New Year delays and a book review twofer
So… I fail at personal blogging, apparently. I can’t believe it’s already the end of January, and I haven’t added anything to this blog since October. >.< But in my defense, I do have a pretty decent excuse for being distracted: we found out in early November that I’m pregnant! We’re due at the end of July, and the past few months have been a pretty crazy cacophony of baby-planning, life-rearranging, and generally freaking out about becoming parents. No matter how long you’ve talked and dreamed and planned for such an event, until it’s actually imminent, nothing’s quite the same.
Anyway. There will be more baby-talk to come, I’m sure, but for now I wanted to get a couple of book reviews up while they’re still fresh in my mind.
Ganymede by Cherie Priest
The third book in Cherie Priest‘s Clockwork Century series (well, fourth if you count Clementine), Ganymede takes a few of the characters in her alternate-history-steampunk-zombie world to New Orleans, where a massive submarine lies submerged in Lake Pontchartrain. Airship captain Andan Cly, whom we’ve met before, is hired by a beautiful, successful, and stubborn madame named Josephine Early - who happens to someone Cly was romantically involved with many years before - to travel from Seattle to New Orleans and figure out a way to get the Ganymede past the Southern forces to the Union commander in the Gulf, where it just might be what’s needed to finally turn the tide of the war.
I’m a big fan of Cherie Priest’s writing, and I definitely enjoyed Ganymede. It was nice to get some tidbits of information about a few characters we’d met in other books, though I found myself wishing for more. The characters were beautifully detailed and interesting, and the plot was fun and enjoyable. That said, I found myself wanting a bit more. More conflict, more danger, more point to the bit characters and other tie-ins. Voodoo priestess Marie Laveau even made an appearance at a few points, but I felt like there could have been much more done with her. At the end of the day, I wanted to see a bit more of an arc from the beginning to the end - it seemed almost like we started at point A, made a detour over to point G, then ended up back at point A without much having changed.
It will be interesting to see what Priest does next with the Clockwork Century world. She has such a wonderful eye for detail and world-building that I hope she does do more with it, and I hope we can see more of the characters we’ve grown to know and love.
The Hum and the Shiver by Alex Bledsoe
Every once in a while, you pick up a book by an author you’ve never read, cautiously optimistic that it’ll live up to its potential… and you find yourself pleasantly surprised when it does. The Hum and the Shiver by Alex Bledsoe was one of those books for me. I don’t recall what led me to add it to my Amazon wish list, but I’m certainly glad I did! It had been a good long while since I was last up till 1 a.m. reading because I simply couldn’t put the book down.
Bronwyn Hyatt was an Army private whose leg and spirit were shattered after a horrible experience in the Iraq war. She finally makes it back to her tiny hometown in the Appalachian hills of Tennessee and is greeted with a hero’s welcome that she doesn’t want, and a wide range of reactions from her family and the townsfolk. Bronwyn is also a First Daughter of the Tufa, a mysterious group of people living in Cloud County. They’re polite enough to outsiders, but keep to themselves and never share any details of their community. The Tufa have a deep connection with music, and also may or may not actually be connected to the Tuatha Dé Danann and the fae of ancient Ireland. They also have a very rigid hierarchy and social structure, which grates against Bronwyn’s rebellious nature.
So when Bronwyn returns home to tension in her family and in the community, and that tension is compounded by dark and sinister omens warning of impending tragedy, things don’t go well. There are those who would pull her one direction or another, and she can’t seem to live up to the expectations anyone has of her, least of all those she puts on herself. The tension builds like electricity in the air from a summer storm, until finally its released in a crashing, thunderous finale and a satisfying ending in which Bronwyn finds a way to be true to herself and her heritage.
The world of the Tufa and Cloud County, Tennessee, is rich and detailed. When you find yourself checking Wikipedia just to make sure that an idea is, in fact, fictional, that definitely says something about how believable the telling is. The society really feels like it has hundreds of years of history and tradition, and Bledsoe does an excellent job of integrating that into the modern world, even if it’s the modern world of a backwoods town. The characters are interesting and compelling, if not always likeable, and their interactions feel very true and real. There were a few moments when I found myself raising an eyebrow - mostly towards the beginning, when too many men were described in chiseled-ab perfection, and too many people had immediate sexual reactions to each other - but they didn’t distract too much from the story.
Amazon lists The Hum and the Shiver as the first of the “Tufa Novels,” which implies that Bledsoe intends to write more. I sincerely hope that he does, because I want very much to know what happens next! The book offers tantalizing glimpses of who the Tufa are and what they’re really capable of, and the ending gives a hint that their rigid traditions might well be bending with the modern world, and I hope Bledsoe returns to this world to tell us more.