Happy Halloween!

I'm sure you can all tell that I am back in hardcore school. I have a test every week and every day is full to the brim with classes/clinical. With that and trying to get things straight for the wedding next year, my reviews have suffered. I am still working on Angelslayer, it's just going slower than anticipated. Much slower.

That's the thing about school. You never really have any free time because there's always something you should be doing. Also hanging over my head, in addition to the tests, is a 20-30 page paper.

The good news is my venue is booked for my wedding, I got through the first clinical and will be done with the serious clinical paperwork this week, and I've gotten all my information together to write that horrid paper.

Today is also the last day of the RIP V Challenge. I met my goal, Peril the First, but I didn't complete my entire list unfortunately. Whenever I have a chance, I plan on visiting more of my fellow participants.

Either way, Happy Halloween, Happy Samhain, Happy All Hallow's Eve. Hope yours is more exciting than mine :)

Teaser Tuesdays: Angelslayer by K Michael Wright

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page 

BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)

Share the title and author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

My Teasers: When the bolt discharged from the tip of Uriel's blade, it was like a sky storm rippling over the waters; it spread outward, separating into lightning-like serpents searching in a dozen or more directions, all at once, simultaneously, they struck every target. heads exploded with whips and pops, some with cracks of thunder, explosions blew sprays of sea and blood into the air.

-Angelslayer: The Winnowing War by K Michael Wright, pg 316

I couldn't find a big enough cover image, but if you look at my sidebar, there is a librarything widget which has this book on it.

Elfland by Freda Warrington

WARNING: Some spoilers, merely because to illustrate why I didn't like this book, I have to spoil some plot points. Nothing that will ruin the book for a potential reader, though.

Had a hard time getting into this book. Was about to give up several times...

Elfland is an intimate, sensual novel of people—both human and Aetherial—caught between duty and desire. It’s a story of families, and of Rose Fox, a woman born to magic but tormented by her place in her adopted world.

Led by Auberon Fox, a group of Aetherials—call them the Fair Folk, if you will—live among us, indistinguishable from humans. Every seven years, on the Night of the Summer Stars, Lawrence Wilder, the Gatekeeper, throws open all gates to the Other World. But this time, something has gone wrong. Wilder has sealed the gates, warning of a great danger lurking in the realm beyond them. The Aetherial community is outraged. What will become of them, deprived of the home realm from which their essential life force flows?

Rose Fox and Sam Wilder are drawn to the lands beyond the gates, even as their families feud over Lawrence’s refusal to do his duty. Struggling with their own too-human urges, they discover hidden truths that draw them together in a forbidden alliance. Only by breaching the dreaded gates and daring the danger beyond can they confront that which they fear most— their otherness—and claim their birthright.

...and then I finally did. The writing in Elfland is sound, though I admit I picked this up mostly for the cover. I love Kinuko Craft. This book was not what I was expecting to be at all.

If anything it was a soap opera, with vaguely magical beings. But the 12 chapters I read had very little magic. It was mostly about flat, ridiculous, trashy characters that I worked very hard to try and like and failed miserably.

Rosie, who is the main narrator, is stupid. Just plain stupid. Naive to a level not attributable to her age. When she decides to have sex with another character (not her husband) in her wedding dress, I was done. Compound this with the fact that she's obsessed with Jon, who is quite self absorbed, a druggie, and has no idea she (or anyone else really) exists. And she whines a lot...like...man.

Matthew, Rosie's brother, seems nice in the beginning. Turns out he wants to be "normal" so badly, he doesn't care who he hurts to get there. So he knocks up one of Rosie's friends and marries her, even though he doesn't love her. The reader gets the impression he is a very controlling person, and his wife is doltish and is happy just to be with him. Honestly, for her part, I sort of understand, because she came from a pretty terrible background herself.

The only semi-likable main character is Sam. He's a bad boy, but underneath he seems like a decent guy. However, the only reason he's a decent guy is because he's obsessed with Rosie, for no reason I could discern other than she has a nice rack and pretty hair.

Lawrence is another character that has potential. He seems like a jerk in the beginning but you find out (spoiler) that his life force, his soul essentially, was stolen by his father for disobedience. That explains the statue demeanor I suppose. (end spoiler)

Either way, call me shallow, but I have a hard time spending hours on a book where I just can't stand the characters. I found I really couldn't care less what happened to any of them. The world and Aetherials were intriguing, but definitely not intriguing enough to wade through the muck of the Wilders' and Foxes' lives.

Overall, I'll give this at least a 2 / 5. I may give this one another try. It wasn't totally irredeemable. The story was slow but I did want to know more, and the writing was very good. I guess I just wasn't in the mood for unlikeable, ridiculous, pretentious characters.

Hiatus

Just so everyone knows, I'm probably not going to do any memes or anything this week. I may get a review up, but I sort of doubt it.

I got engaged Saturday night, and I'm still visiting my fiance (squee!). Since we're in an LDR, I doubt I'll spend much time on the computer or even reading :) Next week, though, everything will be back to normal. Lots of books, lots of memes.

Prospero in Hell by L Jagi Lamplighter

WARNING: I try to avoid spoilers, but they are possible (even probable), since this is the second book of the Prospero's Daughter Trilogy. Prospero Lost is the first. I recommend reading them in order.

I don't think I've ever read a series that so seamlessly mixes history in with high magic. While many describe this as urban fantasy, I feel like it is more akin to a modern fairy tale than anything else.

Book description from goodreads.com: The search of a daughter for her father is but the beginning of this robust fantasy adventure. For five hundred years since the events of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Miranda has run Prospero, Inc., protecting an unknowing world from disasters both natural and man-made. Now her father has been taken prisoner of dark spirits in a place she could only guess. Piecing together clues about her father’s whereabouts and discovering secrets of her shrouded past, she comes to an inescapable conclusion she has dreaded since Prospero was lost.

Prospero has been imprisoned in Hell, kept there by demons who wish to extract a terrible price in exchange for his freedom. As the time of reckoning for Miranda draws near, she realizes that hundreds of years of their family’s magic may not be enough to free her once-powerful father from the curse that could destroy them...and the world.

It's pretty hard to review Prospero in Hell without major spoilers, because the plot twists are such a great part of this novel, I think. There are some fairly enormous, integral pieces of information you receive in this book. Nonetheless, the plot is exciting and I felt like it moved faster than the previous novel did.

I found this story to be darker than the first. The first half of the novel feels like a continuation of Prospero Lost: a fairly lighthearted exploration of Miranda's world and history. We finally meet the rest of Miranda's siblings, and we are given more information about their extensive lives. I can only imagine the historical research Lamplighter must have done for this book to fill in 500+ years of the siblings' lives, not to mention all the mystical creatures and classic literature references.

Some not so great things happen, though, and the last half takes a darker turn. The Prospero siblings, as hinted at in the book description, finally make it into hell. It isn't fire and guys with pitchforks. It's a dark, horrible, twisted, sickening place, modeled after Dante's Inferno for the most part. The bad guys present in this book are truly evil, something which isn't really elaborated on in Prospero Lost. The portrait Lamplighter paints of hell is disturbing, putting it mildly.

Generally, I don't particularly like sequel baiting, and this book has a big one at the end. Things are going great, you think you've got it all figured out, and then literally in the last two pages or so everything goes bad. I'm not looking forward to having to wait for the next one at all.

There is a fair amount of character development in this book. You find out more about Miranda, who finds her own very steady personality and temperament changing after 500 years. As you meet her family, Miranda shares her memories of her siblings, giving you a better idea of what they are like. However, we still do not know much about Cornelius and Ulysses. I'm hoping we will find out more about them in the next book.

As previously mentioned in my Prospero Lost review, while the cosmology is distinctly Christian, there is a smattering of other religions thrown in. However, there is more talk of salvation in this novel, and we encounter more angels and demons. It is gnostic and mystic enough, though, that I did not feel I was being preached at. It doesn't read like Christian fiction, which I appreciate.

All in all, Prospero in Hell is a very enjoyable read, and left me wanting more. I'm so excited that a writer like Lamplighter is on the scene. These books deserve far more publicity than they receive. I can't wait to read the concluding novel of the series, Prospero Regained. No firm publication date is set yet, just sometime in 2011, but I very much hope it comes out soon!

Bottom Line

Overall Rating: 4 / 5

Buy or Try? Buy
More? 2 / 3 in projected trilogy. All are written, 2 are published

Content

Plot: 4 / 5

Setting: 5 / 5 (wowsers.)

Characters: 4 / 5

Style 
Pace: Middlin' to Fast (while only over a few days, LOTS happens to move the story forward)
Descriptiveness: Prose
Fantasy factor: Magical Realism (most of the book still takes place on earth)



Amazon.com link

Teaser Tuesdays: Prospero in Hell by L Jagi Lamplighter

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page

BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)

Share the title and author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

The exciting, suspenseful story of Miranda’s search for Prospero, the fabled sorcerer of The Tempest

The search of a daughter for her father is but the beginning of this robust fantasy adventure. For five hundred years since the events of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Miranda has run Prospero, Inc., protecting an unknowing world from disasters both natural and man-made. Now her father has been taken prisoner of dark spirits in a place she could only guess. Piecing together clues about her father’s whereabouts and discovering secrets of her shrouded past, she comes to an inescapable conclusion she has dreaded since Prospero was lost.

Prospero has been imprisoned in Hell, kept there by demons who wish to extract a terrible price in exchange for his freedom. As the time of reckoning for Miranda draws near, she realizes that hundreds of years of their family’s magic may not be enough to free her once-powerful father from the curse that could destroy them...and the world.

My Teasers: "What do poets have to say about harpies, hm? 'Hatchet-faced'; 'loathsome'; 'ill-tempered.' Not a word about what wonderful mothers we are. Not a word about our feelings or our needs. No it's just 'frightened this nosy king' or 'chased off by that pair of winged clowns.'"

-Prospero in Hell (Prospero's Daughter #2) by L Jagi Lamplighter, pg 23

Prospero Lost by L Jagi Lamplighter

Prospero Lost was an impulse pick-up for me at the library when it came out in 2009. I love being the very first person to read a new release, and this one has stayed fairly obscure.

I picked it up again when I received Prospero in Hell, the sequel, from the library. It was rather confusing since it had been awhile since I read the first, but it was doable. Nonetheless, I decided to reread the first and review it because I just love this series.

More than four hundred years after the events of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the sorcerer Prospero, his daughter Miranda, and his other children have attained everlasting life. Miranda is the head of her family’s business, Prospero Inc., which secretly has used its magic for good around the world. One day, Miranda receives a warning from her father: "Beware of the Three Shadowed Ones."

When Miranda goes to her father for an explanation, he is nowhere to be found.

Miranda sets out to find her father and reunite with her estranged siblings, each of which holds a staff of power and secrets about Miranda’s sometimes-foggy past. Her journey through the past, present and future will take her to Venice, Chicago, the Caribbean, Washington, D.C., and the North Pole. To aid her, Miranda brings along Mab, an aerie being who acts like a hard-boiled detective, and Mephistopheles, her mentally-unbalanced brother. Together, they must ward off the Shadowed Ones and other ancient demons who want Prospero’s power for their own.

I think my favorite part of the Prospero's Daughter trilogy (so far anyway) is that it weaves history and legend in with magic and the modern world. Prospero and Miranda, at least, have been around for about 500 years and in the modern world they run a company which controls magical forces so humanity's technology can exist. Lamplighter seamlessly works these characters into the last half-millennium of human history. Miranda was almost burned as a witch. One of her brothers was a Pope. The Prosperos were involved in Milanese politics.

The way Lamplighter writes makes this a fairly easy read, I think. The descriptions are vivid but I feel as if I'm looking through a soft focus. We also find out more about Miranda and her family slowly as the book goes on. Little hints and pieces of her past are spread throughout Prospero Lost. It's one of those books that I just enjoy reading from start to finish.

One critique that I saw made on another review was that there was an anti-Catholic sentiment. I found that amusing, considering I, as a non-religious person, found it almost a little too Christian for me. Miranda and her family, with the exception of two, are all protestants. As previously mentioned, one of her brothers was the pope, and although I don't know much about papal history, I got the impression he was one of the better ones. There is a very Greco-Roman description of hell, but I found the cosmology to be mostly Christian. "The Almighty" is mentioned, along with his angels. There exist other gods, but they are weaker. There's a half-page where Mab, the Northeast wind, talks about the origins and nature of Jesus which I found interesting.

I find that people who read fantasy, however, by the nature of the books need to be rather open about god/s so I imagine this won't even register for most people who would read this book anyway.

My only other critique (tiny one) of the book is it seems to be very much a "quest" book. There is a definite goal, and it's not a broad sweeping exploration where you have no idea what will happen. Miranda wants to save her family before 12th Night. S'it. A simple plot, but I must say I don't find I have an issue with it. Perhaps if the world travel, history, religion, and magic weren't so intriguing, it might be problematic. As it is, I only really notice if I sit here and contemplate the book.

Prospero Lost is probably one of my favorite books. It's one of those that makes you want to curl up by a fire with some hot chocolate and just read on a chilly day. I guess it's a comfort book for me. Simple story, but intricate exploration of a world that "exists" within our own. I have the next one in hand and am already enjoying it.

Bottom Line

Overall Rating: 4.5 / 5

Buy or Try? Buy
More? 1 / 3 in projected trilogy. All are written, 2 are published

Content

Plot: 4 / 5 (a little weak, see above for explanation)

Setting: 5 / 5  (love love love)

Characters: 4 / 5 (soft focus, but well-written)

Style 
Pace: Slow (over the course of only a few days)
Descriptiveness: Prose
Fantasy factor: Magical Realism

Amazon.com link