Tag Archives: 5 Star Book Review

Review of Alchemy of Secrets by Stephanie Garber

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Five Star Book Review

Stephanie Garber, Alchemy of Secrets.

For me a five-star book is something that either I want to read again or something that is so profound it makes an immediate impact. There are lots of ways that books can be compelling: a unique idea, an interesting set of characters, a complex plot, an artistic use of the English language and more. Reading is also a subjective experience, so what appeals to me as a reader may be very different for you. I read a lot for both pleasure and work, but these short reviews are a way for me to show my appreciation for the work and the craft of the author of the reviewed work.

I am a fan of Stephanie Garber’s Caraval and Once Upon a Broken Heart series with their magical worlds, incredible but dark magic, and dangerous relationships. Alchemy of Secrets is her initial adult novel and while it still retains the magical elements of her other writing, the world is contemporary Los Angeles. For much of the story the magical elements are more subdued than her previous young adult novels. Her description of an early moment of the story could apply to the book in general:

It almost felt like magic. Not big, miraculous magic but the simple magic of timeless things. Of two-dollar bills and handwritten letters, typewriters and rotary phones. (9)

There are certainly times where big, miraculous magic is also a part of this story, but most of the story feels like this simple magic of timeless things. She has a phenomenal gift of describing places in the book as she leads you on this treasure hunt full of unreliable allies and lost knowledge. Sometimes it feels like you as a reader are impacted by the devil’s ability to make a character forget in the story and yet, as you begin to know the protagonist’s, Holland St. James’s, backstory it becomes woven into her life-or-death search for the Alchemical Heart.

Stephanie Garber’s work is comfort reading for me because it makes me believe and feel and wonder with the characters. In her words, “What is magic, if not something that makes you believe and feel and wonder?” (237) To ape the mysterious professor at the beginning of the book, “I came to this book because of her earlier stories and now she has told me another one.” There are still young adult elements to the story, but the protagonist is still young, naïve, and inexperienced and pulled by characters with a lot more experience in the magical side of the world she has sought but not truly encountered before the beginning of the story. The writing is beautiful, almost magical and the treasure hunt is an enjoyable trek through the unique architecture of Los Angeles.

Review of Project Hail Mary by Andy Wier

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Five Star Book Review: Project Hail Mary by Andy Wier

For me a five-star book is something that either I want to read again or something that is so profound it makes an immediate impact. There are lots of ways that books can be compelling: a unique idea, an interesting set of characters, a complex plot, an artistic use of the English language and more. Reading is also a subjective experience, so what appeals to me as a reader may be very different for you. I read a lot for both pleasure and work, but these short reviews are a way for me to show my appreciation for the work and the craft of the author of the reviewed work.

Project Hail Mary was a delightful journey with Dr. Ryland Grace on a last chance mission to save humanity from a failing sun caused by a previously unknown species. The story cleverly combines Dr. Grace’s experiences in the Tau Seti system as the sole survivor of the ship named Hail Mary and flashbacks to his role in the discovery of the problem, the conception of a solution and his surprising inclusion on the interstellar mission. This is a novel that is science fiction, heavy on science, but in a delightfully geeky way that allows a non-scientist to enjoy with the scientific main character. Both the portions that take place on earth as well as the portions that occur in space tell a very human story of fear, loneliness, the joy of discovery, and hope. Without providing spoilers, the book is full of unexpected discoveries and friendships, and Ryland Grace is a character who is easy to enjoy as you experience the discoveries, both scientific and personal, through his eyes.

Andy Wier does a great job of creating a book that is a joy to read. He strikes a great balance between science and storytelling. His curiosity expresses itself through his characters and he does a miraculous job of making the scientific experimentation that the story depends upon both accessible and interesting. I listened to the audio version of Project Hail Mary and there are some added benefits to this version of the book which I can’t adequately express without providing some spoilers. One of my sisters gave me this book as a gift after she had enjoyed it, and I thoroughly enjoyed it as well. Great characters caught in an epic journey who are unapologetic in their curiosity about their world. A very human story of space, discovery, curiosity, and hope.

Review of The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden

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Five Star Book Review

Katherine Arden, The Bear and the Nightingale

For me a five-star book is something that either I want to read again or something that is so profound it makes an immediate impact. There are lots of ways that books can be compelling: a unique idea, an interesting set of characters, a complex plot, an artistic use of the English language and more. Reading is also a subjective experience, so what appeals to me as a reader may be very different for you. I read a lot for both pleasure and work, but these short reviews are a way for me to show my appreciation for the work and the craft of the author of the reviewed work.

The Bear and the Nightingale feels like a story told around an oven in a home snowed in for the winter, a story of magical creatures and grown ups who cannot see the magic of the world any longer. Vasya, the main protagonist, is both mischievous and kind and has a strong enough will to resist the machinations of her stepmother and father. There are many of the classic elements you find in fairy tales, for example a wicked stepmother, but I enjoyed the interweaving of distinctive Russian elements to the story: from the Russian orthodox painting of an iconostasis by Father Kostantin to the domovoy, rusalka, leshy, and other elements of eastern European folk stories. Although Morozko and his brother Medved, who the conflict of the story rotates around, have the classic good verses evil polarity, Morozko is not simply good and Medved is more animalistic hunger than evil. It is a story of family, of faith both in the sense of religion and in the sense of magic, and for the main character it is the beginning of a coming-of-age story for a woman who will determine her own course in a world where women do not write their own stories.

I read the entire Winternight trilogy several years ago, and I was deeply impressed with Katherine Arden’s debut novels. Returning to this novel was like returning to a home I never knew. The characters are great, but I think it was the way she narrated the atmosphere of the story that invited me in to dwell in this magical world for a time. This is a work of historical fantasy, so the magical events are caught up in the history of the Russian people and I really appreciated the way she allowed me to live a snapshot of an imaginary life in a magic infused slice of this world defined by winter. I look forward to continuing through the remainder of this series with Vasya, Morozko, and the rest.

Review of the Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden

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I received an advance readers copy of the Warm Hands of Ghosts and I am a fan of Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale series as well as her middle grade series Small Spaces. The Warm Hands of Ghosts takes the reader back to the historical fantasy genre of The Bear and the Nightingale, but this time the environment is primarily the hellish environment of Belgium in 1917 during the World War I battle for Passchendaele. Katherine Arden does a phenomenal job of presenting the environment of a world at war through the eyes of Laura and Freddie Iven. Laura begins the narrative home in Canada after several years as a field nurse for the medical corps, while her younger brother Freddie later joins the Canadian army in the trenches near Ypres. There is both a spiritualist and an apocalyptic framing of the war (particularly in a Jehovah’s Witness sense) and into the soul stealing space of war enters the beguiling but also devilish Faland. There are some similarities to the Smiling Man of the Small Spaces series, but the devil in a different context calls a different tune and plays a different game.

The Warm Hands of Ghosts is a story of humans caught in the inhumanity of war, of men and women who will sell their souls to forget what they have endured, of love that allows broken men and women to slowly rebuild their shattered lives, and of the death of a world as it gives birth to a new one. Laura and Freddie are both believably broken and yet still heroic characters who struggle to embrace this world at war instead of becoming ghosts of their former selves. It is the story of an ugly era of history beautifully written, of love struggling against the demons both outside in the world and the ones that dwell in the shattered hearts of the characters, and humanity trying to come to terms with the inhumanity of World War I. I appreciate the careful way she narrates this war that saw the advent of modern technologies like aircraft, long range artillery, submarines, and machine guns which was still primarily fought using the tactics of the 1800s and the disconnect between the experience of the soldiers at the front and the generals making their plans in houses miles away from these hellscapes. Even in this place of devils and destruction love still exists and it is the only hope for the lost men and women who journey to hell and back again for one another.

Review of Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most by Miroslav Volf, Matthew Croasmun, and Ryan McAnnally-Linz

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Miroslav Volf has been an influential theological voice for me since his publication of Exclusion and Embrace and I have learned a great deal from his writing over the past two decades. Volf has been wrestling with the question of what makes a life worth living in his publications for the last eight years and this book feels like the successful culmination of years of writing, teaching, and seeking wise partners from his position at the Yale Divinity School and the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. His previous books on this topic (Flourishing: Why we Need Religion in a Globalized World and For the Life of the World: Theology that Makes a Difference) have helped frame the questions that now A Life Worth Living provides a guide for working through. A Life Worth Living models the class that Volf, Croasmun, and McAnnally-Linz teach at Yale, as well as at Danbury Federal Correctional Institute where they invite their seekers to consider several faith and wisdom traditions as they pose several key questions that are a part of seeking an authentic life. These questions include: What is worth wanting? What is the place of happiness in an authentic life? What is the authority are we responsible and what traditions form our vision of truth? How does a good life feel and what role do negative emotions/suffering have in the good life? What is worth hoping for? How should we live and what provides for a meaningful life? How do the various answers come together to form a life worth living? How does our good life fit within our bigger picture of the world? What do we do when we fall short of our visions of what life should be? How do we react to the suffering we experience and the suffering we encounter in the world around us?

One of the gifts of this book is it invites the reader into an encounter with a diverse set of wise voices who provide very different answers to each of the questions the book poses and provides a spectrum of possible answers for one willing to engage the questions. It is not a difficult book to read and it does not expect any previous engagement with philosophy or theology, instead coming out of the experience of teaching both undergraduates and inmates it simplifies the voices which come from across the religious and non-religious spectrum into an approachable set of stories. But the simplicity of the presentation does not take away from the deep nature of the reflection prompted by the questions that the book presents. This is an invaluable resource for those seeking to live a life that authentically reflects the values of the person trying to construct a life worth living.

Review of Sunyi Dean The Book Eaters

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Sunyi Dean. The Book Eaters

For me a five star book is something that either I want to read again or something that is so profound it makes an immediate impact. There are lots of ways that books can be compelling: a unique idea, an interesting set of characters, a complex plot, an artistic use of the English language and more. Reading is also a subjective experience, so what appeals to me as a reader may be very different for you. I read a lot for both pleasure and work but these short reviews are a way for me to show my appreciation for the work and the craft of the author of the reviewed work.

The Book Eaters is a work of dark fantasy set in contemporary England. The first time I saw the title and read the synopsis I was intrigued by the idea of a people who ate books instead of food and I was curious to see how this idea played out in the story. The story alternates between the present-day struggle of Devon and her son Cai and the traumatic story that places this mother and son on the run from the families of book eaters. Devon grows up in a world where she is isolated from the rest of the world by her family and grows up on fairy tales of princesses. These carefully curated stories are fed to her (literally since she is a book eater) and form her world and imagination, but she is also curious for the other stories that she is not supposed to read or eat. She begins to see signs that life is not the fairy tales she has been fed as a child, but as an adult she discovers that her role in the families is to be essentially breeding stock and she will be unable to raise the children she bears. Devon is permanently scared when the connection with her daughter is severed suddenly and she is sent to another marriage to bear her second child.

Devon’s second child, Cai, is a mind eater. Among the book eaters there are children born who consume human minds instead of paper and although there is a drug that allows them to consume books instead of minds they are always looked upon as a danger. Most of these children will become ‘dragons’ who are kept by the ‘knights’ in the story but as the time near for Cai to be taken by the knights and Devon to be removed from his life the family who produces the drug to treat the mind eaters disappears. In the present day the story follows Devon and Cai as they attempt to find the Ravenscar family who manufactures this drug which will allow five-year-old Cai to no longer eat human minds. In the meantime Devon must find a human for her son to feed on every two weeks as she attempts to avoid the families and the knights who want her and her son dead.

What makes The Book Eaters a compelling read is the realistic character development of both Devon and Cai who are looked upon as monsters but are bound together by the love of a mother and son. It is a book full of betrayals and broken people, of fairy tales that hide the darker side of reality, of the difficult choices love can cause us to make, and princesses who find a way to save themselves. The isolation of the families reminded me a little of the Ravenwood/Duchennes family in the Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl series Beautiful Creatures although that is set in a Southern U.S. gothic world rather than an English one. A compelling plot which realistically develops a group of characters who are shaped by the curated narratives they have been fed and the trauma inflicted upon them as they attempt to survive in a world that views them as monsters.