the first of a trilogy, and you can definitely feel that in terms of how far the story gets, and the way it's setting up the larger arc of the series. But I definitely became invested in Jakkin and his dragon, and the secrets that he keeps while training his dragon and the secrets that others have which he's largely unaware of. There are times when Jakkin is a bit slow on the uptake, but in a way that's largely charming rather than frustrating. I am definitely looking forward to reading the next two books in the trilogy.

Grade: B

Book 28: The Ruin of a Rake by Cat Sebastian

I have hit a string of books this month where I didn't really love anything I read. This was another one of those, unfortunately--a perfectly serviceable story, but not one that left much of a lasting impression on me.

This is the third book in a connected trilogy of stories, and it's the one that hangs together the least well for me. Julian and Courtenay, the couple this book focuses on, are fine, but all of the plot around them essentially revolves around everyone in the story being incapable of having a straightforward conversation about anything. Courtenay is the rake in question, a man who we meet in an earlier book and is described as being terrible and wicked, but of course he's not really. And Julian is the straight-laced man who just needs to let love into his life, who has a sister he adores who he thinks sacrificed her life for his health by moving to England from India, and it's just all very complicated and not particularly satisfying, in the end. The plot intrigue needs to either be more important or less; I have read one too many historical romance novels recently that have insurmountable obstacles that are just magically handwaved without actually convincingly solving those obstacles, and I don't have much patience or interest in it at this point.

Grade: C

Book 27: Don't Stop Believing by Gwen Hayes and Tragen Moss

This is a classic holiday romance novella, featuring a former marine loner who was hurt in the past and a librarian who always falls for the wrong guy who happen to get snowed in together over Christmas. It was written by the same author of Romancing the Beat, and you can really see the point by point beats she laid out in her book in the story. The book is fine because the premise itself is the draw, but it doesn't really get any deeper or more interesting than that, unfortunately. Also, this is one of those gay romances where the names of the characters don't match--I kept wanting Simon to be the librarian and Adam to be the marine, and the fact that it was the opposite made reading the story genuinely harder. Not the worst option if you need a quick holiday romance to read, but not much more to recommend it.

Grade: C 

Book 26: Romancing the Beat by Gwen Hayes

This is a pretty straightforward 'how to structure a romance novel' book that I bought because I've had an idea floating through my head for the past year and I was sort of hoping that mapping it out via a beat sheet would help me actually write it. There's some good and useful tips in this book, but my reaction to a bunch of the beats outlined was more along the lines of 'oh, here's the section in a lot of romance novels that I dislike' rather than 'this is how the magic works!' I don't regret buying or reading it, and I think there's some useful structural advice in there, but it feels a bit like a paint by numbers instruction manual that doesn't actually result in a pretty or particularly interesting picture.

Grade: C

Book 25: Wicked Intentions by Elizabeth Hoyt

I read this book two weeks ago and have already forgotten most of it, other than that it is the sort of historical romance novel that is surely perfect for someone but isn't for me. There's a rich guy with unusual sexual appetites who everyone thinks is bad but really he's just kinky and sad because his mother didn't show him enough love, and there's a widow with a secret who's trying to save all of the orphans from the slums of London, plus the deaths of a bunch of prostitutes and overprotective older brothers and a sister who sacrifices her own virtue to save her ungrateful husband, like you do. So there's obviously a lot of stuff that happens in this book, but there's very little heart or real human behavior, and I just don't like straight romance well enough these days to get past all of the nonsense, sorry.

Grade: C