Looking for Your Next Book

It is 1985 and private investigator Ethan Reckless is trying to track down a man who has disappeared. It is during this investigation that Reckless meets Linh Tran, A Vietnamese-born woman who had been sent to the U.S. and adopted shortly after she was born.  Linh has the same general demeanor as Ethan - emotionless, steady, focused - and the two hit it off for a brief love affair. Ethan doesn't want to pry, but he can tell that Linh has sadness in her life and it finally comes out that her sister, by adoption, has been missing for years. One day, as Ethan and Linh are watching an old B-movie, Linh recognizes one of the women in the background as her missing sister. Ethan, being the P.I. that he is, takes it upon himself to track down the missing woman, but sometimes not knowing the truth is better, or easier, than knowing how someone met their demise. The missing sister was involved with a cult who filmed much of the work  and whose followers willing succumbed to sacrifi...

'Worm' Tarnauer is an 8th grader who prefers to stay out of sight and lets his best friend, Eddie (arguably the most popular guy in school), be the leader in all things school and social life. The one day all 8th graders look forward to is "Dead Wednesday" - a day in which all 8th graders are given the name of a teenager who died in the past year and have them wear black shirts and essentially become invisible to everyone else in school (as well as many of the local townfolk). The goal is to make the the students contemplate their own mortality. For many 8th graders, being invisible is the chance to create mayhem, knowing that the teachers and administration will turn a blind eye because to reprimand them would mean acknowledging them and defeat the idea of having them be invisible. For Worm, it's just another day of being invisible, but Worm didn't count on Becca Finch. Becca was a 17 year old girl who died in a car accident. Worm experiences a Dead Wednesday...

Sophie Tucker, known as "Last of the Red Hot Mamas," was an entertainer (vaudeville, radio, film, theatre) who was popular in the early-to-mid 1900's. She was known for her risque and comic songs and her big, belting voice. Think, cross between Mae West and Ethel Merman. Authors Susan & Lloyd Ecker has chosen to tell Sophie Tucker's story in the form of a fictional biography, but I'm not sure why. Clearly the Eckers are fans/admirers of Sophie tucker and her work and they've done an immense amount of research. And it also seems evident that they've captured Sophie's 'voice' in this presentation. But what is not so clear is where biography ends and fiction begins. (Louis B. Mayer was a stage boy who lent his bicycle to Sophie so she could get from one vaudeville engagement to another? Al Capone kidnapped her for a private performance? Seriously?) The Eckers have adopted Sophie's stage persona - her bigger than life carriage and her snapp...

It's no secret that I'm a fan of Steve Almond's work.  I religiously buy everything he publishes, and even have purchased anthologies with strange themes just to read an Almond story.  And it was all I could do to not behave like a Raving Fan Boy when he was speaking at my local bookstore a year or so back. What is my attraction to Almond's work?  Well, his writing first and foremost.  He's got a smooth, conversational way with words - conversational for those who can speak in more than Twitter codes. But I think it's more than just his writing style.  There are many writers whose style or way with words I greatly admire.  Almond also manages to have the same interests or concerns or ideals that I gave. Whether it's being a Candyfreak, or having a grudge against football while still being a fan of the sport, or being a Drooling Fanatic for music and musicians ... Steve Almond GETS me! It's like we're the same person (except that he's younger, lik...

It should not be surprising that the man who wrote such classic and wildly unusual books for children such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory , James and the Giant Peach , The BFG , T he Twits , and The Magic Finger as well as some ripe tales for adults, such as My Uncle Oswald , Switch Bitch , Cruelty , and Lust: Tales of Craving and Desire , should write an unorthodox style of biography.  Roald Dahl tells of his earliest days and he tells it in such a way that even his youngest readers will be able to follow along and suffer with Dahl through his various canings and whippings. Yes ... the rather common form of punishment of the day - hard strikes of a cane against the buttocks - are described in searing detail and was, clearly, one of the main things this reader came away remembering. Dahl does mention that not all teachers or headmasters used the cane on schoolboys like him, but that this punishment clearly made an impression on him. What also makes an impression is the absol...

   Hallvor Cullen is an ex-soldier. A genetically-engineered, high-technology implanted ex-soldier know as a 'vat.' As a vat soldier he was often fed a chemical drug that would give him an adrenaline rush and keep him fighting. No longer in the service, Cullen is just searching for his next rush. There's no point in doing much else because a vat is engineered to work fast and hard and to live a very short life. Cullen's best friend is his former Commanding Officer, Tyce, and Tyce is determined to find a way to prolong Cullen's life. In the meantime, he hopes to distract Cullen by taking him off to do some salvage work in the far reaches of the galaxy. One more crew member is added just before they depart - Vivi, a tech genius who had been a hacker. Out on 'the edge' an alien presence is downloaded into their ship. I found this to be a very disappointing read. The book takes some very typical sci-fi tropes and adds a few unremarkable characters and has them w...

 I'm a sucker for any book about musical theatre, so when I saw there was a new book, dealing specifically with "the Politics of Bursting into Song and Dance" I was seriously interested in reading this. However, I take issue with any book that reads like a graduate thesis, looking to convince the reader of something, as opposed to a non-fiction book, and this really reads like a thesis paper to me. We start with an introduction that is at least twice as long as the longest chapter in the book and the first half of it reads like an explorative chapter. So much so that I stopped reading (twice!) and flipped back, certain that I must have skipped over a page indicating the beginning of the chapter. But no, it's just a very long introduction. When the introduction starts to inform the reader what they will be reading ("The case studies and arguments of chapters 1-4 form the infrastructure for the synoptic account of the genre that I articulate in chapter 5, while ch...

It should be no surprise that I, a book reviewer/blogger, grew up in a house with plenty of books. We had a special children's bookshelf, built by my grandfather, and on it I remember four very specific books. These were all hardcovers and quite old.  They were Anderson's Fairy Tales , The Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales , The War to End All Wars (a history of WWI), and Pinocchio . Throughout my years growing up in that house, I would periodically read a fairy tale or two in either the Anderson or Grimm books, and I looked at the photos in the book about WWI, but Pinocchio both fascinated me and terrified me. This was years before I knew of the Disney animated film, but I didn't need to see the dark terrors to get an uncomfortable feeling as I read the story. All the people around Pinocchio seemed cruel and the little puppet seemed always to fall into their clutches. When I saw this new, annotated edition available as an ARC, I was quick to make the request. Was it as dark as ...

Molly McGill is a twice-divorced single mother with a struggling P.I. business. She's struggling to hold her life (and her kids' lives) together and seeing her teenage son wearing a t-shirt that supports the "Blind Mice" - a group of anarchists who have been disrupting government functions and have been in the news frequently - puts her on edge. Everything seems to be falling apart around her when she gets a visit from Quaid Rafferty, a former (now disgraced) Massachusetts governor and his partner Durwood Oak Jones.  They have a job for Molly ... infiltrate the Blind Mice. They establish Molly as an outspoken blogger opposing government interference and Molly finds it surprisingly easy to write her vehement blog posts. Her blog posts get her noticed and she's soon invited to do some radio talk shows, and up the ladder to television, and then she's finally invited to become a more 'official' member of Blind Mice. What Molly didn't foresee was the li...

Ember loves to read and write poetry in her spare time. But Ember doesn't have a lot of spare time because she's busy killing monsters most of the time.  Ember is a Big Girl.  No, seriously.  Like 300 feet tall Big. Science has found a way to feed the world by producing tremendously large fruits and vegetables.  But there appears to be a side-affect.  it also, occasionally produces ridiculously large people. If there's any rhyme or reason as to who becomes large and who doesn't, that isn't clear. But what is made clear is that males who grow big become vile, stupid monsters whereas women simply grow proportionally larger. Ember's job is to protect her city from the monsters. Someone 300 feet tall can easily destroy entire buildings with a single step and those once-male-now-freakish-beasts seem intent on doing just that. But when Ember is forced to kill an over-sized male infant so that it doesn't become a monster, she has to rethink her job and those puny h...

So ... the actor who plays the android Data on the Star Trek: The Next Generation television series has written a book.  And the main character in Brent Spiner's book is ... Brent Spiner.  Of thirty years ago. And the supporting cast in the book are Spiner's fellow actors from Star Trek: The Next Generation. It is 1991 and Star Trek: The Next Generation is a huge, global hit. The young actor from Texas, Brent Spiner, who plays the Pinocchio-like android, Data, receives a horrifying package and some very disturbing fan mail. He seeks advice from his cast-mates, whose quirks make them almost as odd as the fans writing to them, and ultimately he calls for the FBI. Taking his case is FBI agent Cindy Lou Jones, for whom Spiner immediately begins jonesing. Spiner wants Jones around 'for protection' more often than she can afford to provide, so she gives him her sister's contact information.  Candy Lou Jones is Cindy's identical twin sister who runs her own private s...

Somehow I missed the first book in this new duology by Charlie N. Holmberg, which is really too bad because this book shows much more promise as a series - in line with Homberg's successful Paper Magician series. There are two kinds of wizards in the world - those who pay for the power to cast spells and those, like Elsie Camden who are born with the power to break those spells. Elsie has kept her spellbreaker ability a secret, meaning she is unlicensed, which could land her in some trouble. Currently (in 1895) magicians are being murdered and the crimes are unsolved. For someone with Elsie's talents, it isn't too difficult to find the culprit, but to do so she'd have to reveal herself as an unregistered spellbreaker. The assassin in question tries to get Elsie to join him in pursuit of his more nefarious plans (and he's a charmer, making this a more difficult decision than it should be) and the also charming good wizard, Bacchus Kelsey, offers to help Elsie navigat...

Somehow I've never heard of this comic or superhero and yet I see that there are graphic novels going back ten years or so. What this means for me is that I don't have any background on the characters, but I found that it didn't really matter, because this graphic novel held my attention all the way through and if I had questions, it -just made me eager to look for some previous books. Aric of Dacia, aka X-O Manowar, is living on Earth as a human. He is a little bit lost and trying valiantly to use his powers for good, but understanding when it's good and when it's not is sometimes still a challenge for him.  Fortunately he has some modern human friends who try to help him out, which of course puts them in danger. Aric of Dacia has a super-intelligent, alien technology, bonded, sentient armor who has a dry sense of humor and helps guide Manowar during threatening situations. This offers some often needed humor during tense situations. I found this book exciting with...