books 43-45
The Gauntlet by Karuna Riazi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
At this point there are so many got-sucked-into-a-game books out there there should be a subgenre. What would that be called? That said that doesn't mean this feels cookie cutter or trite in the least. The blurb called it a steampunk Jujmanji. I would agree but add as seen through a Muslim lens.
Our point of view character is the Bangladeshi-American twelve-year-old Farah, who is having a bad birthday. Her family has gone more upscale in NYC and she really doesn't know most of the kids invited to her party and she feels like the only Muslim. At least at her old school she wasn't alone. Her two friends from there, Alex and Essie , have come from the party where her ADHD brother Ahmed is keeping Farah from hanging with them (Because her family's entire treatment of his ADHD appears to be to give him everything he wants to avoid tantrums).
Instead of some books, Farah's gift from her aunt is the game, the Gauntlet, which naturally her brother tries to take over for himself and gets sucked in. Her aunt tells her the horrors of the game, which threw her out years ago. Farah and her friends enter to save Ahmed. The rules are simple, solve the puzzles/win the games and you win your freedom, fail and become a permanent resident of the game like Henrietta Peel and Vijay.
While the stakes are high, I will say some of the games seem less than threatening (keeping in mind this is for middle graders so that would be why.) I like Farah and her friends but if this had a half star rating this would have been 3.5 and that's because this is so close third person point of view it might as well have been in first person. We never really get to know Alex or Essie well and that was disappointing.
Overall though, this is a fun book and I enjoyed it.
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The Solstice Kings by Kim Fielding
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I wanted a LGBT book for Pride that wasn't all about the pain of being rejected for being gay and it took some doing to find on in my current collection that wasn't. This one was a quirky novella and in some ways it might have worked against it a bit but I really did enjoy it. Sometimes novellas do feel like you have too much for a short story but not enough for a novel and that's where this was.
It has strong paranormal undertones that felt like they could have been better developed. Miles Thorsen has lived apart from his family for years pock marked by drugs and alcohol before he finally sobered up in New Orleans (of all places) Recently abandoned by his lover, he decides to head home even though he doesn't want to. I think overall it's why he feels so cut off from his family that seems off in this story.
When we meet them the Thorsens are loving and wonderful and have been since they adopted him as a very young boy. The family is huge and magically in a very understated way as is their house and the forest beyond. And that's the part that didn't work as well as it needed to for me, there's some 'I need more' for their magic' but I could live with that. It was more of why is Miles so dead set about coming home.
We finally learn it's about Remy, a family friend with paranormal secrets of his own. Apparently all of this was from Remy's rejection of Miles back in college (Miles assumes it's because he's good for a lay but nothing more which isn't the truth naturally).
As the holiday approaches, Miles starts to feel at home with everyone but Remy. A little Solstice magic, some enpowerment from the Holly and Oak kings, and you get your HFN romance resolution. I enjoyed it.
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Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I do not have a good track record with award winning books. I often sit there thinking how did this win and yes, that was the case for this. It's a 2.5 read for me at best and I wouldn't have picked it if not for Popsugar challenge. It has all the things every writing professor I ever had said not to do, over describe, multiple analogs in a row and sentence fragment after sentence fragment.
I also have issues with stories about real people (I always wonder did that/could that have happened) Here's the thing we know very little about Ann (Agnes which is the name used here) Hathaway-Shakespeare so O'Farrell could create this wholecloth and probably as fictional as it comes. Honestly this should have been called Agnes and not Hamnet (nor Hamnet and Judith as it was in the UK) . This is HER story and not her son's.
O'Farrell does her level best to turn Agnes into a Cunning Woman/Hedge Witch right down to giving her a fairy mother. No seriously. Her mom 'appeared out of the woods' which is seen in fairy tails all through the UK. Mom dies young and naturally we have an evil step mother. Agnes is considered to have second sight and is feared by the villagers as she walks the woods with her trained kestrel on her arm. At one point Shakespeare's mother even accuses her of bewitching him. Even her name Agnes we're told is not pronounce AGH-ness but Ann-iss like Annis, a fairy hag. Like I said O'Farrell goes all in on this fairy background and yes Agnes is an herbalist, what would have been called a Cunning Woman in that day.
We do know Agnes is older than Shakespeare. We know they were pregnant when they hurriedly married. We know Hamnet dies young. Those are facts. I was one hundred percent over this book when Hamnet decides he'll trade his life force for his sister Judith who is sick with the plague.
most of this book is about Agnes as I said. Hamnet feels like an afterthought in his own book. And for a book about loss, it's mostly not. It's more about the mom's life (she even goes out to the woods alone to give birth another tie in to the fairy magic thing) and oh fair warning there is on the page child abuse by Shakespeare's father when he was young.
I know I'm in the minority here but I didn't think this was that great.
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