Winter’s Child (Once Upon a Time Series)

by Cameron Dokey

Winter’s Child is the newest addition to the teen Once Upon a Time series, a collection of fairy tale retellings. The series began in 2002 and has been printing two or three stories every year since. The stories selected for transformation range from traditional tales like Snow White and Cinderella to more unusual choices, like The Magic Flute and the lives of Pocahontas and Anastasia. Winter’s Child sets out to re-spin Han Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen.

Grace and Kai have been best friends forever – how could they avoid it when they grew up next door to each other? They played together by day and in the evenings, Grace’s grandmother would tell them legends about the Winter’s Child, an immortal princess from the land of ice and snow cursed to undo the damage wrought upon the world when her mother smashed a cursed mirror filled with fear and released its damaging shards throughout the world. When the old woman dies, Grace and Kai have only each other for companionship, but Kai’s marriage proposal – a perfectly logical step – is shot down by Grace’s desire for freedom. When the Winter Child shows up, Kai eagerly decides to accompany her on her quest. Grace immediately sets out to follow them, and finally experiences the adventure she’s been craving.

The book is set up into thirteen ‘stories,’ following the format set forth in the original Snow Queen. Grace, Kai and Deidre the Winter’s Child alternate as storytellers. The first half the book sets the stage very well; Deidre’s life is told in the fantastic style of fairy tales while Grace and Kai live in a gritty poverty.  The Christian elements of Andersen’s tale have been removed, too, grounding Kai and Grace in a difficult world with little hope of divine intervention. But it gets a little awkward around Kai’s departure, because the Winter Child is a radical departure from the Snow Queen. Whereas the Snow Queen is a beautiful enigma whose motivations are known only to herself, Deidre is a teenager who has been lonely for many years, trapped in her sixteenth year until her quest is complete. She acts just like a teenage girl with her first crush. She’s giddy, she’s hopeful…she’s not sad. Over and over, we’re told her name is ‘Sorrow’ and that names match their owners perfectly, but she rarely seems as icy or as unhappy as we’re told she is.

When Grace is following Kai and the Winter’s Child, the story gets a little disconnected. An old woman tries to distract her, and she is captured by a band of thieves. These are both part of the original tale, so they had to be included, but we rush through the scenes so quickly that it feels like they were added to complete a checklist of important points from The Snow Queen. The ending, too, wraps up too quickly and too neatly, with a last-minute character addition to ‘fix’ the developing love triangle. 

This is the first book I’ve read in the Once Upon a Time series, and it intrigues me enough that I want to check out more of the series. Although the plot has its weak points, Winter’s Child is true to the fairy tale genre and a fun way to re-imagine The Snow Queen.

To read more about Winter’s Child, buy it or add it to your wishlist click here.

Short Girls

by Bich Minh Nguyen

Van and Linny Luong were as close as could be growing up, but as they grew older the sisters drifted apart. When their father proudly throws a party to celebrate his new American citizenship, it is the first time the sisters have seen each other in years. Van, the responsible older sister with a law degree and beautiful home, is struggling to hide her failing marriage from her family while younger Linny is working – temporarily, she promised herself – to mass-produce frozen homemade dinners for wealthy Chicago after ending an affair with a married man. Their father is an inventor who dreams of his creations and believes one day he’ll strike it rich creating devices that will aid short people in a world designed for taller bodies.

The Luongs came to Michigan from Vietnam in the 1970s, but their daughters were both born and raised in the United States. Van and Linny act as a bridge to the outside world for their father, who speaks English with difficulty and has trouble communicating with the Americans outside his tight-knit group of Vietnamese friends, while never quite fulfilling the roles of traditional, proper Vietnamese daughters. Van also specializes in immigration law, and through the cases she takes on the reader is exposed to some of the major issues facing immigrants in a post-9/11 America.

The title, Short Girls, reflects an obsession of Mr. Luong’s, who constantly reminds his children that they were short people growing up in a world designed for taller people. It’s a way of reminding them that they are outsiders, and they have to work harder than other people just because they’re made a little bit different. It helps emphasize the larger themes of the immigrant experience and the role of the ex-patriot community for first and second generation Vietnamese.   As Mr. Luong comments at one point, he is “normalized” after becoming an American citizen, but only his daughters are truly “naturalized”. 

My hometown, San Jose, has the largest population of Vietnamese-Americans in the country, so I interact with Vietnamese on a daily basis. But as a literary group, the Vietnamese-Americans haven’t yet developed a strong voice, partly because the Vietnamese communities are relatively new. But authors like Bich Minh Nguyen are ensuring that the experiences of her community will be heard, and personally I’m excited about it. I enjoyed Short Girls and look forward to reading more from Nguyen and other first-wave Vietnamese-American authors.

To read more about Short Girls, buy it or add it to your wishlist click here.

The Angel’s Game

by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Back in 2001, Carlos Ruiz Zafon released his fifth novel, The Shadow of the Wind, and the story sold like gangbusters. For a while it seemed like The Shadow of the Wind was everywhere, yet I never got around to reading it. When I received a copy of The Angel’s Game for review, my first big concern was Will I need to hunt down a copy of The Shadow of the Wind before I read this? Luckily, the answer is no – although set in the same world as Zafon’s previous novel (the second of a projected series of four books) the stories are independent of each other, and can be read in any order.

The Angel’s Game crosses all sorts of genres. A little bit fantasy, a little bit horror, a lot of mystery/ thriller with a healthy dose of historical tossed into the fiction mix. Set in Barcelona in the 1920s, our narrator is one David Martin, a young writer struggling for recognition. Working first as a journalist and then as a pulp fiction novelist, Martin dreams of creating his own Great Spanish Novel. Working at a frantic pace, Martin manages to write two such novels – one under his own name and secretly revising his friend Vidal’s manuscript – but when published, Martin’s book tanks while Pedro Vidal’s is almost universally acclaimed. To add to Martin’s humiliation and misery, Pedro Vidal – who has no idea that his text was “fixed” behind his back – marries the love of Martin’s life.  When a mysterious publisher named Andreas Corelli offers Martin an enormous sum to write a grand fiction of a book, the sort that will spawn a new religion, he accepts. What has he got to lose? Everything’s going wrong in his life anyway. But death seems to follow this Corelli wherever he goes, and the more Martin learns about his publisher and a previous writer who attempted the same project, the more Martin wants out of the deal, especially as he begins to fear his sanity may be slipping…

I enjoyed reading this book, but I could only take it in very small dose. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because Zafon’s prose is so dense. There is endless description of musty scents, shadowy streets, flickering lights and ancient books. A rich and moody atmosphere oozes out of every single page. But the dialogue often seemed stilted and unnatural, and almost overbearing in its need to pass information to the reader. (Andreas Corelli was especially bad when he slipped into ‘lecture’ mode.) After reading three or four chapters (which were quite short) I’d have to take a break to let the words break down and penetrate, I guess.

The end of the book is extremely open-ended. It’s hard to talk about without revealing spoilers, but I think the big question it boils down to is this: was Martin a reliable narrator? Can his account of the events – and we are given no other – be trusted? It’s hard to write these ambiguous endings; it can leave the reader satisfied, engaged with the book and interacting with the text in a way a straightforward resolution doesn’t allow. But it can also leave the reader with the impression the author wrote himself into a corner and didn’t quite know how to finish things, so he didn’t – and personally, this was how I felt. The book started out in a richly imagined world with a vibrant narrative and interesting characters, but by the time I was two-thirds of the way in the plot had lost focus and sunk into a loose, uncommitted dream world. No longer did things seem to be progressing. There was something frustrating in that, but I also know a lot of readers would love that, so it’s very much a personal thing.

            To read more about The Angel’s Game,but it or add it to your wishlist, click here.

Museum of Human Beings

by Colin Sargent

While leading Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on their famous expedition, the Shoshone woman Sacagawea gave birth to a son. This child, Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau, became the youngest member of the expedition as his mother carried him on her back through many dangers. Colin Sargent has pulled this child - usually regulated to a footnote in a book about Lewis, Clark or his famous mother – out of the past and written Baptiste’s life story in his first novel.

Sargent follows the skeleton of facts that are known about Baptiste’s life. He grew up under the care of William Clark after the death of his mother, traveled to Europe with a nephew of King Fredrick I and showed a talent for learning languages. After several years Baptiste returned to his homeland and took up his father’s trade of trapping, and retreated into the American wilderness.

These bare bones give the author plenty of wiggle room, and Sargent decides to make his book another voyage of discovery, but while Sacajawea traveled across land Baptiste struggles on a quest for identity and self. Raised by Clark and given a classic European education, Baptiste does not fully identify with other Native Americans but he is not allowed to embrace the world of the white man. 

Sargent’s strengths in realizing the character of Baptiste are tempered by his decision not to develop the rest of the cast. Some of the other characters, like Duke Paul, the man who decides to bring Baptiste to Europe, are little more than 2-D caricatures. Others, like Baptiste’s little sister Lizette, simply don’t appear for more than a few pages, so we never learn much about them. Part of the problem is the size of the cast; over the course of a lifetime there are going to be many people who don’t amount to more than a few sentences. A lot of “celebrity” faces pop up, like Beethoven and Washington Irving; I suppose it is possible that Baptiste could have met a great composer like Beethoven, but it seems improbable at the very least. 

The writing style is easy to read, but at times it seems quite choppy. The plot tends to jump from one scene to the next, sometimes skipping years, but there seems little rhyme or reason as to how Sargent picked which moments of Baptiste’s life to write about. At times this book is also quite brutal and graphic. Duke Paul takes advantage of Baptiste’s ignorance of European products and culture to drug him, rape him, and keep him subservient. He does not shy away from showcasing the harsh treatment of Native people at the hands of the whites.

It’s an interesting book, and was quite entertaining to read.   But it’s not something I would pick up for a second perusal.  

            To read more about Museum of Human Beings, but it or add it to your wishlist, click here.

The World in Half

by Cristina Henriquez

Book  Description (from Amazon.com)
Miraflores has never known her father, and until now, she’s never thought that he wanted to know her. She’s long been aware that her mother had an affair with him while she was stationed with her then husband in Panama, and she’s always assumed that her pregnant mother came back to the United States alone with his consent. But when Miraflores returns to the Chicago suburb where she grew up, to care for her mother at a time of illness, she discovers that her mother and father had a greater love than she ever thought possible, and that her father had wanted her more than she could have ever imagined.

In secret, Miraflores plots a trip to Panama, in search of the man whose love she hopes can heal her mother—and whose presence she believes can help her find the pieces of her own identity that she thought were irretrievably lost. What she finds is unexpected, exhilarating, and holds the power to change the course of her life completely.

            Miraflores is all of twenty years old, so it amazes me that she was able to arrange things at home so that she could fly to Panama and search for her father. She sets her mother up with a caretaker (her mother has early-onset Alzheimer’s) and tells her she’s heading to Washington to do a project for a geology class. That her mother would accept this with so little questioning seems so strange to me, and slightly unrealistic. What struck me as even stranger was that her friends seemed so blasé about it. If I told my best friends that I was going to Panama to search for my missing father, they’d freak out, insist on going with me, and/or probably tell my mom. They’d never agree to cover for me and bless me with a “Have a nice trip!” 

In spite of several improbable moments, the narrative is smooth and unfolds in an easy, natural way. Cristina Henriquez paints a very vivid, entertaining portrait of Panama. The city is lively and populated with good-natured, helpful people. Miraflores soon befriends Hernan, the doorman at her hotel, and his enterprising nephew Danilo. They help her and support on her quets, providing her with the family she sought even as her attempts to find her father stagnate. They almost seem too good to be true – Hernan invites her to live with them and Danilo spends days accompanying her around the city searching for her father, neither asking anything in return – but the conversations between Danilo and Miraflores as they attempt to bridge their two vastly different worlds make up some of the most interesting passages in the book.  

A dedicated geology student, Miraflores’ conversations and thoughts often focus in on rock-related phenomena.  During quiet times there are paragraphs devoted to volcanoes, South Pole exploration, that sort of thing. 

For me the book was a quiet sort of work, very introspective and self-contained, and a very quick read. The entire book is written from Miraflores’ point-of-view, which does help streamline it. I think it’s a great book for travel, when you’re on an airplane or a bus or a train, because it will entertain you and even transport you away to the streets of Panama, but you can pull out of it easily and return to the narrative at a later time without a jolt of re-immersion shock that leaves you scrambling to remember what happened before. 

            To read more about The World in Half, but it or add it to your wishlist, click here.

Bound South

by Susan Rebecca White

From Booklist
Louise Parker is a classic southern belle. Well-dressed and well-mannered, she can’t help but be frustrated by her daughter. Wild Caroline goes to a strict Christian prep school where she cheats in math class and can only focus on becoming an actress, until she has to leave after she’s discovered in flagrante delicto with her drama teacher. In the meantime Louise is distracted by Missy, the daughter of her housekeeper, a born-again evangelical who assists her mother in between trying to convert Louise’s gay son. Despite the consequences of Caroline’s behavior, Louise finds herself wishing she could be as careless and wondering how her life would have turned out had she chosen a different path. Even with their differences, Louise’s thoughts eventually lead her to believe that Caroline may be more of a southern dame and Louise more of a rebel than either of them thought. --Hilary Hatton

There are three main narrators: Louise, Caroline, and Missy. Each girl/woman is distinctive from one another, both in voice and personality, so you don’t even need the chapter headings to know the identity of the speaker.  I found something in each character that I could really identify with. Louise is so blunt and thoughtless about the words she speaks that she appears cruel or bigoted, but she means well. She has always worked hard to maintain her role as a good wife and good mother, but as life throws her one surprise after another she is forced to re-evaluate her approach. Her daughter, Caroline, ran away to California when she was eighteen. We’re roughly the same age, in the same Bay Area, so many of the choices she makes and people she meets are the same sorts of faces and situations I get into every week. She’s utterly believable and real to me: Caroline could have been inspired by one of my co-workers or a classmate. Missy, with her drive and desire to ‘save’ Louise’s son, at first glance seems the perfect stereotype of the meddling, brimstone-and-hellfire born-again Christian. One of my friends in Texas is also in this mold; after Obama’s election last November she was convinced the world would end, he was the end of America, etc. I couldn’t get her to really discuss the issue with me, which was frustrating. Through Bound South’s Missy and the way she processed the world, my friend’s world view – although still seeming out of touch with reality as I understand it – made a lot more sense.  Susan Rebecca White does a great job of highlighting the ‘Southerness’ of her characters, even as in incarnates differently in each person.

Bound South meanders carelessly to a close. Well, it’s not that the ending is careless. But the story doesn’t have a really specific start or a definitive resolution. It’s like the author stepped into the characters’ heads drove them around like they were cars until she ran out of gas. There’s no real destination in mind, but that’s OK. I suppose one could argue that since the book opens and closes with funerals, and some sort of theme or metaphor for life could be extrapolated out if one felt so inclined.    

Susan Rebecca White's debut novel was as refreshing as a tall glass of sweet tea on a hot summer day, a leisurely and humorous vision of the 21^st century Southern belle.  Check it out!

            To read more about Bound South, but it or add it to your wishlist, click here.

Etta: A Novel

by Gerald Kolpan

            The life of beautiful, elegant Etta Place has long been a mystery to scholars of America’s Wild West. She was the lover of Harry Longabaugh, best known in pop culture as the Sundance Kid, and accompanied him on many of his adventures. After he and Butch Cassidy were killed in 1908, Etta disappears from the historical record. Theories abound as to who she was and where she went after his death, but nothing conclusive has ever been found.

            In Gerald Kolpan’s first historical fiction novel, Etta Place is forced to flee her luxurious home after her father’s death brings the Black Hand mafia to collect his gambling debts. She is soon across the country in Colorado, serving travelers of the railroads meals with the graceful smile of a perfect “Harvey Girl.” But violence seems to follow Etta wherever she goes, and after defending herself against the unwanted advances of an amorous customer, Etta is once again on the run – this time in the company of Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch. She meets the great love of her life, participates in the Wild Bunch’s train robberies, and quickly becomes as notorious as the rest of the gang. Constantly on the move in a variety of disguises and personas, Etta meets and befriends many of the celebrities of her age, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Buffalo Bill and Leon Trotsky.

            Kolpan tells his story through a multitude of media, including diary entries, letters, newspaper articles interwoven with straightforward narrative.  I enjoyed the story immensely; Etta is vivacious and brave, able to adapt to almost every situation. That said, the plot stretches credulity again and again. That Etta was a rich girl fleeing her home is reasonable; she was known for her beauty, manners and meticulous dress and such refinement would have required some money to cultivate. But Etta also befriends Eleanor Roosevelt, who saves her from trouble with her family’s influence, and for a time impersonates Annie Oakley in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. It’s a definite stretch.  I could see any of these things working well as a plot device in separate novels, but thrown together in the same story it’s almost too much. But the beauty of historical fiction is the author is not bound by the biographer’s “and this is what did happen.” As long as he or she can say “this is what may have happened” or “we cannot prove that this did not happen,” history can be pinched, pulled and shaped to whatever the storyteller desires. So cast aside your desire for history and have fun with this entertaining tall tale of the Wild West.

            To read more about Etta, but it or add it to your wishlist, click here.

Henry V: The Graphic Novel

by William Shakespeare and the team at Classical Comics

Shakespeare and graphic novels seem to go together like peanut butter and jelly. Seriously, it seems like there's a new one coming out every month. You've got your “manga Shakespeare” series. (I remember flipping through their 'Hamlet' a couple of years ago, and thinking it was pretty bad. But I am curious about these books. They can't be doing everything wrong, because they've managed to illustrate fourteen plays.) There's “No Fear Shakespeare,” made by the same company as SparkNotes. Barron's has their Picture This! books, which I've never seen but seem to be merely illustrated study guides, not actual graphic novels. (Not a surprise, given this company gained its fame printing study guides for AP Exams and SATs.) Certain plays appear again and again – Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet, Julius Caesar – but Classical Comics is the only publisher I've seen who took on the historical play Henry V.

Henry V: The Graphic Novel was Classical Comic's first published title, and it shows. I don't mean this in a bad way, necessarily. But compared to the stunning art of Jane Eyre and the intensely original rendition of Frankenstein's monster, the art of Henry V seems...underdeveloped. I think part of the problem stems from the need to portray the size of the armies in the heat of battle. The artist would pull away to show armies scaling the walls of a town or charging each other, but the tiny figures become like ants, indistinguishable from each other, with wooden faces and stiff, doll-like figures. Neill Cameron does better on the close-ups; I am pleased that his Henry resembles the 1520 portrait of the king. The art is adequate, I suppose; it reminds me of the old Classics Illustrated comics that I used to read as a kid. But it doesn't excite me the way Classical Comic's later publications do.

As far as the pacing and transition from play-to-graphic-novel, Henry V does quite well. It has three versions of the text:

Original Text: The complete text of Henry V, unaltered from the Bard's vision
Plain Text: Henry V script is updated to "normal" English, but maintains the form and pacing of the original plain
Quick Text: Henry V rendered in modern speech. This is the closest version to our modern speaking patterns.

It was very nice to see someone do a graphic novel for one of Shakespeare's lesser-publicized works, after all the Hamlets and Romeo & Juliets and Macbeths you see around.* As I mentioned in my Macbeth review last November, plays were written to be watched. If there isn't a drama group performing Shakespeare where you live, graphic novels are the next best way to experience the play. So when you get a chance to read one, go for it, even if you aren't a comic book reader. Whether you read in the Original Text or Plain Text or Quick Text, it's worth your time.

* I'm still waiting for someone to make an Antony and Cleopatra graphic novel, though. If you've seen one, please point me in the direction of it NOW. Classical Comics, if you're taking notes please consider adding A&C to the Shakespeare queue after Hamlet and Richard III.

To read more about Henry V: The Graphic Novel, buy a copy or add it to your wishlist, click here.

The Last Days of Krypton

by Kevin J. Anderson

Krypton is a planet in trouble. Its red sun has been acting strangely. Massive earthquakes and unprecedented volcanic activity are wracking the southern continent. An ineffective aristocracy runs the political machine and society is stagnated. The Council, which tightly controls any and all technological advances, have forbidden space travel and decreed that everything is fine. Brilliant scientist Jor-El and his brother Zor-El are working to save the planet, but with a government opposed to their progress and a rebellion threatening to throw everything into chaos, Krypton is surely doomed…

Ah, Krypton. Home planet of DC Comic’s Superman, its mythology is revisited and revised frequently but it has never been fully explored.   I’ve never been much of a Superman fan. (I always liked Batman better.) But I watched The Batman & Superman Adventures all the time in middle school, and was familiar enough with his story that when I heard Kevin J. Anderson had written a book about Superman’s planet, I was intrigued. Given my lack of background – never read the comics, never saw the movies – I worried I’d be confused. 

Luckily, you don’t really need to know all that much about the Superman universe to enjoy this book. In fact, just ignore that this is a Superman book. Just read it as a straightforward sci-fi story about people on another planet struggling to save themselves from certain doom. The characters are a little wooden, and the dialogue doesn’t exactly sparkle. But Krypton is a fully realized planet, with its own mythology and traditions. General Zod is positively Machiavellian as he manipulates the people around him in a quest to seize power, while Jor-El’s budding romance with an artist working on his estate is touching. It’s a neat tribute to the Superman world, and as near as I can tell (thanks Wikipedia!) Anderson takes all the various Krypton stories that have come up over the years and unites them into a single timeline.   (Of course, given that Krypton was destroyed in like five different ways, depending on what the Superman story needed in any given year, it makes for a truly apocalyptic story.) 

Fans of Superman, you have to read this. It’s a fantastic addition to the world, smoothing out and solidifying established elements of the canon. Even casual fans of the series can enjoy the reading. 

The Wordy Shipmates

by Sarah Vowell

            The Pilgrims are deeply entrenched into American culture, remembered every year on Thanksgiving and along with the Puritans frequently cited as a major influence in our government, education and daily life. They have a reputation for being witch-hunters, adulterous-branders, conservative, no-fun hypocrites.    But as Sarah Vowell sets out to explore, we owe quite a bit to these religious radicals, and the problems we encounter today are the same ones they faced over three hundred years ago.

            The Puritans were unusual in that most of them could read. (Their dedication to providing literacy to children helped lay the foundation for our public school system.) This extremely literate bunch left behind a sturdy written record in the form of sermons, diaries and letters – showing the views of men and women from multiple walks of life – and Vowell often uses their own words to reflect their opinions and justifications for their actions. Vowel herself has a very chatty style of writing – the book is filled with little asides and humorous comments that one often includes in conversation but would normally be left out of a history tome – which I think will make the reading much easier on the layman. 

            Vowell opted not to divide her book into chapters, and it drove me nuts. The failure to provide easy stopping points made the reading awkward; I developed a tendency to read more than I could process in a single sitting, and the next time I picked up The Wordy Shipmates I wound have to re-read the previous paragraph or two to pick up my train of thought once more. It seems such a silly thing to nitpick over, but the simple breaking up of Vowell’s essay into separate chapters would have made the book much more digestible. 

            This book is chockfull of information about many of New England’s earliest major players – John Winthrop, Roger Williams, and Anne Hutchinson, to name a few – but presents the facts in a way that I think many people who normally find history texts impenetrable will enjoy. But I found some of the parallels she tried to draw to our modern culture a bit tenuous, and the overall tone of the book – quite sarcastic at times – not quite to my taste.

            To read more about The Wordy Shipmates, buy it or add it to your wishlist, click here.

Deborah's Story

by Ann Burton

Born a slave in Canaan, Deborah lives out her days caring for animals and avoiding her master's abusive fists. But she has a gift, one that her fellow slaves help her hide: when she touches another person, she can read their thoughts and secrets, and sometimes she can see the future. For years she has dreamed of a man named Lappidoth, who one day appears with a business proposition for her master. Deborah's master tries to kill Lappidoth, but she warns him and he escapes, only to return and free Deborah and her fellow slaves. She is then brought back to Hebrew people to fulfill the destiny she sees in her dreams: that of Israel's prophetess and judge.

The fourth book in Ann Burton's Women of the Bible series, Deborah's Story provides the background of the only female Judge recorded in the Bible. (Her story is found in Judges 4-5.) The Biblical account jumps right into Deborah's leadership, so we never know what sort of childhood she had. Burton's decision to make Deborah a woman of such humble origins was an interesting twist, and consistent with the Bible's frequent “raising up” of little people to positions of power. (Many of the patriarchs are not the first born son, Ruth was a widow, Rahab a prostitute who saved Israel, King David the youngest son of his father and a shepherd, etc. etc.)

Deborah cannot lie as a result of her prophetic gift; this is stated many times throughout the book. However, there are a couple of times that she does lie, such as giving a false name when asked who she is. So I am not sure if the “no-lies” rule applies only to her prophecies, or her whole life. Either way, Deborah has a strong sense of honesty, but she can be rather irritating when she refuses to take advantage of certain opportunities to escape or get more supplies for her fellow slaves because it would be dishonest. She's also quite ridiculous in her constant insistence that she doesn't deserve X because she's only a slave and it is far above her. Yet the book is quite entertaining, and does a fine job of expanding on the few details provided in the Bible.

No mention of Deborah's song is mentioned, which is a pity. It's believed to be one of the oldest passages in the Bible, and the earliest example of Hebrew poetry.

To read more about Deborah's Story, buy a copy or add it to your wishlist, click here.

A Constant Heart

by Siri Mitchell

            Born the daughter of a wealthy merchant, Marget thought her family had made a perfect match when she married the Earl of Lytham. Uniting her family’s wealth and the earl’s title will make Marget a countess and grant her a place at court…but it soon becomes clear that her husband and the other courtiers dislike her. All Marget wants is to find the love she found expressed in the sonnet the earl wrote for her when they became engaged, and she is willing to take whatever steps are necessary to make the marriage succeed.

            Nicholas, the Earl of Lytham, had such a disastrous first marriage that he no longer feels he can trust any woman. When he sees his new bride for the first time, he is horrified by her beauty – for a beautiful woman cannot have a constant heart, and will never remain faithful. He stubbornly resists all evidence that his wife is a good woman, avoiding her both at court and in the home.

            The feasts may be sumptuous and the gowns may be exquisite, but Siri Mitchell captures the loneliness of court life under a Queen. Women can be beautiful, but they cannot outshine the Queen, who must remain the focus of every man’s desire. As the women of the court seek to imitate Queen Elizabeth’s red hair and white skin – the only way the Queen will accept their presence – Mitchell reveals the detrimental effects lead cosmetics have on their health. There’s a brief moment where Marget starts to eat a nut, only to realize every other woman is having only custards or jellies; these references to the effects of lead poisoning help create an undercurrent of creepiness that pervades all of Marget’s experiences at court. 

            I thought that characterization of Nicholas was a little unstable at times. His irrational desire for an ugly wife – or at least, his irritation with Marget for being pretty – is quite ridiculous at times. I have trouble imagining that a guy would really make such a big deal about it…but men get pretty darn crazy when their pride is involved. He also seemed to have a few very sudden mood swings, and there would seem a disconnect between the Nicholas of one chapter and the next. But he had his adorable moments. There’s an incredibly cute scene at State dinner where the gathered courtiers are served a love salad, a dish in which each plant in the salad having a secret meaning, and Nicholas and Marget are finally able to converse through the plants. It was a very silly but very fun flirtation.

            It’s a very fun story, and it was actually quite refreshing to read a book set in the Elizabethan court that was not about Elizabeth or one of her famous intimates. Viewing the court from the perspective of a minor courtier was an interesting change from the usual.

Descartes’ Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason

by Russell Shorto

Russell Shorto has taken a unique approach to the conflict between science and religion; he has traced it to its origin in the philosophy of Rene Descartes, and using Descartes’ corpse followed the repercussions of the dead man’s ideas on Western civilization. The book is a history of the evolution of philosophy and the emergence of the idea that reason and religious faith were separate entities, a concept Descartes did not come up with, but without his groundwork someone else may never have come to that conclusion. 

I had expected this book to be a bit of a mystery, a bit of adventure as Shorto hunted for the remains of Descartes and traced the bones through the years that they were moved by governments, disassembled by relic seekers, interred in monuments and displayed in museums. No such luck. Descartes’ remains have crumbled to powder and disappeared, leaving only his skull behind. Instead the book is a history of Descartes’ ideas. It follows his philosophy through the genesis, rise and fall of Cartesianism, the Enlightenment, and on through the modern era. In a way, the book is a history of the rise of science as an entity unique unto itself, and discusses some of the ‘failed’ sciences like phrenology, which used Descartes’ skull to prove and disprove its theories. The creation of scientific societies, autopsies, and even the evolution of forensics are also covered in detail. 

As a history of the conflict between science and evolution, Descartes’ Bones was quite interesting. But it’s not what I was expecting from the book at all. So I did feel quite disappointed, and to be honest I’m not sure it’s a book I would have picked up. The writing style is rather dry, and it reminded me of reading drafts of term papers in my English classes.

I don’t regret reading it though, and there are several readers that I know would be interested.  So if it sounds appealing, go for it.  Just keep in mind that the blurb on the back of the cover is rather deceptive:
 

In 1666, sixteen years after his death, the bones of Rene Descartes were dug up in the middle of the night and transported from Sweden to France under the watchful eye of the French ambassador. This was only the beginning of the journey for Descartes' bones, which, over the next 250 years, were fought over, stolen, sold, revered as relics, studied by scientists, used in séances and passed surreptitiously from hand to hand.

The bones are not the main focus of the book, only a thread used sporadically to tie Shorto’s ideas together.

            To read more about Descartes’ Bones, buy it or add it to your wishlist, click here.

The Necklace: Thirteen Women and the Experiment That Transformed Their Lives

by Cheryl Jarvis

Jonell McLain was out shopping one day when she saw a stunning diamond necklace in the display window of a jewelry store. It was a simple “tennis bracelet” style, exactly what she wanted in a necklace. However, at over thirty thousand dollars it was way out of Jonell’s price range. So she came upon a clever idea: what if she split the cost of the necklace up with a group of women, and they would take turns wearing it? A time-share for jewelry, you could say, could make something of beauty available to many instead of an elite few. Men laughed and told her it would never work, but Jonell was determined to try…so she gathered together one dozen women, and together they took the plunge. Each month they met up to discuss the adventures of the necklace. For one woman it helped revitalize her marriage; another was motivated to lose twenty-five pounds. At times there was tension and disagreement – Who could wear the necklace? What was the point of their gathering together? – but ultimately the string of diamonds brought them together and made them a community. To some women it gave courage and to others hope. In all it fostered a sense of giving and sharing that spread to other aspects of their lives as well.

The Necklace is an interesting study in women’s behavior and sense of community. None of the women really knew each other that well when they went in to buy the necklace, but the single shared piece of jewelry led them to form a support group. For Jonell, the one who came up with the idea, this experiment could raise the groups’ consciousness. She wanted them to read books about consumerism and how the things we own really “own” us, but many of the others weren’t interested. Patti wanted to loan the necklace to a friend’s daughter for her wedding day, but the other women felt it wouldn’t be special if just anyone could wear it. At each argument I wondered if the group would finally fall apart, but friendship and finances are two powerful motivators. The author doesn’t say it, but I suspect at times the potential loss of the investment may have been powerful glue holding the group together.  

I found the book quite interesting. It reads very quickly, and each chapter tries to focus on one of the women in the group and how the necklace affected her life, and what they did with it.  I’m hardly motivated to run out and try to start a similar group, but the book did make me stop and think for a moment about my attitude towards my belongings and the friends I spend time with. It was an enjoyable way to spend an hour or two.

To read more about The Necklace, buy it or add it to your wishlist, click here.

Dalí & I: The Surreal Story

by Stan Lauryssens

Salvador Dalí was a strange, brilliant man. His famous face, with trademark gravity-defying pencil mustache and perpetually bugged eyes, is instantly recognizable. Dalí created some of the most haunting and bizarre images of the 20^th century while living the topsy-turvy life of the ultimate attention whore. (Really. Paris Hilton and her like have NOTHING on this guy.) If something was strange, if something was perverted, if an act would surely make society flinch, Dalí did it.

Dalí and I chronicles the story of two men: the artist in his declining years and the unscrupulous art dealer Stan Lauryssens. Stan specializes in Dalí; it is all he sells to his wealthy clientèle. This is not due to artistic snobbery, for Stan readily admits he knows nothing about art, but through a perfected sales pitch – BS of the ripest order – he has gained the reputation as the man to see if you want to buy some Dalí.

Unfortunately, ever since Dalí discovered the fine art of screen-printing, it's almost impossible to find a genuine Dalí. By the mid-1970s, when Stan begins his dubious career as Dalí expert, there are hundreds of prints circulating, and it is rumored that Dalí spends his entire day signing blank pieces of paper. The artist's insatiable love of money has trumped his paintbrushes and artistic vision, save for one thing: Dalí does not have a consistent signature. He signs each painting or print in a different style, making it extremely difficult to authenticate his works. How can one tell if a print of The Persistence of Memory is from Dalí or some random crook out to make an easy buck? Is Dalí creating art, or is it just a scam?

Well, scam or not (and although he paints himself as innocent and trusting, it's pretty obvious the author knows he is dealing in fakes) Stan is soon in hot water. It's that precious sales pitch that he used to sell his prints: “A British investment magazine has calculated that the art of Salvador Dalí has gone up 25.94 percent per year between 1970 and 1975, and that's only for starters. When Dalí dies, prices will skyrocket.” Well, confound it all, Dalí is just refusing to kick the bucket, and Stan's clients (many of them with sketchy connections, to put it mildly) are getting antsy for the huge profits they were promised. It's an investment, after all. The market's getting flooded with cheap prints of Dalí's art and the authorities are beginning to suspect Stan of art and mail fraud. What else can he do but flee straight to the hometown of Dalí himself, and hideout next door to his famous neighbor?

This hilarious autobiography of Stan's mad scramble to survive and escape the world of art and Dalí is often as ludicrous as the artist's creations. “What is a real Dalí?” Stan asks, but to answer that question must first answer “Who was the real Dalí?”and the stories he shares from Dalí's servants, associates, friends and lovers do more to fortify the artist's mythology than reveal the man behind the name. Since the book was released there have been a few critics about it's authenticity – Stan is a man who did eventually go to jail for fraud, after all! - but it's fun. It's worth the read just for Stan's ridiculous sales talk and the cameos of some of the hottest artists from the 60s and 70s. But a serious study of the artist this isn't; was mysterious Salvador Dalí an artist genius cashing in on society's insatiable desire for his work, or a mastermind scamming the entire art world, getting paid without doing a lick of work? Only he and his six-hundred and seventy-nine different signatures will ever know.

A movie of this book is currently in production, with Al Pacino to play Dalí.