Lake Effect by Nancy A. Nichols

Lake Effect: Two Sisters and a Town's Toxic Legacy
by Nancy A. Nichols

Published: Island Press
Format: Hardback
Copyright: 2008
Pages: 178
Genre: Non-fiction / Environmental Health
Source: personal copy 

From the cover: Sue and Nancy had an everyday American childhood on the shores of Lake Michigan, with summers on the beach, swimming and fishing, and the sorts of secrets that only sisters share. But their hometown had a secret of its own: it was strewn with deadly industrial pollutants.

Sue was diagnosed with cancer at only forty-one years of age. As she lay dying, she made Nancy promise to write about the pollution in their hometown of Waukegan, Illinois, and whether it was connected to her illness. ... Using her skills as a journalist, Nancy investigated the troubling history of Waukegan's toxic waste sites."

This book is a short and intensely personal look at the impacts of exposures to toxic chemicals that were commonly used in industry and are still pervasive in the environment today. The Great Lakes are ringed by AOCs or Areas of Concern - a term that technically means "geographic areas that fail to meet the general or specific objectives of the [U.S.-Canada Great Lakes Water Quality] agreement where such failure has caused or is likely to cause impairment of beneficial use of the area's ability to support aquatic life." More simply, an AOC is a location that has experienced environmental degradation as exemplified by issues like contaminated wildlife,  water quality problems and loss of fish and wildlife habitat. In practice it usually means that there are one or more Superfund sites in the area.  There are currently 43 identified AOCs in the Great Lakes: 26 in the United States, 12 in Canada and 5 that are shared by both countries.

Source - http://www.epa.gov/greatlakes/aoc/

You can see Waukegan along the lake on the boarder between Illinois and Wisconsin. There wasn't a natural harbor there, so to improve the economy of the town, they build an artificial one. Industry boomed there, but because there was no river flowing into the lake from the harbor, pollutants that were dumped into water there pretty much stayed put, building up over time.

"By 1969, the top predators among fish were so contaminated that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) seized 34,000 pounds of Lake Michigan coho salmon, labeling it unfit for human consumption. There were fish in the lake with whole-body PCB [polychlorinated biphenyls] concentrations as high as 77 ppm [parts per million] – levels approximately 15 times the then permissible 5 ppm. The FDA's acceptable level today is 2 ppm ... and the eight Great Lakes states themselves now have a far more stringent standard of 0.05 ppm."

The author discusses the various studies she found that demonstrated links between PCB exposures and both rare cancers like the ovarian cancer her sister died from and the most common cancers like breast cancer.  It is an insightful look at the science of environmental cancer and at our societal response.

"It is, after all, so much easier to think of Lance [Armstrong] as the courageous survivor, even the victor that he is [or at least it was - $&**$&*!!! - she wrote the book before the drug thing hit the fan], rather than to think about what could have made the rate of testicular cancer triple between 1940 and 1980 – post-World War II years when the use of toxic chemicals in our society blossomed." p 121

We still have a legal and legislative system that favors manufactures over citizens and for all we talk about the concept of the precautionary principle in this country we don't usually apply it.  The EU does, which is why the United States, once a leader in environmental law, has now become a dumping ground for products that have been refused entry in the EU (but that is another soap box).

The author adds Rachel Caron's favorite quote, from Abraham Lincoln: "To sin by silence when they should protest, makes cowards of men." p 122

I am almost certainly going to be using this book in one of my classes next year because it offers a short but thoughtful and well-referenced investigation of environmental cancer in a manner that is very approachable. This book provides a stepping stone to a more complex works like Our Stolen Future, Silent Spring and the Pulitzer prize winning book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee (which, yes, is staring at me from my shelf, sigh - I have only read bits of it).

If you are interested in learning about environmental cancers, this book is a reasonable place to start.  
Four claws (though I am discovering that rating nonfiction is going to be tricky - I need to come up with another system.) 

The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean

The Disappearing Spoon
by Sam Kean

Published: Little Brown and Co.
Format: hardback
Copyright: 2010
Pages: 391
Genre: Nonfiction
Source: own book

From the cover flap "Why did Gandhi hate iodine (1, 53)? Why did the Japanese kill Godzilla with missles made of cadmium (Cd, 48)? How did radium (Ra, 88) nearly ruin Marie Curie's reputation? And why did tellurium (Te, 52) lead to the most bizarre gold rush in history ?

The periodic table is one of our crowning scientific achievements, but it's also a treasure trove of passion, adventure, betrayal, and obsession. The fascinating tales in The Disappearing Spoon follow carbon, neon, silicon, gold, and every single element on the table as they play out their parts in human history, finance, mythology, conflict, the arts, medicine, and the lives of the (frequently) mad scientists who discovered them.

Why did little lithium (Li, 3) help cure poet Robert Lowell of his madness? And how did gallium (Ga, 31) become the go-to element for laboratory pranksters?* The Disappearing Spoon had the answers, fusing science with the classic lore of invention, investigation, discovery, and alchemy, from the big bang through the end of time.

*Though solid at room temperature, gallium is a moldable metal with a unique property: it melts at 84 degrees Fahrenheit. So a classic prank for scientists is to fashion gallium spoons, serve them with tea, and watch as the guests recoil with the Earl Gray makes their utensil disappear."

Gallium melting in a warm hand. Picture from  http://gajitz.com/

This description from the cover gives you a very clear idea of what the book is about. The author takes interesting stories about the discoveries and discoverers of the elements and atomic properties and strings them together to create a human history of the periodic table. He arranged the book in a series of chapters that cover groups of elements with similar histories - for example Chapter 9 is called Poisoner's Corridor: "Ouch-Ouch" Cd, Tl, Bi, Th, Am (which stands for cadmium, thallium, bismuth, thorium, americium). This makes for a neat theme in each chapter, but it also means that you end up zig-zagging back and forth in time throughout the book. So while it starts out well, it gets kind of irritating when things that you read about in the earlier section of the book are events that actually came after the events you read about in the last section of the book. I think this is one of the things that slowed me down in the book. I just realized that the chapters read more like magazine articles - each is self-contained and works well as a standalone, but when you string it all together as a book it works less well. This makes sense because the author does actually write primarily for magazines and the like. 

I give the author high marks for telling some really fascinating stories and providing lots of cool tidbits of information that I wandered around reading at or reciting to various people. I just wish it had been organized better. Also the section on wartime development of chemical weapons and the like was really depressing and made me feel like I was losing my faith in humanity. It got better again once I got past that section of the book.

I also generally love the author's use of language - apotheosis, demotic, avant la lettre, susurrus - an expanded use of lots of lovely words that kept me on my toes and added to the feel of the text, i.e. a rich use of words rather than a gratuitous abuse of a thesaurus.

I do have to say that I was rather disappointed with the authors discussion of Pons' and Fleischmann's adventures with cold fusion though. Yes, We Have No Neutrons: An Eye-Opening Tour through the Twists and Turns of Bad Science by A. K. Dewdney has a good history of cold fusion which has a rather different perspective and, as far as I can tell (from a non-physicist but earth scientist perspective), is a bit more accurate. It wasn't the factual stuff I was bothered by so much as the spin the author put on it.

This did make me wonder a bit about how accurate some of his gloss really is ... though the majority of the time, when it was an event I knew something about, the author's summary seemed reasonably accurate, so I don't really think that is a deep problem. However this leads me to one of the other 'down' sides of the book for me - it kept making me think about other books that I want to read - there is a book called Toxic Truth: A Scientist, a Doctor, and the Battle over Lead in my TBR pile that was called to mind as well as a couple of other books buried in there, plus now I want to add another book about the periodic table that the author talks about I want, and I want to read a biography of Roentgen, etc., etc. Plus it sort of makes me want to re-read The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York by Deborah Blum, which is very cool even if it is way overly focused on forensic developments in New York at the expense of events in other places around the world.

Also, the periodic table at the back of the book is pretty useless; it doesn't include the names of the elements or cool stuff, just the chemical symbols, atomic numbers and weights.  I had to bring home one my tables from work so that I could look things up as I read. But that is a chemistry geeks complaint so I doubt it would bother most people.

Overall this was a pleasurable read - it floated between 3.5 and 4 for me but mostly I think it is a 4. If you like science history this book should be a fun read for you.

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.

Etiquette & Espionage by Gail Carriger

Etiquette & Espionage 
by Gail Carriger

Published:  Little Brown and Company, Hachette Book Group
Format: Paperback
Copyright: 2013
Pages: 307 
Genre: Fiction
Source: own book

"Fourteen-year-old Sophronia Temminnick is a great trial to her poor mother - her atrocious curtsy is an embarrassment to the family name. So Mrs. Temminnick enrolls her daughter in Mademoiselle Geraldine's Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality.

But Sophronia soon realizes the school is not quite what her mother might have hoped. At Mademoiselle Geraldine's, young ladies certainly learn the fine arts of dance, dress and etiquette, but they also learn to deal out death, diversion, and espionage - in the politest possible ways, of course. Sophronia and her friends are in for a rousing first year's education. "

So first - what on Earth happened to that poor young woman on the cover ? She clearly isn't wearing her stays (scandalous !), her decolletage appears to have been forcibly collapsed and I fear that something untoward has happened to her spine.  I like the background of the cover and even the idea of the cover, but the execution leaves something to be desired.

The story inside, however, is a delight.  Do believe that I liked it better then I liked Soulless.  Sophronia is a lovely protagonist. She is intelligent and willing to take action but she is neither perfect nor does she dwell on her perceived deficiencies. Plus, she has friends - female friends!  It is really nice to read a YA story where the lead is not the only girl in the story - or not the only good/worthwhile one. Relationships develop and end evolve thorough time, like they would at a real school. The cast of characters is a nice mix. And there is no heavy-handed boy angst either. Hurray!

The language is nicely textured, though the names of individuals started to get a bit wearing. I laughed out loud several times as I envisioned the action.  The end of the book tied some things up neatly while other plot threads were left merrily flapping in the wind, a nice balance that left me satisfied but very much looking forward to the next book.  Four and a half claws because it cheered me up while I have a yuck cold. 

The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker

The Golem and the Jinni 
by Helene Wecker
Published:  Harper Perennial 
Format: Paperback
Copyright: 2013
Pages: 484
Genre: Fiction
Source: own book

From the cover "Chava is a Golem, a creature made of clay, brought to life by a strange man who dabbles in dark Kabbalistic magic. Ahmad is a jinni, a being a fire, born in the ancient Syrian Desert. Trapped in an old copper flask by a Bedouin wizard centuries ago, he is released accidentally by a tinsmith in a Lower Manhattan shop.

Struggling to make their way in 1899 New York, the Golem and the Jinni try to fit in with their immigrant neighbors while masking their true selves. Meeting by chance, they become unlikely friends whose tenuous attachment challenges their opposing natures, until ..."

Okay, actually I cut off the description from the cover because frankly it gives away too much. I am glad that I hadn't read it until now. Strangely enough the plot is both complicated with many threads, while at the same time simple and quite short. Reading the cover sets up expectations for events far into the story, which is really too bad of publishers. I think it is better to follow the tale as it unfolds.  There is more than enough waiting on events without the cover description making it worse.

The essence of the story is more about the natures of each of the main characters and how they struggle with reconciling themselves to their current conditions, then it is about action anyhow. The Golem represents steadfastness and giving, subsuming of ones own will to serve another, while the Jinni represents the mercurial and, while not exactly selfish, he is pretty oblivious to consequences of his actions, and to the needs and wishes of others. This got a bit heavy handed without noticeably advancing the self-awareness of either character for much of the book.

The story develops very slowly and I am afraid that I got rather impatient at points, waiting for the foreshadowed events to finally occur.  I had also invented several alternative plots in my mind, so in some ways I was rather disappointed with how some of the story lines were resolved.

I feel that Chava doesn't really get the development that she deserves. The whole question of agency is a large one, after all, exactly how much agency did non-golem women have in 1899? I also didn't quite get where this whole golems would become mindless agents of destruction thing came from - in the traditional stories I learned, the reason that a golem would go on a destructive rampage was that they were at the mercy of uncontrolled human emotions - trapped in the flash of rage that can overwhelm a human mind during a crisis in their life. This never quite meshed with me in the book - I see her getting overwhelmed by rage or fear but I don't see why she would feel joy at destruction. I have mentioned before that I very much love Terry Pratchett's Feet of Clay and the development of Golems in the Discworld books.  I think there is really much more depth there to be explored and it just kind of sat there.

The book is beautifully written and has the beginnings of a carefully rendered portrait of a period of history, though I have liked for there to be a greater distinction between the different communities. I really enjoyed the peak at immigrant life and the distinctions that used to exist. This was the best part of the book - both the 'openness' of the city as well as the sense of claustrophobia.

Overall, I very much enjoyed the book and will certainly look forward to future books by this author. I do have to admit that I am rather displeased with the ending though. Lack of full resolution is fine with me, so in some ways it was the perfunctory nature of some of the "ends" was unsatisfying. Intellectually, there are some issues with what happened. It is hard to day anything else without giving something away. I do want to point out though, several reviews have called the Golem and the Jinni potentially immortal - that is not true - they may live longer than an ordinary human but they are not immortal - that is in fact an important part of the story so I don't understand why so many reviewers didn't understand that.

Update: The more I think about it, the more upset I am about how the last portion of the book played out. With only one exception (the Jinni) I don't understand why the characters behaved as they did. This includes the antagonist - so think about what happened - the memories, the quote "No golem has ever existed that did not eventually run amok. You must be prepared to destroy her." (from the first chapter of the book) and what follows. Just huh? Why ?  There is a point where the story changes pace completely and the characters are no longer acting in accord with what was slowly and contemplatively constructed for the first 2/3 - 3/4 of the book. It doesn't make sense.

So - three and a half claws (this was four but after sleeping on it, the last quarter of the book really did annoy me)  - I am glad to have read it though I clearly don't love it the way several other people did. Also - if you like fast moving action in your books - avoid this book. It moves very slowly and you will frustrated. 

Goth Girl and the Ghost of A Mouse by Chris Riddell

Goth Girl and the Ghost of A Mouse 
by Chris Riddell
Published:  Macmillan Children's Books
Format: Hardback
Copyright: 2013
Pages: 224
Genre: Children's Fiction
Source: own book

Ada Goth lives in the enormous Ghastly-Gorm Hall. She is the only child of Lord Goth, who is "mad, bad and dangerous to gnomes."  Her father may be quiet and elegant, but he is also a bit of a jerk because he believes that children should only be heard and never seen. He has Ada wear large clunky books so that he can always hear her coming. She only sees him once a week for tea. The household staff is busy attending to their work and for some reason they have a hard time holding on to governesses, even though Ada is actually a very sweet child.

So, she leads a rather lonely life until the day she meets a ghostly mouse called Ishmael. Thus begins an adventure where Ada gets some new friends and begins to unravel a dastardly plot that Maltravers, the cadaverous looking indoor gamekeeper, is hatching. 

The actual plot is rather undemanding and somewhat short, but the story is full of over-the-top characters and fun literary references, like Mary Shellfish and "What happens in the Attic Club stays in the Attic Club." The real treasure is the intricate artwork in the book, just like with the Ottoline books.  I really enjoyed the story, it was quite fun to read and would be fine for younger children, as the "gothic" elements of the story are quite straightforward and not scary.  There are ghosts and monsters, but everything is treated as if this is totally normal. I can see re-reading the book just to look at the pictures again.

The physical book is book is absolutely beautiful. Photographs do not do it justice. The front cover is black velveteen with metallic silver accents, the edges of the paper are gilded in metallic purple. The end pages have a lovely metallic silver skull motif. It is amazing.

 Inside the back cover is a "Free Teeny-Weeny Book" - tucked into a pocket is a version of the mouse's memoirs, a rodent version of Gulliver's Travels written in verse. 

The book is so lovely I had a hard time letting my son borrow it to read. I wanted to stick it up on a shelf where it would be safe. 

I also found out (when I got the book) that is has won the Costa Children’s Book Award for 2013.  And ooh - neat - I found Chris Riddlell's website for this book (http://www.panmacmillan.com/gobstoppers/chrisriddell).

I rate it four claws. My son is reading it now (he practically pulled it out of my hands when he saw it and the moment I set it down - I hadn't actually finished it by the way - he grabbed it and ran off with it.  I had to steal it back to finish it) and I am really interested in what his verdict will be. 

 

Cinder by Marissa Meyer

Cinder (Book 1: The Lunar Chronicles) 
by Marissa Meyer
Published: Feiwel & Friends 
Sold by: Macmillan
Digital edition (January 3, 2012) 
Format: ebook
Pages: 400
Genre: Science Fiction/YA Fiction ???
Source: own book

 I know that I am late to the boat on this book. I kept seeing great reviews and was interested, but honestly the cover kept putting me off. I finally decided to bite the bullet and downloaded the chapter 1-5 freebee on Amazon and started reading, mostly to avoid doing the non-fiction reading that I was supposed to be doing (oops!). After reading the teaser I was hooked.

A short introduction to the story: The protagonist is Cinder, a mechanic and a cyborg.  Because she is a cyborg, and adopted, she is a second-class citizen and for all purposes is basically owned by her adoptive mother. She works in a street market in New Beijing repairing machines to raise money for her family (which seems to be living outside of their means). There she meets Prince Kai, who needs his android repaired. We also learn that a deadly plague which has been decimating other areas and is now moving into the city. The story is a futuristic re-framing of the traditional Cinderella story and manages to have a very fresh, interesting take. 

Pros: The story is very fast paced and moves along quickly. I didn't even realize that it was 400 pages long until I looked it up after finishing the book. The pages just flew by. On there other hand, there were certain aspects that dragged a little bit. I mean we already knew from the framing device who Cinder was going to turn out to be (I don't think this counts as a spoiler - the whole story just screamed this). I wonder if the story would have been even stronger if there was a bit less dependence on the framing so developments might have been a bit more of a surprise ?  On the other hand, a lot of the fun of reading the story was seeing how the author dealt with the classic Cinderella tropes.

Cons: The cover still bugs the heck out of me. Yes it is eye-catching and quite attractive in its own way, but it doesn't connect to the story at all! The story is set in New Beijing with street markets, the naming structure, and dresses that sound more like kimonos than anything else due to the description of the sleeves.  

That shoe doesn't seem to have anything to do with what was being described in the story and it actively interfered with my ability to envision the world of the story. It is just wrong.

This also leads me to the biggest issue I was having with the book - kudos to the author for choosing to set the story in a futuristic China, but I never really felt that in the story. There were some thing that were vaguely oriental but it never really went past that.  The world building was very uneven. 

And the ending - ARGH!  Sorry, I do in fact live under a rock, so I didn't realize that the book wasn't going to end so much as simply stop.  Yeah, yeah so now I have get book two and book three comes out next month, but if that book ends the same way it is going to be a long wait to book four in 2015.  

Overall: I really enjoyed Cinder. Based on the cover and location in the book store (YA fiction) it is normally not something I would have picked up, but I am glad that I did.  I will definitely be picking up the next book in the series Scarlett and will probably jump on Cress as soon as it show up in the store.  Four nice sharp happy claws. 

The Grand Tour: or the Purloined Coronation Regalia by Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer

The Grand Tour: or the Purloined Coronation Regalia 
by Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer
Published: Open Road Media Young Readers;
Digital edition (May 22, 2012)
Format: ebook
Pages: 484
Genre: Historical Fiction
Source: own book



First - if you have not read Sorcery & Cecelia: or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot 

STOP

You need to read that book first. I suppose technically this is a self-contained story but if you read it first: a) you won't have the emotional connection with the main characters that you need to make this an enjoyable read  and  b) there are several spoilers for Sorcery & Cecelia which would make that novel much less fun to read.  And honestly, Sorcery & Cecelia is the better book.  

The Grand Tour basically picks up right after the action of the previous novel ends. The previous novel was in the form of an  epistolary novel, written as a series of letters between Kate (authored by  Caroline Stevermer) and Cecelia (Patricia Wrede) (i.e. written as a letter game.) This time the novel is presented by alternating Kate's private journal entries with a transcript of Cecy's deposition to the Joint Representatives of the British Ministry of Magic. The result is a much less even in tone and occasionally has some odd repetition.

Cousins Kate and Cecy are newly married to Thomas Schofield and James Tarelton, and are taking a wedding trip on the continent with Thomas’s mother, Lady Sylvia. Napoleon is imprisoned at St. Helena and the continent is in the process of rebuilding. The history should be fairly familiar, but this world includes magic. Thomas and Lady Sylvia are wizards, and Cecelia is a journeyman sorcerer. As soon as they land in France, odd things begin happening, including delivery of a mysterious package by the Lady in Blue. The travelers eventually realize that there is a plot afoot to steal items to use in the reconstruction of an ancient magic spell. They set out to foil the plot in a race against time and across Europe.

So - first the good news. The story is quite fun to read and has lots of good lines. The characters are engaging and there is none of the cheap intraparty feuding or 'big misunderstandings' that can dominate Regency or travel novels. Instead you have two strong marriages where the partners are not only very much in love, but also (for the most part) respect each other. Despite one major author's recent contentions, the story does not stop just because characters get married, and married life does not have to be boring.

The bad news - this story is definitely not as engaging or fast paced as Sorcery & Cecelia, is way too dependent on lucky coincidences and the plot is rather convoluted in a scattered rather than intricate way. 

Now I will take coincidences over massive plot holes pretty much any day, so as long as you are willing to suspend disbelief this is still quite a fun novel to read, but it does not recapture the really sparkling ingenuity of the first novel. 

Some quotes that caught my eye: 

"Shrieking is indispensable, as is some kitchen mishap to spoil the meal we have ordered.  Many doors must be slammed, before and after one shrieks ... These are not the only incidents to provoke the shrieking. There are others, some of which seem to originate from nothing but the pure desire to shriek. I think I begin to understand the impulse." 

"If we looked like something the cat dragged in, it must have been a very undiscriminating cat, indeed." 

"shouldn't there be some sort of mathematical limit to the number of gloves I can lose? Some upper theoretical boundary? Given the laws of probability?"

Overall four claws

(and FYI Sorcery & Cecelia would be a 4.5 or even a 5 - I would have to re-read it to decide).

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.