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rainwater

Book Review of Sandra Brown’s Rainwater

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Rainwater

I won a signed copy of Sandra Brown‘s novel Rainwater from a Goodreads Firstreads giveaway.

Description:
The year is 1934. With the country in the stranglehold of drought and economic depression, Ella Barron runs her Texas boardinghouse with an efficiency that ensures her life will be kept in balance. Between chores of cooking and cleaning for her residents, she cares for her ten-year-old son, Solly, a sweet but challenging child whose misunderstood behavior finds Ella on the receiving end of pity, derision, and suspicion. When David Rainwater arrives at the house looking for lodging, he comes recommended by a trusted friend as “a man of impeccable character.” But Ella senses that admitting Mr. Rainwater will bring about unsettling changes.

However, times are hard, and in order to make ends meet, Ella’s house must remain one hundred percent occupied. So Mr. Rainwater moves into her house…and impacts her life in ways Ella could never have foreseen….

Review:
Anyone who reads many of my reviews knows that I read a lot more fantasy/Sci-fi than I do literary fiction, but even I need a little variety every now and then. I won this last year and felt guilt about it still sitting on my shelf, so I decided to finally give it a read. I’m glad to have read it now that I have, even if it is one of those Depression era novels where even the happy endings are heart rending and sad. Having said that I did generally like it. Mostly because Mr. Rainwater was every bit the honourable gentleman of my dreams. He was wonderful. It would be awful hard not to like him. I liked Mrs. Barron, Margaret and the Doctor too, but it was Rainwater who stole the show. Guess that’s why the book’s named after him, huh?

This is the first Sandra Brown novel I’ve read and according to the acknowledges is a departure from her normal stories. She can sure write though. The prose of this book is beautiful and evocative. She manages to relate a lot of emotion in relatively few words. Small movements on the part of the characters relay a lot of meaning. Even though I had a fairly good idea of where the plot was going to end up (one way or another) I still hung on every word until I got there. Would be more than happy to read another of Mrs. Brown’s books.

On a totally unrelated point, I read the hardback edition and it is a beautifully put together book. I love the cover image and the addition of the little bit of fancy gold edging around the title and the deckle edging of the pages.

Review of Bella Forrest’s A Shade of Vampire

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 I Won a signed copy of Bella Forrest‘s A Shade of Vampire from Layers of Thought. I included both the new and old cover just to be awkward. 

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Description from Goodreads:

On the evening of Sofia Claremont’s seventeenth birthday, she is sucked into a nightmare from which she cannot wake.

A quiet evening walk along a beach brings her face to face with a dangerous pale creature that craves much more than her blood. 

She is kidnapped to an island where the sun is eternally forbidden to shine.
An island uncharted by any map and ruled by the most powerful vampire coven on the planet. She wakes here as a slave, a captive in chains.

Sofia’s life takes a thrilling and terrifying turn when she is the one selected out of hundreds of girls to join the harem of Derek Novak, the dark royal Prince.

Despite his addiction to power and obsessive thirst for her blood, Sofia soon realizes that the safest place on the island is within his quarters, and she must do all within her power to win him over if she is to survive even one more night.

Will she succeed? …or is she destined to the same fate that all other girls have met at the hands of the Novaks?

Review (with mild spoilers):

If Edward Cullen had ever been forced to rule a hidden enclave of vampires he would definitely be named Derek Novak. No doubt about it. A Shade of Vampire is a quick little YA read that Twilight fans will love. The problem is that I’m really not a Twilight fan. So in order to give this book a fair chance I tried imagining how I would have reacted to it if I was still an angsty teenage girl. Certainly Sofia is described as a smart, slightly quirky, wall flower. I can relate to that. She’s secretly crushing on her popular best friend, who I THINK she lives with. I guess I can relate to that too. (Though the whole living situation was never very clear. Apparently she was abandoned, but I never could grasp the details. Maybe I’m wrong.) I had to wonder a little bit about the whole high school clique thing though. I mean if he’s popular and she isn’t how are they best friends? I don’t really remember cliques being so accepting of such social transgressions. In the end I decided that I can relate to Sofia’s life prior to the vampires, but not after. Once she is taken to the Blood Shade I could do nothing but shake my head.

Derek wakes from a protracted sleep and INSTANTLY falls for little ‘ol Sofia. What does he fall in love with? Well, I don’t want to give anything away, but it isn’t anything the other girls don’t have too. So, really the question still stands. Sofia, in turn, is either exceptionally susceptible to Stockholm Syndrome or has no sense of self-preservation, because she is feeling Derek in return. She is falling in love with his kindness, which, honestly, feels misplaced. Really there is a whole undercurrent of incongruous innocence in this book. It’s in small things, like the keeping of harems and constant references to playing with their beautiful slaves, or the leers Sofia is subjected to but the complete lack of follow through or sex of any kind. Example: the girls are all kidnapped when they are 17 because they mature and taste sweetest when they turn 18. Now, the whole blood letting/sex connection is pretty blatant, so the message is essentially that the girls will be ravished, but not until they conveniently (and coincidentally) come of legal age. Riiighhht. The novel is so sexually charged that this absence is conspicuous. I realise that as a YA novel it shouldn’t really have any, so maybe the suggestion needed to be pulled back a little. 

I have a guess about where the story will go from here and I’d be willing to read a sequel to see if I’m right or not. With the exception of the constant and annoying one sentence paragraphs (I was always told a minimum of 3 BTW) it reads fairly smoothly. (Though to be fair Derek’s dialogue is a little too smooth for someone who’s been asleep for 400 years. But since I wouldn’t really want to slog through the old English I’m more than happy to let that pass.) It was also interesting to be able to see both sides of Sofia and Derek’s interactions. Sometimes their actions held different meanings for the two of them, but were still meaningful to both. I thought that was very cleverly played. All in all I thought it was OK, but I’m well aware that there will be those who love this sort of story and they will, no doubt, really enjoy it.

Review of Nathan Young’s Fire and Ice, The Fall Begins

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I won Nathan Young‘s novel Fire and Ice, The Fall Begins in a Goodreads First Reads giveaway. (For the record, that cover freaks me out a little bit. Don’t know why, though.)

Description from Goodreads:
Danny Patterson never promised that he was a good man, and despite his experiences living in Leigh Park, he is actually quite vulnerable. But with Stacy Ryan at his side, he is finally beginning to find some closure. He has fought for what he believes in on many occasions, however when he finds himself the prey of Alistair Carter and a sinister group known only as The Rogues, he is inadvertently pulled into a grotesque game of cat and mouse from which he may not survive. 

Death waits for no man; today, the fall begins…

Review (with slight spoilers):
It was alright, I guess. This was a Firstreads win and one of the joys of the giveaways is that you chance winning something completely outside your normal reading area. From Fire and Ice‘s blurb I wouldn’t have thought this one was too far outside of mine, but I think this book has a fairly specific target audience, that of the young English male. For the record, I’m a 35-year-old American female. 

I think the book would be most enjoyed by this particular group of people for a few reasons. First, despite living in England for several years, I didn’t have enough of an intuitive understanding of what Leigh Park is and, therefore, didn’t have the automatic knowledge that the author presumes readers will possess. Apparently, people coming out of the area will naturally be tough motherfuckers by virtue of growing up there. If it had been set in Camden, NJ, or East St. Louis, IL, I might have understood this, or if I was English and familiar with Leigh Park’s reputation. But it isn’t, and I’m not, so I was a little too slow on the uptake in the beginning. I didn’t initially grok why Danny was such a good fighter and shot without having been trained in any way. It didn’t make much sense to me. He felt too good at everything. 

Now I’m not saying all books need to be targeted to an American audience or anything so horribly nationalistic, especially since I was IN ENGLAND when I won it…well within the geographic confines of what I would consider its targeted readership. I just could have done with an info-blurb or something in the beginning that others probably wouldn’t have needed. [Unless, of course, Danny’s exceptional skill isn’t meant to be the result of growing up on a run-down, gang-infested council estate, but then I would have to take exception to it for other reasons.]

Secondly, there are quite a few descriptions of the specifications and capabilities of cars and guns in the book. Here is an example:

The SA-8OA1 was the standard issue assault rifle and light support weapon of the British Army. Manufactured jointly between BAE systems and Heckler & Kock, it entered service in 1987. It had an effective range of 450 metre’s when fired with an aperture iron sight whilst later variants of the rifle were kitted out with telescopic SUSAT sights. Gas operated and using rotating bolt mechanism, the SA-8O fired the 5.56 x 45 mm NATO cartridge fro a 30-round detachable STANAG magazine and had a fully automatic rate of fire of between 610-775 rounds per minute.

Now, as a woman, I honestly just don’t care. ‘He had a big gun’ would have been enough for me, but if I was a young man or a gun enthusiast (who knew what half of that meant), I might be thinking ‘right on.’ 

I don’t think I was the intended demographic for this novel, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy any of it. I appreciated the friends’ loyalties to one another. For some reason, I really liked Ade. I’m not even certain why, but I did. I enjoyed the small normal moments, like stopping for a cup of tea (though Carter did anomalously enter the tea area to drink coffee on occasion, shock/horror) or enjoying a good bacon sarnie. This went a long way toward providing the reader a peek into their lives and humanizing them. I also appreciated the fact that it didn’t have a cookie-cutter happy ending, which would have been really unrealistic in this circumstance. As the first in a series the book definitely ends on a clanger that makes you want to know what is coming next and looks to focus on far more than one man’s fight to save himself and his loved ones. 

There is some repetition in the writing. I seem to recall someone, probably Danny, sinking into ‘dark darkness,’ the word instantly being used three times in one paragraph and slightly three times in two sentences. There isn’t anything inherently wrong with these examples, but such things always drag me out of the fantasy and force me to notice the words on paper.

In the end, while I openly expect that others will whole-heartedly love this book, the best I can say is that it was OK. I couldn’t help wondering why it focused on Danny (especially since the initial hit wasn’t intended to be him in the beginning). Surely, the police, his friends, the bad guys, etc, would be more interested in the person whose identity set the whole mess off in the first place than his friend. I also wondered why everyone was so willing to just let him take care of everything as if no one else was involved. Why the protagonist and antagonist wanted each other dead very very badly, but somehow never simply shot each other. They both had numerous opportunities.  There seemed to be some drastic leaps of logic, where a character knew A and, therefore, immediately knew B, with no apparent reason why. For example, how Paul knew that the relatively common name ‘Carter’ must be Alistair Carter, a man he presumably hasn’t seen in ~20 years, doesn’t know Danny, and would have no obvious reason to be involved in what might otherwise be presumed to be a basic gang turf war. Some extreme decisions are based on this knowledge, but I can’t fathom how he could be so certain. And I never could reconcile the cold killer in the beginning with the man Danny was at the end. It was meant to have come full circle, but they didn’t feel like they met up with me.