Tinker by Wen Spencer

Tinker is a technological genius who lives in Pittsburg, a city that regularly transports itself between Earth and Elfhome due to a bizarre side effect of an interdimensional gate. There, Tinker invents things at a workshop in her very own scrapyard, races her motorbike, and stops listening when anyone tells her she's wasting her potential by not living on Earth where there are colleges with research labs. Why go to college when she already knows everything about quantum physics?

Then one day, a pack of wargs chases an elven noble into her scrapyard, and suddenly she's on an adventure that will require every scrap of her potential just to survive. Will her intelligence be enough to unravel alien elven customs, outsmart government agents, and foil and interdimensional plot? Oh, and while she's at it, will she ever find the time to go on her first date?

This book is pure fun. The action starts on the very first page, drawing you right into the story. The plot, characters, and setting are nothing revolutionary, but honestly I think that's what makes it so good. Wen Spencer writes the stereotypical urban fantasy book as if it isn't stereotypical at all, with care and attention to detail; she doesn't need fancy tricks to tell a good story. The elves are exactly as they should be, immortal, arrogant, somewhat baffling, and dead sexy. The government agents seem to come from an adventure movie, and the enemies are derived from familiar folklore. Yet, somehow, the story still seems as fresh as if nothing like it had ever been published before. This is the kind of stuff that made me fall in love with the urban fantasy genre long ago. It's wonderful to see it in a new book.



My rating system

February 2009--The Books I Read This Month

The books I read in February:

Tinker by Wen Spencer
Wolf Who Rules by Wen Spencer
Midnight on Julia Street by Ciji Ware
Rebel Angels by Libba Bray
A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray
A Princess of Roumania by Paul Park
Ananzi Boys by Neil Gaiman
Sex, Lies and Wedding Bells by E.M. Linley
Homespun Bride by Jillian Hart
Party Favors by Nicole Sexton

Reviews coming soon!

Rating System

My rating system for publshed fiction comes from my lack of storage space. I live in a tiny apartment, and if I kept every book I liked, my family would soon have no place to sleep. I had to develop a book purging system just to keep my bookshelves down to a reasonable number.

Six is a reasonable number, right?

To keep the mountains of books from falling on our heads; I only keep a book as long as I know I'll want to read it again, and I purge my bookshelves monthly to make room for new fiction. Some books go immediately on the re-sell pile, some stay for months, some for years, and some will have a place on the bookshelf until the day I die. I've been winnowing my library like this for so many years that I can usually predict a book's eventual fate on the very first read. Since I already do this automatically, I think it makes a pretty good basis for a rating system.




Black Sky, No Stars--This book is so awful that I can't even finish it. I'll skim through it so I know how it ends, the put it on the re-sell pile.




One Star--This book isn't so great. I can manage to finish it, but it goes straight to the re-sell pile when I reach the last page. It's too boring, too derivative, or too something. I know I'll never want to pick it up again in my life.




Two Stars--This book is a decent read. It will stay on the bookshelf long enough to read it again, but it will be one of the first to go when I run out of room on the bookshelf.




Three Stars--This is a good book. I'll re-read it two or three times before it goes to the re-sell pile, and I'll probably read it again at least one more time before I actually take it to the used book store.




Four Stars--This book is really good. I know I'll re-read it more than two or three times, and it might have a place on the bookshelf for as long as twenty years. There's just something about it that makes me hesitant to get rid of it. It may just be sentimentality; perhaps it influenced me during a particular time in my life, and I'll want to keep it even though I've outgrown the thing. It may be that the power of the story outweighs any problems with the writing that make the book less than perfect, or it may be the power of the writing that outweighs any problems with the story. This book may go on the re-sell pile more than once, only to be rescued at the last moment. If I actually do sell it in a burst of spring cleaning or something, I'm likely to regret it and buy a used copy again someday.




Five Stars--This book is so awesome that I know it will stay on my bookshelf until I'm dead or homeless. This is the kind of book that is so well-written that it will always have the power to interest me. I know I'll discover something new each time I re-read it, the characters will become like old friends, and someday the pages will be held together by packing tape and a prayer.




Half Stars--I add a half star when I'm not sure about a book's eventual fate on my bookshelf. I make rating judgements after the very first read, and sometimes I'm not certain how I really feel about a book until I've read it more than once.

As you can see, this rating system is based on personal preference rather than any objective critical reading strategy. I'm not a publisher or editor, so I can do that if I want. (Nyah, nyah, so there.) :D

Thank You for All Things by Sandra Kring

Lucy is an eleven year old, homeschooled genius. She lives with her writer mom and her twin brother (who's even more of a genius) in a small apartment in the city. Add in a new age grandma, a missing father, and a journey to the country to take care of a dying grandfather; and you have all the elements for a coming of age story in the midst of family drama. It's been done before, but never quite like this.

This is a pretty fun book, partly because of Lucy's young voice. Profound insight mixed with youthful innocence makes for a unique perspective on what is, after all, a purely adult drama. What makes it even better is that the author never develops the story quite how you'd expect. She sets up these common literary tropes--the urban, single mom going back to her family in the country, the troubled child coming of age, the quirky relatives, the big family secret--and subtly turns them all on their heads. I won't spoil the surprise by explaining further, but I will say the unexpected twists kept those pages turning until the very end of the book. Sandra Kring is now definitely on my list of authors to watch.



My rating system.

Fanfiction Friday

I'm a bit late this week, but since it's still Friday somewhere in the world, here are the fanfic recs:

Labyrinth
The T-shirt Incident by Pika-la-Cynique--A story based on a drawing by the author. Funny stuff!

Lord of the Rings
Those Who Remain by Marnie--A bittersweet conversation between Celeborn and Sam. Truly lovely.

Rhett Butler's People by Donald McCaig

Remember Rhett Butler? He was that good looking, somewhat mysterious guy in Gone With the Wind. You know, the one who didn't give a damn. I always thought he was pretty awesome, so reading Rhett Butler's People sounded like a treat. The author, Donald McCaig, delves into Rhett's character, his backstory, and the lives of his family and friends--just like it promised on the little blurb on the back of the book. It's like fanfiction for GWtW.

The bad stuff:
The book is an authorized sequel to Margaret Mitchell's work, but strangely enough, McCaig is not a huge fan of the original. It definitely shows. It's been a long time since I read the original work or even saw the movie, but since I have a thing for handsome, uncaring men, I at least remembered Rhett. His selfishness and masculine mystery made him such an intoxicating counterpoint to Scarlett's character. Unfortunately, McCaig completely fails to capture that. In his version, Rhett is the poor, misunderstood good guy. Every less than savory action on his part is justified times a million. Sounds a bit unlikely, doesn't it? I don't remember the original story enough to know how well McCaig wrote the other characters, but based on my observations of Rhett, I can see why GWtW fans are so upset with this book.

The good stuff:
As a stand alone novel, this book does very well. If you pretend the characters and setting have nothing to do with GWtW, the book becomes your standard, well-written Southern nostalgia story. It possesses a nicely suspenseful plot (for me, probably aided by the fact that I couldn't remember exactly how the original ended), a slightly more balanced view of race than you usually get in this type of book, and well-drawn characters. Rhett's sister was a particularly enjoyable one; it was a delight to watch her personality become more complex as she grew. Also, Rhett waxing eloquent about nature came across as downright sexy. Rhett Butler's People was definitely worth reading for that alone.



My rating system.

Splendid Solution: Jonas Salk and the Conquest of Polio

My grandma's bookshelves are always full. I'm grateful for this when I don't have the time to visit the library or the money to visit the bookstore, but it does make for some odd reading choices.

Splendid Solution by Jeffrey Kluger is one of those books that I never would have picked up on my own. It's about the development of the polio vaccine, mainly focusing on the biography of Jonas Salk, the scientist who invented the vaccine we use today. Kluger presents Salk's story as the triumph of science over public fear and other researchers' intellectual hubris. It's surprisingly readable for a book of this kind.

The narrative starts with Jonas Stark's mother and her efforts to protect her child from the polio epidemic in the summer of 1916. It continues with Stark's education, his internship under his mentor, his work on a flu vaccine, and finally his efforts to develop a polio vaccine from a "dead" virus. The author chronicles the work of competing scientists as well, though more briefly, and he also gives us the story of the fledgling March of Dimes organization (created to fight polio) and other philanthropists like President Franklin D. Roosevelt whose efforts contributed to the defeat of the disease.

There's little blind praise of Dr. Salk here; he may be the hero of this story, but he's a flawed one. He blunders occasionally, just like the rest of us poor mortals, and the author doesn't flinch from describing those misakes. It certainly makes the biography more interesting than your standard "triumph of reason" book.

Kluger also does a great job describing the science in layman's terms. He intersperses human interest stories with each stage of the vaccine's development, and his descriptions of individual polio victims give that dry theory immediate importance. Less successful are the character sketches of rival scientists, Salk's assistants, and polio organization members. Though necessary to give a complete view of the struggle to eradicate polio, I found reading about all the infighting and bureaucracy incredibly tedious. It meant that I had to read the book in little snippets every night instead of devouring it in a few hours.

I thought it was a pretty good book considering that I had no prior interest in the subject. It's definitely worth reading if you are at all interested in a behind the scenes glimpse of the scientific community, if you want a picture of the climate of fear surrounding the disease in the forties and fifties, or just because you're grateful we no longer have to be scared of polio today. I know I'll say a big thank you to Dr. Salk the next time my kid gets his shots.