Wrapping Up the Spring Reading Thing

Alas, I have failed at my goal for the Spring Reading Thing...sort of. When I started, my goal was to read all those pesky books that were waiting for review or that I owed to somebody from BookObsessed at the time. More importantly, I wanted to boost my reading numbers. I got off to a sorry start to reading this year, and I was hoping to read a bit more than I started out the year reading. I failed at the first goal and succeeded at the second.

Here are the books that I claimed I was going to read...

Stealing Heaven by Elizabeth Scott
How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff
Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan
Uglies by Scott Westerfield
The Beet Queen by Louise Erdrich
The Widows of Eden by George Shaffner
Fever 1793 by Laurie Halse Anderson
Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortensen
Inside the Mind of Gideon Rayburn by Sarah Miller
A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray

Then, here are the books I actually read...

Stealing Heaven - Elizabeth Scott
The Beet Queen - Louise Erdrich
Speak - Laurie Halse Anderson
Fever 1793 - Laurie Halse Anderson
The Widows of Eden - George Shaffner
The Cactus Eaters - Dan White
Black Wave - Jean and John Silverwood
Queen of the Road - Doreen Orion
A Great and Terrible Beauty - Libba Bray
Three Girls and Their Brother - Theresa Rebeck
Forgive Me - Amanda Eyre Ward

With Forgive Me squeaking in just under the wire (so under the wire in fact that I haven't had time to write my review of it yet), I made my number goal. Some unexpected reading "have tos" snuck in after I made my list and threw off my plan, but all in all, I'm pretty satisfied with how it turned out. I read some great books (ones that I was planning on and ones that I really wasn't).

All of my reads were written by authors that were new to me except for Forgive Me and The Beet Queen. My favorite? Probably A Great and Terrible Beauty for absorbing me so much that I was nearly able to forget that I had a dreadful cold while reading it. The Cactus Eaters and Queen of the Road tie for a close second for laugh out loud funny vicarious traveling. And I'm still plodding through Three Cups of Tea from my original list(which puts me at eleven and a half books, so, I did really good, right? Ha!), which is a good, informative, and even inspirational book but not a quick read by any means especially since I seem to be suffering some non-fiction burnout. I told myself I would read more non-fiction this year, and I have! Perhaps too much! 6 of 18...that's a solid third of my reading that's been non-fiction, and that's not counting Three Cups of Tea or those two other, ahem, I mean three other non-fiction titles I've agreed to review in the near future, and the five others that might well be coming in the mail shortly from Elle. Yikes! Anyhow, I digress.

All in all, I have to say that the Spring Reading Thing was a pretty rewarding experience for me despite my not quite success. It definitely got me reading more than I'd been, and that's just what I was hoping would happen. Thanks again to Katrina for hosting, and I might well join up should you choose to host a Fall Into Reading challenge!

A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray

And I'm back for the second night in a row attempting to achieve this task of catching up on my book reviews. As promised, it's not a travel memoir! Tonight I have for you some well done, young adult magical historical fiction that I'm convinced everyone but me has read (but I'm usually wrong about these things).


When Gemma's mother dies of mysterious circumstances that Gemma foresees in a vision, Gemma is packed off to a London boarding school for girls where she hopes to become the sort of girl who will be able to get a good husband. There, she quickly gains entry into an elite circle of new friends - Felicity, a power hungry Admiral's daughter; Pippa, a stunning beauty about to be married off to a much older man; and the unlikely Ann, an orphan whose best hope in Victorian England is to gain a place as governess to a wealthy family. Among her new friends, with the help of secret diary discovered in another vision, she learns that she has the power to transport herself and her friends into magical realms. As the powerlessness their gender dictates for them is revealed, the allure of the magical realms where they get to choose and their best hopes are realized grows. As the four bring magic back to their own world, danger lurks, and only Gemma has the power to stop it.

Despite its historical setting complete with its implications for the girls, A Great and Terrible Beauty's characters face similar situations to today's teenage girls. For Gemma, as for many teenagers, there is always that dangerous line between being herself and changing herself to fit in with her peers. Her friends' activities are at once attractive and repulsive to her, but Gemma is by no means perfect. She is spunky, opinionated, and outspoken. She is blunt and tactless when perfect manners are expected of her. She knows what's right but she does what's wrong. In other words, she is a very real character and one who is easy to sympathize with.

Bray's writing is richly atmospheric, effortlessly evoking the many settings of her story. From a busy Indian marketplace to a slightly spooky girl's boarding school in London to incredible magical realms, Bray's beautifully rendered places play almost as important a role in her story as the girls themselves. Her rich descriptions make this novel a particularly engaging page-turner.

Most significant of all is Bray's skillful handling of the problems inherent in being a young woman in Victorian times and her use of these issues to further our understanding of the particular grip the magical realms have on Gemma, Felicity, Pippa, and Ann. Girls are sent to Spence not to learn for the sake of knowledge but to store up the lessons that will make them good and cultured wives for some wealthy gentleman of their parents' choosing. Bray's characters are strong-willed young women who desire husbands and beauty and fluent French but also want to have their opinions heard, to be able to have the power to influence the courses of their lives, to accomplish things that women aren't even allowed to attempt. This understandable desire for choice and for power plays beautifully into the girls' growing obsessions with the magical realms that will open for Gemma alone.

My heart's a stone, sinking fast. We make polite conversation. Grandmama tells us of her garden and her visiting and all about who is not speaking to whom these days. Tom prattles on about his studies while Ann hangs on his every word as if he were a god. Father is lost to himself. No one asks how I am or what I am doing. They could not care less. We're all looking glasses, we girls, existing only to reflect their images back to them as they'd like to be seen. Hollow vessels of girls to be rinsed of our own ambitions, wants, and opinions, just waiting to be filled with the cool, tepid water of gracious compliance.

A Great and Terrible Beauty is a delicious, spooky page-turner that doesn't shy away from serious themes. One of my favorite reads of the year.

Read another review at Reading Adventures.

The Widows of Eden by George Shaffner

The citizens of Ebb, Nebraska are suffering through their worst drought in history. After more than one hundred days without rain, farmers who have lived in Ebb for their entire lives are packing up and disappearing in the middle of the night unable to make a go of it any longer. Not to worry, though, help is on the way. Word comes that a certain Vernon Moore, mysterious traveling salesman and occasional worker of miracles, is on his way for his first visit to Ebb in about five years. The quaint townspeople of Ebb believe that Mr. Moore is the answer to their prayers and their only chance for rain, but the ailing multi-millionaire Clem Tucker has other ideas. What happens when Clem proposes a deal that would have Mr. Moore choose to spare his life instead of asking for rain?

This is the premise of George Shaffner's The Widows of Eden. It defied my expectations in more ways than one. There were parts of this book that I enjoyed very much and others that nearly discouraged me from finishing it. The premise is very attractive, which is why I requested and received it from Library Thing's Early Reviewer program. The follow-through is a bit less than optimal. At the helm of the book is first person narrator Wilma Porter who operates the bed and breakfast where Mr. Moore stays when he is in town and is also the fiance of the aforementioned Clem Tucker. As one might guess, Ms. Porter is very much at the center of the story given her relationships to those two pivotal characters, however, her first person narration continues even into places and situations where she is not present which is somewhat disorienting. It also often seems that Shaffner has taken every stereotype of small town fiction and played each up to a fever pitch that can, unfortunately, be a bit cringeworthy. Sometimes this can be overlooked - I'll admit to giggling at a few of Wilma's kooky comments such as, "An amendment to the state constitution was supposed to prevent the sale of family farms to big corporations, but it turned out to have more loopholes than a cheap shag rug." Other times, Shaffner overplays his quaint rural fiction hand with his constant use of the endearment "honey pot," the existence of an all-powerful Quilting Circle of gossipy ladies who don't seem to do any quilting at all, and Wilma's irritating way of never referring to her goddaughter by her name but as her "sweet/perfect/adorable little goddaughter."

That said, there were parts of this book that I found so absorbing that I could forgive this book some of its more irritating tendencies. Despite the occasional lapse into pure cheese, Shaffner writes snappy dialogue and creates a cast of very lively characters bent on saving their town and their way of life. The mystery of Vernon's possibly miraculous origins as well as the origins of three widow friends who accompany him on the occasion of this book is well thought out and even a bit suspenseful. My favorite part, however, was Vernon's conversations with Clem on the subject of the deist's paradox (which suggests that a benevolent God would intervene in the affairs of men and since He hasn't in quite some time He has abandoned us), the nature of God, and his attempts to persuade the unbelieving Clem that God cares for His creation and hasn't retreated to heaven leaving His people to their own devices. I'll be the first to admit that having guaged the tone of this novel, I didn't expect a philosophical discussion this well thought out and absorbing. I might not believe everything that was said, but I drank it up and these scenes kept the pages turning the quickest. By the end, I was thoroughly curious whether Vernon would be able to convince this selfish and heartless millionaire of God's existence and providence and what would happen if he couldn't.

All in all, this book seemed to be a paradox in and of itself, as if Shaffner intended to write a lighthearted novel for those in need of some small town centered brain candy but ended up with something a bit more serious than that, and the reader is stuck trying to figure out just how to take it. While it isn't one of my favorite reads and it definitely wasn't what I was expecting, it does have its redeeming qualities and as such could make for a fun summer read with a side of a little food for thought.

The publication date for this book is June 17, 2008.

That's another one down for Pub 2008 and the Spring Reading Thing, too!

A Laurie Halse Anderson 2-fer-1

In the span of one week, I've gone from being a total Laurie Halse Anderson newbie to being a big fan. As usual, I'm doing a fine job of reading a variety of different types of books, right? Well, lucky for me, despite their being by the same author and featuring female narrators coming of age under difficult circumstances, the similarities between Speak and Fever 1793 end there. Now, because I'm so good at being concise (I'll give you a few minutes to get all the laughter out of your system now), I'm going to attempt two brief(er?) reviews of two excellent YA books. Since I may be among the last five people on the earth that proclaims to read YA books and hasn't read anything by Laurie Halse Anderson, maybe I'll be able to kill the whole summary thing and get right to the good stuff. Maybe.


Speak is the story of Melinda Sordino who is starting her first year of high school as a total outcast after having called the cops from an end of summer party. It's obvious that Melinda has a dark secret from that night, but Halse Anderson takes her time in revealing it. In the meantime, Melinda offers up a scathingly realistic and wryly humorous look at high school. For readers still in high school, I would think they could easily I identify with many of the ridiculous events that Melinda describes. It definitely rang true for my high school experience and brought back a lot memories. Melinda is a realistic and engaging narrator starting her year scared and insecure and slowly growing up through the course of the year. For a "troubled" teen, she is surprisingly lovable, and it's a breath of fresh air when she finally begins to share the secret she's been holding on to. This is a great story of a girl coming through something terrible that has happened to her and learning what she's made of in the process. Definitely one of my favorites of this year so far.

Read other reviews at Dog Ear Diary and An Adventure in Reading.


Fever 1793 features another girl, Matilda Cook, who is about the same age as Melinda but in vastly different circumstances. The setting for this novel is Philadelphia in (you guessed it) 1793. Mattie's widowed mother owns and runs the Cook Coffeehouse where important men of the city come to talk politics and enjoy coffee and the fare prepared by Eliza, a free black and friend of the family. At the beginning, Mattie is a typical young girl - more eager to have fun and disobey her mother than to pull her weight at the coffeehouse. As summer is very slowly drawing to a close, disaster strikes as a deadly yellow fever epidemic sweeps the city. The city devolves into chaos and Mattie's life is torn asunder when her mother takes ill. The epidemic forces Mattie to grow up fast as she is left almost alone in a city that seems to be slowly dying. As the first frost comes, effectively ending the fever, and Mattie has still not heard from her mother, Mattie is forced to make some difficult decisions about her future and the future of the coffeehouse.

Mattie is an engaging narrator as well. It's easy to relate to her desire to leave behind the backbreaking work of the coffeehouse and enjoy her life. Halse Anderson does a fine job of portraying how Mattie changes during the epidemic and gains a new inner strength that she is able to draw upon to pick up her life once the epidemic has ended. Philadelphia in 1793 is realistically portrayed both in health and in sickness. Halse Anderson has obviously gone to great pains to maintain the historical accuracy of her story and succeeds admirably. Included at the end is a very interesting appendix that elaborates on the factual elements of the story. Fever 1793 is another great story of a girl transcending her very dire circumstances and finding out who she is in the process.

Both of these books get two thumbs way up from me. At first, I worried that I would find Mattie lacking after Melinda, but once the epidemic came to town, Mattie's narration really found its stride, and I can report that both books were excellent and well worth reading for both teens and adults.


Hey, that was pretty concise...well, for me, that was pretty concise. That's two more down for the Spring Reading Thing, too. In other news, I'm probably not going to make my Spring Reading Thing goal anyhow as my three Elle jury books just arrived this week and demand to be read. They're all travel writing and I am way excited to read them, but yeah, it's kind of a big detour from my challenge goal - but alas I must do my best and be grateful that the challenge has indeed been encouraging me to read more this spring, which I suppose, is the point of it all anyway!

The Beet Queen by Louise Erdrich

The Beet Queen is a story about love. But not necessarily good love. It's about needing to be needed. It's about flawed characters loving each other in flawed ways.

The story begins with Mary and Karl Adare, whose mother quite literally got in a plane and flew away for good, reaching Argus, South Dakota by train during the Great Depression. Mary arrives with a fierce need for a survival and a willingness to make herself absolutely indispensible to her aunt and uncle to achieve that end. Within a few moments of their arriving in Argus, Karl is frightened by a barking dog and flees back to the train. From there, Mary and Karl's lives proceed in vastly different directions but ones that also bind them together for life. Mary inserts herself into life in Argus with an overbearing force that will define her entire life. Karl's life is marked by a rootlessness that sees him becoming a traveling salesman later in life.

Various characters play a significant part in the story including Mary's ambitious and eventually unhinged cousin Sita; Celestine, the best friend that Mary steals from Sita; and Wallace Pfef, a pillar of the Argus community who is unwittingly drawn into Mary, Celestine, and Karl's very unusual "family." What little that can be considered plot in this book revolves around Celestine and Karl's daughter, Wallacette nicknamed Dot, who was born on Wallace Pfef's couch during a fierce winter blizzard. Each of the characters tries misguidedly to give Dot the love that was missing from each of their lives - Mary by giving in to her every whim and being her confidant, Karl by sending oddball gifts from whereever he happens to be selling something at the time, and Wallace by attempting to win Dot's love through the staging of parties and events that should be the stuff of dreams but turn into the stuff of nightmares. Each character reveals his or her own selfishness through the love they shower on Dot eventually bequeathing her their own worst character traits and making Dot into a completely insufferable person. Erdrich reveals each one's desires, failings, and in essence, their humanity in their relations to Dot. While these characters aren't all that lovable, it's not difficult to see how grounded in reality they are.

For as I am standing there I look closer into the grandstand and see that there is someone waiting. It is my mother, and all at once I cannot stop seeing her. Her skin is rough. Her whole face seems magnetized, like ore. Her deep brown eyes are circled with dark skin, but full of eagerness. In her eyes I see the force of her love. It is bulky and hard to carry, like a package that keeps untying. It is like this dress that no excuse accounts for. It is embarrassing. I walk to her, drawn by her, unable to help myself.

This book is primarily about its characters. If you're looking for a quick moving plot or even a linear one, this book is not for you. The book is more of a "slice" of these characters lives, opening windows to the most vital parts. The bouncing between narrators and events gives the feeling of interconnected short stories instead of an entire cohesive novel. The individual stories are absorbing, but I couldn't help feeling that I was missing something. I kept waiting for everything to come together in the end, for some of the several narrative threads to resolve themselves but found myself dissatisfied. I enjoyed the writing but by the end had a feeling like that of going to the store, coming back with a lot of stuff, but not what I'd gone for in the first place. The writing is captivating. The characters come to life. The theme is valid. In the end, though, it still feels like there's something missing.

Stealing Heaven by Elizabeth Scott

Every once in a very great while I get picked to review an ARC for Harper Collins First Look. This one came to me from Harper Teen First Look for my review. It's also my first title for the Spring Reading Thing Challenge...sooo...one down! Of course the first thing I'm going to do is break the cardinal rule of ARCs and post a quote because...well...I can't resist.



The story of my life can be told in silver: in chocolate mills, serving spoons, and services for twelve. The story of my life has nothing to do with me. The story of my life is things. Things that aren't mine, that won't ever be mine. It's all I've ever known.

Danielle's first memory is of waiting outside a lavish house for her mother to return with stolen goods. As a child, she learns when to wait quietly for her mother and father to finish burglarizing the homes of the rich. As she grows up, instead of attending a normal school and having a regular life, Danielle is schooled in the art of thieving and soon makes her mother an accomplished accomplice. Her mother only believes in the value of what she can hold in her hands, but at the age of eighteen Danielle doesn't share the thrill her mother gets from stealing, instead longing for the normal life and normal relationships she has been missing out on for her entire life. Little does Danielle know as they enter the small beach town of Heaven with their eyes set on its lavish estates, that her life is about to change in more ways than she could have imagined.

First, there's the guy that seems to pop up everywhere she goes - a cop named Greg. Despite her fear of what he is, Danielle can't seem to stop talking to him and soon even tells him her real name, a massive faux pas for a traveling thief. Then there's Allison, a rich but friendly inhabitant of one of the very houses Danielle's mother is looking to rob. As Danielle probes her for valuable information she finds that Allison doesn't seem like the type of person she'd like to rob but the type of person maybe she'd like to have as a friend, that is, if she was allowed to make friends. All of this and her constant reservations about her mother's choice of "career" make Danielle begin to reconsider the path her life is taking and consider that maybe she isn't so powerless to change her situation as she had always thought.

Stealing Heaven is an engaging read about a girl who wants nothing more than what most teenage girls have - a school, a friend, a boyfriend, stuff that belongs to her instead of to someone else. Scott captures Dani's longings for all these things and her mother's total lack of understanding of why anyone would ever want the things that Dani wants. The conflict between Dani's love and loyalty to her mother and her desire for a different kind of life is realistically drawn. The lush beach town of Heaven comes to life and it's hard not to love its friendly citizens and understand why Dani would desperately want to trade in her unusual way of life for a place among Heaven's population. Stealing Heaven strikes a good balance between the more fluffy parts of the book and more serious issues such as Dani's questions about the morality of stealing from the very rich, the difference between love and sex, and even the prospect of losing a loved one to cancer. This is a quick read about growing up and learning that it's never too late and you're never too powerless to make the decisions that can change the circumstances of your life.

Book available May 27, 2008.

Happy Spring!

So, it's spring. Of course, it's ridiculously cold outside and doesn't seem very springy at all, but I did brave the crowds of irritating youths to get some free Rita's Italian Ice, so spring must really be here. Spring generally means everything gets to start anew and afresh, right? Well, it's recently come to my attention that the enormous pile of waiting to be read books on my nightstand is simply out of control and I would desperately like to finish them and start a new and a fresh pile, hence the joining of....



The Spring Reading Thing is hosted by Katrina at Callapidder Days and encourages us to set our own goals for books to be read between now and June 19th. I liked the nice loose parameters and welcome the incentive to tackle the dreaded "nightstand pile of doom" even though my langorous reading speed of late might make this list a bit too ambitious...even though it's not all that ambitious to the average reader (or maybe I should say "average book blogger"?). Nonetheless, I will cease my advance excuse making now and get on with the list!

Stealing Heaven by Elizabeth Scott
How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff
Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan
Uglies by Scott Westerfield
The Beet Queen by Louise Erdrich
The Widows of Eden by George Shaffner
Fever 1793 by Laurie Halse Anderson
Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortensen
Inside the Mind of Gideon Rayburn by Sarah Miller
A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray

and, this is unoffical, but if I am seized by a vast increase in reading speed, I'll include Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth here as my "bonus" book, as in, I'd be perfectly happy if I got all those other ones read, but if I get those read plus this daunting chunkster, I'd be truly ecstactic and deserve a great pat on the back.

There's the list. Reviews will be linked to this post as I finish the books. So let the reading (and uh...spring too, please) begin!