Review: Shakespeare's Landlord

Shakespeare's Landlord by Charlaine Harris
3.5 stars


Reasons for reading: Recommended by Raidergirl; Triple 8 Challenge Mystery list; April book for Every Month is a Holiday Challenge (April 23, Shakespeare's birthday)


First line: "I gathered myself, my bare feet gripping the wooden floor, my thigh muscles braced for the attack."


Summary (from Booklist): Charlaine Harris "introduces Lily Bard, resident of Shakespeare, Arkansas, a woman fiercely protective of her privacy, determined to succeed as a one-woman cleaning agency, and just as fiercely determined to excel in karate. When the unpopular and very nosy owner of the apartment building next door is murdered and the body dumped in the local park, Lily reports the body to the police--anonymously. The local police chief, however, is nobody's fool and quickly discovers Lily's involvement and her own past, which makes her a possible suspect. Given the situation and, since she cleans for many of the other possible suspects, some opportunities, Lily decides that the only way to clear her name is to find the real killer."


My thoughts: Charlaine Harris seems like a very prolific writer - I've had people recommend her for both vampire lit and Southern lit. I think I'll definitely be checking out more of her work, because I enjoyed this book. To me it wasn't so much about the mystery (I didn't really care who had killed Pardon, the landlord), it was about Lily and her relationships with her clients and the other townspeople of Shakespeare. Harris sucks you in immediately, wondering why Lily walks alone at night, why she takes martial arts, and what caused her terrible scars. Lily is smart and sardonic and I enjoyed her progression from being utterly guarded and alone to starting to trust and like other people. We learn about the town and its people (many of whom are suspects) through Lily's housecleaning jobs - ditzy blonde Deedra, whose rent-paying step-daddy wouldn't like to know she's sleeping with a black man; "reformed" drunk and church janitor Norvel, who has a violent streak; hunky martial arts instructor Marshall and his estranged wife Thea, who has a dark side the townspeople have never seen and police chief Claude Friedrich, who's in charge of finding the killer and finds himself intrigued by Lily.

A dark, suspenseful book with an ass-kicking heroine!

Weekly Geeks #1

The challenge, to find and visit 5 new-t0-me blogs from the challenge participants.

1. The 3 R's - Florinda has some fun quizzes up. Apparently we should both live in the suburbs and we're both confident women...sometimes.

2. Reader Rabbit - These sisters love YA books, just like me - yay!

3. SomeReads - Somer is a librarian like me and she recently brought home 45 FREE BOOKS from the Texas Library Association conference. I'm so envious!

4. A Girl Walks Into a Bookstore - Katherine loves two books that I love - Confessions of a Shopaholic and The Thirteenth Tale. I love her blog's title, too!

5. Park Avenue Princess - has lots of pink on her blog, which I'm in favour of, as well as lots of cute icons and a fun, unique book-rating system.

Weekly Geeks

Dewey has so many fab ideas for connecting folks in the book blogosphere!

Click here for full details, but basically it's a weekly blogging challenge, with themes. I love themes! And challenges! (And I love that this is a blogging challenge rather than a reading one because if I join one more reading challenge, my eyeballs may fall out. Yeah, I know, that means I'll probably join another one next week.)

The best part, by writing this post I can enter to win this chocolate monkey! For heaven's sake, people, she's offering a chocolate monkey, how much more fun and cooler could Dewey be? Rush over there right now and join!

Themed Reading Challenge Wrap-Up

Many thanks to Wendy for hosting the challenge! I think this was the challenge that spurred me on to join others this year, especially the Triple 8, as it's all about themed lists.

The challenge was to read at least four books about a single theme. My theme was vampire fiction.

The Books
Bloodsucking Fiends by Christopher Moore
Blue Bloods by Melissa de la Cruz
Real Vampires Have Curves by Gerry Bartlett
Tantalize by Cynthia Leitich Smith

1. What things did you enjoy the most about this challenge?
I really liked that you could pick your own theme and that it could be anything under the sun. It was quite funny going through my TBR list - I'd never have predicted that I'd have enough vampire books to make up a whole theme! But apparently all those Buffy and Angel DVDs have been at work in the book-choosing part of my brain. I also liked that it was flexible - though I decided to just read 4 books, I liked that you could have read more.

2. Favourite book?
Bloodsucking Fiends - it was so hilarious and bizarre.

3. Least favourite book?
Real Vampires Have Curves - it had too much repetition and was too Harlequin-ish for me.

4. Would you do this one again if it were offered next year?
Yes!!

5. Anything you'd change about the challenge?
No, I think everything was great!

Review: Enchanted, Inc.

Enchanted, Inc. by Shanna Swendson
3 stars

Reasons for reading: sounded fun, New York list for the Triple Eight Challenge

First line: "I'd always heard that New York City was weird, but I had no idea just how weird until I got here."

Book description: Katie Chandler, a small-town Texas gal finds that in New York "everywhere she goes, she sees something worth gawking at and Katie is afraid she’s a little too normal to make a splash in the big city. Working for an ogre of a boss doesn’t help. Then, seemingly out of the blue, Katie gets a job offer from Magic, Spells, and Illusions, Inc., a company that tricks of the trade to the magic community. For MSI, Katie’s ordinariness is an asset. Lacking any bit of magic, she can easily spot a fake spell, catch hidden clauses in competitor’s contracts, and detect magically disguised intruders. Suddenly, average Katie is very special indeed. She quickly learns that office politics are even more complicated when your new boss is a real ogre, and you have a crush on the sexy, shy, ultra powerful head of the R&D department, who is so busy fighting an evil competitor threatening to sell black magic on the street that he seems barely to notice Katie. Now it’s up to Katie to pull off the impossible: save the world and–hopefully–live happily ever after."

My thoughts: This was a fun, cute book. The magical elements are super - gargoyles that move from building to building, a below-average-looking man who has all the ladies drooling thanks to an illusion and love spells, and, my favourite part, actual frog-kissing in Central Park. Apparently there are still some princes left out there, you just have to catch them. Although they may also be the result of magical frat-boy pranks. I think this would make a great movie - the imposing MSI Castle in the middle of Manhattan, the fairies fluttering around on the subway - I think it would give Enchanted a run for its money (minus the bursting into song). Katie, with her small-town common sense and business smarts is a heroine to root for. I don't know if I'll read the rest of the series, but for a quick chick lit read with more than a touch of magic, this was a good pick.

Review: Late Nights on Air

Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay
2.5 stars

Reasons for reading: Book club, Canadian author for the Orbis Terrarum Challenge

Book description: "Harry Boyd, a hard-bitten refugee from failure in Toronto television, has returned to a small radio station in the Canadian North. There, in Yellowknife, in the summer of 1975, he falls in love with a voice on air, though the real woman, Dido Paris, is both a surprise and even more than he imagined. Dido and Harry are part of the cast of eccentric, utterly loveable characters, all transplants from elsewhere, who form an unlikely group at the station... One summer, on a canoe trip four of them make into the Arctic wilderness (following in the steps of the legendary Englishman John Hornby, who, along with his small party, starved to death in the barrens in 1927), they find the balance of love shifting, much as the balance of power in the North is being changed by the proposed Mackenzie Valley gas pipeline, which threatens to displace Native people from their land."

First line: "Harry was in his little house on the edge of Back Bay when at half past twelve her voice came over the radio for the first time."

My thoughts: While not as utterly dreary as a great deal of Canadian fiction, this one didn't do a lot for me. I didn't hate it, but overall it felt pretty blah. I really agree with Nicholas Maes' review in Books in Canada:

"Another weakness is that the novel lacks a sense of urgency and forward momentum. Very often, somewhat inexplicably, we are warned in advance that some character's decision will lead to misfortune down the road, or that situation A will cause (dramatic) situation B. Perhaps Hay felt such milestones were necessary because events on their own wouldn't sweep the audience along... Even the romance in the novel is resolved without much emotional fanfare... Eleanor loses Ralph the very day he has proposed to her, and the loss is more capricious than necessary or devastating. Harry has seemingly slipped away from Gwen, but then tumbles into her lap eight years later. This turn of events seems such a matter of happenstance that the reader, while wishing the couple well, doesn't really care one way or another."

That was my feeling through most of the novel, not really caring. It seemed like the novel was made up of too many uninteresting things strung together with a few interesting ones. The Mackenzie Pipeline Inquiry stuff was dull and I never want to read about frozen lakes or herds of caribou ever again.

The foreshadowing mentioned in the review really bugged me - it was so incredibly blatant that it was annoying. And really, after all that buildup, the tragedy is sad but not particularly earth-shattering. I tired of the constant references to John Hornby's doomed expedition (more heavy-handed foreshadowing) and couldn't quite get past the sheer stupidity of novices attempting that journey through the Arctic. I was actually expecting all of them to die.

The characters' relationships struck me as odd quite often. People falling in love rather suddenly, people being attracted to horrid people - it's hard to imagine why every man (and the occasional woman) she met would fall in love with an utter bitch like Dido. She and the loathsome Eddy were made for each other. While I liked both Gwen and Harry, their relationship - with a 20-year age gap and a failed marriage each - did seem "happenstance," almost as though they ended up together because they were the only two left to get out of Yellowknife relatively unscathed.

The radio station parts were well done, especially when Gwen was learning the ropes (I liked how she was enchanted by the tiny little sound-effect door). I'd now like to know more about Yellowknife and I particularly enjoyed the descriptions of the almost endless daylight in the summer Hay does have some really well-crafted passages. To me, the radio station and Barrens trip combined would have been enough for a good story, if they had been allowed to gain more momentum and not get bogged down by extra threads.

But I am not stuffed with fluff

This is pretty darn accurate, I've always related to Piglet. And I'm in agreement about the Very Small Animal problem! :)

Your Score: Piglet

You scored 12 Ego, 20 Anxiety, and 10 Agency!

"It's a little Anxious," he said to himself, "to be a
Very Small Animal Entirely Surrounded by Water. Christopher
Robin and Pooh could escape by Climbing Trees, and Kanga could
escape by Jumping, and Rabbit could escape by Burrowing, and
Owl could escape by Flying, and Eeyore could escape by -- by
Making a Loud Noise Until Rescued, and here am I, surrounded by
water and I can't do anything."

You scored as Piglet!

ABOUT PIGLET: Piglet is a Very Small Animal, who used to live in his own house, a nice big tree. However, after Owl's house was blown over by a storm, he "found" Piglet's house, and Piglet didn't want to tell him that the home was already lived in. So he went to live with Pooh.

WHAT THIS SAYS ABOUT YOU: You are a rather nervous person, and you tend to worry about The Worst happening. You don't really feel capable of dealing with the things that life could throw at you, and so you tend to fret about it. You are one of those people who seems to think that worrying actually accomplishes something... and your friends can't help but love you for it. Your humble manner and self-deprecating ways make your friends feel good about themselves. They want to help and protect you.

Your loving friends are always trying to encourage you to be more independent, and they are right. You need to develop a bit of self confidence and stand on your own two feet.

Link: The Deep and Meaningful Winnie-The-Pooh Character Test written by wolfcaroling on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test View My Profile(wolfcaroling)