Jane Bites Back by Michael Thomas Ford & Pride & Prejudice by Marvel Comics

When I waved the white flag on challenges a couple of weeks ago, I had completely lost track of the fact that the Everything Austen Challenge also ended on December 31.  I may be willing to give up on some challenges but not on this one!  So I've immersed myself this week in racing to complete five more things for the challenge, having already read and reviewed Northanger Abbey.

Jane Bites Back by Michael Thomas Ford
Published December 2009 by Random House Publishing Group
Source: I won this book as part of the prize pack for last years' "Everything Austen Challenge"

What if Jane Austen really was dead?  Or, more precisely, what if she were undead?  In Jane Bites Back, 41-year-old Jane Austen traveled for a tryst with Lord Byron only to have him seduce her...and the turn her into a vampire.  She returned home only to fake her own illness and death.  Over 200 years later, she's living in a small town, operating a bookstore, fending off a possible suitor and just about to give up on having her last manuscript published.  Things are complicated enough but they get even more complicated when a publisher buys her book, Lord Byron returns to try to woo her away (and by "woo" I mean threaten to harm those she cares about if she doesn't come with him), and a particularly vocal Charlotte Bronte fan, who is also a well-known blogger, starts causing trouble. 

This book did pose some interesting ideas as Jane contemplated her modern day life as opposed to her known life and what it might be like to actually outlive everyone and everything you ever knew.  But seriously, this book is almost three hundred pages long and in the end almost nothing is tied up.  Byron seems to have become a changed vampire, Jane has decided to take a chance on love but there is still the matter of another vampire, Jane still hasn't told her lover the truth about herself and Byron is prepping to train her more secrets of the vampire world.  Ford appears to have written this book solely to set himself up with the means to write a sequel.

Pride and Prejudice (set of 5 comic books)
Published April 2009 by Marvel Comics
Source: more loot from the Everything Austen prize pack

Exactly what it says it is--the graphic version of my all-time favorite book.  Kudos to Marvel comics for a job well done chopping the book down to the amount of dialogue and narrative that can be squeezed into this format without losing the essence of the book.  This book took me right back to the comic versions of other classic books I read growing up and I have to admit that enjoyed them.  Except for the faces.  Really, I often found them to be more than a little creepy, hard to distinguish the different young female characters and the faces were a bit too modern. Oh, and the ads for other comics and video games were distracting and seemed entirely out of place.  If I'm reading any kind of a version of Pride & Prejudice, am I really likely to be the kind of person who will be interested in picking up the game "Red Faction: Guerilla," rated M for mature audiences?

Sex and the Austen Girl
An internet series written by Laura Viera Rigler (Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict and Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict) seen on Babelgum.com

It has been my intention since I first heard of this series to keep up with it as the new episodes came out.  And then I completely forgot about it.  So I watched all 23 (as of now) episodes in one evening.  Which means that I watched the beginning 23 times.  Boy, was I sick of that by the end.  The series consists of two characters, "Jane Mansfield" and "Courtney Stone" having a conversation about different aspects of life.  "Jane" has been dropped from Regency England into modern day Los Angeles and "Courtney" has been dropped from L.A. into Jane Austen's England.  These ladies find a lot they agree on (indoor plumbing is vastly superior to chamber pots) and some things they don't (Jane is appalled that women shave and wax off all of their body hair).  Twenty-three episodes in a row got to be a little much.  But taken individually, these are a lot of fun and make you think about the things we take for granted and things that might be better done the good old-fashioned way.

The Returners

The Returners by Gemma Malley
Published March 2010 by Bloomsbury USA
Source: the high school library

Teenager Will Hodges is a pretty miserable kid.  His mother is dead; he remembers seeing her dead in the water but can't remember anything about what happened.  His father has become radically political and heavily involved with a man whose political leanings are so nationalist that he seems he will stop at nothing to convict Will's old friend of murder just because he's not a native citizen.  His friends won't have anything to do with him, he's having terrible headaches and nightmares about concentration camps are waking him up almost nightly.  But most disturbing to Will are the people he keeps seeing who look familiar to him until he gets closer; then he realizes he doesn't know them but most certainly seem to know him.

More and more these people, these "freaks," start showing up...at school, on the street and even in Will's yard.  Then one day Will decides that it's time to confront one of these people and is surprised to find that they have been waiting for him to recognize them and they know him from another time in history.  They are the Returners and Will, they say, is one of them. Now Will has to a decision to make: will he follow what they say is his destiny or will he choose to break the cycle and do what he knows is the right thing. 

Although the first 150 pages of the book are a little slow moving, the story really picks up once Will meets the Returns and discovers what they know about his past and what they say is his destiny.  Then all of the build up starts to come together as Will is has to decide if there is really such a thing as free will or if all of us are pre-destined to follow a certain path.  I don't want to give away too much of the story; it will have to suffice to say that being a Returner is not a pleasant destiny and yet they all seem perfectly willing to stay on the path they have been following for thousands of years.

The book is marketed as being for 12-year-olds and up but I think someone that young would not really get the messages this book delivers.  My daughter read it in sophomore English and I think that 15- to 16-year-olds would be able to have a terrific discussion of the themes in this story.

Shadow of the Swords by Kamran Pasha - Guest Review

Shadow of the Swords by Kamran Pasha
390 pages
Published June 2010 by Simon Schuster Adult
Source: the publisher and FSB Associates

When Julie, from FSB Associates, contacted me about the possibility of reviewing Shadow of the Swords, my initial reaction was to decline. I've got so many books that I need to get to and this one didn't necessarily sound like something that might trip my trigger. But then I got to thinking that I do know someone who is very much interested in the Crusades. So I asked Julie if she would mind getting the opinion of a very bright 18 year old. She was game and when the book arrived and I saw the cover, which looks so much like something out of the video games Mini-me is so fond of, he was eager to get started.

Synopsis from the publisher:
The epic story of the Crusades from the Muslim point of view.

Okay--that doesn't give you much to go on, does it?! So here's a synopsis from Publisher's Weekly:
The bloodshed of the Third Crusade is vividly portrayed in Pasha’s second novel (Mother of All Believers), an excellent swords and sandals saga that takes in the action from an early Islamic perspective. Richard the Lionheart leads the armies of the European Crusaders, while Saladin commands the Muslim forces in Palestine. Both men are cunning and ruthless, and both are victims of the wiles of a beautiful young Jewish woman’s plotting—one man as her lover, the other as an enemy. Miriam is the niece of Maimonides, Saladin’s trusted physician, and she has the power and will to thwart one man’s plans and save the kingdom of the other.

I asked Mini-me to jot down his thoughts on the book and imagined that we would sit down together and work them into a review. But I liked what he did so much, that I'm going to give you his thoughts, largely unaltered other than to add a few of his thoughts that he shared with me along the way.

Liked:

- I enjoyed the vivid imagery created by the author.
- The characterization was in-depth and gave me a sense of connection to each character.
- The character development was very [central] in this novel. Each character changed vastly from the beginning to the end as they learned and gained new experiences.
- I liked that Pasha showed the story from multiple religious points of view.

Disliked:

- Sometimes I felt as thought the descriptions were overly wordy, making the reading process a bit slower.
- I felt that certain characteristics were repeated when it was not entirely needed such as writing again and again about Miriam's eyes and hair or Saladin's honorable nature.
- Occasionally I felt the book read a little like a romance. [Mama's comment--bear in mind, here, that this is the opinion of a young man who's primarily focused on the action.]

Writing Style:

- I felt that for a novel set in the location that this book takes place in and for the time period involved, this writing style worked very effectively. Pasha made sure that the reader was aware of the setting in which each particular chapter was taking place.

[It's interesting that this is his view now. Early on he was telling me that he thought the book was, perhaps, overwritten. But evidently it began to work for him.]

Favorite Character:

- Maimondes was probably my favorite character. He was a character who faced many conflicts relating to his religious views, his morals and his family and friends. He was able to overcome these conflicts and learn from them even into his old age.

From the Prologue:

"They were supposed to have been safe. The coastline of Sinai was guarded by the Sultan's men. The handsome new Sultan who had swept into Cairo and overthrown its ailing king, ending the Shiite dynasty of the Fatimids and restoring Egypt to the fold of Sunni Islam. She should have been too young to understand these complex matters of state, but her father had always insisted that Jewish children should be well versed in the politics of the day. For it was the curse of her people that the changing winds of nations inevitably brought with them storms of tragedy and exile.

There had been many who had feared that the new Sultan would persecute the Jews for supporting the heretic kings who had ruled Egypt in defiance of the Caliph of Baghdad. But he had proven to be a wise man, and had reached out in friendship to the People of the Book. The Jews had found in the Sultan a patron and a protector, and her own uncle had been welcomed into the court as the ruler's personal physician.

How she wished her uncle had been with them today. Perhaps he could have saved them from the warriors of Christ who had descended on their caravan like locusts. Stanched the flow of blood from amputated limbs. Applied his special salves on the burns inflicted by flaming arrows. Maybe if he had been with them, the others would have lived. "

Thanks, Mini-me, for reading "Shadow of the Swords" and reviewing it!

The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson

The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson
272 pages
Published April 2008 by Henry Holt & Co.
Source: my daughter checked it out from the school library

**review contains possible spoilers**

Jenna, 17, has just awoken from the coma that she has been in for more than a year following a terrible accident. She has no memory of the mother and grandmother that she is living with or the father who made his fortune in biotechnology and who spends most of his time across the country. Fortunately, Jenna was a treasured child and much of her life has been preserved on video discs; there's a disc for every year of her life. But Jenna has no recollection of any of the events on the discs and has no connection to the girl in videos with the same name.

Gradually memories begin to return. Most of them are very detailed memories of very small parts of her life. But there are also memories of friends that are no longer in her life. And the memories begin to create more questions than they do answers. For one thing, why can she remember whole passages from Thoreau but not remember what her old room looked like? And why can she remember being in her mother's womb? Jenna's also trying to figure out why her grandmother does seem to like her (something she's sure wasn't the case before the accident), why her parents won't allow her to return to school and why her room and clothes seem so impersonal. The answers will come from everyone and everything around her.

Set in the not too distant future, California has experienced the "big one" and much of that state has fallen into the ocean, leaving what's left badly damaged. Planting of non-native species of plants has resulted in the extinction of many native species of trees, shrubs and flowers. Overuse of antibiotics as resulted in super viruses that cannot be contained by any medication. A world-wide virus has killed millions of people. Because of this, an ethics board has been set up that is in charge of governing medical technology and to set up a point system for all lifesaving technology. The reader is asked again and again to question the choices that mankind has made.

This is the first true YA novel that I have read since I was regularly reading YA novels in my youth. It did take me a while to adjust to that level of storytelling. But this is definitely not a book that talks down to young people or that would strictly appeal to young people. It deals with the very grownup issues of ethics and what constitutes a "soul." It asks the question, how far would you go to save someone you love?

This book does contain some plotting issues that bothered me. For one thing, why does Jenna enroll in school under her own name if her family is so well known and she's supposed to be in hiding? Also, there's a neighborhood boy who is also a schoolmate of Jenna's that poses a threat which is never resolved. But the pacing and writing are so well done, that I was able to overlook these things. Midway through the book, Pearson reveals the big truth about Jenna. What, I thought, is she doing? Why would I want to keep reading now that I know this? The answer is because Pearson is not done with the reader yet. Knowing the "what" does not reveal the"why" and only serves to make Jenna's situation appear all the more perilous.

I highly recommend this book for anyone high-school aged or older.

The Dogs of Babel by Carolyn Parkhurst

The Dogs of Babel by Carolyn Parkhurst
288 pages
Published June 2004 by Little, Brown and Company

I read this book as part of The Literate Housewife's Dog Days of Summer.

The book opens with the death of Lexy Iverson. She's fallen from a tree in her backyard while her husband, Paul, is at work, with only their dog, Lorelei, as a witness. Paul is devastated but can't help but wonder if the police pronouncement that the death was an accident is correct. Did Lexy commit suicide? Paul notices a few things in the next couple of days to make him believe that maybe she did. Only Lorelei knows and she's not talking. But Paul, who happens to be a professor of linguistics, wonders if maybe she can't be taught to talk so that he can get some answers. He's heard some stories previously that leads him to believe it might be possible so he takes a sabbatical and begins trying to teach Lorelei to speak. At the same time, Paul looks back on his relationship with Lexy.

Two pages in, this book had already grabbed my attention. Then I got to the talking dog business. And I began to wonder exactly what it was that originally convinced me to pick this book up some months ago. "Is this supposed to be a black comedy?" I wondered. Nope, it's completely serious and more than once I almost put the book down. But the book alternates chapters between the look back at Paul and Lexy's relationship and the teaching-dog-to-talk chapters. And I was enjoying the relationship chapters so I stuck it out. Then Paul became involved with some "Very Bad People" who do surgery on dogs to try to make them talk. Yes, you read that right; there is a whole organization of people doing this. And it did get a little tense during some of those parts. But it was still strange. As was Paul's fascination with a television psychic. And the part where Lexy was making masks for the families of dead people. Yep, the more I write about it, the more bizarre this book sounds.

Yet, I can't say that I didn't like it. I did find the relationship between Paul and Lexy interesting. I understood a love so deep that Paul would do anything to try to find some answers. And Parkhurst deals with Lexy's mental illness beautifully. But I can't think of a single person to whom I would recommend this book. Seriously, how would I sell it? "Hey, you wanna read a book about teaching dogs to talk?"