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Book of the Month: Crocodile on the Sandbank
A bit of The Mummy, a bit of a stand-alone Agatha Christie, the adventures of Amelia Peabody feature a plain, spinster along the lines of Jane Eyre. Albeit a more sprightly Jane Eyre what with the shooting, escavating and mummy-hunting.
Let me back up a bit with the death of Amelia’s father, she decides to use her share of inheritance to go on a whirlwind tour of ancient ruins in honor of her and her father’s shared love of archeology. It’s there that she saves the fallen English-girl, Evelyn Forbes, whose lost her virtue and her fortune. Luckily, Amelia has no concerns for high society concern of virtue and invites her to be her companion in Egypt.
From there, they come upon the Emerson brothers who are digging up a new royal tomb and Evelyn’s amorous cousin, Lucas, who wants Evelyn’s hand in marriage. Also the mummy that is following them around and impervious to bullets.
This was a fun novel as you cna tell by the other book franchises I name-dropped in the beginning. Even though it was written in the 70s, Peters does an excellent job of writing in the 20th century vernacular with the focus on ladies’ virtue, the white saviorism among the British towards the Egyptians where they feel bad about how they’ve been abused by “bad” British people while also dismissing their ways as uneducated and superstitious, and the disdain towards Italians (so if you are in doubt of who the villains are, there’s a big clue).
Yet it is also quite funny like the slap-slap-kiss between the elder Emerson brother (called Emerson because Amelia refuses to call him by his first name) where they clearly like each other under the antagonism such as Amelia admiring his broad shoulders under the guise of being a student of anatomy. While Emerson blusters that she’s the most unladylike lady ever, it’s clear he loves the way she acts as his equal and fights his gruffness. It has entertaining quips between them that add levity.
The younger Emerson, Walter, and Evelyn form a cute beta couple while her amarous cousin, Lucas, adds potential will-they-won’t-they conflict. The reveal of the who the mummy is and why he’s “haunting” the escavation plot is predictable but Peters’ strength lies in her real-knowledge as an Egyptianologist and archeologist that lend real imagery and feeling to her prose.
Nice book
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Ranking The Secrets of Charlotte Street
This was really, really hard. In fact, I almost considered not ranking the series because each of them were so well-written that the minor flaws made it impossible to rank one above the other because they were insurmountable compared to what Peckham did right in subverting tropes and creating three-dimensional characters of complexities and layers. So take these rankings with a grain of salt knowing that each are so good in their own way. Just read the whole series.
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Book of the Month: The Great Alone
Ah the great Alaskan wilderness, a place to reconnect to nature.
Or in Hannah’s novel, a place where family demons come to tear them apart with no chance for help in the middle of a blizzard. Aka a nightmare in my thinking.
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Finished Nancy Drew!
It only took over a year and browsing through Internet archives to get to the final two Nancy Drew books that escaped my grasp-The Clue of the Whistling Bapipes and The Strange Message in the Parchment.
Oddly enough, they both involve a lot of sheep.
The Bagpipes have Nancy heading to her ancestral Scotland homeland after witnessing a carjacking back in the US. It’s suspicous, but she hasn’t cracked the case yet. She figures she can save it for after her Scottish trip, but being Nancy, these rouguish characters assume that she’s followed them overseas to foil their plans and with their bumbling and attempted murder, she does!
I always enjoy the travel books and this was no different even though I felt the whole mystery aspect to be convoluted. Let’s say it involves sheep smuggling which makes sense because Scotland is famous for its wool but it also feels very Scooby-Doo. I was complaining about the constant missing treasures and jewels so I should be happy with the change but it all strikes me as comically out there.
Still, it did give me another reminder of why Ned Nickerson makes a good BF for Nancy. I always forget how helpful he is. I know Nancy wouldn’t want to date an idiot but he was actually a vital part to the mission.
I also love how ride or die George is when she offers to plow down the carjackers on Nancy’s behalf. She doesn’t play.
The other mystery was convoluted in a confusing way. First we’re introduced to another of Nancy’s never-before mentioned (and will probably be forgotten) friends, Junie. Her father, a shepard (I told you there was a lot of sheep in these two books) recently bough a parchment with pretty pictures but then he gets a creepy phone call instructing him to decipher the message and that’s when all the trouble starts.
A flock of birds is sent to attack Nancy and Junie. A random girl tries to steal Nancy’s bag. Someone tries to rob Junie’s home, obviously on the hunt for the parchment. One of the fellow shepards is framed for the robbery, and there’s a sad little Italian boy whose uncle won’t allow him to talk to anyone.
So much was happening yet it did not speed up the story, it felt longer than other books in the series for some reason like she was dragging this out with the sheer number of things happening to the girls. Although the bird thing was really crazy, it made me wonder if she wanted to get a Hitchcock reference in there even though I can’t imagine a robber would spend all his time training a flock of attack birds on short notice.
Plus at the very last three chapters, the author shoves Bess, George and Ned into the story to blot the cast and provide some humorous meta jokes about how do they manage to get into another one of Nancy’s crazy cases in less than a minute.
It was like Keene was trying to make it more mysterious parchment to the little Italian boy but it just mae it last longer and I wanted Nancy to wrap it up and reveal how she figured everything out. So not my favorite.
And yep, I finally finished!! The OG series at least. I know it continued onwards but I think I feel satisfied for now in getting to know the wild and convoluted mysteries of the first girl detective. Moreover, the creative mind of the ghostwriter that showed that no plot or locale was too big for Nancy to get her nose in.
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Ranking Pretty Tough
I’m not a sports person as any of my friends would attest. Not watching and not doing. I’m not athletic and even if I were, my 4 foot nothing size would make me an easy tackle or block or whatever the term is.
But sometimes I get struck by a vicarious need to read a sports book to get the adreneline and passion I do not feel in real life when I see a ball.
The Pretty Tough series started as a brand I believe to encourage high school girls to pursue sports and spawn off into a webseries, and books, and the books certainly fit into their mantra.While romance is part of it as it’s in any YA book, it doesn’t take away from how important the sport is to the protagonist. I think it was most surprising that sometimes the protagonist didn’t end up with a love interest in the end. Which may be saying more about YA as a genre than the series itself.
There’s also a strange thing regarding the authorship as the books’ rebrand name only one author-Nicole Leigh Shepard. But the first two books is supposedly written by Liz Legelaar and the third by Keri Mikulski (who was nice enough to sign my book so many years ago). Then goodreads makes it more confusing by implying Shepard wrote #1 and 5, Mikulski wrote all of them. I definately think the first two was written by someone else as the tone is radically different from the other four but I’m not sure the definitive authorship and why the brand would try to rebrand the whole series under one pen name.
Anyway, here’s my ranking. Or bracket. Or whatever sports term you want to use.
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Author Highlight: Coco Simon
Get ready for this one, with 58 books spreading across 4 different series, this prolific author has terrific taste.
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Fall Nonfiction
Humans of Judaism edited by Nikki Schreiber
Taken from the social media hashtag, this is a collection of stories from Instagram highlighting the breadth of the Jewish diaspora, their traditions and stories and tales of survival. From sweet stories of Bashert (think kismet) where two Holocaust survivors meet again in New York after the war, and then decades later when their grandchildren marry, to Shayna Maydele the dog that teaches her followers about Passover to a woman sharing variations of rainbow challah and how they differ by region.
Yes, there are a few famous faces like Einstein, Jerry Seinfeld and Jerry Stiller, and Marilyn Monroe who was a convert. But it’s not primarily about them, but the ordinary and the extraordinary like those who survived unspeakable horrors and a desire to remember those who lost. As well as a celebration for how far they’ve come in classic immigrant narratives and those who embrace their connection to one of the oldest religions by restoring old Torahs and recoering Nazi-looted treasures.
Also I had no idea how they’ve created so many things like Levis (aka denim everyone owns), Peeps, hot tamales (the candy, not the actual Mexican dish), Curious George, Gimbels, Baskin-Robbins ice cream, American Greetings cards, Ralph Lauren, Marc Jacobs, Calvin Klein, Zac Posen, Barbie, Mattel, bloomingdales, Barneys, Macys and so much more.
(more…)#aliwong, #anitasarkeesian, #arccartbooks, #behindtheseams, #biography, #bookindustry, #briannajonnie, #bushelandpeckbooks, #celebrity, #crazybrave, #daniellehigley, #deardiary, #deargirls, #dianevonfurstenberg, #dollyparton, #ebonyadams, #fashion, #feiwel&friends, #funnybusiness, #graphicnovel, #hachettebookgroup, #heroesofworldwartwo, #historyvswomen, #humansofjudiasm, #ifIgomissing, #interviews, #jarretkeene, #jennyjordhal, #joyharjo, #kidliterature, #leonardmarcus, #lesleyarfin, #lindywoodhead, #martabreen, #memoir, #missingandmurderedindigenousgirlsandwomen, #nealshannacappo, #nikkischrieber, #nonfiction, #popstars, #proud, #publishing, #simon&schuster, #smashthepatriarchy, #taylorswift, #taylorswiftandtheclothesshewears, #tenspeedpress, #terrynewman, #thestoriesbehindthestories, #thewomanIwantedtobe, #vicepublishing, #warpaint, #worldwartwo, $ibtihajmuhammad -
Long Live Evil Review
Rae enjoys the Time of Iron series. What she initially dismissed as one of her sister’s ridiculous fixations ends up being a lifeline when she gets a fatal diagnosis and has to distract herself in the endless waiting rooms and endless tests. She is especially attracted to the series’ villain, the Emperor. Not because of his psychopathic murderous tendencies. That’d be weird. But he has all the anger that she has. Her boyfriend and best friend hooked up. Her father left. Her mother’s in debt paying her hospital bills, and she’s in constant pain. Physically and emotionally.
Then the series becomes a literal lifeline when one of the characters’ offer her a chance to live. Get the magical Flower of Life and Death and she’ll be cured.
Only when she’s plunged into the world, she is inhibiting the body of the story’s villain, a harlot named Rahela and she’s to be executed the next morning! No one is going to make it easy for her to get the flower. But hey, when you’re cast as the villain, it only gives you more opportunity to build up a ruthless army to get what you want.
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Fall Comics
Titans: Starfire by Kami Garcia. Illustrated by Gabriel Picolo.
After the less than steller preceding books, Garcia gets the plot momentum moving with a good dose of character development. Much like the others, Kori thinks she is a normal teenage, albeit a bit more introverted due to her Ehlers-danlos syndrome making socialization a literal pain sometimes. I hadn’t heard it before, but it’s a bit like arthritis for younger people, and it’s a very tricky, dehibilating thing that fluctuates by the day. Not that her co-workers believe her. They think it’s convenient how it flares up and is all better the next day.
So yeah, she doesn’t have a barrel of friends or boyfriends like her older sister, Kira who is annoyingly obsessed with her jerk of a new BF. But he is offering to take them to H.I.V.E. to get Kori into a new clinical trial for her ED. Things are not as they seem and Kori starts to realize those painful twitches and pains in her joint may not be ED but alien growing pains.
Just like the cartoon, Kori sees the best in her sister weighing the times Kira sticks up for her to all the other times she belittles her, and bosses her around. Readers can see that for Kira’s good moments don’t outweigh that she wants her sister to remain the little one that can’t compeate with her in looks, popularity and now powers.
That sisterly love gets tested when Kira doubles down on her verbal bashing when Kori develops her powers. She is just so self-involved, she sees Kori’s concern for her as jealousy because let’s face it if the situations were in reverse Kira wouldn’t be caring. So while this Kori’s origin story, Garcia paints a parallel picture of this being Kira’s villain origin story with her feeling betrayed/disrespected by her inferior little sister and falling deeper with Slade and the H.I.V.E.
The rest of the Titans (Beast Boy, Raven, the Robins etc) take a backseat in this graphic novel, appearing near the end for the final battle. Instead it is Victor Stone aka Cyborg who rconfides his hunch about the H.I.V.E.’s real deal and alleviate her concern when she starts shooting neon green blasts. They make a nice friendship while providing organic exposition for both their backgrounds. Garcia even manages to add a sweet meeting between Dick Grayson and Kori, planting the seed for their famous romance.
I just wish that the ending did not feel so rushed to getting the grand finale. Yet the next book is the final one in the series, and I’m sorry but does anyone else think it’s a bad look for the series to skip a limelight book for Cyborg? Especially how absolutely nothing happened in Beast Boy Loves Raven, and Robin. I would have fixed it up by having the action of BBLR put in with R so it solves how mushy the former was and how the latter felt like nothing happened. Then they could have eased the pacing with Starfire and give Cyborg his own book before the finale.
Nonetheless, Picolo’s art remains solid and it’ll be exciting to see them come together and defeat H.I.V.E. once and for all.
(more…)#autobiographical, #awkward, #berrybrookmiddleschool, #brave, #candlewickpress, #cheetara, #christinasoontornvat, #comingfoage, #crush, #dccomics, #domenicocarbone, #dynamitecomics, #elliotkahn, #enemies, #gabrielpicolo, #georgekambadais, #grace'stwist, #graphicmemoir, #graphicnovel, #graphicnovels, #hudafahmy, #hudafcares?, #joannacacao, #josiecampbell, #kamigarcia, #lostsoulbeatpeace, #maggiethrash, #middlegrade, #miniseries, #myadventureswithsuperman, #pablomcollar, #rachelreads&reviews, #scholastic, #soolee, #starfire, #svetlanachmakova, #teentitans, #thesquad, #volumetwo, #yenpress -
Book Hightlight: Tales From A Not-So-Bratty Little Sister
I know, I know. I admitted in my last post that I have too aged out of the series to enjoy it. But I still keep coming back because I have to know how it ends. . .
I have a feeling it might be coming soon, but Russell is certainly stretching it out.
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Rachel Reads & Reviews 