christianreader | March Books (Reply)

Lucifer's Companion by Juliet Blyth
I ordered this thinking it was the sequel to her "The Parfit Knight", but either Amazon mixed up the summaries or I got confused - all those rakish dukes in Regency romance novels run together after a while! Even though it wasn't the book I was looking for, I adored it. A rakish duke rescues a damsel in distress and accidentally ruins her reputation, so decides to pass her off as his ward in order to stop the gossip. Very fun and reminds me of some of Patricia Veryan's lighter books, like Men Were Deceivers Ever.

The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey
I'm not usually a big fan of sci fi, but I flipped through this one while I was processing it and put myself on hold just to find out what happens. I thought it was very good, one of those books you can't put down until you get to the end and so I ended up reading the whole thing in a day. It's creepy and claustrophobic, with the alien drones constantly circling and the terror of not knowing who to trust, since they aliens look just like humans. I was a litle disappointed to get to the end and find out it's the beginning of a series, but it's YA, so that's only to be expected.

The Host by Stephenie Meyer
Certain parts of The 5th Wave reminded me of The Host, so I had to re-read it. I'm not going to get on my Stephenie Meyer soapbox again, but I really do love this book.

The Fairy Thorn by Dorothy Keddington
Flower of the Winds by Dorothy Keddington
I can't remember who, but I was reading someone's blog and she included Dorothy Keddington in a list of her favorite authors, along with Mary Stewart. So I thought, Hey, no one who likes Mary Stewart can have bad taste in books! Oh boy, was I wrong. I mean, they aren't terrible. But they're so cheesy and silly and everyone falls in love at first sight and every time they eat something it's described in great detail and the heroines talk like middle-aged women instead of girls in their early twenties. The writing style reminded me a lot of Colleen Houck's, actually, with the trying-too-hard to describe everything.

The Chocolate Temptation by Laura Florand
Laura Florand remains hit-or-miss for me. When she announced that Patrick's book was next I got really excited (I loved him in The Chocolate Heart), but now that I've read it I'm pretty underwhelmed. It was too rushed, and the whole conflict could have been resolved in about five minutes if the characters had just talked. It seemed like for every line of dialogue there were five paragraphs of either Patrick or Sarah thinking out their interpretation of what was just said, or what just happened. Not a very exciting book, in the end.

Shadows by Robin McKinley
I know this might be book blasphemy, but I just don't get the fuss about Robin McKinley. I loved Beauty, but every other book of hers I've tried to read doesn't do anything for me. This one was no exception. If you're going to write fantasy you have to do at least some world-building, but halfway through the book I still had no idea what they were talking about most of the time.

Highland Masquerade by Mary Elgin
Goodreads recommended this to me after I rated some Elizabeth Peters books, and the description sounded fairly mysterious and gothic - a girl who left her Scottish home at 16 after cursing the villagers she held responsible for her father's death comes back in disguise. It was pretty good, but not at all what I expected. There's no mystery, no danger, nothing supernatural or gothic at all. She comes back in disguise, falls in love with the man who bought her father's house, and gradually starts revealing her true identity to people she can trust. I liked it, but it wasn't something I'd recommend to people who like mysteries or gothic romances.

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri
I first read Jhumpa Lahiri the summer after high school - one of the stories in Interpreter of Maladies was what introduced me to Bollywood, actually - and while I love the way she writes I find all her stories too melancholy and depressing to really say I enjoy them. It made me mad to get halfway through The Lowland and find I had no will to finish the book, because the first part was wonderful. She sets up a story of two people who need each other, a man who marries his brother's widow both to get her away from his parents who resent her and to take care of the baby she's about to have, and then spends the rest of the book making them miserable. No one grows or learns, they just stay stuck in the patterns she's set for them and ruin lives. I loved the way it began but I hated the way it turned out.

Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell
A re-read; I read it so quickly the first time that I barely remembered the details. I love this as a story of first love but I really just want to pull Eleanor and Park out of the book and give them a big hug, and make them be okay.

The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
Eleanor and Park left me feeling a little blue, and this was the perfect light-and-happy pick-me-up. It's a little anticlimactic reading this after seeing the Jeeves and Wooster TV show, since I already knew how Jeeves would sort everything out, but it's still so funny I laughed out loud even while reading in public.

In a Persian Kitchen by Maideh Mazda
Two of my cousins have married Persians, and we had Persian food at their weddings, so now I'm obsessed with recreating those flavors at home. I don't think this one is the most practical of cookbooks - it was written in 1960 and assumes you'll have to go to a special Middle Eastern market to find yogurt, plus most of the recipes are so vaguely written you'd have to be a mind-reader to figure them out. But it's a pretty little book that looks nice on my bookshelf!

Cruel Beauty by Rosamund Hodge
I was surprised by how much I loved this book. I mostly wanted to read it for the cover, but the fact that it mixed Beauty and the Beast with Hades and Persephone drew me in as well. Still, I didn't expect to love it so much. It's not actually a very "young adult" book at all, except for Nyx's age, and I almost wish it wasn't published as one, since then the story could have been fleshed out more, especially the last third.

Every Frenchman Has One by Olivia De Havilland
Cute and lighthearted, more a collection of anecdotes than a true autobiography. I probably would have enjoyed it more if I'd already known about Olivia De Havilland's life and just wanted to hear her side of the story. Since I knew nothing about her, I found it a little uninteresting.

The Legacy by Katherine Webb
Finally, a modern "gothic" novel that isn't too gory or supernatural or weird! It irritated me a little that the reader is given information the characters aren't, and I wanted more closure at the end, but I guess that's more realistic than books where the character finds just the right letter or diary at the right moment to put the whole story together. Some things we'll just never know. Despite that, I really enjoyed the book and will definitely seek out more by Katherine Webb!