christianreader | September/October Reading List

Taking the Ice by Jennifer Comeaux
I've enjoyed Jennifer Comeaux's figure skating romances in the past, but her last two books with Courtney and Josh have annoyed me quite a bit. I just find Josh unappealing. We're told over and over how "hot" and "sweet" he is but to me he comes across as bland and too "nice", with no personality. I don't feel invested in their relationship like I did with Emily and Sergei or Aubrey and Chris. So I'm glad that this is the final installment in their trilogy. Her figure skating scenes are still great, though - you really feel like you're watching a skating program, not just reading descriptions of the movements.

How To Speak Brit by C.J. Moore
Very small book, with not a lot of new information. If you're at all interested in British slang you probably know all of these words already.

The Troika Belle/The Rake and the Rebel by Ira J. Morris
I've been searching for years for a book I read in high school at the height of my Russia obsession. I thought this might be it, even though the cover didn't look familiar. Well, it wasn't, but it was a fairly interesting story. The hero, Sergei, gets on the tsar's bad side and is exiled to his country house. (His country house is a 25-bedroom mansion, so this is hardly a punishment really.) On the day he's supposed to leave he gets roaringly drunk and accidentally takes along his aunt's 15-year-old ward. Once the mistake is discovered they scramble to cover it up and collect a British lady adventurer to pose as the girl's chaperone and make it seem like this was a perfectly proper expedition. Of course the girl (whose name I've forgotten - Natalia? Elizaveta?) is in love with her not-quite-cousin, and over the next few years he makes her miserable by carrying on an affair with the neighbor's wife. Then the rumors of Napoleon being on his way start filtering in, and everything turns chaotic. And that's where the story lost me. Natalia-or-whatever begs Sergei to let her stay with him, telling him she loves him. And his response is, "Why did you tell me that? Don't you know what you've given me permission to do?" And then he assaults her virginal sensibilities against a tree. Um. What? So that's pretty much where I stopped reading. I did look to the end, and they meet up again in Vienna after the war and live happily ever after, but I couldn't really root for them as a couple anymore.

The Talisman Ring by Georgette Heyer
One of my favorite Heyers, needed to get the bad taste of the previous book ^^ out of my mouth.

All For You by Laura Florand
The Chocolate Touch is my favorite Laura Florand book so far, and I was so excited to read this one since the heroine works in Dom Richard's chocolate shop, and Dom and Jaime play a small part in the plot. And it started out very well for me - the heroine, Celie, is quite literally knocked off her feet when her teenage crush Joss shows up at the chocolaterie where she works. Five years before, he left to join the Foreign Legion without saying goodbye, and she's worked hard to get over him. I loved reading their interactions - I love the prickliness and the hurt it covers up, and waiting for one or both of them to finally get things out in the open and stop pretending nothing was wrong. Ultimately, though, it was frustrating. It took too long for things to finally start happening, so that emotionally I was beyond "yay there's so much tension, it's going to be great!" and had moved on to "ugh, just TALK already!" And then to add a secondary conflict just when the first one was barely resolved...it was just too much for such a short book.

Honest Illusions by Nora Roberts
I've always thought of Nora Roberts as an author I like, but maybe that's just because I haven't read very many of her books? I grabbed this one at the library book sale since the title looked familiar, but got bogged down in the childhood flashback and couldn't get past it. I've read "raised as siblings but fall in love as adults" stories that worked for me before, but this one spent too much time with them as kids and...I got bored.

Old Delhi: 10 Easy Walks by Gaynor Barton
Not that I have any plans to go to Delhi any time soon, but if I ever do, I'll definitely take this book. The author does a really good job of describing the routes, adding historical details about the different sites and letting you know when it's easier to look for a landmark than a street sign or house number. There are a few full-color picture inserts, but the line drawings showing Delhi as it was in the 1980s, when the first edition was published, were more interesting.

Some Girls, Some Hats, and Hitler by Trudi Kanter
The autobiography of a Jewish woman in Vienna in the late 1930s who manages to get herself, her husband, and her parents out of Austria after the Nazis invade. She was incredibly brave and resourceful, but her husband frustrated me to no end. Every time Trudi came up with a plan he'd stall. "Oh, let's wait and see, things aren't so bad right now." Even though it was nonfiction this reminded me a bit of Eva Ibbotson's books, especially Madensky Square - the loving descriptions of Vienna, the horror of war overshadowing people's lives, the plucky heroine. I loved it.

Never Mind the Bullocks by Vanessa Able
The Tata Nano is the world's cheapest car, costing only $2,000 when it was first sold in 2009. Intrigued by the idea of a car she could buy out of pocket, Vanessa Able buys one and drives it around India, braving some of the world's deadliest roads. I almost didn't buy this, since the reviews on Amazon are all about how grumpy she is and how it's "too much about the car, not enough about India". On the contrary, I found it light and breezy for the most part, and the point was never to be a travelogue but a story of driving a funny little car. I did get frustrated that the cities I was most interested in reading about were the ones she either skipped or only mentioned in passing, but as a story of a girl and her car, I think it would be hard to beat.

Beastly Bones by William Ritter
Jackaby was one of my favorite books last year, a highly entertaining combination of Sherlock and Doctor Who, so I've had the sequel on my to-read list ever since. It was...a bit of a let-down. It should have been great: there were cannibalistic shape-shifting kittens, a fossil discovery too good to be true, Abigail is reunited with Charlie Cane, the adorable police officer who had to leave town when his, um, hairy secret was exposed, and Mr. Jackaby is as odd as ever. But the story just fell flat for me. I didn't like that Abigail was the one who had to make all the moves in her and Charlie's relationship - maybe the author is just trying to be pro-feminist but it made Charlie seem like kind of a useless duffer. There were too many characters with similiar names (how am I supposed to remember which one is Hugo and which one is Hank when they're both big, jovial country types?). And the climactic action scene, while exciting, wasn't really enough after all the build up. If this was Doctor Who it would be one of the episodes you watch once but skip on re-watching, I think.

Far Far Away by Tom McNeal
Confession: I read most of this while I was home sick on Tuesday, so it could just be the not-feeling-well-ness talking, but I found this book confusing and weird and not really to my taste. Also, I was picturing the characters as high school seniors when all of a sudden halfway through the book one of them mentions being 15 and it completely threw me. The writing is gorgeous but it's the sort of gorgeous that distracts you from the fact that nothing is really being said and you're just going around in circles to delay until a suitable amount of time has passed and the real story can get started. It was...not my favorite thing I read this month.

Hidden Corners of Britain by David Yeadon
I'm not sure where this book went wrong. It started out so good, with a voice I wanted to follow all around the less-traveled parts of Scotland and Wales and England, but not too far in the narration became less personal and more a recitation of history and architecture that didn't hold my interest at all.

The Wrath and the Dawn by Renee Ahdieh
The familiar story of 1001 Nights, with a twist. I think this might be my new Twilight - the book I can't put down even though it's way too late at night, because I just have to read one more page...just one more...just one more... When I was a kid I was obsessed with this illustrated copy of Arabian Nights the library had, and reading this brought that all back. I'm in love with the world of this story, with Khalid the tortured king and Shahrzad who loves him even though he killed her best friend. Give me the sequel NOW!

Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined by Stephenie Meyer
I've had mixed feelings about this since it was announced - Yay, a new Stephenie Meyer book! But...it's not Bella and Edward? How's that going to work? Fairly well, as it turns out. The hardest part for me was picturing a guy instead of a girl as I read, since the narration stays mainly the same. Beau (heh) is less flowery in his thoughts than Bella, but I've read Twilight often enough that certain phrases stick in my head, and for the first few chapters it kept jarring me to hear him say something exactly the same way Bella had. My concern going in was that the love story wouldn't be as interesting - drop-dead gorgeous girl falls for ordinary guy isn't as immediately compelling as ordinary girl meets drop-dead gorgeous guy - but it works, strangely. I found myself identifying with Edythe (ha!) as much as, if not more than sometimes, Beau, and viewing him not as the character whose shoes I could put myself in, but trying to see him as a potential boyfriend. Would I like him? What does he have going for him that he can't see about himself? Edythe is more fun in some ways than Edward - she's slightly more open and less angsty and self-loathing. There's flirtatious banter and spontaneous hand-holding that Edward would never have allowed. I didn't realize going in that almost all of the characters had switched genders, not just Bella and Edward, which makes for some unintentionally funny moments, as when two female teachers help pull the van off of Beau and Edythe after the parking lot accident. It made me laugh picturing the male teachers standing around watching while two women jumped in to be the muscle. But it was also hard work keeping everyone's new role straight in my mind, which got a bit annoying. I think I'd have liked it better if B and E were the only ones gender-swapped. (Um, also, Rosalie/Royal HAS A MAN-BUN. That just...has to be said.)