Terrier
A Tortall Legend: Beka Cooper, by Tamora Pierce.
In 2001, when I was working at a library just outside the city for the summer, one of the library assistants there turned me on to Tamora Pierce. I absolutely devoured all of her Tortall books in about two weeks, and then reread them all. She was midway through the Protector of the Small series at the time, and I'm pretty sure Squire had just come out because I remember having to wait for it. (Which sucked, because the Protector of the Small series is the best one by a factor of about a million. Kel is totally her coolest character.) (I just looked it up on Amazon: May 22, 2001. Wow, I can hardly ever do that! I know when HP6 came out because it's my freaking wedding anniversary, but other than that I have no idea when I read things, usually.)
Anyway, I had spent much of my first few weeks at this job arguing that I didn't really like fantasy, much to the chagrin of this (awesome) library assistant who loved it. I liked Harry Potter, obviously (I started reading Harry Potter in 1999, shortly after book 3 came out. Mum had the first two and lent them to me, and I made her go to the store and buy me book three when I was about 60 pages from the end of book two. I was 18, so it's not like I couldn't have gone myself, but I didn't want to have to stop reading! It is a tribute to my mother's appreciation for book binging that she went out immediately and bought it. Mind you, she wanted to read it herself, but I still don't know how many mothers would go to the bookstore upon the demand of her 18 year old daughter.), but other than that I was sort of lukewarm on a lot of fantasy. I'd gone on a brief binge of the classics (Madeleine L'Engle and Susan Cooper, and I loved Over Sea Under Stone), but was still kind of pretending like I hated fantasy.
Vicki talked me into trying Tamora Pierce, and grudgingly, I picked up Alanna.
And oh my god, I freaking loved it. I read those books faster than I think I've ever read anything in my life. I kept a booklog that summer (just titles and the dates I finished them in my daytimer), and flipping through it, I read First Test, Page, and Squire in three days. I read more than 50 books in four months that summer. It was also the summer I started writing again, and the summer Jamie and I started dating, and the summer of the best job ever. Clearly, that was a good summer.
ANYway. Suffice it to say that since that very busy summer, I have been a big time fan of Tamora Pierce's Tortall books. Oddly, I've never even picked up any of her other books, because I've heard too many people say they aren't as good and I don't want to ruin the magic.
Terrier is a "Tortall Legend," which means it's a story set hundreds of years before Alanna's time. It's the story of Beka Cooper, a way-back ancestor of George Cooper, Alanna's husband. She is a "puppy," in training to be a "dog" - a member of the city watch. Unlike Pierce's other Tortall books, this is written in diary format from Beka's point of view.
I don't think the diary worked as well as it could have, and this is far from my favourite of the Tortall books. I enjoyed it, and I liked Beka, but I felt like she was trying to hard to make Beka a proto-Alanna rather than giving her a personality of her own. That's the problem with prequels, I find - when you're trying to postshadow foreshadowing, it's a little anvil-y. (I'm looking at you, George Lucas.) There were so many moments of "this is just like George if he'd been on the side of the law instead of the Rogue!" that it got a little annoying. Plus, I like all the nobility detail in the other books, and this lacked the inner workings of the palace that I like so much. Plus with it being a prequel you can't have the random throwaway appearances by other characters from other series, and I love that. Raoul is pretty minor in Alanna, but he is the greatest character ever in the Protector of the Small series, and I like that.
So. If you are a big Tortall fan, you'll like this book. But if you've never read any Tortall books, don't start with this one. Go pick up Alanna, or the Protector of the Small series. (Alanna is chronologically first but Kel is the coolest.)
Hate mail
Ha! I was just flipping back through past entries, and I discovered I don't have comment notification turned on for this blog. (Not that anybody posts many comments.) I deleted a few spam comments, and then discovered
this post.I saw 6 comments and figured it was spam, and then discovered...it's actually a wild tirade against me for hating that book. (I stand by that, by the way. I hated that stupid book.) But I feel like I've arrived! People hate my opinions about a book! Woohoo!
(I have no idea how they found my review, but oh well.)
The Guy Not Taken: Stories
by Jennifer Weiner
This is one of those cases where somebody returned this and I checked it in, and otherwise wouldn’t have heard about it. I loved Good in Bed, Jennifer Weiner’s first book, and have been neither thrilled nor horrified by her subsequent books. I feel approximately the same way about this collection of short stories. I hated the first few stories about a girl and her intolerable sister, and it made me wonder if Weiner has some truly horrendous sister, because a lot of her books seem to feature really hateable sisters. Some of the other ones were much better than the first few, but overall it was just mediocre. I will keep reading her books, but my expectations are not as high as they once were.
Knitting Under the Influence
by Claire LaZebnik
This book clearly did what it was supposed to do. I saw the title (in my regular trolls of the new books about knitting) and put it on hold without reading anything else about it, because I like reading about knitting. Fortunately, I got it from the library rather than buying it, because man, it was terrible. They’re obviously banking on the millions of knitters around the world doing exactly what I did: saying “oh, a book about knitting!” and reading it. The knitting is enough in the foreground that I wouldn’t think non-knitters would find it terribly interesting, but there is absolutely no detail given about any of the knitting itself.
Lame. The character are one-dimensional and irritating, the plot is flimsy and not very interesting, and there isn’t even enough knitting to keep me interested. Boo.
Did that stop me from putting Knitting Circle on hold? No it did not. That one’s even being made into a Julia Roberts movie! Not that that means it will be any good, but I can hope that there might be a modicum of plot. (Oh. I just looked at my list and realized that the Knitting Circle book is not the Julia Roberts one – that’s The Friday Night Knitting Club. Clearly this is a popular genre.)
A Season for Miracles: Twelve Stories of Christmas
Various Authors
This is a compilation of short stories in the Dear Canada series. Each of the 12 stories is a Christmas story about the characters from one of the previous Dear Canada books. I’ve read a few of them, and I think they’re actually pretty decent books. (They got some of the best authors in Canada to write them, and they’re remarkably unformulaic.)
This book, however, relied entirely on you having read the previous books and therefore had no characterization independent of what you were presumed to know based on the books. That bugged me, and I didn’t particularly enjoy the book. However, I think that’s a problem fairly specific to this type of book and not an indication of the series in general, unless they start churning out more short story compilations.
Dreamhunter
by Elizabeth Knox
This was a book for my YA book group, which I’ve been slacking off in reading for lately. I actually finished this after the meeting, which is a good indication that it was a good read.
It’s the story of a world in which a parallel world, which can only be accessed by certain people (the dreamhunters), has dreams that can be caught and passed on to others. It’s a neat concept and it’s actually executed pretty well, despite the slightly predictable set up of the two cousins who are about to make their attempt to become dreamhunters.
The central story is that of using dreams as punishment, which is an interesting and horrible idea that totally reminded me of the BFG, now that I think about it. (The details aren’t quite the same but the concept is remarkably similar given how totally different the books are.) I loved the idea of the dream theatres, where a dreamhunter is on stage and everyone is asleep, dreaming the same dream.
It’s a good book, and I’d read the sequels. If I remember, which is always questionable.
Peter and the Shadow Thieves
by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson
I read the first book in this series, Peter and the Starcatchers, rather warily. It was a YRCA book this year, so I had to read it, and I was pleasantly surprised by it. They are prequels to Peter Pan, and while they don’t quite live up to the original, they’re pretty compelling stories on their own.
While Peter and the Starcatchers was the story of how Peter became the Peter Pan we all know, this is a sequel to the prequel and doesn’t set up quite as much of the original. Although I suspect that Peter’s detached shadow is somehow a result of one of the Shadow Thieves. Lord Ombra, one of said shadow thieves, is an appropriately creepy bad guy, and although his constant groaning got a little tedious, overall it was a good story. It probably could have been a little shorter, though. Nobody seems to want to edit anything anymore. I like a good fat book as much as the next person – I’m a fast reader and I hate skimpy stories that leave me wanting more – but this was a bit excessive.
The Fourth Bear
by Jasper Fforde
This is the second book in the Jack Spratt Nursery Crimes Division series, following The Big Over Easy, which we read for book club last year. Fforde is also the author of the Thursday Next books, which I am very fond of.
This one was great. I have a deep and abiding love for puns, even when they make me fling myself off the chair groaning, and this book was absolutely ridiculously packed with them. I think my favourite was the ongoing discussion as to whether bears should be allowed to carry guns. That’s right…the right to arm bears. GROAN!
Anyway, it was a good read. Nothing terribly meaningful, not exactly deep, but amusing, clever, and engaging. I am quite fond of Jack Spratt and Mary Mary, and I’m looking forward to the next book in the series. (There’s another Thursday Next book coming out too.)
Poor Neglected Booklog
Hi, booklog. Sorry about the neglect. It's not like I haven't been reading - I have! I just haven't been keeping track. I know. I'm a bad person. I did so well for a whole year!
Don't worry. One of my resolutions this year is to go back to keeping you. I just bought five new books with a Christmas gift certificate, and I have a whole pile on hold at the library, too. Book updates will begin once more!
