Book Review: A Study in Scarlet Women by Sherry Thomas

Book #53 of 2018:

A Study in Scarlet Women by Sherry Thomas (Lady Sherlock #1)

I cannot over-emphasize how much I love Charlotte Holmes, author Sherry Thomas’s take on the famous consulting detective. She’s every bit as genius as the original figure, and Thomas writes insightfully about the restrictive Victorian gender roles that would stifle a woman like that. Charlotte is absolutely brilliant as she invents a brother to bring her talents to the outside world, and her every scene faintly crackles with wit and energy.

The problem is that far too many scenes in this first Lady Sherlock novel are missing our heroine, and the narrative sags in her absence. The plodding investigation of Inspector Treadles is pretty interminable, and it effectively reduces Charlotte to guest-starring in her own book. I hope that’s an issue that Thomas handles better in the sequels, because this story is great when she lets it actually be about Holmes.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff

Book #52 of 2018:

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff

There are reasonable criticisms to be made about Michael Wolff’s inside account of the first six months of Donald Trump’s presidency, and I’m hesitant to trust any particular anecdote within. In general terms, however, the book paints a credible picture of the chaos behind the headlines: a temperamental president who didn’t expect — and perhaps didn’t want — to win the election, a neophyte political staff in warring power centers, and a top-down focus on television broadcast news over traditional White House sources of intelligence and expertise. Overall it feels less gossipy than I had expected, and particularly insightful into Trump’s governing psyche. This is unlikely to go down as the definitive version of the historical record, but if taken with a grain of salt, it’s a surprisingly worthwhile read for anyone looking to better understand this administration.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow

Book #51 of 2018:

Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow

This definitive biography of America’s controversial Founding Father is meticulously-researched, exhaustively-detailed, and above all engaging to read. It really brings the past to life, especially in relating the political struggles that took place after the Revolution as Alexander Hamilton and other patriots pursued different visions of what was best for the new country. Although history has not always viewed our first Treasury Secretary favorably, author Ron Chernow shows him as a man of genius who made an incredible positive impact in his few short years shaping America. The tragedy of Hamilton’s life and death makes for a great Broadway musical, but this book that directly inspired the play is well worth reading on its own.

★★★★★

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Book Review: Page by Tamora Pierce

Book #50 of 2018:

Page by Tamora Pierce (Protector of the Small #2)

I like this book better than the first one, and it definitely has a more engaging climax, but I’m still finding this particular Tortall quartet to be a rather aimless bildungsroman. As likeable as the heroine is, there’s simply not much plot to her story so far beyond getting bullied for her gender and training to become a knight.

I would also appreciate it if author Tamora Pierce could either stop writing preteen girls having crushes on adult men or at least have the common sense not to make those feelings mutual. Young Adult fiction provides models for children to understand the world, and there are some really unhealthy relationship dynamics that Pierce continues to present in a positive, romantic light.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Out of Orange by Cleary Wolters

Book #49 of 2018:

Out of Orange by Cleary Wolters

The Netflix prison dramedy Orange Is the New Black began as an adaptation of a true-life memoir, with the character Alex Vause based on a figure from author Piper Kerman’s past. Out of Orange is that woman’s own account of her time as a smuggler-turned-prisoner, but it’s unfortunately nowhere near as compelling as the first book or the show. Blame the editors for some awkward, repetitive, and disjointed language, but the story itself is also quite slow and often focused on mundane details like the minutia of flight plans or a revolving door of the author’s lovers and pet cats. And since it’s largely missing the advocacy for criminal justice reform that helps make the original Kerman memoir so effective, there’s really not much here to recommend at all.

★☆☆☆☆

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Book Review: Calling on Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede

Book #48 of 2018:

Calling on Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede (Enchanted Forest Chronicles #3)

I’ve liked the first two books in this children’s fantasy series, but this third one is a misfire for me. Its issues might not trouble a younger reader, but the humor is way more slapstick than before, and the new character of Killer the enchanted rabbit takes up far too much space being far too annoying (his catchphrase, repeated ad nauseum: “I’m HUNGRY”). The plot is thin and ends on a cliffhanger, so I just hope the fourth and final book is nothing like this one.

★★☆☆☆

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Movie Review: Ocean’s Eleven (2001)

Movie #3 of 2018:

Ocean’s Eleven (2001)

We had some bad family news yesterday, and when I got home I needed a comfort watch. Enter this movie, which is near and dear to my heart despite its flaws (like Don Cheadle’s atrocious attempt at a cockney accent or Julia Roberts being literally the only woman with lines in such a massive cast). It’s a classic and a franchise-launcher for a reason, and it’s really just an all-around fun heist movie. I really like all the vague references to the previous history these characters share, suggesting that there are early adventures we’ve still never seen. That’s an unusual writing choice, but as with most of the rest of the movie, it somehow just works.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Ship of Magic by Robin Hobb

Book #47 of 2018:

Ship of Magic by Robin Hobb (Liveship Traders #1)

As always, I have mixed feelings about this book and its sequels. On the one hand, you couldn’t ask for better atmosphere in a fantasy yarn of pirates, sea serpents, and talking figureheads, and the rich worldbuilding wonderfully fleshes out an area on the edges of the map from author Robin Hobb’s earlier Farseer trilogy. The characters too are largely an interesting bunch, and by bouncing around among a large cast, Hobb is able to weave a more complicated narrative than the Farseer books could offer.

On the other hand, this first novel’s plot is incredibly slow, and one of its major threads doesn’t even connect with anything until the very end. Other threads, like that of the serpents themselves, effectively go nowhere for this entire book, and although they’ll be important later on in the trilogy, their inclusion here feels rather aimless. Ship of Magic is far from the only fantasy story to suffer these flaws, but they hobble what should be a fun swashbuckling adventure.

[Trigger warning for a budding romance between a 13-year-old girl and a 20-year-old man, and for a sexual encounter between two adult characters who are both high, drunk, and concussed at the time. There’s also a rape that I can recall later on in the trilogy, so readers wanting to avoid that may wish to give all three books a miss.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Book #46 of 2018:

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

This is a stunningly beautiful story that blossoms from a small family drama into a whirlwind of class and racial politics in a wealthy Cleveland suburb. The narrative darts here and there, fleshing out different characters’ perspectives and backstories so that even the most odious figures in the town are at least understandable as flawed human beings. Everything ties together a little too neatly in the end for my tastes — and the less said about the bespoke artsy photographs that speak to each recipient’s soul, the better — but I love these characters and all the ways that author Celeste Ng has found to explore different facets of motherhood through them. Adoption, surrogacy, and simple mentorship can form powerful bonds between young girls and their mother figures, and in Ng’s hands they can be as devastating as the literal fires that give this novel its title.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: How to Stop Time by Matt Haig

Book #45 of 2018:

How to Stop Time by Matt Haig

There’s a lot of potential to this novel about a man aging at 1/15 the usual rate, but it’s sunk by certain elements that feel barely sketched in. Most glaring is the secret society of people with the narrator’s condition, of whom we only ever meet one or two and never even glimpse their supposed enemy. And of course, it doesn’t help that other authors like Anne Rice and Claire North have already written such poignant and gripping stories of functional immortals surviving the centuries to which this book must inevitably be compared. It almost rises to that level at times when our hero grapples with the nature of outliving everything familiar, but on the whole the project unfortunately just doesn’t hang together.

★★★☆☆

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