Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Author: Elizabeth Lim Genres: Fantasy, Young Adult Pub. Date: July 2021
After I read and loved The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea, I found Six Crimson Cranes suggested as a similar read and quickly purchased a copy of the beautiful UK edition. Six Crimson Cranes is about 17 year old Princess Shiori and her 6 brothers, who are cursed by their step mother. Her brothers are turned into cranes and Shiori is forced into silence, her identity hidden by a bowl covering her face. She is abandoned far from the castle where she grew up and forced to try and break the curse and save the kingdom.
I did enjoy this. It wasn’t my favourite, but it wasn’t hard to read and was a compelling story. There are lots of really likable characters, it has a creative and intriguing world, and Shiori has a lot of characterization. There’s a lot going on and it made for a compelling start to the novel. Between the dragon and the curse, there’s a lot of action to take in. Although I did think the book struggles with some pacing issues. It starts off quick and it has an explosive ending, but it gets a bit lost in the middle of the book and I found the story dragged once Shiori is cursed. She spends a lot of time at Castle Bushian, and while this is a very important part of the story for character development and relationship building, I really think it could have been trimmed down. At 450 pages, I think this book could easily have been 50-75 pages shorter.
That said, it has a very smart plot, but maybe a little bit too smart. In some ways it’s predictable (I had no trouble guessing who was behind the shenanigans at Bushian Castle), but in other ways it’s convoluted. There’s a lot going on in the kingdom, but limited information is revealed to the reader before the end of the book, which I found confusing and overwhelming after such a slow middle. I will be returning for book 2 once the paperback releases, but I kind of wish this had been a standalone instead. That said, there is definitely some unfinished business, so I’m excited to see where things go in the next book!
I’ve been a fan of Heather Fawcett for years (BC based author!) and I’m so glad to see so much buzz about Emily Wilde this year! If you liked this one, definitely go check out her YA series, Even the Darkest Stars, which I also love. Besides that she has a few middle grade books that are still a lot of fun. I’ve seen Emily described as “cozy fantasy” and I would describe all her books that way.
Because her last few books have all been middle grade, I assumed Emily Wilde was also middle grade. I was delighted to learn that it’s actually her first adult fantasy! It reads a bit more like YA, but there’s definitely some violence in here. It’s very infrequent and not gratuitous, but who knew such handsome faeries could be so casually violent when they get angry.
Anyways, let’s get into it – Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries is set in the fictional country of Ljosland (although Google informed me this is also a small village in Norway). It’s appropriate because Ljosland is a cold, northern country that made me think of Finland or Iceland (or Norway). Emily is a young professor who has been working for many years writing an encyclopaedia of faeries and this is her last field trip to research “the hidden ones”.
Initially she finds it hard to fit in in cold Ljosland and is not sure why the villagers have rejected her. Things get even more challenging when her enigmatic colleague Wendell Bambleby arrives at her cottage and she fears he has come to piggyback off her research and success. However, the two soon discover that there is something nefarious going on between the hidden ones and the villagers and Emily must apply all her research of faeries to help protect the villagers.
This is quite different from most other fantasy novels I’ve read and even though I found it a bit slow moving, I really enjoyed it. I’ve always said that Heather Fawcett is great at creating setting and atmosphere and this novel was no exception. She really excels at writing these desolate, cold landscapes and despite the chill, I love to escape into them. What I liked about this book is that Fawcett trusts her reader to be able to infer information and context without spelling it out for them. This world is very similar to our own world (though set in 1909), with only subtle changes in terms of geography and the existence of faeries. Her world building is strong and I felt like I walked straight into this slightly kooky world that was fully realized without a lot of tedious info dumping. In short – she’s good at showing, not telling. A skill many fantasy authors have not been able to hone.
Emily is a great character. She’s relatable, yet flawed. She’s intelligent, capable, and quick-witted, yet she recognizes when she should ask for help. She makes lots of smart decisions and plays hero to several of the villagers, yet she also makes mistakes and requires a rescue of her own. Despite being set in a fantastical world of faeries, she’s incredibly genuine and believable, which I think will appeal to a lot of readers.
Like any good fantasy, this story also has a side-romance. It’s definitely subtle, but this is one of my favourite types of romances. It doesn’t dominate the storyline, rather Fawcett focuses on relationship building, while weaving a simple element of romance between the characters. Their love is tangential to the story, but makes it so much more meaningful because of it. Any good series author will also weave ongoing plotlines throughout multiple novels, which Fawcett has done, so I can’t wait to see where this relationship goes in the next book.
So overall, there was a lot to like about this book, but I do have some criticisms as well, mostly with the ending. The book moves along at a pretty slow pace – I didn’t mind it, but overall I thought it had some pacing issues. What I didn’t like was how quickly everything wrapped up at the end of the book. I felt like the story ended too quickly and was not resolved. There’s no real conclusion to the conflict the village was having with the faeries and it seemed to me like Emily and Wendell were just disappearing off into the night without accomplishing their objectives. Otherwise, it was a really fun book. I’ll definitely be picking up book 2 when it releases and may now have to get to a few of her backlist books that I haven’t read yet!
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What was the most frustrating to me was how Emily stopped the poisoning plot because “it didn’t feel right”, basically because it wasn’t in line with the faeries stories and she didn’t want to see things ended that way. So instead they run away and leave things even more unresolved in my opinion. As a reader, it just didn’t feel very satisfying. I was hoping to see some resolution in Emily and Wendell’s relationship as well, but that one I could accept because it will be continued in book 2. It doesn’t sound like we’ll be returning to Ljosland, so the poor village is going to be more or less left on their own. Overall, I just felt like I had whiplash from how quickly the story ended and it left me feeling a bit unsettled and incomplete. I would have liked to see a bit more closure to the main plot points. It just felt a bit sloppy.
I started listening to this as an audiobook a full month ago and it took me a long time to get into the story. It’s really slow at first and I found it to be pretty confusing. I felt like the author didn’t give quite enough context or background for the story and I was left scratching my head about what was happening and who all the characters were.
Once things get going, I liked it a lot more. The Bandit Queens is named after real life Indian activist, Phoolan Devi. Phoolan was imprisoned for murdering the men who raped her and eventually went on to be a politician and activist once getting out of prison. Phoolan herself doesn’t feature in the story, but she’s a source of inspiration for the poor Indian village women in a microloan group, who dream of lives without their abusive husbands.
Our main protagonist, Geeta, was abandoned by her husband 5 years earlier and since no one knows what happened to him, many of the women assume Geeta killed him. Some of the women want to be rid of their own husbands and approach Geeta as a sort of hired killer to help murder them. It sounds dramatic, but the author infuses a lot of humour into the story, which changes the tone and makes it read more like Finlay Donovan than How to Get Away with Murder.
Once the plot picks up, I was pretty into it. I love how easy it is for the women to kill because everyone constantly underestimates them and no one expects a few poor little village women to actually be murderers. Either because they think women are incapable of killing, or just too stupid to pull it off. The author tackles a lot of heavy social issues, primarily around how women are still viewed as the property of their husbands in India and that domestic abuse is widespread and marital rape not recognized. There’s also a lot about caste politics in here, but it was a little bit over my head and I’ve read some reviews that it wasn’t that well done.
So I was actually pretty impressed with the second half of the novel until the big climactic scene at the end. I thought the juxtaposition of the author’s humour against social injustice was an effective way to make this book more readable. I know some readers prefer for these kinds of topics to be given the gravitas they deserve, but I don’t think the humour takes away from the impact of the domestic violence they experienced, if anything, centering your story around a cadre of murdering housewives only serves to highlight the ridiculousness of such a patriarchal system.
However, in the last 10% I think the author takes it too far. The climax of the novel veered into unbelievability for me and I felt it was sensationalized for the sake of drama. I hate when authors do this, but I do think it’s an easy mistake for a debut author to make. I think she took the outrageousness too far and it detracted from her initial premise. I believed the women as they stumbled along, trying to figure out how to be rid of their husbands, to protect themselves and their children. But they start to become villainous in their plotting and I couldn’t suspend my disbelief in the final confrontation. Plus, the author gets too heavy-handed with her social agenda around caste and I felt she was telling me about equality and representation rather than showing me. I know a lot of her readers won’t be Indian and that this system may not be familiar to us, but trust us to be able to figure out basic inequality.
Overall I thought the book had an excellent premise, but that the author tries to do a bit too much with it. In some ways it sinks under the weight of its aspirations and the author would have done better to focus her ideas. But overall, not bad, not great. solid 3 stars.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Author: Alice Walker Genres: Historical Fiction, Classics Pub. Date: June 1982
I had an old copy of this on my bookshelf in Newfoundland for years. I can remember starting it, but I don’t think I ever finished it, so I was really happy to return to it with my book club in time for the movie adaptation coming out later this year.
The Colour Purple is an American classic, and with good reason. It’s set in the South from the early 1900’s, to around WWII (roughly 1910-1940). It’s about civil rights, but from a different perspective than we normally see. It’s told in a series of letters written by Celie, an uneducated, poor black girl who lives with her Ma and Pa. After being raped several times by her Pa, starting at 14, her children are taken from her. She’s separated from her sister Nettie, her only friend, and is eventually married off to another abusive man, Albert.
Over the years, Celie writes to God about the injustices she faces, and eventually to Nettie when they are reconciled as adults. It’s an examination of how racism and abuse were still heavily present in the south during this time and how a group of women come to find support in one another to become better versions of themselves.
Most notable is the writing style. Alice Walker writes Celie’s letters from the point of view of a young women with limited schooling, who is confused and overcome by the world around her. It’s extremely hard to read at first, both because of the poor grammar and spelling used in the writing, but also because Celie’s experiences are so unbelievably painful and her confusion around them causes her to become very detached from what happens to her. Celie has such limited ownership over her life that I actually thought the setting was about 100 years earlier, during slavery. However, it becomes apparent pretty fast that slavery was ended in name only and is very much still alive in Celie’s life.
Overall I thought this book was quite radical for when it was published and for the content it addresses. We are introduced to a number of black women and they all bring something very unique to the story. While Celie is very much a victim – we also have headstrong Sofia, confident Shug, compassionate Nettie, and tolerant Mary Agnes. These women move in and out of one another’s lives, but all become a source of support and growth for Celie. Most impactful for me was probably Sophia and Nettie.
I thought Sophia’s story was really interesting because it showcased “modern” slavery and how all it took was for Sophia to stand up for herself once to then wind up in prison for a decade before being forced into indentured servitude. On the other end of the spectrum, I liked Nettie’s story because it showcased the complicated dynamics of being black in America versus being black in Africa and how the two perceive each other. Plus, it examines how sexism is the same on either continent.
So overall, I really liked this. It takes a little bit of time to used to the writing style and I found the timeline really confusing, but it gave me a lot to think about and I can understand why it has become a classic. I’m glad the movie doesn’t come out until the end of the year though because it’s a very emotional read and I don’t think I’ll be ready to revisit the story for another few months.
I’m a huge fan of the Finlay Donovan series. It’s an outlandish mystery series featuring a single mom turned accidental contract killer. Everything that happens is over the top and requires a certain amount of disbelief, but it’s a lot of fun and never takes itself too seriously.
The first book is definitely my favourite, but the second book was a lot of fun as well. Finlay Donovan Jumps the Gun is the 3rd book in the series, but it didn’t feel as anchored as the other books and I found myself questioning at what point this mystery and the out-of-control antics will ever start to become too much?
The first book has closure and is easy to read as a standalone, whereas the third book felt like more of a direct continuation of the second book. I couldn’t remember a lot of details from the second book, but the further you read, the more convoluted the story becomes and it does finally start to enter into the territory of just not believable. Finlay and Vero really push the limits and I thought they were needlessly sloppy in this book. We do get resolution on some of the story points at the end, but we’re immediately propelled into what will form the basis for the fourth book. The longer things go with the same continuing storyline, the harder it is to suspend disbelief that they won’t get caught. It’s easy to see how mistakes can get made and evidence overlooked on one or two occasions, but Finlay is at the center of so much crime that I can only assume at some point she’s going to have a crooked cop working for her.
Which brings me to my next point – I didn’t like the setting of this book. The idea of a citizen’s police academy is just a bizarre concept for me. Is this something they actually do in America? What is the motivation? It seemed like a contrived concept for Cosimano to force all her characters into close proximity, but I couldn’t fathom why such a thing would even exist. The reasoning for Finlay and Vero attending was also weak and felt akin to lighting a cigarette at a gas station. I think the idea could have worked for a portion of the story, like Finlay and Vero attend a 1-2 day workshop with police to try and collect intel, but setting the entire story there really changes the dynamic of the book and turns it into more of a closed-door mystery, which doesn’t work for a runaway train like Finlay and Vero.
More importantly, I’m not entirely sure how comfortable I was with the narrative of policing that’s presented in this book. On the one hand, the fact that Finlay gets away with so much is a scathing indictment of the entrenched injustice in policing; that police can’t see the real perpetrator right in front of their eyes. But the narratives around hyper vigilance and gun-use reinforce the idea that policing inherently requires violence, when a lot of police work could be solved through investing in community and social services instead. In theory, a citizen’s awareness program is great, but that program should be focused on recognizing and providing support to those at risk rather than teaching a single mom how to cuff someone and use a gun. Neither are skills I want the average American perfecting or using as a common citizen and are more likely to lead to more profiling and unnecessary violence from over-enthusiastic vigilantes.
So overall, definitely some problematic elements to this book. It still has a lot of what I liked about the first two though. Mostly that it’s funny and never takes itself too seriously. Vero is easily my favourite character and I was glad to see a primary love interest finally arise for Finlay. I was definitely gunning for these two to be together, but I have to admit, despite all the antics, I didn’t see a whole lot of personal development for any of the characters. But it’s a plot driven novel and if you want something fast-paced, this is definitely it. I will keep reading the series, but I would like to see the author do something a bit different with the next one. At some point I feel like Finlay and Vero are going to have to get caught for something or it feels like there are no real stakes.
The Paperback Princess 