Cover Reveal: Hidden Huntress by Danielle L. Jensen

HiddenHuntress-300dpi

Sometimes, one must accomplish the impossible.

Beneath the mountain, the king’s reign of tyranny is absolute; the one troll with the capacity to challenge him is imprisoned for treason. Cécile has escaped the darkness of Trollus, but she learns all too quickly that she is not beyond the reach of the king’s power. Or his manipulation.

Recovered from her injuries, she now lives with her mother in Trianon and graces the opera stage every night. But by day she searches for the witch who has eluded the trolls for five hundred years. Whether she succeeds or fails, the costs to those she cares about will be high.

To find Anushka, she must delve into magic that is both dark and deadly. But the witch is a clever creature. And Cécile might not just be the hunter. She might also be the hunted…

I don’t usually post many cover reveals but when I got the chance to do a reveal for Hidden Huntress, the sequel to Stolen Songbird (a book I absolutely adored) I couldn’t pass it up.  If you’re a fan as well, the book will be published on June 2nd of this year and if you’re like me, you can probably hardly wait.

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Lazy Sundays: Rural Drivers are Terrifying

As most of you know, I’ve lived my entire life in a really small town.  And by small town I don’t mean what newscasters usually mean when they say that same phrase.  This is not a town of ‘only’ 5,000 people.  I live in a village of about 300.  So yeah, I know all about rural driving.

It still terrifies me.

More so than driving in the city, driving in my own town terrifies me sometimes.  Why?  Because the drivers are insane.  People who live in rural areas tend to take the exact same route to work every day and usually you’re lucky if you see one car on that route.  So over the years people get lazy and stop doing things like checking for other cars at intersections and drive down the middle of the road on blind corners or hills because they think “Oh well, there’s never anyone here anyway.”  Except when there is.

Last Saturday I yet again avoided a collision in the middle of town.  We only have one paved road in town (the main street) and I was going down the road on my way to the gas station.  I drive a fairly little car you see, so I’m always on the look out for people in bigger vehicles who don’t watch where they’re going.  Thank goodness I did because in an intersection that dumps onto the main road some idiot was coming down in a great big truck and was not going to stop at the stop sign.  (This is a fairly common problem as there’s only ever one cop in the area and he usually works on the main highway.)  So I jammed on my brakes and honked my horn to get their attention.  They stopped and then had the nerve to wave at me to go on as if I was the idiot in the scenario.  Ugh.

So yes, rural drivers are terrifying.  They don’t look at all where they’re going, they often drive way too fast (150km/h in a 100km/h zone on a regular basis) and most people drive big trucks so collisions are really nasty when they do happen.  In a lot of ways, driving in my village is way more terrifying than driving in the city.  At least in the city I know most people are watching where they’re driving; in my village I know most people aren’t watching where they’re driving.

In your experience, where are the drivers the worst?  If you live in a rural area, do you notice the same problems or is my village just special?

“people who criticiz the endings of books” and More Weird Search Terms

Yes, folks, it’s time for another weird search term round up and I’ve got some pretty bizarre ones this time around.  Here are just some of the more recent weird search terms I’ve received:

people who criticiz the endings of books

i’m an artist i will not work for free

the mad warlock

goodbye farewell to a wonderful person

zombies horribles

most self published authors bad writers

pegi

mr.willy wonka;s factory write an essay the story of my name is khan

age apropiate mad books

why do girls hate game of throwns

mouse oracle

the mad zats flowers for algernon

what is the code word for walking dead november 23,2014

i’m greedy for you

{searchterms}nudist scenes

read to me the word lynburns

mad brown girls porn photo

And best of all:

did roman gladiators puke

 

Um…yes?  Like all human beings I think gladiators were capable of vomiting.  So what do you guys think of these search terms?  Have you gotten any weird ones lately?

Marie Antoinette: The Journey by Antonia Fraser

Marie Antoinette by Antonia Fraser(Cover picture courtesy of Goodreads.)

France’s beleaguered queen, Marie Antoinette, wrongly accused of uttering the infamous ‘Let them eat cake,’ was the subject of ridicule and curiosity even before her death; she has since been the object of debate and speculation and the fascination so often accorded tragic figures in history. Married in mere girlhood, this essentially lighthearted, privileged, but otherwise unremarkable child was thrust into an unparalleled time and place, and was commanded by circumstance to play a significant role in history. Antonia Fraser’s lavish and engaging portrait of Marie Antoinette, one of the most recognizable women in European history, excites compassion and regard for all aspects of her subject, immersing the reader not only in the coming-of-age of a graceful woman, but also in the unraveling of an era.

One of the historical figures that I’ve never liked was Marie Antoinette.  To someone like me who is incredibly bookish and curious about the world around me I just could not connect with a woman who hated reading and seemed to only care about the insular court of Versailles.  I had bought this biography about her on sale for just about $2 so I decided I’d give Marie Antoinette another chance.  Antonia Fraser is a noted historian so I thought that if anyone could make me feel an ounce of sympathy for the woman she could.

And in the end, Antonia Fraser was the one who changed my mind about Marie Antoinette.  Let me explain.

Marie Antoinette was the last girl in a long series of children birthed by the formidable Maria Teresa (more commonly known as Maria Theresa but Antonia Fraser uses the former spelling), archduchess of Austria and Holy Roman Empress.  She was given a mediocre education at best until it was decided she would be the next queen of France and then poor Marie was supposed to learn everything there was to know about the French court, customs and language in just a couple of years.  For someone who was functionally illiterate until the age of 10 or so because of an incredibly lazy governess, this would be no mean feat but I was actually surprised at how much she succeeded.  Marie Antoinette was not a party girl as is commonly depicted.  No, she was more of a lonely wife dealing with the humiliation of the whole court knowing that her husband Louis could not perform his manly duties (which of course was her fault).  Louis was kind of a useless sort of a man, more interested in hunting and tinkering with his locks than learning about politics and how to run the state or even how to properly bed his wife.  (As a side note: how one could stay totally innocent about sex in Versailles of all places, I’ll never know.)

So Marie Antoinette turned to her circle of friends and one of her weaknesses was gambling; she lost massive fortunes gambling with courtiers as was expected.  When the regime’s fiscal crisis became apparent she started dressing more plainly but was rebuked by her fellow courtiers and the French people for not honouring the dignity of her role by dressing elaborately.  No matter what she did, she was in a no-win situation and for that I really feel for her.  Sure, she made some huge political miscalculations, particularly with encouraging Louis to hold fast against the tide of the Revolution but I just can’t hate her for her lack of political sense when she was never taught history or politics in any meaningful way.  Marie Antoinette was not a smart woman, but that’s hardly a crime meriting a death sentence as well as the nearly universal condemnation of history.

Antonia Fraser’s strength as an historian is the fact that she can both tell a good story and analyze it and the results of people’s actions without boring her reader or focusing too much on the story-telling.  Her writing is clear and to the point and when she injects her opinion into the narrative, she backs it up with evidence and logic extremely well.  She even manages to shed some light on the bizarre and still mysterious Diamond Necklace Affair that so hurt Marie Antoinette’s reputation among the French people.  The only real caveat I have about her writing is that it helps to have a bit of knowledge about common French phrases.  She does usually translate the phrases but sometimes they are just put into the writing and it’s left to readers to figure things out.  Usually you can figure things out because of the context, but it’s much easier if you’re like me and have had at least a little bit of a background in French, however basic.

Marie Antoinette: The Journey is a very well written biography of a woman who has been characterized as a villain for over two hundred years.  As it says in the blurb, Marie Antoinette was an ordinary princess born into an extraordinary time that she was not equipped to handle.  Not everyone can be Eleanor of Aquitaine and change the course of history so dramatically through daring and intelligence; Marie Antoinette was no Eleanor of Aquitaine.  And can we really fault her for being rather ordinary?  No.  Even someone like me, who characterized her as a rather stupid woman was able to feel sympathy and understand her dilemmas much better because of Antonia Fraser’s work.  She’ll never be one of my favourite historical figures but thanks to Fraser she’s definitely one that has been rehabilitated in my mind.

I give this book 5/5 stars.

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Spelled by Kate St. Clair

Spelled by Kate St. Clair(Cover picture courtesy of Goodreads.)

Magic runs thicker than blood.

Misfortune seems to follow the Sayers family. Georgia has tried endlessly to reestablish normality since her mother died, and she’s no closer from escaping her strange past when a mysterious fire destroys the only other high school in her tiny Texas town. Georgia is thrown into the company of Luke, a cryptic senior who brings her face to face with the truth about her heritage. Her loving, perfect mother created her family for the singular purpose of birthing five of the most powerful witches in the world, capable of terrifying magic. Now that she knows the truth, can Georgia keep her siblings safe?

Who is behind the dark cult that’s after her family? And does Luke know more about her powers than even she does?

[Full disclosure: I received a free print book through Masquerade Tours’ Reader Round-Up program in exchange for an honest review.]

One of the things that initially attracted me to Spelled was not the cover, but the blurb.  It’s pretty common to have a girl that doesn’t fit in living in a small town as a main character but a seemingly evil (but now dead) mother?  Four siblings all possessing unusually strong magical powers due to selective breeding?  That sounded a lot more unique than your typical YA novel so I decided to give it a try.

I was far from disappointed in the characters.  Georgia isn’t the most unique character ever but she stands out from a crowd and Kate St. Clair has made her a three dimensional, believable character.  She loves her family to death and will do anything to protect her siblings, especially from the legacy of their mother, who was nearly burned alive as a witch in the modern day.  We don’t know much about her mother in the beginning but as the story goes on and the tension and sense of foreboding ratchet up we learn far more about the Sayers family’s sordid past.  What’s interesting about Spelled is that St. Clair decided to show us a lot of the developments that caused Georgia to change but we don’t really see that gradual change (that happens more off-screen).  Instead, we’re shown how she is later and while it makes sense considering how short the book is, it was a little disappointing for someone like me who likes to see a little more on-screen character development.

The plot was okay in general but it was pretty typical.  A girl in a small town meets a hot guy who seems to already know her/like her and they get to know one another and he eventually reveals to her that she’s special, i.e. she has powers of some sort.  I don’t mind that plot if there’s some variation but Kate St. Clair really didn’t have all that much variation within that typical plot arc.  That was the sort of disappointing element of the story for me.  I expected something a little more unique, a little more imaginative.  Still, it was fast-paced and although I sort of predicted the ending, I didn’t predict everything that happened in the end.

The world-building was actually fairly decent.  In Spelled at first you think the Sayers family has pretty typical witch powers but that’s not necessarily true.  They were created to be powerful and they are powerful but they’re not completely the same as the average witch you’ll encounter in YA.  Because the book is so short and they don’t know they’re witches from the start we don’t get to learn as much about them as I’d like but I saw enough that I can say I understood the essentials of how their powers worked and why they didn’t show up earlier.  Again, considering the fact that Spelled is quite a short novel (and the author does call it a novella), Kate St. Clair did a pretty good job with her world-building.

Essentially, Spelled is an okay book.  It’s not the greatest I’ve ever read but it’s certainly not the worst.  It’s pretty much in the middle of the two extremes and if you like YA stories featuring witches, I would recommend it for you.

I give this book 4/5 stars.

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