Book Review: How to Lead a Life of Crime, by Kirsten Miller

Title: How to Lead a Life of Crime
Author: Kirsten Miller
Publisher: Razorbill
Publication Date: February 2013
Read: June 2013
Where It Came From: Library
Genre: YA-thriller-ish?
Rating: 3.5 Peter Pan Hats

The Quick and Dirty:

Flick, a teenage pickpocket, leaves the streets of NYC to attend a prestigious academy-- the Mandel Academy exists ostensibly to give not-well-off kids a leg up in the world, but in reality to train the next generation of powerful criminals. Flick agrees to attend in exchange for an opportunity to exact revenge on his father, whom he suspects of murdering his younger brother. As he rises up through the ranks, will he be able to achieve his goal, or will he lose sight of who he truly is? And when the girl he left behind to attend the academy shows up as a fellow student and his best competition, things only get more complicated. Fun and enjoyable, but also very violent, very long, and the protag’s self-loathing became grating at times.

The Wordy Version:

When I began reading this book, I remember thinking about how the jacket copy didn’t really seem to capture what was going on in the book—I mean, it did in a very basic sense, but somehow missed the feel (and the whole middle section) of the book. And now when I just typed up the Quick and Dirty, I can feel those jacket-copy-writers’ pain. This is a hard book to blurb, and that’s the best I was able to do. Also, let’s take a moment to appreciate the awesome cover art. ((moment)) Isn’t it cool?

As an added fun fact, I started reading this book when I was sitting in a Police Office one day (fingerprint cards stuff, not law-trouble stuff). It wasn’t until later that I realized reading a book called How To Lead a Life of Crime in the presence of the police might not have been the best idea I’ve ever had. Hah.

Anyway! I returned this book about a week ago and it’s already starting to become fuzzy in my mind, so we’ll see what I can do here. Overall, I enjoyed this book. I enjoyed it quite a bit, in fact! I liked the gritty atmosphere, and the characters were really well done. Flick, the protagonist, had a distinct, sassy voice, and it was fun to read his snarky perspective. (There was some weirdness with changing verb tenses, though—like for awhile it was like Flick was talking about things that happened in the past, and then switched to telling it like it was happening in present tense, and I just didn’t follow.) For most of the other characters, there was always more to them than what was on the surface. It would’ve been easy for some of these other criminals-in-training (especially the legitimately psychotic ones) to become two-dimensional, but Flick, and thus we the readers, eventually perceived the layers and were able to see them as actual people, complete with pasts and regrets and different motives and all sorts of complicated people-stuff.

Genre-ally Speaking: Indelible, by Dawn Metcalf

Title: Indelible
Author: Dawn Metcalf
Publisher: Harlequin Teen
Release Date: July 30th, 2013
Read: June 2013
Genre: YA-fae-urban fantasy
Where It Came From: ARC from the BEA*
Rating: 3 Out of 5 Signaturae

The Quick and Dirty:

16-year-old Joy has been dealing with the fallout of her parents’ divorce and her brother going to college, and thinks things are finally starting to normalize a bit—but how wrong she is! While out dancing one night, she spies a cute boy across the room—and then he comes over and slices her eye with a knife. She soon finds herself entangled in the world of the fae, accidentally bound to Ink, the boy who cut her eye. As the two get to know each other, they find themselves at the center of a fae political maelstrom with the fate of humanity hanging in the balance. The fresh take on the fae mythos is interesting, and there are some really vibrant characters, but parts of the new mythology can be a bit muddled. An enjoyable read, but it didn’t quite capture me in a way that would bump it up to 4 stars.

The Wordy Version:

Overall, this was a pleasant read—well, as “pleasant” as a read can be with eye-slicings, brandings, and other sorts of mayhem going on! Maybe “enjoyable” would be a better word. Does that still make me sound ghoulish? This was definitely on the darker side of urban fantasy, but it still didn’t feel DARK-dark to me, despite the above-mentioned shenanigans. Does that make any sense? The beginning of the book was really genuinely creepy, after Joy gets her cornea nicked by a mysterious boy and is all WTF?? as the fae world closes in on her. The sort of mounting sense of dread was really cool, and had me jumping at sounds when I was reading it at night.

After it’s explained to Joy what’s going on, the creep-factor goes down and the story continues. I thought the author’s new additions to the fae mythos were really cool and even made sense—the fae coming up with a way to circumvent the power humans have over them (power gained from knowledge of the fae’s true names) with a symbol or grouping of symbols called a signatura to stand in for their name, and then the raw creation of a pair of new beings whose purpose is to dole out these signaturae, so the fae aren’t running around claiming humans willy-nilly via signatura for themselves.

The Audio-Philes: Pearl of China, by Anchee Min

Title: Pearl of China
Author: Anchee Min
Read By: Angela Lin
Publisher: Recorded Books, LLC
Publication Year: 2010
Listened To: June 2013
Genre: Historical fiction
Rating: ****

Fiction audiobooks are generally not my thing (nor Alyssa's). I usually can read faster than someone else can read to me, many voices readers use for characters don’t sound like the way I’d read them from the page, and most importantly—listening to bedroom scenes destroys any pleasure I’d have in them on the page. So when I won a collection of audiobooks from my library’s summer reading raffle a few summers ago, I wasn’t sure I’d ever listen to the fiction selections.

Following a few soporific nonfiction titles I chose from my library (Guns, Germs and Steel and The Revenge of Geography) I decided to try fiction again. Unfitting voices at least can keep me awake while driving; I remain thankful that I caught myself before falling asleep at the wheel while listening to geography studies (DWB—driving while bored).

By luck, the first novel on my iTunes playlist this month was Pearl of China, which I didn’t realize until midway through listening was the historical fiction version of Pearl S. Buck’s life. A few days later I was baking muffins galore because scurrying around the kitchen would give me an excuse to keep listening to the book. I’m giving up on geography books—the history parts of Pearl of China (spanning the last emperor of China through the death of Madame Mao) fully absorbed me.

It isn’t just the history in the novel that makes it enjoyable listening; the main character, Willow (Pearl’s childhood best friend in the story), is courageous and resilient. My impression from women’s literature set in China has been that women’s lives were miserable and that no matter how intelligent they were, they’d get caught by institutional violence. However important such tragic stories are, it’s hard to listen to them. Pearl of China upended the tragic battered wife stereotype by making women escape their marriages and find intellectual fulfillment in universities and publishing, and some romantic fulfillment in new partners. These successes do not mean that Willow and other characters necessarily have easy lives after escaping marriage, but it makes them the force behind what happens to them later in life. It’s also worth noting that Willow’s choices in the second half of her long life (~50-80 years old) are the ones that show her true strength, and that all the other senior citizen characters are autonomous and active. So double well done to Anchee Min—independent women AND senior citizens!

Angela Lin, the audiobook reader, does a very good job. She varies voices for characters without exaggerated affectations. Best, she sings haunting excerpts of songs.

Recipe Challenge: Chocolate Strawberry Tarts

It’s pretty obvious what my experience with tart-making has been that when I was reading The Selection, I pictured the strawberry tart as a Strawberry Toaster Strudel. Not a Pop Tart though, because Pop Tarts are absolutely not fancy enough for young women wearing dresses (possibly gowns) all the time.

But when I looked in the Martha Stewart cookbook Alyssa gave me I saw pictures of tarts with crinkled circumferences or stretching sides. And I wanted to eat one of my own.

Such was my desire to eat one of these pastries that I bought mini tart pans (cuter and easier to store than the 11” pan I saw), pulled out my food processor, and read a slew of recipes for our Selection Recipe Challenge.

I went to my garden to pick some strawberries too, but this was about a month ago, and my berries weren't quite ripe yet. (Though they were still pretty!)

Book Review: Plague in the Mirror, by Deborah Noyes

Title: Plague in the Mirror
Author: Deborah Noyes
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Publication Year: 2013
Read: June 2013
Genre: YA-paranormal / YA-historical / YA-contemporary
Rating: **

The Quick and Dirty:

Decent premise of a ghostly figure trying to trap a girl (who may be imagining it all) in the hellish world of the Florentine plague; actually about an insipid girl who deserves to be trapped and a crazy ghost figure who would be my #1 target in an Inquisition.

The Wordy Version:

May is spending the summer in Florence to avoid the shakeup of her parents’ divorce under the guise of helping a family friend research a travel guide. What seems like an interminably scholarly trip turns life-threatening when a doppelgänger from 1348 starts to haunt May and offer her a portal to Florence of the Middle Ages. As much as May tries to get involved with her present life, she is preoccupied by the harm her historical twin may be doing in 1348, and wonders if being trapped in the midst of the Black Plague would be as bad as it seems.

Time travel has been done so often that characters crossing into a world that ended before they were born doesn’t seem unusual. What is peculiar in Plague in the Mirror is that there is almost no logical impetus to engage in the time travel. 1348 is approximately the worst time in the second millennium to travel to Florence. Almost thirty years after the death of Dante and thirty years before the birth of Brunelleschi (whose famous dome is the modern image of the city), the only thing 1348 Florence has of interest it is its newly created republican government ...and the Bubonic Plague.

Middle Ages scholars may disagree with me, but I cannot figure out what appeal there would be in visiting a medieval city during a health crisis. As a writing convenience, setting up 1348 Florence as a hell if May were trapped is a good idea because it ratchets up the stakes for her to avoid being there. During May’s first visit we see “a young man in formfitting—that is, bulging—tights and a short, stained tunic…leering into her face. He has winey breath, and his bad teeth are bared, his head tilted like a curious dog’s.” There are “sinister towers” and “diseased-looking sausage links and sides of ham, swathed in flies,” “beds of filthy straw.” Everything about these descriptions convinces me of the undesirability of being there.

I would say “job well done” for setting up the stakes, except that the main character, May, seems to ignore all of the bad stuff that she is observing in those scenes! May has the choice to visit 1348 or stay in the present, and after her first visit she continues to return. For May, 1348 Florence is a previously living hell that contains one artist apprentice, Marco, who is every sort of Italian artist sexy May can imagine. Her one encounter with Marco (which involves about three sentences of broken dialogue because THEY DON’T SPEAK THE SAME LANGUAGE) convinces her that she has found her true love on the other side of time, and that he feels the same way. Because May’s look-alike, Cristofana, knows May likes Marco, Cristofana uses him as bait and then as a hostage, and instead of May doing the logical thing of telling herself that none of this matters because they already died hundreds of years earlier, May lets this go to her head.

“A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment,” says Mr. Darcy early in Pride and Prejudice. I am convinced that even the self-satisfied Darcy of that point of the novel would underestimate May’s ability to jump from admiration to married life seven centuries before her birth. It’s astounding that May has no friends or interests that convincingly ground her in the twenty-first century. It is equally baffling that May doesn’t consider the language and culture differences that would separate her from Marco if she stayed.

(On the subject of languages, I am mystified at Cristofana’s ability to converse with May. Cristofana, living in 1348, says her mother was English and taught her the language. A word of linguistic context here: in the fourteenth century, people in England spoke Middle English, which is very different from what speak today. As an example, the dialect that Chaucer uses in the Canterbury Tales is the most accessible form of Middle English (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0ybnLRf3gU) and I would be exhausted trying to figure out a conversation carried out in that. And chances are that Cristofana’s English could not have been so Chaucerian since he was only born in 1343.

I understand arguments for not using Middle English for Cristofana’s dialogue, including that the unfamiliar language would have made May’s time travel choices even weirder. But it would have given clarity to May’s potential mental problems if her twin could not have conversed with everyone in modern Florence while they switched places. Apologies for the side-rant.)

May’s imagination is certainly vivid when it comes to relationships, but it’s not clear if that creativity carries over to other parts of her life. According to her childhood friend (potentially with benefits), “[May] always had to invent these worlds and assign everyone names and make costumes. It was freaking exhausting.” This same friend suggests that May’s time travel could be psychological, and that May could use some help. The potential for Plauge to turn into a psychological thriller makes the middle section of the novel more palatable to read.

Unfortunately the thrills fail to come. May never seems to fully connect with the reader (or even with her own life), and when she finally is in a potentially exciting position, all she can muster is passive acceptance. If you need one reason to read this book, page 254/255 is it. On a page that should be the culmination of many of May’s dreams, May could be replaced by a board, and you might not be able to notice the substitution. Ugh, I have so many problems with this page that the next few paragraphs will be SPOILERS.

He's so intense she doesn't know what to do...until she does. The sleeping child has the bed, so they kneel together in a crouch, settling on the floor among coils of rope and oily stains and splinters and sawdust and chicken feathers.

It's hard to look at him as he eases her down, his eyes urgent and sorrowful while he undresses and lowers himself over, pulling her middle close in rough, paint-smeared hands, smoothing the sides of her crimson gown up. So she meets the blank stare of an unfinished sculpture beyond them, until at last he starts kissing her again, and she kisses back, a little fiercely, rolling on top of him in a bliss of rising away and falling and sliding and biting her lip as he moves inside her, moves and moves, and it's like reeling or flying apart.

...May feels sore and ripe and real and wonders did she really lose her virginity with...what? A man who no longer exists? An afterimage? How could something that physical not be real? She isn't sorry or disappointed, not at all, but there's something bittersweet because of Liam. She wouldn't change anything, May thinks, meeting Marco's dark eyes, wouldn't give this back or undo it, but part of her feels like a thief.

This is without a doubt the most disturbing depiction of consensual sex I've ever read. May "meets the blank stare of a sculpture" instead of the urgent eyes of her sexual partner, and after they're done she asks with what she lost her virginity. And yet she doesn't sense that not being able to communicate with the guy she's sleeping with, and not being convinced of his humanity, are major problems. May has extremely unreliable birth control available to her, but wouldn't that be a normal college-bound girl's first thought the next day? A little, "Holy F***. What if I'm preggers?" would make this scene (slightly) more palatable.

(SPOILERS END) Another thing that could make it more to my taste would be any point of view other than the third person present. I took years to get used to first person present, but the buck stops there. NO THIRD PERSON PRESENT. PLEASE. Let this book be a lesson, and examine the effect of changing the verbs to past tense.

To be fair, this was simply not my book. Even if everything I wished different had changed, I might still not have been enamored...I would just be less able to pinpoint things that made it not my book.

The Audio-Philes: Leviathan, by Scott Westerfeld

Title: Leviathan
Author: Scott Westerfeld
Read By: Alan Cumming
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
Publication Year: 2009
Listened To: June 2013
Genre: YA-steampunk-alt history
Rating: 4 Out of 5 Fabricated Beasties

I used to joke that everything I knew about World War I, I learned from reading Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan. Now I can happily say that everything I know about WWI I’ve learned from Leviathan and Downton Abbey. (I feel WWI was perhaps not as well-covered as WWII during my secondary education—thankfully I can rely on fictional entertainment to pick up the slack.) And this book is great—full of imagination, historical inspiration, vividly portrayed characters, and rollicking action. Here, have a GoodReads blurb:

Prince Aleksander, would-be heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, is on the run. His own people have turned on him. His title is worthless. All he has is a battletorn war machine and a loyal crew of men.

Deryn Sharp is a commoner, disguised as a boy in the British Air Service. She's a brilliant airman. But her secret is in constant danger of being discovered.

With World War I brewing, Alek and Deryn's paths cross in the most unexpected way…taking them on a fantastical, around-the-world adventure that will change both their lives forever.

So yes, I love this trilogy THIS MUCH and think everyone should read it, especially if they’re unsure about steampunk but want to give it a go. However, I’m not here to review the BOOK-book right now, but rather the audiobook.

My nitpicks and dissatisfactions with audiobooks in general are well-documented, so every time I decide to try another I wonder if I’m setting myself up for failure. But when I saw this beckoning to me from the library shelf, I had to give it a go. Scott Westerfeld? Love. Alan Cumming? Love. What could possibly go wrong? And I am pleased to say, not much. I found this to be a very pleasant listen.

It fit my criteria of having been a book I’d: a), already read the traditional way (so I could follow without much trouble), and b) enjoyed immensely, so it had those things going for it from the start. And I thought Alan Cumming did a great job reading it! Really wonderful choice there. There’s always an adjustment period where I acclimate to the characters sounding different than they do in my head, but once I made it through that, it was great. I loved his narration and the voices he created for all the characters, most notably and surprisingly, Deryn! I have this thing where I normally in audiobooks (or movies like Milo and Otis) I hate hate HATE when men try to approximate a female voice, but Mr. Cumming’s was spot-on for the character.

Less successful, for me, was his portrayal of the German-speaking characters. I don’t know what it was about it, but it just seemed…maybe a bit hokey? And to me it kinda made Alek seem a little less intelligent than he was. When I was reading, I imagined Alek with a lighter accent, with more natural tone and smooth cadence when speaking English, due to his privileged upbringing and education. Like I said, though, that’s just part of adjusting to a portrayal of characters on CD sounding different than they do in your head. But this is completely subjective on both counts—I’m sure there are plenty of people who LOVE that he gives those characters distinct accents. At any rate, while it really bothered me for about the first 2 discs, after that I got used to it and got sucked back into the story and Mr. Cumming’s reading of it and it didn’t really matter anymore! The fact that I want to listen to the rest of the series serves as evidence of that, but it seems my library doesn’t have the other two! Noooooo!

All in all, I thought it was great. Alan Cumming’s reading really captured the feel and personality of not just the main characters, but more peripheral ones as well, along with the sense of excitement and adventure of the story overall. If you haven’t read this book, you should probably go do that, or listen to it, or something. AS LONG AS YOU CONSUME IT AND LOVE IT AS MUCH AS I DO. No pressure. :)

Zucchini Bread

Recently I was talking to one of my aunts on the phone, and the subject of our summer gardens came up. I mentioned my zucchini plant’s uncanny habit of having perfectly normal-sized vegetables one day, and then sucking up a ton of water and ballooning them to gargantuan, seed-filled proportions the next. She mentioned that she often uses the bounty from her garden to make zucchini bread, and that inspired me to do the same. There have been lots of zucchini and thus many bread attempts lately, and this is the recipe I’ve settled on after fiddling with the parameters of the Better Homes & Gardens New Cookbook’s version and arriving at the ratios and ingredients most pleasing to my own tastebuds. Feel free to try your own spice and nut combos to keep things interesting!

Ingredients:
3/4 C. all-purpose flour
3/4 C. whole wheat flour
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp. ground nutmeg
1/4 tsp. ground allspice
1/8 tsp. ground ginger
2/3 C. chopped walnuts
1 egg
1 C. sugar
1-1 1/2 C. shredded zucchini
1/4 C. cooking oil
1/2 tsp. vanilla

1. Preheat the oven to 350 ° F.
2. Meanwhile, we can toast! Heat a frying pan over medium heat, and dump in the chopped walnuts. Stir frequently so they heat evenly and don’t burn. When they start to smell delicious and toasty, take them off the stove and transfer them from the pan to another container.
3. In a large bowl, combine the two flours, baking soda, salt, baking powder, and spices. Stir with a wooden spoon until well mixed up, with the spices evenly dispersed in throughout.
4. Beat the egg in a medium bowl. Then add the sugar, oil, and vanilla. After washing your zucchini, you can grate it (skin and all) onto a piece of wax paper until you have enough, and then dump it in with the rest of the wet mixture. Stir it until well combined. Perhaps not the most appetizing to look at, but the end result will be tasty, I assure you!
5. Add the wet mixture to the bowl with the dry mixture, and stir it until everything is nice and moist. It’s okay if there are some lumps! Then you can fold in the walnuts you worked so hard to toast.
6. Spray your loaf pan with cooking spray. A medium-sized pan should do the trick—mine was Pyrex 8.5”x4.5”x3” and worked just fine. Pour or otherwise coax with a spoon the batter into the loaf pan, and then put it in the oven to bake for 50-55 minutes.
7. After 50 minutes, pull it out and perform the toothpick test. If you stick a toothpick in near the center and it comes out goop-free, you’re good to go. If there’s some stuff stuck to it, it’s back in the oven for a bit.
8. Once the toothpick test has been passed, you can set the pan on a wire rack to cool. When it is cool to the touch, you can remove the bread (it might help to run a knife around the edges before trying to dump it out) and leave it to continue cooling on the rack. Slice and serve with butter melting over it, and wrap the rest up for midnight snacks!