May 2014 – My Book Report, by Jean Age 20-Something

A Tale of Time City by Diana Wynne Jones

Title: A Tale of Time City by Diana Wynne Jones
Scored a: A
Status: Finished

The other time travel book I described! Through a series of mishaps, a little girl (Vivian) is kidnapped from a train station during WW2 when she’s on her way to the country and brought to a city that exists outside of time itself.

And that city is collapsing in on itself.

She teams up with a pair of boys native to the city (also her kidnappers) to save it.

There’s a lot of ‘oh wait, so THAT’S what that scene meant’ during this book, which is preceded by a lot of guessing about which bit meant which, as things get a little… timey wimey.

Why did I like this book so much? Lots of reasons, but the little details are probably what did it. The dessert that they all have a mad passion for, 42nd century butter-pie which sounds absolutely delicious when described in the book, and the time ghosts. The time ghosts are throughout the city. They’re important things that happened, emotional things that happened, repeated things that happened. And the whole concept was really appealing to me.

Also? There’s an android manservant to the family with atrocious taste and the clothes he helps pick out for Vivian were excellent.

The city itself is a brilliant creation. People from stabilized time periods with time travel (it seems to get discovered and outlawed off and on) come to study in the city, they have tourists, you can apply for citizenship, it’s just a really neat idea. A time country. I love this book.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney

Title: Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney
Scored a: C-
Status: Finished

Diary of a Wimpy Kid was a disappointment. I picked it up because the art looked like a lot of fun. And it’s true, the comics in it are pretty charming. The problem was the characters.

With a few exceptions, the characters are pretty repellant.

The father’s sexism/homophobia/whateverness made anytime he was on the page teeth-gratingly irritating. While he was a good explanation for why the wimpy kid was a real jerk, I could have really done without him.

One of the bits of the story that really stood out to me was how the kid wanted a Barbie Dream House for some reason, and his father threw a fit, so the kid asked his uncle, who gave him a Barbie instead. So the father threw another fit and ordered him to get rid of it.

I don’t care much that the kid never learned a lesson about how not to be horrible, because that would have been fine if he was at least entertaining to watch going from situation to situation. But in the end I just wanted my money back.

I rated this a C- instead of anything lower because the art was fun.

Hexwood by Diana Wynne Jones

Title: Hexwood by Diana Wynne Jones
Scored a: A+
Status: Finished

Hexwood was my favourite book for years and years. It didn’t fall out of favour with me so much as The Neverending Story fell into favour, but it’s still dear to me.

Hexwood is a book with a lot going on in it. And when you think you know the plot, it turns out you don’t. And even when I was rereading it with that fact in mind, it still totally side-swiped me, because my memory is terrible and I got caught up in believing the narration.

One of the plots is one day a young girl is very sick and notices that people are going into the Hexwood Farm and not coming out again, and she decides to investigate. In the process she gets caught up in an Arthurian legend. Then there’s all the other plots.

Diana Wynne Jones books have one major flaw, and that’s usually their endings. But in this case the ending is pretty solid and all the threads running around the story tie up together pretty tidily.

A problem with stories with a lot of moving pieces is they can leave you frustrated from the feeling things are being kept from you, but in the case of Hexwood you don’t get that feeling at all, as things aren’t kept from you, but things are added instead as things go on. You think you’ve got a stick figure and then it turns out to be an elaborate oil painting. Like pieces clicking into place.

If you forget things like I do, this book has an excellent reread value.

Just a warning though, later on in the book is some pretty intense child abuse. Like Dogsbody‘s animal abuse it makes sense in context, but it’s fairly shocking. When I got to that part I had to stop and look at the ceiling for a while. I’d managed to totally forget that part.

I’m glad a lot of Diana Wynne Jones’ oeuvre has been made available digitally, as it allows me to revisit my old favourites since my paper books seem to continually shift around the house and into hiding.

When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead

Title: When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead
Scored a: A
Status: Finished

One of my hobbies is composing themed lists of movies/books, etc, to suggest to people or just find themes in entertainment. Others do work, but this does what it needs to to keep me entertained.

I’d put When You Reach Me on a list of excellent time travel fiction. I don’t have a very big list of that so far, mind you. Just The Time Machine and A Tale of Time City so far. But I’m sure it’ll grow. The problem is time travel isn’t usually a plot point that makes me go ‘well, hey there little book. Let’s get some reading done.’ Which doesn’t mean I dislike it, I’m just way more likely to go ‘Oh my god! Griffin in wizard school!’

But as I said, When You Reach Me is excellent. The plot is that Miranda Sinclair has three things going on in her life: Her mother is preparing to go on a gameshow, her best friend refuses to speak to her and she doesn’t know why, and she’s getting letters from the future.

Everything ties together just right. The ending is satisfying in a good way, and you get to really see Miranda discover the world around her as she’s forced to leave her comfort zone in the book. It also features a SO for her mom that is not dickish, which is nice to see in fiction because that’s so dang rare.

I’m a little biased on account of getting on pretty good with my stepmom, I admit.

It’s a good book if you like time travel, or if you like books that explore what friendship is.

Aunt Dimity’s Death by Nancy Atherton

Title: Aunt Dimity’s Death by Nancy Atherton
Scored a: B+
Status: Finished

And now for the third book I finished over my vacation! Although it looks like If Walls Could Talk by Juliet Blackwell (same as the witchcraft vintage store mysteries, but this one is about home repair and a good deal more gritty) is fast approaching putting me at four completed. See, what happened was, at the airport on the way home I was struck by wanting to read a LOT of ghost cozy mysteries so I googled ‘mystery partner ghost’ and and the first result was exactly what I was looking for. Thanks, googley overlords.

The page I found was a huge list of cozy series that featured ghosts and summaries of the series. I picked out a few to start with (Aunt Dimity, Family Skeleton, Haunted Bookshop, Haunted Home Renovation) and started with Aunt Dimity’s Death.

Well, it was a mystery, but not the kind I was expecting. Not a single murder! But that’s not a criticism, since a book not being what I expected when I didn’t read the summary all the way is not its fault in the least.

Since the amazon page is withholding summaries from me, I will donnez:

Lori Shepherd’s life has been in a downward spiral. She’d had a happy childhood with a loving mother and stories her mother made up of the adventures of ‘Aunt Dimity.’ But now her mother’s dead, she can barely get any work, and a law office just contacted her to tell her that not only is Aunt Dimity real, she died some months ago. But she has a task for Lori.

There was a ghost as promised and I am satisfied.I will be reading the next book in the series.

The book itself was very much like a fairytale, but the idea of a fairytale and not a real one where your life is in constant peril. It was fun to read and picture the descriptions, because the places in the book sounded beautiful.

It’s not an A because as much as I enjoyed what it was, it didn’t give me all I wanted – the plot wasn’t full enough for me. Hopefully the next ones will be more meaty.

Sketch Me If You Can by Sharon Pape

Title: Sketch Me If You Can by Sharon Pape
Scored a: B-
Status: Finished

Summary:

She’s a police sketch artist. He’s a dead lawman. Together, they put a face on murder.

When her uncle dies, police sketch artist Rory McCain get’s a list of clients from his private detective business and a beautiful, old house with a ghostly inhabitant: Federal Marshal Ezekiel Drummond, aka Zeke.

Having a ghost as a housemate is bad enough, but as Rory’s drawn into one of her uncle’s unsolved cases and faces a cold-blooded killer, she may need the marshal’s supernatural help to stay alive.

I’ve actually been reading this one for… well, it doesn’t appear to be logged when I bought it in my email. Needless to say, a long time. I didn’t stop reading out of dislike, but distraction. Fortunately after literally years, it was easy to pick up where I left off and finish this book. Which is sort of funny, because during when I was reading it the first time I totally forgot the prologue where you witness the murder and then was like ‘how does she know that her uncle’s murder WASN’T an accident then?’ because I am a sillybilly.

Rory was pretty great. Capable and interesting to listen to the narrative of. The ghost’s sexism, while time appropriate, made me sigh, but I enjoyed how they seemed to gel pretty quick. The series is ‘A Portrait of a Crime’ and I’ll be reading the next one to see what they’re like when they haven’t just met.

And, most importantly for a mystery? I liked the ending.

Secondhand Spirits by Juliet Blackwell

Title: Secondhand Spirits by Juliet Blackwell
Scored a: B
Status: Finished

The cover of Secondhand Spirits - in person the grey swirls have sparkles! — The cover of Secondhand Spirits – in person the grey swirls have sparkles!

Before I left town on a trip to San Diego, I was overcome with an urge to read about mysteries with ghosts. Fortunately my mother has one of the biggest cozy collections I have ever known and that included more than a few supernatural mysteries. What I chose was Secondhand Spirits by Juliet Blackwell and Grave Sight by Charlaine Harris. After doing a more thorough reading of the plot of Grave Sight, I chose not to read that one ever, but Secondhand Spirits kept me nicely occupied on the plane as well as being the first paper non-comicbook I read in years.

The summary:

Love the vintage- not the ghosts

Lily Ivory feels that she can finally fit in somewhere and conceal her “witchiness” in San Francisco. It’s there that she opens her vintage clothing shop, outfitting customers both spiritually and stylistically.

Just when things seem normal, a client is murdered and children start disappearing from the Bay Area. Lily has a good idea that some bad phantoms are behind it. Can she keep her identity secret, or will her witchy ways be forced out of the closet as she attempts to stop the phantom?

The summary turned out to be misleading, as it turns out she cannot see ghosts.

I did like it, though. The cast of characters was appealing, her love interest wasn’t a dick, I enjoyed the job she did, and I only snickered a little every time she referred to the ‘burning times’ in reference to witch history.

It was a little light on the actual villain of the story, but the monster portion of the story was pretty cool. It was La Llorona, the weeping woman who drowns children. A note on the use of a Mexican spirit, at first for a lot of the book I thought Lily was Latina, but it turned out that while her grandmother was, she is only Lily’s grandmother via adoption. So it was a ‘oh, it’s her culture!’ followed by ‘oh, it’s sort of her culture’ but you know, a good scary ghost.

I’ve bought the sequel to read soon. Right now it’s chilling its heels in my kindle account.