The White Road (Nightrunner #5) by Lynn FLewelling

The White Road by Lynn Flewelling


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
After the last book's excessive torture scenes, this book reads like a breath of fresh air. Serigil and Alec are together, they're still discovering secrets about each other, and there's plenty of archery, sword fighting, feasting, and all the other stuff that is supposed to be in this genre. When Flewelling gets back to the heart of this series, she really gets it right. My only complaint is that the supporting character's names are becomeing more difficult to tell apart. I hope there's a companion book in the works, something that breaks down the various languages so there's something to go by other than what are now appearing to be random syllables strung together.

Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell

Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
When I saw that Woodrell was also the author of "Tomato Red", I almost put this book back on the shelf. I really, really, really did not like that book. But the reviews for this were great, the plot sounded like an actual plot, and he's written a few more books between that one and this one, so I decided to give it a shot. And I'm really glad I did!

This is a tremendous story of a young girl who has lived in survival mode her entire life. Survival not only for herself, but for her two brothers and her own mother. She takes care of them not only because in her world, it's expected, but also because, as is revealed through her actions more than her words, she is a person that takes responsibility and family very seriously. It's all she has to call her own, and she will not let anyone, no matter how scary or violent and cruel, get in her way. The story moves very quickly, covering just a few days, yet there is so much character back story and revelation that it could have taken twice as many pages. The beauty of this book is that it didn't. Like the lives of the people in this story, the story is raw and to the point.

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The Thief of Always: A Fable by Clive Barker

The Thief of Always: A Fable by Clive Barker


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
If I had read this book when I was the age that it's written for, it would have scared the s**t out of me! As an adult, I've read, seen and even lived things that are more frightening than the things that Barker imagined for this book. However, the moral of this story is written for every age of reader, and because Barker is such a master of making his protagonists an Everyman that every reader can identify with, this is still a good scary read. Within the first few pages, you'll be back into the days of your life when you thought that a new adventure would always be a good adventure, the days before you learned to be careful what you wish for.

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The Winter Garden by Kristin Hannah

Winter Garden by Kristin Hannah


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is two books in one: a very good historical fiction within a contemporary family drama, and both stories are well told. Too many times I've read books with combined genres that read as if the author had two small stories to tell and combined them to get a full novel, but this time the stories really are a part of each other and the family part wouldn't exist in the form it does if it weren't for what had happened in the past. I loved the slow progression of fairy tale to memoir, and the third to last ending (with two plots, there's bound to be more than one ending, right?) was a well earned tear jerker. The very final ending went to a place I wish the story hadn't gone, but up until that point, this was a good "loose yourself in other people's troubles" book.

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Tonight I Said Goodbye by Michael Koryta

Tonight I Said Goodbye by Michael Koryta


My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I recently attended a ceremony where Koryta was the honored alumnus, and enjoyed his speach so much that I couldn't wait to read his writing. Perhaps it was the different purposes, or maybe he's gotten better as a writer since this first book, but I was slightly disappointed. In person, Koryta was a bright and funny guy, and there was a naturalness to his speaking that took it several notches aboce the usual commencement speach. That naturalness is missing in his writing, unfortunately. Although his characters are fairly interesting, the seem forced together as if they were taken from a mystery writers checklist. The plot is convinving and again, fairly interesting, and given the first novel thing, passable. But there's just nothing that jumps out at me and says this is a series you want to get hooked on. Having said all that, I am going to give his most recent book a shot. It's a different genre and maybe he's found a way to let his true talent shine in his writing.

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The Circus in the Attic and Other Stories by Robert Penn Warren

The Circus in the Attic: and Other Stories by Robert Penn Warren


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
An alternate title for this book could be "The Funeral in the Basement" or something along those lines, because at the heart of every one of these stories is death and saying goodbye. In my mind, that makes for good reading, especially when the stories are told by an author as unsympathetic to his characters as Robert Penn Warren is. By far, my favorite new-to-me story of this book was "The Patented Gate and The Mean Hamburger", probably the closest Warren ever got to writing humor, but of course, it's dark humor. "A Christian Education" I've read before in several short story anthologies, and it is a story that holds up to being read over and over again. Many of these stories focus on tobacco farmers, set in a time when tobacco growing was an honorable and honest way to make a living. It's become politically incorrect to remember that time, making this collection of stories historically important as well as great reading. My only negative goes along with the almost always true bit of writer's advice: never write in dialect. As great as a writer as Warren is, his attempt to use dialog to create setting is jarring, and when that happens in the first story of a collection, it jumps out in every other story that follows.

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Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy, narrated by Richard Poe

Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is the second work of McCarthy's that I've listened to (as opposed to read) and it confirms what I suspected. McCarthy's stories are meant to be told. There is poetry in his words that is amplified by the human voice. Certainly, any of his books will move you if you read them, but listen to a good narrator (Richard Poe in this case, who annoyed me to stopping The Story of Edgar Sawtelle but seemed perfect for this book) and the story will pull you in as surely as if you were sitting in a room with McCarthy himself. Being immersed in this story can be a challenge, however, because it is extremely violent, dark, and at times down right unpleasant. But it is never gratuitous - the actions of The Boy and the Judge and the rest of the Glanton Gang are the people themselves. This is an epic of a downward spirally journey that will drag you down with it, if you're willing to go.

My only critisism of the story is there's a feeling of disjointedness. It's like McCarthy ran out of steam at one point, found a new track and then plunged back in. Events are described in painfully good detail, but then huge chunks of time pass with almost no narrative explaining what happened. It's a "wait a minute, did I miss something?" moment that passes quickly, but still, it's a break from a great story that you wish didn't happen.

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Fragile by Chris Katsaropoulos

Fragile by Chris Katsaropoulos


My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Disclosure: This book was given to me through the Goodreads "First Read" program.


If half stars were available this would be 2 1/2, not quite a 3. There's some amazing character depth here, and considering the three main characters tell almost all their own stories, that's a big statement. We see more of these people than they think they are revealing. Also, the settings are very well done, from the cookie cutter mid-range hotel to the soon to be demolished old style movie palace. Katsaropoulos understands how locations can form personalities. However, despite the well done story telling technique of having one character's narration take over in mid-sentence from another's, the story isn't really all that well joined up. The triangle that is said to form between the three characters, that one is necessary for the other two to find peace is simply not true. That one character could be pulled out altogether, and the other two would probably end the same way. Yes, there's crossover, but it's not needed to move the story forward. It's there because each character has a story of their own to tell.

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Carrion Comfort by Dan Simmons

Carrion Comfort by Dan Simmons


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
A fascinating concept of "vampires" that feed on violent acts and are able to bend the will of most of the rest of the human population through a sort of parasitical mind control if they choose. Now, blend in that there's a sort of war going on among the vampires, and that they can't always identify each other and that they truly believe that they are a superior being compared to the people they use, and you've got the making of a very good thriller-horror-fantasy story. Simmons' uses his creatures to explain some real historical events that have evoked the "how could that happen?" question, such as Hitler's rise to power and how some Hollywood movies get made.

However, this book is a case of too much of a good thing. It really should have been two books. In fact, it reads like two books with a huge final act battle scene right in the very middle, then going back to suspense building narrative. It takes a LOT of characters to support a book this long, and although Simmons' does an a good job of labeling chapters so that you know who's POV you're switching to, a story shouldn't need a road map to keep you from getting lost.

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Castle Eppstein by Alexandre Dumas

Castle Eppstein by Alexandre Dumas


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Very, very gothic and a darn good ghost story told in the old fashioned style of a narrator sharing a scary story at a social gathering. Readers who don't like Dumas's over the top melodrama probably won't like this book, and those looking for the intrigue and complicated relationships of The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers will might be a little disappointed as well. This is early Dumas, possibly when he was writing all of a book by himself, and there's as much focus on setting as character in this one, and I liked that. There were portions of the work that didn't read like something written in the 1840s, however and for that I blame the translation. Also, I'm not a fan of footnotes in fiction. They take me out of the story and into a lesson that the editor didn't trust me enough to figure out for myself.

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