Clockwork Princess

Note to self: When it’s been over a year since you have read the last book in a series, a refresher might be a good idea. It was almost 18 between reading this book and reading Clockwork Prince and I spent a lot of time looking things up on the internet and hoping I didn’t accidentally fall into a spoiler. I liked the book, but one day when I have some time (you know, when I win the lottery I never buy a ticket for) I am going to reread all three back-to-back so I’m not so confused!

I found what I wrote last August:

I had a hard time getting into Clockwork Princess. It dragged at first but about 5 chapters in it picked up. I'm not sure if it was the book that dragged or if it dragged because it had been so long since I read Clockwork Angel and Clockwork Prince.

Clockwork Princess reveals a lot of genealogy and other details that are relevant to the Mortal Instruments books as well. I am quite tempted to reread the three Infernal Devices books and the first five Mortal Instruments books before the last book comes out. I always reread all of the Harry Potter books before a new one came out and while I knew those books better than these, it always helped.

I thought the epilogue wrapped things up a little too nicely...there seemed to be a little too much of people getting what they wanted even if it was far fetched…

(August 2013)

Speaking from Among the Bones

Baby C came home from the hospital and a few days later, Alex came home from the library with this…I had put a hold on it and of course the hold came up at the most inopportune time…but I finished it and I enjoyed it. Easter at Buckshaw and the crypt in Bishop’s Lacey is opened and disturbed…sounds like a ghost story and maybe a bit like of of the most famous ghost stories in Christian lore…and then, because he can, Alan Bradley tosses a curve ball on the last pages…a good book for a new mom!

Oh, and have I mentioned that I think the name Flavia is awesome? I would have named Baby C Flavia, but Alex wasn’t a fan…and I think I like her name better than Flavia now anyway…but Flavia is still an awesome name.

(April - May 2013)

The Mark of Athena

I was very excited when a message from the library popped up, telling me this book had arrived. But the thing that made me the most excited? On one of the last pages, a few little lines reading: The House of Hades, coming Fall 2013. For whatever reason, correct or incorrect, I thought The Mark of Athena was the last book in the Heroes of Olympus series. I'm so glad there's at least one more book!

I felt like I needed a refresher from The Son of Neptune before I started this one...I kept mixing up which of the "new" characters came from Camp Jupiter and which ones came from Camp Half-Blood.

I liked the book - the adventures were exciting and there were enough of them, but not too many (if that makes sense). I did kind of wish we got to see more of Camp Jupiter and Camp Half-Blood preparing for their inevitable meeting (maybe that will happen in the next book?). The little teaser glimpses of what was going on that the seven got to see through Piper's knife were revealing, but I wanted more!

I'm on track for 16 books in the first four months of 2013...yahoo!

Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Demigod Files: A Survival Guide to Greek Gods and Monsters

Hey, you, remember the note-to-self yesterday? Yeah? Well here’s another example for you.

Quick read anyone? Less than an hour! This was fun. And that’s that!

The Heroes of Olympus: The Son of Neptune

I’m waiting somewhat impatiently for my name to come up on the list for The Mark of Athena, but I’ve got a few weeks at least ahead of me…this book followed a similar format to The Lost Hero except this time it was Percy Jackson who had no idea where he was or why. I’m super excited to see Camp Half-Blood and Camp Jupiter join forces in the next book. And I’m super excited that Michelle is also all over these books so I have someone to discuss them with. She’s a little peeved that the third book is Athena and not Minerva, but I think there’s a reason for that…I don’t think that the son of Neptune referred to in the title was Percy Jackson…

And with that, we're finally into October...I'm so far behind, it's unbelievable, but I'm blaming it on the six weeks in trimester number one where the guy who got up at 3:30 am every morning, the preschooler and the pregnant lady were in a competition to see who could go to bed first and our house was usually silent at sleeping by 8:30 pm at the LATEST!

The Heroes of Olympus: The Lost Hero

Yay...more Percy Jackson, except Percy Jackson is missing and all of a sudden there are Roman demigods running around with the Greek demigods. I really liked this book and how Rick Riordan meshed Greek and Roman mythologies. I really appreciated the glossary at the end that explained who the various gods where and what their Greek equivalent was. I was super impatient to read the next installment...and I have now...so in a few days, that will be up too...

The Book Thief

Where do I start?

My mom brought this book back from Australia with her in 2008 and has been telling me I should read it ever since. It lived in the bookcase beside the bed in the room I slept in when I visited my parents. I'd see it there, but for whatever reason I'd never pick it up and start it. I finally packed it up last summer and brought it home with me. And it proceeded to sit on my bedside table, untouched, until last week.

And then I couldn't put it down. I read it in snatches while J was having a bath. I read it while dinner was cooking. I stayed up late reading it, but not too late because I didn't just want to read the story, I need to savour every word.

The Book Thief is set on a poor street in Molching, a village outside of Munich, during World War II. Yes. Another WWII novel. It is narrated by Death and it follows Liesel, a young German girl, as she adjusts to life with a poor foster family and all of the additional challenges the war brings.

The cast of characters in this book is amazing - besides Liesel and Death there is her foster mother whose language would make a sailor blush, but who loves Liesel even through all her fierceness, there's Papa, the gentle foster father with his silver eyes and his accordion, there's Rudy, the boy next door with the lemon coloured hairwho dreams of being Jesse Owens, there's Max, there's Frau Diller and Frau Holtzapfel, there are so many wonderful characters.

It's a book full of colour and full of emotion. Death associates each dead person with a colour and throughout the book colour is emphasized - hair colour, eye colour, the colour, or lack thereof, of some minor, inconsequential detail. And there are emotions. Many emotions. There's fear and anger. There's joy and sorrow. It's all there. And the reader feels it too. I had tears in my eyes a few times - just like Jessica G. in the comments on this post when Rosa held the accordion and when the eyes turned to rust and when Max left, not once, but twice and when he came back and over and over in the last 50 or so pages. I finished this book on my break at work and I'm sure they thought I was going crazy (I am temporarily helping a department that is not my own on a project that is super stressful, and don't know any of them very well, so I'm sure they thought my red-rimmed eyes were work, not book related!)

I've written before (I think over there, I thought maybe when I wrote about Suite Française, but apparently it was some other book) about being sad a book ended and wanting it to keep going, well this was one of those books. I wanted to know what happened, beyond the small snippets that Death gave us. I know why the book had to end there, Death explained it, but I want to know what happened in the years between where we leave Liesel in 1943 and where Death picks up the story again in the Epilogue. How do you think she got were she ended up? I have a bunch of theories and no answers. Maybe that's how it's supposed to be, but I want more!

Oh, and a quick quibble about the Young Adult genre. I don't get it. Apparently it's a relatively new genre. Books like Anne of Green Gables and Little Women were written for adults, with teenagers caught up in that age groups. I have a hard time distinguishing between YA for older teens and adult fiction, especially if its well written. I think this book could fall into either category. I dunno...YA is a difficult genre to define!

I'd love to hear what other thought of the book...this book really makes me wish I still had a book club because I really, really, really want to talk about it!

Dear George Clooney: Please Marry My Mom

Hmmm. What can I say? I picked this book up because the author, Susin Nielsen, is Canadian and she wrote some Degrassi episodes. As in old Degrassi. From when I was a kid.

It's one of those funny in-between books - Violet, the protagonist is 12, so is it kidlit or YA fiction?

Violet is an angry and upset young lady - her father, a director, ran off to California with his star, married her, and had twins. Violet lives in Vancouver with her mom and her five year old sister. Her sister's reaction to the divorce is slightly less angry than Violet's - Rosie has taken to wetting the bed and biting a girl at the daycare.

I was on the fence with this book. I loved how Violet and her friend Phoebe take control of what they think is an out-of-control situation, Violet's mom's love life, and send George Clooney a long letter detailing why he should marry Violet's mom. I love the everyday 12 year old-ness of the book - the cute guy from Winnipeg who calls Violet Pamplemousse, Violet's proclamations that she's not into boys, she'll never be into boys, look at all the guys her mom has dated that didn't work out so all boys are gross and her simultaneous (and somewhat confusing to her) crush on aforementioned cute guy from Winnipeg, the mean girl, the influence of social media on her life (I am oh so glad there was no social media when I was 12. Life was interesting enough as it was!), the Magic 8 ball conversation with her father.

Overall I liked this book for what it was - a book for a pre-teen/young teenager. I loved all of the Vancouver references. I even liked the cute ending. The only thing that drove me nuts was that the boring, dorky man Violet's mom ended up with (who isn't actually boring or dorky) was the white knight who rode in and fixed all the things wrong with their home and car - bannisters secured, old furniture removed, mufflers fixed, etc.

The Enchantress: The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel

BIG SPOILER ALERT

So the series is done. The secrets have all been exposed. Or have they?

As with the other books, The Enchantress one picked up immediately where the previous book (The Warlock) left off. I wasn't as excited about this book as the others: all the way through I wished the other five were nearby so that I could thumb through them for some little kernel Scott mentioned previously that would help make the current book make sense.

The only character that really developed and grew in this book was Virgina Dare...learning a little more of her back story made her motivations much more clear. I never really got the feeling she was a "bad guy" except that her association with John Dee (who also turned out not to be a through and through "bad guy" in the end. He didn't really redeem himself, but he did show that he was a human capable of human emotions) pointed that way. I'm not sure if I needed the end of the Warlock to help me along, but I had trouble with the whole thing with Josh becoming Marethyu and living a bunch of parallel existences (in Isis and Osiris' Shadowrealm, on Earth etc) I have heard rumours that Scott is writing a series about the Earthlords and the first installment is going to be released sometime in 2013, so I'm wondering if some of the loose ends will be tied up there.

Scott's own website suggests that not everything will be revealed in the last book.

screen shot from Scott's website

I'm hoping that's the case, because ugh. My reading of the end is that the prophecy [The two that are one must become the one that is all. One to save the world, one to destroy it] came true because Sophie saved our world and Josh destroyed Danu Talis. But I still have lots of questions. Did Isis and Osiris really die? What happened to Will and Billy the Kid and Machiavelli and Black Hawk? Where the three simluatneous battles necessary [I felt like they were big screen fodder]? If Marethyu was taking Nicholas and Perenelle back to Paris to die, how did the three of them manage to make it to Niten and Aoife's wedding? How did they get Aoife back from the Shadowrealm she went to to imprison Coatlicue? What adventures did Sophie have the 700 (I think) years from the destruction of Danu Talis until she returned to earth? What was Virginia Dare queen of? What happened to Bastet?

More! I want more!

I think I will probably reread this series, but I need to do it when I have all six books together...so I will either be buying them at some point in the future or I'll move back to Kelowna for the sole purpose of borrowing them from Michelle. Okay, maybe not about the Kelowna part, but I might see if she'd trust me with them in Vancouver for a while.

City of Lost Souls

City of Lost Souls is the fifth of six in the Cassandra Clare The Mortal Instruments series. I wasn't thrilled with the ending of the last book and some of that spilled over into this book. It got a bit strange and there was a lot of waiting for something to happen. I will read the sixth book because I need to know what happens, but I am not as excited about it as I was about the first three book in this series or the books in The Infernal Devices. The best part of this book? I managed to get a brand spanking new copy because I was one of the first in (the virtual) line when they received the shipment!

I also heard that Cassandra Clare is writing another trilogy called The Dark Artifices that takes place sometime in the future. From what I've seen it appears that the books will follow a similar plot line to the other two series - talented teenaged Shadowhunters who have intense romantic feelings for one another that are problematic in someway. What do you think, should I read those too or am I going to be increasingly annoyed??

The Warlock: The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel

POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT (unless you've read the first four books, then you're probably okay)

The Warlock. The Deceiver. The Traitor. There were a few warlocks in this book. As I've made my way through The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel, I have discovered that I really need to read it with a dictionary, an open web browser and maybe a professor of mythology by my side. I think this is a series that I will one day want to share with J, but I need to better educate myself on mythology. My biggest problem is that most of the myths I know about, apart from the Bible, are Roman and some Greek. Michael Scott doesn't just include those two, he also refers to Mayan, Egyptian, Norse, Irish, and Japanese myths among others. The books are also full of other historical figures, some of whom were instantly recognizable (Mr. William Shakespeare or Joan of Arc anyone?), some of whom I recognized but had very little context for (Machiavelli, Billy the Kid), and some who are most certainly interesting but I had no idea who they were in any context (Virginia Dare).

I read The Necromancer and The Warlock back-to-back over a few quick days. I was away from home with J and had lots of downtime and when I finished The Necromancer, I literally put it down and picked up The Warlock and kept reading. That's mostly why my post on The Necromancer is so short and refers to this one. I can't remember where one book ends and the other begins.

The Enchantress, the last book in the series, is due out very soon and I get to have one of the first copies from the library, fresh off the shelves, before anyone else reads it and I'm hoping that soon there might be a box set, maybe of trade paperbacks, so that I can read them slowly and refer to earlier books as I plug along. Oh, and so I can pay closer attention to the covers.

I wish I had made a map of the main characters and their relationships and drawn myself a family tree of sorts, because I can't remember who goes with whom now...

So far I've enjoyed this series. I am looking forward to the last book and to rereading all of them too...

The Necromancer: The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel

Book four in Michael Scott's series about Sophie, Josh, the Flamels and a very interesting cast of supporting characters was good. I am feeling like I'd like to have all of them around me when I read them though...more about this with The Warlock, coming soon to a blog near you...

The Tin Princess

This is and isn't part of the Sally Lockhart series, The Ruby in the Smoke, The Shadow in the North and The Tiger in the Well being the others. It features some of the same characters, including Sally, but it focuses on her friend Jim and Adelaide, a young girl who vanished in The Ruby in the Smoke. As with The Tiger in the Well, I started reading this book to get through the series, but then it actually became kind of interesting. I felt it was a bit farfetched, but it was interesting.

And now I'm quite happy to moving forward to something else...

Would I recommend The Tin Princess? Maybe. I feel like I probably would have enjoyed it more if I wasn't thinking of it as part of the Sally Lockhart series.

The Tiger in the Well

Does anyone else remember when I started this challenge I made some rules? Mostly rules for me, but rules nonetheless? (Although really, I'd call them guidelines more than rules...) Specifically, rule #1? About not finishing a book if I wasn't enjoying it?

Yeah. Me too. I remember that.

But I didn't follow that rule with this book. I struggled with this one. It was long. It involved plot elements from the first book, which I read back in February and that book is back at the library, so I couldn't flip back and check things out. I had trouble concentrating, mostly because I was reading to distract myself and it was only working some of the time...

Once I got to the last five or six chapters, I did start enjoying what I was reading, but before that, not so much. I felt like there was too much going on and too many little threads of story happening, some of which were relevant and some of which were not. And I was frustrated. And I'm sure that was the intention of Philip Pullman. Lots of the stuff going on in the book wouldn't be tolerated in our society and yet it was commonplace in late 19th century London. I also really wanted them to Google a bunch of things and maybe use GPS cell phone pinging to locate people and things. And that is a sign that I watch too many procedural dramas. Yes, that I do.

Do I recommend it? Well, I didn't think it was a good as The Ruby in the Smoke or The Shadow in the North (what's with Pullman and this series and it's "The Blank in the Other Blank" titles?), but it was interesting. It was maybe too long. And I maybe need to let go of my sentimentality...I'd read the first two, so I had to finish (sort of) the series.

So do I recommend it (yes, I asked that already and got all parenthetical on myself)? Well, maybe. I'd recommend the first two and then suggest you try number three...you might like it better than me...you also might be more focused than I was...

I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

Flavia de Luce is back and it's Christmas at Buckshaw and there is a film crew on site and a baby is born (it is CHRISTMAS after all) and of course, someone is murdered...

This might have been my favourite of the four so far - the relationship between Flavia and her sisters is expanded just enough to make me feel better about it. Flavia is still quite isolated and I'd love to see her make some friends. We learn a little bit more about Dogger - was he a medic during the war? Flavia sets off the most spectacular fireworks display. Buckshaw might be saved from creditors by Shakespeare, but will it? And maybe Santa Claus delivered some amazing chemistry supplies to Flavia.

I can't wait for book five...

Dash and Lily's Book of Dares

This was also a one day read - I really liked the idea of the book...a teenaged girl leaves a diary in a used bookstore and dares a male reader to go on a little scavenger hunt. They go back and forth with the diary until they finally meet...I'm a nerd and that would totally have appealed to me as teenager. Heck, even as an adult it would appeal...I love the choas and disaster that happens. And when the book ended, I kind of wanted to know what happened next...

Princess of the Midnight Ball

Princess of the Midnight Ball is The Twelve Dancing Princesses. I wasn't sure how the fairy tale would be extended to novel length, but I really like how Jessica Day George did it. I don't have a whole lot to say about this book, but I am planning to read the others - I'm looking forward to the Cinderella adaptation - Princess of Glass.

Goodnight Mister Tom

I read Goodnight Mister Tom in just a few hours. (WWII obsession...check) I loved this book even though there are some painfully sad parts. I love that grumpy Mister Tom softens and that scared Will becomes comfortable and happy and I love that something so wonderful could happen in the middle of such a horrible place in history. I haven't read a book recently where I wanted the book to keep going and not stop - I have been reading a bunch of series and I know there is more to come, so even though I feel like those stories are not complete, I know there is more coming...it's different - I really wanted to read page more about Will and Mister Tom.

The Sorceress: The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel

First of all, I need to remember to take these pictures with my camera, not my pathetic phone. What a hideous picture!

Secondly, I need to post these soon after I read the book...especially when I am reading a ton of books, close together.

Third, I'm kind of looking forward to this series being done. But that might be because I have read four whole books and two partial books since I read The Sorceress, so my memory might be fuzzy. I am still convinced I need a good, basic course in world mythology, so I'll work on that. In any case, I liked this book well enough - it takes place simultaneously in San Francisco and London...there's time travelling...there's magic and twins and twin magic. I have The Necromancer sitting on the table waiting for me to finish another book and then I'll be back in the thick of the Nicholas Flamel world...

The Magician: The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel

Whew. I finished this at the physio yesterday. I've figured it out, the physio is part of the reason I've been devouring book...I spend an hour 2-3 times a week lying on her table with the acupuncture needles or vibrating cup things or heat on my leg and that gives me a nice quite hour to read. No kid. No phone. No husband. No chores. No distractions. I also spend about 30 minutes each session on the bike and elliptical, so there's that too...

Anyway.

The Magician mostly takes place in Paris and introduces some new characters like Machiavelli and Joan of Arc. Seriously. It also provides more information on Nicholas Flamel's background and I'm beginning to wonder about him...

I've mentioned my obsession with London and how I always feel homesick when I read a book about it over there, but I also have this thing for Paris. I always wanted to go to Paris and for a while I thought I wanted to live there. And then I visited Paris and I didn't like it. And then I visited it again and I figured it would be fabulous the second time, but I didn't like it. But you know what, I visited it again and I still didn't like it.

But I still want to go back...especially after reading books about Paris (like this one) so I'm now in "Let's visit Paris" mode.

I'm still enjoying this series - I love all of the characters - the traditional mythology ones and the quirky others (Hi there Joan)...I am planning to do some background reading once my library book pile is substantially reduced.