Review of Sister

Title: Sister

Author: Rosamund Lupton

Genre: Adult mystery/thriller

Publisher: Crown

Publication date: June 7th

Beatrice and Tess are sisters and best friends, so when Beatrice gets a call that Tess has gone missing, she's on the first plane back to London. Tess has always been the flighty, irresponsible younger sister. At first Beatrice isn't completely convinced that something is wrong, but then Tess is found in Hyde Park.

Although Tess's death is ruled a suicide, Bee is convinced that her sister was murdered. The story shifts back and forth between Beatrice's meetings with a lawyer and her investigation, stringing the reader along with tantalizing bits of information that make this book almost impossible to put down.

There aren't many authors who can pull off creepy, vivid, intelligent, fast-paced, and prosaic all in one book, but Rosamund Lupton does it well. This book is highly recommended for fans of Tana French and Erin Kelly.

Review of The Magician King

Title: The Magician King
Author: Lev Grossman
Genre: Adult fantasy
Publisher: Viking Adult
Publication date: August 2011

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that I don't typically review books that are the second or third in a series. That's because it's hard to review a sequel without giving away too much information about the first book. Now, however, I'm breaking my own rule for The Magician King because I just can't let it go to print without putting in my two cents.

But, that being said, there are ***SPOILERS*** in this review if you haven't read The Magicians.

I'm going to start with the thing I liked the most about The Magician King. It's a feeling. It's the same feeling I get when I'm at the movie theater (about once every six months) and the movie is something I'm really excited about, but while the previews are on I'm totally engrossed and not thinking about the feature film. Then the previews end and for a split second I forget what's coming next. And when I remember, I get this sudden jolt of nervous excitement.

Maybe it's just me--I don't get out much--but that's how this book made me feel whenever one of Julia's chapters came up.

Which brings me to my next point: Julia. Her chapters only occupy about 1/4 of the real estate in this novel, if that, but it's clear that she is the protagonist of The Magician King. This is partly because Quentin is still a mopey little wiener who sighs around his own story but mostly because Julia is a force of nature. Finally we get to hear what happened to her between her ill-fated Brakebills entrance exam and her ascension as Queen of Fillory.

Meanwhile, Quentin is looking for something to do. He settles upon a journey to Utter Island to collect three years' worth of back taxes, but being Quentin he has to make an ostentatious quest out of the expedition. And, of course, things start to get weird pretty fast. He and Julia make an interesting team: both with a caravan's worth of emotional baggage, both incredibly smart and powerful, both really good at screwing up their own lives.

Where Quentin (I love Quentin, I really do, but he's SO emo) is depressed in a kind of sad and pathetic way, Julia is depressed in a dark, fiery, angry way. She's totally hardcore in her unhappiness, and her magic is an extension of that. In The Magician King we finally get to see what the non-Brakebills-educated magicians are all about, and let me tell you, it's pretty awesome.

I'm going to stop there, before I give too much away. Suffice it to say that the dialogue is still hilarious, the prose is still luscious, and the characters are still irritatingly human. I plan to read this one again when it comes out in August.

Why I've Been Silent

It's been a while since I reviewed a book. Almost a month, in fact. I'll tell you why.

I started this blog to promote the forthcoming titles that I was excited to sell. When I first began blogging (elsewhere, at an undisclosed location) I would review everything I read--which meant that four out of five titles would get lukewarm or bad reviews. I was not sparing with my criticism. But then I stopped to think about what purpose my negative reviews could possibly serve.

As a teacher and children's book specialist, every day I see kids getting excited about books I don't personally like. A classic example is The Mysterious Benedict Society. I found it boring and lacking in atmosphere. But last year my third graders went CRAZY over the series. Kids who would otherwise be intimidated by a 485-page tome were reading it without hesitation. Now, imagine that before any of them had read it I'd publicly disparaged the book, picking apart the things I didn't like and halfheartedly praising the things I did. Do you think those kids, who liked me and respected my opinions about books, would have been so excited about reading it? I don't. And it's not my job--in fact, it's the opposite of my job--to limit readers' enjoyment of books in any way.

So here, on this blog, I keep my negative reviews to myself. I don't review books that earned fewer than four stars on my goodreads.com page. And I haven't read any of those in the last two weeks.

Some people have criticized my review policy, saying that they're not real reviews if I only say nice things about the books. This is probably true. Some people say that I'm only trying to ingratiate myself to authors and publishers by never ripping apart a bad book. This is not true. I have no problem telling someone that they won't like a particular book. But I won't tell the world that a book shouldn't be read just because I didn't like it. Who knows, maybe that book is the one that turns a reluctant reader into an avid one.


Addition: I do not read e-books or accept self-published novels for review.