Genre-ally Speaking: Falling Kingdoms by Morgan Rhodes

Title: Falling Kingdoms
Author: Morgan Rhodes
Publisher: Razorbill
Publication Year: 2012
Read: April, 2013
Genre: YA-fantasy
Magical Epic or Epic Fail: Epic Fail 1/2* (0.5 star)

The Quick and Dirty:

Unenjoyable enough to need Cicero's help in reviewing. Wants to be Game of Thrones, succeeds in sucking.

The Wordy Version:

When, publishers, do you mean to cease abusing our patience? Do you imagine that we have never met people who act with logic? Or do you willfully flood the market with paltry imitations of human behavior so that we shall no longer be able to recognize shadow from form?

This novel has a score of characters who, time and time again when given information, refuse to interpret what they have heard. It is impossible to believe that an impoverished kingdom, paying a 75% tax on wine exports, does not recognize that their tax rate is partially to blame for their poverty. The income tax in Sweden may be close to 60% today, but the Swedish government uses its income to provide its taxpayers with social services. The chief of Paelsia does not give his people anything but a vague hint that he can use magic (a claim none of the characters take seriously) to better their lives. Yet Jonas, the most intelligent of the teenage main characters, doesn’t begin to think of the possibility that his taxes are being mishandled until the end of the book. This is senseless; Jonas—in almost any other story—would be considered stupid.

Book Review: The Summer Prince

Title: The Summer Prince
Author: Alaya Dawn Johnson
Publisher: Arthur A. Levine
Publication Year: 2013
Read: April, 2013
Genre: YA-futuristic sci-fi
Star Rating: ****1/2 (4.5)

The Quick and Dirty:

Beautiful contemplation of the interface of art, physicality and mortality, set in a militantly feminist city in future Brazil.

The Wordy Version:

In a future world where nuclear winter has destroyed whole countries, and technology has extended physical life to 200+ years and digital life indefinitely, the city of Palmares Três has become an oasis in neo-Brazil. Palmares Três, to reject the violence that destroyed the world we live in, created a government of women, led by a term-limited queen and council of aunties. Every five years the people elect a Summer King to participate in government functions and select the next queen as the current queen slits his throat in a spring ceremony.

Youth Revisited: Lemon Squares

When Alyssa and I first talked about doing a Youth Revisited post about food, I was kind of stumped.

Youth Revisited: Watergate Salad Recipe

For our latest recipe challenge, Susan and I decided to do recipes we remember fondly from our childhood. Interestingly enough, they both ended up being desserts. I chose Watergate salad, hearkening back to a time when salads were a lot more diverse than greenery in a bowl with some extra add-ons to liven things up (not that I’m against that sort of salad. I actually rather enjoy it!). Just looking at it reminds me of the ‘50s and ‘60s, when people ate all manner of strange “salads” and things that might appear odd to modern taste buds, served at dinner parties and potlucks. (I’m picturing people in Mad Men-style attire, smoking cigarettes and schmoozing. It’s a very glamorous American nostalgia mental image, and I wasn’t even alive then for me to be nostalgic about it now!)

Alas, my visions of vintage fashion and family life might be set a couple decades too early, as pistachio pudding mix, one of the main ingredients, didn’t come out until 1975. Apparently Kraft, the maker of said pudding, came up with the recipe under the moniker of “Pistachio Pineapple Delight.” There doesn’t seem to be much consensus on how the name “Watergate” came about. Some think it was a new name for Kraft’s recipe invented by a Chicago food editor, others say the whole thing was concocted by a sous chef at the Watergate Hotel, and still others say it’s just an association with the presidential scandal that occurred around the same time as the salad’s height in popularity. Wikipedia says all these things and more.

At any rate, I find “Pistachio Pineapple Delight” to be a little too literal for me. I prefer the name Watergate for the tasty green concoction—mysterious, with absolutely no hints as to what the ingredients are. And Watergate was such a mystery to me as a child, my eyes peering at it over the edge of my grandparents’ dining room table, sitting so unnaturally pastel in its crystal bowl, waiting until such a time as I would be allowed to glop it on my plate. Did it contain water chestnuts, and that’s how it got its name? Wasn’t Watergate also a kind of crystal, and maybe that’s the kind of crystal bowl it always lived in on my grandma’s table, and maybe that’s why it’s called Watergate? It was an endless source of mystery and speculation to me. Not only the name, but the ingredients that made it so delicious as well.

Genre-ally Speaking: Matched by Ally Condie

Title: Matched
Author: Ally Condie
Publisher: Dutton Juvenile
Publication Year: 2010
Read: April, 2013
Genre: YA-Dystopian
Dys-miss or Dys-hit: Dys-miss. **

The Quick and Dirty:

Tired dystopian clichés make the background for a typical YA love triangle. Attempts to make the book "deep" (i.e. quoting poetry) merely irritate me.

The Wordy Version:

Tolstoy’s famous quote is that every happy family is alike but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. If only this could be applied to futuristic novels in addition to families. As far as I can tell, almost every unhappy future envisioned by novelists is unhappy for the same reason of having a fundamentally flawed socialist government taking away people’s individual freedom.

The Audio-Philes: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Disclaimer: I fully intended for this to be a short and sweet review of the audiobook, but it morphed into a beast of a treatise on the merits of audiobookery, poetry in translation, and other geeky rants. You’ve been warned! (Skip to the next-to-the-last paragraph if all you want is the bottom line.)

Title: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Author: Unknown
Translator: Simon Armitage
Publisher: BBC Audiobooks America
Listened to: April 2013
Star Rating: ****

Now, I’m not normally a person who enjoys audiobooks. I am very picky about them—if I don’t like the voice reading the book or how it reads the book, I will probably end up not liking the book. I suspect this has something to do with early trauma watching Milo and Otis with that one guy doing voices for ALL the animals, including a terrible approximation of a female voice. (There was also a bad experience involving the audiobook of Snow Falling On Cedars, with some offensive stereotypical “Asian” accents for the Japanese-American characters, but we shall speak no more on that matter…)

Read-Along: AGoT chapters Tyrion 1, Jon 2, and Daenerys 2.

And we keep on truckin' in the read-along! Susan has found herself buried under a veritable avalanche of library books and has tabled her A Game of Thrones reading for now, but hopefully she will rejoin us soon with some savvy insights and snark! This week we read Tyrion 1, Jon 2, and Dany 2. Join us!

Tyrion 1

Our first Tyrion POV, yay! Not a very long chapter, but it serves to move the plot along a bit. Tyrion has pulled an all-nighter reading in Winterfell’s library, and now that dawn has come he heads out in search of breakfast. He comes upon his nephew Joffrey and the Hound in the courtyard. The ever-sensitive Joffrey doesn’t see why he should go tell Lord and Lady Stark that he’s sorry their son fell out a window and broke his back, so Tyrion provides some instruction, punctuated by a brisk slap across the face. And another. Readers rejoice!

Tyrion then joins his siblings Cersei and Jaime, along with the royal children, for breakfast. Here as well Bran is the hot topic of conversation. Little Tommen and Myrcella appear to (thankfully) not be cut from the same cloth as their brother Joffrey, and express the more conventional thought that they hope Bran doesn’t die. Pretty much all the adults Tyrion has encountered so far this morning seem to think it would be more merciful to kill the comatose boy and be done with it, however. When Tyrion reveals that the maester thinks Bran will live, he notices a glance pass between Cersei and Jaime. Hm…