Devil's Food (Kerry Greenwood)

Another fairly light and fluffy mystery by Kerry Greenwood, starring her baker/detective, Corinna Chapman. You wouldn't read these books for the mystery, though - this novel had several little mysteries scattered through the text, and none of the characters devote their whole attention to them. There are far more important things to do, like baking divine date muffins, challah bread, and having a dinner made entirely of hors d'oeuvres.

The incredibly lucscious descriptions of cooking and baking are why I read these books - the writing is fun, and the food descriptions are so wonderful they make me want to leap into the kitchen and start baking bread. Or maybe chuck it all in and become a baker. It gets 3 out of 5, mostly for the food descriptions.

Paying the Piper at the Gates of Dawn (Rosemary Edghill)

Mediocre fantasy short stories - 2 out of 5. (They really don't deserve any greater description.)

Human Croquet (Kate Atkinson)

This is another absolutely wonderful novel by Atkinson, who is rapidly becoming one of my favourite authors. The way she uses language astounds me. I love the way her characters just come alive in my mind.

Human Croquet (I really hate this book's American cover, by the way - the one I read is much better) is the story of Isobel Fairfax, and her brother Charles. Their mother is missing, although small clues of her existence keep appearing, their father won't tell them anything about her, and their stepmother seems to be rapidly descending into insanity. The story skips around in time, so it has a fairly large ensemble of characters. Enormously funny in parts, full of rather beautiful despair in others - its a truly wonderful novel. 5 out of 5.

Secondhand Books

I went a little crazy at an enormous secondhand book sale this weekend:-

The White Garden by Carmel Bird
Angel's Gate by Gary Crew
Wild Women edited by Sue Thomas
High Tide in Tuscon by Barbara Kingsolver
Cosmo Cosmolino by Helen Garner
Raising the Stones by Sheri S Tepper
The Hours by Michael Cunningham
Chocolat by Joanne Harris
The Mistress of Spices by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
Prospero's Children by Jan Siegel
Walking to Mercury by Starhawk
The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul by Douglas Adams
The Windsingers by Megan Lindholm
The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (for Mum)
Human Croquet by Kate Atkinson (also for Mum)

I've read most of them, but am looking forward to re-reading all of them, and reading The White Garden, Wild Women and Northanger Abbey for the first time. Aaaah - the oh-so-addictive pleasure of getting new books.

Wisdom's Daughter (India Edghill)

This novel is set some years after Queenmaker, and focuses on the reign of King Solomon and his encounter with Bilqis, the Queen of Sheba. Edghill begins by pointing out the few paragraphs in the Bible in which the Queen of Sheba appears, and declaring that her offering is a complete imagining with the bare bones of fact. But what a fun imagining it is.

The narrative is what I disliked most about Wisdom's Daughter - it switches wildly, from Solomon's daughter, to Bilqis, to Solomon's dead wife, to many of his living wives... at one point, where many of the wives tell their own stories, it becomes almost farcical. We veer madly off the main plot, but eventually it settles down to a few storytellers, and we move along. The novel circles mostly around the Queen of Sheba and Solomon's only daughter, and the relationship they develop throughout the story. It's a fun, mildly feminist, mildly mystical novel, and I loved her descriptions of the streets and the people of Jerusalem, which are done beautifully. 4 out of 5.

The Bowl of Night (Rosemary Edghill)

This is the last in a loosely linked trilogy of mysteries starring a pagan detective, Bast. It's the only one I've read of the series, but it doesn't suffer from that. It does quite a good job of filling in Bast's past without doing a Sweet Valley High ("Jessica and Elizabeth were twin sisters, with blonde hair and blue eyes...").

As a mystery, it was pretty poor - it was obvious who the culprit almost as soon as the body is found. However, I liked Edghill's style, and I enjoyed the pagan scene background, as it were. However, it's really only of interest as a curiousity, and not a good book in its own right, so I'd only give it 2.5 out of 5.

Secrets & Mysteries (Denise Linn)

I'm only half-way through this book, and I'm just skimming at this stage, but I'm perfectly comfortable in declaring that it's absolutely TERRIBLE.

AWFUL.

I'm sure you could have guessed that from the title - for some reason, I decided it was worth picking up. Oh, how wrong I was. Sickening, facile, cliched... what an utter travesty of a book. Negative stars.

Mao's Last Dancer (Li Cunxin)

This is an autobiography by a ballet dancer, trained in China several years before the death of Mao. He travelled to America several times on a cultural exchange, eventually defected from China and married an American woman. English is his second language, and it's apparent in his writing - it's not terrible writing, but it's not a book I could enjoy purely for its writing.

I most enjoyed his descriptions of his peasant upbringing and his ballet training as a teenager - his drive and determination to be a fantastic dancer are phenomenal, and his longing to succeed in order to give something back to his family is very touching. In fact, I think the simplicity of the language used makes this come over more intensely.

All in all, a very enjoyable autobiography, and a wonderful evocation of China during the last years of Mao's reign (although I must admit, during parts I kept comparing it with Wild Swans, to its detriment). Four out of five.

Queenmaker (India Edghill)

I don't know much about Biblical stories, and so this novel about King David and his many wives was all new to me (although I don't think the author claims to be totally accurate with the Biblical tradition). This is the story of Michal, daughter of King Saul, wife to King David, and is a wonderful story. Michal is a wonderfully realised character, and her strong voice narrates her story, that of David, and his later wife, Bathsheba.

The period, what little I know of it, is realised well, and I could picture Jerusalem, its crowded streets, and the roofs of the houses where the women bathed. It's a well-written story, Michal's emotions and decisions are well realised. However, it wasn't a completely gripping book - if I was going to be incredibly pedantic, I'd give it 3.75/5.

The Wizard of London (Mercedes Lackey)

More trashy fantasy by Lackey - these stand alone novels are even worse than her Valdemar ones. Unless badly written overly sentimental fantasy is one of your most beloved genres, steer clear.

Gibbon's Decline and Fall (Sheri S Tepper)

Sheri S Tepper is probably best labelled as a feminist science fiction author, but she's certainly not in the same league as Ursula K Le Guin, for example. Tepper's feminism - or the feminism she displays in her fiction, anyway - is excessively didactic and black and white. In all her books, there are male characters who have no redeeming features - they hate women with a deep and abiding fury, they kill women, they beat women, they try to create worlds where women are utterly confined and controlled by men. Reading back on that sentence, I'm now undecided - perhaps Tepper is writing realistic feminist prose, and I'm simply too optimistic about the world and men to see it as such. She's not a subtle author, in any case, and I prefer subtlety to Tepper's bludgeoning approach. (But is this because I'm too mired in the patriarchy and it makes me feel uncomfortable? Aaah, who knows?)

Gibbon's Decline and Fall is a story that centres around six very different women, who formed a "Decline and Fall" club while in University together. Later in life, one of them disappears, and while mourning her, the remainder of the club are called upon to, essentially, save the world and humankind from an evil force. This is more fantasy than science fiction, and becomes more so as the story continues. It's a decent story, and kept me involved, but I was disappointed by the two dimensional characters, and by what I felt was a rather vague and unsatisfactory way to end the story, not quite in keeping with the arc of the novel as a whole.

A three out of five book, and I'll keep re-reading Tepper in the future - I wouldn't quite classify her as a guilty pleasure, but in some of her novels (including this one) she's leaning perilously close to that precipice.

Magic's Promise; and Brightly Burning (Mercedes Lackey)

Mercedes Lackey is a very prolific and very trashy fantasy author, whom I like to pick up occasionally for a junk-food read. These two books are set in her world of Valdemar, where love, honour and magic abound, and there are magical white horses called Companions who choose Heralds to ride around with. Get the idea? It's like a Girls/Boys Own adventure (complete with lots of horses) transplanted into your average medieval-style fantasy world.

These two novels are about two duly tormented characters who are comforted by the unlimited understanding of their magical Companions and who ride about being terribly brave and self-sacrificing for Valdemar, and its King or Queen, who is the most wonderfully royal person in all the world. Lackey doesn't overused exclamation marks, but she writes as if she does, if that makes sense. There are so many adjectives, so many passionate internal dialogues. It's all too much.

I wouldn't recommend these books to anyone except those who enjoy reading trashy fantasy while curled up in front of the TV.