Party Favors by Nicole Sexton and Susan Johnston

Tee is a fundraiser for the Republican Party in Washington D.C. She’s the original Southern girl, softhearted and eager to please; who struggles to survive in a world of scandal producing senators, backstabbing co-workers, and glittering parties. The story is the fictionalized account of Nicole Sexton’s career as a director of finance for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, so naturally all resemblance to actual politicians is completely unintended. Ha. These guys are hilariously, unbelievably hypocritical, and the sad thing is that it‘s probably a spot-on characterization. The whole thing reads like The Nanny Diaries for politics.

This is a cute little book, as bubbly and as easily read as its heroine.





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A Princess of Roumania by Paul Park

Miranda Popescu, adopted from Romania in infancy, feels foreign and strange even though she‘s lived in the same college town almost all of her life. Of course, most people feel dislocated during the teenage years, but Miranda has more reason than most. Though at first she isn’t aware of the fact, she’s actually a princess from an alternate world. As political and diplomatic forces reach into our world from “Roumania,” she must decide who to trust and which reality she ought to believe.

On a blurb on the inside of the book, Terry Bisson (no idea who that is) says, “I once told Paul Park to write a tale filled with…the dark complexity of Phillip Pullman….Sooner or late, Paul always does what I tell him.” Apparently, he did. I agree that this book is very reminiscent of the His Dark Materials series. The problem is that I didn’t like that series at all. Though Pullman's concept of an animate soul is neat, I just couldn’t make myself care about the characters enough to keep them straight as they meandered through the plot. A Princess of Roumania is similar. Though the world building concept behind the story is really cool, as soon as the characters journeyed to that other world, I stopped caring what happened to them. No one there was interesting enough to draw me into the plot (which has the same ponderous rhythm as “His Dark Materials“, by the way), so I had to keep turning back to look up the characters anytime something new happened.

I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who enjoyed the Dark Materials series. Whatever it was that made you like it is probably present in this book, as well. Otherwise, don’t bother.




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A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray

When I was a little girl, I wanted to go to an English boarding school just like Sara Crewe in A Little Princess; so when I went to the bookstore to look for things to read for the YA challenge, it wasn’t surprising that I was attracted to Libba Bray‘s book. Like Sara Crewe, Gemma Doyle grows up in India and is sent to an English boarding school. Though the similarities in their stories stop there--Gemma is a young lady with a mystical connection to a secret magical society, not a little girl with a riches to rags to riches story--A Great and Terrible Beauty possesses that same Victorian English voice that enchanted me so much as a girl.

Despite the old fashioned feel, this is a deeply feminist book. Don’t cringe. It’s quietly subversive, definitely not one of those stories where a modern character seems to be dropped fully formed into a historical setting. Gemma is a product of her times; there are no anachronisms in her dealings with women’s issues. No, what’s so great about this book is that you barely notice the feminism for the story. Gemma struggles with her mother’s death, with making friends at school, and with learning about the magic of the Realms; and she does it all firmly within the Victorian setting. It’s only when the plot doesn’t turn out quite how you’d expect that you notice the message. Quite frankly, it astounded me.

It made me think about the what society expects of our girls. In the time period of the book, girls were not supposed to want anything but to make a good marriage and have babies. We’ve come quite a long way from that time, but what this book made me realize is that our modern society is still hanging on to more of those ideas than I thought. No, we don’t shun a girl who wants a career or wants to stay single; we don’t say that she can’t do something because she’s female. We do, however, send girls a completely different message with the stories that we tell them. It’s this: girls are not supposed to want. When girls get what they want, they ought to be punished for it, because what they want is never, ever what they ought to have. That message is in almost every story we tell to our girls.

Think about it. In any story, the heroine may want to be normal, to be special, to go out with the bad boy, to be smarter, to be beautiful, or to be popular. If she gets what she wants, it always ends in disaster. She learns her lesson. At the end of the story, she has learned that she shouldn‘t have wanted any of those things. Being normal, special, smarter, or beautiful didn‘t make her life better. It made it worse. She finds that she’s better off without being popular, and that she really ought to go out with the geek next door. Undoubtedly, learning to value yourself for who you are is an important lesson, but it’s rather sad that we never tell our girls stories in which the heroine wants something and gets it without being punished. It’s like we’re telling girls not to bother to reach for what they want. They’re learning that wanting things is wrong.

A Great and Terrible Beauty turns those assumptions upside down. I won’t give away the plot here, but I will say that Gemma Doyle doesn’t get away with having everything she wants in this book; Libba Bray tells a much more complex story than that. Like I said, it’s subtly subversive. It’s a powerful, well-written story, and what’s more, it’s humorous, exciting, and fun. I highly recommend this book.



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Homespun Bride by Jillian Hart

This was one of the e-books given away by Harlequin in honor of their sixtieth anniversary. I never expect much from romance novels, so I wasn’t too disappointed by this one. The heroine, blinded by a carriage accident, is rescued from a runaway horse by a cowboy who loved her long ago. They get a second chance at love. Yawn.

Besides the main character’s blindness, which made for a pretty interesting point of view, this was a novel like hundreds of thousands of others. It was, however, free and grammatically correct.



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Midnight on Julia Street by Ciji Ware

This is another book borrowed from my grandma’s bookshelf. I suspect she only kept it on the shelf because her name is Julia, not because she thought it was wonderful literature. She usually gets rid of this type of light reading a few years after it’s been published. (Where else did you think I learned the art of collecting good books? Or of getting rid of the mediocre ones?)

Midnight on Julia Street isn’t bad, but it’s not all that great either. It’s a love story that spans generations. Go-getter TV reporter Corlis meets rich Southern guy King, her rival from her militant feminist days in college. She’s all feminine looking now, he has unexpected depths, yadda, yadda, yadda. He’s a leading figure in the movement to restore old houses, she’s covering the movement for TV; thereby providing the main tension in their relationship, “Oh no, we can’t give in to our lurve! It wouldn’t be professional!” None of this is very original or exciting, but at least it’s written well enough not to be annoying.


Their love story is juxtaposed with the stories of their ancestors in New Orleans. It’s done through the psychic experiences of the heroine, psychic experiences that leave her drained and disoriented so that King can come to the rescue in a manly way. Despite this cliched aftermath, Corlis’ psychic episodes are really the best thing about this story. The author clearly adores historical New Orleans. While telling about the characters who used to live and work in the building that King is trying to rescue, Ciji Ware shows her love for New Orleans’ old houses, for its history, and for its diversity. The backstory ties in nicely with the modern love story, redeeming the mistakes of the past in a happily ever after sort of way. It’s a satisfying, light read for anyone who loves New Orleans.




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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.



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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.



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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.



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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.