Apocalyptigirl: an Aria for the End Times

Wow, two books in one night with me having nothing really to say! I found Andrew MacLean's Apocalyptigirl: an Aria for the End Times at work today. I'm not going to lie, I took it out because there was a girl and a cat on the cover. I wanted to see an apocalypse story with a cat companion. And in that regard, Apocalyptigirl didn't disappoint.

But beyond that, I didn't really get much else. Aria and Jelly Beans are trying to find a powerful relic (and fix up an old mech?) Two groups of people are fighting each other; one of them takes an interest in her after she kills their hunting dogs (in self defence). A third bunch of people caused the world's problems; they show up later for some reason and start blasting. Aria is from a fourth people (I don't know who, or really why they wanted the relic beyond "it is super powerful.") Honestly this was a weird story. With all the exposition Aria gave, I feel like I should've had a better idea of what was going on than I did. The art style was fun though. Although even with that, I had a hard time following a lot of the action.

So yeah, that was Apocalyptigirl.

Compost: the Natural Way to Make Food for Your Garden

I don't really have anything to say about Ken Thompson's Compost: the Natural Way to Make Food for Your Garden.  My parents started composting just before I moved out.  It was great to have so much less garbage.  So I started composting this summer, too, and wanted to learn more about it.  And while Thompson's book wasn't really that technical, the stuff he said about Carbon to Nitrogen (C:N) ratios really didn't stay with me (it didn't help that I was falling asleep the night I started reading this).  The main thing I took from his book was the end sentence: "Even if you do everything wrong, you will still make decent compost eventually."  What a great sentiment for someone like me who is new to composting.  :)

Strong Female Protagonist Book One

I'm still trying to power through my stack of Macleans magazines (I've got 3.5 to go) but I realized I was getting sick of them.  So I read Strong Female Protagonist last night.  It's about Mega Girl (Alison Green), a biodynamic girl who is invincible and super strong.  She was fighting monsters and giant robots like a superhero, which was fun until a mind-reading super villain named Menace showed her evidence of a sinister conspiracy where biodynamic individuals who would have been able to genuinely make the world a better place had been killed. 

So she has quit being a superhero (publicly unmasking herself) and has instead enrolled in college.  But she's having a hard time because she's different and everyone knows it.  Her philosophy teacher failed her paper because he doesn't think she can understand the human condition, and when she complains about this the professor is fired; the school doesn't want to risk angering her.  And of course it isn't easy to just quit being a superhero.  When one of the villains she incarcerated finds out where she is, he shows up to fight her in the middle of the school.

Then Alison goes to visit a biodynamic friend named Feral and discovers Feral is going to make an incredible sacrifice.  That's when Alison realizes that saving the world is going to take even more that she thought it would.

I loved how the characters were very real and flawed individuals.  Especially since these biodynamics were all fourteen year olds when they got their "powers."  They made mistakes because they weren't grown up yet (and ended up pulled from their families).  This was a very real look at what might happen if superheroes became real.

Strong Female Protagonist is a very deep and thought-provoking read.  It's awesome that they got Book One published through Kickstarter; I hope to see more books in the future!

Learn Twitter in 10 Minutes

I got a few books on social media from the library today.  I wasn't originally going to take Lynn C. Schreiber's Learn Twitter in 10 Minutes because I wanted something a little more advanced.  But in the end I figured why not?  It promised to be a quick read, which seemed like a great introduction to Twitter, which is exactly what it was.  Schreiber covers all the basics, from signing up to following people and using RTs, MTs(modified tweets, something I didn't know), and hashtags.  This is a great book for anyone new to Twitter.

Troubled Waters

When I was visiting Chapters awhile ago with my brother, Sharon Shinn's Royal Airs caught my attention.  It sounded like a standalone story, so I didn't mind reading it.  But knowing it was book two of her Elemental Blessings series kind of bothered me. So at the first chance I got, I picked up the first book, Troubled Waters.

Earlier this week I realized I had to write a book review.  Having not read anything for a few weeks besides Macleans magazines (my brother has been giving them to me and I'm quite behind on reading them), I decided I should read a book fast.  I was thinking of reading The Secret Country by Pamela Dean, but I found myself really, really wanting to read Troubled Waters instead.  For one thing, I've read only short stories by Shinn and have been wanting to read one of her novels for some time now.  For another, her Elemental Blessings novels really appeal to me right now: if I get super into the series, there's currently only one more out, which I have (unlike with her Samaria series - if I start Archangel and love it, I'll have to track down the other four books!)

So Troubled Waters is about Zoe Ardelay, a girl who has spent the last ten years living in a small village with her father, a former royal advisor.  After her father passes away, the new royal advisor, Darien Serlast, arrives to inform her she has been chosen to be the king's fifth wife. 

On their journey to the city, Zoe is a shell of herself, still deeply grieving her father's very recent death.  But when they arrive in the city, she seizes a moment to disappear, staying with the other people who live alongside the river.  Slowly she begins to heal, making a life for herself there.  But she knows it is only temporary, for she will have to decide what she will do.  For she is born of one of the Five Great Houses, and she knows she will not be content to live by the river forever.

But then she makes an even more astonishing discovery - she is the heir to her mother's family, a secret that has been kept from her her entire life.  And so she goes to reclaim her heritage.  A heritage that means she will have to return to the city, the King's court, and to Darien Serlast, but this time as the prime of a powerful family. 

I wasn't sure what exactly I was going to get out of Troubled Waters.  I've basically just given you the summary of the back of the book.  But honestly, that pretty much gets you halfway through the book.  The second half of the book is actually a court drama that Zoe is thrust into the middle of.  What made it super interesting was not only the schemings of the king's four wives and the presence of Darien Serlast (a man of wood and bone, who was totally at odds with Zoe's water and blood heritage and personality), but the way Zoe was able to play the court games even after having been living in exile with her father for ten years.  She didn't really care about a lot of what was going on, but she was playing the games anyway, mainly because she had to - she is now the head of the Lalindar family and needs to keep up their position.  But she's also part of the Ardelay family, and wants to bring them back into favour with the court and the king.

Shinn's worldbuilding was quite awesome - I loved the world of the Elemental Blessings.  This is a world where the number five is incredibly important.  At birth, a child's father goes up to three strangers to acquire three random blessings for the child, which come from the five elements (or if the child is extremely lucky, from the sixth set of extraordinary blessings).  Most people have a main element that they have an affinity to, be it water/blood (coru), wood/bone (hunti), fire/mind (sweela), air/soul (elay), or earth/flsh (torz).  This tends to be quite pronounced in the Five Great Families.  The head of each family also has extraordinary power, being able to command the element they have an affinity for.  So in Zoe's case, she can call water to do her bidding, she will not drown, and she can actually feel the make-up of anyone's blood if she can touch their skin.  The seasons are also organized into five, which are also named after the elements (Quinnelay, Quinncoru, Quinnahunti, Quinnatorz, and Quinnasweela).

Oh yeah, and you can wander into a temple and pull random blessings during a day.  These blessings can help give you direction for what's going on in your life.

I also really liked that all the people in this book is that they all felt real: they were all flawed human beings in their own way.  Oh, who am I kidding?  I actually liked Troubled Waters so much that it made its way onto my favourites shelf on Goodreads, something that doesn't happen all that often (the last book to make it there was Elizabeth Bear's By the Mountain Bound, which I read in January).  The characters were believable, Shinn's descriptions were great, everything was great.  Troubled Water was exactly the sort of book I expected from her after reading the couple of short stories by her (especially after being blown away by "Nocturne" four years ago) I'm only sorry that I've put off reading a novel by her for so long!

Where is my Sister?

Well this is it, the last book in Scott Butcher's Fairly Stillwart Chronicles, Where is my Sister.

Where is my Sister was an extremely odd book in the context of the Fairly Stillwart Chronicles.  Stillwart disappears very early on in the story, and remains mysteriously absent for the majority of the book.  Appleblossom and all of Stillwart's friends and family are left worrying about Stillwart for seven years.  Appleblossom and Nightwood, the pixie knight who was sent by Queen Pridella to bring Stillwart home, look for the missing Stillwart.  But Appleblossom is forced to abandon the search because she has been absent from the South too long; as Queen of the Southern Fairies, her people need her to come home.  Nightwood agrees to continue the search for Stillwart; Appleblossom hears from him for a few years, but then he, too, disappears.

Out of these three new stories in the Fairly Stillwart Chronicles, Where is my Sister was hands down my least favourite.  To explain why, I'm going to give a spoiler warning here.  So if you haven't read the stories in The Fairly Stillwart Chronicles: Volume 2, don't keep reading this post.

Stillwart is gone without a trace for seven years, the length of time that the Magic Sisters (the daughters of the helpful human) are serving the Morrigan.  At the end of their servitude, they bring Appleblossom some visitors from the North: Stillwart and company!  It turns out Stillwart made a deal with her brother to avoid the war he was starting in the North.  He agreed to surrender to Queen Pridella if Stillwart disappeared.  During these seven years, Stillwart has been helping the Morrigan.  But her brother decided that Stillwart doesn't have to stay hidden anymore, and so she has come back home to the South and to her heart sister, Appleblossom.  Stillwart is also taking her place as the Queen of the Southern Pixies, which she always has been, even if no one realized it.

One thing that I liked about Where is my Sister is that I didn't have a hard time keeping track of characters.  In my first two posts about The Fairly Stillwart Chronicles: Volume 2 (Tory Blithe and the St. John's Pixies and The Hidden Chronicle), I noted that this was a bit of a problem because there were a ton of characters around all the time.  Where is my Sister dialed back the number of characters who were around, which was a really good thing.   

One thing that I really disliked about Where is my Sister is that the majority of the action is just told to us after the fact.  Sure, Appleblossom and Nightwood spend some time looking for Stillwart at the beginning of the story.  But Nightwood (and Stillward herself) only tell Appleblossom and the reader where Stillwart has been hiding after the fact.  We aren't shown any of it.  We don't even get to see Nightwood's quest to find Stillwart because the narrator of this story is Appleblossom.  Appleblossom was a fine secondary character, but as narrator (especially of this particular story) she falls short: she ends up going and living her life, worrying about Stillwart but ultimately being unable to look for her.  A better choice of narrator would have been Nightwood, who was actively searching for Stillwart.  Or even Stillwart herself.

Another thing that I really disliked was that like in Tory Blithe and the St. John's Pixies, we don't get to see much of Stillwart.  This time I felt like we saw far more of the Magic Sisters than we saw of the fairies and pixies, which was really unfortunate; I was reading this series for the spunky Stillwart and company, not for the magical humans. 

So unfortunately, as much as I loved the first few books in the Fairly Stillwart Chronicles (especially A Pixie Pilgrimage and The Scotti and 'Fairies Don't Exist'), I found the latter three, and in particular Where is my Sister?, to be disappointing. 

The Hidden Chronicle

I started reading the fifth book in the Fairly Stillwart Chronicles, The Hidden Chronicle, and found myself rather confused. Tory Blithe and the St. John's Pixies ended implying Stillwart and company would finally make it to the Northern Pixies and that Stillwart would take her place as their princess. But the prologue of this book says that didn't work out and so instead she is working at the library in Tintagel as a scribe. This was a bit of a letdown. But I do admit that I was curious to see how this happens.

This time, Stillwart and company decided to visit Tintagel before going to the Northern Pixies with the fairy grains; they need to look for information on the Morrigan. The Morrigan is the most powerful banshee, so Stillwart thinks the Morrigan will be their best shot for undoing some of Tory Blithe's magic (in particular, making Lucy and Phoebe human again). Of course, the Morrigan is also the most fearsome magical creature in existence, so Stillwart's friends agree to help her out with this quest. In total, seven royal pixies and fairies and their entourages seek Tintagel with the help of their human allies.

But Tory Blithe has other plans for them. Having escaped St. John's, Tory has made it to Europe ahead of Stillwart and company. He has managed to raise a new army of pixies and is determined to stop Stillwart. 

Once again, I did have a hard time keeping all the characters straight. But it was nice to see a bit more of Stillwart this time around. This is the first book that has Stillwart as the narrator; it was interesting to see things from her perspective for a change.  Although I do believe having the chronicle narrated by Stillwart herself meant The Hidden Chronicle lacked some of the comedy (in the case of Appleblossom harassing the human narrator of books 2 and 3) and the extra characterizations (like how Belinda was able to look back on her earlier experience and acknowledge she was wrong) that earlier books had.

I'm not at all sure what's going to happen in the final book of the series, but I do think that Stillwart and company will finally meet Queen Pridella of the Northern Pixies. Luckily I don't have to wait to find out! I'm also very interested to see who the narrator of Where is my Sister? will be.