Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven

After college, Susan Jane Gilmore and her old roommate Claire decided they wanted to do something adventurous before settling down in their lives.  During a meal together at IHop, of all places, they decided they were going to take a year and backpack around the world, starting in China, pre-Tienanmen Square.  Susan probably should have figured out something was not quite right when Claire’s father was so adamantly against her going on this trip, warning her of all of the bad things that could happen.  Or perhaps when Claire started talking about the young Israeli man she was infatuated with before they left who, oh, by the way, was a member of Mossad.   As if it wasn’t hard enough to be two young girls backpacking through Communist China in the 1980s, strange things begin happening, and Claire begins to act secretively, and hints that they may be being followed by any number of spy agencies.

Oh my goodness, I simply could not stop reading “Undress Me In The Temple of Heaven.”  I was somewhat skeptical, wondering why I wanted to read Gilmore’s travel memoir; after all, quite a lot of people seem to get memoirs published when their lives are not particularly noteworthy.  Well, I learned the answer to why I would want to read Gilmore’s travel memoir, and that is because it is AWESOME.  Not only is Gilmore’s writing fantastic, the story she was telling – all true, by the way, with just some identifying details of certain people changed – was absolutely fascinating.  I was on the edge of my seat trying to figure out whether Claire was crazy or somehow involved in high stakes espionage (and no, I’m not going to tell you which it was) and when Susan would figure out just exactly what was going on.  Really, this story is bizarre enough you’d think it was fiction, except as fiction it would probably be too improbable to be published.

I definitely recommend this book for the descriptions of the girls’ travel, Gilman’s writing style, and the highly emotional intensity.

Buy this book from:
Powells.*
A local independent bookstore via Indiebound.*
Amazon.*

This review was done with a book received from my local library.
* These links are all affiliate links. If you buy your book here I’ll make a very small amount of money that goes towards hosting, giveaways, etc.

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Undress Me In The Temple of Heaven – Book Review

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1. Heaven to Betsy and Betsy In Spite of Herself – Book Reviews
2. The Weight of Heaven – Book Review
3. The Time Traveler’s Wife – Movie Guest Review

Black Hills

Paha Sapa is a Lakota man who has seen the evolution of the American West from the Battle of Little Big Horn to the carving of Mount Rushmore.  What is more, he has been an integral part of all of these things: he counted coup on Custer at Little Big Horn (and ended up haunted/possessed by Custer’s horny ghost – more on that later – for his troubles), performed with Buffalo Bill at the Chicago World’s Fair, and acted as a powderman in the carving of Mount Rushmore.  Paha Sapa, known throughout the book also as Billy Slow Horse and Billy Slovak, is not just any Lakota man, though, he has a special gift, or perhaps curse, of being able to see people’s future and past sometimes upon touching them.  Perhaps because of this, he is blessed by the Six Grandfathers with a vision that will provide him with a life’s mission.

Okay, so this “Black Hills” sounds really interesting and, actually, it was.  However, I would only recommend it with the greatest of reservations.  I had a couple really huge problems with it.  First, as I mentioned before, Paha Sapa’s haunting/possession/whatever by Custer’s ghost.  First of all, by the end of the book I was convinced that nothing about the Custer storyline really added much of significance to the story that Simmons is telling here.  Yes, it was partly done to help establish Paha Sapa’s gift, but I think that Simmons established that just fine through other parts of the story, and so this was unnecessary.  Really, it all just felt to me like a manipulative ploy, a selling point “OMG! Custer’s ghost invading the body of a Lakota boy at Little Big Horn! The drama!”  This book was almost 500 pages and definitely felt too long, the exclusion of the entire Custer storyline would have brought it to just about the length I think would have worked best.

If it wasn’t bad enough that Custer’s entire storyline felt irrelevant (well, that might be too strong, but I really do not think it added anything to the book), there were the ‘letters’ ‘written’ by Custer’s ghost to his wife.  Evidently Custer and his wife had quite the sex life, because these letters were pretty explicit.  Talk about not adding anything to the story!  I assume that the point of these was to establish how much Custer loved his wife, which was relevant to his storyline but not, I think, to the greater purpose of the novel; however, they seemed to me to indicate much more that Custer’s wife was a freaky lady than that they had a true, great, deep love.  Oh, and all his letters were in italics – pages and pages of it – because, didn’t I mention?, all the dialogue in the book was in italics.

And that was my second big issue with the book, the dialogue being in italics.  I really don’t understand the purpose, other than to do something different.  I suppose it could be argued that doing something different like that gave the book a little more of a mystical or memory-laden feel, but mostly it just annoyed me.  I was able to get used to reading that, but I pretty much still continued to hate it throughout the book.  Probably it wouldn’t have bothered me so much if I wasn’t already annoyed with the whole Custer thing, though.

The really sad thing is, the rest of the book was really pretty good!  Okay, I thought the ending was a little bizarre, but Paha Sapa’s story was fascinating, growing up through the Indian wars, the huge push towards agencies and reservations, Buffalo Bill’s show and the Chicago World’s Fair, the carving of Mount Rushmore, all really interesting stuff!  I just really wish the Custer stuff hadn’t been in there to detract from the rest of it and it really did detract, the sex letters particularly just pulled me out of the story (I finally decided to only read Custer’s letters until the first time they got explicit, then skip to the next chapter, I’m pretty sure I didn’t miss anything important).  This book had so much potential, I think it was really a missed opportunity.  If it hadn’t been for the Custer stuff, I’d probably give it a mental rating of 4 or even 4.5, even with the italics.  Now I think it would be about a 3, because after about page 100 the story took off and got interesting, but it just wasn’t enough to redeem it for me.

I would recommend this only to those with a strong interest in the history of the American West and the interaction between whites and Native Americans.  Even then, I’d say be prepared for some randomness.

Buy this book from:
Powells.*
A local independent bookstore via Indiebound.*
Amazon.*

This review was done with a book received from Miriam at Hachette so that I could take part in the discussion on That’s How I Blog.
* These links are all affiliate links. If you buy your book here I’ll make a very small amount of money that goes towards hosting, giveaways, etc.

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Black Hills – Book Review

Related posts:

1. Teaser Tuesday – Black Hills
2. Gilead – Book Review
3. The Ghost Brigades – Book Review

Melanie Benjamin is the wonderful author of the equally wonderful book ALICE I HAVE BEEN.  I was able to meet her at an event at The Bookstore in Glen Ellyn and she was so gracious and did an amazing job reading from her book (you can really tell she once was an actor!).  When I realized she lived in the vicinity as well, I knew I just had to feature her for the Literary Road Trip.  She was kind enough to supply me with this fabulous guest post about writing ALICE I HAVE BEEN the inspiration for which, coincidentally, occurred to her right here in Chicago!

What makes an author suddenly change genres?  It’s not something many of us would choose to do.  But as it sometimes happens, the genres choose us—if we are smart enough to realize it.

Prior to writing ALICE I HAVE BEEN, I had absolutely no desire to write historical fiction; if you asked me if I read it, even, I would have answered with a resounding “no.”  In my mind, historical fiction was all about the Tudor era, an era that holds little interest for me. I’ve since realized, however, that actually my shelves are full of historical novels.  But I’m always interested in a great story first, not a particular era, so again, in my mind it wasn’t a genre to which I was particularly drawn.

So how, you might ask, did I suddenly become a historical fiction author? In my case, it was simply because I left my house.

I was very much in a rut, writing-wise; under a different name I published two contemporary novels but wasn’t content with the subject matter.  I knew I needed to write something different but didn’t know just what; for a long while, I kept trying to re-write the same old subject in a different way. I felt stuck in a literary maze of my own design, one that was going to ruin because of my own neglect.

This is an occupational hazard of authors’, I truly believe.  We get something in our heads, an idea of who we are as writers, what we stand for, and maybe it works for us for a while.  Maybe it doesn’t.  Yet we still spend years reworking the same territory, unable to see that perhaps there’s a reason why it isn’t working any longer. Some people spend years reworking the same manuscript. We find it comfortable and safe in our little author-den, cloistered from the world at large.

But I did something that changed my life; in the midst of this rut, I got out of my house.  I had a moment of clarity when I realized that my creative well was dried up, and I needed to replenish it—and I was not going to do that by staying home and continuing on the same overgrown, well-worn path.

Somehow I knew I needed to look outward; I could have seen a movie, attended a concert, gone to an art exhibit. What I did was take a train into the city, walk into the Art Institute of Chicago, and stumble into a photographic exhibit that changed my life.

I would never have sought it out; I had no great interest in Victorian photography. But because I was out of my house, into the world, I happened upon an exhibit called “Dreaming in Pictures: The Photography of Lewis Carroll.”

“Lewis Carroll?  Who knew he took photographs,” I thought, wandering into a small basement room.  And once there, confronted by wall after wall of pictures of young girls, I became fixated on one photograph in particular—that of Alice Liddell, the 7-year-old daughter of Dean Henry Liddell of Christ Church, Oxford, and the inspiration for ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND.

Until that moment, I didn’t know there had ever been a real little girl named Alice. Suddenly I was curious to know what happened to her when she grew up and left Wonderland behind; dying to understand what happened between the photographer and very young subject to result in such a startling image.  Suddenly I had an inspiration, an idea that would never have found me still sitting at home, staring at my laptop.

Suddenly, I wondered what it might be like to write historical fiction.

When I told my agent I was thinking about this new direction, she was supportive, but cautious; after all, I’d never written anything close to this before.  She encouraged me to try, and was very excited about the story, but always she reminded me that it would depend upon how well I could pull it off.  So I dedicated myself to learning how to do just that.

When I sent her the first fifty pages, she liked the story but felt my voice was still too contemporary.  She suggested I re-read some Victorian-era novels, and then rewrite what I had in that style.  I re-read Jane Eyre, some Dickens, Lady Audley’s Secret. I re-wrote my pages, and didn’t even have to send them to my agent to know that while they were very authentic to the era, they were difficult for modern readers to follow.  Too authentic, in fact; long, dense sentences, an over-reliance on adverbs.  The language was now a barrier to the story.

So I re-wrote them again.  I decided to toss aside the research to a certain extent, striving to write in a way that would sound authentic to a modern reader, not a reader weaned on Dickens.  I sent them off to my ever-patient agent, and somehow a miracle occurred; she was ecstatic.  She felt I had captured enough of the flavor of the period yet managed not to tax the contemporary reader too much.  Somehow it just worked, and I was off and running, a full-fledged historical novelist.  No one was as surprised as I was.  (Well, except, perhaps, for my agent, who now had one less contemporary novelist on her list.)

I learned so much while writing ALICE I HAVE BEEN.  I learned that Alice Liddell had to hold completely still for at least forty-five seconds when Charles Dodgson snapped that memorable photograph.  I learned that John Ruskin went mad and had to be removed from a classroom near the end of his life after breaking down.  I learned that Alice in Wonderland really did meet Peter Pan at Columbia University in 1932.

But the most valuable thing I learned is that inspiration comes when you least expect it, and in a shape you might not be looking for. It was true for Charles Dodgson—or Lewis Carroll—in 1862, and it was true for me in 2008. He wasn’t looking to become an author of children’s literature—he was a mathematics professor, for heaven’s sake!  And certainly, I wasn’t looking to become an author of historical fiction.

Yet ultimately, we were both open to the idea.  That’s the thing all authors, all artists, need to remember.  And most often that means walking away from the laptop, the writing desk, the office.  We need to get out there and experience other people’s art, other people’s ideas, in order to create our own.

And sometimes we need to just take a big breath and follow that white rabbit blindly, wherever he may take us.

Melanie Benjamin, author of ALICE I HAVE BEEN, Delacorte Press

The Literary Road Trip is the brainchild of Michelle at GalleySmith.  It is a chance for book bloggers to spotlight local authors and their books.  I will be spotlighting authors and books from Illinois (my current state of residence) and Indiana (my state of birth).

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Literary Road Trip: Following The White Rabbit – Guest Post by Melanie Benjamin, Author of “Alice I Have Been”

Related posts:

1. Literary Road Trip – M. Glenn Taylor and The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart
2. Literary Road Trip – James Whitcomb Riley
3. Alice I Have Been – Book Review and Giveaway

Merlin’s Harp

Nivienne is one of the fey of the land that humans call Avalon and daughter of the Lady of the Lake.  Although the fey tend to hold themselves separate from men, she deigns to join Merlin in the land of men in order to aid Arthur and his kingdom in their fight against the Saxons.  She helps not for the sake of Arthur and his people, but for the sake of the fey, whose peace Merlin believes will be disturbed if the Saxons overtake the land.

This was a very different take on Arthurian legend, and I appreciated that.  Nivienne is a strong female voice and, as one of the fey, has a very different perspective than is often found in stories of Arthur.  That being said, I did not end up loving this book.

It was not that the writing was bad, or the book itself was poorly done, it was more a stylistic choice (I think) that I understand but which hindered my enjoyment of the book.  Basically, character and world development was really not very fully fleshed out.  As one of the fey, Nivienne was very other worldly and set apart from the human world, she simply was not interested in helping to fill in the missing pieces of what was actually happening.  Don’t get me wrong, this lent a great sense of ambiance to the book, but it really didn’t work for me, I wanted the world and the actions to be more fully explored, without 5 or more years passing by with a couple of pages, just because the mind of a fey is so different than the mind of humans.

I really wasn’t crazy about “Merlin’s Harp,” but there’s lots of room for other opinions here, I know that some people will be drawn in by the unique perspective and how thoroughly Nivienne’s personality insinuates itself into every part of the story.  If you want to decide for yourself, you can read the first 47 pages of “Merlin’s Harp” on the book’s page.

Buy this book from:
Powells.*
A local independent bookstore via Indiebound.*
Amazon.*

This review was done with a book received from Paul at Sourcebooks Fire.
* These links are all affiliate links. If you buy your book here I’ll make a very small amount of money that goes towards hosting, giveaways, etc.

For other reviews, check out these blogs (links go to blog homepage, not to individual reviews):

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Merlin’s Harp – Book Review

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1. The Kingmaking – Book Review
2. Pendragon’s Banner – Book Review
3. Dream House – Book Review

Grab your current read.

Let the book fall open to a random page.

Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.

You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!

Please avoid spoilers!

During those dark, endless hours, as lists flew through my mind and my heart pounded, I sometimes thought about what would have happened to me if I hadn’t had to fight so hard to carve out my own identity, one that would keep me from fading into a shadow when my twin sister was around.  Would I be this driven, this fixated on success, if I’d been born into another family?

-The Opposite of Me by Sarah Pekkanen, p. 39

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Teaser Tuesday – The Opposite of Me

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1. Teaser Tuesday – Shadow of the Wind
2. Teaser Tuesday – Godmother: The Secret Cinderella Story
3. Teaser Tuesday – American Rust

The Wives of Henry Oades

When Henry Oades tells his wife, Meg, that they will be moving from London to New Zealand, she isn’t exactly thrilled about the prospect.  In the late 19th century, a trip from London to New Zealand could be quite the harrowing experience, and New Zealand did not have many of the creature comforts of London.  However, it was initially supposed to be only two years, so she agreed to take her son and daughter and go with him.  Of course their trip was not only two years long, and their family grew while in New Zealand by twin girls.  Then, one day, while Henry was at work, Meg, her children, their neighbor, and her son were set upon by Maori seeking revenge for the public punishment of one of their own.

When Henry returns to his house that night, he finds a woman’s body no longer recognizable.  The neighbor’s carriage is at his house, so he has no idea whether the body belongs to her or to his dear Meg.  Regardless, his wife and children are either dead or missing.  After a long period of mourning, Henry finally gives his family up for dead and decides to move to Berkeley, California, where he will not be so haunted by the memories of his family.  In Berkeley, Henry makes the acquaintance of a young girl left pregnant and widowed.  After the birth of her child, he marries her for what is love on his part, and protection on her part.  When Meg and her children show up one day on Henry and Nancy’s front porch, everything in all of their lives becomes infinitely more complicated – and they are indicted for bigamy.

This was a beautifully written book, based on real events.  All Moran had to work with was a scant document, she had to fill in the majority of the action herself, and she did a superb job. The thing that particularly struck me was how sympathetically the characters were written.  I really, really, really wanted to hate Nancy multiple times; for one thing she was essentially the other woman, although that was not her fault.  Much more obnoxious was her immaturity, she did not truly seem to want to be either wife or mother.  Since regaining her status as wife and mother was what Meg truly desired, it pained me to see Nancy in her place.  However, every time I got myself good and worked up to hate Nancy, Moran would show me her frailty and humanity and I would find it impossible to feel anything but sympathy for the predicament she found herself in.  I also appreciated that Moran presented the story of the Oades without moralizing, I have no idea whether she considered Nancy or Meg Henry’s true wife, or what she felt about their predicament.

Although there were perhaps a few elements of Nancy and Meg’s stories that could have been explored further, this was overall a completely lovely debut novel, a fresh and new work of historical fiction.  I will definitely be looking for more from Moran in the future.

Buy this book from:
Powells.*
A local independent bookstore via Indiebound.*
Amazon.*

This review was done with a book received from the publisher via the LibraryThing Early Reviewer program.
* These links are all affiliate links. If you buy your book here I’ll make a very small amount of money that goes towards hosting, giveaways, etc.

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The Wives of Henry Oades – Book Review

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1. Teaser Tuesday – The Wives of Henry Oades
2. The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn – Book Review
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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

***Caution:  Contains Spoilers***

Oooookay, and now I’m back to the crying while listening.  Not big gulping sobs, not even tears streaming down my face, but I definitely was teary eyed and a little choked up for, oh, like 10% of the book.  Hedwig dying didn’t get me so much this time, because it all happens so fast Harry barely has time to reflect on it, but Fred!  Tonks!  Lupin!  Harry himself (sort of, almost).  And most gut-wrenching of all, Dobby.

Yes, I suppose people are right when they said that Rowling could have used an editor, that the book went on a bit long, but, honestly, I’m glad it did.  I felt the same way when I was listening to the audio that I did when I read this book for the first time: I wanted to experience the denouement of the book, of the whole series, but I also didn’t want either of those things to end.  How could there be no more Potter books coming from Rowling’s pen?  How can I already be through all of the books with Dale’s narration?  Now the only thing I have to look forward to from this franchise are the two movies that will make up the last book.  Sad, sad, sad.

This review was done with a book borrowed from the library.

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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Related posts:

1. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (audio)
2. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
3. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and the Prisoner of Azkaban (audios)

Alice’s Hirsh’s life has been turned upside down.  Her husband has recently gone from beer gut lawyer named Alex to the svelte boyfriend of a big movie star who calls himself Xander, leaving Alice and her daughter Gabby in the lurch.  Alice is basically completely in shock; she always assumed that once she got married and had kids, life would just sort of continue along – she never expected to lose her husband to superstar Rose Marin.  Not only that, but Alice’s mother has a fairly advanced case of Alzheimer’s and is about to be kicked out of her not-exactly a nursing home home for cursing.  Plus, Alex/Xander has always given their daughter Gabby whatever she wants, so Alice is stuck with being the bad guy to a princess-obsessed child on the verge of being a spoiled brat.  Is Alice ever going to be able to pick up the pieces of her life and find her happily ever after?

I have to say, I had a great time reading this book.  Alice was a really fantastic character.  She is so hurt, and so damaged by what has happened to her, but she also experiences wonderful growth.  There were a few things in the book that bothered me: the dropped thread of the Rose Maris-haters club and Trinity (Alice’s mother’s Filipino caregiver)’s inability to use correct pronouns but ability to give an out-of-character exposition about how Americans have and want too much.  Even so, I found this book to be a thoroughly enjoyable experience, primarily because of how real Alice was.

“Pieces of Happily Ever After” is one of those books that is both fun and serious, empathetic and hilarious.  I would definitely recommend it to fans of women’s fiction.

This is the first pick for the SheKnows.com book club, so we’d love to have some of you come and discuss it with us!

Buy this book from:
Powells.*
A local independent bookstore via Indiebound.*
Amazon.*

This review was done with a book received from Crystal at SheKnows.com. It is the February/March 2010 book for the SheKnows.com book club.
* These links are all affiliate links. If you buy your book here I’ll make a very small amount of money that goes towards hosting, giveaways, etc.

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Pieces of Happily Ever After – Book Review

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2. Alice I Have Been – Book Review and Giveaway
3. Expecting Adam – Book Review

They Found Him Dead

Oh, Georgette Heyer, who are these people you create who joke around when they are repeatedly having attempts made on their lives?

There is a fair amount of acrimony in the air at Silas Kane’s 60th birthday party.  His business partners are begging him to assent to some sort of Australian ’scheme,’ the details of which are never fully laid out, but they aren’t really important anyway.  Then there’s Rosemary Kane, who is possibly the most ridiculous woman in the history of literature – and what’s more, she knows it!  Rosemary completely owns up to her selfishness and mercenary nature and doesn’t bother to hide the fact that she’s seriously considering leaving her well-off but not rich husband Clement for her handsome boy toy because she simply can’t be happy without a load of money.  When Silas is found dead the next morning, the original conclusion is that his fall from the cliff was simply an accident, but when his heirs start dying, it becomes increasingly apparent that something more is going on, and that perhaps Silas’s death was no accident.

This is my second foray into Georgette Heyer’s mysteries.  This one was a bit slower start – “Death in the Stocks” started with a dead body, so when “They Found Him Dead” started with Silas’s birthday party I found the first 20 pages or so slow going.  I actually picked this book up once and put it back down, to pick it up again a few weeks later.  Perhaps I just wasn’t in the right mood for it, though, because the second time I picked it up I fairly flew through it.  Heyer’s characters are delightfully ridiculous, and most of them are completely insipid, but in a good way.  I did appreciate that “They Found Him Dead” had characters that were actually sympathetic, as opposed to “Death in the Stocks.”  However, I did again figure out whodunnit about half way through the book, and this time I even knew why the entire time, as opposed to last time when I was surprised by motive, but not culprit.  Surprisingly, figuring out the ending really didn’t mitigate my enjoyment of the book.

All in all, I think Heyer mysteries and quite delightful, and I wouldn’t mind stocking up on them for fun, escapist reads.

Buy this book from:
Powells.*
A local independent bookstore via Indiebound.*
Amazon.*

This review was done with a book received from Danielle at Sourcebooks.
* These links are all affiliate links. If you buy your book here I’ll make a very small amount of money that goes towards hosting, giveaways, etc.

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They Found Him Dead – Book Review

Related posts:

1. Death in the Stocks – Book Review
2. The Nonesuch – Book Review
3. Serendipity – Book Review

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That’s How I Blog! Tonight!

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3. Bloggiesta Wrap Up