Art – no matter the medium – buoys my spirit up. It’s a refuge and a dream, a story of my own making, inspired by the artist. You could say I’ve turned appreciating it into an art form all of its own. So why not include it here? I ♥ This Art is a bi-weekly feature on Tempting Persephone.
“The Humble Amulet” – Emil Landgreen
Publisher’s Summary:
“While developing a new system to maintain the town’s defenses, genius student Claire Danvers discovers a way to use the vampires’ powers to keep outsiders from spreading news of Morganville’s “unique” situation.But when people in town start forgetting who they are-including the vampires-Claire has to figure out how to pull the plug on her experiment before she forgets how to save herself…and Morganville.”
After the first eight books in the Morganville Vampires series, two things remained true: 1. Its high ranking among my favorite young adult urban fantasy series didn’t budge, and 2. It continued to please with quality story-telling, fast pacing, and consistently good plot advancements. Moving into Ghost Town, the series’ ninth installment, my enjoyment didn’t dim so much as my reading took a critical turn.
From where I sit, the strongest selling point of this series has always been the four foundation characters: Claire, Shane, Eve and Michael. Defined by distinct personalities and identifying traits, each is comfortingly familiar, an old friend; for the very first time I found that familiarity chafing. To be clear: I adore the dynamic of their friendship; I love the romantic relationships and how the pairings make the group stronger as a unit. If either aspect were to change, I would be upset. But when it comes to character development, they’ve…stagnated. Each is locked into a specific role that’s been set on repeat for eight novels. But that actually, and perhaps surprisingly, is not where my frustration lies.
What has begun to bother me is the fact that Claire, Shane, Eve and Michael struggle and fight, and they prevail – for the most part – in each book, but only ever gain tenuous ground. Recent installments have seen a bleak tone settle in, which makes me wonder: Is peace and lasting happiness possible for them? The group appears to be resigned to their fate: being threatened is nothing new, and they’ve long since adapted to looking over their shoulders. But as a reader who has come to care about them, I’m not. I’d like to see the ground they gain after each victory – however small – begin to mean something.
Another first: the narrative voice took a step back with minor inconsistencies and annoying parenthetical asides. I’ll start with the latter and an example:
“Mom wasn’t in the bathroom, but Claire was relieved (no pun intended) to get there anyway.”
The following example illustrates both points:
“…she didn’t know what good it was going to do her to know Amelie had once filed a complaint against a man who owned a dry-goods store (what was a dry-good store?) for cheating the human customers.”
Claire – smart, quick on the uptake, early college enrollment Claire – was suddenly asking what a miasma was and had no clue what a dry-goods store might be. Because of who she is – and what she is continuously asked to do – for either of those things to catch her up is too hard to swallow. And each time I encountered an aside, I wondered why it was there as there never seemed to be relevance attached to it.
My reading experience wasn’t all doom and gloom, though. Myrnin, in all of his delicious, unstable glory, was a key player once again, and lit up every scene he was in. He is quickly climbing the rungs to be one of my favorite vampire characters in fiction. There was an interesting development (or two) between Amelie and Oliver. And there’s always Shane, who never fails to please.
Ghost Town was good if not great, and was as quickly read as all the rest. The premise of Bite Club, however, which looks to introduce a change of plot pace, has ensured my anticipation for its release next month.
Publisher’s Summary:
“Seventeen-year-old Lochan and sixteen-year-old Maya have always felt more like friends than siblings. Together they have stepped in for their alcoholic, wayward mother to take care of their three younger siblings. As defacto parents to the little ones, Lochan and Maya have had to grow up fast. And the stress of their lives–and the way they understand each other so completely–has also also brought them closer than two siblings would ordinarily be. So close, in fact, that they have fallen in love. Their clandestine romance quickly blooms into deep, desperate love. They know their relationship is wrong and cannot possibly continue. And yet, they cannot stop what feels so incredibly right. As the novel careens toward an explosive and shocking finale, only one thing is certain: a love this devastating has no happy ending.”
In the aftermath of reading Forbidden, I was gutted. My heart felt like a tissue being torn at; one tiny piece at a time falling to the floor. I was so unaccountably shaken by the ending that I had to make it impossible for myself to dwell on it: I pushed through one menial task after the next; I forced myself to pick up another book, something light and comforting. And whenever I lapsed, thought back to a scene, to one of the final scenes, I slammed a mental wall down. There was finally no other option: I had to move the book, innocuous and unpretentious in appearance, from my line of sight.
But I would not take back reading this book for anything.
Forbidden is not about incest. It is, because it’s there, but to hold up that one subject as the pivot on which the story turns would be wrong. The story shines a painful, bright light on neglect: the totality of one parent’s absence; the emotional withdrawal and mental abuse of the other. It holds a magnifying glass over teenage social anxiety and stress. It demonstrates how responsibility, however willingly shouldered, can slowly suffocate dreams and what-might-have-beens. And it accomplishes all of that and more utilizing a dual narrative that is distressingly hopeful at times, but aching and tense and hopeless more often.
There is a lot of repetition of thought in Forbidden; that’s something that would, in any other novel, itch at my skin like a new wool sweater. In this novel it wound me up; pulled me into the moods, fears, happiness and longing that Lochan and Maya sheltered and attempted to conceal. I had moments of certainty: I couldn’t continue reading. In the pit of my stomach, which felt both weightless and coiled, I knew I couldn’t – wouldn’t – stop. I was almost too emotionally engaged with these characters, this fictional family. My wrecked self was the result.
It needs to be said that whenever a rational, intellectual argument against a few of the events in the story rose in me, the visceral, emotional pull of it choked it back. It also needs to be said that the story brought me to a point in which I was hoping – with some desperation – for there to be a way for Lochan and Maya, a mistake or loophole that would allow them to be. Having since read several other reviews of this title, I know I wasn’t alone in that.
Tabitha Suzuma’ s Forbidden offers up powerful, gripping storytelling and unforgettable characters in Lochan and Maya.
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Forbidden is available in the UK now (I purchased my copy from The Book Depository, though it looks like the book is no longer available there); it will be released in the US this June.
I fell in love with Linda Gillard’s writing and characters last year when I read Emotional Geology on Angie’s recommendation. I’ve since received Star Gazing, and reviewed her latest e-release, House of Silence, just yesterday. Suffice it to say, I was thrilled when Linda agreed to write a guest post and love the result. Enjoy!
PICTURE THIS…
Guest blog by LINDA GILLARD for Tempting Persephone
I have – so far – refused to watch the movie COLD MOUNTAIN (one of my all-time favourite books) because the actor Jude Law is just so completely wrong for Inman. It would ruin that book for me to see one of my favourite fictional heroes being played by an actor who is so very different from the man I imagined.
I’m an author and I tend to have clear ideas about what fictional characters should look like, but oddly, I’m not always certain what my own characters look like. When I was writing my first novel, Emotional Geology, I kept visualising myself as my heroine Rose, simply because she was the same age as me and like her, I made quilts.
I’d actually made Rose look different from me in the book, but somehow I still couldn’t see her. I particularly couldn’t see her through my hero’s eyes. I kept seeing me and that was inhibiting my writing. So I decided to look through magazines until I found a photo of someone who looked something like my idea of Rose. Eventually I found one and the character took off. Finally she was no longer me, she was Rose.
Photographs bailed me out again when I was writing my third novel, Star Gazing. I got stuck early on with my strong-but-silent Scots hero, Keir. I knew how he spoke, how he behaved and I knew he was a gentle giant, but I just couldn’t visualise him in any detail. (This was probably something to do with the fact that my heroine never sees Keir because she’s blind.) The book was limping along with an enigmatic gap where Keir should have been in all his detailed physical glory. Then one day I saw a photo in a magazine of the actor Gerard Butler displaying the exact blend of virility and vulnerability that I’d envisaged for Keir. Once I’d discovered Butler and “cast” him as my hero Keir, the character took off and the book practically wrote itself.
Now when I’m starting a novel, I routinely “audition” for my characters. I collect photos that represent something about the people I’m trying to create. They could be photos of anyone, not necessarily celebrities. I don’t even have to know who they are or what they do. It’s just the look of the person that’s important.
I used to cut pictures out of magazines, but nowadays I tend to search online and save pictures into a folder. Then I put a selection of photos on my desktop to inspire me and help me focus on my characters. (Sometimes the photos I select for my heroes can get a little distracting and they have to be taken down and replaced with something a little less, er, stimulating.)
My method is useful if I’m working on more than one book at a time (and a professional writer usually is. You’re writing one book while promoting the previous one and you can get a bit confused.) For example my work in progress is a paranormal love story, but I’ve just launched an e-book, HOUSE OF SILENCE, which is a family drama. I’m currently writing guest blogs and answering interview questions about HoS, while trying to stay in touch with my ghost story. There’s a lot of people running around inside my h
ead! So at the moment I have photos on my desktop representing the characters in the paranormal novel to remind me which book I’m writing. (I had a long search for my ghost, especially as he had red hair, but I was very happy when I finally found him – British dancer, Edward Watson.)
I assumed the way I see my characters was peculiar to me. I never thought my readers would visualise characters in the same way I do, especially as I don’t include a lot of descriptive writing in my books. But when I’ve corresponded with readers and occasionally sent them photos I was working from while writing the book, they’ve surprised me by emailing back, “OMG – that’s exactly how I saw him!” It’s almost as if there’s some kind of telepathy going on between author and reader. I don’t describe my characters in great detail, but readers can nevertheless see them in detail. Weird… But Stephen King, no less, says writing is telepathy. And who am I to disagree?
*****
Thanks, Linda!
Summary:
“Orphaned by drink, drugs and rock n’ roll, Gwen Rowland is invited to spend Christmas at her boyfriend Alfie’s family home, Creake Hall – a ramshackle Tudor manor in Norfolk. She’s excited about the prospect of a proper holiday with a proper family, but soon after she arrives, Gwen senses something isn’t quite right. Alfie acts strangely toward his family and is reluctant to talk about the past. His mother, a celebrated children’s author, keeps to her room, living in a twilight world, unable to distinguish between past and present, fact and fiction. And then there’s the enigma of an old family photograph…When Gwen discovers fragments of forgotten family letters sewn into an old patchwork quilt, she starts to piece together the jigsaw of the past and realises there’s more to the family history than she’s been told. It seems there are things people don’t want her to know.
And one of those people is Alfie…”
Linda Gillard’s House of Silence effortlessly captivates. The story, which weaves the tension and isolation of the gothic novel into a mystery that winds its threads around a discourse on familial ties, does not disappoint from its first sentence to its last. It is, you see, a story full of moments: insightful moments that reverberate against an inner thought, perception or emotion; quiet, hold your breath moments that are sweeter for their bare simplicity; gasping moments at the precipice of a fall. House of Silence invokes one of the best reading experiences: it’s voraciously read, and lingers on.
The characters that reside within the pages of Gillard’s novels are textured; they charm the reader – this reader, at least – because of their quirks and flaws, not in spite of them. They are, all of them, deeply real, struggling under the weight of previous trespasses, coping with the pains and pleasures of their pasts. Gwen, the heroine of this particular novel, buried the trauma of hers under a blanket of reason and fortitude. Just as Alfie playacted around it, Hattie sewed it down, and Marek pruned it. These people, these characters – and not just the four I mentioned – are emotionally engaging because they haven’t buried, acted, sewn, or pruned deep enough to keep their turmoil from rising to the surface. I, for one, wanted to stand witness when all of it – the lies, the attempt at avoidance, the misdirection – broke. You will too; that’s a promise.
It’s highly unfortunate that House of Silence was overlooked by traditional publishing houses, but it is undoubtedly and assuredly their loss. In turn, I hope that you will not let its format (as a Kindle ebook release*) stop you from discovering this deliciously involving, wonderfully written novel.
“Well, that’s the nature of families, isn’t it? Everyone trying to accomdate everyone else. Struggling to like people they’d normally cross the road to avoid. Trying hard not to dig up buried hatchets.”
Stop by tomorrow for Linda Gillard’s guest post on visualizing characters.
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*It would be remiss of me to not point out that the Kindle app can be downloaded to most portable devices, and that House of Silence is an absolute steal at $2.99.
Publisher’s Summary:
“Super-Being Exterminator Kitty Katt and the Alpha Centaurian she loves, Jeff Martini, should be finalizing their wedding plans. But that was before she discovers Jeff is in line to become Emperor back on his home world. Kitty knows she is everything a royal family wouldn’t approve of, and is bracing herself for the worst. As it turns out, the royal family is just the beginning. Especially when extraterrestrial Amazonian terrorists are determined to start and end Kitty and Jeff’s nuptial festivities with a bang.”
What is it about Gini Koch’s Kitty Katt series that turns me into a can’t-explain-herself-for-nothing type of girl?* I’ve a few ideas, and they are as follows:
1. Kitty, Jeff, Reader and the rest of the characters, after three books, are family; beloved, occasionally crazy, always welcome in my home family. My instinct, then, is to shelter and protect them from those who maybe possibly might not understand them the way I do. Readers, let me tell you: it’s hard to type when your fingers have metaphorically expanded to mama bear proportions. Nevermind that all I really want to do is parade them out, dressed in their best bits of dialogue and description, and say the heck with even trying to write a review; I’m going back for a re-read.
2. Alien in the Family was funny, outright hilarious at times, but that’s nothing new. Humor is one of the trademarks of this series. This book, however, did something else: it made me teary. I was laughing, chortling one moment then sniffling, blinking and looking up the next; try explaining that to another occupant of the room. This installment packed an unexpected emotional punch on several levels, at several different points during the story, which wraps back to my first point because, if not for the fact that I love these characters dearly, I suspect the events might not have had such an impact or effect.**
True to form, one explosive event steamrolled into the next in Alien in the Family, but keeping pace with the action and hostile alien plot unraveling was a closer examination of the ties that bind these characters together. Reader and Kitty, for instance: their friendship was put under a microscope. And I loved what that magnifying lens revealed; I hope, in fact, that what we learn is somehow further developed in future books. That aspect of the Kitty Katt series – those bonds, the friendships, and the tight family unit that’s been forged – is one of the things I love most about it.
Add Jeff and Kitty’s wedding, the introduction of a few new, can’t-wait-to-see-them-again characters, and a most interesting development to the mix, and I…well, couldn’t have been happier with Alien in the Family. For the right reader, this series will deliver hours – no, a lifetime, really*** – of reading at its most fun and pleasurable best.
Previously: My reviews of Touched By An Alien and Alien Tango
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*In a good way.
**It’s also my way of saying that this series is best read in order.
***The spines of my copies (of all three books, even this one) are showing signs of multiple re-reads. If and when they fall apart, I’ll replace them. Never know when you’re going to need a Jeff Martini fix. I, for one, require said fixes often.
Art – no matter the medium – buoys my spirit up. It’s a refuge and a dream, a story of my own making, inspired by the artist. You could say I’ve turned appreciating it into an art form all of its own. So why not include it here? I ♥ This Art is a bi-weekly feature on Tempting Persephone.
“Backyard Bermuda” by Kyle Cobban
Publisher’s Summary:
“October “Toby” Daye is a changeling-half human and half fae-and the only one who has earned knighthood. Now she must take on a nightmarish new challenge. Someone is stealing the children of the fae as well as mortal children, and all signs point to Blind Michael. Toby has no choice but to track the villain down-even when there are only three magical roads by which to reach Blind Michael’s realm, home of the Wild Hunt-and no road may be taken more than once. If Toby cannot escape with the children, she will fall prey to the Wild Hunt and Blind Michael’s inescapable power.”
October Daye has been put to the test before, but never more than in An Artificial Night. Forced to play a life or death game with Blind Michael, one of the Firstborn’s children, she must also evade the Wild Hunt and save the children they stole, including her adoptive niece and nephew. This third book was the most breathless, must-finish installment in the series to date.
Having now posted reviews for Rosemary and Rue and A Local Habitation, it’s safe to say that everything I loved from those first two books was present and accounted for in An Artificial Night: deep world-building, new developments with characters I’ve come to love, and the addition of a few others that I cannot wait to read more about.
“I didn’t want to go. I’m not a hero; I never have been. I just do what has to be done.”
Toby never shies away from any situation that has the potential to do her harm; she repeatedly suffers for doing the right thing, or for taking on a problem no one else seems willing or able to. That’s part of her appeal: Toby does suffer, sometime she doesn’t come out on top, but she always gets back on her feet and does what needs doing. If not for that pragmatic, noble side of her, Toby might not have survived her encounter with Blind Michael. (Well, that and the willingness of her allies to come to her aid.) After three books, my love for Toby’s character has not diminished.
My love for some of the other characters, like, oh, Tybalt, continues to grow (and consume, in his case). A few new characters, such as Tybalt’s nephew, Raj, packed an amazing punch. And that’s something to be noted: the secondary characters in this series help boost it to a standout, knockout level. Not one is wasted, or introduced without reason; each usually appears in a future book, or has a hand in the advancement or resolution of that given plot. The secondary characters also supercharge the emotional impact of the story. To continue down that line of thought, however, would be to veer into spoiler territory, so…mum’s the word.
The layered world-building in this series is one of its great strengths. Pieces of Fae culture, for lack of a better word, are revealed in every book. In An Artificial Night, the world-building was, for me, especially impressive. We learn more about the Firstborn, their children, and Luna, Toby’s liege’s wife; those examples are just that, examples. With Toby, there’s always more under the surface. I’m not often one to dwell on the world-building, but when it comes to this series I not only notice it, I love it.
As was the case with the previous two, I finished An Artificial Night and moved on to Late Eclipses. Believe me when I say: This series just keeps getting better and better.
I’d be remiss to let National Poetry Month slip by without a single post dedicated to it in celebration.
So. Was I one of those young girls scribbling lines in unfinished notebooks, half afraid to say the right thing, to put down a line of truth, willing to do so only because it was poetry, and who can ever say what meaning lies between breaks on the page? Yes. I was. I still am, when time and mood allows.
More often than I write it, I read it. Below are a few of my favorites, discovered too many years ago. And then one of my own, not quite done. Continue reading
Publisher’s Summary:
“Toby Daye-a half-human, half-fae changeling-has been an outsider from birth. After getting burned by both sides of her heritage, Toby has denied the fae world, retreating to a “normal” life. Unfortunately for her, the Faerie world had other ideas…Now her liege, the Duke of the Shadowed Hills, has asked Toby to go to the Country of Tamed Lightening to make sure all is well with his niece, Countess January O’Leary. It seems like a simple enough assignment-until Toby discovers that someone has begun murdering people close to January, and that if the killer isn’t stopped, January may be the next victim.”
With introductions seen to in Rosemary and Rue, A Local Habitation thrusts October’s services as a PI/Knight Errant to the forefront, setting the stage for a locked room-esque mystery that dangerously escalates as the pages turn.
Where Rosemary and Rue was character driven, establishing October’s past, present and personality alongside other key players, A Local Habitation is plot driven. If, like me, you read for character, don’t be concerned; growth is achieved, insights are there to be taken apart. I was plenty pleased; my appetite for what yet may develop thoroughly whetted. And if, like me, you happen to enjoy detective novels or mystery stories, you will be pulled into the events of this book, avidly attempting to unravel the tight knot of lies, secrecy and murder alongside Toby and Quentin, who, to my delight, had a larger role in this book. Once again, it’s all good.
The action essentially begins when October’s liege, Sylvester, sends her to a small, contained County to make contact with his niece, whose calls abruptly stopped three weeks prior. Quentin is tasked with tagging along, and so they pack up and head out to Fremont, cognizant of the fact that they’re traveling into a political disaster zone with no back-up and no hope of a quick rescue if something goes wrong. And, don’t you know it, something goes drastically wrong. Toby and Quentin aren’t in Fremont for more than two days when the first murder occurs. The staff of ALH Computing – owned and operated by Sylvester’s niece, January – knew nothing, saw nothing, and not a shred of evidence was there to be found on the body or at the scene. Unfortunately for Toby, matters have only begun to get complicated.
Toby is a PI, yes, but she’s not an expert on murder, and admits repeatedly that she’s working blind, relying on logic, skills specific to her heritage, and determined stubbornness to puzzle out motive and opportunity. Her inexperience slows her down, which is unfortunate because the killer is operating at an increasingly faster speed, but she stays put when another might have run. The story is tense, but I found it dense, too, thanks, I think, to the necessity of wading through all of the possibilities at Toby’s pace. I was always engaged, no doubt about that, but I didn’t zip through A Local Habitation the way I did Rosemary and Rue. That’s neither a complaint nor a criticism; just a personal fact.
I mentioned before that Quentin, the young Daoine Sidhe who fosters at Sylvester’s Court as a page, has more page time in this book, and I could not have been happier about that. His character matures the most under the harsh hand of the events that unfold and, as October observes, he has so much potential. I can’t help but wonder what he’s going to be like when – I hope not if – he’s older; how the tentative bonds he’s formed with Toby may come in to play. And Tybalt. If he hadn’t won me over completely in Rosemary – oh, but he did! – he would have sealed the deal in Habitation with his snarls, his awesome lines, his jacket and his tight trousers. (I would have read the book for the exchange that brings up those tight trousers alone.)
A Local Habitation kept me up late – far too late considering work the next morning – but I had to finish it in what amounted to a sitting and a half, broken as it was by work shoehorned in between. (Folks, take a lesson from me: Do not start a new book hours before you’re due in at work. Next time I’ll even try to take my own advice.) I suppose it’s not hard to guess my next move. In fact, I’ve already if only briefly begun An Artificial Night.* Or even the move after that, which will soon find me at a book store, buying Late Eclipses so I can move to it without pause as soon as the third book is done. That is the best testament I can give to how much I am enjoying the October Daye series.
*Actually, since scheduling this to post I’ve finished books three and four. And have promptly begun to experience withdrawal symptoms.
Previously: My review of Rosemary and Rue
