katedp - Kate Degelau-Pierce

Why am I still reading these?

Why? Why am I still reading Rick Riordan books? They’re formulaic, there aren’t any surprises, not really, and the good guys never win until they do.

You know why? Because they’re still fun brain candy to read when you’re sick, like I was a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t want my brain to have to work, I just wanted a good yarn that would distract me from how much I wanted to sleep and how stuffy my nose was. The Hidden Oracle was *totally* that story.

Apollo has been turned human, and some old Roman emperors turned gods (they used to do that back in the day) have decided to take over the world. Nero’s the villain in this one – there are two others that haven’t been revealed yet. Apollo has to make it to Camp Half Blood, figure out a mystery, and temporarily defeat the local big bad – that is, thwart Nero’s plans but have him escape so that he can be defeated in a later book.

Like I said, it served its purpose well. It’s entertaining and fluffy and that was exactly what I needed.

I need to go think about something happy

The Museum of Intangible Things is the third of four YA books that I’ve recently read. Three of them are all about dealing with depression and depressed people. (The fourth is a Rick Riordan adventure book.) It’s getting hard to write about them using different language.

So what sets this one apart? One of the two main characters is so manic, she’s actually starting to have visions – most other books don’t go that far. The other main difference is that the characters in this one are sort-of throwbacks to the stories from the 1970s and 1980s: they’re not wealthy and their parents are messed up so that they’re both functionally running their families. You don’t often see that in modern YA, though Judy Blume is all about that (Tiger Eyes, I’m looking at you).

Did I enjoy it? Yes. Would I urge you to seek it out? No.

Let’s go on a quest

Mosquitoland is a quest – a high schooler is running away from her father and stepmother in Mississippi to see her mother in Ohio. She gets on a bus, and adventures abound. She meets all kinds of eccentric folks, avoids perilous situations, runs out of the money she stole from her step-mother, and, of course, learns things about herself in the end. It wouldn’t be a quest without that lesson.

It’s less precious and funnier than I thought it would be. Recommended for a vacation/beach read.

A first novel

TFW you’re writing about a book, and the best description you can come up with is: perfectly adequate. The Sherlockian was perfectly adequate. There are two mysteries, one solved by a fictional Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. There’s an eccentric main character. There’s even a romance.

It’s… fine? It’s especially fine considering it’s a first novel, and it’s got some of the oddities that first novels often do. (I like first novels – I’m clearly not a great writer, and it’s heartening as a reader and amateur writer to see even professionals get better with more practice. [You will probably never see any fiction I have written. You don’t want to.])

If you’re into Sherlock Holmes, read it, but it’s not something I’d recommend going out of your way for.

Taking care of people is important

Oh, All the Bright Places was a lovely story. Which seems like an odd thing to say about a book about depression. But both characters, Violet and Finch, are treated with such care and attention and, well, love.

Finch is manic-depressive, has been his whole life. Violet was in a car accident last year, and her sister died. She’s depressed, but in a different way. They meet one morning when they’re both thinking about committing suicide. It’s less sad than it sounds. He talks her off the ledge (literally) and then follows her down.

Long story short, Finch goes into a manic phase, Finch and Violet end up in a relationship, and things go from there. Violet starts to come out of her depression, and Finch’s manic phase ends. It’s not always easy to read, but it is always compelling.

Chronic and situational depression are different. I’ve had situational depression; I’m friends with chronically depressed people. It’s not the same, and putting words around those differences is important.

Recommended.

Not for Kates

The Windup Girl, overall, might be as good as the pull quote on the cover says. But I was 100% turned off by the girl-on-girl rape scene at the beginning that’s in there solely to show how the titular Windup Girl was in a slave-like situation. There were other, less sensational, ways to illustrate her slavery. Just… no.

Cotton Candy

Geek Girl is a nothingth of a book. It’s cotton candy for your brain: fun, fine in small doses, but isn’t nourishing or particularly memorable.

Grunge was the punk of its day

I enjoyed Champagne Supernovas more than I expected to, quite frankly.

The subtitle sums it up: it is about Kate Moss, Marc Jacobs, and Alexander McQueen through the 1990s (and a bit into the early 2000s). I wish there had been more photos of the fashion, but given how easy it is to search for the collections online, that’s a minor quibble.

You think of grunge when you think of 90s fashion, but that was really only a couple of years. The rest of the decade was still about stripping away the clothing armor of the 1980s, but it was a more put-together look. Marc Jacobs had the famous (infamous?) grunge collection that got him fired. Alexander McQueen was making art, not clothes a person would (or could) wear. And you can’t talk about fashion in the 1990s without Kate Moss.

It’s a great overview of the aesthetics of the decade and the clothes that went with it.

Magic v Technology: who will win?

All the Birds in the Sky was, for me, a tightly written three-act near-future novel about the clash of technology and magic (read: nature). I really enjoyed it.

There are two middle school aged children, Patricia and Laurence, and they are both freaks in that special middle school way. They almost become friends before they go their separate ways. As adults, they meet up in near-future San Francisco. Laurence is part of a tech incubator whose goal is to reach other planets sooner rather than later. Patricia is helping her fellow people via healing magic. The world is falling apart, and that accelerates. Clearly, humanity needs saving; will it be technology that will get us to the other world(s) before this one is destroyed or will it be magic that fixes it all?

This book is very much A Good Thing and worth your entertainment time.

Powerful women getting the short end of the story-telling stick this time

Even those of you who don’t like to read about Ancient Rome have probably heard of Augustus Caesar. He’s the one who saw Rome through its final leap from Republic to Empire. He was, by all accounts, intelligent and fairly ruthless. Livia was his wife. She – as most powerful women do – got a bad rap, particularly from Robert Graves’ I, Claudius. *

This seemed like a good opportunity to read a book about someone who’s pulled all the tidbits about Livia together into one coherent story. It should be interesting. Alas, it wasn’t. Records about women tend not to survive this long; the paucity of information means that the author relied on general observations about life at this time. That wasn’t what I wanted to know about. I remain dissatisfied.

There may very well be a good book about Livia out there. But it wasn’t this one.

* Which is a wonderful soap opera and a great opportunity to see Patrick Stewart with curly hair. Highly recommended.