Publication year: 2002
Genre: Fantasy
Time and place: a fictional world, unspecified time
Narrated in: third-person limited
First sentence: “Wind howled through the night, carrying a scent that would change the world.”
Verdict: A promising start to a series.

Summary
Eragon is fifteen and out hunting to help feed his family, when all of a sudden a big blue round stone fell from the sky. He took it home hoping he’ll be able to sell it for a big sum, but no one knew how much it was worth, so the stone remained in Eragon’s possession. Not for long though: one night a small baby dragon hatched from it :)

Determined to keep the animal a secret, at least for the time being, Eragon hides the dragon, Saphira, away from the village. As time goes by the two become fast friends, especially since they can read one another’s minds. Not much time later, two mysterious strangers come to the village, chasing whoever had the blue stone. Luckily for him, Eragon was away with Saphira, but his uncle was killed and their house destroyed. Together with the village storyteller, an old man who clearly knows a lot more than he tells, Eragon and Saphira start tracking the two culprits, looking for revenge and having no idea that they will never see the small village again.

General impression
Most people say this book is heavily inspired from the Lord of the Rings, starting with the very name of the protagonist, but the similarities I noticed were with Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World¹. An orphan boy who doesn’t know his parents and lives in a very remote village goes on a voyage where his party is periodically attacked by horned beings, led by a more powerful magical creature (a Fade in EotW, a Shade in Eragon). There’s also a special sword, a hand marked, the hero discovering magic within himself, a storyteller with a hidden past, and the list probably goes on. Would I go as far as to call the book plagiarism? Of course not. The hero-chosen-to-save the world story has been told countless times; the secret is in the details.

Some criticize this book because the author has started writing it at fifteen, and it was published by the author’s parents’ publishing house. This in itself doesn’t make it a bad book, however. Sure, I wouldn’t go as far as to call it brilliant, but I have enjoyed reading it, and I am planning to read at least one of the sequels. Sure, some times it’s obvious that shortcuts were taken — when it comes to Eragon’s love interest, for example: instead of building a believable characters, with flaws and all, the author has created this perfect, supernatural being that Eragon was instantly attracted to. I would have, of course, preferred it wasn’t so, but on the whole the sum of parts is a positive, and I won’t complain.

Setting
The book takes place in the fictional land of Alagaësia — a world where once upon a time ago men and dwarves and elves lived together in peace. Everyone was protected from the forces of evil by the Dragon Riders, powerful people who could wield magic. One of them however has gone mad and turned to the dark side, so he killed his brethren and proclaimed himself king. The dragons were almost extinct (only three eggs remain), the dwarves and elves each hid in their own worlds and wanted nothing more to do with humans.

As the book opens, King Galbatorix has been ruling the land for decades. One of the three dragon eggs has been stolen, and the king has called on the forces of evil to help him get it back. But when the Shade and his Urgals attacked the elf who was transporting it she used her magic to send it in a remote place — which is how it found Eragon, or how Eragon found it.

I liked the world building, and thought most of it is original (although, I know, elves and dwarves were also in Tolkien’s books, and others’). It is not perfect — for example the lore says that the dragon egg hatches in the presence of the one that is supposed to be its Rider; this is why people and elves came to see the egg, just in case one of them will be the chosen one, which implies that the hatching will happen instantly, or very close to that, when the Rider was there; but Eragon had the egg for a few days before it hatched –, but some bits of it were fun, and I really liked it. I liked the werecat, Solembum, that alternated between being a larger-than-normal cat and a shaggy-haired boy. I liked the way magic works, physically tiring one, and even killing one out of sheer exhaustion if one tries doing too much. I liked the way the dragons were connected to their Riders, and how one Rider could technically live a very long time because of its dragon’s influence on him. I am looking forward to exploring more :)

Characters
The dialogues are not, perhaps, the author’s forte, and yet I did like most of the characters — even Arya, who’s probably the sum of all cliches². Everyone has their well established role: Eragon is the hero, Saphira the loyal sidekick (who just happens to be a dragon), Brom is the hero’s teacher, and Arya the hero’s love interest. There’s also Murtagh (the hero’s human companion, so he won’t feel lonely) and Angela (the mysterious witch). The former is my favorite character — a brave, loyal young man, having to bear the burden of his father’s sins. He keeps mostly to himself because of that, which is why I think his friendship with Eragon is so precious: because it’s earned. Brom would probably be a second favorite: a former hero, he’s been through much and knows a lot, and it is for Eragon the father figure he needed at this challenging time of his life.

Writing
The writing is what attracted me to the book in the first place. The descriptions in particular are the author’s strongest point. One of my favorite bits is the first description of Saphira:

“The dragon was no longer than his forearm, yet it was dignified and noble. Its scales were deep sapphire blue, the same color as the stone. [...] The wings were several times longer than its body and ribbed with thin fingers of bone that extended from the wing’s front edge, forming a line of widely spaced talons. The dragon’s head was roughly triangular. Two diminutive white fangs curved down out of its upper jaw. They looked very sharp. Its claws were also white, like polished ivory, and slightly serrated on the inside curve. A line of small spikes ran down the creature’s spine from the base of its head to the tip of its tail. A hollow where its neck and shoulders joined created a larger-than-normal gap between the spikes.”

Trivia
According to the author, he had spent a lot of time trying to pick the perfect names for his characters. He considers himself lucky to have thought of Eragon, as it’s “dragon” with a letter changed. Also, Angela the Herbalist is inspired from the author’s own sister, also named Angela :)

What I liked most
The first time we meet Angela the herbalist she is described as “holding a frog in one hand and writing with the other“. When asked about it, she said that the frog was in fact a toad, and that she was trying to prove that toads do not in fact exist. I loved the unexpectedness of the answer, and the reasoning that follows is funny too:

“If I prove toads don’t exist, then this is a frog and never was a toad. Therefore, the toad you see now doesn’t exist. And,” she raised a small finger, “if I can prove there are only frogs, then toads won’t be able to do anything bad—like make teeth fall out, cause warts, and poison or kill people. Also, witches won’t be able to use any of their evil spells because, of course, there won’t be any toads around.”

Which pinpoints Angela once and for all as a bit eccentric, if you will. But still I liked that :)

Also, although not directly related to the things in the book, here is a quote from an essay written by the author:

I hope that Eragon will leave you with the same sense of wonder that I had while writing it. I do believe in magic—the magic of stories to give you wonder, awe, and revelations. Such feelings can come from small things; in a fey vision of fairy dust swirling in marble moonbeams, or at the end of an epic where a wave of emotion washes over you, sweeping away the mundane world for a moment. Either way, I hope that you find something special in Eragon, something from the other side of the looking glass.

Enjoy the journey!

What I liked least
The author seems to have a problem estimating periods of time. This is most jarring when it comes to Eragon’s training — the guy goes from zero magic powers and zero sword training to unbeatable hero in just four weeks or so. Now, I can get there’s such a thing as a natural talent, and that helped, but still that was too much. Particularly as afterwards Eragon is the equal of Brom, who albeit older has spent most of his life in battle (and has killed at least one enemy hero, so by all means he was a good fighter), and a bit later Murtagh’s, who also has studied swordplay for most of his life.

Also, show spoiler

Thoughts on the title
Well, it is the story of Eragon :) So it’s a fitting, albeit unimaginative name. I am looking forward to see how come the 3rd(?) volume ended up being called Brisingr :)

Thoughts on the ending
Darn, knowing that the book was written in early 2000s I was hoping it had escaped the wave of ‘everything should be trilogy’ that plagues us nowadays³. Alas, it wasn’t meant to be. Not only there are still untied threads left at the end of the book (I for one am very curious about who Eragon’s father may be — probably a Dragon Rider hero, but which one), but a new challenge is set for Eragon in the very few pages. Why yes, I still hate this scheme.

Other than that I actually liked the ending more than I thought I would though. Of course there is a big battle, and of course the forces of good win. I really did like, however, the way this was accomplished: show spoiler

Recommend it to?
People who love dragon stories :)

Buy this from amazon.com | Buy this from bookdepository.co.uk | The series’ website | Christopher Paolini on Twitter

1. and yes, I know that EotW itself draws heavily from LotR
2. well, at least she’s generally not the damsel-in-distress cliche, but the I-need-no-help-I-can-slay-anything-myself one, which I happen to love :) but she also needs rescuing at one time, so…
3. yes, I did know there were many books in a series, but I was hoping that the first one was written as a standalone

* for simplicity’s sake, I will refer to the main character as Mick, although that was not his name in the edition that I read

Summary
Dubbed “The Irish Novel” (of Jules Verne), this is the writer’s tribute to Ireland as he knew it, seen through the eyes of a foundling child. Mick’s fortunes vary, as he passes from the hands of a puppet master to being raised by a village and then sent to a “ragged-school” (an orphanage), as he is raised for a short while by an actress who treated him as a pet, as he spends a few years at a farm and then, after a brief stint as the groom of a young count, as he takes his life in his own hands and makes a bit of money while travelling through Ireland selling small wares. His travels (and tribulations too) end in Dublin, where he, despite being still very young, manages to open a small store. He builds up a small fortune there, and also a small family, gathering around him the few people that have treated him well over time.

General impression
I cannot be very objective with this book, as it is one of the first books I ever remember reading, and as I read it since the so many times that I lost count. It is not perfect (since I grew up I find Jules Verne’s books a little too simplistic for my taste), but I love it nonetheless. It’s like a version of the American Dream, the story of someone who started out very very poor, and has managed to build himself a comfy life with his own efforts. I love this types of stories, where honesty and hard work are rewarded. And I love this book even more for the way Mick, now able to repay other people’s kindness, does not hesitate to do so. A bunch of formerly destitute people — an orphan mill worker, a small beggar who tried to drown himself despite his very young age (seven), a former orphanage supervisor and a house servant –, all gather around Mick, as he is able to offer them things they may have not known before: a home and a family¹. I really cannot put into words how much I love this last part.

Now, if you expect this to be a thorough commentary on the condition of the human being, or anything profound, you’d probably come to the wrong book. This is a feel good story of from-rags-to-riches, and not much else. The characters usually have a single, representative trait, or two at the most. Mick, despite having lived his early years among brutal people, and thieves and beggars, has an innate honesty that doesn’t allow him to steal or beg. He also has a very serious nature and turns out to be really good with numbers, both things that will help him build his future later on. The rest of the cast though is merely represented by the way they treated our boy — those who treated him well were paragons of goodness, those who treated him bad had no redeeming features. A sort of exception are the Marquis of Piborne and his wife (which are sort of indifferent, since they interacted very little with our hero directly), two people who were proud of their ancestry and very self-conscious of what it implies in terms of etiquette. Sort of competitive too — they went to a trip to visit the lakes and insisted on seeing all the things they were told that this-or-that titled person has visited before them; they didn’t much care for actually seeing those places, but they wanted to be able to brag to their friends that they had been there. In a word, the Pibornes’ one trait was not either being good or bad, but merely ridiculous. And I think they may be the best written characters in the book because of that.

Events-wise the book is also simplistic, as after our hero manages to get on his own feet his challenges are basically over: everything he invests in turns out perfectly, and while he and his dog (and later his protegé) still have to live frugally, his savings are only increasing, as he never encounters a setback. I am not necessarily complaining, as I like the kid very much and I am glad to see him going from well to better, but the suspense was lacking after a while (although I don’t know what suspense I was expecting, given that I almost know the book by heart). Later on Mick manages to providentially encounter the two people who took care of him when he was a toddler and small child², which, while definitely among my favorite bits, is also a tad hard to believe. Especially as Mick meets Sissy just in her hour of need, and takes her away while she was unconscious; never giving a thought to the possibility that she may have a husband, or a child, or someone who would be worried for her when she didn’t come home. But of course Sissy was in fact all alone in the world, and Mick’s “kidnapping” her turned out to be the very thing she needed. See what I mean by overly simplistic?

Thoughts on the title
The actual title is something like Little Fellow (P’tit Bonhomme), and I have no idea why it has been changed to Foundling Mick. Especially as, according to Wikipedia (I haven’t read this book in English) the main character is called “Lit’l Fellow” throughout the book. Apparently there’s also been another version, called A Lad of Grit, that refers to the main character as Mick. No idea why Mick, of all things, but at least this may explain the source of the name they used in the title of Foundling Mick. Or who knows.

Thoughts on the ending
Of course I love the ending :)
Mick finishes (with a flourish) repaying everyone who’s ever done him good, and then everybody lives happily ever after. I told you, it’s a feel good book :)

show spoiler

Recommend it to?
Anyone in the mood for a simplistic, feel good story that takes place in Ireland.

Buy this from Amazon | Buy this from bookdepository.co.uk

Written by the same author:
The Golden Volcano (with Michel Verne)

1. now that I think of it, Mick actually reminds me of Gone with the Wind’s Scarlett. My opinion towards her varied throughout the book, but one thing I unquestionably respected about her: the scenes at Tara after the war, during the famine, when Scarlett fought tooth and nail so that “me and mine” will not starve. The way she felt responsible for everyone there, and did everything she could for their well being, is the same way Mick feels responsible for those that fate has entrusted into his small hands.
2. and they even more providentially recognize each other, although in Sissy’s case she was six and he was two the last time they saw one another, and now Sissy is eighteen; although to be fair he recognized her by her voice not by her face

Summary
Scotland Yard Inspector Alan Grant is in the hospital, stuck in bed after an accident. He’s bored, as he has nothing to do, so he decides he will try to solve one of the history’s unsolved mysteries, to pass the time. Captivated by a portrait of Richard III, and the way his physiognomy did not match the awful things that people believed about him, Grant wants to find out all about the man, and perhaps find out who killed the princes in the tower in the process. He sets to work, with the aid of Brent Carradine, a young American who works at the British Museum. Bit by bit, Grant’s theory takes shape, a confirmation of his first impression, as in his version of events Richard is a loved and just king, a victim, not a perpetrator.

General impression
I started reading this book around the time Richard III’s remains were found. People here and there were promoting the idea that Richard may not have been a villain after all, and cited this book as support. My curiosity was then aroused, and I picked up the book with no idea what to expect (I had a vague idea that it must be something with a female time traveler, because of the title). To my (slight) disappointment, there was no time travel at all involved, just a modern-day inquest in things that have happened centuries ago.

A lot of the book is tell, not show, as very little happens in modern times — the bulk of the book consists in the information Alan Grant and his research assistant dig up and interpret. It reads like a non-fiction book seen through the conversation of fictional characters, characters that are there only as a means to present the results of the author’s research to the reader. An interesting approach, though it did feel at times like something was missing. I did however love the novelty of having a detective solve a crime that has been committed many centuries ago :)

History-wise I found the book very interesting, although I am not sure how much of it is actually non-fiction and how much of the information Brent digs up has been simply created by the author — let’s not forget that the book is marketed as fiction. The conclusion Grant arrives at is not shared by many historians today (Alison Weir for example heartily opposes it), so the chain of events must have been less clear in reality than Ms. Tey wants her readers to think¹.

Be that as it may, I have found very interesting the arguments that the author brings forth to support her case. The three that had me almost convinced were:
a) Richard had no political reason to want his nephews dead, as he was already a legitimate king, so they were no threat (plus there were other people with similar claims to the throne as the two princes, and nothing happened to anyone else);
b) Henry had a lot to gain from exposing Richard’s crime, but he never did;
c) Henry’s claim to the throne was lesser than the princes’, plus it is his modus operandi to have his rivals killed.

Sure, none of these is ironclad, but together with others they do make quite a bit of sense. There was at least one moment when the book had me wondering how come this is still a mystery, since the author has gathered up so many proofs to support her theory :)

What I liked most
The “Tonypandy” bits — during the course of their research Alan and Brent come across various pieces of history that were widely believed to be true, but in fact were anything but. Such as the Tonypandy Riots:

“If you go to South Wales you will hear that, in 1910, the Government used troops to shoot down Welsh miners who were striking for their rights. You’ll probably hear that Winston Churchill, who was Home Secretary at the time, was responsible. South Wales, you will be told, will never forget Tonypandy!”

Carradine had dropped his flippant air.

“And it wasn’t a bit like that?”

“The actual facts are these. The rougher section of the Rhondda valley crowd had got quite out of hand. Shops were being looted and property destroyed. The Chief Constable of Glamorgan sent a request to the House Office for troops to protect the lieges. If a Chief Constable thinks a situation serious enough to ask for the help of the military a Home Secretary has very little choice in the matter. But Churchill was so horrified at the possibility of the troops coming face to face with a crowd of rioters and having to fire on them, that he stopped the movement of the troops and sent instead a body of plain, solid Metropolitan Police, armed with nothing but their rolled-up mackintoshes. The troops were kept in reserve, and all contact with the rioters was made by unarmed London police. The only bloodshed in the whole affair was a bloody nose or two. The Home Secretary was severely criticised in the House of Commons incidentally for his ‘unprecedented intervention.’ That was Tonypandy. That is the shooting down by troops that Wales will never forget.”

Or this story:

Scotland has large monuments to two women martyrs drowned for their faith, in spite of the fact that they weren’t drowned at all and neither was a martyr anyway. They were convicted of treason—fifth column work for the projected invasion from Holland, I think. Anyhow on a purely civil charge. They were reprieved on their own petition by the Privy Council, and the reprieve is in the Privy Council Register to this day. This, of course, hasn’t daunted the Scottish collectors of martyrs, and the tale of their sad end, complete with heart-rending dialogue, is to be found in every Scottish bookcase. Entirely different dialogue in each collection. And the gravestone of one of the women, in Wigtown churchyard, reads:

Murdered for owning Christ supreme Head of his Church, and no more crime But her not owning Prelacy And not abjuring Presbytry Within the sea tied to a stake She suffered for Christ Jesus sake.

They are even a subject for fine Presbyterian sermons, I understand—though on that point I speak from hearsay. And tourists come and shake their heads over the monuments with their moving inscriptions, and a very profitable time is had by all.

I find it terribly fascinating how flimsy history (and by extension, what we take as truth) actually is.

What I liked least
There’s nothing that has truly bothered me (although admittedly I was a bit confused about Martha’s place in the story at first, and I would have liked a bit more details about her and her relationship with Grant; I get that this is book 5 in a series so many people already know this, but a few words allowing me, the newcomer, to catch up wouldn’t have hurt).

Thoughts on the title
Brilliant :) But also very much the opposite of obvious. I had no idea what it referred to until I read about it on Wikipedia: it comes from a quotation of Sir Francis Bacon: “Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.“. Which, as I said, I happen to find it brilliantly relates to the idea behind the book — that the truth has been found now, after all these centuries, despite what the then-authorities (the Tudors) have tried to pass on as facts. Put in another way, time has brought on the discovery of truth, not the authorities. A perfect match between the book and the quote the title is from.

Thoughts on the ending
“It would have been a silly murder, that murder of the boy Princes; and Richard was a remarkably able man. It was base beyond description; and he was a man of great integrity. It was callous; and he was noted for his warmheartedness.”

Predictably enough, shortly before he gets discharged from the hospital Grant reaches the conclusion that Richard is in fact innocent of the crime everyone thinks he committed. I liked that Brent plans to even write a book about it, to clean up the dead king’s name; all the book would have seemed futile otherwise, if Grant and Brent had spent all that time doing research and then had kept the solution for themselves.

Recommend it to?
Everyone with a penchant for medieval history or classic detective novels :)

Buy this from amazon.com | Buy this from bookdepository.co.uk | josephinetey.net

1. It is worth noting, however, that there is at least one fact that Ms. Tey got right in the book — “According to Sir Cuthbert, the hunchback is a myth. So is the withered arm. It appears that he had no visible deformity. At least none that mattered. His left shoulder was lower than his right, that was all.“. While everyone knows this now, after the remains were found, keep in mind that the book was written more than half a century ago.

Summary
As one of George Bush‘s strategists laid dying, he came up with the ultimate idea to help his boss, then president of the US, gain popularity: he should fake a war. A war that America will win, a victory that will turn the president into a hero worshiped by the masses.

At first everyone thought his suggestion way overboard. And yet the more one thought about it, the more it seemed like it made sense. And after a while, faced with the possibility of not being reelected, Bush Senior decided that they might as well try it.

This is the story of the steps they took to cover up their traces. This is the story of a man (and a woman) looking for the truth.

General impression
Very predictably, I added this book to my to-read list after seeing the movie made after it. What I liked there was the media manipulation bit, the way the war does not actually exist but is in fact a movie presented as actual news footage, and I was interested in discover more about the story. It turns out that, as the author puts it, “the movie is exactly like the book, all they changed was the characters and the plot“.

The movie is about a fictional president and a made-up war. The book is about a real president and a real war. And the very bits I was looking forward to were missing (as the media had no reason to be manipulated into believing a war existed since it was right there and obvious for everyone to see). This being said, it wasn’t a bad book. I have enjoyed it, most of the time. However, at times it seemed to me to drag on for too long, as now and then the author has gone into too much detail. And then there were the footnotes — I generally love footnotes and I have loved Beinhart’s take on them¹, but many of them are very politics oriented, details about this or that person, and they failed to hold my interest after a while. It’s not necessarily the book’s fault though; the fact that I am not particularly interested in 80s’ US politics probably didn’t help matters either.

Setting
The story develops on two different timelines: a part of the story deals with Bush and his decision to have the movie made, while the other takes place at a later date, after the main characters (a famous actress and the guy she hired to solve the mystery) have noticed there is something fishy going on, a secret that everyone goes to great lengths to hide. The setting then is a mixture between the political world, the movie world, and the workings of being a private investigator. Something I found pretty impressive was the way the book doesn’t seem dated (if we leave aside the fact that the events in it happened many years ago), despite being written almost two decades before.

Characters
The author has gone to great lengths (scenes upon scenes unrelated to the main plot) to make his characters stand out from one another. Each have their quirks, things they enjoy doing, and a past. A great thing to do, in theory; what actually happened was that my interest sort of faded after one too many such unrelated scenes, and I ended up losing track of the details and of who did what. By the end almost all the bad guys were more or less combined in my head. Even now as I write I remember various details about them, but I couldn’t
say exactly who did this or that to save my life.

The exception to the multidimensional rule was the main female character — we get to know very little about her. Maggie is a big movie star, recently divorced. Maggie is not above using her sexuality to her purposes. Yet Maggie does not want to have sex with the hero until later on in the book (although she does come very close to having sex to a fellow actor she may have known even less than she knew Joe). I didn’t quite get what makes her tick (other than her willingness to bend the moral rules at least a little, for her career’s sake), and as such I didn’t care too much about what happened to her.

I did like Joe Broz, however, our narrator and the guy she hires to do her snooping around. In his 40s, stocky-looking but combat-trained and with a lot of muscle, Joe thinks himself as an average guy. A Vietnam vet whose wife-to-be was killed in a surprise attack, Joe has built his life around his job at an important security firm. He’s very good at what he does, and my favorite bits were those involving his investigation. He’s honest and raw, and at times he seems to good to be true (albeit not perfect). And for some reason I really liked him, despite the fact that his world and mine have almost nothing in common.

A character that surprised me was the US president himself. I am of course taking everything with a grain of salt, as this is before everything a fiction book, but still I was somewhat surprised at the way G. Bush was portrayed. Admittedly I knew nothing about him other than the fact he was once president, so I am not sure how much of this is common knowledge and how much is the very opposite of things that are common knowledge. Some quotes about him:

Bush picked up his glass. The 747 cut through the night sky, huge and steady, easily able to keep the Head of the Free World safe. But with the Evil Empire crumbling, “Head of the Free World” was rapidly losing its ring. He was going to have to think of something new to be called. Leader of the…? Put the speech-writers on it. They knew about word things.

and

But without those options and with so many presidential things to think about, it became that 2,134th detail that the presidential mind could not handle, akin to, Should the black socks be to the right or the left of the blue socks in the sock drawer or should “Me” follow “Mac” or come after “Max” in the contributor’s-list filing system or where to actually put bills when he vetoed them.

and

George Bush said of himself (6/6/89): “Fluency in English is something that I’m often not accused of.”

Such an unflattering picture, to say the least.

The bad guys (as a collective) have some interesting traits. My favorite of them was Hartman (a Hollywood hotshot), who was in some ways very similar to Broz — they were both Vietnam vets, they both trained in a dojo, and they both searched for inspiration between the pages of the Art of War. A worthy opponent, Hartman is. The scene where we got to see his strategy in action, convincing Bush to fund the movie², was one of my favorites in the whole book.

Other considerations
I found sort of amusing the way the scenario the director has made for their war could very well apply to the war on terror after 9/11 :

Bush, in anger and grief, leads the nation—the nations, plural, of the West—in a Holy Crusade against terrorism.
[...]
The terrorists would be Muslims. The Backward forces of Superstition and Repression of the East against the Rational, Ethical, Forward-looking West. It tapped into atavistic hatred. Christians against Moslems!

With the added bonus that they set up Saddam Hussein as the villain to be defeated (and we all know how things eventually ended for him). History repeats itself and all that.

And something that has bothered me a bit (but only a teensy bit, as there was no readily available Internet when the book was written, so checking things was a bit more difficult in those days), the author says that Unix is “an incredibly complex and ingenious program for editing on multiple screens at once“, when in fact it’s an operating system. Nitpicky, I know :D

Thoughts on the title
The original title was American Hero, which is a reference to both Joe Broz (main character, Vietnam War vet, actual American hero) and George Bush (the one who engineered a war to make him seem like the American Hero to the populace). The current title is the title of the movie, and I think it matches that better than it does the book.

Thoughts on the ending
The book ends with Joe Broz paying a visit to the author, and telling him his side of the story, in the exact same words. I liked the ambiguity, the fact that it could be interpreted as having been a real story if the reader so pleases. Particularly as afterwards the author offers a list of thirty-nine “anomalies”, reasons why the idea that the Gulf War was not an actual, real war makes sense. My knowledge of the events isn’t very strong, so I cannot form an opinion on whether his reasons were actually valid, but it matched the way the book ended very well, and I liked that.

show spoiler

Recommend it to?
If you have an interest in 80s politics, this is an intelligent book that you’ll probably like.

Buy this from amazon.com | Buy this from bookdepository.co.uk | Larry Beinhart’s website

1. “They’re frequently the stuff that doesn’t fit into a book but that the author found so interesting, he couldn’t let them go.”
2. he knew just the right chord to strike: Americans’ pride in being American, and the way everyone’s morale would rise if they witnessed a war where America would be the winner; so basically Bush & the rest will be doing everyone a favor by staging this war

Summary
Five months ago Tricia Miles, newly divorced, finally had the money and the means to open her own business. She has moved to a small town and she opened a small mystery bookstore, and business goes well. Her next door neighbor, Doris, the owner of a cooking book store, cannot say the same: money is tight and the owner wants to increase the rent. Doris is trying to rally the town people against the rate change, and she arranges a meeting with the owner to discuss it. That very evening she is found dead, with a knife sticking out her back and one of her most expensive books stolen.

Tricia is the one that found her, and, as she is new in town, the sheriff considers her the main suspect. Since all the locals are considered above blame, and no one in the police force moves a finger to prove the opposite, it’s up to Tricia to discover the real culprit and clear out her name.

General impression
This would have been a nice little book, and I would have quite enjoyed it, if it weren’t for the main character. Tricia and I just didn’t click, as I found her annoying above all else, and as such I wasn’t able to get lost in the story as I might have done otherwise.

Setting
Stoneham used to be a dying town, until the owner of some of the buildings on the main street had a great idea: he rented out the stores to booksellers, catering to tourist buses passing from and to cities nearby. There is a mystery book store, a cooking book store, a history book store, and so on :)

As the book opens, Stoneham has been considered the safest town in New Hampshire for the last ten years — but of course that will change after Doris’ murder. The townspeople are a bit upset about losing the title, as its PR value was good for the business; there’s even a mention of a crew having to take down the Safest Town banners from the north and the south ends of the street, and I found that (their pride in their title, the fact that they even had banners about it) quite endearing¹.

Characters
Ah, Tricia. I spent quite a few pages wondering what it is that I can’t stand about her. Among other things, she’s a snob. She is repeatedly described as a passionate bookworm, and books are supposed to be her life and all — but she cares more about the form than she does about the content. Sure, she is said to love the classics of the genre — her little store is fashioned after Sherlock Holmes’ address and her cat is named Miss Marple — but she is also the type that judges a book by its cover. She makes her living selling (mostly) rare books, and she despises cheap editions (in her defense, the editions she was referring to were also abridged). I may be wrong about her, but this is the feeling I’ve had.

She also thinks herself smarter than she is. Not that she’s not smart, she is a business woman perfectly capable to take care of herself, and I admired that about her. But there is at least one moment when something was obviously amiss and, although her sister pointed it out to her repeatedly, she just wouldn’t consider it. Eh.

I think that the idea was to have Tricia as the sympathetic sister, while Angelica was supposed to be the tiresome, unlikable one. Perhaps we were even supposed to commiserate with Tricia, shaking our heads at just how tough her lot in life is with such a sister. But in my case it was the other way around, as Angelica I have really liked. Sure, she’s not perfect, and her outlook on life is more fit to a big city than a small town, particularly at first, but on the whole she felt more real. Her passion for cooking is obvious and makes her endearing, unlike Trish’s passion for books, that felt anything but authentic.

Relationships
There is another reason why I liked Angelica more. The author has apparently wanted to add depth to Trish by hinting at a less than happy childhood, having been wronged repeatedly by her parents and/or sister. The trouble is that we are not told exactly what her issues are — we just see Trish disliking Angelica with all her might, even when the latter makes amends. For me, the reader, they are both blank slates, and I cannot stand behind a resentment that I have no reason to support; which meant that I kept feeling that Angelica is being unjustly treated, so of course I sided with the wronged party, and disliked the other one. If only the author had been a bit more specific about the bad blood between the two I think what she had tried to do would have worked a lot better.

I liked the fact that there was no love story introduced for Trish. I like the fact that she can stand on her own as a character, solving her own problems and not needing a man to rescue her. There is a certain guy that she rather dislikes but I think sounds promising for the future, but I am glad it wasn’t all neatly packaged in a single 200-something pages book.

Plot
The actual plot is not that bad. Sure, the sheriff’s insistence to pin the murder on Trish requires some vast suspension of disbelief — especially when Angelica finds the stolen book in Trish’s store and the call the cops to declare that and the sheriff considers this a sign of Trish’s guilt². Speaking of the sheriff, the one moment I really did not like Angelica was when she suggested that the reason why her sister is considered a suspect is because Trish is thin and the sheriff is fat and jealous of her good looks. A low blow, even if (perhaps) true.

Back to the plot, it was satisfactory enough (at least for me, others say it employed an overused trope), with other misdeeds uncovered along the way and more than one culprit. There weren’t any major surprises, but it would have been hard to since we only get to encounter a handful of people, and I thought the “whodunnit” bit was pretty nicely done (the reason behind it and all).

What I liked most
The idea of having a bookish-themed town :)

What I liked least
The book would have benefited from tighter editing. Starting with the mention of a “meatloaf-shaped loaf of bread” (which I read as “a loaf of bread shaped like a meat dish shaped like a loaf of bread”) from the fact that one sentence almost appears twice (Angelica and Trish find themselves twice “exploring” other people’s houses at night, and in both cases as they climb up the stairs we are told that Angelica is so close to Trish that the latter can feel her breath on her neck; I find the imagery a bit confusing — how can they climb up the stairs if they’re almost touching? — which is why I noticed that the same thing is mentioned twice, and in almost the same words).

Thoughts on the title
I have yet to discover the connection between the title and the content of the book. It is obvious that it wanted to hint to something bookish, since our main character is a bookstore-owner booklover, but I would have liked it better if it had had an actual connection with the events, other than the “murder” bit.

Thoughts on the ending
Okay, I guess. Everyone’s happy, the perpetrators punished, all’s well when it ends well, that sort of thing.

show spoiler

Recommend it to?
People who like cozy mysteries. It’s rating on goodreads.com is above average (3.70) so I guess people usually like it more than I did (I gave it two stars).

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1. On the other hand I also find sort of amusing just how much down the drain their title is heading to: since there is a whole series of murder mysteries taking place in Stoneham I imagine that eventually the town will be a good candidate for “the small town with the most murders” in New Hampshire
2. “I contend that you stole that valuable book and killed Doris Gleason for financial gain.”, she insists. Leaving aside the fact that there was actually no financial gain in it for Trish, since she and Doris were just neighbors.

Summary
His wife’s betrayal has turned King¹ Shahryar’s heart to stone. Afraid that history will repeat itself, he concocts a plan: on every full moon he will marry a young woman, and the next morning she will be put to death. His decision, of course, was not well received — people ran away with their families, or hid their daughters well. But Shahrazad, the blind daughter of the king’s vizier, thinks that this is the very moment she was born for: her duty is to revive the king’s heart and thus save her people. Despite her father’s entreaties she marries the king, and then on their wedding night she starts telling him a story…

… a story that she does not finish when the morning comes. The king, happy for the reprieve, promises her that she will not be put to death until her story ends. And the story goes on and on and on, for many days.

The king’s people however were less happy with the situation than they should have been. Rumors start circling around, that Shahrazad is actually a witch, and she is still alive because she has enchanted the king. The rumors are planted by the five brothers of the previous queen, who want revenge². Their army is small and they cannot defeat the king in fair fight, so they send the youngest to the court, disguised as a kitchen boy, to gather info and discover the best moment for a surprise attack.

General impression
I have seen that a few reviews criticize the writing style for various reasons; in my case the writing was one of my favorite things. I loved the poetry of it all, with stone hearts, and hearts overflowing with feeling, and everything in between. I loved the idea of having Shahrazad be a cloth reader, who didn’t know the stories beforehand but found them hidden in bolts of cloth. And I loved the very idea of a retelling of the story of the thousand and one nights.

Characters
I don’t remember how the original Sheherezad found herself in her unenviable position (whether it was by choice or by design), but I liked very much that the Shahrazad in this story has taken matters into her own hands. Not only she is the one who decides she will take the risk, but she does so before the king has had a chance to put his threat into action (and in doing do she has rescued him from the consequences of his decision). This Shahrazad is the quiet, confident type, intelligent and with a courage I admired more than once. She is no damsel in distress — quite the opposite, she faces danger to rescue her prince.

Shahryar himself is by no means evil, he’s just a powerful man with trust issues and with his heart closed off. I wonder whether he could have gone through with his plan, putting a random girl to death if he found himself in the position to. The author has done a good job in explaining his inner conflict all the steps of the way. As a consequence, the king is never an unsympathetic character, he just feels terribly misguided at times, and I for one have read the book in a single day, so curious I was to see how he will get to know and accept what his heart wants once again.

Relationships
Another thing I liked is how the relationship between Shahryar and Shahrazad was built little by little. Ever since he was a child Shahryar has been intrigued by little Shahrazad, and now, seeing her for the first time as a woman, the last thing he wants to do is put her to death. He is torn between his initial decision and this reluctance he finds surprising (for hasn’t he already decided on a course? And he’s a king, his will must be steady!), yet still his heart is closed off and unfeeling. Actually, that wasn’t it: his heart was not dead, quite the opposite, but Shahryar, just like the king in Shahrazad’s story, was simply refusing to see what was in front of him.

And the same goes for Shahrazad, in a way, although she is smart enough to realize it sooner: she too falls in love with the king and does not initially realize it. Since it’s a short book, however, this trope is not prolonged for too many pages — another thing that I couldn’t but like.

What I liked most
The prologue, written in the words of a Shahrazad enticing the reader in, to listen to her story :)

Two of my favorite quotes:

“A story is alive, as you and I are. It is rounded by muscle and sinew. Rushed with blood. Layered with skin, both rough and smooth. At its core lies soft marrow of hard, white bone. A story beats with the heart of every person who has ever strained ears to listen. On the breath of the storyteller, it soars. Until its images and deeds become so real you can see them in the air, shimmering like oases on the horizon line.”

and

“I wished to be the one to truly see, to come to know your heart. At least, I wished to try.”

At her words, Shahrayar felt his stone heart give a crack, and the pain surged forth into his veins, scalding as lava. Too late. Your wish has come too late, he thought.

I so love the imagery in this last one :)

What I liked least
The ending. It had the potential to be great, but then something happened that it seemed to me broke the previously established rules, and I did not enjoy that a bit.

Thoughts on the title
While the title has a poetic ring to it, I don’t think it’s a particularly good fit. Shahrazad’s mother was indeed a storyteller, one of the best in her tribe. But Shahrazad herself was foretold to be the greatest storyteller ever, so she went far beyond being simply her mother’s daughter. “The Storyteller” would have perhaps been a better title, methinks.

Thoughts on the ending
The ending is the reason why I did not give it 5 stars.

show spoiler

Recommend it to?
People who enjoy fairytale retellings :)

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1. he is referred to in the book as being a king, but I would expect him to actually have been a shah.
2. …with a rather interesting motivation: first they were angry at their sister, who brought shame on the family, and then after a while they started thinking that it was all Shahryar’s fault for giving her too much freedom.
3. speaking of which, I loved the idea that everyone found the exact piece of cloth they needed, with a story addressed just for them.

Summary
“You have seven years to think about disobedience. Until you are meek with regret, your face turns my stomach.”

With these words Lady Saren’s father left her, imprisoned in a dark tower, with only Dashti, her maid, for company. A fitting punishment, he thought, for refusing to marry the man her father had chosen for her, and insisting that she was betrothed to another instead.

At first, Dashti is thrilled to find herself surrounded with so much food (seven years’ worth of provisions). However, as days pass, she starts to miss the fresh air, and the sky, and the sun. The monotony is eventually broken by a visit from Lady Saren’s betrothed. But she is too shaken by her ordeal and her inner demons, so she orders Dashti to answer him and pretend she was her. It’s thus that Khan Tegus and Dashti become acquainted. They spend the next few nights laughing and talking through a hole in the wall. But then the Khan must return home, and the two prisoners are left alone again. Well, not entirely alone, as Tegus’ parting gift, upon hearing that their tower is rat infested, was a gray cat.

Their next visitor, a while later, was a lot less pleasant: Lord Khasar, the man Lady Saren was supposed to marry. He’s everything Tegus wasn’t: evil and threatening and aggressive, and Dashti understands at last why her lady has preferred life in a tower to marrying her suitor. The encounter does not go well, and Khasar leaves angrily; later that day an enormous wolf attacks, killing the guards, yet cannot enter the tower, so the girls end up scared but safe.

But time passes and the guards have not been replaced. There is no fresh food brought up, and the one already in the cellar is going fast. It becomes obvious that there is no way they could make it the full seven years, so help must be gotten, and fast. But how?

General impression
I finished the book in a single day. I liked it so much I couldn’t fall asleep until I knew how it all ended. I loved the characters, the world-building, the challenges, the writing… in a word, I loved everything about it :)

The book is written in diary form, being the journal that Dashti has kept during their imprisonment and beyond. Sometimes she even draws little sketches of the things she sees, and I liked that. Interestingly enough, the way the entries for the first few years were written reminded me of Life of Pi — while the two books are of course very different, they both feature characters whiling their days away while trapped in a bad situation, and the way they have adapted to their adversity felt quite similar at times.

Setting
The story takes place in a world similar to our medieval Mongolia (map), with only a few supernatural touches. One such thing are the muckers (Dashti being one of them), people who live in the wild and who know songs that can heal all sorts of physical and moral afflictions. I very much liked the way these songs are supposed to work: they “nudge things to be what they really are — a healthy body, a heart as calm as a baby’s in the womb“. It was an interesting idea and most importantly it was kept consistent throughout the book. My favorite bit regarding that was when (minor spoiler) Dashti manages to save a general whose soul was close to departing by singing to the latter a bunch of happy songs, reminding it how good it feels to live.

The mythology is interesting too. There are eight Ancestors, and each land is dedicated to one of them and bearing its name (a poetic form, such as Titor’s Garden or Song for Evela). The Ancestors are considered a sort of gods, and together with the Eternal Blue Sky they form “the sacred nine”. The nobility of the world, the gentry, are thought to be the offspring of the Ancestors, who then “formed commoners from mud so there would be people in the world to serve their gentry children“. Dashti firmly believes in all this, including the vast superiority of aristocracy¹ over “commoners”, and I assume everyone else did too.

Characters
Lady Saren starts out as a mystery. Dashti has only met her on the day of their imprisonment and, as the Lady does not offer much information of herself, poor Dashti has no idea how to help her. It it obvious that the Lady is suffering, but since Dashti does not know the reason why she cannot choose the right song to sing. So Lady Saren spends most of the book being afraid of almost anything, and struggling to be brave. I very much loved the way the author presented her, weak and strong at the same time. Her strength is less than obvious for many pages, but, given the demons that she’s obviously fighting, the fact that she is resisting them and hanging in there must have been no easy feat. While there were many times when she has been nothing but a burden on Dashti, she was still a sympathetic character (not in the least because of Dashti’s loyalty to her), and I was happy to see her finding herself near the end of the book.

And Dashti… Dashti is the very engine that propels the book forward. Her life was tough until she met Lady Saren, and it didn’t get easier afterwards either, what with their imprisonment, and the rats in the cellar, and the lack of food, and so on. But she has an iron will and she never gives up. She’s also loyal, caring, resilient and resourceful. There is that scene in the tower, sometimes in the third year, when Dashti and Saren are all out of food. Since they are trapped there, this means they will die in a few days at the most. The situation seems hopeless, but not for Dashti:

I’ve decided. We’re going to live. It’s such a relief! I begin to feel more my mucker self just to settle my mind on it. A mucker survives. No matter that we’ve not enough food. We’ll find a way.

I admired her so much at this moment :)

Extra bonus points: she is not beautiful. Her face is disfigured by birthmarks, and yet this is not a defining characteristic for her. In fact, I doubt that anyone who met her was bothered by her face after the first few moments. She’s just so… captivating, I would say.

Unfortunately there isn’t much I can say about the main male character, the Khan Tegus. He’s flawless, and of course very likable. I very much liked seeing him interact with Dashti, as one can see that they were having fun together, but on the whole I didn’t feel like I really got to see who he is as a person. Perhaps he just needed a tiny flaw somewhere, to make him stand out :)

Thoughts on the title
Dashti and Saren’s story stretches on for almost twice as much of a thousand days, and the book (Dashti’s diary) follows them all. Now, while the title is confusing from this point of view (as there’s no book of a thousand days anywhere), I think it has something to do with something that Dashti’s mother used to say: “you have to know someone a thousand days before you can glimpse her soul“. Just like Dashti has finally gotten to know her lady, and just like I, the reader, have gotten to know them both by the end of the book.

Other bits I have liked:
Two of my favorite quotes, to showcase the beauty of the writing:

They weren’t nice words he said. He could’ve lived a good life and died never having made a person feel rubbed down to bones and too sad to hold together. Still, it can’t be an easy thing, guarding two girls who’ve been thrown into the rubbish heap of Under, god of tricks. I think he laughs because he doesn’t want to hurt for us.

and

Except for singing my mama into the Ancestors’ Realm, giving My Lord [the cat] to Saren was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And I felt emptied, a well dug out of my chest, and as pathetic as a three-legged cricket.

Thoughts on the ending
Predictable (how else could it have ended? :) ), but I enjoyed it terribly nonetheless.

show spoiler

Recommend it to?
Anyone who doesn’t passionately hate the genre :)

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Written by the same author:
Austenland | Midnight in Austenland

1. as an example, when she became a lady’s maid, Dashti has sworn, among other things, that her lady won’t have to touch anything harder than water; ahe feels bound by this promise and later on she feels guilty that she wasn’t able to keep it, despite the many things she did do for Saren.

Summary
When Emily March opened the book she had chosen for a school assignment she heard a strange sound. In the next moment she found herself inside the story, as one of the characters: the middle daughter of the March family in Little Women. Having no idea how she got there or why, she decided she might as well take on a mission. She decides that she will save Beth from dying, and then she will probably be sent back home. And in the meantime Teddy Laurence is just so cute, she is definitely certain she will not get bored.

General impression
I couldn’t help finding Emily, our heroine, a bit too harebrained, self-centered, and a bit too boy obsessed for my taste. I know that she is fourteen and all, but if anything this should stop her from behaving like a spoiled brat. And it doesn’t, or at least not always. To be fair, the fact that there’s a lot of room for improvement in her ends up being sort of a good thing, since she gets to grow and becomes a better person while in the pages of the book. She does this, however, somewhere near the end, which means that I was stuck with the obnoxious Emily for most of the novel. And I did not particularly enjoy that.

One of the bits I found particularly annoying: one day she finds herself alone with Laurie, and she kisses him (she even “tried to slip him some tongue” — could she have been more oblivious to the customs of the age?). And when he, understandably enough, is horrified by this, she draws the conclusion that “he was probably just acting so flustered because on some level he thought I was hot, even if he couldn’t allow himself to think that“. Even if I had been inclined (and by now I wasn’t) to like her until this moment, after that my esteem for her dropped somewhere below ground.

The rest of the characters aren’t fleshed out too much, most likely because we see them only through Emily’s eyes, and she is too self-involved to notice much around her (I was actually amused when Beth’s canary died and Emily was rather confused, as she had no idea they had a canary in the first place). Most of her thoughts regarding the March family and their world are derogatory¹, including when it comes to Marmee, and I was sad to see that because it seemed unwarranted. At least Emily establishes a sort of report with the two sisters nearer to her in age (Jo and Beth), and that is at times nice to read/discover. Laurie too is mentioned a lot, since Emily tends to obsess about him a little², but the vast majority of the time she only thinks about how “hot” he is or how much he likes her but won’t show it. Ugh.

Something I did like was the way that Emily’s new life stuck very close to the events in the book. Practically she only gets to act/participate in the scenes that were in the original novel, as the Marches never do anything but that (they never go to church, never go shopping, etc). This “rule” is rather lax, as Emily does have some leeway (otherwise she wouldn’t have been ever able to spend any time alone for example), but I thought it an interesting idea nonetheless. Especially when the book moves forward three years and Emily practically blinks and finds herself three years older :)

Another interesting idea I thought was the way the March family has adapted to having a new member, but not entirely seamlessly. Everyone knows that Emily is the middle March sister, but they are sort of hazy on the details. Even Marmee mentions one time how hard it was for her to raise her four daughters alone, and when pressed she admits that she has no idea why she sometimes thinks she has four girls not five. This part was very nicely done, but apparently Emily too suffers from a sort of “story amnesia” that randomly comes and goes. While I get that it would have been a boring book if Emily had known in advance everything that was to happen, her amnesia felt too much like a plot device, as it comes at goes at the most convenient times. I do not see why the author has chosen to make this book Emily’s favorite, as it would have been a lot simpler to give her only a passing acquaintance with it, and it would have been the perfect explanation for the fact that she only remembers the major plot points.

Thoughts on the ending:
The ending was… interesting :)

show spoiler

Bottom line: It has some good points. Its Goodreads rating is at the moment a bit less than 3 stars. It would have been more enjoyable if I had liked the main character.

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1. random example: “I looked around and thought how ridiculous all the imagination games they played were. Seriously? These were supposed to be teenagers? What would I be doing back home right now? Back at my real home? Playing Wii. Texting friends. Going to the mall to buy clothes.” Because texting and shopping are oh so superior to having a powerful imagination, right?
2. another thing I found really annoying about her was that she asked her sisters for a pact about Laurie — not to let him come between them or other some such — and then she repeatedly breaks it for the rest of the book, while also expecting Jo to keep it; I hate double standards.

Summary
“If I have no option to be happy and good, then why not be as bad as I can be?”

The day she turned fourteen Emer Morrisey was sent by her uncle far away from her native Ireland. She had been sold to be a wife to a much older man, in Paris. Luckily for her, once she got there she managed to run away from her husband-to-be. After living for a year on the streets, she boarded a ship to Tortuga, hoping for a better life. She was wrong; she sailed again. The ship she was on was attacked, and she fought valiantly. And this was the turning point, the moment that set her on the path of becoming nothing less than a pirate captain.

Years later, having attained everything she wanted, she was planning to retire and start a normal life. She never made it though: not only she was killed right on the beach where she first landed, but she was also cursed to spend 100 lives reincarnated as a dog. And so she was reborn as a French poodle puppy…

…

Fast forward to the twentieth century. It’s the 70s, and, having finished her due, Emer reincarnates again, this time as a human girl. Now Saffron, she amazes everyone with her knowledge of past events. Everyone thinks she will have a wonderful career in any field she’ll choose. But Emer has a plan and one plan only: once she will turn eighteen she will go to the beach where she died and dig up the immense treasured she has buried there.

General impression
Well, the book was a tad more violent than I would have expected (the former Emer relishes imagining various gory ways to maim the ones she find annoying; which is basically everyone she talks to). I get that Emer had lived a violent life in violent times; I get that after being around for three hundred years she has very little patience with the people around her. And yet this part seemed to me a bit overdone.

The story is told in alternating chapters, some telling the story of Emer’s life and others narrated by Saffron. There are some pages dedicated to a third character, Fred, the modern-day owner of a house on the beach Emer is interested in; there are also small stories, now and then, about some of Emer’s lives as a dog, complete with lessons learned. Each of these has a different point of view, yet they manage to come together as a whole quite nicely. I wasn’t too fond of the contemporary bits, mostly because I didn’t much like the characters involved; Emer’s original life however kept me on the edge of my seat more than once.

I was sad to see that Saffron doesn’t really suffer any effects after having spent so many years as a dog. It would have been interesting/quirky to see her having trouble adapting to being a human again (after all, she has been a human for less than 50 years, and a dog for six times that). She has some memories left, of course, but it would have been interesting to see more of a “cultural shock”, if you will. If anything, modern day Emer, although she has now lived such a long time, feels even more immature than she ever felt before, and I didn’t enjoy that.

Characters
The story of Emer begins when she is five, a happy child in the middle of a happy family. By her sixth birthday she loses everything, as her village is destroyed and its people killed by Cromwell’s army. Emer has to go live with her uncle’s family, in a very poor area. The uncle is aggressive and beats everyone; the cousins aren’t particularly friendly either. Emer’s new life is anything but happy. And it’s not going to get much better for a long, long while. Under these circumstances I have to say I was quite fond of Emer, and the way she grit her teeth and powered through the adversities that life threw at her. I liked that she had a fiery personality and she wasn’t afraid to fight for what she wanted. Sure, she does enjoy killing people a bit too much for my taste (her signature move was tearing people’s eyes out of their sockets), but I do get that this can (sort of) be put down to the fact that almost everyone in her life has treated her bad.

Emer reincarnated however is nowhere near as interesting. Perhaps because her appeal consisted in her piratey ways, and of course she can no longer act as a pirate in the 20th century. She’s just… bland. Sure, she knows a lot, due to her having witnessed a lot of history first hand, and she has that quirk of maiming people in her mind; other than that however there is not much that can be said about her. The fifth child, she isn’t particularly close to anyone in her family, despite the fact that her parents were pretty okay people throughout her childhood. I sort of resented that about her — the way she thought of everyone, her parents included, as being her inferiors (now it is true that they weren’t particularly bright people, but up to a point they were doing their best, and I was sorry to see that Saffron/Emer did not appreciate their efforts).

Another character is the guy owning the house on the beach, Fred Livingstone. Kudos to the author, as she has managed to create the creepiest and most unlikable character I have ever read about until now. Even as I write this, a day or so after I finished the book, thinking about him makes me shiver a bit. It’s not just the way he treats his (good natured, albeit not very bright) dog, although just this and made me despise him and dislike him on the spot. It’s in the way he thinks about women around him. Ew. And to think that people like that do in fact exist.

The rest of the cast consisted mostly of placeholders, unidimensional people that play a single role and have no complexity at all. Take Seanie for example, the only man Emer has ever loved. He was just there. He has no trait of his own other than the fact that he loves Emer and is loved by her. The same goes for David, Emer’s first mate. He’s there to take care of all the jobs Emer, as a female, cannot do, and in the process he of course falls in love with her (since she is so very beautiful and courageous and one of a kind). And that’s all there is to him. When Seanie comes back and there’s no more need for David, the latter disappears without a trace. Emer’s uncle was abusive and treated her bad, to provide for a challenge in her early life. Saffron’s parents become addicted to pills, to provide for a challenge in her new life. And so on, most of the characters being there as plot devices and nothing more.

A detail that I liked
Emer’s first ship was called Emerald :)

Something I did not understand
If Saffron is Emer reincarnated, how come that as she arrives in Jamaica she complains about losing Emer?

Thoughts on the ending
The ending was the part that sort of ruined the whole book for me. I liked it that it was a nice, happy ending, but I thought that its plausibility left something to be desired.
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Recommend it to?
People who enjoy YA books and are not afraid of some gore. There isn’t anything too graphic but it’s not overly tame either.

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Summary
“Good heavens, what business has she with a conscience, after such a life as hers has been!”

The story begins in 1832, with the dying Allan Armadale’s written confession to his son, a confession of murder, but also an entreaty to stay away from the son of the man he had killed, and/or from a certain servant girl.

Years have passed. Unknown to both of them, the son of the murdered and the son of the murderer accidentally meet and become fast friends. When the former inherits and estate, he even insists that his friend come live with him and be his stewart. The friend, who lives under the assumed name Ozias Midwinter, by now knows the back history — what his father did, and what his last request was, but despite it he cannot tear himself away from the one he sees as his saviour in his time of need.

And then the servant girl, now grown-up, shows up with a thirst for money and revenge. She is so very beautiful that everyone falls in love with her, Ozias included, so at first it seems her plan simply cannot fail. But then…

General impression
The book has five parts, but to me it felt like it could be better split into three: “Life before Lydia”, “Lydia’s first plan”, “Lydia’s second plan”. Each of these was for me more interesting than the one before: the first one, where we meet the Allan Armadales, felt to me like simple exposition, even though it has taken about 40% of the book or more. After Lydia first showed up, I thought the story picked up, as I was intrigued about her schemes and was looking forward to see someone thwart her. Then, sometime between parts two and three, Lydia became the narrator and I started caring for her. She then risked everything to set her second plan in motion and by then I couldn’t put the book down :)

As an aside, the one thing I wasn’t very fond of was the foreshadowing dream that Allan had. Ozias was almost obsessed with it, and I grew a bit tired to hear it mentioned over and over again. This being said I liked how the author has offered both a perfectly reasonable explanation (my favorite kind, the one involving elements encountered in the dreamer’s real life), and a superstitious/supernatural one, leaving it up to the reader to choose the one to believe in.

Characters
There are no less than four characters named Allan Armadale in this novel (two fathers and two sons). While there are a bunch of improbable coincidences in the book, I liked that this particular detail had a very logical explanation: one of the original Armadales was born with the name, but was disinherited and the other one inherited the family fortune, on the condition to also adopt the name. And then each of these two had a son who shared the father’s name, and voila, there are four :)¹

One thing I can say with absolute certainty after reading this book: Mr. Collins can write very compelling villains. Up until now I have admired him for giving life to Count Fosco, the eccentric evil genius always surrounded by small animals and with a weakness for his truly capable foe. With Fosco, one of course cannot but want him to fail, while at the same time admiring his resourcefulness. With the villain in Armadale however, Mr. Collins has outdone himself. The red-haired Lydia Gwilt is both a terrible villain and a hapless victim (of society, of circumstances, of other people). While I knew I should dislike her and want her to fail, I couldn’t help feeling compassion for her, and almost, almost wanted her to succeed. I did like her more than both Allan Armadales, and, while of course one cannot approve of her schemes, I would have rather sacrificed them than her (although of course that would have been unthinkable in a Victorian novel). If that is not the mark of a well-written villain I really don’t know what is².

I do not mean, of course, that I fully approve Lydia’s choices. Her life to date has been anything but easy (not only she has never known her parents, she only has a vague idea of her origins), and the environments she lived in have all been rather on the wrong side of the law. Now, she clearly doesn’t possess a strong moral fiber, as her first misdeed (forging her mistress’ letters) has taken place when she was just a child — or perhaps she just didn’t know better at the time? — but her life has not offered a real opportunity for redemption either. Not even when she marries Midwinter and thinks she will give up her schemes does she find happiness at last. I was rooting for her (despite the fact that, since she was the villain, it was obvious that she will re-take her plan sooner or later), but sadly her new husband started neglecting her, and she ended up unhappy again. A thing that in turn made her let her temper loose and try to kill Allan not once but three times. And I was sorry to see that (and by now I sort of disliked Midwinter for treating her so coldly).

Speaking of Midwinter, he’s an interesting character too. His early life has been just a tad easier than Lydia’s (at least he knows who his parents are, or were, as his father is dead), but only just barely. He has spent some of his childhood travelling through villages together with an old Gypsy and a pair of circus dogs. After the Gypsy died and the dogs were lost (one shot, one stolen), little Midwinter has been able to find all sorts of menial jobs, in places where he was not treated kindly. Unlike Lydia however, Midwinter’s moral compass is strong, and keeps pointing in the right direction regardless of other temptations. This becomes even more obvious after he meets Allan, whom Midwinter sees as his savior because he’s the first person who has ever treated him well. I liked that about Midwinter, his loyalty, his selflessness when his friend was involved. What I was less than crazy about was his insistence of believing in supernatural, and in the Dream (although to be fair those things really did seem to have come true, so no wonder his nerves were shaken when it came to that). Other than that however, he was a perfectly fine character. If only his feelings for Lynda hadn’t changed…

Allan is… a piece of fluff. He had grown up sheltered by her mother and his tutor, and as such I believe he doesn’t have a fully correct idea of the world. He is however a guy with a huge heart (as seen in the very first moment of his acquaintance with Midwinter), though he is very much lacking social skills or any kind of refinement. This last is most obvious whenever he sits down to write a letter, as his manner is rather brusque and he rarely stops to consider things. His letters are always terse, and he’s actually proud of this skill he thinks he has — always being able to churn out letters in the blink of an eye. He is not very bright, as evidenced in a very funny scene where he and his beloved Neelie are trying to make sense of the marriage law, but he is nice and generally likable (at least until the last pages, where the POV changes to Lydia’s and she finds him dreadfully aggravating).

My favorite characters where actually some of the secondary cast ones — the lawyers, Misters Pedgift Senior and Junior. At a time when Lydia Gwilt’s beauty fooled people left and right (basically every man in her path falls in love with her, with the exception of Neelie’s father, who was probably too attached to his clock), Pedgift Senior is the only one who realizes there’s more to her than what it seems, and that she’s actually planning some mischief. Sadly, this attitude of his sets him at odds with Allan (who insists in acting like he thinks a gentleman is obliged to, even as he knows that the old lawyer is right) and so Mr. Pedgift resigns his position and leaves the pages of the book until the epilogue. Too bad, I thought; he would have been a worthy adversary.

Thoughts on the ending
Well, it was only to be expected I guess.

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A few quotes that I liked
The book opens in Germany, with the inhabitants of a small city are expecting two English visitors to arrive. They cannot pronounce either of their names, so they refer to each of them by the number of the letters:

“His excellency of the eight letters writes to me (by his servant) in French; his excellency of the four letters writes to me in German.”

An observation of the author’s:

“[T]he way that leads to reformation is remarkably ill-lighted for so respectable a thoroughfare.”

Advice to Lydia from her partner in crime:

“Don’t encourage poetical feelings by looking at the stars; and don’t talk about the night being awfully quiet. There are people (in observatories) paid to look at the stars for you; leave it to them. And as for the night, do what Providence intended you to do with the night when Providence provided you with eyelids–go to sleep in it.”

Recommend it to?
Everyone who enjoys reading the classics.
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Written by the same author:
The Moonstone | Poor Miss Finch

1. actually, now that I think about it, there may have been five, as the father of the original Allan Armadale may have been named Allan A. too
2. it is perhaps worth noting that the critics of the day do not share my opinion, as one has called her “a woman fouler than the refuse of the streets” and another “one of the most hardened female villains whose devices and desires have ever blackened fiction“