A Cast of Stones

A Cast of Stones by Patrick W. Carr is both his first novel and the first book in The Staff & The Sword trilogy.  It is an epic fantasy set in a world where the church is second only to the king, though seemingly not by much.  Errol Stone, the village drunkard, is paid handsomely by a church messenger to deliver a package to Pater Martin, a priest who lives outside the village, on the other side of some challenging terrain.  Errol knows the way like the back of his hand, but surefooted as he is, he runs into trouble when he realizes he is being followed by a man in black who apparently wants him dead.  He makes it to the cabin, but only just barely.  This would only be the first in a long string of instances where he likely wishes he had never volunteered to deliver that package, because he ends up becoming a reluctant member of a small party setting out for the city of Erinon - the seat of both the kingdom and the church - and his life is never truly his again.

Rescuing the Children: The Story of the Kindertransport

Rescuing the Children:  The Story of the Kindertransport by Deborah Hodge is a non-fiction book about the Kindertransport movement; this was an heroic effort made to evacuate as many Jewish children as possible out of Nazi-controlled Europe just before World War II really started.  This is a part of (pre)-Holocaust history that, sadly, not many people are aware of.  In 1938, nine months before war was declared, things were getting more and more dangerous for European Jews.  Hitler had what seems like almost everyone convinced that the Jews were to blame for their hard times, and these people reacted with hatred and violence.   Many tried to escape as refugees to other countries, fearing the worst for themselves and their families if they stayed any longer in their native countries - but many were refused entry.  The Great Depression gave governments an excuse to bar these people from seeking a safe haven, by being concerned that what precious few jobs they had available would go to these new immigrants rather than to their own citizens.

Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, was the real catalyst, though, for the birth of the Kindertransport movement.  Mobs of Hitler's followers destroyed Jewish-owned properties, including homes and places of worship.  Jews were killed, and many were arrested and sent to concentration camps.  Jewish parents were faced with what was probably the hardest decision they would ever have to make in their lives:  sending their children thousands of miles away to be taken in by strangers, not knowing when or if they would ever see them again.

Craving

Craving by Kristina Meister, the first in her Apocalyptic series, is a sort of urban fantasy detective novel with a heavy philosophical bent.  Lilith Pierce flies from her home in California to make her estranged sister Eva's final arrangements after getting the call that Eva has committed suicide.  When she goes back to the station the next day to collect Eva's body, however, it turns out the last few days were a vision --- they never actually happened.  Eva once told Lilith that "everything means something," and with that in mind, she is convinced that there is more to her sister's death than meets the eye.  With the help of her sister's shelves of handwritten journals and a soon-to-be-retired police detective, Lilith begins to investigate Eva's life, and with every step, she finds herself becoming more and more directly involved in the mysterious underworld Eva left behind.

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Sorry for the crazy delay in getting this review up, everyone!  School and things have been keeping me occupied and blogging got a little shunted to the side for a while, but I am back!  This might be running a little more slowly for a while, but I hated being on my unexpected hiatus, and I hope to not be inactive for such a long time again.

Anyway, so I finished Craving quite a while ago, but sitting here and thinking about it to write this has brought the story and the character pretty easily to the front of my mind again.  The philosophy/spiritualism is a little on the heavy side for some, I think, so it would certainly not be everyone's cup of tea; it wasn't preachy exactly, but if you're looking for more of a "mindless" read to just kick back and get through, I don't think I'd recommend this one.

That being said, I rather enjoyed Craving, in part because it ended up being very different from what I'd expected.  Based on the sisters' names and on the title, I thought this would be a Judeo-Christian morals in disguise kind of thing - Eva and Lilith?  Yeah.  Not very subtle, or so I thought.  But most of the philosophy in the book centers around Buddhism, which is something I honestly don't know too much about, so if anything is inaccurate, I wouldn't know.  It all sounded very well-researched to me, so either way, it made for some fairly rich storytelling.  The vampire element was interesting and because of the nature of the rest of the plot, Meister has given the reader an "unconventional" take on that niche that might be at least a little more palatable to vampire "purists" than the sparkling variety presented by Meyers in the Twilight saga.

Beneath A Rising Moon

Beneath A Rising Moon, by Keri Arthur, is the first book in her Ripple Creek Werewolves series.  In the version of the world Arthur has created, humans and werewolves coexist, albeit maybe not too harmoniously.  Werewolves live in their own towns (reservations), there are certain measures upheld to control the werewolf population (basically, the males get some kind of birth control injection), and laws which apply to humans also apply to werewolves.  The werewolves do, however, have their own branch of law enforcement to deal with their own kind:  the rangers.  And it's a damned good thing, too.

So basic werewolf lore tells us that the full moon is a pretty big deal, and Arthur sticks to this.  The nights leading up to the full moon, everyone is more and more attuned to their wolfiness.  In Ripple Creek, Colorado, the Sinclair mansion outside town becomes the red light district; masked and clad in either nothing or next-to-nothing, they participate all night, every night of the moon phase in what is known as "the moon dance."  It seems to be akin to the idea of some kind of sexy pagan festival honoring the moon goddess.  There are centuries-old rules and rituals associated with it, and basically in this entire book, any time you see the word "dance," they are talking about sex.  Dancing = Sexing It Up.  Reverend Moore would have a heart attack.

Anyway, Neva Grant is part of the golden pack in town; telepathic and a powerful empath, she can use the energy from her own feelings and the feelings of others as a sort of psychic weapon.  Her twin sister, Savannah, is a ranger who has been investigating what appears to be a serial murder case; Savannah's determination and tenacity on the job has landed her a room in the ICU, unconscious, and Neva has made a vow to the moon to catch her sister's attacker.  Her plan for continuing the investigation is crazy and potentially dangerous, both to her physical person and her reputation in the pack.

The main lead in the case is the fact that the murderer is a silver wolf, which means the Sinclair family, the head of their silver pack, is at the top of the suspect list.  In fact, they basically make up the entire suspect list.  Their reputation in town among the more conservative golden pack doesn't help, either.  Word is that Duncan Sinclair, the most lascivious of them all, has returned after a ten year absence, and the easiest way Neva figures to gain access to the mansion is to seduce Duncan at the dance.  Once in, everyone else will be too occupied with copulating to pay attention to her snooping.  

What she didn't figure on, however, was the way she would react to him.  To his touch, his scent, his voice...to every part of him.  He seems to be living up to his reputation, though, so to allow herself to feel something for him, to hope that there could be more to their relationship than just the moon dance, would be crazy.  But it's too late to back out now...her sister is hanging on by a thread, and more women could be killed if this case isn't resolved.

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I received this as an eBook from NetGalley, and it's actually the first eBook I've ever read.  I think I picked a good one!  Ha.  I'm a big fan of romance novels, whether they're good or so-bad-they're-good, and I really enjoyed this one; I read it straight through in one night.  The only other werewolf books I've read were Alisa Sheckley's Abra Barrow duology, and while I thought there was a lot of sexytimes either happening or being referred to in those books, this one has those beat.  If you are one of those people who skims along and skims along in a romance novel, just to get to the juicy bits, you might like Beneath A Rising Moon.  The smut begins early in the first chapter and is pretty constant throughout the entire book.

12.21

Released just this month, Dustin Thomason's 12.21 is a novel about...you guessed it...the end of the current Long Count of the Mayan calendar.  We're in Los Angeles, and it's two weeks before the date that's been designated to be the end of civilization as we know it; even with all the hype the "2012ers" are making about the alleged prophecy, things are pretty much business as usual.  Until Gabriel Stanton, a prion expert for the CDC, gets a call from a resident at a hospital in East L.A.:  she's got a patient whose symptoms she can't pin down as anything known, but which are remarkably similar to the extremely rare prion disease, Fatal Familial Insomnia.  It doesn't take long to determine that this was serious, and needed to be contained.

The only problem, however, is that the patient doesn't speak any English.  Chel Manu, a linguistic researcher at the Getty Museum, is asked to act as translator, and as soon as she's told what he is saying, she agrees immediately.  A Guatemalan American, her academic specialty is in Mayan epigraphy, and she has recently acquired (under the table) a complete codex from the classical period.  A priceless artifact academically and an equally priceless piece of her people's history, and the hospital's new patient with the mystery illness seems to be connected to its discovery - the one word he keeps repeating is the Mayan word for "codex."

Before they know it, they're racing the clock to follow clues in the codex to the origin of the disease; without the origin, a successful treatment can't be made, and the infection is rapidly becoming an epidemic of epic proportions.  Could this be the collapse of civilization the calendar is thought to predict?

The Homecoming of Samuel Lake

The Homecoming of Samuel Lake is a truly lovely debut novel from Jenny Wingfield.  We're in a small rural community in mid-1950s Arkansas; every year, the Moses family has their reunion at John and Calla's home.  It was tradition.  And every year, Samuel Lake would drop off his wife, Willadee Moses, and their three children.  He couldn't stay himself, because every year he had to attend a convention where all the Methodist ministers would find out where they would be preaching, and therefore, whether they would have to move.  The Lake family moved a lot, because Samuel had his own way of doing things that didn't quite meet eye-to-eye with the church and his congregations.

This summer, though, everything begins to change, and not always for the better.  Samuel has faith that God's plan is at work underneath all the apparent misfortune, but that doesn't make it any easier when things gradually start to go from bad to interesting, back to bad, and then about as bad as you might think it could possibly get.

A lot of the focus of the story is around Swan, the Samuel and Willadee's spunky 11-year-old daughter.  Her brothers, Noble and Bienville, are endearing in their own ways as well.  Noble is only 12, and still plays with his brother and sister in their extremely imaginative and enthusiastic games of make-believe, but he is also beginning to think about being a man.  Bienville is a reader with a scientific kind of curiosity.

I could go on and on about every character in the novel, to be honest (Just Plain Honest, not Moses Honest), because I really felt that I had a good sense of each one.  And those I didn't know as well, I wanted to.  I didn't feel that any of them where caricatures; they are all complex, which brings them to life in a way that makes them seem very real.  My favorites, though, would have to be Swan and her uncle, Toy Moses.  I probably fell a little bit in love with him, actually, which maybe is a little weird.  But so what.  As for Swan, I sincerely hope that if I ever have a daughter, she would be just like this little girl.  She's a good-hearted child with a lot of spirit.  She's just not enough of a handful to be what I would consider "naughty" or bratty, but she's enough of a handful that you know she will grow to be a strong, independent, confident woman one day.

It's Time: Writing on the Wall

Pavel Kostin's It's Time is a somewhat philosophical novel set in contemporary urban Russia.  Max is a young man working as a night watchman who doesn't do much besides work and hang out around the city with his friends, a small group of street artists.  At the book's opening, Max is sitting on the edge of the roof on a tall building - there seems to be a sort of panic below him on the street, but Max is rather calm.  He isn't up on the roof alone, either; a strange and beautiful young woman who calls herself "Lady F" appears near him and they chat.  After this, she shows up throughout the story at the most random moments.  Mysterious and a little cryptic.  Max and his friends contemplate life, the future, and art, and Max tags along as his friends tag the walls of the city.  Every blank wall is a potential canvas, and the city is their gallery.  

This might sound so far like some kind of pretentious hipster philosophy, a beatnik novel for this generation.  When I read the synopsis on LibraryThing (I received the book through their Early Reviewers program), I kind of expected some sort of modern day Russian La Bohème.  That isn't quite what I got, though.  Honestly, the very beginning was a bit slow.  Boring, almost.  It took me a little while before I really got into it.  

And then things get more and more weird, and the rest of the book had me questioning at every turn whether what was happening was real or whether Max was hallucinating.  Lady F keeps showing up and the questions just pile on until at a certain point, I couldn't put the book down until I'd finished it and found out what in the heck was going on.  Things ended up getting very strange, yes, but also rather interesting.  Much like with Julie Cross's Tempest, I'm unsure just how much I can even say without ruining some twist in Max's story.  The philosophical discussions and comments in the book are worth considering as well; some of them are quite poignant, sometimes so much so that they made me stop and really think for a moment, not about the story exactly, but about what was just said and how it does or does not seem to really apply to my own life and my own experience.

Sophie and the Rising Sun

Sophie and the Rising Sun by Augusta Trobaugh is a short, sweet, and simple romantic novel taking place during World War II.  Part of the story is being told by Miss Anne, a kind and quietly unconventional woman; she doesn't know all the details, however, so the rest is filled in for us.  The story is of Sophie, a woman raised by her strict mother and aunts, and whose only real indiscretion being her love for a young man who never returned from the Great War.  Then there is Mr Oto, a first-generation American who was sent from California to New York with funds to bring back a relative who had come over from Japan.  He loses the money, but too ashamed to face his family, he makes his way south, where he ends up in the small town of Salty Creek, Georgia.  Mr Oto is a soft-spoken and respectful gentleman, and soon becomes friends with Miss Anne, who has hired him as her gardener.  Every day as he works in the flowerbeds, he sees Sophie walk by the house, and it is not long before he is completely infatuated with her.  The two grow very close over time, as they meet every Sunday in the same spot by the river to paint.  

Things change very quickly, though, when the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor.  Everyone in town except Miss Anne and Sophie have been under the assumption that he is Chinese, but they know it likely won't be long before the growing anger toward the Japanese causes them to react anyway.  He is already not the most well-liked individual, what with being colored in the pre-Civil Rights South, and Miss Anne fears for his safety.  She makes a plan to hide him, and makes up a story that he's gone to Canada to be with his family.  The lies weigh heavily on her, and Mr Oto wonders whether he will see Sophie again.

Yesterday's Dead

Yesterday's Dead by Pat Bourke is a middle grade novel set in Toronto in 1918.  Meredith Hollings is a 13-year-old girl who must leave her small hometown of Port Stuart to become a maid for a doctor's family in Toronto.  Her father left and was killed in the war, and their family's store isn't bringing in quite enough.  She regrets having to leave school, since she dreamed of becoming a teacher someday (and who will hire a teacher who didn't even go to high school?).

Meredith decides, however, that her time in Toronto will be an adventure, and she may just get a little more than she bargained for with that.  The rest of the household staff are mostly pleasant - kind Mrs Butters runs the kitchen and helps her to feel more at home; Forrest, the chauffeur and sort of jack-of-all-trades for the house; Mrs O'Hagan, who doesn't live in the house, but comes to clean and do the laundry.  Mrs O'Hagan's son, Tommy, is also very nice, and he offers to show Meredith around the city on her day off.  Parker, the butler, on the other hand, is not very pleasant at all.  He seems to find fault with everything Meredith does, and is generally a grouch.

The members of Doctor Waterton's family are perhaps a different story altogether, apart from the doctor himself.  The eldest, fifteen-year-old Jack, is a flirt who teases Meredith every time he sees her; Maggie, who is Meredith's age, is a brat with airs of entitlement; the youngest, Harry, is a handful - he's always getting into something, mainly the sugar.

Despite some of the difficulties, Meredith is doing her best and doing a pretty good job, but when the Spanish influenza sweeps through Toronto, it doesn't skip the doctor's house.  Meredith has her work cut out for her trying to get all the regular housework done while also taking care of the members of the household who have fallen victim to the flu.  The doctor is detained for days at the hospital as waves of people are brought in, and he's ordered them all to quarantine themselves inside the house - no one goes in, no one leaves - to try and keep anything from spreading even further.  He doesn't know, however, that nearly everyone in the house is now ill, and Meredith is running the place nearly on her own.  People around the city are dying every day - will she be able to maintain everything in the house until Dr Waterton gets back?  She's been relatively lucky so far, but with all their lives in Meredith's hands, what will happen if she also falls ill?

The Darkening Dream

Andy Gavin's debut novel, The Darkening Dream, takes place in Salem, Massachusetts in 1913.  If you think this is a book about puritans and witches, however, think again.  It is so much more, although the location's infamous history does figure into the story in interesting ways.

Sarah Engelmann, the teenage daughter of a rabbi, begins to have unsettling dreams and also hears the sound of a horn being blown, even when awake.  These strange dreams take on new and even more unsettling meaning when Sarah and her friends - twins Anne and Sam Williams, and their new Greek classmate, Alex - discover the body of a young man, whose corpse bears what appear to be what Sarah discerns as evidence of some kind of ritual.  She turns out to be correct, when they see the dead boy again after his funeral.  Alex reveals himself to have quite a knowledge of the undead, and the foursome become determined to find and destroy the vampire who turned him (after dealing with him first, of course).  

The plot thickens and faith is tested as they find that they have gotten themselves involved in something much more complicated than simply the arrival of a centuries-old vampire:  he is in league with gods of the Egyptian pantheon, who want the Archangel Gabriel's trumpet, and a powerful warlock with a demon lover who has the ability to travel between celestial realms.  Deep secrets are unveiled and Sarah becomes attuned to her faith in ways she never knew possible, and with the help of her father, she uses what she's learned to help her friends in the battle they are now desperate to fight.  The stakes have become very high, and Sarah's dreams are becoming more and more disturbing.  Will they be able to stop the forces they have pitted themselves against?  Are they even ready to pay what it might cost them to win?

Come In and Cover Me

I received my ARC of Come In and Cover Me by Gin Phillips through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.  The book is set to be released on 12 January, so keep an eye out!  Because my copy is an uncorrected proof, things may have been changed for the finished version (though I hope not too much, because I really enjoyed this book!)

Come In and Cover Me follows Ren, an archaeologist who specializes in pottery.  When Ren is in the field, the sites speak to her, but it isn't just the passion for the work - she can see ghosts of people who once inhabited the site, and they sometimes point her in the right direction for somewhere to dig, or can give her clues as to the interpretation of a find.  Her colleagues believe she has incredible intuition, that she just gets a feeling about a place, and leave it at that.  She's never told anyone what she sees, though she's an extremely private person in general anyway - she's closed herself off since the death of her brother in a car accident when she was twelve years old.

It's because of one of these ghosts that she has made such a big name for herself, when she was led to the location of some intact Mimbres bowls, all seemingly made by the same person.  When items turn up at a different site that also appear to have been made by Ren's artist, she is invited to come take a look.  Working in the canyon is Ed, a colleague and former mentor; Paul, the landowner's son, who is interested in possibly becoming an archaeologist himself someday; and another archaeologist, Silas Cooper, who has a knack for identifying bones.  Ren and Silas are drawn to each other, but while Silas is ready with a story or an anecdote whenever the opportunity presents itself, Ren is extremely guarded.  She's also preoccupied with the ghost of her Mimbres artist coming to her again in the canyon; at this site, though, she's joined with another ghost - the Parrot Woman.

Ren tries to piece together the story of these women, but Silas wants some pieces of Ren's story; can she let go of her ghosts and allow herself to be close to someone tangible?

Tempest

Tempest by Julie Cross is the first book in what will be a trilogy about a young man, Jackson, who can time-travel.  It is an innate ability he has, and the only people who know about it - or so he thinks at first - are himself and his science-geek friend, Adam.  He and Adam do "experiments" to try and learn as much about the physics and the concept of time-travel as they can, and Adam encourages Jackson to keep a journal of notes about each "jump."  One thing they have noticed from these experiments is that nothing Jackson does when he goes into the past ever changes the future - their present.  But when two men burst in on Jackson and his girlfriend, Holly, in her dorm room, everything changes.  They seem to know who he is and what he can do, and Holly is shot.

Jackson jumps, but something's different, because this time he can't get back.  All he can think about is trying to get back to 2009 to save Holly, but not knowing how, he is determined to learn all he can about his abilities.  What he ends up learning is that there is much more going on than he ever could have imagined - and much more is at stake than just Holly's life.

Winding Down October

It's Halloween, which means October is very close to being over.  Which means it's time for a wrap-up post!

This month, I participated in the Spooktacular October Paranormal Reading Challenge, hosted by Marie at Ramblings of a Daydreamer.  Basically, to participate, you just had to read and post a review of at least three paranormal-themed books throughout the month of October.  And bonus, there is to be a giveaway once the challenge has officially closed!  Anyway, for this challenge, I read:  Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling, The Becoming by Jeanne C. Stein, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters by Ben H. Winters and Jane Austen, and The Better To Hold You by Alisa Sheckley.