cannonball read / review 05 / Room by Emma Donoghue

What a fabulous book. If you don’t know what it’s about, I’m not about to spoil it for you, since everything from the first page on is a series of discoveries, shadings of meaning, uncovering of truths, and peeling back of layers.

Powerful, moving, often shocking, and quite rewarding, Room is the kind of story that could only work as a novel. (Maybe a graphic novel. Maybe.) Emma Donoghue’s careful doling out of information - visual, emotional, historical - takes care of the reader while keeping the pace steady and the twists plentiful.

I give this one four stars - not an all-time favorite, but certainly unlike anything I’ve read. See it at goodreads.

cannonball read / review 04 / What-the-Dickens: The Story of a Rogue Tooth Fairy by Gregory Maguire

I had to skim this one just to finish it. Definitely another “Maguire blowing cigarettes in my face” experience, unfortunately. This oddly long childrens’ book builds a mythology around the Tooth Fairy: there are actually thousands of them, and the true name for their people is the Skibbereen. (I know. So… cute.) We follow the journey of an orphan Skibberee, named What-the-Dickens, as he learns there are more little creatures like him and tries to find a community that’ll accept his odd ways.

The only thing that actually kept me reading was the story around the story - the whole thing’s framed as a story told to three frightened children by their cousin/babysitter during an apocalyptic storm. I wanted much more apocalyptic storm and much less dumb tooth fairy story.

This book gets one solitary star… for the hope of a potential sequel where the resourceful young girl has to strike out on her own across the ruined country to save her baby sister. See it at goodreads.

cannonball read / review 03 / The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan

“Yer a half-blood, Percy.” - nobody in this book, at least not literally

Harry Potter’s obviously changed the world of fiction for the better. (Hey, anything that gets non-reader kids to love books is cool with me. Except Twilight.) I can’t help but wonder, though, if Harry Potter hadn’t been written, would the world of YA fiction be a little more, shall we say, diverse?

I mean, it must be hard, as a talented writer of books for young people, to stand up to one’s editor and say “I don’t want to write a story about a young boy who discovers he’s The One and has to battle a series of magical creatures alongside his plucky young lady friend and hapless young guy friend. I want to write about anything else.” But kids and Chosen Ones and magic are now a proven formula. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying Rowling wrote the book on this formula - ha, ha - but she certainly brought it front-and-center recently.)

I’m late to the Percy Jackson party, so as a very brief summary to the six of you who haven’t read the books - and without really spoiling anything - Percy is a precocious though academically troubled twelve-year-old who learns over the course of one magical summer that the world is much grander than he imagined, and that he must play a special part in saving it. He teams up with Annabeth, an athletic and brave young woman with daddy issues, and Grover, a shaggy well-meaning teenager, to travel across the country and unravel the mystery behind a brewing war before it’s too late.

The Lightning Thief was a quick (I mean it - 377 pages in just under four hours, which was fast, even for me) and enjoyable read. It’s the first in a series of five (plus a book 4.5, plus some Silmarillion-like companion volume) which has its own sequel series of five that’s only partway released. (Plus a 2010 movie directed by Chris Columbus [who directed the first two Potter films] which didn’t even make back its budget, despite which a second movie is in development. But I digress.)

If I had a twelve-year-old kid of my own who had finished the Potter series and wanted a little light reading as a cool-down, I’d certainly point her to this. It’s not particularly challenging - academically, linguistically, morally, or otherwise - and I’d imagine any young critical thinker would see all the major plot points coming a long ways out, but it was fun. I appreciated Riordan’s relentless didactic drilling of ancient history, Greek and Roman mythology, and his tongue-in-cheek treatment of their role in his version of our world.

The book gets a solid three stars - not exceptional, but if you’re a fan of the oh-so-Potter-popular “smart kid saves the world” genre, certainly worth four hours of your time. See it at goodreads.

cannonball read / review 02 / Matchless by Gregory Maguire

I didn’t grow up celebrating Christmas. And while I’ve gotten into the holiday spirit by learning carols and the appropriate pop tunes, there are certain stories, like The Little Match Girl, that just never made it into my life in any meaningful way. So perhaps this book and I were never meant to get along.

I’m developing an interesting sort of relationship to Gregory Maguire’s work. Wicked is one of my all-time favorites, a read-it-every-couple-of-years classic. I quite enjoyed Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, as well as Mirror, Mirror, and Lost is totally bizarre and meandering but still has enough of that Maguire je ne sais quoi to make it a good, compelling read. On the flip side, the Wicked sequels (Son of a Witch and A Lion Among Men) were terribly disappointing - though I’m holding out hope that Out of Oz - on my list for this year - will be good.

Maguire’s like a boyfriend who flew me to Paris for a whirlwind, once-in-a-lifetime weekend, and then bought me a few crepes… and now just blows cigarette smoke in my face. It’s hard not to pick up the phone when he calls… what if he wants to go back to Paris?

I didn’t like this book. One star for the illustrations. See it at goodreads.

cannonball read / review 01 / The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks

I’ve read a lot of Iain (M.) Banks (much of it while falling in love with my then-college-boyfriend, now-husband, who adores the guy), but have been remiss in recent years on keeping up with his science fiction.

The Algebraist, like much of Banks’s sci-fi, is a dense character-driven epic complete with alien races, warring cultures, interstellar travel, and humor - lots of humor, actually. (Not as much as Hitchhiker’s.)

To summarize, briefly: Fassin Taak is a human, a Slow Seer at the court of the Nasqueron Dwellers. (This sentence will take some unpacking: Seers are anthropologists of sorts, doing decades-long slowed-down field research within the atmospheres of gas-giants in various planetary systems, the inhabitants of which are Dwellers, a race of super-old, crazy-intelligent, somewhat-eccentric yo-yo-shaped beings. Nasqueron is the gas giant that Fassin has visited for most of his career at the start of the book.) His former schoolmates, Saluus Kehar and Taince Yarabokin, are a successful industrialist and a naval vice-Admiral, respectively. Two hundred years after Fassin unwittingly finds an artifact that might unlock a vastly powerful secret, the bad guys (or are they?) are headed to Ulubis (Nasqueron’s system, which also contains ‘glantine, Fassin’s home planet). The good guys (or are they?) likewise begin to converge on Ulubis, and, well… the shit hits the fan, as it were.

Banks’s talent, to me, is being able to handle the micro and macro at the same time: to tell a story about a rebel force of a thousand ships attacking the Summed Fleet of the Mercatoria (think The Empire) in a world where the use of AI has already come and gone, where aliens are our friends, and still be able to drive a story through the hopes and fears of a few incredibly well-drawn characters.

I very much enjoyed the book. Banks is a master of the medium - his pacing and structure, the deliberately sequenced revelation of secrets, weaving of themes, and, as mentioned, his use of humor take good care of the reader. Though don’t be surprised if he kills off a main character or two - the galaxy’s a big and dangerous place.

This one gets four stars from me - a solid read. See it at goodreads.

So I’m doing the Cannonball Read this year and put a bunch of books on hold. They just started coming in. I will consider in advance my late fees as donations to the Seattle Public Library.