Awesomeness! The Nightmare Garden Cover Reveal

Normally I don't do cover reveals, but I hadn't even realized that The Nightmare Garden, sequel to The Iron Thorn (by Caitlin Kittredge), was coming out so soon! February 14, 2012, to be exact. Given how much I enjoyed The Iron Thorn, I can't wait for this next book!!! And I like this cover even more than that of the first book.

From the publisher's website: Everything Aoife thought she knew about the world was a lie. There is no Necrovirus. And Aoife isn't going to succomb to madness because of a latent strain—she will lose her faculties because she is allergic to iron. Aoife isn't human. She is a changeling—half human and half from the land of Thorn. And time is running out for her.

When Aoife destroyed the Lovecraft engine she released the monsters from the Thorn Lands into the Iron Lands and now she must find a way to seal the gates and reverse the destruction she's ravaged on the world that's about to poison her.


Is anyone else uber-excited for this release?

Guest Review: Flip by Martyn Bedford

I'm going to try something new. This review is by my younger brother, Isaac, and I'm hoping that both he and one of my friends will become regular contributers to this blog (which will then require a slight name change). Formal introductions will come as they contribute a bit more.

From the back cover of the ARC: One morning fourteen-year-old Alex wakes up to find himself in the wrong bedroom, in an unfamiliar house, in a different part of the country. Six months have passed overnight. The family at the breakfast table are total strangers. And when he looks in the mirror, another boy’s face stares back. A boy named Flip. Alex may be trapped forever inside a body that belongs to someone else.

            

Isaac's review: I have decided that one of the few problems with this book is that it takes a while to get started (also, there's a certain page that is nothing but fragmented sentences and words strung together, which I assume is for effect to show what is going on inside the character's mind, but it is confusing nonetheless). The back cover is basically a summary of the first two or three chapters, instead of the first chapter as is usually done. Once the book got started, however, I didn’t want to put it down. I started reading it around 10:00 one night, and I didn’t put it down until 1:00, when I had to force myself to go to sleep. I finished it as soon as I woke up the next morning. Bedford ties in problems associated with teenagers (school, relationships, etc.) as he writes a book about a supernatural occurrence. I enjoyed this, as it was a fantasy that takes place on Earth as opposed to many other books I’ve read that take place in fantastical settings. There isn’t much depth to the book, but the storyline makes up for this, allowing the novel to be a great read for teenagers. 

Maturity Factor: Sporadic profanity.

Our ARC of Flip was received through Random House's Random Buzzers program. The book was released April 5, 2011.

This Week's Book Haul(s) - Which Do You Want Reviewed?

I had a great week's vacation up in the North Carolina mountains - and came home with three times the number of books I came up with, thanks to a Books-a-Million sale and a used bookstore, and then arrived home to find even more books that had arrived in the mail while I was gone! (*evil laugh*) Anyway, since State of Wonder is the only one for review, are there others of which anyone would like reviews? Really, your suggestions are appreciated.

For review:
State of Wonder by Ann Patchett (from Harper)

Won:
Song of the Silk Road by Mingwei Yip (thank you, Amused by Books)
The Iron Thorn by Caitlin Kittredge (from Random House Kids' Twitter)
This is my second copy of Kittredge's novel and is hardback and signed (the other is an ARC and slightly stained); I'm planning on offering the ARC to a friend, but if she doesn't want it, there'll be a giveaway.

And a ton of thank you's to Wrighty's Reads for this box of awesomeness:
Matched by Ally Condie
Wither by Lauren DeStefano
Hell Hollow by Ronald Kelly
You Are So Undead to Me by Stacey Jay
Infinite Days by Rebecca Maizel
Radiance by Alyson Noel
Undiscovered Gyrl by Allison Burnett
Passing Strange by Daniel Waters

But wait, there's more!
From BAM (total $13, because I have to be thrifty to survive on a teenager's allowance):
Lucia: A Venetian Life in the Age of Napoleon by Andrea di Robilant
The Romanov Bride by Robert Alexander
The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers
The Bride's Farewell by Meg Rosoff
Peter Pan and Other Plays by J.M. Barrie
Paradise City by J.B. Stephens
Spaceman Blues by Brian Francis Slattery

From the book exchange in Waynesville (not sure what it's called, but these cost me $18 total):
Golden by Cameron Dokey
Laughing Boy by Oliver La Farge
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Mabinogion
Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach
Lady Susan, The Watsons, Sanditon by Jane Austen
The Message in the Hollow Oak by Carolyn Keene (I was a huge fan of Nancy Drew when I was younger and still pick up mysteries for my collection whenever they're cheap enough.)

Oh dear, now I have to find space for all of these...

Utopia: Island by Aldous Huxley

From the back cover: In his final novel, Aldous Huxley transports us to the remote Pacific island of Pala, where an ideal society has flourished for 120 years. Inevitably, this island of bliss attracts the envy and enmity of the surrounding world. A conspiracy is underway to take over Pala, and events are set in motion when an agent of the conspirators, a newspaperman named Will Farnaby, is shipwrecked there. What Farnaby doesn't expect is how his time with the people of Pala will revolutionize all his values and - to his amazement - give him hope.

My review: I discovered that I love Aldous Huxley's writing. I've read Brave New World, Ape and Essence, and After Many a Summer Dies the Swan but had forgotten how much I enjoy Huxley's books. It only took me the first couple pages to rediscover this. Huxley's writing is sound, and in this book it's intellectual, but at a cozy level of intellectual (as in the majority of readers should easily be able to understand it). I was connecting bits and pieces from just about everything I've learned to the novel: history, literature, religion, philosophy, biology, sociology, even French. It is this aspect, along with the fact that the book is a utopia, that makes the novel fascinating. Not in a read-it-as-fast-as-possible way, but a one-chapter-a-day, soak-it-in way. Island was published in 1962, and it does have a bit of the '60s vibe, mostly with the Eastern religions that play a prominent part of the utopian society along with the moksha-medicine that the Palanese use for Enlightenment.

Is there anything that I didn't like about the book? The one thing that seemed a little off-kilter about the utopia was its blend of Western and Eastern aspects. The Palanese are full-blown Buddhists and live in semi-primitive conditions, yet most are familiar with the Western canon and Western science and Malthusian economics have left them with superior agricultural technology, electricity, and a method for population control. The whole West/East blend never completely synced for me, but hey, it's Huxley's pipe dream, not mine. Also, by the last two chapters I was bored. Maybe it's just because it took me a while to read the book (again, it's a one-chapter-a-day, soak-it-in novel), but I was ready for the book to end by the time the conclusion was reached. Still, there were thirteen awesome chapters before the two less interesting ones, and I'll be re-reading Island in later years to ensure that I didn't miss any of Huxley's message or the little connections he makes to all kinds of other subjects.

My Harper Perennial edition of Island was given to me for Christmas. Island was first published in 1962.

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YA Fiction: Tighter by Adele Griffin

Seventeen-year-old Jamie Atkinson has had a tough junior year. After a sports-related injury that still bothers her and a failed romance with her young chemistry teacher, she's turned to pill-popping her parents' meds for relief. When Jamie's parents pack her off to the island of Little Bly to be a summer au pair to Isa, she's shocked to find that Isa's au pair the year before, Jessie, looks eerily similar to herself - and that the other girl died the summer before along with her boyfriend, Pete Quint. Even more surprisingly, these two don't seem to be quite gone from this world. In a retelling of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, Jamie is forced to discover her connection to the dead couple as the lines between reality, perception, and the supernatural are blurred.

Anyone familiar with James' story will realize that this is a retelling from simply reading the book's blurb and its first few pages. Very quickly, however, Griffin establishes her take as unique and capable of standing by itself without the added bonus of being a retelling. Tighter is distinctly YA, whereas James' story is distinctly not; the new novel features teenage issues (the protagonist is a pill-popper, for goodness' sake), high school drama, and a more relaxed writing style. Having read James' original story, the two are hard to otherwise compare besides noting that Griffin's writing is easier to understand. Tighter is not as thrillingly, can't-put-it-down suspenseful as I expected, but the mystery of the ghost story is still there. The most amazing part for me, however, was the conclusion, which makes a definite break with The Turn of the Screw and makes Tighter even more deeply a distinctly YA novel (and also changes it's expected genre around a bit). But as to what the actual climax is, that is a discovery I will let other readers make on their own...

Some interesting notes: It took me forever to realize that the object on the front cover is a girl turned sideways, not a frog. Also, I find it creepy that, at the end, it is revealed that Jamie's middle name is Susanna (my name, for those of you who don't know). Susanna is not that common a name, so it seems a bit uncanny to me when it pops up in books/television.

My ARC of Tighter was won from Random Buzzers' Twitter account. The book went on sale May 10, 2011.

Fiction: State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

From GoodReads: Dr. Marina Singh, a research scientist with a Minnesota pharmaceutical company, is sent to Brazil to track down her former mentor, Dr. Annick Swenson, who seems to have all but disappeared in the Amazon while working on what is destined to be an extremely valuable new drug, the development of which has already cost the company a fortune. Nothing about Marina's assignment is easy: not only does no one know where Dr. Swenson is, but the last person who was sent to find her, Marina's research partner Anders Eckman, died before he could complete his mission. Plagued by trepidation, Marina embarks on an odyssey into the insect-infested jungle in hopes of finding her former mentor as well as answers to several troubling questions about her friend's death, the state of her company's future, and her own past.

My review: In retrospect, this book has many characteristics that make it a not-my-cup-of-tea read. Middle-aged lead characters with accompanying issues, aimed at an audience of older (i.e., adult) readers, set in an adult world of business, grown-up relationships, and dreams decades in the making. Perhaps this is why I often found the plot slow; if I didn't have all the time in the world right now to read, it would have probably taken me longer than my usual reading time to finish the book. Still, the slowness is not tedious, and I did enjoy the novel. Patchett's writing is excellent, and once Marina finally gets into the jungle, the scientific and anthropological facets to the story are interesting. At times the experiments for the new drug seem a bit odd and science fiction-y, but they continue to blend with the story rather than stick out from it. For those of you who are past your teenage years and enjoy reading literary fiction, I highly recommend this book.


As a side note, I love the cover. It looks like calligraphy, which beautiful drawings along the border.


My ARC of State of Wonder was received from the publisher, Harper. It went on sale June 7, 2011.

Classic Lit: The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

When the narrator, a young governess, sets off to a secluded job taking care of two young orphaned children, she hardly expects to find what she does. The children, Flora and Miles, seem like perfect angels, but something else is at work in Bly. The governess soon begins to see apparitions of the deceased former governess and her lover and decides that these two can only be after her two young charges. Can the governess save the children from evil - or is it all just imagined?

I'm unsure what to say for this book. Ghost story: A. My understanding of it: B-. James is the king of run-on sentences, chock full of commas that make for rather choppy reading. Abnormally for me, I had problems grasping the story. The governess' narration leaves out a lot of her thoughts (often readers are told of her realizations in following scenes, not when they actually occurred), and she jumps to so many conclusions in a similar manner that the unfolding of the story can be hard to follow. The ghost story behind the plot, however, remains fascinating. "Who are these people, and what do they want? How far are they going to go? Are the children aware of them, and are the ghosts corrupting the children?" These are the questions that run the length of the novella and, like all good ghost stories, the build-up to the climax is exciting and leaves readers with an unexpected conclusion (unless, like me, you read the introduction first and it contained spoilers).

My copy of The Turn of the Screw is my mom's old 1979 Penguin paperback she bought back in college for a gothic literature course. The novella was originally published in 1898.

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