February Books
Mar. 1st, 2012 03:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
slemslempikeThe Maker's Mask - Ankaret Wells
The Hawkwood War - Ankaret Wells
Two's a Crowd - Diana Gregory (Sweet Dreams)
Lights, Camera, Love - Gailanne Maravel (Sweet Dreams)
Three Cheers for Love - Suzanne Rand (Sweet Dreams)
Miss Timmins' School for Girls - Nayana Currimbhoy
Break No Bones - Kathy Reichs
The Amber Cat - Hilary McKay
Dolphin Luck - Hilary McKay
Beginner's Love - Norma Klein
It's Not What You Expect - Norma Klein
Give and Take - Norma Klein
Mariana - Monica Dickens
French Postcards - Norma Klein
Love is One of the Choices - Norma Klein
A Dragon in Class 4 - June Counsel
The Making of a Marchioness - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Still really liked The Maker's Mask and The Hawkwood War on the second read. One of the reasons I re-read was that I realised I'd read the main epicon character (epicons are both male and female) as almost entirely one sex, and wanted to see what I could get out of changing my thinking on a second pass. Interesting. The books are SF (I guess? I'm not too good at genres - Jen once explained it to me as SF has spaceships and Fantasy has elves, and these books have no elves, few spaceships, and a grue), mainly focusing on Tzenni, who is a second sister of three trying to prevent said sisters from starting wars and messing everything up. If you have an e-book reader, the first book is £2.55 on Amazon - I mention this because I've been recommending it to people already, and also because Ankaret is a friend and I think her work deserves a wider audience. (Not just because she's a friend. I mean, if her books were rubbish I wouldn't recommend them because then I'd have to have awkward conversations about why I'd told other people to read them.)
More Sweet Dreams! Especially enjoyed Three Cheers for Love, where girl meets boy from a rival cheering squad at camp, and then he has difficulty being a sore loser when his football team loses, but it all gets sorted in the end after someone in her school pours red paint into his megaphone and humiliates him in front of the whole field, but then he is a good sport about not getting people expelled. In Lights, Camera, Love, the girl is an actor in a soap, and has to deal with moving to a new school and trying to make friends, having her first on-screen kiss (her first kiss EVER!), and fitting in her new boyfriend. In the end something has to give, and she gives up a trip to the Caribbean with the soap in order to spend more time with her boyfriend OH GOOD.
Miss Timmins' School for Girls is set in a girls' boarding school in India, which used to be run for Anglo-Indian girls, but is now for Indian girls. Most of the teachers are white (and all are expected to agree with the (mostly) unspoken idea that White British is best, and the main teacher narrator (it switches) is one of the few Indian women there. There is lesbian love, murder mysteries, and friendship. Very good.
I need to take a substantial break from Kathy Reichs, I think - I am finding the books dull and formulaic. Break No Bones also suffers from being about an ongoing archaeological issue, with lots of Information shoehorned in at every opportunity.
The Amber Cat and Dolphin Luck are th sequels to Dog Friday. It features a largeish family, as with Exiles and Cassons, but this time they live next door to the "main" people, who are a single mother and only child, who live comparatively sedately. I find these books very quiet-feeling, in comparison to the other series, nice, but not terribly exciting or hilarious. (Though Sun Dance is great.)
Ah, Norma Klein. I suddenly decided I needed to own all the possible teen books she'd written, and went on a buying spree, thus contributing to my designation of March as "buy as little as possible" month. ("As little as possible" is open to some very generous interpretations, but will not include buying books that are not hard to get on a whim, or buying a sofa or some paint.) It was still a good decision though. So far all the ones I've read seem to involve girls getting pregnant, and some suspicion of how that happened (they were silly not to take more care, or they were duplicitious), which is a little odd. Also I didn't realise that French Postcards was a book of a film until I finished it, which explains why it is WEIRD and oddly lacking in characterisation. And a bit crap.
Mariana was good - I think I've read it before, but possibly not right the way through. Horrid Denys is horrid, and I enjoyed her deeply unsuitable attempt at the stage and the ending burlesque. I also thoroughly enjoyed The Making of a Marchioness - Emily was nice without being too insipid, and the relationships between all of the women were fascinating. (The men were less interesting and less well-drawn, but then it wasn't really about them.)
I had a signed copy of A Dragon in Class 4, from when I was little, which I then lent to a youthful family friend, who never returned it and when I inquired of her mother when I could have it back, was told that she wouldn't have borrowed it from me as she had her own copy BUT THAT'S NOT TRUE. Anyway, I have not given up on my grudge, but I have given up on getting my book back and so bought another copy. And I still like it very much. Scales is a young dragon who meets Sam on his way to school, and ends up living in a cardboard cave in Class 4's classroom. He needs lots of P&G (praise and glory) and helps people with spelling and stories, and makes Ivy and Tina be friends by giving them dragon dolls.
The Hawkwood War - Ankaret Wells
Two's a Crowd - Diana Gregory (Sweet Dreams)
Lights, Camera, Love - Gailanne Maravel (Sweet Dreams)
Three Cheers for Love - Suzanne Rand (Sweet Dreams)
Miss Timmins' School for Girls - Nayana Currimbhoy
Break No Bones - Kathy Reichs
The Amber Cat - Hilary McKay
Dolphin Luck - Hilary McKay
Beginner's Love - Norma Klein
It's Not What You Expect - Norma Klein
Give and Take - Norma Klein
Mariana - Monica Dickens
French Postcards - Norma Klein
Love is One of the Choices - Norma Klein
A Dragon in Class 4 - June Counsel
The Making of a Marchioness - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Still really liked The Maker's Mask and The Hawkwood War on the second read. One of the reasons I re-read was that I realised I'd read the main epicon character (epicons are both male and female) as almost entirely one sex, and wanted to see what I could get out of changing my thinking on a second pass. Interesting. The books are SF (I guess? I'm not too good at genres - Jen once explained it to me as SF has spaceships and Fantasy has elves, and these books have no elves, few spaceships, and a grue), mainly focusing on Tzenni, who is a second sister of three trying to prevent said sisters from starting wars and messing everything up. If you have an e-book reader, the first book is £2.55 on Amazon - I mention this because I've been recommending it to people already, and also because Ankaret is a friend and I think her work deserves a wider audience. (Not just because she's a friend. I mean, if her books were rubbish I wouldn't recommend them because then I'd have to have awkward conversations about why I'd told other people to read them.)
More Sweet Dreams! Especially enjoyed Three Cheers for Love, where girl meets boy from a rival cheering squad at camp, and then he has difficulty being a sore loser when his football team loses, but it all gets sorted in the end after someone in her school pours red paint into his megaphone and humiliates him in front of the whole field, but then he is a good sport about not getting people expelled. In Lights, Camera, Love, the girl is an actor in a soap, and has to deal with moving to a new school and trying to make friends, having her first on-screen kiss (her first kiss EVER!), and fitting in her new boyfriend. In the end something has to give, and she gives up a trip to the Caribbean with the soap in order to spend more time with her boyfriend OH GOOD.
Miss Timmins' School for Girls is set in a girls' boarding school in India, which used to be run for Anglo-Indian girls, but is now for Indian girls. Most of the teachers are white (and all are expected to agree with the (mostly) unspoken idea that White British is best, and the main teacher narrator (it switches) is one of the few Indian women there. There is lesbian love, murder mysteries, and friendship. Very good.
I need to take a substantial break from Kathy Reichs, I think - I am finding the books dull and formulaic. Break No Bones also suffers from being about an ongoing archaeological issue, with lots of Information shoehorned in at every opportunity.
The Amber Cat and Dolphin Luck are th sequels to Dog Friday. It features a largeish family, as with Exiles and Cassons, but this time they live next door to the "main" people, who are a single mother and only child, who live comparatively sedately. I find these books very quiet-feeling, in comparison to the other series, nice, but not terribly exciting or hilarious. (Though Sun Dance is great.)
Ah, Norma Klein. I suddenly decided I needed to own all the possible teen books she'd written, and went on a buying spree, thus contributing to my designation of March as "buy as little as possible" month. ("As little as possible" is open to some very generous interpretations, but will not include buying books that are not hard to get on a whim, or buying a sofa or some paint.) It was still a good decision though. So far all the ones I've read seem to involve girls getting pregnant, and some suspicion of how that happened (they were silly not to take more care, or they were duplicitious), which is a little odd. Also I didn't realise that French Postcards was a book of a film until I finished it, which explains why it is WEIRD and oddly lacking in characterisation. And a bit crap.
Mariana was good - I think I've read it before, but possibly not right the way through. Horrid Denys is horrid, and I enjoyed her deeply unsuitable attempt at the stage and the ending burlesque. I also thoroughly enjoyed The Making of a Marchioness - Emily was nice without being too insipid, and the relationships between all of the women were fascinating. (The men were less interesting and less well-drawn, but then it wasn't really about them.)
I had a signed copy of A Dragon in Class 4, from when I was little, which I then lent to a youthful family friend, who never returned it and when I inquired of her mother when I could have it back, was told that she wouldn't have borrowed it from me as she had her own copy BUT THAT'S NOT TRUE. Anyway, I have not given up on my grudge, but I have given up on getting my book back and so bought another copy. And I still like it very much. Scales is a young dragon who meets Sam on his way to school, and ends up living in a cardboard cave in Class 4's classroom. He needs lots of P&G (praise and glory) and helps people with spelling and stories, and makes Ivy and Tina be friends by giving them dragon dolls.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-03-01 04:11 pm (UTC)And I so empathise with the book grudge, though I am also guilty of still having in my possession several of someone else's Babysitter's Club books. They belonged to the sister of Best Friend Of Yore and after our 'break-up' I wasn't quite sure how to return them. (I am still feeling guilty about 18 years later.)
Interesting about the male+female character: I wrote a non-gendered character which one reviewer said came across as male, when I'd had to keep stopping myself from writing 'her' rather than 'hir', so I have personal experience of the fact that they don't necessarily come across as you thought they would. What DID you get out of changing your thinking, incidentally?
no subject
Date: 2012-03-01 04:40 pm (UTC)I got a clearer idea of which the key triggers are for me to assign gender - clothing, names, actions, and also when I was noticing my changes in thinking, how difficult I found it to maintain a similtaneously male and female character in my mind - and how sexuality influenced that.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-01 04:18 pm (UTC)I kind of want fandom to find the books just so that I can see whether they accuse Innes of being a Mary Sue, a Gary Stu, or both.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-01 04:37 pm (UTC)You so-and-so
Date: 2012-03-01 09:01 pm (UTC)Re: You so-and-so
Date: 2012-03-01 09:19 pm (UTC)Re: You so-and-so
Date: 2012-03-01 10:45 pm (UTC)Thanks for recommending it, I'm really pleased to have found it and for it to be so different to what I'd have expected, too!
Re: You so-and-so
Date: 2012-03-02 03:24 pm (UTC)And - has Ankaret self-published it? I imagine so, based on the publisher name and the fact there are very few Google hits for her name & publisher name, and nothing official as far as I can see. Good for her, if so - though she might like to try submitting stuff to things like the Clarke award sometime, and that does need to be the publisher that does it - dunno what happens if you self-publish in that case.
How very odd!
Date: 2012-03-02 08:47 pm (UTC)Fabulous stuff and many thanks again for the recommendation!
no subject
Date: 2012-03-01 09:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-04 06:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-02 12:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-04 06:50 pm (UTC)I have just started another Norma Klein, and am wondering if it's going to hold true for this one too.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-14 01:15 pm (UTC)