Coraline
Neil Gaimam
Harper Perennial
Fiction, YA Fantasy
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Young Coraline's family has just moved into one floor of a run-down old house. The upstairs neighbor claims he's training a mouse circus. The elderly sisters downstairs raise terriers and speak endlessly of their bygone days on the stage. Her parents are wrapped up in their jobs, hardly noticing her coming and going. Left mostly to her own devices, she starts exploring... and finds a peculiar door in the drawing room that leads to a brick wall. One night, she follows a strange shadow to the door, and finds that it now opens onto a hallway leading to another flat just like her own - only not quite. Here, Coraline meets her "Other Mother," a paper-pale woman with black buttons for eyes. She offers the lonely girl all the love and attention that her real parents haven't given her in ages... but at what cost?
REVIEW: This movie formed the basis of the 2009 animated film of the same name. I saw the movie first, and there are significant differences. The overall creepy nature of the Other Mother's world remains the same, as does the independence and courage of the heroine herself. Considering that I find Gaiman a very hit-and-miss author, this one falls in the "hit" category, with the strangeness augmenting the story rather than bogging it down. While I personally preferred the movie, I could still enjoy this book.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Comet's Nine Lives (Jan Brett)
Comet's Nine Lives
Jan Brett
Putnam
Fiction, YA Picture Book
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Born and raised on Nantucket Island, the cat Comet was happy and carefree... until an ill-advised snack on foxgloves cost him the first of the nine lives all cats are born with. He decides it's time to find himself a permanent home, but can he find a place to live before he runs out of lives?
REVIEW: I bought this for the beautiful watercolor images, full of bright details and a subplot told almost entirely in pictures. The story is light and fun, and it reads quickly. Enjoyable all around, whether you're a child reading it for Comet's adventures or an adult appreciating Brett's remarkable artwork.
Jan Brett
Putnam
Fiction, YA Picture Book
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Born and raised on Nantucket Island, the cat Comet was happy and carefree... until an ill-advised snack on foxgloves cost him the first of the nine lives all cats are born with. He decides it's time to find himself a permanent home, but can he find a place to live before he runs out of lives?
REVIEW: I bought this for the beautiful watercolor images, full of bright details and a subplot told almost entirely in pictures. The story is light and fun, and it reads quickly. Enjoyable all around, whether you're a child reading it for Comet's adventures or an adult appreciating Brett's remarkable artwork.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Cats Cats Cats (S. Gross, editor)
Cats Cats Cats: A Collection of Great Cat Cartoons
S. Gross, editor
Perennial Library (Harper & Row)
Fiction, Humor/Comics
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: A collection of cat cartoons from many sources.
REVIEW: This is an older book, but even considering that, the humor is dated. Lots of unfixed pets with unwanted kittens/throwing shoes at strays/kicking the cat outside all night type of jokes that might have been funny in the 1950's; I'm delusional enough to hope that spaying and neutering are more mainstream these days, as is keeping cats safely indoors. Some of the cartoonists treat cats with such contempt that I wonder why they bother drawing them at all, or why Gross thought they'd be worth including in an anthology of cartoons aimed at cat-lovers. A few others take way too many panels to get absolutely nowhere. For all that, there are a few fun cartoons here. Overall, the dross outweighs the gold. It didn't hack me off enough for a Bad rating, but the general blandness and dated humor place it firmly in Okay territory.
S. Gross, editor
Perennial Library (Harper & Row)
Fiction, Humor/Comics
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: A collection of cat cartoons from many sources.
REVIEW: This is an older book, but even considering that, the humor is dated. Lots of unfixed pets with unwanted kittens/throwing shoes at strays/kicking the cat outside all night type of jokes that might have been funny in the 1950's; I'm delusional enough to hope that spaying and neutering are more mainstream these days, as is keeping cats safely indoors. Some of the cartoonists treat cats with such contempt that I wonder why they bother drawing them at all, or why Gross thought they'd be worth including in an anthology of cartoons aimed at cat-lovers. A few others take way too many panels to get absolutely nowhere. For all that, there are a few fun cartoons here. Overall, the dross outweighs the gold. It didn't hack me off enough for a Bad rating, but the general blandness and dated humor place it firmly in Okay territory.
Monday, May 24, 2010
Site Updated, Reviews Archived
Brightdreamer Books has been updated again. The previous reviews have been archived. I also rotated the Random Recommendations, and I cross-linked more book reviews.
Enjoy!
Enjoy!
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
The Inscription (Pam Binder)
The Inscription
Pam Binder
Sonnet Books
Fiction, Romance
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: In many corners of the world, a legend is whispered of a secretive race of immortals. In the fifteenth-century Scottish Highlands, where myths grow thicker than heather on the hills, these stories find flesh in the MacAlpins and their castle on the shores of Loch Ness. The MacAlpin laird, the handsome Lachlan, is strong and wise, an arbiter of justice and reason. He is also cursed, as his father was before him, with a terrible bloodlust, a savage thirst for death that fills him more and more whenever he bares his blade in battle. Though he may try to avoid combat, sometimes it comes seeking him out. As an immortal Mongolian enemy makes his way to MacAlpin territory, bent on revenge, Lachlan feels the shadow of his curse growing darker across his destiny, a doom as inevitable as the coming confrontation... but there may be hope, in an old legend which even his own immortal kin hardly believe, a legend about a woman whose healing love will transcend time...
Amber MacPhee, visiting her Aunt Dora in Inverness, was driving past Loch Ness when a freak lightning storm drove her car into the icy waters. She woke in the arms of a tartaned man, in a place that seems to be taking medieval reenactment far too seriously. She has spent her life as many in the twentieth century do, flooding her schedule with a constant flurry of external activity to hide a deep internal void. Her Scottish hero may fill that void, but he hides his heart as well as she hides hers. Can a love out of legend redeem them both, or is Lachlan doomed to lose his heart and his life to the monster that dwells within?
REVIEW: No, I don't normally read romances. They usually put plot on the back burner, playing out as an overlong seduction scene with fairly predictable endings. This book is no exception. Amber and Lachlan waver back and forth over their feelings and motivations depending on whether the author wanted to heat up a scene or cool it down. The story of Lachlan's enemy seeking vengeance on his doorstep lacked bite, and his face-to-face meeting with his nemesis is practically over before it begins; his real enemy, I suppose, is supposed to be his curse of blood-fury, but I still expected more out of a nemesis who spent years honing his blade and his sadism under the nefarious Genghis Khan. The climax felt tacked on, ending abruptly. Binder's descriptons of life in the medieval Highlands were decent, though I'm not sure how many Irish Wolfhounds (as opposed to Scottish Deerhounds) were running around on the shores of Loch Ness in the 1400's. (I also dispute the idea that the Loch Ness Monster could be a creature resembling a Brachiosaurus, as is implied here - the "aquatic brachiosaur" idea was debunked when it was shown that their lungs would collapse under that much water - but I digress.)
Overall, considering that I only picked this book up to kill time, I can't say I hated it. I can say that I preferred it to Diana Gabaldon's The Outlander, which uses the vaguely similar plot of a (nearly) modern woman plunging backwards in time to warm the bed of a Highlander; Binder, at least, didn't derail the minimal plot to delve into the downright sick territory Gabaldon explored at the end. I suppose I'm just not a fan of romance novels, even romance novels with the sci-fi twist of time travel.
Pam Binder
Sonnet Books
Fiction, Romance
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: In many corners of the world, a legend is whispered of a secretive race of immortals. In the fifteenth-century Scottish Highlands, where myths grow thicker than heather on the hills, these stories find flesh in the MacAlpins and their castle on the shores of Loch Ness. The MacAlpin laird, the handsome Lachlan, is strong and wise, an arbiter of justice and reason. He is also cursed, as his father was before him, with a terrible bloodlust, a savage thirst for death that fills him more and more whenever he bares his blade in battle. Though he may try to avoid combat, sometimes it comes seeking him out. As an immortal Mongolian enemy makes his way to MacAlpin territory, bent on revenge, Lachlan feels the shadow of his curse growing darker across his destiny, a doom as inevitable as the coming confrontation... but there may be hope, in an old legend which even his own immortal kin hardly believe, a legend about a woman whose healing love will transcend time...
Amber MacPhee, visiting her Aunt Dora in Inverness, was driving past Loch Ness when a freak lightning storm drove her car into the icy waters. She woke in the arms of a tartaned man, in a place that seems to be taking medieval reenactment far too seriously. She has spent her life as many in the twentieth century do, flooding her schedule with a constant flurry of external activity to hide a deep internal void. Her Scottish hero may fill that void, but he hides his heart as well as she hides hers. Can a love out of legend redeem them both, or is Lachlan doomed to lose his heart and his life to the monster that dwells within?
REVIEW: No, I don't normally read romances. They usually put plot on the back burner, playing out as an overlong seduction scene with fairly predictable endings. This book is no exception. Amber and Lachlan waver back and forth over their feelings and motivations depending on whether the author wanted to heat up a scene or cool it down. The story of Lachlan's enemy seeking vengeance on his doorstep lacked bite, and his face-to-face meeting with his nemesis is practically over before it begins; his real enemy, I suppose, is supposed to be his curse of blood-fury, but I still expected more out of a nemesis who spent years honing his blade and his sadism under the nefarious Genghis Khan. The climax felt tacked on, ending abruptly. Binder's descriptons of life in the medieval Highlands were decent, though I'm not sure how many Irish Wolfhounds (as opposed to Scottish Deerhounds) were running around on the shores of Loch Ness in the 1400's. (I also dispute the idea that the Loch Ness Monster could be a creature resembling a Brachiosaurus, as is implied here - the "aquatic brachiosaur" idea was debunked when it was shown that their lungs would collapse under that much water - but I digress.)
Overall, considering that I only picked this book up to kill time, I can't say I hated it. I can say that I preferred it to Diana Gabaldon's The Outlander, which uses the vaguely similar plot of a (nearly) modern woman plunging backwards in time to warm the bed of a Highlander; Binder, at least, didn't derail the minimal plot to delve into the downright sick territory Gabaldon explored at the end. I suppose I'm just not a fan of romance novels, even romance novels with the sci-fi twist of time travel.
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