It's about damned time they handed an award or two to Atwood, whose prescience has changed women's fiction forever. I remember reading The Handmaids Tale 30+ years ago and thinking that things could never get that bad in America for women. Ha. I've been proven wrong more than once in the past few years.
Margaret Atwood Honored by Queen Elizabeth
On Friday, Queen Elizabeth named Margaret Atwood a member of
the Order of the Companions of Honour http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/uz3642037Biz42276736
for her services to literature, the CBC reported, adding that Atwood told
British media she felt "a bit emotional" in the presence of the Queen
while accepting the prestigious accolade during an investiture ceremony at
Windsor Castle. The Royal Family's Twitter account noted the event: ".@MargaretAtwood was made a Companion of
Honour by Her Majesty for Services to Literature. #Investiture."
"When you see the Queen at her age and her schedule
that she puts out, it's an inspiration to everybody, you just keep going,"
Atwood said after the ceremony.
Founded by King George V in 1917, the Companion of Honour is
an award for those who have made a major contribution to the arts, science,
medicine, or government over a long period.
Earlier this month, Atwood was a co-winner of the Booker
Prize http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/uz3642037Biz42276738
for her novel The Testaments. She later announced that she would be donating
her Booker winnings to Indspire to support education of Indigenous students.
This was a pick for last month, but it's a book that sounds fascinating, especially now when scientists are doing more work mapping the human brain and trying to find out why we think as we do, why we get dementia and Alzheimers and how some people are able to create works of genius.
Frankfurt
Book Fair New York Picks Scatterbrain
The
Frankfurt Book Fair New York has selected Scatterbrain: How the Mind's Mistakes
Make Humans Creative, Innovative, and Successful by Henning Beck as its October
Book of the Month.
The
organization described the book this way: "In this mind-bending book, an
esteemed neuroscientist explains why perfectionism is pointless--and argues
that mistakes, missteps, and flaws are the keys to success.
"Remember
that time you screwed up simple math or forgot the name of your favorite song?
What if someone told you that such embarrassing 'brainfarts' are actually
secret weapons, proof of your superiority to computers and AI?
"In
Scatterbrain, we learn that boredom awakens the muse, distractions spark
creativity, and misjudging time creates valuable memories, among other benefits
of our faulty minds. Throughout, award-winning neuroscientist Henning Beck's
hilarious asides and brain-boosting advice make for delightful reading of the
most cutting-edge neuroscience our brains will (maybe never) remember."
Henning
Beck received his Ph.D. in neuroscience from the Graduate School of Cellular
& Molecular Neuroscience, University of Tübingen. He is a lecturer,
workshop leader and scientific consultant.
The Chocolate Maker's Wife by Karen Brooks is a historical romance that takes place in mid 17th century England. Women at that time were considered pawns to be used in marriage to make their families/fathers more wealthy and/or powerful. Abuse was rampant, of course, and we learn that our heroine, Rosamund, though the illegitimate daughter of a nobleman, is no exception to this rule. Here's the blurb:
Damnation has never been so sweet...Rosamund Tomkins, the illegitimate daughter of a nobleman, spends most of her young life in drudgery at a country inn. To her, the Restoration under Charles II, is but a distant threat as she works under the watchful eye of her brutal, abusive stepfather . . . until the day she is nearly run over by the coach of Sir Everard Blithman.
Sir Everard, a canny merchant, offers Rosamund an “opportunity like no other,” allowing her to escape into a very different life, becoming the linchpin that will drive the success of his fledgling business: a luxurious London chocolate house where wealthy and well-connected men come to see and be seen, to gossip and plot, while indulging in the sweet and heady drink.
Rosamund adapts and thrives in her new surroundings, quickly becoming the most talked-about woman in society, desired and respected in equal measure.
But Sir Everard’s plans for Rosamund and the chocolate house involve family secrets that span the Atlantic Ocean, and which have already brought death and dishonor to the Blithman name. Rosamund knows nothing of the mortal peril that comes with her new title, nor of the forces spinning a web of conspiracy buried in the past, until she meets a man whose return tightens their grip upon her, threatening to destroy everything she loves and damn her to a dire fate.
As she fights for her life and those she loves through the ravages of the Plague and London’s Great Fire, Rosamund’s breathtaking tale is one marked by cruelty and revenge; passion and redemption—and the sinfully sweet temptation of chocolate.
Sadly, though Sir Everard at first seems like a kindly benefactor, he is intent on using Rosamund to exact revenge on a man he sees as his rival, when in reality, Matthew is just as much of a pawn as Rosamund, though he is blackmailing Everard with a horrible secret (SPOILER ALERT). Aubrey, Everard's son and his daughter Helene have been having an incestuous affair for years, and Helene is with child by her brother. Though his children are vile and insane enough in their actions, Everard isn't as concerned with what they've done as he is with what will happen to his reputation and family name if the truth gets out. So he sends his son away and his daughter leaves with her baby in a boat when the ship she's sailing on is attacked by pirates. We never find out if she and her child are alive or dead, but after Everard dies from what appears to be a massive coronary or stroke, Aubrey tries to force Rosamund to marry him, when she's in love with Matthew (and she's become a canny business woman to boot). This was a fairly compelling read, with romance and mystery and a woman finding herself and her life's work, after being abused and used despicably by most of the men she's encountered. I'd give this book an A-, and recommend it to anyone who finds the birth of chocolate mania in England of interest, and those who like well told historical romance.
Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo is the first book in a new adult fantasy series, this time set in the "secret societies" founded and fostered at Ivy League universities like Yale, where this novel takes place. I've never found much to like about fraternities or secret societies, usually because they're created by men to help other men become rich and powerful, and they have traditionally excluded women and people of color or religions other than Christianity. Yet the protagonist of this novel, Alex, is such a train wreck, I felt compelled to read on to learn how she'd manage to do anything with her life other than throw it away on self hatred and fear. Here's the blurb: The mesmerizing adult debut from Leigh Bardugo, a tale of power,
privilege, dark magic, and murder set among the Ivy League elite.
Galaxy “Alex” Stern is the most unlikely member of Yale’s freshman class. Raised in the Los Angeles hinterlands by a hippie mom, Alex dropped out of school early and into a world of shady drug-dealer boyfriends, dead-end jobs, and much, much worse. In fact, by age twenty, she is the sole survivor of a horrific, unsolved multiple homicide. Some might say she’s thrown her life away. But at her hospital bed, Alex is offered a second chance: to attend one of the world’s most prestigious universities on a full ride. What’s the catch, and why her?
Still searching for answers, Alex arrives in New Haven tasked by her mysterious benefactors with monitoring the activities of Yale’s secret societies. Their eight windowless “tombs” are the well-known haunts of the rich and powerful, from high-ranking politicos to Wall Street’s biggest players. But their occult activities are more sinister and more extraordinary than any paranoid imagination might conceive. They tamper with forbidden magic. They raise the dead. And, sometimes, they prey on the living.
Galaxy “Alex” Stern is the most unlikely member of Yale’s freshman class. Raised in the Los Angeles hinterlands by a hippie mom, Alex dropped out of school early and into a world of shady drug-dealer boyfriends, dead-end jobs, and much, much worse. In fact, by age twenty, she is the sole survivor of a horrific, unsolved multiple homicide. Some might say she’s thrown her life away. But at her hospital bed, Alex is offered a second chance: to attend one of the world’s most prestigious universities on a full ride. What’s the catch, and why her?
Still searching for answers, Alex arrives in New Haven tasked by her mysterious benefactors with monitoring the activities of Yale’s secret societies. Their eight windowless “tombs” are the well-known haunts of the rich and powerful, from high-ranking politicos to Wall Street’s biggest players. But their occult activities are more sinister and more extraordinary than any paranoid imagination might conceive. They tamper with forbidden magic. They raise the dead. And, sometimes, they prey on the living.
The plot was twisty and dark, and the characters weird and often cruel, but the relationship between Alex and her mentor "Darlington" (A mashup of Daniel Arlington) was what made the novel readable. Alex can actually "see" and speak to ghosts, (or Grays, as she calls them) and that is what helps her figure out what each society is doing, or trying to do, to get/keep their "house" in wealth and power. There is a great deal of death and manipulation and vile behavior in this book that made me somewhat nauseated, as I am not a fan of the horror genre, and this book leans pretty far into those waters. Even the teachers aren't safe here, and there's really no one to turn to as a character to admire, which usually means I won't like the book, even if it has good strong prose and a twisty but sturdy plot, as this one does. But I found myself wondering what Alex will do next, so I am probably going to break my ban on horror fiction and read the next one anyway. I'd give Ninth House a B, and recommend it to anyone interested in East Coast Ivy League Colleges and their secret societies.
Smoke by Anna Beguine (one of Lilith Saintcrow's pen names) is a "dark" (read horror) fantasy thriller that I was hoping to like a lot more than I did. The protagonist is a nasty chain-smoking anorexic drug addict and alcoholic who is, of course, the standard "petite" female (because only petite women are sexy in nearly all of the romance novels ever written) and who seems to only want to die in some weird fashion, but like many a coward, can't quite get the job done. Rosemary Ames (the femme fatale protagonist) lives on cigarettes, booze and drugs, and is rail thin because she never seems to eat, yet somehow, men still salivate over this pathetic broken creature because she is...I suppose mean and vulnerable are the best ways to describe her so-called allure. Here's the blurb: Rosemary Ames is committing suicide one slow masochistic step at a time
during the coldest winter on record. Until, that is, she witnesses a
murder. The cops want her under protection. Her sometimes boyfriend
wants her in his bed. And the killer? He has plans for her too. Rose is
the killer's key to a tangled labyrinth of stone, where unimaginable
power waits to be grasped by beings far more--and less--than human. Her
only safety may be Michael Constantius. He says he's in love with her.
He says she's safe. But Michael's keeping secrets too. He knows what
lies under the city, and he seems to know more than he should about what
makes Rose tick. In fact, he seems obsessed with her. And just a little
bit scary... What do you do when you find out you want to live just as
someone is trying to kill you? And what can you do when you find out
monsters are real?
I found myself loathing Rosemary almost as much as she loathes herself. Her anorexic friend and fellow drug addict Kitty seems tobe the only person she cares for, yet she doesn't really take steps to protect her at all, and when things go south for Kitty, Rosemary is too bound up with her own problems to really intervene, not that there's anything she really could do against the powerful vampires who populate the book. Oddly rendered, the vampires are split into two groups, the ones who drink human blood and become insane and the ones, like Michael, who instead have learned to manipulate a human into fostering a psychic connection with them so that they can feed off the human's emotions and spirit or soul. In exchange, they turn the humans into a kind of immortal, but though they claim to love their psychic companions, they're really little more than pets that they constantly manipulate mentally and can't be parted from once they're psychically linked to one another. Michael tricks Rosemary into bonding with him when she's drunk and high and ill from what I can only assume is lung cancer from smoking. Once he forces her to agree, he then heals her and purges her of her illness.
You would think this would stop the mouthy Rosie from smoking or drinking again, but you'd be wrong, because she goes back to both and tries to buy enough drugs to kill herself, only to fail when it becomes clear that the vampires are one step ahead of her and have no intention of letting her die, since Michael is their leader and is now "healthy" off of sucking out her emotions/soul every time they are in bed together. If this all smacks of non consensual sex and slavery,then you're on the right track. Somehow we're supposed to find this romantic, when it really isn't. Rosemary doesn't really have a choice, and yet she considers herself "in love" though she knows she's being mentally manipulated by Michael. I found this whole book distasteful, dreadful and sexist in the most horrible fashion possible. The protagonist is too stupid to live, and yet she does, while her kinder best friend dies. I'd give this book a D, but I don't really understand why it was written in the first place. It seems beneath an author like Lilith Saintcrow to write such misogynistic clap trap. I can't think of anyone masochistic enough to recommend the book to, either. Perhaps fans of that twaddle Twilight? Or fans of it's nasty sister fan fiction, 50 Shades of Grey? Unfortunately I bought the second book in this series before I read the first one, so now I am stuck wondering whether I should plunge back into the sewer of this world of senseless violence and slavery. Ugh. I will let you know if I do read it in another post sometime before the year ends.
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