Review: Apocalypse to Go by Katharine Kerr

This book will be released on February 7, 2012.  I have actually read it, and it is fantastic!  Kit will be doing a signing on February 11th at Borderlands Books in San Franciso.  You can order signed copies from their website by e-mailing them if you don't live locally.  There is also a giveaway over on Goodreads that you can enter.  Kit says these will be shipped directly from the publisher, so they will not be signed.

You can read excerpts at her blog, along with progress updates on her other works, and other non-book talk.

Apocalypse to Go by Katharine Kerr

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Nola O'Grady gets deeper into the deviant world levels in the third installment of this exciting series. Greeted by a projection of a leopard-woman one morning, followed by a vision of the destruction of the level known as Interchange, Nola grabs her partner (in every sense of the word) and heads off on an exciting and fast-paced mission. Her goal at first is to find out who this "ASO Fourteen" who has been contacting Ari is. But it leads her somewhere I don't think she ever anticipated.



Family secrets come to the surface as Nola finds out who her father really is, and where he has been for so long. The climax of the book comes upon the reader with anticipation and a big bang. And Nola makes a huge change for the better - but you'll have to read to find that one out.



This is a fantastic addition to the series and sets up a great continuation into the next book, not yet published. Check it out - you will enjoy this, and you'll be surprised at how the action carries you through. I finished in about two days, and enjoyed every minute!



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Review: The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold

The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This book was a bit of a disappointment, because I went in with such high hopes for it. I think that Alice Sebold came out swinging with The Lovely Bones, and she just can't seem to live up to it with this book. In fact, I don't think it's possible for her to beat The Lovely Bones, because it was just that beautiful.

The Almost Moon is about Helen, a woman who has been stuck with a mentally ill mother and an emotionally unstable father her whole life. It took her many years to see it, but once she figured it all out, she became very detached from her family. However, at the same time, she was completely unable to make a decision concerning her own future - rather, she let life be something that happened to her, rather than living her life to the full. When she makes the split-second decision to smother her mother, her one act of control in the entire book, she disconnects from the rest of the narrative and from herself. She doesn't seem to know herself, or anyone around her. She can't make a coherent decision or even have a truly coherent thought from that point on.

Spoilers after the jump.

Cover Art and the Power of an Image

My husband shared this editorial with me tonight, because he knows how I've been such a judge of cover art in the past. Everyone likes to say that they don't choose books based on their cover art, but we all know that in some way, that's the reality.

I've always been drawn to covers that are bright colors, usually blues, reds and pinks. Also, when covers have fantastical scenes on them my eyes go right to them. I think it's because I have always lived in a sort of fantasy world, and my primary subject matter is fantasy/sci-fi. But I am also attracted by more human art, pictures of people or even something simple. But not just any pictures of people - I like strange crops, odd focuses, and things that have been blurred a bit with some subtle colorings.

The writer of the editorial listed a bunch of covers that draw his eye, but only one of them is one I actually picked out on my own as something I want to read. Below are some covers that popped out at me, that made me want to read the book (not necessarily buy it, but at least try to win it in a giveaway).







What kinds of covers do you gravitate towards?

Reconciling Differences

Last year I spent a lot of time reading from the Wilkie Collins catalogue, and seriously enjoying every minute of it. I never really found him sluggish or boring, and I always got through in a relatively short time. His books weren't necessarily easy, nor were they very funny, but I found them to have a great flow that wasn't restricted by lots of description or narration that didn't seem necessary. Despite his portrayal in Dan Simmons' Drood, I found his writing style to be exactly what I enjoyed reading, and even if he was kind of a bastard in real life, I could forget about that while reading his books.

Back in high school we did a lot with Charles Dickens. We read the obligatory Great Expectations, and even read A Tale of Two Cities (one of the greatest books in existence). But we never learned a lot about the author himself. And while Drood was a fictional account of a book that was never finished, Simmons was able to give us a little bit of the relationship between Dickens and Collins that I found fascinating to the point that I wanted to read something else Dickens wrote to see how the two stack up.

I've mentioned a few times, both on Goodreads and on Facebook, that I am having a very hard time understanding how the two could have possibly collaborated on anything! Their writing styles are so wholly different that it almost seems impossible that they could have been contemporaries, or even friends. I'm working my way, slowly, through Little Dorrit and am having an awful time of it. The book is hilarious, but it is also very long-winded. The narration is heavy-handed and at times unnecessary, leaving me sometimes confused about who or what is the subject and even what is going on. I am also having trouble with how long the story is and why, after 300+ pages, I'm still left with a feeling of, what's the point? The funny thing is, Little Dorrit is one of his most prominent works, one that simply everyone talks about (once you're out of high school, anyway), so there has to be something about it, other than the often sardonic humor, that makes it so prestigious.

Compared to Collins, who was able to tell a fantastic story sometimes in less than 200 pages, Dickens is long-winded and ridiculous. But Collins, compared to Dickens, is not descriptive enough and much more dark. How could they reconcile the differences in their respective styles enough to make one cohesive work together? It makes my brain hurt to think of it.

I think, now that I've immersed myself in Collins' works for so long, I can't quite appreciate Dickens as much as I used to. I do love the subtleties of his works that some people just don't see, but I wonder if some of it wasn't just blustery "look at me write!"-type sections. Collins was obviously aware of his genius, as was Dickens, but I think Collins used it a bit more to his advantage. And yet, he is often overlooked when discussing the period of literature or even as a contemporary of Dickens. I mean, look at me - I spent years studying this period in literature and didn't hear about Collins until I had been out of graduate school for a couple of years. How does that make any sense? And if you compare the lack of availability of his books in the US, with the overabundance of Dickens' works, well, it's understandable that no one knows who he is. The only two books of his I've seen on the shelves in any US bookstore are The Woman in White and The Moonstone, obviously his most famous but not the only ones worth reading. In the UK he is everywhere!

So what is it about Dickens that made him more famous than Collins, and what is it about the two of them and their friendship that led them to reconcile their style differences and collaborate? I have no idea how they did it, but somehow they did. Maybe a topic for future research, but for now, I will content myself with slogging through Little Dorrit and looking forward to reading the books of Collins' that I was lucky enough to get for my birthday last year.