Spin
Dec
31
2010

“Police helicopters peppered the crowd with tanglefoot gel until much of Gamla Stan looked like something a tubercular Godzilla might have coughed up.” Robert Charles Wilson, Spin

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Review of Lady Lazarus by Michele Lang
Dec
30
2010
Lady Lazarus
by Michele Lang
320pp (Trade Paperback)
My Rating: 3.5/10
Amazon Rating: 4.5/5
LibraryThing Rating: 4/5
Goodreads Rating: 3.62/5
 

Lady Lazarus is the first book in a trilogy, the Magda Lazarus Saga, by Michele Lang.  The second book in this re-imagining of World War II, Dark Victory, will be released in 2011.  Even though it is an account based on an alternate history involving vampires, angels, witches, and werewolves, it is also based on the author’s family history since her Jewish mother and grandparents are Holocaust survivors who lived in Hungary during this time.  It also draws from the magical culture at the time and the Jewish Book of Raziel as Michele Lang discusses in a fascinating article she wrote for the Tor/Forge blog.

During the summer of 1939, Magda Lazarus lives in Budapest, Hungary, where she works for a vampire in order to support the only family she has left, her younger sister Gisele, and her best friend Eva.  There have been rumors of an impending war, but the reality doesn’t really hit home until Gisele, who has the gift of prophecy as an ancestor of the Witch of Ein Dor, has a vision.  In the future Gisele sees, millions of people are killed by the Nazis.  Horrified, Gisele asks her sister Magda to do something about it; although Magda would like to deny her legacy, she has the stronger power as the eldest daughter of an eldest daughter in the Lazarus family.

Against her better judgment, Magda is convinced to summon the Witch of Ein Dor herself in an attempt to discover what they can do to prevent this ominous event from occurring.  The Witch tells her the Jewish race will be eradicated, and there is nothing she do to change fate.  After some more cajoling, she reveals there is one possibility although it is very dangerous – Magda can find The Book of Raziel and use its power.  The future is so bleak, anything is worth trying so Magda embarks on a search for the legendary book of the Angel Raziel.

This has been a tough book for me to review (as evidenced by the fact that I finished it in the end of August/early September and am only reviewing it now).  I had very mixed feelings about this one, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I liked the premise far more than the execution.  It’s an alternate history featuring vampires, werewolves and the supernatural, which has been done to death recently, but I really liked the way that it was rooted in Jewish history and lore as well as its feminist leanings. Throughout the story, there is some mention about the Witch of Ein Dor being instrumental in the time of Saul and Solomon, and there’s also a very interesting story about the Book of Raziel and how it was actually given to Eve and passed down to her daughters.  The power of the Lazarus heritage is similarly passed from mother to daughter, and there are some strong female characters.  Magda is a reluctant heroine, but no one can fault her courage in the end, and Eva is a resilient protagonist as well.  I really wanted to like this book because I loved the idea of it – basing it on the author’s family’s personal experience with the Holocaust, the mythological parts and the role of women throughout the ages and in the present.

In spite of these strengths, I found my interest waning about halfway through and it was a bit of a struggle to finish the book.  While admirable as a character, Magda didn’t have enough depth to continue to be enjoyable to read about, and the romance between her and the angel Raziel was very trite.  Her attraction to him made sense – he was supposed to be a gorgeous angel – but I never really understood what he saw in her.  The romance was a bit quick and predictable, and I never really believed in them as a couple.  The characterization in general was fairly flat and no one really came alive; they just had a few character traits.

The main reason I wanted to read this book was the first paragraph, which intrigued me:

 

I damned my soul in the summer of 1939. I did it for the noblest reasons, the best ones — to save the people I loved; to make a terrible wrong turn right. But still I am tormented by the thought that my sins overwhelmed my intentions and turned my noble sacrifices to dust even as I made them. Only time will tell if my desperate measures, in the end, were justified. [pp. 11]

This is a case where being mysterious did not pay off because my imagination was hoping for something truly horrible, a big moral dilemma, and I ended up feeling underwhelmed by how it actually played out.  Plus the writing grated on me after a while.  It is from the first person perspective, and a lot of the sentences started with “I.”  It’s inevitable that this will happen sometimes, but it happened excessively and just started to seem like lazy writing.  There are times when it really threw me out of the story because there was no reason for it, particularly when she told us “I watched” instead of just stating what she saw:

 

I watched a crow fly over the tracks to reach a cluster of his brethren waiting on the other side. [pp. 106]

Just say a crow flew, Magda.  It goes without saying that you are watching it if you see it.

There were also some overly melodramatic statements and internal monologue that made me feel like I was reading an angsty 13 year old girl’s diary.  The entire prologue was written in the same tone as that very first paragraph and occasionally there were more parts that were just trying too hard to sound theatrical.

Even though I loved the basis for Lady Lazarus – the Jewish history, the mythological stories about angels and Biblical tales, and the strong roles of female characters – I found I lost interest about halfway through and have no desire to continue to read the series.  There’s a great foundation for a story, but the plot, the characters and the writing are not good enough to pull it off.

My Rating: 3.5/10

Where I got my reading copy: Review copy from the publisher.

Read the Prologue

Looking to 2011: The Blog
Dec
29
2010

Next year I’m hoping will be a little less crazy so I can manage more of a one review per week schedule, but other than that, I don’t expect next year to be all that different.  While I’d love to be one of those people who posts 3 – 5 reviews a week, I’m afraid it just isn’t going to happen unless I win the lottery and get to manage my own schedule (which would be a great thing to have happen in 2011 but I’m not holding my breath waiting for that one!).  I do tend to write rather slowly since I often end up rereading part of the book when writing a review and trying to make sure I’ve really thought it through – and sometimes I even end up changing my mind about what I initially thought in the process.  I’d rather try to write the best review I can than try to write more reviews that I feel are rushed and not great quality (not that I think my reviews are particularly great now, but I at least feel like I’ve given it my best shot when I publish them).

So as far as reviewing goes, I’ll try to do more of what I’ve been doing but will hopefully improve with practice – which would be my hope for every year.  My goal is to give you some information about each book I read – if it fits into a series and where, if it works as a stand alone or not, the plot (while always putting this in the same spot so it’s easy to skip for those people who don’t care), and any thoughts on characters, pacing, writing, world-building and anything else that stood out.  Since everyone’s taste in books is different, I attempt to provide enough information that you can get an idea of whether or not it’s a book you will like regardless of if I liked it or not without spoiling too much – which can be a difficult balance to maintain.  I generally decide what is too much information by asking myself if knowing what I’m saying beforehand would have spoiled the reading experience for me, but of course that differs from person to person.  Also, I sometimes ask what my husband thinks since I generally ask him to read my reviews before I post them anyway (any editor’s notes you find occasionally sprinkled throughout reviews are his).

The one thing I would like to change in 2011 is that I’d like to do some more interviews with authors whose work I’ve read and enjoyed.  This year I did an interview with Ginn Hale and one with Danielle Bennett and Jaida Jones and both of these were a lot of fun to do.

I would also like to open this up to suggestions.  Is there anything you’d like to see more or less of in 2011?  Now that there’s a new website, is there anything you’d particularly like to see on the new site?  The only feedback I received about changes when the site first went up was that it would be nice if Disqus let you just post a name and URL, which it does if you type your comment and then go to submit it instead of logging in first.  Is there anything else that would make the new site better?

Thank you to everyone who read my site in 2010!

Review of Midsummer Night by Freda Warrington
Dec
28
2010
Midsummer Night
by Freda Warrington
412pp (Hardcover)
My Rating: 8/10
Amazon Rating: 4/5
LibraryThing Rating: 4/5
Goodreads Rating: 4.75/5
 

Midsummer Night is the second Aetherial Tales novel as well as the second book by British author Freda Warrington to be published in the United States.  The first Aetherial Tales book is Elfland, but both this and Midsummer Night stand alone even though they are set in the same universe.  The more recently published book does take place after Elfland, but it’s definitely not necessary to read the earlier book first.  There are some minor characters that appear, but it doesn’t add much to the reading experience at all to know who are they are beforehand.

After the recent accident that destroyed her dreams and changed her life, Gill Sharma just wanted some peace and quiet.  She left London to stay at a cottage in Cairndonan in Scotland for 6 weeks, thinking it would be isolated and she could just be left alone.  Instead, she finds that Dame Juliana, the owner of Cairndonan and a famous artist, is running an art class so chaotic that it reminds her of an insane asylum.  Also Peta, one of the other art teachers, keeps trying to befriend her and even convinces her to be one of her subjects for making a mask in one of her classes.

One day Gill leaves her cottage in search of a grocery store and finds herself in an unusual town.  It has no roads and she finds herself entering what must be a pub with a great statue of an angel outside.  At this point, she is in great pain from her injury, but a magnificent man named Rufus somehow makes her pain disappear.  He then offers her a drink, and Gill accepts some fruit juice and tries to find out more about where she is.  She’s told she is in Boundry, but later she cannot find anyone who has heard of this place – anytime she mentions it, people act as though she has lost her mind.

That night when Gill is in her cottage, someone begins pounding on her door and yelling for her to help him.  At first Gill is terrified, but he seems truly upset so she lets him in – and discovers it was the quiet man she noticed in Boundry with Rufus.  He seems hysterical and unable to say much other than to tell her not to let him go back there, so Gill fetches Peta.  The two women decide they want to find out just what is happening for themselves rather than involving any authorities, but they do involve Dame Juliana herself – who has her own secret fears that this man may be tied to her past and her artistic gift.

After reading Elfland, reading Midsummer Night was a must.  While I enjoyed Midsummer Night and think that it was better than Elfland in some ways (mainly in that it didn’t border on too much melodrama), my personal preference is Elfland.  The newer novel didn’t have the same intensity and turbulence as the previous book, which had me thinking about it when I wasn’t reading it.  The characters in Midsummer Night were likable but didn’t capture me the same way as Rosie and Sam and the others from Elfland.  Midsummer Night was a good book that I’m glad to have read, but ultimately it wasn’t as memorable as Elfland.

Personal preference aside, Midsummer Night is both very different from and very similar to Elfland.  Both books have some beautiful writing and an interesting setting in the earth that is accessible to the Aetherial realm. Each book starts out with a prologue that involves different characters than the ones introduced at the start of the first chapter, and both novels are character-driven but with very different protagonists.  In Elfland, the main characters are children who end up as adults in their twenties by the end of the story, and it feels like a coming of age story in a lot of ways.  As the protagonists grow up, they make a lot of mistakes and make huge realizations about life and themselves along the way.  In Midsummer Night, the ages of the protagonists vary from youngish adults to a woman in her sixties.  They still develop throughout the novel but to a lesser degree, and they have more past mistakes than ones made during the course of the novel (although these past mistakes do certainly play an important role in what happens in Midsummer Night).  It’s also less intensely dramatic and more atmospheric than Elfland was, and Elfland had a lot of romance while Midsummer Night had very little.  There’s also a little more explanation about how the Aetherial realm manifests itself on Earth in Midsummer Night, but Elfland also has the gorgeously written Aetherial creation story.

While Midsummer Night contains a lot of different characters, the main focus is on Gill, an athlete whose career and engagement were shattered by an accident, and Dame Juliana, a renowned artist who is struggling to keep Cairndonan Estate because she hasn’t yet completed her master work titled Midsummer Night.  Of the two, the latter is the more compelling although I still sympathized with Gill, who just wanted some solitude after her ordeal.  Dame Juliana is in her sixties and has not sold any of her art in years, resulting in her financial difficulties.  She is certainly a perfectionist who discards her creation as inferior when others think it is brilliant, but mostly she fears the unusual properties of her art and the origin of her gift – and does not understand either of these.  Throughout the story she learns more about them as well as her family’s past, mostly through the journals left by her Aunt Corah, and the discoveries about the past came together well and really made sense given certain other characteristics of Dame Juliana.  It does all tie in with the appearance of Leith, a young man trying to escape from Rufus, and more is revealed about the Aetherials.

Midsummer Night did not have the same passionate energy that made me love Elfland so much, but it was still a very enjoyable book in its own right.  With its elegant but not over-the-top flowery prose, immersive setting, well-developed characters, natural dialogue, and mystery-filled plot, it has left me eager for more Aetherial Tales.

My Rating: 8/10

Where I got my reading copy: Review copy from the publisher (I requested one after reading Elfland and finding out there was going to be a new book soon).

Read an Excerpt

Review(s) of Related Books:

Other Reviews:

Looking to 2011: Reading Goals
Dec
27
2010

My end-of-the-year lists will probably be up next week since I want to make sure I’ve read all the books I’m going to for the year before I post them.  That very last book read in the year could end up being a favorite – after all, that happened to me last year when I read The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge, which I got for Christmas!  So I’m taking a brief break from the review I’m writing now to write one of the first posts about looking ahead to 2011 – reading goals for the year.

Actually, I’m trying not to have many goals for next year.  I’ve tried to do some the last few years and I’m too much of a mood reader to really stick with them.  After glancing at my goals for last year, I didn’t do very well at all.  It ended up being a tough year for reading since it was busier than normal (mostly due to moving twice in one year – that took up a lot of my weekend time for quite a few weekends).

2010 Goals: A Sad State of Affairs

1. The first goal will most likely be met: reading 50 books.  It’s not a huge number, but considering I try to review everything I’ve read it seems that somewhere between 50 and 60 books is all I can do.  I’m reading book #50 of the year right now so I’ll probably end up reading 50 books (that’s debatable, though, since this one seems like it will take a while to read), but other than that, my goals have not been met even though I tried to keep them somewhat easy to meet. Actually, I’m surprised it’s possible I’ll make this one since I had quite a few months where I only read 3 books.

2. Reading more science fiction didn’t go well at all, and I actually read less of it this year than the last. I think this is largely because I started getting a great number of review copies that I was very interested in reading this year and most of those are fantasy.  So I probably actually read fewer books already on my shelves than in previous years (not that I’m going to complain about free books that I want to read!).

3. Making more progress in series I’ve started didn’t go badly, but most of that progress was with books that just came out this year in series I had started instead of books I already had around from series I started.  The point was really to read more books already on my shelf from series I had started. I did read 3 more books in the Miles Vorkosigan series, though, so I’ve now read the first 10 books and only have 4 left including the one that just came out a few months ago.

4. I picked 5 specific books from my bookshelf to read.  Of those, I have only read 1.  I just wasn’t in the mood for the others any time I was thinking about reading them.  That would be why I am not going to set a goal of reading specific books ever again other than maybe 1 or 2 picked out by a friend.  One of my friends and I picked out 3 books for each other to read this year and I read 2 of the 3.  I read a little bit of the third, but I was sick at the time and it was over 700 pages long and it just wasn’t drawing me in so it’s a DNF (I’ll do a post including DNF books later).

2011 Goals: Keeping it Simple

Due to this sad state of affairs, I’m keeping 2011 goals pretty simple.  I’m just going to face up to the fact that I have Book ADD and will constantly be distracted by the next shiny book that needs to be read right now.  So here are my goals for 2011:

1. Read 50 books.  It’s a fairly attainable goal and it keeps me trying to make sure I get in 4 – 5 books a month.

2. Read some of the books for the Women of Science Fiction Book Club and the Women of Fantasy Book Club.  I already have some of these books and really want to read a lot of them.

That’s it.  I still want to read more science fiction, but if it’s a crazy year and those aren’t the books that are calling my name, I’m not going to worry about it.

Do you make reading goals for a new year?  Or did you ever start to and then give up on them for being too restrictive?

Happy Smugglivus!
Dec
27
2010

Today is the day of my guest post for Smugglivus, a month long (plus one week) year-end/beginning celebration of books held by Thea and Ana of the terrific site The Book Smugglers.  Head on over to see some of my favorite series and author discoveries of the year and some books I can’t wait to read next year!