Things were pretty hairy there for awhile in Florida, in fact they basically went straight to hell, but now I’m home on a brief break before Germany and ready to bring you another round of
In the interest of timeliness and inspiration, this week I’ve chosen
Sporadically back to bring you another classic for this go-round on
This book, originally published in Japanese and translated for audiences around the world, gets to the crux of an issue that every human being must come to terms with at some point in their life:
This was the original e-mail from the publisher (names removed):
Thank you for recently submitting your sample of VALKYRIE. We’ve enjoyed what we’ve read so far, and would like to read more. As such, please send the full manuscript as a Word doc attachment to your reply email. Please put “Requested Materials: VALKYRIE” in the subject line. Once received, we will respond to your submission in 4-6 weeks. After that time, if you have not yet heard back, feel free to follow up via email. We look forward to reading more of VALKYRIE.
This was the second e-mail I got about a week later, note that I had not sent my full manuscript as I was still writing it. This was indicated in my submission, and the editor was aware when she requested my sample:
Sincerely,
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not busted up about it. As I was writing I began to feel very strongly that Swoon was not the right imprint for this book at all. I just thought this correspondence would be of some interest to the writery folks out there.
This is going to be one weird instance of
I’ve posted songs for an unpublished book before, but this time I bring you tunes for a book that does not yet exist in its entirety!
This will probably be a short review, because my feelings for this novel are solidly middle-of-the-road.
Sweetly by Jackson Pearce
After the disappearance of their younger sister, losing both parents, and being thrown out by their stepmother; Ansel and his sister Gretchen are looking for a fresh start in a place far from the demons of their past. Their search takes them from the Pacific Northwest to the tiny South Carolina town of Live Oak. With nothing but a busted Jeep to their name the pair find themselves working for and living with local candymaker Sophia at her isolated cottage/chocolatier. Their hostess’ charms are many, but so are the unpleasant rumors about her in town.
I love the fairy tale Hansel and Gretel, and I was very excited to read this book’s updated take. It had been on my TBR list for ages, and maybe my expectations/hopes were too high, but the greatest praise I seem able to muster about the novel is that it was fine. There were some cool ideas here in the ways Pearce updated details from the original story, and in the ways she made the events fit with the universe she created with Sisters Red. I am still interested in reading the final novel of the set, Fathomless.
It might sound odd, but the story felt a little empty to me. The plot was good, potentially very exciting, but I think it could have been handled better (and it is killing me to write that because I think Jackson Pearce is a delightful human being). The characters were half-developed, just shy of whole individuals in every case except perhaps Sophia’s. The narrator was a shell, and perhaps that was the author’s intention as Gretchen had been suffering terrible grief for so long…but it just didn’t work for me. When she fell for another character it seemed rote rather than organic (e.g. characters in YA Fantasy always fall in love with someone so she will too). The brilliant moments were too far apart, but they were there. Gretchen’s response to a lot of the events and hint-dropping in the book made me think she was a bit of an idiot, or had perhaps suffered some brain damage at some undisclosed point.
I think it may all have been just a little too far from Pearce’s own experience for her to write in a rich and convincing way. Several times a scene ended or an issue/event was dropped before it had been developed to my satisfaction. The brother/sister relationship felt totally one dimensional to me, a woman with two brothers with whom I am close. Ansel was a cardboard cutout and his voice was a bit feminine. Urgh.
All the candy in the book was chocolate. Sad for me, as I am a huge candy fan but not remotely a chocolate-lover.
I don’t feel like I am explaining this well, so I will leave it at this: Sweetly was not as good as I had hoped it would be. It was not bad.
Chair Review:
Promising moments, but lacking something essential.
Back in action, for this installment of
I bring you a carefully crafted and perhaps overly theme-adherent playlist for
Hello fellas and gals in internet land!
Now that you’ve caught your breath and are no longer gasping with shock over the return of fresh content to Ink, allow me to tell you what’s been goin’ on:
1. I took an internship with the Department of Defense that has me on a military base for four months providing daycare/after school youth services for service-members…in Key West, FL! They offered me a position over the summer in Bamberg, Germany so I will be trying to add a fourth language to my linguistic arsenal ove
r the next few months.
2. Today I applied for the credential program at the university near my home in California, which I would begin in the fall as a first step toward becoming an official (rather than substitute) teacher. I have wanted to teach since I was nine years old but both of my parents spent a lot of time trying to convince me that it was beneath me/not prestigious/not a path to a swimming pool full of money. Mom wanted doctor or lawyer, dad pushed for engineer. Nearly two decades later the fact remains that, much like Albus Dumbledore found, my greatest pleasure lies in teaching. Also as in the case of Albus Dumbledore, pursuing a career in teaching does not mean an end to my other creative/intellectual pursuits. I am really excited, and already planning curriculum in my head.
3. My sister had demanded a cover for the novel she wrote, and I finally finished and delivered it just bef
ore I left for Key West. She is quite pleased with it and that pleases me. She is looking into self-publishing.
4. I got to go to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios Islands of Adventure in Orlando (what a mouthful)! It was everything I could have dreamed and more, you guys! The butterbeer, the wands, the awesome rides! I spent way too much on souvenirs.
5. If you are a regular reader, you may remember that I was part of a group show in a gallery back in December. The gallery informed me that I had sold a piece, and then didn’t send my work back to me for almost two months because after the show closed I sold a second piece! Which means that total on my “about” page gets to go up by a hundred buckeroos (the gallery took a fifty percent commission).
I apologize for allowing the blog to languish during this very busy time of packing and flying and working 40+ hours on base every week, but I do have a Mix-Tape Monday and Random Review planned for this week. I am hoping to retcon the weeks that I missed in Mix-Tape Mondays as well, but we will see how this week goes. Thanks for sticking with me, and if you haven’t stuck with me I’d like to say:
It took Stephen King his entire life to write this book.
Duma Key by Stephen King
After a debilitating job-site accident wealthy contractor Edgar Freemantle is left with one arm, a barely functioning hip, and scrambled mental faculties. When he threatens his wife’s life with a plastic knife and she decides that she can take no more, his therapist suggests a change of scenery. So begins Freemantle’s second life: in a big pink house on Duma Key, Florida he discovers a latent talent for painting and a supernatural mystery that’s been haunting the island for nearly a century. As his skill grows, along with powers seemingly granted by his missing arm, so does the danger to everyone he loves.
Quite simply, this is King at his best. The supernatural elements are as strong and sinister as those in It or ‘Salem’s Lot. Freemantle’s friendships with former-lawyer-with-a-current-brain-injury Wireman, college student Jack, and Elizabeth Eastlake are as rich as any he’s ever written. There are insights on art and creativity that could just as easily have come from his non-fiction work On Writing. King draws much from his own struggle to recover artistically from being hit by a van and his experiences as an artist and father. The mythology, the textural details of the Florida locale, the peek into the world of visual arts..it’s really good, you guys. That’s what I’m saying.
The way the dread builds from mere despair to out-and-out unstoppable horror is unparalleled. How King found somewhere lower than “suicidal divorcé amputee” to take his main character, and made me enjoy it, is a spectacular mystery for the ages. I stayed up all night reading this one, and I could see myself doing it again.
I have no complaints with the novel, but I did see a Goodreads reviewer call it “sentimental” (as a negative trait). The novel is sentimental, about art and family and loss and recovery, I just don’t agree that that’s a bad thing.
Chair rating:
Dark, disturbing, and absolutely built upon a strong foundation.
It’s that time again, folks!
This week we’re takin’ it back to the old school, ‘cuz imma old fool, who’s so cool…
I loved this book. Full stop. 
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
Ender Wiggin is the specially-commissioned brilliant third child in a family tracked for its ability to create brilliant children. His older brother was too violent, his older sister too passive, and the hope is that Ender (like that third bowl of porridge) will be just right. With the fate of the Earth resting on his six-year-old shoulders, Ender is shipped off to a boarding school in space where the planet’s brightest children are being trained to win an intergalactic war. Cut off from everything he loves and everyone he knows, the powers that be put him through a gauntlet in hopes of turning him into the greatest general the galaxy’s ever seen. Socially isolated, younger than everyone, and pushed to his limits, can little Ender save the world?
This might be the most perfectly written book I have ever read. Nothing is extraneous. The conversations between Ender’s handlers about the ethical implications of what they’re doing, the political subplot with Ender’s brother and sister back on Earth, each army and leader Wiggin learns from or comes up against; it all feeds into the central story. It is so tightly plotted that at times one feels like Wile E. Coyote: you’ve run right off the cliff and extra ten feet before the full impact of what’s happened hits you. My only regret is that I waited so long to read it. Because it seemed like “a boy book” with its soldiers-in-space cover, I’m not big into war stories. This is not a war story: it’s a story about the making of a hero and what that costs at every level.
What I love most about the book is the social dynamic when Ender reaches his training academy. He has been marked for greatness, and intentionally set apart. There are people who take offense and oppose him simply because of this, others who are indifferent, others who are willing to befriend him and share what they know. Card includes a range of ethnicities, belief systems, and moral codes. This is a school for brilliant children, and Card understands at a fundamental level the social structure that exists among the gifted. Where they are blessed and where they fall short, and the things they need that are often overlooked. I could easily devote an entire Character Study to breaking down each of the people Ender encounters at the academy and how they contribute to his future.
My only quibble is the treatment of women in the book. There are only three of significance: Ender’s mother, Ender’s sister Valentine, and sharp-shooter classmate Petra. Ender’s mother is little more than a caricature: sad to lose her baby boy, secretly religious, the end. Valentine is basically uninterested in war despite her brilliance, and acts as a human blankie for Ender when needed. While she does have some impressive political accomplishments, they are basically spearheaded and engineered by her brother Peter. Petra is an exceptional shot, unable to rise higher in the ranks because that is the only area in which she shines. She is also used as “weakest link” at one point in the story. Card writes at one point early on that evolution had made girls softer and less-suited to military success. Um. That irked me. Methinks your Mormonism is showing.
Still. The book is an A+, and I’m passing my copy directly on to my brother.
Chair Rating:
Magnificent, beautifully crafted.
