Book Review: The Captive Queen, Alison Weir.

Title: The Captive Queen.
Author: Alison Weir.
Page Count/Book Type: 487. Hardback (incl. author’s notes).

It is the year 1152 and a beautiful woman of thirty, attended only by a small armed escort is riding like the wind southwards through what is now France. She is leaving behind her crown, her two young daughters and a shattered marriage to Louis of France, who has been more like a monk than a king, and certainly not much of a lover. The woman is Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine, and her sole purpose is to return to her vast duchy and marry the man she loves, Henry Plantagenet, and man destines for greatness as King of England. Theirs is a union founded on lust, which will create a great empire stretching from the wilds of Scotland to the Pyrenees. It will also create the devil’s brood of Plantagenets — including Richard Coeur de Lion and King John — and the most notoriously tempestuous marriage in history.

The Captive Queen is a novel on the grand scale, and epic subject for Alison Weir. It tells of the making of nations and of passionate conflicts: between Henry II and Thomas Becket, his closest friend who is murdered in Canterbury Cathedral on his orders; between Eleanor and Henry’s formidable mother Matilda; between father and sons, as Henry’s children take up arms against him; and finally between Henry and Eleanor herself.

Review: This took me way longer than usual to read because I was so ill last month and concentrating my eyes on a book was the last thing that I could handle most of the time but when I was feeling well again and got back to reading it I devoured the remaining chapters. In all honesty I’m probably a little biased towards loving this book because I think Alison Weir is a fantastic writer to begin with and I really love novels about monarchs, I’m just such a sucker for them and it’s pretty easy to suck me in because of that.

This novel is about Eleanor of Aquitaine whom I had never even heard of before I started reading this, I don’t know if that’s shameful or not considering we’re talking about the High Middle Ages in France here, but Weir ambitiously tackles Eleanor’s marriage to Henry II in this book, from start to finish. As she lays out in her author’s notes at the back of the book she didn’t want to write a novel about the whole of Eleanor’s life but if she went back and wrote about Eleanor’s first marriage (to King Louis VII of France) I would happily read it. Eleanor is a strong, feisty woman in a time when women were expected to be meek and submissive, she sees herself as a lioness and feels in her younger years that she can take on the world. For me the transition of her through middle age and into her twilight years is handled beautifully and delicately and I’m not too proud to say that I cried at the end of the book, I couldn’t help myself. Weir has a way of constructing these really concise but poignant sentences.

In the end it’s the way that she rounds out her characters that makes me enjoy her novels so much and this is no exception; Eleanor and Henry in particular are both characters that go through massive changes over the thirty-seven years the novel covers and no matter how frustrating they can be they really are just human in the end, it’s the humanity in this novel that made me enjoy it so much. I would recommend it to anyone.

Quick Read: Traitors of the Tower, Alison Weir.

Title: Traitors of the Tower
Author: Alison Weir.
Page Count/Book Type: 75. Paperback.

More than four hundred years ago, seven people — five of them women — were beheaded in the Tower of London. Three had been queens of England. The others were found guilty of treason . Why were such powerful people put to death?

Alison Weir’s gripping book tells their stories: from the former friend betrayed by a man set on being king, to the young girl killed after just nine days on the throne. Through her vivid writing, Alison Weir brings history alive.

This was written for World Book Day this year in conjunction with the BBC in an attempt to get more people interested in reading, something I fully support! It’s a very short, factual read, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. I really liked how it was obvious that Weir was really enthusiastic about Lady Jane Grey and Anne Boleyn, they were less a string of facts, dates and accounts as little works of prose. As an aside; I would really recommend Innocent Traitor by Alison Weir, it’s a really fantastic read if you, like me, are fascinated the Tudor period. That was why I picked this up from the library along with another full length novel. Oddly, I have The Other Boleyn Girl somewhere and I hate that book. It is the driest piece of overhyped literature I think I have ever picked up. Though maybe, unlike the masses who raved on and on about it when it came out, I have just read vastly better material by vastly better authors, i.e. Alison Weir. End rant!

This is a short review for a short book, it’s good if you like reading about the English monarchy around the late 1400s to the early 1600s, in which case you probably know about Margaret Pole and the three queens who were killed in the Tower, but it gives a nice, straightforward account of events and circumstances and speculation on motives surrounding the deaths. If you’re not interested in that sort of thing then there’s probably no reason you’d pick this up. So it’s a marmite book, but a well written one.

Book Review: Deadly Slipper, Michelle Wan.

Title: Deadly Slipper
Author: Michelle Wan.
Page Count/Book Type: 301. Hardback.

Almost twenty year shave passed since Canadian Bedie Dunn, a wild orchid enthusisast vanished without a trace on a hikinh holiday in southwestern France. The police long ago relegated thr unsolved mystery the the cold-case files. But Mara Dunn, Bedie’s twin, is haunted by her sister’s disappearance. Was Bedie the victim of an accident? Or did she cross paths with the wrong person at just the wrong time? Mara has come to the Dordogne determined to find the answers.

Mara gets the first break in her investigation when she unearths Bedie’s camera on a chance visit to a local junk shop. The camera still contains a roll of film with pictures of the local landscape and the orchinds that so enchated Bedie. Convinced that the photographs document her sister’s final path, Mara brings them to Julian Wood, and English expert on orchids who lives in the area and makes a desperate request: Will he help her retrace Bedie’s footsteps using the photogrpahs as a guide? Julian has his own reasons for not wanting to undertake such and impossible task, but he is fired into action when he sees the last image — the tantilizing vision of a totally unkonw Lady’s Slipper Orchid. Finding a rare, undocumented species of orchid would bring him accolades from botanists around the world. The search, however, could lead to a far grimmer discovery: It is all too possible that the flower marks a secret grave dug two decades earlier.

This is actually my mum’s book and she suggested that I read it after she brought it back from Canada last summer, so I finally got around to doing just that. I think I liked this partly because I was looking for a quick murder mystery having not read one for a while, and it just happened to hit the spot. I did enjoy it, I read it quite quickly, it’s certainly not a difficult book in terms of prose and doesn’t require a massive amount of concentration but I found it enjoyable. Mostly.

My problems with it largely come fromt he characters, sadly. I found Julian Wood completely maddening and started two conversations about the book with my mum with “Julian is an ass” to which she nodded, much to my amusement. There’s just somethign so grating about him, he’s so blase about the fact that Mara’s twin sister has been missing for nineteen years and that drove me nuts. Mara’s largely okay, I’ve already forgotten what, if anything, I found annoying about her so it can’t have been that bad. Still the plot was good, there were a couple of twists towards the end that I genuinely didn’t see coming, but I’d figured out who the culprit was pretty early on which always irritates me slightly. Disguise it better, writers! I also liked the general tone, or I guess the ‘voice’ of the book, it really did have that Frech flavour to it, and in that respect was very well and realistically written.

All in all a good read, I’m glad my mum suggested it to me.

Book Review: Haunted, Kelley Armstrong.

Title: Haunted
Author: Kelley Armstrong.
Page Count/Book Type: 495. Paperback.

Eve Levine – half-demon, black witch and devoted mother – has been dead for three years. She has a great house, and interesting love life and can’t be killed again – which comes in handy when you’ve made as many enemies and Eve has. Yes, the afterlife isn’t too bad – all she needs to do is find a way to communicate with her daughter Savannah and she’ll be happy.

But fate – or more exactly, the Fates – have other plans. Eve owes them a favour, and they’ve just called it in. An evil spirit called the Nix has escaped from hell. She feeds on chaos and death, and is very good at persuading people to kill for her. The Fates want Eve to hunt her down before she does any more damage, but the Nix is a powerful enemy – previous hunters have been sent mad in the process. As if that’s not problem enough, it turns out that the only way to stop her is with and angel’s sword. And Eve’s no angel…

Honestly I don’t read a lot of books about witches and magicks~ and whatnot, that whole sub-genre doesn’t interest me much at all, but because I like the author I made the leap into her witchy novels a while back. As much as I usually enjoy Kelley Armstrong’s books this is probably my least favourite. I can’t exactly put my finger on what it is about it I don’t like, I just know that at some point before I was halfway through it started to feel like a chore. The premise is fine, and I was aware of events prior to this novel regarding Eve and Savannah having read other — better — books, so that wasn’t a problem for me. I’ve read the other Paige novels too, and I like her and Lucas as characters so they definitely perked up the parts of the story they were involved in, the connections between the character really were the saving grace in this story to me, because I felt that while it was a neat and simplistic idea and needed to be given that the setting is largely in the fictional afterlife of the Otherworld series it got very convoluted somehow, somewhere. All the partners of the Nix blurred together for me after a point, I couldn’t recall who was who and who had done what and maybe that was just because my enthusiasm had waned catastrophically by that point but I definitely had a hard time slogging through some of the talky parts.

There were a couple of genuinely spooky parts however, I was reading one of them while I was in bed at one point and I really did have chills going up my spine but aside from that there was a lot of talking and teleporting around and… I just couldn’t get into it, my brain disconnected from what was going on and I digested what was happening on the page without really getting sucked in. Really, the only thing I liked a lot was Jamie’s cameo. Actually it’s a pretty big role in the story and when it ended I wanted to know more about her and how she was doing and what Jeremy was going to say when he found out what had happened. I actually think that of all the protagonists of Armstrong’s novels Eve doesn’t match up; Elena, Jamie, Hope and Even Robyn are much more dynamic and charismatic to me. I would like to read a novel about Eve when she was alive, I want to know about some of these awful things she’s done, and what happened when she split with the Coven. I think I’d like her alive much more than I like her as a ghost.

Sadly, I don’t even have much to say about it really. I just ploughed through it so that I could get to the next book on my pile waiting to be read. Unlike some of Armstrong’s other books that I will likely re-read in the future, this one will be a onetime deal.

Book Review: Wizard’s First Rule, Terry Goodkind.

Title: Wizard’s First Rule
Author: Terry Goodkind.
Page Count/Book Type: 764. Paperback.

One man, Richard Cypher, holds the key to the fate of three nations, to the fate of humanity. But until he learns the Wizard’s First Rule his chances of succeeding in his task are slim. And his biggest problem is admitting that magic exists at all…

A novel of incomparable scope and brimming with atmospheric detail: this is a world where heart hounds stalk the magical boundaries between countries, and worlds, for unwary human prey, blood-sucking flies hunt on behalf of their underworld masters and where artists can draw more than just your likeness.

There is nowhere to hide, nowhere is safe. Here magic makes love twice as sweet, and betrayal and loss twice as bitter.

I went into reading this book having already seen (most of) the television series that was based upon it and I have to say that, as is so often the case, the book is much better than the series. That isn’t to say anything against the television series as a whole, from reading just the first novel (out of eleven oh my goodness) I can see how difficult it must have been for them to adapt it; the novel is extremely dark in parts, there are just some things you cannot put into a show like Legend of the Seeker and I understand that. Still, I think they could have been a bit more adventurous with it, taken a few more risks. This is about the book though, so moving on I have to say it’s probably one of the best books I have read this year, if not hands down. Everything was fantastic, the pacing and dialogue, the action and the emotion, good grief the emotion. I’m kind of a sap but it’s not often that a book will make me cry, however Wizard’s First Rule packs such a punch in some places that I just couldn’t help myself. It’s so clear that Goodkind adheres to the writing principle of taking characters and just putting them through absolute Hell to reveal things about them, the depths of their strength and the heights of their passion, their flaws and their ticks. All the main cast in this novel shine as rounded characters, you know so much about them and their habits by the end of the book, I honestly came to care about them and desperately wanted everything to go right for them.

Some parts of the book were difficult to read because of that, the characters were put through some things that just made me sick to my stomach for them, and when a book can actually make me feel indignant and disgusted over what is being done to a character and so desperately want to see them come out of it okay then something really special has been put to paper. It actually makes me a little stir crazy to feel like I will never ever be able to write anything comparing this in terms of sheer intelligence, weaving so many threads together and characterising people so well, not to mention the beautiful and full descriptive language that Goodkind wields effortlessly.

What will probably stay with me most are the emotions this novel struck up for me, the excitement as it careened towards the end, the sudden realisation of that one plot twist that you have been waiting for, the last little bit of information that slots into place and makes you go “Oh! I get it!” and it was carried out so well, it wasn’t rammed down my throat. Even the denouement was nicely done, something that I usually find to be a bit hackish most of the time in that ‘And they all lived happily ever after’ vein that just sickens me. Here it was short and concise; you have what you need in the climax of the story even though you are given the feeling by Goodkind that the whole story isn’t over.

Over the course of reading it I actually had to stop for a few days at a time because I was concerned about reading it too fast and I didn’t want to blast through it so fast it would leave my head spin, I could have read the whole thing in about a week and a half and while I would have enjoyed it I think I might have been a bit stunned by the journey instead of savouring it, so I’m very glad I took the summer to enjoy it. It was worth every page turn and every sunny afternoon in the garden to go along with Richard and Kahlan and Zedd on their quest.

In short: I loved it and I can’t wait to read the rest of the series and eventually come back and read this book again.

Book Review: Storm Glass, Maria V. Snyder.

Title: Strom Glass
Author: Maria V. Snyder.
Page Count/Book Type: 504. Paperback.

With her unique magical abilities, Opal has always felt unsure of her place at Sitia’s magic academy. But when the Stormdancer clan needs help, Opal’s knowledge makes her the perfect choice — until the mission goes awry.

Pulling her powers in unfamiliar direction, Opal finds herself tapping into a new kind of magic as stunningly potent as it is frightening. Now Opal must deal with plotters out to destroy the Stormdancer clan, as well as a traitor in their midst.

With danger and deception rising around her, will Opal’s untested abilities destroy her — or save them all?

I’ve gone and become a sucker for these books. Opal is actually in one (or two?) of The Study Series novels, Yelena encounters her a couple of times so building up a story around her makes sense and is a great way to expand the world she has already established, thus giving readers more and allowing her to stretch her legs a bit. This was a really fun read, I tore through it almost half a dozen chapters at a time and liked the general story; it touched on the original series enough so that if you read it you’d know exactly what she was talking about but only so much for people who hadn’t read it that they would get the picture. Despite myself i found that i got really sucked into the love triangle in the book to the point where I was having Darth Vader moments of melodramatically howled NOs out loud at some parts for fear she was going to end up with the wrong guy, which was sort of fun to get wrapped up in when it’s written well and actually that was one of the stronger threads in this novel for me. I think a lot of the characters in these books can be a bit archetypal, but I don’t really mind it so much because it’s just such fun to read and by this stage the world is pretty well established. That was definitely something I felt Snyder did well in this novel, building on the fantasy world and revealing more about Sitia and Ixia. However, coming back to cameos briefly: No Valek, what are you playing at, Snyder? My favourite “liquid mercury” assassin better be in the next one at least briefly or I will be disappointed. Next chance I get I am going to snap up the next in this series, it’s fun summer reading!

Book Review: The Extra Large Medium, Helen Slavin.

Title: The Extra Large Medium
Author: Helen Slavin.
Page Count/Book Type: 229. Paperback.

 Annie Colville can see dead people and for some reason they’re all wearing chocolate brown.

Since she was a child, Annie has been able to see and speak to the dead. But when her husband disappears suddenly he does not come to visit her. So is Evan still alive? During her long wait to discover what happened to Evan Bees, Annie searches through her mother’s vast collection of lovers for the other missing man in her life, and struggles with the questions her gift asks of her. Who is the mysterious girl who sits by the lake? What happened to the lost woman whose sister has never stopped searching for her? And why are so many of the dead voices called Jim?

Quirky, irreverent, moving and a little bit spooky The Extra Large Medium will charm you completely — even as it’s raising the hairs on the back of your neck.

I was not “charmed completely” by this book in the least. I picked it up for 99p and perhaps that should have been an indicator to me of the quality. There were definitely some nice moments in it, some moving moments, and I liked some of the techniques that Annie used as a medium. I certainly felt it was quite well researched in places but in others the narrative seemed flaccid and dull. My main complaint is that the book is too ethereal in the narrative style, it’s like 229 pages of exposition; I never felt like I was present for any of the action, not until right and the end and maybe that was Slavin’s intent. I can see why she would aim for this fragile feeling to the work; Annie as a character is very fragile and I don’t think that’s a bad thing, I actually liked her quite a bit as the protagonist but the insubstantial narrative really undermined a lot of the writing for me. Especially when the so called mystery surrounding her husband is actually revealed. I felt no impact. In the end this isn’t a book I would recommend to other people, I read it because I am fascinated by mediums and spiritualism personally, I’m not necessarily a believer but I think it’s an incredibly intriguing area to explore through writing, but this novel just didn’t live up to its own potential for me. 

Book Review: Living with the Dead, Kelley Armstrong.

Title: Living With the Dead
Author: Kelley Armstrong.
Page Count/Book Type: 372. Hardback.

Robyn Peltier has never done anything out of the ordinary and she never makes snap decisions. But when her new boss is murdered and she is named the prime suspect, she finds herself way out of her depth. As the bodies pile up, only her best friend Hope Adams, and Hope’s somewhat spooky boyfriend Karl, are on her side.

What Robyn doesn’t realise is that Hope has a few secrets of her own. namely that she’s a half-demon, and her ‘spooky’ boyfriend is actually a werewolf. Robyn has accidentally stumbled into a bloody supernatural turf war, and the only way Hope can keep her friend alive is by letting her enter a world she’s safer knowing nothing about. A world where homicide cops talk to ghosts, defence lawyers are sorcerers and nothing is quite what it seems.

Great read. I don’t think that you necessarily need to have read the rest of the Otherwold books to jump into this one and be engaged by it and that’s the beauty of Robyn, your bog standard, everyday human, being a main character for those who don’t know much or anything about the supernatural world in Armstrong’s books. Having multiple protagonists works so well, I got a lot of the insider jokes from Hope and Karl but had I known nothing about any of the previous works in the series Finn and Robyn would have given me that outsiders view and learning curve that I needed to catch up and still feel engaged and not as if I were missing out on a party. I feel like Armstrong is really propelling the whole Otherworld series somewhere and the last chapter really compounded that for me which left me feeling really exhilarated by the time I closed it. That said, it’s still a great stand alone novel in its own right. As always the pace is great, the dialogue is sharp and clean with enough humour to perk the story up in places and enough drama and action to get your heart beating. Obviously I’m a fan haha, so I’m probably gushing, but I really enjoyed this book.

Book Review: Sea Glass, Maria V. Snyder.

Title: Sea Glass
Author: Maria V. Snyder.
Page Count/Book Type: 472. Paperback.

Student glass magician Opal Cowan’s newfound skills to steal a magician’s strength make hertoo powerful. Kept under house arrest, Opal dares defy her imprisonment to search for Ulrick, the man she thinks she loves. Thinks because she is sure another man — now her prisoner — has switched souls with Ulrick.

In hostile territory, without proof or allies, Opal isn’t sure whom to trust. And now everyone is after Opal’s special powers for their own deadly gain…

I have to get this off my chest straight away: The sea glass doesn’t appear until quite close to the end, I’d say over two thirds of the way through. That threw me a bit. My suspicion is that it’s actually a set up for the third novel (which comes out in September and I now have to wait for, yikes) but if that’s the case why call this one Sea Glass and not the third novel? Which is called Spy Glass? The titles probably could have worked reversed actually since there’s a fair bit of spying in this novel. I guess something like Secret Glass would have thrown of the one syllable S-word title pattern, but moving on! As I suspect is a tradition with Snyder the second book in a trilogy isn’t as good as the first, which isn’t to say I didn’t like it but I don’t think it was as tight plot wise as the first book was and the plot was resolved quite quickly towards the end which is a definite pet peeve of mine and one of the major problems I had with her previous work, Fire Study. The only reason that doesn’t bother me so much in this novel is that it was actually a pretty awesome few chapters towards the end there, some badass images came out of the solution so I can forgive a little that the diabolical scheme was revealed like BAM! Also keeping track of Ulrick/Devlen and their soul switching boggled my mind a bit towards the end, I would recommened really keeping their eye colour straight in your head because Snyder references that a lot and if I had paid better attention I might have noticed more.

I did like that the novel picked up pretty much where the last one ended, and again the balance between new characters and familiar ones from not only Storm Glass but also the Study series was really well handled. Overall I thought it was competant but that teh opening novel for the trilogy was better, hopefully the next one will be better rather than following my opinion of the Yelena Zaltana trilogy in being the worst of the lot.