Tag Archives: fantasy

Book Review of The Shape of Water, by Guillermo del Toro & Daniel Kraus

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I borrowed a copy of Guillermo Del Toro and Daniel Kraus‘ The Shape of Water from the library.

Description from Goodreads:
It is 1962, and Elisa Esposito—mute her whole life, orphaned as a child—is struggling with her humdrum existence as a janitor working the graveyard shift at Baltimore’s Occam Aerospace Research Center. Were it not for Zelda, a protective coworker, and Giles, her loving neighbor, she doesn’t know how she’d make it through the day.

Then, one fateful night, she sees something she was never meant to see, the Center’s most sensitive asset ever: an amphibious man, captured in the Amazon, to be studied for Cold War advancements. The creature is terrifying but also magnificent, capable of language and of understanding emotions…and Elisa can’t keep away. Using sign language, the two learn to communicate. Soon, affection turns into love, and the creature becomes Elisa’s sole reason to live.

But outside forces are pressing in. Richard Strickland, the obsessed soldier who tracked the asset through the Amazon, wants nothing more than to dissect it before the Russians get a chance to steal it. Elisa has no choice but to risk everything to save her beloved. With the help of Zelda and Giles, Elisa hatches a plan to break out the creature. But Strickland is on to them. And the Russians are, indeed, coming.

Review:
I’m surprised at how much I enjoyed this. While I understand this was developed along-side the movie, not based on it, I usually find book from movies quite shallow. So, I wasn’t expecting much. Which means the depth and shades of grey in this book was a pleasant surprise. I loved the writing style and characters, especially Giles. Plus, how so many characters crossed paths without ever knowing it.

It wasn’t faultless. I found it’s message, while admirable, too bluntly relayed. It was a bit in your face. And Strickland’s mania went too far, much farther than needed anyhow. Having said that, as much as I detested him (of course I did), he was also one of my favorite characters. Favorite in the sense that there was the most to him. He was horrible, just a monster. But he was also profoundly broken and trying desperately to unfuck himself (but too dysfunctional to have any hope of succeeding or recognizing that fact). I’ve not seen the movie. But I wonder if they could have brought this to the screen without his internal monologues. Lastly, I thought the ending, while predictable, wrapped it all up a little too nicely. (Unless of course you read the whole thing to have been orchestrated by Deus Branquia in order to get from South America to New York to find Elisa, which after the last scenes I kind of do. That brings an element of sacrifice I appreciate. )

Review of Bitten and Stolen (The Otherworld #1-2), by Kelley Armstrong

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I borrowed Bitten and Stolen (by Kelley Armstrong) from my local library.

Description:
Elena Michaels seems like the typically strong and sexy modern woman, She lives with her architect boyfriend, writes for a popular newspaper, and works out at the gym. She’s also a werewolf.

Elena has done all she can to assimilate to the human world, but the man whose bite changed her existence forever, and his legacy, continue to haunt her. Thrown into a desperate war for survival that tests her allegiance to a secret clan of werewolves, Elena must recon with who, and what, she is in this passionate, page-turning novel that begins the Women of the Otherworld series.

Review:
I liked but didn’t love this. I liked the idea of it. I enjoyed Elena’s stubborn nature and could relate to her not wanting to forgive someone for doing something that diverted her whole life, even if by accident. Plus, I like Armstrong’s writing style. But something about the whole thing just never wowed me. Perhaps it’s just a matter of the book being from 2010, so it feels like old news now days.

Description:
Elena Michaels, the female werewolf who finally came to terms with her feral appetites in Bitten, is back—and she has company: Katzen the sorcerer, Leah the telekinetic half-demon, Cassandra the vampire, and Savannah the twelve-year-old witch who is just coming into her considerable powers.

Vampires, demons, shamans, witches—in Stolen they all exist, and they’re all under attack. An obsessed tycoon with a sick curiosity is well on his way to amassing a private collection of supernaturals, and plans to harness their powers for himself—even if it means killing them. For Elena, kidnapped and imprisoned deep underground, separated from her Pack, unable to tell her friends from her enemies, choosing the right allies is a matter of life and death.

Review:
I enjoyed the first book in this series. I didn’t love it, but I didn’t regret reading it. I almost didn’t finish Stolen. I pretty much hated it from start to finish. Armstrong lowered herself to using TSTL stunts to put Elena in danger and move the plot alone. While in book one Elena was strong and stubborn, here she talked a big talk but just acquiesced over and over again. Even her escape wasn’t really of her own doings. I have the third book in the series, but I don’t think I’ll bother reading it.

Book Review of Pick Your Teeth With My Bones, by Carrie Newberry

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I won a copy of Carrie Newberry‘s Pick Your Teeth With My Bones through LibraryThing.

Description from Goodreads:
Tattoos. Scars. Wild black-and-silver hair. A near-permanent scowl. A collection of knives, and a vocabulary to make an oil rig captain blush like a virgin. Not to mention the tail. No one ever accuses shape-shifter Kellan Faolanni of being beautiful, but she’s very good at her job. Until now.

Kellan is a member of the secret Sankhain society, protectors of a deep and ancient forest magic, and their most devout warrior. When a man appears, smelling of Earl Gray tea and old books, he unravels secrets of the Sankhain that should no longer exist, secrets Kellan lives to protect. With the help of Tony, another Sankha, and her dog Galen, Kellan uses her unique sense of smell to follow the trail of lies leading to the traitor bartering Sankhain secrets. Answers hide in the very heart of the forest. What she uncovers there will shake her world to the core.

Kellan is over two hundred years old, and she’s living proof that you’re never too old to learn who you are.

Review:
This wasn’t wholly bad. It had an interesting idea, but it also had several elements that irritated me. The most obvious of which was the “strong woman” equals emotionally stunted, angry woman. I see this all the time. Authors want to write a strong, warrior woman, but they don’t know how to craft a warrior, except to give them male characteristics. As if a woman can’t possess female qualities and still be strong and warrior-like. The result is a woman so angry, sarcastic and emotionally illiterate that the reader is left wondering how she’s lived 200+ years.

What’s worse, she’d been in a sexual relationship with her boss for 180+ years without ever realizing that she wasn’t an equal in that relationship. She was so incapable of forethought and rational behavior that a 24(ish) year old boy showed up and she basically handed all decision-making off to him. Pair all this with the fact that she had lustful thoughts about every pretty man she encountered and formed unwanted attachments, and it made her feel stupid and child-like, as if she couldn’t control her temper, her thoughts, her actions, or her libido.

I’ll grant that a lot of the banter was funny and I do like the idea behind the world. I also appreciated the presence of some racial and sexual diversity in the cast. Even if of the four LGBT characters, the only gay man was mauled, one of the lesbians died and one turned out to be a villain. (That’s not really a resounding success for the LGBT crowd. There’s a trope named Bury Your Gays for a reason. This is sadly a rather common outcome of LGBT characters.)

All in all, I liked the idea of this book but thought it’s presentation was clumsy enough to detract from my enjoyment of it.