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I have always found coloring to be a really relaxing activity. When I was a kid my nana used to have a stack of coloring books and a huge basket of crayons next to her couch. I remember flipping through the books, past her neatly colored-within-the-lines pages to whichever blank page took my fancy, and half coloring it before getting bored and moving to another page. She never seemed to mind that her grand kids messed up her coloring books. I wonder what she would have thought of intricate adult-geared books like this one...
The whimsical worlds the girl travels through really do spark the imagination and are very inviting. They're not only fun to look at, but the detail of the drawings leaves a lot of choices for colorers--these are not pictures where you want to stick with traditional colors for things.Many of the pictures are spread across two pages making for stunning visuals (though also making it difficult to color into the spine). One of my favorite spreads was of a giant owl flying through the night sky with a house on his back.
I've been using colored pencils in The Time Garden, and they have worked well as long as I keep my sharpener around for the many intricately small sections. The paper is thick enough that markers would probably also work, though I haven't tested that (yet). Traditional crayons are definitely a bad choice.
It's worth noting that though the word "garden" is in the title, the book is not set in a garden and only a few of the pages have garden-ish scenes. So don't choose this one if you're looking primarily for flowers and vines and trees.
All in all this book has been a joy to color so far, and I look forward to many hours filling in the details and bringing the adventurous heroine's magical journey to life.
This plot follows close on the heels of the first book. A year has passed, but not much has happened and little explanation is needed to catch the reader up to the present. Spademan once again is the storyteller, relaying the plot in his minimalist narrative style.
The setting is still post-dirty-bomb New York City which is falling into ever deeper corruption and chaos. Wealthy residents lie shuttered away in high-rises and spend their days plugged in to an artificial reality called the Limnosphere while other try to earn enough to buy a few hours here and there to escape the harsh reality.
During a job where Spademan is hired to kill a lowlife "bed-hopper" named Lesser (who also happens to be a genius programmer), Spademan learns that Lesser might have discovered a valuable, and deadly, secret about the Limn. He decides not to kill him until he learns more, but soon Lesser disappears. Spademan is coerced into tracking him down by a member of the police who seems to have his own agenda and doesn't balk at using threats and force to get his way.
The story follows Spademan's search for Lesser and the gradual revelations that follow about the limn, the city's leadership, and even the group behind the bombing of the city.
Sternbergh has done a fabulous job crafting Spademan's character--his dry humor and pseudo-poetic observations of the crumbling world around him lend a definite depth to his anti-hero character.
The world, though again, not perfectly fleshed out (does anyone really believe the NYC would be given up for dead by the rest of the world?), was still very vivid and easy to visualize. I imagine the world looking very much like the one in the Fallout PC games (which I wish someone would make into a movie)--drab, run down, with occasional patches of normality the further you get from the cities.
Near Enemy was more expertly written than Shovel Ready in subtle but noticeable ways. The pacing of the plot was very well done--particularly the transitions between action scenes. The symbolism, though not subtle (to match the book's unsubtle narrator), was still clever.I do wish there was a more satisfying ending to this book. While some parts of the plot are resolved in the end, much more is hinted at. Of course, it's part of a series, but in my opinion Sternbergh did a better job in Shovel Ready of bringing the book's main plot to an end while still leaving it clear that there is more to come.
All in all I really enjoyed reading this book and look forward to the next.
For more info and to buy the book, visit the Random House website.
I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review.
The Secrets of Life and Death by Rebecca Alexander
0 comments Posted by Ashley at Monday, January 05, 2015
Happy 2015 to everyone! The holidays gave me a much-needed chance to sit down and finally finish reading this book. It's another one I received from Blogging for Books, though, unlike the last one, this is a bit more within the genres I generally enjoy.
I was intrigued by the description on the website which included a mention of Elizabeth Báthory. For those who have never heard of "The Blood Countess" she is said to have brutally tortured and killed hundreds of girls for her own inscrutable reasons (most likely because she was a complete nutter) in the late 1500s / early 1600s. She's one of history's most famous and most bloodthirsty female serial killers. I find her rather fascinating in a morbid way and was excited to see how the author, Rebecca Alexander, would weave her history into this novel.
The narrative switches back and forth between first-person narration in 1585 by Edward Kelly, assistant to Dr. John Dee, and a third-person narrative following the activities of Professor Felix Guichard and Jackdaw Hammond in 2013.
Both sets of people are finding their lives intertwined in somewhat magical activities that extend the "living" existence of the dead. Kelly and Dee are commissioned by the king of Poland to save his dying niece Elizabeth Bathory by whatever means they can, while hundreds of years later Guichard is aiding in the investigation of mysterious deaths of young girls, and Jackdaw is herself a formerly dead person now trying to save the life of another dying girl.
I really liked the idea behind this book. Showing how Bathory became a monster/murderer and linking it to present day events lent intrigue and depth to the story. However, the narratives didn't always mesh well. I would have liked to see a stronger link between them throughout rather than just passing mentions of John Dee and the final Bathory link solidifying at the end. The issue was that the narratives were basically two separate stories. It might have been a stronger novel if, as the present-day characters discovered things about Bathory or about the history of revenants, that Kelly's narrative revealed them at the same time.
Unfortunately, though I found the book interesting, it had what I feel are numerous flaws which detracted from my overall enjoyment of the book. The character development was rather flat and the romance was heavy-handed. A lot of interesting material was hinted at in both narratives but wasn't explored--making it feel like the plot was under-developed. And lastly, a half-cooked attempt to explain how supernatural events are possible was thrown in near the end which really should have been left out. I don't feel that readers need to be walked through how supernatural things are possible--that's the point of them being supernatural.
Ultimately, I felt the novel fell short of what it could have been.
I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review.
