Waistcoats and Weaponry by Gail Garriger

Waistcoats and Weaponry
Finishing School Book the Third
by Gail Carriger

Published:  Little Brown and Company, Hachette Book Group
Format: Hardback
Copyright: 2014
Pages: 298
Genre: Fiction - Steampunkish
Source: own book

From the cover:

Class is back in session. Sophronia continues finishing school in style – with a steel-bladed fan secreted in the folds of her ball gown, of course. Such a fashionable choice of weapon comes in handy when Sophronia, her best friend Dimity, sweet sootie Soup, and the charming Lord Felix Mersey hijack a suspiciously empty train to return their chum Sidheag to her werewolf pack in Scotland. But when Sophronia discovers they are being trailed by a dirigible of Picklemen and flywaymen, she unearths a plot that threatens to throw all of London into chaos. With her friends in mortal danger, Sophronia must sacrifice what she holds most dear – [Oh good grief what a pack of drivel! I didn't read this before I read the book and I am sorry to have now.]

Obviously if you haven't read the first two books, you can't start with this one. And if you have been reading these books, and enjoying them, you don't need the silly description on the cover to want to pick it up. I loved the first book, liked the second, and was really, really looking forward to reading this installment. I snapped up a copy as soon as I saw it in the bookstore. 

Now that I have finished the book, I am not quite sure what to say. For this most part, I found this installment pretty disappointing. The complaint that I had about the last book Curtsies & Conspiracies concerning the developing love triangle - well that stuff was amped up to ten this time. I was bored out of my skull by 'relationship drama' stuff when I was in high school and I find it pretty darn boring now too. Especially as it was not handled in a way that felt real or interesting. However, I can live with it, as long as there is something else going on plot-wise, but in this book the plot took forever to get going. Things didn't really get into swing until the last quarter of the book. The overarching plot didn't actually develop much more from the state of things in the previous book (we see where the whole prototypes and how they could be used thing spelled out in capital letters this time). The questions I had about how vampires work in the world from the last book didn't get answered. In fact, for the most part, there was very little world building going on. 

As for the ending. Well - it was unexpected. I will give it that. I don't know - I was kind of, hum, that was kind of out of the blue. Plus - I am not one of those people who think vampires or werewolves are sexy. Sorry.

I am not nearly as excited about the next book. Sigh. 

Pie in the Sky by Wendy Mass mini review

Pie in the Sky
by Wendy Mass

Publisher:  Little, Brown and Company, Hachette Book Group

Format: paperback 

Copyright: 2013

Pages: 244

Genre: children's fiction - sci fi ish
Source: purchased  
Summary from the back of the book:
Joss is the seventh son of the Supreme Overlord of the Universe. when Earth suddenly disappears, Joss is tasked with the seemingly impossible job of bringing it back. With the help of Annika, an outspoken girl from Earth, he embarks on the adventure of a lifetime...and learns that the universe is an even stranger place than he'd imagined.

I so wanted to love this book.  Space, quotes from physicists, Carl Sagan ... it tries sooo hard to be nerd cool. The problem is that overall it is stunningly mundane.  If you are a trans-dimensional being in a Realm that encompasses all of the Universe - um - you are going to spend billions of years in school, live in a house with your family, have an after school job and be a bipedal humanoid with two arms ???  Your life is going to sound like a totally average kids life except with a few special effects?

The plot really consisted of going here to get information, waiting, going there to get information, waiting, waiting some more, going there --- you get the idea.  And don't get me started on the understanding of physics. I shall be charitable and ignore that train wreck. Oh, I have to rant about one - can anyone explain why the ancient ones and the Powers That Be complain that they don't understand time / timetravel and the effects of changing things in the past but go ahead and do something that should have massive repercussions anyhow? If they are running things, shouldn't they darn well understand what should simply be another dimension for them ? Score one for the grownups are idiots trope. Sigh.

And ARGH!  I hate the whole math, physics, thinking is hard stick! In a book that is supposed to demonstrate that science is cool!  Instead the book treats it more like woo. Oops - I am shooting over my quota of exclamation points here.

I also really don't see the kid appeal.  There really isn't much of an adventure here and the touching resolution is not geared to appeal to the apparent target age group of the book. 

To sum up - the book is readable and kinda cute but was ultimately quite disappointing for me - for all the window dressing this was not really a science fiction or sciencey story - it was just mundane.

Three claws? Just okay. I am going to see if I can get my son to read it to see if a science savvy kids perspective is really that much different than mine.

P.S. This book resembles Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy / Douglas Adams books in no way whatsoever.  I have no idea what those people are thinking. It is also not terribly educational either - I don't know where people are getting that either. The most educational things here are the quotes.  Throwing in a few terms like Higgs boson in a totally superficial way doesn't make a book educational.

The Irish Game by Matthew Hart - mini review

The Irish Game
by Matthew Hart

Publisher:  Plume by Penguin Group

Format: paperback   

Copyright: 2004

Pages: 220

Genre: Non-fiction, crime
Source: purchased  
Summary the back cover:

Famous paintings. A notorious thief. Cunning cops. And a troubled Irish history. 

In the annals of fine-art theft, no case has matched – for sheer criminal panache – the heist at Russborough House in 1986. The Irish police knew right away that the mastermind was a brazen Dublin gangster named Martin Cahill. Yet the great plunder – including a Gainsborough, a Goya, two works by Rubens, and a Vermeer – remained at large for years until the challenge of disposing of such eminent works forced Cahill to reach outside the mob and into the international area. When he did, his pursuers were waiting. 

The sting that broke Cahill uncovered a maze of banking and drug-dealing connections that redefined the way that police view art theft. With the storytelling skill of a novelist and the nose of a detective, Matthew Hart follows the twists and turns of this celebrated case. 

And, unfortunately, leaves his readers in the tangles. This non-fiction retelling of the robberies (yes, plural) at Russborough House, book starts out strong, but leave the reader increasingly at sea - lost in an extraordinarily messy chronology and in an increasingly less than lucid explanation of machinations of both the police and the criminals.

The use of art as surety in the criminal underworld is a central theme in the book, but is explained so poorly that it leaves the reader under the impression that the criminals involved are related to the Three Stooges - fumbling about with art while at the same time creating complex international networks for supply of drugs and/or weapons. You get the idea that these connections are important but the way they are described they don't make any sense. And even the most inept thief must be aware that a multimillion dollar painting that is damaged or destroyed due to poor handling is no longer worth millions - so as a long term strategy treating art as some sort of football to be passed around the word just would not work - at least not as described. The author fails to really make the connections to explain why these art thefts are really new and significant.

Here is an article from the FBI Bulletin that makes more sense http://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/law-enforcement-bulletin/march-2012/protecting-cultural-heritage-from-art-theft   (hum - this looks interesting too but I haven't had time to read it all https://mckinneylaw.iu.edu/ilr/pdf/vol45p601.pdf).

I really struggled to finish this book. The more you read, the more it resembles a stack of notes for a book that never really got fleshed out. You need a score card to keep track of the majors players - especially with the inclusion of all the aliases used by the police. There is not enough information to really make any of the latter part of the book make sense - instead it is just a string of details that don't hang together to make a coherent portrait (sorry, that probably counts as a pun). There just isn't any rhyme or reason, and the lack of overarching framework leave you utterly bewildered as to why anyone was doing anything - or even who was doing what. And I think the book completely excluded the drama in Turkey.

The chronology is also increasingly tortured - zipping around in time from the 1986 robbery, to more recent ones, back again, forward again to when the Vermeer is hung in the National Gallery then in the next chapter telling you that the paintings were hung back where they had been originally in Russborough. Plus, Russborough House was the target of more smash and grab robberies in the 2000's - which get tossed in by the author to make some sort of point.

Anyhow - yea gods - there are much better books about art theft out there.  Unless art crime is really your obsession, I think this one is a pass - most of the information here is presented more clearly and in more detail in other books.

I guess this was a three claw read.

Death by Inferior Design (Domestic Bliss Mysteries Book 1) by Leslie Caine

Death by Inferior Design
(Domestic Bliss Mysteries Book 1)
by Leslie Caine

Publisher:  Dell

Format: Paperback and ebook 

Published/Copyright: 2004

Pages: 400

Genre: Mystery - cozy?
Source: paperback swap and personal copy


From Amazon - actually altered some since it isn't correct - Never mind I have re-written the whole thing so this is my blurb :

Interior decorator Erin Gilbert recently relocated to picturesque Crestview, Colorado and opened an interior design business. Now, after a few months in business, she has a bitter rival named Steven Sullivan - since apparently the people who live in Crestview are literate enough to know about Gilbert and Sullivan operas but not smart enough to remember which interior designer they were hiring. 

One morning finds herself conned into a 'friendly' competition with Steve - who is, of course, extremely attractive. They will each decorate one room in neighboring houses over the course of one weekend. The prize is a feature spread showcasing their design business in Denver Magazine.

It is soon clear that the neighbors are actually anything but friendly and the job much more than it first appeared. 


So - I read this book when it first came out - I got a copy in a paperback swap with some friends and apparently liked it enough that I purchased the second book when it came out. I haven't paid much attention to it since, but while I was sick I saw that Amazon had his book on sale for $0.99 so I got a copy to read whilst grumpy. 

Turns out that on the second reading - I was much more meh.  I didn't actually like any of the characters - they all annoyed me.  Erin - for example - is a special example of too stupid to live - in this case too stubborn/obsessive to live? Not quite sure how to put it, but any reasonable person would have run away screaming.

This might get a bit spoilery I suppose but no more than most of the stupid book blurbs are ... 

As a single child myself I have never understood why people - generally those who have both parents and grandparents too - seem obsessed with the idea that orphans or single children need to know who their birth parents are. For most of us (yes I am generalizing, I admit) - we know perfectly well that whatever happened in the past it has nothing to do with us and we understand that finding a birth parent can turn out really, really badly - however much we might have pretended that we were actually royalty in hiding as children. Yes, for some people this becomes a quest - but for most of us that I have every talked with about this - we simply don't care. 

I mention this because Erin suddenly becomes obsessed with her birth parents - despite both a deathbed promise to her mother, and the growing evidence that being related to any of the awful people in the story would stink - and this is ostensibly the reason that she hung around to finish the decorating job. 

I was on-board at first but as the story went on it became harder and harder to suspend disbelief.  Besides - these were generally pretty awful people - it made no sense for her to keep acting like this was a normal decorating job.  Especially the bit about just having to fix the outlet covers so that they matched the wallpaper pattern - while under threat, after murder and around people who are violent. Nope - not buying it.  Too stupid - too unrealistic and the author clearly has something against the police - her detectives/cops were right out of central casting for a bad movie. 

Plus the characters - including the lead and her love interest - were petty, self-obsessed and often too jerky to care about.

Not my thing - and I think I must have been pretty starved for reading material to decide that I liked it the first time.   Three claws - just okay.

Soulless by Gail Carriger

Soulless
by Gail Carriger

Published:  Little Brown and Company, Hachette Book Group
Format: ebook
Copyright: 2009
Pages: 357
Genre: Fiction - Romantic Steampunkish
Source: personal copy 

"The vampire's hands shot forward, going for her neck. Apparently, he decided if he could not suck her blood, strangulation was an acceptable alternative. Alexia jerked back, at the same time pressing her hair stick into the creature's white flesh. It slid in about half an inch. The vampire reacted with a desperate wriggle that, even without superhuman strength, unbalanced Alexia in her heeled velvet dancing shoes. She fell back." 

Because I liked the idea of a covert finishing school that trained young ladies to be spies and I was looking for something fun to read, I picked up the first book of Gail Carriger's Finishing School series, Etiquette & Espionage, and enjoyed it a great deal. The second book Curtsies & Conspiracies  I didn't enjoy quite so much, but it was still a fun light read. There are two more books to the series, but the next is not due out until the end of the year. Therefore I decided to read the first book in the original, adult Parasol Protectorate series set in the same universe. I understand that there is some connection and repeating characters, so I thought I would like to fill in some back story, plus I already had the ebook from some point in time when the book was on sale (TBR bonus!). 

The good - Soulless was a very light, fun, quick read. Alexia Tarabotti is an enjoyable protagonist to follow, though she had the stereotypical nasty stepsisters - the twist here is that it is her own mother that prefers the younger girls to her older daughter, who takes after her deceased father. I would have preferred her friendship to Ivy to be more equal, but at least she had a female friend.

Alexia's 'power' is also quite interesting, cancelling out the supernatural natures of vampires and werewolves - making them human on contact. So - very special women who has amazing powers, but lacks self-confidence and, because of her mother and sisters, is unaware of her own attractiveness. (Is this becoming a requirement somewhere?) There were rather too many awkward POV shifts in the text for the sole purpose of allowing the author to remind us that even though Alexia has dusky skin and a rather Roman nose, she also has a spectacular figure and is really a sultry Italian-style beauty.  That got rather tedious.

The bad - I didn't realize that this book is more a romance with steampunk/supernatural overtones than a steampunk/supernatural adventure that happened to include romantic overtones. The difference is rather important to me, since romances are generally not my thing. I can still enjoy a romance element if it shows the development of a relationship. In Soulless, it took very little time to establish the match and go from a Hepburn-Tracy spat thing to deep kissing, so that was not really terribly interesting (plus - they didn't appear to worry at all about the implications of that pairing - could they have children? what would they be ? wouldn't the marriage shift the balance of power too much?)

I would still have been at least fine the story if the sexytimes interruptions were not so ill-timed, repetitive and long. Sexytimes should not start boring the reader. And I have a really hard time believing characters throbbing and groping each other while in imminent danger! It just doesn't make any sense to me and really distracted from the story. If romance is your thing, I imagine that you would have no problem with the book, but for me there was too much lusting, rubbing and stuff. It kept feeling like I had wandered into someone's boudoir.

The book also really needed a wider world.  If you only have a handful of active presences in a story, there isn't much mystery to 'who dun it.'

Overall, I liked the story, but I am not sure that I am interested enough to pick up the next book.  Did things get more interesting and less throbbing in the next book?
 

Scarlet by Marissa Meyer

Scarlet 
by Marissa Meyer

Published: Square Fish, MacMillian
Format: paperback
Copyright: 2013
Pages: 452
Genre: Young Adult / Science Fiction
Source: own book


I really enjoyed Cinder. It was fun to read and I thought it was an interesting take on the whole Cinderella story.  I also live under a rock so I didn't realize that the book ended so abruptly. When I spotted Scarlet in paperback, I grabbed a copy to see where the story went next. Unfortunately, I didn't enjoy Scarlet nearly as much as the first story. For 452 pages, the story didn't really advance much - you could already tell pretty much exactly where things were going from the start, but it took until somewhere in the 200 page range before the story to gain any momentum and no new ground was broken here.


If you have not read Cinder, you probably shouldn't read this ... 

---

Scarlet's grandmother is missing and has been declared a run-away/suicide by the local authorities. She is extremely upset by this and so ends up having a bit of a confrontation with several people during what should be a routine vegetable delivery. During the course of events, Scarlet meets Wolf, who acts both frighteningly savage and endearingly shy. So the first several chapters of the book are setting up Scarlet and Wolf, interspersed with Cinder's escape with 'Captain' Carswell Thorne (why does everyone have to be paired up?). 

I have to admit right here that I was not nearly as interested in the new characters as I was in the ones introduced in the original book. I don't find either incompetence or serial womanizing (Thorne) interesting - I know he is supposed to have the bad-boy, rogue thing going there, but it never really pulled together as far as I was concerned. The stuff I have read on-line about this character is imbuing him with all sorts of traits that are not actually in the book. [Seriously, can you see Han Solo or Westley/The Dread Pirate Roberts complaining about the lack of moisturizing soap?!?  Just no.]  Actually, this seems to be true for a lot of the love of this series - people are using their conceptions of some archetypes to pad out things that are actually missing in the book. Scarlet is an okay character, but pretty one-note, and Wolf was, well, a generic type from central casting really - if you have read any urban fantasy at all, you have already met him. I never really got invested in any of them. Things only pulled together in the last 100 pages of the book when I finally got interested again.

I also felt that the world building was much weaker as well - which is really saying something because the world building in the first book was majorly sporadic. Other than some name dropping - nothing felt like 'France' in this story to me at all. The author apparently used Google Maps and images as her inspiration, but that didn't translate into anything significant in the text - this was even less France than we had New Beijing in the last book. And in a world were we have space travel etc. am I really supposed to believe that the TGV is an integral part of this new post WW4 world ?  Those trains take a huge amount of energy for a relatively small amount of space (look at the size of the first class compartment). 

First class compartment

The way the train is described in the book sounds like a really weird mix of the TGV on the outside and an old fashioned Orient Express luxury steam train on the inside. It just annoyed me. Either make a new train system all your own that works in your world or make sure you understand the system you are borrowing. You can't borrow archetypes if you don't actually understand them.

I did like how Cinder and Scarlet's stories were pulled together and the developments in Cinder's character.  Still for a book this size (and it should have been smaller - what is up with the line spacing and those ridiculous margins ?) not a heck of a lot is really in there.



Slightly spoilery stuff here ...



Since I was just complaining about the train - I can live with the whole jumping off the train and clearing the tracks - but do you see those wires above the train?  These are important because they would a) make it pretty hard to jump on the train safely and b) are the reason that there are not any tree limbs anywhere near the tracks to launch a jump from.  The return to the train sequence ... that whole thing just threw me out of the book becuase it simply would not work.  

In the first book - the growing attracting between Cinder and Kai is handled well, and is believable. It wasn't quite insta-love, though it did rather border on it, but it was episodic and growing. The relationship between Scarlet and Wolf - especially chapter 46 just did not work for me - insta pack member love ? It just doesn't make sense - after all of the events that happened in such short space in time, how can you actually justify chapter 46 ? Shared love of tomatoes ?

If you can tell a Lunar from an Earthen using a simple blood test, why can there be hundreds, or more likely between the LSO and fugitives, thousands of Lunars running around on Earth with no-one the wiser ?  With the emphasis on blood tests for the plague, you would think that someone - or more likely several someones, would have starting running into some of these Lunars. Plus, once again we have a book that seems to have trouble with the whole idea of what a species is - if two people can successfully couple to produce a fertile offspring they are not two different species and there would be no blood test that could tell them apart as different types. This just doesn't make any sense. This whole blood test and back story thing is handled inconsistently and poorly in the book I think.



End spoilery stuff  ...



I will read Cress as some point but I am not nearly as interested in the whole thing as I was at the end of Cinder.

Hyperbole and a Half

.

Hyperbole and a Half
Allie Brosh
Published: Simon and Schuster, November 2013
Format: Paperback
Pages: 369
Genre: Humor
Source: own book




I bought this book last month because I kept running into reviews expounding on how funny it was and how much the reviewers laughed out loud. I was seriously in need of some laughter so I don't know if this made my hopes too high or what, but I kept thinking that most of this stuff was half a hyperbole at best.  Most of the stories just read as life, so I don't know if most people have much more normal (?) of a life than I or the people I know, if I am still humor impaired from work, or what, but only a couple of the essays made me laugh or even amused me. I already know, or have lived, weirder stories then this and almost everything in the book seemed so self-absorbed it was hard for me to really relate.

Everyone I know has dumb dog/weird animal stories, like off the top of my head  ...  the dog that, after hours of peaceful coexistence, suddenly decided that the ceiling fan was a threat and starting hopping around in circles on her back legs, barking furiously at the fan ... which was funny at first, but when the dog showed no signs of stopping after several minutes it started to get rather worrisome. Yes, the easy answer might have been to turn off the fan - but we were working in that room, it was summer and really hot. Turning off the fan completely might have made the dog feel she had won, but the humans in the room would have been seriously miserable. (Turning it off and then back on surreptitiously didn't work.) And the dog didn't listen to reassurance on this topic. She clearly thought she knew better than we did when it came to random, sudden threats from rogue ceiling fans. And, well ... I don't know, but the last dog essay was too much of a punching down kind of thing for me to think funny.  I think the only story that really made me laugh was Dinosaur (the Goose Story).  

I know that this is material from a popular website, so it is probably my fault for not visiting the website first. I wish I had check it out of the library or borrowed it. For me this is a meh - not bad, but not really funny for me either.  I am lousy at Likert scale style rating systems but I suppose in the spirit of reviewing I should work something graphic up.  I lieu of one - I will give this book a *** for now.

Ha! I have one now!

Update: I realized that I didn't talk at all about the depression thing - and I can completely understand how the author's ability to describe the experience of depression to people who don't get it can be extremely helpful. I appreciated those stories.  My issue is with the book as a whole and all these reviews exclaiming thinks like - these essays are so funny that I fell over laughing - which I just don't get. Nothing in the book was that funny to me.

Update 2: Okay - I visited the website and read a few more. Nope - not working for me.  I liked the Alot, but the fish story was just kinda awful. Sorry - not getting it.