Throne of the Crescent Moon

At long last!  After weeks of a seemingly endless string of child needs I have a few stolen moments to tell you about the latest read, the frightening and fantastic high fantasy novel Throne of the Crescent Moon by debut author Saladin Ahmed.  I thought this day might never come...

In case you haven't noticed from my prior reviews, world building is important to me.  Since reading is my one and only escape, I want to be fully immersed in an alternate reality.  I want to know how is looks, smells, tastes and feels.  Transport me, authors!  My life smells of baby poo and Scentsy warmers.  Take me away!!

That being said, sometimes authors can go a bit too far in building their worlds and I find writers of high fantasy to be especially guilty.  Okay, we've read ten tedious paragraphs devoted to the machinations of your medieval siege engine...can we see it do something?  Or there is the other related problem of building a really cool world, only to have the actual plot line meant to take place in said world sort of fizzle and die a sad and lonely death amongst lots of imaginative wonder.  Mr.  Ahmed avoids both pitfalls and delivers a novel that does not disappoint.

Set in an Arabesque landscape, we find our unlikely hero Doctor Adoulla Makhslood.  An aging and overweight ghul hunter, his irreverence and increasing disillusionment with his craft disturbs his young protege, the earnest and devout dervish, Raseed.  Despite their differences, the duo successfully hunt and destroy the evil ghuls, agents of the Traitorous Angel, though Adoulla wonders how many more such battles he shall survive...or shall desire to.  A lifetime of ghul hunting has not prepared the old Doctor, however, for the evil they are to encounter, a shadowy manjackal that calls itself Mouw Awa, an inhuman beast unlike any ghul they have ever seen, who steal the very souls of its victims to feed the power of an unspeakable evil that it serves.

So begins a story that weaves together magic, faith, political intrigue, horror and romance into a seamless tapestry.  Its cast of characters delight.  There is Zamia Banu Laith Badawi, the tribeswoman who can shapeshift into a powerful lioness, and the Falcon Prince, a charismatic outlaw in the vein of Robin Hood, among many others.  The storyline is complicated but Ahmed never loses the thread and the depth of his world is amazing.  By the first chapter's end, you have invested hook, line, and sinker, accepting this city of Dhamsawaat, its legends and demons, its religion and customs, its fantastic realism, as easily as if it were your own.  Is it fantasy?  Yes!  Arabian Nights meets Dracula with some creepy, Guillermo del Toro-like action thrown in.  But his characters' ease with quoting their holy book, Adoulla's love and hatred for the dirty, loud city he calls home, Zamia's recollections of tribal life...they all ring with such truth and clarity that you don't hesitate for a minute to leap right into Mr. Ahmed's world.  And stay for some cardamom tea.

Apologies

Okay, okay, I know, imaginary internet audience.  I've been away too long.  It's personally embarrassing to look at one's blog and realize you have not posted in two entire months.  It's inexcusable really.  That being said, here are my excuses:

Excuse #1:  My husband was out of town for work.  Building elevators in scenic Amarillo.  Okay, maybe "scenic" is a bit snarky.  The kids and I took a week and visited him in March and actually had a fantastic time.  Really.  It's dry and flat and smells like a slaughterhouse but there is still much fun to be had in Amarillo.  Anytime you find yourself in the Texas panhandle I recommend you stop by, eat a steak at The Big Texan and spray-paint a Cadillac buried in the dust at Cadillac Ranch.  The botanical gardens are worth a look see and even the zoo has its charm, though it's mostly inhabited by farm animals and the lions and tigers are disconcertingly separated from visitors by a mere chain link fence.  There was also the abandoned (though apparently operational in the summer months) "Wonderland" which has given me fodder for a future horror novel.  In all seriousness, it was a great vacation which inspired both one of my favorite snapshots of all time entitled "Toot on the Prairie"

and led to...

Excuse #2:  Spring Fever.  It's a real thing.  And it struck our house hard.  Normally in Texas we move straight from winter into summer but this time we had spring!  An honest to goodness spring!  After a freakish late snow in March, the month of April was full of sunny skies and moderate temperatures and you could find us outside every.single.day.  Which meant inside hours were devoted to homeschooling (although we totally counted our outdoor excursions as Nature Study because we're Charlotte Mason-ers when it's convenient) and I had very little time for outside reading.  May's uncharacteristic torrential downpours put an end to it, we were able to finish out our school year and sooooooo...

...my husband is back in town, my kids are officially on summer break, it's too hot to breathe outside and I can read!  I've been binge reading!  I'm a mere 50 pages away from the end of the fantastic high fantasy novel I'm devouring (figuratively, of course) and I can't wait to share it with you!  

We're All Mad Here

Let me make something perfectly clear.  I am Southern.  Through and through.  In fact my sister once studied the genealogy of our family and discovered that, since crossing the Atlantic, the furthest north our people hail from is North Carolina.  We are solidly below the Mason-Dixon line.  And I'm great with that.  I love the South and all its trappings.  The words "hon" and "bless your heart" feature prominently in my vocabulary.  "Y'all" is not a colloquialism in my book.  It's...you know...a word.  (Non-Southerners, I don't understand how y'all get along without it.)  I am an avid runner, not only because I habitually birth babies and have to keep on top of the corresponding waistline, but also because country gravy and fried okra are staples in my diet.  I have a permanent flip-flop tan line.

My love for my native South aside, though, I was blessed as a child to be a Navy brat and spend some of the most magical years of my life in Scotland (where, as it turns out, our people also hail from...genealogically speaking).  I never wanted to leave.  Yes, it's cold and rainy and there is a shortage of grits.  But it is one of the most beautiful places on earth, full of some if the world's most wonderful folks.  Scots are cranky and funny and full of life and I could listen to their melodious accents forever.  So even though it's been many years since I've stepped upon her banks and braes, a piece of my heart is forever in the Highlands.

Consequently, there are a few British quirks mixed into my Southern-ness.  An over-fondness for pickled onions, malt vinegar, and beans on toast.  The trunk of a car is forever a "boot."  I've forced myself to stop referring to french fries as chips and the ladies' room as the toilet, but it took a lot of work and no small amount of embarrassing moments on the part of my pre-teen self.  One of the most enduring habits and one I will never give up is the taking of afternoon tea.

Tea-time.  Seriously, why don't more Americans get in on this?  It's not like we're opposed to extra eating...right?!? It's the perfect little meal before all the madness of extra curricular activities.  Why fill that space with frozen pizza bites and juice boxes, when you could just as easily enjoy a few finger sandwiches, a biscuit or two (that's cookies by the way...yummy, yummy cookies) and a lovely cup of tea?  It doesn't have to be English Breakfast tea, though why on earth anyone wouldn't want it to be is beyond me.  There are lots of teas to choose from in an infinite array of flavors from fruity to puts-hair-on-your-chest.  And kids love nothing more than to break out the china and clink cups.  It's a win-win!

So my kids have grown up familiar with high tea.  In varying degrees of fanciness.  Sometimes we have cucumber sandwiches and scones and clotted cream.  Sometimes it's Girl Scout Cookies and Ritz crackers.  But we have tea, darn it!  My big kids have excellent manners and have finally stopped adding so much sugar to their tea that it tastes a bit like syrup.  Toot on the other hand...well, let's just say that you've got to roll with the punches.  It's not going to be tea at the Ritz around here (crackers excluded).  He recently decided the event was pants-optional.  But, hey, The Full Monty is a great British flick, right?  Our tea parties tend to resemble the Mad Hatter's more than the Granthams' but they make me happy.

Speaking of things that make me happy, let's talk historical romance.  Yes, I'm talking about bodice-rippers.  I haven't been able to read much during the past month (teething baby, streaking toddler and homeschooled ninjas...'nuff said) but when I steal a moment I have been enjoying the sexy little short stories in Christmas Brides by Suzanne Enoch, Alexandra Hawkins, Elizabeth Essex and Valerie Bowman.  I won't be writing a full review because my perusal has been stopped short by the arrival of a new sci-fi/fantasy e-book (with instructions to drop everything and read it NOW) so I'm setting Brides to the side for the time being.  But wanted to give it a mention for those of you who enjoy this genre.  The tales I've read thus far are just what they should be:  light and sweet with just the right amount of steam.  A bit like afternoon tea.

The Cold Dish

Oh, my dear reader friends, there is nothing like a good mystery.  And Craig Johnson's The Cold Dish:  A Longmire Mystery isn't a good mystery, it's a great mystery.  In it we meet Walt Longmire, sheriff to the small town of Durant, Wyoming, a sleepy town whose usual crime reports read of smashed mailboxes, stolen snowmen, and the occasional drive-by egging.  Sheriff Longmire is still haunted, however, by the ghost of a far more serious crime, the gang-rape of a young Cheyenne girl, and the light sentences ultimately handed down to her attackers.  His ghosts begin to come alive when one of the rapists is found dead and signs begin to point away from a mere hunting accident and toward a killer bent on revenge.

Let me begin by saying that I am picky when it comes to crime novels.  Back in my glory days, in that long lost age when I kept my highlights as current as my fashion choices and my tags occasionally read "Dry Clean Only", I was a criminal attorney.  I practiced several years of criminal defense (keep it nice, people; everyone hates a criminal defense attorney until they need one) with a brief but memorable stint in prosecution.  I loved criminal law.  If I'm to be honest, I still love criminal law.  Seedy?  A bit.  Disturbing?  Often.  Hilarious?  More often than you'd think.  Each case is a puzzle to be solved and the stories are interesting stories.  So there is no excuse for a boring crime novel and I expect the plots of fictional scenarios to hold a candle to those in which I've played a nominal role in real life.  I also expect them to be realistic.  No "that would never EVER happen in real life" law enforcement moments please.  I get enough of those from CSI.  I will abandon your book and never look back.

All of that being said, The Cold Dish met my expectations and then exceeded them.  Johnson's handling of the ins and outs of crime investigation are spot on and the mystery held my attention and kept me guessing until the very end.  And his characters. Oh, his characters.  No two dimensional stock characters here, my friends.  From Longmire himself, who by the story's end I felt a kinship with like a long lost (rather grumpy) uncle, to his best friend, the charismatic Henry Standing Bear, to the waitress at the local diner, Johnson gives each person life and depth and sparkle in their eyes.  I find myself wondering what they are up to these days.

One of the greatest characters in this novel, though, is Wyoming itself.  I love it when a novelist makes his landscape come alive and I've never seen it done better.  Aside from a brief pass-through on the way to North Dakota when I was a teenager, I know Wyoming as well as I do the dark side of the moon.  After reading the combined descriptions of the countryside, the people (both those in Durant proper and the Native Americans on "the Rez"), and even the weather, I feel like I've vacationed there.  I can smell the snow on the sharp wind coming down from the mountains, hear the plaintive bleating of sheep.  Superbly crafted.

Last but certainly not least, this book is funny.  Laugh-out-loud, annoy-your-spouse-by-reading-random-passages-out-loud, funny.  Johnson weaves hilarious circumstances and witty dialogue throughout the mystery without sacrificing a shred of realism.  To the very last page, nay the very last line of dialogue, this book had me smiling.  If all the books in the Longmire series are as excellent as The Cold Dish, I simply cannot wait for a second helping.  

And Now For Something Completely Different

Am I the only one who suffers from post-libris depression?  (And if you're a Latin scholar and I just committed some grave grammatical error please keep it to yourself.  Studying Latin is on the to-do list.  I should get to it by the time I'm 67 or so.)  A let-down after the completion of a really great book.  A feeling of loss, wishing you could travel back to an earlier time when you hadn't actually read said book so that you could start it all over again.  Feeling restless and lost, your mind frantically repeating the question over and over again, "But, but...but what shall I read?!?"

For me I find it better if I make an immediate shift to another genre.  Just as with the obsessive compulsive marathoning of television shows that sometimes takes place in my house late at night, you can't go from numerous episodes of Downton Abbey (is anyone else finding this season a bit disappointing?) into, say, a binge on North and South or some other historical British drama.  Each muddies the waters of the other and cheapens the experience of both.  I have to go from Downton to Dr. Who or The Walking Dead or American Horror Story or something similarly dissimilar.  

So here I was, awash in a sea of indecision, overwhelmed by the sheer number of titles available to me through that wicked, brilliant giant of a virtual establishment which is Amazon, when two events occurred which relieved me of my misery.  The first was that Toot started puking.  A lot.  And it's hard to maintain a bookish funk when one is cleaning up an endless stream of toddler vomit.  He of course shared his misery with his brothers and sister so this first puke was not the last puke. Thing Two summed up the hell my life has become this past week in the following conversation:

T2:  Mom, I smell throw up.
Mom: (wearily)  Where?
T2:  (eyes widening)  Everywhere.

But this development was accompanied by another, happier, turn as well.  My lovely sister e-gifted me a book on my new Kindle (which I now shall refer to as My Precious... because that's what I call it).  I'm pretty sure she was wearing a white hat and surrounded by a heavenly aura when she committed this act of charity.  Of course, I have no idea what she was actually wearing since everyone in their right mind is staying as far away from our House of Barf as possible.  I've tried to make it visitor friendly.  There's plastic sheeting outside and haz mat suits at the door.  It looks a lot like that scene from E.T. that traumatized us all as children.  But I've still had no takers.  And since my husband was out of town for work until this very evening, I have had no human companionship over the age of seven in several, several days.  All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.  All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.  All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

I'm kidding.  Sort of.  The thing that has kept me from going all Overlook Hotel on everyone has been My Precious and the delightful, change-of-pace cargo it now carries.  So as my household makes the subtle and seemingly inevitable shift from tummy complaints to what Thing One refers to as "the coughs," insuring me another round of sleepless nights, I make the much less subtle but much more enjoyable shift from sci-fi/fantasy to a mystery/crime novel and lose myself between the virtual pages of another fabulous book.          

Ready Player One

Oh, let's just start out with a bang shall we, friends? I just finished Ernest Cline's Ready Player One. This futuristic thriller is set in a dystopian America circa 2044. Life is bleak and the future bleaker but the denizens of this world escape regularly into the OASIS, a fully immersive virtual reality. Five years prior to our story's beginning, the simulation's co-creator, '80's pop culture obsessed multi-billionaire Jim Halliday, has died, leaving his vast fortune to the lucky citizen who successfully completes a quest he has programmed into the game. Our protagonist, Wade, through his avatar Parzival,  is one of millions of "gunters," gamers dedicated to the hunt for Halliday's "egg" and the first to have any success in discovering its location.  His elation at his discovery is short-lived, however, as he finds himself a fugitive in both realities, fighting now not only for the prize, but for his life.

Okay, honestly, Mr. Cline you had me at hello.  The title of this thing, Ready Player One, made my heart skip a beat, as it would any self-respecting gamer who ever put a quarter on the edge of a coin-operated arcade game in the well-respected ritual that said, wordlessly, "got next."  And what follows the title doesn't disappoint.  The entire novel is an ode, the sweetest love song ever written, to 1980's geek culture.  If you still remember with misty fondness your first Dungeons and Dragons character, if words like "Zork" make you pee in your pants a little bit, if your thumbs cramp at the very mention of the word "Joust" as you instinctively flap the wings of your ostrich, this book is for you.  If you have no idea what I'm talking about, we can't be friends.

I'm kidding, of course.  I still love you even if you never played Pong.  And actually you will still absolutely love this book.  Cline does a fantastic job explaining the games, movies, albums, spaceships and other various trappings of geekdom for those who missed out on the wonderful, glorious '80s (or who were there but never played Pac-Man; but, to be real, is there anyone who didn't play Pac-Man?) and his story behind the nostalgia is a-maz-ing.  Heart in your throat, "don't-go-in-there!" suspense, tantalizing riddles to be puzzled through, engaging characters, humor and charm.  This book has it all.  And his world-building is so exquisite that at the book's end you emerge as one of his characters must after hours spent in the OASIS -- lost in another world and forced to take a long, slow-blinking moment to adjust to your own.

...And Immediately Stalls

It occurs to me that in order for one to successfully write a book blog one must in theory at least read a book.  To completion.  More than once a year.

Many things are getting in the way of this endeavor.  There's the usual.  You know, educating the children.  Nursing the infant.  Life with a toddler who today removed and lobbed his dirty diaper at my head from his playpen/timeout...because he was out of things to throw.  Paltry excuses, I know, and I shouldn't even mention them since they aren't actually the most prohibitive to my foiled attempts at reading.  No, the reason I really find it hard to read these days is that said toddler is a bookavore.

By bookavore, I do not mean that he so loves to read that he has figuratively digested every single volume of his extensive Eric Carle collection.  Though to be fair to the little fella, he probably does know Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by heart now (I know I do).  I have seen the term used to described people who consume books in this manner.  No, I mean literally.  He eats books.  Like a devious little goat.  My paperback copy of Donna Tartt's The Secret History survived over a decade of attic storage only to be gnawed around the edges in the comfort and relatively safety of my hopefully rodent-less living room.  I've told people not to loan me books, not because I don't want to read them (I do) or I won't find the time (a 60/40 chance), but because I'm afraid my kid will eat them.  There, I've said it.  Envy me.

So the natural solution to this problem is obvious.  E-books!  Wonderful, lovely e-books!  Have smartphone, will travel.  And I do.  But I hadn't upgraded to a tablet or big screened mega-phone yet so frankly my eyes start to hurt.  That and I find myself in a fairly constant game of tug-of-war over whether I'm going to read on it or the above-mentioned tot is going to talk to Siri.  I've actually just given up and programmed her to say his name.

As I continue on this rambling account that is increasingly calling my mothering skills into question, it occurs to me that I ought to name my children.  For purposes of this blog, I will call them Thing 1 (boy, 7), Thing 2 (girl, 6), Toot (boy, 21 months, goat), and Puddle (boy, 4 months).   Moving on.

Thing 1 and Thing 2 have tablets.  They were Christmas gifts from their Nana two Christmas's ago and they love them possibly more than they love me.  We have already had to declare the dinner table a "device-free" zone and set various other restrictions in place.  One of the words in Toot's perhaps 20 word vocabulary is "tab-it."  I've even seen Puddle eyeing them with envy.  I discourage this media addiction.  I am a kick-them-outside kind of mom.  I like nothing better than for my children to finish the day smelling of dirt and sunshine, leaving a healthy ring of grime around the bathtub when the water drains.  The only way to break this hold that electronic devices has over them, then, obviously, is to lead by example.  "Do as I say, not as I do" doesn't work.  So yesterday, when the Kindle Fire HD6 my mom bought me for my birthday arrived, I responded accordingly, and hudded in a remote corner of the living room with my back to them all, snarling, "My birthday-present!  We wants it, precious!  We wantsss it!!"

So, yeah, I have a tablet!  An awesome, amazing pink tablet!!  And I have already made mad progress on the book I'm currently reading.  No, I'm not telling you which one it is.  I've decided to only tell you what I like about books after I've read them because quite frankly if a book isn't doing it for me I'm more likely to put it down and pick up another one than to soldier on so I can give it a complete review.  Now, if you'll excuse me.  I've got some reading to do.