Good day to book lovers far and wide! I've been ill with asthmatic bronchitis and a kidney infection, so I've not been able to post for the past couple of weeks, unfortunately. Today I will rectify that situation by reviewing all the books I've read since I've been sick and while I am on the road to recovery. I'll start with a book that I would love to read, as it's about a group of women I admire greatly: female pilots.
Book Review
Flying Free: My Victory over Fear to Become the First Latina Pilot on the U.S. Aerobatic Team
Bullied as a child in her small Indiana town, Cecilia Rodriguez Aragon learned early on that staying quiet meant staying safe. The daughter of Chilean and Filipina immigrants, Aragon excelled in school, especially math class, but learned to keep her brilliance under wraps. She found her way to a career in computer science, but still struggled with crippling fear and anxiety. When a coworker's love for flying ignited her own, Aragon--to her own surprise--found herself spending weekends at airfields, learning to fly increasingly complex maneuvers and dreaming of buying her own airplane. Her memoir, Flying Free, chronicles her journey from INTF--her own "personality label" of Incompetent, Nerd, Terrified, Failure--to a strong, confident woman who became the first Latina to compete on the U.S. Unlimited Aerobatic Team.
Aragon begins her narrative with her first exhilarating flight, an after-work joyride in a Piper Archer plane belonging to her coworker Carlos. She then looks back on her childhood, vividly rendering both her father's belief that she could excel at anything, and the continual bullying by white boys who gave her doubts. She tells the story of pushing herself to find a flight instructor, going out to a local airfield for the first time, finally speaking up and telling the same instructor that she was ready for a solo flight (after logging far more than the required hours in the air).
Aragon's crisp, straightforward narration mirrors the steps she had to take before, during and after every flight: plot a course, perform the necessary mechanical checks, load the plane, strap herself in, take off.
Soon, readers are following Aragon not only to the airfields near her home in San Francisco, but up to Seattle and over to Oklahoma in pursuit of higher-level planes and more advanced instruction. She learns (and instructs her readers in) the nuances of spins, rolls, stalls and other complicated maneuvers, which eventually become sources of joy instead of heart-stopping fear. And she calls out the consistent sexism in the world of competitive flying, as well as the costs and challenges for pilots who are not independently wealthy. Readers will cheer Aragon's journey, which eventually takes her to France for the World Aerobatic Championships.
Today a professor of engineering and data science at the University of Washington, Aragon has used her flying experience to build confidence and overcome fear elsewhere in her life. Her memoir is a paean to flying, a testament to grit and hard work, and a real-life model for anyone longing to cast their fears aside and fly free. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams
This looks like a juicy remake of the classic novel, which I've read about three times during my life, and each time I found something new in the book to startle and unsettle me.
Movies: Rebecca Trailer
Netflix has released the first trailer for Rebecca http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/uz3642037Biz45562328, based on Daphne du Maurier's classic novel, which was previously adapted by Alfred Hitchcock in 1940, Deadline reported. Directed by Ben Wheatley, the film stars Lily James and Armie Hammer, leading a cast that also includes Kristin Scott Thomas, Keeley Hawes, Ann Dowd, Sam Riley, Tom Goodman-Hill, Mark Lewis Jones, John Hollingworth and Bill Paterson.
The screenplay is by Jane Goldman and Joe Shrapnel & Anna Waterhouse. Rebecca is produced by Working Title Films (Emma, Darkest Hour) and is set for release on October 21 on Netflix.
I was fortunate enough to interview Frank Herbert's son Brian during the early 2000s, just as he was coming out with prequels to his fathers Dune series. I read the first three Dune books back in the 70s when I was a teenager and they blew my mind. Later, I watched the ill fated movie version with Sting in awe, as I loved the cast and the Bene Geserit and Fremen brought to life before my eyes. I know I am in the minority in loving the first Dune movie, as most thought it was an incomprehensible mess. Still, the TV series was also fascinating, and I've been hoping that someone would take Brian's books in hand and make them into a series. This new reboot also has a stellar cast, with my fellow Iowan Jason Momoa as Duncan Idaho, and Dave Bautista and Charlotte Rampling also playing key roles in the film. Now that CGI technology is farther along, the Sandworms look so real they're frightening, and I can hardly wait for my birthday month when this film debuts. Hopefully by then there will be a vaccine for COVID 19, and I will actually be able to see the film in a movie theater. Fingers crossed!
Movies: Dune
A trailer has been released for Dune http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/uz3642037Biz45565216, based on Frank Herbert's classic sci-fi novel. Directed by Denis Villeneuve (Arrival, Blade Runner 2049) from a screenplay he co-wrote with Jon Spaihts and Eric Roth, the film is set to be released in theaters on December 18.
The cast includes Timothee Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Stellan Skarsgarrd, Dave Bautista, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Zendaya, Chang Chen, David Dastmalchian, Sharon Duncan-Brewster, Charlotte Rampling, Jason Momoa and Javier Bardem.
The trailer "throws a lot of images and faces at the viewer http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/uz3642037Biz45565217, teasing the many depths of a story that will be told across two movies," Entertainment Weekly reported, and spoke with Villeneuve about some of the key moments.
When this landmark book, the Hite Report came out, I was 16 and on a feminist reading jag, having gotten a copy of Our Bodies Ourselves and The Feminine Mystique and a couple of books by Gloria Steinem for my birthday. I read my mother's copy of this book and was fascinated by the challenges to all the male dominated societal beliefs about female orgasms and female sexuality. I also distinctly remember the backlash, all from men, who said that Hite was a lesbian man-hater who was making all this up. I also remember my mother saying that she believed Hite was onto something, and to never trust men when it came to my body or my sexuality. RIP Shere Hite, and thank you for speaking out when surrounded by misogyny.
Obituary Note: Shere Hite
Shere Hite http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/uz3642037Biz45565185, best known for The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality, which has sold more than 50 million copies since its publication in 1976, died September 9. She was 77. The Guardian reported that The Hite Report "challenged male assumptions about sex by revealing that many women were not stimulated by sexual penetration. It also encouraged women to take control of their sex lives. It was dismissed as 'anti-male' and dubbed the Hate Report by Playboy."
"I was saying that penetration didn't do anything for women and that got some people terribly upset," she told the Guardian in 2011, adding: "I was the only sex researcher at that time who was feminist. I tried to extend the idea of sexual activity to female orgasm and masturbation."
Sustained criticism of her in the U.S., "much of it highly personalized, led Hite to renounce her U.S. citizenship in 1995," the Guardian noted. She subsequently lived all over Europe before settling in north London with her second husband, Paul Sullivan.
Writer Julie Bindel, who interviewed Hite in 2011 and stayed in touch afterward, told the Guardian that Hite's work "was groundbreaking--in many ways she began the real sexual revolution for women in the 1970s after the abject failure of the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s. In the '60s, women didn't ever feel that they had the right to sexual pleasure. Shere Hite put women's sexual pleasure first and foremost for the first time ever. She centered women's experiences as opposed to seeing men as the default position and women as secondary. That really spoke to a lot of women about their own bodies, their own sexual liberation and sexual pleasure."
Into the Blue and On Broken Wings by Chanel Cleeton are the final two books in the "Wild Aces" fighter pilot romance novels. I'd read the first book, "Come Fly With Me" a couple of weeks ago, and I really enjoyed the breezy prose and well thought out plot, as well as the wonderful characters that kept me turning pages into the wee hours. These two books were just as good as the first book, detailing the lifestyle and romantic lives of another two fighter pilots in the Wild Aces squadron, Eric/Thor and Easy/Alex, as they try to find a way to fall in love with the women of their dreams and start families while flying dangerous missions in the US Air Force. Here are the blurbs:
Into the Blue: Eric Jansen—call sign Thor—loves nothing more than pushing his F-16 to
the limit. Returning home to South Carolina after a tragic loss, he
hopes to fix the mistake he made long ago, when he chose the Air Force
over his fiancée.
Becca Madison isn’t quick to welcome Thor
back. She can’t forget how he shattered her heart. But Thor won’t give
up once he’s set his sights on what he wants—and he wants Becca.
Thor shows Becca that he’s no longer the impulsive boy he used to be,
and Becca finds herself irresistibly drawn to him. But will Thor be able
to walk away from his dream of flying the F-16 for their love or does
his heart belong to the sky?
On Broken Wings: A year after losing her husband, Joker, the squadron commander of the
Wild Aces, Dani Peterson gets an offer from his best friend, Alex “Easy”
Rogers, to help fix up her house. Dani accepts, and their friendship
grows—along with an undeniable attraction.
Racked by guilt for
loving his best friend’s widow, Easy’s caught between what he wants and
can’t have. Until one night everything changes, and the woman who’s
always held his heart ends up in his arms. Yet as Easy leaves for his
next deployment, he and Dani are torn between their feelings and their
loyalty to Joker’s memory.
But when Dani discovers something
that sends them both into a spin, (SPOILER, she's pregnant) the conflicted lovers must overcome
the past to navigate a future together.
I must admit that I kept hearing Mister Mister's song "Broken Wings" every time I tucked into a new chapter of the book by the same name. At any rate, I adored both of these stories, primarily because they were well written tales that had a strong romantic/sexual through line, without resorting to being just a flimsy structure to support the authors penchant for writing soft pornographic sex scenes. The characters feel real, full bodied and with emotions and careers to take into consideration before they commit to long term relationships/marriage. I also liked the fact that the female protagonists were not cookie-cutter stereotypes of the romance novel woman, ie a petite blonde with big breasts who is childlike and stupid and irresistible to nearly every male she encounters, because she needs to be 'rescued' by his big manly schlong. The only female protagonist in the trilogy to come close to the stereotype was Dani, but she shows a lot more spine and grit than the stereotype, and because she's miscarried and lost her husband, she is a bit more fragile than the heroines in the previous two books. I also loved the fact that the author didn't use too many cutesy euphemisms for body parts during the sex scenes (ie "throbbing manliness" for penis and "moist velvet cave" for vagina), and she was unafraid to have the characters swear when it seemed appropriate. I'd give these two books A's, just as I did the first book in the series, and highly recommend them all to women (or men) who enjoy hot guys in uniforms, especially Air Force F16 pilots in flight suits (which has always been a fantasy of mine, to be honest. I love airplanes).
The Lions of Fifth Avenue by Fiona Davis is the third historical fiction/romantic mystery of hers that I've read and enjoyed. This one revolves around the glorious New York Public Library, and the family who lived there in 1913, and their descendants in 1995 trying to solve the mystery of the missing rare manuscripts. Davis is a master at weaving unique historical facts into her fiction, and here they fascinate and keep readers turning page after page to see what happens next. Here's the blurb: In New York Times bestselling author Fiona Davis's latest
historical novel, a series of book thefts roils the iconic New York
Public Library, leaving two generations of strong-willed women to pick
up the pieces.
It's 1913, and on the surface, Laura Lyons
couldn't ask for more out of life—her husband is the superintendent of
the New York Public Library, allowing their family to live in an
apartment within the grand building, and they are blessed with two
children. But headstrong, passionate Laura wants more, and when she
takes a leap of faith and applies to the Columbia Journalism School, her
world is cracked wide open. As her studies take her all over the city,
she is drawn to Greenwich Village's new bohemia, where she discovers the
Heterodoxy Club—a radical, all-female group in which women are
encouraged to loudly share their opinions on suffrage, birth control,
and women's rights. Soon, Laura finds herself questioning her
traditional role as wife and mother. But when valuable books are stolen
back at the library, threatening the home and institution she loves,
she's forced to confront her shifting priorities head on . . . and may
just lose everything in the process.
Eighty years later, in
1993, Sadie Donovan struggles with the legacy of her grandmother, the
famous essayist Laura Lyons, especially after she's wrangled her dream
job as a curator at the New York Public Library. But the job quickly
becomes a nightmare when rare manuscripts, notes, and books for the
exhibit Sadie's running begin disappearing from the library's famous
Berg Collection. Determined to save both the exhibit and her career, the
typically risk-adverse Sadie teams up with a private security expert to
uncover the culprit. However, things unexpectedly become personal when
the investigation leads Sadie to some unwelcome truths about her own
family heritage—truths that shed new light on the biggest tragedy in the
library's history.
I found myself wishing that the central mystery and characters in this book were real, and not fictional. The world of antique and valuable books is a fascinating one, and those who wish to own them merely for their value as objects, and not as literature, are still somewhat opaque to me, as I revere books as sacred stories of humanity. I would never harm a valuable book or destroy it for my own gain. Still, the motivation of thieves and those who traffic in stolen books seems similar to those who traffic in stolen art. That whole dark underbelly to creation of beauty is something I don't think I will ever tire of investigating. So I'd give this book an A, not just for the sterling prose and swift plot, but for the bibliophile's dream subject matter.
A Killing Frost by Seanan McGuire is the 14th book in the October Daye series of fantasy novels set in modern day San Francisco. This is the first hardback copy of an October Daye book that I've bought, and though it was not too long, discounting the unnecessary novella at the end, it was more of a "wrapping up a lot of loose ends from previous books" sort of novel, which meant there was a lot of rehashing of past plots and events that took up at least half of the book. This left me feeling a bit ripped off, as at hardback prices, a recap isn't worth it to me or anyone else who remembers what happened in the previous 13 novels. Still, even with the "fan service" aspect of Killing Frost, there were several good things to recommend the book, not the least of which was finally getting to see Toby make it through a "quest" without puking or being completely eviscerated (though, to be fair, she is cut, stabbed and elf shot, and May, her fetch, is as well). McGuire's prose is clean and crisp, and her plots don't flag, though they may wander a bit. Here's the blurb: Now in hardcover, the fourteenth novel of the Hugo-nominated, New York Times-bestselling Toby Daye urban fantasy series
When October is informed that Simon Torquill—legally her father, due to Faerie's archaic marriage traditions—must be invited to her wedding or risk the ceremony throwing the Kingdom in the Mists into political turmoil, she finds herself setting out on a quest she was not yet prepared to undertake for the sake of her future.... and the man who represents her family's past.
The product information on Amazon says that this is book 14 of 14, indicating that it is the last of the series, but I find it hard to believe that McGuire would leave her readers without access to Toby and Tybalt's (the King of Cats) wedding, which is likely to be raucous and to have at least one of the firstborn gate-crash and try to kill her. I was fully expecting a wedding by the end of the book, and though there was one, it wasn't Toby and Tybalts, unfortunately. Also, the bisexual/polyamorous relationship thing felt a bit forced to me, but that could be clouded by my disappointment on the other aspects of this book, mentioned above. At any rate, I'd give a B to this latest installment of the October Daye series (the last??) and recommend it to anyone who has read all the other books in the series...just prepare to be disappointed about the lack of nuptials.
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