Wind Spell by Mallory Loehr

Joe, Polly, and Sam find three feathers and a message from the sky right before their camping trip.  They soon meet Athena from Greek mythology and have to go on a quest to help a lonely hero.

Joe is back and worse than ever.  I was almost hoping that he'd be gone for good after the last book.  His defining character traits are not believing in magic, being bossy, and being too good for his younger siblings.  He also believes his memories are dreams.  One has to be pretty far up the Nile without a paddle for that to work.

One good thing that's a constant between these books is that the kids know who the Greek gods are from reading schoolbooks, comic books, and other literature.  Many books featuring Greek mythology assume that the protagonists need to be told who people like Athena and Zeus are, even though a general grasp of the Greek gods is common knowledge, at least in America.

There seem to be no real similarities between the books in this series aside from the characters.  None of the adventures have any relevance on each other, and these three books don't really build up for anything in the fourth book.  The last book will probably be just another unrelated adventure.

Earth Magic by Mallory Loehr

Polly and Sam are off to another adventure.  They find a piece of parchment hidden under a rock that gives them instructions for baby-sitting said rock.  When they bring it home people are surprised to find that the rock can move!  All of the adults are quite blind to the rock moving by anything magical, though.

Remember Joe from the last book?  The characters sure don't!  Reading just this book, it wouldn't even enter your mind that they had an older brother.  I don't think the word "Joe" came up a single time.  Wait, what am I typing about?  Who's Joe?  I don't know what I was thinking....

Instead of Joe, there is Audrey, an annoying but cute six-year-old who follows everybody around.  She sucks her thumb, which is odd for age six, but it is portrayed as normal in the book.  I liked her, but I don't think that just because a new character is added, an old one has to be completely forgotten.

Water Wishes by Mallory Loehr

I found this book, along with its three sequels yesterday.  I had it when I was little, but I never got around to reading the series.  Better late than never.  Water Wishes is about three kids who find a bottle with a piece of parchment in it (I probably wouldn't be able to recognize parchment on sight, and these kids are all younger than me.  They don't recognize anything else beyond their scope on sight.  Their parents must be black market parchment dealers or something.)  The parchment gives them three wishes.  The middle child, Polly, wishes to be a mermaid and become a mermaid for the night.  You'll have to read it to find out what the others wish for.

The three kids are portrayed with a very accurate (at least to my eyes) level of intelligence.  They aren't miniature adults, but they don't all seem two years old, either.  They know about as much as a seven-year-old, ten-year-old, and thirteen-year-old would be expected to know.  Very few books have this quality.

Besides them knowing what parchment looks like, there weren't any of the glaringly obvious errors that plague most children's books.  I enjoyed it and if I had a younger sibling, I'd probably give it to them to read if I liked them.

The Day Boy and the Night Girl by George MacDonald

This book was quoted withing the narrative at least three times, as far as I can recall, in Enclave, so I just had to read it.  Photogen and Nycteris have both been raised by the witch Watho.  Photogen is raised so that he never walks in shadow or sees the night.  He sunbathes often, even as a toddler.  He goes to sleep before the sun sets and awakens before it rises.  Nycteris, on the other hand, grows up in a building that has no light save a single, incredibly dim lamp.  She sees not even moonlight, until one night she follows the route her captor took outside and sees the glory of the night sky and outside air.  They meet each other, and both are scared of the realm of the other.

The night is not inherently bad and the day is not inherently good -- in fact, nothing is really seen as inherently bad.  Watho acts the way she does because she has a wolf trapped inside her head that makes her bad.  The prose is delicious.  It perfectly captures the fairy tale style without sounding stuffy and awkward.  I'm surprised that this gem from the past isn't a lot more popular, and it's certainly worth reading.  An online version can be found here: http://www.ccel.org/ccel/macdonald/daynight/files/daynight.html

The Death Cure by James Dashner

The Death Cure was a brilliant and thoughtful final book to a brilliant and thoughtful series.  Thomas and everybody in group A and group B start out in the main WICKED building, about to receive their memories.  Thomas, Minho, and Newt refuse, and they are led by Brenda to escape.  From there, longstanding ideas in the previous books are inverted as we finally figure out whether WICKED is good.  The twists are constant, and this doesn't feel cheesy.  In fact, some of the best parts were the twists in the very epilogue -- an explanation of the Flare virus surfaces that is much more sinister.

I loved The Maze Runner and The Scorch Trials. This third installment did not disappoint me.  Watch out if you want to see all of the main characters survive.  More than one doesn't.  Their deaths are chilling and heartbreaking at the same time.  In fact, their deaths, along with the death of Chuck from The Maze Runner, drive most of Thomas's actions.  In a world where WICKED could control anything, Thomas becomes incredibly attached to those he holds in his circle of trust.

The one large, glaring flaw in the book was the electricity grenades.  Electricity, as far as I know, does not work the way it does in the grenades.  Their power source would be better described as "magic".  The inaccuracies on electricity make the battle scene in the beginning a lot less harrowing than it could have been otherwise.  However, they are rarely used subsequently, so the author's lack of knowledge about electricity can easily be pardoned in the context of it being a great book.

Enclave by Anne Aguirre

 It has been, as said in the afterword, over 100 years since some sort of disaster (I won't say what) destroyed modern society.  Deuce lives underground in a rule-oriented and almost Spartan culture, where she achieves her lifelong dream of becoming a huntress who brings food and kills off some of the monsters known as "Freaks".  She is assigned a suicide mission with her partner, Fade, by her mean supervisor, Silk.  It turns out the Freaks are getting smarter and may overwhelm the College Enclave soon, but nobody believes Deuce or Fade when they return with the news.  Deuce steps in to save her friend from a horrible punishment, and both Deuce and Fade...

I'll let you read from there.

Enclave is magnificent, aside from a couple of factual errors.  I had fun reading the whole way through.  Half of it is a rich Dystopia, while the other half is a fun adventure.  Every page brings a new wonder to gape at or mull on.  So if I have two large paragraphs about the flaws, assume that this is only because it is much easier to write about the flaws of a book than the merits of one.  If you read Enclave, it will be one of the best decisions you will make.

The characters all spoke two languages.  One was conveyed by the vocal chords, the other by the eyeballs.  Or so it seemed, with the crazy intuition that everybody had.  At one point, the protagonist is wondering if Silk will think of her a certain way if she does a certain thing.   Fade is apparently able to answer her concern because he is able to read all of that from her face.  Did she give it away by twitching her "Silk muscle" too much?  Not to mention that she intuitively knows that "winter" sounds like a cold word and "soul" just sounds like the words she's heard from somebody dead.  If I used that kind of logic, I could just walk up to anybody and speak English with the assumption that they would have an intuitive knowledge of what the words mean.

One of the things that irked me about the book was how wonderfully fresh all of the canned foods were.  The author included a couple of pages at the end where she cited where she got the idea that canned foods would last hundreds of years.  Here is the website: http://www.internet-grocer.net/how-long.htm  This website is interesting.  It has a few stories of canned food lasting decades or, in three cases, over a century.  I don't think she picked up on the fact that those were extraordinary cases.  The website itself says "Now, we're not saying that our canned meats, canned cheese and canned butter will last 118 years, but we're pretty confident that you can get at least a 15-20 year shelf life out of them, in light of this article. (The manufacturer offers a 3 year guarantee.)  There's a second, similar story--this time American--following this one."  Also of note is how one of those extreme examples was from a sunken ship under thirty feet of silt.  The DSV Alvin was a sunken submersible found with completely unsealed sandwiches aboard after about a year that were still edible, though this may be partially attributed to the depth it was submerged at, which was several times that of the example.  In all of the website's examples, the cans were pretty much kept at the same low temperature the entire time.  In the book, on the other hand, these cans are found in New York houses, schools, and stores that haven't had heating in over a hundred years.  They would not still be edible.  On another, related note, I highly doubt that Stalker would have been able to learn to read as fast as he did.

Gaaaaah

No post today.  I don't have my Kindle with me and I've had a lot of schoolwork for a while.

The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells

What a wonderful book!  A brat of a man, prone to increasingly violent temper tantrums, is given the power of invisibility.  He was not a nice man to start with, but the invisibility corrupts him into a sadistic lunatic out to kill.  After all, killing is the only thing he can think of that one can do better when invisible than when visible.


The characters are fun.  Griffin moves from a whiny jerk to a homicidal maniac, partly because of his new found power.  Invisibility is shown to have numerous practical drawbacks.  For example, if he has no clothes on, his whole body, especially his feet, gets incredibly cold.

It reminded me a bit of The Stranger because of Griffin's cavalier attitude to causing others suffering and death.  He never stops to think of others except for to further his own means.  His character development involves him going from a replica of the protagonist of The Stranger to somebody who actively seeks out and enjoys murder.  This one's a classic for a reason.

Nightlight by the Harvard Lampoon

I laughed a lot during the first part of the book, but the laughs petered out as the story went on.  I was in hysterics every few sentences in the first chapter, but as time went on, they seemed to run out of humor.  It was also quite apparent that the authors have never read Twilight, the Wikipedia article on Twilight, or anybody's school report on Twilight.  The only scenes that were decent parodies were the ones based on the parts of Twilight that are now in popular knowledge.  Strangely enough, some slight details were accurately made fun of in the beginning that could only have come from somebody who has read Twilight, but it moves on to a vampire prom masquerade where Belle is wearing a full-body cast.

The character of Belle was one of its strong points.  She's a self-centered Mary-Sue who remains oblivious to everything around her.  I wouldn't say that Bella from Twilight was exactly this, but the humor around Belle's character had some truth in it. 

I moderately enjoyed Twilight, and I was hoping for a parody that would leave me laughing throughout.  It wasn't a bad parody; it just needed a bit more humor in the later chapters.  If you find yourself in a bookstore without enough time to read a full book, this might be a good choice.

Helper12 by Jack Blaine

I'm always a sucker for a dystopia.  Even though the book had romance as its main plot, the setting kept me reading.  Everybody's assigned at birth to a job, usually a horrendous one, and trained to know nothing more than the necessary amount of knowledge to fulfill that job.  They all go home to slums, with each one-room house having a handy video camera in it.  Most of the world is sealed off to them and they only know what they're supposed to.  Helper 12 is one of them.  She has a friend but nobody that she really cares about, until she and one of the babies she presides over are sold to a rich family that lives outside the system, in Society.  They are so rich that they have their own child and are getting a new one.  They experience things like grass and wood and personal servants.

The son of the two that bought Helper 12, Thomas, quickly and for literally no reason at all falls in love with Helper 12.  No reason.  Just "Hey, can you sit at the dinner table with me just because?  Oh, whoops, I fell in love!" There is never an explanation.  Besides that, though, the story doesn't seem to have any major flaws.  It's a good light read for somebody who loves dystopias and doesn't have much time before she has to post in her blog again.

The Sword of Good by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Here's a book that makes you laugh and think at the same time.  The hero of the story is named Hirou.  If you don't get it, try saying it out loud.  He's been transported from modern-day Earth to a fantasy realm that he turns out to be the prince of.  Hirou's weapon of choice is the bluntly named Sword of Good that destroys its owner if the owner doesn't have good intentions.  There's a prophecy involved that he will face the Lord of Dark and be given a choice between Good and Bad.  Of course, Hirou instantly tells his friends that he'll choose good: the options being named "good" and "bad" are kind of a giveaway for him, as well as the bad guy being called the "Lord of Dark" and numerous other blatant wordings.  It turns out at the end that it's a tad more complicated than that, but I'll let you read it and see what happens.  It's an online book, and you can read it here: http://yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good

Up almost until the very end, it delivers wonderful humor.  The last part transitions into high drama that will keep you turning the -- scrolling your mouse until the last sentence is done.  The Sword of Good deconstructs the typical aspects of a fantasy story.  Hirou is able to question the normal fantasy conventions because he comes from our world.  If you were told you'd be given a choice between good and bad and then asked which one you'd pick in the future, you'd say good without hesitation too.  The other characters are all surprised when he does this, too, for added laughs.

The only real flaw I noticed was that it mentions the TV tropes wiki.  I love TV tropes.  I spend hours at a time on it when I'm supposed to be doing schoolwork.  I know almost all of the regular terminology, and I love reading about TV tropes... on TV tropes.  When somebody references a term from TV tropes outside of the website, it never comes off well.  Mentioning the website itself sounds even worse, staining the next few paragraphs with a bad feeling of pretentiousness. 

Except for the single sentence about TV tropes, however, the book was enjoyable, thought-provoking, and amusing throughout.  If you're stuck somewhere with only your laptop and need a good book, The Sword of Good would be an excellent choice.

Undine by Penni Russon

Undine is about a perfectly normal girl who discovers that she has magic powers.  Wow, how new-sounding!  Why is it always the normal ones who get magic?  Her good friend Trout has a crush on her, but she likes his older brother Richard.  This is one of the driving forces of the plot, unfortunately.  I'm not a big fan of romance at all, and watching it be almost the sole focus of part one was boring to read.  Also, do not be misled by the title.  The main character, Undine, is not a sea nymph but a girl.

One of the main points of Undine is Shakespeare's play, The Tempest.  It's mentioned throughout the book, there are characters named after characters in The Tempest, and Trout and Prospero (yes, that's his name) are obsessed with it.  I've never read The Tempest, but I have the funniest feeling that if I do, it will share some remarkable similarities with Undine.

The magic she gets is interesting.  It's called "chaos magic" in the book, but it has nothing to do with actual chaos magic.  The modern tradition of chaos magic is based upon using your belief in something or your desire for something for magical purposes.  In the book, chaos magic is about chaos theory, where small changes in the way something is at the beginning end up causing major differences, especially over long periods of time.  Undine apparently can control small things that happen enough that she can create storms, grow to several times the size of the Earth, and turn dead fish into people.

Undine wasn't a terrible book, but it was definitely below average.  If you see it on the shelf in your library and are attracted by the name or cover, you might want to consider picking up a different book instead.

Three Worlds Collide by Eliezer Yudkowsky

I'm back and better that ever!  If you like it here, you might also want to mosey on over to my other blog, which is the same thing only for music videos.  www.blogger.com/musicvideoperdiem

Today I review a book published on the internet.  You yourself can read it here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/y5/the_babyeating_aliens_18/

It's not a spoiler at all to say that the first aliens that the humans meet eat their own young.  The title of part one is "The Baby-Eating Aliens" and it mentions those aliens in the description.  These aliens spawn thousands of babies and then eat them when they would be preteens as far as development goes.  It's not like the babies they eat are without intelligence, either.  They're about the same as human children.  Is this some strange fanatic sect on this planet?  No.  It's just how the aliens are culturally.  Their word for "good" translates as "baby-eating".  This is a stark contrast to aliens who have moral systems identical to ours and only have a few cultural quirks.  The author even wrote a separate article about how aliens in most science fiction stories are just human counterparts, no matter how funny-looking they are: http://lesswrong.com/lw/so/humans_in_funny_suits/

The book, of course, deals with rationality, something that the entire rest of the website is about.  The interesting part, though, is how different the two sets of aliens are from us.  It's almost hard to imagine living as one of the baby eating aliens or the super happy people, who are the second set of aliens encountered.  I won't spoil it, but I liked the first ending a lot better than the "true" ending, even though the latter was supposed to be the happy ending.  I really didn't see what was wrong with the... alterations.

All in all, it was a good book.  Impeccably written, Three Worlds Collide told a fun story with aliens who will most likely be on my mind for weeks to come as I try to imagine being among them.

The Graveyard Book

The main character of The Graveyard Book, Bod, has brilliant circumstances that make up the entire book.  He himself, however, is a bit of a cliche.  I have been noticing that if somebody wants to really make a clever character in a book, they will make him or her quiet, observant, and full of questions, even though the first and last of those qualifications contradict each other.  Bod exemplifies these traits, just like all of the other characters that are like this in all the other books.  In The Graveyard Book, there seems to ten times the story if one is familiar with all types of mythology.  I am not, but it seemed to be there, just beyond my reach.  I liked the idea of the Jacks as well.  All in all, it has a good premise and has Neil Gaiman's standard wonderful prose, but the main character is a bit too stereotypical for my tastes.

Splash

If you read the back cover of Splash, you'd think that it was a ridiculous book about people killing each other over water guns.  The white chalk outline on the front cover doesn't help, either.  I checked it out from the library because it seemed to have a ludicrous premise.  However, nobody actually gets hurt because of the water gun game in the book.  Splash is fast-paced and fun.  It starts off with far too many characters, but they get eliminated quickly.  While I wasn't exactly gripping the pages with white knuckles, desperately hoping for my favorite character to win, it was fun to see where they would all go.  Once it got down to nine or so players, the action tapered off a bit, but it managed to maintain its pace by introducing a bit of drama.  A decent book overall.

Gone

Janie is very depressed.  This is understandable, considering the events of the book, along with the events of the previous books.  However, it starts out with a vacation scene, where she is getting away from it all, and she's depressed at the slightest things there, too.  For example, when she falls in while water-skiing, she's scared for her life, disgusted with the water, and mad at everybody for making light of it.  The small incident is given as much detail as if she was crashing a plane instead of some water-skis.  Throughout the rest of the book, she tends to be over-the-top unhappy, and though this is sometimes justified, she snaps out at Cabel for no reason every other page.  She also developed a new habit: thinking in circles.  Not just a few circles.  I would expect a tough choice to take up a few pages, maybe even a whole chapter.  People do go over things multiple times when making a hard decision.  Her choice to either isolate herself or stay with Cabel, however, appears to take up more words than the actual plot.  The entire book could easily have fit into fifty or so pages, and seemed to be filled up mostly with whining and her having the same debate with herself over and over again.

Gifted

Gifted appears to be about an extremely Machiavellian boy who learns that being a stuck-up jerk in preparation for future admiration is not as good as being a stuck-up jerk for present admiration.  He flat-out lies several times to further his own ends and is obsessed with two things: himself and revenge on the school bullies.  It's not a dark book, though.  It appears to be quite light and whimsical, in fact.  I actually like that the character is unsympathetic:  it's harder to write and makes for an interesting read.

iDrakula

iDrakula had more fluff per page than any book I have ever read, barring children's picture books.  Most pages had word counts that made Dr. Seuss look like Tolstoy.  The average page consists of an overwhelming amount of white space with a phone in the middle and a text message going on in the screen of said phone.  I haven't read the original Dracula, so I don't know how good of an adaptation it is.  In fact, I don't like adaptations in general, so it's probably a good thing for iDrakula that I haven't read its predecessor.  Expect your hands to get tired of page-turning long before your eyes get tired of word-scanning.

Lost Boys

Lost Boys is both complex and easy to keep track of.  The creep who fantasizes about children and the mentally unstable man who thinks he's a god are both not the serial killer.  I expected it to be one of the two and was pleasantly surprised by it not being either.  Good job for not being predictable, Orson Scott Card.  One of the characters, DeAnne, grated on my nerves whenever the writing was centered around her.  She treated her children like idiots, was unnecessarily preoccupied with keeping them safe (read: not letting the children play near the part of the sidewalk that has a rain gutter on the curb because she's afraid they'll fall in), she got mad at her husband for no reason in particular, and never treated any of her children like human beings.  She is one of the protagonists, and this is seen as a normal, good thing to do.  I'm not quite an adult myself, so maybe I'm a bit biased, but it does not seem correct to act like childhood is analogous to drunkenness: a child is not to be believed or trusted, ever, has to be watched like a hawk to keep from being a complete idiot or getting themselves hurt, and often-times needs to be fed complete lies -- not on sex or graphic violence or anything many wouldn't mind being kept from children, mind you -- because they are too stupid to comprehend even the most simple things.  I really do not like DeAnne.  I read through the entire book hoping that she would be killed off.  Otherwise, it was a wonderful book.  The last twenty pages or so turned the entire plot around. 

Latawnya, the Naughty Horse, Learns to Say "No" to Drugs

I realize that it's not a novel, or the kind of book I would usually ever touch with a ten-foot stick.  However, numerous websites have told me that this is one of the worst books in existence, so I had to see for myself.  Latawnya, the Naughty Horse, Learns to Say "No" to Drugs is about a young horse who feels compelled to copy whatever she sees.  She is lured into the "smoking games" and "drinking games" of the malicious Connie.  Luckily, her two wise sisters see what's happening, and knock the bad stuff out of her hoof.  Did I mention that these horses are drawn realistically and not anthropomorphically?  Their hooves must be made of something exceptionally sticky to be able to lift anything.  The prose is simplistic and repetitive.  The horses themselves consist of the cult of people who use drugs and want to convince others to do likewise and the innocent horse family ready to be led by their wiles if weak enough.  A good read for a laugh.

Pebble in the Sky

Well it's written by Asimov, so of course it's good.  I cringed a bit when Schwartz got telepathic powers -- surely Asimov could have invented something else to achieve the same result -- but it was overall a good book.  It did not so much keep me excited for the next page as the next paragraph.  The story was full of wonderful little details, like how people in the distant future have a different skull structure, fewer teeth, and a smaller appendix. 

Equal Rites

I must admit, I haven't read enough of the Discworld series to truly enjoy this.  It didn't really reference much outside of itself, but I felt as if I would have gotten a much richer experience by having read more Pratchett books beforehand.  It had a good combination of humor and plot, as most science fiction or fantasy humor books really try to hit the readers over the head with humor at the expense of the plot.  I hope to read more Pratchett books in the future.

Timeline

Though I'm reviewing two time travel books in a short time, I usually don't read time travel fiction, because there always seems to be a rush on things imposed solely by the author.  There was a fair amount of this in here, but most of it had the explanation that the time machine would disappear in a day.  The plot was decent.  The technology explanation seemed mildly believable, especially when they threw in facts that most people know.  I loved how they had to struggle with the languages of the time.  Most authors seem to think that people all spoke English centuries ago. 

The Red Badge of Courage

It would be hard to find fault with The Red Badge of Courage.  The main character goes from being somewhat of a selfish brat to a worthy man.  The other characters get jumbled up a bit -- I really couldn't keep track of who was who -- but that seems to be how it is in real life, unless someone has some sort of astonishing physical feature.  I've never even considered participating in a war, so I will trust others' accounts on how realistic it is.  From all that I had heard of it, I expected it to cover a longer period of time, but it put enough emotion and detail in the battlefield to make up for it.

The Stranger

The Stranger is a quirky little book about a man with very few feelings who commits a murder.  Nothing seems to matter to him throughout the book, and he is quite detached from everything else, with a vaguely friendly attitude and a willingness to take whatever is thrown at him.  He cares not for extreme happiness or extreme hatred.  The whole thing has a slightly creepy air to it, but it lacks the passion of many books about murders.  The author must be skilled to pull off a first-person perspective about an amiable young man who cares about nothing and kills a man.  I don't quite know what to make of The Stranger.

The Iron Ring

Why, after the failure of The Arkadians, would I read another book by Lloyd Alexander?  First of all, I am trying to go through the "A" section at my local library.  Second of all, authors can write good books and bad books: I loved Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground, but I consider The Idiot one of the worst books I have ever read.  The Iron Ring acted similarly.  While The Arkadians was a miserable failure, The Iron Ring was quite good.  The only major flaw was that it had enough characters for a book twice its size, which made those characters a little hard to keep track of at times.  Most of the characters, however, were very different from each other, which made it much less painful than the average too-many-characters book.  The story was quite interesting.  I enjoyed the ending and the nature of Jaya came as a surprise for me.  The entire premise, in fact, mesmerized me from the start.  Though many of the main characters seem to have values that are western as compared to the implied rest of the book's populace, it seems to do this less than most other books.  Tamar only starts to dislike the caste system near the end.  This quirky novel fascinates and compels, and anybody who picks it up will certainly want to follow it through to the end.

The Machine Stops

Have you ever read The World Inside?  The first part of The Machine Stops follows a similar story, but it predates The World Inside by decades.  The Machine Stops was a rare and early version of the story of people relying too heavily on a mechanical device, a story that has grown in popularity in years since.  Its prose is unparalleled, and its story provokes both thoughts and emotions.  The book, in 1909, predicted as strange and futuristic of things as teleconferences and social networking.  The mother, Vashti, expresses the traits that we all have and we choose to ignore.  The fact that we ignore those traits is one of those traits, by the way.  The son, Kuna, is the one we all hope survives, but he seems half-mad, and it is unknown whether his hopeful prophecy at the end is nothing more than a delusion.  The religion is also a nice touch.  If you choose to read The Machine Stops, you will come out glad you read this brilliant and deep little novella.

Toys

James Patterson is, quite frankly, a glorified editor.  Let me explain.  You might have noticed that nearly every single book he writes is written by with a coauthor.  He has publicly stated that the coauthor write the first draft and he takes it from there.  This means that the entire story, including every major detail and most of the minor ones, is written by the coauthor, and James Patterson simply makes it look like his style.  I am writing a book.  I know how first drafts work.  Most of the information in a book will be conveyed in the first draft.  He does little more than spruce up (or down) a few details, italicize the important parts, and break the chapters into three pages apiece. 

Now, for James Patterson to have his name in big letters and Neil McMahon's name in letters that are a similar color to the rest of the cover, smaller, and near the bottom, one would think that he did a lot of editing of that first draft.  It should come out bursting with imaginative prose, subtle details, and all the other non-plot things that, though there in a first draft, really start to shine in later drafts in a book.  Not so.  It reads like, well, a first draft.  Details are nonexistant.  I wouldn't be surprised if James Patterson took out the details from Neil McMahon's first draft.  You're supposed to feel for some of the characters, especially the protagonist and Shana (Hey!  That's my name spelled differently!  Why'd you have to make her a slut?), and, I presume, get some real "evil" vibes from the Toyz company.  I certainly didn't.  This is a great book if you are used to flimsy worlds made of cardboard and need every point drilled into your head in blunt phrasing.  Otherwise, stay away. 

On an ending note, I just looked it up, and there is apparently a different cover available for Toys that says that James Bond and Jason Bourne have just been topped!  This is a falsehood.  I didn't put any quotes around this because there aren't any on the cover.  I presume the author himself said it.

This World we Live in

This World we Live in is an imaginative book with compelling imagery.  It may be only becaue I'm partial to dystopias, but I love this book.  The best part is when they find the man who'd been eaten partially by his dog.  The way Susan Beth Pfeffer tells it, you will never get that image out of your head -- which says a good thing for her writing, but it is not the most pleasant of images.

Stardust

Stardust seems not to have been written by human hand.  The words on the pages must have been originally forged by the creatures of Faerie, or even the stars in the sky, and simply dictated to Neil Gaiman.  The story has many interesting and original parts -- there is a boat that fishes lightning -- and seems to run on pure imagination and cause the reader to stop for wistful glances.  I would recommend this book.

Siddhartha

When you read Siddhartha, and you journey with the protagonist through a wild variety of lifestyles, it is unlikely that you will not find at least one part of Siddhartha's life that is not unlike your own.  Siddhartha is about a man who thinks he finds perfection in almost every chapter and seems to find it at the end -- but it makes me wonder if had there been more chapters, Siddhartha would have realized yet again that what he had thought was wisdom was really folly.  The English translation that I read had a quite poetic prose, saying several thoughts in a single sentence.  It was incredible to me that so many things could be expressed in a mere 157 pages.

The Metamorphosis

I've been wanting to read this one for a long time.  It's a book that I've heard much about, and I have before read its famous first line.  The Metamorphosis is beautiful and thought-provoking.  Even as he tries his hardest to make his ppresence better for his family, he becomes more and more something they would be happier without.  Shortly after his death, they happily buy a new apartment.  When he tries to keep his human nature, he doesthe things that disgust his family the most.  This dark tale s a must-read.

Pathfinder

 Pathfinder has its own special brand of logic.  In Pathfinder, things that do not happen influence things that do happen.  Umbo went back and warned Rigg.  Rigg changed his actions.  Umbo then decided that he actually now didn't need to go back in time, because something that had happened when the warning wasn't in place now didn't happen.  It was a bit confusing, but I got the feeling that it broke logic up a bit.  Besides that, it was very well written, with an original storyline and several original elements in said storyline.

The War of the Worlds

This book has been sitting around unread for a while, and I thought I'd finally give it some love.  The War of The Worlds is, even after decades of people writing about similar things, very original and imaginative.  Every paragraph is useful and memorable.  The imagery seems realistic and grand.  The decrease in humanity of everyone near the end is portrayed very well, and certainly much better than most modern books.  I love it.

Chuck Dugan is AWOL

Chuck Dugan is AWOL manages to be lighthearted, yet not blatantly comedic, throughout the whole book, eve in scenes of injury and gunfire. It's not often that you find a book like that. It suffered from every character being every other character -- if you meet somebody new in this book, there's a strong likelihood that they've been mentioned before. Other than that, however, it was a good book. It balances suspense and humor without overdoing either.

This was meant to be posted yesterday.  It did not get posted because of a glitch in the system.

Night

Night, in just over a hundred pages, manages to completely capture both darkness and optimism.  It is about a young Jewish boy taken to concentration camps during the Holocaust.  He is starved and beaten, and, at the very end, he watches his father die.  Night is made all the better by being an autobiography.  I do have a question though.  I mean no disrespect, but when they were starving within an inch of their life and people were dying of hunger consistently in the cattle cars, why did they not resort to cannibalism?  I mean no offense by this question; it just seems the logical thing to do in such a situation.  That minor detail aside, Night was an excellent book that gives a unique perspective on the most terrifying and horrible event in recent history.

Speak

Speak is about a girl who loses and then regains her desire to talk at all after becoming a rape victim.  She goes through high school like this.  I cried at one particulalry poignant scene, where her only friend deserts her to be with a more popular crowd.  There isn't much to really say about Speak, as reading it is really the only way to know about it, moreso than in many other books.

The Arkadians

This is a what could have been a quite complex and interesting story.  It was hampered by two things.  The biggest hindrance was the the writer.  Lloyd Alexander has a thing about the reader always knowing what the motivation of every character is for every action.  Now, that isn't that bad in itself.  An author could really have something like that either way.  It's how he shows each character's motivation that weakens the book: by speech.  Even in the most unlikely ties, the characters will say exactly why they, or in some cases, another character, is doing something.  They can also be quite fond of talking to themselves for the same reason.  The writing style itself also has a lot of room  for improvement, giving this little gem quite early on: "If I didn't know I was awake, I'd think I was asleep."

The second thing that makes this book bad is the ending.  The truly evil baddies are burned in an all-consuming flame.  Fronto, a donkey who takes the whole book up in his quest to be human, is also in that flame... but guess what?  The author stated earlier on that he could also turn back into a human by being burned.  So all is good for the good guys.  Can't have one of them harmed.  That would just be awful, wouldn't it.  There are no less than three mairrages arranged between prospective couples in the book in the last fifteen or so pages.  The almost evil guy who was only a victim of circumstance gets off easy, and the only good guy not mairred seems to be the I-can't-believe-it's-not-a-satyr kid, who is too young.  Honestly, can anything turn out better at the end?  Based on the rest of the book, the ending is completely unrealistic in how happy it is.  The second most ludicrous happy ending I've ever read, rivaled only by Eoin Colfer's Airman.  This book had a decent story, but it was by no means a good book.

Ishi

Ishi was the last of his kind.  What makes this so special is that this is non-fiction, and it shows the history and personality of the last of a Native American tribe.  Ishi went from stone age to the modern age overnight, and this wonderful book tells of both im and his tribe.

Brian's Winter

Brian's Winter, like most survival in the woods stories, is a string of lucky accidents that cause a kid to survive who would have been dead within days.  The whole thing would have been a lot more complicated, for example, had he not had that extremely accurate shot on that moose.  The prose, on the other hand, is excellent, and seems quite close to human thought without being hard to read.  Unfortunately, it doesn't really make up for the fact that he gets by mostly on luck.

M is for Magic

Neil Gaiman's book, M is for Magic is, like all short story collections, hit-or-miss.  However, it is mostly hit.  The Case of Four and Twenty Blackbirds was one of the misses.  Books with a serious or modern tone that use fairy-tale and nursery rhyme characters have been done before, and often.  This one used characters from far too many nursery rhymes to be a good read.  It was like reading the little stories at the back of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: a lot of references just thrown out there trying to sound cool or funny, but quite tedious for somebody who doesn't know every single one.  Troll Bridge was a masterpiece.  Though a tad vulgar, it conveyed a deep message.  It had a feel to it of taking place in a world many times richer and more soulful than our own.  Don't Ask Jack was unmemorable.  It had a plot that has been done by several authors several times, and Neil Gaiman's rendition of it didn't exactly knock me out of my seat.  In fact, though I read it only a few hours ago, I had to look it up to refresh my memory.  The plot of How to Sell the Ponti Bridge was fantastic and well-thought out.  The only problem was the frame story: the Rogue's Club could have been left out entirely and it would have made the story much better.  October in the Chair was fun.  This one had both a good frame story and good main stories.  Even though it was not the main attraction, I particularly enjoyed the small story about the airport security guard.  Chivalry was hilarious.  The little details about sir Galaad giving pony rides to the neighborhood children and how the apple felt to the old lady made the story all he better.  The premise was incredible and original as well.  The Price had an exciting premise, but it could have been told better.  It definitely should have been longer.  I think I'd have liked it more from the perspective of the cat.  I've read Gaiman's work before, and The Price has little of his way with details.  How to Talk to Girls at Parties was hilarious, though the main character's friend seemed unusually dark for a humorous story.  His rough way with girls was shocking from beginning to end.  I was fascinated by the girls' stories.  The story, though small, was bursting with ideas, as if Gaiman had hundreds of them and wanted to stuff in as many as he could, which was not a bad overall effect.  Sunbird was a good read.  It was better than the average short story, but was not a masterpiece for Gaiman.  The Witch's Headstone was beautifully written, and by the end, I still couldn't tell if the witch was good or bad.  Most of the elements were either completely made up or taken from mythologies that I am not familiar with, so it was wonderful to read something fresh that hadn't been done hundreds of times, like most books and short stories seem to be.  Instructions probably belonged in another book.  I don't know what to make of it.  I would review it similarly to The Case of Four and Twenty Blackbirds, but I'll give it the benefit of the doubt by saying that it belongs in another book.

Abarat: Absolute Midnight

Hello.  My nme is Shannah McGill, and I read a book every day.  I've been reading a book every day for years.  This blog will review, every day, one book.  Enjoy!

Always remember before reading my review: I WILL put spoilers, if you were planning to read that book.

Today's book is Abarat: Absolute Midnight by Clive Barker.   I haven't picked up an Abarat book in a long time, so this one had to refresh me on all of the characters, settings, and problems of the last books.  It did so reasonably well, and without one of those "explanatory chapters" som series like to put at the beginning.  It also had none of the obvious "recap dialogue" which is another favorite of some authors.  What I love about the Abarat is the lack of werewolves.  Unfortunately, there are dragons, but those are pretty much the only creatures that have been thought of before.  Most books seem to love to use magical creatures that have already been invented centuries ago and are extremely overused.  The Abarat, on the other hand, has geshrats, orange humanoids with large flaps of skin on their heads and four small horns.  One of my favorite creatues is the Johns, a person with enormous horns sticking out of his head with eight speaking heads sprouting from them.  Absolute Midnight gave a lot more attention to my favorite character: Christopher Carrion.  I love the story of the tender-hearted soul who is the youngest of a great dynasty of evil.  Christopher Carrion looks fierce, surrounding the lower half of his head with a liquid in which nightmares swim, but this dazzling and fearful lord of midnight is softspoken when not in battle.  This book does have its problems, though: especially a certain problem named Gazza.  Many book series these days have fomed the ugly hab it of getting a wonderful story going and then wrecking it by putting romace in.  I do not read romance novels.  They are boring and revolting, filled with kissng and pet names and all of that junk.  When a normal novel gets a romantic subplot, I cringe.  It could be a wonderful adventure, but no.  Gazza has to be the love interest.  There is no reason for him to be a love interest, or for a love interest to form anywhere in the series for Candy.  The fact that Gazza starts out as a scoundrel pointing a knife at Candy makes it all the more ludicrous.  Another flaw is the similarity of Rojo Pixler beingtaken over by the Requiax and Zephario Carrion beingtaken over by the Nephauree.  What's the likelihood that within an extremely short time, TWO people will be taken over by Lovecraft-style evils that hate all life?  The author, I assume, thinksthat it would be good writing to have that happen and then have it as a "theme" where they are "contrasted", when all it really does is take away from the coherency of the beautiful Abarat. 

Despite those setbacks, Abarat: Absolute Midnight is a good book overall, with colorful chracters and unique pictures splashed throughout.