Author Archives: Superfast Reader

Blood Moon by Alexandra Sokoloff (The Huntress/FBI Thrillers)

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Synopsis:
This sequel to Huntress Moon follows Special Agent Roarke as he tracks a female serial killer who sets prostitutes and abused children free from their captors, while wondering if a cold case holds the secrets to her deadly sojourn.

Review:
Blood Moon was an outstanding follow up to Huntress Moon and I cannot wait to find out what happens next. I only like crime when the writing is top notch and often I find that most crime novels rely on sensationalistic descriptions of crime scenes and torture. Sokoloff focuses on character development and that’s what I love about her. Plus, she’s a fantastic writer. I can’t say much about the plot without spoiling both books so I’ll just urge you to read them.

Sober Mercies by Heather Harpham Kopp

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Synopsis:
Subtitled: How Love Caught Up with a Christian Drunk.

Review:
Sober Mercies is first and foremost an addiction memoir, showing the secrecy and the deception and the havoc wreaked by Heather Harpham Kopp’s need to drink as much alcohol as possible every single day.

What makes her story stand apart is that Kopp was (and still is) a professing Christian at the time of her addiction. She believed that alcoholism was only a sin problem, not an addiction or a disease, and so she resisted seeking help. She didn’t know why she couldn’t just repent her way out of her problem. She was editing books on Christian theology but wasn’t seeing her beliefs translate into her life at all. I think this is a common problem for all Christians, especially in the evangelical tradition. We have orthodoxy (“right doctrine”) but not orthopraxy (“right living”), and I think the relentless focus on individualism in popular evangelicalism is a big reason. We’re told that Christianity is a personal relationship with Jesus and so we get lost in our personal experience, instead of being taught that Christianity is first and foremost about what Jesus Christ did on the cross, vanquishing sin and making it possible for us to be right with God. As long as it’s all about us, we’re doomed to see how we fail every day. That’s what happened to Kopp. I wish she had spent more time showing how her perspective on God and herself changed because that’s where the magic in a believer’s life happens. She sort of rushed the ending and I wanted more because I she did a fantastic job getting me invested in her story.

The Sweet Dead Life by Joy Preble

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Synopsis:
After a car accident, Jenna’s stoner older brother starts acting really weird, like all perfect and helpful and otherworldly–and then announces that someone is trying to poison her.

Review:
The plot mechanism behind The Sweet Dead Life was a little clunky in parts, but the voice that Joy Preble came up with for Jenna absolutely won me over. I also loved that the story was set in Houston, not just because my mother-in-law lives there but more because it gave the book a great sense of place that tends to be an afterthought in a lot of YA novels. The book is funny, sweet, edgy, suspenseful, and ultimately satisfying–though a huge part of me wished the door had been cracked a bit wider for a sequel. I loved the relationship between Jenna and Casey and would totally keep hanging with them.

Many thanks to Soho Teen for the review copy.

The Way of Kings (Stormlight Archive, Volume 1) by Brandon Sanderson

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Synopsis:
The first installment in a planned 10-book series set in a world where the remnants of long-forgotten magic may prove to be the undoing of all mankind.

Review:
My brother has been begging me to read The Way of Kings for ages, and he finally went and bought it for me. I’m ever so glad he did because it was a highly enjoyable read and a cut above Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy, which I enjoyed but found a bit flat. I am going to have to thump my brother one for getting me into a series that (a) is going to be 10 books and (b) only has 1 of those 10 books written so far. The next one is supposed to come out in November and Sanderson does seem like a fast writer.

The Way of Kings follows three main characters. Dalinar is an Alethian prince, brother of the murdered king and uncle to the current king. He has been plagued by crippling visions that come upon him during the high storms of Roshar. These storms ravage the land and kill anyone caught in them, and also infuse gems with Stormlight, which can be used to perform small bits of magic. Dalinar holds a Shardblade and Shardplate, Stormlight-infused weaponry that make him nearly invincible. Winning any Shards in battle automatically lifts any man up to nobility in the Roshari caste system, where the light-eyed rule the dark-eyed. I think if you win Shards your eyes change color but I was a little unclear on that point.

Anyway, Dalinar and the other princes are waging a war on the Shattered Plains against the Parshendi, a people with mottled red and black skin who sing as they fight. The Shattered Plains are home to chasmfiends, who lurk the deep crevices between plateaus. If you find and kill a chasmfiend in its chrysalis, you can rip out its gemheart and those hold a lot of magic. The princes want to get the gemhearts before the Parshendi can, and the king has them competing against each other instead of working together. Dalinar’s visions tell him that he is supposed to unite them all, but since everybody thinks he’s crazy that doesn’t seem very likely.

Kaladin is a bridgeman in another prince’s army. Sadeas isn’t honorable like Dalinar. He enslaves men to carry heavy bridges so the soldiers can quickly cross the chasms. A bridgeman’s life basically sucks, but Kaladin isn’t the kind of man to just suck it up and die. A former soldier, he’s haunted by the idea that he’s doomed to survive, unable to save anyone around him, starting with the battlefield death of his younger brother. Kaladin decides to rewrite the bridgeman’s script, and in so doing, unleashes Sadeas’s anger. However, he discovers a strange connection with Stormlight that links him to heroes of old called Radiants–the same ones who may be speaking to Dalinar in his visions.

Lastly, Shallan is a noble girl charged with stealing a powerful Soulcaster from a noteworthy heretic, Jasnah, who is also sister to the king. Here is where the book really shines–the theology is complicated, deep, and well thought out enough that the heresy makes sense. I felt like there was a lot to discover about the belief systems in the book and I appreciated that not everyone was on the same page, religiously speaking. Needless to say, Shallan’s plans go tragically and terrifying awry.

There’s also a scary guy who can walk on walls while he kills everyone in sight. This bit reminded me too much of Mistborn, but I’m curious to see where it goes.

If you have read this far, you’re either a fantasy nerd who will probably like this book if you haven’t read it already, or you are just amazed at the depths of my geekery. I am the real deal, okay? I am really and truly an epic fantasy nerd and I don’t care who knows it!

Homeward Bound by Emily Matchar

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Synopsis:
Subtitled: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity.

Review:
Here’s what really gets me–we finally get to a point in history where most men acknowledge that women can have a voice in both their own lives and in the future of our country. And what happens? Women decide to take over the job of telling each other “yer doin’ it wrong.” Homeward Bound is yet another polemic against women who dare to decide that the corporate world is not for them. Leaving aside everything else in this book, what is the point of continually demonizing breastfeeding? Matchar is so reductionist on the topic that she actually says that since working women are going to quit breastfeeding after three weeks, the huge corporations that own formula manufacturers should get prime product placement in their hospital rooms. It’s like saying that since it’s really hard to cook for yourself when you’re working all the time, that you might as well remove people’s kitchens and replace them with giant freezers to store convenience foods.

What is the point of trying anything you’d like to try when it’s only going to be a giant failure and make other people miserable watching? Or worse–what’s the point of succeeding at something difficult when it’s only going to make people like Emily Matchar argue that success is an even bigger problem than failure because then other people might try it too!!! And that’s basically how the book goes. She presents what seem to me to be inspirational stories of people who are carving out lives outside of the mainstream, focusing on making things by hand and recovering lost domestic arts. And then she says that these are pointless endeavors because nobody succeeds (except the ones who succeed) and if you do it’s at the expense of the poor people who need hipsters to decide what’s best for the whole world.

It reminds me of a homeschooling debate I read on an infamous message board for moms, a spinoff of Mothering.com where members castigate anyone who takes the (s)Mothering woo too seriously. A debate on homeschooling kicked off when a member said that she would only respect a homeschooling family if they were also involved in their local public school system. When a homeschooler said that her family pays their taxes as required by law, the response was they were not doing enough, that they should be voting in school board elections and volunteering at fundraisers for the PTA. And then someone else suggested that her time would be better spent–for the good of the world–if she would put her kids in school and then use her homeschooling time to volunteer 20 hours/week at the school. Best of both worlds, she was told–be involved in your kids’ education while helping the poor wretches whose parents are just using school as daycare while they work. Being a stay-at-home mom, she’s got the time and the energy to be the surrogate mom to a whole classroom. The homeschooling mom shut it down by saying that she doesn’t spend 20 hours/week homeschooling and she isn’t looking for an unpaid internship.

What is the point of calling another woman’s life choices into question? Matchar and Rosin and others like them think they know what’s best for all of the rest of us, and when other women decide to rewrite the rules because we have a vision of a better world, we’re called traitors and stupid and Nazis. Breastfeeding Nazis, of course, because there’s nothing more like genocide than wanting to do things like lower infant mortality rates throughout the world or protect women against breast cancer. Ugh.

Tiger Babies Strike Back by Kim Wong Keltner

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Synopsis:
Subtitled: “How I Was Raised by a Tiger Mom but Could Not Be Turned to the Dark Side.”

Review:
My interest in Tiger Babies Strike Back petered out in the first 30 pages. Kim Wong Keltner is a good writer but I just grew weary of the memoir aspect of the story. I know it’s not entirely fair to judge the book you wish you were reading, but honestly I really wished she had talked to more families in an effort to present a nuanced picture of Chinese American families in all their complexity, instead of solely telling her own story. But take that with a grain of salt–memoir is one of my least favorite genres.

Blood of Dragons by Robin Hobb (Rain Wilds Chronicles)

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Synopsis:
The fourth and final book in the story of the return of dragons to the world, and how they change humans for better and for worse.

Review:
Robin Hobb is one of my very favorite authors and I really wish I had done my due diligence and re-read the first 3 books in this series (as well as brushed up on the Liveship Traders series) before reading Blood of Dragons. I really love the world she created here but I didn’t connect with any of the characters the way I connected with Althea and Malta in the Liveship Traders series. I also felt like this final book rushed through some of the most suspenseful moments. For example, Rapskal came into his own as a fearsome threat, but then his storyline was pretty neatly resolved. I am just not sure that I feel satisfied with this particular endgame for the world I’ve been following for 13 books and several short stories. The mystery and darkness that has pervaded the books felt neutered, somehow. I don’t know, I guess perhaps I’m hoping that she’s not done writing books in this world!

Rapture Practice by Aaron Hartzler

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Synopsis:
A sheltered young man realizes he needs to decide what he really believes in.

Review:
Aaron Hartzler is witty and perceptive, and Rapture Practice is an insider’s look at the wacky outskirts of evangelicalism. I didn’t stay very interested in the memoir aspect, mainly because as I’ve mentioned before I’m not crazy about the genre, but I did like the way Hartzler told his story. He’s a good writer, to be sure.

And the review would have been longer, but my site was hacked and I spent all my blogging time changing my password through the backend. As Henry on Oswald would say, it’s “time to go to bed.”

The Business of Baby by Jennifer Margulis

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Synopsis:
Subtitled, “What Doctors Don’t Tell You, What Corporations Try to Sell You, and How to Put Your Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Baby Before Their Bottom Line.”

Review:
I was basically nodding my head and saying yes yes yes while reading The Business of Baby, which covers pregnancy, birth, and the newborn period and lays out in damning detail how financial considerations are the reason why the US has such abysmal newborn and maternal mortality rates. Because of my work in lactation and had two home births, much of this information was familiar to me, but it was refreshing to see it laid out in such an accessible way. The way mothers and babies are treated in the US makes me so, so sad, and I’m hoping this book leads to some positive change.

Dare Me by Megan Abbott

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Synopsis:
When a new coach kicks head cheerleader Beth out of her spot, her sidekick and quasi-faithful lieutenant braces herself for the impact, even as she becomes enthralled with the coach herself.

Review:
I heard about Dare Me from a friend and got really excited over the premise–cheerleader noir–but a day later she said, “Don’t bother, I loved the first half and then it fell apart.” I started reading and it was SO AWESOME that I was like, “What is she talking about? How could this book possibly fall apart?” And then it totally fell apart. Not cool, Dare Me, not cool.