9.  There are 2 or 3 other stories/books within this book.  This, in high-faluting lingo, is called intertextuality.  In economic lingo, it would be called more bang for your literary buck.  In "I like books" lingo, it's called creative and fun.

8.  The novel is brilliant.

7.  It will make you laugh.

6.  It will make you cry.

5.  It will make you feel outraged.

4. It will warm your heart.

3.  It will remind you of the power of words.

2.  It will remind you of the importance of history.

1.  You will love it.

Now, then, to the point:  I won't bother you with in-depth descriptions or reviews of ALL of the books I stumbled through (or tried to stumble through); instead, I will simply rant about a couple of the books that I found annoying.  Perhaps you will feel inspired to pick up these reads so you can see for yourself what you think - I encourage this.  Perhaps you will see some merit (or some further annoyance) that I didn't, and you can follow up on my thoughts.

Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laurie Viera Rigler:  Anyone who knows me knows how much I love everything Jane. Movies, books, essays, modern re-tellings - if it has anything remotely to do with Jane or something she once said or thought, I'll take a look at it.  With high hopes, I picked up Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict, in which the protagonist (also a Jane-ite) wakes up one morning to find herself not only in Regency England, but also in the Regency body of one Jane...something or other (not Austen, though she does meet the real Jane Austen, and awkwardly blurts out many futuristic things that scare the poor author immensely).  I can't believe I can't remember the character's last name.  Anyways, not the point (or is it?).  After many many days of shock, she finally comes to grips with the fact that she is to remain in that body and that time for the foreseeable future, so she attempts to settle in.  There are possible romances, hindered by memories she can't actually recall (not having been present in her current body at the time that body was creating the memories), friendships, familial relationships, etc, for her to negotiate, all while attempting to take on the manners, graces, and rituals of Austen's England.   The main character, however, still has great trouble in finding ways to fit in.   For a self-professed Jane Austen addict, she has considerably more trouble with the social mores and codes than seems likely.  Her behaviour often smacks both of stupidity and authorial contrivance to make a thin plot extend into novel length and to make confusions between characters remain confused until the predictable end of the book.  All in all, it was no clever witty Jane-like read. Like it's main character, it was occasionally entertaining, but mainly blundering, inconsistent, and kind of annoying.

Chasing Shakespeares by Sarah Smith:  I confess, I never actually finished this book, though it wasn't really that bad.  For anyone who loves Shakespeare and the figure of Shakespeare (the same thing?), the wealth of information in this book will be delightful.  I don't love Shakespeare as much as I love Jane, but I really enjoyed reading the various ideas, conspiracies, and theories the book outlines (all in a very non-obstrusive manner) as to who "Shakespeare the author" actually might have been. The basic gist of the book is that a grad student named Joe Roper finds a letter that may or may not be real, and may or may not prove one of the various Shakespeare identity theories circulating in academic discussion.  He and another student (a  brilliant but privileged, spoiled, and slightly Valley-girl-ish character named Posy) travel to England to try and uncover the truth.  The author is, I believe, a professor at a college in the US, and it shows.  Reading her writing is like listening to a really good lecture: unique expressions, dry humour, and a way of imparting information that makes you want to proceed immediately to the library for more information on the same subject.  Unfortunately, also like a lecture, it's too hard to take in too much at a time.  I also found I couldn't really attach to the characters, who really did seem to me like characters.  I didn't really care about them, what they found, or if they got together.  That's a death strike for a novel, in my opinion.

Also, a very minor grievance, but one I'll bring up anyways:  this book was written by a female author and had a main character that was male.  For some reason, to make sure we all believed he really was male, she had him say things like "fucking A" and "shit, no" and various other supposedly "manly" expressions that mostly just frustrated me.  I don't mind swearing, but this felt deliberately placed to XY up the character, and I didn't buy it.  It felt out of place, and was a symptom of the larger overall issue with the characters, namely, that they were a mish-mash of qualities and characteristics, with no coherence.

If you love Shakespeare, read it, if only for the intriguing information and academic clues and theories.  If you want an entertaining literary mystery with interesting and like-able characters, I'd skip this one.

I'll end with a glimpse of light at the end of the tunnel:  As previously mentioned, I have been reading The Book Thief, and enjoying it immensely.   It's clever, moving, and really rather unique.  A breath of fresh air in a sea of mediocrity.  I'll keep you posted.

The book takes place in 1860s Canada, in and around a small town in Northern Ontario. It follows the development of the Hudson's Bay Company, along with other companies, that make their money off of trade, particularily the trade of animal furs. The trapping and hunting (and trading) of furs has become so rampant, however, that the animals are increasingly wary and the trading increasingly tense. When a French trapper is murdered in his cabin, various people attempt to solve the crime, some for reasons of justice and some for other reasons altogether. Using the murder as the key plot event, Penney spirals out to a variety of topics and themes, including, but not limited to, love, family relationships, female identity and roles of women, race relations, Canadian identity, disappearing sisters, adopted children, archaeological discoveries, cultural exploration, and so on. In Penney's expert hands, these disparate plot strands weave together and form a tale that is mysterious and romantic and adventurous and exciting. Read it!

It isn't simply the direct relationship of the frozen river to human endeavours that Humphreys explores, however; in her capable hands, the frozen river becomes a backdrop, a theme, a motif for an investigation of a variety of topics. For example, a husband feels as though he and his wife have grown apart, and believes that

"the freezing of the Thames has changed everything. All that once allowed him, included him, has now locked him out" (37).

A Jewish man disguised as a Spaniard (Jews at the time were not allowed to live in England) notes a ship frozen in the slowly thawing Thames and thinks

"I can feel the tight grip of the ice around me, around my life, and what I want, this evening by the edge of the river, is to be cast back upon the water, to be set free" (77).

By 1895, the year the book concludes, London Bridge has been reshaped and remade, and the flow of the river around has changed. Henceforward, the river is no longer the "wild thing" that

"will simply arch its back and throw anything off that tries to tame it" (122).

Instead, thanks to the new design of the bridge,

"the Thames would never, will never, freeze solid in the heart of London again". (179).

In these 40 tales, then, the most important character is the river itself, which is at turns passive, complying, helpful, sly, or destructive, but in the end, ultimately (and always) transitory. The 40 glimpses into its frozen history are the only glimpses that will ever be. The 'frozen Thames' has melted into the vast river of history and is gone.

Happy Reading!

Petrovich arrests the obvious culprit, his every move questioned by his new protégé (a character we met in the first instalment, who richly deserves this resurrection). But with Petrovich so despondent, we suspect our thoughtful investigator is merely biding his time while St Petersburg struggles in the dusty heat and the stench of raw sewage is no longer confined to the slums.

At the scene of a second murder, the prime suspect is found with the murder weapon in his hands and Petrovich has no choice but to arrest him, too. But his heart is not in it, and before the third murder takes place he has set off on a trail where the only signposts could be either coincidences or connections. Meanwhile, the irascible Lieutenant Salytov pursues a line of enquiry of his own making and in his own hard-hitting style, in contrast to Petrovich's intellectual approach.

The mystery kept me guessing to the final showdown, though as in A Gentle Axe, when I first encountered the culprit there was a ‘walked over my grave' feeling that would only click into place later on - but Morris is concerned here with the how and the why, not just the who. And it is in the ‘why' that we find the richly quotable passages that broaden the novel's reach from an exciting page-turner to an insightful tale with themes no less relevant to today than to nineteenth-century Russia.

He uses atmosphere to remarkable effect, and there is nothing overindulgent or surplus. There are layers in this novel that come back to haunt you, like a disturbed young boy's irrepressible habit of copying passages from newspapers, or the ‘jagged sobs' of a bereaved mother and Petrovich's humbling visit to the slums, where life has a permanently rotten stench. Throughout the novel we take a headlong look at suffering to discover how relative it can be and how far-reaching can be the consequences of what appears on the surface to be a lesser predicament.

As to our hero, Petrovich, he is enigmatic and cynical but immensely human and as much a part of the city as the victims and villains he comes across. Whatever it was that inspired Morris to resurrect him from Crime and Punishment, he is a character I look forward to meeting again. This was vivid and satisfying read about power, suffering, bitterness and revenge.

Faber and Faber, 2008, paperback, 336 pp., ISBN: 0571232523

For the second time this year (only the second time, I might say), a book that I was convinced I’d adore has fallen short of my expectations and I’ve been left with that puzzled sort of feeling you get when someone tells a joke at a party and you’re the only one who doesn’t get it. With ‘Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize Winner’ and the Richard and Judy seal of approval plastered on it, Jenny Valentine’s debut novel was perhaps already too weighed down to get a completely fair trial – but I did want to love it, and I ended up somewhere between liking it and admiring it from afar.

         Sixteen-year-old Lucas Swain is slightly stoned in a cab office one night when he becomes fixated by an urn on the shelf: inside are the ashes of Violet Park, an old lady who should mean nothing to him. But ‘something’ tells Lucas that it is his duty to rescue these forgotten ashes and solve the mystery behind them – why were they abandoned in the back of a mini cab? Who is Violet Park? What message is she trying to give this lonely, introverted teenager whose entire life is overshadowed by his father’s mysterious disappearance five years ago?

         Although the story unravels in a very page-turning way, I found aspects of it contrived and I felt ultimately disappointed by the outcome of the mystery, coming from such an original premise. But I could have gotten over that if I’d felt emotionally involved in the story. As it was, I felt that the style – quirky and spare as it is (not usually a bad thing in my book) – created this story as a beautiful but untouchable bubble. I desperately wanted to break though the surface and get right inside the book, but I never quite made it bar a few glimpses. There was something a bit aloof and knowing about it that kept me at arm’s length.

          There were things about the book that I did enjoy, like the very endearing grandfather, swaying in and out of awareness, and the rather lovely Martha – Lucas’s girlfriend – who was like the ‘angel’ of the book, not quite real but very nice to have around anyway. I liked the idea of a sixteen-year-old boy running around London with an old lady’s ashes in his rucksack, and the black humour of that central premise. I particularly liked the fact that the ending wasn’t a mawkish cop-out.

It is a very thoughtful book, and there are some lovely touches, and I’m still wondering if perhaps “It’s not you, it’s me.”

When I read YA fiction, and like it, I find that I am either transported back to fifteen, utterly absorbed as my younger self, or I read it from a distance, aware of how much more I would have enjoyed it without all those pesky years getting in the way. This is the third book by Jaclyn Moriarty to have achieved that first, far preferable, reaction.

Bindy Mackenzie seems an unlikely hero at first. She’s the school nerd who scores top grades in everything, holds down several jobs, creates business opportunities (designed to con her schoolmates out of their pocket-money – endeavours that earn her the attention of her preoccupied father), grasses people up, and categorically places herself way above the phenomenon known as The Teenager. Part of her charm is that she is completely unaware of how she is perceived. But in a new class, called FAD (Friendship and Development), consisting of eight students and a new, kooky teacher, Bindy discovers how disliked she is when the group have to write down, anonymously, what they think of her.

Outraged, Bindy embarks on a campaign to hold up a mirror to her classmates and reveal the venom that must exist inside them if they can be so cruel to her. Of course, ‘genius’ Bindy has missed the point, but by the time she realises that it’s she who has been unfair to them – aloof, judgemental, patronising, offensive – she’s more disliked than ever and now suffering from some unexplained fatigue and sickness.

Moreover, she’s upset about a secret she’s keeping about her brother – I originally thought this was the ‘mystery’ hinted at in the blurb, but it’s perhaps the only part of the story about which I expected more than I got. And she’s increasingly concerned, though she would never admit it, about being ‘wanted’ – her parents have left her with her aunt and uncle while they go off property developing in the city, she loses her job(s), and the love interest of the story is elusive to say the least.

Bindy is on a mission to atone for her behaviour, and as a result of that and the illness her schoolwork slides and people start asking questions. But by now Bindy has some digging of her own to do, concerning a conversation she happened to transcribe in the school grounds (on the laptop that goes with her everywhere – even to her first gig). By finally shedding her haughty exterior she manages to win the friendship and support of her FAD group just in time for them to figure out that someone is trying to hurt her – or even kill her.

What starts as a story about finding yourself, and finding your place in the world, suddenly turns into a gripping mystery – I spent the last quarter of the book literally on the edge of my seat as Jaclyn Moriarty managed to reveal all the tiny clues she’d left throughout the book and weave them into a brilliant finale. If I were being mean I’d say that it’s a tiny bit far-fetched, but above all it is page-turning fun, and there is so much more to this book. I have to admit that there were times I panicked about the slightly wild but thoroughly readable mess the author was creating – “How are you going to pull it all together, Jaclyn?” I was thinking. “Is all of this really relevant, Jaclyn?” (I don’t actually know her, I’m just a bit of a desperate fan). But it all ties up ingeniously, and surprisingly – Jaclyn Moriarty does not just do ‘funny’, and ‘warm’ and ‘insightful’, she also does ‘clever’.

Bindy is arrogant and insensitive but she has a such a good heart, it’s more that she has no idea how to use it, and her total lack of awareness made me want to drag her into a corner and whisper to her the ways of the world. Jaclyn Moriarty masterfully builds her up as a grossly misunderstood girl who is plagued by a woeful misunderstanding of life around her. As the overachiever is unhinged, our affection for her grows. I was relieved to see Bindy changing, but not out of all recognition – not by becoming ‘just like everyone else’, which would have been an almighty cop-out. It is very heart-warming (ok, I’ll admit it, I shed a tiny tear), not to mention gorgeously funny: feel-good, read-it-twice kind of stuff.

The novel is written, as usual for this author, in a series of letters, memos, reports and Bindy’s diary (or ‘philosophical musings’ as she calls them). Fans of her first two books, Feeling Sorry For Celia and Finding Cassie Crazy, will enjoy meeting some of the characters from those books in minor roles, but the story works on its own, too.

What I love most about her writing is that it shows me how proud she is to be writing for her target audience. (I can’t bear it when authors claim they’re writing for teenagers when it’s perfectly obvious they’d rather impress an adult reader.) She is never preachy or patronising; she gets under the skin of such varied characters and helps us to identify with them all. Jaclyn Moriarty knows young teenagers, and here she deftly juggles several elements while maintaining an immensely readable, light and humorous tone.

Macmillan Children's Books, 2006, 384 pp., ISBN: 0330438840