Hello there fellow book dragons and literary friends! I know it's been awhile since I've posted something new, and while that has a sizable back story, I would just like to say that its wonderful to be back here posting again. I don't think I will reach 50 posts by the end of the year, unfortunately, but it's been a really tough year both physically and mentally, so I will give myself a pass for 2022. Next year will be my 40th college graduation anniversary, already. Meanwhile, here are some interesting tidbits from Shelf Awareness and some great book reviews.
This sounds like a fascinating book. I've always loved stories of feral cat rescues and the lovely people who take the time to care for them.
Book Review: She and Her Cat: Stories
She and Her Cat offers a quartet of imaginative, deeply affecting stories of magical realism written by Naruki Nagakawa and based on an original story by Japanese director, producer and manga artist Makoto Shinkai. The book is alternately narrated by multiple generations of isolated Japanese women who face loss and the feral neighborhood cats who come to love them--and vice versa.
In "Sea of Words," a male street cat is rescued by a single gal who works for an art and design college. The woman lives a quiet life and has romantic woes that lead to a falling out with her best friend. She names the cat Chobi, and the two offer each other comfort and solace. As Chobi patrols the neighborhood nightly, he meets a cast of eccentrics including Jon, a dog who is a sagacious philosopher; Mimi, a kitten; and Reina, a woman who lives nearby and feeds feral cats.
Mimi, the kitten now grown, anchors "First Blossoming," where she and Chobi meet up daily to enjoy food provided by Reina. A "gifted" young artist-painter, Reina couldn't get into university, but is offered an exciting internship at a film and manga design company by the narrator of the first story. Reina excels until exploitive corporate culture upsets her life. In the meantime, Mimi "[ties] the knot" with another feral cat and gives birth to kittens.
In "Slumber and Sky," Cookie, one of Mimi's offspring, is adopted by a mother who gives the cat to her young adult daughter, Aoi, whose severe depression keeps her housebound. A huge artistic rift between Aoi and her "soul sister" precipitated Aoi's paralysis of sadness, guilt and regret. When Cookie, normally a housecat, goes in search of her mother--Mimi, who is sick--Aoi is forced to confront her own limitations.
In the fourth story, "The Temperature of the World," a long-suffering and self-sacrificing divorcee takes in her rebellious, disillusioned nephew. His presence forces her to stand up to her domineering brother--with the help of a smart, feral, neighborhood boss cat who knows all.
Read on their own or taken as a whole, these heartfelt, insightful stories offer a thematic continuum about the quiet burdens people bear in the modern, often isolated world and how human-animal interactions enrich and embolden lives. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines
I often rely on the infamous book blurb to get me into a story or make me want to buy a book, and I certainly couldn't do without them in my posts of reviews, where I use the longer blurb to show what the book is about, so that I can comment on what I did or didn't like in the text. It's a time-saver, but I often wonder about those authors who have been coerced into writing blurbs, and how tired they must be of using the same phrases over and over to describe the book to make it enticing to the readers glance. This is Robert Gray's thoughts on blurbs and their purpose in bookselling and reading.
Deeper Understanding
Robert Gray: Herding a Stack of Book Blurbs
“From the moment I picked up your book until I put it down I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend to read it.”--Groucho Marx's blurb on the rear panel of Dawn Ginsbergh's Revenge by S.J. Perelman (Horace Liveright, 1929)
I've been thinking about blurbs, which are hard to avoid if you're a reader. There they are, right in front of you, every day. Blurbs tend to travel in groups, often vertically (a stack of book blurbs?), and to nest on packed bookshelves. For an individual title, the stack's numbers can vary from a single blurb on the front cover to three or four on the back. Ambitious blurbists will sometimes even include a few pages of them inside the book. Fellow writers' blurbs, reviewers' blurbs, publicists' blurbs. Do they all get read? I wonder.
Not long ago, Barbara Lane wrote in Datebook: "Blurb is such a wonderful word, It conjures up exactly what it is: a belch of praise for a book, generally found on the dust jacket, to lure the reader to purchase it. I must admit to reading blurbs when deciding whether to buy a book, but I am swayed only by plaudits from publications I trust or authors I greatly admire."
Speaking for the opposition, Joe Queenan noted in One for the Books that
"writers hate writing blurbs for strangers, because it forces them to read books they do not want to read, at a point when time itself is running out on them.... Purists can decode blurbs to see the procrustean contortions a writer had to put themselves through in order to be able to praise a friend without actually praising his book."
I confess I enjoy tracing the six degrees of separation (often fewer than six) between blurberistas, as Queenan describes them, and the writers they plug.
In the Guardian last August, professional copywriter Louise Willder, author of Blurb Your Enthusiasm, shared some book trade secrets including: "The chances are that you have read more blurbs on books than actual books. Perhaps you have even glanced at one I wrote: I've been a copywriter in publishing for 25 years, crafting those miniature stories that aim to distill a book's magic and connect with readers. Part compression, part come-on, blurbs can also, as I found when I wrote a book about them, open up a world of literary history and wordy joy."
Among the many things she discovered is there "have always been blurb haters. J.D. Salinger refused to have any words on his book jackets other than the title and his name. Jeanette Winterson burned her own books on social media in 2021 because she hated the 'cosy little domestic' blurbs on their revamped covers. Joe Orton was sent to prison for defacing library books with, among other things, outrageous fake blurbs.
A copywriter colleague of mine once had a blurb torn up in front of him by an irate editor, while another made him write 21 different versions for a popular novel."
In his New York Times "On Language" column, William Safire observed in 1981 that a blurb "is an effusion, printed in an advertisement or on a book's cover, extolling the contents by a critic, a friend of the author, or if worse (worst?) comes to worst, the publisher.... I have often dreamt of supplying a blurb that goes: 'The book can be put down but the author cannot.' ''
He added that the coinage of the term blurb can be traced to Gelett Burgess, "a writer for Smart Set magazine, [who] came up with an idea in 1907 for a way to tout a book: He drew a picture of a simpering girl on his book's jacket and said that his book was beloved by Miss Belinda Blurb. Our girl Belinda has never been busier: Unforgettable. Gripping. Luminous. The best linguistic gift since the gift of speech."
The inaugural blurb (though it wasn't called that) in the U.S. apparently had a dodgy genesis. When the first edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass was published in 1855, Ralph Waldo Emerson sent the poet a letter that included the phrase: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career." Whitman subsequently had those words stamped in gold leaf on the spine of the second edition.
If you're desperate, Plot Generator manufactures blurbs. For my never-to-be-written crime novel The Boston Story (under the pseudonym Malcolm Canterbury), PG began with the question: "What would you do if you knew there were illiterate booksellers with shocking habits near the ones you love? The night of the conference changes everything for Samuel Emerson, a 55-year-old bookseller from Boston." PG also created a pair of blurbs. My favorite: " 'Never have there been more chilling villains than illiterate booksellers that plagiarize each other.' --the Daily Tale."
My favorite blurb was Michael Ondaatje's literary blessing on the back cover of John Berger's 1995 novel To the Wedding: "In some countries it must still be the writer's role to gather and comfort... to hold and celebrate a moment before darkness. With To the Wedding John Berger has written a great, sad, and tender lyric, a novel that is a vortex of community and compassion that somehow overcomes fate and death. Wherever I live in the world I know I will have this book with me."
Does he really still have that book with him, more than 25 years later? I suspect he does.--Robert Gray, contributing editor
I'm chuffed that the first Ursula LeGuin award went to an author whose book sounds like something LeGuin herself might have written.
Awards: Ursula K. Le Guin for Fiction
Khadija Abdalla Bajaber's The House of Rust (Graywolf Press) won the inaugural $25,000 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction https://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/x/pjJscAaIwegI6alkJx52Gg~k1yJoKXv-hs8x6jBWsCgpoMLg-gVdw, which is "intended to recognize those writers Ursula spoke of in her 2014 National Book Awards speech--realists of a larger reality, who can imagine real grounds for hope and see alternatives to how we live now."
The jury praised Bajaber's transcendent writing and innovative, transporting story, saying: "Scene after scene is gleaming, textured, utterly devoid of cliche and arresting in its wisdom. The novel's structure is audacious and its use of language is to die for."
Two finalists were also named: How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu (Morrow) and The Past Is Red by Catherynne M. Valente (Tordotcom Publishing).
Hither, Page by Cat Sebastian is a delightful mystery/LGBTQ romance novel that reads like a historical romance in a cozy post-WWII English village setting. I was able to snag this gem for a really reasonable price for my Kindle from Amazon. Here's the blurb: A jaded spy and a shell shocked country doctor team up to solve a murder in postwar England.
James
Sommers returned from the war with his nerves in tatters. All he wants
is to retreat to the quiet village of his childhood and enjoy the
boring, predictable life of a country doctor. The last thing in the
world he needs is a handsome stranger who seems to be mixed up with the
first violent death the village has seen in years. It certainly doesn't
help that this stranger is the first person James has wanted to touch
since before the war.
The war may be over for the rest of the
world, but Leo Page is still busy doing the dirty work for one of the
more disreputable branches of the intelligence service. When his boss
orders him to cover up a murder, Leo isn't expecting to be sent to a
sleepy village. After a week of helping old ladies wind balls of yarn
and flirting with a handsome doctor, Leo is in danger of forgetting what
he really is and why he's there. He's in danger of feeling things he
has no business feeling. A person who burns his identity after every job
can't set down roots.
As he starts to untangle the mess of
secrets and lies that lurk behind the lace curtains of even the most
peaceful-seeming of villages, Leo realizes that the truths he's about to
uncover will affect his future and those of the man he's growing to
care about.
Leo's essential cynicism and feelings of worthlessness (due to a horrible childhood) have helped him become a kind of invisible man during his career, but it's also kept him isolated and lonely. Once he meets the sweet but shy Dr James, who is compassionate and handsome, there's no turning back on their insane chemistry and deepening feelings for one another, though at this time in England homosexuality was illegal and treated as a disease. Sebastian's prose is deliciously elegant and wry and full of the unflagging British sense of humor. The plot wings along like a newly freed bird, and you can feel the joy that the author brings to their writing. I read this heartening and hearty book in one sitting, and I can't imagine any reader, after being hooked in the first chapter, putting the book down and walking away. Jolly good fun, this book deserves an A.
Heart of Venom by Jennifer Estep is book 9 in her Elemental Assassin's series. I've read all the books previous to this one, and I've enjoyed most of this urban fantasy series, though at times it can get redundant, as the main character goes over the "greatest hits" of the past books in every subsequent novel. This takes up a lot of real estate in the current book and I feel it's completely unnecessary because once you've gotten past the first few novels, you don't need reminders of what you've read before, you already have the background in your head. Anyway, here's the blurb for #9:
This installment has the usual "they're impossible to kill and have been on the rampage for decades" bad guys that Gin is always up against, only this time, she basically says "hold my beer" and goes after them to rescue Sophia without thought to having backup, initially, but then manages to get Owen and Finn and the rest of the crew behind her to put evil faux "cowboy" and his twisted sister out of commission for good. Like the A Team, I love it when a plan comes together, and the final showdown near the end of the book was gory, but worth the wait. I'm also glad that things (SPOILER) worked out between Owen and Gin. Those two are made for each other. One of my difficulties with this series is that the author, Jennifer Estep, describes all the great Southern cuisine that Gin and Sophia make at their restaurant and at home in great, loving detail...and it always makes me hungry for BBQ! Seriously, do NOT read these books on an empty stomach or you'll end up bankrupting yourself at the grocery store or local restaurant. Anyway, I really enjoyed this installment of the Assassins series, and I'd give it an A- and recommend it to anyone who has read the other books in the series.
All the Stars and Teeth by Adalyn Grace is a diverse fantasy romance with a fair bit of piracy and swashbuckling woven into the text. Though it's close to 400 pages, this is one of those books that, once you've become engrossed in the story, you will have a hard time putting it down and finding your way back to reality. Here's the blurb:
Set in a kingdom where danger lurks beneath the sea, mermaids seek vengeance with song, and magic is a choice, Adalyn Grace’s All the Stars and Teeth is a thrilling fantasy for fans of Stephanie Garber’s Caraval and Sarah J. Maas’s Throne of Glass series.
She will reign.
As princess of the island kingdom Visidia, Amora Montara has spent her entire life training to be High Animancer—the master of souls. The rest of the realm can choose their magic, but for Amora, it’s never been a choice. To secure her place as heir to the throne, she must prove her mastery of the monarchy’s dangerous soul magic.
When her demonstration goes awry, Amora is forced to flee. She strikes a deal with Bastian, a mysterious pirate: he’ll help her prove she’s fit to rule, if she’ll help him reclaim his stolen magic.
But sailing the kingdom holds more wonder—and more peril—than Amora anticipated. A destructive new magic is on the rise, and if Amora is to conquer it, she’ll need to face legendary monsters, cross paths with vengeful mermaids, and deal with a stow-away she never expected… or risk the fate of Visidia and lose the crown forever.
I am the right choice. The only choice. And I will protect my kingdom.
SPOILER ALERT: So Amora discovers that everything she's ever been told as the heir apparent to the throne is a complete lie, and her father the king is a cowardly, evil bastard. I really felt for her, because at one point in my life, toward my late teens, I also discovered that my father was a lying, cheating bastard who had caused irreparable damage to everyone in our family, and who would go on to cause trauma in several other families, but would ultimately get swindled and grifted into a horrible death in a poorly-run nursing home. You live by the sword, you die by the sword. But it's hard, as a young and idealistic person, to have the scales removed from your eyes and realize that your parents have feet of clay, or worse, have appeared to be good people while harboring a rotting soul full of demons. That was why I admired Amora, because, though she discovers it's all been a sham, she works as hard as she can to right her family's wrongs. I also like that she gave people on the ship (and what a marvelous magical ship! Complete with a mermaid!) the benefit of the doubt, and between them the crew was able to kill the bad guy and, after the king dies, bring some semblance of order to Amora's kingdom, though her soul magic has been cursed into her beloved Bastian. The prose in this book is dense, but very readable, and the plot moves at a brisk pace. I'd give this book a B+ and recommend it to anyone who is a fan of Sara Maas's books and other YA fantasies.
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