Book Reviews

Summary: A very special Solstice (Christmas) edition.

I am of an age where we lived through “very special episodes” not just made fun of them. After a TV show had a hundred episodes and could go to syndication, then it would have a couple of seasonal episodes that would always be shown out of season during syndication. I kept waiting for this the purpose of this book and I never really found it.

The book is overshadowed by recovery from “the war.” But the war was really a couple of battles. We know from previous discussions that 500 years ago there was a war that had lasted for years. And we know that the Rhys and others had been captured for nearly 50 years. I am not asking for more war narrative, but three battles without a real peace settlement doesn’t feel to me like the end of the war is here. So the whole premise of the book, Feyre and others trying to come to terms with the trauma of the war, seems off.

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Summary: Roz becomes a farm robot and wants to find her son and make her way home to the island.

At the end of the first book of the series, The Wild Robot, Roz had been damaged trying to protect her adopted son (a wild goose) and her friends (the other animals on the island where she lives) from the robots that had been sent to retrieve her. Those robots were Those robots were all destroyed, but Roz had no choice but to turn herself in so that she could be repaired.

Roz was refurbished but she maintained her memories and personality. After refurbishment, she was sold to a disabled farmer. As Roz works the farm, she becomes friends with the farm animals and the two children on the farm.

She is good at farming. She understands how to work with the animals and the other farm machines. She can see that there is real value in the work, not just because the work is enjoyable, but because the work she does serves the family and Roz likes the family.

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Summary: Peter discovers a new duty that his role of Duke brings. It leads him to a mystery and eventually to several deaths.

I have enjoyed this series of four books that grew out of Dorothy Sayers writing. The first was the draft of a novel written by Dorothy Sayers that Jill Paton Walsh finished. The next three were mostly Jill Paton Walsh using Sayers characters. I have enjoyed the books and I am glad that I read them. But I also haven’t loved them.

I still like Peter and Harriet as characters and I appreciate seeing them as they age. Their children are young adults. At the end of the last book, Peter had assumed the role of Duke after his brother died. His nephew was killed in action during WWII. Harriet still is writing, but the work of Duchess takes time. And there is a lingering of her earlier reputation as an accused murderer that does pop up in this book several times. Bunter is the ever present assistant who wants to keep the social boundaries in place, but who acquiesces to the increasing informality of the 1950s.

The mystery always felt a bit under developed. There is an ancient manuscript in one of the college of Oxford. Because of a long ago bequest, Peter has the role of “visitor” to help settle disputes within the college. In part because of money problems within the college, there is a disagreement about whether the manuscript should be sold and the money invested or if the manuscript should be kept and financial changes made in other ways.

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Summary: Princess Aurelia is forced to ask James for help. A curse complicates everything.

Son of Gold and Sorrow is the third in KB Hoyle’s series of fairy tale retellings. Each book can be read independently, but for this third book in the series, it helps to have read them in order. In the first book Son of the Deep (a gender swap retelling of the Little Mermaid), James was a side character. In the second book, Son of Bitter Glass (a retelling of Hans Christian Anderson’s Snow Queen), James joins the book midway through as a partner on the quest. But in this third book, Son of Gold and Sorrow, James, along with Aurelia, is the protagonist. You do not need to have read the previous books to read this book, they can be read in any order, but you will have more understanding about James as a character if you have read the others.

Son of Gold and Glass is a retelling of The Pretty Goldilocks (not Goldilocks and the Three Bears). Like the Snow Queen, I was familiar with elements of the story because it has been retold in other formats, but I had not read the original fairy tale. Again, like the last book, about half way through the book I started searching to figure out what the original fairly tale was and read a few summaries so I could see the elements and get and idea of what had been changed in this retelling. None of that is required to read the book.

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Summary: A single story arc split between two books.

I am behind on writing about my reading and while I have enjoyed this series enough to keep reading it (I am in the middle of the fourth right now), this if far from a perfect series. I have read pretty widely in the more classical fantasy world. And I have read some romance. The recent trend to Romantasy isn’t completely new, but this series seems to have contributed to the movement.

There are some irritating distractions in this version of fantasy. Some are silly things like flush toilets and hot water bathtubs and the level of technology constantly shifting from medieval to 19th-century references. And there is the more common fantasy issues like magic being used to bridge plot points in ways that do not make sense internally to the system.

The series has a sharp turn at the start of the second book (spoilers for the first book and these two books follow), Feyre saved Tamlin and all other Faerie courts by breaking the curse. In the process knowingly killed several innocents and herself was killed. But she was brought back to life by the combined work of the seven High Lords who were all gathered together in captivity and who had just been released because of Feyre’s work. She is resurrected and becomes the “Curse Breaker”.

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Summary: A new robot is lost, and as attempts to survive, it learns from the animals around it and becomes a “wild robot.”

My son read and enjoyed The Wild Robot last year when he was eight. He is a pretty good reader and likes to read books on his own. I have been interested in reading the book myself since I saw that it was being made into a movie.

This is a classic late elementary book. There are tons of very short chapters, rarely more than a couple of pages each. This makes the book both easy to engage for 3-5th graders to read by themselves and easy to read to them at that age or slightly younger.

I appreciate that this is a book that admits hard things. This book is mostly about a robot trying to understand the world around “her” and about animals. The reality of the wild world is that animals will die. Some will be eaten by others, some will die from elements or accidents. The fact that there is grief and sorrow in that loss is not glossed over.

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Summary: After the war, Lord Peter starts telling Harriet about his first case, and that telling leads to a new case. 

One of the ongoing themes of this set of four books is that there is a play between what is real as a mystery and how mysteries can be written about to be believable. As a setup for the rest of the book, Lord Peter describes to Harriet his first case and how he started as a detective. Throughout this early section, Harriet and Lord Peter talk about whether something would be believable if it were in one of Harriet’s novels vs in one of Peter’s cases. This is a running gag in the series because Peter is often asking Harriet what he should do or if she were writing the story what the perpetrator would do at that point. It is both a running gag, but also a serious discussion about the nature of reality and how the nature of writing works. You can’t just write a story, you have to fall within the set of conventions that seem believable unless you are intentionally subverting the conventions to suggest that the conventions themselves are not believable.

Part of the thread of the book is that the Attenbury Emeralds, which is what his initial case was about, has continued to come up again and again over the years. That is improbable, but it is improbable because there is more to the story than what it initially seems.

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Summary: A retelling of Beauty and the Beast in a modern (spicy) romance/fantasy format.

Recently my local school district removed A Court of Thorns and Roses and the rest of the series from all of the school libraries. I was unfamiliar with the series and so I looked it up. I saw that the first book is a loose retelling of Beauty and the Beast. I read the original short story about fifteen years ago and was very familiar with the Disney movie and the live-action remake. As I was looking up information about it I saw that the audiobook was free to me in the Audible lending library for members. So I picked it up and fairly quickly decided to just buy the Kindle edition.

There is a good discussion in the YA author community about the role and purpose of young adult and middle-grade fiction. I think KB Hoyle, cofounder of Owl’s Nest Press has done the best at discussing the changes to the category “Young Adult Literature”. There are a variety of podcasts and articles where she has done that. But I will highlight this article and this podcast about the need for a real middle grade and YA category and this post about why retellings of classics are useful. To summarize her point, with the rise of adult interest in young adult stories (Twilight, Harry Potter, Hunger Games, Divergent, etc), there has been a shift to writing coming-of-age stories for adults and it is included in the category of “young adult books.” There are a number of reasons for this, but the coming of age story is a popular format. The rise of the internet seems to have pushed interest toward simpler stories. Then these books sold well. And then there was the mega-success of Fifty Shades of Gray, a type of coming-of-age story that included sex as a central theme.

KB Hoyle started Owl’s Nest Press particularly to address the ways that middle-grade children and young adults were getting ignored in their own category of literature. I have read every one of KB Hoyle’s books, many of them more than once, so I definitely think that books written for pre-teen or teen readers can still be read by adults with great enjoyment. But that category of books, the adult-oriented coming-of-age novel which includes sex is still being written and remains popular. And it is one type of book that is being targeted for school book bans. I am not particularly in favor of school book bans, in large part because the act of banning draws attention to the books. My local library now has over 100 people in line for the ebook of A Court of Thorns and Roses and that doesn’t include the print or audiobook waits. When I looked the estimated wait time was 18 weeks.

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